Headscratchers / Hitman 2: Silent Assassin

• So what's the deal with the car keys in the tree (where you'll have to get them from if you don't want to kill the lieutenant?) on the first mission, anyway?
  • Maybe a bird snatched them.
• The game has it's share of mission titles that are simple and to the point, but mission 4 "Tubeway Torpedo" feels like an odd one of the bunch. You're tasked with rescuing a captured Smith in an underground military facility and there is no submarine or torpedo involved in the mission. You do escape by breaching a wall with bomb however.
• The intro where Sergei and the Mystery Man visit the Asylum and find corpses in the place. If you consider that Codename 47 takes place around 1999/2000 (Contracts directly states that "Asylum Aftermath" and, by extension, "The Setup" and "Meet Your Brother", take place in 2000). Assuming Silent Asassin takes place in the present day of the game's release (2002. The video during the briefing for "Hidden Valley" explicitly states Hayamoto visited his son's grave in December of that year), does this mean that the Romanian police just left the dead bodies of people killed in a shootout involving the police just lying around at the scene of the crime for two years?
  • If one looks carefully at the newspaper on the ground on the opening cutscene (just at the bit where the cat jumps onto the bin and meows), you can make out the words -BER 2000, suggesting one of the later months of 2000. Therefore, it can be suggested that the intro takes place at the end of 2000, immediately after the massacre. After all, Sergei insists that 47 is still alive due to the CCTV footage, suggesting that the date of recording must be recent. If this had taken place in 2002, the dead bodies in the asylum would be reduced to skeletons. That being said, the mystery man said that he hadn't heard anything about 47's activities "for a very long time". Then again, there was long gap between 'Plutonium Runs Loose' (around the time mystery man claims to have seen 47) and 'The Setup'. In conclusion, the likely explanation is it took Sergei and Mystery Man two years to track 47.
    • Even if you assume that Sergei and the mystery man arrive in the immediate aftermath, this leaves the implication that the Romanian police let just anyone poke around their crime scenes, including a notorious Arms Dealer who happens to be toting a shotgun.