Summary: Secrets, plots, and lies. For Team Machine, these things are a way of life. But for a few days in December, all the conspiracies are just a little sweeter. And though none of them have a real home, this Christmas, together, they might find something that’s close.
Categories: Season Two Characters: Taylor Carter
Genres: Friendship
Warnings: AU: Alternate Universe
Challenges: Series: The Chaos Series
Chapters: 13
Completed: Yes
Word count: 47210
Read: 8361
Published: 02/03/2013
Updated: 02/03/2013
Story Notes:
In the Chaos AU, this story follows "Sacrifice". Before Shadow Box.
1. Chapter 1 by LindaO
2. Chapter 2 by LindaO
3. Chapter 3 by LindaO
4. Chapter 4 by LindaO
5. Chapter 5 by LindaO
6. Chapter 6 by LindaO
7. Chapter 7 by LindaO
8. Chapter 8 by LindaO
9. Chapter 9 by LindaO
10. Chapter 10 by LindaO
11. Chapter 11 by LindaO
12. Chapter 12 by LindaO
13. Chapter 13 by LindaO
Harold Finch’s Christmas of Small Conspiracies began in early December, prompted by a telephone call from Will Ingram.
He took the call in the library, but as far as Will knew he was in his posh insurance office. “Uncle Harold? Are you in the middle of something?”
“Of course I am, Will,” Harold answered, “but I’d much rather talk to you. How are you?”
“I’m good. I’m good.”
“And how’s Minnesota?”
“North Dakota now.”
“Oh.” Trading one snow-blasted Midwestern state for another didn’t sound like much of an improvement to Finch, but then his late partner’s son wasn’t looking to improve his own life. “And how is that?”
“Cold. How are you?”
“I’m fine.” There was a little breathless pause, and Finch smiled to himself, anticipating the young man’s next words. “And in answer your next question, no, I have not heard from Miss Carson.”
Will sighed. Six months earlier, he’d declared his love for Julie Carson, a State Department minder who’d been assigned to watch him while he traveled overseas. She’d promptly declared that what he called love was almost certainly actually transference. Then she’d been badly injured saving his life. Finch had brokered an arrangement between them: They would meet in six months, on Boxing Day, for dinner. No expectations, no promises, just dinner.
And in the interim, Will was to make no attempt to contact her.
Julie Carson was also, incidentally, the youngest daughter of the extremely wealthy Carson family. When she was injured, the Carson family had closed ranks around her. After years of living independently, the young lady was being smothered in the care of her relatives. Unless Finch had misread the signs badly, she was just about ready to break out. Which might be very good news for his partner’s son. Provided Will kept his end of the bargain for the last few weeks.
“I … guess that’s good,” the boy answered.
“Twenty-five days, Will. You can make it.”
“Yeah. If she even wants to see me then.”
“I know it’s very difficult.”
“If I just knew, you know? If she can’t wait to see me or if she’s trying to figure out how to get out of it? If I just knew what she was thinking.”
“Will, believe me, if you ever think you know what a woman is thinking, you’re wrong.”
“You’re a big help, Uncle Harold.”
Finch smiled to himself. “I’m sorry, Will. Was that why you were calling?”
“Not exactly. I mean, not only that. Do you remember Alicia Corwin?”
The smile died. Harold tightened his grip on the phone; his hands felt like ice and it threatened to slip away. “I … uh …”
“She was the woman Dad worked with? In the government? She told me about what happened to IFT.”
Finch made himself take a deep breath. “Oh, yes. The woman from Virginia. Or … West Virginia? The place with no cell phones.”
“That’s her. I just found out she was murdered.”
“That’s horrible, Will.”
“She was shot, last spring some time. There in New York.”
“Who shot her?”
“The police don’t know. They never solved the case.”
Harold closed his eyes. He could see Alicia’s frantic face, her frightened determination to make him shut down the Machine that terrified her. And then the too-loud noise and she was dead, right there in the car next to him … and Root had laughed. Laughed.
Please, Will. Please don’t touch this. Please let this be.
His lips felt numb. His whole body felt numb. But Finch forced himself to speak. “I don’t understand, Will. Do you think this has anything to do with your father’s company?”
“No, no. I mean, I don’t see how. I just … I don’t know. It’s just weird, you know? So I got to thinking, maybe I should take another look. I mean, if she was up to something that got her killed, something with the government, than maybe she wasn’t telling me the truth for some reason.” He hesitated. “Do you think I’m crazy?”
“I don’t … no, of course not, Will. I mean, if you still have questions, then by all means you should pursue the answers.”
The boy sighed. “I don’t know. I guess I just want to confirm what she told me. Or see if there’s more I should look at. I don’t even know what I’m looking for, exactly. But something doesn’t feel right.”
“Then come back to the city and take another look. If nothing else, it will give you something to do while you wait for Christmas.”
“Yeah, that’s what I was thinking. At least I could spend some time with you.”
“I’d like that.”
“And you can teach me everything you know about women.”
Harold forced a chuckle. “What I told you before? About knowing what a woman is thinking? That was the sum total of my knowledge, I’m afraid. When will you get here?”
“I told them clinic I’d work through the week, and they have a clinic scheduled Saturday, so I’ll probably fly in on Sunday.”
“I’ll make a reservation for you. The usual place?”
“Yeah.” The young man paused. “You sure you don’t think I’m crazy?”
“I think you’re curious, Will. If you think the answers are here, then you should look for them here.”
“Thank you, Uncle Harold.”
“I’ll see you soon, Will.”
Finch put down his phone and sat back slowly. Sensing his mood, Bear came over and sat beside him. “Well,” Harold said, “this is going to be a problem, Bear.”
The dog bobbed his head, just once, but it looked like he nodded.
“We’re going to need some help. Some very particular help.”
Bear looked up happily and gave a small whine.
“How do you know who I’m thinking about?”
The dog danced in a happy circle.
“You are much too smart for your own good.” Finch rubbed the dog’s ears fondly. “You’re a lot like Will that way, aren’t you?”
Finch stood up. “I need to think this through. Let’s go for a walk.”
Bear scrambled happily for his leash.
***
Fusco looked at the laptop nervously. “It’s great. But, uh, what do I owe you?”
Christine slid a mug of coffee across the bar. “Sixty-five.”
He blinked. “Are you kidding?”
“That’s all I’ve got in it. I got it at the police auction. It just needed some clean-up, a few parts. And getting the cocaine out of the keyboard.”
“How’d you do that?”
“I rolled up a dollar bill into a little straw … I’m messing with you, Lionel. I replaced it.”
He scowled. “And what about the labor?”
“You don’t pay for labor here, sweetie. Your partner with you?”
“She got a phone call, she’ll be in.” He shook his head.
“I can’t take this. It’s gotta be worth ten times that much.”
“Twenty,” she answered, “if you bought it retail. At least. But you didn’t, so shut up. If your son wants a gaming computer, he’s gonna love it.”
“Yeah.” Fusco closed the laptop gently, ran his hand across the case. “Yeah, he is.” Then he shook his head again. “I dunno. You think I’m crazy, turning a kid loose on the Web?”
“Yes.”
He groaned.
“But this day and age, it can’t be helped. He can learn it at home or he can learn it on the streets like we did.”
“You’re not helping.”
“I can load up some parental controls,” Christine offered. “He’ll find a way around them, eventually. Or one of his friends will. Or I can have Zelda keep an eye on him, which is much more effective.”
Fusco frowned at her. “Who’s Zelda?”
“My system. She’s upstairs.” She gestured around the café. “Everything that goes on here, she watches. If it’s legit, she ignores it. Somebody gets too far off the trail, she lets me know.”
“That’s kinda creepy.”
Christine shrugged. “There’s no expectation of privacy here. And after the first time the Secret Service kicked down the door, I got more aggressive about policing the traffic.”
“Yeah, I guess I can see that.”
“So give him the laptop, and tell him that you’ve got a friend tracking him. He’ll test it once, and one of his smart-ass friends will test it once. I’ll slap their hands twice, and that will be the end of it. Until he’s about fifteen. Then it’s a whole new ballgame.”
“Seems like I’m putting you to a lot of trouble.”
Christine shook her head. “It’s all automated. I only do anything when it alerts me. And like I said, I’m already watching a bunch of places. One more won’t make any difference.”
“I dunno …”
“Fusco. How long you been lookin’ out for me? Let me do this.”
He thought about it, finally nodded. “I really appreciate this.” He tapped the laptop again. “He’s gonna love it.”
Carter came across the bar. She did not look happy.
“Leave it here, if you want, and I’ll get the Christmas monkeys to wrap it for you.”
“The what now?” He glanced at his partner while Christine poured her a cup of coffee. “What’s up, Carter?”
She shook her head. “That was Taylor’s English teacher. He’s flunking.” She thumped her phone down on the bar top. “How in the world can that kid be flunking English?”
“Literature?” Christine asked.
“Yeah. British literature.”
“Beowulf. Gag me. I could flunk it.”
“You’re not helping.”
“Sorry.”
“Can you get him a tutor or something?” Fusco asked, trying to be more helpful.
“I don’t know.” Carter shook her head. “The main problem is that he doesn’t turn in his assignments. I don’t know what I’m going to do with him. I already took away his computer and his video games. If I take his phone he can’t call me. And now they’re coming up on winter break, he’s going to be home all day, laying around … “
“Bring him here,” Christine answered. “I’ll put him to work.”
Carter raised one eyebrow. “I don’t think making coffee will help his English grade.”
“No. I’ll make him wrap presents. And deliver them.” She reached down the bar and grabbed a flyer. “This.”
“The Chaos Christmas Crush,” Carter read. “What’s that?”
“I hire a bunch of kids for two weeks, mostly college kids. People drop off presents and they wrap them, even pick up and deliver in the neighborhood. The people make a donation to the charity of their choice for the service. We’re pimping Staten Strong and Dr. Atlas this year, but any charity will do. So he’d be here all day, working his butt off, and hanging out with college kids.”
“Ahhh,” Carter said. “A little positive role modeling.”
“I don’t know about that. They’ll mostly tell him about the awesome parties. But anything that motivates him to work toward getting there is good, right?”
“I’ll talk to him. I might take you up on that.”
“That’s nice, that you do that,” Fusco said.
Christine shrugged. “I enjoy watching frantic people.”
He slid the laptop back to her. “Yeah, go ahead and wrap it for me. And put the tracking whatever on it.”
“You got it.”
Carter picked up her coffee and drank deeply. “Flunking English. Good Lord, give me patience.”
***
Her control was admirable, almost super-human, but finally, two blocks from their destination, she cracked.
“Random, where are we going?”
Finch smiled. “You’ll see. We’re almost there.”
She gripped his elbow a little tighter. The sidewalk was spotted with ice; he wasn’t sure if she was holding onto him for support or ready to help if he slipped himself. Probably some of both. In any case, he liked having her on his arm. A rare delight bubbled up in him as they walked.
“You do like being mysterious, don’t you?”
“I do,” he admitted.
She was quiet then until they reached the back door. It was utterly plain, just a steel entrance door with no signs of any kind, but Christine, of course, recognized the building. “This is a library branch,” she said.
“It used to be.”
“Why are we breaking into a library?”
“We’re not breaking in,” Finch pointed out. “I have a key.”
He pushed the door open, gestured for her to go in ahead of him.
“Why do you have a key?”
She stopped just inside. Finch closed the door, took her elbow and led her down the access hallway.
“Random?” They reached the doorway to the lobby. “Why do you have a key?” she repeated. And then she got it. “You own a library.”
“I control a company that holds the …” He stopped; it was unnecessary. “Yes. For all practical purposes, I own a library.”
“You own a library.”
Finch smiled, delighted. If he’d shown her a luxury yacht the size of the Titanic, she would have been less impressed than she was by this. She was probably the only person in the city who understood the thrill of that phrase quite the way he did. “I own a library.”
“You own a …” She stopped dead in the doorway, looking out over the sea of books scattered on the floor of the main entrance. The delight died out of her voice; it was suddenly full of despair. “There are books on the floor.”
He’d walked over them so often that he scarcely noticed them anymore. “It’s necessary to disguise our use of the building.”
“But there are books. On the floor.”
Finch shook his head. He hadn’t anticipated that this would be an issue. He should have. “They’re only mass-market paperbacks.” He tugged at her arm gently, but she didn’t move.
“But … books. On the floor.”
“It’s okay. Come upstairs.” Finch released her arm and walked out onto the books.
He paused halfway across the lobby and looked back. She was still frozen in the doorway. “Christine?”
“I can’t.”
“Upstairs are my first editions. And my computers.”
“But … books.”
“Come up when you’re ready,” he said gently. He turned and went up the stairs without her.
He was nearly to the top before he heard her footsteps scrambling up behind him. When she caught up, he was only a little surprised to find that she was in her stocking feet, carrying her shoes in her hand. A reasonable compromise, he supposed.
He unlocked the gate and pushed it back. Bear danced out to greet them; he was especially attentive to Christine, and Finch guessed that the dog had picked up on her lingering anxiety.
She paused again at the gateway and just looked around. Her shoes dropped out of her fingers; she didn’t seem to notice. Her eyes were wide as a child’s on Christmas morning. Though, Finch reflected sadly, she’d probably never had a Christmas morning that made her eyes wide. Neither had he, to be honest. But his Christmases with Grace, those had been joyful beyond words, and sweeter because he had thought such joy was impossible for him.
“Come in,” he invited. “Welcome to the … Bat Cave.” He took her shoulder bag and her coat and hung them on the coat tree, then added his own.
Finch went to his desk and sat down, logged into his system and pretended to ignore her. After a moment she moved quietly past the gate and looked at the first shelf of books. Finch watched her out of the corner of his eye. She started slowly, reading every title. And then she got distracted by the next shelf. One thing led to the next, and then she was moving, scanning titles, taking in everything.
Bear followed her for a few minutes, then retreated to his bed and flopped down happily. Evidently the dog thought her anxiety had faded sufficiently.
Even as he basked in the warmth of her excited approval, Finch reset his passwords. It wasn’t necessary, logically. But he couldn’t override his own small anxieties, and he didn’t try. If she’d known what he was doing, she wouldn’t have minded. Nor been surprised.
“What’s this?”
Finch looked up. She was standing in front of one of the boards. The one that was full. He exhaled very slowly. He should have hidden it away before he let her up here. “Those are the people that we couldn’t save. The ones before we began our … project.” He pursed his lips. “The lost chances.”
Christine nodded solemnly. She understood that she was standing in front of a memorial. “Where’s the other one?”
“The other one?”
“The board of the ones you did save.”
Finch stared at her until she turned around and met his eyes. “I don’t have one.” He shrugged. “We shred them. For security reasons. Once a case is closed, once they’re out of danger …”
“It never even crossed your mind, did it?”
“No.”
“Or John’s.”
“Not that he ever mentioned.”
Christine shook her head. “You need to reconsider your architecture. There’s some wicked asymmetry going on.”
Finch nodded. She was absolutely right, of course. The fact that they kept the lost ones in front of them and destroyed all evidence of the saved ones did represent an unbalanced mindset. Wicked asymmetry, indeed. They won, they celebrated quietly, they cleaned up, sometimes healed up in Reese’s case, and they moved on to the next Number. But the failures remained, a constant reminder
As if he could forget.
As if John could.
He couldn’t imagine taking the lost ones down. But maybe a second board was in order. Not pictures, not numbers. Nothing traceable. But something. “Ten minutes in the library,” he said quietly, “and already you’re redecorating.”
“Sorry.”
“Don’t be. You’re right.”
She gestured past him. “What’s that?”
Finch didn’t have to turn to know what she was pointing at. “The best of my collection. Go see.”
Christine moved past him to the decorative gilt doors that secured the shelves of his most precious books. He heard the soft creak of the hinges as she touched the doors, but the expected click of the latch didn’t follow. He waited, then finally turned. She was motionless, her hands flat against the ornate gates. Just looking. Emotion welled up in him again; no one, no one, understood this the way she did. That they were not merely books beyond the gate, but relics. That they weren’t just valuable, but treasured. That they were not objects, but friends. Books had been his first friends, his oldest friends. At points in his life his books had been his only light. His only reason to live.
At the depth of her addiction, the week before she should have died, Christine had still had library books in her backpack.
If I had raised her as my daughter …
Finch smiled wryly, sadly. She would not have turned out like this.
He stood and walked up behind her. Slowly, he reached past her and twisted the knob. She backed up and he swung the door open. “They’re just books,” he said gently.
“No, they’re not.” She met his eyes then, and she was smiling and trying not to cry. She put her hands over his and gently pushed the doors shut again. Finch understood that she was too overwhelmed to touch them. Yet. “Thank you,” she said, in a whisper.
Behind them, his computer beeped a quiet alert, Christine looked toward it. “Can I see?” she asked, shaking off her reverence.
“Ahhh.” She’d circled the room and looked at the shelves, but barely glanced at his computer desk. Finch realized that she thought she shouldn’t, that that was off-limits.
“Christine, I wouldn’t have brought you up here if I didn’t want you to see it.” He gestured to the desk. “Come, sit.”
She still hesitated, studying him. Looking for any trace of reluctance. For reservations. He smiled encouragingly. Then he took her hand and led her to the desk.
She dropped into the chair. Finch watched her scan from one monitor to the next. Her hands reached out to the nearest keyboard. She rested her fingertips on the home keys, then stopped and looked at him again. Her hesitation, her delicacy, calmed his own rising anxiety. It was hard to share, but easier to share with her, in part because she knew it was hard. “Go ahead,” he said.
Her fingers moved, slowly for ten keystrokes and then fast. She understood some things, stopped to study others. “Could you have just a few more programs open?” she asked under her breath.
“Of course I could,” he teased gently. “This is restricted access. I thought we’d start out easy.”
Christine grinned. “How do you do all of this with keyboards? It’s maddening.”
“Yes, dear.” He moved away, pretended to be busy with some files and then with books. Gave her room to explore without hovering over her shoulder.
Despite her complaints, her fingertips moved with certainty. She opened programs, studied them, moved them aside. Most of his structure she understood intuitively; they were arranged in the most logical way, with what he used most often in the center, less critical screens on the sides. Some screens made her stop and study them. Every so often she hesitated and looked from screen to screen, searching. Finch could tell she was beginning to identify the programs that were not open to her, the pieces that were missing. She didn’t complain; she just smiled, pleased to be able to identify what was absent. As with the book shelves, she was skimming, skipping. Trying to see everything at once.
Trying to see everything before he took it away from her.
Finch pushed the other desk chair, the one Reese sometimes sat in, over to the desk and sat down beside her. The young woman glanced at him anxiously, and from the look in her eyes he was able to confirm his suspicion. He reached into his vest pocket and brought out a plain key. “This opens the back door,” he said, “and the gate. I’ll send the alarm codes to your phone each time they’re updated. Unless it’s compromised, you’ll be able to access the library any time you want to.”
Christine stared at him. “Why?”
“I can access your home and your system with my thumbprint.”
“That’s different.”
Finch nodded. “It is. There may be times when I’ll need you to be here. When I can’t be. To assist us.”
“I’ll need passwords, then.”
“I can log you in remotely.”
A little smile danced around her eyes. “Restricted access, naturally.”
“Naturally.” The idea tweaked his paranoia a bit, but not nearly as hard as it would have earlier in their relationship. He trusted her, as much as he trusted anyone. And certainly more than he trusted someone like Leon Tao.
“You’re sure?”
“I’m sure.”
“Then I’m in.”
Finch put the key down and sat back. “As for the books, you’ll take better care of them than I do. Borrow whatever you like.”
“Seriously?”
“Yes.”
She squealed in a way that made Bear jump to his feet. Then she threw her arms around his neck and kissed him on both cheeks. “Thank you. Thank you.”
Harold grinned, delighted with her response, but then he caught her hands and pushed her away gently. “All right, all right. You’re scaring the dog.”
She looked down. Bear was on the floor between them, but he wasn’t scared. He was watching eagerly; he wanted to play, too. She leaned down and gave him a hug. Then she sat up and looked around again. He could see her calculating how long it would take her to read all of those books. She liked the answer she came up with. So did he.
“Now,” he said briskly, “if I can get your attention focused for a moment, I need a favor.”
Her eyes narrowed. “What?”
“I need you to do something for me. It should be easy enough, with your talents, but it will probably take some time. Perhaps a great deal of time.”
The dog should have tipped him off. Bear dropped to the floor, suddenly tense with focused attention.
“What?” Christine repeated.
Finch frowned at her. They were still sitting very close, but even from a mile away he would have picked up the change in her. The joy had died utterly from her eyes. And there was something else there. Something he’d seen before.
When he’d gone to her at Chaos, when she thought that the kiddie porn ring that she’d found on Sam Campanella’s computer network belonged to him, she’d had that same look. Hurt. Wounded. Disappointed. And furious.
He hadn’t liked it the first time he’d seen it. He didn’t like it now. “Christine … “
She pushed back away from him, stood up. Hurried to grab her coat and her bag.
He stood up. “Christine?”
“This favor,” she said, without looking at him. Her voice was dead flat. “When do you need it?”
“I … Sunday. Maybe Monday.”
“How much prep time?” She had stopped at the gate and put her shoes on.
“A few hours …”
“Fine. Call me Friday and we’ll go over it. I should be done being pissed off by then.”
Finch raised his hands, palms up, helpless. “Christine, what are you angry about? I haven’t … “
“Friday,” she said firmly. She hurried back down the hallway. By the time she hit the stairs she was running.
“Christine!” Finch called after her. He hurried to the top of the steps. He had some vague hope that the books on the floor would stop her, or at least slow her down. But she was too furious to even notice them.
John Reese was just coming into the lobby. He was surprised to see the woman, but not unduly so. “Hey, Christine.”
“John,” she snarled.
“Whoa.” He grabbed her arm. “What’s up?”
She glanced over her shoulder, up at Finch. “Boys are dumb,” she said flatly. “Even the really smart ones.” She shook herself loose and hurried out of the library.
Reese watched her go, then turned back to look up at Finch. “What did you do?”
“I don’t know.” Finch was genuinely bewildered. “I brought her to the library. I thought she’d like it.” He hesitated, thinking. “She did like it. She was delighted. She was … and then she was so angry.”
Reese climbed the stairs two at a time. “Why is she so angry?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know.” Finch held his hands out again. “You understand women, Mr. Reese. Far better than I ever will. Why is she so angry?”
“What did you say?”
“Nothing. At least, nothing out of the ordinary.” He walked back to the main room. “I let her look around, I told her she could borrow any books that she wanted. I gave her a key.” He paused at the desk. The key was still there. His fingers shook as he picked it up and tucked it back into his pocket. He’d been so sure. “She was happy to be here. And then I told her I needed a favor and before I could even explain what it was she was …” He gestured in the direction she’d fled. “She was furious at me.”
“Wait,” Reese said. “You brought her to the library, and then you asked her to do something for you.”
“Yes. But it’s nothing dangerous, or even unpleasant …”
“Finch, you’re missing the point.”
“Obviously I’m missing the point.” Finch looked at his partner hopefully. Reese was much better at human interaction than he could ever hope to be, and he sounded like he knew what had set Christine off. “Please, Mr. Reese.”
“Christine would do anything for you.”
“I know …”
“Anything, Finch. All you have to do is ask. You don’t have to pay her or explain your reasons to her. You just have to ask.”
Finch nodded. They both remembered that they’d dumped a screaming teenager in Christine’s living room and she’d barely blinked. “I know that.”
“You don’t have to bribe her,” Reese concluded.
“I didn’t bribe her.” Finch protested.
John gestured to the room around them. “You brought her here, Finch. You knew that was something she really wanted. You gave her a key, you let her see your system, you gave her the run of the stacks.”
About half-way through his sentence, Finch got it. The knowledge settled on him with a sick thud. “And then I told her I needed something from her, and she thought this was …” He rubbed his forehead. Then he took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. Christine’s rage made perfect sense now. Her cooperation, her assistance, was his for the asking. But it could not be bought. “She’s right. Boys are dumb.” He put his glasses back on. “But I never meant it that way. I just wanted her to see the library.”
Reese nodded. “Sure. But you can see how she read it.”
“This is bad,” Finch said. “This is very bad.”
“It’s not like you to be this ham-fisted, Harold.”
“No, it’s not. If I had asked her for the favor first …”
“She’d still be here.”
Finch shook himself. He had screwed up, badly. He’d insulted his friend. And though he hated it, there was only one way to fix it. “Flowers or chocolate?” he asked Reese. “Or both?”
The ex-operative considered. “This may rise to the level of a jewelry offense. But nothing too expensive. Go over the top and you’ll just make it worse.”
Harold moved to the wooden filing cabinet and opened the second drawer. He brought out a small box, weighed it in his hand, then took it back to his partner and opened it. Nestled within, on the signature Tiffany blue bed, was a largish pendant on a silver chain, a dove, studded with stones.
Reese shook his head. “Yeah, if those are real, that’s over the top.”
“It’s what I have at hand.” Finch closed the box and tucked it into his jacket. He moved to get his overcoat.
Bear bounced to his feet and brought his leash.
“If I were you,” Reese said, “I’d give her some time to cool off first.”
“Sound advice, I’m sure,” Finch answered. He took the leash from Bear and snapped it onto his collar. Then he hurried out of the library.
“Good luck!” Reese called after him.
Finch nodded to himself on his way down the stairs. He was going to need it.
It was sheer luck, Finch supposed, that he found her at all. Being Christine, and being very angry, the first thing she’d done was shut off her phone, and the second thing was to take the battery out of it. Her message to the world was, I don’t want to talk to anyone. Her message to Harold was, And you can’t find me.
There were a thousand places in the city that she might go, and that assumed that she’d stay in the city at all. She had cash and clean ID’s; she could go anywhere.
But she wasn’t running, Finch reasoned. She was just going away to cool off. So she wasn’t likely to go too far away, or to make any special effort to hide. He started back to Chaos. The coffee shop, he thought, was her most likely destination. And if she wasn’t there, it was the best place to wait for her.
But then, two blocks north of the cybercafé, a small sign and arrow caught his eye. Library. Her neighborhood library. Finch paused, then turned that way. If she wasn’t there, he could always double back. But he was unreasonably certain that she was.
He parked the car, took the dog’s leash, and walked through the front door. There were two librarians behind the counter; one was much younger, a red-head with freckles. The other was a handsome woman somewhere near fifty with long dark hair and eyes. He could tell by her bearing that she was in charge. She looked at him, at his limp, at Bear, and decided that the dog could pass for a service dog, whether he actually was one or not. She was a dog person, he could tell. She knew the dog would behave. She smiled at Finch as he approached the counter.
“Hello,” Finch said, in a calm, quiet voice, precisely pitched for the library. Bear sat calmly beside him. “This is going to sound like an odd question, but I’m looking for someone. A young woman. Christine Fitzgerald.”
“Scotty.”
“Yes.”
“You’re the one, huh?”
“I’m afraid so.”
She nodded her head toward the far corner.
“Can you let her finish shelving first?” the younger woman asked. “She’s really fast when she’s mad.”
“Shelley,” the older librarian scolded.
“Well, she is.”
Finch sighed. “Thank you.”
He was half-tempted to let Bear off his leash, let him seek out the woman and softened her up. But it seemed too cowardly. He moved down the rows along the far wall. Bear tugged uneasily at the leash, picking up on his nervousness. “It’s all right,” Finch told him. The dog looked up at him like he was crazy.
He heard the cart before he saw her. It had a squeak in one wheel. The younger librarian was right; she was moving very quickly. Angrily. And the message was very clear: You own a library. Good for you. I can walk into any library I want and make it my own. I don’t need yours.
Or maybe he was overthinking it. Libraries were where she went for comfort. They were where she’d spent her childhood, hiding from her abusive mother. They were her safe place. Her sanctuary.
He rounded the end of the last row. She was half-way down. The cart of returned books was nearly empty.
She glanced at him, then looked away and continued shelving books. “Is there some part of ‘leave me alone for two days’ that you didn’t understand?” she asked coldly.
“I couldn’t bear the idea of you being angry with me for that long,” Finch answered honestly.
She paused, rested her forehead against the shelf in front of her. “Harold, please go away.”
Harold, he noted. Not Random. She never called him Harold. Though she was calmer, she was still very angry. “I am so sorry, Christine. I was clumsy and careless. And I apologize.”
She turned her head and met his eyes for the first time. “All you had to do was ask.”
“I know that. And I never intended to use the library as any sort of enticement. I just wanted to share it with you. It was entirely independent of the favor, I swear. It never occurred to me that you’d think of it as a bribe. That was absolutely not my intention.”
“Harold …” She turned her shoulders so that she was facing him, finally.
He moved a little closer, but not too close. “I am not generally a careless man, Miss Fitzgerald. And that fact that I was this careless with you in this should be seen as an indication of my faith in you. My trust that I do not need to be hyper vigilant about every move I make. I allow myself a level of carelessness because I know that I can rely upon your forgiveness if I do make a mistake.”
Christine shook her head. “That was the most elegant line of bullshit I’ve ever heard.”
Harold allowed himself a small smile. “Honesty, I didn’t mean it the way it seemed.”
“I know.”
“Am I forgiven, then?”
“Of course you are.”
“Thank you.” He moved closer still. “I have something for you.”
“You’re about to screw this up again, you know.”
“I’ll take my chances.” He drew the small box out of his pocket. “Please.” When she didn’t reach for the box, he opened it and showed her the pendant inside.
“It’s beautiful.” She eyed it, but made no move to take it. “I don’t suppose those are rhinestones.”
“Yes, of course. From the new Tiffany’s rhinestone collection.” He slid the little dove apart with his thumb, revealing the USB drive hidden inside it. “It was custom made. I can’t return it.”
“Random …”
Finch nodded in relief. She was back to using his nickname; she truly had forgiven him. “Please,” he said, holding the box out to her. “It was to be your Christmas gift. Now I’ll have to come up with something else, I suppose.”
Christine sighed. “If I take that, will you promise to get me what I really want for Christmas?”
“Of course. Anything. Within reason.”
“What’s within reason for a man who owns a library?”
Finch smiled. “Anything you can name, of course.” He took her hand and folded it around the jewelry box. “Just tell me what it is.”
“Blueberry pie.”
“That seems a bit … conservative.”
“Blueberry pie, with real whipped cream, and Irish coffee. On Christmas night, in the library, with you and John.”
“That’s all?”
“That’s all. I’ll bring the coffee. I’ll have Zubec make us a Thermos.”
“That’s all?” Finch repeated.
“That’s all,” she answered firmly.
He nodded thoughtfully. “All right.”
“Good.” She handed him the next book off the cart, gestured vaguely behind him. He found the spot and shelved it. “So what’s this favor you need?”
“Ah, that.” He drew a picture out of his pocket. “I need you to enthrall a young man for me.”
She took the picture, handed him another book. “This is …”
“Yes.”
Christine nodded solemnly. “Okay. But what’s the favor?”
***
Special Agent Donnelly glanced at his watch again. Then he looked toward the door.
It wasn’t like her to be late.
Well, it was New York City. Traffic snarls, subway delays. Any meeting was subject to starting at the whim of the city. But it was utterly unlike Christine Fitzgerald to be late for anything.
She’d invited him to lunch, and she was ten minutes late.
He brought out his phone and studied it for a moment. He could call her. In the city, too, he couldn’t absolutely rule out the ‘mugged in an alley and in need of help’ possibility, either. Five more minutes.
He put the phone down and brought out the book. It was a paperback, Les Miserables, that she’d loaned him months before, on the night of what had been their first and last date. She’d asked him to bring it back. The request had surprised him a little; he’d thought it was a gift. But he didn’t really object. It was just odd.
As odd as her being late was.
The waiter stopped at the next table, where a woman was sitting alone. “Are you ready to order?”
“Oh, could I wait just a few more minutes?” she asked apologetically. “I’m supposed to be meeting a friend.”
“No problem.” The waiter moved away.
Out of long agent habit, Donnelly watched the woman for a moment. She looked at her watch. At her phone. And then she picked up her book and resumed reading it.
The book was the tell, of course. The minute he saw the title. Donnelly knew Christine Fitzgerald wasn’t late. She wasn’t coming at all. She had never intended to.
“You bitch,” he murmured very softly. He very rarely thought in such terms, and even more rarely gave voice to them. This time the word was bitterly delicious on his tongue. “You devious little bitch.” He’d been played. Like an overture. And he hadn’t seen it coming.
As fast as his anger had flared, it faded. Grudgingly, he had to admire the maestro’s skill.
The smart thing, the dignified thing, would just be to stand up and walk out.
But he studied the woman with the book a moment longer. She was an attractive woman, in her late thirties or early forties, with dark, shoulder-length hair, pulled back at the nape of her neck. She was dressed casually, conservatively, a blue-green sweater and black slacks. Small gold stud earrings, a thin gold chain around her neck. No wedding ring. Subtle make-up. Big brown eyes.
She had glanced up from his book, right into his eyes. The look held just for a moment. Then she smiled modestly and looked down again.
Get up, Donnelly thought, and walk out. If you talk to this woman, if you engage in any way, you are playing right into Christine’s plan.
And yet …
She seems nice enough. Are you going to walk out and leave her here, waiting for someone who will never arrive? Someone she thinks is her friend? Someone I thought was mine?
Someone who had gone to a fair amount of trouble to be sure the two of them met?
It was insane.
The woman at the next table closed her book again, glanced at her watch, and picked up her phone.
Not insane, Donnelly amended. Just wildly impulsive. Christine had thrown a dare in front of him. He wondered if she was watching somehow, waiting to see if he’d take it.
He was not going to be played with. Not this way. He put his things back in his pockets and stood up to walk out.
And made it as far as the woman’s table. She clicked off her phone, shook her head. She looked worried. Her hand fell onto her book, almost like a talisman, a comfort. Up close, Donnelly could see that the book was the French version.
“It went right to voice mail, didn’t it?” he asked quietly.
The woman looked up at him, startled. “I … yes.” She smiled, embarrassed, and looked away.
“She’s not coming, you know.”
She looked up again. “Excuse me?” She looked around quickly, verifying that she safely surrounded by other people. He was scaring her.
“Christine Fitzgerald,” Donnelly said evenly. “Scotty. She was supposed to meet you for lunch fifteen minutes ago. But she’s not coming.” He flashed his badge. “I’m Special Agent Donnelly. FBI.”
The woman’s face changed. “Oh, God, is Scotty in trouble again?”
Again. What an interesting life Christine Fitzgerald had, that her friends, confronted with a badge, immediately assumed that she was in trouble. Again. “I don’t know,” Donnelly said. “I haven’t decided yet.”
“Pardon?”
The waiter scooted behind Donnelly with a tray. He glanced at him, then looked back to the woman, gestured to the empty chair. “May I?”
“Please.” She was still flustered, but curious. The badge had calmed her fears about him.
He sat down. “I know Miss Fitzgerald isn’t coming,” he explained, “because she was supposed to meet me here for lunch fifteen minutes ago. And as you probably know, she’s never late for anything. Also, she asked me to return a book I’d borrowed from her.”
The woman’s eyes narrowed. Donnelly brought the book out of his pocket and let her see the cover.
“I’m going to kill her,” she pronounced firmly.
“That’s pretty much what I was thinking, yes.” He considered. “Of course, as a federal agent I can’t actually condone that kind of thinking, but …”
“We can fantasize.”
“Absolutely.”
The woman sat back. “I can’t believe she’d actually … no, I can. I absolutely can. Damn it.” She shook her head. “I am so sorry, Agent …”
“Donnelly,” he said again. “Ellis Donnelly.”
“I’m Theresa Ramos.”
“It’s nice to meet you.” Donnelly hesitated. “I think. I mean, it is, but …”
“… under the circumstances,” she completed for him. “I understand completely.”
The waiter returned. “Ready to order now?” he asked cheerfully.
Theresa looked at him, startled and confused. “Uh … no, I don’t think we’re going to …”
“I think we should,” Donnelly answered. “We’ll need nourishment while we fantasize her untimely demise.”
She opened her mouth to protest. Then she changed her mind and ordered the cobb salad. Donnelly opted for the grilled chicken sandwich. They both asked for coffee. The waiter went away, brought coffee, went away again.
Donnelly added just a little sugar to his coffee; Theresa drank hers black. “It’s not as good as hers,” she commented.
“True.”
“A minor loss.”
“How do you know her?” Donnelly asked.
“I used to be a librarian. I mean, I still am, but not in the public system any more. But when I was …”
“You saw Miss Fitzgerald on a regular basis,” he guessed. He knew from his background checks on Christine that she visited the library nearly every week. “Where are you working now?”
“At the law library at NYU.”
“That’s a big change.”
She nodded. “The money’s better, the clients I’m not so sure about.”
“Law students are harder to deal with than the general public?”
“Law students are very demanding. And … entitled.”
“Ahh.”
“I’m almost afraid to ask, but how do you know Scotty?”
Donnelly considered his answer. “She may be a witness in a case I’m working on.”
“So her arrest is not imminent.”
“Sadly, no. She’s not a suspect.”
“Pity.” Theresa smiled briefly.
Donnelly nodded his agreement. “That would be lovely, wouldn’t it?” He did not add that he had been emphatically told by his superiors that he could not arrest her no matter what she did.
“Can you tell me about the case?”
“It’s an ongoing investigation. I really can’t discuss it. Except to say that I’ve been working on it forever.”
The woman studied him across the table for a long moment. “I think I like a man with a little mystery to him.”
Unexpectedly, Donnelly found himself relaxing. He hadn’t been aware that he was tense. But of course any first date was an audition, even a completely unanticipated date. A delicate balance between trying to impress the woman, trying to get her to like you, while at the same time being honest about who you were.
Theresa Ramos liked him. Or at least was open to the possibility of liking him.
Their lunches came. They ate, they talked. They got along. Wonderfully. Of course. Because Christine Fitzgerald would not have planned it any other way.
And then, though they ate slowly, the lunch came to an end.
Donnelly waved down the waiter. “Can I get the check, please?”
“Of course.”
“We should split it,” Theresa said. “This wasn’t your idea …”
“No,” Donnelly admitted, “but I enjoyed it very much anyhow. And there is nothing about me that will let me split a check with a lady. Ever.”
She seemed doubtful. “Ellis, I can’t … “
“Please.”
The waited dropped the folder with the bill in it, and Donnelly snagged it before she could reach for it. He opened it and shook his head. “And the point is moot anyhow.” He flipped the folder around. There was no check inside. There were, instead, two movie tickets.
Theresa shook her head ruefully. “She is damnably thorough.”
“Determined.”
“Relentless.”
“Oh, yes.”
“Are those …” Theresa looked more closely at the tickets. “Les Miz, of course. On Christmas Day.” She looked just a little wistful. “Every ticket in the city has been sold out for weeks.”
Donnelly put the folder down, took out the tickets, and slipped a twenty dollar tip into their place. “You should take them,” he offered.
“Oh.” She took them, tentatively. “I imagine you already have plans for Christmas.”
Oh, yes, Donnelly thought grimly. They mostly involve sitting in a bland apartment alone, watching insipid TV, heating a frozen dinner in the microwave, and wishing the hours would pass more quickly so I can get back to work. “Nothing special. But you could take a friend ...”
“I would rather go with you.” She seemed startled by her boldness; she was, Donnelly thought, a bit old-fashioned. He liked that. She’d only asked because she thought he wasn’t going to. “But of course if you’d rather …”
“I would love to see the movie with you,” Donnelly assured her quickly. “But that means that we have to admit she was right.”
Theresa nodded solemnly. “It means we have to let her live. At least through Christmas.”
“Yes.”
“Well. But the tickets are impossible to get.”
“True.” Donnelly shrugged. “I’m really rather busy at work anyhow. Not much time to plan a discrete murder.”
“I could do some research,” Theresa offered. “Find some kind of loophole. You know, just in case.”
“We’ve already committed conspiracy,” Donnelly mused.
“Sure. But a jury of our peers, if they heard the whole story? They’d never convict.”
“True,” he agreed. “Totally justified.”
“But … not until after Christmas.”
“Right.” He drew out his card and gave it to her. “You should keep the tickets, though, in case I get called in to work.”
She nodded.
“And I should warn you … that happens a lot.”
“I imagine it does. I’ll consider myself warned.”
Donnelly studied her for another moment. He liked this woman. It was perhaps unconventional to bond with someone over hypothetical plans to murder the person who’d introduced them, but they were perfectly in accord on that. He liked her wit. He didn’t know enough about her to decide anything further than that. But he wanted to know more, and that was more than he’d expected. He liked her.
And she seemed to like him.
You devious little bitch, he thought in the general direction of Christine Fitzgerald. But he actually smiled in fondness at the thought.
***
Reese squinted unhappily at the picture Finch was taping to the board. “Soldier?” he asked quietly.
“No. Not anymore.” Finch stepped back. “Gregory Farrell. Married, no children. Six years in the Army, two tours in Iraq, one in Afghanistan. Honorably discharged eight months ago. No more recent pictures available. Nothing very remarkable one way or another in his service record. However, since his discharge he’s been through three jobs. Two minimum-wage warehouse positions, the third as an appliance delivery man. He was fired from that one last week.”
“He got lost coming home,” Reese said.
“Perhaps.” Finch pulled another sheet off the printer and hung it up. “Mr. Farrell’s wife, Susie, works in the accounting department of a national firm. She’s been there for eight years. Her income has been sufficient to keep them afloat.”
“But?”
“Three days ago, Susie’s credit card was used to rent a room at a long-term-stay hotel.”
“She moved out on him,” Reese said.
Finch smirked, showed him the address. John recognized it. He’d stayed there. “She kicked him out,” he amended.
“I would say.”
“So he’s likely to be a perpetrator.”
“I’m sorry to have to agree, Mr. Reese.” Finch sat down at his desk and tapped the speaker phone.
“Carter,” the detective barked after two rings.
“Hello, Detective,” Finch answered.
“I just caught two new cases, so make it quick.”
“Gregory Farrell.”
Her keyboard clicked. “Okay, got him. Picked up six months ago in a bar fight. Released without charges. Caught a speeding ticket three weeks ago and got belligerent with the officer. They brought him in, but he blew clean, so they released him.”
“Not drinking and driving, just angry,” Finch said.
Reese moved closer to the desk. “Any domestic calls?” he asked.
“Not seeing anything.”
“Run the wife. Susie.”
A brief pause. “Fender-bender last January. Icy road, cited for assured clear distance. That’s it.” And then, “Farrell’s a vet, you know.”
“We know.”
“Call me if you need me.”
Thank you, Detective.” Finch cut off the call.
“Keep digging,” Reese said. “I’ll see if I can find him.”
***
q95;
No one answered the knock, so Reese let himself into the hotel room. There was a battered suitcase on top of the dresser, with clothes strewn roughly in its vicinity. He did a more thorough search, then tapped his earpiece. “Finch? Farrell’s been here, but he’s not here now. What have you got?”
“Something disturbing,” Finch answered. “Susie’s credit card was used to secure a pay day loan from an on-line lender, in the amount of five thousand dollars.”
“That’s a big loan.”
“Especially for a man who just lost his job.”
“He has no intention of paying it back,” Reese said grimly. “I need to find him, Finch.”
There was a minute of nothing but keyboard. John looked around the room. It was grim, dirty. He’d lived in places just like this. He hadn’t minded at the time; he hadn’t much noticed his surroundings. But now it depressed him. He didn’t know anything about Farrell, really, except that the man had worn a uniform. And now he was in trouble. That was enough.
Finally Finch’s voice resumed in his ear. “He picked up the money from a Western Union just over two hours ago. I’m sending you the address.”
“Good.”
“I’ll see if I can locate the wife,” Finch continued. "She may have some idea where he’d go.”
Reese looked at the address on his phone. “Let me know.”
***
Reese stood outside the cash shop and looked around slowly. He knew this neighborhood. He’d been here before. Farrell was long gone; he was more than three hours behind him. But this neighborhood was a long way from the man’s home. He’d come here for a reason.
Down the block, a big square man stood next to the doorway of an empty shop. He was flipped through a comic book. Graphic novel, Reese hear Finch correct in his mind. Which meant, basically, that it was a comic book with cleavage. It seemed a little chilly to be reading outside.
Reese crossed the street and walked briskly right past the reader. The man barely glanced at him. He looked back to his comic, and Reese’s elbow caught him squarely in the jaw. The man fell neatly out of sight beside the steps.
Reese went inside.
The front room of the shop was guarded by another goon, but he wasn’t much trouble. John dropped him, then continued to the back.
The show room, as is turned out. Not much of a store at that, just three folding tables, but all of them were covered with guns. There were two more men there. Reese looked them over quickly as they drew on him. He shot the younger one in the thigh, then turned his weapon at the older one but didn’t fire.
They stood very still for a moment, with their guns aimed at each other. The man was about sixty, with grey hair and a heavy jowl. His eyes were almost black. He considered John calmly. He decided, probably correctly, that Reese was faster. “You a buyer?” he finally said.
“Just browsing,” Reese answered.
The man’s gun came down. “Something special?”
“Guy was in here a couple hours ago. Five grand in cash. I need to know what he bought.”
“You a cop?”
“Not even close.”
The man tucked his gun into the back of his waistband. “Two AK’s, semi-auto. Six thirty-round clips, two hundred rounds. And a bag to carry them in.”
Reese felt his stomach lurch, but he nodded calmly. “Anything else?”
“Cheap-ass little thirty-eight. Loaded, but no extra rounds.”
“Thank you.” He glanced at the man on the floor. “I’ll show myself out.”
“Please do.”
Reese did. On the street and safely away from the gun shop, he called Finch. “We’ve got a problem, Finch. Farrell’s weaponed up, in a big way.”
“What do you think he’s planning?”
“To kill a lot of people.”
Finch went quiet for a moment. “Then we need to determine where.”
“His last job?”
“Perhaps. He was only there for five weeks. Not much time to work up a good hatred.”
“He’s been working on it for a long time, Finch. It’s just a question of what sets him off.” Reese looked around again. It was Sunday; the streets were quieter than usual. “How many people work there?”
There was a pause while Finch consulted with the deities of the internet. “Fifteen, currently.”
“No. What about the wife?”
Another admirably brief pause. “Just over three hundred.”
“Send me the address.”
“They’re closed today, Mr. Reese.” His phone chirped with the information he’d requested.
“Good. Maybe that will keep the body count down.”
***
The Chaos Café was packed. Donnelly slipped in through the back door and moved up the little corridor to the old bar.
Christine Fitzgerald was there, conveniently close, with her back to him. She had both hands on a tray on the bar. It was already loaded with five cups of various incarnations of coffee, and one of the baristas behind the bar was busily filling more. There were three others working behind the bar, and four waiters working the floor.
Between the noise of the coffee grinders and steamers, the rock music, and the increasingly loud chatter of the patrons, the café was deafening.
It was easy for Donnelly to slip up behind her undetected. He grabbed her arms firmly from behind, just above the elbows, and leaned close to speak in her ear, quietly but very sternly. “I am fully capable of buying my own lunch, Miss Fitzgerald.”
She chuckled, unimpressed. “And I’m fully capable of buying my own restaurant. What’s your point?” And then to the barista, “I need one more, with a depth charge.”
“Got it.”
“I’m also fully capable of finding my own dates.”
“Yeahhhh,” she answered, “I haven’t really seen any evidence of that.” The last cup hit the tray. She looked over shoulder. “Ronnie! Tray up!”
She turned and gently elbowed Donnelly back, balanced the tray above the heads of the crowd and handed it off to one of the waiters. Then she turned back, took his arm, and drew him into the doorway of the little office. “So how’d it go?”
“I’m not here to discuss my date. I’m here to discuss the fact that you …”
“If you’re calling it a date, it went well. Outstanding. Are you coming to the movie?”
“Christine …”
“Are you bringing Theresa?”
“You can’t just …”
“Ellis. She’s lovely. And she’s smart. And she’s a little bit shy. I knew you’d get along. So what are you mad about?”
Donnelly made himself take a deep breath; she was talking so fast he felt winded on her behalf. “I don’t like being ambushed.”
Christine tipped her head quizzically. “If I’d asked you in advance, would you have gone?”
“No. But that’s not the …”
“Yes, it is. It’s totally the point. So you met this wonderful woman and you hit it off and you have a second date and all is shiny. What’s the problem?”
The front door of the café opened and six more gamer-types game in. They were greeted loudly by their friends, and the whole noise level of the café jumped noticeably. Donnelly flinched, but Christine grinned. He drew her further into the office and pushed the door half-shut behind him. “What did I ever do that made you think it was acceptable for you to interfere in my personal life?”
She raised one eyebrow. “Well, you kissed me once, for starters. But beyond that, what did I ever do that made you think I needed your permission to interfere in your personal life?”
“Christine …”
“Ellis. Haven’t you spent enough Christmases alone?”
Her words brought him up short. Every argument, every objection he had, simply died. She was absolutely right. For the first time in a very long time he was actually, tentatively, looking forward to Christmas. Because of Theresa, and because of Christine.
And yet he couldn’t quite give up his reluctance. “The odds of this turning into anything long-term are incredibly remote.”
“Isn’t that always true?”
“My job, and especially this case, it consumes my life …”
“Take a chance, Ellis.”
He shook his head. “You’re absolutely relentless, aren’t you?”
“You should talk.”
Which reminded him of his primary interest in the woman. “Have you seen him? The Man …”
“No,” Christine cut him off. “And good, we got that out of the way. Look, just this once accept that I know what’s best for you.”
“I don’t think that’s …”
“You have a date for Christmas Day. If it doesn’t go anywhere beyond that, fine. You still had a date for Christmas Day. And I’ll find you a new one next year.”
“No,” Donnelly protested in genuine alarm. “No more. Just stop. You need to stop.”
“We’ll see.”
She was toying with him, and she was having way too much fun doing it. Worse, Donnelly realized, he didn’t have any effective way to stop her. “Christine, please. Please don’t do this anymore. I’ll bring Theresa to the movie, I’m sure we’ll have a lovely time, we’ll see where it goes from there, but please, please stay out of it. Whether it works or not, please stop.” His mind latched on to his one possible angle. “You know I’m not made for this kind of chaos. I can’t deal with it. Please. I am begging you. Promise that you’ll stop.”
Christine considered for a long moment. The teasing smile faded from her eyes, grew gentler, warmer. “All right,” she finally agreed. “You and Theresa are on your own from here on out.”
“Thank you,” he answered with devout gratitude.
“But if it doesn’t take, next year you’re fair game again.”
“Christine …”
“At least you’ll know it’s coming.”
“Why are you doing this? Why am I suddenly one of your projects?”
“Because I like you,” she answered, as if that were the most obvious thing in the world.
“If you liked me, you’d leave me alone.”
Christine shook her head. “Left alone, you are too much alone. Like me.”
“Will you be alone?” he asked suddenly. “On Christmas?”
“No. I have places to be. Friends to be with.”
“Will you be at the movie?”
“I wouldn’t miss it.” She smiled, pleased with herself. “I rented out the theater for the matinee.”
“The whole theater.”
“And gave tickets to all my friends. It made gift wrapping so much easier this year.”
Donnelly stared at her. “You’re serious.”
“I am.”
Her announcement actually made the whole tickets aspect a little easier to swallow. “You never run out of ways to surprise me.”
“I hope not.”
“I don’t suppose you gave a ticket to your friend in the Suit?”
Christine sighed. “You really are obsessive, aren’t you?”
“You already knew that.” Donnelly sighed himself, looked around the sparsely-furnished little office. “She is very nice.”
“Theresa? Yes.”
“So this means you and I are definitely breaking up?”
She chuckled. “You and I, Ellis, are not dating. If we were, it would mean that you were dumping me right before Christmas in favor of a librarian that you just met and that would suck. But we’re not and we never were, so everything is shiny.” She paused. “Shiny. Damn. I gotta stay away from the Browncoats for a while.”
“The what?”
“Never mind.”
“So we were never dating?” Donnelly asked. “Not even that first night?”
“Maybe that first night,” she conceded. “But since you wouldn’t kiss me after that, we definitely aren’t dating now.”
Donnelly studied her for a moment. Her bright blue eyes were calmer now, less manic, warm but somehow a little sad. Serious, finally. “Maybe I was afraid that if I kissed you again, things would get completely out of control.”
“I think being completely out of control once in a while would do you a world of good.” Her voice was very gentle, taking the sting out of her words.
“I would hate it,” he said. “But I wish … things could have been different.”
“We would have had to be completely different people. And completely different people would probably never have met at all.”
“True.”
“Paradoxes. I hate paradoxes.” Christine brightened a little. “But speaking of which. Christmas night, Doctor Who special, viewing party here. You should come, after the movie.”
Donnelly frowned at her. “No, I don’t think so.”
“Ahhh. Not a Whovian. And doesn’t know Browncoats.” She nodded wisely. “More reasons that we’re not dating.”
“Not a Whovian,” he agreed. The word felt strange in his mouth. “I might watch the show anyhow, but I think it will be at home, in my quiet apartment on my own couch, well away from those people.” He gestured to the ever-louder café beyond the door. “Perhaps with just one lovely librarian next to me.”
Christine smiled her approval. “Solid plan. Let me know how it turns out.”
“No,” Donnelly answered firmly. “Whatever happens between Miss Ramos and me going forward is none of your business. Agreed?”
She sighed heavily. “Fine.”
“Christine.”
“Fine. I promise.”
“Thank you.” He touched her arm. “And … thank you for the introduction.”
Something crashed loudly at the front of the café, followed by shouts and hoots and applause. “I need to get out there,” Christine said, rolling her eyes. “I’ll see you on Christmas, if not before.”
She leaned up to kiss him on the cheek. Almost without meaning to, he turned his face and touched his lips to hers. It was very brief, hardly more than a brush, but then she stayed there, her face close to his, her blue eyes sparkling up at him, and suddenly he was breathless. “Can I …” he asked, and then stopped, because he didn’t know what he wanted, only that he wanted it.
“Kiss me goodbye?” Christine suggested, very softly.
“Yes.”
“Yes, please.”
It wasn’t a deep kiss, nor a very long one, and certainly not nearly as passionate as the kisses on that first night had been. It was sweet, and it hurt. If you dared, Donnelly thought, you could keep her. If you could let yourself be completely out of control, even for a minute. Just grab her, just … He couldn’t, and they both knew it. It didn’t make the kiss any less sweet, or the longing any less sharp. She will always be the one that got away, he thought, and this is the moment that she slips irrevocably out of my reach.
And that was how it had to be.
He drew his lips away from hers.
For one impossible instant she clung to him. It was quick and then it vanished, but it had undeniably been there, that one second when he knew that she felt the pain, too.
It was madness, Donnelly thought. But it was there, in her kiss, in her eyes. One flash of longing. Calm me, tame me, keep me. And then it was gone.
Gone. Done. He would go on to date Theresa, and Christine would go on to date whatever hapless man in uniform next crossed her path, probably, and that was the end of it. And it was for the best. It was absolutely for the best.
She slipped out of his arms, out of the office and into the chaos of the coffee shop.
Ellis Donnelly watched her go, and then slipped out the back door himself, absolutely certain that he’d done the right thing, and mercilessly, relentlessly smothering the small voice in the corner of his heart that told him to turn back.
***
Greg Farrell wasn’t hard to find, once Reese knew where to look.
The man was pacing on the sidewalk across the street from the office building where his wife worked. He looked strung-out, exhausted. Anxious.
He had a big black duffle bag over his shoulder. Carrying that much fire power might have made Reese anxious, too.
He slapped at his earpiece. “Finch? How many people inside right now?”
“Give me a minute.”
Reese waited, watching the man pace. He stopped every so often and looked across at the targeted building. Checking the sight lines, Reese knew. Scouting the area.
He didn’t seem to be much interested in an escape route, though.
The longer he paced, the more agitated he got.
“Mr. Reese,” Finch said finally, “I’m up on the security cameras. There’s a guard in the lobby and another walking rounds, but there doesn’t seem to be anyone else in the building.”
John felt his shoulders relax. “Then it’s not today,” he said. “Probably.”
“What’s he doing, then?”
“Planning.” Reese nodded to himself. “Pull the fire alarm and wait right there.”
“He’d be caught.”
“Eventually. And he doesn’t care.”
There was another pause, this one without a keyboard accompaniment. “What are we going to do, Mr. Reese?”
“We’re going to stop him from killing anyone,” Reese answered simply. “After that ” I don’t know.”
The line stayed quiet, but he knew Finch was still with him.
Greg Farrell sat down on a bench, dropped the black bag at his feet, and put his head in his hands.
“He’s at the end of his rope, Finch.” He’d been there himself, and he knew that Finch remembered.
“Can we find a way to throw him a lifeline?” Finch asked immediately.
And that, Reese thought, is why I would tear this city apart to find you, Harold. “We can try.”
“Detective Carter may have some resources.”
“If she doesn’t, Christine does. Hang on, Finch.”
Farrell had made some kind of decision. He stood up, straightened his jacket, picked up his bag. Then he started walking, away from his target, with speed and purpose.
“I’ll get back to you,” Reese said. He trotted after the man.
***
q95;
Farrell was in good shape; he walked briskly for the better part of half an hour. Reese wished he’d had Bear with him; might as well kill two birds with one stone.
Finally Reese saw water ahead of them. They were coming up on the East River. Farrell saw it, too, and he broke into a trot. “Damn,” Reese said. He began to run, closing the distance between them. It was way too cold for a dip. He didn’t want to have to go in after the man. But when Farrell got to the railing next to the bank, he stopped.
Reese slowed to a walk and turned just a little, so he wasn’t approaching the man directly. Farrell didn’t notice him. He stood very still, looking at the water. Reese stopped twenty feet from the man and waited. A minute passed, then two, then three.
Finally, Farrell took the strap of the duffle bag off his shoulder and set it on the ground. From the sound and apparent weight of the bag, it held all the weapons. The man climbed over the railing, then reached back for the bag. Reese started to move again. But Farrell didn’t move any closer to the water. Instead, he swung the bag by the strap, built up some inertia, and flung it.
The bag, and presumably the weapons, hit the water ten feet out and sank immediately.
Farrell climbed back over the railing, He looked around, but scarcely noticed Reese. Then he walked the other direction.
“Mr. Reese?” Finch said. “Everything alright?”
John was already following the man again. “We’re going to need Carter,” he said.
“Why? Is someone dead?”
“No. And I’m going to keep it that way.”
***
Greg Farrell stopped in the nearest alley. He went behind the dumpster and pulled out his phone. He hit speed dial, waited while it rang and went to voice mail. “Hey, Susie,” he said. His voice was shaky. He cleared his throat. “Hey, I, um … I just wanted to tell you. I wanted to … I’m really sorry. Really sorry, Susie. I just want you to know, I love you. I’ve always loved you. Even when I didn’t treat you like I did. I’m sorry about that most of all. I wish …” He stopped. Struggled for words. None came. Finally he just pressed the button to end the call.
He put the phone away and pulled out the gun. It was a .38, a cheap little piece of crap, but it would do the job.
“Hey, pal, you got a smoke?”
Farrell turned, startled. He ran squarely into a fist, and his world went black.
***
It was too cold to be patient. Carter walked over to one of the remaining piles of snow ” everything had melted except the piles left by the snowplows ” and scooped up a small handful. It was crunchy, mostly ice. She walked back to the man slumped on the bench and slapped the ice on the back of Farrell’s neck.
He woke up with an audible ‘whoosh’ of breath. “What the …”
“Hey, there,” Carter said. She sat down next to him and flashed her badge. “I’m Carter. Homicide.”
The man blinked, licked his lips, swallowed. “I didn’t kill anybody.”
“I know. But you thought about it.”
“I … I threw all the weapons away. I’m not going to kill anybody.”
Carter tilted her head. “Yeah. I’d like to believe that. Thing is, both of those things are only mostly true. Right?”
“I …” He kept looking at her, but his hand patted his coat pocket. Then he dropped it to his side. “Am I … am I under arrest?”
“Haven’t decided yet.”
He swallowed again. “Maybe … it would be best. If you …”
“If I took you in? Could be. Or maybe we should get you some help instead.”
“I don’t think anybody can help me.”
“Oh.” Carter sat back. “I get it. You think you’re the only one that got a little lost, huh? All those men and women serving in Iraq, Afghanistan, and you’re the only one who couldn’t quite fit in when you got back?”
His eyes flashed with sudden anger, and he looked away. “You don’t know anything about it.”
“I know everything about it,” Carter snapped. “I was there.”
He looked at her. Then he looked away again. “I’m angry,” he said quietly.
“You have some right to be.”
“No, you don’t understand. I’m always angry. All the time. It’s like I can’t turn it off. I can’t sleep, and when I do I wake up and I’m … angry.”
Carter nodded. “We can get you help for that, Greg.”
“My wife. She’s been so good, but … she’s scared to death of me. Everything she does, she just, she tries so hard not to upset me. She’s on eggshells all the time. And I … I get angry about that. That she’s trying so hard, that she’s tiptoeing around. She’s scared. And I’m scared.”
He turned and looked her squarely in the eyes. “I was going to kill everybody. Her and everybody she works with. As many people as I could.”
“But you threw the guns away,” Carter prompted quietly.
“I had to. I had to. I don’t want to hurt anybody …” Tears filled his eyes. “Can they really … can somebody really help me?”
“Yes. But you’ve got to do something for yourself first.”
“What?”
Carter brought the .38 out. “You told me you threw all the weapons away. But you forgot this one.” She held it out to him. “Take it. Throw it in the river. And then we’ll get started on making the second part true. The part about not killing anyone.”
He stared at her like she’d lost her mind. “Go on,” Carter said. “Take it.”
“I can’t.”
“Yes, you can. You’ve done much braver things than this. Just take it and throw it in the river.”
“I …” Farrell reached out suddenly and grabbed it from her hand. He strode to the railing and looked out at the water. Then he stopped and looked down at the gun. Then he looked back at her.
Carter sat very still, silent, and waited.
After a very long moment, he cocked his arm back and hurled the gun into the river.
Then he walked back to the bench. “You took all the rounds out, didn’t you?”
Carter smiled wryly. “Damn right I did.”
Farrell found a sad little smile of his own. “Thank you.”
“Come on.” She stood up, nodded toward her car. “They’ve got a bed waiting for you.”
“They can really help?”
“I promise.”
He followed her to the car. Then he hesitated again. “Should I …” He gestured toward the back seat.
Carter shrugged. “You can sit up front if you want. You’re not under arrest.”
“I should be.”
“Yeah, we don’t usually book people for littering, and that’s all I’ve seen you do.”
“But you know …” He stopped, looked at her again. “How did you know?”
“I have a source.”
“But then you know …”
“I know,” Carter answered. “And you need to hear this, Farrell. You do to this program, you stay there, you work hard, you get well, and nobody else knows what I know about today. But you take one step off the path, you drop out, you screw around ” you so much as look at a gun dealer, and I swear, I will throw your ass in jail in a hot second. And I will be keeping an eye on you. Every step of the way. We clear?”
His eyes gleamed again with tears ” and gratitude. “Clear.”
“Get in the car.”
Farrell did. She closed the door behind him, walked around to the driver’s side. She checked rearview mirror. There was a dark sedan there, idling. She knew it would follow her all the way to the hospital. “Every step of the way,” she said again. She glanced over at Farrell. He looked tired.
He had a right to be.
When she’d gotten him checked in, she went back to her car and looked around. The sedan was gone. But the minute she was behind the wheel, her phone rang. “John.”
“Thank you, Carter.”
“You’re welcome. Feels kinda good to help a live one once in a while.”
“I know.”
“You’re gonna keep an eye on him, right? I don’t want to be looking at a dozen bodies six months from now.”
“We’ll watch him. I promise.” He didn’t add that if Farrell went astray, Reese would take care of him personally. He didn’t need to. Carter wasn’t sure she approved, but it was still reassuring.
She smiled to herself and put her phone away.
***
Will Ingram look up from his plate of ortiki “ quail grilled in spinach “ and frowned. “Uncle Harold?”
“Hmmm?” Finch shook himself and returned his attention to the young man. “I’m sorry. North Dakota.”
Will looked the direction his uncle had been looking. At the other side of the restaurant, three men and a young woman was having lunch together. The men all wore suits; two were late middle-aged, the third younger and evidently angry. The woman was a little more casual, in a skirt and sweater. It was the third time he’d seen his uncle watching them. “Do you know them?”
“Yes.” Finch glanced that way again. “Sorry.”
It seemed to Ingram that his uncle’s cheeks were just a little pink. He looked again. “She’s pretty,” he ventured. The woman was pretty, in a sort of understated, fresh-scrubbed way. She was also about his age, rather young for his uncle. But Will shrugged that off immediately. If Harold wasn’t alone for a change, he didn’t really care who he was not alone with.
“Yes,” Harold agreed. “Very.”
Direct hit, Ingram thought, surprised. “Who is she?”
“Just a … business associate.”
“Oh. Okay, then. Don’t tell me.”
His uncle smiled briefly. “Her name is Christine Fitzgerald. She’s the owner of a company called Cassandra Consulting. She conducts independent information security audits for various companies throughout the city.”
“Independent … ?”
“She hacks computer networks, and then tells the companies where their vulnerabilities are.”
“Oh.” Will frowned. So it wasn’t a romantic relationship after all. That was a little disappointing. “So how do you know her? You don’t know anything about computers.”
“No, I don’t. And that’s why I frequently employee Miss Fitzgerald’s services.” Harold took another bite of his lunch. He’d opted for the shrimp saganaki. “Aside from the pharmaceutical companies we insure, the largest liability risk for nearly all of our clients is information exposure.” He waved his fork. “Financial firms, like Bender Warren there, are particularly vulnerable to exposure of confidential client data. And it all goes back to computer security.”
“Oh.”
“So our underwriters frequently base our rates on the results of independent security audits. A thorough audit can provide the basis for a …” He stopped, smiled wryly. “Shop talk. I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay.” Will grinned. “I was almost following you this time.”
“Nobody follows it, except other insurance people. And every they’re bored by it.”
Will glanced at the girl again. “The guy with her looks upset.”
“I noticed.” As they watched, the agitated man grew steadily louder. They had a computer tablet on the table, and he poked it with his finger repeatedly. The other men spoke to him, trying to calm him. The woman sat back, subtly leaning away from the table and the conflict. They were all pretending it was a civilized conversation, but Will could tell it was getting less polite by the minute.
“You think she caught something?” he asked.
“I would say so,” Harold answered. “Something major, by the look of it.”
“Are they your client?”
Harold sighed. “Yes. Obviously I need to review their account.” He shrugged. “After lunch. This is really excellent.”
“I almost forgot how much good food there was in New York,” Will agreed.
“I have a whole list of new places I’d like to try. If you’re here long enough, we’ll hit them all.”
Will grinned. “I’m in.”
The angry man at the other table stood up and hurled the tablet against the wall. It broke and fell in pieces to the floor. The waiter moved toward the table, but the man was already striding toward the front door.
The restaurant hushed and then murmured. The waiter gingerly retrieved the pieces of the tablet and brought them back to the table. Fitzgerald took them graciously and dumped them into her shoulder bag. She and the remaining men spoke quietly.
Harold stirred. “Would you mind, Will, if I asked her to join us for a few minutes?”
“What?” It was a rather startling request, and Will wondered again if his uncle’s interest in the young woman was more than professional. He was very curious. “No, that’d be great. I’d like to meet her.”
Harold pulled out a business card and scrawled a brief message on the back, then gestured for their waiter and gave it to him with a whisper and a nod. The man nodded and moved away.
They ate and waited.
When the party at the other table broke up a few minutes later, the waiter moved discretely and slipped the young woman the card. She glanced at it, then looked around, surprised. She caught Harold’s glance and smiled, nodded briefly, then turned and spoke to her lunch companions. They left; she waited until they were out the door before she came over to their table.
Harold stood up, and Will followed his example. The woman greeted the older man first, with a warm kiss on each cheek. Ingram reconsidered his first theory about their relationship; he’d certainly never seen his uncle allow that kind of closeness with any other associate. He was usually very careful to keep his physical distance from people.
“Miss Fitzgerald,” Harold said formally, “this is my nephew, Doctor Will Ingram. Will, Christine Fitzgerald.”
She turned, and Will gave her his best smile, shook her hand gently. ”It’s very nice to meet you,” he said.
The woman hesitated, just for a second, her hand still in his. “You, too. I didn’t mean to interrupt.”
“Nonsense,” Harold said firmly. “We invited you. Please, join us.” He gestured to the waiter as they sat down again.
The waiter smiled at her. “The usual?”
“Please,” she answered.
He took dessert orders from the men and moved away.
Harold raised one eyebrow at her. “Come here often, do you?”
“I do, actually, but I have a standing dessert order at every good restaurant in the city. Triple espresso and whatever’s most chocolate.”
“Ah, a fellow caffeine addict,” Will said. “Good to know.”
“She owns a coffee shop,” his uncle answered.
She smiled brightly. She got a lot prettier when she smiled. “I have a private barista.”
“Wait,” Will said, looking between them. “I thought you said she was some kind of computer, um …”
“Hacker,” Christine provided. “And I’m that, too. Hence the need for the caffeine.” She gave him a business card. It had a fake coffee ring stain.
“The Chaos Café,” Will read slowly. He glanced at his uncle again. The romantic angle melted away for a second time. “That sounds interesting.”
“It’s appropriately named,” Harold assured him.
“You should stop by,” Christine invited. “But not tonight. It’s karaoke night.”
“Is that bad?”
She made a face. “Talentless drunken karaoke in a noisy bar is sad. Stone-sober, highly caffeinated geek karaoke is just tragic.”
“I’ll consider myself warned.”
The waiter returned with coffee for the men, pie for Will, a scoop of ice cream with a drop of chocolate syrup for Harold, espresso and chocolate cake for the woman.
“Your client didn’t seem particularly happy,” Harold commented when he was gone.
The woman sighed. “No. That one’s bad.”
“Beyond incompetence?”
“They’re going to bring in a forensic accountant this afternoon.”
Harold frowned. “You think there’s embezzlement involved?”
“I can’t certify it, but I’m pretty damn sure.”
“You did …” Harold hesitated “… whatever it is you do to be sure the angry gentleman can’t do any more damage, haven’t you?”
“Oh, yes,” the woman answered. “Before we told him he was busted.” She chewed a bite of cake thoughtfully. “Oh, God, that’s good. Are they one of yours?”
“Yes.”
“You’re gonna take a hit on this one. Sorry.”
Harold shrugged heavily. “It is the nature of the business.”
“On the bright side, we caught this early.”
“That will help.”
She gestured to her plate. “You should try this.”
There is no way in hell, Will thought. And his uncle reached his spoon over and took a small portion of the cake off her plate and ate it.
“That is good,” Harold agreed.
Christine looked to him. “Here. Try.”
“I’m not really a cake person.”
“It’s chocolate.”
He considered the most polite response. There didn’t seem to be one. Either refuse a genuinely generous offer, or share food off someone else’s a plate in an upscale restaurant. But Harold had done it, so it was probably okay. He extended his fork and took a tiny piece. It was insanely rich. “You’re going to be vibrating like a hummingbird,” he warned.
“That’s the plan.” She smiled, studying him. “We’ve met before, you know.”
“We have?” Will asked, surprised. “I’m pretty sure I’d remember that.”
“I’m going to take it as a compliment that you don’t.” She reached down into her bag, brought out her tablet ” evidently the shattered one had belonged to the company she’d hacked ” and scrolled through several screens. “Hang on.” After thirty seconds or so, she handed the tablet over. “Here.”
Will looked at the picture. He remembered it right away. It was one of those awful posed group photos. He was standing next to his father in the center of it. He was about fifteen, and was wearing a faded black t-shirt. Nathan was wearing a dark suit, a conservative plain tie, and his habitual charming smile. They were surrounded by twenty kids around Will’s age, all in dark red polo shirts with the IFT logo on them.
“Oh, God,” Will said, “you were a Red Shirt.”
Harold leaned to look, and Will shared the tablet with him. “When was this taken?” he asked.
“It must have been the very first year,” Will answered. “That was the only time I got roped into meeting them.” He glanced up. “Sorry.”
Christine chuckled. “You do not look like you were happy to be there. That was 1998. The very first class of Red Shirts.”
“He hated it, that everybody called you that,” Will remembered. He studied the picture. “I still don’t see you.”
“Bless you,” she answered warmly. She reached across the table and pointed. “I’m right there.”
“You’re her?” Will remembered the girl she’d pointed to. She’d been tiny and painfully quiet, and her looks could be described as plain at best. She had blunt-cut hair and thick, bent glasses and pasty skin. But his father had put her in the center of the picture, directly in front of him and Will, and he had his hand on her shoulder. “You’re Chrissy?”
“Nobody calls me that anymore.”
“My dad thought you were a genius.”
“He did?”
“He thought you were going to be a rock star. That you were going to make IFT huge. I mean, even bigger than it was … what happened to you?”
“Will …” Harold began.
But Ingram had already caught himself. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that the way it came out. But you disappeared after that year. You never came back to the program. What happened?”
Christine hesitated. “My life went all kinda pear-shaped that fall.”
“He looked for you. He called the school, I think he even hired some private investigator. They couldn’t find you.”
“He hired a PI?”
“Did you leave town or something?”
“Or something.” Christine shook her head. “He came looking for me? Really?”
“Rock star,” Will confirmed. “He talked about you all the time.”
“Huh.”
She glanced at Harold. He shrugged. “We had an agreement. I didn’t talk about underwriting, and he didn’t talk about computers.”
“Then what did you talk about?”
He gestured toward Will. “Him, mostly.”
“Ahhh.”
“It’s really nice to meet you.” Will handed the tablet back. “My dad would be glad you’re well.”
Christine tucked the tablet away. “I’m so sorry you lost him.”
“Thanks.” Will reached across the table and took another, bigger bite of her cake.
“And now we’re family,” she commented dryly.
“Apparently,” Harold agreed. He took another small bite, too.
She smiled, sat back with her little coffee cup. “So where are you doctoring these days, Doctor?”
“Will,” he corrected. “And nowhere, at the moment. I was with MSF ”Doctors Without Borders ” but that’s kind of up in the air right now.”
“You could finish your residency,” Harold suggested, very quietly.
Will rolled his eyes. “Are you ever going to stop saying that?” he teased.
“Maybe,” his uncle answered, “if you finish your residency.”
Christine’s phone rang. She reached into her purse and silenced it without looking.
“Anyhow,” Will said, “I’m just going to have around the city until the holidays, and then we’ll see.” He glanced at his uncle. “I expect things to change by the new year, one way or another.”
The young woman nodded as if she understood. “If you need anything, let me know.”
“Thank you.”
Her phone rang again. She grumbled, reached for it, and silenced it again.
Thirty seconds later the waiter approached the table and whispered in her ear apologetically. Christine rolled her eyes, but nodded. “Thank you.” As he left, she said, “I’m sorry, I have to run.”
“Bender Warren?” Harold asked.
“Yes.”
“By all means, go. The faster you get there, the less it costs me.”
She threw back the rest of her espresso, pushed what was left of her cake across the table. “You guys should finish this. It’s wonderful.”
She stood up. The men rose with her, and after some hurried farewells she left. As they sat back down, Will said, “Interesting girl.”
Harold nodded. “I wasn’t aware that she’d known your father.” He took a bite of the cake. “I suppose I should have checked her background more thoroughly.”
“She was just a kid then,” Will countered. “I don’t even remember her, honestly. Just my dad talking about her. He thought she was talented. That she was a genius.” He shrugged. “I was jealous.”
“Will, even if your father admired her gifts, he loved you.”
“I know, Uncle Harold. But she understood the computer stuff, you know? Knew what he was talking about. I tried, but I always got lost.”
“He was proud of you exactly as you were.”
Will sat back, put his fork down. “I don’t know, Uncle Harold. It seemed like the more I find out about him, the less I understand.”
“This woman that was murdered.” Harold wiped his mouth carefully. “Corwin? That’s truly bothering you, isn’t it?”
“It probably has nothing to do with my father. I mean, this is New York City. People get murdered here every day.”
“Actually, the crime rate is way down.” Harold answered.
“I guess if the police had solved it, if they just said it was a mugging or it wasn’t, something like that … I don’t know. I don’t know what I want.”
Harold smiled at him. “Yes, you do.”
Julie Carson. “Yes, I do,” Will admitted. “But since I can’t have her, I’m just … flailing.”
“Since you can’t have her yet.”
“And maybe not ever.”
“Will.”
“Please, will you tell me where she is?”
“Will …”
“No, don’t. You’re right. I know you’re right.” Will ran his hand through his hair. “I’m going to be a wreck for the next three weeks, aren’t I?”
Harold nodded solemnly. “I think we’d better switch you to decaf.” Then he smiled, gestured for the check. “How about a movie?”
***
q95;
Taylor Carter sat very quietly in the front seat of his mother’s car. It was early, and he was sleepy, but he knew better than to say so. He’d been on his phone for two hours after she’d told him to go to bed the night before.
“You going to give me the silent treatment every morning, or just today?” his mother finally said.
“Sorry, Mom. I’m just waking up, that’s all.”
“I don’t want you sitting home for this whole break. You need to be doing something.”
“It’s fine,” Taylor answered. He’d known she was going to be mad when she found out about his grade. Having to go work for her friend over break was actually a much softer punishment than he’d anticipated. “Tia’s got to work anyhow.”
“Tia.”
“She’s nice, Mom.”
“You’ve been seeing her a while now. When do I get to meet her?”
Taylor shifted. “I don’t know. I mean, it’s not like I’m trying to keep her away from you, just you’re always working late and stuff.”
Carter glared over at him, then sighed. “You’re right, of course.”
“But, um, she wants me to go to dinner at her house on Christmas Eve. I told her I had to check with you.”
She glanced over again. “Christmas Eve, huh? That’s pretty serious.”
“They just have like ham and stuff. Not a big deal. But, yeah, her mom and dad want to meet me.”
“I like them already.” Carter nodded. “Okay. I guess that’s okay. I have to work anyhow.”
“Thanks, Mom.”
“But then I want you to invite her over to our place Christmas Day. She can come for dinner, or just for dessert after. But I want to meet her. Right?”
Taylor smiled. “Okay. I’ll ask her.”
“You got her a present, right?”
“Not yet, but I’m thinking about it.”
“Do not let me find out that you’re out shopping on Christmas Eve.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Carter shook her head. “How are Tia’s grades?”
“Mom.”
“You’ve got to get that grade up, Taylor.”
“I know. I will, I promise. I’ve got this extra credit paper I can write over break.”
“And have you started on it?”
“I’ll start tomorrow.”
“You’ll start tonight.”
She parked the car in front of what looked like an old bar. Taylor got out and looked at the place. “Chaos?” he asked.
“The name fits,” his mother promised. “You’ll see. C’mon.”
There was a sign on the door that read:
MISTLETOE IS BOTH POISONOUS AND PARASITIC
NOW KISS!
“I’m scared,” Taylor said.
“Me, too,” Carter answered. “You go first.” She pushed him inside.
The place was crazy. It was loud. There were Christmas decorations and lights everywhere. There were also people everywhere. A bunch of them were in line at the counter, people in suits scrambling for their morning coffee before work. But there were also a big bunch of teenagers and college kids in jeans running around. They all had Christmas hats: red Santa hats, green elf hats, hats with reindeer horns. Taylor groaned.
“Scotty!” Carter yelled over the noise.
A woman popped up from behind the bar. She was somewhere between Taylor and his mom in age, and she was pretty. “Hey, Carter. Zubec, get Carter some coffee.”
“To go,” she added. “This is Taylor.”
“Hi, Taylor. I’m Scotty.”
“Nice to meet you.”
“Hey, Joey! This is Taylor.”
Behind him, a very tall, thin young man with an elf hat said, “Hey, Taylor. Welcome aboard. Come on, we got to get the tables from the basement. Suze, come help with the tables!”
And that was the end of the introductions. “Bye, Mom,” Taylor said. He followed the elf into the crowd.
“Bye!” she called after him.
As punishments went, Taylor decided, at least this one wouldn’t be boring.
***
John Reese walked out of the diner and slid into the passenger seat of Christine Fitzgerald’s car. He’d finally given it back to her, after driving it all summer. Technically, it might have been Harold’s car. He wasn’t sure, and it didn’t matter.
Christine nodded without speaking, and he reached into the glove compartment to switch on the damper. A soft white noise fed through his earpiece. Sure that they were alone, Reese said, “You get it?”
“I got it.” She passed him a piece of paper with an address on it. “It’s in the garage. The code to the door is there. Eight boxes. You’re going to need a van.”
“Thank you. I couldn’t have done it without you.”
“Oh, you’d have figured out something.”
“Can you get him to the library?”
“It’s all set.”
“Good.” Reese folded the paper and slipped it into his pocket, turned off the damper, and got out of the car.
Christine drove off without a backward glance.
***
Will Ingram paused in the doorway of the café and looked around.
It made him think of his mother.
His mother was very precise about decorations. She did not decorate at all for the lesser holidays; he’d carved pumpkins for Halloween, but they’d been set out on the back patio, not the front porch. Nothing for Easter or Independence Day or any of other holiday people decorated for. For Christmas she’d consented to indoor decorations only, and they were provided and installed by a professional decorator.
Will didn’t think it had always been that way, but every Christmas he could remember at home had been. Understated, Elegant. Reflecting their wealth.
The Chaos Café would have made his mother scream.
It looked like the Spirit of Christmas had exploded, or maybe thrown up. There were lights everywhere, some colored, some white, small and large, blinking and steady. There were garlands and bulbs. Colorful cardboard cut-outs. Fake snowflakes with yellowing sequins sewn on them. Several three-foot high felt stockings. A dozen smaller stockings hung from the bar. Bells. And mistletoe, everywhere.
Will Ingram laughed out loud in delight.
A very large man in a white apron was stringing more lights. “Like it, huh?”
“I do,” Will agreed.
“Hold this.” The man handed him a coil of lights. Then he climbed onto the nearest chair. “Okay.”
Will handed him the lights. The man looped one strand around a hook, handed the rest of the coil back down, and climbed down himself. “Over here, now.”
Ingram followed obediently, still looking around.
Beneath the decorations, the place was grungy. Worn. But homey, too. It looked like a college lounge. Nothing matched, but everything fit. He liked it. Liked the way it felt. But it didn’t quite fit with the professional woman he’d seen with his uncle. Or with his father’s long-lost potential-filled computer genius.
He handed the coil of lights up again. “Is, uh, is Christine here?”
The big man looked at him. “Scotty?”
“Yes.”
The man handed him the coil and stepped down again. “Scotty!” he bellowed.
The woman came out of a door toward the back. She had on jeans and a white shirt and a black wool coat. “Good God, Zubec, stop with the lights already.”
“They’re pretty,” he argued, climbing onto another chair.
“They’re blinding,” she argued. “And you’re going to blow a circuit.” She crossed the bar. “Hey, Doctor Ingram.”
“Will, please,” he corrected. “Hi.”
“Hi. Welcome to Chaos.”
“Thanks. I like it.”
“Want some coffee?”
“No, thanks. I just, um, I wanted to talk to you for a minute, but you’re going out, I can come back later …”
“I’ve got a minute,” she said. “Come on, have a cuppa.” She took the last of the lights from him, handed them to the big guy, and led him over to the bar. “Black? No. Two cream, two sugar.”
He grinned nervously. “How do you know that?”
“I am the coffee whisperer. I can sense these things. And also, I watched you at the restaurant.”
“Oh.”
The young guy behind the bar brought him a big mug of coffee. He tried it. “This is really good.”
“I know, right? What’s on your mind?”
“My Uncle Harold says you’re really good with computers.”
“That’s true.”
“Do you know anything about finding people?”
“What, online?”
“Yeah. Or in real life. Whatever.”
“Sure. It’s pretty easy, these days.”
“Could you help me find somebody?”
Christine grinned. “No problem.” Before Will could continue, she added, “As long as her name isn’t Julie Carson. Or Essex. Or Mullins.”
He sighed heavily. “Uncle Harold told you.”
“Who do you think’s been tracking her for him?”
“So you already know where she is.”
“Yes.”
“Will you tell me?”
“No.”
He sat back, reached for his wallet.
“No,” Christine repeated firmly.
He stopped. “Please?”
“Look, you are less than three weeks out on this thing. If you want to screw it up, that’s your choice. But I’m not going to help you do it.”
Will put his elbow on the bar and his head in his hand. “I just … I’m going crazy.” He sat up. “She’s okay? Really?”
“Yes.”
“Is she … seeing anybody?”
“Lots of people.” She cocked her head. “You mean romantically? No.”
“I guess that’s something. Will you give me a hint?”
“No.”
“And I can’t bribe you.”
“No.”
He took a big swig of coffee. “Can’t blame a guy for trying.”
“I never do.” She patted his arm. “You look like a man in need of distraction. You like Gerald Walsh?”
“What? No. He’s a psycho.”
“Oh, good. Come on, we’re going to his rally.” She slid to her feet and took his arm.
Will followed, then pulled back. “Wait, what?”
“C’mon. You’ll like it. There’s a party.”
“A Gerald Walsh party?”
“Trust me.”
“But …” She was already dragging him toward the door.
He followed her out, got into the waiting cab with her. “Umm … you know I have a girlfriend, right? I mean, sorta? Maybe. I hope.”
Christine nodded. “You know I have a schoolgirl crush on your father, right?”
Will actually blanched. “Okay, you win.”
“Relax. We’ll be fine.”
He felt a little as if he’d fallen down the rabbit hole, but Will sat back in the cab and waited for the next surprise. The Chaos Café, he remembered, and wondered why he’d expected anything different.
***
The next Number came in around noon. Reese, at Finch’s instruction, finished his lunch before he returned to the library. By then, the genius already had the man’s picture and other documents up on the board.
“You do not look happy, Finch.”
Harold scowled, not at him but at the board. “This is Tony Woods,” he said crisply. “Until yesterday he was the IT director for Bender Warren Financial.”
Reese dropped into the chair, leaned back, crossed his legs. “What happened yesterday?”
The scowl deepened. “Christine Fitzgerald got him fired for gross incompetence.”
He put his feet down and sat forward. “Does Woods know that? That it was Christine?”
“They all had lunch together.” Finch raised a hand. “But I don’t think it’s her that he’s planning to kill.”
“You don’t think?”
“Miss Fitzgerald also recommended that Bender Warren hire a forensic accountant. She’d uncovered some evidence of significant financial improprieties.”
“A forensic accountant?” Reese asked slowly. “You can’t be serious.”
Finch looked at him. “They asked me ” they asked their insurance advisor, Harold Wren ” to recommend someone.”
“Finch, you didn’t.”
The billionaire’s voice went up just a little, into a not-quite-aggrieved, not-quite whine. “It seemed like a good idea at the time!”
***
Gerard Walsh’s ideas genuinely scared Will Ingram. His followers scared him more. There were a lot of them in Central Park, maybe a thousand people, gathered around the stage where Walsh was going to speak. In the days before the election, Walsh’s crowds had been ten times as big. With the numbers down, Walsh’s rhetoric was increasingly aggressive. He didn’t call for actual violence, but he came close. The government, he warned his followers over and over, was watching everything they did, and it going to take their weapons and then their freedom forever.
And the President was going to give those orders.
The followers who remained were rabidly faithful to him. They believed every word he said. They believed, and they were terrified.
Will Ingram had been in enough hot-spot countries to know first-hand that terrified people in large groups were dangerous. He’d been caught up in riots twice, and both times they’d been sparked by a speaker just like Walsh. He’d spent weeks putting people back together after those riots. He’d walked through neighborhoods destroyed by them.
Riots wouldn’t happen in New York City. He was pretty sure of that. But other things might. Other kinds of violence. He didn’t really want to be there if it did. And if he did have to be there, he wished he had his gear with him.
But Christine wasn’t headed into the crowd. Instead, she led him across the street and into a high-rise building. They went to a restaurant on the mezzanine, then out onto the patio deck. Despite the cold, there were about fifty people there, all hovering around the rail, watching the rally from a safe distance with good table service.
He followed her across the deck to the railing just as Walsh stepped to the microphone. The people already gathered made room for them. Several of them greeted her.
They acted like they’d been expecting her.
“What are we doing?” Will asked.
“Just watching. You’ll see.”
Behind the podium was a huge projection screen; in the front row were a handful of network and cable TV crews. There were also, as always, a contingent of protestors. They were penned to the back of the gathering.
Walsh made his usual start, thanking the local celebrity who’d introduced him and the fans who’d come to hear him speak, then a little story about his childhood to warm up the crowd. They didn’t need much warming up. They were true fanatics, there to hear their hero speak about the evils of their elected (but not by them) government.
“He’s insane, you know,” Will said.
“I know.”
“And dangerous. He’s gotten much worse since the election. He’s going to get someone killed.”
“Maybe.” She leaned her hip against the railing. “What do you know about infosec?”
“Uh … I don’t even know what that is.”
Below them, Walsh had started into the meat of his speech, about how the government in Washington was no longer listening to the people, about how their rights were under assault. The screen behind him showed a panorama of D.C., with dark ominous clouds over it.
“Information security,” Christine said. “Basic and massively important. Here’s your first lesson. If you’re going to give the same speech dozens of times, and you’re going to use the same Powerpoint as your backdrop at every speech, you really need to change your password on a regular basis.”
Walsh said, “This President is has dangerous ideas. If he is left unchecked, he will take away the rights that our brave forefathers fought to give you. Rights that were endowed on us by God Himself.”
“It won’t stop a determined hacker,” Christine continued, “but at least you won’t insult her. Or him.”
The waving American flag on the backdrop suddenly vanished. A plain blue screen replaced it, with large text spread across it:
“WILL NO ONE RID ME OF THIS MEDDLESOME PRIEST?”
The crowd gasped, but Walsh went on, unaware. “It’s not popular to speak out against a man who’s just won re-election, but if you look at the numbers, the real numbers, it’s obvious that the vote was fixed. This man is not the legitimate President of these United States. It is an abomination that he’ll stand on the steps of our Capital and place his hand on our Lord’s Holy Bible and swear to uphold the Constitution, when his very inauguration is in defiance and defilement of that Constitution.”
The text behind him changed.
THIS IS CALLED SCHOASTIC TERRORISM.
And then:
YOU HAVE SMART PHONES. LOOK IT UP.
The crowd’s reaction and the scrambling of the news crews finally caught Walsh’s attention. His well-practiced speech sputtered. He glanced over his shoulder.
The screen read:
IN SHORT, HE’S BLOWING A DOG WHISTLE AND HOPING A LONE WOLF WILL SHOW UP.
Walsh stared at the screen.
HE WILL DENY THAT HE IS CALLING FOR THE ASSASSINATION OF OUR PRESIDENT
JUST AS HENRY II DENIED THAT HE WANTED BECKET DEAD
(SMART PHONES, PEOPLE. LOOK IT UP)
The protestors at the event began to cheer, and the supporters began to boo, trying to drown them out.
Walsh reached for his microphone. “This is outrageous!” he spluttered. “Our event has been hacked, we’ve been taken over by cyber terrorists … “
The screen predicted:
HE WILL SAY THAT HIS RIGHT TO FREE SPEECH HAS BEEN DENIED
Walsh wasn’t looking. “It’s begun already. They are trying to take our right to free speech! I have the right to speak! They have no right to interfere with our event!”
He was all but screaming. He pushed the microphone away. “Turn it off! Turn it off!”
There was scrambling at the side of the platform, frantic technicians and handlers. But the screen continued, implacable:
HE IS FREE TO SAY WHATEVER HE WISHES
BUT IN THE EVENT THAT HIS WORDS LEAD TO VIOLENCE
GERALD WALSH WILL NOT BE FREE FROM THE CONSEQUENCES OF HIS WORDS
The screen turned from blue to deep scarlet.
HE WILL BE HELD RESPONSIBLE.
“Pull the plug!” Walsh shrieked.
The screen went black. Not five seconds later it sprang back to life, exactly as it had been, but just a bit off to one side.
The Guy Fawkes mask appeared under the text.
“Pull the fucking plug!” Walsh screamed.
WE DO NOT FORGET
WE DO NOT FORGIVE
“The plug! Pull the fucking plug!”
The technicians had pulled every plug and cord they could find. “It’s not ours!” one of them screamed back.
The last message came up on the screen:
EXPECT US
Then, suddenly, the massive waving American flag was back on the screen and Walsh’s customary cheerful patriotic music filled the air.
Over the silence of the crowd, the music was brutally ironic.
Red-faced and cursing, Gerald Walsh stormed off the stage. One of his tech people tried to talk to him and he shoved the man aside on his way to his limo. The media crews scrambled for places to do stand-ups. The crowd grumbled and shouted. Someone tried to start a chant, but it died awkwardly. Confused, deflated, and leaderless, they began to disperse.
“Holy shit.” Will Ingram stared at his new companion. “That was amazing.”
“It was,” she agreed. “I’m glad we were here to see it.”
“How did you do that?”
“Me?” She blinked innocently. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“But you …”
“Don’t know anything about it,” she said serenely. “That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.”
“Holy shit. Holy shit.”
They watched the wandering, dispirited crowd below them for a moment. “I don’t usually pay much attention to politics,” Christine said, “but you’re right, he was dangerous.”
“And now he’ll get a ton a free publicity.”
“First wall-to-wall coverage of him screaming obscenities, and then a hard look at the context of his speech. Sunlight.”
“The best disinfectant,” Ingram completed. “It’s not, you know. Medically speaking.”
“You’re no fun.”
“You’re amazing.”
“I have my moments.” She glanced around the deck, where the crowd was cheering and laughing and drinking. “So. You want some lunch?””
“I … yes. But I’m buying.”
“Suit yourself.”
They went back inside. It was too cold for lunch on the deck.
“You’re kidding, right?” Leon Tao protested as Reese dragged him down the street by his arm. “This is a legit job, I swear! I got it through a temp agency. It’s straight-up legal, really! I promise!”
“I know, Leon,” Reese grumbled. “Keep moving.”
Leon struggled to keep up. “Then why you dragging me around again? I swear, I didn’t do anything this time.”
“I’m sure you did something,” John countered as he shoved the man into his car. “But that’s not why I’m here.” He walked around and got in, and then he drove, fast.
As he’d expected, the navy sedan down the block followed him. Fast.
Reese grinned.
He let the other car follow him, without being too obvious about it, until he hit the freeway. He accelerated even more. Leon squealed in protest, braced his feet against the dash board. Which would, John knew, simply help shatter his legs if they got in an accident. But he didn’t bother to mention it.
The car continued to chase them. John got the car up to ninety miles per hour, swerving through the mid-afternoon traffic. He watched the mile markers as they flew by. The sedan closed on them. Three car lengths behind, then two. Well within shooting range, but the driver was alone and evidently he didn’t have enough confidence in his skills to try to fire a weapon while driving that fast.
“Oh my God you’re going to get us killed!” Leon wailed. "Slow down slow down slow down slow down!”
Reese jumped on his brakes. Leon lurched forward, then slammed back against his seat. One foot slipped and ended up against the windshield.
The would-be assassin flew right past Reese’s car ” and right into the speed trap.
The traffic cop lit up his lights and went after him. The killer kept going, accelerating, but John knew they’d stop him. And that he had several illegal weapons and five keys of heroin in the car. The killer, of course, only knew about the one weapon he’d brought with him. But John liked to plan ahead.
He resumed driving at the recommended speed. Leon struggled to get himself upright in the seat.
“Okay, Leon,” Reese said calmly, “where can I drop you?”
***
“Can I ask you something?”
“Sure.” Christine sat back, set her coffee down. “But I’ll continue to deny any involvement.”
Will Ingram shook his head. “Not that. How much do you know about IFT? I mean, when my dad was running it.”
“I was a high school intern there for one summer. I knew where every coffee pot was and I could clear most copier jams. That’s about it.”
“But you could find out, right? I mean, if you had access, you could …” He stopped. “Here’s the thing. When my dad died, I got all of his records. Boxes of stuff. A lot of it’s person stuff, papers I did in school, random junk, whatever. But there’s a lot about the company, too. And some of it doesn’t make any sense. Like he downsized more than half his staff. For seven years. And then he sold something to the government for a dollar… a lot of it doesn’t make sense to me. And I don’t know much about computers ” okay, I don’t know anything about computers. But I can tell it doesn’t make any sense.”
She frowned at him, dubious. “Okay.”
“I would really like it if you could … if I could hire you to take a look at them.”
“You want me to look at your dad’s company documents and what? See if I can figure out what he was doing? We know what he was doing. It’s in the stockholder reports.”
“No, there was something else. Something more. Or less. I don’t know.”
She thought about it. “I could take a look.”
“There’s a catch, though. Maybe.” He picked up his fork and pushed his salad around, then put it down. “There was this woman who worked for the government. She knew about this whole dollar thing. She told me some stuff that was going on, about R & D failures and something about patents. Basically, she said IFT was going down the tubes. That he’d lost his touch.”
“And you don’t believe her?”
“I do, actually. Or I did. But the thing is, not very long after I talked to her she got killed. Shot. Here in New York.”
“By who?”
“That’s just it. They don’t know. The police. They never solved the case.” He picked up his fork and put it down again. “It probably has nothing to do with IFT, with her talking to me. But she was … weird. She moved to this little town in West Virginia that doesn’t have any cell towers or wi-fi. It took me forever to track her down. And she was scared, when I talked to her. Really scared. I don’t know if that was about my dad and the company or if it was something else.”
Christine sat back. “So this woman was telling you about IFT’s internals and then she got killed, so now you want me to look at IFT’s internals?”
“That’s why I wanted to tell you up front,” Will answered. “Maybe this is a bad idea. I’m sure this is a bad idea. You know what? Never mind. “
“Hush,” she answered. “You just dangled all of your father’s records in front of me. Give me a second.”
“It might be dangerous.” He shook his head. “That’s just it. If Alicia was killed because of what she knew about IFT, then it’s a big big deal and it’s really dangerous and you shouldn’t go anywhere near it, but I really want to know what it is. But if she wasn’t, if it was just a robbery or whatever, then what she told me was true and I don’t need you to look at it anyhow.”
“Intriguing.”
“I don’t want to put you in danger. Just forget it.”
“Mmm. I’ve got some friends in the police department. Let me poke around a little bit. I’ll see what they think about this woman “ Alicia?”
“Alicia Corwin.”
“Pretty name.” She nodded to herself. “Let me see what they think about that. Under the table. And then we’ll see where we go from there.”
“I don’t want to put you in danger,” Will repeated emphatically.
“Like I said, I know people. Let me see what they think, and then we’ll talk about this some more.” She picked up her coffee and took a long drink. “But all this downsizing and stuff, it was after 9/11?”
“Yeah. Started pretty much right after that.”
She nodded. “Then I can probably tell you right now what I’m going to find.”
“You can?” Will asked, dubious.
“Were you here, in the city, when the Towers came down?”
He shook his head. “I was at college.”
“But your dad was here.”
“Yes.”
She wrapped her hands around her mug, like they were cold. She was silent for a minute. Will waited; she was like one of his patients, trying to come up with just the right words for something that was hard to say. Finally she flexed her fingers. “I was still a heroin addict then. I didn’t really know any Suits. But I’ve gotten to know a lot since then, and a lot of them have the same story.”
You were a what? Will thought in surprise. He wanted to go back to the heroin part of her statement, but he didn’t want to interrupt her, either.
“Men a lot like your father,” she continued. “Rich, successful, confident that life was the way it should be. After that morning they went home and they looked around, at their full bank accounts and their empty houses, and a lot of them just …” She paused again and looked for words. “It was like a gigantic karmic wake-up call, you know? After the running and the screaming and the crying, everybody sorta looked at their lives and went, y’know, maybe I’m not where I want to be.”
“It was like that everywhere,” Will said gently.
“I suppose it was.” She shook her head. “A lot of people got married, or got divorced. I know at least three top-name execs who divorced their wives and married their assistants. Everybody stopped doing what was expected of them and started trying to do what made them happy. For a while. It didn’t last, of course. Maybe some of it did. Sorry, I’m rambling.”
Her hands were shaking, ever so slightly. “It’s okay,” Will assured her. “I know what you’re trying to say.”
“I suspect, and you can see if this fits what you saw, that your dad looked around at what he’d spent his whole life building and realized that it could all be gone in the space of an hour, and he started looking for … what he really wanted to be building instead.”
“You think he didn’t want to build IFT?”
“I don’t know. Maybe computer programs for car dashboards weren’t what he wanted. Maybe he really wanted to be writing video games. And maybe he didn’t want to be in computers at all, maybe he wanted to be, I don’t know, carving chess sets of out of tiki wood. Whatever. Whatever it was that he was doing eighty or ninety hours a week before the Towers fell, he might have woken up the next day and decided that wasn’t what he wanted to do with the rest of his life.”
Will thought about it for a long moment. “He started calling me every week,” he finally said.
“Just to talk?”
“Yes.”
Christine nodded, understanding.
“Before that, I always called him. Usually when I was in trouble. Or needed money. And we always fought. But after, he called just to talk. About anything.” He sighed. “We still fought. Almost always. I don’t know, maybe that’s just what kids do with their parents.”
“Maybe,” she answered vaguely.
Will continued to ponder. “So maybe he … tried something new and it didn’t work? And that’s why he needed the government to bail him out?”
“Maybe.”
“But the downsizing. That doesn’t make sense.”
“A lot of the west coast tech firms got very aggressive about recruiting here after that,” Christine offered. "They pushed the whole ‘we’ll pay to move your family out here where it’s safe’ angle really hard. They may have picked off some of his best people. They did with everybody else. So maybe he thought, well, change up the size while they’re leaving anyhow?”
“That’s possible, too.”
“It’s all speculation,” she admitted. “And all the answers might not be in those papers, anyhow. But you don’t build a company like IFT without being completely obsessed with it. And once the world knocks that obsession out of you, maybe you don’t keep building it at all. Maybe you find other things.”
He damn sure found other women, Will thought bitterly. Then he reined that emotion in sharply. No reason to think he didn’t find other things, too. She was probably right. But he wanted to know.
“If you want to do this, if you’re interested ” ask about the Corwin thing first. And if it’s not dangerous, if you’re sure, I’d pay you anything you want. Just to look, just to find out.”
A dangerous little smile played around the corners of her mouth. “Anything I want?”
“Uhhhhhh … yeah, pretty much. Except, you know, I still have that girlfriend, maybe.”
“I don’t think she’d object to what I have in mind. But let me talk to my peeps and get back to you.”
He smirked. “Your peeps.”
“Yeah. I got peeps. You wanna make somethin’ of it?”
“No. I’m good.” He picked up his own coffee again. “Were you really a heroin addict?”
She studied him for a minute. “Yes.”
“You went from IFT to street drugs in three years?”
“I went from IFT to street drugs in one afternoon.” Before he could ask another question, she raised just her fingertips. “Leave it, Will. We may talk about that someday, down the road. Maybe. But not today. We’re not there.”
He closed his mouth on the question, then picked up his fork. “The salads are really good here.”
Christine nodded. “You should try the steak tenderloin next time. It’s amazing.”
Ingram watched her fork as she moved ate. Her hand was still shaking, just a little, but it didn’t get any worse. By the time she finished her lunch it had steadied entirely.
***
Carter looked at the man calmly. “Okay,” she said, “one more time. Who hired you?”
The man looked away.
“We have Tony Woods in the next room,” she continued. “And I’m guessing he’s the guy. But without your statement, I can’t prove that.” She sat down across the table from him. “Now you, you’re already going up for the weapon, the high speed chase, and the drugs.”
“I’m told you, the drugs aren’t mine.”
“Whether they are or not, this thing isn’t going away. You’re on the hook for all of that, plus conspiracy and attempted murder. Only question is whether you go down alone, or whether you take your friend with you.”
He remained silent.
“Okay,” Carter said again. “I’ll go talk to Woods.”
She got as far as the door before he spoke up. “He’s not my friend.”
“Go on.”
“He hired me to kill the accountant. And get the laptop.”
“Why?”
“Why? Because he was stealing from his company.”
“So, how did this work? You were going to shoot him in a car and then what?”
The guy shrugged. “Figured he’d crash and I could grab the laptop.”
“Have you ever killed anybody before?”
The man looked away, licked his lips. “How hard can it be?”
***
“So?” Carter asked when her son got in the car. “How was it?”
The boy held his two hands up. On his ten dark fingers, there were six tan bandages.
She grimaced. “Paper cuts?”
“The paper’s not so bad,” Taylor said wearily. “The ribbons are a bitch.”
“Taylor.”
“Sorry, Mom.” He reached up and rubbed the back of his neck. “It was pretty cool, though. The elf crew is cool. Scotty’s cool. Zubec looks scary, but he’s really cool, too.”
“So everybody’s cool?”
“Yeah.”
She nodded. “I think I know why you’re failing English.”
He sighed and closed his eyes. “Can I go see Tia when we get home?”
“Sure,” Carter answered “Soon as you put some time in on your extra credit paper.”
Taylor sat up and dug into his backpack. He brought out a battered spiral notebook and flipped through it, then pinched several pages between his fingers. “Worked on it during lunch,” he said. “I asked the crew about it. Got this many notes.”
She glanced over at the papers. She couldn’t read them, since it was dark and she was driving, but at least the top page was covered with writing. She looked at his bandaged fingers again, too. “All right,” she finally agreed. “But some time when I’m not driving, I want to see the work.”
“Okay,” he agreed at once.
“Okay.” Carter smiled tightly and turned the car toward home.
***
Reese got out of his car and looked around carefully. No threat caught his eye. He didn’t really expect one, but Finch’s call had been so odd that it set his nerves on full alert. Christine needed to see him right away, the billionaire had said. But he wouldn’t say why, only where. Then he hung up.
So many things wrong with that call. For starters, if Christine needed to see John, she would have called him directly. And second, she was parked at the end of the lot and was standing outside her car, with her back to him. She glanced over her shoulder, but didn’t turn. “Christine?” he said, striding toward her. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.” She turned around. Unexpectedly, she had a toddler in her arms. A rosy-cheeked little girl in a scarlet coat and a pink hat and gloves and …
“Leila!”
The child hid her face against Christine’s coat. John went closer anyhow, put his hand on her back, kissed the top of her head through her hat. She’d gotten much bigger since he’d last seen her. Long legs, long arms; already she was turning into a girl instead of a baby.
She turned her head and peeked at him, smiled, then hid her face again.
“I don’t understand,” John said to Christine. “How did you do this?”
“Not me, sweetie. I just showed up with a note and picked her up. She’s yours for the afternoon.” She held out a sheet of paper awkwardly around the toddler. “This is your suggested itinerary.”
Reese took the paper and glanced over it. It was Harold’s crisp handwriting. “Zoo first,” he read. “Especially penguins.” There was, not surprisingly, a zoo pass clipped to the paper.
Leila popped her head up. “Pengins?” she asked hopefully.
John smiled at her. “You want to go see penguins with me?”
She nodded enthusiastically and held her arms out to him.
John took her. She was heavier, of course, but much less floppy than when she was a baby. She put her arm around his neck and held herself up. He buried his face against her, took a deep breath. She smelled wonderful. Like baby shampoo and vanilla and love.
Christine popped her trunk open and unloaded a stroller. John didn’t really think he’d need it; he didn’t want to let the child out of his arms. But he watched while she showed him where the latch was to fold and unfold it. She brought out a diaper bag and tucked in into the baggage compartment of the stroller. “Unlock your car,” she directed. He clicked the keys and watched while she transferred the car seat over. Lastly, she handed him a little box of animal crackers. Leila reached for them and he let her have one.
“Pengins,” the girl insisted.
“Yes, love. Just a minute.” He turned to Christine. “Are you in on everybody’s surprises?”
“Pretty much.”
“Thank you.”
She smiled. “Have fun.” She leaned and kissed Leila on the cheek. Then she kissed John on the cheek, too.
“Pengins!” Leila insisted.
John looked at the toddler. “You’re kind of a bossy little thing, aren’t you?”
“Pengins!”
“Penguins.” He watched Christine get into her car. Then he pushed the stroller with one hand and headed for the zoo entrance.
***
John carried Leila to the penguin exhibit and stood holding her so she could see them. “Stinky!” the toddler pronounced, wrinkling her nose up adorably.
“They are kind of stinky, aren’t they?” The exhibit smelled very strongly like fish, and, Reese supposed, penguin poop.
Leila watched the creatures with great fascination. “Swim,” she said, pointing.
“Yep, they’re swimming.” John pointed. “Watch that one. He’s going to jump.”
Right on cue, the swimming penguin jumped out of the water and landed on the rocks.
“Jump!” Leila exclaimed, delighted. Then she looked at him solemnly. “Again.”
Reese laughed. “Again, huh?” He studied the swimming birds. “That one.”
“Jump!” Leila commanded.
The penguin did.
Uneasily, Reese remembered something he’d heard once about toddlers: Never do anything with them unless you’re prepared to do it fifty times. He pointed to one of the birds up on the rocks. “That one’s about to jump in.”
“Jump in!” Leila repeated.
The penguin did.
The child laughed in delight, and Reese laughed with her. He cuddled her closer, kissed her cheek again. She was so sweet, so warm. Her laughter made his heart bubble up. He was, he knew, hopelessly sentimental about this child. He didn’t care.
Eventually Leila got tired of the penguins. “Down,” she commanded, and Reese set her on her feet. She held his hand and walked for a little ways, while he pushed the stroller with his other hand. When she got tired of walking, she pulled at the stroller. Reese belted her in and gave her the animal crackers. They saw the sea lions and the polar bears.
The snow leopard was right at the front of its enclosure. Leila squealed, and the big cat turned its head slowly toward her, wagged its tail lazily. Reese felt the hair on the back of his neck stand up. He could see the cat’s predatory intentions in its eyes. Bring it, he thought. You want her, come try and take her from me. Endangered or not, I’ll make a rug for her nursery out of you.
Leila whimpered, as if she understood the big cat’s look, too. “It’s okay, Leila,” John told her. “I won’t let her hurt you. I won’t let anything hurt you, ever.”
They went to the children’s zoo. John got Leila out of her stroller and let her wander around again. He picked her up to pet the alpaca, crouched down with her when the Nubian goats got a little too aggressive. But the toddler was fearless. The goat pushed her and she pushed right back, laughing. She petted the pot-bellied pig and fed little food pellets to the sheep. Even the screech of the peacock didn’t alarm her.
One of the zoo workers smiled at him. “You have a beautiful little girl.”
Reese smiled back. “Thank you.” He didn’t bother to correct her impression of them. For today, just for today, Leila was his.
They explored the little zoo for three hours, and ended up back at Leila’s precious penguins. On a whim, then, Reese ducked into the gift shop with her. There was a three-foot tall stuffed emperor penguin there, and also a tiny soft stuffed penguin chick. John asked the toddler which one she wanted. She held one in each arm and said, “Yes.”
Reese hesitated, then grinned. “Yes, huh?”
For the first time, the voice spoke in his ear. “You’re spoiling her, Mr. Reese.”
“Yes,” John said happily. “Yes, I am.”
He bought both of the toys.
***
Finch hesitated just inside the door to the library. He could feel it. The tickle on the back of his neck, the small ball in the pit of his stomach. He was not alone. He turned back, checked the exterior lock. There was no sign of tampering. Of course, someone with skills like John Reese would leave no sign.
Harold glanced down at Bear. The dog seemed unconcerned. He reached down and unclipped the leash from the dog’s collar. Bear moved directly to the stairs, still showing no sign of concern. Somewhat relieved, Finch followed him.
At the top of the steps, he paused again there. The gate was open. He had locked it when he left. Bear went past it and lapped water from his bowl. Finch checked the lock on the gate. Again, it showed no sign of tampering. And the alarm was shut off. John was here, he thought in relief. Then he frowned. John was at the zoo with Leila.
He glanced down. There was a smallish pair of snow boots, black, in the shadow to the side of the gate. He looked quickly toward the coat tree. Her coat was there, and her red scarf. Finch took a deep breath and smiled. He’d told her she was welcome any time. He just hadn’t expected her to take him up on it so soon.
He hung up his own coat, then walked around his desk. The computer monitors were dark, his keyboards apparently undisturbed. “Christine?” he called softly. He looked in the back rooms. She was not there. He frowned, puzzled. If she wasn’t here, trying to hack his system, why was she in the library at all?
Bear sat down and looked at him. “Well?” Finch finally said. “Where is she?”
The dog cocked his head.
“Such!” Finch said crisply.
Bear jumped to his feet and ran back down the hall.
Should have put him back on his leash, Finch thought. But at least Bear seemed to know who he was supposed to be searching for. He followed the dog, more slowly. Down the corridor, down the stairs. He paused there and called softly. Bear barked, just once, happily. Down another corridor, around a corner, into the children’s section. Christine was just coming out, with Bear dancing triumphantly beside her. She had an old hard-cover book in her hand.
“Hey,” she said, giving Harold a quick hug.
“What are you doing down here?”
She frowned, uncertain. “You said I could borrow whatever I wanted.”
“I did,” Finch assured her. “But I didn’t think you’d start in the children’s section.”
“I’m just poking around,” Christine answered, a little flushed, embarrassed. “I want to see everything. It seemed like a logical place to start.” She looked back toward the stacks. “These were my first friends,” she admitted quietly.
“And mine,” Finch answered honestly. “My first hint that the world was a much bigger place than the one I occupied.”
His companion smiled wistfully. Then she shook it off. “How goes the zoo trip?”
“Wonderfully. Thank you for your help.”
“Not a problem. She’s cute. Was she one of your people?”
Finch nodded happily. “Yes. I kidnapped her.”
“That’s getting to be a habit, Random. How come you’re not with them?”
“I’m planning to join them for dinner.”
“Good. More celebration is good.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I’m on board with Will to look at Nathan’s files. He was concerned about Corwin still. I told him I ran it past my detective friends and it was safe. So we’re officially good to go. We’re going to go pick up some boxes tomorrow. I told him I’d take them back to Chaos a few at a time and go through them.”
“Thank you. I truly appreciate this. If he had gone to an outside source … it would have been very bad.”
“I like him, Random.”
“I thought you would.” He hesitated. “Does that make it too difficult? To lie to him?”
“No. It actually makes it easier. Because if he finds out the truth he’ll be …”
“Horrified,” Finch provided. “And in grave danger.”
“Yes.” She held the book up, showed him the ragged edge of it. “Your library has mice.”
“I know. I have traps upstairs, around the first editions. The enclosed ones, so I don’t have to see the little corpses.” He shuddered delicately; even without seeing the deceased rodents, disposing of the traps was highly unpleasant. He was a little too vain to ask Reese to do it for him ” but only barely. “It seems to keep them at bay, at least.”
“You need Smokey to come for a visit.”
Bear yipped happily at the mention of his friend’s name.
“You are wayyyyy too smart,” Christine said, smiling and rubbing his ears.
“Does she hunt?” Finch asked.
“Like a fiend. I take her down to the café when it’s closed. She’s caught eight, that we know of. She leaves me the little heads by her dish.”
“That’s … charming.”
Christine considered. “It’s a big library. You may need more than her, and more long-term.”
“Perhaps,” Finch agreed. “I considered poison, but I’m worried Bear would get into it.” He nodded. “In any case, we could give it a try. Perhaps she could come for a holiday visit. I’m sure Bear would be delighted.” The dog wagged his tail enthusiastically. “She’s right, you know,” Finch told him. “You really are much too smart.”
***
Lelia was getting fussy by the time John got her back to the loft. He took her coat and hat and gloves off, and her boots, washed her hands, then put her back in her stroller and, per his written instructions, set a bowl of dry Cheerios and another of finely-diced apple pieces in front of her. She ate both quickly. Then he washed her hands and face again and changed her diapers. He filled her cup with milk ” a fresh quart had appeared in his refrigerator, thanks to the magic of Finch ”and sat down in front of his windows with the toddler in his lap.
She was asleep before the milk was gone.
Reese smiled, took the cup and set it aside. Then he turned the girl so she was sleeping on his shoulder and brought her blanket up around her. She was warm and soft, and still smelled sweet, though now a little like goats and apples. He closed his eyes and remembered another time when he’d held her like this. He’d been handcuffed, and she’d been freezing to death…
He opened his eyes quickly. Outside, the sun was setting over the little park. Leila was safe in his arms, and maybe a little too warm. He turned his head and brought her tiny fingers to his lips. She wriggled in her sleep, then settled again.
She had not frozen to death. She was alive, sweet and strong and growing every day. John took a deep breath. “Oh, my beautiful girl,” he whispered against her hair. He could feel the warmth of her little body soaking through him like peace.
He did not sleep. He just sat, very still, and enjoyed her warmth.
It was the best gift anyone had ever given him.
***
“Mr. Reese?”
John tapped his earpiece. “Finch?”
“We’re coming up. I didn’t want to alarm you.”
“Thanks, Finch.”
John sat still, holding the sleeping child against his chest. Her cheeks were red and slightly sweaty. The door to the loft opened and Finch came in. He had a handled bag in one hand and Bear’s leash in the other. He set the bag down on the counter and stooped to unleash the dog. “You were supposed to put her down to nap,” he scolded gently.
“I couldn’t,” John answered simply. The dog came over, and he petted Bear’s head with his free hand. “How did you do this, Finch?”
Harold shrugged. “A simple matter of gift cards and theater tickets, plus the offer of a free babysitter for the afternoon. We have to have her home by nine.”
“Hmmm.” Leila stirred at their voices. Her eyes opened, then closed. Then she opened them and sat up. Her hair was rumpled and she blinked sleepily. “Dog!” she said.
Bear pushed his nose at her, and she recoiled, squeaking.
“It’s all right,” John told her. “This is Bear. He won’t hurt you.”
Leila looked at him. “Dog,” she said firmly.
“Yes, he’s a dog. His name is Bear.”
“Not bear.”
Reese chuckled. “Right. He’s not a bear. His name is Bear.”
“Dog,” Leila repeated. She looked at the dog again, then sat up boldly and reached for him. Bear stood very still while she grabbed his ears. He licked her face and she released him. But she reached for him as he moved away. John swung her to her feet.
“Wait,” Finch said.
“He won’t hurt her,” John protested.
Harold shook his head. “Socks on hardwood floors.”
John lifted the toddler and Finch swiftly stripped her socks off and tickled her feet a little. She squealed, and John dropped her to the floor. She paused to look at Harold, obviously curious about his glasses. Then she toddled after the dog.
“She’ll warm up,” Reese promised.
“I know.” Finch didn’t seem at all upset at the child’s snub. “She certainly has grown.”
“They do that.”
“I brought dinner.”
Reese stood up and stretched. He was stiff from holding the toddler still for so long. He rinsed out the sippy cup and refilled it with milk while Finch unpacked the dinner. Cantonese, from the smell of it. “Do Leilas eat Chinese food?” he asked.
She was still toddling around the open loft on her little bare feet, following Bear. Any time she fell too far behind, the dog circled back to her, gave her a quick kiss, and moved away again. When she caught him she pulled his ears, but gently, and the dog endured it patiently.
“I don’t believe so. I brought her … chicken.”
Leila swerved toward them. “Chicken!”
“Yes.” Finch removed a red and yellow cardboard box from the big bag and opened it to reveal five lumps of something that had once been parts of a chicken. “Supposedly.”
The toddler came to the table and held her arms up to Finch. “Chicken!”
He bent and picked her up. Reese moved a little closer, worried about his partner’s neck, but he managed without apparent difficulty. Leila hooked her arm around his neck and studied his face. She couldn’t possibly remember him, Reese thought, but she was fascinated by him. Briefly. Then she turned and leaned toward the table. “Chicken!”
Finch sat down, with the girl on his lap, and pulled the box over. She grabbed a chicken nugget and took a bite. Reese put the sippy cup within her reach, and also retrieved a cup of peaches from the diaper bag. He served Finch’s dinner onto a plate and pushed it over to him.
The reclusive billionaire seemed more than happy to eat with one hand.
When she was finished eating and had been washed up, Leila returned to playing with the dog. She was too tired to chase him now; instead, she grabbed onto the fur between his shoulders and simply walked around the apartment next to him. Bear seemed to prefer this to the ear-grabbing game.
While Finch cleaned up the kitchen, Reese went and sat on the floor. Leila settled onto his lap and he showed her how to throw a ball for Bear. She laughed with delight every time the dog slid on the wooden floor, and laughed harder when he brought the ball back to her.
Harold helped him give her a bath ” naturally, he’d brought bubble bath along ” and they tucked her into a clean diaper and fuzzy pink one-piece pajamas. She got her baby penguin and settled onto Finch’s lap with a cup of milk. He brought out a brand new story book, one of a dozen he’d brought with him, and read to her.
Reese sat back in his own chair and listened. Finch’s voice comforted him, as it always did, though it was odd to hear the usually business-like voice reading so warmly about telling the moon goodnight. He bent his head and sniffed his shirt; it still smelled like Leila. Such a simple thing, just a sweet little girl. He felt warm right to his core.
Too soon, they wrapped the sleepy toddler in a blanket and carried her and her bag and her penguins down to the car. Bear sat in the back seat beside her. She stroked his ear sleepily.
When they’d delivered the almost-sleeping toddler to her happily exhausted grandparents ”they’d been to a matinee, shopping, and to an elaborate dinner ” they paused next to the car. “Thank you, Harold,” John said sincerely. “I can’t remember when I’ve had a better day.”
Finch smiled. “Christine pointed out to me that we keep the lost ones in front of us, but we scarcely remember the ones we save. I thought a bit more celebration was in order.”
“Pengins,” Reese said quietly.
“Pengins, indeed.”
***
q95;
“You look beat,” Christine said.
Fusco sighed heavily. “Yeah. Rough day.”
She put a cup down in front of him. “It’s decaf. I want you to be able to sleep.”
“Thanks.” He tasted the coffee. Most decaf tasted like crap to him, but this wasn’t bad.
Christine went away and came back with a big shopping bag. Inside were his gifts for Lee, all neatly wrapped with fancy bows. She put it on the chair beside him, then went behind him and tried to rub his shoulders. He still had his vest on under his shirt. She chuckled, annoyed, and moved her hands up to his neck.
“Thanks for wrapping those. And for the laptop. He’s going to love it.”
“Good.”
Fusco rolled his head to one side and then the other. “God, that feels good.”
“You’re all knotted up.” She straightened his head up and dug her thumbs into the corded muscles on each side of his spine. Her touch was very firm and came just short of hurting.
He’d seen Simmons on his way out of the precinct. The man hadn’t even spoken to him. Just gave him that smug eyebrow thing as they passed. Fusco growled under his breath.
“What’s bugging you?” Christine asked quietly.
“Nothing,” he answered. “Just the day. It always gets to me, people killing each other just before Christmas.” Her thumbs continued to knead his neck, and almost against his will, Fusco felt himself start to relax. “I always think about the families, you know? How they’ll have to remember these people who got killed right at Christmas time.”
She murmured something without words. Fusco sipped his coffee, then dropped his head, gave her full access to the back of his neck.
“Do you have plans for Christmas Day?” she asked after a minute. “I have tickets for Les Miserables, the matinee, if you’d like to see it. Bring a date, maybe?”
“Mmm. Not really into musicals,” Fusco answered. “And I’ve got Lee for the day. I don’t think he’d be into it.”
“Okay. Maybe I’ll find you something else to do.”
“You don’t have to do that.” He gestured to the bag of gifts. “Really, this is more than enough. And I probably won’t be able to pry him off his computer anyhow.”
“Nah, none of his friends will be online until late in the day.”
Fusco shook his head. “Ten years old and he knows more about computers than I ever will.”
“Ten years,” Christine said quietly. “I admire your courage, Lionel.”
“For having a kid?”
“For having a kid right after 9/11. That took some stones. As it were.”
Fusco smirked. “Yeah, well. It seemed like a good idea at the time.”
“It wasn’t?” She dropped into the chair next to him.
He took another long drink of coffee. “After the Towers came down, my ex ¬“ my wife “ she was obsessed with it, you know? All those shows on TV, the documentaries, the news shows? She watched all of them. Taped them and replayed them over and over. She was scared to death. She never stopped thinking about it. Nightmares, the whole thing.” He shrugged. “So I got this bright idea, you know, once we were pretty sure there wouldn’t be another hit, that maybe if we had a kid it’d give her something else to be obsessed with.”
“It didn’t?”
“Sorta. Once she was pregnant she was obsessed that she’d die because she was too big to run away. And after Lee was born, she was sure he was going to die horribly somehow. She wouldn’t leave the house for six months. She was scared to death all the time. It was awful.” He shook his head. “And since the kid was my idea, it was my fault that she was so scared.”
“I’m sorry,” Christine said.
Fusco sighed. “Don’t get me wrong. He’s a great kid, and I love him to death. But yeah, my timing sucked.”
“Good idea. Bad execution.”
“Yeah. I do that a lot.”
“Don’t we all?”
“Maybe I’ll bring him in over his school break.”
“If you’re sure you want to,” she answered vaguely.
“You don’t think I should?”
“No, I’d love to meet him,” Christine said. “It’s just … you know who I used to be. I didn’t think you’d want him anywhere near me.”
Fusco stared at her. “Are you serious?”
She looked away. “Well, yeah.”
“I know who you used to be,” he said firmly. “And I know who you are now. People change, Christine. You’re living proof of that. Of course I want my boy to meet you. Heck, when he’s older I’ll make him come do the present thing with Carter’s kid.”
“I’d like that.”
“You aren’t who you used to be, kid. Seems like everybody knows that but you.”
She leaned against his shoulder. “I thought I was supposed to making you feel better.”
“Actually, you are.” He looked around the bar. There were lights and Christmas decorations everywhere. It was bright, warm. There were couples and groups, talking quietly. Happy people. A group of young soldiers by the front window. “’Cause if you aren’t who you used to be, maybe I’m not, either.”
Christine sat up. “Lionel, what’s going on with you?”
He shrugged. “Nothing. Like I said, just the season. Maybe feeling my age a little bit. I don’t know.” He stood up, patted her shoulder. “Thanks for the decaf. And everything. I’ll see you later.”
He took his bag of presents and walked out, aware that Christine watched him every step of the way.
***
There weren’t any spots in front of the café in the morning, so Carter stopped her car down the block and let Taylor out. She watched him walk back to the coffee house. It wasn’t necessary, of course: He was old enough to walk half a block on his own, even in the early morning darkness. But it was a mother’s habit and she was reluctant to let it go.
In the time it took him to walk to the front door, two cars pulled out of the spots right out front and two more pulled in. The morning coffee shuffle, Carter thought. She was tempted to go get a cup herself. Chaos coffee was about ten times as good as she could get at the precinct. But she was running late, so she decided against it.
She was a little surprised when Scotty got out of the passenger side of the second car. The driver got out, too. He was tall, fit, blond, and wearing Army fatigues. “Really?” Carter said, leaning forward. “At this hour?”
The two met in front of the car and kissed. If she’d been called to the stand, Carter decided, she would have characterized the kiss as passionate, but brief. And she would have been fairly comfortable in guessing that they’d spent the night together. The man was regulation tidy, but the woman looked a little rumpled.
Nothing wrong with that, Carter thought uneasily. They were both single adults ” she assumed the soldier was single, anyhow “ and what they did behind closed doors was their own business. If Taylor saw his temporary boss wandering home at the crack of dawn, well, he wasn’t a child. He knew grown-ups had sex. Some grown-ups, sometimes, anyhow.
The soldier got back in his car and drove off. Scotty stayed on the sidewalk and waved, then went inside. “Huh,” Carter said to herself. She didn’t know why it struck her as so odd. So wrong. She knew Fusco didn’t have any romantic feelings for the woman; he treated her like his wayward little sister. John and his partner had some interest in her, but it seemed to be limited to making sure she didn’t get killed or kill anyone. That only left Donnelly in the picture …
She sat back and laughed at herself. Scotty might be a player, but she didn’t have enough game to get Donnelly’s tie off, much less the rest of the suit. As far as she knew, the man who’s life work was chasing the Man in the Suit never took his off, either.
***
Reese said, “Can you get away for an hour?”
“Seriously?” Christine asked. There was a loud crash somewhere behind her. “I’ve kind of got things going on.”
“It’s important.”
She sighed. “For you, love, of course. When?”
“I’m out back.”
There was a distinct pause. “Damn it. Two minutes.”
“I’ll wait.”
Reese put his phone away and waited. It was raining, trying to snow, and the windshield wipers fought against the freezing mixture. He turned the defroster back on.
As promised, in two minutes she slid into the car next to him. “Nice upgrade,” she said, looking around her.
“Buckle up.”
“Where are we going?”
“You’ll see.”
He drove just over fifteen blocks from the café, turned right and went up another two. He parked the car in front of an empty building, brick, three stories and a basement, with a sloped roof. There was a “For Sale” sign in the front window. It was faded with age. He got out and went around, opened the car door for her. “Come on.”
“Okay.” It was still raining ice water, but she climbed out gamely. “What’s this?”
“You’ll see,” he said again. He climbed the stairs to the front door. There was a combination box lock on it, the sort that realtors used.
“I’m not really big on surprises,” Christine said.
“I know.” He keyed in the combination from memory and opened the door. “Do you trust me?”
“Roughly as far as I can spit.” But she grinned and followed him into the building anyhow.
The ground floor was open, except for support columns. The floor had been beautiful hardwood once; now it was crap. But Reese wasn’t interested in the floor or anything else. He led the young woman to the stairway at the side of the big room, then down toward the basement.
Four steps from the bottom, the wooden stair bowed under his foot. He paused, tested the next one. It was worse. He reached his foot back to the next, which was reasonably solid, so he skipped over the third. The bottom step actually cracked when he tested it. He jumped down to the floor, which was safely concrete, then reached back, took Christine by the waist, and simply lifted her off the stairs entirely. “We’ll need to deal with that,” he mused as he set her on her feet.
“Why?”
John ignored her and walked to the wall opposite the stairs. There was a lot of rubbish there, old shelving, boxes and crates of junk, some old chairs in stacks, and pieces from a couple of broken desks. Behind the hulking furnace, he saw what he was looking for. He pushed the debris aside and studied the door.
Christine came and stood beside him. “Ohhhhh,” she said.
Reese grinned. “No promises.” He looked at the padlock on the door for a moment. Then he took out his gun and rapped the lock sharply with the butt. It fell open immediately, sprinkling rust flakes onto the floor.
The door screamed on rusty hinges, but the two of them managed to push it open enough to get through. On the other side was darkness; Reese pulled out his little flashlight, and gave a second one to Christine.
The tunnel was smooth and straight, concrete on the floor and cement blocks on the walls. But it had obviously been abandoned for some time. There were cobwebs everywhere, and the blocks were badly cracked in places. Patches of dampness showed at the corners of the floor, though there was no standing water.
Reese moved carefully, slowly. There were side tunnels about twenty yards in. The one on the right ended after five feet, in another block wall. The one to the left continued further, then ended in a dirt cave-in.
They returned to the main passage and went on.
Perhaps two hundred yards from the basement entrance there was another large steel door. It had a standard key lock. It was very old, and it took Reese several tries to pick it. When it finally clicked, he pushed against the door. It opened stiffly, but more easily than the first one had.
A blast of cold air and noise came through the opening.
John held one hand out to the woman, warning her back. Then he flattened himself against the wall and peeked past the door. After a minute he pushed it further open and slid around the side into the space beyond.
“John?” Christine said.
“Come here,” he said.
She slid around the door to join him in the vast cavern beyond.
John stayed very close to the wall, hidden in shadows. He grabbed Christine’s hand and drew him next to him. Then they simply stood and looked.
Six feet from the doorway there was a narrow ledge, and then a drop to train tracks. Six sets of train tracks, to be exact. And not trains, but subway cars. While they watched, one train passed them from the north. There was a screech of breaks just after it passed.
Reese moved to the end of the short tunnel.
The ledge was two feet wide, easy enough to walk on with a little care. At its end, twenty feet away, was a subway platform.
He glanced at Christine. “You know where we are?”
“Yeah.” She grinned. “I know this station. You can catch two lines up there, both directions.”
He gestured to the doorway behind him. “Must have been construction access or something. You could hide in there. Or use it to escape.”
She nodded. “And once you got out here, to the subway lines, you could go anywhere.”
“Let’s see.” He moved along the ledge carefully. She followed him closely. Once they got to the platform, it was simply open. They stepped into the sparse crowd, unnoticed. Waited while another train rolled into the station and then departed. Then they slipped out again, still unnoticed.
“Well?” Reese asked, when they were back in to quiet tunnel. “Will this work for you?”
Her body was tense, her eyes nervous, but she nodded. “This could work.”
“We should go look at the building, then.” Reese led her back to the basement, lifted her over the rotten steps, then followed her back to the ground floor.
“How did you find this?”
“I do my homework,” Reese answered. “I’ve been looking for a while. I wasn’t sure about the tunnels, though.” He looked around the big open floor. “Office space,” he mused aloud. “Maybe accounting, a travel agency, something like that. Or you could make it an apartment.”
Christine shook her head. “Ground floor windows are not my thing. Maybe office space. It’s got good light, I bet.”
There were windows on every wall. She was right; it probably got great light on bright days. Reese walked to the back of the room and looked out. “It has a yard,” he said.
She joined him at the window. “A what?”
“A yard. With grass. Or it could have.”
“Eh,” she answered, unimpressed.
“You’d like grass between your toes, I bet,” he said. “You could have a patio.”
She looked at him like he’d lost his mind.
“Then I could grill steaks,” he continued.
“Ahh. Now you’re talking.”
“My little carnivore,” he said fondly. “Let’s see what’s upstairs.”
She started up the stairs, but Reese stopped her and went first. “I fall better than you do.”
The stairs to the second floor seemed solid. The floor had been divided into four small apartments, one bedroom each. “Yuck,” Christine pronounced, looking at the tiny rooms in the first one. It was empty, but the remaining carpeting was olive green and had been plush once. The kitchen had badly-dated wallpaper that was supposed to look like brick. The linoleum floor was the color of nicotine. Everything was dirty, and many things were broken. “But the windows,” she added. “The windows give it possibilities.”
Like the ground floor, there were windows on every side. Reese nodded. “If you tore out all the interior walls, made it two apartments, or maybe one big one … maybe leave it open, like loft space?”
“It’d be enormous,” Christine answered. “I can’t imagine a loft this big.”
“Here.” He brought out his phone and scrolled through it, held it out to her.
Puzzled, she looked at the screen. Reese flicked through the next several pictures. “That’s gorgeous,” she said.
“That’s my place,” he told her.
“Seriously?” She flipped back through the pictures, looking more closely. “It’s really nice. Really nice.”
“Finch bought it for me,” he said casually. “You could do something like that here.”
“I don’t know. That’s a lot of wide-open space. I think I like walls. Just not walls quite this close.”
“Fair enough. But you like this building? The tunnel, the location?”
“I like it,” she agreed. “I like it a lot, John.”
“Let’s see what’s upstairs.” They went back to the stairway and started up. “There’s just one problem with this property,” he said easily.
“Oh, there are hundreds of problems with this property,” she corrected. “But I’m already seeing ways to overcome them.” She sighed happily. “Oh, I like it.”
“One insurmountable problem, then,” he corrected.
“What’s that?”
He paused, his hand on the door to the top floor. “It’s not for sale.”
“Yes it is. There’s a sign downstairs.”
“Nope. It was sold yesterday. It’s off the market.”
“What?”
“I talked to the real estate agent. It’s sold.”
“Well, crap.” She shook her head. “Maybe I can find the buyer, talk him into flipping it.”
“I don’t think so.” Reese pushed the door open, let he go ahead of him onto the third floor. “He seems pretty determined to get rid of it on his own terms.”
The third floor had been gutted before the original owner ran out of money. Like the ground floor, it was wide open except for the support beams, and the windows on all four walls let in the gray light of the afternoon. The floor was gritty with dust.
“You’ve met him?”
“So have you.”
Christine stopped dead. “Son of a bitch!”
Finch stepped out from beside a column. “That’s hardly a helpful starting position for negotiations,” he said mildly.
“Damn it, Random. We had an agreement about this. I was very specific.”
“You were,” he agreed. “You specifically forbid me to buy Nathan Ingram’s loft for you.” He gestured to the empty room. “This is about as far from that loft as I could get.”
She glanced at Reese for support. He shrugged, walked to the back windows, and looked down at the yard again. There was even an oak tree, way back by the property line. He liked the possibilities.
“I can’t let you buy me a house. A whole building. I can’t.”
“Why not?”
He bought me the loft, Reese willed her to remember. There was a reason I told you that. But he stayed silent and physically separate from their discussion. He probably couldn’t help, and if Christine felt like they were ganging up on her she was likely to dig her heels in. More than she already had.
Christine made a little strangling noise, but she couldn’t put words to her objections for a minute. “I can’t,” she repeated.
“You can’t stop me, actually,” Finch answered gently. “It’s already in your name. The title transferred this morning.”
“I won’t accept it.”
“Then don’t. Leave it. Let it stand empty until it crumbles, or until some vagrant burns it down, or until they sell it for back taxes. It’s yours. Do as you will.”
“Random …”
“Or make it your home. Build the walls you need, tear out the ones you don’t. Rip out the carpeting and polish the hardwood floors. Run new wiring, make your wi-fi the fastest in the city. Let in the light from every side.” Reese could hear him moving closer to where the woman had been. He didn’t turn around; it seemed like the moment called for privacy. “And keep your tunnels in the basement, just in case,” Finch continued. “But whatever you decide, please, please let yourself move away from Chaos. Call it a gift to me, if you like, because it’s what I really want. More than anything, I want this. That you give yourself a little space.” His voice went soft, and very gentle. “That you give yourself permission finally to put your father’s death behind you.”
Reese stared fixedly at the ground outside the window. There was a lump in his own throat. He could almost feel how conflicted Christine was. She was silent for a very long moment, and without looking John knew her eyes were locked up with Harold’s. Their feet didn’t move. He held his breath, held very still, desperate not to disturb them.
Finally, he heard Christine inhale. It sounded shaky, like she was about to cry. “Damn it, Random …” she whispered.
And then there was movement, and fabric rustled, and when he glanced over his shoulder the woman was in Finch’s arms.
Reese grinned and turned back to the window. It would need to be fenced, he decided. A decent fence around the yard, and a patio around the back door. Not concrete. Sandstone or granite, something with a little style. With a propane line for the grill. Charcoal was better, but too slow. He wasn’t patient, where red meat was involved. Maybe a bird feeder.
Christine muttered something against Finch’s chest. Reese only caught the last few words, but he got the gist of the question. “…have pie?”
Harold laughed out loud. “Yes, little Dierdre, you can still have pie, too.”
Reese nodded to himself. He rarely heard Harold laugh, and almost never like that, open and actually happy. It was worth all the tunnels he’d climbed through in the past six months. Worth a lot more than that. He smiled to himself and turned to join them.
Taylor followed his co-worker, Holly, up to the front door of the house. It was her fifth year with the Christmas Crush. She had a green elf hat on. The steps were still covered with snow, and he felt the cold seep through his sneakers. His mom had told him to wear his boots, but he’d ignored her.
Holly knocked on the door a lot harder than he thought she needed to. He heard someone moving inside, but it was about two minutes before the door opened. The old black man looked at the m and grinned broadly. “Hey, it’s Santa’s helpers! Come in, come in!”
“Hey, Mr. Jansing,” Holly said loudly. “How are you?”
“I’m good, I’m good. You’re Holly, right? You were here last year.”
“Sure was. This is Taylor.”
The man stepped back and let them into his tiny house. “Taylor. Good to meet you.” He stuck his hand out and Taylor shook it politely. “Haven’t earned your horns yet, huh?”
Taylor grinned, embarrassed. He’d been afraid they were going to make him wear one of the stupid hats, and he was relieved when no one insisted on it. But on his third day with the crew, he realized that it was sort of a badge of honor. He didn’t feel like he fit in well enough to grab one. “Not yet, sir.”
“What?”
“Not yet, sir!” Taylor said, much louder.
“Ah, you’ll get there, son. Give it time.”
“Do you have your presents ready?” Holly asked.
“Still writing the tags,” Jansing answered. “Give me just one minute, okay?”
“Sure. No rush.”
“Come in, sit down.”
Holly wiped her feet carefully on the front mat and followed him into the living room. Taylor started to follow, then stopped and looked back toward the door. “I’ll be out front,” he told his companion. “Call me when there’s stuff to carry.”
She shrugged, a little confused. “Okay.” Taylor went back outside.
He stood in the snow on the front steps and looked around. Then he walked around to the side door. As he hoped, there was an old snow shovel leaning against the siding. He took it back to the front and shoveled off the porch and front steps. Then he worked on the sidewalk. He didn’t get it all cleared, but he made a two-person wide path before Holly called him.
She came onto the porch with a box of unwrapped gifts. “Taylor? Put these in the car.”
“One sec.” He trotted around and put the shovel back where he’d found it, then took the box from her. “Got it.”
There were three more boxes to follow. “That’s a lot of presents,” he said, as the old man handed him the last box.
“I have six sisters,” he said. “And between them, they have thirty-two children.”
“Do you all get together for Christmas?”
Jansing nodded, smiling. “We rent out a church hall. Only way we all fit.”
“That sounds great.”
“Lots of smiles, Lots of smiles.”
“We’ll have these back tomorrow,” Holly promised.
“Thank you so much, little elves!”
Taylor’s feet were still soaked and cold, but the rest of him felt warm and he trudged back to the car.
***
Will Ingram pushed up the door of the storage locker and looked at the wall of boxes. “You’re sure this is okay?”
“That is a crap ton of boxes,” Christine answered.
“I mean, are you sure it’s safe?”
She nodded. “I talked to my friend. He says they’re pretty sure they know who killed Corwin. They just can’t prove it yet. And it’s got nothing to do with this.” She gestured at the boxes. “Holy shit.”
“I told you.”
“Well, let’s throw a few in the car, and then we’ve got to go.”
“Where are we going?”
She smiled, but didn’t answer. She climbed up and pulled down a box, then carried it to the car.
Ingram grabbed another one and followed her, but slowly. “You know … maybe this isn’t a good idea anyhow.”
“Why?”
“Just … because. This is my dad’s stuff. I don’t know if he’d …”
Christine leaned against the car and stared at him. “Spill it, darlin’.”
Will put the box in the trunk and walked over to her. “Here’s the thing. I know you admire my dad. A lot. If you start wading into this stuff, you’re going to … find out things.”
“Isn’t that the point of the exercise?”
“Yeah, but …” He stopped, looked at his feet for a minute.
“But I’m going to find out things I’d rather not know?”
“Yeah.”
“Like about the affairs?”
Ingram exhaled. “You already knew.”
“The tech community? We gossip like a bunch of little bitches.”
“So everybody knows.” He went back to looking at his feet again.
“Will.” When he didn’t look up, she moved close enough to lean her shoulder against his. “Hey. You want to know what I know about your dad?” He glanced at her, curious.
“He bought me glasses.”
“What?”
“The summer I was at IFT, he bought me glasses.”
“Glasses.”
“I’ve got contacts now, but I’m nearsighted as hell. Always have been. The summer I was an intern, I had these glasses that were like three years old. You saw them, in the picture. All bent to hell. And I couldn’t see. I was looking at monitors all day, and I went home with a screaming headache every night. But I didn’t tell anybody, because … well, because.”
Will nodded. “Okay.”
“One day I’m headed down to lunch, and Ms. Watts comes down and gets me.”
“Ah, Ms. Watts,” Ingram said, smiling. “I do remember her. Damn, she was hot.”
“Tell me about it.” Christine shook her head. “Anyhow, she says Mr. Ingram wants me to go run an errand with her. And we go out, and his limo’s there. His limo, Will. I know that’s not a big deal to you, but I’d never even seen one up close, let alone ridden in one. His. Own. Limo.”
Will turned to look at her. She wouldn’t meet his eyes; she folded her arms across her chest, made herself smaller. But she kept talking.
“Ms. Watts took me to this opthamologist. He did the whole big exam, wrote me a new prescription. Watts helped me pick frames. And then we went to lunch, and then we went back and got my new glasses. Ms. Watts put them on a company credit card. Said it was part of the internship. And I stopped getting headaches.”
She gestured to the storage locker. “Whatever’s in there, Will, whatever I find out, that’s who your dad will always be to me. The oh-my-God beautiful billionaire who noticed that a little high school intern needed new glasses, and actually did something about it. Whoever else he was doesn’t matter.” She finally managed to look at him. “It won’t change who he is to me.”
“Can I hug you?”
“What?”
“Can I hug you?”
She made a face. “Oh, you’re one of those people.”
“Did you expect anything else?” He gave her his most winning smile.
“All right,” Christine sighed, “but make it quick.”
Will put his arms around her. “You sound just like every one of my old girlfriends.”
She laughed and hugged him back “ briefly. Then she moved and he let her go. “Right. Load the car, lover boy. We’ve got to go.”
“Where are we going?” Will asked again as he lugged boxes to the car.
“Staten Island.”
He paused, surprised. “I hear there’s not much there anymore.”
“More than you think. And today, there’s a free health clinic.”
“And that’s the trade-off. For this.”
“That’s it.”
“Clever. But I’m not licensed in the State of New York.”
“You’re in good standing with MSF. And they have special dispensation to work in the disaster zone. You’re covered. I checked.”
“Okay.” He slammed the trunk and closed the storage bay. “So how does this work? Straight up hour-for-hour swap or what?”
“Nope. Just go today.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.” She shrugged. “Of course, if you want to go back, no one’s going to stop you.”
“And you know I will, don’t you?”
“I think you need something to occupy your time between now and Boxing Day.”
He groaned out loud. “Boxing Day. Why did she have to say Boxing Day? Do you know how far off that is?”
Christine laughed. “Get in the car, or I’ll get you a night job, too.”
***
Taylor carried the first box of presents to Mr. Jansing’s front door and knocked loudly.
“Geez, break the door down,” Twitch teased him.
“He can’t hear,” Taylor answered. He was glad he’d come the day before with someone who knew that. Twitch ” his real name was David, but he hated it ” was a first-year, like him.
It took even longer than the day before for the old man to answer the door. “Hello?” he said, peering at them.
“Hey, Mr. Jansing,” Taylor said, his voice pitched for the man’s hearing. “We’ve brought your presents back.”
“Oh.” The man seemed a little surprised, but he covered it. “Oh, right, right. Santa’s elves. Come in, come in.”
It felt cool in the little house, but Jansing was in just a thin shirt and he was sweating.
Taylor carried the box in; Twitch followed. “Where do you want these?”
“Oh.” Jansing thought about it. “Just put them there, by the door.”
“Okay.” Taylor put the box down to the side of the door, then took Twitch’s box and put it next to it. “We’ve got one more trip, okay?”
“Okay.”
As he walked back to the car, Taylor frowned to himself. There was something off about the man. When they got back, the door was closed. He nudged it open with his foot. “Mr. Jansing?” he called loudly. “We’ve got the rest of your presents.”
The man was standing in the middle of the living room. Taylor thought he swayed just a little as he stood there. He looked at him blankly. “Oh. The presents. I’m not quite done with the tags yet. Give me just a minute and I’ll get them.”
“What’s with him?” Twitch asked quietly.
“Mr. Jansing,” Taylor said, “we already got the presents. They’re all wrapped, see? We’re bringing them back.”
“Oh. Oh. Right.”
“We should go,” Twitch said.
Taylor ignored him. “Mr. Jansing, are you okay?”
“I’m fine. I’m fine. I met you yesterday, didn’t I?”
“I’m Taylor. I was here with Holly.”
“Right. Holly. She’s a nice girl.”
“Yes, she is.”
“Taylor?” Twitch said. “We should go.”
Taylor hesitated. “You go,” he said. “I’ll walk back.” It was only six blocks back to Chaos.
“You sure?”
“Yeah. Go ahead.” He closed the door behind him, then wiped his feet and moved closer to the old man. “Mr. Jansing, you have a lot of presents here. You must have a big family.”
“Oh, yes,” the man said happily. “I have six sisters, and they have so many children …” His voice trailed off. “They have …”
“How many children do they have?” Taylor asked.
“They have … they have …” The man looked at him. There were tears in his eyes. Then he shook himself. “You’re here for the presents. I haven’t quite finished with the tags yet. Give me just a minute.”
“There’s no rush, Mr. Jansing,” Taylor said. “I’m going to stay here a while.”
He pulled out his cell phone and dialed quickly. Zubec answered, in his habitual bellow. “Chaos!”
“It’s Taylor. I need to talk to Scotty.”
“She’s not here …”
“Then give me her cell phone number,” Taylor insisted. “I need to talk to her right now.”
***
Finch snagged the phone on the first ring. “Hello, Christine.”
“Hey, Random.”
“Everything alright?” She sounded a little off to him. Sad, perhaps, or tired. “Where are you?”
“We’re out on Staten Island. Will’s doctoring. I’m trying to fix networks. It’s a freaking mess.”
“How can I help?”
“I’ll get them sorted. Eventually. But I have a question for you.”
“A question with a preamble. That’s never a good sign. But go ahead.”
“I was telling Will this morning about how when I was at IFT Nathan Ingram sent his assistant to take me for new glasses.”
Finch sat up straight, touched his own glasses. “Yes?” he asked, carefully neutral.
“Because the ones I had gave me headaches.”
There was still something in her tone. Some kind of longing, something grasping at hope. “And?”
“And while I was telling him, I got to thinking. That I wasn’t sure if it was true.”
“That Nathan’s assistant took you for new glasses?”
“That it was his idea.”
Finch touched his own glasses again. He knew, then, what she wanted. And he gave it to her, immediately and without regret. “I don’t know anything about it, Christine.”
There was a brief pause. He knew, in the silence, that she knew he was lying. That she knew Nathan Ingram had not been the one to notice the intern in pain, but that Finch was willing to let his partner keep her admiration for it. It was a very small thing. But it was important to her. “Thank you,” she finally said.
While Harold was trying to think of something to say, the phone went dead.
***
“Sanchez!” Carter said as she passed the young cop at the doorway of the café.
“Hey, Detective,” he answered warmly. He had a carrier and four cups of coffee. “How’ve you been?”
“Good. You?”
“Learning every day.”
“Good to hear.”
“Your boy did real good today.”
Carter blinked. Whatever Taylor had done, this was the first she’d heard about it. But the rookie didn’t seem to know that. She played it off. “Uh, yeah. I know.”
“You must be proud of him.”
“Every day.” She gestured to the carrier he held. “You should get that coffee delivered before it gets cold.”
“Yeah. Good to see you again.”
She went into the café. Taylor was sitting at the front table, bent over his notebook. He wore a green elf hat. There were a couple other helpers with him. “Hey,” she said, putting her hand on his shoulder.
Taylor looked up. “Sorry, Mom. I didn’t see you pull up.”
“That’s okay. How’s the paper coming?”
“Good.” He leaned aside so she could see what he was actually working on. “Really good.”
“And what else happened today?” she prompted, since he obviously wasn’t going to volunteer it.
The boy looked down, but he had a little grin. “Nothing, really.”
“That’s not what Sanchez said.”
“It was no big deal.”
Carter sighed. “Hey, Scotty!” she shouted. “What did my kid do today?”
From the bar, Fitzgerald looked up. “Saved a man’s life!” she shouted back.
Taylor ducked his head even further. “It wasn’t a big deal,” he repeated, embarrassed.
Christine scooted through the crowd to them. “It’s a big deal,” she said. “Mr. Jansing’s blood sugar crashed. Taylor got him help.”
“All I did was call you,” he protested.
“Yeah, but if you hadn’t called me he might be dead now. It’s a big deal.”
Carter grinned and put her arms around the boy from behind. “Sounds like a big deal to me, too.”
“Mom!”
She released him, but kept her hand on his shoulder. “I’m proud of you.”
He squirmed, closed his notebook and stuffed it in his bag. “Thanks, Mom.” He took his hat off and handed it to Christine. “See you tomorrow.”
Carter let it go until they were in the car, but then she said, again, “I am really proud of you, Taylor.”
The boy shook his head. “He just didn’t look right. When we picked up the presents he was with it, and when we took them back he was confused. All I did was call Scotty, and she let me talk to this doctor she was with, and then she called the squad.”
“A lot of people wouldn’t have thought to do even that. You noticed something wrong and you did something about it. You used your head, and you helped that man.”
He shrugged, still embarrassed. “I couldn’t just leave him there.” He shifted. “Do you know any paramedics?”
“Sure, a few. Not real well, but I’ve worked with some. Why?”
“The guys that came for Mr. Jansing. They seemed pretty cool.”
“You think you might want to look at that as a career?”
“Maybe. I’d like to find out more about it, anyhow.”
Carter shrugged. “Okay. Maybe I can set up a ride-along for you.”
“I don’t know, though. Holly’s in this biotech program at college, and that sounds really cool, too.”
“Biotech?”
“Technology and biology mashed together. Like, they’re working on nanobots that can open up blood vessels in the heart. These tiny little robots that they can just inject and they go where they’re needed and fix stuff. They don’t have to cut people open any more. And that sounds really cool, you know?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Or there’s all kinds of other stuff they can do. Like they put an implant in this woman’s brain and it lets her control her artificial arm, with her mind. I mean, how cool is that?”
“Pretty cool,” Carter admitted.
The boy went on talking. He was much more excited about this idea than he had been about being a paramedic. His words fell over each other; he barely stopped to take a breath. Carter made little encouraging noises when she needed to, but mostly she just listened. Evidently her son had been talking to his co-elves a lot. She’d always told him she expected him to go to college, and he’d never argued about it, but suddenly he was enthusiastic.
She thought about reminding him that failing an English class might limit his college options. Then she decided to keep her mouth shut, at least for the moment. He was a smart kid. He’d figure it out.
q95;
Miraculously, Fusco got a real lunch break on Christmas Eve. He paid for the miracle, of course; when he got back to his car, there was an envelope taped to his steering wheel.
The car was still locked. It had to have been Mr. Wonderful.
Fusco made a face and grabbed the envelope. He was sure it was going to screw his Christmas with his son. But inside there were two tickets to the Nets game the next day. They were in the fifth row, right behind the bench. And they were clipped to a card for the Chaos Café.
He smiled and tucked the tickets into his jacket pocket. He’d told her not to get him anything, but he wasn’t really surprised that she had. Besides, Lee would love it …
Before the satisfaction could take a good hold, the passenger side door opened and John Reese got in.
Fusco scowled. “What?” he snarled.
“Merry Christmas, Lionel,” Reese said smoothly. “You should check your trunk when you get home.”
“Why? There another body in there I need to bury?”
“No. Just a token or two of our appreciation.”
“Great. So what do you want? I’ll tell you right now, I’m not helping you tomorrow. I’ve got my kid for Christmas Day and you’re not screwing it up.”
“I’ll do my best,” Reese promised.
“Then what are you doing here?”
“Our girl’s worried about you. What’s going on, Lionel?”
“What’s going on?” the detective snarled. “Well, let’s see. I was a dirty cop, and then I got clean, but I still have to pretend to be dirty, because this psycho Simmons thinks I killed a different dirty cop, which I actually didn’t, but I did bury him after he got killed by this other psycho vigilante who keeps breaking into my car. Is that enough going on for you, or should I go on?”
“She’s right. You need to switch to decaf.”
Fusco shook his head. “Look, just … don’t call me tomorrow, okay? Give me one day?”
“We’ll try.”
“Try hard.”
“If it’ll make you feel any better, we found Christine a new place to live.”
Fusco looked over at him. “And she’s actually going to move?”
“It needs some renovation. Won’t be done until summer, probably. But she says she’ll go.”
“Good.” The detective nodded decisively. “That’s good.”
“I thought you’d think so.” Reese was quiet for a minute. “What else do you need, Lionel?”
“Nothing. I’m good.”
The big guy probably knew he was lying, but he decided to let it go. “All right, then. Merry Christmas, Detective.”
“Hey,” Fusco blurted before he could open the car door. “You’re right. There’s one more thing I want. I want you to promise me something.”
Reese was silent. Fusco knew he wouldn’t commit to anything until he knew what it was.
“If something happens, if I go down,” Fusco said quickly, before he could change her mind, “I know my kid’s going to hear all about what a dirty cop I was. I get that. Nothing to be done about it.” He looked steadily out through the windshield. “But I want you to promise me, you make sure he hears something good about me, too. Okay?”
“What do you expect to happen, Lionel?” Reese asked quietly.
“I expect you to get me killed, sooner or later.”
“I told you, I’ve got your back.”
“Yeah. Whatever. But you make me this promise. You make sure my boy knows.”
“I’ll make sure, Lionel.”
The words untwisted something deep inside him. He took a deep breath, and then another one, just to be sure he could. “Thank you,” he said quietly.
“I won’t get you killed,” John said. He clapped his hand on Fusco’s shoulder briefly. Then he slipped out of the car and was gone.
Fusco drove back to the precinct. In the parking bay, he looked around carefully, then opened the trunk. There was a big white box in it, with a fancy red bow. There was an envelope tucked under it.
In the envelope were three gift cards. One was to the gift shop at the Nets game. One was to a sporting goods store. The third was simply a prepaid MasterCard. None of them had amounts noted on them, and Fusco was almost afraid to know what they were worth.
Inside the box was what looked like a standard-issue NYPD bullet-proof vest. But when he picked it up, it weighed about a third of the one he was wearing. He could feel that it was different material, and although he’d never seen one, he knew what it was. State of the art, brand new, and expensive as hell. SWAT didn’t even have these yet.
He put it back in the box and closed the trunk. Then he stood back and stared at the car. He shouldn’t accept it. He should give it back. The vest and the gift cards both. He shouldn’t …
He’d buried a body for the guy. He’d broken more laws than he could count, let alone regulations. A little graft at this point was just icing on the cake. Not even icing. Just a little sprinkle of powdered sugar.
He put the gift cards in his wallet and went back to work.
***
Joss Carter got home after seven on Christmas Eve, but she didn’t really mind. Taylor was having dinner with his girlfriend’s family and she was on her own. She’d cleared out all her paperwork before she left the precinct.
Well, most of her paperwork. It was never really all done.
There was a big white box, tied in a red bow, sitting on her kitchen table.
Carter regarded it for a long moment. Then she pulled out her cell phone and called Reese. He didn’t answer; the call went straight to voice mail. “Seriously, John,” she said firmly, “we’ve talked about boundaries before. Stop breaking into my house!” She snapped the phone shut.
Then her curiosity got the better of her. She opened the box.
She put the envelope aside for a moment and lifted up the sweater. It was deep red, and it was the softest thing she’d ever felt in her life. Like fleece, like flannel, but smoother. It was the kind of sweater you wanted to wear with nothing on under it, just to feel it against your skin.
Carter smiled, felt her cheeks grow warm. She looked around quickly, but of course there was no one else in the apartment.
She didn’t bother to check the size. She already knew it would fit perfectly.
Beneath it was a bullet-proof vest. She paused for a minute at the contrast, but in a way it made sense. The two sides of Joss Carter’s life: Sleek and stylish on the surface, hard and well-protected underneath. She picked it up. It looked like a standard-issue vest, but it was very light. State of the art personal armor.
She should give it back.
But given the work she did with John and his friend, she might need it.
She put the things back in the box and opened the envelope. There were gift cards inside. The first was for a clothing store that Taylor loved. The second was for a book store. The third was just a prepaid MasterCard that she could use everywhere.
The fourth card was for an on-line site that specialized in women’s shoes.
“Shoes?” Carter asked aloud. She stared at it for a long minute. She had to give it back, of course. She had to give all of it back. The gift cards, anyhow. She couldn’t …
Her phone buzzed with a new text message. Carter picked it up. Unknown caller, of course, but the message was too precise and poetic to be anyone but Finch:
DON’T REFUSE
UNTIL YOU’VE SEEN THE SHOES.
Beneath that was a link.
Carter rolled her eyes and snapped her phone shut. She looked around again. Shuffled through the cards again. She had to give them back. There weren’t any amounts written on them, but she was pretty sure they’d be uncomfortably large.
She wondered if Fusco had gotten the same gifts. Although she couldn’t really see the red sweater being his style.
If he had, she was damn sure her partner was going to keep his.
The vest. She could keep the vest. They owed her that much.
She and John had taken a private jet to Texas to search for his friend. She was pretty sure money wasn’t an issue for them. But that wasn’t the point.
Finch wore suits that cost more than she made in a month.
Still not the point.
“Damn it,” she said under her breath. She snapped her phone open again and clicked on the link.
Carter rarely spent a lot on clothes for herself. Taylor shopped for labels, the latest trends, when he could, but she liked her work clothes conservative, serviceable. Not cheap, but sensible. There was always a chance they were going to get blood on them, or something even less savory, and she never wore anything she couldn’t bear to throw away. But shoes …
… shoes were her weakness. And maybe John hadn’t figured that out, but his partner damn sure had.
Boots that strapped around the ankle. Kitten heels and peep toes. Stilettos that would make her legs look a mile long. The site had everything, in every color.
“Damn it,” Carter said again.
Because if she kept the shoe card, if she used it, then she couldn’t very well send back the one for Taylor’s favorite store, could she? And if she kept those two ” well, the book store, maybe he’d find something he liked, that would keep him going on his college quest. SAT prep books, if nothing else. And she might find …
“Damn it!” she said a third time. The private jet. The suits.
She touched the sweater again. It was like a cloud.
Her resolve crumbled like a sand castle. She stacked up the cards and tucked them in her pocket.
***
It was easy, Reese thought, to break into a house without waking the people who lived there. Easier if they were an older couple without especially good hearing who slept on the second floor. And easiest of all if you have yourself consulted on the security measures for the home.
Easy to get in and out unnoticed. Once.
But on his third trip through the back door, and with at least one more trip to go, Reese slapped at his earpiece. “Finch,” he whispered, “don’t you think you overdid this a little?”
“You’re the one who added the chair,” Finch answered calmly. “I did offer to come with you.”
“If I’d known there was so much stuff I would have let you.” Reese carefully deposited his armful of presents under the modest Christmas tree, then tried to arrange them silently. Finch had, at least, wrapped most of them in square boxes. It helped, but the result was still well short of being decorative.
Of course, he doubted that the toddler would care much how artful the pile of presents was.
Reese grinned and made one more trip to the van.
The van, he thought, was a nice touch. He’d needed to rent it anyhow. Telling Finch that he needed it to haul Christmas presents to Leila’s house was just a bonus. He charged it on Finch’s credit card. It amused him. And honestly, he did need it.
The toddler-sized easy chair, in the shape of a ‘pengin’ with a lap, wouldn’t have fit in the trunk of a sedan.
Reese carried the chair in last. He put it beside the stack of presents under the tree and carefully added a huge red and gold bow to the back of it. Then he stepped back to observe.
It wasn’t Macy’s display window, but it looked good.
Grinning to himself, Reese crept out of the house. He made sure to reset the alarm and lock the door behind him.
“All done?” Finch asked.
“Santa mission accomplished,” Reese confirmed. “If you don’t need me, I’ll see you in the morning.”
“See you then.”
Reese turned off his earpiece, got into the rented van, and headed out of state.
***
Reese got back to his loft well after midnight, technically on Christmas morning. He was tired, but very pleased. All his Christmas Eve deliveries had gone without a hitch, and his one pick-up had been equally easy. As a bonus, there had been no new Number for two days. That couldn’t hold, of course. It was only a matter of time. But with any luck they’d get one more day.
There was a big white box with a red bow on the kitchen counter.
Reese looked at it, chagrined. He should have anticipated that while Finch had him occupied, the genius would not be idle. The box was bigger than the ones he’d left for Fusco and Carter. Of course, he already had one of the brand new vests, so that wasn’t what it was. There wasn’t a thing in the world that he needed that Finch hadn’t already supplied, except guns, which he’d acquired for himself.
So what was in the box?
Almost reluctantly, he slipped off the ribbon and lifted the lid.
The overcoat inside was blue-black. It was also some kind of cashmere/wool blend. It felt rich to the touch, elegant. The lining was silver. He lifted it out of the box. It would be warm, he knew, and it would look fantastic. He slipped off his old coat. It was still perfectly serviceable, but had bullet holes and tears expertly, invisibly patched in several places. He put the new coat on. It was perfectly tailored, of course. The sleeves were exactly the right length. There was room to move in the shoulders. It was the most comfortable thing he’d ever owned.
Beneath it in the box were a pair of leather gloves, calfskin, silver-gray in color, and a matching scarf.
The pockets of the coat felt heavy. Reese put his hands in. In one was an envelope. In the other was a small package. He opened the envelope first. It was a letter from an organization called “War Dogs Making It Home”, thanking him for his very generous donation. John smiled. He’d heard about the group from a news story; they paired returned vets with PTSD with shelter dogs, who trained as helpers. It had seemed like a genuinely good idea to him, and he’d probably mentioned it to Finch.
In the other pocket was a small wrapped gift. He opened it slowly. It was a brand new copy of Nine Princes in Amber. Reese had picked up one of the library’s copy early on, when Christine had first called Finch Random, but he hadn’t read very far into it. He’s meant to start it again when Finch had bestowed his own pet name on her. And he wondered where he fit into their mythos. If he did at all.
Maybe the book would tell him.
He picked up the scarf and draped it around his neck. Then he went and opened the closet door to look at himself in the mirror behind it. He looked ” powerful. Not threatening, precisely, though he knew he could appear dangerous just by putting the right expression on his face. But by itself, the coat said he was habitually, comfortably well-off. So accustomed to the finer things that he no longer noticed them. It was elegant.
He went to the windows and looked down to where the van was parked. It was locked, and the alarm was on. No one was going to mess with it. Finch’s gift was safe. And if all went well, he would actually surprise the man for the first, and perhaps last, time.
He rubbed his hand over the sleeve of the coat absently. It was so very Finch, both practical and extravagant. It kept him warm physically. And symbolically, perhaps, it was Finch’s way of going with him everywhere he went. I’ve got you covered. Reese closed his eyes. It had been a very long time since he really believed anybody cared about him. And longer still since he’d let anyone care about him.
He turned and looked around the loft. This was Finch, too. There was a time when John would have resented the gift, flailed away from letting someone give him a home, especially one so extravagant. Fought in protest, as Christine had, but with much more determination. But Finch, who claimed to be so bad at human interaction, had picked exactly the right time to offer it. Had made it easy for John to accept it.
He still didn’t know where Finch lived. He wasn’t willing to accept that he never would. Not yet.
He slipped his coat off and hung it up in the closet, then slowly stripped out of his clothes. He’d shower in the morning, he decided. Most of his Christmas chores were done. He could sleep late, have a big breakfast. Lots of time. He was looking forward to the next day.
Reese pulled back the covers, sat on the edge of his bed and looked toward the windows again. Outside, the normal street light was tinged with color, red and blue and green for Christmas. I’m looking forward to tomorrow, he thought again, surprised. How long had it been since he’d looked forward to Christmas morning? Years, at least. Maybe a decade. Maybe more. How many Christmases had he spent alone? How many had he spent working and fiercely ignoring the calendar? How many of them had he spent stubbornly drunk?
Even last year, he thought, he’d been in a cheap hotel, carefully hoarding the pay Finch gave him, certainly that their project would end abruptly. Still angry, still brooding. Still keeping his careful distance from Finch and everyone else. Still alone.
He stretched out on the bed and pulled the covers up. This year was different. This year he had places to go and people to be with. Christmas was awful when you were alone. But when you had friends, it was, well, wonderful. Not perfect, of course. It would never be perfect. But it was so much better than it had been in a very long time.
He was still smiling when he fell asleep.
***
q95;
Harold left home early in the morning on Christmas Day and waited in the park. It was sharply cold. He adjusted his scarf to keep the chill off his neck, then shoved his gloved hands into his coat pockets.
He waited.
Just before eight, a blue sedan stopped in front of Grace’s door. A red-haired woman older than Grace got out and went up the stairs; the door opened before she got there. A few minutes later both woman came out with their arms full. Grace had two bags of gifts and a big wicker basket. Her sister had a covered tray and another bag. They put all their parcels in the trunk and back seat. Grace went back inside and returned with one last bag and a Thermos. She locked the door behind her. When the car was loaded, Grace got into the passenger seat. The older woman drove, and they were gone.
Harold watched until the car was completely out of sight.
Grace and her sister, he knew, were headed to Connecticut, to the home of their brother. The brother had received a big cooler of prime rib from his employer, as had everyone else at his company. The sister had six bottles of very good wine in the trunk of the car. Or five, at least. She’d ‘won’ them in a drawing at her favorite wine shop, along with five other lucky customers. The covered tray was loaded with desserts; it had come from one of the magazines Grace had drawn covers for. All their employees and private contractors had received one like it.
The whole extended family would enjoy a wonderful Christmas dinner.
Grace had, on Christmas Eve, been presented with a fancy new single-cup coffee brewer that actually made decent espresso. Her business card had been chosen from a fishbowl at her local coffee shop. She’d received a year’s supply of coffee with it.
It was the most Harold could do for her, in the way of gifts and surprises for Christmas.
It was not enough.
He turned his face to the cold wind and walked.
***
Ellis Donnelly surveyed the theater lobby with a practiced eye, taking in everything.
The people gathered were loud, talkative. Of course, many of them knew each other; they were all Christine Fitzgerald’s invited guests. His date had already peeled off twice to greet people she knew from the café or the library. He didn’t mind, really; it gave him a chance to study the crowd.
He wasn’t foolish enough to think the Man in the Suit would show up. Even if Christine knew him ” and he still didn’t have any concrete evidence of that ” she wouldn’t be stupid enough to invite him to this event, when she’d already invited Donnelly. Of course, he wouldn’t actually know the Man if he met him face-to-face, so she might think she was safe …
Theresa touched his arm. “Ellis? Are you alright?”
He smiled tightly. Stop working. You’re not working. Let it go. “I’m fine.”
“Agent Donnelly,” a woman said behind him.
He turned. “Detective,” he answered. “Merry Christmas.”
Carter was wearing a stunning red sweater. She looked at him a little quizzically. “Merry Christmas.” She glanced over her shoulder. “Taylor.” She grabbed the tall young man by his arm. “Agent Donnelly, this is my son, Taylor. Taylor, Agent Donnelly.”
“Nice to meet you,” the teen said formally. He offered his hand and Donnelly shook it.
“Theresa Ramos, this is Detective Carter and her son Taylor.”
They did another round of greetings and handshakes. Donnelly could see the detective’s eyebrows climb even higher, but she was much too refined to comment. Yes, Detective, I have a date, he thought, rather smugly. And a life, outside of chasing the Man in the Suit. Or at least I’m trying to. He shook his head. He’d been looking for him just a moment before.
“Where’d your grandmother go?” Carter asked her son.
“She and Tia went to the, uh …” He gestured with his head toward the restrooms.
A young Hispanic man spoke to Carter and her son then. It took a moment for Donnelly to realize it was Sanchez, the rookie from the coffee shop. In street clothes, the young man looked younger than Carter’s son. He nodded his greeting, then turned back to Theresa. “Do you want some popcorn?”
“Sure.”
They made their way to the concession counter. Donnelly reached for his wallet, but there was no need; the counter was lined with cups of soda and tubs of popcorn and boxes of candy. No one was taking money. It was the Fitzgerald family-friendly version of an open bar.
Donnelly shook his head. “She doesn’t do anything half-way, does she?”
“I’ve never known her to,” Theresa agreed. She grabbed a cup of cola and a bag of M & M’s. Donnelly took a Sprite and a tub of popcorn. Theresa tucked another pack of M & M’s into his pocket. “For later.”
He grinned and added a pack of Twizzlers.
Inside the theater itself, the crowd was still milling around and talking. Christine was there, but Donnelly noted that she stayed in the aisles and she moved quickly, never engaging with any group for too long. It was her event, her friends, and yet she was visibly anxious. Smiling, pleasant, but he could read the tension in her from across the room.
The only time she seemed to relax even for an instant was with a smallish man in glasses who was dressed like a well-off college professor, and his companion, a much younger, rather scruffy-looking man in jeans and a suede leather jacket. They were an odd couple, Donnelly thought, but then the whole theater was full of odd couples. And trios. And bigger configurations.
The younger man looked vaguely familiar.
Theresa could see their friend’s tension, too. Donnelly knew that she’d been planning some at least gently chiding remark, but when Christine reached them, she said, “You look awful.”
The hacker flushed, but smiled. “I may have significantly underestimated the extent of my social anxiety disorder.”
“You all right?” Donnelly asked.
“I’ll be fine. I expect the Xanax to kick in any minute. Have fun.”
He started to say something else, but she was already moving away. The house lights dimmed in warning, and he helped Theresa to a seat.
A few minutes later, the owner of the theater went up onto the little platform in front of the screen and introduced himself. “For any of you who haven’t been here before, welcome to the Empire City Theater. We’re what you’d call a second-run house, which means we get new movies a month after the big chains, but we’re a lot cheaper. We run classics on Thursdays, classic horror on Fridays, and the first Saturday of every month we still have the midnight showing of Rocky Horror. There are flyers on the concession stand and at the entrances. And we sincerely hope you’ll join us again after today.
“Now, if you’re wondering how a house like this got a reel of a big-name blockbuster like Les Miz on opening day, the answer is … I don’t know. I imagine there were felonies involved. I’m not asking.
“Anyhow, you all know who our hostess is today. I’ve been warned that if I mention her by name or attempt to make any kind of speech about her, she’ll f-screw me over with the IRS for the rest of my life. And since you all know her, you know she can do it. So I’m going to say simply this, I think for all of us. Merci, mademoiselle, and Joyeux Noël.
“And now, madames and messieurs, Les Miserables.”
He stepped down from the platform to a serious round of applause, and the movie began.
Donnelly settled deeper in his chair. He put the bucket of popcorn on the arm of the chair between them, and after a moment Theresa reached for some. He smiled over at her, and she smiled back.
He’d lost track of Christine, though they were fairly far back in the theater. He twisted around and looked up toward the box, but he couldn’t see her. He wondered if she’d slipped out. Her party, but she wasn’t there. She was an odd one; there was no doubt about that. He felt sorry for her. And then that struck him as odd. She had enough money to rent out a theater, and enough friends to fill it. And yet having those things didn’t make her happy. He’d known from the first that she hated to be in the spotlight. But this was something else. Faced with a sea of friendly faces, she’d chosen to retreat.
He glanced over at Theresa. They’d spoken twice on the phone since their blind date lunch. Both times he’d planned a simple detail-checking conversation, and both times they’d been drawn into a much longer talk. They were very compatible, in many ways. He liked talking to her, and he liked being with her. There was something about her that made him feel at ease. He was pretty sure she felt the same way.
Christine was alone on Christmas, even with her crowd of friends. But because of her, he and Theresa were not.
Theresa looked at him again. He raised an eyebrow in question. She leaned closer and whispered, “We could go find her.”
He considered, than shook his head. “It wouldn’t help.”
“No. I suppose not.”
He reached out and touched her popcorn-buttered fingers with his own. Just the fingertips for now, but it was enough. There was nothing he could do for Christine Fitzgerald, he thought regretfully. But he could enjoy her gifts nonetheless. He smiled once more at his unexpected date, and turned his attention back to the hopeful, tragic movie.
***
The woman came out the back door of the theater, propped it open with a brick obviously left there for that purpose, and sat on the fire escape stairs. She lit a cigarette. Reese shook his head and walked up behind her.
He was still five steps away when she said, “Merry Christmas, John.”
He paused, then continued around in front of her. “You know, I can sneak up on most people.”
“Most people don’t have access to Random’s apps.” He cocked his head, curious. “He had this custom app on his phone,” she explained, “that lets him know if he gets too close to certain phone numbers. I re-wrote part of it, so it lets me know if certain numbers get too close to me.”
“So any time I get within a hundred meters of you … “
“My butt starts to tingle,” Christine confirmed.
Reese grinned and sat down beside her. “Does he know you have it?”
“I assume so.”
“You’re missing your own movie.”
“Yeah.” She blew out a stream of smoke. “It seemed like such a good idea at the time. See all my friends at once, give them something they’d enjoy, make the gifts really easy to wrap and deliver. I didn’t think it all the way through. That they’d all want to talk to me.”
“Overwhelmed by the human interaction?”
“Little bit. And also, everybody’s crying. I hadn’t thought about the crying.”
Reese smiled sympathetically. “Want me to leave?”
“No. You’re okay.” She got out a second cigarette. “But thank you. Want one?”
“I haven’t smoked since I was in boot camp.”
“Yes, but do you want one?”
He considered for a long moment, and then took the cigarette.
“Ahh,” Christine breathed. “So you can be lead astray. Good to know.”
She lit both cigarettes and they smoked in silence for a moment. Reese inhaled very lightly and managed not to cough. He felt a little buzz as the unfamiliar nicotine went straight to his brain. It was not unpleasant, but nothing he wanted to get used to.
“I’m still thrashing about the building,” she admitted.
“Don’t,” John assured her. “Harold owns buildings all over the city that he never even sees. This makes him happy. Just go with it.”
She shrugged, smoked, unconvinced.
“And believe me, he knows perfectly well that you don’t need no man to take care of you.”
Christine chuckled wryly. “Is it that obvious, that I needed to hear that?”
“You’re pretty transparent on that issue.”
“Wonderful.” She gestured toward the theater. “You could come inside and watch.”
Reese shook his head. “A few too many federal agents in there for my taste.”
“Donnelly won’t notice you. He’s too busy falling in love.”
“How’d you manage that?”
“I set him up with someone who’s pretty much my polar opposite.”
“So he’s falling in love with someone stupid, mean, and ugly?”
“Awww, you’re so sweet.”
He tipped his head back and blew a stream of smoke out. “You’re finally cutting him loose, huh?”
“Never had him wrapped up to begin with. Although, in my considered opinion, a little light bondage play would do that man a world of good.”
“If he ever catches me, I’ll be sure to mention that.”
“Do that. Let me know how it goes.” Christine stubbed out her second smoke ” it was already burned down to her fingertips ” and field-stripped it and her first one. He smashed out his own cigarette, only half-gone, and gave it to her. She stripped it, too.
“Ingram’s here,” John said, gesturing toward the theater. “I thought he’d be half-way to Denver by now.”
“He’s flying out late tonight, last I heard. Do you know him?”
“I know him. He doesn’t know me.”
“Ahh. “
“I know Julie Carson, though.”
“What’s she like?”
Reese considered. “She’s good people. Tough. Smart. Used to be a hell of a runner. I let her put me in handcuffs once.”
“Speaking of a little light bondage,” Christine teased. “Think they’ll end up together?”
“Probably. Last I saw, they were catching bullets for each other.”
“That’s romantic. I think.”
“Sure you’re not going to miss running all over town with him?”
“Ahh.” Christine looked at him. “So now I know what you sound like when you’re fishing for information.” She smiled. “He found out Corwin got killed. He wanted to know if what she’d told him about IFT was true. So he went looking for an outside consultant to go over Nathan’s stuff.”
“And conveniently found you,” Reese guessed.
“I am uniquely qualified, actually.”
“Sure. To tell him anything Finch tells you to tell him.”
“That’s kind of the name of the game, isn’t it?”
“It is,” he agreed. “Better than letting him find out the truth.”
“Seems like that might be kind of a perpetual challenge with him.”
“Probably. Finch likes his secrets.”
She shrugged. “Anyhow, it’s a chance to go through all the documents, make sure there’s not anything there that shouldn’t be.”
“Harold’s actually going to let you look at them?”
“He hasn’t said I couldn’t.”
“Interesting.”
“Isn’t it, though?” Christine nodded. “I have something for you.”
The little plastic object she handed him was a quarter the size of his cell phone, thicker and much heavier. It had three buttons on its face, one large and two small, and an infrared scanner on one end. He turned it over, curious. “What is it?”
“It’s a code scanner. For keyless entry cars. Get close, press the big button, wait until it vibrates that it has the code. It will open and start almost any domestic car. And most of the foreign ones except Volvo and Jaguar, bless their deviant electronic hearts,”
He looked up from the device. “Thank you.”
“I know you have a fondness for other people’s cars,” she teased gently. “The new ones are a bitch to hotwire.”
“Not if you only plan to start them once.”
“True. Anyhow, it’s illegal as hell, so don’t get caught with it.”
“I’ll do my best.” He tucked the device away, brought out an envelope and handed it to her. “This is for you.”
Christine peered into the envelope, then frowned and brought out the plane tickets. “You’re sending me to North Carolina?” she asked curiously.
“Home of NASCAR.”
“Have I been very bad?”
Reese grinned and pulled down the tickets to reveal the paper behind them. “You’re going to driving school.”
She unfolded the sheet and studied it. “Ahhh.”
The school trained security and limo drivers for the private sector. The instructors were all ex-military and ex-intelligence. “They can’t make you a pro in two weeks,” John said, “but they can make you a talented amateur, and that’s a place to start.”
“A place ahead of her, if it comes down to it,” Christine answered.
“Exactly.” Reese couldn’t think of a precise scenario in which Christine would need security-grade driving skills to get Finch away from Root. But then, he couldn’t imagine why she’d need to shoot Root, either. If it came to either one, he wanted her prepared. Her small arms training was coming along nicely; she didn’t have any particular aptitude with guns, but she never needed to be told the same thing twice.
“I could be away from the city in February,” she mused agreeably.
“Good.”
She pocketed the envelope. “Thank you. Are we set for tonight?”
“Will be, by the time you get there.”
“Cool.”
“You going to be okay?”
Christine nodded. “I’m better. Thank you.”
He rolled to his feet, pulled her up. “See you later.”
***
“That was so good,” Theresa said. She was still dabbing her eyes as they walked out.
Donnelly nodded. “I enjoyed it very much. Although Russell Crowe …”
“Definitely out of his depth.”
“Yes.” The crowd leaving the theater all seemed to be headed in the same direction, toward Chaos. “They’re going to have a party for the ‘Doctor Who’ show tonight. I’d be happy to go with you, if you want.”
The woman hesitated. “I do like the show very much, but I’m not sure I’m up for a Chaos party. Honestly, I like it better when it’s mostly empty.”
The agent nodded his understanding.
“But if you want to go …” she amended quickly.
“No,” he answered. “I’m not really into science fiction. Although apparently I’m missing something with this whole ‘Doctor Who’ thing.”
“It’s really about the human condition. And the worth of the human race. You might like it.”
“Well, okay …” Donnelly paused on the sidewalk, offering to turn toward the café.
“No. I didn’t mean that.”
He offered his arm and headed back toward his car instead.
“I’ll write Scotty a thank-you note tomorrow,” Theresa said. “From both of us, if that’s okay with you.”
“That’s fine. Thank you.” And then, quite suddenly, Donnelly said, “Ingram!”
“What?”
“I’m sorry. I just … there was a young man at the movie, and I’ve been trying to remember where I’ve seen him before.” They reached the car and he opened the passenger-side door for her. As he walked to the driver’s side, he pulled out his cell phone. “I think I may know who he is.” He started the car and turned on the heater. “I’m sorry, give me just a minute.”
“No problem.” Theresa seemed bemused, but patient.
A car horn honked repeatedly. Donnelly looked up from his phone and realized that the driver was stalking his spot. He scowled.
“Here,” Theresa said, taking the phone. “Tell me what I’m looking for.”
Donnelly pulled out of the parking space, gave the impatient driver a little annoyed wave. “Nathan Ingram.”
“The computer billionaire?”
“Yes.”
“He’s dead.”
“I know.”
Theresa shook her head, but scanned the phone. “Okay. Now what?”
“He had a son. Edward. No, William, I think.”
She looked a little further. “William. Got him.”
“Is there a picture?” He narrowly avoided a car that pulled out in front of him.
“Yes. No.”
“No?”
“There’s a link, but it’s 404. File not found. Let me see what else I can find.”
Donnelly drove with one eye on her. Theresa worked his phone like a pro, flying through files, shaking her head. Finally she growled out loud. “I don’t think there’s a single picture of him on the internet.”
“Not even from the funeral? I know I saw a picture in the paper.”
She shook her head. “It’s been scrubbed.”
“That’s odd.”
“Not really. If you have a billion dollars, you can pay someone to keep your pictures off the Web.”
“Well. Thank you for trying.”
“Not done yet,” she said firmly. “He’s got to have a driver’s license or a passport or something. Do you have access to those files?”
Donnelly glanced at her. “That’s totally against regulations.”
“Oh, right. Sorry.”
“There’s a laptop under the seat.”
She leaned forward and got it, turned it on and then, at the next stop light, held it for him so he could log in. He showed her where the database was.
“Got him,” she announced after a minute. She flipped the laptop around again. “This guy? I think I saw him.”
Donnelly glanced at the picture. “That’s him. I knew I knew him from somewhere.”
“You’ve got a good eye.”
“Helps, with this job.” Donnelly shook his head. “I’m sorry. I get these little details stuck in my mind and they just nag at me until I figure them out. I didn’t mean to make you join in this wild goose chase.”
“It’s okay. That was fun.” She powered down the computer. “If you’re going to chase obscure details, maybe it would be good for you to date a reference librarian.”
“I hadn’t thought about it that way, but you’re probably right.” He nodded, satisfied. “So Scotty knows a billionaire. That’s interesting.”
“Maybe she’s the one who keeps his picture off the internet.”
“That wouldn’t surprise me. I wonder who the guy with him was.”
“Bodyguard?” Theresa suggested.
Donnelly laughed. “No. He was just a little guy. Looked like a professor. Maybe a financial consultant.”
“Or just a friend.”
“True.” He glanced over at her. “I am sorry. It’s just trivia. And I do it all the time, I’m afraid.”
“I don’t mind. It’s interesting.” She took what sounded like a very deep breath. “Do you have any plans for dinner?”
“Uh … not really. We could try to find someplace open, if you like.”
“Well, if you like.” She hesitated again. “Or I have some really nice pork chops I could make for us. If you wanted to do that.”
“That sounds very nice.” Donnelly sighed happily.
“Oh.”
“Was I supposed to say no?”
“No. But you sighed. If you’d rather not …”
“No, no,” Donnelly said quickly. “I sighed because I was trying to remember the last time I had a home-cooked meal. I think it was two thousand and … eight?”
Theresa laughed, reassured. “You don’t cook, then?”
“I’m extremely good at taking things out of the freezer and putting them in the microwave,” he admitted. “I would very much enjoy having you make dinner for me. If you don’t mind.”
“I wouldn’t have offered if I minded cooking.” She shook her head. “We’re both being way too careful, aren’t we? I just didn’t want to be too pushy. Or ” forward was actually what I was thinking. But I don’t think anyone’s used that word in this century. Or most of the last one.”
Donnelly grinned. “You’re not being pushy or forward.”
“Sometimes I wish I was a little more like her. Scotty. I don’t think she’s ever thought she was being forward in her whole life.”
No, Donnelly agreed, but she has certainly been forward. He remembered how she’d kissed him at her back door, and then invited him upstairs. He wisely kept his mouth shut about it.
“I feel like such a cliché sometimes,” Theresa continued. “The modest librarian. Sometimes I wish I was just a little less …”
“Reserved?” Donnelly suggested.
She looked over at him. “Ooh, nice. That’s a much kinder term than ‘old fashioned’.”
“There’s nothing wrong with being a little old fashioned,” he said. “I like it.”
Theresa went silent. When he glanced over at her, she was looking out the front window and her cheeks were a little pink.
“I’m sorry,” Donnelly said. “I didn’t mean to embarrass you.”
“No, you didn’t. I like … that you like it.” She smiled. “But she was right about us, wasn’t she?”
“Scotty?” Donnelly nodded. “Of course she was. Did you ever have any doubt?”
“Not really, no.”
They stopped at the next light. Theresa unbuckled her seatbelt and leaned forward to put the laptop back under the seat. “Maybe I could manage to be just a little forward,” she said quietly. She leaned across and kissed him quickly on the cheek.
“A little would be lovely.” He turned his head and their lips met very briefly. Then the light changed and she settled back and put her seatbelt back on.
Donnelly steered around yet another driver who ran the light. He didn’t mind. It was turning into the best Christmas he’d had in a very long time.
***
Harold Finch glanced down at the cell phone he held on his lap. It remained stubbornly blank.
For the second time, Will Ingram put his fork down. “We really should get going, Uncle Harold.”
“We have time, Will. Finish your dinner.”
“I’m not really hungry.”
Harold smiled gently. “Getting to the airport early won’t make your plane leave any earlier.” The young man had booked himself onto the redeye to Colorado, with the intention of being in Aspen as soon as the sun rose on Boxing Day.
“I know.” The young man ran his hand through his hair. “But at least I’d be there. On my way, you know?” He brushed his fingertips over the tiny scar at his hairline, then smiled self-consciously.
“I know. Finish your dinner.”
He stalled him for another ten minutes. But by then the boy was ready to burst. “We really have to go, Uncle Harold.”
Harold nodded and gestured for the check. He made the process of paying as slow as possible, but it didn’t buy him much time. The phone remained silent. He had a contingency plan, of course. He gave it two more minutes before he needed to implement it. But finally, as they were claiming their coats from the coat check, the screen lit up.
Harold glanced at the message, smiled to himself, and tucked the phone into his pocket. He followed Will out to the sidewalk and gave his ticket to the valet. Then he took his nephew’s arm and turned him toward him. “Will, I need to tell you something.”
“You can tell me on the way.”
“I’m not taking you to the airport.”
The boy blinked at him. “I … um, okay, I can get a cab, that’s no big deal.”
“Will. You don’t need to get to the airport tonight. “
“Uncle Harold … “
“There’s nothing in Aspen for you.”
Will froze, staring at him. His face fell. “You heard from Julie.”
Harold felt the corners of his mouth twitch and fought to keep it under control. “I did,” he said, as solemnly as he could.
“She doesn’t want to see me.”
There was so much heartbreak in his voice that Harold immediately abandoned the rest of the teasing he’d planned. “She does want to see you, Will. But the idea of having you meet her in Aspen, with her entire extended family around, struck her as, in her own words, the worst idea she’d ever had in her life.”
A vague hope lit in the boy’s face. He looked so much like his father with that expression that Harold felt his heart lurch. “I can meet her somewhere else?”
“Yes.”
Will moved toward him. “Where? Just tell me. I don’t care, I’ll be there if I have to crawl.”
“I don’t think that will be necessary.”
“Uncle Harold, just tell me when and where. Please.”
“Here,” Harold answered, with relish, “and now.”
“What?”
He looked past the young man’s shoulder. “Here and now,” he repeated.
The boy still didn’t get it. Harold took his shoulder firmly and turned him around.
Julie Carson was standing five feet behind him.
Her hair was still short and still blonde. Her cheeks were red with cold and excitement. She was smiling, a little uncertainly. The last time Harold and Will had seen her, she’d been badly injured and unconscious. Now she was on her own two feet, steady and healthy and very much alive.
And waiting.
Will froze like a deer in the headlight. “Julie …” he said, so softly that from behind Harold could barely hear him.
The woman smiled and nodded. “Will.”
“You’re … here.”
“Yes.”
“In New York.”
“Yes.”
“I thought … I couldn’t see you until tomorrow.”
Her habitual confidence fluttered visibly. “I could … go away and … come back tomorrow. If you want.”
“I …”
Finch leaned to his left and looked past Will to Julie. “A little help?” he offered.
“Yes, please.”
He released his grip on the boy’s shoulder, slid his hand down to the center of his back, and shoved. Will staggered forward two steps, and Julie moved forward and caught him, and from that first touch it was easy. Will simply gathered her in his arms and she clung to him.
“That’s better,” Harold said with satisfaction.
After a minute, Will twisted his head around without releasing the woman. “You knew? How long did you know?”
“I called him on Sunday,” Julie answered. She wriggled loose just far enough to stand upright. “Having you come to Aspen was a terrible idea. I don’t know what I was thinking.”
“You were a bit broken when you came up with it,” Harold allowed.
“True. But seriously, the family thing …”
“I want to meet your family,” Will protested.
“Later. Much later.”
“Okay,” Will agreed. He just looked at her, still utterly flummoxed.
Harold moved closer to them. “I’ve booked you into a suite at the Mandarin through New Year’s.” He handed them two room keycards, gestured behind them to the hotel. “I know it’s not your first choice, Will, but I’m told it has the best lap pool in the city.”
Julie smiled at him. “You do your homework, don’t you?”
“As well as I can.” He smiled at the two of them. “Well. I’ll be off, then.”
“Wait,” the woman said. “I have something for you.” She reached into her bag and brought out a smaller gift bag, red and green and quite heavy. “We make it ourselves. The family. But don’t drink it until you’re where you need to be. It’s got some kick.”
Harold drew the dark, heavy bottle out. It had a simple label, green with a gold ‘C’ on it and a date. “Thank you,” he said, touched.
“Uncle Harold.” Will freed one arm and reached for him. Harold moved closer and found himself suddenly the third part of their embrace, with Will’s arm around him from one side and Julie’s from the other. He hugged them both, as well as he could. It was clumsy and awkward and incredibly fulfilling. “Thank you,” Will whispered.
The valet pulled up with his car. Harold drew regretfully out of the little cluster. He smiled at the two of them. “Merry Christmas.”
“Merry Christmas,” they answered in unison.
Even before he got into the car, they were looking at each other again and had completely forgotten he existed. Harold shook his head, smiled again. That was exactly as it should be.
***
q95;
Eventually, of course, they had to move apart. They held hands on the short walk to the hotel. The doorman there said, to Julie, “Nice to have you back with us.”
“Thank you.”
On their way to the elevator, Will asked, “You’ve stayed here before?”
“Last time I was here,” she confirmed.
“When you were following me.”
She took a deep breath. “Yes.” They stepped into the elevator. “Will, I’m sorry about that, I …”
They were still holding hands. He wished they were closer, but he didn’t know how to manage it. Or even if he should. The promise had been dinner, no strings, no expectations. Still, he wouldn’t release her hand. “You saved my life. Don’t be sorry. It’s just … there’s so much I still don’t understand.”
“I know. And we can talk about all of it. I promise.”
Will nodded. “Are they okay with this? The people you work for? Are they … I don’t even know what I should ask.”
“I’m not sure they would approve.” Julie smiled wistfully. “But I don’t work for State anymore.”
“You quit?”
She shrugged. “It was quit or get fired. I broke a lot of rules.”
“I’m so sorry,” Will answered sincerely.
“After Joe, I didn’t really trust anybody anyhow. It would be hard to go back to it. Even if I was up to speed.”
The elevator stopped, and they stepped off onto the top floor. “God, I forgot to even ask how you are,” Will exclaimed. “So … how are you?” He inserted the key card and opened the door. And then, “Damn it, Uncle Harold still has my luggage in his car.”
Julie laughed out loud. “What makes you think that?”
“He was going to drive me to the airport …” He stopped, looking across the huge living room of the suite. At the far side of the room, next to the doors to two bedrooms, were two sets of luggage. One set was definitely his. He shook his head. “He thinks of everything.”
“I noticed. He booked the suite. I think it has four bedrooms.”
Will caught what she was saying immediately. “I don’t think we need four.”
“And yet the luggage is in the living room. Is there a message there?”
“No expectations,” he guessed. He turned, caught both of Julie’s hands in his. “That’s what we promised, right? No expectations. Just dinner. Except I’ve already had dinner. But we could go out, if you’re hungry, we could find someplace that’s still open …”
“I ate on the plane,” Julie answered simply.
“Oh.” He looked at her, confused. He’d forgotten how pretty she was. He couldn’t think straight when he looked at her. “I don’t know what I should do now. I don’t care what we do now. As long as I can be with you, I don’t care.”
She smiled nervously. “There is so much we should talk about.”
“I know.”
“I’m sorry I lied to you.”
“I’m sorry you lost your job because of me.”
She took a step toward him. “We should take this slow.”
“Absolutely.” He could barely speak. He could barely breathe.
“We should talk about things. Take our time. Actually get to know each other.”
“You already know me,” he pointed out.
“I do,” Julie admitted. “But you should get a chance to know me.”
“Yes.” He took a step toward her, and they were close enough then that their bodies nearly touched.
Julie hesitated. “I have all these awful scars.”
“I don’t care.”
“I know you don’t.”
She leaned, or he did. It didn’t matter. When the leaning stopped, their lips were all but touching. “We should talk,” Julie whispered, breathless.
“We’ll talk,” Will promised. He closed the last small distance and kissed her.
He had kissed her before, but it had been a long time ago. She’d had another name then, a false identity, designed to let her get close to him, to protect him. He barely knew this woman he had in his arms. The real woman. The real Julie Carson. She was right. They should talk.
She moved against him, put her arms around him. The kiss continued.
If we stop, the fast-vanishing threads of Will’s common sense said, if we stop and sit apart and talk, like we should, it won’t make any difference. Whatever we say, whatever I learn about her, I will love her.
He’d already known he loved her. The only astonishing thing was that she seemed to love him.
Although, the last gasp of sense said, she hadn’t said that. She hadn’t said anything of the sort.
It didn’t matter. He shifted his arms, cradled her head, kept on kissing her. She felt firm in his arms, solid. She’d been so broken the last time. His head was swimming, his pulse racing. Talk or no talk, he didn’t care anymore, as long as he could keep her in his arms.
“Will …” she murmured.
“Yes,” he answered, breathless.
“Yes,” she answered back.
***
Harold picked up Christine up in front of the café. It was crowded with loud, over-excited, over-caffeinated Doctor Who fans. He was glad he’d missed it.
She put the pet carrier in the back seat. Smokey growled fiercely. “Shush, you,” she said. The cat ignored her and continued to growl softly. “You have everything else?” she asked.
“I got everything on the list,” Finch promised.
She got in the front seat. “How’d it go with Will?”
“Exactly as planned.”
“Nice.” She raised the big Thermos she’d brought with her. “You have pie?”
“I have pie,” he promised.
They went to the library.
The lights were on and the gate was open; Reese was already there. Bear galloped out to greet them. He fussed around the cage insistently, but Christine kept the cat contained. She went to the little anteroom Finch had set up as cat habitat ” cat box in the corner, food and water on the counter, out of the dog’s reach ” opened the cage, and shut the door before Smokey could follow her out.
Bear whined. “Give her fifteen minutes,” Christine said.
He cocked his head, then sat down in front of the door and waited.
“That dog is too damn smart,” she said. She joined the men in the main room.
Finch barely heard her. He was staring at the bulletin board. The new board.
It wasn’t new, of course. It had been in the children’s section. It was still covered with bright yellow paper, and it had a scalloped border with badly-faded spring flowers on it. A printed banner across the top proclaimed, ‘Readers are Winners!’
The board was covered with printed pages of numbers. They started with 3.14159265358979323. Pi, of course. And it went on. Pages and pages of numbers covered the whole board. Ten thousand numbers, at least. Maybe more. There was a pencil cup taped to the side of the board. It held five different-colored highlighters. Scattered throughout the printed numbers were apparently random groups of five numbers that were highlighted in the various colors.
06062, highlighted in pink. Finch smiled, recognizing the end of Leon Tao’s Number. 07821 in green took him a minute longer. Sarah Jennings. 17863 in orange was easy: their own Detective Carter. He spotted Leila’s Number, Andrea Gutierrez, Judge Gates.
Not the entire number; that would be too easy to trace. Just the last five digits. Small splashes of color on a huge field of black and white numbers. Splashes that indicated every victim they’d saved, and every perpetrator they’d stopped.
It made his heart feel full and light at the same time.
He finally managed to look away from it. Reese was leaning against the edge of the desk, watching him. Patient. He became aware that he’d been staring at the board for a very long time. “Thank you,” he finally managed to say.
Reese shook his head, gestured with his shoulder toward the woman.
Finch didn’t even turn. He simply reached his hand back, and her fingers curled around his. He pulled her close, put his arm around her. But he looked to Reese again. “I told you she’d want to redecorate.”
His partner shrugged. “I can live with it.”
“Thank you,” he told Christine. He kissed her on the forehead, kept his arm around her shoulders. “What to the colors mean?”
“Nothing,” she answered. “They’re random. Let ‘em figure that one out.”
He nodded. Of course, if someone got this far into the library and recovered the board, it probably indicated that they had much bigger problems. And the board full of dead people’s names would only exacerbate those problems. But it amused him to imagine some hapless analyst spending months or years trying to decipher the pattern to the colors. It tweaked a little wicked part of his personality, one that he knew she shared.
“What to see your other surprise?” Christine asked.
“I don’t need anything else. Truly.”
“The point of Christmas is not to get gifts that you need,” she answered. “John?”
Reese smiled, the quirky little smile he had when he had a secret, and moved to the side of the room. He snapped the light on and gestured for Finch. Harold went, curious. It was the side room where he’d set up his audio equipment; there was nothing else of interest in there. Except …
He paused in the doorway and stared. The audio computer was still there, but everything else had been moved out. There were two long folding tables on each side of the room, covered neatly with white butcher paper. At the end of one was his red tool box. Otherwise the tables were empty.
But at the far end of the room was a … he wasn’t sure what to call it. A pile of boxes, arranged in a pyramid. Draped with colored lights. Not a pyramid, then, but a representation of a Christmas tree. There were two very large boxes at the bottom, three feet on a side. The rest were paper cases, the kind that ten reams of paper came in. Three on the second row, two on the third, one on the top. And on top of that, a big gold star.
He looked to Christine for an explanation. She gestured to Reese. “This is his,” she said.
“She helped.”
“I just crippled his web spiders.”
“My … what? But what is it?” Finch asked.
Reese walked over to the box tree and pulled off the gold star. He handed it to Harold, then brought down the top box and set it on one of the tables. “It’s a puzzle,” he said. “A sort of jigsaw puzzle.”
“A what?”
John gestured. Finch took the lid off the box. He looked at the jumble of parts and pieces. Computer parts. Wires, hardware, drivers. Plastic, metal. They looked oddly familiar. A hopeless mix of … “Oh, my God.”
Christine chuckled. “Yeah, I think you surprised him.”
“I think so,” Reese answered happily.
Finch looked at him. The op’s eyes were crinkled up, lit with a genuine smile. “These are pieces to a Xerox Alto,” he said.
“Some assembly required,” John answered. “Sorry.”
“No, it’s …” He started pulling pieces out of the box and putting them down on the paper. When he had half a dozen out, he started to re-arrange them, spread them out. The work tables suddenly made sense. Room to unpack everything, to see what he had and what he was missing. He looked at the stack of boxes again. “All of them?” he asked, breathless.
“The guy said he thought there were two or three in there, more or less. His father took them apart years ago to see how they worked and if he could fix them. He was kind of a tinkerer.”
“He was kind of a hoarder,” Christine corrected.
“But how …” Finch turned to look at her. “The web spiders. You shut down my notifications.”
“Only way to get them before you did. As soon as they came up for sale we jumped on them.”
“I have some notion I should scold you for that.”
“Eh. Google’s an easy hack. I put them back already, by the way.”
“Good girl.” But Finch was already looking back at the pile of boxes.
“More?” Reese offered.
“Please and thank you.” He tore his eyes away from his unexpected treasure and focused on his friend and partner. “Thank you,” he said sincerely, clearly.
Reese grinned, embarrassed, pleased. Then he unplugged the Christmas lights and brought down the top boxes for Finch. “Enjoy,” he said.
Finch was faintly aware that his companions had left the room. He opened the next box, and the next. The mythical Xerox Alto lay in pieces before him. More than one, yes, if all the parts were there. It would take days to assemble them, and even then they might not work …
Finch slipped off his jacket and hung it on a hook near the door. He undid his cuffs and rolled up his sleeves. Then he set about sorting the pieces.
He was looking forward to the task. More than he’d looked forward to anything in a very long time.
***
There was a quiet knock on the door.
Will jolted awake. Beside him, Julie scrambled for something ” her gun, he realized, and also that she didn’t have one.
There was the click of a lock, and then the sound of the outer suite door opening. Will sat up and looked toward the bedroom door. He remembered kicking it shut, but it hadn’t latched and stood open about three inches. Julie sat up beside him, and they both pulled the covers up.
There was a very soft rolling sound, a little clatter of china. Then retreating footsteps, and the outer door closed again.
Julie giggled. “Room service?” she asked quietly.
“Uncle Harold,” Will answered with certainty. He slid to the edge of the bed ” it took a while, it was a very big bed ”and put his feet on the floor. He looked around for his pants. There were clothes scattered all the way to the door, and beyond.
Julie had climbed out the other side of the bed and went to the closet. “Here,” she said. She handed him a big fluffy robe, and wrapped herself in another one.
He couldn’t help himself; he grabbed her around the waist and kissed her again. She didn’t resist.
Eventually, they made their way out to the living room. As expected, there was a silver room service cart standing near the couch. It had a silver coffee pot, two china cups, two plates, and two platters covered with silver domes. “I’m almost afraid,” Will said, reaching for the first one.
Under the first dome way a three-part dish with fresh strawberries, pineapple, and tangerine slices. Under the other was a beautiful tiramisu.
“Your uncle,” Julie said, “has insanely good taste.”
“He does,” Will agreed. “He always has.”
They got coffee and desserts and settled onto the couch. “He’s not actually my uncle, you know. He’s my godfather.”
“I know.”
“Of course you do.” Will rubbed the little scar on his forehead. “We have to talk now, don’t we?”
“Or we could just go back to bed,” Julie offered.
He leaned to kiss her. She tasted like whipped cream. “Tempting. But I think I need a little nourishment first.”
“A few calories might be in order.”
He took a big bite of cake. “So … you don’t want me to meet your family.”
“You don’t want to meet my family. Believe me. They’re insane.”
“Tell me.”
“Okay. My dad’s not so bad. Stuffy, and he barks, but not much bite. Very into his businesses, and leaves all the household stuff to my mom. Stephanie is a control freak. She wants to know what everybody’s doing, all the time, and she wants it done her way. She didn’t grow up with money, and she’s freaked out about the idea of ever not having it. Or her kids not having it.” She shook her head. “If she had any idea I even knew you, much less that we were together, she’d go crazy. She would never let you out of her sight. Well, you know, except to …” She gestured back toward the bedroom. “But only in the devout hope that she could claim that her daughter had borne Nathan Ingram’s grandchildren.”
Will flinched. “Like that, huh?”
“I told you, it’ll be awful.”
“So you think you shouldn’t be with me because she’d be so happy you were with me?”
“I didn’t say that. Although it did cross my mind. But I guarantee you, the minute she hears your name you will become her favorite person in the whole world.”
“You’re right. That does sound terrible.” He bit into one of the enormous strawberries.
“You don’t get it.”
“I get it,” he assured her. “I just don’t care. I want you, and I’ll take any baggage you come with. But frankly, your mother liking me too much doesn’t sound like a huge obstacle.”
Julie shook her head. “She will smother you.”
He gestured to the cart. “Will she send room service to my hotel room at midnight?”
“That’s not smothering. That’s just sweet.”
“If your mother had done it, would it have been smothering?”
“Maybe,” Julie admitted. “But at least your uncle seems to actually like me.”
“He does.”
“My mother will just like your name and your money.”
Will shrugged. “Not like that’s never happened before.”
“It shouldn’t happen inside your own family.”
“So you’re planning on me becoming family, then?”
Julie froze with a piece of pineapple halfway to her mouth. “I might … be getting a little ahead of myself there,” she admitted quietly.
“Maybe, but I like the way you’re thinking.” Will smiled, but changed the subject to put her at ease again. “Does your mother have a decorator put up the Christmas decorations?”
“Yes. And how did you know that?”
“My mom’s the same way. I’ve got to take you to Chaos.”
Julie gestured toward the bedroom again. “Isn’t that what you just did?”
“Ahhh, no. Chaos is a bar. A coffee shop, actually. A cybercafé. The head barista is a nut for Christmas decorations. It’s like Santa’s workshop exploded in there. You have to see it. It’s the complete opposite of what my house used to be like.”
“Chaos.”
“The name fits, believe me. It’s crazy. The woman who owns it, Scotty, she’d kind of an anarchist. That Gerald Walsh thing the other day, did you see that?”
“It was all over the news.”
“She did that. The hack. At least I’m pretty sure she did. She’s some kind of computer genius. You’ll like her.”
“She’s a computer genius who owns a coffee shop?”
“Yep. She’s going to look at my dad’s stuff for me, all the documents from his estate, from the company. She was an intern for him one summer in high school. I think she’s a year, two years younger than I am.”
“Is she pretty?”
Will recognized the trap immediately. “Not as pretty as you,” he answered swiftly. “And besides, I think she’s sleeping with Uncle Harold. Maybe. I don’t know. I’ve changed my mind about it like twenty times. After you meet her, maybe you can figure it out.”
Julie chuckled. “Okay. But if she’s younger than you, isn’t she way too young for him?”
“I guess. But she’s … it’s hard to explain. She’s been through some stuff, you know? It’s like she’s older somehow. If they are sleeping together, it wouldn’t freak me out. Much.”
“She’s an old soul?” Julie suggested.
“Yeah. And honestly, Harold’s alone so much, I wouldn’t care if she was some nineteen year old bimbo, if she made him happy. But like I said, I don’t know. One minute I can see it and the next it’s like she’s just a friend.” He shook his head. “I’m not very good at reading women.”
“Oooh, you do okay,” she assured him. She went and got more of everything from the cart, then sat back down and stretched her legs out.
Will leaned down and put his hand around her ankle. Very gently he lifted her injured leg onto the couch. It had healed, of course, but half a dozen surgical scars crossed it, front and back.
“I know it’s ugly,” Julie said quietly.
“No,” Will countered. “They did good work.” He ran his fingers lightly down the bones in her lower leg. He could tell where some of the plates were, and the pins. But her muscle tone was fantastic. She’d been very fit before she’d fallen out the window; rehab would have been much easier for her than someone less fit. “Really good. Does it bother you? Hurt?”
“No. But they don’t think I should run on it. Not distance, like I used to.”
“No.” Will leaned and planted small kisses along one of the scar lines. “I’m sorry. I know you loved to run.”
“Actually, it’s probably just as well. Me and my brothers and my cousins used to go free-running. This way I have an excuse to quit while I’m still better than all of them.”
Will smiled. “Everything’s a competition in your family.”
“Oh, God, yes. We’re still arguing about whether I hold the broken bone record, or whether breaking one bone in two places only counts as one. Seriously, Will, you have no idea. It’s awful.”
“I’ll be fine.”
“Awful. Seriously. Anyhow, I’m swimming a lot more now. And that’s just as good as running. Almost.”
He rubbed her toes between his two hands. “My dad’s loft has a lap pool in it.”
“What?”
“My dad has a loft that has a lap pool in it. Well, I guess it’s mine, now. The loft. We’ve been trying to sell it for years, but I could keep it, if you want to stay there. I mean, it would be convenient, you don’t even have to change. Or wear a suit. I’ll take you over there tomorrow, if you want.” He stopped, laughed. “It’s so stupid. I always hated that place and now I can’t wait to show it to you.”
“Why do you hate it?”
Will shrugged. “It’s just really big and rich and empty … but it wouldn’t be, if you were there with me.”
“I think you’ll still hate it.” Julie pulled her foot back and moved over next to him. “And I think it will always be your father’s loft, in your head. But we can take a look. You think you want to stay in New York?”
“I don’t know,” Will admitted. “Maybe for a while. I’ve been working with MSF out on Staten Island, and they still need help. But I haven’t really thought much beyond tomorrow. Today, whatever. Just ‘get Julie back’ and then go from there.”
“I’m sorry. I just really thought we needed the time apart.”
“Don’t be sorry. You were absolutely right. I know you were. I just never want to be away from you again, okay?” He put down his plate and drew her closer in his arms. “And now I’m rushing things, aren’t I? This was supposed to be just dinner, no expectations.”
“Well, we skipped the dinner part, so I guess we can skip a lot of the rest.”
“Am I allowed to tell you I love you?”
Julie twisted around and kissed him lightly. “No. There’s a seventy-two hour waiting period on that.”
“Oh.” The kiss took the sting out of it.
“But you can be wildly infatuated until then.”
“Okay.” He kissed her again, more deeply. “I can live with that.”
She twisted around, and his hand slipped under her robe, across her warm bare skin. “And after that,” she murmured against his ear, “I can tell you I love you, too.”
***
q95;
“I was just thinking,” Will said, much later, in the dark. “If we’re going to be together, we probably need more protection.”
“Mmm,” Julie answered sleepily. “I have a six-pack of condoms in my bag. If we go through those and whatever you’ve got left, we can call the concierge.”
He chuckled warmly. “If we go through that many, we’re going to need I.V. Gatorade. Not saying I’m not willing to try. But I was thinking of the bodyguard kind of protection.”
“Oh. Right.”
“I mean, beyond the two guys Uncle Harold has following me around.”
Julie smiled against his chest. “You’re not supposed to know about them.”
“I know.” He ran his hand over her back. “They’re mostly invisible here in the city. In on a reservation in Minnesota, they were pretty obvious.”
“Are you mad?”
Will shook his head. “No. I get it.” He sighed. “My dad and I used to fight about it all the time, but I get it now. I just wonder if they’ve always been there. Even after he said they weren’t.”
“Hmmm.”
“Is that a yes?”
“I don’t know. But if you were my kid, they’d have been there all along.”
“Our kids are going to need serious bodyguards,” he mused.
“Definitely,” Julie answered.
“Oh,” he added thoughtfully, “and you should be warned, Uncle Harold has already threatened to spoil them rotten.”
“That doesn’t surprise me.”
“He said something about puppies. And ponies.”
“Ponies.”
“Yeah.”
“Do you think he’s serious?”
Will thought about it. “I want to believe that he’s not. But … I’m not entirely sure.”
“Ponies.” She shifted, draped her leg over his under the covers. “I don’t suppose the loft with the pool also has a stable, does it?”
“No. But there’s room to put one in.”
Julie giggled. “Well. We should keep that in mind, I guess.”
He leaned down to kiss her sleepily. “Ponies,” he murmured again.
“And here I thought my mother was going to be the problem.”
***
“Random,” Christine said from the doorway, “come have pie.”
Finch looked up at her, then at the clock. It was past midnight. He had lost more than an hour.
He looked around the table. All of the smaller boxes were unpacked and sorted. The larger boxes were untouched.
He was tired and hungry. And full of joy.
He smiled and followed the young woman back to the main room.
They’d let the cat out of confinement and set up a baby gate across the doorway to let Smokey in and keep Bear, theoretically, out. The gate would not actually stop him, Finch knew, but firm instruction from Mr. Reese probably would. At the moment, the cat and the dog were curled up together in the dog’s bed. “That’s just wrong,” Finch said happily.
Bear wagged his tail.
“Your obsession with that cat is indecent, you know. An absolutely perversion of your canine nature.”
The dog lifted his head and cocked it to one side.
“And she’s supposed to be hunting.”
Smokey stretched indolently. Bear put his head down again. The cat put one gray paw over Bear’s muzzle and closed her eyes.
Reese poured Irish coffee from the Thermos. To the side, Finch noted, a cup of tea was already brewing for him. Christine served the pie; from the scent of the room, she’d warmed it up. They’d gathered three chairs around the end of the desk, pushed the keyboards back. Finch sat down. All of the monitors displayed the same image, logs in a fireplace, burning brightly.
“Festive,” he commented.
“Cheesy,” the woman countered. “We need a real one.”
Reese sat down with his plate. “No reason you couldn’t have a fireplace in that apartment,” he said. “I’d go with a gas burner, though. Way less work.”
“That’d be nice. One in every apartment.”
Finch glanced over at the other table. There was a stack of blueprints there; evidently his companions had started considering floor plans for Christine’s new home. “Ideas?” he asked.
“We thought we’d start with building out the stairways as a separate hallway, and then splitting the top floor into two apartments. Front to back. One for me, and one for you guys to use if you need it.”
“That’s really not necessary.”
She shrugged. “The idea of having a neighbor that close, on the same floor, annoys me. I’d rather leave it ready and empty.”
“We were also thinking,” John continued, “that it might not be a bad idea for you to have a separate set-up there.” He gestured to the computers. “In case this one gets compromised again.”
“You could use my system,” Christine added, “but I know it’s a pain in the ass. We have the room. You might as well have the hardware you want in place.”
Harold nodded slowly. He took a bite of the pie. It was warm, as he’d guessed, and the whipped cream melted just a little on top. It was very good. “And the other floors?”
“Two more apartments on the second floor,” she said. “Rent out the ground floor to some kind of business. Something quiet. But we’ll get to all of that.”
Finch nodded thoughtfully. “What about an elevator?”
“At the front of the stairwell,” Reese said.
“But I’m going to want to pick your brain about wiring,” she said. “I suspect you have better ideas than I do.”
“Perhaps.” Finch finished his pie, except for the crust, and put his fork down. “That was very good.”
“You’re not going to eat that?” Reese said. “It’s the best part.” He snagged the crust off the plate and took a bite.
“I …” Finch gave up; the crust was already gone. “No, I wasn’t, actually.”
Christine stood up. “I have one more thing for you. For your collection, sort of.” She went to her bag and brought him a children’s book.
“Where’s My Cow?” Finch read. It was written by Terry Prachett. The cover was bright green and purple, and prominently feature a cow’s back end. He opened the book gently. It was, indeed, a first edition. And it was signed by the author.
“You’ll like it,” Christine promised. “It has a properly citified view of farm animals. Moo cows say ‘sizzle’ on the plate. You can read it to little Ingrams.”
“Are you anticipating little Ingrams?” he asked, amused. He flipped a few pages of the book.
“Are you not anticipating little Ingrams?” she returned. “Like, by next Christmas?”
Finch considered. “I’m betting on announced but not arrived by next Christmas.”
“That sounds about right.”
“I got this in the mail yesterday,” Christine said. She showed them both a picture, 5 x 7, glossy. Elisa Hammond, in a short red dress, posed in the arms of a young man in a suit and red tie, in front of a Christmas tree backdrop. “From her high school holiday formal.”
“Very nice,” John said. “She’s gained some weight.”
“It suits her,” Finch agreed. “Except that’s not Edward Clay.”
“Nope,” Christine answered with some relish, “it’s not. Told you she’d smarten up.”
“Poor Cash.” And then, “I have brandy,” Finch remembered. “Or something. Something brewed privately by the Carson family.”
“Sounds tasty. And potent. Save it for New Year’s,” Christine advised.
“Will you join us then, too?”
“Oh, hell no. I am not setting my foot outside on Amateur Night. You can come to my place if you dare.”
“I bet Chaos is wild on New Year’s Eve,” Reese said.
“I wouldn’t know. I won’t go down there. I won’t even look.”
“So … Time Square’s out of the question, then?” he teased.
Christine cocked her head at him. “Let’s take a million people, cram them together in the streets, get them drunk and mildly hypothermic, and then blow off artillery shells over their heads. When did that ever sound like fun?”
“They’re decorative artillery shells,” Finch pointed out.
“Until one falls on the crowd. Then I’m betting they’re just not pretty anymore.”
Reese laughed. “What do you do on Fourth of July?”
“Leave the country.”
“No, you don’t.”
“She does, actually,” Finch said. “I hadn’t connected the dots, but you’re always gone in early July, aren’t you?”
She shrugged. “’A man has got to know his limitations,’” she quoted. “I never liked fireworks much anyhow. And after …” She stopped.
Harold nodded, and noted that Reese did, too. They didn’t have to hear the words. After the Towers came down, overhead explosions had lost their appeal for a great many people, no matter how decorative they were.
She stood up and got another piece of pie.
“Maybe a fire ladder,” Reese said quietly.
They both looked at him. “Mr. Reese?” Finch said, puzzled.
“Sorry.” Reese straightened up. “Explosions, escape routes. I was just thinking, you could put a ladder in a corner, conceal it in a closet. Straight from the top floor all the way down to the basement.”
“Opposite the stairwell,” Christine said. “Maybe in the front corner? Both front corners, one in each apartment?”
“Between those corner windows.” Reese stood up and walked back to the blueprints. “Here.”
Christine joined him. Finch smiled quietly, stood and cleared the dishes. When he finished, his companions had moved on to discussion of Scooby doors “ swinging bookcases, trap doors and the like. There was quite a lot of laughter involved, possibly fueled by a bit too much Irish coffee. He doubted much of it was serious. But sometimes the silliest ideas spawned genuine improvements.
He paused and watched them for a moment. Christine was sitting down, both hands roaming over the blue prints. Reese was standing, half behind her. He rested one hand on the table, leaned down over her shoulder. His very dark hair, short, precise, just above the soft brown waves of hers. His large hand lightly on her back. And their voices, both soft, his gravely as always, slow and deliberate even now, hers higher, lighter, quicker. Their words fell over each other, tangled, harmonized. And the laughter, one note in two keys.
They looked good together.
They didn’t see each other yet. And that was just as well. They weren’t ready. But Christine’s revolving door of men in uniform had slowed down markedly. And Reese seemed somewhat more inclined to try non-violent means to help their people lately ”although if that approach failed, he was certainly still willing to revert to his more hands-on approach.
Moving Christine out of Chaos was a positive step. He’d keep John well involved in the renovations, Finch decided; that would help, too.
He needed to be terribly careful, Harold knew. Delicate, invisible. If either of them felt his touch, saw his prints, even sensed his wish, they’d balk and there would likely be no restarting them. They were both impossibly stubborn people. It would take time.
But for the moment they were there, together and happy. And happiness could get to be a habit, as surely as loneliness could.
More of these moments, Finch wished fervently. They deserve so many more of these moments.
Maybe I do, too. With Grace, I could …
He shrugged the thought away.
This moment. These people. His partner and his protégé. This deep night, this quiet joyful gathering while the rest of the world was already falling asleep. This was real, here and now, and he was only separate from it because …
Because …
There was no because. These were his friends, his family, and there was nothing in the world that held him separate from them. Not tonight.
Harold smiled to himself and went to join them.
The End
End notes:
Post “Prisoner’s Dilemma”, I feel like I ought to say something about Donnelly. First, I hope he’s not dead. I know that’s unlikely, but it’s possible. Second, I know they finally gave him a canon first name. But since they didn’t do so until the last three minutes of his screen life, I’m not changing mine. If he’s not dead and I get to use him again, I have an explanation for the difference. (And it’s a pretty damn good one!) And finally, most of this story was done before that ep aired, and I decided that the characters deserved one last happy Christmas before he left us.
About Les Miz the movie. If you haven’t seen it, go see it on the big screen. It is a beautiful thing. Lots of sweeping big shots that really need a theater. Expect to cry. A lot. Partially at Russell Crowe’s singing. Seriously, did no one think to check before they cast him? But otherwise, it’s brilliant. I also heard a line afterward that would have made Finch cry. “Wasn’t this based on a book or something?” Sob!
If you’re inclined to help New York after the hurricane, Kevin Chapman has tweeted about statenstrong.org. He’s there; I assume he knows.
Disclaimer: All publicly recognizable characters and settings are the property of their respective owners. The original characters and plot are the property of the author. No money is being made from this work. No copyright infringement is intended.