Much to his surprise, Sam Shaw picked up her phone.
"Where are you?" he asked, before she could say anything. She rolled her eyes, continuing to adjust the camera in her hands. "Nice to hear from you too. I'm just outside the psych hospital, keeping an eye on our mutual friend. Any word from Research yet?"
"Got a call two days ago. We think it might be a guidepost to where the hardware got shipped."
"So where're we headed, then?" she asked, zooming the lens in as a white van rolled out of the hospital's front gates. A quick snap caught the license plate – in case she needed it for later.
"Finch and I are headed upstate," he replied. She noticed the pointed absence of her name. "I'll need you to stay here and look out for Carter and Fusco while we're gone."
"You're heading off to track down a rogue A.I. and you want me to babysit? Fuck that."
"There are a lot of eyes on them, Shaw. I need someone watching them with their best interests at heart. Think of it as protecting assets. You've done that before, haven't you?" The street he was on offered an oblique view of the police station entrance; so far, neither Joss nor Lionel had been led out surrounded by officers, but on the other hand, he hadn't seen Joss enter or leave the whole time he'd been there.
"Yeah, it was boring then too."
"You'll be dogsitting." She only grumbled in response. "Bear misses you terribly."
"I'll bet he does," she gave in. "You know you're going to owe me a hell of a favor for this."
"I know. I'll give you the details back at the safehouse in twenty."
She shut off the camera, clicked the lens cap on. "Upstate, huh?"
"Little further than that, actually."
One Day Prior
"I don't think the Machine sent us a number, Mr. Reese," Harold said as soon as he came in, not looking up from his computer desk. "I think it sent us a location."
John pulled up a chair next to the desk; trying to keep track of three people for most of the day wasn't the hardest day at work he'd ever had, but he welcomed a moment to take a load off.
When Harold answered the ringing payphone on their return to New York, it had given him two titles - two Dewey sequences - and what he had described as a garbled, mixed audio. The two numbers had shown up in five different Social Security numbers; John had been assigned three of them, and had found nothing suggesting them as victims or perpetrators.
"At first I thought the Machine was simply malfunctioning, but even at its most critically infected it still waited until it had a complete number to call." Harold pulled up a set of satellite photos. "So I started running through any six-number sequences I could think of - serial numbers, zip codes preceded by a zero, that sort of thing. Turns out if you enter these numbers as coordinates, it gives you four locations, depending on which side of the date lines you place them on. Middle of the Pacific Ocean, mountain in Kazakhstan, plains in Chile, and…"
"Ram's Head, Maine." John read off the screen. The GPS cursor blinked over a section of mostly empty forest, dotted with thin grey streets and thin grey houses. "It didn't use the code when it talked to me before. Why would it use it now if it wasn't giving us a number?"
"I don't know." Harold didn't look up when he replied, writing down a few numbers on a sheet of paper. "Now that neither of us has administrative access it may not consider us authorized to receive information directly. I'm afraid I'm unable to predict its behavior the way I could before the infection."
"The place appears to have been centered around a lumber mill, once," he continued as he wrote. "It was abandoned about twelve years ago; from what I can tell the mill shut down due to one too many accidents. Presumably there's some infrastructure left surrounding the plant that the Machine can use to supply its own power, at least enough of it to run its most basic functions."
"You think that's where it's moved?" he asked, watching as Harold got up from the computer chair and opened a drawer behind him. He wondered what the point was of turning the Machine loose if it was just going to call them to collect it within a day, but then, he hadn't programmed it.
"I think there's something there that it wants us to find, whether it's the hardware or not," he answered, pulling a road atlas out from the drawer. "Pack your bags, Mr. Reese. We're going to Maine."
They didn't speak much on the drive up, save to work out logistics - when to stop and where, when to switch drivers. Beyond that, Harold mostly looked out the window away from him, gazing out the window for eight long hours as cities gave way to cracked and rusted towns which in turn dissolved into forests.
Best not to press him at a time like this. Even without the events of the past few days, Harold wasn't fond of filling silence with idle words. He'd talk to him when he needed to.
He hoped Joss had received his message. He hadn't been able to find a safe time to talk to her, and being seen with him now would put her at too great of a risk. He'd managed to corner Lionel only once, asking him to pass on his message to Joss, and for now that was all he could do. The longer they waited, the greater the chance that someone else - anyone else - could figure out where they were going.
"Maybe we shouldn't go after it," Harold said, without prompting, as John pulled the car away from a half-dead gas station in Massachusetts. "I doubt it would want to come back, now that it's free."
"Wish you'd told me that before we left," was his only reply, deliberately flat and purposefully withholding comment on the subject of the Machine. Free worried him. Free was how Root talked.
He had a spark of a selfish thought - if they didn't pursue the Machine, if they left it alone and never heard from it again - what would he do then? He had rebuilt his whole life on the foundation of the Irrelevant list; if that went away...he disliked the idea of not having a direction.
So, he suspected, did Harold.
They stopped for the evening in a nondescript, two-floor hotel two hours from their destination; they took separate rooms on separate floors so if one was detected the other would remain hidden. But the phone line between them, as always, was on even when they had nothing to say, and John could tell from the sounds on the other end - the mumble of the television and the clicking of computer keys - that Harold did not sleep.
It wasn't until they passed a vacant gas station, floodlights broken and burned-out sign corroded to nothing, that they even knew they'd reached the town. Ram's Head did not greet them, with welcome signs or passerby, and was exactly as deserted as his research had described it.
"Abandoned places all over the country and it choses here. Hard to imagine why," Harold said, as they drove by one empty walkway after another. A few businesses had their lights on in their windows - the post office, a drugstore, an unlabeled building too squat and sturdy to be a house - but the rest of the scenery consisted of boarded-up windows and mouldering brick, and that was on the livelier streets. Past the two-block downtown lay weedy lots and houses given over to black mold and lichen. If anyone lived in them, they had long since given up their care.
"There's nobody here to notice it," John replied. "It's quiet, empty...seems like it'd be perfect."
"Nobody here to care for it, either. The Machine requires maintenance, power. Someone to supply it with everything it needs to stay active, whether they know what they're doing or not. In Hanford, it had an entire crew of technicians trained to operate nuclear reactors. Here…" he paused, letting another empty street pass by the window, "here it has whoever's left. Head for the power station," he continued, indicating a building outside of town on the satellite image on his phone. "If the hardware has been moved here, I'll be able to tell from the station records."
John complied, turning left at the next intersection. From the overgrown residential area another former commercial street faded in, with a shuttered shop, a row of dark townhouses, the long-spent neon of a hole-in-the-wall bar -
And a public library.
He hit the brakes, stopping the car in the middle of the road, and looked over at the square brick building again. He hadn't mistaken it - in concrete above the door was the word "Library". There were lights on behind the unbarred door, and beside it hung a still-undisturbed sign: "Free and open to the public, Monday - Saturday, 9 - 4".
His traveling companion did not seem to mind that he had stopped. Indeed, he mirrored his puzzled expression, and, giving voice to John's thoughts, asked "Why would there still be a library?"
"It even looks occupied," he added. "Seems like that'd be the first thing to go in a town like this."
"Could be why the Machine sent the coordinates to us in library code," he replied. "Maybe it meant to lead us here."
He didn't need specific instructions to pull the car over and put it in park, locking the doors as they exit - though he couldn't think what he was locking them against.
The library was indeed open, and the door unlocked. A bell rang as they entered, though even it seemed dampened and tired.
A librarian's desk sat directly in front of the door, next to a "Quiet Please" sign with a letter missing. Its occupant barely looked up at them. He might have been engrossed in the book in front of him, but from his expression he was merely too bored to care.
The card at the front of the desk read "Ernest Thornhill".
He even looked like the composite that the Machine had created - squared-off face, brown hair, slightly upturned nose. Noticing their stares, he looked up from his reading, met their gazes one by one with an unimpressed expression. "Something I can help you with?"
Harold was the first to shake his head. "No, no. We'll just be a moment." Nodding back at John, he headed back towards the Spanish-language section, where the first code the Machine gave him came from.
"Think it's a coincidence?" John asked quietly, as they walked past the shelves.
"The librarian, you mean?" he answered, running his index and middle fingers along the spines of the books as he searched the shelf. "Possibly. I assumed the Machine had simply fabricated a name, one that didn't already exist, but it's not hard to believe that Mr. Thornhill was another sign for us." He glanced backwards, checking to see if the subject of their conversation was listening in.
"When the Machine pulled his number, Shaw and I couldn't find any records. No birth certificate, no driver's license." John eventually found the coded book and reached over Harold's head for it, pulling it from the shelf. "If the Machine was using his identity, why weren't there any signs he really existed?"
The book naturally fell to a middle page as he opened it, as though it had been left open to that page for days on end. But the page that greeted him was blank.
Frowning, he showed the page to Harold, who took it from his hands. "Is it misprinted?" he asked, fanning through the remaining pages.
"Not sure," he replied. "I'll find the second book." The next number was a few shelves down, and he stepped past Harold as he continued to inspect the empty volume.
Harold checked the cover again; so far as he could tell it was the correct book, the only one that matched the code, not one in a series or any such thing. No errors on the jacket to indicate a misprint, either.
Maybe this book was intentionally blank. The contents of Number books had no bearing on their purpose. He was unused to checking them save for his own pleasure, and wasn't in the habit of perusing Spanish-language dictionaries. He opened it up again, leafed through the first few empty pages, and stopped.
On the third page was a title, accompanied by an edition number, a publisher, a year of release. But all of them were clumsily handwritten. Instead of printed lines the publication information wandered downwards, outwards; it was peppered with misspellings and cross-outs, as if the writer had only heard the language, but never seen it written.
He turned the page; the next one was handwritten, too, some sort of introduction in black ballpoint pen, written quickly, like notes, rather than a handmade manuscript. The handwriting - always print - tidied as the book went on, settling into rows as the text moved from introductions to definitions.
He reshelved the book, picked up the one next to it. "Mr. Reese?" he said into the earpiece. "Come and look at this." The second book opened to another handwritten page, this one neater, more uniform. He pulled out the next book; this one, too, contained row after row of neat but unmistakably human handwriting.
He walked further down the row of bookshelves, stopped at the next section, and pulled out the first book he saw; more handwriting greeted him, this time in precisely-accented French. "Mr. Reese?" he repeated, realizing he'd heard no reply. The other end of the line remained silent.
He stepped out from the bookshelves and checked the hallway; no sign of John. Maybe the cell signal in the building was weak, and he hadn't heard him. "Mr. Reese?" he called out down the hallway. There was no one else in the building to hear him save for the librarian.
No answer. Had he left? Perhaps they'd been found or followed, and something had happened to him - but he'd have heard the struggle, if it had. Wasn't like him to go quietly. Had he been so distracted by the handwritten book that he'd neglected to listen?
If something had happened to him, he thought grimly, then whoever had done it now knew where he was as well - if they didn't before. He stepped back behind the bookshelf, checking behind him.
Maybe John had just left, or received a call from Shaw or Carter or Fusco. Though John had said nothing about it Harold knew he'd been concerned about them; if they called, he'd have answered. And even they'd been followed, then his first step should still be to get back to the car. Better separated than stranded.
He doubled back first, towards the 690s where the other book was. No disturbance, no scattered books or overturned trolleys, nothing to indicate a struggle. And yet there was no sign of John.
Out of curiosity he picked up the second coded book, the one John had gone to fetch. It was undisturbed from the shelf, with more handwriting - this one disordered and messy - inside.
He peeked out into the hallway before heading towards the front door, glancing into the shelves as he passed them in case anyone was waiting for him. But every row was empty. The place was a tomb.
When he made his way back to the librarian's desk - where he was certain the front door had been - he found nothing in front of him but a blank wall. Behind him the flesh-and-blood Thornhill read quietly, unconcerned or uninterested in his guests.
Perhaps he'd gotten turned around, he thought, even though he was certain the librarian's desk was the first thing he'd seen when he'd gone in. The opposite end of the building held another blank wall, paint peeling from the damp - as did the west end, and the east end, save for a wooden door leading to a decrepit bathroom.
And the entire time, the phone line was silent.
"Sir? Sir? I'm closing up for lunch." The voice, he found when he started and turned around in surprise, belonged to Thornhill, who was still holding his book. "You got everything you need?"
"Ah - yes, yes I do. I'll just…" How had he not heard the other man approaching, either? Letting someone surprise him, losing the only door - his head just wouldn't clear today.
But the librarian did not seem to care about his hesitance, taking a set of keys out of his pocket as he walked away.
Waiting for him to gain a few paces on him, Harold followed. This Thornhill was the first human being either of them had seen since they left the hotel that morning; there hadn't even been a car on the road for the last thirty miles. If they'd been detected, Thornhill was likely involved. Besides, he knew which way the exit was, silly as Harold felt needing to follow someone to get out of a single-story brick building.
Thornhill strode towards the back of the library, on the opposite side of the building from his desk, leaving his book on an empty trolley as he passed it and never looking behind him. Harold was sure he'd already looked back here. And he hadn't noticed before, but this place was deceptively large for a library, especially for a town so small. He seemed to have been walking for quite some time.
(He lifted the cover of the librarian's book as he passed the trolley; it too was full of handwriting. How were there so many of them?)
After rounding one final bookshelf, full of magazines and newspapers (even the pictures looked drawn by hand), Thornhill at last came to the door. Only this must not have been the door that Harold entered through, because that door wasn't boarded up and barred. He distinctly remembered that; that was why they'd stopped.
What's more, for someone so concerned about closing, Thornhill didn't even check to see if Harold was leaving. He just walked out the door and shut it behind him; as soon as he left there was a click of a latch.
Harold quickened his pace, cleared the space to the door. Could be that this Thornhill hadn't forgotten - could be that he'd locked him in. He pulled experimentally on the handle; the lock held firm on the inside. A glance at the door's edge revealed no deadbolts or chains; perhaps he could force it.
The lock yielded easily enough, with minimal coaxing. He edged the door open and looked through the crack in the door, expecting any number of things - police, armed civilians, possibly even the wreck of their car.
What he didn't expect was a hallway.
He opened the door an inch or two wider, and finding no one outside, stepped through, holding it open. It couldn't be part of the same building as the library; for one thing it was barely lit, and mostly concrete rather than brick and plaster. A set of steel stairs like a fire escape descended downwards. He couldn't see where they went.
"You were looking for your friend, right?" Thornhill reappeared from the bottom of the stairs, as though he'd been waiting. Harold tensed, unsure of what was coming. "He should be back here. This goes back out to the road at the end."
So far as he could tell Thornhill was unarmed, with no means of reaching Harold before he shut the door and went back to the library. He'd find the regular exit. It had to be somewhere - he had just missed it somehow, he had to have.
"The other door's gone by now," the other man answered his thought; the steel beneath his feet clattered as he climbed the last stair. Even though Harold was still standing in the doorway he felt suddenly cornered. "Besides, it's not safe out there. You ought to know that, Harold."
Behind him, the lights of the library suddenly went dark - pitch dark, like a black bag had dropped over his head. He snapped the door shut, stumbling back into the library until he backed into a bookshelf. The shelves held nothing but dust, devoid of the books he knew had been there.
He scanned the darkness - how could it be so dark in here when it was only noon outside? - and searched. For a way out, for another person, for something. But all that followed was the librarian, dimly backlit, holding the door open for him.
"Do you want to get out or not?" he asked, plain as if he was asking the time of day.
He stepped away from the bookshelf slowly, leaving one hand on the empty shelf to anchor him - who knew what else might change behind his back if he didn't. "How do you know my name?"
He couldn't see the other man's expression, but his voice betrayed nothing. "Why wouldn't I? Look, if you're going, then go. I don't want to be here all day."
Through it all, through his earpiece, there hadn't been a word.
Each step he took towards the door felt like a mistake, a blunder into an open pit. But what would happen if he stayed here, in the huge dark library, locked in and waiting to be found?
He'd find another way out. He'd escape. If Thornhill was his captor, he had to be leading him somewhere - somewhere he'd be able to get free. He stepped over the threshold, and the door shut behind him with a snap.
The phone on the hospital wall had rung again, two days after the first time. Root didn't answer it. She didn't have to.
She'd spent the past two days watching, learning the orderlies' schedules, overhearing from their snatches of conversation which ones were on call to assist the people they referred to as "the real crazies" - the violent, the unpredictable. The ones who were charged with the care of heavy sedatives and chemical restraints, in case their patients acted up.
It was easy to stay off that list herself. After all, no one here knew she'd really done. And She had told her to wait, so wait she would, even if it took the signal months to come. She had to be ready.
As much as it thrilled her to be called to action she would have almost preferred a longer wait. She hadn't had time to let them grow truly complacent around her, to learn their secrets, their evacuation plans. But they still found her cooperative enough to require only a single escort.
An escort who, when surprised by a twisted bedsheet around his throat, was quickly quieted.
He passed out too quickly to get to his radio, but she could tell from the noise outside her cell that someone had heard them, Didn't matter. The nurse with the restraining drugs was just about to pass her room.
Root didn't bother to subdue her - it'd take too long. It was seconds' work to pull the tray from her hands, to snatch up the vial of valium and shut the door behind her, leaving the staff to look for her room key.
It wouldn't have worked as an escape plan. But escape wasn't what She wanted.
She wondered, as she emptied the syringe into her veins, if it would hurt.