"Hell, I don't know anything for certain because you won't tell me where you're getting your information."
Reese stands with every muscle, every nerve, coiled and seething, drawn abruptly to the surface where this bout of sobriety bursts with clarity, and the conditioned killer rises with it in a continuous storm of betrayal and lies he knows too well.
Need to know.
John Reese waits for Harold Finch to say the three words he has come to despise.
The cold-blooded monster dares this funny little man to utter them. It relishes the prospect. It's been dormant, inebriated, tamped down at the bottom of the bottle, and it relishes unleash. It revels as it waits for the unbridled proof that it's been right all along.
John Reese waits for Harold Finch to tell him.
Reese's fingers flex in anticipation, in inexplicable anger. The distant part of his brain, now snapped off from the rest and floating somewhere to oblivion knows it shouldn't matter. Harold Finch has not unleashed him to eliminate targets, so why should it matter whether or not he knows the source of the numbers this elusive man acquires, when Reese himself is researching them, carefully acquiring the situation, before intervening?
It shouldn't.
It does.
Because too many times John Reese has been told he doesn't need to know.
Looking through the scope of a rifle, prepping the shot of a foreign dignitary on friendly soil, he asks them why. Need to know, they tell him. Ordered to take out three targets with no prior interrogation: "That's need to know, Reese." His own partner is condemned to be eliminated by his hand and he requests to see the evidence—"Need to know, Reese!"
John Reese waits for Harold Finch to tell him.
It's a world of lies and deceit and tyranny, and Reese is an object to be used, broken, and discarded. Objects need not know. Information belongs to the rich, the powerful, the elite, and Reese is not their equal.
John Reese waits for Harold Finch to tell him.
He waits so that he may restore to his inebriated state of waiting for death to come knocking. To where there is nothing left worth saving.
John Reese waits for Harold Finch to tell him.
Reese, eyes flat bottomless pits with no compunction, crowds into the smaller man's space, impatient, and is undeniably impressed that Harold Finch does not retreat, for Reese has cowed larger men with less. Does he not know how easily Reese could have his arms around his throat, drawing his last breath?
Perhaps Finch's bodyguard, standing amid the bustle of park goers is providing a fool's comfort; Reese could carry out the deed and decamp before the man even realized what happened.
Or perhaps the public setting with numerous potential witnesses is exuding comfort. This, too, would be fraudulent. Reese has nothing left to lose.
Does Harold Finch not know that men with nothing to lose are the most dangerous of all?
Harold Finch is looking at him, and Reese thinks perhaps he does after all.
Reese doesn't know how it happens, doesn't fathom it, but, unaccountably, somehow, the monster is reined in, muzzled, drawn back to lurk but not act. His fingers buzz with the aftermath, the shock. Because somehow Harold Finch reaches in and pulls out the smallest shred, the smallest piece of what Reese thought long gone.
John Reese waits for Harold Finch to tell him.
Harold Finch does not.