Shaw will argue that she doesn't have many pet peeves.
(Which, anyone who knows her knows is a complete and utter lie, but they also know how pointless it is to argue the fact with her; she is as stubborn as she can be delusional, it seems.)
One of her biggest pet peeves however, and she will be the first to tell you, is radio silence. Especially in the midst of a mission, or in the important aftermath in which her and her little team of misfits - mostly Finch and more recently Root, in the safety of the subway surrounded by computers or off doing something more than likely ridiculous, respectfully - are trying to tie up lose ends and cover any of the tracks they may have left behind. In the wake of Samaritan's awakening, and Shaw's cover identity being blown in the worst way, they have had to be extra careful. Shaw has since been allowed to partake in a select few missions, so long as she follows the shadow map and maintains some sort of contact with Root. As annoying as that fact is, it's her only proxy to the Machine, and she wouldn't dare operate without either of their watchful eyes at this point.
Which is why, at this exact moment, standing in the middle of a sidewalk without further direction from anyone and at the end of the known black-out area she's been operating in since early that morning, Shaw is berating Reese with her long list reasons why radio silence bothers her so.
"I would even take her stupid innuendos over fucking nothing at this point. Do you know what I mean?"
"I don't know what you want me to do Shaw", his voice comes over the line for the first time since his disgruntled partner in crime started ranting. He sounds tired, and bored, and Shaw almost feels bad for calling him up to do nothing short of complain. Almost. "Finch is at a conference out of state and I'm working a case. It would be hours before I would be able to do anything remotely useful."
As if to emphasize the point, Fusco's comm link opened up as well and all she heard at first is the rustling sound she knew all too well to be the opening of a bag of chips before loud crunching came through her earpiece. She winced, instantly irritated.
"Sorry, Shaw," the detective said between loud bites, "but if I let boy wonder here miss another day of work the captain will have both our asses."
She rolled her eyes in an unseen response and bit back the many snide remarks she had on the tip of her tongue, instead waiting for Reese to continue.
"I thought Root was running point on this one, Shaw?"
"She was. But she was afraid her position had been compromised and said she would get back to me in 30 when she relocated. But that was an hour ago now and if I'm being completely honest I'm about to say fuck this shadow map and go to the bar across the street from me."
The other lines were silent, but Shaw could almost hear the wheels in John's brain turning. She almost knows what he's going to say before he actually says it.
"So you're telling me", he started slowly, "that you haven't heard anything from Root in an hour and your primary concern is getting a drink?"
"Yes?"
Reese sighed, long and forlorn, and Shaw imagined the way he closes his eyes with a little shake of his head like she has seen him do in her direction what has to be hundreds of times before by this point.
"Maybe you should go check on her?", he asked, but it's less of a suggestion and more of a statement.
"Why? Root can take care of herself. She left the subway with six guns, Reese. Normally I would admire her tenacity but really, who needs six guns to run technical interference and recon from an abandoned building two miles away? That's more firepower than I brought!"
Shaw was about to continue, add on a quick "she's fine" (mostly for her own comfort) when more loud crunching came through, drowning her out, signalling Fusco reopened his line.
"Listen, I dislike CocoaPuffs as much as the next guy - as most guys, I imagine -", Shaw smirked at that, "but if there's one thing that lady is, it's efficient. Crazy, without a doubt, but definitely efficient. She probably brought those guns because she was expecting trouble, Shaw. Which probably means-"
"You should really go check on her", Reese finished for him quickly, and in the background she could hear the crackling of the police radio. "We've got to go for now. Let us know if you need anything."
With that, the other two lines close, leaving Shaw with the complete radio silence that started this whole thing. She threw her head back and groaned, annoyed but knowing she couldn't leave Root in a dangerous situation if that is indeed what she had stumbled in to.
And knowing Root, she probably had.
Shaw turned around and started off in the direction of the building Root had been set up in earlier, muttering to herself about the nice glass of whiskey she missed out on at the bar across the street.
The building that Root had been staking out in was an old apartment building south of the warehouse Shaw had been in that was slotted for demolition later this week; it was vacant, completely and wholly, without so much as wallpaper on the walls or a single sign that once, however long ago, people had lived here. Shaw stepped over drywall and fallen beams from more decrepit parts of the building that had fallen and are now littering the hallways. Root had been on the sixth floor, in the 9th room in from the right, and Shaw only remembered because of the vulgar jokes the hacker had been making about '69' all the way up until she had heard gunfire from Shaw's end of the comm link.
Who knew Root's terrible jokes might one day save her life?, Shaw thought. She decided almost instantly to make sure Root never found out that that was how she found the room she'd been in so quickly.
Not having to clear every room made Shaw's search much easier, and she took the steps two at a time all the way up to the sixth floor. She drew her gun as she neared the door to the room Root had been in, and took one deep breath before letting instincts take over - she kicked the door in, leveling her gun quickly and doing a scan of the small studio apartment before realizing no one was there. She lowered the gun but didn't replace it in the holster she was wearing (at John's behest - "What's the good of just stuffing in your waistband?", he had argued, and she stared at him blankly but roughly snatched the holster from his outstretched hand anyways), letting her arm fall to her side as she tried to make sense of the state of the room.
There was a broken laptop in the middle of the room, no doubt Root's, a gunshot through the screen. And a broken stool just beyond that, and next to it a knocked over bowl of cereal. CocoaPuffs, Shaw noted, and she would have laughed at the irony if she didn't take a step forward towards said bowl and almost slip on the cheap linoleum flooring. Frowning, she looked down, and noticed for the first time in the dimly-lit room that there was an alarming amount of blood on the floor of the room. Some of it in sprays, the pattern a heavy blow would leave behind, some of it in small puddles that Shaw knew all too well to be almost indicative of gunshot wounds.
Swallowing thickly, anger tinged with an unfamiliar feeling rising in her chest, Shaw pressed her earpiece to open a line with John.
"We have a problem."
Reese and Fusco arrived just short of an hour later. Fusco looked as if he was going to vomit as soon as he walked in to the apartment, barely making it past the threshold before excusing himself.
Some homicide detective, Shaw thought bitterly.
Reese walked around the room slowly, too slow for Shaw - who had been in the room too long already, she thought, and was itching to begin chasing down whatever leads they could find as to where Root may be now.
Shaw was acutely aware of the fact that Root had been missing for two hours now, and with the amount of blood she had apparently lost, they were rapidly running out of time to find her.
"Are you sure it's all hers?", Reese asked carefully when she expressed her concerned as he tried in vain to get some information off the laptop that Root had left behind. In addition to being shot it appeared as if someone had manually fried the hard drive - Root, they had all agreed, knowing that more than likely it was Samaritan operatives that found her and she would never risk the rest of their positions by letting her personal laptop fall in to their hands. He looked up at her carefully when she didn't answer right away.
Yes, she wanted to say.
She was sure that it was mostly Root's, if not all of it, because she had searched the room while waiting for the detectives to arrive and found nothing to point towards any kinds of struggle - nothing to point towards Root getting a single shot off, a swing in, any type of defense at all. There were no stray bullet holes in the small room as if there had been a gun fight, just the three directly across from where Root's broken stool would have been set up, in a good grouping about chest-high if she had been sitting in it. (Eye-level if she had been kneeling in front of it with the laptop on the seat, as Shaw had seen her do many times before when she tired of sitting - the thought made Shaw's chest tighten uncomfortably, unfamiliarly, so she tried not to think on it too much.) There was the spilled cereal by the broken stool, with Root's favorite shade of lipstick on the spoon. There was some of Root's hair, longer than Shaw remembered regardless of the fact that she had just seen her that same day, which Shaw sickeningly noted in one of the smaller pools of blood, as if she had been struck in the head. Then, of course, there was the six magazines that had been discarded haphazardly in the corner of the room behind the door - Shaw knew instantly that they belonged to the six missing guns Root had taken that morning, despite the ex-agent's ardent protests that there was such as thing as an unnecessary amount of firepower.
("Since when is more not better?", Root had said with a suggestive wink. When Shaw didn't give in right away, Root pouted. Shaw knew she was done for before Root did. "You said the same thing when I suggested using two, and you thought that was hot. I'm just trying to up the ante."
If only you had actually shot someone with one of your six precious guns, Shaw thought angrily as she checked all the magazines and confirmed what she already knew - that not a single round had been shot off.)
"Almost positive", was all she was able to croak out to Reese, who regarded her seriously for a moment before turning back to fiddle with the broken laptop.
Fusco returned from the hall, where he had said he was going to go check the surrounding rooms, but both of the ex-agents knew he needed a moment to collect himself before returning to them.
"Well there's nothing out there. We all agree this was Samaritan, right?"
Reese and Shaw nodded at him, as if it needed to be confirmed.
"How would they have found her?", Reese asked no one in particular, looking up at the ceiling as if the answers were written on it. "I thought the Machine had her covered. She's been going through identities more quickly than usual lately."
"Maybe that's how? Maybe Samaritan caught on somehow?"
They sat in silence for a moment, none of them knowing quite what their next move was to be. In the dead zone Samaritan wouldn't have been able to find Root without somehow locating her through her laptop or some other electronics, but they all knew Root was smart enough to avoid that issue. They were so lost in their own thoughts that John's cellphone startled all of them, Shaw and Reese each pulling out their guns while Fusco nearly jumped out of his skin.
Taking a deep breath and looking at his team mates apologetically, John lowered his gun and answered the phone.
"Finch", he said with some finality before putting the call on speaker.
"Mr. Reese." He sounded tired, but the happy kind of tired, like a man who had a full day that was finally winding down. Shaw envied him immediately, wondering how different her day might have turned out if she had stayed back in the subway with Bear. "How are things going with the number?"
"The number is fine", Shaw answered for him, sounding more short than she meant to, "but we have a problem."
"Ms. Shaw? What's happened?"
"It's Root", John looked side-long at Shaw, a white-knuckle grip still on her nano and her jaw set tightly - in anger or something else, he wasn't sure. "It looks like Samaritan may have gotten her."
"Looks like? No."
"Shaw's right", Fusco agreed from the corner, his breathing finally normalized. He almost surprised both of the ex-agents, who had almost forgotten he was there. "You should see this place, Glasses. There's blood everywhere. The only thing we found in here is a laptop and that thing's too busted to get anything off of."
There is a long silence on the other line, and Shaw could picture the way Finch's eyes have opened wide, the way his mouth fell open. She clenched her jaw even tighter, and wondered (not for the first time) if Finch is more concerned about Samaritan compromising the position of one them, or about Root herself. She wondered when she became Root's advocate, and shook her head absently as if to shake the thought. Fusco sent her an odd look, but she ignored him.
"Let's convene at the subway. And bring the laptop. Ms. Groves must be found, and soon. There's no telling what Samaritan might do to her, and to what means."
Shaw elbowed her way past the boys and out of the room before Finch even finished his sentence.