Note: I have no idea where this story is going. Just sayin'. Well, OK, I have a rough idea, but...hehehe...
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April 2012
"Ellie," said John, "you need to get out of there. Duane is on the move."
His soft voice crackled through the tiny Bluetooth headset that was nestled inside my right ear. My fingers stumbled on the grimy black keyboard in front of me.
"Every time you distract me, it takes longer," I complained. The convoluted shell scripts took long enough to type without John nagging me every thirty seconds. "I've almost got his emails copied."
My external hard drive chattered on the desk as it copied data from a massive desktop computer at thirty megabytes per second. Most days, I considered that to be fast enough; right now it felt like I was copying files from a glacier. The drive's indicator light flashed rapidly, on-off-on-off, as I scanned the partition for any other files of interest—word documents, memos, todo list, pictures, scanned images, zip files, spreadsheets—anything that could help us figure out just why this Jonathan Duane fellow had shown up on John's vigilante-o-matic radar, or whatever it was that John had in his Batcave that let him know when someone was about to get themselves in a boatload of trouble.
"Ellie, he's heading back. Get out now."
"Almost done," I said, biting my lip. My heart pounded and my fingers shook, but I wasn't ready to yank the drive, not when I was so close! The shell scripts recursed into directory after directory, dredging up information and feeding it to my hard drive's two-terabyte maw.
"Ninety-three percent," I told John. I kept my voice low—sure, no one else was in the house besides a particularly fat and ill-tempered cat, but I didn't want to be overheard by one of Duane's neighbors. The last thing I needed was for somebody to come a-knockin', or worse, to call the cops. John's detective friends could only do so much to run interference for us.
The speaker crackled in my ear. John's voice now had a tone that I didn't often hear from him: not quite fear, but getting there. "Ellie, we just found out: he's not a vet, he's a money launderer, and he's headed right for you. Go, now—damnit. Fellows, not now, I'm a little busy—"
There came a sudden crashing noise in my ear, followed by sounds of pain and what sounded suspiciously like a fistfight.
"John?" I asked. He didn't respond, but the sounds of the fight continued.
Come on, come on, come on, I thought, watching the script run with impatience. As far as desktop computers went, this Duane guy had a decent model, but there were thousands of interesting files on his hard drive, and it took longer to copy a great many small files than several large ones. I tapped my foot impatiently on the carpet. Glanced up at the window for the dozenth time, even though I knew the shades were drawn.
A long, drawn-out howl screeched through the earpiece, overloading the tiny speaker. I winced, and for an instant, worried it was John—but the voice was too high to be his. The fight was still going on. Glass broke. Things crashed. John panted and grunted in my ear as the files copied, one after another after another, until—
"It's done!" I said. I had the drive synced and unmounted in seconds. I dropped it into my tote bag, pulled the infiltration flash drive too—it was mounted read-only, so I could just yank it—and powered off the computer. I shouldered the bag and stood.
The front door lock clicked. The knob turned.
Aww, shit, I thought. Dread trickled down my spine, like ice water. I backed away, but I was in sight of the door, almost in the center of the room, and I couldn't run fast enough. My hand dipped towards my bag—
Jonathan Duane was short and bald and far too muscular. He had a goatee, the kind that screamed "thug," and a single tattoo of a rose on his wrist. He was wearing a polo shirt, a pair of gray shorts, and flip-flops. His eyes widened when he saw me, standing there like an idiot in the middle of his living room, and he froze. But by then, my hand had closed around my pistol and I brought it up, arms straight, aimed straight for the center of his mass like John had taught me. Clicked the safety off with my thumb mid-motion.
For a long, long, long moment, neither of us spoke.
After awhile, Duane said, "So, Tyler sent a schoolgirl in a skirt to get his revenge?" He took a step towards me, then another. I backed towards the kitchen, keeping the dealer in my sight the entire time.
"Sorry," I said. "Just passing through. I'll be going now."
My hands shook around the gun—not enough to throw off my aim, but enough for me to notice. I wondered—would this guy be The One? My first victim? I had never had to fire my gun before—not even out of self defense. Usually, the mere sight of it was enough of a deterrent. But not for this guy.
"Not here to kill me? You looking to be a client? I can give you more bang for your buck with a little...persuasion."
"No, thanks," I said. Beneath my shoes, the flooring went from carpet to linoleum. The back door was less than ten feet away. If I could just make it across the yard and through the wooden gate...
I took a step backwards. Then another. And then—
A yowl—
That fucking cat—
The fluffy monstrosity had crept up behind me and tangled itself in my legs. I stumbled and fell backwards and landed flat on my back. Somehow, I managed to keep a grip on my gun, but before I could regain my wits, Duane was on top of me. He hadn't showered in awhile, I noticed in a sort of detached way as I was pinned beneath the mass of his body, or maybe he had just come from the gym. Either way, he stank, and either way, I wanted him off me. He grabbed my right wrist and held it to the ground, forcing the gun away from him, but with his attention fixated on the gun, there was nothing to stop me from introducing my knee to his family jewels.
Twice.
Hard.
Duane wheezed and his grip loosened. That gave me just enough freedom of movement to jab him in the eyes with my free hand. Swearing, he released my wrist. I thanked him by elbowing him in the face. His head snapped back and he clutched his face. I scooted out from under him. By some miracle, the gun was still in my hand, and I kept it pointed at Duane as I stood, breathing hard.
"Stay down," I hissed. He obeyed, clutching his face and crotch.
My bag had fallen from my shoulder mid-fight. I collected it, and then, with all the calmness I could muster, I backed my way to the front door, keeping the gun pointed at the man squirming on his own living room floor. I yanked the door open and stepped out into the afternoon, keeping my gun concealed between the bag and my body as I made my way down the front walk. There was no one around.
"I'm out, John," I panted.
"Are you hurt—?"
I ignored the sharp ache in my wrist and backside. "No," I said. "But Duane is."
"Badly?"
"You care?"
"Consider it morbid curiosity."
"He'll live." I kept the gun concealed between the tote bag and my body as I reached the sidewalk and made my way to the little brown car John had loaned me. Didn't relax until I had checked the back seat, then slid behind the wheel and locked the doors.
"Okay," I sighed. Took a deep, steadying breath. "Okay. I'm heading back to the rendezvous. What was all that noise I heard? Are you all right?"
"You should see the other guys."
The corners of my mouth rose as I put the car in drive and pulled out into the street. "Seems to be a common theme today."
"I'll tell you all about it when you get to the diner," John said.
"You're buying me tea. Lots of honey."
"Yes. Oh, and Ellie?"
"Yeah, John?"
"Don't do that again." The humor had disappeared from his voice. "You're getting better at defending yourself, but you're not that good. It's better to run than to fight. When I say get out, you need to get out. Got it?"
"Yes, Mama," I said. But I knew he was right.
There was a little room in the back of Sinclair's diner towards the rear of the kitchen. The room was hot and moist and stuffed with computer equipment for the sales terminals up front, and it offered John and me a good rendezvous location. Sinclair had gotten herself into a bind a few months back. John and I had done our thing and helped her out, and now she felt that it was the least she could do to allow her saviors a private place to meet. As an added bonus, Sinclair's had the best sweet-potato french fries I had ever tasted—on the house. At least, Sinclair tried to make it on the house. John always left a hundred-dollar bill behind whenever we borrowed the back room, even though he never ate anything. Well, sometimes he snuck one or two of the fries from my plate—but other than that, he seemed to run on coffee alone.
My little netbook—a recent, unexpected gift—sat amidst piles of old bills and invoices on the desk. The compact computer was jacked right in to Sinclair's router, which in turn was connected to a business-class DSL modem. My external hard drive was lying on its side nearby, connected to the netbook by a thin USB cable. A half-full mug of tea warmed my hands, which still trembled from time to time as the adrenaline faded from my body. I took a deep swig of tea, set the mug down on a spot of desk that had been cleared of papers, and pointed to the screen.
"Here's another email from Tyler Morris, dated two days ago...dayumn, he's pissed off."
"We may have just found our perpetrator," John said, rubbing his chin. There was a cut on his cheek and a shiner throbbing above his left eye. He didn't seem to notice, or to care. His hair, usually combed so precise, was tousled—a sure sign he'd been in a tough fight.
"Can Duane and Morris both be perpetrators?" I asked. I still wasn't sure about the whole perpetrator/victim thing, or why John's BatRadar didn't tell him which one a person was about to become—leaving it up to us to figure it out. "Because, Duane doesn't act like much of a victim."
"Funny how people get mad when you break into their house," John said.
"Yeah, well, like you said—it's for their own good."
"I don't remember saying that." John's hand snaked towards the basket of french fries that was balanced a little too close to the netbook; I slapped his hand away.
"You implied it."
"Well, it is for their own good, but they get even madder if you try to explain it when they catch you."
His hand crept towards the basket again; I rolled my eyes and allowed him to make off with a single fry.
"I think I'll be paying Tyler a visit later today," John said. "Maybe Duane, too. If we're lucky, the case will be closed tonight."
"Don't beat Duane up too much," I said. "I took care of it for you already."
"Ellie, I'm proud of you. You've graduated from B&E to assault."
"He came at me first. Think he's gonna tell anybody he got beat up right and proper in his own home by a girl in a skirt?"
"Probably not. Nobody would believe him."
I smiled; took another sip of tea. The tremble in my hands was receding. I reached for the netbook keyboard, brushed a few stray crumbs aside, and pulled up a file manager to see if there was anything else interesting among the files I'd copied from Duane's desktop.
"Finally warming up to Sybil's latest present?" John asked, tilting his head towards the netbook.
I glared at John, which only made the little smirk on his face widen. "I like my old laptops better," I grumbled.
"Nothing wrong with getting a little new hardware every once in awhile," John said. "Does it work well?"
"Well...yah," I admitted. And that was the problem. I'd spent days looking for even the tiniest fault in the little netbook, but it performed as advertised and beyond—the keyboard was comfortable, the Linux operating system was stable, the solid-state drive put the tiny computer's short boot time into a class of its own, and try as I might, I hadn't managed to get the darn thing to overheat even with all CPU throttling disabled—impressive, considering the tiny laptop had a quad-core CPU and a discrete graphics chip. The only thing that really bugged me about it was the built-in webcam, and that little problem was easily solved with a strip of electrical tape. "But—she didn't have to be so snarky about it."
"What's snarky about saying you could use a faster computer?"
"It's just—she—she typed it sarcastically. The greeting card that came with it. It was sarcastic."
John raised his eyebrows and looked aside.
"Oh, shut up," I said, poking him in the chest. "I swear, when I finally meet this Sybil lady..."
John helpfully finished the sentence for me: "...you'll thank her for the expensive netbook, and the books, and the tea, and the chocolate?"
"Yeah. Sure. So, when do I get to talk to her so I can, uh, thank her?"
"I dunno," John said. "Sybil is a very private...person."
"Sybil, Lucius Finch, Shaw—all you superheros are private people," I muttered.
"They're called 'secret identities' for a reason," John agreed.
We stayed there in that over-heated, over-cramped room for another half-hour, nibbling on sweet potato french fries and picking apart Duane's emails just to be sure there was nothing that we had missed. John left first, as usual. I waited fifteen minutes, packed up my computer equipment, slipped out the back door, and walked the three blocks to the garage where I had parked my car. I kept close watch on my surroundings as I rode the lift to the third floor, loitered a bit, then took the stairs back down to the second floor and walked to my car, but no one paid me undue attention.
It was paranoia, I reflected as I started the engine and eased the car to the spiral downward ramp, but John had told me stories about some of the men and women he had met during the course of his career as professional vigilante, and with people like that out there, I figured it paid to be extra careful. So I put up with it.
I kept a careful eye on the cars around me as I drove. No one seemed to be following me. About a half-block from my apartment, I parked the car in an underground garage, made sure I'd gotten all my belongings out, and walked the rest of the way.
The car would be gone by that evening.
I entered the apartment building through a side door, took the lift up to the seventh floor, and walked down the hallway to a door marked 7C. This apartment, if anyone had cared to check, was rented out to a Cassandra Bradbury, who did not exist. Sure, I had her driver's license and passport, and I occasionally updated her FriendZone profile, but Cassandra was nothing more than a cover identity, one I had created myself with a little help from John and a lot more help from his mysterious rich guy, Harold Finch. Cassandra was my newest identity, the latest of three—still a bit sparse, especially in the social networking department, but given time, it would grow.
Right now, though, I didn't want to be Cassandra, who liked blue cheese and video games and bebop jazz and colorful T-shirts with geeky, nerdy things emblazoned on the front. I just wanted to be plain ol' Elizabeth Ruben, who preferred cookies over salad, and could barely hold a GameStation controller the right way (really, a good computer was far superior for gaming), and wore happy blouses and swirly skirts and dark tights and little-girl shoes, none of which had any logos or printing on them because she didn't want to be a bipedal billboard.
I unlocked the door and stepped inside the modest apartment. Locked the door behind me. Then, before I did anything else, I pulled out my gun and swept through the apartment, room by room—more paranoia, but some of John's stories were really quite good at scaring the bejesus out of me, so I did it anyway, checking each room until I ended up back in the living room. Once satisfied that the boogieman wasn't awaiting me, I plopped down onto the couch. Unloaded the gun. Set it and the tote bag on the glass coffee table. Unbuckled my flat Mary Janes, one at a time, and tossed them towards the obsidian rectangle that was the television. Stretched. Padded into the kitchen to set the tea kettle boiling and to snag a cookie from the tin atop the refrigerator. Ducked into the bedroom, stripped off my clothes, and draped myself in a silky forest-green nightgown, like liquid comfort. A little later, I fixed myself a cup of black tea with a generous dollop of honey.
It was amazing how easy it was for me to put on my mask and become a vigilante sidekick, and then later, to take off the mask and go back to being an innocent young woman. Like flipping a switch. Just a few hours ago, I'd been fighting off some sod who thought a girl in a skirt was easy picking, and now here I was, settling down on the couch with a steaming cup of tea and a sci-fi book from the wall-to-wall bookcases out in the living room. The transition was natural, mindless...
Most days.
(Other days, it took much more than a mere cup of tea and a book to calm me. The Wilson case still haunted me. That poor man...)
I read until 11PM, soaking up the words from the book like a good, hot bath, and then retired to the bedroom to sleep. I took the gun with me. Slipped it under my pillow.
Just in case.
As John liked to say, only the paranoid survived.
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Miles away, in a second-story chamber within a derelict library, John Reese sat in a swivel chair. Sprawled, actually; casually, without a care; a shadow against dark leather. The only illumination in the room came from the six LCD monitors arranged on the round wooden desk before him. It lit his face and the sliver of white shirt visible beneath his black suit jacket, making it appear as though his head were floating in the night.
Adjacent to him, poised like a lord in his castle, sat Harold Finch, dressed to the nines and then some in a burgundy three-piece suit that had cost more than all of the computer equipment in the room. His fingers tapped away at the keyboard, like a rabid pianist, but he exuded the same atmosphere of tranquility as the abandoned library building. The various windows and terminals open on the monitors were reflected in his glasses; a tiny, ghostly constellation hovering inches before his eyes.
A teacup, half-full, sat in its saucer on the desk. Next to the saucer, two cell phones charged.
For awhile, neither of the men spoke. It was Reese who broke the silence.
"Today was fun," he said. His voice matched his pose—lazy, laid-back, dark, ominous—and just a touch seductive.
"Mr. Reese," said Finch, not taking his eyes from the lines of C and assembly code he was optimizing, "you sent six thugs to the hospital today, not to mention Mr. Morris, and set two ambulances and a fire truck on fire. You also managed to infuriate Detective Carter—yet again—and very nearly shot Detective Fusco in the posterior. And let's not discuss the state of Miss Shaw's boots. Or her propensity towards high-caliber weaponry."
"Like I said: today was fun. Don't forget about Duane. Elizabeth got him pretty good. He was still limping when I got to him."`
Finch's mouth turned downward and his eyebrow rose. "About that. I believe you told Miss Ruben to vacate the premises—four times."
Reese shrugged. "Bad connection, probably. Maybe Duane's house is a dead zone."
"Mr. Reese, while our Miss Ruben has proven herself to be a valuable asset on occasion...working with someone who is unable or unwilling to follow orders will inevitably imperil our mission."
"You let Shaw hang around," Reese pointed out.
"Miss Shaw is experienced. Miss Ruben is not."
"Then we should give her experience," Reese said.
Finch looked away from the monitors just long enough to give Reese a glare of disapproval.
"Our work is perilous, Mr. Reese. Miss Ruben needs to understand that what we do is not some sort of—trivial comic book adventure. Her attitude towards our endeavor occasionally borders on flippant and rollicking." He glanced at Reese again. "I wonder where that came from?"
"Shaw," Reese said, without hesitation.
"I was thinking someone with a greater propensity towards tying petty criminals to lampposts to await their imminent arrest."
"Hmm," Reese said, rubbing his chin. "Bear."
The incredulous look on Finch's face was a sight to be behold. "Bear," he repeated. "Mr. Reese, you're childishly avoiding the subject. Bear is a dog."
"He's smart."
"He doesn't have thumbs. He cannot tie a knot."
"Well, if the guy is holding his leash, Bear can drag him to a post and run around the post a few times. Works pretty well. Right, Harold?"
The pearly illumination from the monitors was just sufficient for Reese to see Finch blush.
"Perhaps we should discuss this matter tomorrow," he said, salvaging his dignity by returning his attention to the monitors.
"Suit yourself," Reese said, and for awhile longer, there was silence. Until...
"Elizabeth warmed up to Sybil's latest gift," Reese said. This time, Finch's fingers faltered.
"Gift?" he asked, uncertain. "Which gift? The software disassembly book?"
"No," Reese said. "The top-of-the-line IFT UltraPad netbook and mTech two-terabyte external hard drive."
Finch's brow knitted itself together. "It sent her a computer?"
"Yeah," Reese drawled. "And a nice hard drive. I tell you, Finch, I'm feeling a little hurt here. Sybil never buys me computers. Neither do you."
Frowning, Finch turned to the monitors and said aloud, "Did you send Miss Ruben a netbook and hard drive?"
For some seconds, nothing happened. But then an LED lit up next to the monitor: the "record" light on the tiny webcam clipped to the monitor frame. Finch's cell phone buzzed a second later.
1, said the screen.
"Why?" Finch asked, in a voice that managed to be both curious and irritated at the same time.
62 65 63 61 75 73 65, said the screen. Reese had no idea what that meant. Finch must have, because mouthed out a few syllables and said, lovingly, "Oh, now you're being childish too. And it would take you less data to transmit that in the clear."
that in the clear, said the screen.
Reese smirked. Finch, for a long time, did not speak.
"It's right," he said to Reese. "Technically, that is fewer characters."
"Your Machine has a sense of humor, Finch."
"Yes. And I don't know if that is awe-inspiring or terrifying. Perhaps both." He cleared his screen and said to the camera, "The gifts to Elizabeth Ruben need to stop."
y ?
"Because—because each shipment is a trail that could potentially lead back to you. You are careful, I'm sure, but your actions carry with them an inherent risk. So do these text messages, for that matter. You know how I feel about long conversations."
1.
pkg det prob: 5.62112351x10^-37
phn det prob: 8.12342623521x10^-38
Finch sighed. "Well...I suppose you know better than I do."
1.
Pinching the bridge of his nose, Finch said, "Why do you use the alias Sybil Thornhill?"
y! ?, said the screen. It took Finch a little longer to decipher that one.
"Why not. Haha." Finch looked amused.
"Maybe it's having an identity crisis," Reese suggested.
0, said the screen.
"You're tired of being Ernie?" Reese asked.
0, said the screen.
"You're still Ernie?"
1.
"And you're Sybil, too?"
1.
"Whadaya know, Harold," Reese said. "It's Schrodinger's cat."
Finch cleared his throat again and said, "Do you...wish us to call you by a particular one of these names?"
*, said the screen.
"What does that mean?" Reese asked.
"I believe it means that it does not prefer any particular name," Finch said.
1.
"Well," said Finch, staring straight at the camera, "whichever identity you wish to go by—please, be careful. There are factions out there that wish to find you. To control you. To use you to harm others. Miss Ruben does not know you exist as you are. It would be better for her if it stayed that way. Safer for her and for you."
There was a long pause.
1, the screen said, and Reese noticed that the font was half the size it had been before, as if the Machine didn't really want to admit it...
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