John followed Christine down to the café, and then to the basement. She showed him where the hidden door was, and then the secret hallway to the vast underground space that had once been a speakeasy. She pointed out the markings over the door and explained how they worked: A mark over the hinges indicated an exit that was concealed from the outside; over the doorknob meant that the opening was exposed. Reese nodded and pocketed his key, ready to explore. But Christine pointed the flashlight beam at the ground and gestured for him to wait.
He heard a noise, but it was so soft that he wouldn't have recognized it as a man approaching. Christine, turned, unsurprised. "Hey, Pony," she said quietly.
"Daisy." The man moved very quickly and was on her before Reese could intervene. But it wasn't an attack anyhow; it was an embrace. Despite the man's shabby appearance and pervasive odor, Christine hugged him back tightly. "Missed you, girl. Who hit 'cha?"
"Idiot at the airport. It's handled. How are you?"
The man stepped back and Reese got a good look at him in the flashlight beam. He was nearly John's height, but very thin and maybe ten years older. His hair was long and tangled, equal parts red and gray; his face was mostly hidden behind a full, unkempt beard. His clothes were faded and ragged, and he wore several different layers. He had the distinct smell of the street. But his eyes were sharp. He looked Reese up and down. "I'm alright," he told the girl. "Who's your friend?"
"This is John," Christine said evenly. "He's okay. John, Pony,"
Reese held his hand out. Pony considered for a long moment, then took it. John shook firmly, exactly as he would any Wall Street titan. He saw the man register that he hadn't pulled back. They both nodded.
"Good you're back," Pony said, to the woman. He released John's hand and vanished into the darkness.
He was very, very quiet.
Reese took the flashlight and looked around, getting his bearings. Then he shut it off and let his eyes adjust to the semi-darkness. "How many live down here?"
"Twenty or so, all the time," Christine told him. "More when it's cold, of course. Maybe twenty more have keys, just use it for pass-thru."
"It's good space."
"It stays dry, most of the time. Do you want the tour, or do you want to explore on your own?"
"I'll explore. You point out anything I miss."
"Okay."
The speakeasy itself was large, with a high ceiling. Smaller tunnels let away from it in all directions like the legs of a spider. There were, Christine said, nearly than thirty entrances, all secured, most concealed from the outside. The complex stretched under six city blocks. There was almost no way to trap a person down here. As bolt holes went, Reese decided, this one was fantastic.
He could see why Christine was reluctant to leave the security it offered.
"Why aren't there more people here?" he wondered aloud.
"It's got a bad rep," she answered. "When I lived down here there were probably three hundred hard-core junkies. With all the mayhem that that implies."
"Where'd they go?"
"Hard-core junkies," she repeated. "Most of them are dead. The rest of us got clean." She considered, then nodded. "Which is why Random's allowed to rearrange my furniture, I suppose."
Finch – he'd called himself Harold Wren then – had taken her off the street and forced her, literally kicking and screaming, into rehab. According to Finch it had saved her life, and she sounded like she agreed.
Reese paused, looking at the wall to his left. His instinct told him there ought to be an opening . It took him nearly two minutes to find it, but it was there. He nodded in satisfaction. Then he looked to the girl. She had waited in silence while he found it. She did silence as comfortably as Finch did.
"Once the old guys got a toehold down here," she continued, as if there had been no break, "they started policing the place better, installing the locks."
"Which you paid for," Reese guessed.
"They were cheap enough, in bulk."
In the next tunnel to the right, three men hovered over a barrel fire. The smoke vented through a grid to the street. They nodded to the woman, stared at Reese in mild challenge. He nodded to them and moved on.
"How long were you on the street?" Christine asked easily.
"Four months," Reese answered at once. No point in lying about it; she knew the truth from his behavior. But it wasn't like him to be so open. And then he added, "And then Finch rescued me. By what could technically be called kidnapping."
"Ahhhh." She seemed amused, but not surprised. "So he makes a habit of it."
"You were his first. You taught him well."
She shook her head. "Nope. After me he should never had done it again."
"You turned out all right. Eventually."
"Eventually."
She was easy to talk to. She was observant and hellishly smart; like Finch, it would be difficult to deceive her. But there was something else. Her manner told him that if he hadn't answered, she wouldn't have insisted. She would have let it slide.
That made it easier not to resist.
He remembered how she had touched the back of Bear's leg and waited for him to put his paw in her hand. She treated Reese the same way.
And he responded the same way. Put his paw trustingly, willingly in her hand. Remember this, Reese told himself. She may be on your side right now, but she is uniquely dangerous. Or useful.
Partly from curiosity, and partly to shift the conversation, he asked, "All those junkies. You were just a kid. How did you survive?"
"I was small and harmless," Christine answered immediately. "When you're no threat to anyone, ninety percent of people just ignore you."
"But the other ten percent are predators."
She nodded. "When you're small and harmless and smarter than everyone else, you find the biggest predator and you make yourself useful to him."
"Hmmm." Reese stopped and looked upward. There was an outline of light in the ceiling. "Trap door?"
"Uh-huh. You're good at this."
"Thanks."
They moved on. "His name was Sharps," Christine volunteered unexpectedly. "The first one. He didn't have any veins left in his arms or legs. But I could hit one in his back or neck without killing him. That made me indispensable. So he protected me." She shrugged. "Until he got septic and died. And then there was somebody else."
Find the biggest predator and make yourself indispensable to him, Reese mused. It was an obvious answer. Then it struck him: That was what Finch had done. Finch was small and apparently harmless, and so much smarter. So he'd found the biggest predator and made himself indispensable to him.
But Finch hadn't meant to make himself indispensible. What had he said at the train station? I really didn't intend for you to come and find me, Mr. Reese. He'd genuinely thought that Reese would go on chasing the Numbers without him. That Reese wouldn't do everything in his power to get him back.
Which just went to prove that Mr. I-Know-Exactly-Everything-About-You didn't know exactly everything, after all.
Reese had flown halfway across the country looking for Finch. He'd shot up big chunks of New York City, and would cheerfully have torn the rest of it apart. How many times, this week alone, had he said simply, 'I need to find my friend'. Not I'm trying to, or I want to. I need to.
What he'd said in the warehouse had been mostly true, too. He only had one friend. And maybe that was the explanation. Maybe that was all there was to it.
He saved my life. He gave me a purpose. He gave me his trust – in tiny little doses, but more than he gives to anyone else.
Once a man had threatened to kill Reese's friends and his family. John had answered, with perfect calm, that he didn't have any friends, and no family left either.
But that wasn't true anymore. Finch had somehow become both.
He is undeniably indispensable to Reese now.
"John," Christine said, very quietly.
He looked at her, startled. Her hand hovered near his arm, but she didn't touch him until his eyes acknowledged her approach. Like with the dog. No. Like with her dangerously insane father. He made his face relax, his voice soften. "Sorry. Drifted off for a minute."
"You missed one."
Reese smirked at himself and retraced his steps until he found the entrance he'd missed. It wasn't very well-hidden, and he'd walked right past it. A stupid mistake. Embarrassing. Except Christine knew why he'd made the mistake, knew he'd been lost in his thoughts. Which was somehow more troubling.
"I met this woman named Joan," he said, surprising both of them. "She was … little. Harmless. She looked after me. I never thought about her being indispensable so I'd protect her. I just thought she was kind."
"Maybe she was," Christine answered. "Probably she was. What I did isn't what everybody does."
"True," Reese said, unconvinced. He cataloged the tunnel in his mind and moved on to the next one. "And she never needed it. But I would have protected her."
"You protected me when I hadn't done a damn thing for you," Christine pointed out. "You're not …" She stopped and considered her words. "You're not really a predator. You like to think you are, but you're not. Not a conventional one, anyhow."
Reese looked at her and let his face be just a little dangerous. "Then what am I?"
"You're a soldier," she pronounced simply. "You can be dangerous and aggressive, but that's how you can be, not who you are."
A soldier. It was such a simple word. But the way she said it – the way she meant it, in the very best sense of that word. In the oldest meaning it had for John …
…a little boy running barefoot on the lawn, chasing fireflies in the dusk with the neighbor kids. All of them flopping down onto the grass and the inevitable discussion children had while they looked up at the emerging stars. 'I wanna be an astronaut.' 'I wanna be a nurse.' 'I wanna be a fireman.' And for John, always and forever the first answer: 'I wanna be a soldier.' It had never changed. Not once, in all the years since. I wanna be a soldier.
Honorable. Brave. Honest. Strong. Protecting the weak …
I think all you ever wanted to do was protect people, Finch had said, with Reese's arm at his throat.
It had all gotten distorted along the way. Protecting people became perverted into destroying people. It was bad enough in a war that he quickly saw was unnecessary, based on a lie. It was worse with the CIA. But by then it was too late. Your country needs you, John. The greater good, John. We are the darkness, John. The distortions. The outright lies. The things he'd believed. The things he'd done …
I wanna be a soldier. All you ever wanted to do was protect people.
Finch had done more than drag John out of the street and give him a job. He'd done more than save his life.
He'd given John a way back his better self.
This path leads out of the darkness. If I can stay on it, I can be someone that little boy would at least recognize. Maybe, someday, someone that little boy would be proud of. But I can't get there without Finch. I need my friend.
Finch was indispensable. And John knew exactly why.
It all clicked into place.
A simple word from a woman who was all but a stranger had put his world right. He looked at Christine again. She was watching him with those uncanny blue eyes. Calm. Patient. He wondered what the hell emotions had just flashed over his face. Whether she knew how profoundly her words had affected him. It seemed likely. She didn't miss much.
But she didn't comment. Because she was kind, too. She understood that there were places he could not go, things he could not say aloud. And she let him be.
Reese cleared his throat. "You're very good at assessing people."
Her eyes dropped. There's the line, Reese though, surprised. There's where she stops being open. She can talk about the junkie she was, but not about the abused child she'd been before that. The one who'd gotten so good at reading people in order to survive.
"Have you ever been wrong?"
She hesitated. "Yeah." Very softly.
He let her be, too. They walked a bit more.
John slowed, then stopped, staring at a grate half-way up the wall. He pointed. "There?"
"Yes," Christine said. "But it narrows. I can get up it, or Bear can. I don't think you can."
"I'm very flexible."
"Can you dislocate both shoulders?"
"Maybe." Reese shook his head. "Do I want to? Not so much."
"Exit of last resort." Christine moved over to the grate and pulled out her cell phone. "Signal's always bad down here, but if you can see daylight, you can usually get a bar or two." She got a picture from her tablet, though it jerked and froze badly. Bear and the kitten were still cuddled together.
"I didn't even think to ask. If you don't like cats …"
"I'm keeping the cat, John."
"Just checking."
She smiled and took his arm. They continued their circuit of the tunnels.
"I can see why you don't want to leave this," Reese said, when they reached their original door again. "It's fantastic."
"When my dad was alive …" Christine hesitated, and Reese could tell she was surprised to have edged over her own comfort line, but she shook her head and went on, "… we lived two blocks from the north end of the tunnels. I didn't come down here then, not into the main part, but I used to hide inside the doorways sometimes. It was always …" She stopped again. "I'll find something. There are tunnels all over the city."
Reese took his new key and opened the door. They moved through the basement and climbed the stairs. "Of course," she continued, "the tunnels that I really want to find are the ones that aren't on any of those charts. The ones that don't exist. But I'll figure it out."
"Like I said," Reese offered, "I know a guy."
"I'll remember."
