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Detective Fusco doesn't look happy at having to wait around in the little diner a few blocks down from the precinct, but John resists from making a sarcastic comment when walks over to them. Taylor is nursing a coke with a distinct lack of enthusiasm, however the other man at least seems to have made an effort to look after the kid, and the first words out of his mouth are "any news on Carter?" For that alone his opinion of the man rises a little.
John chooses his words carefully. Taylor is looking at him with a mixture of hope and dread, and while he doesn't want to dash his hopes he doesn't want to lie to him either. Instead he deflects the question. " Ballistics, forensics – are there any results yet?"
Fusco shakes his head. "Nah, but believe me they're doing a rush job on things over there. I reckon maybe an hour before they get the bullet from the wall run through the system." When Taylor frowns he winces. "Sorry. She'll be ok, we'll get her back."
"I know." The words are meant for the Detective but he looks at Reese when he says them. "We're going to find her."
"Yeah, there's someone I need you to talk to. We need to go." John waits for Taylor to grab his backpack and nudges him towards the direction of the door. "You'll keep me informed I trust, Fusco."
"Hey I'm behind you on this." The middle aged man scrubs a hand through his hair. "Carter's good people you know. Take care of the kid."
The teenager opens his mouth in protest at the "kid" reference, but Reese hustles him out of the door and into the car parked down the block before he has a chance to give any real protest. Slamming the door of the blue Honda which smells of cheap perfume and whose keys Finch had provided without any explanation, Taylor glares at the man who slides in next to him.
"Who are we going to talk to? Have they got mom?"
"Put your seatbelt on." John waits with a patience he has to struggle for before putting the key in the car's ignition and pulling out into the traffic. The teenager buckles up sulkily, giving the man beside him a frustrated look that Reese studiously ignores. "How well do you know James Kenyon?"
Taylor looks utterly blank for a moment before his brow furrows. "Jamie? Jamie from school?"
"Red-head who plays on your basketball team. We think someone might have used him to get your mom to open the door to whoever took him." Harold's voice crackles into his earpiece, and John flicks the indicator light, taking the next left turn towards the park where according to The Machine Kenyon was currently located.
"He's ok. We hang out sometimes..." Taylor's hands clench around the backpack on his lap. "You think he sold my mom out?"
"I think if you put a gun to someone's head or threaten your family there's a lot that most people would do whether they want to or not," John replies. He needs the teenager to talk to his friend not kick the crap out of him. "We need his help, we need to know who coerced him and I need you to keep cool and ask him what he knows. Can you do that?"
"Yeah." Taylor tugs at one of his sleeves. "Yeah. Whatever it takes man."
"Good."
Following Finch's directions John drives through a housing project that might once have been decent and now is falling into disrepair. Giving a quick check to make sure that there aren't too many people around, he circles around the park and keeps the engine idling while he lets Taylor out. It's not a big place, seemingly used more as a dumping ground for trash than recreation. The yellowing grass has pretty much given up on trying to grow on the sparse soil and of the six lonely looking swings tucked under the beech trees two are missing their seats. Upon one of the still functioning ones James Kenyon's red hair makes him easy to identify even from a distance. Parking the car in the driveway of an obviously long abandoned house, John jogs around to the gate to the south of the park. Several large bushes provide cover, and when James Kenyon predictably bolts as soon as he sees Taylor it's easy to catch him as he tries to make his escape. Grabbing his wrist and shoulder, John shoves the teenager back into the park, dumping him onto a bench covered in graffiti. "Mr Kenyon I presume," he says dryly. Taylor is beside him within a moment, his eyes wild, and it's only sharp reflexes that allow him to grab the kid by the back of his shirt before he can attack his friend.
"Taylor, no." The tone of his voice has had terrorists literally pissing themselves before, but it takes a glare and a shake of his head as well before the kid finally backs down somewhat.
"Where the fuck is my mom?" Taylor's voice is shaky and he's so tense that Reese doesn't dare let him go. If James makes a run for it trying to hang on to the both of them is going to take all his energy and time that they simply can't afford to waste. One look at Kenyon's face though and he relaxes slightly. The redhead doesn't look panicked anymore he looks utterly miserable, and John is fairly sure that if he let Taylor beat him to a pulp he'd probably let him without putting up any sort of fight whatsoever.
"Tay.." When James finally speaks his voice is quiet. "I swear to God I didn't have a choice. He had a gun. He said that if I didn't tell him where you'd live he'd kill me and my mom."
"So you sold my mom out instead." Taylor's voice is bitter but John can feel the anger bleeding out of him. When he lets go of the kid he walks over to the bench and slumps down next to his friend, most of the fight in him gone. "Who was he? Do you know him?"
James shakes his head. "Never seen him before. He knew my name though, he knew that I knew you. I was waiting to see if you wanted to walk back after practise, maybe shoot a couple of hoops down with the little kids on the court by the 7-11, show them how it's done but you never turned up."
"I left my phone in my locker, Coach Davies offered me a ride home and we went out the back to the teacher's car park."
"Who took you?" Taylor looks like he's on a fast track to blaming himself for not actually being in the wrong place at the wrong time, so John tries to get things back on track. "What did he look like, was there only one person and what happened when you got to Detective Carter's apartment?"
"Who are you?" James gives him an uncertain look. "Are you the police?"
"I'm a friend of the family. If you could answer the questions." Keeping calm is becoming increasingly difficult, but shooting or torturing the teenager to get information is a line that even he won't cross. Although perhaps it might make things go more swiftly.
"Ok, yeah," Jamie gives him a wholly mistrustful look, and at least that's one thing in his favour John thinks. The kid isn't an idiot, just another victim. "This guy, he comes up to me and says my name like we're buddies or something. The next thing I know there's a gun against my ribs and I'm being tossed into a car and told to shut up and not make a sound or I'm dead and when he's finished with me then he's going after my mom."
"What did the car look like, what did he look like?"
"It was a white, a what do you call it – SUV. He had brown hair. Shorter than you, maybe a bit under six foot, but heavy, like he worked out. When we got to Taylor's place he put a mask on and made me knock on the door and ask for Taylor." He closes his eyes. "Shit Tay, I'm so sorry. I'm so fucking sorry. Your mom opened the door and he shot at her and I ran like a fucking coward."
"Probably would have killed you if you hadn't." Taylo closes his eyes, his voice hesitant, but he steadies himself quickly and there's a lot of his mother's steel in his eyes when he opens them again. It makes something inside John twist painfully.
"Is there anything else. An accent, a scar, something else he said?"
Jamie shakes his head, obviously blinking back tears. "No, he just sounded like a normal guy and it's not like we had a conversation really. Oh, wait!" He brightens and looks over at Taylor. "He had a tattoo. It was on his wrist; when he put the mask on his sleeve rode up and I saw it. It was like a bird and a cross. If you've got some paper then I could draw it."
Taylor rummages around in his backpack, passing over a pen and a battered notebook. Within a couple of minutes his friend has done what John considers a pretty impressive rendering of a bird with its wings outstretched perched on a chunky looking cross. It doesn't look familiar to him, either from gang insignias or political emblems but he snaps a photo of it and sends it on to Finch. Even if it's a one-off sentimental tattoo they might get something to link it to the artist who had inked it.
"Thank-you James, you've been most helpful." Nodding towards the park gate, he waits for Taylor to get up and follow him. Jamie snags the arm of his friends shirt before he can get up.
"Tay, I'm sorry. Truly."
The younger boy nods slowly. "I know, and it wasn't your fault. I might beat the shit out of you tomorrow at school but mom will probably do it for me before I get a chance." He follows Reese to the car without looking back.
It doesn't take long to get to the library. Taylor is quiet and John doesn't feel much like talking either. It's only when he parks in the nearby garage that the teenager speaks.
"I don't get it. Someone wants mom. She's a cop, she pisses bad guys off. I mean it's not like I haven't ever thought that maybe something like this is gonna happen. But how come they knew that Jamie was my friend? I mean I'm not stupid. If someone had been watching me then I'd have known right?"
John doesn't feel the need to answer that particular question. Finch could have the fun of describing The Machine to him all to himself. Instead he turns to the teenager.
"Where we are going you can't ever tell anyone about. Ever."
He expects a retort along the lines of "or what?" and an eye-roll, instead Taylor studies him intently before looking away..
"I'm not stupid," he says quietly. "I don't really know who you are, and the stuff you do isn't legal. It can't be. You don't get that good at using guns without having killed people. But you're helping me and mom so I reckon that makes you one of the good guys. If I wanted to turn you in then I'd have done it at the station."
There's nothing that John can say to that and the clock is ticking, so instead he leads the teenager back around the alley and into the library, locking the door behind them. Behind him he can hear Taylor sneeze as the dust, carefully undisturbed on the tables tickles his nose but the teenager remains quiet until they reach the heart of the operation.
"Mr Reese." Finch moves awkwardly from the wall where he had been pinning several different photographs. His eyes brush over Taylor with a strange mixture of compassion and distrust; tiny nuances that only anyone who truly knew him would recognise. "I see that you've brought a friend."
"Harold Finch meet Taylor Carter. Have you found anything from the picture?"
"A pleasure, Mr Carter, welcome to my humble abode, I wish it were under more pleasant circumstances."
Taylor blinks and gives a weak attempt at a polite smile, his eyes wide as he takes in the computer, the myriad of photographs on the wall and the sheer volume of what John generally describes as "stuff". At least in John's part of the job he mostly only has to carry a gun and a cell phone.
"I've got a hit on the rather exceptional sketch James Kenyon provided," Harold says, turning back to the computer.
"He wants to be an artist," Taylor says, moving forward to see what the eccentric man had pulled up on the screen.
"A worthy ambition," Finch replies absently, fingers tapping too fast to follow on the keyboard. "It's the symbol of a right-wing paramilitary group known as Ember. They used to be part of The Militia movement, but even for them they were a little extreme. Anti-government, conspiracy oriented – they make Waco look like kindergarten. They also had a tendency towards explosives which literally blew up in their faces two years ago. One of their members defected and turned informer against their leader." Harold clicked another file and the face of a man who looked around sixty years old with greying blond hair, weathered skin and defiant dark brown eyes popped up. "This is Owen Banks. A nasty piece of work by all accounts. One of Ember's high ranking officials - when they were active he orchestrated several bombings of civil rights organizations and government buildings. Men , women, children – he didn't discriminate when it came to collateral damage."
"And where is he now?" The "didn't" in Finch's speech didn't escape Reese's notice.
"Dead." Harold tried to choose his words wisely but his neck and his head were killing him and since John had brought Taylor here it wasn't like he'd asked to be put in this situation. His patience not to mention his energy was wearing thin. "There was a hostage situation in Brooklyn. Shots were fired, it seems as though Banks set off a crude bomb made from fertilizer and a few other things he probably sourced from the internet since there was no paper trail. The three men inside were killed, but that was only one cell of the group. There are others out there. They're mostly off the radar and don't trust technology so it's hard to track them, but I did get this."
The file that comes up has obviously been downloaded from a cell-phone and Reese is pretty sure that it came from Fusco. "Detective Carter..." Finch looks apologetically at Taylor. "Your mother, I mean was on the task force bringing Ember down. She was on the front line as it were."
"Is that why they took her?" Taylor asks quietly.
"I think so. If indeed we are on the right track." Harold doesn't look at the teenager behind him. "Mr Reese, if we are going to continue with this line of enquiry then I think it prudent to investigate the late Mr Banks' widow Eileen. According to her bank records she's deposited twenty thousand dollars into her savings account for the past five months and I am yet to find out where she is getting the money from."
"I'm on it." John takes the address that Finch passes him and quickly walks to the bathroom both to check his weapons, change into his biker gear and escape the questions Taylor is bombarding his employer with.
"If you're a weird genius then shouldn't you have like a cat to stroke while you spy on people?" That's the last thing he hears as he slips outside, adjusting his leather jacket over his shoulders. Taylor will be safe with Finch provided that they don't kill each other while he's away. In the meantime Joss is out there somewhere and he's going to find her whatever it takes.
It's only been half an hour and Finch has already thanked God that he hadn't had children four times. Not that he ever really had the chance what with the obsession with work and then the being legally dead and the crippling pain that blights his day to day life.
Fused vertebrae are less painful than a teenager practically climbing the walls and asking endless questions though, most of which he doesn't want to answer and some of which he can't.
"I find the works of Apuleius soothing in times of trouble," Finch finally says. It's the red book on the top left corner." When Taylor merely gives him a baffled look, he hurriedly backtracks. "Or perhaps Tacitus. The blue book next to it. It has violence and fighting – like a video game only on paper and with words."
"I know what a book is," Taylor says, crossing his arms across his chest. "I'd rather look at that. " He nods at Harold's spare laptop. "How good is the broadband connection here?"
"Exemplary."
"Right. So while you're going through all that..." he waves a hand towards Harold's workstation. "Why don't I start looking up the Ember Group and this Banks asshole. There might be something out there – a forum or or web page. Even if it's old stuff it could help right?"
"It could." Picking up the laptop Finch quickly logs in before passing it over. Any searches made will be re-routed through a secure, untraceable line so letting the boy look for evidence couldn't do any harm. Of course it probably wouldn't do any good either - paranoid extremists didn't tend to leave evidence online after all, but he understands the feeling of helplessness when sitting back and being unable to help when a horrific situation unravelled before him. If Taylor kept busy with the computer at least he wouldn't be tempted to race after Mr Reese and get himself killed while looking for his mother.
If she was still alive. And if she wasn't there wasn't anything he could do for Taylor, and he's pretty sure that losing Carter would mean losing Reese as well. Harold turns back to his own computer and starts working once again.
A/N I usually reply to reviews but I reckoned you'd prefer a quicker update instead. Thankyou very, very much everyone who has given feedback/reviewed and put this story on favourites/alerts. It really is appreciated.
