Chapter 4: The Right Thing; Shaolin

Manhattan, October, 2014

How long could it stay like this? How far down would he go – if he just let go and let himself sink. So easy, to just let himself sink lower, slowly, drifting down. No pain. No thoughts. It was all just right – the lighting, the temperature, the weight of the air on him – just perfect. Better than free-fall in air. There was no sense of falling at all, but there was movement, downwards, he thought.

It was not long before Harold's head tipped forward, slowly, until he reached the limits of what his damaged spine would allow these days. He was at his desk in the library office. Three in the morning, well before dawn, and yet there was some light in the darkness of the room. A soothing light entered from the high windows. Manhattan never really went to bed. There was always traffic, activity, streetlight just outside, and it painted the windows with dim white light that glowed into the darkness of this space that he had loved. Surrounded by thousands of books, tens of thousands just on this floor alone, winding in careful, precise lines like corridors; he could smell them, sense their paper, their leather covers, their quiet aging on the shelves surrounding him at his desk.

There was safety here, here among the books. They were patient with him. They regarded him with deference, even tenderness, in his current state. They could see that he was struggling. They made space for him to rest among them, as they watched over him all night long.

Reese found Harold in the library office sitting alone at his desk, just past dawn. It was very quiet. Even Bear hardly stirred on his bed. He just looked up to see who was there, and wagged his tail softly, then went back to sleep. Harold stirred as footsteps approached.

Reese carried in two blue and white coffee cups from the deli down the street. He was up early, too, before dawn, arriving at the deli with the dark-eyed quiet men who worked construction, laborers who grabbed coffee and egg sandwiches before piling into pickups headed for dusty, fenced-in gashes in the ground.

One cup had tea for Harold, and the other had coffee for himself. Reese reached out to Harold with the tea and he took the cup but then just sat with it, absently, in his hands. Steam from the hot coffee curled up off its black surface, and Reese aimed his cup so he could observe Harold's face, above its rim. Harold was staring off into space, but there were small movements in his expression as though responding to something in the stream of his private thoughts. Reese frowned. Harold was too quiet – it was unsettling.

Since they had returned from Bethesda, Harold was more and more distracted, distant. He hadn't tried to confide in anyone as far as Reese knew. And Reese wasn't sure this was the right time to bring it up – about Grace. He could see how it was weighing on Harold's mind, but he was waiting to see if Harold brought the subject up himself. If not, Reese would understand. Harold just wasn't ready to talk about it yet. He needed time to come to terms with what had been done to Grace. Every day more was coming out; everyone on the Team could see that Harold was sinking further with each new detail. They didn't know what to do to help him. The things that they would do for each other: cajoling, ribbing, pulling rank – none of it would work for Harold. He was different. His mind worked in such a different way than theirs. It made them all uneasy to see him like this.

Fusco and Harper had secluded Grace inside one of the safe-houses as soon as they had returned to Manhattan. They were working with her every day, like a tag team, slowly taking her back through the events that she could remember from the last two months. Harold had been able to give them details about her abduction in Italy. Greer had made sure that Harold saw it happen, on a TV monitor, when Harold was his prisoner in Bethesda – just one more tactic to try to bring Harold to his knees. Using details about the abduction, Fusco and Harper were able to help Grace piece together a little more of the story:

She remembered that she had been held in a concrete bunker, underground, for much of the time. She was alone in her cell, unable to tell day from night, or one day from the next. Her captors had kept coming for her at all different hours, interrupting her sleep, asking her all kinds of questions that she couldn't answer.

She told them that Greer was initially friendly towards her – encouraging, coaxing. But as time went on, he began to get more and more upset, impatient with her when she couldn't answer his questions. They started threatening her with worse treatment, even torture. Grace was scared. No one knew she was down there. She had no hope of rescue.

But then Grace noticed that their tactics changed. She remembered waking up and knowing that something had happened to her, but she couldn't recall what. She began to dread waking up that way. Blocks of time were missing. She felt more and more blank. Her memories were fading, sliding away just beyond her reach. It seemed like every time she woke, more of her memories were missing. She began to feel terrified of what would be left once her memories were all gone. The whole thing had paralyzed her; she had no recourse, no way to stop them from taking everything from her.

Grace recalled that they had always brought her to a room with white walls, each time they came for her. At first she would be seated in a chair, with her hands tied behind her. Then, she was lying down. People were standing over her, speaking, but she couldn't hear what they were saying. Darkness would come, and the next thing she knew, she was waking in her cell, missing more time.

She did clearly remember that Greer had sent a particular man to her cell, an interrogator who pressured her for information, insisting that she was holding back what he needed to know, saying over and over that she was lying to them to protect her colleagues. She couldn't convince him that it wasn't true. He kept coming, day after day, wearing her down, until she couldn't bear to see his face at her cell door any longer.

Harper and Detective Fusco had even showed her a picture of the man. They told her his name was Harold, but didn't explain anything more about him. Seeing his face again like that had made her pull back, repulsed. That was a face she never wanted to see again...

Reese could see the change in Harold's face. Harold was taking this hard, feeling fully responsible for everything that had happened to Grace. It was tearing him up inside to know that Grace had become a target just for knowing him. He wasn't sleeping, wasn't eating, and wasn't concentrating on his work. Reese had been finding him like this, at his desk, neither sleeping, nor fully awake.

For the rest of them on the Team, things like this came with the territory. In their line of work, capture and mind games, even torture, were possibilities they lived with. They were trained to deal with it. But for Finch and Grace, this was so far past the boundaries of their experience that neither one could grasp it when it had happened to them. They were not prepared for this. They were civilians, not soldiers.

When Harold had first come home, after the Team had freed him from Greer, they knew that Greer had used rounds of profound sensory deprivation inside an isolation tank, then drugs and coercion, to try and break him. Greer was desperate to get his hands on the Machine. He had tried to mislead Harold, tried to convince him that his Team was gone, destroyed by Greer's own forces.

He had used a woman he altered to look just like Grace. Greer knew that Harold would trust Grace, and he had used her to feed Harold lies about the Team. The isolation tank was just the beginning. It had weakened him, stripped him of his senses again and again, had taken away his sense of time. Inside the black tank he was floating, awake and aware, but unable to make sense of his surroundings. Each time he was put inside the tank, he would wake up in total darkness. No vision, no hearing, no sense of touch at all – afloat without sensation, in total blackness. Awareness without sensation became terror.

The brain without sensation shuts down. It cannot function without input. He would hallucinate until his brain – mercifully – went quiet. Sleep state? Unconsciousness? And then, if he woke again, still inside, it would begin all over again...

Then they plucked him from it:

He would wake in a room, by himself, in a comfortable chair with his feet up on an ottoman. And there were stacks of his books, as though he had been napping after reading all morning long. The door had opened and she had entered, crossed to his chair and kissed him awake. Startled, he would look up and see her face. In this state, Grace's image became Grace herself, right down to the voice he knew so well. He had been so hungry for something familiar, something real. He made her real in his mind.

She told him how he had come to be there in that room, recovering she said. He had locked Reese and Shaw together inside a vault, to keep them safe, while he carried out one last mission for the Team. Everything was collapsing around them. Harold knew he was likely not going to survive. He was badly wounded, shot by one of Samaritan's soldiers, but he was making his way across a rooftop where he would upload the final instructions that would silence Samaritan for good.

She said his Machine had been attacked; the only way to save it had been to siphon off it's core processes into a suitcase, so it could be kept hidden from Greer and survive the final devastating blow they had planned for Samaritan. But the Machine was crippled in this compressed state, running only essential code, unable to help Harold with more than just some final guidance. Odd that, at the end, it was Root's voice in his earpiece, giving his Machine's final words to him before full shutdown.

Harold was there on the roof, but faltering from shock, blood loss. He remembered leaning against a wall at the edge of the rooftop, looking down at the street below before something caught his attention.

Reese was on a nearby rooftop. He had escaped the vault, floors below Harold, with the Machine's help. Reese knew that Harold might have had this ending in mind, sacrificing himself to save the rest of the Team and his Machine.

But Reese and the Machine had conspired. Harold was sent to the wrong rooftop. Reese would be the one to upload the code to destroy Samaritan, and then draw fire from Samaritan's soldiers, so Harold could escape and live on.

Grace told him that Reese had given everything in the end, for him. So like Reese.

She let him believe that Reese allowed himself to be ambushed on the rooftop. Harold could only watch helplessly as the firing started. His Machine could not intervene. Harold could not even call for help from his Team.

For Harold, it was just like Carter and Reese back on the street corner, all over again. Shots fired, one of their own down again. But this time it was Reese who would not get up. Harold remembered the sight of him, sitting in the open on the rooftop, no longer firing back. He was slumped forward, gun dropped down from his hand, resting on the ground at his side. Harold couldn't see his face. Reese had lowered his eyes, away from the soldiers, perhaps sparing Harold from the memory of his eyes in his final moments.

There were no longer any movements in his chest. Red stains, too many to count, spread one into another across the white shirt. So still. Final.

It was over... He was gone... Unbearable... His friend.

Grace comforted him in his grief. And she used that terrible moment to tell him that the entire Team was gone now, too; hunted one by one, preferring to die in battle than to surrender to Samaritan. She had told him that he was the only one left, that he had barely survived his own wounds.

Harold had believed her. Greer was right. He couldn't help trusting Grace. Greer's plan had nearly worked.

For Harold, much of his own capture and torment were still submerged below his conscious mind. It would only give him a little of it at a time, so painful were these memories to him. He could only access bits and pieces. So Harold could understand what Grace was going through right now.

His own torture in the isolation tank had left him numb, empty for months after he was freed by the Team. He had had no feelings at first, no emotional life at all. He could only pretend to have feelings. But now, as his memory of it was beginning to return, stirred by Grace's torment, there were new, deeper feelings: pain, confusion, and smoldering anger. There was an unfamiliar stirring inside him; he was beginning to want something he had never desired before in his life – revenge.

Harold looked up and realized Reese was watching him. He was so uncomfortable with these thoughts. He was not a violent man. He had not been raised to think this way. It was like something ripping away inside, to have such thoughts, when he had tried so hard his whole life to do the right thing. Harold looked to Reese again.

Reese was a soldier. He had killed people, had done things that Harold could not even imagine. And yet, Reese was a decent man, in spite of his past. Reese had been chosen precisely because of his past.

It had all seemed so simple at first. They would get the numbers from the Machine, and they would work together to find out who was a victim and who was a perpetrator, and then prevent any harm to the victim. Reese was perfect for that. He knew how to surveil, how to interview, how to apply pressure, and ultimately, how to stop a threat.

But, Harold had never considered what effect it would have on all of them, especially Reese – all of this violence, all of this pain, from wounds they could see and those they couldn't. How had it all come to this?

All of their sacrifices – Carter's death; Reese's near-death with Carter, and all of the wounds he had endured for them; Nathan's death in the ferry boat explosion; all the deception and lies he had let Grace believe about him, uprooting her to move to Italy, and then her capture and torture.

It was all his fault. He had created this monster that had devoured them all and spat them out, crushed, ruined. It had to stop. It must stop...

"Finch," Reese said softly and Harold raised his eyes, the downward spiral of his thoughts broken.

"Mr. Reese," he said back, "you're here early." Harold avoided his eyes, pulling off his glasses to clean them, instead. Reese frowned.

"We have work to do, Finch. I'm meeting with Leon tomorrow and I need to know what was on that thumb drive he gave me last week - he said maybe something to do with power grids?"

Harold nodded and sat up straighter in his chair. He reached over to his laptop and powered it on, sipping cold tea from the blue and white cup on his desk. Then he looked up at Reese while he over-explained: "We can't assume Mr. Tao is trustworthy. I had to open the drive on a stand-alone computer far away from here. The drive could have been dangerous to us, transferring malicious code if we opened it in here. It could have attacked our systems – like a trojan horse."

Reese nodded as though he knew what Harold was talking about, but he didn't, not really. That was Harold's world. But he had to agree about Leon – he couldn't be trusted. Reese had to know whether Leon was just leading them on, or whether he really had something on that drive.

"The drive did have schematics. That was correct. But the important part had nothing to do with power grids. I believe it has more to do with the sites where the plants are located. I can't be sure yet. We need more data. If Mr. Tao wants to prove himself trustworthy, he needs to provide us more data."

Reese nodded his head in agreement. Leon would be meeting him again the next day and Reese had left word that he wasn't impressed with what Leon had supplied thus far. Leon would have to do better.

Steppes, West of Beijing, China, October, 2014

Dawn light just painted the Eastern sky at the horizon, and the new glow falls across his face. His eyes are closed, and he sits tipped slightly forward on the flat surface of a tree stump cut close to the ground. It's cold in the morning mist. Wind has started up again, fitful, blowing hard across the grasslands before him, nothing left standing high enough to block it, for centuries.

Slowly, the light increases. His full face and shaved head illuminate. He opens his eyes. In front, before him, the empty land falls away below his bare feet. He rises, bows deeply, in acknowledgement of sunrise, which stares, one-eyed, in return. Cold eye; no love for this windy land.

No matter. He adjusts his footing, knees turned in, like clamping a goat, arms held at his sides, hands held forward. In sunrise misty light, he begins the form, Siu Lim Tao. Slow movement, graceful, forward, powerful, like motion in molasses, tracing back to Shaolin. Meditation in motion. Over and over. Precise. Practiced.

Not far away, in the small shack where he sleeps and eats his meals, a small ledge near the iron grating where he cooks holds a photograph. Crisp, sharp, foreign, held down in the harsh winds by a rough stone; on it, the clear image of a man. The photo fluttered in the wild wind... Reese. It was John Reese.