A/N I own neither of these shows. Sure wish I did! I'm aware that some of the backstory for Person of Interest may change as the show continues to dribble out clues about things. I'm working with the most recent information I have. Thanks as always to Esperanta, who hunts down and kills my errors!
Pixels in the Night
Chapter Four
Connections
Washington, D.C.
She'd been in bed for all of twenty minutes before she was upright again, eyes narrowed, huddled over her computers. Almost 3:00 AM, and there she was, mainlining energy drinks and delving deep into the mass of damaged data that VoD had spiked into her hard drive.
It was like putting together tiny shards of a Christmas ornament without the first clue what the design of the thing was, but after a while she began to see a pattern. This pattern led not to the boring, precise Harold F. Jay, but to someone else—and after a little more work, she was pretty sure that the person was right there in the D.C. area.
It was just too easy to locate Mr. Jay. Whoever the poor doofus was, he didn't need Penelope Garcia stalking him across the Internet when the real VoD was so close by. Slowly, one little piece at a time, she began to recreate some of the shattered pathways that the noise attack had lodged on her laptop.
Sure enough, there was another path embedded there. She reconstructed it slowly and carefully, but she didn't have enough to complete the links. Finally, she tiptoed out to the area where she kept encountering VoD.
Nobody chased her away.
Recalling some of her early hacker days, she typed "koko?" She'd been friends, in a virtual way, with another top hacker, now long dead or sold out, or, like Garcia, behaving to stay out of the slammer. He'd used African expressions and words, sometimes Swahili, sometimes Tswana, when the mood struck him. He'd told her koko was the equivalent of "knock knock." She'd looked it up, and in Swahili it meant testicles.
She owed "egedn" for that one, big time.
Her doorbell rang. Her gaze flew to the clock because nobody rang your bell in the middle of the night unless something was seriously wrong. Her heart pounding, she thought of all the people she loved who routinely put themselves in harm's way to protect the public. God, let them all be OK, she thought.
She got up and hit the speakerphone button. "Yes?" she croaked.
"It's Tim," a somewhat familiar voice said, "from Longtime Louie's? Can I come up and talk to you for a minute?"
She wished she'd let Kevin and Derek fix the security camera right away, but oh, no, she'd told them, it can wait until the weekend, oh crap …
"Well, pardon me for being obvious, but it's almost four A.M.," she said.
"Fine," Tim said, but he didn't sound happy about it. "Just warning you that a bunch of G-men are at the shop. They shut it down completely for the night. Dad's over there with them now. They're watching security footage and fingerprinting everything you touched. I just thought you could use a heads-up."
G-men? Like the Bureau needed to know what she looked like or what she touched?
But she couldn't recall ever mentioning where she worked when she hung at Louie's. "Let them," she said, although their interest kind of creeped her out. "I'm not breaking any laws," she protested, as much to herself as to Tim.
But maybe VoD is, she reminded herself.
"Thanks, Tim," she said, "but I'm not worried about it."
"OK," the young man said. "I'll get on home then. You take care, Pen."
"I will, Tim. You, too."
Or maybe VoD is the Bureau, she thought. He was certainly authoritative enough—but he also had a sense of humor, which the Bureau as a whole did not. Individual agents, for sure—especially her team.
And he did figure out quickly that I'm a tech analyst.
And, truth be told, she was worried about it.
~ o ~
New York City
For the first few glorious minutes of his day, he was nobody. There was nothing quite like the freedom of having no identity. He lay motionless in one of his interchangeable beds in one of his interchangeable apartments and stared up at an eggshell-hued ceiling that was, like him, a blank canvas.
He stretched slowly, coaxing life back into his aching muscles, performing a few of the silly exercises the physical therapists had shown him after the—after the event. One thing that followed him from place to place, from life to life, was his physical disability. Regardless of how assiduously he covered his tracks, he was always that little man with the stiff neck and the limp. Fortunately, most of his life activities were carried out in a chair, so his handicap was barely noticeable when he was on the job. He could pretend, often for hours at a time, that nothing had ever happened.
Eventually reality crept in from the edges and sank deep into his being. He sat up—carefully, knees drawn up, back moving rigidly as a unit—and ran his hands through his hair. He was, oh, hell, Harold something. Wren or Crane or Partridge or Jay or some other damn bird, but most importantly, he was Harold Finch. He was the servant of the Machine. It was like being a vestal virgin, but without those pesky vows of chastity, of poverty.
Well, not directly.
Like any woman would find anything about him erotic except his bank accounts.
He pulled one of his dozens upon dozens of laptops toward him and consulted a spreadsheet that tracked his myriad telephone numbers. He'd had five calls—pharmacies, newspaper delivery services, work-related questions—on four of his identities. One call to his freelance journalist identity was from one of "his" sources. As he brewed his morning tea, he made notes on how to answer those calls.
After his shower and his breakfast, he selected one of a dozen cell phones and reprogrammed it, on the off-chance that someone—ideally, the enchanting Ms. Garcia—were to call Harold F. Jay.
You're a sad and pathetic man, he told himself. It never paid to let his hopes rise.
He threw the coverlet over his sheets, left a tip for the housekeeping service, and left for the library.
~ o ~
Quantico, VA
She never bothered trying to go to sleep after the Longtime Louie thing, so she got to the office much earlier than usual. She refilled her coffee mug, locked herself into her techie lair, and sat down in front of her monitors. To the array already in front of her she added a new one: the laptop she'd used the night before. She wouldn't use Bureau hardware or software to make these connections.
She wouldn't even use the Bureau's net connections. Instead, she took out her personal, non-Bureau cell phone and set it to function as a wireless hub.
This would all be on her, for better or worse. She calculated that she had twenty minutes until the early birds on the Team (Morgan and Hotchner) were awake, another ten before they first started calling on her. So—half an hour.
The first item of business was to get beyond the façade that was "Harold F. Jay." Whoever VoD was, he wanted her to connect him with Jay. Therefore, it was possible that the two men knew each other.
She'd already determined to her own satisfaction that Mr. Jay must have some alternate place to conceal his money, which meant that he was hiding something.
Which meant, of course, that she would find it.
And there it was, Mr. Jay's bank and credit card accounts, and totally without a warrant, so it had to be done completely on her own if she didn't want the Bureau climbing all over her.
Mr. Jay had a monthly automatic deposit from Molyneaux, Jay, and Fritts, followed by several automatic payments for rent, utilities, insurance, newspaper, and a cleaning service. He had subscriptions to two technical magazines. He's beyond boring, she thought. Every week he withdrew $400, no doubt for groceries, dog food, and incidentals.
Where are the restaurants? Online purchases?
Dog food. She frowned. Where the hell are the vet's bills?
Digging yet another phone out of her bag, she dialed Molyneaux, Jay, and Fritts, and asked to speak to Mr. Jay. Some friendly female informed her that Mr. Jay was out of the office, and offered to connect her with his voice mail.
"No, thank you," she said. "I'll try another time."
She rang off and punched in the number for his landline. "You've reached the Jay residence," a formal male electronic voice announced, and crisply directed her to leave a message.
A few well-placed requests online and she had the cell number of Harold Jay. Without further hesitation, she connected.
One ring. Two rings.
"Hello?" a deep male voice said. Nice voice. Like velvet.
A real voice.
Aiming for a seductive tone, she asked, "Is this Harold?"
"I'm sorry," the man said. "He's stepped out for a few minutes. May I take a message?"
Crap. For all she knew, this could be the freaking Bureau searching the guy's apartment.
Changing tactics rapidly, she turned on a more businesslike tone. "Yes, please," she said, falling back on her original cover story. Keeping her tone friendly, downright perky, she said, "This is Dr. Morgan's office, calling to remind him that it's time to bring Reese in for his shots."
"I—beg your pardon?" the voice intoned.
"Reese?" she prompted. "Neutered male beagle?"
"I'll, ah, give him the message," the velvety voice assured her.
"Thank you so much! We're looking forward to seeing his furry little face."
A pause. "I'll definitely tell Harold," the voice assured her. "I'll be delighted to tell him."
Huh, she thought. Maybe he's gay.
~ o ~
New York City
The man who at the moment called himself Harold Finch dried his hands and hung the towel on the rack, then cleaned the lenses of his glasses and returned to his computer station.
To his pleasure, his partner and only friend was seated across from his own chair, his left foot cocked up and resting on his right knee. He smiled as Harold approached.
"Good morning, Harold," he said. It was a weird smile.
"Good morning, Mr. Reese," the alleged Finch said somewhat sternly. First names were fine under some circumstances, but he found true comfort in distance and the formal courtesies.
The smile got weirder. "Keeping things from me, Harold?"
Finch was unamused. "I'm a very private person, Mr. Reese. As, in fact, are you. Has this only now penetrated your consciousness?"
Reese nodded toward the right side of his computer station. "Your phone rang while you were out. Harold."
Whoops.
What a loser, what a sad man you are, he reminded himself. Probably someone from MJ&F, hoping for a quick programming workaround.
Outwardly he showed nothing. "Phones do that from time to time."
"They do," Reese confirmed. "I thought it was you calling me—"
"From the restroom? Really, Mr. Reese, I can't imagine what—"
"Imagine my surprise when some woman from Dr. Morgan's office told me to tell you that it's time to bring me in for my shots."
Finch stared, utterly nonplussed. "Your what?"
"She said that Reese needed to come in for his shots. That they're looking forward to seeing his furry little face." He batted his eyes. "Harold, my face hasn't been furry for months."
Finch reviewed quickly Harold Jay's identity and back story.
Oh.
Oh, dear.
Finch drew himself up with as much dignity as he could manage under the circumstances. "If you'd been more civilized about it, I might have been inclined to explain that to you. Under current circumstances, I believe I'd prefer to keep my private life private."
Reese shrugged. "Be that way. No new number today?"
"None."
Reese unfolded himself from the chair. "Then I believe I'll go and conduct a little business of my own."
"Fine."
He supposed that he sounded more than a little dismissive, but—she'd called. There was no dog named Reese. Only someone who was delving deep into that particular shell that he hid inside would know about the dog. Considering the multiplicity of his identities, the likelihood that anyone else in the known universe was checking up on Harold F. Jay was unlikely.
On the other hand, any other entities poking around that particularly dangerous corner of cyberspace might have gone in search of either of them.
Or both of them.
He consulted his spreadsheet and determined that a hangup on Harold Jay's landline had preceded the call to Jay's mobile by four minutes.
Four minutes. That was fast work for accessing hidden cell records.
He wanted to leap online and follow her trail. He told himself that it was only to ensure that she wasn't being stalked by one of Weeks's thugs—or worse. Of course, if both of them were under scrutiny, it would be unwise, so he decided to wait for further information.
He finally allowed himself a tiny grin.
Oh, my.
He wondered whether Ms. Garcia had informed Reese that he'd been neutered.