Note: I can't decide whether this chapter or the next one should be uploaded first. The next one is funny, but you'll have to put up with a bigger cliffhanger than the last one. :)

Rsync is an absurdly useful Linux file transfer utility (although it's been ported to Windows and Mac OSX as well). SSH is an ubiquitous secure Telnet replacement that allows an administrator to execute commands on a remote system. It also allows one to forward arbitrary encrypted traffic. I have the feeling Finch would use both often.

Thank you all so much for all the encouraging reviews!

#####

Two Years Prior

The lift arrived at the ground floor. Reese stepped into the lobby just in time to see the glass exit doors swing shut behind Elizabeth Ruben.

"I got her, Finch," Reese said, tapping his earpiece. He ran across the spacious lobby, dodging office workers. "Following her outside."

"Be careful Mr. Reese."

"Why, thanks, Harold. Here I was planning on taking a lot of unnecessary risks today."

"Ha-ha."

There were two large fountains a short ways away, one on either side of the wide cobblestone path. Each fountain was backed by a long, curved waterfall, which fell over the Landis company logo and splashed back to the blue-tiled pool. Elizabeth had stopped at one of the fountains and was sitting on the wide cement rim, her hands in her lap, her legs crossed at the ankles. She wiggled her sandals and peered around.

Several seconds later, a man with slick brown hair brushed past Reese, walked to the fountain, and sat down next to Elizabeth.

"Finch, she's meeting someone. Sending you a picture."

"That's Issac Leroy, Mr. Reese; Miss Ruben's coworker."

Reese sauntered towards the opposite side of the fountain, being careful not to appear interested in the two workers sitting at the edge. He faced away from them, watching out of the corner of his eye. The steady splashing of the waterfalls made it difficult to hear their conversation. He would've liked to be closer, but he didn't think he could get any nearer without attracting attention.

Isaac was talking. Reese struggled to hear over the noise.

"...wanted to apologize...asshole lately..."

Elizabeth spoke louder. "You think?"

"...stressed..."

"I'm stressed too, Isaac. I'm not being an ass." Elizabeth sighed, hunching her shoulders. "What's wrong?"

"...hard to explain...shouldn't have brought it up...just wanted apologize for...could make it up...dinner tonight?"

"Awww, thanks, Isaac. But I gotta finish coding this routine."

"...work too hard, Elizabeth."

"Bad habit, I know. Maybe another time? Look, I gotta get back upstairs..."

"...see you later."

Reese turned away as Elizabeth walked past him, her sandals tapping on the cobblestones as she headed for the gleaming entryway of the Landis building. Reese was about to follow her back to the office when he noticed Isaac pull out a cell phone and flip it open. Isaac laboriously typed out a text message and sent it by squeezing the phone hard enough to make his hand tremble. Glancing around, he headed back inside as well. Reese followed.

"Finch? Elizabeth just turned down a dinner offer from Isaac. He seems a little...aggravated. I'll keep an eye on him."

#####

Reese took a small sip of coffee, put the cup back in the holder, and leaned back in his seat. Night had fallen. Elizabeth Ruben was safely in her bedroom. If the light was any indication, she was still awake. Reese had once again parked a ways down the street—in a different car than the one he had used the night before. He had coffee, he had a doughnut, he had binoculars, and he had an empty water bottle—everything he needed for a long night of surveillance.

"So, Finch," he said. "What did you find out about Elizabeth and her coworkers?"

Even over the phone, Reese could hear Finch's fingers tapping away at the keyboard.

"I'm still processing the information from Miss Ruben's home computers," he said, sounding rather like a little boy in a candy store, despite the fact that it was nearly 11 o'clock at night. "The ones she leaves running at all times, that is. More data is coming in every minute. I had to set up another RAID cluster just for Miss Ruben's data. You wouldn't believe the amount of information she stores on her home network."

"It can't be any more unbelievable than a massive supercomputer that spots crime before it happens, Harold."

"Point taken, Mr. Reese. Anyway...Miss Ruben is indeed working on security algorithms for a new line of Landis routers for homes and small businesses. She specializes in wireless security, it appears. I have seen her source code commits on the Landis systems and I must say, they are quite elegant. However, I can only find isolated snippets of source code related to elliptic-curve cryptography. There is an encrypted partition on her main desktop, and it is frequently accessed. She probably keeps all her sensitive code there."

"Can you decrypt it?"

"Working on it as we speak, Mr. Reese. It's proving unusually recalcitrant. I'm also attempting to trace the encrypted emails from the thief's cell phone. It seems they were sent from a throw-away email account registered through the Tor anonymity network. We probably won't be able to find whoever hired the thief that way."

"Great."

"However, I have been able to find a plethora of information on Elizabeth Ruben's coworkers at Landis..." There was a pause, and Reese's phone lit up with a new message. "I've sent you pictures of three of her coworkers, the ones she interacts with most often. You briefly met Isaac Leroy." The picture popped up on Reese's phone. "Thirty-three years old, full time employee; he is assigned as Miss Ruben's mentor at Landis. His father died of a stroke two years ago; his mother lives in Alaska. Mr. Leroy is a very, shall we say, creative programmer, although his formatting leaves much to be desired. However, I must wonder how much of the code he submits is actually his. I found quite a bit of Miss Ruben's source code on his workstation. It appears that each time she uploads her work to the company source code repository, Mr. Leroy's workstation downloads a complete copy, even if it was marked as a private branch."

"He's trying to steal her work?" Reese reached into a paper bag, broke off a tiny chunk of the doughnut, and nibbled on it, savoring the bittersweet chocolate. He caught a glimpse of movement at Elizabeth's apartment and quickly raised the binoculars to his face. But it was only the young programmer herself, fetching yet another cookie from atop the refrigerator in the kitchen.

"It is quite possible, Mr. Reese. Mr. Leroy's finances are irregular as well. In the past week, he's transferred thirty thousand dollars to an offshore account in regular increments under five thousand dollars each."

"The crook that broke into Elizabeth's apartment said he was going to get paid that exact amount."

"Yes. It's also worth mentioning that Mr. Leroy now has only ninety-two dollars to his name."

"Well, he could be our guy...maybe he's gambling on a big payoff. Something feels funny about him though. What about the others?"

"The second one is Tara Dodson. Thirty-seven years old, full-time employee. She's a project manager at Landis. She specializes in low-level network protocols and is a decent programmer. Her mother and father own a trucking company called Fandango Transportation. Nothing strange about her finances that I can find, but I'll keep digging."

"And the third?"

"Bobby Tam. Thirty years old, was just hired last year as a full-time worker at Landis. He's a system administrator and maintains many of their servers. He's exceptionally skilled at Linux shell scripts and Perl programming. Stable finances, resides with family here in New York. His father owns a computer store in Queens and his mother is a chef at a small bistro."

"Who has the most to gain by stealing Elizabeth's algorithm?"

"Hmm. If I had to guess, Mr. Reese, I would say either Dodson or Leroy."

"Maybe you should tail one of them around tomorrow while Elizabeth is at the library. I can follow the other one."

"What about Miss Ruben? You don't plan to leave her unprotected, do you? It is possible we missed a potential perpetrator at the 94th street library."

"I'm sure Fusco could appreciate a good book or two."

"I somehow think not. In the meantime, I'll continue to sort the data as it comes in. There is enough information here already to analyze for weeks..."

"Don't forget to sleep sometime tonight, Finch."

"Pray tell, how much have you slept in the past forty-eight hours, Mr. Reese?"

"Enough. I'll talk to you tomorrow, Finch. Get some rest."

"You should as well, Mr. Reese. Good luck with the surveillance."

He signed off, and the car was silent.

#####

Detective Carter showed up a few minutes past midnight. She swung her slender frame into the car and leaned back in the passenger-side seat, setting a large thermos down by her legs.

"Good evening, Detective. What brings you here?"

"I got Finch to tell me where you were. Wanted to talk to you." She looked around the dark neighborhood. "Which apartment are you watching? The one with the light on?"

"Yep."

A quiet scoff. "Looks like we're not the only ones staying up past bedtime."

"She went to bed at about nine last night," Reese said. "Odd schedule."

"Staying up late for work, maybe. Doesn't she have two jobs?"

"She attends college, too. Friday and Saturday night classes."

Carter shook her head, eyes wide. "Not enough hours in the day for all that."

"She seems the type to work herself to exhaustion."

"Uh-huh. Look who's talking. How long have you been following her around?"

"Oh, the past two days."

"And how much sleep have you gotten in the past two days?"

"Enough."

"John—how much?"

Reese turned his head to glance at Carter. "Did Finch ask you to play mother hen?"

Carter shrugged. "He might've mentioned that he thought you were overworked. I volunteered to come check on you. It beats late-night paperwork at the precinct."

"I'm more exciting than a bunch of dead trees?" Reese grinned. "Good to know." There was another flicker of movement at the apartment. He raised the binoculars again, while Carter leaned forward in her seat and squinted. It was Elizabeth. She appeared to be pacing throughout the apartment. Every so often, she ran her fingers through her hair.

"She looks nervous," Reese said softly.

"Have you guys figured out why she's in trouble yet?"

"We're still working on it." Reese watched Elizabeth disappear back into her bedroom. "What did you want to talk to me about, Carter?"

"Aside from trying to get you to take care of yourself every once in awhile?"

"Yeah. Aside from that."

Carter sighed. "It's Donnelly. He's got a task force after you again. Not real big. Maybe four, five guys."

"Another fan club. Does he want my autograph?"

"John, seriously. He's got a new tack. Now he's trying to find people you've helped to see if they can point him to you. He's got his ear to the ground, listening for anybody who says they got saved by some guy in a suit."

"And how's that working out for him?"

Carter chuckled, shook her head. "I think he's just happy to be out of that hospital and back in the field. I know I'd be."

"Kara used to shoot better than that. He should be glad he's alive."

"He is. He says, first thing he's gonna do when he finds you? Thank you personally for saving his life. Then he'll arrest your ass."

"He won't find me, Carter."

"Are you sure Finch fixed your phone?"

"I haven't gotten caught again, have I?"

She sighed, shook her head. "You'd damn well better hope he doesn't get to you again," she said. "I can't take another Rikers, John. I just can't. And neither can you."

A tiny shrug, that was the only response. Carter waited for him to say something more, but the man next to her stayed frustratingly quiet. She knew she wouldn't get much more out of him tonight, not unless she pulled out the big guns. And she would've, too, if it hadn't been for Elizabeth passing the window of her apartment yet again, reminding Carter that someone's life might've depended on the two of them staying alert and on-task.

"John?" said Carter.

"Yes?"

"Give me those damn binoculars and go to sleep. I'll wake you in four hours." She rattled the thermos and added, "I'll have coffee for you."

He considered, then handed over the binoculars, leaned the chair back, and closed his eyes without a word.

#####

Finch blinked wearily and found that his computer desk seemed to have been turned on its side. The monitors, keyboard, and mouse were all floating up above his head as though they had been glued to the dented wooden surface of the table.

He blinked again and realized that he had fallen asleep at the desk.

"Oww," he muttered as he pushed himself up from the table to sit up straight. He adjusted his glasses and peered at each monitor. The main one contained many windows with information on Elizabeth Ruben's coworkers. The screen on the left contained the processes that were siphoning data from Miss Ruben's home network via the backdoor, and the one on the right—

Wait!

He squinted at the largest terminal window on the left screen. Last night, the terminal had been copying data from Miss Ruben's desktop to the new RAID device. But instead of the expected progress bar or a summary of a successful transfer operation, he now saw:

rsync error: unexplained error (code 255) at rsync.c(544) [generator=3.0.6]

He frowned. If rsync—one of Finch's favorite file-transfer utilities—had quit midway through, he'd have to start the process all over again. While rsync handled partial transfers gracefully, it still had to scan the disk to see which files had changed since the last run, and that took anywhere from several minutes to an hour. Sighing, Finch retyped the rsync command and pressed enter.

ssh_exchange_identification: read: Connection reset by peer

rsync: connection unexpectedly closed (0 bytes received so far) [receiver]

rsync error: unexplained error (code 255) at io.c(600) [receiver=3.0.6]

"What?" he muttered. A nasty feeling began to bubble in the pit of his stomach. By instinct, he tried to log in to the backdoor and ping Elizabeth Ruben's desktop—but the backdoor would not respond.

Worried now, Finch pinged her router. It responded. Her Internet connection was still up, but the backdoor—which he had programmed to be extremely aggressive towards connecting to the systems at HQ so long as it was attached to a usable network—was unresponsive.

"Oh no," he whispered. "Oh no, no, no..." Scrolling rapidly through the log files, he saw that the transfer had failed at about 3AM. So had every single other operation that he had tunneled through the backdoor.

It was as though it had been physically disconnected early in the morning.

He wasted no time dialing John Reese's number.

"Mr. Reese?" he said.

"Good morning, Harold—"

"John, where are you?

"94th street, tailing Elizabeth to her library. She left a little late. What's wrong, Finch?"

"I'm afraid we have a very grave problem on our hands. Miss Ruben discovered our backdoor device last night."

#####

Reese frowned, glancing towards the silver SUV several cars ahead of him. "What do you mean, she discovered it?"

"Mr. Reese, I'm not sure how I can make myself any clearer. The backdoor is offline. She found it. Disconnected it."

"So that's why she was so nervous last night. Finch, I hid that thing pretty well—"

"She must've spotted the network traffic somehow," Finch said, talking very fast. He sounded as panicky as Reese had ever heard him.

"Can she trace it back to you?"

"Of course not, Mr. Reese, I took many precautions when programming the backdoor—but Miss Ruben knows she's being monitored now. If only I had bothered to masquerade the traffic as—!"

"Focus on worrying about Elizabeth now, Finch. We'll figure out how she found it later."

Reese watched as the silver SUV abruptly changed lanes, cutting off a small red sports car before taking a right turn onto a side street. The SUV narrowly avoided a collision with a bicycle and sped off.

Startled, Reese said, "Finch, she's driving worse than Fusco. She just turned off 94th street. I don't think she's headed for the library. I'm following her now."

"Don't let yourself be spotted, Mr. Reese. She may be trying to shake any pursers"

"You know, Harold, I have tailed people before."

After some minutes, it became clear that Elizabeth Ruben had no intention of driving to the library. Reese recognized the route Elizabeth was taking.

"Finch, she's headed to the Landis offices."

"Why on Earth is she going there?" said Finch. "She works at the library today."

Reese watched the SUV pull into a side entrance and drive erratically through parking lot, then vanish around the back of the squat building.

"She just pulled around to a loading dock. I'm going to get closer."

"Mr. Reese, are you sure that's a good idea?"

"No, but we don't have much choice, Finch."

Reese parked the car at the side of the building and got out. He edged along the wall until he reached the back of the building, then peaked around the corner. A narrow road ran between the building and a dirt embankment topped by a row of trees. The silver SUV was parked a ways down the road. Elizabeth was standing about thirty feet away, facing a blank metal door. She had her laptop bag over her shoulder and her cell phone in one hand. She tapped a message, then dropped the phone into her bag. Even at a distance, Reese could tell she was trembling. Her hair was half-combed and there were deep, puffy circles beneath her eyes. It looked like she'd been crying.

There was no one else around. An oily, overfilled dumpster lurked a few feet away; Reese hunched down and made his way towards it, watching Elizabeth through the gap between the dumpster and the wall.

"I see her, Finch," he said softly. "She's waiting for someone."

A minute later, the door swung open, and Bobby Tam stepped out.

"Elizabeth!" he said. "I got your message. What's wrong?"

In response, Elizabeth yanked the zipper open on her laptop case, reached inside, and pulled out a gun. She brought it up and pointed right between Bobby Tam's wide, terrified eyes.

"I thought you were my friend," she snarled.

Reese sighed and reached for his own gun, hoping dearly that he wouldn't have to use it. "Finch?" he said. "We have a problem..."

#####