Chapter 28: "Can we play something else?"(rated T); bend to his will; "On my way."; Time ceased to matter;

Please note: In the Works Cited portion of Chapter 1 there are suggested music pieces to accompany this and other Chapters to enhance your experience of reading. I hope you enjoy them...

Queens, NY, January, 2015

Root lifted her head, waiting for the door to open. This could go either way. And she definitely had her preference about who she wanted to be on the other side of that door. Heels. Quick, short gait. Light steps. Damn!

Root could hear them talking – Chinese – no idea what they were saying. And then she heard them pulling the hose again, swinging it back through the doorway.

"So you're not even gonna come over here and give me a kiss? I didn't miss you!" she shouted at them. Fan gave a quick command over the top of Root's shout, and that metallic squeak down the hall sounded. The hose had emptied itself, draining into the hallway, and now it started to fill all over again. Root could hear it. Fast, before the water started shooting from the hose, Root turned herself to face the wall and readied her free arm and leg to cushion the shock of hitting it this time.

Spurting ... then the cold water hit her square in the back, like electric shock going through her. The bucking force scraped her across the floor and then picked her up as its speed jumped to maximum. She slammed the wall with her free knee and elbow. The pounding water-force thudded on her back between her shoulder blades, then straight up to the back of her head, but this time her knee and arm bought her some distance from the wall and kept her face from hitting.

As they aimed the hose up and down her body, and side to side, the changing force skidded her over the rough wall, flailing on the chains that held her by one arm and one leg. She tipped and slipped first one way, then another, until her skin scraped raw, but at least she could breathe facing this way.

The men went a little longer this time before they stopped the hose. Maybe they were just frustrated their video wasn't turning out as well as last time, she thought. There was some kind of grim humor in that – at least in her mind.

When the hose shut off, she skidded and dropped to the floor, hard. This time the sheet hadn't wrapped around her like a tourniquet, and she wasn't gasping for breath. Another small victory. She'd take it!

Fan was saying something to one of her boys over there by the door. Root heard someone coming up behind her, a man this time, judging by the sound of his footsteps. He grabbed her by the hair through the sheet and pulled her head backwards. There was nothing she could do, taut on the chains and facing the wrong way, to do any damage with her fist or a foot.

Through the sheet she could just see him holding something pointy above her. It looked like a long tapered knife with a long wooden handle. He just held it over her as though he was posing for – right – the camera. Fan must be filming the whole thing.

What Root wouldn't give right now to drop him with a well-placed kick.

Or a head-butt – that would work, too.

She threw her head backwards as far and hard as she could. Bingo! At least if she was going down, they were going to know they'd been in a fight. She heard him gasp and buckle, dropping the knife. He sputtered away, cursing she suspected, in Chinese. Then Fan sneered something at him and he limped back, sliding the knife away over the floor with his foot.

They were having trouble closing the door over there; the hose was in the way, and she could hear the men kicking at it, and spouting Chinese epithets as they kicked at it. Their whole propaganda session had failed. Root turned to yell something over her shoulder at the retreating trio.

"Hey, Fan, can we play something else? This is getting boring."

The door slammed and she could hear two people stomping down the hallway, and a third bringing up the rear. It sounded like he was still limping. She'd have to remember that move, for next time, Root thought. And she laughed out loud to herself – in the dark and the cold.

For a little while all that effort and concentration had warmed her inside. But re-wetting, and the cool basement air were catching up.

She was shivering again, even shaking now. More misery.

Zuma Rock, January, 2015

Olawale moved to the lab next. A little while after he'd powered up his system, he reached into his back pocket. Tethered through the buttonhole at the top of the back pocket was a metal carabiner clip with a thumb drive hanging from it, tucked into his pocket. He freed the drive from the clip and slid it into a port on his system.

When the directory opened on his monitor, he scanned through the list and picked one of the files. This was the easy part. He set about wrapping the file in a special protocol that would look like a data packet coming out of a high-security server node, from Five Eyes to be exact. Global systems like Samaritan and the Machine would certainly notice a packet like this one appearing on a priority channel. Greer had shown up here in Nigeria trying to recruit someone to help him crack a high security computer system – Samaritan to be exact. It must be in really bad shape if Greer'd come all this way to find him. If Olawale was right, then Samaritan must be so disabled at this moment that it wouldn't be able to see this packet. In that case, the Machine would be the first one to "notice" it and pick it up. If he could get it noticed and not destroyed, then he had a way to send a message to Harold Finch. If not, then he was on his own, and then if Greer's people found him, no one else would ever know. He'd disappear without a trace, just like his father before him.

Olawale sat down in front of his monitor, and typed a message to attach to the video he was sending. When he was done, he closed the message file, and wrapped it inside the Five Eyes protocol. He sat up and took a deep breath, forgetting his ribs for the moment.

Olawale moved the cursor over the green button, hesitated for a moment, as he confirmed all his steps for the last time in his mind, and then he clicked LAUNCH. The text file rolled itself up like a scroll, wiggled on his screen and disappeared with a little twinkling sound. He wished it godspeed.

It was done – and there was no taking it back now. His fate was in the hands of those across the sea.

Next, Olawale went about setting up a doomsday scenario. If things ever got so bad that he had no other choice, he would launch this set of instructions and his system would self-destruct in less than 30 seconds. All the work, all the time and effort over the last five years – gone! He didn't want to think about needing to go that far. Things would have to be dire for him to take that step. Like his system falling into the wrong hands. He hoped it never came to that. Once he'd entered the instructions, he saved them and then set it up so he'd only have to tap the launch button to run the file and it would automatically destroy all his code. Just in case.

He was starting to get hungry now. In the kitchen he had a little gas-powered stove, and he went in to get it. He could bring it to the front of the lab, where it was open to the outside. The fumes from the cooking gas would draft outdoors from the opening, part of this large crack in the rock behind Zuma's right eye. He could make a nice meal for himself in short order. Olawale had a heavy black iron fry pan to make some homemade pan bread from dry ingredients in his pantry. And he had some dry spicy meat, goat, wrapped in some kind of white covering that he had to peel from the meat. It didn't need refrigeration so it was simple to store and use. Once he made the pan bread, he'd use the same fry pan to cook up the meat with a little water to make it softer. Then he could spoon the meat onto the top of the warm bread. Rolling the meat inside, Olawale could eat it just like that. Spicy and warm, and filling. With a little tea he'd be all set for the evening. By seven p.m. it would be too dark to see outside, and he'd try to go to bed early tonight. He was all in from the goings-on today and nursing some very sore ribs.

Greer turned to Kara sitting next to him in the back seat of the sedan. She'd pulled the window closed between the two of them and the driver up front, then looked his way to start:

"Those kids didn't know anything about the target here in Abuja. But one of them gave up Olawale," Kara said in a low voice. Greer nodded. Consistent with his reasoning to come here in the first place.

"I cloned his phone when we were in his office," she said. Greer moved his eyes to her.

"He may try to evade," he said softly. She agreed and pulled out her cellphone. She tried to call Olawale's number. Then she tried a local scan to see if she could pick up a signal. Nothing on either count. Not surprising. He must be trying to evade them by turning off his phone and disconnecting the battery. Kara clicked on one of her contacts in her phone list and after a few rings, a female voice picked up.

"Martine, Kara." She went on to net out the situation to Martine, who was back in the hotel in Dakar. She'd stayed in Senegal to coordinate all the ground arrangements – between London, Nigeria and a military base in nearby Cameroon. They were scrambling an extraction team from their base in the northern tip, a few hours' fly-time east of Abuja. Tactical support would be available for any kind of mission necessary.

"Hold on – lemme tell Mr. Greer." She lowered the phone to her lap and then repeated the plans to Greer who silently assented with a nod.

"OK, now I need you to do something else for us. Bring up that cellphone locator software on your laptop. Let me know when you're up." She could hear Martine in the background clicking and tapping on the keyboard, then waiting for things to initialize.

"OK, I'm ready," Martine said. Her voice still sounded hoarse from the neck wound back in Manhattan.

"Find the program that's something like Eye-spy – eye, like an eyeball," Kara said. She waited while Martine looked for the program.

"Got it."

Kara walked her through the instructions for using it. She gave Martine the cellphone number Olawale had used. If he'd tried to disable his phone, even if he took out the battery, there was still a way to track the phone. It used some of the functions in the phone that created small amounts of data and could be queried without the phone even being turned on or connected to a battery. Time zone data was available from the phone, and that could lead to the cell tower that had last picked up the phone's signal before it was deactivated. Then there was a nifty little pressure sensor piece of software installed in most cell phones. It would give up height location information even if the battery was disconnected. From a few pieces of data like that, the location of the phone in space could be triangulated with remarkable accuracy. A little piece of wizardry from one of the East Coast Universities in America.

"Call me back when you get a hit," Kara said and she ended the call. Since they didn't want to keep driving when they weren't sure where they were headed yet, they had their driver go where they could pick up some food. Kara guzzled two bottles of water, and then gorged on some of the local fare, followed up by a large cup of coffee. Greer ate sparingly, and drank tea. They headed for a gas station next, so the two could wash up in the restrooms. By then, Kara's phone was ringing and Martine had some news. Their car was already back on the road, heading north on the main highway above Abuja.

"Are there any tall buildings around you?"

"Like how tall?" Kara asked.

"This is saying a thousand feet. Are you sure this is working?"

Kara leaned forward and slid the window to one side. She started to ask the driver if there was a building that tall anywhere around here, and then she stopped with her mouth hanging open. There, in front of them, was an enormous, huge rock that stuck straight up out of the ground. It practically filled the whole windshield in front of them.

"How tall is that thing?" Kara said to the driver.

"Seven-fifty? Something like that," he said. Kara did a rough calculation in her head.

"Over 2000 feet," she said, turning to look back over her shoulder to Greer.

"Is anything else around here tall like that? Even half that tall?" The driver thought for a moment.

"No, Miss." He shook his head. "Mostly just like you see the ground here." He pointed to the terrain around him, gently rolling landscape, with nothing approaching the height they were looking for.

Kara slid the window closed again and sat back in her seat.

"We're gonna need some equipment here. If he's up there somewhere, it's gonna be interesting to try to find him." She realized Martine was still hanging on, on the phone. Kara gave her an update and told her what they'd need and how soon.

"On it," Martine said and ended the call. Greer looked up at the monolith in front of them, shaking his head. So, they had a younger man disguised as the older man, Olawale, who Greer had known, himself, twenty years ago. Who was the younger man, and why was he masquerading as Olawale? Even his students hadn't known.

When they found him, and they would find this younger man, would he lead them to the target they were seeking here? Or to the real Olawale? He needed someone who would know the target, and he didn't care which one it was. Greer knew it wasn't much to go on, but some time back, Samaritan had been in a test configuration, running for a brief time to test device configurations and perform a dry run before it came on live for a demonstration. During the dry run, Samaritan had encountered an anomaly. Long story, short, it had traced the anomaly to London and then back to Nigeria. The reference was muddled there, though, and Greer had thought of his acquaintance, Olawale. He was in the business there, and if anyone knew the players in Nigeria, he would. Greer had expected Olawale could tell him who it was that Samaritan had discovered. Anyone who could penetrate Samaritan's formidable security like that could likely be convinced, coerced if necessary, to do it again under more controlled circumstances.

Unfortunately, the chance to reach out sooner to Olawale was squandered, and once Samaritan had come under attack by Harold Finch and his Machine all of their efforts were placed on wresting Samaritan from Finch's grip. Even with all their efforts to undo the damage, Samaritan remained essentially useless to them now. It was "awake" but unable to communicate. And they had a deadline to keep with the U.S. government. Samaritan had to be up and working as soon as possible.

Samaritan itself had pointed to the one who might be able to break the grip Finch had on the system. They just had to find him here, in Nigeria. Greer sat back in his seat, studying the monolith in front of them. He'd found over time that there was always a card to play in these dire kinds of situations. Greer had been around for a long time. He'd seen a lot in his years of service. This problem, too, would bend to his will, and they would have the ending they sought. Reinforcements were on the way. Surveillance would begin after dark this evening and continue until they had their man.

Towne car, en-route from JFK airport, New York

Harold's driver, Winston, built like a rugby player – one solid muscle – was waiting for them at the terminal when they cleared customs. Private jet service like Harold's allowed certain perks, such as priority customs processing, and they were quickly through and out to the car. Their luggage could be delivered later – right now, the priority was getting to Queens to meet with the rest of the Team. The DC Team – Logan Pierce, Joey Durban, and Harper Rose had arrived earlier today, and already found Detective Fusco. The Team had also made a stop on their way into New York, at Finch's warehouse to get the specialized weapons and hardware they'd need, plus their body armor.

They had to assume they'd be outnumbered; down in the tunnel that ran below that whole block of Chinese businesses on that street in Queens. Everything there was close-packed together and connected in ways the Team couldn't predict. There could be traps anywhere and everywhere.

Reese and Shaw were looking through schematics they had for the stores, but the real thing could be completely different than what they had in front of them now. The Zheng had gutted the buildings to suit their needs, turning block after block into their hood. The Zheng controlled the streets in there, not the police. Nobody got in or out of there without an OK from the watchers. And the watchers were everywhere.

Reese had the rest of the Team staging in a motel blocks away from the area they were about to penetrate. The plan was for Finch to leave Reese and Shaw at the motel. He would monitor the group's activities on his way back to the safe-house in Manhattan. Shaw had given him instructions on what to prepare for Root, and Harold was the only one expendable from the firefight about to erupt. Once Reese and Shaw got there, the plan would be reviewed one more time with the full Team, and then they were going "live". The first priority was to locate Root. Then, they had to get her out.

A light on Harold's laptop started flashing as he worked inside the car. He looked at the screen first, and then up at Shaw, nervously. Another message had come in; found, and then routed to him by the Machine. The flashing light was telling him that he had an urgent message waiting.

Shaw kept her eyes steady on Harold, until he finally broke and clicked the message on his screen. Try as he might, he couldn't keep his face from showing a reaction – even though the Zheng had muted all the sound, they'd pieced the most dramatic parts of the last session with Root. At the end there was a male shown pulling Root by the hair, backwards, and threatening her with a long knife. Harold turned away at that point. He couldn't bear to watch any more.

"Give me that laptop, Finch –" Shaw said, her dark eyes drilling into his. She watched him hesitate.

"I'll have to shoot you, myself," she said quietly, as if she meant it. Harold turned to Reese – who shrugged his shoulders.

"Better do what she says, Finch."

He made some bird-like movements with his head and neck, and then finally turned it over to her. Shaw re-started the video and watched it through to the end. Her face remained emotionless throughout, even at the end. When it stopped, she looked at the message left for the Team, scrawled on the screen:

"No more chances. You come now."

She looked up from the screen.

"On my way," Shaw replied.

Queens, NY

Everything Root had tried to warm her body was failing now.

Stretched out long with a shackle on one arm and another on one leg, she couldn't pull herself up into a ball to preserve heat.

The sheet around her was sopping wet, wicking heat from her skin, and she couldn't get herself up off the concrete floor.

Root had passed the stage of violent shivering, and was just entering the next stage.

All shivering had stopped. Thinking slowed. Time ceased to matter.