Chapter 32: She wasn't.
Safe-house, Midtown Manhattan, January, 2015
Even with full sun shining through the windows Harold could see the glow from the red light blinking. Rhythmic – a soft red glow blinking on the wall behind his desk. The Machine had a message for him.
It was the wrong time of day for something good – some happy message fluttering in. This was something else. Harold stood for a moment in the hallway, his eyes fixed on the soft red glow blinking on the wall. In his mind's ear, he could hear the sound of a phone ringing – insistent, like the ones he'd always answered on the streets outside.
Ringing. Ringing. There was no such thing as walking past.
He turned and looked over a shoulder down the hall behind him; no one there. They were in tending to Miss Groves, fiddling with the improvements he'd made for raising her temperature. This was just what a good engineer would do – solve a problem, make things better.
He'd taken parts from equipment there in the apartment, and he'd even raided a storage locker in the basement where Mr. Reese kept some of his old Ranger survival gear. Harold remembered when Mr. Reese had disappeared for a time, just months after he'd started work. Harold had quietly held his breath at the time – uncertain if Mr. Reese would return. And when he did, days later, he'd brought two duffel bags back with him. Harold could see there was something different about him when he'd come back, as though he'd been living rough out there – unshaven, his clothes and shoes muddied. There were dark circles under his eyes, too, like he hadn't slept much. But some of the restlessness, and that wild look that crept into his eyes now and then – that seemed diminished after his return.
Something had happened out there while Mr. Reese was gone. He didn't want to talk about it, so Harold let it go; but he did allow Harold to watch him unpacking and re-packing the contents of the two duffel bags. Even at the time, Harold had thought it odd. Odd that he could be so secretive about one thing, and unusually open about the other. It had always stuck in Harold's mind.
One of the duffel bags Mr. Reese placed in the locker in the basement of this building, and the other he hid in a secret location. To this day, Harold had no idea where. It seemed to Harold like some habit left over from his CIA days.
From that same basement locker, Harold returned with two mummy sleeping bags filled with down. And then in Miss Shaw's medical closet, he'd found a pair of rubbery pads meant to wrap around a sick patient's legs. A small heater unit sent warmed water in a circuit through the pad. The unit clamped on the end of a hospital bed. Two white tubes brought the heated water to each pad, then back again to the heater once it cooled on its journey.
Harold wished there were more of the pads to cover more surface area, but if they wrapped the two they had around Miss Groves, then insulated with extra layers of blankets inside the mummy bags, heat would stay more consistent inside than by using warmed IV bags. Not to mention that Miss Shaw could now dial in the temperature she wanted on the unit. The heater would cycle on and off automatically to maintain whatever temperature she chose. Miss Shaw's only comment was that she'd need to protect the skin under the pads, and keep checking for burns from this more aggressive reheating system. She seemed satisfied with the improvements, but then again, it was always hard to tell with Miss Shaw.
When Harold had left them, everyone had their eyes turned to the cardiac monitor. Each time Miss Groves shivered, the orderly tracing on the screen suddenly turned to chaos, like a child's scribble on paper; you didn't need to be a doctor to see that something was wrong. Alarms shrieked for good measure. Then everyone turned to Miss Shaw to read her reaction. Her dark eyes remained calm – this jitter in the tracing was artifact, she said, not real. It came from the muscle jumps from shivering, not from Root's heart, so no danger.
Once Harold heard that, he'd left Miss Shaw and Miss Rose there, preparing Miss Groves for transfer to the pre-heated mummy bags. He had no desire to be there for this part, to watch them unwrap her and see the damage the Zheng had done. Harold would leave the doctoring to those whose aptitude was a better fit – and he turned now to what the Machine had waiting for him.
Harold stepped inside his room, closed the door softly behind him and limped briskly to his desk. The laptop sat open, screen dark, with its small red light blinking soundlessly toward the wall. He lowered himself to his leather chair, and in another moment his hands were on the keyboard – its feel so familiar, so comfortable, poised on top of its keys.
In another moment the screen jumped to life and the Machine soon offered him a series of choices. Harold was quite sure the Machine knew exactly which he would choose. His eyes flicked from file to file on the screen, then held on one for a second longer. The Machine selected the chosen file and opened it on the screen in front of him.
Harold scanned through what turned out to be a letter. Midway through, he paused to look up from reading. His eyes drifted high over the top of the screen, unfocused, as he searched his memory for something jogged by the letter. Some tantalizing fact lay just out of reach. If he could just have a minute to focus, it would come to him. But the Machine had already selected the next item to show him. A square window opened in the top left corner of the screen. Motion and a man's steady voice pulled Harold back to the screen. His search for that memory would have to wait.
"Mistah Finch," the soft voice began. The dark outline of a man's seated figure appeared inside the small square window of the video. His face was heavily shadowed.
"By the time this communication reaches you, it may already be too late. I send this to warn you. Our common foe has come here to find me. When he does, he means to force me to intahvene. I have no desire to do so. You know me, Mistah Finch, though we have nevah met. My hope is that once you know my identity, you will come for me. We cannot allow him to win."
With that, the video ended. Harold stared at the darkened square in the corner of his screen. Words echoed in his head: you know me; we've never met; our common foe. He didn't recognize the voice, his musical speech, or his silhouette. Nothing about him seemed familiar. Harold moved his gaze to the camera eye of his laptop, and said directly to the Machine:
"Identify speaker."
No information typed soundlessly across his screen. He looked back to the eye of the camera.
"From what location did the message originate?"
On his screen a black map popped open with the outline in white of the U.S. coastline, Western Europe, and most of Africa. A bolder white line traced backwards from a star where New York City would be, to another star where London would be, and then down across the Mediterranean, deep into Africa. A white star at the end of the tracing blinked at him.
"Identify."
The map expanded quickly on his screen, and zoomed in first to identify the country in Africa: Nigeria. Yes, Harold thought, the man's accent had sounded Nigerian. Then the map expanded again and identified a new star, Abuja, capital of Nigeria. And finally, a smaller blinking star a short distance north of Abuja opened. It resolved into a photo of a giant gray stone structure rising straight up out of a brushy landscape. Harold stared at it. On his screen in the conversation box with the Machine, Harold learned its name: Zuma Rock, Nigeria.
He leaned forward to view this imposing structure. It dwarfed stands of mature trees at its base. Its size and the suddenness of its rise from the earth made it look foreign, otherworldly, as though a giant hand had placed it there for humans to ponder.
More data began scrolling next to the photo, locating the Rock more precisely, listing dimensions and composition. Then the photo rolled away and a video opened in its place. The view of the Rock began to move. It was an aerial view, a low flight just above the top of the massive structure. Gray rock puckered and flattened irregularly across its surface, punctuated by islands of brushy growth seeded there by the wind.
For long minutes the top of the Rock scrolled by beneath him. Then, like a carnival ride cresting, the surface suddenly dropped away – plunging down to nothingness. Harold lurched in his seat.
The view flew out away from the ledge in empty space, then swung sharply back, around to the Rock's vertical face. He saw long, closely-spaced gouges running the full height of the dark gray rock. And as the Machine fed the image, Harold noticed something strange rotating into his view. In pale chalky white were two large irregular circles, like ghostly eyes staring out from the gray; and below them chalky slashes for a nose and mouth. This rock face had a most human face looking out on one side.
The face rotated slowly in front of Harold. As it did, the Machine noted his interest and paused it for a better look. Harold stared intently at the screen. In response, the Machine zoomed in on the image. Ghostly eyes stared back and the mouth twisted in a grimace.
Data began scrolling alongside the image, the Machine presenting him with all relevant facts and historical context but Harold had looked away again, searching in his memory for whom this could be. Nigeria was home to many who made their living, legally or otherwise, in the cyber world. He had watched the level of sophistication rising through the years, but this message coming to him like this was something altogether different. Whomever had sent it, and whatever the meaning of the massive rock, he needed to unravel the clues.
Common foe – this was likely a reference to Greer. He'd made his way to Nigeria, after all, so he was the most likely foe. Their Team had tracked Greer and his two female accomplices across the Atlantic aboard a British Hospital Ship. The Argos had been bound for Sierra Leone and the Ebola outbreak there but someone in the U.S. government was able to divert it back toward New York. And in a mission that had all the earmarks of a Navy Seal operation, the three wounded agents were airlifted from Manhattan to the approaching ship. It seems the three had recovered enough to disembark from the ship in Senegal, on the westernmost coast of the African mainland. Within days, though, the Machine had traced two of them chartering a jet to Abuja.
Once there, precious little intel surfaced from the pair. If Greer was indeed searching for the mystery man, there must be a serious expectation that he could assist Greer in some way. Samaritan was essentially offline now, thanks to the efforts of Miss Groves, Mr. Pierce, and Harold's late friend, Arthur Claypool. They'd exploited a hidden entrance to Samaritan's internal code, something only its author could have left behind. Arthur had allowed their Team to bring his creation to its knees. It couldn't see or hear, though its internal processes continued. Greer and his people were desperate now. Harold knew they would stop at nothing to untangle Samaritan from his grip. He expected Greer to pull out all the stops to find him and the Team; if they got too close, Harold was fully prepared to destroy Arthur's work, destroy Samaritan. But this new information was a complication he hadn't foreseen. Had Greer found someone else, someone they could exploit to rescue Samaritan?
Data scrolling had paused – the Machine noted the changes in Harold's attentiveness: pupillary dilation, skin perfusion, muscle tension, heart rate and breathing effort – all tiny data points it collected, recorded, and compared, ceaselessly, about Harold. Just now he was thinking, not reading, and the Machine made adjustments in response. Logic dictated certain questions be asked, and in the time since it had intercepted this foreign message, the Machine had prepared some answers.
The message itself had come through an unusual security pathway. Even so, it was greeted with serious scrubbing through multiple layers of security protocol before it was opened. The fact that it had come from a Five Eyes node was noteworthy, but not sufficient to save it from the scrub. Rather than sending the message along to Harold as received, it was isolated in safe space, behind a secure glass wall. There, it was optically read, and the text re-typed by the Machine on its side of the glass wall in simple font to present to Harold. No mixing of the two data streams was allowed and the original was kept in safe space, far away from the Machine and their network.
As for the video sent along with the letter, the same scrub cycle was applied, and the signal was optically read while the file was isolated in its own safe space. The digital images were then re-created on the Machine side of the glass wall, so that Harold could see this portion of the message, too. Once the transcription was complete, the Machine began to look for answers to the questions that would arise. A plausible story was beginning to emerge, but there were still many missing details.
Harold leaned back in his chair. He slid his notebook in front of him and began to jot some notes to himself. The Machine read his neat, precise handwriting, upside-down, and re-ordered its files. It would have to go back and bring Harold up to the latest iteration of the Machine's research. They both anticipated a long afternoon of work ahead to determine who had sent the message.
Down the hall, in the medical space, the lights were lowered now. The gurney from the helicopter ride was gone, rolled to a side wall. In the hospital bed at the center was what looked like a blue mummy with tubes and wires coming out of it. Shaw and Harper Rose had just finished transferring Root from the gurney to the hospital bed, lifting her on one of the thin cotton blankets beneath her to the waiting mummy bags, one inside the other. They placed Root in the center of the inner bag, and rolled the cotton blanket over the top of her, layering the ends over her torso. She was lying on one of the rubbery pads, which was itself lying on top of another thin cotton blanket. Once the two women applied the second pad over the top of Root's torso, they brought the lowest cotton blanket up around her, closing the pad ends over the top of the upper pad. Her upper body was now completely encased by the two pads, with a thin layer of cotton between the pads and her cold, traumatized skin. Shaw and Harper used the heated blankets from the dryer to wrap around Root's legs and over the top of the pads, then zipped the two layers of mummy bags over the top of everything. Very soon, the pads would have all the layers up to the temperature she had set, and then it was just a matter of observation, and changing the heated IV bags infusing fluids into Root's veins to warm her core. They'd managed to make the transfer with the least amount of disturbance to Root, and their reward was a steady tracing on the cardiac monitor. Harper had watched Shaw watching the monitor closely as they made the transfer. When it was over, she wanted to understand why.
"Expecting trouble?"
Shaw glanced at her. It was one of those glances like between people of totally different status, Harper thought. Okay, Shaw might be the bad-ass Root said she was, but Harper had earned some creds, too, on the Team. She wasn't exactly a choir-girl, herself. So maybe Shaw should take it down a notch or two.
"Hey, I asked you a question!" flew out of her mouth. Shaw just turned, her dark eyes calm, and looked at her like at an annoying little kid. Anything she could come up with to say next would only make things worse. She didn't need to stand there and take this. Harper backed away and strode from the room. Shaw watched her go, and turned back to Root.
Reese stood there on the last step of the stairwell, just a step above the elevator lobby in their building. He stuck his head out and checked – the lobby was empty. He held his phone next to his ear while the phone on the other end of his call rang three, then four times. Reese clicked the button to end the call. She wasn't picking up. He flipped down to the V's in the list and tapped the number for Harold's vet in Midtown. A familiar voice answered.
"Colin, John Reese," he said, casually.
No hesitation. "Mr. Reese, how's it goin'? Are you back in town? Dr. G said you were called away – short notice an' all. Bear's ready to go whenever you are, Mr. Reese."
"Sure, that's what I was calling about. I know it's been a lot longer than we thought." Reese waited a moment longer and then asked. He kept his voice low and even, like this was a business call.
"Dr. G left me a message to call her. Is she there today?" He could hear the change in Colin's tone, like he hated giving bad news over the phone.
"Oh, I guess you haven't heard. She's back home, in England." A tightness began to settle in his chest. He managed to keep his voice low and even.
"Too bad I missed her. Did she say when she was coming back?" Reese could hear it in his voice.
She wasn't.
