Chapter 3

Of all the things he'd thought of when Harold told him to be prepared for a shock, this had not been one of them. That she could still be alive, living under a false name in Long Island, that this Lisa Williams could actually be Jessica, had never crossed his mind.

But the dates fit, he realizes, staring at the picture on his phone. Jessica had been "killed" three months before Lisa Williams bought the house he'd just been searching. And although there had been female remains found in her house, there'd been nothing conclusive that it was her. He'd just assumed it was the Agency, being thorough, leaving no evidence. He should have looked closer, thought harder, but he'd been on the other side of the world, and in the distance the news of her death had somehow required less proof.

"Mr. Reese? John, are you okay?"

"Yes, Harold."

A gust of wind and a loud shock of thunder remind him that there's a storm coming, and he resumes running to the LIRR station, inappropriate clothes be damned. She is not dead because of him — she is alive, even if she is not safe, and he can feel hope, hope like he hasn't felt in years, intermingled with worry. He has a second chance, now, and they must find her.

"Finch, dig a little more into that offshore account. She may try to access more of her money outside of the ATM network."

"Yes, I'll look into it."

The storm catches up to him quickly, soaking him through his suit. No sign of her at the LIRR station, and he drips his way through Grand Central and back to the library.

"There are towels in that cabinet over there," Finch says, pointing, and he helps himself to one, dries his face and hair as he walks back over to the computer monitors.

If Reese had any doubt that Jessica was the woman at the ATM, it is gone when he sees the video up on the larger monitor. Her hair is shorter, now, and she looks frightened, but it is clearly her. He was so close. He was in her house when she came in the door, and now he's scared the hell out of her and made her run.

"There's something I want to show you," Finch says, minimizing the picture and pulling up the spec for what appears to be an engine. "You've always been operating under the assumption that Jessica was killed because of her past relationship with you. An assumption, I must admit, that I shared. But this is the spec for a Fuller Avionics FA32 engine. As you know, Jessica was working for Fuller at the time of her death."

"She'd been with them for six years," Reese says. "They transferred her to their New York office in 2007."

"Yes, and they had just completed testing on the FA32. Everything I can find indicates that the tests showed a better-than-acceptable failure rate. But when they actually started using the FA32 in the field, on modified Black Hawk helicopters, they lost five helicopters within the first year, all with engine failure."

"We heard about those choppers," Reese says. "Nobody wanted to go near one of them."

"In all, 17 men have died," Finch says, pulling up crash footage on one of the other monitors. "There was a Congressional inquiry, but Fuller was still paid for all of the engines the government contracted for. The company claimed that the Army was failing to maintain the engines properly, given the hazardous conditions they were being used under. But what if there had been problems that appeared when they tested the engine? What if Jessica knew about it and threatened to blow the whistle?"

What if, Finch does not say, that was actually what caused her number to come up in 2007, when he saw her as a pretty face he was unable to save? He merely looks at Reese, waiting for a reaction. For one brief moment, Reese looks as though he might cry in relief, but it passes.

"If she knew Fuller was going to try to kill her, she could have faked her own death," Reese says, "but I think she would have needed help."

Jessica was from the other world, the innocent world. She did not have access to cadavers, to the resources that would have set up this new life. So who was —

Beeping from Harold's computer interrupts his thoughts, as Finch minimizes a Black Hawk crash and pulls up a new window.

"I'm into the offshore account," Finch says. "Looks like one of the Cayman banks. She had 1.6 million dollars in there. And — yes, she just made a wire transfer, $10,000 to a Chase branch on Park Avenue. Intersection of Park and 27th."

But Finch is not the only person watching the offshore account, and Jessica is gone before Reese gets to the bank. This time, she wakes in the back of a cargo van with a blindfold on and a gag in her mouth, and she thinks surely she will die soon — only Nathan would know to save her, and he's gone.