AN: So things have gone a little off-canon, but we're nearly at the end anyway...

Chapter 13

With Reese holed up in the hotel room, Finch goes about things the way he prefers: slow, quiet, methodical. He spends the better part of the first night and the day after in the usual places, delicately opening the back doors to any number of sites he'd never planned to enter again without a very good reason.

He manages to get to the fringes of Snow's life, longing for the days when he could type in a social security number and know everything, immediately. He still could, if he swung open that particular back door, but that is for absolute emergencies, only — the only time he ever intends to open it beyond the number feed is if he has to shut the whole thing down, command the machine to fry itself and hope it hasn't grown so independent that it will no longer listen.

When he realizes it could take weeks before he gets to anything of substance, he decides to speed things along, calls Reese and pokes and prods at the unknown patches of his CIA past, until Reese finally blows up and hangs up on him. And now, with new angles, new directions, he goes back in.

All the while, waiting for the beep, fearing the beep that will tell him there's another number, still undecided as to what he'll do if it comes. Probably hand the whole thing over to Carter, part and parcel, see if she can prove she's right that the police can handle it.

But the beep never comes, and four days after he dropped Reese and Jessica off at the hotel, he pries the one little nugget he needs out of the mass of data. There, still buried in AT&T's servers, is the voicemail Cara Stanton left on a prepaid burner phone that must have been Reese's.

Reese must have destroyed the phone before hearing it, Finch thinks, because surely he would have mentioned it — unless that had been why he'd hung up. But if Reese has heard the message, he never needs to again, and if he hasn't, he never will. Finch does not want to listen to it, but he does, all the way through.

Stanton starts, breathless, by telling Reese they've been burned, not to come back to the safehouse, to go to ground. She screams, then, and the phone goes skittering across the floor, so the audio sounds more distant as there's a sound of a scuffle, and then a body hitting the floor.

The sound of two silenced gunshots, and then ragged, wet coughing. Repeated thumps — perhaps the person on the floor being kicked, and a noise closer to a wounded animal than a human. Then, mercifully, the thumping stops.

"You bastard. We weren't under Agency orders," Stanton chokes out, "We never were, and you knew, you always knew."

"The Agency's just a figurehead," a man says, and the voice is clearly Snow's. "The Consortium always gets the real work done."

"Illegally," Stanton says with a steely voice that earns Finch's admiration, before she descends into a fit of coughing.

"Shame you had to grow a conscience, Cara," Snow says. "At one point we were thinking you had the potential to move up in the organization. But then you had to start asking questions, and now we're going to have to put an end to you and your soldier."

"He doesn't know anything. Leave him out of this."

"Sorry, Cara, even if I believed you, we always tie up all the loose ends. You should just be glad I'm pressed for time, or we'd take this a lot slower, see if I could get anything useful out of you. Any last words?"

"See you in hell, Mark."

Two more silenced shots, in quick succession — head shots, Finch assumes, because then the only noise is a set of footsteps, walking away. Then 16 minutes of silence, followed by the sound of the door opening again. Perhaps it is Reese, but the message hits the time limit and beeps off.

Finch unclenches his fists slowly, one joint at a time, stares at the little crescent moons his nails have left in his palms. Exhales slowly, waits for a mild wave of nausea to cease. It's not the first time he's heard someone die. Before Reese, he listened to and even saw quite a few of the irrelevant list deaths, in voicemail audio like this, surveillance camera video, the occasional wiretap. It never gets any easier.

When the disgust has passed, he considers what to do. It's sloppy tradecraft, not to have checked the phone, not to have deleted the voicemail, permanently — surely if Finch could get to it, Snow and whatever this Consortium is could have done so — but then, there's always been a note of sloppiness about Snow, Finch thinks. And this is exactly what he needs; now, he just has to be careful about what he does with it.

When he finally contacts Snow, he does it through a string of proxy servers, one that circles the globe three times, each sufficiently booby-trapped to ensure that Snow and his Consortium will never, ever, trace it back to the library.

It's tempting to make a VOIP call, so that he can hear Snow's reaction, but it's safer to use email, and Finch always prefers the safer option. He sends an email to one of the active addresses he's found for Snow, with the audio file attached:

"Clear out of New York. Call off the hunt. Still deciding where to send this if you do not. Tell me, what would be worse for you? I have contacts at the NSA I know are not in your little consortium, but then, CNN is so very tempting."

He receives no response, but this doesn't surprise him.

So Finch digs back through his video archives, finds the footage of Carter, calling Snow, runs it through a script that extracts the phone number from the tones she dials. Calls that through VOIP, to hear an automated voice tell him it's been disconnected. Then, finally, he smiles and rises stiffly from his desk.