"I'm here to see Henry Harris," said Reese. "I'm his grandson."
"Oh, certainly, sir," said the receptionist, smiling as she brought up the right computer file. "And your name was…?"
"John," said Reese. He cleared his throat. "John… Harris." It was surprisingly hard to get the name out. He glanced surreptitiously at Joss. She was studying an abstract print, all purple splotches, hanging on the wall.
The receptionist's forehead furrowed. "I'm very sorry, Mr Harris, I don't have you on my list..."
"It's all right, John, I'm just working on it," came Finch's voice in his earpiece.
"Oh. How strange. You're on it now. I could have sworn..." The receptionist looked up with a puzzled smile. "He's in Room 14, just down the hallway to the right." She pointed.
"Thank you," said Reese softly. At his glance, Joss abandoned her examination of the purple splotches and followed him down the corridor.
When they arrived outside Room 14 Reese found himself unable to knock. He stood there, clenching and unclenching his hands, working himself up to enter this room. He felt Joss's touch on his arm and looked down to see her brown eyes gazing up at him.
"You've faced worse, you know, John," she said quietly.
He tried to smile, but found he couldn't move his lips or cheeks – his face seemed frozen. All he could do was take her hand and squeeze it. Still holding it, he raised his other hand and tapped at the door.
There was a long pause before a sound came from inside. It would have been too much to call it a word, but it was more than just a grunt. They exchanged glances and Reese pushed the door open.
Henry Harris was lying propped up in a bed by the window. A tube in his nose supplied oxygen from a tank next to the bed. His face, as he turned it towards them, had an unhealthy yellow tinge to it. The noise of his breathing filled the room.
He smiled. "Pa- Pat? Who's that with you?" The smile faded suddenly. "You're not Pat. Who are you?"
Reese flinched, but he answered steadily. "No, Grandpa, I'm not Pat. I'm John."
Harris lay blinking for several minutes. The rasp of his breathing and the hiss of the oxygen were the only sounds.
"Johnny? You're not dead?" The yellowed face gave a slight smirk.
"Not yet, Grandpa." There was another silence. Reese found himself shifting his weight from foot to foot, unsure what to do. Sit or stand? Go or stay? The old man dying in the bed – because surely he wasn't much longer for this world – was his grandfather, his own flesh and blood. And yet he wasn't. He was just an old man lying in a hospital bed.
"So who's that with you?" came the whisper from the bed.
"Oh. Um, Grandpa, this is my fiancée, Joss," he found himself saying, tugging slightly on Joss's hand to bring her forward. With an absurd surge of pride he added, "She's a police detective here in New York."
"Police?" Grandpa looked away, staring at the darkness outside the window. "Does she know, then?"
Another silence.
"I know everything that matters, Mr Harris," said Joss. She gave Reese's hand another squeeze.
"Ha. You don't know, then." Grandpa was still looking out into the darkness. Slowly he turned his head back towards Reese. "You tell her, boy. See if she still thinks you're a nice guy then." The effort of this speech seemed to have worn him out, and his eyelids slid shut. After a moment Joss squeezed Reese's hand again, and they left.
They didn't go far – just across the hallway to a visitors' waiting room. It had chairs, a table, a small kitchen with tea and coffee making facilities and a microwave oven. There was no-one else there, and they sat down. Automatically Reese took the seat facing the door, able to see into the hallway and monitor the door of his grandfather's room.
Before he could say anything, Joss raised a hand. "Whatever it was your grandpa was referring to, John, you don't have to tell me. If you want to, that's another matter, but don't feel you have to just because he was trying to get a rise out of you. Like I said, I already know everything I need to."
He heard her out with a feeling of inexpressible relief. And yet… "Maybe it's time you understood. About why I don't have a family. 'Cause I left them behind a long time ago, Joss. Long before I joined the Agency."
Joss said nothing, so he took a deep breath and began.
"Patrick was a golden boy. He had everything – Prom King, valedictorian, top athlete, captain of the high school debating team. Good looking. Popular. There wasn't a girl in town he couldn't have had. Actually I don't think there were many girls he didn't have."
"I bet he left a lot of wounded male pride in his wake," said Joss, smiling a little.
Reese shrugged. "He was three years older than me, so I was only on the fringes of his crowd. That side of things just went over my head. Wasn't that interested in girls right then."
"Well, I'm sure glad that changed."
He twitched a smile at her. "Patrick's little sister, my cousin Julia, she was a golden child too. She was the same age as me. A sweet, sweet girl. Very smart, very pretty, very kind. When I was getting into fights at school she was trying to defuse 'em. She was in a lot of the same classes as me. Used to tease me into studying. She'd say, 'Come on John, you gonna let a girl beat you?' I look back, and it was Julia who got me through high school with decent grades and without being kicked out."
"She sounds lovely, John."
"She was." He sat looking at his hands. "But when she was eighteen she killed herself."
"Oh. Oh, John. I am so, so sorry."
"It was a couple of months after she died that I learned the full story. Patrick took me out drinking with his buddies, and when he'd gotten really plastered he told me. See, he'd gotten her pregnant-"
"What? His own sister?" Joss looked astonished.
"Oh, yes. Pat had trouble keeping it in his pants, and he was drinking a lot at this time. Came home from college for a mid-semester break, got drunk… but wait, it gets even more lurid. He told me, once he realised what had happened, 'what she'd done', he said, can you believe that? Anyway, once he realised, he talked her into an abortion. Who knows, maybe it wasn't so hard to persuade her. Poor Julia. It was only a few weeks later she hung herself."
Joss was silent along moment. She reached out and grasped Reese's hand and squeezed hard.
"Soooo..." he let out a sigh. "I took a day or so to think about it and the next night I went into the bar where Pat was drinking and I made him pay. Told him it was for Julia, walked out and went straight to the Sheriff and turned myself in. Thing is, even though I pleaded guilty and there was no trial the story got all over town. I guess I wasn't the only one Patrick bragged to, but Mom and Grandpa and Aunt Sharon and the rest all blamed me. That was when I decided, to hell with them. The Army became my family after that."
xxxx
Okay, so McKay was good looking in a slightly fleshy way. But he was also overconfident and had a high opinion of himself. Shaw had only known the guy ten minutes, but she was already wishing John had done a more thorough job all those years ago. McKay led the way out of the club and down the street to the next intersection. They waited in a crowd of other late night revellers for a 'Walk' signal. Shaw felt a hand encroach ever so slightly on her, um, chest, and told herself that this was what she wanted, wasn't it? She hadn't slapped the guy down when he'd come on to her at the bar, after all. Ah, the pitfalls of modern etiquette. When the hand moved a bit further she tensed. Screw modern etiquette, he'll be easier to protect unconscious at a safe house anyway. She was just about to apply a choke hold to the handsy bastard, crowd or no crowd, when something deep in her reptile brain screamed a warning. There was a guy in a leather jacket standing right next to them, but she'd already seen him this evening - at the club... The 'Walk' signal chose just that moment to appear, and McKay started out into the street. As her peripheral vision detected leather jacket guy going for something in his breast pocket she wrenched herself from McKay's increasingly intimate hold, whirled to face the other man and felt a needle go into her neck. McKay was caught in the crowd surging across the intersection while she found herself collapsing into the arms of the man who'd drugged her. "It's okay, I've got her, she said she was feeling dizzy earlier..." she heard the man saying. Quite a nice voice, she thought, English accent – that was important, right? But she really couldn't remember why….
xxxx
Casey was working late: he had three operations active if you included the New York thing, and the reports generated gave him an impressive amount of reading to get through. Not to mention the final mopping up from that shit in Oman. There was a report in from London about the New York situation, though. That might signal some kind of progress.
He frowned as he read it. Nothing. Not a damned thing from the British end. Previously helpful contacts either swore total ignorance or clammed up completely.
Casey leaned back in his chair. So just what the hell was going on in New York? 22:30 EST. The last report from his team on the ground there had been at 20:00. Earlier in the day one of the Brits, the big sandy-haired Scot Gillespie, had been following someone, but his people hadn't been able to identify the target. They'd also thought there might be a fourth member of the British team, a woman, but they hadn't got a good look at her. Useless bastards. All his resources hadn't been able to identify either the woman or her route into the country, so he was still trying to unravel that one.
He pressed the heels of his hands over his eyes. Well, no one ever said this job would be easy. He decided to wait until the next report at midnight before he clocked off for the evening.
xxxx
Finch was still trying to hack SIS at a quarter to midnight. Whoever it was in charge of their computer security, they were very good. Finally his wits caught up with him, and he changed tack. Kevin Gillespie had entered the US as a diplomatic courier bound for the New York Consulate office. Which was a great deal less secure than MI6.
He smiled with satisfaction as he rummaged around in the Consulate's files. "If they don't want you to see inside, they should build it better," he murmured to himself. Then his smile disappeared. "Oh dear. Oh dear, oh dear. There's three of them."
He tapped his earpiece. "Ms Shaw? Sameen?"
But there was no reply.
Xxxx
Jimmy Shannon watched Martin Bowen leaving the Coronet Hotel. Bowen walked four blocks before hailing a taxi, obviously making sure he wasn't being tailed. But Shannon was an old hand at this kind of thing. Better than those idiots who'd obviously been made this morning when they tried to follow Kevin Gillespie, that was for sure. Bowen didn't realise he was being followed, and Shannon was able to keep it that way all the way out to Queens.
Trying to follow someone once they made it out of the city centre into residential streets was always a challenge. No crowds to lose yourself in. So he was forced to drop further and further back until he began to be afraid he'd lose the guy. Finally the taxi stopped and Bowen got out, paid the driver and began to hike along the road. Shannon pulled over and considered. Where was the bastard heading for?
When he checked the map on his phone he could see nothing of any significance in the area apart from the Eventide Rest Home and Aged Care Facility. Why the hell would Bowen be going there?
He didn't want to get out of his car and try following on foot – there were hardly any pedestrians around, so he'd stick out like a sore thumb. But if he was right, Bowen would have to turn down a side street. Shannon could drive a few hundred yards further and just take a different street running parallel. Yeah, that'd work. If he was correct.
Up ahead Bowen had reached the street he would need to turn down. Bingo! Shannon smiled to himself and pulled away from the curb again.
xxxx
Shaw came to with her head pounding. She was lying on a bed in a hotel room with duct tape across her mouth and zip ties around her wrists and ankles. There was a man sitting in a chair next to her bed, a gun in his lap. He seemed to be dozing, but he opened his eyes as she stirred.
"Ah. Thought you'd be waking up soon."
English accent. Black hair, green eyes with a glint of humour in them. Square, stubby hands. Shaw glared at him.
"Now, I can remove that tape from your mouth, but only if you promise not to scream or make a fuss."
She thought about this for a long moment, then slowly nodded her head.
"Okay." The man sounded approving. "Ready? Here goes-"
He ripped the tape off in a swift motion.
"Crap, that hurt," said Shaw after a moment.
The man gave a sympathetic grimace. "I can't say I've ever had that experience, so I'll take your word for it."
"Who the hell are you?"
"I might ask you the very same question. You're not CIA."
Shaw narrowed her eyes at the man. "After sticking a needle in me and bringing me here, you expect me to say anything to you?"
The man shrugged. "If I wanted information out of you, sticking a needle in you would be exactly how I'd go about it. Right now, I want you out of the way. You're complicating an operation which was already complex enough."
Shaw considered this, wincing as her head throbbed again.
The man noticed the flinch. "Here." He dug in a pocket. "Your head must be pounding. Want some Panadol?"
"It's called Tylenol here," she said automatically. Her head twinged again. "Yes. Yes, please."
"I can't untie you, I'm afraid," said the man apologetically. "But if you don't mind me holding your shoulders up, you should be able to swallow these."
Shaw eyed him again. Actually, he was kind of cute.
"Oh, I'm fine with that," she breathed. "I kind of like being tied up, you know."
The man blinked at this, then took a deep breath."Okay, I'll just lift your shoulders up like this, right?" he said with studied professionalism.
Shaw smirked up at him.
To be continued...