Note: Reese might be a little out of character here. But I figured that, since he is intelligent enough to have survived delicate operations in the CIA, he's probably intelligent enough to remove a laptop from a hard drive, place it in an external enclosure, and clone it. If he didn't learn that in the CIA, then Finch likely taught him.

The "backdoor" is based on a real-life Raspberry Pi hack. I wanted to refer to the little embedded computer by name but I couldn't imagine Finch saying "Raspberry Pi" with a straight face. The RPs don't have Power over Ethernet that I know of, but they could still be used as described with an external power source. Since this site seems to be severely allergic to anything that looks like a URL, and since this IS a story about computer geekery, here's the URL. :)

68 74 74 70 3a 2f 2f 77 77 77 2e 74 75 6e 6e 65 6c 73 75 70 2e 63 6f 6d 2f 74 75 70 2f 32 30 31 33 2f 30 35 2f 30 38 2f 72 61 73 70 62 65 72 72 79 2d 70 69 2d 70 68 6f 6e 69 6e 67 2d 68 6f 6d 65 2d 75 73 69 6e 67 2d 61 2d 72 65 76 65 72 73 65 2d 72 65 6d 6f 74 65 2d 73 73 68 2d 74 75 6e 6e 65 6c

Web servers often sit in a "demilitarized" zone between a router and a business' firewall.

Last, am I the only one who occasionally likes to imagine Reese in his underpants? :)

#####

Two Years Ago

Much as Harold Finch loathed to admit it, Landis made stout firewalls. The company was a believer in using what they produced, and so try as he might, Finch had been unable to gain access to the company's intranet from outside. Their embedded firewall software was exemplary.

The stubborn, childish IFT geek in Finch cringed at the perceived slight against his company, but there was no use denying it.

So Finch had sought an indirect approach into the Landis network. A close examination of the company's public-facing servers had revealed them to be running an old version of an open-source web server, on a Linux platform in dire need for security patches. Finding a usable exploit was, naturally, trivial. Within an hour, Finch had gained root access to every one of the public web servers, which sat outside the watchful firewalls protecting the company's internal network. Soon after, he had crafted a careful series of time-delayed surprises that would guarantee a chaotic distraction in the Landis offices shortly before 11AM the next morning; a perfect opportunity for a quick infiltration.

But then he had also found that one of the web servers was connected directly to the human resources database...and a different plan had come to mind. A slightly more risky plan, but one that would allow him to more quickly gather information on Elizabeth Ruben.

The plan would also put a temporary end to the endless playful jabs from Reese about how Finch needed to "get out more"-a pleasant bonus.

"I like the look, Harold," said Reese. He circled his boss, who stood in the center of the library chamber. "You should wear it more often. Much more casual than your usual outfit. Makes you look less...owlish."

Harold raised his eyebrows as Reese casually passed in front of him—again—but said nothing. He tied the striped red-and-black tie around his neck with practiced ease. He had abandoned his beloved tailored suits in favor of a pair of precision-ironed tan slacks, held up by an expensive maroon leather belt; a long-sleeved white shirt, tucked in at the waist; a pair of polished leather shoes, red leather to match the belt; and the striped tie. He wanted to look smart, dapper, but not excessive.

After all, Mr. Harold Starling had just been "hired" by Landis Technologies. It wouldn't do to show up sloppy to his first day of work, nor would it be appropriate to come to work overdressed.

Reese said, "I notice there's no fancy tie for me. Or shirt. Or pants. Are you expecting me to show up in my underwear?"

"Change of plans, Mr. Reese. I will be able to keep a closer eye on our Miss Ruben if I'm undercover at Landis for a longer period of time. With any luck, I'll also be able to find out what she is doing there and identify any threats."

"And I'm not coming with you?"

"I'm afraid the technical nature of the work done at Landis Technologies is somewhat out of your league, Mr. Reese."

"So you are taking point. Very impressive, Harold. It's good for you to get out more often, especially if it's to see a young, intelligent, bookish woman who's good with computers."

Finch glared. Reese put on that infuriating little smirk and said, "Gotta love a girl with good security habits. Right, Harold?"

"Mr. Reese, you are insufferable."

Reese, still smirking, merely tilted his head ever so slightly.

Finch, satisfied that his tie was straight, glanced himself over in a portable mirror and then picked up a laptop case from the computer table, slinging the bag awkwardly over his stiff shoulder. Then he picked up a small black plastic case, about the size of a deck of playing cards, and handed it to Reese.

"What's this?" Reese said, turning the device over to examine it. The only breaks in the case were three holes on one side—a USB port, a network port, and a DC power port.

"It's a backdoor. When powered on, it attempts to contact the computers here at the library through any network to which it is connected. Once it links up, I can control it remotely and attack the network from within. It effectively bypasses most firewalls, since the initial connection occurs from inside the target network."

"Very clever, Finch."

"Install this in Miss Ruben's apartment and hide as best you can. If we're lucky, she'll have a network switch or router that supports power-over-Ethernet." He pointed at a little round LED near the network port. "If the light blinks twice, you need do nothing more. If it doesn't, use a wall wart or a USB cable connected to a computer. Think you can handle it, Mr. Reese?"

"You'll turn me into a geek yet, Harold."

"Perhaps, Mr. Reese. We'll see how you do this time. I'll call you once I've settled in at Landis."

#####

The lock on the front door of Elizabeth Ruben's apartment offered only the most meager resistance to someone like John Reese. It took him slightly less than four and a half seconds to gain entrance. He locked the door behind him, sat his duffel bag down, and began to explore the apartment.

It was rather small. Cozy, in a way. The front door opened onto the living room. A modest LCD television sat on a wooden cabinet at one end of the room. One of the cabinet doors was open a ways, revealing a small DVD player and a VHS deck. The accompanying disks and cassettes had been stacked lazily on the shelf below. A simple coffee table sat in the center of the room, just in front of the mottled maroon couch. Decorations were sparse. Several photographs, some of which included an older woman that Reese gussed was Elizabeth's mother; a few potted plants, gathering dust; candles on the coffee table. A window near the door let the golden morning light fill the room.

The kitchen adjoined the living room. Dishes were stacked in the little sink and a box of cereal sat on the tan tile counter. Reese glanced the room over, resolving to examine it more thoroughly later, when a small glint of silver beneath one of the counters caught his eye.

He bent down and retrieved the corner of a candy bar wrapper. From a Star-bar, it looked like.

Fusco loved his Star-bars.

Reese peeked into the trash can beneath the kitchen sink, and sure enough, there was the rest of the wrapper, right on top.

"Lionel..." Reese muttered, shaking his head. He left the kitchen and made his way to the bedroom, to find that Fusco's description of a "bunch of" computers was a slight understatement.

"Great," Reese said. "Just great."

He counted nine computers and two laptops. The mismatched desktop towers were stacked two high and all faced backwards. Colorful cables hung from the back of each computer, snaking drunkenly across the beige carpet to vanish behind a wide wooden desk. Two large LCD monitors sat on the desk behind a keyboard and mouse. A fat gray network switch sat beside the monitors, and on top of it was the "wireless thingy"; a sleek black box with three angled antennas protruding from the back. Papers—presumably, the "geek notes"-were spread out on the right side of the desk.

Reese was amused to see that Elizabeth had covered the LED lights on most of the equipment with electrical tape.

The only other furniture was a tiny dresser, a bookcase stuffed with old paperbacks, and a small twin bed decked in plain white sheets. The room was unnaturally warm, no doubt from all the computer equipment.

Reese decided to install the backdoor before doing anything else. Backtracking to the living room, he hefted the duffel bag and brought it back to the bedroom. Opening it, he removed the tiny backdoor and a network cable, then gently rotated the wireless router on the desk so he could see the ports on the back, nestled between the antennas. Fortunately, there were several ports free. Plugging one end of the network cable into the backdoor, he plugged the other into the router and waited.

A little green light flashed twice on the backdoor. Satisfied, Reese used a piece of tacky adhesive to affix it to the underside of the desk, near the back, where Elizabeth would be very unlikely to find it—unless she noticed the extra cable attached to her router. Fortunately, the cable was the same color as the majority of the other cables connected to the router.

Team Machine now had access to Elizabeth's home network.

Reese moved the router back to its old position, then sat down at the desk and wiggled the mouse. The monitors lit up and presented a password prompt. Reese inserted Finch's trusty flash drive into the computer that appeared to be connected to the monitors.

The computer thought for a moment, then thumbed its nose as Reese by doing precisely nothing.

It figured that her computers would be immune to Finch's magic hacking flash drive. It just figured. Reese was beginning to regret the comment about the "girl with good security habits."

Irritated, he examined the other computers. Most of them were off. A thought occurred to him: just how were the two monitors connected to all these computers? After comparing the connectors on each computer, he realized that they weren't. Only the computer closest to the desk had monitor cables attached to it, which meant that the others could probably only be accessed over the network. Which meant that they could only be accessed by Finch through his new backdoor—or by removing their the hard drives and cloning them directly.

This was going to be a long, long morning.

Just for good measure, Reese tried the flash drive on the two laptops as well. Neither of them allowed him to bypass the password prompts, which meant that he had to resort to desperate measures.

Reaching into the duffel bag, he pulled out Finch's little laptop, its power supply, an external hard drive, a USB drive enclosure, and a small screwdriver. He set it all on the desk—careful not to disturb any of the papers—and connected the peripherals. He then selected his first victim: the nearer of Elizabeth's two laptops. Two screws and three minutes later, he had the tiny laptop hard drive removed from its bay and mounted in the enclosure.

Hoping to hell that the drive didn't have a hardware password, Reese ran the disk clone utility on Finch's laptop, selecting the massive external hard drive as the destination. He braced himself for disappointment, but was instead presented with an innocuous progress bar.

If something went wrong now—say, if the drive data was encrypted—Finch would get to deal with it, not him. Removing a hard drive was the limit of Reese's hacking abilities.

He leaned back in Elizabeth's surprisingly comfortable desk chair, and then, like an impulsive little kid, spun around twice. By the time he focused again on the laptop, the progress bar had presented a time estimate: one hour, eleven minutes remaining.

Reese used the time wisely. While the laptop cloned the hard drive, Reese searched Elizabeth's room. Carefully. Patiently. Methodically. Fusco was a decent detective—well, he was alright, kinda—but he didn't know how to spot hiding places the same way that Reese did. At least, not without leaving behind a mess.

Elizabeth would never know that Reese had been in her apartment.

He found a small wad of cash nestled beneath a stack of birthday cards in the desk drawer. Reese peeked inside one of the cards. In flowing cursive was the message: "I think of you every day, my beautiful daughter! See you in December. Love, Mom."

Smiling sadly, Reese glanced through the other cards, then replaced them back in the drawer.

There was nothing hidden between the mattresses, under the pillow, or behind the drawers. No loose carpeting under which to hide things. No secret compartments in the books. Only plaster behind the photographs. Only electrical cables behind the light switches. Only motherboards, hard drives, and expansion cards inside the computer towers.

Reese sifted through the notes on the desk. They appeared to be mathematical equations and graphs of various curving lines—all completely foreign to Reese. Finch would have to decipher them. He snapped a few extra pictures of the notes.

Either Elizabeth was a criminal mastermind, or she was an innocent victim. So far, there was nothing out of the ordinary to suggest the former—just the belongings and sentimental knickknacks of an intelligent young woman whose computers were likely responsible for a significant portion of the building's electricity usage.

As Reese explored the room, he began to fashion a better idea of Elizabeth Ruben's habits and personality. The books in the shelves were clearly well-loved and oft-read: science fiction, mostly, with a few fantasy selections sprinkled in. He could imagine her curled up in bed, unwinding after a long day at the library; visiting the worlds crafted by Ursula Le Guin or Elizabeth Moon or A.E. Van Vogt—something Reese had done occasionally as a child, but rarely since.

Especially not with science fiction.

(He'd always been more of a detective novel kind of kid, really. Spaceships and aliens had never suited his fancy.)

Elizabeth appeared to spent a significant amount of time at the computer desk. The keyboard palmrest and the mouse buttons had been worn to a shine in places, and the chair, while comfortable, was tattered, revealing its stuffing in places. Food crumbs littered the the carpet around the base of the desk.

She really was rather like Harold.

In the closet, Reese found a pair of black-and-pink roller skates gathering dust on the shelf. Two pairs of flat leather sandals and a pair of running sneakers still in their cardboard box. There were boxes of photo albums. A clarinet case. Stacks and stacks of music CDs—Steely Dan, the Allman Brothers, and The Who, to name a few.

He checked inside every box and case in the closet, just to be sure.

Behind Reese, the laptop beeped, signaling that it was finished. Reese removed the drive from the enclosure, placed it back in Elizabeth's laptop. Then he extracted the drive from the other laptop and started it cloning as well.

The cell phone rang shortly after.

"How's it going, Harold?" Reese said.

"I'm currently engaged in the most undignified form of programming known to humankind, Mr. Reese. I've been asked to touch up some HTML files for a router configuration webpage." There was a burst of static, or maybe a cough, or a scoff; Reese couldn't tell which. "Technically, it's not even programming, because HTML is a markup language, not a—"

"Sounds like you're having fun, Harold."

"I'm also getting to know several of Miss Ruben's co-workers. They're friendly, for the most part. A few of them are...questionable. One of them—Isaac, the man Elizabeth punched in the face—despises Linux. Unfortunately for him, many of the Landis products are based around a hardened MIPS Linux kernel. We've already had an interesting debate on the nature of open-source software in the context of—"

"Glad to hear it. Listen, Finch, I installed the backdoor, but Elizabeth's computers seem immune to your hacker-in-a-stick. At least, the three with a monitor are."

"Just how many computers are there, Mr. Reese?"

"Eleven."

"I'm sorry, Mr. Reese, would you say that again?"

"Eleven. I've cloned one of her laptops. Had to take the drive out to do it. You should give me a raise, Harold. I'm doing your job."

This time it wasn't static; it was a chuckle.

"Anyway," Reese continued, "six of the other computers are off. I can clone their drives too, but it might take awhile."

"I have a better idea. Mr. Reese, are there keyboards connected to these six computers?"

"No."

"Then they likely won't have a power-on password. Turn them on."

"All of them?"

"All of them. I'll access them over our new backdoor and scan them in-place."

Reese switched on each computer. The room was soon filled with the hum of running equipment.

"Okay, Finch, they're on."

"Excellent; I can ping them through the backdoor. We'll see if her computers are as difficult to crack as her router. Have you discovered any evidence indicating whether our Miss Ruben is soon to be a victim or a perpetrator?"

"No. I'll keep looking. Fusco may have missed something."

"Keep me informed, Mr. Reese."

"Will do. Try not to have too much fun without me, Harold."

#####

While Reese searched Elizabeth Ruben's apartment room by room, Finch sat at a low cubical in an uncomfortably over-airconditioned office and juggled five tasks at once: keeping an eye on the brown-haired woman four cubicles away, testing the new backdoor at Elizabeth's apartment, exploring the Landis network, hacking the exterior firewall from within, and pretending to be enthusiastically typing out the transcendentally riveting HTML code he had been asked to write.

The last task was by far the most difficult technical challenge Finch had encountered since he had begun working with Reese.

As Finch worked—pretended to work—pretended to be even interested in working—he watched Elizabeth Ruben. She was in cyberspace, he could tell. On a roll. In the programming "groove". The look of intense concentration on her freckled face belied it, as did the slow yet unfaltering dance of her fingers playing on the keyboard.

"Slow" compared to Finch, anyhow. But still, a respectable number of words per minute.

She typed steadily for a half-hour, rarely reaching for the mouse or looking away from the screen, until she was interrupted by an older man, perhaps thirty-five years old—Isaac Leroy. He had a mop of oily brown hair and a prominent nose. Beady eyes. Twitchy, gaunt hands.

Finch didn't like the way he leaned over Elizabeth, placing one hand on her desk.

She shook her head, dismissed him with a wave of her hand, but he wasn't about to give up so easily. He tapped her on the shoulder. Arms crossed, Elizabeth stood and got in his face—never mind that she was several inches shorter than the older man. She raised her eyebrows and glared while Isaac spoke, motioning angrily with his hands. Elizabeth interrupted him, shook her head again.

It didn't take the skills of a master lipreader to know that Elizabeth had just said "No." Finch would have gladly given up a small fortune to know what they were discussing, but he had not been able to bluejack Isaac's phone.

Isaac grabbed Elizabeth's wrist. Alarmed, Finch stood—entirely too suddenly for his injured spine and leg, but he hardly noticed.

Elizabeth, her mouth set in a grim line, deliberately clenched her free hand and held it just beneath Isaac's nose, narrowing her eyes. Isaac said something, smirked, and rolled his eyes, but released her nonetheless. She stared after him, hands on her hips, as he walked away.

Finch quickly sat down before he drew attention to himself.

"Mr. Reese," he whispered, "our Miss Ruben just had a rather physical spat with Isaac Leroy."

"Did she punch him in the nose again?"

"No, but I can see why she did the first time."

"Is she all right?"

Elizabeth calmly sat down at her computer, peered at the screen, and resumed typing. Finch felt a little smile form on his face.

"I believe so, Mr. Reese. I'll keep my eyes on her. I've very nearly cracked into the source code repository for the company, so I'll soon know what they're working on here at Landis. Anything new at the apartment?"

"Not yet, Finch. The second laptop is still cloning. I'm going through the kitchen now. I'll let you know what I find."

Finch did his best to return to his "programming", but try as he might, he couldn't convince himself to write a single HTML tag. He wasn't here to program, and he especially was not here to work on this...disgraceful excuse for a configuration GUI. He was here to find out more information about Elizabeth Ruben, to find out if she was soon to be a victim or a perpetrator.

Reese's voice echoed in his ear.

It's good for you to get out more often, especially if it's to see a young, intelligent, bookish woman who's good with computers.

And, sometimes, a direct approach was the best approach.

He frowned, tried to put the thought out of his head by focusing on the various windows arrayed on his monitor. Getting personal with a Number had numerous risks. He would never forget Jordan Hester, who had appeared innocent and intelligent and bookish at first yet had turned out to be a murderess, an identity thief, and a drug dealer.

Four cubicles away, Elizabeth typed steadily away, focused entirely on her work.

If Elizabeth Ruben was in fact nothing but the bookish, intelligent, slightly oblivious and hot-headed young woman she appeared to be, and if Finch didn't make contact because of the mere possibility that she was a murdering drug dealer, he might miss some crucial piece of information he needed to save her.

She could be hurt. Killed. And he'd never forgive himself.

You are running point...

Finch stood, took a deep breath. Smoothed his shirt. He thought to himself: Nothing to it, Harold. Go up to Miss Ruben. Introduce yourself as the new employee. Ask her what she's working on; it'll doubtlessly be much more fascinating than fixing childish mistakes in a poorly-written HTML document.

He gulped.

She's not a drug dealer, Harold. She's not like Jordan Hester. You can talk to Miss Ruben. You have common ground between you. She has a Master's degree in computer science—almost. Close enough. Data compression, encryption, networking—whatever is her field of expertise, you can communicate with one another.

So go communicate. Now. Go on, go do it!

Harold shuffled his feet. Took one halting step, then another.

Smile, Harold.

The corners of his mouth twitched upward. He began to walk faster, more easily.

He was ten feet away from Elizabeth Ruben when Reese's voice crackled in his ear.

"Finch?"

Harold stopped, turned around. There was something alarming in Reese's tone of voice.

"Yes, Mr. Reese? What is it?"

"I found a gun in Elizabeth's apartment."

Horrified, Finch turned again, ever so slowly, to see Elizabeth Ruben typing steadily away with a look of focused determination on her face...