Note: OMG ACTION. I'm not that great at writing action scenes, sorry.
Carter is going to have a FIT.
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One Year and Six Months Prior
Patty Conkin, at first glance, appeared to be a perfectly reasonable and completely un-murder-prone middle-aged woman. Short, slightly dumpy, with straight blond hair, a tan overcoat, too many earrings, and a pair of leather boots that probably cost more than one of Elizabeth Ruben's computers, the woman looked like somebody's rich and stuffy aunt.
Except for the assault rifle in her hands.
She clearly wasn't very experienced with the weapon. She fumbled with the clip. Tried inserting it backwards. It wouldn't fit, but she kept jamming it in the slot, hoping that by some miracle it would slide home. The laws of physics were not feeling miraculous today. She swore, threw the clip on the ground next to three empties.
Reese, like a panther, had plenty of time to sneak up next to her in the shrub-riddled darkness beneath the elevated highway.
"Hi," he said.
Patty Conkin whirled around, leveling the rifle at Reese's chest, but she had forgotten a minor detail: it had no ammunition. The gun clicked once, twice. Reese stepped forward and grabbed the rifle right out of her hands.
"If you're gonna shoot a gun," he said, "you really should know how to reload it." A little louder, he said, "All clear."
Detective Carter slid out from behind the thick concrete column with her gun held before her. A moment later, Fusco crawled out from behind the abandoned car. He was covered in dirt and dust.
Patty Conkin stared at Reese with wide, wide eyes. It seemed she was too shocked to move, at least until Detective Carter neared, handcuffs at the ready. She ran, or tried to—Reese's hand shot out and clamped around her upper arm.
"Patty Conkin," Detective Carter said, "you are under arrest for attempted murder, grant theft, and assault on a police officer." The cold anger in her voice was like a deadly undertow beneath a placid, smooth surface. Carter yanked Conkin's hands behind her back. The woman winced but said nothing. There came the sound of a ratchet, then two. "You have the right to keep your lying piehole shut. You can bet your BMW that anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney. If you somehow cannot afford an attorney, the State will provide you with an attorney..."
Fusco waddled over to Reese as Carter led the hapless woman to the police cruiser.
"The hell did you come from?" Fusco said, waving his arm at the steep dirt embankment that went up to kiss the underside of the highway. Conkin had been backed into a metaphorical corner.
"Hello to you too, Lionel," Reese drawled.
The portly detective shook his head. "I know, I know. 'At least I'm not late, right?'"
"Pretty much. Is Carter okay?"
"Yeah, she's fine. I'm fine too, thanks." He eyed the rifle in Reese's arms, disquieted by the way he cradled it like a sleeping child, or maybe like an exceptionally deadly kitten.
"You gonna keep that thing?" he said.
"I'll add it to my collection, Lionel," Reese drawled. "It's a nice gun. Unless you want it?"
Fusco rolled his eyes. "You can have it."
Reese's phone rang, but before he could tap his earpiece, the call connected by itself.
"Mr. Reese?" came Finch's voice. "We have a situation. It seems our Mr. Sarim has encountered Miss Ruben in the Connetrix server room. You need to get over there now."
"I'm on my way," Reese said. He turned and ran for his car, leaving a sputtering Lionel Fusco in the dust.
"Hey, you're welcome for cornering this psycho!" he shouted after Reese. Shaking his head again, he made his way through the thorny weeds towards the police cruiser.
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My mouth moved, but the only thing that came out was a tiny squeak. My brain had just short-circuited like a bad ATX power supply, leaving only one thought stuck on repeat: oh my god, oh my god, oh my god—
"I—I was just—"
As I struggled to come up with a plausible explanation, I saw Sarim's eyes move from me to the laptop balanced on the server near my elbow. The surprise on his face morphed into suspicion and his eyes grew cold.
"The hell are you doing?" he said. "What—what are you doing with that laptop? Did you connect it to the switch?" He took a step closer, and my heart leaped into my throat. I took a step backwards. "I told you to stay away from that—"
John's voice echoed in my head.
...apologize a lot...it throws people off...
"L-look," I said, holding up my hands. "I'm like, s-so sorry, okay? But—but I—" An idea popped into my head, and I didn't even bother thinking it through, I just ran with it. "I admit it. I really needed the bandwidth, okay? I know I'm not supposed to do it, but I admit it."
Confusion. Squinted eyes. "Admit what?"
"My—my ISP throttles torrent traffic, and I get like, less than a hundred kilobits per second, so I figured, we're on a gigabit line, right? And—and who's gonna miss a few episodes of Star Quest, right? S-so I thought that if I came here late at night when nobody's really using any bandwidth—"
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the laptop screen blank itself. My legs were trembling, but I forced my voice to stay steady and just a little bit snotty for good measure.
"—then I could borrow a little bandwidth, like a tiny bit, because all my friends talk about Star Quest and I don't have a TV and I can't keep up with what they're saying and—"
A look of incredulity slowly blossomed on Sarim's face.
"You're torrenting TV shows? On our connection?"
"Well, yeah, I mean, it's not like anybody's gonna notice, right? I mean, it's only a few shows."
He stood there. It looked like he couldn't decide if he wanted to move or not. Then, like a bull, he stalked towards me—no, towards the laptop.
Oh shit, I thought. I left the Wireshark window up! He'll see the packet analysis!
But it was too late. He pushed me out of the way and brushed his thick fingers against the laptop's touchpad. The screen flashed once, lit up. My heart skipped a beat and I wondered if I could make a run with it while Sarim was distracted.
Sarim stared at the screen and didn't say anything.
There were three windows up—but not any of the windows I had been using before Sarim had found me. There was a web browser displaying a popular torrent search site, a torrent client with several torrents queued up, and a file browser showing an incredible amount of folders—all of which had suspiciously not-quite-legitimate titles, such as OUTLANDER [DVDRip-HQ] and BURN NOTICE [TVRip-720p z00DAAAX].
What the hell? I thought, stymied.
Sarim must've had the same thought, but he recovered faster than me. He reached out, slammed the laptop lid closed—I winced—yanked the network cable, coiled it, tossed it down on top of the laptop, and handed it to me.
"Get out of here," he said. His voice was entirely too calm. He leveled a finger at my chest. "And if I ever catch you in here doing something like this again, I swear, Melissa will fire you so fast it'll make your head spin. Got it?"
"Y-y-yah," I said, nodding quickly. He pointed down the aisle in the general direction of the server room door. Tucking the laptop under my arm, I scooped up the laptop case, slung it over my shoulder, and walked towards the mouth of the aisle. Didn't dare make eye contact with Sarim. I had to force my feet to keep moving. If I paused for so much as an instant, I would surely collapse.
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In a darkened library, miles away, Harold Finch let out a long, deep breath and adjusted his glasses. Thank goodness he had connected to Elizabeth Ruben's phone at that crucial moment. Had he realized her plight even seconds later, he would not have had time to obfuscate Miss Ruben's activities on the laptop...
Thank goodness, he thought. Disaster averted.
He reached for his tea cup. The tea had long since turned cold. He downed it in one gulp, then set the cup aside and brought up several terminal windows to view the port scan progress on the mysterious IP address discovered by Miss Ruben.
Before he could browse through the terminal window log, a voice crackled in his earpiece, which he had left connected to Elizabeth Ruben's cell phone. Finch's eyes widened.
Oh dear. That's not good at all!
He wasted no time in dialing John Reese's number.
#####
"Wait a minute," Sarim said behind me. I froze. Couldn't help it. It was like he had just command my leg muscles to quit moving, even though his voice was hardly louder than the servers around us.
"What is it?" I said, turning around like a little kid caught with her hand in the cookie jar. I was so close to the end of the aisle. I wanted to run for it. Freedom was just a few yards away. Okay, and down an elevator. And out the lobby doors. And down the long front walk to the car.
All right, so maybe running was a bad idea...
"How did you get in here?" Sarim said.
I gulped. "I—the door—it was—"
"The door needs a keycard," he said slowly. "You don't have a keycard."
The world was crumbling around me. All of a sudden I was ten years old and Mama had just caught me lying about hiding my brother's favorite stuffed cat. "I...it was—"
Sarim reached behind his back. When his hand came back, it was holding a pistol. For the second time in less than a year, I found myself staring down the barrel of a gun.
You're kidding me, I thought. An instant later, my brain started its oh my god loop again.
"Robin," Sarim said, "give me the laptop."
I clutched it to my chest. "No, it's mine."
"Are you serious? I have a gun. Give me the damn laptop."
I don't remember deciding to run, but all of a sudden I found myself running full tilt down the large aisle that ran the length of the room. Rows and rows of equipment blurred by. Behind me, Sarim swore. I heard shoes pounding on the raised floor panels—not mine; I was light as a mouse, but Sarim was built like a truck.
The server room door was maybe fifteen feet ahead. I engaged my afterburners, forced my legs to move faster.
Sarim ran out from behind the very last row of equipment and flung his arm wide, blocking the door with his body.
"Give it to me!" he roared, pointing the gun right at my face. I shifted direction as fast as momentum allowed, probably leaving burned rubber and skid marks behind on the floor panels as I darted into one of the side aisles. I reached the end and glanced behind me just in time to see Sarim raise the gun. I ducked and ran to the left, hugging the narrow space between the wall and the ends of the racks.
There was a loud pop and something hit the plaster where my head had been a few instants before.
Shit, shit, shit, I thought. Where's the emergency exit?
I ran. There were more pops, two of them. One of them hit the end of the rack ahead of me and tore through a thick bundle of network cables. The other one whistled by my ear and thudded into the wall down at the end of the server room. I changed direction again and ducked down one of the rows. Ran out into the center aisle again, tried running for the door, but Sarim had predicted where I'd be and he burst out from one of the rows ahead of me, forcing me to run down one of the side aisles across the way.
It was a dead end.
Gasping, I spun around. Sarim was less than five feet away and he had the gun pointed at my face.
The first shot went wide—barely. I could hear it tear past my ear. Squeezing my eyes shot, I held my laptop up to protect my face—a token gesture; I knew how fast a bullet went and how much it took to stop a—
There was a pop, and the laptop jerked towards me. I winced away. Another pop. Another jerk. Something sparked, burning my fingers. Sarim swore. I peeked over the edge of the laptop to see the gun wavering in his hand.
He hit the laptop, I realized, not yet daring to wonder how I was still alive. And that made him mad. He wants it.
So I gave it to him. I threw it at his face, putting as much muscle into it as I could.
It was hilarious to see, in a way. At least, it would've been, if it hadn't been for the whole about-to-get-shot thing. Sarim's eyes went wide and he stumbled forward as if he wanted to catch it. His gun swung away from me. I dove towards him, wrapped one hand around his arm, and started smashing his wrist into the racks of equipment, hoping he'd drop the gun. With my other hand, I jabbed at his eyes.
He screamed. The gun went off—bam, bam, ba-bam, deafeningly, like thunder, but he didn't drop it. Each bullet went into the racks around us. Sarim knocked my hand away from his face. He looked me right in the eyes and I could tell that he really, really wanted me dead.
Sarim was far stronger than I had realized. Without the element of surprise, I was outmatched. He threw himself against me, pinning my body against one of the racks. I did the instinctual thing—I raised my knee as hard as I could, aimed right between his legs. It worked, kinda. He gasped and stumbled just enough for me to slip away towards the mouth of the aisle, but I tripped on the laptop and went sprawling to meet the cold floor tiles. Gasping, I tried to stand. Sarim kicked me in the back and I collapsed flat on the floor with a yelp.
"Look at me," he said.
Groaning, I rolled over on my back. Sarim had the eeriest, calmest look on his face and his gun was pointed at my heart. I bit back a whimper. Did my best to push myself away with my palms, but they kept slipping on the tiles. Sarim walked forward as I backed away from him, inch by inch.
"Who are you?" he said. "FBI? CIA? NSA?" I stayed silent, still doing my best to get away from this monster. I had retreated a little ways down one of the side aisles. Sarim didn't follow me in. He stood at the mouth of the aisle, his massive bulk outlined in white by the florescents on the ceiling.
You're dead, whispered a little voice in my head. D-e-a-d.
Yeah, well—I got another six months out of life...
You're gonna die. It's gonna hurt. Oh god, I've heard that gunshots hurt. Where is John? He said a half hour—it's gotta be at least a half hour by now.
"You're stubborn," Sarim said. "That's okay. I don't need you. I'll salvage what I can from your laptop. By the time your agency sends somebody else, I'll be long gone."
He pointed the gun right at my face. I forced myself not to wince, not to look away. I stared straight into Sarim's eyes.
Distract him, I thought desperately. John has to be on his way back. Buy time!
"Can I ask you something 'fore I die?" I said. Despite my best efforts, my voice shook.
Sarim chuckled. "You can ask. Will I answer?" He made a long, elaborate shrug. "Dunno."
"What's the server for?"
The chuckle turned into a laugh, cruel and deep. "I knew you were too curious for your own good from the moment I laid eyes on you. The server? You'll never know."
"Please?"
"No. Sorry. It used to be that the dead could be trusted with secrets, but you just have to be so careful these days..."
His finger twitched.
He grinned.
He was gone.
Like lightning, a tall, dark blur appeared out of nowhere, ramming into Sarim from the side. The impact knocked him out of sight. There was a gunshot; a light fixture shattered. There were the sounds of a struggle. Screams. A thud.
Heart pounding like a jackhammer, I pulled myself up using one of the racks and staggered out into the main aisle.
Sarim was lying in a heap on the ground. John stood over him. He turned to me and said, "Hello, Ellie."
I didn't know what to say to that. Didn't know what to do. I stood there, gaping like an idiot, as John walked over and put his hand on my shoulder.
"Are you hurt?"
Speechless, I shook my head.
There was movement near the door. Two people entered. I recognized the woman as Detective Carter. Next to her was a shorter man—not quite fat, but definitely wider than most. He had short, curly brown hair and a long tan overcoat.
"Ellie," John said when the detectives neared, "meet Detective Lionel Fusco. You've met Detective Carter already."
"Hi," I said. I wasn't sure what else to say. My life was still flashing before my eyes like a ghostly movie reel.
John added, "Fusco works with Detective Carter and me. You can trust him, especially if there's doughnuts involved."
The detective rolled his eyes. To Reese, he said, "Look, cops are gonna be all over this place in about ten minutes. You two had better get out of here."
"We will, Lionel. But first—Ellie, can you show me the server you found?"
I led him over to the strange rack at the back of the server room. John looked at it, then yanked the cables and pulled the server out of the rack.
"You're stealing it?" I asked.
"No," John said, tucking it under his arm like it weighed nothing at all. "Just borrowing." He grasped my shoulder, squeezed gently. "Let's get out of here."
Those were the best five words I'd heard in a long time.
On the way out, I spotted a piece of black plastic on the pristine white floor tiles near one of the side aisles. I peered down the row. "Oh," I said. "My laptop!"
It had landed lid-up a few feet away. I rushed forward to pick it up. Turned it over. There was a ragged two-inch hole in the back, a little to the left of center. The bullets had gone through the motherboard—but they hadn't come out the other side.
The laptop had saved my life.
I wondered how much I could salvage from it. Even I couldn't repair this kind of damage. Saddened, I tucked the ruined hardware under my arm. The laptop bag was on the ground nearby. It must've fallen off during the fight.
Detective Carter was cuffing Sarim's hands behind his back. When we passed, she stood up and got in John's way.
"We're gonna have a talk about this," she said, pointing at his face.
"I'm sure we will, Detective," John said.
Carter glanced at me, then motioned John and me towards the door.
"Get out of here," she said.
We got out of there.
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