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Harold tried to stop her at first. "He wouldn't have wanted you to do this," he said.
"There's more to your life — "
"It's not too late to — "
That last one was two weeks after they'd put John in the ground. Joss had just walked out of the precinct with her resignation left behind. She slammed her hands down on the dashboard of her car and said into the air, savagely, furiously, "Don't you dare tell me there's something more worth doing. Don't you dare, Harold."
His voice fell silent in her ear. Finally, he said, "You'd better come in," and gave her an address.
Turned out he and John had been working out of an abandoned library in lower Midtown. It was a good location: near a lot of subways, close to Grand Central and Penn, close to the bridges and the tunnels. Harold came out of the stacks to meet her, like a ghost haunting the place. It was the first time she'd seen him since the funeral. His face looked the same. Mouth small and downturned, eyes as blank and unreadable as the first time they'd met.
That first meeting. She'd walked out of that brownstone half ready to call herself paranoid for being suspicious of an accountant in a sweater, but something about his blankness had rung a bell in the back of her head even then. By now, she knew better than to believe in it for a second. But she was still mad at him, though, blazing angry. It wasn't fair, and she knew it wasn't fair, but John was dead; John had bled out in her arms, and he'd smiled up at her, but the last thing he'd said had been, "Thanks," softly, to Harold. To the man that got him killed.
She didn't understand how Harold's thing worked, this Machine of his, but it didn't seem to her that it could know that someone was going to kill John, and not know that Simmons was hanging out in a doorway around the corner from the 3rd Precinct, not with six different security cameras aimed at parts of that block. She didn't see how Harold could see into the future, but not know enough about the here and now.
And when she'd asked him, point-blank — standing in front of a monument that said John Reese, friend and hero, because that had been his real name, his name to the people who'd loved him and buried him. She'd asked Harold, why didn't you know, and Harold had flinched. He'd stared down at the tombstone and he'd said, "It's complicated."
Yeah, complicated. Joss knew what that meant. It meant that a choice had gotten made somewhere, and she also knew that choice hadn't been made by John. John had never met a weapon he hadn't liked, and he'd never stuck them on a shelf, either. Harold was the one who held back. Who flinched from the dirty work, and Joss wasn't sure she was ever going to forgive him. She still had the memory of grit and dirt under her own fingernails, splinters from a shovel handle digging through her gloves and the smell of a corpse two years old.
But John's work was still out there, even if John wasn't, and Joss had made the call a long time ago that it was work worth doing. She'd already put his work ahead of her own. This was just making things official. The resignation on her captain's desk had been closer to the truth than most of the reports she'd left there the last two years.
Money started to show up in her bank accounts, a weekly paycheck ten times the size of her old one. "I don't want a consolation prize," she told Harold through her teeth, the day after the first one deposited.
He looked slowly up and said blankly, "It's only money." After a moment, he added, "Having money in excess means you don't have to think about it, Ms. Carter. Use what you need, and if you like, give away the rest. That's what — " John did, he didn't say.
And the numbers came. Once or twice a day. Harold would call her, and there would be another number, another face up on his board. They'd do a pile of legwork to gather info that his supercomputer already knew, but Harold didn't, because things were complicated. Shaw was a good partner, and Fusco was at the other end of the line whenever she needed him, needed something in the department. On the good days, they'd save a life before it ended, stop a crime before it happened.
The first bad day came two months later. Joss had got a rhythm going, her and Shaw together. It was okay. She was okay. It helped, knowing that John's work was getting done, getting done right. Hell, getting done better. She'd loved John like crazy and she missed him like crazy, but he'd also been crazy. He'd walked into fire fights he could've gone around, and he'd put himself out there way too much. He'd taken risks to get kneecap shots instead of head shots, and he'd leave guys behind him still dangerous, like he'd valued his own life less than sparing theirs.
Shaw was apparently working from that playbook too. Joss put her foot down about it, for both of them. "No," she said to Harold, flatly. "If we can't get a clean non-fatal shot, we're not coming out from behind cover to get one. You want a martyr — you want another martyr, you go find somebody else."
Harold didn't raise his head. "Understood," he said, staring down at the keyboard fixedly.
It hadn't been kind, but Joss wasn't feeling kind. She hadn't got past anger yet.
And then they lost Jinny Doppler, seventeen year old kid with straight As and her whole life ahead of her, made the bad mistake to catch the eye of the drug dealer down the block. They lost her, and it didn't make anything better that Joss put the dealer down right after, and she slammed back into the library so fast and hard that Bear stood up and whined, unhappy.
She shoved Harold's chair back from his desk. It skidded across the floor and slammed into the bookshelves, and he struggled out of it. "Ms. Carter — "
"Why?" she snarled at him, hand fisted in the smooth expensive wool of his waistcoat. "Why didn't you know?"
Harold's face was blank again, and she wanted to slap him, to shake him. "The Machine only — "
"Bullshit," Joss said. "Don't try to feed me that line. Don't you tell me the only thing the Machine can tell you is the number. Shaw told me about Root. She talks to the Machine — "
"And you consider that a recommendation?" Harold snapped, jerking himself stiffly back.
"I consider that a possibility," Joss said. "So don't tell me you can't talk to it. That girl is dead. She's dead, do you understand me? I saw her brains on a sidewalk tonight, because you won't talk to your goddamn Machine, so don't you tell me you can't! You can. You chose. You chose for him to die — "
Harold dragged in one short, sharp inhalation. Joss stopped. Harold's eyes were fixed on her, wide; they were still blank, but his mouth was small and trembling. She didn't take it back. She wasn't going to take it back. Her hands were clenched in his clothes. Bear was standing tense next to them, gathered.
"Yes," Harold said. "Yes. I — chose. You're quite right. I tried to — " He looked away. "I tried to make it impossible," he said, "but — " He moved his arm, slightly; she barely felt the movement through where her knuckles pressed against him. "A loophole was introduced. And yes, I could now exploit it quite easily. I could remove the restrictions on the Machine's communications to me and permit it to provide me with a full flow of nearly limitless data.
"And there's no reason to stop there, either," he added. "For instance, currently I have to undertake the somewhat laborious process of manually penetrating bank accounts, financial institutions. But it's not an exceptionally complex problem. Certainly a smaller one than the Machine's existing task. With, oh — fifty thousand lines of code? I could simply have the Machine establish full access to the worldwide financial network.
"Beyond that?" He flicked his eyebrows up a quarter of an inch in place of a shrug, efficiently. "The electrical grid would be another thirty thousand lines of code. Then there's the United States military networks — those are reasonably well secured, but the Machine has significant access to them already, which would make things simpler, and all the major arms manufacturers are fairly vulnerable. I would guess that with another fifty thousand lines of code I could arm the Machine — by which of course I mean myself — with at least a handful of nuclear weapons and a far more substantial number of conventional ones. We haven't even begun to discuss the production of biological and chemical agents, which — "
"Stop," Joss said. Her heart was pounding. Harold's face was still blank.
She'd figured out what Harold had done, about the Machine he'd built, but that knowledge had been slotted into the back of her head along with all the other things Harold did; he'd been a magic black box you couldn't look into. Except now she had looked inside, and this was what was in it. Something out of 1984 and doomsday movies, a Pandora's box instead.
"So yes," Harold said, calm, steady. "I chose. And furthermore," he added, "I chose in controversion of John's own wishes. After the incident last summer, he became aware, as you are, of the wider range of possibilities. We didn't discuss it, but we didn't have to. I knew that he would have chosen to have me make use of those options. He trusted me, you see. He — " Harold's voice cracked all the way down, skittered off. He looked away. His eyes behind his glasses were glistening wet, lit up with computer screen reflections.
Slowly, Joss unwound her fingers from his clothes. Her hands slid down Harold's chest and fell away from him.
"He trusted me," Harold repeated, and he lowered himself to the floor down the bookcases in short collapsing jerks, and then he put his face in his hands and sobbed. Bear whined in distress and took a step closer. He was still standing on high alert, his tail stiff, looking up at her warily.
She backed up. "It's okay," she told Bear, and he padded past her, nosing his head under Harold's elbow into his lap. Harold dropped one hand to the dog's head.
Joss went to the window and stood staring out blindly. Her chest ached. Harold wept on behind her, the horrible gasping sound of a man crying who didn't know how to let himself do it, but who'd just broken so bad he couldn't stop. She knew the sound. She'd heard it a few times before. Anger was draining out of her unwilling, like someone had pulled the plug on a bathtub when she wasn't ready to get out. "He loved you," she said, trying to hold on to anger.
Harold gasped, gasped again. "Trust mattered more," he said hoarsely.
She shut her eyes and saw John's face on the airplane to Texas, a little more than a year ago now – remembered how he hadn't slept, the naked desperation of his hands clenched into the armrests. "John," she'd said quietly, "I'm going to stick with you on this, but whatever we're chasing, you need to be ready not to find him."
"I can't be," he'd said.
"You don't think you can go on without him?"
John's mouth had trembled, just a little. "The thing is, Carter," he said, "you've got a Harold, too. You've just got him inside your own head, that little voice that tells you where the line is. Well, I don't. And I tried to find one in a whole bunch of places, but it turned out the people in those places didn't really want to help me figure it out. They just wanted me to walk over the line when it was useful for them. And then Harold — "
John had stopped there, swallowing. "I'm never going to be ready," he'd said.
Joss opened her eyes again and turned around and went to Harold. She sat down on his other side, shoulder to shoulder, and gripped his arm with her hand. Harold gasped a few more times and then quieted.
"God damn it, Harold," she said.
Hoarsely he said, "The worst of it is — " He was panting like someone fresh off a race. His face looked like someone had wrenched it out of shape. "The worst of it is — now I'm safe. Because I can't — I can't ever — " He stopped.
She got it. If he hadn't done it for John, he could never do it for anyone else. He could never make the world a place where he'd let John die for no reason.
Joss put her eyes against the heel of her hand. She'd cried plenty of tears for John before, but there were a few more left, looked like. For John, for herself. For Harold, who'd given John something John had wanted more than his life.
But she'd already known he loved John too.
# End