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My first fanfic, for Zaniida’s 2017 birthday, a year late but then I didn’t even know Ao3 even existed until 2 weeks ago. And yes, I know, the previous sentence had no verb or object. Hopefully the fic will be more grammatically correct than that first line! With gratitude for Zaniida’s shepherding me through the brambles and briars and wilds of Ao3; I dedicate this work to her.
Three Minutes and Counting
“Three minutes, now.”
“I’ll find you.”
“You will,” Finch affirms, a statement of absolute faith. But his breaths over the airwaves are coming faster -- the edges of a panic attack. “John, I know I can’t do anything to stop this but… I’m scared. I… I can’t…”
The final attacker goes down, and as you scan the room for additional threats, you try to think of something, anything to say to that. But you come up blank.
“Will you… will you talk to me?” Finch asks, his voice gone small. “Please, just… anything… just help me wait, keep me calm until she gets here. Give me something to cling to. Be with me. Talk to me. Please.”
John turns and grabs Ms. Kaur by the arm, drags her to the street. New York’s rush-hour gridlock makes spotting a cab easy; pulling her behind him, he goes up two cars and over one, getting cover from a moving van, and yanks open the door of an empty cab.
“Your purse and coat. Give them to me.” While she struggles out of her halflength brown leather coat, John takes out his wallet and pulls out all the cash he has. He strips her coat off the rest of the way and pulls the clip out of her hair in one quick motion. Her hair drops into a straight brown curtain, obscuring her face.
“I’m with you, Harold.” He pushes the woman forcibly into the cab, throwing the wad of cash down on the floor. Over the honking and curses of the street, John yells at her and the cabbie, “Coronet Hotel. Ask for Mira.” He slams shut the door of the cab and knocks hard on the roof, knowing the cab isn’t going anywhere soon.
John slips between and across cars, smearing grime on his coat and trousers as he slides across the hood of a low-slung ancient Camaro. “Harold?”
“I’m here, Mr. Reese.” Harold’s voice is high and tight, and John could tell from his breathing that Harold is well on his way to a panic attack.
“Sixteen minutes. And I’m closing the gap.” John plows his way past a food truck and enters the no-man’s-land of bicycle couriers and buskers, slipping into the ground-eating lope he learned so many years ago. His original twenty minute estimate was based on a fast-moving cab, but with traffic at a standstill he can calculate a running distance to the library using alleys and construction sites. “We still have two minutes and forty-one seconds.”
Harold’s breath hitches. “You’ve quite the internal clock there, Mr. Reese.” Harold gives a shaky laugh. “And shaving off four minutes from your arrival time – have you learned to breach the space-time continuum?”
“I’m a man of many talents, Harold. Otherwise you wouldn’t have hired me.” John slams into a white plaster wall making the turn into an alley with restaurants on each side. Using a recycling bin he launches himself up onto the top of a large dumpster, and sees dumpsters alternating down the rest of the alley, and through the two alleys past that. Mentally he knocks off another minute and a half from his time, and drops Ms. Kaur’s purse and coat into alternating dumpsters.
John drops his jaw and begins breathing deeply, charging his blood with extra oxygen. His sight narrows down to a single objective, a lamppost with a limp blue-and-white banner dangling from it, three blocks in front of him. Normally he wouldn’t have dropped his guard to such an extent, but right now personal safety didn’t interest him very much. Parkour-like, he lunges from dumpster to dumpster, grabbing open lids and twisting to keep his balance on slick metal edges.
“So,” John pants, “something for you to cling to. Practical things first.” Using the heel of his shoe John catches the hasp of an open combination lock and zigzags over the next two dumpsters. “You remember complaining about fresh termite shavings showing up around the interior of the library?”
“Yes?” Harold says cautiously.
“You can pack up the sulfur candles. It was me, installing a couple of backup systems for something like this.”
John could almost see Harold perking up. “What sort of systems?”
“One of them is a modified echolocation device. I’ve got sensors put up throughout the library that record the movements of anything larger than a rat. Backup recordings of a week. The larger spaces have multiple sensors. Enough feedback to tell me the height, weight, speed, and gait of anything that moves.” John grunts as he launches off the last dumpster across a 6 foot sidewalk onto the roof of another ubiquitous cab. Two more slow-moving roofs and one pickup bed later, he touches down on a newspaper stand and starts sprinting across the next alley’s dumpsters.
“So,” John continues, panting, “no matter what happens, I’m going to have a damn good idea of where she came from and what direction the two of you go next.”
“Bats, John? You’re using the sound of bats as an information gathering source?” John hears the last few words carefully enunciated, and knows that he has at least temporarily distracted his friend. Two minutes eight seconds for her to get to Harold, fourteen and a half minutes now to get to the library, at least a minute and a half for her to get Harold down the stairs and onto the street. Net time to intercept: circa eleven minutes.
“Don’t worry, Harold,” John gasps, “the actual pings are hidden under recordings of Bear spooking bats for me throughout the library. She’ll never notice.” Damn it, John curses to himself, I just redirected the asset’s attention to the threat.
As expected, Harold’s breathing starts to speed up again. He is silent for a moment. Then, “John?” Harold quavers.
John is almost to his lamppost goal, but slips on the second to last dumpster, lands with a grunt and keeps running, spinning around three laughing teens on the sidewalk. He swings himself up on top of a limo, vaulting completely over the next car and zigzags through the next to the lamppost. Making a hard right, he keeps moving.
John takes a deep breath. “So that’s the practical part.” He slips back into the nominal bicycling lane the couriers use and speeds up. “Second part is focus.”
“That’s… that’s what I need, John.”
John takes a deep breath, splitting his attention between covering ground and accessing memory. It could slow him down, but keeping Harold, a civilian, an asset, calm, is worth it. In the long run.
“Part of focus is using something that’s familiar.” John takes a running leap and throws himself over an eight foot plywood fence, stumbling across the awning of a forklift into a demolition zone.
John leaps onto a pile of rubble, scrambling up over the broken reddish bricks and continuing across the double lot. “ ‘And books!’ “ John gasped. “ ’ ...she would buy them all over and over again; she would buy up every copy, I believe, to prevent their falling into unworthy hands; and she would have every book that tells her how to admire an old twisted tree.’ “John grunts the last two words, swinging himself up over the far plywood fence onto the next sidewalk.
Harold inhales sharply, half a laugh and half a sob. “Where in heaven’s name did you get that quote?”
“You know where, you tell me.” Nine minutes forty-five seconds to intercept. Better.
“Jane Austen. Sense and Sensibility. When did you read that?” John hears the squeak of Harold’s chair in the background.
“Two weeks after I started working for you.” Bicycle lane again, slipping through lines of people gathered around food trucks. “You’ve got three copies in the workroom. One in the antique section, one on the bottom of your book cart, and a dogeared paperback copy between two unused computer towers on the floor.” John stops to breathe and duck an oncoming bike courier. “All of them covered with dust. Seemed like a good way to get to know you.”
John hears Harold laugh shakily. “So, quotations from Austen? That’s the point of focus?”
“Yep. And any others you can come up with.”
There is a moment of silence. “John? My mind has gone blank.” John could hear the tremble in Harold’s voice.
John pushes through a display of fresh produce outside a corner bodega, nudging a memory. “ ‘It's been many years since I had such an exemplary vegetable.’ “
Harold huffs a small laugh. “Pride and Prejudice. I’m afraid to ask when you read that one. How many quotes do you have memorized?"
“More than you’d think. We can have a quote-off during the next number’s stakeout.” Eight minutes thirty seconds. He throws open the door of the Chinese takeout restaurant and slides through the kitchen out the back.
“ ‘You must learn some of my philosophy. Think only of the past as its remembrance gives you pleasure.’ “ says Harold. John hears Harold’s breathing slowing down.
Alleys are good for cutting down the time, but the grease bins leave slick puddles on the uneven concrete. John scrapes the layers off his shoes as soon as he hits a clear patch. “That’s a big part of focus, Harold. Remember the good stuff.” She’ll be at the library soon.
“Here’s another one, Harold. ‘Know your own happiness. You want nothing but patience — or give it a more fascinating name, call it hope.’ “ The seconds tick away.
Harold snorts. “Hope. Sense and Sensibility again. Have you read only two of Austen’s books?”
John sprints half a block through a roadbuilding project, picking up a layer of sticky tar on his shoes. “You’ve kept me pretty busy, Harold. But there’s always some downtime, so I’ve read a few others.” Another thirty seconds before she’s there.
“Okay, Harold. Here’s one for me and one for you. Mine’s from Northanger Abbey, yours is Pride and Prejudice. I want you to hang on to these.” John takes a deep breath and continues to lope past the gridlocked cars. “This one’s for me. ‘There is nothing I would not do for those who are really my friends. I have no notion of loving people by halves; it is not my nature.’ “
Harold catches his breath in a sob. John continues, “And this one’s yours. ‘There is a stubbornness about me that never can bear to be frightened at the will of others. My courage always rises at every attempt to intimidate me.’ “
“Yes.” Harold takes a shaky breath. “Those are the two I shall cling to most particularly. Thank you.” John grunts as he slides across the hood of another car. Half a block of pavement opens up in front of him. Four minutes thirty seconds to intercept. He’s not going to make it. A guy carrying two brown shopping bags cuts John off, knocking him off his stride. John’s tunnel vision narrows to a point nine blocks ahead. Still too far, too far.
After a moment Harold says breathlessly, “Are you there, Mr. Reese?” In the background John can hear the click-click-click of Root’s heels coming up the library stairs.
“Always. I’m coming for you, Harold.” He hears Harold inhale softly and then the line goes dead.
John breaks into a sprint.