Gold Chapter One
Banner by my beta and good friend Managerie
John Williams couldn't believe the address listed on his work assignment card for the day. The security guard at the construction site's main entrance had handed him it to John after checking his company issued ID. “The supervisor wants you there today Williams.”
Williams had started the job at GHC construction four months ago as a general laborer which for this company usually meant on-site clean up. John spent long hours pushing around a wheelbarrow gathering up waste construction materials, pushing it out of the building, and dumping its contents into a pile. The scrap lumber, drywall, tile, or whatever remnants of what the builders were using that day would be scooped up eventually by a loader into a waiting dump truck which hauled the refuse away.
The work was hard and although the over forty Williams had never been soft or considered out of shape, it had made his body leaner, his muscles more toned than they had been in years. If not for the proliferation of silver streaking his dark hair and a life hardened face, John could be mistaken for one of the other workers there half his age.
It was a menial job like thousands of others in the city that thousands of ordinary people went to everyday. There was nothing to the work that would draw attention from the eye in the sky and maybe that was why he had ended up at GHC last spring, coming to this very site for the past ninety days.
GHC's recent hire had spent his first thirty days with the company on probation being shuffled from site to site. Yet after Williams had been hired full time, the twin high rise apartment’s development project had been a semi-permanent placement. It came as bit of a surprise, although not completely unexpected, to be pulled off the job here and sent to the address on the card.
John certainly hadn't been sent to every construction location of the company, of which there were many in the five Burroughs, but the company logo was easily recognizable and Williams knew what a GHC venture was without having worked there.
Williams had driven past the address's building every Sunday the past four months in his beat-up Chevy Silverado and today was only Tuesday. Only one day ago the old library had still appeared to be a long ago suspended renovation venture and certainly not one GHC had ever been involved in. If John had been surprised earlier, what he had felt before was replaced by total shock and then an overwhelming disappointment. The golden horizon of a rising sun beyond a city skyline, the company's logo, was emblazoned on a banner now hanging from rebuilt scaffolding.
There was a sectioned off part of the street marked with 'Parking for GHC vehicles only' that he pulled the Silverado into, parking behind the only other vehicle, a black Toyota Tundra with the GHC logo painted on its side. Hanging his company issued vehicle tag from the rear view mirror, John got out of his truck looking up at the building that held so many memories.
The building's entrance Williams had walked through many times past; finding the old wooden double doors was easy and he opened the unlocked one. On the main floor there was one other man wearing a blue work jacket, the company's name in gold lettering printed on the coat's back, hammering a nail into the packing crate he was assembling. When the man turned upon hearing the door closing, Williams was stunned to see that the man, shorter than John and with dark hair, had a long scar from forehead to mid cheek under his right eye. The disfigurement wasn't what had made him stop in his track; the man was someone from a life John was no longer a part of.
“You're Williams?” Burnell, the name embroidered on the jacket's front, asked giving no indication he knew John from before. When Williams nodded an affirmative, Burnell introduced himself as the foreman in charge of the renovation. The scar faced man pointed the hammer in his hand around the room indicating the damage from vandalism that needed to be taken care of before he could bring a crew in. The books scattered around the main floor needed to be crated up in order for them to be moved elsewhere and restored. The building's new owner, a lover of books, did not wish for any of them to be destroyed. The foreman pointed up the stairs, finishing his instructions by telling Williams the rest of the floors were in better shape, books just being pulled off the shelves, but there was other damage that just needed to be cleared up and disposed of.
The other man looked at his watch before telling Williams he had to leave, this job only needed one worker for the day and the foreman had to go to the company headquarters and choose the men he would need on the crew.
Burnell stopped in front of John, “The boss thought you would want to handle this on your own.” He handed Williams the hammer and a set of keys and winked, “Don't forget to lock up when you leave.” Burnell had known exactly who Williams was, the same as John was aware of the real identity of the marked man.
After the ersatz foreman left, Williams put the keys in his jeans pocket and the hammer on one of the empty crates. Nothing much had changed in the old lobby since the day John Reese, that was what he was known by then, had first followed another smaller limping man through the double doors. Books were still strewn across the floor, dust covering them and everything else in the foyer. All except for a small pathway leading to the staircase and where recent footfalls had tracked the fine powder away visible on the marble floor.
Those tracks were too many for one man inspecting a building to have left in one day. Reese guessed they were made by those that had come looking, to hunt down or kill John and his handicapped friend months ago. The two men had left this old building that fateful day and assumed new and separate identities. Reese had become Williams and his friend? John didn't know.
Reese had been army and then CIA. John had obeyed orders without question, including carrying out assassinations. As a covert agent he had done things that Reese wasn't proud of, even believing he had become nothing more than a cold-blooded killer. Yet, the former soldier had been rewarded for that loyalty with betrayal. John Reese had reached the lowest point in his life when the strange little man with his wire rimmed glasses and Tin-tin haircut had reached out offering the deceived operative a life line: a new purpose and an unusual job.
Now Reese was back here, under the guise of a construction worker known as John Williams, and trying to figure out how and why an employee of an old nemesis was posing as a GHC foreman. It wasn't hard to figure out this was some elaborate plan to get Reese back into the old library without setting off warning bells.
The eccentric older man's unusual job offer was to help save innocent people using John's unique skill set. Harold Finch, Mr. Finch as he wanted to be called, had built a super computer for the government to predict terrorist threats, to prevent mass casualty events. Only the computer could also predict threats to single individuals. The computer and all its servers were in the government's hands but Finch still had a back door into the system. The Machine, as they called it, let him know about those innocents in trouble.
Only The Machine was a power another organization, Decima, wanted to control and when that failed, the group found another machine. Through an elaborate plan, Decima and its leader fooled the government into abandoning The Machine and using the group's computer system to now prevent terrorist acts.
That organization and its supercomputer Samaritan was why Finch, Reese and five others had had to go into hiding. They were the only people with the power to destroy the other system and subvert what other plans Decima might have. Samaritan was the eye in the sky and the reasoning for this obvious plot to get John to The Library unobserved. Only why?
John ascended the winding staircase to the second floor. The metal gate Finch had closed, even in their haste to leave, was now wide open, the destroyed lock still lying on the floor. The crushing disappointment he had felt outside returned. The main room that had once been their headquarters was a wreck. Shattered glass was everywhere; the table that had once held Finch's computers was overturned. The monitors had been smashed beyond recognition, and the computer towers were gone, their connections ripped from them, wires left hanging.
The old wooden filing cabinets had their drawers pulled open, but at least the contents weren't dumped. Pictures and clippings, remembrances of innocents lost or saved that Finch had painstakingly pinned to a cork reminder board and connected by colored yarn, had been ripped down.
Their dog Bear's bed along with his food and water containers were scattered around in the mess. John gave the dog to Harold for the lame man's protection but the canine had always remained their dog.
There was a small waste dumpster pushed along an empty wall. How and when it was brought up here Reese didn't know, but at a loss for what else he could do for now a sullen John began cleaning up the mess.
It had been drummed into Reese during his years in the army and even more so after joining the agency, to never get attached to anything, to never care. Seeing all this, now, John thought he should have let them succeed in making him cold and unfeeling. This place, the job, the odd limping bespectacled man, John had come to love. The Library had been like a home, the job his purpose, and Finch a light for John who had once been surrounded by darkness. Maybe if Reese had learned to remain detached bitterness wouldn't be welling up in him now.
The broken monitors he tossed in the dumpster first along with all the ruined cables, upset Finch's equipment had been destroyed so viciously. The plush dog bed now filled with shards and slivers of glass Reese angrily chucked into the trash bin next.
As the now furious man turned to look around and find something else to vent his ire on, a glint of golden light from the partially stained glass window caught his eye. John's rage vanished as memories of Finch looking out that window flooded his mind.
The window was stained with a gold stripe in the shape of a square, the glass one way.
The most vivid remembrance of Harold dressed in a vest and a tie the color of amaranth, drinking tea from his favorite cup while gazing out that window, Finch's thoughts a million miles away, clutched at Reese's heart. John had loved, no, still loved that man so.
The two had started out as strangers. Finch, so wary of the former operative who was now his employee, tried to keep Reese at arm's length. Only John had broken through those walls Finch had built to protect himself and they had become friends. Somewhere along the way and most unexpectedly for them both, the love they had for each other as friends changed into something more. After denying their true feelings, to one another and even to themselves, for too long, they had finally become lovers. This made their separation that much more painful, four weeks later they had to part. Reese didn't have any idea where Finch was, how he was or even who he was.
John drawn by the flicker of gold, moved to where his memory’s illusion had once stood, to look out that same window. His own thoughts were now far away in a motel room in D.C. remembering the night the two had first made love, when someone stepping in the broken glass snapped his mind back to the present, reflexes taking over making his body ready to spring into action.
There was no threat, only a hallucination. Only mirages don't make noise. Nonetheless, Reese thought he was seeing one, when standing not three feet away was … Harold Finch. He was wearing wire rimmed glasses again and his hair was longer, parted on the side. Gone was the three piece suit Finch always preferred, this Harold was dressed in dark jeans and a blue tee shirt with the logo of an electronics retailer printed in gold lettering across the front.
Reese blinked several times not believing that what he was seeing in front of him was real, until Harold moved closer, looking up at the taller man's face. “John. I'm here. It's me.”
“Finch...Harold?” John reached out a hand to brush his fingers across the whiskers on the other man's face. The rasp of the stubble and the warmth of flesh beneath his fingertips confirmed this was not imagination, Finch was standing before him.
Reese placed both hands on the older man's face and dropped his head to kiss Harold. At first the contacts was brushing the other’s lips tenderly and sweetly, tentatively asking with his own, if he could take more, give more. When Finch moaned into the kiss, John deepened it. Each opened their mouths, taking turns tasting one another, tongue over teeth, tongue tangling with tongue, until they had to pause to catch their breath.
Harold pulled away and hearing John's gasp of confusion, grabbed his reunited lover's hand pulling him to follow. “They didn't find it. Nothing in there has been touched.”
In his slow limping gate Finch led John to a place in the old building only the two knew about. Behind a movable book shelf was a hidden room with only a bed and a nightstand next to it. Harold had shown him the alcove when John had jokingly asked once if Finch slept there in The Library.
The first time they had tried to make love in that very room, the fruition of denying their feelings any longer the result of yet another life threatening situation for both men, had ended abruptly by the arrival of Finch's other operative.
“There will be no interruptions this time, John. I know this is rather inconvenient, but I needed to be with you. This is all right is it not?”
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Chapter Two Chapter Three