Chapter 15 : Background Check
Queens Public Library — October 25, 2013, 2:00 PM
The library smelled exactly the way it had smelled the first time Nathan had walked through its doors— that specific combination of old paper, industrial carpet cleaner, and the faint chemical sweetness of book-binding glue that every public library in America shared like a franchise scent. Three months ago, he'd sat at these same terminals researching the man whose body he'd inherited. Now he sat here researching a woman he intended to save.
Meera Malik.
The public record was deliberately thin. FBI personnel databases didn't exist in any accessible form— you couldn't Google "FBI Special Agent" and get a roster, no matter how creatively you phrased the search. But people left traces. Even ghosts cast shadows when the light hit right.
Nathan started with the obvious. LinkedIn— nothing. Facebook— nothing under her real name, though the absence itself was informative. Twitter— nothing. Instagram— nothing. The woman had no social media footprint, which in 2013 was unusual enough to constitute a statement. Most federal employees maintained at least a professional profile. Meera Malik had chosen to be invisible online.
Ex-CIA. They train you to disappear. The FBI is less rigorous about digital hygiene, but old habits survive agency transfers.
He moved to public records. Property ownership— nothing in New York State under Meera Malik. Vehicle registration— one hit: a 2011 Honda Civic registered to an M. Malik at a Virginia address that turned out to be a UPS Store mailbox when Nathan checked it through Google Maps. She'd registered her car to a mail drop. Professional-grade misdirection for someone who wasn't technically undercover.
Court records— nothing. Not a parking ticket, not a civil filing, not a single interaction with the justice system that generated a public document. For a federal law enforcement officer, this was plausible. For a human being living in the United States, it was remarkable.
[EA Passive Analysis: Subject profile consistent with intelligence community background. Digital footprint: near-zero (deliberate). Public record gaps suggest active maintenance. Assessment: Former covert operative, current sensitive assignment.]
Nathan absorbed the analysis and kept digging.
The breakthrough came from an unexpected direction: academic publishing. Meera Malik had co-authored a paper in 2007 for the Georgetown University Law Center's National Security Law Review: "Cross-Agency Intelligence Sharing: Barriers and Opportunities in the Post-9/11 Landscape." The paper itself was behind a paywall, but the abstract and author bios were public.
Meera Malik, J.D., M.A. (International Security). Currently serving with the Central Intelligence Agency's Directorate of Operations. Previously assigned to Islamabad Station (2004-2006) and London Station (2006-2007). The views expressed are the author's own and do not represent the CIA.
Nathan read the bio three times. Islamabad and London stations. Directorate of Operations— the CIA's clandestine service. She'd been operational, not analytical. Field work. The kind of work that involved meeting assets in dangerous locations, building cover identities, and occasionally running from people who wanted to kill you.
She left the CIA after 2007. Joined the FBI — when? The show never specified exactly. But by 2013, she's on the task force. Cooper selected her. Why? What does a CIA field operative bring to an FBI task force that FBI agents don't?
The answer was obvious: tradecraft. The ability to operate in environments where the rules were different from domestic law enforcement. Meera Malik could do things that FBI agents couldn't, because she'd been trained by an agency that didn't recognize the same boundaries.
Nathan wrote down the Georgetown paper's citation in his notebook. Then he closed the browser, cleared the history— library computers logged sessions, and he didn't want anyone tracing his research interests— and shifted to the second part of his investigation.
The task force itself.
He'd been building this picture for weeks, but today he intended to formalize it. Not publish it. Not share it. Just organize what he knew into a structure he could reference, update, and eventually use.
The evidence was circumstantial but convincing. Nathan pulled up his working file— kept on a USB drive, never on the laptop's hard drive— and began cross-referencing.
Fact: Raymond Reddington surrendered to the FBI on September 23, 2013. Within 48 hours, the Zamani case was resolved. Within three weeks, the Freelancer was captured. Within a month, sealed federal proceedings in Manhattan suggested an espionage-related arrest.
Fact: The same cluster of vehicles appeared near multiple federal operations in the D.C. and New York areas. Nathan had photographed plates from four separate locations over the past month. Three of those plates were registered to the FBI's vehicle pool. The fourth— the town car from Centre Street— was registered to a private security firm called Regal Protective Services, which Nathan's research showed was a known FBI front company for sensitive operations.
Fact: The same faces appeared. Nathan had dozens of photographs now, taken from coffee shops and park benches and sidewalk vantage points. Cross-referencing them was tedious— he wasn't facial recognition software, and his smartphone camera produced images that were adequate rather than identification-quality. But patterns emerged. The same woman— Elizabeth Keen, whose photograph he'd captured at the surrender— appeared near the federal building during both the Freelancer and Wujing operations. The same tall man with Ressler's build. And Meera Malik, entering through a side door with the deliberate casualness of someone who used that entrance regularly.
[Pattern Recognition — Analysis: Cross-referencing location data, vehicle registrations, and personnel sightings. Probability of organized task force: 94.3%. Estimated size: 6-10 members. Operational focus: High-value targets identified by Reddington. Confidence: High.]
94.3%. Not proof, but close enough to know without knowing.
Nathan stared at the assessment floating at the edge of his vision. A secret FBI task force, built around Reddington's intelligence, staffed by agents from multiple agencies, operating outside normal Bureau oversight. The biggest story in federal law enforcement, hiding in plain sight.
And you can't write a word of it.
Not because of the system. Not because of the Seeker's Oath. Because publishing the task force's existence would destroy it— and destroying it would eliminate the only mechanism currently catching the criminals on Reddington's list. The Freelancer would still be killing people if the task force hadn't caught him. Wujing would still be selling CIA agents' identities. Whatever came next on the list— the Stewmaker, Anslo Garrick, the names Nathan carried in his meta-knowledge like classified files he couldn't declassify— would continue operating without opposition.
The task force needed to exist. Nathan needed it to exist. Because without it, there was no framework for the changes he intended to make— no structure to work within, no people to build relationships with, no access points for the information that might eventually save Meera Malik's life.
You can't write the story. But you can get close to the people in it.
The librarian appeared at his elbow. Nathan startled— SEC 9 passive detection hadn't flagged her because she wasn't a threat, but his body didn't know that. His hand jerked, knocking his pen off the desk.
"Sorry," the librarian said. Short woman, sixties, glasses on a beaded chain, the particular gentleness of someone who spent her professional life helping people without being asked. "You've been here four hours. Brought you this."
She set a paper cup of coffee on the desk beside his notebook. Nathan stared at it. The gesture— unprompted, unrequested, the simple kindness of a stranger who noticed another person working hard and decided to make their afternoon marginally better— landed somewhere in his chest with a weight that had nothing to do with caffeine.
"Thank you," he said. And meant it with a completeness that surprised him.
She smiled and walked away. Nathan drank the coffee. It was terrible— vending machine quality, the kind of coffee that existed to remind you that better coffee existed elsewhere. But it was warm and it was free and someone had brought it because they thought he looked like he needed it.
Human moments. They're still real. Don't forget that.
He saved his files to the USB drive. Ejected it. Pocketed it. Checked the time: 6:15 PM. The library closed in forty-five minutes, and he had one more research thread to pursue before he left.
Janet Chen— Deborah's contact in the Southern District clerk's office— had responded to Nathan's introductory email with the cautious warmth of someone who'd been told positive things by a trusted friend. She couldn't share sealed proceedings. She could, hypothetically, mention whether the sealed proceedings in question had generated any publicly visible ripple effects— motions for continuance, scheduling changes, courtroom security adjustments.
Nathan pulled up her email. Read it twice.
"Nathan — Deborah says you're trustworthy. I'm taking her word for it. I can't discuss specifics, but I will tell you this: the security protocols in Courtroom 4B were upgraded three times in October. Upgraded, not maintained. Three different technical teams. That's unusual for a federal courtroom that typically handles financial fraud cases. Draw your own conclusions. — Janet"
Three security upgrades in a financial fraud courtroom. That meant the courtroom was being repurposed for something that required more protection than white-collar crime. Espionage cases. National security proceedings. The kind of cases that a task force built around Reddington's intelligence would generate.
Nathan added the detail to his file. Another brick in the wall.
[Source Interaction: Janet Chen (indirect, via Deborah). Information value: Medium. No trust score established yet — contact was email only.]
[Investigation XP: +25 (Task Force pattern verification). Total XP: 200/200.]
[Level Up: 2 → 3. +3 Stat Points available. Energy cap: 120. Function efficiency +5%.]
The level-up notification arrived with a physical component— a brief flush of warmth through his torso, a sharpening of the ambient sounds around him (the library's HVAC system, a woman whispering into her phone two aisles over, the specific electronic hum of the computer terminal). Level 3. The system settling deeper into his neural architecture, the integration tightening like a joint properly seated.
Nathan closed his eyes for three seconds. Let the sensation pass. Then opened them and checked the stat allocation interface.
Three points. Current stats: INS 8, NET 6, CRD 6, SEC 9, RES 5, ANL 8. The temptation to overweight Security was strong— his paranoia had found its justification in SoHo, and the system rewarded caution— but the balance principle held. He needed to be more than a survivor. He needed to be an investigator.
One point into Insight, bringing it to 9. One into Network, bringing it to 7. One into Credibility, bringing it to 7.
[Stats Updated: INS 9 | NET 7 | CRD 7 | SEC 9 | RES 5 | ANL 8]
The numbers settled and faded. Nathan gathered his materials, returned the library's coffee cup to the returns counter with a nod to the librarian, and walked out into the October evening.
Queens was doing what Queens did at 6:30 PM on a Friday: the specific controlled chaos of a borough where half the population was heading home and the other half was heading out. Nathan walked the twelve blocks to his apartment through the amber wash of streetlights and car headlights and the neon of bodegas and nail salons and the one Korean barbecue place that smelled so good it constituted an assault on the willpower of anyone who walked past on an empty stomach.
His stomach was empty. He stopped at the barbecue place. Ordered bulgogi and rice to go. Ate it standing at the counter because there were no seats and because the first bite made him realize he'd eaten nothing since the toast at 6 AM and his body was done asking politely.
Back at the apartment, he locked both deadbolts and the chain. Checked the motion sensor— battery at 73%, functioning. Pulled the USB drive from his pocket and opened the task force file on his laptop.
The picture was clear now. Not complete— he didn't know Cooper's name yet, didn't know the internal dynamics, didn't know which cases had been resolved and which were ongoing beyond what he carried in meta-knowledge. But the shape was visible. A shadow organization within the FBI, built around a criminal's intelligence, staffed by agents selected for their ability to operate in moral gray areas.
And Meera Malik— ex-CIA, former field operative, woman without a digital footprint— was in the middle of it.
Nathan opened his notebook to the page where he'd written her name on the subway. Meera Malik. 7 months. How?
He added a line beneath the question:
Step 1: Get close enough to be useful.
Step 2: Be useful enough to be trusted.
Step 3: Be trusted enough to be believed when I tell her that someone is going to try to kill her.
Three steps. Simple to write. Each one harder than the last. Getting close to a former CIA operative who'd been trained to detect exactly the kind of approach Nathan was planning required a level of sophistication that Level 3 and a handful of published articles couldn't provide. Not yet.
But the foundation was building. Thirteen published articles. A monthly column in a D.C. policy magazine. An analysis piece shared by ProPublica's investigative editor. A courthouse source in Queens and a new contact in the Southern District. A system that was slowly, steadily making him better at the work he already knew how to do.
And the biggest story you've ever found, sitting in a file on a USB drive that you can't publish because publishing it would destroy the only thing that might save her life.
Nathan closed the laptop. Pocketed the USB drive. Sat in the dark apartment with the remnants of Korean barbecue and the steady hum of a system that was no longer strange but simply his— as much a part of him now as the green eyes in the mirror or the muscle memory of a reporter's instincts.
Somewhere in this city, the task force was working a case he already knew the outcome of. Somewhere, Meera Malik was doing the job that would eventually put her in the path of a killer she didn't know was coming. And somewhere, the person who'd sent a man in a gray jacket to follow Nathan through SoHo was reading his byline and deciding what to do about a freelance journalist who asked too many of the right questions.
Nathan pulled the laptop back open. Not the task force file. His article queue. Capital Observer needed the monthly column by Monday. He had two pitches due to Diane. Jake Harris wanted a follow-up on the Queens crime beat.
The work continues. The network grows. The clock ticks.
He started typing. The system hummed. Outside, Queens settled into its Friday-night rhythm, unaware that in a studio apartment on the fourth floor, a man with borrowed eyes and a stolen life was writing his way toward a future that hadn't happened yet.
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