We waited long enough for Zapata and Reade to once again come into contact with each other for the first time since the former fled the country with Blake by her side, so it’s a welcome sight to see “Naughty Monkey Kicks at Tree” immediately put us back inside Reade’s apartment, where Zapata has a gun pointed at his head. Her and Claudia have come for access to the FBI’s servers on orders from Madeline Burke. They tie him to a chair, and Claudia begins going through the kitchen drawers, assessing what she can use as a weapon of torture like she’s Bruce Willis in Pulp Fiction. She eventually settles on a a knife and carving fork, heating up the latter on the stovetop to make for a grisly weapon.
Reade, not wanting to have a hot carving fork applied to his face, tries to talk some sense into Zapata. He’s confused and hurt, and he wants to know what happened to her. So, she lays it out. She says she worked her way up through the ranks of the NYPD, FBI, and CIA, but all she found was corruption and people looking out for themselves. Now, she’s doing the same, looking after herself before she gets burned by the CIA or FBI. When Reade starts talking back, she knocks him out with a quick pistol-whip; a moment of anger, or a way for Zapata to make sure Reade doesn’t get tortured? The blow allows Zapata some time to think and see if she can get into the FBI servers. Whether she’s truly still on Reade’s side or not, she clearly trying to protect him to a certain extent.
Back at the office, another tattoo case is getting underway without Reade, who Patterson says is taking a sick day (Zapata sent an email from his computer). This tattoo, which is the outline of a scythe, leads the team to a notorious assassin named, you guessed it, the Scythe. They bring Keaton in for backup, and he says the CIA believes the Scythe has Russian connections because he’s sabotaged some foreign dealings in the past, specifically involving oil deals with Saudi Arabia. They get a hit on his whereabouts, which is Clovis Labs, a place where they do all kinds of different medical research.
When the team shows up, the Scythe has already executed his hit, poisoning a doctor with a needle. The team does capture him, though, and when they bring him in for questioning, they get quite the surprise. The elevator doors open, the Scythe sees Rich, and he loses his mind. “It’s you! You’re the reason I do what I do,” he says, which flatters and worries Rich all at the same time. Rich can’t figure out why this international assassin knows him… until he begins to recite his manifesto. As it turns out, Rich was involved in quite a few scams in his criminal days, and one of those scams involved tricking environmentalists into giving him money to “offset their carbon footprint thought things like planting trees.” Of course, Rich didn’t do any of that, but apparently his radical environmentalist manifesto lived on. He created an algorithm that would crawl the web for environmental-tinged writing from authors and journalists and such, and then create a word soup of hippie-dippie nonsense that, apparently, inspired domestic terrorism in the time since Rich forgot all about it.
After doing a little digging, Patterson finds out that the Scythe has ties to Daniel Katzovich, the leader of the Environmental Liberation Movement, a group known for a number of terrorist attacks in the name of saving the planet. The doctor who was killed was part of the movement too, and was stockpiling white phosphorus, a chemical that starts fires that can’t be put out. So when the Scythe says New York will burn to the ground, he means it. The movement is planning an attack, and the team doesn’t have much time to figure out how it’s happening. (Recap continues on next page)
