Title: Finding the Solution
Fandom: Person of Interest
Rating: G
Length: 408
Summary: Reese needs to solve the puzzle, but it's just a collection of letters.
With thanks to my beta owlbsurfinbird

Reese looked at the piece of paper which was inside the newspaper he had retrieved from the coffee shop table.  Finch had promised to communicate with him and he had assumed that this would be the promised communication.  Instead of that, he was looking at a chart of letters, evenly spaced in rows and columns.  He wondered whether it was a form of coded message, but without any hint as to the code he knew he would struggle to decipher it.  He tried hard to remember whether Finch had given him any hint as to possible ciphers in the last few days, but nothing sprang to mind.

He glared at the sheet.  It almost looked like a word search, one of those puzzles that people sometimes used to kill time when waiting in airports, or gave to their children to shut them up for five minutes while they drank their coffee in peace.  Only this sheet gave no indication of which words should be searched for.  Idly he tried running his eyes up the sheet from bottom to top and then stopped when he realised he’d seen the word VULTURE.  He tried again and spotted SPARROW.  When he looked at a diagonal and saw EAGLE he knew he was on to something.

Not wishing to be observed as he solved the puzzle, he picked up the newspaper, keeping the sheet safely inside and, whistling to Bear, he walked back to the library.  Once there he quickly found seven further varieties of bird, although there was no inclusion of the word FINCH.  It still left a significant number of unused letters, and Reese felt as if he wasn’t much closer to solving the puzzle.

He fixed himself some coffee and considered the sheet again.  This time he saw MCKINNON, the name belonging to the latest number, together with JERICHO.  There were other, shorter words, which seemed initially to have no purpose.  Reese grabbed a map and realized that by joining these words together he could make two road names, which intersected.  Carefully he crossed these words out too.

Finally, he worked his way through, writing down all the remaining letters that hadn’t formed any of the words.  He discarded a number of Xs and Zs, to reveal the message that said: TODAY TWO PM.  He glanced at his watch; he would make it, but he felt that Finch’s confidence in his puzzle solving ability might be a bit optimistic.