The government has done it again. The CIA set up a black site in the middle of Manhattan because that sounds like a good idea. When a truck crashes into the site, five prisoners escape. Halcyon is called in to look for the prisoners and return them quietly before there is panic from the public.
While three of the five prisoners were easy to take back into custody, the other two stand out. Brian Mayhew was imprisoned for espionage. He was caught giving away specs to a missile, but Mayhew claims to be innocent. He’s a hacktivist, and he claims that he accidentally stumbled onto the missile specs while on a different mission. Then, he says that someone cloned his IP address and sent the specs to frame him.
Naturally, Mayhew was right. He was framed by a government defense contractor who stood to gain a lot from Mayhew’s exposure. The government was forced to put the multimillion dollar security contract in place after the missile specs were sold online. The interesting part is that to prove his innocence, Mayhew had to get one of seven keys to the internet. Yes, you heard that right. There are seven keys that can access and control the entire internet. At least, the good guys won today. The defense contractor claims that the next war will be a cyber one, and he was just doing the world a service. I’m guessing there had to have been a better way to get your point across.
Now that Scottie knows that Howard was looking for her son, she wonders if he actually found Christopher. Scottie finds Christopher’s adoption papers and knows the identity of the people who adopted him. When Scottie goes to talk with Mr. and Mrs. Phelps, they are very confused. She explains the situation, and they barely bat an eye. Mrs. Phelps only offers to show Scottie a picture of Christopher, aka Jacob. The picture that she shows Scottie is of a little boy, but Scottie notices something odd. Jacob has a birthmark on his neck. Mrs. Phelps shrugs it off assuming that Scottie must have forgotten, but Scottie comes to a terrible realization. This boy is not her son.
After this encounter, I was very confused. Tom was stressing because he knew that Scottie was close to finding out his true identity. He overheard her conversations, and he recognized the names of his adoptive parents. So what happened? It turns out that the private investigator that led Scottie to the Phelps has been working with Howard the whole time. He was always on Howard’s payroll. They planted imposter Phelps to intercept Scottie and lead her away from her son.
Meanwhile, Howard only cares about Whitehall, whatever that means. Howard is sure that this is Scottie’s big endgame. Howard says that Whitehall is a line item in the Halcyon budget. He traced it to a warehouse in Africa, but by the time he sent a team there, the warehouse was clean. Whitehall is not an official company operative, so why would Scottie have a team doing a black op? Howard believes that it’s only a matter of time until she confides in Tom. But he’s being too secretive now, and Scottie has taken notice. She is already suspicious of Tom, and she tasked Solomon to figure out what he’s up to.
Of course, we know that Scottie is secretive about some things. For instance, she’s grieving her husband’s death by sleeping with a young man, Trevor. She knows that Trevor isn’t real to her, but he provides a comfort for which she longs. What Scottie doesn’t know is that her assistant is also seeing Trevor? This just got weird. It’s slightly unclear how much each of them know about one another. In any case, Trevor tells Scottie’s assistant that his real name is Dan. Could Trevor be another plant from Howard? Or is he just going to be Scottie’s toy for a little while longer?