Reading Time: 130 Minutes
Title: A Greater Sacrifice
Author: SASundance
Fandom: NCIS, Eureka – minor crossover
Genre: Angst, Crossover, Episode Related, Fantasy, Kid!fic, Paranormal/Supernatural, Science Fiction
Relationship(s): Gen, background pairings
Content Rating: R
Warnings: Discussion of suicidality, suicide missions, canonical level of violence
Word Count: 200,260
Summary: When Anthony DiNozzo is told by Director Vance that he must take one for the team, following the death of Mossad Officer Michael Rivkin, never did he imagine that the cost would prove so high. After a year filled with taking one for the team, Tony decides that he is not going to Tel Aviv, until he is blackmailed into going along by opportunistic politicians who see a chance to change the balance of power. Forced onto the plane taking Rivkin’s body home, an injured Tony isn’t sure that he will make it out alive or if there is anything left for him to come home to.
Artist: Lailath Quetzalli
Chapter 5
As Tony watched the arid miles of desert landscape sweep past, taking him ever closer to his ‘death,’ he resolutely turned his mind away from Gibbs’ betrayal. Somehow, it seemed all the more bitter since it came about because the boss was following SECNAV’s orders to play nice with Vance. Well, that and Gibbs’ deep and abiding concern over Ziva. Where the fuck was his all-knowing Gibbs’ gut while Vance was selling Tony’s ass out to Eli for his goodwill?
The director’s casual disregard for Tony’s life would no doubt be waved aside by Gibbs like he’d done when Tony was justifiably livid to learn that his superiors had set him up over the whole wargame scenario. He accused Vance of being manipulative and called Gibbs out for being weak and failing to have their backs. Gibbs telling him that he had been the one who made the call to lie to him, had rocked Tony’s world to its foundations.
For his mentor to tell him he kept him in the dark because he knew he could handle the lies and that it was too risky, to borrow a Ducky-ism was balderdash. He had no doubt that his boss’ lack of support for him in this Rivkin mess was probably being justified by Gibbs on the same basis.
Oh hey, it’s that dumb shmuck, DiNozzo! He’s such a doormat, he’ll lie there and take it, just like he has for the last eight years.
After all, he was just a guy, while Ziva…well, she was like a daughter to Gibbs. She had lost her lover, and Gibbs knew what that was like. The fact that Rivkin, that both of them were Kidon-trained assassins, touting their vast superiority, or that what Rivkin had done in the US was against the law obviously didn’t matter. Not even with Ziva defending his illegal acts, even while she lied to the team leader, was enough for him to doubt her, not in the face of Ziva’s tears. Tony wondered idly, what it might take for Gibbs to turn on her?
What would change when the Israelis announced his death? Would Gibbs still defend her as being mad with grief? Probably, after all, Ziva did bear some responsibility for Cate’s death four years ago and it could so very easily, have been McGee and Abby that had died at the hand of Ari, too, if Tony had still been on sick leave from the plague. Technically, he should have been, but he was going out of his mind with boredom and in doing so, saved them.
Somehow, the boss had been able to rationalise away Ziva’s involvement even back then. Knowing her dossiers identified the people closest to Gibbs, who Ari would target to get to him, plus her role in failing to handle him competently. If he could reconcile her role in Cate’s death and work with Ziva as a trusted member of his precious team and adopt her as a surrogate daughter, then Tony’s death and her role in it would not be a problem for the former Marine.
Tony sighed, knowing that ‘if’ he made it out of Israel alive after this insane undercover operation, and he was not exactly hopeful about his chances, he was done with being Gibbs’ loyal Saint Bernard. He was done with the agency, too!
Time to cut the apron strings. Some betrayals were too irreconcilable and his ability to trust in the system was now non-existent. That was why he was putting the last shreds of his faith in one individual.
Sitting in the SUV, rapidly approaching the city, he thought back to that little prick, Driessen and his bosses, who forced him into carrying out this crazy scheme and his bitter realisation that they were no better than Eli David. Their preparedness to murder Jeanne Benoit, if that was what it took to ensure his cooperation, still outraged him. He vowed that should he survive this, he would use his network of contacts to bring down the vile Mr Fix-it and, if no one else, his immediate boss, Acting Secretary of State Anna Elliot. Hadar had shared with him the whisperings in Mossad that Reed Atkins, the US Secretary of State, was on leave, undergoing treatment for non-hodgkin’s lymphoma, and Elliot who was filling in for him, probably hoping that he wouldn’t return. If she thought that this operation might increase her chances of getting the top job, knowing her reputation for being ruthlessly ambitious, it explained why she appreciated the opportunity to help the Israelis rid themselves of their little Eli David problem.
The MCRT had first encountered Anna Elliot about five years ago; it was McGee who had fallen foul with her when Tony was otherwise engaged undercover, chained to Jeffery White. The MCRT was trying to recover stolen Iraqi antiquities, and Tony ended up stumbling into a serial killer. Elliot proved to be a petty and vindictive thorn in their side. Probably, the only reason Tim hadn’t ended up assigned to a one-agent field office in Anchorage or Death Valley, aside from Tony locating the stolen antiquities, was because McGee’s old man was an Admiral, and his grandfather had been one, too.
In retrospect, it made Tony realise how much his desperate manoeuvre to wrest back some control of the situation must have freaked out Mr Fix-it, who was continuously on the phone with Elliot, delivering sitreps while they waited. As the minutes had continued to tick by towards the forty-five-minute deadline, Tony had decided that Driessen would make a lousy poker player, based on the amount of sweating and pacing he’d done. Perhaps he’d never played for such high stakes as his professional life.
Tony assumed that Driessen was the Fixer for the Secretary of State, Reed Atkins and, he knew he had him over a barrel. At the thirty-five-minute mark, Tony decided to turn up the heat even more. If these were to be his last minutes alive, he might as well use them productively and get on the phone with his financial advisor. He proceeded to undertake some crazy share trading in high-risk purchases. If they paid off, it could quadruple his portfolio. It was not something that he would consider doing under normal circumstances, Tony was much more conservative. He was smarter than the ‘Real Anthony DiNozzo’ (aka his sperm donor), but if he struck out and ended up destitute, then it wasn’t as if Tony would need the money where he was going. Besides, he had no one to leave it to.
Mind, if it paid off, and Tony didn’t make it, he didn’t want to think that his father would probably get hold of it, even though he wasn’t a beneficiary of his will, but Senior had few scruples when it came to money. That was a misstep that he’d rectify if he managed to survive this op.
Sitting here in the cool of the SUV, DiNozzo assessed his companion, noting, unlike Ziva’s driving, the Mossad officer was calm and measured. So, her suicidal driving style was not due to her training then, as she’d claimed. Amit Hadar was his contact with the Israeli government; he would be in charge of the undercover operation and as he drove, was going over details with Tony again.
“Haswari was not the only time we used the ploy. Using a drug that mimics death has enabled at least ten of our operatives to infiltrate high-security facilities successfully. It is remarkable how people let their guard down with a corpse,” he said with a philosophical shrug.
“So, Ari, to all intents and purposes, was drugged when he was smuggled into NCIS?” he asked wearily. “The two security guards insisted he was dead when they signed over the body, although clearly he wasn’t. Everyone assumed they were lying to cover their asses. They both lost their jobs since two of the HRT agents died and Gibbs and an autopsy attendant were wounded on their watch,” he said shortly.
One of the security guards, Jose Fuentes, had been relying on his job to help pay the bills for his wife’s cancer treatment and, Tony didn’t want to think about what had happened to her after Fuentes was fired for negligence. At least Carl Stigger, the second security guard, was a widower.
“Back then, the research team hadn’t streamlined the protocol like we have now. We can keep an operative ‘dead’ for double the time that we could five years ago. Timing is key to carrying this off, but we are highly skilled. It will go down like clockwork,” he promised.
“Aren’t you worried that Eli and Ziva will figure out what you’re up to?” Tony wanted to know. After all, it was his butt that was on the line, and unlike his unusual undercover work, when he relied solely on his wits and skill to pull it off, he was going to be at the mercy of a bunch of people he didn’t know, hadn’t worked with, and had no reason to trust. He was completely vulnerable, which made him feel very uncomfortable.
“The Director is convinced he is in an unassailable position. He has grown complacent and arrogant and Ziva David, as you saw back at the airbase is tightly bound. I know what buttons to push to get under her skin.”
Tightly wound, Tony corrected mentally. “If she is angry at you, she will not be paying close attention.”
“That is correct. I will admonish her, for failing to order Rivkin’s extraction before it was too late and tell her that it is she who is to blame for his death. If it is necessary to distract them, Associate Director Erbaz will put in a strategic appearance which will add to the tension between father and daughter to further dirty up the waters,” Amit promised.
“Is he one of your?”
“She,” he corrected gently. “Orli Erbaz is why Eli’s wife, Rivka took Ziva and Tali and left Eli when Ziva was nine. She divorced him, I suspect because she learned that Orli was not the first time he cheated on her, but Erbaz was the last,” he concluded grimly. “Ziva hates her – blames her for the breakup of her family.”
“But they aren’t together any longer ?” Tony double-checked.
“The associate director is too old,” he said with brutal honesty. “Can we just say that Eli prefers his women, young and beautiful? Rivka’s age was probably why he started cheating on her, but it has become much worse the older he gets. Unfortunately, young attractive women regularly throw themselves at the Director, who is still quite urbane, and often has several mistresses.”
Tony had a sudden mental image of Senior and realised that he and Ziva had more in common than he realised. He wondered if she had reached the age where Daddy’s current mistress was younger than she was. That had been pretty damned embarrassing when it happened to him!
“And Erbaz is not one of Eli’s sycophants?”
She is ambitious, yes, and with Eli’s dynastic aspirations and his plan for Ziva to take over from him as the director of Mossad when he finally steps down, that does not leave room for anyone else. Orli does not intend to play second violin to a hot-headed child who cannot reign in her emotions,” Amit revealed candidly, surprising Tony.
“I think, also, that she despises Eli for cheating on her too, which of course, inevitably happened. I think she hates him almost as much as Rivka did. I get the impression she would like nothing better than to castrate him, but she would settle for making sure he is professionally impotent and removed from power.”
Tony was not sure that he was altogether cheered by them relying on ‘the woman scorned’ but like the rest of this whole crazy scheme, he had no say in the matter. To ensure the continued existence of Jeanne Benoit, he was forced to put his life and his trust in a bunch of foreign agents. Along with a bunch of scientists who claimed to be able to make him seem dead but were able to revive him after they had gotten the goods on the David family. Since he had already been betrayed by two NCIS directors for their own personal gain (and his boss, just for the shits and giggles), trusting a bunch of people from another country wasn’t something he was ecstatic about.
Every cell in his body was screaming out that this plan, letting himself be injected with a derivative of a neurotoxin to paralyse neurons in his body, was madness. Letting them mess around with a cocktail of drugs to slow down his vital processes to the edge of death so he appeared to be dead – it was sheer unadulterated lunacy.
So what if the Mossad had used this scenario in the past? Tony never had the ‘pleasure’ of knowing Haswari before he had infiltrated NCIS. Who was to say he wasn’t a reasonably rational, sane individual before undergoing this protocol so he could be smuggled into NCIS. Maybe the drugs messed with his mind and sent him over the edge into Crazy Town.
But thanks to Anna Elliot and the rest of the people who wanted Director David dispatched and were just as determined to use Tony as a pawn to achieve that goal, he was between that proverbial rock and a hard place. His needs and his life didn’t matter to them, and if they needed to use Jeanne because he still cared about what happened to her, then she was just another pawn. Of course, none of this would have happened if Vance and Davenport weren’t so insanely ambitious and willing to toady for Eli David.
Tony fervently hoped his plan, cobbled together at a moment’s notice, would ensure Jeanne would be safe. There was something to be said for having so much experience working undercover – where it was necessary to think on your feet and to be able to nix a plan at a moment’s notice and do the complete opposite. The main obstacle to success was whether he could trust the individual he’d nominated as his advocate? Shepard, Vance, Davenport, and even Gibbs were all superiors whom he should have been able to trust, but they had all betrayed him.
When the Deputy Director of DHS walked through his front door with less than two minutes to spare, his mien serious as he took in the tableau before him of Tony sitting with his gun angled up under his chin and Driessen yelling into his cell phone at his minions to find a way to delay Vance’s flight to Tel Aviv, he took immediate control. He seemed shocked but calm.
“I understand you need my help, Agent DiNozzo,” he said, coming in and sitting down on his sofa without waiting for an invite.
It had been a couple of years since Tony had seen him, and he felt an overwhelming wave of sorrow. If Morrow had remained at NCIS, Ziva David would never have been able to worm her way onto Tony’s team. He would never have sold him out to Eli David, either. Morrow wasn’t perfect, he let Gibbs get away with a heap of questionable shit, but he was honest and never used the director’s chair for personal agendas.
“I know that the last time I offered you a job, I told you I was only a phone call away if you needed anything, but I thought it would be more along the lines of career advice, Anthony,” he said wryly.
“Sorry, Director Morrow. It surprised me too. I couldn’t think of anyone else that was trustworthy.”
Given Tony an appraising once over as he leaned forward slowly, he asked, “What do you need from me, Son?”
Tony said, flashing a scathing look at Driessen, “Do you know what’s going on, Sir?”
Morrow sighed, dragging his hand over his face in a rare show of emotions, a wedding band with a single encrusted diamond glinted in the afternoon sun.
He replied wearily, “Not until Acting Secretary of State read me in, on the flight over here. I wish I could say that I’m shocked by what I learnt, but I’ve been in DC too long, I think. But I am appalled and, very angry. What can I do?”
“I need to make sure that Dr Benoit and my CIA-sanctioned terminations are rescinded and that everyone knows it,” he said, lowering his voice before continuing. “I need Jeanne and her mother to be flown to France and for them to be placed under the protection of the French security forces. If I don’t survive this dumbass mission, they need to be warned that the US should not be trusted, and to not come back.”
Looking pained, his former NCIS director nodded. ”Agreed, I can see to that. What else?”
“What do you know about the Mole at NCIS and Domino?” Tony quizzed Tom still speaking softly.
“I know the basics, he said noncommittally.
“Were you aware that Chief Petty Officer Vargas, who acquired the classified file, did so long before Director Vance figured out which file he stole from the Pentagon?”
Looking alarmed, Tom leaned forward. “How long are we talking about?”
“Bout five months.”
“Five months. How did it take five months to discover it?”
“Because after he stole it, Vargas encrypted it up the wazoo and then he disappeared, he was murdered. His body wasn’t discovered for another five months. Director Vance had his computer seized, immediately after he approached Vance, and then suddenly went dark. After Vance broke up the MCRT he sent Agent McGee to cybercrimes to try to crack the encryption on Vargas’ computer. Meanwhile, the director focused on trying to find the mole by putting his three suspect agents on Gibbs’ team, apparently hoping that Gibbs’ gut would have an epiphany about which one was the mole, although, both strategies seem pretty damned lame in my opinion.”
Looking alarmed, Tom said, “So Gibbs was read in on the Vargas situation and did nothing for months? He approved of having a potential mole investigating high profile, complex major cases that they may potentially compromise when they got to trial?”
Shaking his head, working hard to refrain from monumental eye-rolling, Tony said, “Erm no, Sir. Gibbs was read in only after Chief Petty Officer Vargas’ body was found. That was five months after the petty officer talked to Vance, and it was Gibbs who was pushing to find out what it was that Vargas had stolen from the Pentagon, all within days of the MCRT processing the scene of his death.”
“The director let Gibbs’ team of suspect moles investigate Vargas’ murder, knowing that the mole was on the team and could contaminate the evidence? What the hell?” Morrow shook his head in disgust.
Tony didn’t blame him. It beggared belief…smacking far too much of letting the fox investigate the massacre in the henhouse.
He thought he heard Morrow muttering something about Vance and Keystone cops, and he smirked.
“So, it took Agent McGee close to five months to break the encryption. Why the fuck didn’t Leon go to the Pentagon and find out what the damned file was. If the mole had managed to steal the file from him when they killed Vargas, Domino could have compromised not only our national security but our allies,” he growled, angrily.
“I know, it would have been a clusterfuck,” Tony agreed sombrely. “I don’t know why he and SECNAV didn’t go straight to the Pentagon, but I suspect that Davenport was shitting himself that if it got out, he’d lose his job, so he nominated Vance for the directorship, on the proviso that he cleaned it up without anyone finding out. And to answer your question, no, McGee never broke the encryption of the file, and it was only four months, not five.”
“If he didn’t crack it, how did Vance and SECNAV eventually figure out that Vargas had copied Domino?”
“Ah, that would be me, Sir. I was serving on the Sea Hawk as agent afloat,” he said, noting Morrow’s glower and wondered what that was about. “Gibbs was being his usual obsessive self in trying to solve Vargas’ murder in under 24 hours, as he does and was pushing hard to know what the file was he was killed for. McGee must have known that he couldn’t come up with the goods, so he came up with the idea of accessing the Pentagon files and backtracking using the data they already had on the encrypted file. He told the director and Gibbs that it would take too long going through the proper channels.”
“Not if they’d done so immediately,” Morrow fumed. “It certainly wouldn’t have taken five months. And if they’d been straight with The Powers That Be, even then, it would have been expedited as a matter of national security. Damn it, it WAS a matter of National Security,” he cursed, raising his voice several hundred decibels.
“Haven’t they learnt anything from 9/11?” he growled furiously before recalling where he was. “So, how did you crack the encryption, Anthony?”
“ I didn’t. McGee explained to the Director and Gibbs when they were pressuring him about not breaking the encryption that there was another way to figure out what was in the file, but it would mean that they had to go outside of normal channels. The director told him he never heard what he was suggesting about circumventing the normal channels and walked out of his office,” Tony said.
“I see, so did Vance order him not to do it or just say he didn’t want to know about it?”
“Option B, Sir,”
“Goddamn Leon, he has too much ambition and too little ethics,” he muttered under his breath.
Tony shrugged. “He probably realised that as soon as Gibbs knew there was a way to attain the information that he felt was crucial to closing the case, he’d just order McGee to do it anyway.”
Morrow silently conceded that DiNozzo had a point, but Tom was still pissed with the NCIS director’s ludicrous method of investigating. His eight-year-old grandson could have come up with Leon’s farcical plot to catch the mole. It was so ineffectual, convoluted, and illogical, plus it was fraught with dangerous traps that could have easily blown up in everyone’s faces.
“Director Vance is head of the agency and Gibbs is just a senior supervisory agent, Anthony. It doesn’t matter what he thinks,” Morrow gritted through an angry clenched jaw.
Tony gave a mirthless chuckle. “Pot, meet kettle. How come you never tried to stop Gibbs encouraging McGee to illegally hack when you were Director, then, Sir?” he said in a carefully neutral voice as Tom winced.
DiNozzo had a point, although, in Morrow’s defence, at least his less-than-effective attempts to contain Gibbs and make him follow the rules were not because he had personal ambitions. His lateral move to DHS had more to do with feeling like in the DHS, which was a much larger agency, he could achieve far more in fighting terrorism and that in a larger agency, small fry like Gibbs were less likely to be allowed to run roughshod over everyone, than SECNAV had permitted him to at NCIS.
“You’re right, Son, I was never very successful in keeping Jethro on the straight and narrow, but it wasn’t for the want of trying, though,” he said pensively. “So how did you come to be involved in this mess if you were on the Sea Hawk?”
“McGee said they needed to access the Pentagon system to trace the unique file hash tag number (which they did have) but to do that, they needed access to a secure naval communications room, and I was it,” he said.
“And when McGee and Gibbs contacted you about accessing the Pentagon did they explain all this or just tell you to do it?”
“Well, the latter, but how did you know, Director?”
“I know Gibbs and when he sees his goal in sight, he isn’t going to let anything distract him. I know that McGee never stops to think about the legality or the morality of hacking and that Elliot and her fixer are probably threatening you with charges of espionage and treason to force you to play along with this crazy scheme. They have already threatened you with reactivating the sanction order on you and Dr Benoit, so it stands to reason that they wouldn’t hesitate to hold this over your head, too.”
He looked at Tony calculatedly. “I assume you want immunity from prosecution for accessing the Pentagon system. I have no issue in advocating for that, considering if you hadn’t done it, we could all still be waiting for McGee to crack CPO Vargas’s encrypted file. It is blatantly clear to me that Vance’s career is far more important to him than our national security.”
Tom vowed if he couldn’t get immunity for DiNozzo, he would see to it that SecNav, Vance, Gibbs, and McGee were charged with conspiracy and treason. McGee might only be a junior agent, but Morrow was pissed with him. He knew all about PO Vargo and how dangerous it was to dither around. His old man and his grandfather were both flag officers in the navy! He couldn’t plead ignorance, unlike DiNozzo, who was not read in on what was at stake. And Gibbs shouldn’t have advocated hacking, but at least he realised how imperative it was to find out what file Vargo stole.
Tony shrugged. “It was stupid, I should have refused, but I was so desperate to get off that ship. If I had thought about it rationally, I’d have realised it was a dumbass thing to do,” he said. “I was in a bad place, mentally but I should have known better,” he said, thinking about how guilty he had been feeling over Director Shepard’s death.
“Okay, I’m going to get right on these matters. I wish I could promise to get you out of this FUBAR mess, but I don’t know how high up this asinine op goes, in terms of political support. It could go right to the top,” he said worriedly, “but I’ll make sure we get the kill sanctions rescinded and get your immunity,” he vowed.
He paused, taking in how rough DiNozzo was looking. “Anything else you need?”
“Yeah, I’d prefer to have a doctor I trust there if I wake up,” he said.
“Ducky?”
“With the greatest of respect to Ducky, I was thinking along the lines of Commander Brad Pitt, from Bethesda Naval Hospital,” he said.
He deliberately sidestepped the elephantine issue that if Gibbs had hung him out to dry, he wasn’t about to put his faith in Dr Mallard. Anytime he bitched about Gibbs’ actions, Ducky always made excuses for Tony’s superior, saying that it was Jethro’s way. He was also inordinately fond of Ziva. Tony didn’t want him to have to take sides in this mess. Besides, he wasn’t even sure the medical examiner would choose him.
Seeing the surprised expression on Morrow’s face, thinking fast on his feet, Tony offered up a more practical excuse. “Ducky’s disappearance would attract a lot of attention. Brad suddenly taking time off from Bethesda wouldn’t be connected with me because it was four years ago that he treated me, as far as most people would know, he treats a lot of people,” he said reasonably. Only DiNozzo’s team presumably knew he continued to make follow-up visits over the years, and he doubted they would hear if Brad were to take an unexpected leave of absence.
“Pitt is the doctor who treated you when you had the plague?” Morrow clarified. “Any specific reason you picked him?”
“Aside from him saving my life?” DiNozzo looked at him evenly. “If my lungs react badly, as I suspect they will, I want him there, and he’s military so reading him in on this won’t be a problem,” Tony shrugged casually.
He thought back to the dark days he’d spent fighting the plague and then pneumonia, recalling how his dislike of all things medical had transformed into a full-blown phobia, particularly where injections were concerned. Unfortunately, there were daily, often twice daily blood draws, alongside other injections, and Brad hadn’t made him feel like a whiny little baby. Ducky and Gibbs hadn’t bothered to hide their opinion that he was looking for attention and telling him to suck it up. Tony had a pretty fair idea that if he survived this mess, it wouldn’t be as easy as Driessen was making it sound. Sure, Ari might have used the method to sneak into NCIS, but he also didn’t have scarred lungs either.
Tony might act like a fool, but he was far from one. His undergraduate degree might have been Phys Ed, but his coursework was science-based, a lot of the coursework had similar course content to pre-med college courses. Aside from his studies, after he had been left with a permanent and potentially deadly reminder of his brush with Y-Pestis, even if Brad hadn’t read him the riot act, Tony would have made certain that he was well acquainted with the risks associated with scarred lungs. To the rest of his team, he seemed to have a cavalier attitude regarding his health but that was all a carefully constructed façade; he’d have to be an idiot not to take his health very seriously, and he was far from being an idiot. Given that he had several cracked ribs and thorax bruising, plus severe laryngeal bruising from Rivkin trying to strangle him, all of which made deep breathing difficult, a long-haul flight in a depressurised plan was contra-indicated.
Not that Vance or Gibbs had bothered to enquire if he was medically cleared to fly to Tel Aviv. Just like when Vance had assigned him as Agent Afloat, he’d been crammed aboard an aircraft carrier with more than five thousand others, forced to live in close quarters in a high-risk environment with his reduced immune system. If he’d caught an upper respiratory virus or infection, the lack of medical facilities for treating someone with his pulmonary history had been potentially life-threatening.
Given his mental state when told he had 24 hours to report for duty, Tony had never even had time to consider he had an ironclad case to appeal his assignment. It had been a mad scramble to make sure he had enough clean clothes to pack. If he hadn’t possessed Brad’s personal cell phone number, he wouldn’t have even had time to obtain prescriptions and get them filled before his departure.
But Tony knew that even if the Israelis had perfected the art of making their operatives appear dead via drugs and then were able to reverse the effects of the drugs, it wasn’t likely to be as cut and dried with him. His reaction to drugs had always been idiosyncratic, and factoring in his lungs, he was not optimistic that this plan was going to be smooth sailing. Thus, he wanted to have someone he trusted to make medical decisions for him, and at this point, there weren’t a lot of people he trusted. He trusted Brad – he didn’t trust Ducky!
“And I guess while we’re at it, Sir, would you consider being my medical proxy, in case I can’t make decisions for myself? I’d ask Brad but there’s probably some ethical constraint prohibiting it,” he mused tiredly. It was ironic, that in this depraved situation, he needed to worry about medical ethics.
“I can arrange for Dr Pitt to be brought on board, and I’m honoured to serve as your medical proxy too, although I sincerely hope that it’s not required,” he said gravely. He was hopeful that he could get this madness called off, but not confident. Eli David had not made himself popular over the years and his manipulations had created a great many enemies.
Sighing at the red-faced, frustrated Driessen who was trying in vain to delay Vance’s flight to Tel Aviv, he told Tony. “I’ll make a couple of calls to get the flight delayed while I work on getting all of this paperwork taken care of,” he said firmly.
“Just promise me one thing, Son. Once this crap is done and dusted, swear to me that you’ll resign from NCIS, even if Vance isn’t the director. You have a supervisory position waiting for you over at DHS. I know I let you down when I was your director, but things are different at Homeland. The agency is too big for anyone to run rogue undercover missions or use agents to run personal errands for them that are disguised as national security,” he said cynically. “Our oversight is much tighter. So what do you say?”
Tony appreciated the optimism Morrow was expressing, not to mention the job offer. It wasn’t the first time, but after confessing to the espionage he’d carried out, he valued it. Yet even if he survived this crazy mess, he wasn’t sure that he could ever trust his own government fully ever again.
He gave a smile, one of his patented ones that never reached his eyes and said, “If I make it back, I promise that the first thing I’ll do is to hand in my resignation at NCIS. They are done jerking me around,” he said, resolutely.
Tom grinned in relief, even though he recognised that Tony had only agreed to the first half of his request. Still, he could always work on the second part later.
~oOo~
Morrow left ten minutes later, vowing to see that all of DiNozzo’s conditions were met. He made no promises about trying to get the whole crazy plan called off because, at this point, he had no idea if he could pull it off or not and didn’t want to give Tony false hope. The Deputy Director knew his first stop was going to be his own boss, to help him put pressure on the CIA about those damned kill sanctions from the La Grenouille debacle, to get those sanctions torn up.
What the hell had SECNAV, SECDEF and the POTUS been thinking when they decided that Jennifer Shepard should replace him as the NCIS director, he couldn’t fathom. Still, thinking about her replacement, Leon Vance, they hadn’t exactly learnt their lesson, even after getting their fingers burnt with La Grenouille or her failure to carry out the assassination of Svetlana Chernitskaya, the Russian assassin. That goat rope ended up killing her, and a former agent and his girlfriend, and screwed the two agents she ordered off her protection detail and resulted in her death. Stupid bitch had a lot to answer for, even without her association with Eli David, he thought exhaustedly.
Making his way back to the heliport, Tom figured it was critical to get things happening asap. The first one was to locate Dr Helen Berkley, learn the location of her daughter and get both of them to safety. While Driessen and the Acting Secretary of State, Anna Elliot, might be bluffing, he didn’t think so. Morrow also wouldn’t put it past Vance and Davenport to get the same idea of how to exert more pressure on DiNozzo. Morrow didn’t know all of the intimate details surrounding the Grenouille affair, aside from Shepard running an unauthorised undercover mission against Rene Benoit, but knew that she’d ruined a CIA mission, and lost Rene Benoit, who was a valuable asset. He knew that the CIA ‘claimed Rene’s death was a sanctioned hit, but there were also some wild rumours going around at the time. One of which was that the FBI believed Director Shepard had killed him in revenge for her father’s death.
Now that Shepard was dead, maybe the CIA would be more inclined to reveal what had really happened. Tom was no fan of Trent Kort, the slimy operative that the CIA had used as Rene Benoit’s handler and supposedly, Kort was his 2IC of his illegal arms business, but perhaps he’d be more forthcoming over the whole mess, with Shepard out of the picture.
As he was escorted up in the elevator to the heliport atop the Esprit de liberté office tower, Tom momentarily thought about the expense of taking a flight back to DHS, literally only a few minutes flight, before shrugging cynically. If these powers that be were going to be assholes and use innocent US citizens to force a loyal government agent into waiving his constitutional rights, then he was not going to second guess using a helicopter to get him back to his office as quickly as possible. Anthony was depending on him!
Chapter 6
DiNozzo was startled out of his reverie by Amit’s deep voice, warning him that they were five minutes out from the private clinic where Stage One of the plan was to be carried out. Once there, they would place him into an extremely deep state of unconsciousness, but first, they’d give him the enteric part of the antidote to the paralytic drug, tetrodotoxin to swallow. Officer Hadar had explained to him that for years, their R & D department in Haifa had been researching the practical uses for tetrodotoxin, a substance found in certain types of marine creatures such as pufferfish, porcupine fish and the deadly blue-ringed octopus.
Apparently, some of the medical research on the drug involved research into its pain-numbing qualities, where it was showing promising results for cancer patients with end-stage tumours. Their research by Israeli scientists also produced the ability for them to use tetrodotoxin in concert with other cutting-edge compounds to mimic death – something that helped them carry out operations that otherwise would have proved impossible.
Hadar informed Tony that experience had shown that the neurotoxic effects of the chemical disrupting the central and peripheral nervous systems, particularly blocking vital functions such as respiration, were extremely distressing. They combined it with the other drugs they used to slow down heart and brain functions, which reduced oxygen requirements to a degree that Hadar told him was unprecedented, but it was also unpleasant. Before they began, they sedated the subject, so they didn’t panic before they started the cutting-edge cocktail of drugs to mimic death. Once sedated the team would administer drugs to target the temperature regulatory part of the hypothalamus in the brain, to chill the body and slow down respiration, plus medication to lower blood pressure and slow cardiac functions to near undetectable levels. Their research had shown that with the new drug protocols, they could extend the interval that the body could survive without oxygen from between on average 3 – 4 minutes by the power of ten.
This meant that they had up to a forty-minute window of opportunity to convince, Eli and Ziva David, their coterie of Mossad officers loyal to Eli, plus the NCIS Director Vance and Leroy Jethro Gibbs that Anthony DiNozzo was dead before they would need to reverse the process.
“Obviously, the less time spent playing possum the better the outcome,” Hadar had observed calmly.
Tony got it, although he didn’t like it. Timing in undercover operations was absolutely critical, and in this case, they had to swap the fake corpse (Tony) for the real corpse (someone of similar appearance to him) who would be substituted after they’d been convinced that he was dead. Then they would stage the car crash and explosion while Dr Deitsch administered the antidote to the tetrodotoxin and reversed his heart and brain functions, all of which would take place en route to a private hospital in Haifa in northern Israel.
Amit told him, “Associate Director Erbaz had arranged for Tony’s substitute corpse to already be loaded in the mortuary van so that they wouldn’t lose precious time in swapping out the fake DiNozzo for you., Agent DiNozzo.”
Tony appreciated all of this attention to detail. It might seem like a cliché but in this case, time was of the essence and he took comfort in that. Initially, the government team had planned to transport him via private road ambulance for the 90-mile journey but having expressed his concern about his impaired lungs to Hadar, which they hadn’t been informed of, they’d swiftly organised a helicopter while they were driving to the clinic. Even though they were concerned about his lung disease, he was disappointed that they hadn’t stopped the mission but not surprised. No doubt Driessen had left that piece of information about his dodgy lungs out of his file, but the Israelis were too invested to pull out when he raised his concern. It seemed this was their compromise.
As the SUV pulled into the back gates of the private clinic where Tony could be sedated before Hadar took him to the morgue, where the elaborate sting would be carried out, he couldn’t help reminiscing about the last time he’d been ordered to impersonate a corpse. In this case, he’d been impersonating the murdered football carrier, Commander Ray Trapp aboard Air Force One, where they’d first met Secret Service Agent Caitlin Todd. That first undercover mission playing a corpse had not ended successfully, although it was not his fault that the jurisdictional pissing match between Gibbs and Fornell ended up with him being thrown out of the FBI mortuary van onto the beltway. Still inside the body bag.
He never would have anticipated that Gibbs would deliberately blow his cover to Fornell, just as Tony had no idea Tobias Fornell had stolen Gibbs’ ex-wife from him, or that the Boss wanted the wife-stealer to know he’d stolen Cdr Trapp’s corpse out from under his nose. (Which was why he wasn’t thrilled to learn about the previous history between Eli David and Orli Erbaz.) Gibbs had decided that Tony’s oh-so-pleasant little sojourn inside the body bag was indolent, and therefore not a good use of DiNozzo’s time on the taxpayers’ dime. As well as wanting to get on Fornell’s wick, Gibbs decided to delegate the searching of Commander Trapp’s residence, not wanting to do it himself, so he opted to get the slothful body-bag reclining agent, Anthony DiNozzo Jr., to stop wasting time and do it instead.
Of course, the pesky details that Tony suffered some minor injuries, not to mention a blow to the skull, when his head connected violently with the road never appeared to enter into his boss’ calculations. That or else it had indeed been calculated and the possibility just gave him even more of an incentive to blow Tony’s cover, since Gibbs’ sense of humour had always been more than slightly vindictive.
To be frank, after that fiasco, it was little short of a miracle that he hadn’t been struck by a car or at that time of night, a semitrailer or a double-B, as the driver would have stood little chance of seeing a dark navy blue body bag on the dark road at night and very little ability to stop. If it weren’t for the quick thinking of Agent Axelrod who risked his life, running out onto the beltway to grab hold of the bag and drag him off the road, he’d be dead or badly injured.
Still, that little escapade should have clued him in, all of those years ago that there was something seriously lacking in his superior, that boded ill for Tony’s longevity. Perhaps he should update the old CV and look for greener pastures…less dangerous pastures in which to work.
At least he should be relieved that Gibbs would not be taking part in this undercover operation, so Tony wouldn’t have to worry about the former Marine gunny watching his six or throwing him under the bus, depending upon what best suited his purposes. No, Gibbs had already thrown him to the Mossad wolves and picked a side. Not because of politics, like Vance and Davenport but because of his misguided sense of loyalty to Ziva, who had actively harboured the killer of a federal agent and lied to NCIS, lied to Gibbs.
He chose Ziva over Tony, who hadn’t done anything wrong, aside from going to her apartment without backup to try to protect her because Tony knew how much the Boss cared about her and look how well that turned out. Gibbs had also chosen Leon Vance’s side with his refusal to observe the law he had sworn to uphold when the director illegally ordered Tony to travel to Israel to answer to Eli David for defending himself against an assassin who was illegally in the US.
And now they were both on opposite sides of this fight since Tony had been coerced by the US government to take part in the Israeli government plot to remove Eli David as the director of Mossad. A mission that if successful, would probably see the destruction of Gibbs, Leon and SECNAV’s careers. They may even face charges, but Tony couldn’t find it in himself to care anymore.
As he exited the SUV feeling numb, he took a look around at what he expected to be his last conscious impressions ever. He cursed himself for not reading the writing on the wall all those years ago on Air Force One when Gibbs had been so enamoured by Cate and hired her, despite her bringing his beloved Marines into disrepute when she had flipped her middle finger at the fraternisation regs with Major Kerry. If someone had ovaries then clearly, Gibbs was willing to overlook them compromising the POTUS’ security or lying, and impeding the investigation of breaches of national security and the death of a federal agent. If Ziva or Cate had a dick instead of ovaries, he doubted there would have been any question that Gibbs would have ripped their balls off, not felt sorry for them and put them on his team, but then Leroy Jethro Gibbs was a chauvinist.
How ironic then that the biggest complainer about patriarchal male dominancy benefited so greatly from what should have been a career-ending faux pas that could have threatened national security, but instead was thrown a lifeline by Gibbs. And not just any old lifeline, but one where she got to work on the premier investigative team in NCIS. Talk about rewarding bad behaviour!
Yeah, in hindsight he’d been such a damn fool, should have seen the writing on the wall so many times, and now he was here, facing what his gut was telling him was his potential suicide for a foreign government. Plus he was going into this, not with agents who he knew and trusted, but Mossad agents and politicians who were caught up in a power struggle with Eli David who wanted to establish a dynasty over Israel’s Intelligence and Counter Intelligence Agency. Tony wondered briefly if Rivkin had been a part of Daddy David’s plan to sire a successive generation of Davids to ensure his bloodline would continue to rule Mossad into a third generation? He briefly hoped that Ziva wasn’t pregnant by Rivkin; having two Kidon assassins for parents plus Eli as a grandfather would quite likely prove too great of a burden for any child to overcome.
Such a scenario would make his own parents, both substance abusers and severely lacking in any nurturing genes, look like the Waltons family in stark comparison. He was screwed up majorly by their rearing of him and it was a minor miracle he wasn’t a serial killing sociopath. At least he didn’t have to worry about leaving any offspring behind – not even ones conceived by his sperm donations when he was at OSU when he was trying desperately to make ends meet after he lost his scholarship when Brad broke his leg.
Well, he might not have any unknown DiNozzo’s floating around out there, but at least he had a former Wolverine to watch his six. At least he hoped that Morrow had been able to swing it and Brad was on his way here. He just wished he’d been able to talk to Brad one more time before he had to do this.
Chiding himself, if these really were his last conscious moments on earth, he should try to think of something a little bit more positive. He was still waiting on the final confirmation from Director Morrow that Jeanne and her mother were out of the US and somewhere safe and that the CIA-sanctioned hit on her life had been lifted. Not that he could do much if it hadn’t, Tony thought morosely. It wasn’t as if he held any of the cards anymore. It would be easy for the Mossad officers to overpower him and force him to submit, so the agent hoped that Tom had come through for him. With minutes to spare before he was sedated, his heart leapt when the burn phone Morrow gave him before he left DC started playing the theme music from Mission Impossible, and he accepted the call anxiously.
“Tony, is that you?”
“Yes, Director, it’s me.”
“I’m sorry that I didn’t call sooner. Actually, I’m terribly sorry I wasn’t able to stop this madness, Son. I tried, I really did,” he said regretfully.
“Yeah, I know, Sir.”
“Unfortunately, the President’s NatSec advisors were all strongly pushing the necessity of getting rid of Eli David, due to the threat he posed. They argued that his obsessive drive to take down terrorists and foes, whatever the cost to allies, made it imperative they not lose the opportunity, despite the danger.”
It was disappointing, but Tony hadn’t been all that shocked by his failure to stop the mission endorsed by the State Department. After all, the guy Tony thought of as his mentor hadn’t even backed him up when Vance issued an illegal order for DiNozzo to go to Tel Aviv.
“Did the packages get sent off safely, Director?” he asked, his anxiety clearly bleeding through the phone.
“Yes, they were posted fifteen minutes ago, and the matter regarding termination of contracts has been settled satisfactorily, as has the matter regarding immunity,” he said, happy to report that he’d had some successes. Although, he still felt guilty that Tony had been coerced into going on what amounted to a suicide mission.
“Thanks, for posting those packages, Sir. I would hate for them not to have arrived,” he said, gratefully.
He knew that Jeanne and her mother had managed to slip out of the country and that the CIA had cancelled the hit on Tony and herself. At least now if he didn’t survive, he could hopefully not spend eternity tortured with guilt that Jeanne was in danger since he’d already spent the past two years torturing himself over hurting her. Plus, Morrow had informed him that he was immune from charges of treason for helping NCIS find that damned stolen file. No good deed goes unpunished, it would seem. At least it couldn’t be used against him the next time they needed their dirty work taken care of.
That’s if there was a next time, something he doubted very much!
Knowing he would not face prison time or the death penalty for downloading the classified document, should he miraculously survive the mission was a relief. He wouldn’t be forced to head somewhere that didn’t have an extradition treaty with the US.
Morrow chatted briefly, telling him that he planned to watch the movie Ocean’s Eleven tonight, a snippet of information that Tony took to be code that Dr Pitt had been brought on board. He felt marginally happier knowing that his friend would be there to help if things went FUBAR. But the last piece of unexpected information that Morrow passed on to him made Tony’s heart stutter, and his stomach lurched as he tried to process completely unforeseen news.
After Tom had terminated the call, wishing him good luck, Tony looked like he’d been hit over the head with a lump of wood as he seemed disorientated. The rest of the prep for the ‘undercover mission’ essentially consisted of him swallowing enteric antidotes before finally being injected with a sedative and was undertaken with DiNozzo appearing to be in a somewhat dazed, almost like-zombie state. Then they would be ready to commence the procedure that would turn him into a credible-looking corpse ( whimsically nicknamed by the scientist who developed it the Romeo and Juliet Protocol) before Hadar delivered him to the city morgue for his death scene and official identification, by Gibbs.
~oOo~
Officer Hadar watched as Special Agent DiNozzo’s eyes slowly closed and stayed that way. He glanced at Dr Avigail Deitsch, who nodded. “Yes, he is out, and we can commence with the procedure,” she informed him, impatient to start.
Amit acknowledged her, inwardly thinking that the doctor/researcher kind of creeped him out with that weird light gleaming in her topaz-coloured eyes. But she was the expert on the protocol because she developed it. Dr Deitsch had an epiphany after learning that one of Mossad’s elite assassins was also a free diver who dived underwater without using breathing apparatus, especially in deep water. She had trained herself to go without oxygen when diving for over 32 minutes. Since the timeline for most normal individuals being able to go without oxygen was generally 3-4 minutes maximum without serious brain damage occurring and death being inevitable after ten minutes of being deprived of oxygen, Officer Selah Wasserman’s feat, which had been duly documented by the free diving association, seemed unbelievable. Yet it was apparently not a one-off; many of the sport’s devotees had trained their bodies to exist without oxygen with no discernible brain damage for longer than medical science had deemed to be possible.
Dr Deitsch knew that free divers spent a great deal of time and effort in training their bodies to ration oxygen to a degree that the average human would be unwilling to emulate but to the researcher, it proved it could be done. So, the scientist set about finding other means to be able to mimic what freestylers did through sheer guts, craziness, or masochism. Knowing how valuable the ability to mimic death would be to the Kidon-trained assassins, Deitsch was encouraged to put together a research proposal, and it received generous funding. Her results were impressive, and Agent DiNozzo was the eleventh volunteer to use the protocol, although Amit conceded wryly, that the agent hadn’t volunteered, he was strong-armed into carrying out the mission under protest. He could empathise.
Would Amit travel to the US if Mossad ordered him to and let a bunch of mad scientists (Agent DiNozzo’s words) render him unconscious and slow down his vital functions to the degree that he was deprived of oxygen for up to forty minutes to convince people he was dead? It would be a massive ask, requiring him to put his faith, not to mention his life, into the hands of complete strangers. He might, if he was given proper time to consider the pros and the cons…if he was asked, not coerced.
But what if he was being dragged off to America to answer questions after being forced to defend his life and kill a drunk, out-of-control CIA assassin who attacked him in Tel Aviv while Hadar was doing his job investigating the death of a Shin Bet officer. What if the CIA operative had killed the Shin Bet officer while he had been spying on Mossad? How would he feel, being ordered to go to the US and justify his actions to the CIA, despite doing nothing wrong?
The veteran officer of Mossad would feel justifiably betrayed by his superiors if, for pure political expediency, they ordered him to go to the US and stand accused of murdering the CIA killer. Like Special Agent DiNozzo, he would probably refuse to go. And if Amit was informed by people in his own government that the CIA intended to kill him to save face and his own government extorted him into going so he could set up the CIA powerbrokers and break their control, he wouldn’t trust them either. Especially if they told him they had some freaky way to make him appear dead that sounded like something out of a science fiction novel, ordering Amit to place his life in their hands, he would not like it, nor trust them either. Probably the only reason he’d cooperate was if they threatened the life of someone he loved; Amit wasn’t sure, but he suspected that the packages the American referred to must have been referring to people he loved. Perhaps his father, since Ziva’s dossier said he wasn’t married.
Rivkin really created a shitstorm when he refused to leave the US after his cover was blown by NCIS, and they ordered him to leave their country. If only Ziva had done her job as his control officer and ordered his extraction when she saw he was out of control, none of this would have happened, but she was too busy acting like a love-sick teenager. He fervently wished that Agent DiNozzo hadn’t killed Michael because Amit would have taken much satisfaction in killing the out-of-control drunkard himself.
He gave a mental shrug because it was all immaterial since the plan to bring down Eli David was something that had been decided upon by the highest levels of Israel and America’s bureaucracy. He just hoped that Agent DiNozzo would be okay. Aside from them needing to be able to produce the man that Eli David claimed to have died in a terrible accident to show him up for the liar and manipulator he was, Hadar had a secondary reason to feel concern for the NCIS agent’s continued survival. Despite Ziva’s undisguised mockery of his abilities and skills, Hadar had done his own checks on Agent DiNozzo; he was admittedly curious after the man managed to survive an attack by a Kidon-trained assassin.
Granted that Michael was legally drunk at the time, but Hadar knew that even sozzled, Rivkin was a highly risky proposition. He was even more dangerous because while his reaction time may have been impaired, his decision-making ability was far less honed, and he was more impetuous…clearly. Had he been clear-headed when Agent DiNozzo attempted to arrest him for the US agent’s death, he surely should have reasoned that the only sane course of action would have been to surrender himself calmly and call the Israeli Embassy to arrange for his deportation. The death of the ICE agent was not deliberate, and, while it was embarrassing for Mossad to be caught spying on an ally and killing one of said ally’s agents, it was far less damaging to international relations than what happened when Rivkin resisted arrest and tried to assassinate a US federal agent, Anthony DiNozzo and ended up dead.
But while Ziva was scathing about DiNozzo, calling him Agent Meatball, which apparently denoted someone who wasn’t terribly competent, and Rivkin had taken up the derisive moniker, it had no doubt contributed to Michael underestimating him, a costly error indeed. Hadar ignored Ziva’s dossier, checking Anthony DiNozzo Jr. out with his own sources. Amit had attended college in the US and had taken the opportunity to maintain many of the contacts he’d formed in the four years he’d lived there before he joined the Mossad. His sources told a significantly different story to the profile Ziva compiled on the federal agent.
Obviously, when Ziva developed her profiles of the Major Case Response Team, she was an outsider, so it was easy to excuse her less-than-accurate work. To put it down to DiNozzo being someone who was not easy to profile and, yet Ziva worked with him, day in and day out, on the same team as DiNozzo for over three and a half years. For four months, he had been her team leader when Agent Gibbs had run off to Mexico to lick his wounds. That should have been ample opportunity for her to realise her miscalculation and rectify it, by amending her profile of him, but she had not done so.
Such a lapse in judgment was appalling, and it was yet another example of the dangers of promotion based upon dynastic motives rather than meritocracy. Ziva might possess deadly assassin skills, but her judgement all too often left much to be desired. She was hot-headed, impetuous, and could not see the bigger picture – all of which had led to her ignoring the glaringly obvious fact that Officer Rivkin was out of control. As his handler, she should have ordered an immediate emergency exfiltration as soon as the federal agent turned up dead at the Secretary of the Navy’s private residence. Yet her emotions had interfered with her doing her duty; Michael was dead because he was out of control and needed his handler to protect him from himself…which Ziva failed to do.
She messed up her assessment of Agent DiNozzo badly – he was far more proficient than she had given him credit for. From Hadar’s independent contacts, he learnt the agent was well regarded by those high up, reputed to be a chameleon who specialised in appearing to be someone of merely average abilities, who used people’s underestimation of him to his advantage. He had even fooled his team members and the current NCIS director, but Amit’s contact in the agency, Owen Granger, felt DiNozzo was not only an outstanding investigator and field agent, his undercover abilities were second to none.
All of which begged the question, why would such an experienced agent, accustomed to being lent out to other agencies for undercover work, be so pessimistic about his prospects of surviving this undercover operation? It didn’t add up. He knew that DiNozzo was reputed to trust few people and Hadar suspected that one of those who had his trust, Special Agent Gibbs, had lost it today in choosing to side with Director Vance’s noxious decision to throw his own agent under the bus to crawl up Eli David’s tuchus. Since Jethro Gibbs was legendary for telling his bosses to get fucked and do what he wanted regardless, Hadar could only speculate that not protecting his agent was because he chose to side with Ziva, a liaison officer. Amit could hardly blame DiNozzo for losing faith in his team leader, who talked of the importance of having people’s sixes, Gibbs hadn’t followed through on it.
Yet for all the stoic refusal to discuss his boss or his inexplicable choices, even though Amit sensed a well of deep hurt hidden beneath the DiNozzo’s façade, he sensed that it was not the only point of contention regarding the mission. He detected genuine fear and a sense of doubt about the viability of the mission and he wondered what prompted it. Was there an actual basis or just the inevitable upshot of being ordered to do this by his superiors? Something that didn’t sit well with him, perhaps combined with a sense of scepticism fomented by someone with the typical cynical disposition necessary to thrive as an undercover operative. Was it typical, seeing disasters and dangers lurking around every bend and knowing there was unlikely to be back-up to help if the worst happened so that self-reliance was de rigueur for his survival? Hadar hoped that was all it was, but he feared not, and it was deeply unsettling.
With Agent DiNozzo sedated, they readied him to play his part in this operation to break free of Director David’s dynastic powerplay. Hadar felt relieved that the American agent was no longer exuding resigned melancholy. It was making Amit unsettled, and that was counter-productive. His role was important in distracting the four key players in this drama, Eli and Ziva David, Director Vance and particularly Special Agent Gibbs. Firstly, it was his job to distract the players from spending too much time in the morgue with Agent DiNozzo, and secondly, in the case of the Davids, who knew about the Israeli death mimicking protocol, to ensure that there were other pressing matters for them to focus on.
The key they had all agreed on when preparing for this operation was to use the David’s’ vulnerabilities against them, ensuring they never had enough time to become suspicious. Luckily, Eli and his daughter possessed some traits that could easily be exploited to make them act impulsively, without proper situational awareness. With Ziva, her weakness was her inability to control her anger, fuelled over the years by her self-righteous knowledge that she was Eli’s heir apparent, the apple of her father’s eye. That knowledge led Officer David to greatly overestimate some of her abilities, along with her sense of entitlement that often saw her physically attack senior officers despite her seemingly lesser rank.
Nor was her rank commensurate with her years of service in Mossad, which did not earn her popularity points. Amit harboured a suspicion that Eli’s embrace of Ziva as his successor was not as fulsome as Ziva wanted nor as wholehearted as Eli liked. For Eli it was borne out of necessity – since when Ari went rogue, she was the only one left who carried his bloodline. Until such time as she produced an heir, and he suspected that it had been, partly why Eli had ordered Rivkin to seduce her, or until Eli decided to impregnate one of his numerous mistresses, then Ziva was the only successor to his reign as head of the Mossad. For better or worse, she was his legacy!
So the plan developed by Associate Director Erbaz was that they would use her arrogance and her lack of control, i.e., her so-called fieriness against her, to keep her off-balance and angry. While it served to distract her and stop her from focusing and maybe becoming suspicious, it served a secondary and equally critical role by focusing Eli’s attention squarely on his tempestuous daughter and not on DiNozzo. As Eli’s right-hand man, Amit happened to know firsthand that while outwardly supportive of her, her father was not happy with the changes he’d noted during her recent trips to Tel Aviv, first when she was sent back to Mossad after Director Vance disbanded the MCRT, and later when she returned to continue her affair with Rivkin. Her Abba felt she was too Americanised, no longer only loyal to Eli.
He had already marked Agent Gibbs down as a rival during the Eschel debacle with the Iranians, when rather than turning to the Israeli Embassy and her father when the Iranians set her up, she’d sought out Gibbs for help. A man who had resigned and was drinking himself to death down in Mexico at the time. The same person who demanded that Leon bring her back onto his team nine months ago and won that battle. Even though it was common knowledge in Mossad that Gibbs trusted her because Eli had ordered her to kill Ari when he went rogue, knowing it would make Gibbs trust Ziva so she could burrow into his team and become his right hand.
That had been the plan. However, once David succeeded in placing her there, the doubts surfaced. His master plan of having someone beholden to him, or in this instance, to his daughter had worked all too well, and Gibbs had embraced her as a surrogate daughter – which had been the intent all along. Unfortunately, the narcissistic director began to quickly doubt his daughter’s loyalty to him. No longer having her in close physical proximity, unable to massage his enormous ego with her daughterly devotion, left him open to a gnawing jealousy.
Amit, as one of Eli’s most trusted operatives, also knew that he was furious at the thought that Ziva was getting involved in a sexual relationship with the special agent Anthony DiNozzo, whose father had close business ties with the Saudi royal family. Moreover, the thought that she might also be developing feelings for the agent whom she had profiled as a skirt-chasing womaniser, who was none too bright and less than competent, had enraged Eli. He’d loudly professed that he did not want Agent Meatball (Ziva’s nickname for DiNozzo) tainting his gene pool. His suspicions about Ziva fucking her team member had first surfaced when Jethro Gibbs had retired to Mexico for four months after an undercover operation had gone wrong and he was blown up. As part of the routine surveillance Eli ordered the Embassy carried out while Ziva was living in DC, some photos showed Agent DiNozzo, now team leader, visiting Ziva regularly at her apartment at night. Then, the following year, when the junior agent on the team, Agent McGee had released a fictionalised account of the MCRT team entitled Deep Six: The Continuing Adventures of L.J. Tibbs, it confirmed that Ziva and DiNozzo were having sex, even in the NCIS elevator and that it was common knowledge at the agency. Director David had been livid.
Later, when he learnt that DiNozzo had been seducing the daughter of the well-known arms dealer, Rene Benoit, he was mollified but still was convinced that DiNozzo had seduced his daughter and therefore despised him. Which was a bit hypocritical because he had no room to talk, with his own womanising ways. Assassins were trained in the art of seduction to get intel or get close up and personal with their marks. If he had seduced Ziva, then it wasn’t as if she was some chaste ingénue – she was more akin to a deadly cobra and good luck to anyone who tried to get close. But it did go some way to explain why Eli was so repulsed by Agent DiNozzo and why, aside from his loss of face, he had decided to execute him. Sure, it fed Ziva’s thirst for vengeance, but it also was retributive in so much as he felt wronged by DiNozzo’s tainting Ziva’s virtue – in a corrupting sense of debasing herself for someone who was everything Eli despised – and ensuring that he was no longer a threat to Eli’s dynastic bloodline.
Hadar knew Eli well, and he was sure that getting rid of DiNozzo was all about him bringing Ziva to heel again. Amit was sure that ultimately, the guilt of contributing to one of his team members’ death, even if it was because the spoilt Princess Ziva stamped her foot and demanded it, would eventually cause a chasm to form between them. It was that end game that Amit suspected was Eli’s true motive. That and making sure that not just Gibbs would be complicit but Vance and Davenport, especially. They might be trying to curry favour with the director because he had information that they badly wanted about internal security leaks, but by forcing them to hand over Agent DiNozzo, knowing that Eli had demanded his head, the Americans, in acceding to him, had made a massive mistake. They would become even more compromised and be even more his lackeys than they already were. After all, should it be revealed that they forced one of their own agents to answer to the director of a foreign nation’s intelligence and counter-intelligence agency, after being found to have acted appropriately and professionally, then their geese were cooked. Even if Eli had merely intended to interrogate DiNozzo, their careers would likely be in the toilet if anyone found out about it.
So Hadar’s task would be to keep Ziva’s temper stoked so she would not have time to examine Tony’s ‘corpse’ too closely, or more of a concern, for too long. They would continue to fuel the director’s jealousy of Agent Gibbs’ influence over Ziva. Eli David was a wily adversary, and why he had so successfully entrenched himself as the Mossad director and convinced everyone, himself included, that his position was unassailable. Since Gibbs’ pissed-off attitude would only have increased at what he believed to have been Agent DiNozzo’s death, it would add to the tension between the father and daughter. This would suit the conspirator’s purposes; they needed as much dissent and chaos as possible to advance their game plan before the Davids had a chance to realise they were being conned.
Amit knew that eventually he would have to answer for why he had taken it upon himself to inject Agent DiNozzo with insulin and ‘kill’ him; Ziva had declared she must be the one to avenge Rikin and kill her teammate for the death of her lover. Hadar would argue that when she landed, she was furious, but due to her devotion to Agent Gibbs, he had some obvious concerns that the former Marine would talk her down from doing what must be done to avenge Michael. Since Hadar was playing on Eli’s own fears about her volatility and loyalty to her American boss, he knew her father would buy it. Ziva would be enraged and dangerous, and it could only work in their favour to increase tension between father and daughter.
With this tactic in mind, at the airfield, today, Amit had purposefully riled Ziva up, acting overly familiarly in kissing her and thanking her for returning home. He knew she would be furious with him for ordering the destruction of her apartment in DC. Of course, she had responded mutinously, just as he knew she would, and he had smirked at that. Commenting on her fieriness with amused indifference as if she were a wayward child. Then, to fan the flames even higher, he took her to task for her rudeness in failing to introduce her teammates and the NCIS Director to Hadar, who was there to welcome them as a representative of her father. Her lack of formality with the three members of NCIS, all her superiors in rank, and official guests in the country was not at all seemly under the solemn circumstance regarding the repatriation of one of their own.
Then, subtly forcing her to back down, he turned his attentions onto Anthony DiNozzo, insisting that he ride into the city, a good couple of hours drive away in peak hour traffic, so they could get better acquainted. His demeanour had been deliberately icy, and Anthony, who already knew, that Hadar was his contact, had played his part well. His seeming reluctance to be separated from his teammates and Leon Vance was brilliantly done. Yes, he could see why he would be such a successful undercover operative.
That tentative look at his director when Amit ordered him to ride with him and received confirmation that he should obey, his nervousness was magnificent. As was the studious avoidance of any exchange with Ziva, but it was the last agonised glance he shared with his team leader, a man that Hadar knew was his mentor and someone whom he idolised, begging him not to make him go with Amit, which was the piece de resistance. It was perfection, and when Gibbs indicated that he should appease the Mossad officer, his tortured expression was so well done that Hadar wasn’t sure if it was real or not, even knowing that DiNozzo knew that Hadar was no threat to him. In fact, he was the American agent’s only ally at that moment, even as Amit roughly snatched Anthony’s bag away from him, which left the American agent no other option but to follow him to the SUV and climb inside.
But as he contemplated the NCIS undercover agent lying unconscious, seemingly dead if one didn’t know any better, he wondered about the conversation Anthony had with his former Director, Thomas Morrow, now the deputy director of the Department of Homeland Security. What information he could have passed on to Anthony that left him seeming quite dazed. He hoped that it wasn’t bad news, perhaps about a relative, although according to Officer David’s dossier on him, he was estranged from his family on both sides. Perhaps, it was a friend or a colleague – he had reputedly not taken the death of his former teammate Caitlin Todd well.
Part Two: The Greater Subterfuge
“If we succeed without sacrifice, it’s because someone sacrificed for us.” Denis Waitley
Chapter 7
Terminating the connection with DiNozzo, Tom felt hollow and old. There were times like right now when he not only questioned if humanity was worth saving. If indeed, he should even bother working in this seething foul cesspit of perpetual political posturing with its murky world of national security. All too frequently, he was impeded by the eternal lobbying of vested interests and corporate greed. When justice and national security issues should, in reality, act as a beacon to only the best and brightest, most altruistic, and self-sacrificing individuals acting in service for democracy and the citizens of the United States of America. Sadly, though, politics and national security paradoxically attracted not only the best people but also the worst scoundrels, grifters and sociopaths. It acted like a clarion call to those who craved ultimate power and wealth, just like moths to a flame, determined to get it at all costs, no matter who or what they had to sacrifice, along the way.
After learning what the acting Secretary of State and her grubby minions had cooked up along with other opportunistic and self-seeking politicians, eager for their own slice of the pie, Tom felt appalled. Worse still, with sufficient like-minded individuals having the ear of the man who had the final say, they’d done such a fine job of convincing the POTUS that Eli David posed an existential threat to America’s national security and extolling the benefits of assisting the Israelis to remove him. And while there was a degree of truth in that, Tom also wondered how many of those so-called advisors were so gung-ho about getting rid of Eli David, not because of any existential threat he posed to the nation but because they feared (or they knew) that they were in his ‘Dirt Files’. The real truth was that he posed an existential threat to their careers?
Probably a lot, he concluded sourly.
Had Morrow been given more than a couple of hours to try to get Anthony DiNozzo out of the mess he found himself in, he could have cobbled together enough of the good guys who still believed in service to country, to help him convince POTUS. Principled men and women who were not aiming to get well-paid political appointments to statutory authorities, vastly over-inflated paid lobbying jobs, preferential help into state governorships, senate seats, cabinet posts or seats on the board of highly influential conglomerates and wealthy corporations in exchange for selling out their former principles. While highly ethical people remained in the fight to protect their country, it was an uphill battle on a good day, and today was not a good day! Tom would need more than a few hours to convince the President to reverse his approval, so he had to content himself with winning the battles he could on such short notice.
After all, Agent DiNozzo hadn’t asked for much in the scheme of things. Hell, he hadn’t even asked Tom to get him out of going to Israel, but, then again, the man had always been far smarter than most people gave him credit for. He was no doubt enough of a realist to know how the DC political scene worked. Knew enough to grasp that he was in a relatively strong bargaining position and savvy enough to demand only a few key things that were likely to be granted. So, getting the CIA-approved sanctions to kill himself and Dr Jeanne Benoit rescinded from two years ago was easily achieved since it should have already occurred as soon as Rene Benoit disappeared, or at the very least, been done after he was declared dead. It was extremely sloppy work for it to have been overlooked and Tom wondered if it was payback of sorts by Trent Kort (or his superiors) for Shepard’s destroying their La Grenouille operation and her killing Rene Benoit as revenge for her father’s suicide.
He wouldn’t put it past them, it was definitely Kort’s style. The man was a bottom-feeding pile of excrement with no redeemable qualities as far as Morrow could judge. He doubted Trent’s own mother would be able to identify anything positive about the Brit, except that he was positively without any morals. So it was somewhat shocking to the Associate Director that Kort sought him out while Tom was in the process of getting the sanctioned kill orders revoked, demanding to see him.
Curious about what the CIA operative wanted, he granted him an interview, despite his distaste for the man and asked his administrative assistant to send him in. Ewan Greenley ushered him in, shooting a look of concern at Morrow, and Tom smothered a slight chuckle. Trent Kort was a stone-cold killer, and some people had a visceral reaction to the assassin. He knew that Greenley would alert security to be on standby; should he try anything, Kort would not leave the building. Telling the swarthy bald agent to take a seat, Tom watched as Kort stalked across the floor, his apex predator vibes oozing out of every pore, dropping a file on Tom’s desk before taking a seat as ordered.
“In light of the brouhaha that seems to be playing out at NCIS, these days, I thought YOU might be interested in reading this file. After all, you used to be director of that pissant little dung heap of an agency,” Trent drawled brazenly in his exceeding annoying upper-class British accent.
Tom marvelled at how Trent’s posh accent disarmed some people, who automatically assumed that he was a harmless enough chap, all based on his speech. An assumption that was neither wise nor indeed accurate. Kort was equally as dangerous an assassin as Ziva David was, or as Ari Haswari or Michael Rivkin had been or even a score of rabid terrorists who wouldn’t even blink over terminating a soft target to achieve their ends.
Staring down at the manila A-4 envelope, the Deputy Director noted that it purported to be a highly classified confidential file on the NCIS Director, Leon Vance. Raising his eyebrows marginally over that, he wondered what the devil Kort was up to.
“Why should I be interested in what’s inside this envelope, Mr Kort?”
“Because Deputy Director Morrow, someone damned well should be,” he rejoined, his enunciation, clipped and angry as he maintained eye contact. “I tried to convince that dolt, Leroy Jethro Gibbs to do something about it, but to my knowledge, he hasn’t even bothered to read it, the cretinous dullard!” he said mockingly.
Ignoring the file, Tom asked dubiously, “What makes you believe he hasn’t read it?”
In his experience as Gibbs’ ex-boss, Jethro would never hesitate to stick his nose into somewhere it wasn’t meant to be, including the classified files of his superiors. Quite the opposite. If Gibbs was told not to do something, that was usually a surefire way to goad him into doing so since the bastard hated being dictated to about anything on principle. Donald Mallard had been known to declare on numerous occasions that Jethro was, without doubt, the most contrary man he’d ever encountered.
Perhaps Jethro’s aversion to being told what to do by the odious CIA operative might have been enough to make Gibbs dig in his heal and refuse to look at it. Especially if he was feeling particularly cantankerous
“Because if the tomfool had read the file, if he bothered to take even a cursory glance through it, he would have acted on it,” Kort retorted emphatically. “What is contained in there,” he flicked a languid index finger toward the file lying untouched on Morrow’s desk, “is incendiary and unable to be ignored. The NCIS director is well and truly compromised,” Kort said with implacability, folding his arms and buttoning his lips.
“Well… that’s certainly quite an accusation, Mr Kort. Care to elaborate?”
Kort shook his head. “I believe this file speaks for itself. I will say this, though. I didn’t compile it although, I am acquainted with the analyst who did, and I know their work to be exceptional. Unfortunately, they had a suspicious car accident not so long ago and died, but they had entrusted a flash drive to me, along with a bunch of copies of the classified file for safekeeping,” he said, tersely.
“And just to be on the safe side, before I came here, I made arrangements for a copy of the flash drive to be mailed to a dozen investigative journalists around the country if anything happened to me,” he warned the deputy director of DHS.
“Paranoid much, Kort?”
“You have a reputation amongst your peers as being a White Hat here in DC, albeit even if most of them are sneering at you because of it, or because they are pissed off by your moralising intransigence. I’m taking a risk on your integrity by coming here, but I’m not such a noddy that I would fail to put some sensible precautions in place to ensure I’m not the unfortunate victim of another accidental vehicular collision with a tree,” he intoned sardonically.
“That’s something that you know quite a bit about, isn’t it, Mr Kort?” Morrow ribbed him as the CIA agent shrugged.
“True, I do know a thing or two about killing people and making it look like an accident, so I guess that makes me an expert witness. And a target, so I make no apologies for having a strong sense of self-preservation,” he said smugly.
“I’m sure that’s also something that Special Agent DiNozzo knows a thing or two about too, he said ironically. “The man is something of a cockroach, impossible to kill,” he taunted Morrow.
Tom wasn’t sure if Kort had heard about Eli’s demand for his execution or the counter operation to bring down Mossad’s director. Either way, he wasn’t going to be making any comments.
Kort’s disgust for DiNozzo was far from a secret. To Morrow, Trent Kort’s aversion for Tony was nothing less than a ringing endorsement for the integrity and ethics of one of the most naturally gifted investigators that Tom had ever encountered. And that was without factoring in his undercover abilities, either. A natural-born leader, he was also a team player – perpetually forgoing promotions to help Gibbs build a permanent team, that before DiNozzo had joined him, had been a constant revolving door of agents who couldn’t or wouldn’t work with Jethro, who must be said, was an atrocious leader.
Yes, Leroy Jethro Gibb was undeniably charismatic, and he engendered unbelievable levels of hero worship in the people under him, which was particularly repugnant, because of the appalling, even abusive way he treated his agents. It also came at a terrible cost for those individuals. Gibbs was, to put it bluntly, a narcissist who ran his team as an extension of himself. Because he pushed himself to work almost 24/7, particularly when there was an active case, eating and sleeping sporadically and having no social life, he expected his team to adopt the same unreasonable standards.
He imposed a flat command structure, with himself at the pinnacle and all the others at the base, even his senior field agent, whom he reduced to little more than a paper tiger. He mocked them, physically assaulted them (although it was almost exclusively male agents, never the females) and used a system where he compartmentalized the dissemination of information that excluded the 2IC, further undermining his status amongst the juniors.
He deliberately forced the senior agent to compete with the junior ones who were naturally less experienced, to shore up his own position. An undesirable consequence of his leadership was that it also created a false sense of complacency among the junior agents, ensuring that the only authority they would answer to was himself. While he probably didn’t see that as a negative, if anything were to happen to him and he was unable to lead, or he resigned as he did several years ago, it became a massive problem for the poor sod who had to step up and try to lead the team.
As Gibbs’ goal centralised his power at the top of the team, focused on him, it wasn’t all that surprising that after eight years of working for him, Tony’s ability to stand up to him had eroded to the point where when Gibbs told him to log into the Pentagon computer system while aboard the USS Sea Hawk, he’d done so. His response was almost purely Pavlovian by that stage. Forcing him to compete with a much less seasoned agent and a damned liaison officer from Mossad for recognition of his skills and his sacrifices, despite his enormous talent, hadn’t helped either.
Gibbs liked to use DiNozzo’s undeniable skills and innate talents, but Tom suspected that instinctively, Jethro saw him as a potential replacement and was threatened by him. This was why he still got to do all of the less sexy senior field agent roles like the paperwork unopposed, and without recognition, but was not permitted to exercise any actual authority. After eight years of such abuse of power, was it any wonder DiNozzo’s confidence had been slowly eroded, bit by bit, probably without him even knowing it.
Morrow wished he had been a better gatekeeper for the young DiNozzo when he was the director of NCIS, but even he, nominally in charge of the agency, has struggled to maintain control over the charismatic agent, too often failing. Gibbs, while content not to take on a managerial role (and thank the Good Lord for small mercies), nevertheless, Jethro flat-out refused to be governed. He craved the power to run his own show, despite the fact he was nothing more than a team leader – a senior supervisory agent from the DC major case response team. Albeit an extraordinarily well-connected agent who gradually and relentlessly chipped away at Morrow’s authority over the years, so he empathised with DiNozzo.
It was why Tom had extracted a promise that if his undercover mission succeeded, Tony would not return to Gibbs’ team. The director ended up leaving NCIS because, eventually, he felt redundant, that he was little more than a glorified pencil pusher but with no real authority over the agency unless it was a matter that Gibbs was not invested in. After leaving fieldwork when he reached mandatory retirement age, Tom took on management roles and, ultimately, the role of the director because Tom still felt that he had more to offer to the Navy and its members but by the time he left, professionally, Morrow felt jaded, ineffectual, and disillusioned.
In effect, Morrow felt he was impotent to control Jethro in any meaningful way. He hadn’t been joking when he told Jennifer Shepard that Gibbs was her problem, as he handed over control to her in MTAC that day nearly four years ago. The former NCIS director was so damned tired of battling against Gibbs and not receiving backup from SECNAV when he tried to make the charismatic former Marine follow protocols and regulations.
That was why Tom had no problem in advocating to the President on Tony’s behalf, arguing that Anthony DiNozzo deserved immunity, and, if he was not granted it, then Director Leon Vance, Senior Supervisory Agent Gibbs and Special Agent McGee should all be charged, too. But aside from Gibbs’ petty mind fucks that he’d subjected DiNozzo to for the last eight years, the other reason why he felt that Tony should not be held to account for accessing classified Pentagon data was that if he hadn’t, who was to say if Davenport and Vance would not still be sitting on their asses. It was entirely plausible that the pair would still be waiting for McGee to decrypt Petty Officer Vargas’ computer or for Gibbs’ gut to suddenly ping and tell them who the mole was on the MCRT. In the meantime, Domino could have found its way into the hands of their foes, and the consequences would have been a scandal of cataclysmic proportions.
Tom sighed and decided that as much as he reviled the likes of Trent Kort and his ilk, perhaps he should read the file on Leon Vance and see what had him in such a flap. He picked up the file and opened it, wondering, wryly if reading it put a target on his back, too. There had to be some pretty damned incendiary stuff in there to have the CIA guy so rattled. With a sigh, he settled down to read the file, first asking his assistant, Ewan, to bring in coffee for his ‘guest’ and a green tea for himself.
As Morrow read through the file, he tried to prevent his face from revealing his inner thoughts and emotions, but HOLY SHIT! If this stuff was even halfway real, it was dynamite. Not only for the current NCIS Director but for everyone who knew what was inside this file. There was no possible way this could have flown under the radar, it had to have been a deliberate and concerted ongoing campaign to keep this all under wraps. And there could only be nefarious reasons why certain people were so eager to look the other way or were actively covering it up. In committing mass fraud and endangering national security!
Damn! He could see why Kort was rattled alright.
It meant, whoever was behind this coverup owned Leon Vance, lock, stock, and barrel. He was compromised, and well before he even sat his ass in the director’s chair. As serious as it was to have a compromised agent, it was nothing compared to getting him into the Big Chair. Tom felt a sudden wave of nausea roll over him as he considered all of the repercussions of this intel.
“Looking at Kort, he said, “If this is legitimate and not a faked file…”
“Oh, it is real, Deputy Director,” Kort interrupted him. “It is the real file, not the one in his NCIS jacket. That’s the dummy one.”
While Morrow had been gone from NCIS for four years, he could say with complete certainty that this file that Kort had handed him was not the one in his jacket at the agency. There is no way he would have overlooked this – in fact, there was no way, if this was real, that he would have passed the security check to have been hired as even a lowly field agent, let alone a supervisory one. It might have facilitated his hiring over at the Central Intelligence Agency, hell for all he knew, it might have fucking fast-tracked him into a plum position as head spook over there, but not at NCIS or NIS, as it was back when he joined. Nor would it have scored him a job at the FBI or other federal agencies, either. But once he had been identified as a candidate to fill the directorship, he would have had to undergo an even more rigorous security and background check. There was no way he could have survived such an exhaustive vetting process. Tom knew; they’d gone through his whole life with a fine tooth comb.
If this information was true then there had to have been a major conspiracy to pull this off, and he suddenly felt a cold chill wash over him. He remembered Kort’s paranoia and his account of the analyst who had died in a car accident. Suddenly, it didn’t seem like such a melodramatic interpretation of events as he first imagined and subsequently dismissed as pathological suspicion. It was starting to seem all too shockingly real…if the file on Leon was real.
“Then why not come forward with it before now? Leon has been director now for nearly twelve months,” he pointed out logically.
“We tried,” he spat. “After the absolute dog’s breakfast, he made out of resolving the Vargas/Domino debacle for over five fucking months, someone in the company decided to take a closer look into the man. How could we not when the previous director created such an utter balls up with her revenge fantasy against Rene Benoit. I’m staggered how she ever was able to pass security and background vetting for the job,” he said, with much sarcasm.
Tom idly mused that the Brits certainly did scathing sarcasm so damned well; they elevated it to an art form. But Kort, goddamn his beady close-set eyes, had a point. How the devil had Jennifer Shepard ever passed the security check – not just for the shit-show surrounding her father, Colonel Jasper Shepard and his supposed ties with Benoit, but the whole failure regarding Svetlana Chernitskaya. Agents Dekker and Gibbs had seriously dropped the ball there in failing to authenticate her kill.
It was most assuredly a blackeye for those who carried out the background and security checks although, there did seem to be a disturbing trend here. Good Lord, they’d spoken to relatives of Morrow who he hadn’t seen for decades, and had interviewed his old teachers and fellow students, looking for anything that might preclude him from being appointed as the NCIS director. So if this explosive file contained not just one but two highly dangerous and disqualifying pieces of data, then Tom asked himself, how could people supposed to be vetting candidates have failed, not just with Shepard but with the current director too?
As much as he was epically pissed off at Gibbs, he had to agree with the man on one of his damn rules. It surely could not be a coincidence. It had to be intentional, and that meant that someone wanted to have compromised directors at the helm of the Naval Criminal Investigative Services agency. Off the top of his head, he could only think of two explanations – they wanted to hinder or destroy the agency’s overall efficacy, or they wanted to be able to exert control over the agency’s director. Neither explanation was a good one, Morrow concluded grimly.
Trent gave him a mocking glare, overlaid by an emotion he wasn’t quite able to put his finger on as he said, “When the analyst who compiled the file was killed, I decided to be far more circumspect, so I shared it with someone who knew where all the bodies were buried in DC. Someone I knew was most decidedly unhappy about the previous NCIS director’s improper use of agency resources to pursue a personal vendetta,” he snapped irately at Tom.
“Gibbs?”
“Gibbs,” Kort confirmed testily.
“Maybe he read it, but he just didn’t believe it,” Tom ventured, trying to figure out why Gibbs would fail to act in the face of such massive fraud and evidence that his director was compromised.
The information was pretty out there. The whole identity-swapping stuff was bizarre enough, but then combine it with the shit about Vance’s involvement in a covert program codenamed ‘Frankenstein,’ training military personnel as secret assassins? That was a whole other level of disturbing.
Tom would bet his bottom dollar that the CIA also had its finger in that horrific pie aside from Kort being involved as a contractor.
“Perhaps it simply seemed too over the top.”
“I doubt that. It’s not as if Gibbs is some wide-eyed naïve white hat, unlike DiNozzo,” Kort said mockingly. “The gunny was engaged in Black ops as a sniper and for NCIS, god damn it!”
Shaking his head and muttering sotte voce, Morrow caught the words about an autopsy and a TKO.
Pinning the CIA guy with a steely-eye glare, he said, “What do boxing and an autopsy have to do with this situation?” he demanded.
“Everything, associate director. It could have proved that Leon Vance and Tyler Owens switched identities when the fake Tyler Owens (the real Leon Vance) turned up dead in Chicago a few months ago, and Vance (aka the real Tyler Keith Owens) insisted that NCIS investigate his death, claiming he was a former Marine. In fact, he sidelined Gibbs and used his junior agents to investigate the murder; the gunny was less than impressed,” Kort said, sounding like he couldn’t decide if he was amused or exasperated.
Tom inwards rolled his eyes, all too easily envisaging how pissed off Gibbs would have been. Jethro was an apex predator who was ridiculously territorial when it involved his team. He could treat them like shit and abuse the crap out of them, but if anyone else tried to interfere with them – look the hell out!
“There was no record of Owens having served in the Corps or any of the armed services either,” Trent continued. “But the director insisted that his friend had served. Of course, he was telling both the truth and patently a falsehood. The reason why there was no documentation of the dead man serving as a lieutenant in the Marine Corps was because he served under his real name – Leon Vance. Coincidentally, Lieutenant Leon Vance had attended the US Naval Academy, where he was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the US Marine Corps, but suffered a detached retina in a boxing incident meant he was given a medical discharge from the Marines. After that, he attended the Naval War College, where he met his future wife, Jacklyn Thomas and came to the attention of NIS agents Riley McAlister and Witney Sharp when they recruited him for a mission.”
“So the theory is that the switch was made after Leon Vance was medically discharged?” Tom muttered, “but to what ends?”
“One thing stands out in Vance’s record. Prior to his discharge, he was collaborative and a team player. Afterwards, not so much. He was focused on number one – ambitious, a loner.”
Morrow wondered if it was worth sounding out Ducky Mallard about the autopsy. Surely they would have run blood and DNA tests as part of the autopsy. Owen’s sister, Tara Kole’s DNA, could be obtained and compared to the dead man’s and the current director to determine which individual she was related to. Perhaps that could be undertaken while Director Vance was preoccupied in Tel Aviv, he mused.
He sighed, cognizant of the time constraints and his need to secure immunity for Anthony over the unauthorised Pentagon access. Morrow needed to wrap this up and get back to his tasks. He needed to find out if his people had located Dr Berkley to warn her she was about to be put into protective custody and find out where her daughter was. It would be just their luck if Dr Benoit was still working for Medicine Sans Frontières in some hopelessly inaccessible part of Africa. That would complicate matters exceedingly. They only had so much time that they could stall that flight to Tel Aviv without the Davids, Leon Vance (or whoever the fuck he was) and SECNAC Davenport becoming suspicious. This business with Kort and the file could wait a bit.
Winding up the interview with the slimy CIA operative, he informed him that he was late for a meeting with his superior. If Kort took that to mean the Director of DHS and not the President…well, that wasn’t Tom’s fault. It was better not to let anything slip to the CIA since right now, in the early stages of learning about the whole Rivkin shit-show, he didn’t have a clue whose side the CIA was taking right now.
Placing the file back in the A-4 envelope and checking that he could retain it, he locked it in the bottom drawer of his desk. He looked at the CIA agent and winced, “Rest assured that I will be investigating this and if the intel is correct, I will be taking appropriate action. This is far too dangerous to be allowed to continue,” he said with conviction.
Kort smirked, “I have faith in you, Deputy Director. You are the quintessential White Hatter, which was why I sought you out after Gibbs proved to be such an abject disappointment. That said, while I trust you as much as I trust anyone, which isn’t a lot,” he said candidly, “take care who you take into your confidence about this matter. Having this intel is bad for one’s health,” he warned the other man grimly.
Morrow nodded darkly. Operation Frankenstein, if it was true, would involve people who would not want it to come to light, and he would tread carefully. It would be like picking one’s way through a minefield, hoping not to trigger a mine, the deputy director thought, angrily. “Thanks for the heads up, I’ll be discreet,” he promised, knowing that Kort’s warning had a largely self-serving element to it, but he appreciated it, nonetheless.
Standing up and walking around the desk to exchange a perfunctory handshake with Trent that inwardly left him wanting to wash his hands or at the very least to wipe them on his pants, he escorted him out of his office and handed him over to Ewan. Morrow returned to his office, no doubt surprised had he realised that Kort was regarding him with a mixture of cynical amusement, antipathy, and a touch of sorrowfulness since the CIA operative was well aware that idealistic ‘White Hatter’ types like Morrow could end up as one of the assassin’s targets one day.
Although he hoped that was not the case, Trent Kort was a realist and knew if he was ordered to take Tom Morrow out, Trent would do his job. It was nothing personal.
Chapter 8
After Kort departed, Morrow headed to the White House for an urgent meeting with the President, a consultation facilitated by Acting Secretary of State Anna Elliot. As a career diplomat, Elliot was desperate to pull off what she saw as a massive coup, confident that it would finally launch her into the big chair after being undersecretary for so long. Supposing that the Secretary of State, Robert Iverson, didn’t return, of course, and that was far from a given with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. It was one type of cancer whose prognosis for remission was reasonably promising, not that Elliot wanted to hear that.
Since he was acting as Agent DiNozzo’s advocate and she was desperate for him to take on the mission to bring down Eli David, she was prepared to move heaven and earth or in, this instance, arrange for him to speak to the President to ensure that it happened. Still, having to use her as a channel to get an urgent audience with the commander-in-chief left Tom uneasy about her knowing too much about DiNozzo’s demands. Out of an abundance of caution, he hadn’t mentioned the CIA-sanctioned hits and getting them cancelled or that he wanted Benoit’s daughter and her mother in protective custody. Tom did not trust Elliot or her smarmy little Fixer, Gerrit Driessen one whit. Considering what they had done to DiNozzo, Morrow would tread very warily around them both.
Still, Tom was surprised by the President’s ready agreement to give Agent DiNozzo immunity for his unauthorised accessing the Pentagon’s system from onboard the Sea Hawk. Though he was surprised, he was most definitely pleased to achieve his goal so easily. Tom got that piece of paper signed, duly witnessed by officials from the DOJ, and made certain it contained the presidential seal as quickly as he could before beating a speedy retreat back to DHS. All that occurred within the time frame they obtained to delay the C-130’s liftoff bearing Mossad Officer Michael Rivkin’s remains back home to Israel. He barely had a chance to send Tony a text message letting him know that the immunity and the CIA sanction of both himself and Dr Benoit had been accomplished before DiNozzo had been forced to climb on board the military flight, still sore from his fight with a Kidon assassin. Tom wasn’t sure if he received it, though,
Tom had then spent hours tracking down Dr Berkley and her daughter, Dr Benoit, who, after mourning her father (or the father she had thought him to be), decided that she wanted to distance herself from the man who had been an international arms dealer. She was now using her mother’s maiden name, too, calling herself Dr Jeanne Berkley and thankfully, she was back in the States. After she’d returned one year ago and falsely accused DiNozzo of murdering her father, she had stayed in the US, moving to New York where her mother worked as a physician at an exclusive clinic. Jeanne found a job at New York-Presbyterian in their ER department, and neither the mother nor her daughter had been too thrilled about being placed in protective custody, both expressing a strong doubt that it was warranted. That was until Tom flew to NYC to enlighten them that there had still been a sanctioned order to kill Jeanne and Tony as collateral damage, dating back to when her father was still alive and wanted to escape the CIA’s clutches.
Suddenly, both women became extremely cooperative, agreeing to leave the country with a team of agents whom Tom trusted implicitly. They would travel to France since Jeanne had a farmhouse in the Limousin region where they could stay, near the city of Limoges. The farmhouse Rene left her after his death belonged to Jeanne’s grandparents. It was the only thing she had accepted from her father’s inheritance since, in her mind, it hadn’t been tainted by blood money at the cost of innocent lives killed because of the weapons her father sold. Also, Jeanne had dual citizenship and was bilingual, fluent and literate in English and French, so it was an excellent place for mother and daughter to lay low.
Initially, Dr Jeanne Berkley seemed antagonistic towards Agent DiNozzo and, therefore, she was disinclined to heed Tom’s warnings about her safety, mainly due to them originating from Tony. When Morrow had explained rather bluntly that Tony was being pressured into carrying out a high-risk mission with poor chances for survival because her life was threatened to make him comply, she had softened her stance pretty quickly. Her mother, Helen Berkley, had also proved helpful in talking her daughter around. Particularly once Jeanne realised that the CIA sanctions on her and Tony’s life had nothing to do with his mission, the CIA was attempting to control Rene by killing Jeanne. At that point, Helen Berkley’s attitude towards DiNozzo had thawed completely and influenced her daughter. Jeanne had begged Tom to let her speak to him but, regretfully, Tom had told her it wasn’t possible, which caused her to break down, crying, realising that he might die believing that she still hated him.
The whole debacle was unforgivable. It wasn’t uncommon for marks in undercover ops to be emotionally damaged when the mission ended, but this charade had never been a real undercover assignment. It had all been about the former director abusing her position of power for personal reasons. Shepard used an innocent daughter, who had no idea of her father’s illegal activities and abused one of her agency’s own agents by lying to him, thereby placing his life in jeopardy. It had been nothing short of miraculous that neither Jeanne nor Tony had been in his car when the car bomb planted by Trent Kort exploded. He felt a righteous fury at his successor, who should never have been given the top job since she’d shown she wasn’t worthy of the position.
When Morrow managed a short call with Tony before the mission started, wishing he could have stopped it so he didn’t have to go through with the crazy plan, Morrow just hoped that his conversation would give the young agent the impetus to make it through. Tom noted with concern, the flat effect in his voice, and he figured that DiNozzo was feeling scared and fed up with all of the shit he’d encountered over the last few years. It was tragic, but totally understandable with all that had happened to him at the hands of Directors Shepard, and Vance for it to have robbed him of his natural zest for life. So it was why the former NCIS director inwardly debated whether to share some news that he learnt a few hours ago. He suspected Tony was bound to be furious when he learnt about it, but if the senior agent was right about not surviving this bullshit mission, then didn’t he have a right to know.
In the end, Morrow decided to tell him what he discovered. He hoped that if DiNozzo knew, even if it enraged him as it had Tom, perhaps it might give him the impetuous to fight. After he discussed the overall mission situation with Dr Pitt, the doctor reiterated what Anthony had already told him. With Tony’s scarred lungs, this was an incredibly stupid plan, and the NCIS agent’s prognosis was not good. Pitt was enraged that they would even contemplate such a course of action, given the risk to Tony and the low chance he had of surviving – it was, in effect, a suicide mission.
Pitt had already left on the first available commercial flight to Tel Aviv he could get a seat on, but both men knew that wouldn’t get there in time for Brad to argue with the Israelis about the inadvisability of proceeding with their plan. Not that Morrow thought he stood any chance of persuading them anyway. This was already au fait accompli and damn the personal risks to the American Agent.
In the end, Morrow decided that DiNozzo had a right to know, so he told him what he learnt, hoping that he made the correct decision. The deputy director had expected him to be furious when he told him, but Tony sounded more shell-shocked than anything, and to be fair, it was pretty incredible. Although perhaps he’d already been sedated before Tom called, and it was not something Tony would have ever seen coming. He had sounded relieved, though when Tom informed him that his friend, doctor, and college football foe, Brad Pitt was already en route to Tel Aviv, even though he was still a good eight hours from arrival.
Well, he’d done all he could, at least for now. Unfortunately, it hadn’t been much, and he desperately wished he’d been able to do more, but Tom had very little time to manoeuvre. For now, all Morrow could do was wait and hope. He wasn’t religious but he found himself saying a prayer or two, invoking a deity, he no longer believed in. If he had to categorise himself, Morrow would probably check the box marked humanist since, in his experience, there was a helluva lot of evil that was justified in the name of a god, which left a bitter taste in his mouth. But in the highly unlikely event that there was some mercurial and fickle higher being overseeing things, Tom figured that if they were even a tiny fraction as powerful and loving as religion made them out to be, invoking them to help Anthony DiNozzo couldn’t hurt. The young man had served many people in his fourteen years in law enforcement despite a childhood that could have turned him towards a life of crime, corporate greed and corruption, he had chosen to serve others. If anyone deserved a miracle, it was Tony!
In the meantime, while he waited on news of the mission and Tony’s fate, Tom began planning some discreet investigating of the information in Leon Vance’s file that Kort had given him. He would reach out to Dr Mallard tomorrow about getting hold of a copy of Tyler Owen’s autopsy report, but he didn’t want to attract any undue attention at this stage. Kort had already intimated that it could prove dangerous to one’s longevity, and he didn’t want to put Ducky in danger. He would also arrange to get hold of a DNA sample of Tara Kole to compare it to the Director’s and start discreetly investigating if Vance (or Owens) was involved with Operation Frankenstein. There had been whispers of such programs from time to time so he would not be shocked to learn of its existence but still, he felt like there was probably more to it than what was in the file. He recalled a rumour he heard of a whistleblower who had hinted of the formation of a squad of assassins for hire, made up of CIA-trained military recruits before the anonymous informant disappeared as if they’d never existed.
He was going to investigate the NCIS director and Philip Davenport, even if the intel in this file didn’t pan out. He would ensure they paid for their outrageous decision to force Special Agent DiNozzo to fly to Israel to answer to Eli David when he should be the one explaining himself. To wit, why he had Mossad officers running around on United States soil, chasing down terror cells, killing federal agents and spying on the US federal law and intelligence agencies. He made a mental note to access Agent Foster-Yates’ report on the death of Agent Sherman tomorrow.
Deciding there was nothing more to do, he headed home, hoping to hear back soon about DiNozzo. He was also expecting to hear from his team, who were on protection detail for Helen and Jeanne Berkley, just as soon as they arrived in Paris. The plan was to spend the night in an Interpol safe house before heading to the farmhouse in Limoges to bunker down amongst the locals until they got a clearer picture of what was happening with DiNozzo. Still, his agents could just as easily call him at home as they could in his office at DHS so nothing was stopping him waiting at home. Plus, he was waiting to hear from Officer Hadar, who was going to give him a sitrep on the plan to convince the Davids, Leon Vance/ Tyler Owen and last but not least, Leroy Jethro Gibbs that Tony was dead. He just hoped it wasn’t true.
He knew Gibbs would be devastated by his senior field agent’s death. At least he hoped his former agent would be devastated that DiNozzo was dead, executed by Eli and sanctioned by Vance and SECNAV. Yet truthfully, Tom couldn’t find it in him to feel all that much sympathy for the arrogant supervisory senior agent. The Jethro Gibbs he thought he knew for all those years, the one who had insisted that a brash young Baltimore detective be hired by NCIS to join his team and refused to take no for an answer because you didn’t waste good, had broken his own god damned rules. Particularly the one about never screwing over your partner.
He just hoped Gibbs was in hell right now, as he deserved to be for allowing Vance and Davenport to drag Anthony to Tel Aviv to placate Eli David without even a whimper. Morrow just hoped his protection of Ziva David was worth the price he would have to pay in the coming days, although he sincerely doubted it would be. Likewise, he hoped that Davenport and whoever the hell the director called himself, found out sooner rather than later the cost they’d end up paying to insert their heads up Eli’s ass and do his bidding.
The trio’s careers were done – if he had anything to say about it…and he did. So that was some comfort, although not a lot. Not when the cost of their jackassery was the destruction of a brilliant undercover career and investigative agent, and potentially his life. Still, even though it was Ziva David that Gibbs had chosen to side with over DiNozzo, deep down, Jethro must be experiencing some guilt or remorse, even if it was minuscule and probably would never admit it. He certainly deserved to be in Hell right now.
What the deputy director of Homeland still had trouble comprehending, was if Trent Kort had been telling the truth about giving Gibbs a copy of Vance’s file (and to be honest, the CIA agent was a compulsive liar), then why hadn’t he acted on it? It was very out of character for the former Marine.
Of course, that was assuming that the file was factual…but assuming for the moment that it was, why then wouldn’t he read it? Jethro’s reputation for knowing where all the skeletons in DC were buried was not hyperbolic, by any means. How else could he keep getting away with ignoring and disobeying rules and laws, never facing any consequences? What possible reason was there to explain why he’d shy away from wanting to discover more dirt on his new director? Tom knew there wasn’t a lot of love to spare between Gibbs and Leon when they were based at the San Diego office. That was before Gibbs had been sent to Paris with Jenny Shepard to kill those two Russian assassins Anatole Zukov and Svetlana Chernitskaya – and what a disaster that turned into!
There were only a few reasons that Morrow could think of as to why he wouldn’t read the file could be sheer bloody-mindedness. That, or if Jethro had already known what was in it or thought he did. And if all of these assumptions somehow proved true and Gibbs didn’t report it and left a fake Leon Vance in the director’s chair, Tom would rip him a new one that you could drive a bus through. After the debacle with Shepard, Morrow couldn’t fathom why anyone would leave a compromised individual in such a powerful position.
All he could come up with was that maybe Gibbs wanted the director to owe him one helluva get-out-of-jail-free card and, if that was the case, it made the deputy director of the DHS feel very uncomfortable, indeed. Could Jethro really be so coldblooded, so implacably ruthless? It would put him on par with Eli David.
Finally arriving at his home, Tom sighed tiredly. All of his muscles ached, not just with exhaustion, but with tension and he wished Lynette was home and could give him a massage. She gave the best Thai massages Tom ever had, but she was away at a work conference in Chicago until the end of the week. And as much as he wished her magic fingers were here to fix all of his knots, he was contrarily relieved she wasn’t there because he was decidedly not good company, at the moment and keeping crazy hours. Wandering into their large and light, airy kitchen, he perused the freezer to decide what to shove in the microwave. Lyn always kept at least a dozen or so meals that she’d prepared in single servings which could be heated up no matter what time of the day or night when Tom was peckish, to encourage him to avoid eating greasy takeout.
Spying a fish stew, he decided that a lighter option at this late hour might be a wiser option than heating up and eating a heavy meat dish. Plus Lyn’s fish stew was delicious, and he popped it into the microwave and bustled around the kitchen, getting flatware, a plate, and a glass of crisp white wine to drink with his dinner. As the meal heated up and the enticing aroma started pervading the room, he was not surprised that Indigo, his wife’s beloved Bombay cat made a beeline for the kitchen, hoping to score leftovers. Chuckling at the frenetic miaowing that Indi was engaging in, he couldn’t blame him. It did smell superb, and Tom suddenly realised he hadn’t eaten anything since breakfast, and that had been some fresh fruit and Greek yoghurt at around seven o’clock.
Despite feeling rather ravenous, Tom generously put some of the fish into Indi’s bowl, feeling sympatico with the feline, who was probably missing Lyn as much as Tom was. Later, both replete with the delicious food, the two males bonded over missing their favourite female, they both occupied the Chesterfield armchair in Tom’s study, rereading Kort’s damned file for the umpteenth time to see if he’d missed anything. Well, Morrow did, Indi just curled up on his lap in a purring post-culinary blissed-out state, digesting the delicious late-night seafood snack.
Oh, to be a cat…at least one in the Morrow house, doted upon by his lovely mistress.
Finally, almost forty minutes after retiring to the study, Tom’s trusted team of agents in France checked in, having arrived at the Paris safe house with the Berkleys, who were now getting settled in for the night. There was still no word on Tony and what was going on in Tel Aviv, which was ominous, although he tried to tell himself that Hadar, who was supposed to be Morrow’s liaison with the Israelis, probably had his hands full, dealing with the Davids, Vance, and Gibbs. Lord knows Gibbs was likely to be causing mayhem as if the hypocritical senior supervisory agent was in any position to take the moral high ground here. What the fuck did Gibbs think would happen by dragging DiNozzo over to Eli’s territory to justify his actions to Mossad while in the meantime, he let Ziva get away with lying to him, lie to NCIS? Jethro let her get away with harbouring a killer in her home after Rivkin had been warned repeatedly to leave the country, for pity’s sake!
Still, he was uneasy and far too anxious to go to bed. There really should have been some word by now. As he paced around his roomy inner sanctum, Tom’s thought inevitably turned to the Israelis who were supposed to be watching Anthony’s six. He’d had one of his most trusted analysts supply him with all available data on the Israelis known to be working with the government to remove Eli David from power. He hoped their allegiance did lie with Israel and its agencies, and was not with Eli David. Tom also learnt that the person who was in overall charge of this shit-show of an operation was an Associate Director in the Mossad, Orli Erbaz, who was one of Eli’s former mistresses, a man whose libido was the stuff of legends. He wasn’t sure if Erbaz’s opposition to the director was a case of payback for her being dumped for a younger, prettier female or if it was patriotism, but he hoped it was genuine.
Likewise, was Amit loyal to the Director of Mossad, or was his loyalty to the individual currently occupying the chair? Were he and Elbaz incorruptible, or could they, too be turned by Eli’s dirt files? Another of the main players working with various cabinet ministers to oust Eli was the leader of the Kidon Unit, Malachi Ben-Gidon, appointed to that position by the former Mossad director when Eli was still deputy director at Mossad. According to Tom’s trusted intelligence analyst, Leyla Álvarez, Eli David had not supported Ben-Gidon’s appointment, nominating one of his own faction, Ilan Bodnar, who was a friend of the David family.
David subsequently appointed Ilan as his deputy director, not all that long after he became Director. So it seemed safe to assume that Ben-Gidon was not one of the director’s faction and probably had good reason to expect that Eli would replace him at some point when he thought he could get away with it. Ben-Gidon had brought in a young operative, Officer Liat Tuvia, to replace Ziva David after she’d been appointed to that ludicrous liaison role at NCIS. Tuvia was also a part of the sting and was no fan of Ziva David, according to Álvarez.
Honestly, what had Jenny Shepard been doing letting a Mossad liaison loose in the agency? It made an absolute mockery of NCIS’ mission statement and the oath she’d taken when she was sworn in as the new director. Having a foreign national with no law enforcement training collecting, handling, and transporting evidence, questioning witnesses and suspects, arresting suspects and taking formal statements from them was all highly illegal. Not to mention the deep shit the agency would be in if anyone ever sued them because Ziva wounded or killed suspects; they would be liable for a gigantic damages payout that could be the death knell of the agency. If it wasn’t so damn serious, it would be laughable.
Anyway, though Liat Tuvia was still young, she would guard DiNozzo once they switched his ‘body’ for the male corpse that would be substituted for Tony in the faked car crash. Liat was going to supervise his secret transfer to Haifa in Northern Israel, where they would take him to a private clinic where he could be monitored for 36 hours to ensure he suffered no ill-effect before he would be smuggled out of Israel by boat to Malta. This seemed overly optimistic of the Israelis, who seemed not to have studied the data that Dr Pit faxed them before he flew out. Tuvia, it seemed, had been chosen, aside from her outstanding ability with a variety of weapons and her Kidon-trained hand-to-hand skills as a bodyguard since she was young and junior enough for her not to be missed by the Davids or Eli’s coterie of Mossad officers.
Desperately tired, yet unable to go to bed and actually sleep, as opposed to tossing and turning until he knew Tony’s fate, Morrow was on the point of calling in some favours or trying to contact Associate Director Erbaz to find out what the devil was going on. He had already had a bad feeling about this operation – DiNozzo was the last person to sound warning bells when it came to his own safety, and the fact he’d been so pessimistic did not bode well. If his former agent didn’t make it or Mossad screwed it up somehow, he was going to burn the house down. Acting Secretary of State Elliot and her pissant fixer were going to wish they’d never been born. As for all the rest of the faceless men and women who’d been on board with this stupid mission to get rid of Eli David, he’d expose every last one of them. Hell, he would track down Eli’s dirt on them, and release it to the press himself to ensure it destroyed them.
His mind was made up, something was wrong, Tom ceased pacing and crossed to his desk to pick up his landline and try to get answers as a text message was sent to his cell phone.
Video call with a Sitrep in 5 – Hadar.
~oOo~
Trent was pissed; one of his underlings had just given him a heads-up that the kill orders for Jeanne Benoit and her boyfriend, Anthony DiNardo, aka NCIS Special Agent Anthony DiNozzo, had been discovered during an auditing process and rescinded. He had deliberately buried those orders, hoping they would remain active, in case he should ever need them again. While he couldn’t imagine a legit reason why he might need to off Jeanne Benoit, she was still useful, because the CIA spook could imagine a time when he needed to hold her continued existence over the head of that obnoxious DiNozzo. He regretted that Rene Benoit’s bodyguard Henri was driving his Mustang when it exploded several years ago. Kort despised the federal agent, not just because he was childish and obnoxious but, because he was so damned self-righteous, wearing his white bloody hat with so much piousness, it made Trent want to barf.
Who the fuck was DiNozzo to look down his nose at Trent for being willing and able to get down in the muck and the mud, with gun runners and arms dealers and have the cojones to do what needed to be done. This was not some Pollyanna world where good triumphed over evil. Sometimes, the evil-doer got to live high on the hog as Benoit had done, in exchange for him setting up the rest of his scum bag colleagues and competitors. At least until the Benoits of this world were no longer useful, then they were cast aside like steaming piles of excrement.
But DiNozzo had made no bones of the fact he despised Trent, and to be honest, the feeling was absolutely mutual. Who was DiNozzo to look down his patrician nose at Kort. Just because his mother was a bloody Paddington, did he think he was too good to get his hands dirty with arms dealers? Although it seemed that he had no trouble going undercover with the Macaluso family, surely he would have gotten his hands bloody working his way far enough up the food change to be able to take them all down. Although he supposed that in DiNozzo’s mind, he put criminals behind bars while the CIA dispatched arms dealers or turned them so that they became assets. Then, when their usefulness expired, they buried them six feet under, which Kort reckoned was a lot tidier all around.
Not that he had the chance to dispatch Rene Benoit – thanks to that stupid red-headed bint, obsessed with killing La Grenouille because she blamed him for killing her father. She couldn’t accept that her old man, Col Jasper Shepard, had supplied Rene with decommissioned weapons to sell on the black market, but, when he got caught red-handed, the colonel couldn’t deal with the shame and shot himself. Of course, the same degenerative brain condition that Director Shepard was diagnosed with had also afflicted Jasper Shepard, and apparently, it was genetic. Perhaps to be charitable, Jasper Shepard was already not mentally competent when he sold weapons to Benoit, but her killing the arms dealer, despite being warned off by the CIA, had ruined their operation.
After Rene disappeared, although it was the worst secret at the company that she’d finally killed him, Kort’s handlers ordered him to step in and take over Rene’s business. His bosses hoped to take down more scalps, but it was hopeless. Clients were spooked, for some reason, they didn’t trust him, even though he had been Benoit’s right-hand man for several years. Whatever the reason, the Op was doomed; he was pulled out barely four months after Benoit disappeared from his boat. And Trent was ropeable about it; he had been thoroughly enjoying the Sybaritic lifestyle that Rene indulged in. Benoit’s cognac and wine cellar, the epicurean food and Cuban cigars, the European designer clothes, palatial residences, and expensive vehicles were intoxicating, as were the women who flocked to become mistresses, attracted by the obscene wealth.
Suddenly, it was all gone…because of Shepard and her holier-than-thou white hatter. Wanting revenge but telling himself it was because the NCIS director was a loose cannon and therefore dangerous to their whole community, he decided if a chance presented itself, he would take her out of the equation. Yet, it was almost a year before an opportunity presented itself. Trent heard about the death of a retired NCIS agent who died in suspicious circumstances in LA and heard rumours that someone – a former Russian assassin – was looking for the NCIS agents who were supposed to take her and her partner (and father of her son) out. Svetlana Chernitskaya only knew the code name Oshimaida and that the agents supposed to kill them were a male and a female who worked for NCIS.
He did a bit of digging in old CIA files, discovering that Gibbs, his protégé Jenny Shepard and William Decker, who was their handler, were ordered to kill Chernitskaya and Anatoly Zhukov. Gibbs took out Zhukov, but clearly, Shepard failed to dispatch her. Trent learned later that Shepard couldn’t go through with the hit because Chernitskaya was pregnant – the weak, sentimental fool. Further proof, she didn’t have the balls for the job and was a liability. He felt no remorse for dropping a clue to the Russian about Jenny’s identity. She was dying anyway; his only regret was that she had a long overdue shred of decency, knowing what was coming for her, so she’d given DiNozzo and Eli David’s daughter a direct order to stand down. Trent knew that DiNozzo was on protection detail with her; he’d hoped that the insufferable former cop would get caught up in the cross hairs, protecting his director – which would have been a bonus. Sadly, Trent was forced to settle for just Shepard dying out in the desert dining.
After ruining the La Grenouille operation, which aside from the opulent lifestyle, was supposed to rocket him into an associate directorship. He felt like it was some payback for what the selfish bitch stole from him. In truth, Trent knew that his time was running out. If he didn’t make a management role soon, then he was destined to remain a CIA assassin, and everyone knew that assassins didn’t get to retire. They ended up like Ari Haswari, Guyman Purcell and even Michael Rivkin (the cretinous fool, killed by DiNozzo), three dangerous and skilled assassins taken out by their own kind. He did not want to end his days like that, and Kort held a grudge against Shepard and DiNozzo for ruining his retirement plan.
So Kort had figured that if the writing was on the wall, he’d take great pleasure in killing Jeanne Benoit and DiNozzo, although maybe he would take his time with the good doctor after she had turned up her nose at his numerous overtures when he ‘worked’ for her father.
But now, that comforting little failsafe was discovered and rescinded, leaving Kort decidedly out of sorts. The only bright star on his horizon was the delicious news that Trent heard that Leon had forced DiNozzo to go and answer to Leon’s Master, Eli David for killing Michael Rivkin. That pain in the arse NCIS agent was as good as dead because Eli favoured the whole an eye for an eye philosophy, and he was anything but squeamish. DiNozzo would return Stateside in a pine box and Trent couldn’t be happier.
Course, Gibbs was bound to be pissed about it. He really should have read the file that Trent gave him, TWICE. He could have blackmailed Tyler Owen and saved his precious goodie two-shoes of an agent’s life.
Chapter 9
Staring at the lifeless corpse, who only hours before had been his living breathing senior field agent, Gibbs felt his heart freeze over. A part of him had stupidly denied the possibility that Tony was really dead, telling himself that DiNozzo was like a cat with nine lives. Just when you thought he was down for the count, he would bounce back into the bullpen despite his beloved car having been destroyed in a car bombing and the team seeing the charred body in his burnt-out Mustang that he never let anyone else drive. He survived the paltry 15 percent survival rate of Yersinia Pestis (aka the pneumonic plague), and battled pneumonia before crawling back to work, still looking more dead than alive. Somehow, he managed to free a half-dead Marine, imprisoned in an underground cell underneath DC in the city’s labyrinth of sewerage tunnels after a serial killer drugged and abducted him, physically dragging the Marine to safety while being pursued by a whack job killer. He had survived when a bunch of pissed-off paratroopers on a night training flight took offence to one of their own, killing another member of the team, and Tony getting inadvertently pushed out of the plane miles away from the jump landing target with zero formal jump training and survived. AT NIGHT!
Sadly, standing here in this Israeli morgue staring at his lifeless corpse, there could be no hope that he had managed to survive the ambush at the hands of Mossad Officer Hadar because he was here in the morgue, very much dead, and Jethro couldn’t deny it any longer. This time there was no miraculous appearance, with him stepping out of the elevator into the bullpen to announce with a cocky but wounded smile, “What? No, balloons!” Or a return to the office, triumphant but grimy after saving Sergeant Atlas, having forced Gibbs into admitting he was irreplaceable. Even after nearly dying from the plague and coming back to work early, looking like something the cat dragged in, somehow, he managed to save Cate and McGee a few hours later from a car bomb. But there would be no more miraculous saves. This time, DiNozzo finally ran out of luck.
Nor could Gibbs take comfort that death had taken him by surprise. That look he’d given Jethro, the last one when he was in Hadar’s SUV as they drove away from the plane, he realised DiNozzo had known that he was being led like an animal to the slaughterhouse, taking one for the fucking team. Davenport and Vance had committed premeditated murder, knowing that he killed Rivkin in self-defence but, he was betrayed by them for the sake of expediency. Fuck diplomacy!
And he must bear some level of responsibility, even though he hadn’t known what they planned, unlike SECNAV and Leon. He never imagined that it would end this way…he’d fobbed off DiNozzo when he expressed his concerns. No, he’d expressed his fears that he might be making a one-way trip. Had Jethro known, he would have stopped it. He would…
An inner voice, one that sounded remarkably like DiNozzo whispered inside his head…Would you have stopped it? It wasn’t as if you didn’t know this might happen, Jethro. You can’t claim the moral high ground of being ignorant, that this wasn’t a possibility. What about your conversation with McGee.
He flashed back to them going to Ziva’s apartment and getting out of the black agency sedan. McGee was excited about finally getting to see Ziva’s new apartment, which considering they were there to process a crime scene where DiNozzo had killed Ziva’s Kidon-trained lover, it seemed damn inappropriate, and I should have head-slapped him, but we were out in public.
I asked him to tell me what he knew about Rivkin, Tony and Ziva, and he made a half-assed attempt to lie to me, but he’s a piss-poor liar. One of my Gibbs’ glares soon had him tripping over himself to spill his guts.
“I saw Tony snooping around in Ziva’s desk. It was the day before she went back to Tel Aviv. He answered the phone. I think he talked to Rivkin… I can’t believe I’m telling you. Tony’s gonna kill me.”
At this point, I made a mental note never to share anything I didn’t want anyone to know about. He sucked at keeping secrets.
Then I told him, “Not if Mossad gets to him first.”
McGee seemed shocked by the suggestion, asking, “You don’t think the Director is gonna hand him over, Boss? Rivkin tried to kill him”.
I shook my head at how naïve Tim was, even after five years as an investigator. “Tony’s word against a dead guy’s,” I replied, succinctly.
“Honestly, I really wanted to call him one of DiNozzo’s nicknames for him…McClueless because… what the hell!.
He protested credulously, “Yeah, but Ziva will back him, right?”
Seriously, McGee?
“Tony doesn’t just murder people, you know? Obviously, the shooting was self-defence. All we gotta do is…”
McGee never got to complete that train of thought. As they took the crime scene gear and started up the steps of the building, there was a whoosh and a massive explosion from a gas leak (which turned out to be deliberate) and I cynically figured Mossad was cleaning up their mess.
That theory was verified later on, although Gibbs didn’t feel the satisfaction, he normally would at being right. Not with DiNozzo lying lifeless on a slab in an Israeli morgue only a few hours after he landed here, forced against his will. His last twelve hours were spent in pain, but he refused to take anything because he knew how analgesics affected him. The last thing he ever wanted was to appear weak in front of Gibbs, Ziva, and Vance. Ironically, that ended up being pretty much the last thing he ever did, suffering in silence on a long-haul military flight, which he also loathed. All so, three people who weren’t fit to shine his expensive Italian leather shoes, wouldn’t think of him as weak.
Ruthlessly, he suppressed thoughts of that last flight, refocusing, back on when he and McGee were investigating the explosion at Ziva’s apartment. Barely six hours after Rivkin died, telling McGee that Mossad would be out for revenge, so I couldn’t claim ignorance for what happened. I might not have done a deal with Mossad like Davenport and Vance, but I knew Eli David would be out for blood.
Gibbs wanted to close his eyes and pretend that today never happened… that DiNozzo wasn’t lying on the slab right there, cold and lifeless, but that would be beyond cowardice. He suddenly heard Ducky in his head, saying, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing,” and Jethro knew that while he didn’t kill DiNozzo, he did nothing to stop it from happening, either. Evil had triumphed!
Forcing an American agent to travel to a foreign country to be interrogated by their intelligence service was illegal and it was morally wrong, yet he hadn’t stopped it. If he had gone higher, to JAG or the Department of Defense, DOJ or the Inspector General, surely, they would have stepped in and prevented it. Or he could have gone lower and leaked it to the press. He was owed a favour or two by members of the fourth estate over the years. The last thing Davenport or Vance wanted was negative publicity.
But Gibbs did nothing, and now he would have to live with the knowledge that he had blood on his hands and that if he tried to seek justice, the rest of his team could have their lives ruined, too. So the very least he could do was not close his eyes and pretend he didn’t bear some responsibility for DiNozzo’s death, as he lay on the autopsy table. His joi de vivre for life, his animation, and his inability to stay still, even in sleep, gone forever. DiNozzo might as well have been a waxen figure, his features slack and now, absolutely immobile, his mouth slightly ajar. What was Tony thinking when death leapt out and grabbed him by the throat when, in the last few moments, he realised he was going to die?
Gibbs thought about what turned out to be the last meaningful conversation he had with his second-in-command back home in his basement. Tony had expressed his serious reservations to Jethro about getting on the plane, saying he thought if he got on the plane, it would be a one-way trip, either thrown into a prison or given a dirt nap. DiNozzo was angry, he didn’t understand why he was being ordered to fly to Tel Aviv to answer the questions of Mossad’s director on a shooting that had already been deemed self-defence. He argued that it was illegal for them to expect him to offer himself up like a sacrificial lamb. He hadn’t even been offered the opportunity of legal counsel or to talk to a union representative before he pointed out that indicted individuals, even the worst of the worst criminals, convicted of heinous crimes, were given access to legal aid.
He was no criminal. He was a dedicated law enforcement professional who could have made a lot more money with his skills and network, however, DiNozzo had wanted to make a difference and help others. Tony felt like he was being punished unfairly, and despite it going against the grain for him, he’d reached out and asked for help. Tony had been in fear for his life, desperately wanting…needing his boss’ support, and what did he do?
He refused to provide it. He told him to ‘man up’. Told him that for once in his life, he should stop being so damned selfish and think of someone else for a change. He was so busy feeling sorrow for what Ziver, the daughter of his heart, was going through that he hardened his heart to Tony. He identified with her anguish, her grief, her primal need for vengeance although, he never imagined she’d demand that Tony pay with his life. He ignored the fact that, unlike with his own life-shattering loss of his wife and child, where neither Shannon, Kelly or himself were in any way responsible for their tragic deaths… Ziva and Rivkin were not blameless in his death. They both made choices before and during the Kidon assassin’s decision to resist arrest that had contributed to his unfortunate outcome.
Despite feeling like it was his fault, Gibbs knew he could not have prevented his wife and daughter’s death. Shannon and Kelly were unlucky to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and witnessed a drug deal that had gone bad.
Ziver and Rivkin?
Both made deliberate choices to ignore US laws, to continue to chase their quarry even after their mission had been uncovered by the agency whom Ziva was supposed to be liaising with.
They chose to ignore the FISA warrant, and she knowingly harboured a suspect. Ziva lied by omission to him and intentionally lied to Tony. Rivkin could have pulled up his big boy pants and submitted to being arrested by DiNozzo and deported, and he CHOSE not to. He was dead because of a series of choices he made.
Yet, Gibbs somehow lost sight of those differences and identified with his surrogate daughter. He forgot he was a senior supervisory agent who had a duty to watch out for his team and an obligation to be even-handed in their treatment.
Everyone always said that when it came to treating his female colleagues, he was not impartial; they accused him of turning them into surrogate daughters, but that wasn’t entirely accurate. He’d never viewed Jenny Shepard as a surrogate daughter – maybe a surrogate Shannon for a brief moment. Likewise, Paula Cassidy, during her brief stint on the MCRT as TAD after Cate was killed, had certainly never been considered as surrogate daughter material, nor as a surrogate Shannon either.
He just wanted to throttle her most of the time, and Vivian Blackadder certainly never earned surrogate daughter status, either. Even if, on the surface, he had a helluva lot more in common with Viv than he did with Cate or Abby. Blackadder had lost her brother Rex to the terrorist bombing of the USS Cole, where nineteen crew members had lost their lives and countless more had been injured. She was desperate to apprehend the terrorist Hussan Mohammed, who was credited with engineering the bombing and like Shepard, Blackadder was a redhead. Despite her tragic loss, perhaps that was why he’d never cottoned onto her as he had with Abbs, Cate and Ziva, who were brunette or raven-haired. His beautiful little princess had been brunette like him.
But his adoption of Ziver was more than her just being brunette like Kells or even that she had lost her mother in a terrorist attack. It was more than the fact that he and the young Israeli were military-trained. He and Ziver shared a dark side, both were highly trained, exceptionally skilled assassins who had killed enemies and were comfortable with those actions – well, as fatalistic as one could be about killing in cold blood. It gave them common ground he would never have with his other team members.
Sure, they had all taken lives while working on the MCRT, but that was when their lives or other peoples’ were being actively threatened. Military or state-sanctioned kills involved killing terrorists, individuals who posed genuine threats or had been responsible for the mass deaths of non-combatants. Killing them when they were just going about their business required a certain pragmatism that most people wouldn’t be capable of…not on a repeat basis.
So, yes, when he looked at Ziver, he saw his surrogate daughter…but not Kelly. Ziver was in many ways the female version of himself, or that’s how he saw her…a killer…someone who could put a bullet in someone’s head, even her half-brother who’d gone rogue and not let it destroy her. His Kelly…he did not want her to be like him…he saw her as her mother’s daughter…brave, opinionated, stubborn, protective. Not a cold-blooded killer like he and Ziva were, able to kill and justify it, and not let it destroy them. Ziver was everything about him that he felt made him special, even if those weren’t qualities most people would admire. He wouldn’t have wanted that for his Little Princess.
It was why, even though Tony had saved his life on multiple occasions, and Cate had stepped in front of those bullets intended for him moments before Ari took her out with a sniper’s bullet for him when it came to feeling connected, it wasn’t a contest. In his mind, killing your own flesh and blood to save a stranger was impossible to top. After all, they were both doing their jobs, but Ziva had no mandate to save his life, she had done so unhesitatingly. And it was for that reason alone that he knew that if he was forced to choose between Ziver or the other agents, it would always be the Israeli he would choose. He owed her his life.
Yet now, having finally realised the cost of choosing to take Ziver’s side in this shit-fest, he wanted to throttle the life out of her. How could he have been so blind as to accept her onto his team four years ago? She had compromised him because of her killing her own flesh and blood brother, to save him…a perfect stranger. He felt overwhelming gratitude that she killed Ari for him, it had made their relationship feel special and unique, but now he was beginning to wonder if he read more into it than it really was. After all, according to Vance, she had been spying on them, informing the director about things they had done that might not pass the sniff test. He didn’t see that coming…how could his gut have led him so far astray?
Now Jethro was standing over DiNozzo’s corpse, knowing he had failed his agent, all because he thought that he and Ziva were on the same page about the bond they shared. He should have insisted that Vance observe the law and not let him throw an NCIS agent under the bus because they were frightened of pissing off Eli David, who ‘supposedly’ was helping them with an intelligence issue. Good to know that the agency’s most valuable assets – their agents – could expect to be hung out to dry at the whim of The Powers That Be.
Of course, deep down Gibbs knew damn well he manipulated DiNozzo into getting on the plane against his will. It wasn’t loyalty to the Agency or the director that impelled his loyal Saint Bernard to board that C-130 against his better judgment. It was DiNozzo’s pathological need to please his mentor, who’d told him if he didn’t go, he was self-centred and weak. Gibbs had exploited him, knowing that the thing that truly terrified the young agent was not being taken hostage or being injured on the job. No, the thing that terrified Anthony DiNozzo the most was being seen as weak, and Gibbs had used that intimate knowledge of his former partner to ensure he would get on that plane.
All so Ziva would receive her pound of flesh. He just thought that it would be metaphorical, not literal, but the evidence of his horrendous miscalculation was lying dead on the autopsy table in front of him, and there was nothing he could do to fix it. Even the usual avenues of dealing with murder, obtaining justice for victims to make sure that their deaths did not go unpunished, was not an option open for DiNozzo. It seemed so wrong that a man who had spent his entire adult life pursuing justice for victims would be denied what he worked so hard to achieve for others. It. Was. Not. Fair!
Gibbs felt the indescribable but powerful urge to yell, scream, kick, or cry.
NOT. CRY!
Hadn’t cried since he lost Shannon and Kelly, not even when he lost Caitlin Todd. Not gonna cry now!
But he’d sure settle for the more macho option of beating everyone involved to a pulp to vent some of his self-hatred and rage because he’d let SECNAV and Leon talk him into going along with their scheme. He just wished that was an option. Sadly, Jethro knew that as much as it would make him feel better, at least temporarily, it was not a route that was open to him.
Fighting hard to maintain self-control, the former Marine could practically hear DiNozzo telling him that he had let him down and fought hard not to lose it.
Gibbs realised that Amit Hadar, the Mossad officer who killed DiNozzo, administering a lethal dose of insulin, had slipped into the room to speak with his boss. Seeing him speaking so calmly to Eli as if nothing had happened, Gibbs felt a red mist of rage overwhelming him, along with a pounding in his ears.
The medical examiner, Dr Devorah Hoffman, must have noticed him struggling to cope because she was at his side, offering him some bottled water and speaking to him in soft and sympathetic tones. He had no idea what she was saying to him but whatever it was, it snapped him back to the present and made him realise that Eli and Vance were looking at him, assessing if he posed a risk. Gibbs was determined to make them pay somehow, but he needed to be alive to see justice done. He might not obtain it for DiNozzo right now, but as a sniper, he knew that patience was often needed to make a successful kill shot.
Noticing that Tony’s murderer had slipped out of the room, Gibbs was about to follow him and…well, he wasn’t sure what he was going to do when he found him. If it was up to him, he’d like to gut that SOB with his K-bar or deliver a blow that would smash his nasal bone, driving it up to penetrate the murderer’s brain, causing his death, but Jethro knew he wouldn’t get away with it. Not right now.
Still, he could follow him and learn as much about his prey as possible for later, when he would take him out as justice for DiNozzo.
Know thine enemy!
Suddenly desperate to get away from the morgue and DiNozzo’s lifeless remains, which paradoxically seemed to be accusing him (and he was aware just how loony tunes that made him sound), he couldn’t help wondering… was he losing his marbles? Jethro was about to mutter something about needing fresh air when his phone started ringing, shattering his last nerve.
He growled, “I gotta take this,” and he slipped out of the room without waiting for Vance’s approval. As a good Marine, he was well aware that a Mossad operative trailed behind him at a discreet distance, although he pretended not to notice.
Jethro was trying to figure out where Hadar had gone, as he spied a stairwell, and his gut told him that Hadar had gone down, not up. So Gibbs decided to follow his gut. Looking down at the caller display on his phone, he groaned, dismayed when he saw it was Abby calling him. Briefly, he contemplated ignoring her call, but he knew how antsy she got when ignored. Plus, she was even more anxious when the team was off travelling on work-related travel after Jenn died, so if he didn’t answer the call, she would keep ringing. Then she would try DiNozzo’s phone, and when he didn’t answer – because he would never answer her calls again, she would call Ziva, and, who knew what she would have to say to the Goth.
So he knew he had to take the call. The only problem with that was the Goth was often prescient when it came to people she loved, having a sixth sense when something was wrong. But he couldn’t tell her about DiNozzo…not over the phone. Actually, he probably shouldn’t ever tell her what happened because he knew she was impulsive, and, a terrible liar.
Deciding that anger was his best defence, he answered that call with an abrupt, “What do ya got, Abs?”
“How‘s Tony? How’s Ziva? Are they talking yet?” she pressed him impatiently.
Lord knows he loved Abby like a daughter, not that he had ever intended to let her get that close, it just happened, but he wished sometimes she wasn’t such a Pollyanna rainbows and unicorn personality. Especially now when he was confronted with the physical embodiment of hate, vengeance, unadulterated ambition, grief, guilt, and anger. It was too much.
He wanted to say to her, “No, they’re not. They never will because Eli ordered Tony’s execution at the behest of his daughter.”
But he couldn’t tell her because officially, DiNozzo hadn’t died yet.
He had no choice, he had to lie to his favourite forensic scientist. “They’re fine, Abby.”
It hurt to have to deceive her. She would be distraught when she knew, but what could he do? He held his breath, wondering if she could hear the lie.
“I’ll take that as a no,” she said dismissively, not believing him.
It seemed her truth radar was working; she just assumed that they weren’t talking because Ziva was still too angry… an explanation that held a tiny kernel of truth. After all, how could anyone, let alone an eternal optimist like Abby – who viewed the team as one big happy – ever dream that Ziva would literally demand DiNozzo’s head on a platter because her Daddy was the director.
“So how’s Israel?” she asked brightly. McGee must be with her because Jethro heard her say, “What? He said they’re fine,” before she returned to their conversation.
“It’s magical, right? I’ve been wanting to go there for years. It’s like third on my list after the Galapagos Islands, and of course, Dollywood, Gibbs.” Somehow, amidst his rage and grief, he had a sudden mental picture of Abby clomping around Dolly Parton’s theme park, and his mind boggled at the image.
Trying to get the call back on track, he said gruffly, “The case, Abby.”
Of course, Abby was impervious to his anger; she and Tony.
With faux perkiness, she told him, “McGee and I, we’ve been working on Rivkin’s computer, and, um, we’re doing fairly well. Uh…. With a little luck, I think we’ll make our 24-hour deadline.”
Meanwhile, Gibbs exited the stairs to find himself outside in an outdoor passageway with a series of external steps and paths. The place was a rabbit warren, and Hadar had his back to him, smoking a cigarette. Hmm, it was tempting…oh so tempting.
Even over the phone, Gibbs could tell that Abby was lying to him, about the computer. She was such a bad liar, and couldn’t keep a secret if her life depended on it. Which was why he couldn’t tell her about DiNozzo. Dr Abigail Sciuto may well be able to kill someone and not leave any forensic evidence behind, but as soon anyone started interrogating her, she’d fold like a cheap deck of cards and confess immediately, he thought, despairingly.
At that point in their conversation, McGee chimed in after the awkward interval when Abby lied to him about retrieving data on the fried computer they found at Ziva place. He probably thought Gibbs was pissed at them for not coming through or for lying about it and was hoping to deflect him. If only Tim knew that Gibbs didn’t give a fuck about the damned computer anymore.
“Boss, I ran the back-trace on Ziva’s cell. Most of the calls check out.”
Gibbs knew he had to pretend to care, so he barked at the junior agent. “Most, McGee?”
“Well, Ziva did make one call from her car two nights ago to a highly encrypted phone. Israeli registered. The call was placed just after midnight. Six hours before the bombing. This means either Ziva was really upset about someone before…
Abby interjected, sounding very disgruntled, “Don’t say it!”
“She was somehow involved,” McGee concluded.
Abby scolded McGee, practically screeching in Gibbs’ ear, “What’d I just say?”
Gibbs as he talked to Abby and Tim had been watching as Ziva glided up behind the Mossad Officer who was Eli’s right-hand man…and the killer of DiNozzo, he reminded himself bitterly. He watched the Israeli he thought of as his daughter stalking her prey, and a part of him hoped she killed the SOB.
Meanwhile, on the other end of the phone back in DC, McGee clearly wasn’t finished. “Boss, I traced the Israeli phone. It’s registered to …
Gibbs beat him to it as he watched Ziva catch the man off guard, putting him in a savage chokehold.
“Officer Amit Hadar,” he finished wearily. “That’s good work. Let me know what else you find out,” he ordered bleakly, as he terminated the call, slipping his cell back into his pants pocket.
Moving silently, he inched up closer so he could watch the pair conduct their little tete-a-tete and hear bits of their conversation.
With the much bigger man effectively restrained, painfully…although as Eli David’s trusted right-hand man, he must have been able to have broken her hold. But perhaps he didn’t dare to harm the director’s daughter in any way.
Ziva yelled at him in anger. “Now talk.”
“You called me, remember?” he taunted her.
“To remove Rivkin from harm,” she spat.
“Harm from who?” he demanded
Ziva responded furiously, “Himself.”
“Circumstances had changed,” he tried to reason with the seething woman.
“And this was your answer?”
Hadar declared implacably, “I protect the Mossad.”
Ziva let him out of the choke hold. Hadar stepped away from her and turned to face her, rubbing his neck, which was already beginning to bruise quite spectacularly.
His declaration did not seem to impress Ziva at all. “There was nothing to protect. I should have known not to trust you,” she told him bitterly.
Amit scoffed at her insistence to foist the blame onto him “As if it was my decision,” he reminded her.
Ziva refused to let him off the hook. “You have my father’s ear.”
He seemed to grow impatient with her readiness to look for scapegoats, even after getting Tony killed. “Rivkin was in chaos. You knew it, and yet you decided not to tell your father. You tried to protect Rivkin. But in truth, you are the reason he’s dead.”
Gibbs felt angry that Tony’s killer could be so blunt in speaking to Ziver, even if her behaviour in demanding DiNozzo’s death had left him horrified and furious in equal measure. He was seriously thinking about stepping in to defend her, even though he’d had similar thoughts about her culpability for Rivkin’s death as Hadar obviously did. But as much as he abhorred what she’d done, he still couldn’t help seeing her as his daughter, and Gibbs was nothing if not protective of those he loved.
Yet it was at this point that Ziva, forced by Hadar to consider that she also bore responsibility for her actions leading to Rivkin’s death, lashed out again angrily at the Mossad officer. Hadar, as her superior, probably could have taken her out but, Gibbs guessed that her favoured status as the daughter of Eli David ensured he responded defensively, as she viciously stuck out at him numerous times with her hands, and he blocked her. Gibbs knew that her behaviour was way out of line, and if she wasn’t the director’s daughter, she would be up on assault charges for sure.
“Rivkin killed that American agent. You knew this, and still you did not report him.”
Ziva refused to accept blame, “I called you and told you to remove him.”
Amit wouldn’t accept any blame. He shook his head, “Too late. By then we could not get him out of the country. All we could do was clean up after him. And you.”
Gibbs guessed that was a confession of sorts, about who had ‘cleaned’ up Ziva’s apartment. Was it also Eli’s way of exerting more pressure to bring his daughter home by destroying her home so she had nowhere to live? Then if, so, then why let her go back to NCIS eight months ago?
Both parties suddenly became aware that Gibbs was watching them.
Hadar moved closer and handed her a piece of paper which she accepted. Before he departed, he told her, “There is no one left to blame. Stop looking.” He gave Gibbs a rather enigmatic look as he disappeared through a door into a building separate from the one that housed the morgue.
Gibbs came down the steps to where the two Mossad officers’ acrimonious confrontation had taken place, approaching cautiously. He’d been caught spying on them. Better play it out.
Ziva didn’t beat around the bush. “Hadar set the fire.”
Gibbs was equally blunt. “Covering for Rivkin.”
She refused to acknowledge that assertion, deciding to attack instead. Her father had taught her well. “I was betrayed. By Mossad, by my father, by Tony.”
She saw the wince of pain at her mention of Tony, something he didn’t try to hide.
“Who’s next? You?” she demanded bitterly.
Looking at her disappointedly, he shook his head. “And what about your betrayal, Ziver? What about rule 1?” he asked her sadly.
Being in her presence now only served to remind him that he’d chosen to support her over DiNozzo, and it cost Tony his life.
As much as he resented her for throwing Rule 1 out the window, Jethro was also forced to admit that in choosing to support her, he screwed over his partner too. Therefore, he bore a degree of responsibility for Tony’s death too.
As Jethro turned on his heels and walked away from her, unable to bear being near her, he heard the Israeli curse angrily at him in Hebrew. Even though he was furious with her, he felt reluctant empathy, because he knew revenge hadn’t sated his grief and anger. Not one bit!
Chapter 10
Several hours later, Gibbs’ cell phone started to ring, and inwardly, he groaned, noting from the caller ID that it was his favourite Goth again. He hated lying to her, he hoped that Director David would make the damn announcement soon. Their dumbass plan was to claim the car DiNozzo was travelling in was blown up a short time after the NCIS party attended Rivkin’s burial to pay their respects. The former Marine felt ill at the thought of his former senior field agent’s body destroyed like that, even though he was past feeling anything, just so there was no forensic evidence left for Ducky to find. DiNozzo had always been concerned about his appearance and the thought that his body having been mutilated that way, sickened Jethro. It was just another indignity that made Jethro want to lash out and take down these people who would sacrifice an honest man and an excellent agent, all so that Eli wouldn’t lose face because his protege was a drunken fool. He couldn’t even…but that didn’t solve the Abby problem. He knew if he didn’t answer, she would just keep ringing.
Sighing defeatedly, he accepted the call, aiming for normalcy. “What do you got, Abbs?”
Abby seemed perky but his gut told him otherwise. “Hey, Gibbs. Whoa, it’s my first trans-global ‘What do you got, Abs’. Think maybe I could get a trans-global Caf-Pow! delivery?”
Trying to keep it regular, although it was almost impossible, he told her, “Depends on what you have.”
“We did a post-mortem Humpty Dumpty on Rivkin’s laptop,” she said brightly.
Too brightly. He detected her nervousness underneath her apparent upbeat mood. What was she concealing?
McGee chimed in, not bothering with any social niceties, for which Jethro was exceedingly grateful.
“And we were able to reconstruct most of the data from his hard drive.”
Tag teaming each other, Abs interjected. “He used a special algorithm to generate a well-harboured short key for most of his files.”
Gibbs was trying to figure out what the hell she just said when McGee leapt into the breach when she took a breath.
“But we managed to crack both the algorithm and the ISP protocols.”
In the sudden silence which he figured out was his cue to respond, he growled in his usual gruff manner when people lapsed into technospeak he didn’t understand. “What’s the point, McGee?
McGee replied, “Basically, we put his hard drive together…”
Good lord! Why couldn’t they have just said that before instead of all the BS about algorithms and short-harboured keys?
“…And as it turns out…” there was a pregnant pause as McGee suddenly didn’t want to continue. Gibbs could imagine the nonverbal conversation that was going on, half a world away in Abby’s lab.
Just when he was about to bark out at them to tell him what they’d found, Abby burst out “It’s not Rivkin’s laptop.”
“So we got nothing?” he commented feeling depressed. Having been ordered by Vance to attend Rivkin’s funeral and listen to him being lauded for his numerous achievements and heroic demise has pissed him off. The guy committed suicide by cop because he was too arrogant, too drunk, and too foolish not to just submit to a lawful arrest. There was nothing heroic or admirable about it. It was about as dumb as it gets.
McGee broke into his mental ranting. “No, actually, boss, we have everything. This laptop belonged to Abin Tabal.”
Gibs was shocked. “Our dead handler?”
“Yep. That’s the one,” Abby confirmed. “Rivkin probably switched laptops after he killed him. Throws us off and gives Rivkin the intel he needs.”
“We’ve got serial numbers, names, and cell phone numbers, all linked to different locations in North Africa,” McGee continued the sitrep enthusiastically.
“And that’s not all Gibbs,” Abby jumped in, as McGee finally took a breath. “Um, we were able to decrypt Rivkin’s e-mail accounts. Which was only half the battle, because it was in Hebrew and Hebrew is hard,” she suddenly sounded pensive.
“Apparently, Rivkin was in D.C., working with Mossad contacts to gather intel on a terrorist training camp,” McGee informed him.
“Who were his contacts?” Gibbs demanded to know.
Suddenly there was a long pause and he imagined they were each trying to get the other person to deliver what his gut told him would not be good news.
McGee must have drawn the short straw because he finally replied, “Well, we traced several e-mails to a…restricted account.”
There was another pregnant pause. Damnit! It was like pulling teeth.
Finally, McGee continued. “A very, very restricted account.”
Jethro rolled his eyes at all the tip-toeing around they were doing. “Restricted by who?”
More silence except for the sound of someone typing on a keyboard. He could almost hear the looks the two of them were exchanging back in the lab half a world away, begging the other person to deliver the bad news.
Eventually, he heard Abby sigh noisily before she delivered the bad news. “Us, Gibbs. Rivkin was e-mailing Ziva.”
As if a dam had been breached, McGee jumped in. “At NCIS. Boss, you know that this means Ziva knew…”
Damn it, more vindication for DiNozzo. Ziva was embroiled in this up to her neck. “Yeah, I got it,” he growled at his agent.
Abby didn’t take the hint that Gibbs was pissed off by the news. She blurted out, “It means that Ziva was withholding vital…”
He interrupted her brutally, already knowing Abby hadn’t been in favour of them going to Israel, “I said, I got it, Abby.”
He broke the connection, deeply troubled by the news that Ziva was not at all innocent in any of this business. She was in it up to her neck. Tony had been right all along, the only mistake he made was giving Ziva a chance to defend herself, instead of demanding she fill Gibbs in immediately.
And if he had, his inner voice questioned him? Then you would have done exactly what he did, unable to believe that Ziva was disloyal to YOU and headed straight to her apartment to save her lying ass. Finding Rivkin still there you would have jumped to the same conclusion as DiNozzo about Abin Tabal’s too-neat suicide and tried to arrest Rivkin too. And while you were special forces and trained in hand to hand, he had roughly twenty years on you. The only way you would have walked out alive was by shooting him and then it would have been your dead body being blown up in a fake car bombing instead of DiNozzo’s.
Or would it? Would you have caved to SECNAV and Leon if they’d ordered you to take one for the team… for the sake of diplomacy when you knew that Mossad was culpable for what happened with Rivkin? You would have told them where they could stick it, but you let them railroad Tony right into the grave, you miserable piece of shit. What would Mike say? So much for Sempre Fi, Jethro.
He thought about Abby and McGee stateside, knowing he could have handled that deeply unpleasant conversation better. He wished he’d been a bit more empathetic with Abby – she just wanted him to tell her this was all a big mistake and Ziva hadn’t been deceiving them. Unfortunately, he couldn’t offer her any solace cause he was all out. But that also didn’t mean he had to bite their heads off either, just because they were the bearers of terrible news.
Thinking about the conversation they’d just had, he couldn’t help thinking about something Abby had said.
“Rivkin probably switched laptops after he killed him. Throws us off and gives Rivkin the intel he needs.”
And there it was. Abs had zeroed in on the critical fact that despite Vance, Fornell Gibbs, and Ducky standing around in autopsy, and agreeing that Tabal killed himself, they’d all been way too quick to close down the investigation. They didn’t even wait for Abby to finish her forensic investigation because Vance was desperate to close the case and they’d all rolled over and showed him their soft underbellies. If they hadn’t declared the case closed, they still would have been in the office when Abby and Tony learnt that the computer recovered from Abin Tabal’s place had been connected to Ziva’s internet. Gibbs would have questioned the liaison officer immediately and realised that the laptop wasn’t Tabal’s. His next step more than likely, would have been to send a team of agents to Ziva’s apartment to apprehend Rivkin on suspicion.
When had he become someone to let the brass steamroller him during his investigation? He would have told Jenny to remove her head from the big shots’ assholes and waited till all the evidence could be processed before he let them call it closed. All those surveillance photos pinned up on Tabal’s walls – did they even have the handler’s fingerprints on them? Now he thought about it, he was pretty sure that they were Rivkin’s photos, and he staged the scene when he killed Tabal. Gibbs doubted that they’d have found the Israeli’s fingerprints on them – even inebriated he felt confident that Rivkin had worn gloves, but they hadn’t bothered to check. Why?
The fact that DiNozzo was so sceptical should have been reason enough for him to object to closing the case before all the evidence was in. Once, it would have been.
So why the bum’s rush from Vance? Now Jethro could hazard a guess that he and SECNAV probably already knew who killed the ICE agent. Had SECNAV suspected it from the start when Sherman was killed. Philip Davenport had been pretty damned quick to overrule the FBI and ICE and hand control of the investigation to NCIS, even though the FBI had jurisdiction of the FBI. Gibbs being a control freak who hated ceding control of an investigation to someone else, played right into his hands. Had SECNAV wanted the MCRT to lead the investigation because Leon could call the shots and pull the plug if necessary? In hindsight, he wouldn’t put it past them since he was too damn eager to call the case done and dusted and everyone went along with it.
No, not everyone, he corrected himself savagely. Ya know that DiNozzo was not convinced. Why didn’t he listen to his most experienced investigator, who kept protesting that it was too neat… too convenient? Since when were cases all neatly wrapped up like the death of Tabal, he berated himself, reaching around and giving himself a head slap that stung. What the hell were ya thinking?
Because you were just as eager as Leon for it to be over, that annoying voice inside his head that kept pissing him off with commentary that sounded like DiNozzo. You suspected that Rivkin was spying on the intelligence summit/ poker game, and you knew he was seeing Ziva, so when Tabal killed himself, it was clean and absolved her of any involvement. Even when SECNAV turned up in his basement to have a man-to-man chat over ludicrously overpriced bourbon, and to warn Gibbs off about poking his nose into Leon’s dirty little secrets, Davenport tried to warn him about her. Coming on top of the fact that the despised bitch SAC Lara Macy had dared to question Ziva’s loyalty when they were in LA working with Callen and the rest of the OSPs team and Rivkin turned up, he’d leapt into protective papa bear mode. Yet if she’d been on someone else’s team, he’d have questioned the coincidence of an assassin from the Mossad Kidon Unit turning up on the same investigation as a team who was involved in chasing down the same terrorist cell who happened to have a Kidon-trained liaison on their team.
After all, Gibbs had an unnumbered rule – never believe in coincidence. Yet he’d ignored it. Continued to ignore the threat posed by her when the SECNAV pointed out that her family were a piece of work and Gibbs worked with her. But his criticism of her and the position that Jenny Shepard had created for her simply put Gibbs’ back up, just like when the hated Macy questioned her. Paradoxically, rather than forcing him to take off his rose-coloured daddy glasses and make him examine her action more dispassionately, he was desperate to protect her and in hindsight himself. Ignoring all the signs that she was lying to them had been an idiot move. If she truly had been his daughter, she would never have been permitted to serve on his team because he would have been too close, incapable of being impartial in how he treated her and yet he’d created just such a scenario.
He’d constructed this fake narrative of how Ziva needed saving from her cruelly abusive father – a man who had created two assassins from his surviving children. One who was filled with hatred for the man who fathered him, and had killed Cate and almost killed Abby to destroy him, because he couldn’t kill his own father. A narrative that involved Ziva making the agonised decision to kill her own half-brother to save Gibbs’ life, despite him being a complete stranger. Plus, the bond that he thought they shared when he offered to take the blame for her killing Ari, assuming that if her father knew that she had done it, he would destroy what remained of her after she killed her own flesh and blood.
Yet, just how real had that narrative even been?
Was it a fantasy like the continuing Adventures of L.J. Tibbs?
If Director David had believed that he killed Eli’s son, then surely the Mossad director would have demanded that Jethro pay the price, just as he had with DiNozzo? Okay, so perhaps the then Director of NCIS, Jen Shepard who was still on probation, might have refused to surrender him but still, he could have sent a Kidon assassin like Hadar to carry out the hit, but didn’t.
Why?
Did he not care that his son was dead?
Had the hatred that Ari clearly felt towards Eli been reciprocated by the father for his son?
Was Eli David happy Gibbs had killed Ari or had he known all along that he was not the one responsible for his death. And if so, how had he figured that out?
Desperate to have caffeine, since he was experiencing withdrawal, he managed to find his way out of the labyrinth of buildings knowing he was being followed by Mossad, but he didn’t care. He needed coffee for what was to come. Actually, he needed bourbon, half a bottle at least. Vance told him that he needed to attend the fucking sham of a press conference to announce DiNozzo’s death. All he wanted was to get falling down drunk and wake up in his basement where his last boat used to be. Ducky would come along to check on him.
He’d say, “One short, Jethro?”
And Gibbs would project into that simple three-word query a world of disappointment and disapproval for him being so careless as to lose his senior field agent in Israel. He would reply in anger, “Wasn’t my fault, Duck.”
Ducky would give him a look that was pitying. “No one said it was, my friend.” But his unspoken words would hang in the air between them. ‘Projecting Jethro. You are blaming yourself for poor Anthony’s death.’
But Gibbs knew better. He could have prevented it if he’d listened to DiNozzo but instead, he told him to man up and stop being selfish. In truth, he did blame him for Rivkin’s death, just like he’d blamed him for Jenny dying in the Nevada desert.
Then Ducky would suddenly realise that the boat was no longer there in the basement, and he would ask how Gibbs had gotten it out. And he would snap at him exasperated because Ducky was a smart guy. Surely, he must have figured it out by now that he’d either disassembled and removed it piece by piece or else he destroyed it and burnt the remains in his backyard. In this case, he’d attacked the boat in a fit of anger after SECNAV paid him a visit to pressure him about digging into the director’s past and try to do a snow job on his background. Davenport had told him that there wasn’t one minute of Leon’s life that he didn’t know about, but that didn’t rule out the fact that Tyler Owens and Leon Vance had switched lives. It just meant that Davenport and the powers that be knew about it and that still made Owens/Vance vulnerable to being blackmailed…by them.
When Davenport started blaming Ziva and questioning her loyalty, well, he felt furious. Not long afterwards, he’d taken an axe to the boat, figuring that he was using Ziva to threaten Gibbs not to make waves about the director. While Gibbs had been leaning towards not doing anything with the knowledge that the director wasn’t who he said he was, he did not take kindly to being threatened, either. Usually, if someone told him not to do something and threatened him, it would have the opposite effect, but he did not want Ziva sent back to work for her father. Feeling trapped between a rock and a hard place, he took his fury out on his boat.
He had to finish cleaning up the basement and have a bonfire when he got home. He decided to hunt down Kort and see if he had another copy of Vance’s CIA file. Jethro intended to make him pay for handing DiNozzo over to Eli, and Davenport, too. Although Jethro knew he needed to be careful about taking them down to protect Abby and McGee.
Lost in his fantasy conversation with Ducky after he returned stateside, he was jerked out of his reverie by someone clearing their throat about six feet to his right. The head of the Kidon Unit, Malachi Ben-Guidon, stood watching him pensively.
“I was sent to inform you that Director David is preparing for the press conference and that your director requires your presence, Agent Gibbs,” he said, his eyes expressing empathy.
Gibbs found it hard to hate him as he did Hadar and Eli David, nodded at him. “Thanks,” he replied tersely.
Although he knew he had no choice but to obey the summons, he didn’t immediately race back. It wasn’t in his nature to comply with orders or demands, which was probably one of the reasons Gibbs was divorced three times. Deciding to be obnoxious, he stood there, finishing his coffee before crushing the polystyrene container, relegating it to his jacket pocket since no trash cans were available. Leon’s anger as he barely made it back before the press conference, announcing the tragic news that a United States federal agent was killed in a tragic car accident while attending the funeral of Mossad Officer Michael Rivkin, gave Gibbs a jolt of triumph. Although Gibbs recognised that he was playing with fire and tried hard to remember that those who got burned would be McGee and Abby, whose illegal hacking would be used against them by SECNAV and Vance if he refused to toe the line.
He knew all that, but he was also too set in his ways…to use to ignoring orders and doing whatever the fuck he wanted. He knew censoring his speech and behaviour, even if he did it to protect them, was difficult. Gibbs had to find some way to take them down, but in the interim, he would have to act contrary to his nature. A leopard didn’t change its spots, and Gibbs was a helluva stubborn Panthera pardus.
~oOo~
After the press conference, he felt gutted. Jethro knew he should have given McGee, Ducky and Abby a heads up about DiNozzo, but he didn’t trust himself to play the role he must, in breaking the news. It occurred to him that there was still the question of what to do about the information found on Tabal’s laptop. He was tempted to order Abby to destroy it because he knew what Leon would do with it once informed of its existence – he would hand it over to Eli like a good little teacher’s pet, hoping for a pat on the head. Jethro decided that in good conscience, he couldn’t ignore evidence from Tabal’s laptop, but he could hand it on to another agency.
He decided that Ducky would be the easiest person to talk to in this situation. As a doctor and a medical examiner, he was accustomed to death in a way that Tim and Abby weren’t. Maybe it had something to do with him being much older – age making him more pragmatic about death. Also, while Ducky was clearly very protective of Ziva, even more so after Rivkin’s death, and he doted on Abby and McGee, his relationship had been much more agitative with DiNozzo. Tony was well known for his ability to try the patience of a saint, and he knew Ducky was often exasperated by his failure to follow Ducky’s sage medical advice.
Yet that excuse could equally be levelled at himself. He also ignored his old friend’s warning over his consumption of alcohol and coffee and his failure to eat leafy greens, as if he was a damned rabbit. He was often bad-tempered, rude even, and Jethro knew that Ducky had been hurt to learn about Shannon and Kelly after he’d been blown up during an undercover mission and lost fifteen years of his memory. Yet Ducky always forgave him, even when Gibbs wasn’t a good friend to him, but he wasn’t as charitable when it came to DiNozzo. It was subtle, but it was there. Ducky never took food out of Jethro’s hands and threw it away while announcing to the bullpen that his blood tests were far too high.
Something about Tony seemed to rub him up the wrong way, so while he didn’t understand it, he doubted he would be as shattered by the news of his death. Unlike Abbs would, and he couldn’t deal with her pain on top of his own.
Dialling quickly, he heard Duck pick up.
“Duck, it’s me. Got some bad news. DiNozzo died in a car accident.”
Yes well, you’re a little late with that news, I’m afraid, my friend.”
“You know?”
“Timothy happened to catch the Israeli press conference – saw you and Director Vance, and quite naturally, it piqued his interest. Quite shaken up he was, and Abigail is naturally inconsolable at the news,” he said chidingly.
“I couldn’t call before,” Gibbs said, his voice cracking. This was as difficult as he feared, having to lie to one of his oldest friends, but it was for his team’s protection…what was left of it. In his mind, Ziva was no longer a part of it but, Jethro had to wonder if she ever had been.
He recalled how he’d come down on her like a ton of bricks for leaking data to Jenny Shepard and how she’d protested that she felt indebted to the director for finding her a place on his team. He really should have realised then, that her allegiance to Jenn was not his biggest concern. It was her allegiance to her father, even if she felt at least some of the resentment to him that Ari had. More fool him!
“I’m sorry, Jethro. I know how upset you must be. Is there anything I can do to help?”
“Take care of Abby and McGee until I get back, Duck. Tell them that cold case that I asked them to check out while I was away, the one about the witness who committed suicide. Tell them to forget about it right now. It will keep until I get back. Not sure yet if there is enough evidence to keep looking, but I want to run it by an old friend before I decide whether to keep pursuing it.”
“I will pass that message on. Any idea when you will be returning, Jethro? Abby is most distressed, and I fear it’s you, she needs right now.”
“I know, Duck. I’m hoping to bring him home tonight,” he replied, his voice unsteady.
It would be so hard swallowing in his rage, especially when he was so used to unleashing it on those around him, especially DiNozzo. This time, he couldn’t lash out in anger at McGee, Abby, and Duck.
“Then I will see you tomorrow, old friend. I know you are already doing so, but take care of dear Ziva. I know Anthony’s death on top of Officer Rivkin’s must be a bitter blow for our dear girl. Please, pass on my condolences.”
Gibbs wanted to yell down the phone that Ziva didn’t deserve Ducky’s pity; she had been dancing a metaphoric jig over DiNozzo’s lifeless body only a few hours ago. The only thing she was upset about was that Eli’s right-hand man had killed Tony when she had claimed that ‘honour’ for herself.
He settled for, “Gotta go, Duck. Ask Balboa to give McGee something to work on from the fraud case they’re on, to keep him busy and take the cold case off Abby and send her to spend some time with Sister Rosita and her nuns.”
He hung up, hoping he’d done enough to stop them working on the laptop. If he successfully derailed their investigations, he intended to turn the information they found over to Tom Morrow at DHS. He wished to Morrow had never left NCIS. If he could get hold of another copy of that file that Trent Kort gave him on Leon Vance, he would pass it on to the deputy director at DHS because he couldn’t risk going after Vance directly since Jethro believed him about the threat to destroy the only people he cared about. Jethro needed to find a way to protect them.
For the first time, he contemplated arranging for the director to have an unfortunate accident – he had the connections and was owed plenty of favours. Gibbs steeled himself about the flood of images of those two precious children and his beautiful wife Jackie, who had no idea of the man Leon really was.
He just hoped that if their call had been monitored by Eli’s minions, it wouldn’t raise suspicions.
Five hours later, after DiNozzo’s coffin had been loaded on the C-130, tied down in the hold where Michael Rivkin’s remains had laid draped in the white and blue flag of his homeland, Gibbs took up a place close by, intending to remain there sitting vigil over his former agent. He might not have had his six when it mattered, when Tony came to him, expressing his doubt about the wisdom of him going to Israel, but he was determined to at least watch his six in death.
Besides, he was positive that he would not be able to tolerate being close to Leon Vance and have to pretend. At least Ziva had stayed in Israel for a few days, so he would not have to be around her yet. He needed time to wrestle his murderous rage into something akin to his normal demeanour if he wanted to save the rest of the team. He knew that if DiNozzo was still here, he would not want them to suffer for something that wasn’t their fault.
Tony had always been quick to forgive people. He never took Gibbs to task for handing him the team and then coming back without even giving him a heads-up that he was taking back the team again. Thinking about it now, Gibbs felt shame for the grubby way he had treated his senior field agent. If Mike Franks had returned after he resigned following the Kobi Towers bombing, passing on to him the baton of leadership to his 2IC, and then turning up four months later without so much as the courtesy of a phone call, he would have cleaned the old Marine’s clock and resigned. Yet even though he was pissed at having his crap dumped on McGee’s desk, he’d stayed and had his six when truthfully, Jethro’s memory still had more holes than Jarlsberg cheese.
Then, a few months ago, he’d been furious with Gibbs when he found out that Gibbs deliberately left him out of the loop when, as his 2IC, he had every right to know. He knew, even though Gibbs denied the accusation he was paying the agent back for Tony not telling him he was working undercover for Jenny Shepard. Gibbs, only now, sitting there beside his agent’s corpse, could admit to himself that Tony was right. H he had wanted to get back at DiNozzo – which was petty of him because he was under orders not to reveal he was working undercover. There had been no such conditions placed on him by Vance over the war games fiasco. The director had even warned Jethro that it was not a good idea to leave the team out of the loop, that it would lead to bad feelings. But he’d insisted they’d be fine with him keeping them in the dark. After all, they were used to him not letting the right hand know what the left was up to. Besides, Jethro was too intent on having his pathetic revenge against Tony for something that wasn’t his fault to listen to good advice.
Likewise, after discovering that the year-long undercover mission that Shepard had him working on while still expecting him to carry a full workload at the office was an unsanctioned personal vendetta, one that he’d barely escaped with his life, Gibbs was pissed off beyond belief was full of rage. Instead of resigning, DiNozzo swallowed down his anger, exhaustion and pain and had the team’s back, like the loyal second in charge he was, then when he needed support, Gibbs spat in his face instead of reciprocating. If he’d been less loyal to Gibbs, to Ziva and McGee, then he would have pulled up stakes a long time ago, not willing to put up with the crap they dished out to him, day upon day.
No one had been kind to him at the end of the La Grenouille affair. They were all hurt that he’d been lying to them all for a year and they took the opportunity to kick him when he was down. But in the spirit of honesty, since he was sitting beside DiNozzo’s body, Gibbs acknowledged that wasn’t the real reason why they’d treated him like scum when they learned he was undercover – it was humiliation. They were supposed to be the elite investigative team, the best of the best but they had all underestimated Tony. They had looked down their noses at him, belittled his intelligence, education and his humble start as a beat cop, and he had fooled them all. He conned Gibbs despite his famed gut; Ziva who was a Mossad-trained spy who thought he was ill, and McGee who prided himself on his degrees from premier universities – no one had a clue that he was living a double life. When they had learned the truth, they felt humiliated that he’d fooled them so successfully, and for so long, they wanted to inflict pain on him for being far too good for them.
They blamed the victim instead of Jenny Shepard, who had basically set him up to fail because her obsession made it impossible for her to supervise the undercover operation the way that it should have been. With him residing in his own apartment, purchased in his real name, plus working almost seven days a week at NCIS, it was only a matter of time before one of Rene Benoit’s people discovered his true identity. Jenny had even had him shadowing Benoit, while Tony was dating his daughter – it was inevitable that his flimsy cover would be blown. But maybe that was what Jenn was hoping would happen. If Benoit had Tony killed to keep him away from his daughter, then she would have an excuse to take him down. Having worked with and trained Shepard he knew better than most that she could be ruthless when it suited her agenda.
How ironic that DiNozzo’s pathologically forgiving nature led to him protecting his teammates when truth to tell, they didn’t deserve it. Ziva should be facing charges of espionage or at the very least permanent expulsion from the US for her duplicity in aiding and abetting in the death of a federal agent.
Ironic because if he hadn’t tried to protect her, if he’d resigned on one of many occasions where he had damn good reasons to flip NCIS and Gibbs the bird, he wouldn’t be lying there in a pine box right now.
Ironic too, because Ziva had been outraged when she discovered how he had fooled the team for 12 months but when the shoe was on the other foot, and she was caught lying, she was outraged to be called on her behaviour. It seemed she had learnt too well when it came to absorbing Gibbs’ rules that he considered to be essential to becoming a good investigator – the overarching one which was – a rule for me but not for thee, which saw him regularly break his rules when it suited him.
Gibbs had really fucked up this time and all he could do was try to protect Abby, McGee, Ducky and yeah, even Palmer because that’s what Tony would do.
—
Notes:
Some of the dialogue in this chapter was taken directly from the episode Aliyah and some of it has been modified somewhat to fit the new plot.
So sad, even though 🤞Tony is probably not dead.
Gibbs expected Tony to be all he needed him to be, regardless of his own wants and needs, without any concern for his second. In fact, less concern than for the other members of the team, who deserved it less, especially Ziva.
Can’t put this story down!