Reading Time: 101 Minutes
Title: Fighting for Freedom
Series: Priceless
Series Order: 8
Author: SASundance
Fandom: NCIS, Stargate SG-1, Stargate Atlantis, Criminal Minds
Genre: Crossover, Dimension Travel, Family, Future Fic / Post-Canon, Hurt/Comfort, Science Fiction
Relationship(s): GEN
Content Rating: R
Warnings: Hate Speech, Major Character Death, Slavery, Torture, Violence-Graphic, Violence-Against Children/Child Abuse, Rape/Non-con/Dub-con, Mind control, Character Bashing, Non-consensual Drug Use, Discussion of Vaccine Hesitancy, and the rise of Conspiracy Theories, Discussion Unethical Medical Research/Experimentation
Author Note: British spellings and grammar conventions. Minor crossovers for Eureka, JAG, Criminal Minds and Leverage
Beta: Aussiefan70
Alpha:
Word Count: 130,000
Summary: Time is running out for Earth to contain a threat of apocalyptic proportions seeking to enslave its entire population by creating a planet of mindless zombies. Despite the gravity of the threat, the Earth and its interplanetary allies have banded together, determined to thwart it, but they encounter resistance from an unexpected quarter, forcing a rejig of a part of their plan. Meanwhile, Homeworld Command’s plan to bring down The Trust once and for all is yielding an impressive amount of raw data when a mysterious Goa’uld disrupts their operation and threatens the life of Tali DiNozzo in Atlantis.
Artist: Germankitty
Chapter 13
Ziva was feeling deeply conflicted; she wanted to get her daughter back so she could finally go home to Israel without a target on her back and enjoy being a real mother again. Having to pretend to be dead, not being able to talk to Tali, and not holding her in her arms had been torture. At least for the first couple of years, her contacts would periodically check in with Tony and Tali, send the odd photo or short video taken on an iPhone. They had to be careful, though, because according to her people, Tony seemed incredibly paranoid about anyone taking undue interest in Tali, making it quite difficult to get regular footage of her.
In one way, Tali’s mother approved since she acknowledged that both she and Tony had plenty of foes. People who wouldn’t wink twice at harming an innocent little girl to get back at her, even if they did believe she was dead. Equally, they would have no hesitation harming Tali, abducting her, or radicalising her to one day attack Israel. Mind you, there were certain relatives, distant and not so distant, who would be outraged that a Gentile was bringing up Eli David’s only grandchild and think that the task should be undertaken by someone more appropriate. Which was something she had no intention of letting happen. As the Americans would say, “Over my dead corpse.”
Which, in part, was one reason she sent Tali to Washington, D.C., to be with her former team members at NCIS, as strangers, particularly foreigners hanging around, would stand out like a sore toe. Honestly, she’d been counting on Gibbs’ extreme paranoia, combined with his unresolved grief over her death (coming on top of losing his family all those years ago), to ensure no one harmed her daughter.
She had no idea Tony would resign and run off to attempt to raise Tali on his own. He was supposed to be terrified of children. Unless they were college-aged teens, she had noted on a couple of investigations. She theorised that it was because he was at the same level of emotional maturity as eighteen and nineteen-year-old males and related to them, or the males sensed a kindred sophomoric sense of humour.
Which was beside the point, because she never in a hundred years thought Tony DiNozzo would willingly walk away from Gibbs’ team. The man who’d donated sperm to father her daughter (yes, albeit unknowingly) displayed so little ambition that she expected him to be still there when Gibbs was forcibly retired, marched out of the bull pen at the point of a gun. Yet in the three years since her resignation and her faked death, when she sent Tali to DC, somehow Tony seemed to have found his gonads and resigned. It finally dawned on him that Gibbs was never going to voluntarily hand the MCRT to the agent he had so many years before anointed as his successor. Maybe it had once been his plan, but if that was true, then it hadn’t been part of Jethro Gibbs’ agenda for many years.
Unfortunately, she had taken for granted that things had remained the same in the three years since she returned to Israel, which was foolish with behind sight. Gibbs even had a rule for it – Rule 8: Never Take Anything for Granted. She really should have double -checked, but unfortunately, she didn’t. If her father were here, he would berate her very harshly for such a foolish lapse, but Ziva didn’t want to examine her choices back then too closely. She was unwilling to admit (even to herself) that perhaps her subterfuge in bringing about her daughter’s conception was dubious. It was easier not to think too much about what she’d done.
She rationalised that the way Tony conducted his sexual life, Tali couldn’t be the only child he fathered. She happened to know that there were several offspring conceived via the sperm donation he’d made as a college student, even though he lied about it to her face. So, she’d convinced herself that there was no difference between the sperm bank using his donated sperm and her acquisition of a fresher donation of semen from him to be used to fertilise her eggs at the private and highly discreet IVF clinic she had attended some six and a half years ago.
Still, as much as she rationalised that Anthony DiNozzo had no desire to rear children and indeed, would make a terrible mess of it, a tiny part of her acknowledged that she gained his genetic material without consent; indeed, she acquired it via nonconsensual intercourse. She did stop short of acknowledging she raped him, since Ziva was convinced that had she offered to have sex with him, he would have hopped at the chance. After all, he had always been utterly transparent about his desire to have sex with her. The only thing stopping him had been Gibbs’ stupid rule, but when Tali was conceived, she was no longer on Gibbs’ team, so she was certain he would have agreed to sleep together if she’d offered it when they were in Israel. The only reason she hadn’t gone down that highway was that she happened to know that he was scrupulous about making sure he used condoms, which would have made it difficult, if not impossible, to collect his DNA.
Much as Ziva loathed having to declare Tali’s existence to her former teammates, least of all her bio father, who no doubt would be in denial about his relationship to the toddler, she had little choice. Indeed, as Ducky used to say, “needs must.”
When Mira Sahar Azam had struck her farmhouse, Ziva, Adam, and Tali had barely made it out alive. She had already been toying with the option of faking her own death so she could go underground and hunt down the Palestinian terrorist cell that Ari had been a member of before his death. After the attempt to kill her and her family had failed, there hadn’t been a lot of time for finesse in planning her next moves when it came to Tali. Eli had taught her to seize the momentum against her enemies and turn it back upon them, and she and Adam did just that.
In the few hours it took for Mossad to arrive at the David’s family olive grove after an anonymous tip-off (by Ziva) about the firebombing, there hadn’t been a lot of time to plan. Adam had called in favours with their contacts to obtain a body that was a close enough match for her, and between them, they had enough forensic knowledge to make it look like her body had perished in the fire. Adam would identify it as Ziva David, based on the cheap bracelet he’d placed around Jane Doe’s wrist before they burned her body and left it in the remains of the firebombed farmhouse.
Ziva was also busy preparing to send her daughter off to the US, although Adam wanted to send her to family members there in Israel. Ziva hurriedly convinced him that ‘their’ daughter would be much safer with her former teammates at NCIS, and he had grudgingly agreed. After all, he’d been the one to sing the praises of Anthony DiNozzo when she’d referred to him contemptuously as just a former cop, something she reminded him of sharply as his opposition crumbled. She knew that he was thinking that if Tali were given to a family member, he would at least be able to see her and hug her, yet, apart from the danger it would pose to their family, Tali was not Adam’s child. Ziva simply couldn’t bear the thought that he was hugging her, reading her bedtime stories, and spending time with her when she was unable to go near her because she was supposed to be dead.
So, in the short time she had left before walking away from Tali (hopefully only for a few weeks, or maybe a month or two), she’d coached the little girl, pointing to the picture she’d stashed in her go-bag of Tony and calling him Aba. In case Tali didn’t remember, she’d written Anthony DiNozzo Jr ~ Aba and Tali’s birthday to make it more obvious to Orli Elbaz what his relationship to her was. And Orli, as much as Ziva despised the sow for breaking up her parents’ marriage, would do everything in her power to guard Tali with her life. After all, the little girl was the only surviving descendant of her former lover, Eli David.
Never in all her scenarios did she expect Tony to take her daughter, leave NCIS, and traipse around the world looking for her. To go running off in flagrant denial of his paternity and leave Gibbs holding the baby (or in this case, a toddler), yes, that one was a distinct possibility in the various scenarios she’d envisioned. And if that one had occurred, Ziva would have been okay with it, because Gibbs was a responsible adult and good with children, neither of which could be said about Tony DiNozzo. However, she never thought, not once, that there was any possibility Tony would pick up sticks and resign. Her ‘death’ must have really fractured the relationship between Gibbs and DiNozzo. Why else would Tony, the ever-loyal lap dog, willingly leave Gibbs’ team?
It may well have been a smart move to contact Tony on the spy to let him know she was alive and was entrusting her precious daughter to her former partner to protect her, while she took care of Mira Sahar Azam. If she had, she would have been reunited with her daughter by now, and Tali would be back home amongst her family. Instead, she was aimlessly wandering around the Midwest states, trying to trace his nonsensical path, which seemed like a demented dragonfly on skates rather than an adult with a young child in tow.
Was it any wonder that the anti-anxiety medication she was taking, almost from the day she left Tali in her baby stroller outside the firebombed farmhouse at her olive grove, had proved woefully inadequate to stem her feeling of helplessness and panic about what horrors her daughter might be experiencing. Knowing that it would be inconvenient to acquire extra fluoxetine and unwilling to jump through all the extra hula-hoops needed to get more drugs legally, she had used her skills to gain more on the black market. Yes, it was more expensive, but thanks to Aba’s unofficial retirement fund, money was no object for Ziva. She had bought a large quantity of fluoxetine from a dealer called Loopy Jo, and she still had a ten-day supply.
Ziva briefly felt irritated about needing to waste time replenishing her supply. Her purchase should have lasted another month at least; however, she had been self-medicating since her anxiety over being unable to catch up with a former US federal agent, wandering about with a child, became increasingly difficult to manage. Honestly, she had expected that after Gibbs took out Azam weeks and weeks ago, she’d fly to France and be reunited with her daughter, and yet here she was traipsing around in the middle of nowhere, yet to catch a glimpse of her daughter. She really should have bought extra from Loopy Jo the first time, except honestly, she’d expected to be safely back home with her daughter by this stage, not roaming around one hick town after another chasing Tony DiNozzo.
It was time to reach out and ask for help. Although it pained her to admit that, as a former Mossad and Kidon-trained assassin, she needed any form of assistance to track down a one-time federal agent who had never been exceptionally skilled. Ziva swiftly suppressed the mutinous thought that Tony had successfully tracked her down in Israel while she was in hiding to warn her that she had a target on her back after she resigned and went home in May 2013. Focusing instead on who to contact, she swiftly dismissed Odette Malone from the list. She was too busy trying to recruit Eleanor Bishop; Odette was playing the role of Henry Higgins to Bishop’s Eliza Doolittle, trying to turn her into a CIA operative. Which also excluded Bishop as someone whom she might con into helping her despite her useful contacts in the intelligence community, particularly the NSA.
She’d already told Gibbs that she was in contact with Tony and Tali, implying it had been almost from the moment he’d left the MCRT, both of which were obviously lies. It had really pissed Gibbs off, thinking that Tony had known for years that she didn’t die in the fire, but he had never bothered to inform the rest of her NCIS family, especially Gibbs, who regarded her as his surrogate daughter. Since her relationship with Gibbs was already rocky after the Sahir operation, she didn’t want to jeopardise it further by admitting she was not in contact with Tony. That she had straight-up lied, they’d not communicated since the night on the tarmac in Tel Aviv, where she bundled him onto the plane so she could get on with her plans to become pregnant.
Ziva had been in a hurry to see the back of him, knowing she would be ovulating sometime within the next 12 to 24 hours, and with his semen she had already deposited safely with her fertility clinic for safekeeping, she would need to go straight there after the plane took off. She was going to check into the exclusive clinic and have her doctor use the latest sperm she’d collected a few hours ago to try getting pregnant via insemination. If that failed, her doctor would create several embryos by fertilising the eggs she had already stored there and then implant them. However, she’d been hoping not to wait that long, so they were going to try to make an embryo with a little less medical intervention.
If she confessed she’d lied, that she wasn’t in contact with Tony, it could lead to some awkward questions from Gibbs. Although she doubted Tony was aware he was Tali’s biological father, the roofies she had given him almost guaranteed that. In his mind, it was physically impossible for him to be her father. In fact, aside from the Rohypnol, she’d deliberately mentioned Adam Eschel frequently while he was staying with her in Israel, insinuating that they were still together, since Tony knew that she’d turned to Adam after Aba’s death. Of course, the truth was that they had been together and were trying to conceive a child. Adam knew she’d gone to the very expensive private fertility clinic to see what the issue was.
She was quite devastated to discover that the nice Jewish boy whom Eli David would have approved of as the father of his first grandchild had such a low sperm count. To be realistic, the chances of Eschel fathering a child were extremely low. Ever since she’d learned about Adam’s infertility problems, she’d been considering the possibility of getting sperm from Tony since she knew he’d donated it back in college and clearly was blasé about any offspring floating around. She’d even contemplated asking Senior to be a donor because, as she had reason to know, he would not turn down an invitation to have sex with her. Of course, seeing that Tony had described his father as a functional alcoholic most of his life, she was worried about the quality of his remaining sperm or the distinct possibility of Foetal Alcohol Syndrome, according to her OBGYN. Ironically, just before Tony appeared in Israel, having found her hidey hole, Ziva had already ruled Anthony DiNozzo Senior out of her calculations, figuring his sperm was probably past its use-by date. Which was when Tony conveniently turned up on her doorstep.
Anthony DiNozzo Jr was very desperate to warn her about Benham Parson and his terrorist cell, The Brotherhood of Doubt, who decided the MCRT (including its former team members: Tim, Tony, and herself) must die, although she wasn’t altogether sure why he wanted them dead. Anyway, it hadn’t been too difficult to persuade Tony to stay with her long enough for her to collect enough of his DNA for her needs before she sent him back to D.C., telling him she could look after herself and that she wasn’t coming back to the team or Washington. After all, she was determined to have a baby and was focused on that goal, except that she deliberately didn’t mention that to him, obviously.
Still, Tony’s appearance five months after she departed NCIS had been extremely good timing; Adam didn’t need to know that he wasn’t the biological father of her child, at least not unless he became a problem. Of course, now he was dead, Ziva was glad she hadn’t told Adam the truth about Tali’s conception and not only because he might have refused to help her bring down Mira Sahar Azam. At least during his torture by Azam, he would have had the solace of knowing that his daughter was safe in Paris. And for the first few years, while she was pregnant and then, after Tali was born, he was blissfully happy being her father, even if biologically that wasn’t the case. Besides, with Azam dead by Gibbs’s gun and her terrorist cell effectively smashed, Ziva was looking forward to raising her daughter as a single mother in Israel.
That’s IF she could ever find her! What was Tony thinking?
Still, having spun this cloth fabric of deceit about how she had reconnected with Tony and Tali in Cairo three years ago, and how she was in constant contact with them while they were in Paris, where they were waiting for her, she couldn’t ask Gibbs for help to find them wandering around in the middle of the US. To sell the tale of them being one big happy family to the team, she’d sent herself old videos that her contacts had sent her on the rare occasions they’d managed to get close enough to film Tali and Tony, usually in a market when they were food shopping in late 2018. That was the last footage she had of them in Paris. After that, she had tracked them solely via the media when they popped up in Britain, and Tony sued his cousin on his mother’s side over her father’s will or something. Yet, sometime early in 2019, something happened that made them disappear, but she had no luck learning why they left Paris almost 12 months ago.
She assumed that Gibbs and his old teammates were in contact with him and knew what caused him to leave Paris, although Ziva could hardly come right out and ask them about it. She’d tried to be covert in trying to find out what was going on with Tony and Tali, but Ziva’s best chance to learn where they were, sadly, wasn’t at NCIS anymore. Abby Scuito had left in 2018 to go to the UK and set up a charitable foundation in memory of an MI6 liaison who’d died defending her from an attack on the street. If Abby were still in DC, it would have been a simple matter for Ziva to get her well and truly drunk to find out where Tony and her daughter were. Unfortunately, Ziva acknowledged that if she didn’t find them soon, she might have to fly to the UK and pump Abby to see if she knew what Tony was up to. Frankly, she was growing pissed off at all the chasing around, looking for them and always just missing them. Maybe Abby had caught up with them when he was in London, contesting the Paddington will and could help her get the hop on him.
But what if, in the meantime, she played her ace card right and persuaded McGee to run a trace on where Tony was booking into motels, breakfasts and beds. She could finally get one step ahead of him and be waiting for them at their next destination. After all, as the father of fraternal twins, surely she could appeal to Tim as one parent to another? He would understand that she was desperate to see her daughter again. Okay, maybe not understand just how badly she missed seeing Tali, since the whole team swallowed her fantasy that she and Tony had met up in Cairo right back in the first months after she’d faked her own death, hook, bait, and reel.
However, she had always found him malleable, even if it meant breaking the rules. Like when she complained years ago about having to listen to Tony collect voice samples in a high-end gated residential community. They were supposed to be his backup as he strutted around starting up his inane conversations with the residents, getting them talking on tape for forensic comparison to the anonymous call-in threat to Adam Gator on the community radio program. Threats they’d tentatively linked to the brutal mass murder of radio host Adam Gator, a US Navy Commander, Walter Daniels and Gator’s radio producer, whose name she’d known but long forgotten. At the time, McGee had whined that they should share the undercover work, but Gibbs told Tony to collect the samples, and his word was law as far as DiNozzo was concerned. At least it had been back then!
Still, after forty minutes of being forced to listen to DiNozzo’s conversational crassness, Ziva was thoroughly fed up and suggested they give their ears a rest before they started to bleed. She argued that this was an expensive gated community where people must sign in and out at the security office and that nothing was likely to happen. Of course, she knew that it was cock and cow tale, and one that a half-way decent Mossad agent would never swallow. Particularly when there had already been a triple shooting/murder of the talk-back host, a US Navy officer and producer, but predictably McGee didn’t argue; he seemed as relieved as she was not to have to listen to him rattle on.
Oh, in hindsight, it could easily have blown up in their faces, she knew that now, but more importantly, Ziva was well aware at the time that she was endangering Tony’s life. Yet the truth was that back then, she was still furiously angry that Tony had gotten away with killing her lover, Michael, even if the Kidon operative never should have been doing field work with his alcoholic issues. Ziva could now recognise (but sadly not back then when it happened), that she also bore some of the blame, too. As his handler, she failed to report him and have him removed from duty. She let her heart rule her head because they had great sex together, and she fooled herself into thinking what they had together was real, not just Michael obeying her father’s orders to make sure she was still loyal to Israel.
So, it was far easier to hate Tony for killing Michael, and when the opportunity came along to put him in harm’s way, she seized it, hoping the terrorists might make the death toll four rather than three. Years later, she could truthfully admit she was lucky that nothing bad happened to DiNozzo, aside from a bad dose of laryngitis. If it had, she would have been fired and sent straight back to Israel, and then four years later, she would not have been able to use Tony’s sperm to conceive her daughter. Still, the point was that McGee’s relationship with Tony was complicated, even if in later years, they seemed to have developed a better rapport. Even so, Ziva was always going to be her father’s daughter, trained to manipulate marks, and she knew exactly which buried insecurities of her former partner to zoom in on and how to apply maximum pressure to get what she wanted.
Ziva felt a sense of relief settle over her after deciding to recruit McGee to help her track down Tony and Tali. She would soon stop this endless running around in Hick Land and decided to celebrate with a fresh cup of jasmine tea and what passed for a piece of baklava in this one-pony place. With Tim on the case, she allowed herself to dream that very soon she’d be boarding a flight back home to Israel, her daughter safely in her custody once more. Tonight, when she finished interrogating the yokes here in Columbus, where Tony had attended college, she would call McGee from the motel and gain his assistance.
As she gestured to the waitress in the café to order more food, she felt a fleeting sense of relief that she had finally accepted she needed help. Yet as wonderful as the emotion was, it soon vanished, to be replaced with a burning sense of longing that had plagued her ever since that man with the intense blue eyes had brushed past her back in Browntown, or perhaps it was Brownsville. Clearly, he’d been looking for a hookup, as was Ziva. She had been desperate to find someone to scratch her itch, since the fluoxetine hadn’t been doing such a great job, and when she saw him trawling for fresh bait, she’d been captivated by his good looks and felt the physical evidence of her libido quicken. He was extremely easy on the senses, and she was eager to get him into bed.
Accidentally making physical contact with her had to be one of the oldest tricks in the book – one she’d used on countless occasions over the years as an assassin. So, she’d expected the man she’d dubbed Sinatra because of his mesmerising blue eyes to make a move on her after dinner. Shockingly, though, it never came; he ignored her completely after that fake ‘accidental contact.’ In fact, it had reminded her of when she had been ordered to get close to Gibbs’ team after Ari killed Agent Catlin Todd, and she had failed repeatedly to seduce Tony as ordered. Gibbs saw her as a surrogate daughter, his surrogate Kelly. McGee saw her as his ally in his superiority complex against DiNozzo, whom Tim pigeonholed as a mediocre cop due to his anti-intellectual bias of DiNozzo’s sports degree from a college he looked down on. But Tony, although he’d flirted with her from the start, had failed to fall into her bed as she’d planned.
Getting pressure (and disappointment) from her father that she’d failed to seduce the man whore, Ziva told Aba (and herself) that it was because DiNozzo was a closeted homosexual; information which would potentially be useful enough to placate her father, who had also been Mossad’s deputy director back then. Personal information that would be priceless for Mossad to be able to manipulate and control him, since he obviously worked so hard to maintain the fiction of being straight.
Unfortunately, that explanation of his sexuality survived only for a relatively short time, until everyone in the D.C. office became aware that he was seeing someone and he was head over heels for them. Still, Ziva was certain that his very uncharacteristically discreet behaviour was due to his lover being male, so when his lover turned out to be Jeanne Benoit, who was most decidedly female, her self-esteem took a nasty knock. Aba had rarely missed an opportunity to point out her error on their weekly video catchups, rubbing even more salt into her wounds. That was why she’d subconsciously picked him to father her child.
Now, Ziva was obsessed with a man who was breathtakingly beautiful and radiated a powerful charisma. Even more sexy, he possessed an air of arrogance that made Ziva’s body react every time she remembered his fleeting touch on her skin, awaking nerves that caused her to tingle all over. A male who, in her mind, when they’d touched, seemed to promise to pleasure her later, but instead had insulted Ziva, ignoring her, choosing instead a slightly pudgy, unsophisticated female waitress. One who could never hold a candle to Ziva: aesthetically, intellectually or in the ways of the world.
It had been humiliating, and she tried to bury the entire episode deep in her psyche. As a retired assassin (now that Mira Sahar Azam and her minions were no more), she fully intended to stop killing others; she was well practised in burying unpleasant thoughts and memories deep where they never saw daylight. Yet for some reason, Sinatra, with his intensely blue, heart-stopping eyes that had smouldered for a second or two when they physically connected as his hand brushed against her neck, back at the inn, made it nigh impossible to forget him. Night after night, Ziva David, a lethal Kidon operative, found herself dreaming of him, sex dreams that made her ache for the real thing when she woke up aroused and frustrated, needing the sex aid she’d sent away for, to take the edge off her desire so she could focus on her real objective- her hunt for Tony and Tali.
The truth was that deep down, Ziva feared she was losing her grip on reality, the fluoxetine, or more likely, the street Prozac pills she’d bought from Loopy Jo a few weeks ago, were to blame. Yes, that must be what was causing her obsession with the man whose name was unknown to her, yet he haunted her sleep and increasingly was impeding her mission to locate Tali. Frustrated that she was wasting time daydreaming of him when she was desperate to find her daughter, Ziva decided on a plan.
Should McGee agree to help her track down Tony and Tali (and she would make sure that he did, one way or another), then she would stop searching. She would take a break and trust her former teammate to come through for her. Tonight, she would contact him when he’d gone home, as it was much too risky to do it at the office, where Gibbs, Ducky, or Jimmy might overhear and question what he was up to. She would remind him how well they worked in secret, tracking down that murderous coward, Ilan Bodnar, who’d set up the assassination of her father.
She was already crafting a story to convince the computer wizard to help her. She would explain how she and Tony had gotten drunk together one night after he found her, having finally acknowledged their attraction to each other. Tim would gulp that down; after all, he’d had Officer Lisa and Agent Tommy going at it like bunnies in the elevator that L.J. Tibbs used as his private office, which, when you thought of it, was gross. She thought it would be easy to convince the would-be novelist that they had slept together – after all, Tali’s existence was proof they had. Although she’d claim that their encounter was consensual, well, kind of, she had insisted on using condoms. After all, it wasn’t realistic that she fell pregnant after one round of drunken sex, so she would imply that they’d been fucking all through the night.
Knowing McGee as she did, he would be too embarrassed to examine her story too closely. She would claim that when she found she was pregnant six weeks after Tony had flown back to DC and resumed his job at NCIS, she felt it wasn’t fair to expect him to move to Israel to become a father when she knew how loyal he was to Gibbs and how much he loved being a federal agent. So, Ziva decided that she wouldn’t ask him to sacrifice his career; instead, she’d decided she would raise Tali alone and then later, she and Adam had reunited, and they had become a family until Mira Sahar Azam had ruined their happy life forever.
Of course, Ziva would perpetuate their unrealistic fantasy that she and Tony would jointly raise Tali together, because she was fairly sure that McGee, as a father to Jonny and Morgan, wouldn’t help track down Tony if he thought she intended to take her daughter back to Israel and effectively shut him out of her life. So, she’d continue the myth that Tali would have both her parents raising her, which should keep everyone happy with the idyllic, if ridiculous, idea of them becoming a family unit.
After all, for years, the MCRT were all supposed to be a family, a great big happy family, but when the fries were down, Gibbs sacrificed her, Tony, and McGee. He sacrificed their careers to pander to his saviour complex that he was more important than they were. He was more crucial, as only Leroy Jethro Gibbs could save everyone; they were merely collateral damage, insignificant in the big picture in which he took centre stage, and they were merely scenery. Ziva remained convinced that she could have carried out his mission as well as he did, if not better. She was younger, fitter. She possessed sharper reflexes and superior contacts in the Middle East, but he had to be the hero of the story (just like her father), even if that meant it ruined their careers. All for a man with an ego that couldn’t accept the inevitable; couldn’t see that his time was running out, even if he fought desperately to resist the natural order.
Jethro Gibbs’ blindness to see what was obvious to others had opened her eyes to the false fiction that they were his kids, because, importantly, he’d never even bothered to warn them that the Brotherhood of Doubt terrorist cell had placed a bounty on their heads when he discovered the threat. If Tony hadn’t gotten lucky that day when the terrorists attempted to shoot up his apartment and take him out, promptly warning McGee he was in danger too, and sought her out, over Gibbs’ objections, it was entirely possible they would all have died. So, Ziva had a hard time believing the foolish fairytale of ‘we are all one big happy family’ anymore, but she could pretend to believe it with the best of them and use it to exploit Gibbs when it suited her. Like when she needed help to kill Mira Sahar Azam.
After all, she was the best that Kidon and the Mossad had to offer. If McGee needed to see Ziva, Tali, and Tony as a happy little family, she could and would play into that illusion. Truthfully, there wasn’t much she wouldn’t do to get her daughter back. She hated admitting it, but as annoying as it was to be forced to chase after Tony on this demented road journey, given the way Sahar had targeted Gibbs, maybe it had been a good thing that Tony had taken her daughter and gotten out of Drudge.
Grudgingly, Ziva conceded that so many years of undercover work had honed his instincts about being in danger. If there was one thing he was good at aside from pretending to be someone else, it was protecting his team or innocent civilians. He undoubtedly thought that Tali had been in danger. Once she learned she failed to kill her and her daughter when she firebombed the farmhouse, Sahar had threatened to hunt him and Tali down and kill them both, after she killed Ziva.
So, despite cursing him a purple streak for unwittingly forcing her to criss-cross the Midwest, she should be grateful for him protecting Tali. It was just so frustrating, and Ziva’s ability to delay gratification had never been her strong suit. Still, having finally accepted that this would go a lot faster with McGee’s help, she felt optimistic that she would soon be holding her child, whom she hadn’t held for over three long years.
Having conceded that she didn’t have to do this solo and getting Tim to do his magic, she would stop and attend to some unfinished business back in the town where she encountered Sinatra. It wouldn’t be hard to identify him. She could spin some story and get McGee to check out the security cameras (if they had them in these boondock towns) and find out who he was and where he lived. With that information at hand, Ziva vowed to hunt him down and seduce him using her Mossad skills. She would indulge in 24 hours of nonstop sex – hopefully, that would purge him from her dreams once and for all. Should he prove to be any good in bed and McGee hadn’t found her daughter yet, she might even indulge in a longer romp of wild, mindless sex to get him out of her head, once and for all.
While he was undoubtedly pretty, she would not tolerate being beholden to a male ever again. She had finally freed herself from her unhealthy devotion to her father, despite his turning her into a cold-blooded assassin. She’d killed her half-brother, her flesh and blood, because her father decreed it. She also found the strength to walk away from Gibbs’ unhealthy father-daughter surrogate relationship, where, like Eli, he sought to control every aspect of her life. Ironically, his desire to control his agents’ cum kids’ lives ensured that none of them had a normal life outside of the office. And he forbade any relationships with work colleagues, sabotaging any chance of them having normal, healthy relationships outside of work. Or any relationships, as she discovered after breaking free when she resigned and went home to Israel. With no Aba or Gibbs to dictate her every move and monitor every breath she took, she finally felt empowered and free for the first time since her little sister Tali had been killed.
As charismatic as that unknown male was, with his stunning looks, she’d vowed after returning to her homeland, liberated at last, that never again would any man own her or dictate what she could or couldn’t do. And something told her that the mystery man was undoubtedly used to calling the shots, too. This made him completely unsuitable, even for a short-term relationship involving even a tiny amount of emotional connectedness.
No, Ziva only wanted to use his body for sex, lots and lots of sex, and then she would walk away, physically sated, collect her precious child that she’d been separated from for more than three long lonely years and take her back home to Israel. Then she would spend a lifetime reconnecting with her again.
Chapter 14
Jonny and Morgan were finally in bed. They had been a bit hyper tonight, and harder than usual to corral for baths and bedtime stories. Delilah, used to dealing with facts, not suppositions, recognised that the evidence that sugar and artificial food dyes cause hyperactivity in young children was more correlative than causative. However, as an exhausted mom of twins, it was much harder not to blame the birthday cake and luridly coloured candy they’d consumed at one of their classmates’ birthday parties this afternoon. Anyway, both were drowsy… finally, and ready to slip off into dreamland. The exhausted mother welcomed the notion of settling down with her husband and indulging in a glass of red wine as they spent some time catching up without the interruption of their twins, beloved though they were.
She rolled her wheelchair into one of the extra bedrooms they’d designated as a home office for their use when they brought work home, which could be locked, since neither Tim’s nor her DOD work was something that the twins should have access to, or their friends or family either. After all, Tim’s sister was a journalist, and it would be stupid to leave their work lying around, tempting her to pry. After settling the kids down and promising to send their daddy in to say goodnight, Delilah had detoured via the kitchen, grabbing a bottle of one of her favourites, a sweet, red wine called Cienna that had been chilling in the refrigerator, a couple of glasses and the block of Lindt Dark Chocolate with raspberries she had been craving all afternoon.
At first, Delilah didn’t pay much attention to her husband as she prattled on, telling him the kids wanted him to say goodnight while she unloaded the glasses, wine bottle and her second-favourite chocolate onto the desk. Having completed her task, her attention was now entirely focused on Tim; she eventually realised there was something slightly off about him. Replaying the last couple of minutes since she entered the room, she recalled his guilty start, his sudden, rapid strokes on the keys of his laptop, and Delilah instantly became suspicious with a mother’s honed instincts. He had been working on something he didn’t want her to know about, and by that tiny little furrow on his brow and a nervous touching of his nose, her suspicions were confirmed.
The bald truth was that McGee was a terrible liar, which was why he wasn’t good at undercover work. Tim honestly believed that so long as you had planned your backstory to the nth degree, with scenarios for every contingency, and had memorised it perfectly, anyone who was as smart as he was could succeed undercover. She more than once tried to argue with his flawed premise, having worked undercover with him herself on an ill-fated case where his jealousy and impetuous actions had led the terrorist right to her front door. Unfortunately, Delilah was unsuccessful in trying to make him understand that he was mistaken, that undercover skills weren’t as simple as he was making out. Tim rejected her reasoned arguments with little more than a large helping of ego that wasn’t earned.
“No, sorry, Delilah, but you’re wrong about this. I think that undercover work is just that simple. If Tony could do it for years, then c’mon, how hard can it be? Don’t get me wrong, we are buddies, but no one can accuse him of being a genius. Street-smart, yeah, maybe. He’s definitely proved he’s got the gift of the gab, but he’s not exactly Einstein.”
The… like me… remained unsaid, but his wife had no trouble deciphering the unspoken part of something she regarded as one of his least desirable traits – his quite colossal ego. Thankfully, he’d become a bit more circumspect in expressing it these days, although she knew it remained just below the surface. Despite his many good qualities and the awkward, geeky ones she found so sexy, working at the DoD around far too many arrogant men who thought that because her spine had been severed in the bomb blast, it affected her thinking, arrogance was not something she found sexy, not even a little bit.
For some reason, even if they had remained friends after Tony DiNozzo resigned from NCIS, it was as if Tim was still trying to outdo him. After Tony left Gibbs’ team, following fifteen long years of servitude, Tim was ecstatic to be promoted to senior field agent or senior agent, in the revamped designations. Rather naively, he also expected to pick up Tony’s other extra duties, i.e. his undercover work, too. When a specialist undercover agent was appointed to the team, Delilah figured he’d felt slighted. When two more agents joined the team, he may have felt it was a slap in the face to his ability to step into Tony’s shoes, and that Gibbs thought he needed three extra agents to fill his former SFA’s shoes.
Delilah had heard scuttlebutt around the DoD that Gibbs expanded the team because it was easier to get rid of people, with much less impact on the MCRT than the departure of his longstanding 2IC had created by leaving so suddenly. Personally, Delilah thought Gibbs’ actions owed much more to trying to prevent anyone from becoming a rival for his own job as leader by hiring people with more narrowly defined skill sets. Although it didn’t escape her notice that no one’s background on the MCRT was that of a highly trained investigator.
How crazy was that?
Although she couldn’t claim to know Jethro Gibbs well, or for a long time, even with the limited amount of time she spent interacting with him before he was shot and nearly died, the Department of Defence analyst couldn’t help but make comparisons from how he was then to how he came back after a long convalescence, and even she could see he wasn’t okay. Perhaps her insight was based on her own protracted recovery from the bombing that left her a paraplegic. Her best guess, not being a mental health professional, was that Tim’s boss was struggling with a lot of demons, and Tony was his go-to target to blow off steam at, plus he was useful for siphoning off his negative feelings from that case. Now that DiNozzo was gone, Gibbs seemed determined to restructure the MCRT’s dynamic significantly.
In her opinion, that had nothing to do with Tim not being good enough to be the SFA, even though McGee would have sucked so badly at being an undercover specialist, and she was relieved that Nick Torres had been hired to fill such a specialised role. No, what was pertinent right now was that her husband was trying to deceive her.
Ever since Delilah had triggered that National Security emergency, she admitted it had been very foolish to look into the massive op unfolding in the Midwest. Unfortunately, even though it culminated in her being read the riot act by President Walsh, her thoughts remained stubbornly focused on what the hell was going on out there involving Ziva David. So, with a sinking feeling in her stomach, even after delivering a warning to Tim as she’d been ordered to do so by her superiors, warning him not to assist his former teammate if she were to reach out to him for help, Delilah almost hoped that Tim was cheating on her for a few panicked seconds. Not that she wanted him to have an extramarital affair, of course. Who in their right mind would want that? But the ramifications for their family if he ignored orders and was working off the books with his ex-teammate made his wife very afraid.
And really, he had previous form with Ziva, having ignored orders once before, as TPTB had been quick to point out to her when she’d reassured them that of course Tim would comply. They told her that despite orders from the DHS, he had helped Ziva track down the man she believed to have killed her father, miraculously getting away with it. So maybe he thought he could again…if he was helping her. However, Delilah was in little doubt that whatever this Ziva thing was, it was much, much bigger than Ilan Bodnar, as in ‘we will throw you into a black hole and forget that you ever even existed and we don’t care if your kids never see you again scenario.’
With her heart in her mouth, she sent her husband off to the twins’ room to say goodnight to his kids, saying a silent prayer that she was wrong about this and that tonight wouldn’t be the last time Jonny and Morgan would have the simple pleasure of a bedtime story with their daddy. By the time he returned, he saw her face as she stared at the computer screen; her very worst fears had been realised. Glancing at the screen he’d been using before Delilah came in with the wine, which he’d swiftly minimised, thinking she hadn’t noticed, Tim’s face blanched, instantly knowing he’d been caught out.
“Tell me, Tim, did you lie to my face when you promised me that if Ziva contacted you, you wouldn’t answer her, or did you mean what you said in the moment, but when she approached you, you caved and decided to break your promise to me? Perhaps you didn’t believe me when I said that I was summoned to the White House and warned off helping her, and that the warning included you, too. Don’t you care that your kids might not grow up knowing their incredibly stupid dad?” she ranted, her fear fuelling her anger, which was white hot.
“No, I believed you, and I meant it, but when I ignored her phone calls, she sent me this awful, heartbreaking email that I couldn’t ignore, hon. She admitted she had lied to us and that she had never reunited with Tony and Tali in Egypt. Ziva hasn’t seen her daughter in almost four years, and she misses her desperately,” he defended his ex-colleague loyally.
Seeing Delilah’s stony-faced expression, he told her, “She confessed that she’s been taking anti-anxiety medication to cope, Delilah. This is Ziva we are talking about here, who never admits to being vulnerable. So, you tell me, how was I supposed to ignore her?” he demanded petulantly. “I couldn’t refuse to help her find Tony and Tali!”
“So, an order from POTUS and warnings about what would happen if you did help weren’t reason enough for you to refuse, Tim? What about the very strong possibility that Jonny and Morgan might end up growing up without you if you end up in some black hole somewhere?” Delilah asked the father of her children, furiously, as he shook his head in denial.
“Did you ever ask yourself why she lied to you about Cairo or why she didn’t come to your team for help instead of faking her death and Tony learning about his daughter the way he did? That was completely pathetic when we thought she’d died, but knowing she faked her death is unforgivable. Whatever she is involved in is HUGE! She has no right to use you like that, and you have no right to help her when you know how dangerous it is for YOUR family, Timothy Farragut McGee,” Deliah spoke icily.
Some people yelled when they got angry or fearful; Delilah Feilding-McGee grew glacial and piercing. Her tongue, like her intellect, was more than capable of cutting opponents to ribbons in an ultra-polite manner.
Never one to handle confrontation gracefully, he responded with his typical passive-aggressive sarcasm. “What if someone was stopping you from seeing your children, Delilah, and you needed my help. Besides, I took extraordinary precautions so I wouldn’t be detected. You know that I hack all the time and never get caught because I’m just that good. No one else is in my league, Babe,” he snarked at her, with that very ugly air of arrogance his wife hated.
“Yeah, I know that you hack all the time, like when you and Bishop thought it was smart to hack into the IRS to find out how your immediate superior could afford his expensive Georgetown apartment,” she said scornfully. “Because that was so damned smart of you two geniuses.”
Tim opened his mouth, an equally sharp retort on his lips, but something in his wife’s expression stopped him at the last minute. Possibly a sense of self-preservation.
“You think because you got away without facing any repercussions that it meant no one knew about it, but they’ve kept a running tally of all of your illegal and highly idiotic hacking stunts, Hon. They showed it to me, and I’m telling you, if you’ve jeopardised a national security operation helping Ziva, they’ll throw the book at you, you sentimental fool. Did you ever stop long enough to ask yourself why Ziva came to you and not Gibbs?”
“I just told you why, Delilah. She lied to Gibbs about meeting up with Tony and Tali in Cairo. Now that they seem to have gone native in the Midwest and she can’t catch up with them, she’s too ashamed to tell the Boss the truth,” he retorted.
“And what makes you think she hasn’t lied to you, too?”
“Because Ziva wouldn’t do that!”
“Are you kidding? You just told me that she lied to Gibbs.”
“Yeah, okay, but she wouldn’t lie to me. I helped her to track down Ilan Bodnar after her father’s assassination, even after Homeland ordered us to stop,” he said with that smug little smile of his.
“It’s on the list too,” she fumed.
“What list?”
The one I just told you had been compiled on your illegal hacks. It’s number 2 on the list, and DHS was baying for your blood for your role in Bodnar’s death. And before you ask, Numero Uno on their list is your hacking of the Pentagon servers via the USS Seahawk to find a file that had been downloaded and was missing, believed to have been sold to a foreign actor. Do the plans for Domino ring any bells, Tim?”
“That wasn’t me; Tony did the hacking,” he said, suddenly starting to panic, his voice rising and his capillaries suffused with blood as panic escalated into fear.
“Oh, please, Tim. It might have been him at the keyboard on the Seahawk, but the Pentagon has the security footage of you and Tony. You were giving him directions. Not only that, but on the security log of your call, he can be heard plainly asking you if what you wanted him to do was hacking. You lied to him and said it wasn’t.” Delilah shook her head in disgust. “They showed it to me, Hon,” she told him caustically.
“So, his ass is covered, but yours isn’t since you can’t claim to be ignorant about what you were doing via proxy. You might even end up with a charge of recruiting an accessory if they decide to charge you, you fool,” was her scathing verdict upon her husband’s treasonous actions.
“C’mon, no one believes Tony is that clueless. He had to know what we were doing,” he snapped at his wife, frustratedly. “And anyway, that was over a decade ago. So, why didn’t they charge me back then?”
Shaking her head at his naivete, she replied, “Leverage.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Domino didn’t fall into the wrong hands, no thanks to you for failing to report it to the Pentagon, by the way. For four freaking months, a top-secret file had been stolen, even if you had no idea what was in that file, but you know you should have reported it to the Pentagon, purely because you had no idea what the stolen file contained. So, they added it to the pile, knowing some day they could use it against you as leverage to make you do something which went against your principles,” Delilah said, witheringly.
Although privately, she wondered right now if he had any.
As he huffed at her slight to his character, she instantly noticed the alert received on her phone. After her accident that left her confined to a wheelchair, and Tim having been targeted by the Brotherhood of Doubters who wanted him dead, plus, of course, the twins’ arrival, they’d upgraded their home security when they moved into this new smart house they purchased a while ago with the money from Admiral McGee’s estate. Delilah, realising that Tim was too angry over their argument to notice, clicked the link that alerted her when intruders had entered their property.
As they rang their doorbell, her heart sank, recognising the features of several agents. A mixture of Secret Service agents and DHS agents, if she wasn’t mistaken- and she wasn’t, because they had escorted her from her office to the White House only last week.
“Of course, I might be wrong about why they compiled a list of all your oh-so-brilliant hacking exploits. But I’m betting that you’ll have a chance to ask them yourself soon, Tim,” she told him as an agent leaned on the doorbell. She had a very bad feeling about their appearance and felt tempted to throttle Tim even if that wouldn’t solve anything right now. Her only concern at this point was whether the twins would ever see their dad again, and she had to say she wasn’t feeling all that sanguine about their chances.
Delilah felt tempted to go and hunt down Ziva David and give her a piece of her mind, but someone selfish enough to make her two-year-old child think she was dead in a firebombing, then stay hidden for years, chasing her nemesis, probably wouldn’t care what Delilah had to say to her about her behaviour.
~o0o~
The two women who had travelled through the interdimensional portal with the ten children from an alternate reality on Earth a couple of months ago sat on the comfortable sectional sofa in the family room, nursing hot drinks. Thora Edwards, the kids’ tutor from Area 52, had a free period because Kaleb Miller was teaching a literature class to the older kids. Thora and her two other teaching colleagues had all agreed they should take full advantage of having an experienced lecturer in English Literature from McGill University, Canada, since he was currently staying on Atlantis.
Heather Mitchell was due to take the afternoon shift in the infirmary in roughly four hours, and she’d sought out Thora to check if she was still okay to watch her daughter, Justine, while she was on night duty. Thora reiterated that she was happy to keep an eye on Justine, and she could sleep over, being too young to stay alone. Although there were plenty of adults here in the family quarters, Heather could have asked, the ten children were still settling into this new reality and still felt most comfortable with one of the three adults who accompanied them from their own world. In time, that would change, but for now, they were taking things on the children’s timetable as per the recommendations of Dr O’Shea and Dr Hang.
In fact, Heather and Thora had been close friends even before they came to this alternate reality. Both were single professional females, and Thora had often watched Justine if Heather’s other babysitters had fallen through. Now, as Paula seemed to slip much more easily into this new reality, probably due to her friendship with Alex Paddington, whom she’d been close to in both realities, they had drawn together even more. Not that everyone on Atlantis hadn’t been incredibly welcoming to them because they had been, but this was such a bizarre situation, aside from the fact that they had ended up hiding out on a floating sentient city in a completely different galaxy than Earth.
Hiding out on Atlantis had not been something they anticipated when they’d offered to accompany the children into this world, as the giant star city had been destroyed in their reality. They knew this world was very different from theirs in so many ways, yet they also knew that this reality was intrinsically good, since it had gifted Janet Fraiser and Martouf with the cure to the Ori Plague that was decimating their own people.
So twice the people of this reality had saved these children’s lives, even if it was yet to defeat Emperor General Shen or Ambassador, as she still was in this reality. Their plans to defeat her had been well established, even before their little entourage had popped up at Area 52 or as it was known here, Area 51. Preparations had been underway for at least five months, and with Charlie O’Neill’s dad, a three-star general and Head of Homeworld Command, in control of the War, hopefully, she would fail this time in this world. Nevertheless, all three women felt much more comfortable with the children safe on Atlantis in a galaxy far from the megalomaniac Shen.
Just as the two women settled in to enjoy a catch-up without interruptions from kids or adults, apart from themselves, Paula had appeared carrying her youngest child, Mikelle, who looked like she’d been crying, and the resident nurse noted the 13-month-old’s reddened left ear.
“Earache?” she asked sympathetically.
“Yeah. She had a bad night, so I figured it wouldn’t hurt to have her checked over by the Doc. Got some meds and hopefully she’ll sleep now,” she said, sinking into the lounge with a tired sigh. Noting the empty communal room, Paula decided to nurse her, even though she was eating solid foods now; Mikelle still nursed mainly for comfort before sleeping.
I’m not working until after lunch if you need me to watch her,” Heather offered.
“Thanks, I appreciate the offer, Heather, but Alex gave me the day off. There isn’t a lot happening at work, apart from a follow-up interview off-world on Dagan after lunch that Tobias Fornell and I were supposed to do, but Alex said he wouldn’t mind getting out of the office, and he’ll watch Fornell’s back so I can stay here with her.”
She smiled when Thora stood up and approached the kitchenette, using the fancy machine to make a hot drink for them all. Paula nodded gratefully as she handed her a decaf latte and another green tea for Heather. For herself, she’d made an espresso, and for a few minutes they sat silently, appreciating the rare solitude and company. Noting that Mikelle appeared to be on the cusp of sleep, the trio tacitly spoke in hushed tones. The topic of conversation was desultory at first, mostly the sharing of Atlantis gossip, such as what was going on in the infirmary and at the ISBI. Of course, it inevitably turned into something the three of them spoke about at great length. The progress of their charges, most of whom had transitioned into what everyone hoped would be their permanent new homes after their terrible upheaval.
Except for little Riley Faxon, who, for the moment, was staying with Clare and Nicholas Jackson and Dr Daniel Jackson in this world, who was much more of a warrior than their dad in their own reality. Apparently, in this world, Daniel had been an Ascended Ancient twice, had Merlin’s knowledge and memories downloaded in his head and had been made a Priory by the Ori, so it was understandable that he was a very different version of the twins’ father. Still, he’d slipped into the role of Uncle Danny with relative ease, even if he was somewhat awkward around the children. While Vala, who was very close to him, turned out to be a great surrogate mother to all three children, she had served with Samantha Carter on SG-1 for a time and considered her a good friend. While her fate remained unknown, Daniel had already indicated somewhat enigmatically that if Sam weren’t able to take custody of him, he would apply for guardianship, should no one else be able to.
Thora and Heather speculated that there might be someone else they were trying to locate, or perhaps someone who wasn’t part of the Stargate program and wasn’t cleared to come to Atlantis. Paula didn’t think so, but that was probably because she was spending a lot of time with Cassie, as the only two mothers with babies. No doubt after Erica arrived in a few weeks, Nikola would also become a part of their mothers’ group. Paula had also been welcomed into Cassie’s extended family circle, which included Daniel (and Vala due to her connection with Daniel), Sara O’Neill, who was now going by her middle name of Lauren and her maiden name of Wyatt, little Gia Kawalski, whose great uncle in this reality had served under the general, Teal’c, who had been here on an extended visit before Paula arrived and Samantha Carter. Cassie might have hinted that Jack and Sam were very close after serving together on SG-1 for seven years, and then the year when he was head of the Stargate Command, after (according to Cassie), a disastrous and thankfully brief stint in the chair by the first civilian to command the SGC, Dr Elizabeth Weir, a diplomat. As compensation for losing the SGC gig, she received a sideways promotion to the commander of the expeditionary force that colonised Atlantis. Both ladies thought that sounded cracked!
Cassie did mention to Paula in conversation at one point that if Jack weren’t the head of Homeworld Command, he would have offered to take both Gia and Riley, because he considered them family, just as he would have dearly loved to honour Charlie’s desire to have him bring up baby Sarah, too. Clearly, though, that wasn’t possible with them in the middle of this existential threat that had already destroyed Paula’s world. And that had all sounded very plausible, but her intuition told her that there was more to the story that wasn’t being said. Perhaps it was the slightly wistful way Lauren looked at her ex-husband, at times. They seemed to be good friends, and she sometimes got the feeling that Lauren wouldn’t be averse to rekindling what had likely been a happy marriage before they lost their Charlie in such tragic circumstances.
Still, everyone was entitled to a private life, and if Jack and Sam Carter in this world were more than just former teammates, as she suspected that they’d become, Paula couldn’t begrudge them their happiness or turn their partnership into watercooler fodder. Not that there was much happiness right now, with Col. Carter’s ship, the George Hammond, MIA along with her entire crew. The disappearance left a gaping hole not just at the SGC, but particularly here on Atlantis, as Colonel Carter had been the second commander of Atlantis, replacing Elizabeth Weir, who’d been tragically lost to the Assurans. By all accounts, Colonel Carter had been a popular leader, earning the respect of both the civilians and the military in a way that Weir could not.
So, while Paula suspected who the identity of an alternate carer for Riley might be, if Samantha Carter was indeed declared dead, she wasn’t going to share petty gossip and speculation with Thora and Heather, as much as the trio had become fast friends.
Deliberately diverting the topic, Paula noted that the acetaminophen seemed to have soothed Mikelle’s pain and let her catch up on sleep. Heather agreed the ear looked a lot less red, perhaps because she’d stopped tugging on it.
Paula thought absently that she should take her back and settle her in her cot, and she might be able to grab a nap too.
“How is Vinia doing, Thora?” Heather asked softly, so she wouldn’t wake the sleeping toddler.
“Yeah, she’s doing okay, I think. It’s only been a few days since she moved in, but she seems to be adapting okay. General O’Neill had that small snapshot of her mother and one of all three of them blown up and framed for her, which was photoshopped from one with her and her dad. He also seems to have helped her with her decision to remain here, at least for now. She’s a lot more settled,” Edwards said cautiously, after all, it was still early days, and everyone knew that teenagers could be volatile.
Heather nodded. “Yeah, I noticed that too. It must be a relief to have finally reached a decision. Justine and I are sad to see her go, but I think she will be happier not to share a caregiver, being an only child.
Paula grinned, “Probably why she wasn’t keen on living with the Dixons. Four boys would be a huge adjustment for her.
“General O’Neill mentioned that Colonel Dixon’s eldest son suspected his dad and Vinia’s mom had been having an affair and that she was really his half-sister. So naturally, he was outraged on his mother’s behalf,” Edwards grimaced. “I’m thinking that being one of five Dixon kids came a long way down the list by comparison to that particular can of snails.”
“Oh yeah, I can see how that would be huge,” Heather commiserated. “Poor Vinia. Anyway, there are a lot more people of colour here, aside from Thora. There are a lot more than at the SCG in our reality, too. That’s a good thing for all our kids with the international scientists on Atlantis and all the Pegasus natives, too. Aside from the remnants of the Wraith,” she shivered at the thought of the vampiric-like creatures.
“Yeah, they are definitely too creepy,” Paula agreed with a shudder. “With the defeat of the Ori and the Goa’uld and most of the Wraith gone too, this is a much better time to be here on Atlantis,” she said philosophically.
“Well, on a positive note, it’s wonderful that there are other Lantean teens for Vinia and Josh to socialise and go to school with,” Heather observed.
Not only were there four other kids whose parents were scientists, but half a dozen Athosian teenagers were living, at least part of the time, on Atlantis in the family wing. Stargate Command employed their parents as indigenous guides on off-world teams, while others served in crucial cultural and diplomatic roles. Their Raison d’être was to ensure the Lanteans from Earth (prone over the years in the Pegasus galaxy to exhibiting cultural insensitivity and even smug superiority) did not offend the indigenous peoples of Pegasus as egregiously as they’d done in the past.
The conversation soon turned to Paula’s oldest child. “Jack Hotchner and Josh seem like great mates,” Thora noted, looking pleased. “Yeah, Jack was apparently a bit lost when they came here to hide out from a particularly nasty serial killer. His dad says he’s much more settled now that he and Josh have chummed up,” Paula replied, looking pleased.
Changing the subject, Thora asked Paula curiously, “And how are things going with your two and Belle? Any second thoughts about moving in with Alex?”
“No, it’s working well. Belle is like another little sister to Josh,” she said, leaving the part about her being of similar age to Hannah Rose unsaid. “He’s besotted with her, and she adores her new ‘cousins’ and loves to help Alex and me with Mikelle.”
“How is Josh dealing with Alex?” Heather quizzed her.
“Well, he misses Tony of course, but he’s almost thirteen, so he keeps telling me, and while the whole alternate reality thing is hard for everyone to wrap their heads around, I think the fact that we are on Atlantis does make it easier to believe because this place is so different on every level,” his mother shrugged.
“And Alex looks different enough from his dad that they could be brothers rather than twins,” Thora noted sagely. “It must help that he’s using a different name, too.”
“Yeah, that helps, although I’m sad that Alex needs to hide from a group of vicious criminals who want to use him to operate Ancient technology,” Paula said.
As much as she trusted her friends, they didn’t know about Belle or Josh and Mikelle, all possessing strong Ancients’ genes as well as Alex, nor that little Sarah O’Neill did, too. And both families were determined to keep it that way for as long as possible.
“Alex is different enough from our Tony that Josh doesn’t feel guilty about getting close to him; sort of like a favourite uncle, and Alex is really good with my two. So, sharing childcare is convenient for us both, and as we’re both single parents in law enforcement, we’ve agreed that if something happened to one of us, the other would adopt their kid or kids, in my case, which is a relief.”
“So, you two…I know you’ve only just lost your husband, but do you think you might get together at some point?”
“No, we talked about that before we decided to live as a family unit. It would be too difficult for Josh, and well, Alex isn’t Tony. They are very different people, and apparently, in this reality, although he briefly dated me, I wasn’t interested in a long-term relationship. But we remained friends, and Alex was devastated when his Paula died in a suicide bombing right in front of him. So, we decided we are better off as a family and bringing up our kids together.”
Paula had no intention of sharing with her friends that she and Alex had slept together, but it was more of a farewell to the other reality self they had both lost. It had never been an attempt to forge a future together. And she would never reveal that she had been the first person he had trusted enough to make love with after finding out that Ziva had drugged and raped him, probably on more than one occasion, to become pregnant with Belle(Tali). She would carry that secret with her to the grave.
Oh, she knew people speculated about her and Alex, and they couldn’t do anything about gossip, but no one knew for sure, nor would they ever hear about it from her; she wouldn’t betray Alex like that. Sometimes she had the feeling that General O’Neill knew about them, but it was no one’s business but theirs.
“Gia seems to be flourishing under Lauren’s care,” she said, deliberately changing the subject.
“She is much more engaged, and she definitely seems to be blossoming within the loving extended family of General O’Neill, Cassie and Baby Sarah, too,” Heather smiled maternally.
All three women had been concerned about the little girl, but Lauren had somehow managed to crack through her grief, and Gia was doing a lot better than when they first arrived in this new and confusing reality. No doubt, all of Dr Heng’s grief work with her and the other children impacted their ability to settle in their new families as well.
Just as in the past, when they’d had these impromptu conversations about the priceless children they’d accompanied through the alternate reality drive, their attention was about to shift to the other child all three women were concerned about: four-year-old Kelvin Austen-McKay. It was right then that Paula heard from Alex via her comms.
“Hey, Paula. How’d you get on with Mikelle? Is she alright?” he asked, and she could hear the genuine concern over the comms.
“It was just an ear infection, like I suspected, Alex. Dr Biro gave her antibiotics and prescribed Baby Acetaminophen for her temperature and pain. She’s sleeping now,” she said reassuringly.
“That’s good. Glad it was nothing more serious. When Belle had an ear infection last year, it was horrible, but at least she could tell me where it hurt,” he said, sounding pained.
“Is everything okay?” Paula asked.
“We’ve had a report of a sexual assault in the botany department.”
“Male or female victim?”
“Female. I know I gave you the day off, but Cadman is off-world right now, and I’d ask Nikki if she could do it, but…”
“With all her Braxton Hicks contractions, I get it. I’ll ask Heather to watch Mikelle and be there as soon as I can,” Paula interrupted, knowing Tony was chomping at the bit to have Amelia Banks back on Atlantis. However, she was still at FLETC doing her federal agent training.
“No, wait, Paula. I was going to say that I’ll watch Mikelle while you interview the victim and are present for the medical,” he said, referring to the forensic exam known in the trade as the rape kit. “I’m only doing paperwork right now, so I can just as easily do that back home, and we agreed to share childcare for our kids,” Tony said.
“Heather already offered, Alex, and she’s a nurse,” she reminded him gently.
“Yeah, I know, and no disrespect intended. I just feel strongly that kids deserve to have their parents with them when they are unwell.”
Something in his tone clued Paula in that this was more about his own neglect as a child than anything to do with Mikelle or even Heather. From what little she’d gathered, more often than not, he’d been left to his own devices growing up, although it wasn’t something she’d discussed in any great detail with him yet.
“Okay, well, I’ll see you in a few. I know she’ll be delighted to see you if she wakes up, but hopefully she’ll sleep right through.”
As she started to stand, carefully trying not to wake the sleeping toddler, Heather told her, “Honestly, I don’t mind watching her for you anytime, Paula. She’s such a sweetie,” she assured the mom, smiling softly at the sleeping little girl.
“I know that, and so does Alex. I think maybe this has more to do with his own childhood, but I can’t say for sure,” Paula stated, carefully choosing her words.
However, the educator and the nurse were mandated reporters. Exchanging a look, Thora and Heather took the hint and said no more.
Chapter 15
When Ziva arrived in Columbus, Ohio, everything seemed to be proceeding normally. So far, they’d collected a lot of valuable intel on possibly unknown Trust operatives who had, until now, managed to fly completely under the radar. Some of these individuals had such squeaky-clean records, with not even a speeding ticket against their names, that Colin Mason and Alec Hardison immediately smelled a big, smelly rat. They suspected that these people had their personal records cleansed of anything that might connect them to known associates of The Trust, rogue NID agents or former agents, even if peripherally. While some of the people shadowing Ziva David, hoping she’d lead them to her daughter and secure them a large tax-free cash bonus, were undoubtedly low-level thugs, criminals for hire. These lowlifes had records, mostly petty assaults and minor theft or fraud convictions. As far as Hardison and Mason could determine, those scumbags likely had no real connection with The Trust, other than being hired to follow David. But they had also managed to identify half a dozen highly significant individuals who were believed to be dead but identified either by Leverage Inc’s operatives or the current and former Mossad operatives who recognised some of the operatives, if not the identities they were using. Others had been entirely fresh faces, and they were working steadily to identify them and build extensive profiles on these previously unknown operatives.
So overall, Operation ‘A matter of Trust’ was living up to expectations, maybe even exceeding them. They had some extremely solid intel on people who weren’t on any suspect lists, which they would start doing deep dives on as soon as they had an opportunity. They also had an impressive list of low-level criminals they could squeeze for intel on every person they’d even the smallest contact with, who seemed to be calling the shots. The pair had identified maybe ten NID Federal Agents who were supposed to be clean but were obviously dirty, as well as a handful of really BAD actors who were reported to be dead. And finally, they could now start investigating how they all fit together financially.
Everyone was thrilled with just how much information had been gathered so far, so it was completely unexpected when, instead of interrogating everyone who was supposed to have talked to Tali and DiNozzo, in and around the city of Ohio and Ohio State University, Tony’s old college alma mater, Ziva David shut herself up in her cheap motel and ignored all the leads they’d planted. She’d made a call to a former teammate back at NCIS and then left, headed west, backtracking the way she’d come. Instead of the meandering route that Tony had supposedly been travelling, showing his daughter places in the Midwest of the USA, she took a far more direct route and headed back to Brownsville in Wisconsin. Then her trail went cold, prompting the cyber specialists to meet with their employer, the DHS, at the Pentagon. Although Alec Hardison had a pretty good idea that these people didn’t work for DHS, he was smart enough not to ask unwanted questions. They met in the Pentagon, and that was enough for him.
Present at the emergency meeting were Jack, Paul Davis, Penelope Garcia (The Black Queen), Alex Hardistan, Colin ‘Chaos’ Mason, and Zane Donovan. Donovan was helping out, since they’d been collecting a good deal more intel than they’d first anticipated. Although technically, Donovan had already been working on the operation, his brief was to search for any links between The Trust and The Consortium, as on paper, it seemed logical that the two organisations overlapped, even if they were separate entities. No one could say for sure, though, and it was Donovan’s job to find out.
Also joining the discussion via secure communications were Liat Tuvia and Malachi Ben Guidon, the Kidon operatives who had been read in on the War on Happy Zombies and The Trust in a rather limited fashion, but not the Stargate or aliens. That said, Jack was pretty sure they already knew about all the Stargate, just not from him. Given the nations that were actively participating in the Stargate Program, it wasn’t realistic to assume that other governments hadn’t shared details with Israel. He just had to hope that if his suspicions were correct, the rest of their international partners were better at maintaining the security of the WoHZ, and the vaccine to counteract it, as tipping Shen Xiaoyi off about their plan to neutralise her would be disastrous.
This meeting was unscheduled; it was taking place in direct response to Ziva’s unexpected disappearance. They were trying to figure out what had gone wrong; had their target (Ziva David) been tipped off by someone, because she had suddenly gone missing? One week ago, everything was fine; they’d painstakingly laid out the bait that Tony had previously discussed with Paul and Jack for this part of the sting, the narrative being that Tony DiNozzo had returned to the scene of his former glory days as a washed-up, aging star of the Buckeyes, playing football and basketball, keen to impress his daughter with his college exploits. The expectation was that she would spend a couple of days or more, hunting down anyone he talked to, trying to learn where he intended to go next, when it became clear that neither he nor Tali was there now.
And yet, inexplicably, Ziva didn’t try to track down her daughter, which was a definite cause of concern for the Matter of Trust contingent. Had they been made by the former Mossad-trained assassin, which, to be fair, had always been a possibility or had she noticed the increasingly sloppy members of The Trust who were shadowing her, who consisted mostly of mercenaries and local guns for hire? It seemed feasible that the thugs whom The Trust sometimes used to follow David, hoping to snatch Tali out from under Ziva’s nose when she found her, weren’t good enough to fool the former Kidon-trained Mossad operative.
As nominally in charge of the A Matter of Trust Caper, co-owner of Leverage Inc, Hardison kicked off the meeting by giving a quick update on the very latest links Penelope, Hardison, Mason and Donovan had traced back to the rogue NID agents, and national and international members of The Trust, which until now, had not been previously known to Homeworld. Jack O’Neill, despite his deep concern over Ziva’s unexpected behaviour, praised the team generously for their sterling work. Likewise, the Pentagon was ecstatic about the quality of intel Zane was uncovering about people previously vetted and cleared of involvement. Not just because of those subjects Donovan identified, but because it pointed to some really high-placed people who were covering up for them. Slowly, as the mission progressed, they were identifying more individuals who’d been bought, corrupted or blackmailed by The Trust. It went even higher than they’d previously expected.
Thanks to Donovan’s forensic keyboard magic, they’d even uncovered several high-level NSA operatives who were seriously compromised, having supposedly vetted and cleared three individuals of any connection to The Trust who were now in highly sensitive classified government positions. Donavan had traced massive amounts of money being hidden in fake offshore accounts that the previous cyber experts failed to detect, suggesting they’d been bought off. Those experts were now being interrogated to trace other previously unknown connections. Although it was slow going, the results spoke for themselves, vindicating Garcia’s push to hire Donovan; his results were spectacular, having already netted them a prominent senator and an up-and-coming member of Congress, plus a high-ranking member of the defence department, something that understandably enraged O’Neill.
After discussing their latest progress in identifying corruption among government officials at the highest levels of the administration, the meeting moved swiftly to the real reason for the unscheduled conference as they attempted to analyse Ziva’s disturbing actions. Almost seven days ago, Lisa Davies, aka Ziva David, arrived in Columbus, Ohio. Having taken the bait that Tony told a random stranger he’d met while he was in Indiana (but in reality, recruited by the Matter of Trust team) all about how he was a varsity star, a famed Buckeye who was headed to Ohio State University to show his daughter around, where he went to college. Based on the reports she’d submitted on the MCRT to her father when she was the Mossad liaison at NCIS, and which had been supplied by her old Kidon boss, Ben Guidon, it was obvious she’d believed DiNozzo was a braggart and a fool. So they’d crafted their clues about his trip with Tali around the Midwest to reinforce her opinions that he was irresponsible and emotionally immature. So far, she’d fallen for their trap, hook, line and sinker.
Everyone already knew about these facts from previous meetings, although Garcia and Hardison gave a quick summary. ensuring that everyone was on the same page before moving on to what happened once Ziva got to Columbus. It seemed that after she booked into a standard motel, things began to go awry. The first thing that seemed very out of character was that Ziva called NCIS Special Agent Timothy McGee out of the blue. Following the detainment of the NCIS special agent and a brutal interrogation, they’d learned the reason for her call was to beg McGee for his assistance in finding Tali. This largely unforeseen development threw the mission into a moderate level of disarray, as the team wondered whether Ziva had somehow found out she was being used as bait to flush out The Trust operatives and their associates. After McGee was taken into custody for agreeing to help her find Tali, despite being warned off by no less than the current resident of White House, President Walsh, they’d interrogated him intently, trying to discover why she’d reached out to him for help; all McGee could tell them was that Ziva was growing weary of the ‘wild turkey chase.’ There was no indication anyone had tipped her off that she was being played.
The only thing her former teammate could share that might explain her motives was that she claimed to have something else to take care of before she could fully concentrate on locating her daughter and then taking her back home to Israel. When asked to justify agreeing to help her find Tali after being ordered to stay the hell out of it, McGee replied that he felt sorry for her. She had been separated from her child for almost four years, and a mother should be with her child; he didn’t think that anyone had the right to stand in her way. Tony was being an irresponsible parent, by the sounds of what Ziva confessed, dragging Tali all around the countryside, and she needed a more stable home life and her mother’s love and presence.
Colonel Davis had given him an icy glare before telling him, “Well, when your own children are deprived of your presence for failing to follow the POTUS’ orders not to assist her in any way, I do hope you’ll still think it was a worthwhile use of your time, Mr McGee.”
“What did he say to that?” Garcia asked with interest after listening to the deputy director of Homeworld Command’s report. While she’d admired his abilities, Penelope had always thought Tim’s level of arrogance when it came to hacking far exceeded his skill. Besides, if she’d done even a fraction of the reckless shit he had while working for the FBI, her ass would be in prison. In a Supermax!
“He didn’t seem all that concerned about it, to be honest,” Paul Davis admitted. “He kept saying Gibbs would sort everything out. “Six days in detention, cooling his heels without any internet connection or contact with his family might have been a wakeup call,” he said with a touch of mischievousness.
“Okay, well, having had a wakeup call about his boss’s clout in the real world is a good thing,” General O’Neill stated a little maliciously. “How sure can we be he won’t try to assist her by searching for Anthony and Tali DiNozzo if we were to let him return to NCIS?” he demanded sharply.
“He’s pretty chastened, but we’d need to monitor him closely,” Paul admitted. “To be honest, I wouldn’t trust him as far as I could throw him.”
Zane Donovan shook his head. “Yeah, I wouldn’t either. Timothy McGee thinks he’s way smarter than everyone else because of his MIT degree, so he probably is already working on a way to circumvent you. You’ll need to build an impenetrable surveillance web to make sure he doesn’t try to warn her,” he cautioned them gravely.
Garcia, Hadison, and Chaos Mason nodded seriously, in agreement. Jack fixed a stern eye on the trio and said, “If he can’t be contained, then I want him to remain in detention with zero access to a computer. With David going dark and not knowing what prompted her to turn around and head back to Wisconsin, I’m not going to take any chances with the DiNozzos’ safety by giving McGee his freedom,” he said, firmly. “He can cool his jets a while longer.”
Only Paul and Penelope understood why he was so protective of the father and daughter, as the rest had not been read in on their status or the reason The Trust had targeted them. Apart from their motives being nefarious, and life-threatening. Homeworld under General O’Neill worked on the principle of compartmentalising information as much as possible, and given how sensitive much of that data was, it was difficult to argue with his caution. Zane Donovan had been read in on the situation with The Trust and the basics of the Stargate Program on Earth. But only because he was helping them with the possible links between the Consortium and The Trust, the data that Baal and his clones had been running The Trust was there in the files. Plus, working as he did for the DoD, Zane understood that he would end up in a Super Max, with the likes of the disgraced former Colonel William S. Makepeace and his merry men, who had betrayed their oaths and sided with The Trust to gain alien technology.
“Right, so we know that David retraced her footsteps back to Wisconsin?” Jack said, getting them all back on track with the reason for the meeting.
O’Neill wanted to talk to Donovan about whether they had any luck tracing a Baal clone in Wisconsin that had appeared in Brownsville, but he’d only found out about it a few weeks ago. Unfortunately, the report of a charismatic, extremely attractive male with flashing eyes had been compiled by Leverage Inc, and they didn’t realise its significance. Jack was furious that they missed such a crucial detail, but to be fair, with all the preparations for distributing the MCD –238β vaccine to an entire planet, he’d also been focused on other issues. Especially on how badly they’d drop the ball by grossly underestimating the size of the anti-vaxxer cohort, putting their whole WoHZ plan to save the Earth in real jeopardy.
Potentially missing another Baal clone shouldn’t have happened, but it was understandable. They’d never tried to vaccinate a whole planet in secret before, let alone US antivaxxers, of course, because politicians weren’t happy unless they were throwing grenades in their way! Perhaps he should get Donovan to run one of his security checks on the esteemed Gang of Eight when he got a chance, Jack thought dangerously.
After the epidemiologists had alerted him to just how high the number of anti-vaxxers was, thanks in no small part to vaccines such as smallpox and polio vaccines being so effective that several generations down the track, the anti-vaxxers weighed up arguably rare potential side effects against the reality of death and permanent disability from the diseases that had been eradicated, and chose to remain unvaccinated. Or so they thought. Measles and polio were starting to show up in pockets around the world where people had eschewed vaccinations in high enough numbers that herd immunity had been threatened.
Still, that was an issue, admittedly a massively important one, to be tackled separately. Right now, they needed to deal with Ziva David’s sudden divergence from their plan, which had been proceeding so well. What connection did it have to a potential Baal clone that might still be wandering about in the Midwest? They were juggling way too many balls in the air right now. It was inevitable that they would drop a few or more, unfortunately. But he’d vowed to protect Tali DiNozzo and his daughter, and Jack O’Neill wasn’t going to go back on his promise.
That said, first things first! Assess how bigger broblem they had.
“So, what we do know is that David hightailed it back to Brownsville in Wisconsin. I guess the question is, what caused the deviation from our plan?” Jack asked, looking around at the participants.
“She could just as easily have waited for McGee to find something actionable and stayed put in Columbus. Who did she interact with while she was there?” Paul observed, looking at Alec Hardison and Colin Mason for their takes on the situation.
Alec Hardison shrugged. “The first time she was there, she went out to a bar and had sex in the restroom with some dude; then they went back to the motel and spent the night together.”
Jack pricked up his ears. “Can we see who she hooked up with?”
Maybe she ran into a Baal clone, he thought, which admittedly would be a disaster, and they certainly didn’t need it right now. He hated that fucking Goa’uld so damn much that if he lived one hundred lifetimes, he couldn’t properly express how much he loathed him to anyone who hadn’t lived through what he had. Being tortured with acid, slowly eating away at his body until he died a painful death, then being brought back to life via a sarcophagus over and over had a way of inducing such intense hatred, not to mention PTSD on a human, that he wanted to kill Baal with his bare hands. In fact, he did it sometimes in his dreams, even if, until very recently, he truly believed that they were finally finished with that evil SOB, until those rumours surfaced in Wisconsin amid a few locals.
Hardison, calmly oblivious to Jack’s homicidal thoughts, tapped a few keys on his computer, and a picture flashed up on the screen of the male with whom David spent the night when she was in Brownsville the first time.
Jack heaved a metaphoric sigh of relief that perhaps wasn’t as silent as he thought because the colonel was regarding him with a concerned air. Colonel Davis, of course, knew enough details of his torture at Baal’s hands to have concerns. Jack also flicked a glance at Donovan, silently quirking his eyebrow, and Zane, whom he’d asked to find ‘the guy with the flashing eyes’, gave a subtle shake of his head, indicating this wasn’t the guy.
Jack felt relieved. “Do you have a photo?” he asked Donovan, hoping that the gossip in Brownsville about a handsome dark-haired stranger with flashing eyes was just a figment of someone’s overactive imagination. Possibly from reading too many trashy romance novels
Zane gave a sharp nod and flashed a photo up on the screen. The man captured was obscenely good-looking, as even the males present would attest. He exuded a charismatic, brooding air of pure exquisite arrogance, so assured of his omnipotence that he absolutely reminded Jack of Baal and the other System Lords, but it wasn’t Baal or his clone, thank goodness. Then a very uncomfortable thought occurred to him. What if the Goa’uld Baal symbiote had left its cloned body and hopped into another human host to hide? It would be a lot smarter and make him much harder to find.
Paul, eyeing the photograph, asked, “Do we have an ID on this individual?”
Zane shrugged. “Yeah, his name is Tyson Aneau, and he’s from Oregon originally.”
“So, is he passing through Brownsville?” Paul demanded.
“No, near as I can tell, he’s living on a ranch about a forty-minute drive away with his girlfriend Courtney Blayne, and he’s been living there for the last 18 months, according to a local.”
“If he has a girlfriend, then he’s been cheating on her with some of the locals in the town of Brownsville,” Jack observed.
“Is it his ranch?” Paul Davis asked.
“Nope, it’s owned by a Lyall Hackett,” Zane said succinctly, having done a brief property check just before the meeting got underway. He was planning to dig deeper if the General wanted him to, even if he looked nothing like this Baal character. “Sorry, that’s all I’ve got on him, but I’ll keep looking if ya want me to?”
Jack thought something seemed fishy, but he didn’t know what. “Yeah, do that, Donovan! Find out more about both men,” he decreed.
The rest of the participants had remained quiet until now. Kidon-trained Officer Tuvia spoke up via secure comms, still in the field. “Not sure what relevance it has, but I’ve been reviewing the old surveillance footage we have of David when she was in Brownsville the first time. There was a very brief interaction between this man, Tyson Aneau and Ziva; it occurred in the dining room at the Brownsville Inn, where she stayed. Can we pull up that footage, Alec?” she asked him.
Hardison jiggled a few keys, typing a search command to bring up footage of Ziva eating breakfast, lunch and dinner in the inn’s dining room, before Paul called out, “There! Go back a bit.”
They watched as Ziv ate her dinner and Aneau stalked into the restaurant attached to the inn, as it also served the public, mainly locals and travellers. The genetically blessed male entered the restaurant, reminding Jack of Baal as many heads turned his way. He owned the room as he swaggered over to an empty table. On his way to the table, it seemed that upon entering, he scanned the room before casually making his way to Ziva’s table, but he didn’t pause or look at anyone, despite being the centre of attention. As he went past, he stumbled slightly, laying his hand on her chair as if to steady himself, but then he casually brushed her shoulder and neck with a feathery light touch. In contrast she acted as if she’d been stung by a hornet, while he totally ignored her, making his way across the room to sit down alone at a small table.
Proceeding to ignore everyone else in the dining room, he flirted outrageously with the waitress. Aneau ate, ignoring every female in the room who was swooning as he ate with an intensity that Jack felt was posturing, savouring every bite. By the end of the meal, several of the younger women were practically drooling, trying to catch his eye, although he seemed to be interested only in the pretty young waitress serving him. His blatant ignoring of the female diners (and two of the obviously smitten guys who were clearly interested in him) felt performative to the group of analysts and operatives viewing the tape. It also just seemed to encourage the fangirls and boys to try harder to attract Aneau’s attention.
Jack quipped that, watching it, all they needed was for Sir David Attenborough to deliver a commentary on the mating rituals of the Midwestern Alpha-male when attracting a mate. Penelope sniggered and exchanged an amused look with Paul Davis while the rest of the cyber crowd looked rather shocked. Perhaps they assumed that three stars had their sense of humour surgically removed before receiving the promotion.
As Aneau left the restaurant some 45 minutes later, everyone could tell that he and the waitress were planning to hook up. That was even without access to sound or being able to read lips. In fact, Jack had the impression Tyson Aneau had already been intimate with the waitress. It was probably something they should confirm.
Jack looked at the Kidon pair over the video comms and said, “So she ate in the same restaurant as Aneau did, but it seemed like a pretty tenuous connection, Officer Tuvia. Besides, she barely paid him any attention after Aneau’s accidental contact, brushing against her as he made his way to his table. Care to explain why you think it’s relevant?”
Ben Guidon looked at his underling. “I am also interested in knowing your thoughts, Officer Tuvia?”
“Former Officer David was schooled in seduction techniques. While plenty of other people were trying to attract Aneau’s attention, Ziva was using methods she had learned in her training as an assassin after their contact to regain his attention. Almost fail-proof ways to attract a mark. Yet he completely ignored her, and it pissed her off,” Liat shrugged.
The others looked sceptical or bemused, so she elaborated. “All I’m saying is, maybe he got under her skin because he ignored her, and so she decided to return while she was waiting for intel on her daughter from Agent McGee. If there is one thing Ziva hates, it’s failure, even if it is just wanting to seduce some guy that she has her eye on. It really pissed her off that she was never able to get her partner, Anthony DiNozzo, to go to bed with her while they worked together.”
“Not for the want of trying,” Ben Guidon agreed. “Director David ordered her to turn him, but she failed while she was working at NCIS.”
“So, do you think that her disappearance after arriving in Columbus, as we planned, might be because she felt disrespected and decided to return and try again?” Hardison asked disbelievingly. “What about her daughter? She’s been chasing ‘her’ all over the country, trying to find her. Did she suddenly lose interest in the kid?”
“Good point!” Jack agreed.
Although if Aneau was really a Goa’uld, and especially one of Baal’s clones, well, it made a great deal more sense. They knew that Hathor had a drug called the Breath of Hathor that only affected males, which was how she was able to take over Stargate Command without a shot being fired. Then there was that Goa’uld Seth hiding on Earth; he had the drug called nish’ta that he used on his followers (both male and female) in the cult SG-1 and Jacob Carter/Selmak broke up in Seattle back in 1999. Okay, so he had been killed, but maybe Baal concocted some drug like Hathor’s that made people (or females) hypersexual or somehow stumbled on a cache of nish’ta left after Seth’s death.
“Right, well, we will need to check out if David headed to the ranch owned by this Lyall Hackett. Do we have any information on him?” he directed, deciding that Tuvia had a cogent theory which was worth checking out.
Penelope, who had already begun a search as soon as he was mentioned, nodded. “Quite a bit of stuff, Sir. He bought the ranch from Bryant Jones five years ago, but here’s the interesting thing. No one’s seen Jones since. It’s like he just vanished into thin air, General.”
“What about Hackett?”
“Same deal with him, too. He was supposed to go and stay with family, but no one has seen him in nearly two years, either.”
“Right, keep digging. And let’s try to confirm whether Ziva David is staying at Hackett’s ranch, folks. If not, I want her found, asap,” Jack ordered crisply.
As Donovan, Mason and Hardison, the three cyber geniuses, stood up to exit the secure conference room, Ben Guidon requested a private word with Jack and Paul.
Jack looked at Donovan and said, “Why don’t you grab some lunch in the cafe, and we’ll meet in 30 minutes to go over that other matter.”
Zane gave a sketchy salute that scandalised the strait-laced colonel, but amused Jack, used as he was to Daniel’s lack of respect for all things military.
After the room was cleared, apart from Colonel Davis, Jack told the head of Mossad’s Kidon, temporarily on leave of absence, approved by Director Erbaz, “Okay, Officer Ben Guidon. What’s on your mind?”
“Our director, Orli Erbaz, has authorised me to inform you that we are aware of the Stargate Program, General. Liat and I were read in on it when our leave to chase down Ziva David was approved.”
“I see. And you are informing me of this, now because?” Jack said, playing his cards close to the vest.
“Officer Tuvia is very concerned about Tali DiNozzo. As is our former colleague, Mikel Dayan, who also knows Ziva. We do not think a former Kidon operative who possesses so many enemies is a fit person to resume custody of Tali.”
“Officer Ben Guidon speaks the truth,” his young protégé chimed in. People close to her usually end up dead,” Tuvia said bluntly.
“We surmised that you probably have Tali and her father placed into a witness protection program before embarking on this mission to catch the corrupt politicians and billionaires, but we want to warn you that Tali isn’t safe in a witness protection program. Ziva is highly trained and has cultivated many dangerous and well-connected informants in the US government, thanks to her time at NCIS. Perhaps Tali should be under guard at Stargate Command, where Ziva cannot gain access,” Malachi spoke diplomatically.
Exchanging an impassive look with Paul, Jack said briefly. “We already considered her informant network. I assure you, Tali is safe.”
“Then you must have moved her to another planet to be so confident,” Liat surmised.
“There are plenty in the Milky Way,” Jack stated, vaguely, deliberately implying she was somewhere in the Milky Way Galaxy.
“Good. Tali is still a child and deserves to grow up and have a normal childhood. By the way, if you are wondering how Director Orbaz knows about the Stargate, her distant cousin Svetlana Markov, and your former compatriot, Harry Maybourne, may have spilled the beans one night over a bottle of vodka in Moscow.
Jack scowled. He might have known!
~o0o~
Funnily enough, it was all the thinking about Vala and Atlantis that her Goa’uld symbiote, Athena, was doing lately that made Charlotte Mayfield pause and reconsider some other things that they might have overlooked. They were all looking for the two DiNozzos in the US because of a press statement, but David had been chasing down leads for nearly six weeks now and still hadn’t found them. But what if they knew about the DiNozzos’ ATA genes and this was a false trail left by Crispian Paddington and the SCG to throw her off the scent?
It was entirely possible thanks to the mess their operatives had made trying to acquire Tali, right in the middle of London. Wasn’t it, therefore, feasible that if the SGC knew they wanted her because of the botched kidnapping attempts and that the pair had the Ancients’ gene, Stargate Command would place the pair into Witness Protection? They’d be just as keen to protect such high-value assets for the Stargate program as The Trust was to try to exploit them.
Of course, all this speculation was predicated on the theory that the SGC knew about the DiNozzos, which wasn’t a given. However, if she were right, it would explain a lot of things that had puzzled them in these past months. There had been no confirmed sightings of either of them by their operatives since the family disagreement over an inheritance had hit the news in Britain more than ten months ago. There had been a confirmed arrival back in the US, announced during the press conference held by Crispian Paddington, the heir to the Paddington fortune, to announce that a settlement had been reached. However, after clearing Customs in California, The Trust could find no further trace of them. It was as if they had simply melted into thin air.
So, they would direct The Trust to continue following Lisa Davies (Ziva David) to determine if she could lead them to Anthony and Tali DiNozzo, because at this point, she was their only connection to the six-year-old. But in the meantime, Mayfield resolved to put one of her best computer hackers on it, checking the US Marshals database to determine whether Tali and Anthony DiNozzo were in their witness protection program. She cursed the fact that the Leverage Inc organisation had rejected The Trust’s request to help them locate the DiNozzos. Alec Hardison was one of the best hackers in existence, and no doubt would have located her weeks ago, but it was highly likely that one of the other partners, Eliot Spencer, immediately vetoed their offer, said to be highly selective of the cases he would work on.
In hindsight, they probably should have exercised a little bit more finesse in how they’d approached Leverage Inc, but it was too late to worry about it now. What’s done is done!
However, Mayfield had also heard of a hacker, Colin Mason (who went by the handle Chaos), who claimed to be better than Hardison, although most people thought that Chaos was self-deluded. But he did come a close second. More importantly, Mason was reputedly far less particular about the cases he worked on so long as the price was right. In the meantime, she speculated.
If the Stargate program knew that the DiNozzos possessed the ancient gene, they may have skipped witness protection and gone straight for protective custody. They may have hidden the father and his daughter on some secret research base where they were researching Ancients’ technology, utilising their ability to interface with the tech, like Area 51 in Nevada. She needed to get onto her last remaining contacts in the NID and have them launch an immediate search for the pair.
When she learned that Ziva had finally contacted her former teammate Timothy McGee, requesting his assistance, she was a little surprised but not overly so. The former Mossad officer was well known for being impatient and infamous for acting impulsively. David’s search for her daughter so far had proved fruitless. But when she turned around in Columbus, Ohio, and began backtracking the way she’d come. It left people scratching their collective heads, that’s for sure.
Charlotte Mayfield had just been informed that Tali David’s mother had returned to Wisconsin, and then she seemed to have disappeared into thin air. Had she gotten a tip-off that the DiNozzos were hiding in Wisconsin and given everyone the slip? Going back through her hours of surveillance video that her people had filmed of Ziva David during her first stop in some backwoods town called Brownsville, she meticulously studied all the footage their operatives had sent back by their people.
Why had David returned there?
Wondering if she should go down there too, Mayfield reviewed all of the intel The Trust had collected on her while she was in the small town, including her nocturnal habits. Mayfield watched all of the tapes for hours until she thought she might have found something when she stopped the footage to review every instance of Ziva David mingling with the Brownsville locals.
When they reached the seemingly innocent few seconds of contact between a handsome male and Ziva David as he passed by her table, her Goa’uld symbiote, Athena, suddenly hissed, /“What is a Goa’uld doing in the fleapit of a town?”/
“Are you sure he’s a Goa’uld? According to our operatives, his name is Tyson Aneau, who arrived in the town about 18 months ago. What makes you think he’s a Goa’uld?” Mayfield asked Athena.
“Run it back.” Charlotte did as her host told her, but there wasn’t much to see; their interaction at best had lasted mere seconds. “There, he’s just infected her with nish’ta. She cannot keep her eyes off him, although she is trying hard. He must be in hiding, hoping to wait until it is safe.”
She did not explain herself, but Charlotte could feel her emotions raging before Athena declared abruptly. “We must go there, now! I must obtain nish’ta so I can find Vala Mal Doran.”
Oh, here we go again, Mayfield thought, fed up with Quetesh’s host!
But what of Ziva David, Athena? We need to find her daughter,” Mayfield protested, having invested too much time and effort, not to mention money, into the search for Tali DiNozzo. A lot of people would pay handsomely if she could produce her.
“Yes, yes, but nish’ta will make the job far easier,” Athena insisted imperiously. We can achieve both objectives. Recall the Al’kesh! We can use the rings to arrive in that pathetic town as quickly as possible. I do not wish to fly there in the corporate jet,” she said imperiously, her mind already plotting how this would change things.”/
Mayfield couldn’t help but feel some of her host’s enthusiasm. She hoped Athena was right; the rich investors were getting tetchy about not having access to an Ancients’ gene carrier they’d promised to deliver many months ago. They’d even been running feasibility studies on trying to seize Jack O’Neill, but his protection as head of Homeworld Command made it impractical. However, if they could acquire some of the Goa’uld mind control drug, it might just be possible.
“Yes, Athena, I’ll see to it right away,” she assured her Goa’uld symbiote, feeling suddenly wildly optimistic.
Chapter 16
Charlotte Mayfield felt a sharp pain explode in her chest as the ex- Mossad assassin’s handgun fired and pierced her body at very close range. A wave of pain spread through her until several seconds later her body became blessedly numb. It wasn’t supposed to happen like this!
Ziva David was supposed to be under the influence of nish’ta and had been acting extremely compliant, following Athena’s directives to torture the man for information regarding Tali DiNozzo’s whereabouts. Yet when it became obvious to them all that he knew less than nothing regarding their target’s current location, Athena became increasingly enraged. The Goa’uld ordered Ziva to kill him and make it look like a robbery gone wrong, which Charlotte thought was crazy, given that the woman had obviously been torturing him. But Athena’s order to kill him changed everything. Despite the nish’ta, Charlotte could tell that Ziva David was fighting against her order to murder the pathetic, snivelling wreck of a human being lying on the expensive carpet, which Charlotte found surprising.
Even as she could feel time slowing down, and with a perfect clarity that was terrifying to her, Charlotte knew she was dying, probably because her entire life had begun to flash before her eyes, which was so cliché. She couldn’t believe how badly it had hurt to get shot before; mercifully, shock stepped in and rendered her insensate to the pain. As she relived her life, the CEO of Farrow-Marshall (and various other lucrative subsidiaries) acquired somewhat dubiously from Xerxes, who was another minor Goa’uld. Baal had ruthlessly ousted him after he fled to Earth, too, when the symbiote poison started killing the Goa’uld and their Jaffa warriors in vast numbers. Somehow, The Trust had acquired the Tok’ra poison by paying scientists at Area 51 and decided that the collateral cost of killing millions of Jaffa hosts when it killed Goa’uld was an acceptable price to pay to rid the world of the parasitic race. Ironically, now in the same situation, Charlotte didn’t agree and began to experience a crushing sense of panic, wondering why Athena, her powerful Goa’uld symbiote, wasn’t healing her.
She knew what it felt like when Athena was healing her from an injury or that terrible wasting sickness that Mayfield contracted on Krytovar. They’d taken refuge there after being forced to flee Earth with Baal and his clones when the Jaffa, Gerak, seized one of the clones and executed him, believing him to be the real Baal. Gerak at that point, probably didn’t know about the Baal clones and that must have been a nasty shock when he found out.
She’d felt like she was dying then, too, but Athena had healed her effortlessly, after letting her sweat a little. Charlotte had interpreted the delay in healing her as a power play. Athena’s way of reminding her that while Charlotte was the face of their ‘partnership’ to the public, the Goa’uld held all the cards and the power in their relationship, so her human host had better not forget it.
Was Athena pulling a similar power play again, or was this genuinely a mortal injury that Athena was unable to heal? Charlotte hoped it wasn’t the case; she didn’t want to die, and now she was beginning to feel cold, starting in her extremities as her circulatory system began to crash. There was still no pain, thankfully, but her life continued to flash before her eyes, which was disturbing: the death of her parents, her mom from breast cancer and then her father, in his inconsolable grief at the loss of her mother, drank himself to death. He died in agony with an acute case of pancreatitis, sick and alone because she refused to see him before he died. Perhaps if she hadn’t pushed him out of her life, blaming him for supporting her mother’s decision to stop treatment, maybe he might still be alive.
She thought of earning her MBA from the prestigious Carnegie Mellon University, her focus firmly centred on technology, before being hired by Farrow-Marshall. She rose rapidly through the ranks until she reached Chief Executive Officer and discovered that there were aliens, and not just out in space, but one owned the company. He was, as she would find out later, an inconsequential Goa’uld called Xerxes, who spent time on Earth in the Mesopotamian era and returned to Earth during the battles amongst the warring system lords, hoping to lie low until it was safe to venture out into the galaxy again. Unfortunately for him, Xerxes had the bad luck to run into the System Lord Baal, who’d also chosen to hide out on Earth, and promptly effected a hostile takeover of Farrow Marshall, killing her then boss and the owner of the company.
Still, Charlotte Mayfield was a survivor, and she’d adapted to having a new boss; in fact, she’d thrived. Baal was urbane and incredibly charismatic, much more so than Xerxes had been. Plus, Charlotte had always been a pragmatist; in addition, she was extremely competent and financially brilliant. So, she made sure Baal understood just how indispensable she was to him. She was relieved that he didn’t want her as a host, seeming far too satisfied with his long-term host’s appearance, not to mention that Baal was misogynistic, preferring male hosts. Although he was not averse to screwing her, he was hardly the first boss she’d slept with, and later, when the Go’auld, Athena, took Charlotte as a host, offering her increased longevity, Lord Baal’s need for sex had only increased. Athena seemed equally attracted to him, and she was equally devastated when they heard the Tok’ra had killed him.
So, the dying woman could understand why Athena had been so impatient to travel by Ha’tak to Brownsville, Wisconsin. She had been hoping that the Goa’uld who’d seemed to tag Ziva David with Nish’ta was Baal or at least a surviving clone. It wasn’t exactly logical that the Goa’uld could be Baal or his clone, as he’d never claimed access to Nish’ta when she’d been his assistant, but Athena wasn’t in the mood to remain cautious. Evidently, she had missed Lord Baal far more than she’d let on to Charlotte. Athena was bitterly disappointed to learn that the Goa’uld in Brownsville was not Baal, nor one of his clones. He was a minor Goa’uld from Ancient Persia who ruled by taking over the host, Phraates IV and ascended the throne by murdering his father and brothers to become the ruler of Parthia around 37 BC. He’d been trapped on the planet when Ra departed in 2995 BC and had survived by swapping hosts after being stranded for several millennia.
While Athena accepted his story unquestioningly, Charlotte’s intuition told her Phraates was hiding something. What he was concealing, she wasn’t certain of; maybe it was the nish’ta? Athena had been right about that; he did have some nish’ta. Phraates claimed he’d discovered a cache of it when he returned to Giza on one of his periodic pilgrimages to try to locate and unbury the gate, but he was unsuccessful. He concluded wrongly that, despite the legends, Ra must have taken the Chappa’ai with him when he departed the planet.
Athena insisted that Phraates turn over his nish’ta supplies to her. Naturally, he protested, but Athena was obdurate, threatening to turn him over to the T’auri, and Charlotte could tell he did not want that, especially when informed that they had allied themselves with the Tok’ra, who had removed Baal from his host and executed him. Phraates was pissed off at losing it but still handed it over, and Ziva David as well, when Athena demanded her, too, as payment for keeping quiet about his presence on Earth. He agreed to hand Tali DiNozzo’s mother over to Athena readily enough, saying she was none too bright anyway, and they were welcome to her.
In hindsight, Phraates’ surrender seemed to happen too readily. They had obviously underestimated Ziva David (who was, after all, an assassin), or maybe Phraates had set them up. As pliant as the former member of the Mossad acted, torturing Anthony DiNozzo’s smarmy letch of a father known as Anthony DiNozzo Senior, readily enough; however, when Athena ordered the former Mossad-trained killer to shoot him, somehow, she managed to defy the order, turning the gun on Charlotte instead.
Time was running out! Her life in review had been replaying from the moment Ziva David turned the gun on her, and two bullets entered her chest. This was the end, and she wondered why her symbiote never even tried to save her when, suddenly, Athena exited her body via her mouth, flying at the assassin’s throat. As Charlotte Mayfield drew her last breaths, she realised that Athena had never intended to save her. She’d likely decided that Ziva David as a host could get her close to Tali DiNozzo and Charlotte; therefore, she had already served her purpose. Mayfield’s painful epiphany about no longer being useful was her very last thought as she drew one long agonising breath; the anaesthetic effect from her symbiote was no longer present.
Charlotte Mayfield died in excruciating agony!
~o0o~
Ziva watched it all unfold as if in slow motion, although the beast emerging from the blonde woman’s mouth moved incredibly fast. It launched itself at her, travelling through the air so rapidly she barely had time to blink as it landed on her throat. All she could do was passively watch it happen, held completely in thrall by that damn drug they had breathed on her. She did think, viewing the beast, that it reminded her of a leviathan in Jewish myths, or a terrifying primordial sea monster resembling a dragon, but in miniature. As it attached itself to her throat and slipped nimbly around to the nape of her neck, proceeding to enter her body and attach itself to her brainstem, she felt an excruciating pain as the nish’ta disappeared instantaneously. Almost as if a switch had been flicked. As the monster burrowed its way into her being, a random thought popped into her head that this was more like a Dybbuk – a possessor demon in Jewish mythology than a leviathan. Dybbuk were thought to be the souls of dead people who temporarily possessed the living.
/“We are Goa’uld, a race of Gods, and you are now my willing slave. You will do my bidding, or I will make your life a long and torturous one,”/ a voice told Ziva inside her head.
“I will not submit to demons, Dybbuk!” Ziva spat out her words, furiously angry.
/“There is no need to shout; I can read your thoughts, you cannot hide from me,”/ the voice in her head sneered at her arrogantly.
/“Now I own you, body and soul. If you are compliant and do not try to fight me, you will live for millennia in opulence and power. If you try to resist me, you will fail, and I will inflict pain upon you like you cannot imagine. I will force you to live ten times your normal life expectancy so you can suffer every hour for your insolence.”/
Ziva wisely decided not to express her feelings of pure rage at this possessor demon. However, she would not submit; she was Mossad. Ziva David had been chosen at birth to become a Kidon elite, taught by the best of the best to resist mind control drugs and brainwashing. She would find a way to kill the Dybbuk because she was Mossad’s finest; the daughter of Eli David (former Director of the Mossad), she was an elite Kidon assassin. Ziva David refused to submit!
SHE REFUSED!
Suddenly, every nerve cell in Ziva’s body was activated at once. She felt indescribable pain, something she never believed possible. David had been tortured by the best in the business as preparatory training for her admission into the ranks of the elite Kidon unit and always passed with flying colours. Ziva had learned to embrace the pain to make herself stronger; she embraced it so it fuelled her anger, and she had learned that anger numbed the pain enough to make it tolerable. That didn’t work this time; if anything, it dialled it up exponentially. The more enraged she became, the worse the pain grew until finally her nervous system decided to act like the adult in the room and she blacked out!
Returning to consciousness sometime later (although how long her loss of consciousness lasted, she did not know), she groaned. Her body felt like she had run ten back-to-back marathons before being worked over by one of Mossad’s most sadistic trainers in the torture training classes she’d endured. Every nerve ending still felt on fire, and a seductively sweet voice inside her head spoke to her.
/“Well, I’m sorry about that, Ziva David, but you must surely concede that you have brought it on yourself. Did I not inform you that I could read your mind? We are one now, although I am your God and you are my slave, to do with what I will. Cooperate, and you will live a long and comfortable life. Resist, and you will live an even longer life, but it will be filled with constant pain that would drive a mere human mad. I’ll inflict the most tremendous suffering imaginable.”/
“Now, first things first. It’s time to take out the trash; I believe that it is a T’auri saying!” The demon told her, speaking aloud this time; it was a parody of Ziva’s voice, but it sounded like it had been run through a voice distortion device to disguise it from forensic investigation. How had she gotten into this mess?
The demon within Ziva produced a weapon from a thigh holster on her leg – Ziva’s leg that wasn’t there before she lost consciousness, or was it, and she hadn’t noticed, under the thrall of that damned drug. She tried to stop the dybbuk hijacking her body, but it was as if she was impotent to stop the Dybbuk as she pointed it at the deceased blonde female whom Ziva had shot.
Firing it once, she instructed, “This is a zat’ni’katel. One blast stuns, two blasts kill,” she said, firing it again. “And three blasts in quick succession will disintegrate matter,” the demon continued. True to her word, she fired the weird-looking weapon for a third time, and the demon’s former human host disappeared right before Ziva’s disbelieving eyes.
The Demon gave a sardonic chuckle. /“And let that be a lesson to you, Ziva David. While you were passed out after I overloaded your pain centres for your brazen insolence, I took the opportunity to skip through your memories and what a gloriously gory journey it was,”/ it purred inside her head seductively.
Ziva tried to block out the voice but was unsuccessful.
/“You have been very busy, assassinating your foes, haven’t you, my dear? Or the people your father Eli told you were your foes. He even commanded you to kill his own son, your brother. Most people would be squeamish about carrying out such a thing and refuse, but not you,”/ the Dybbuk marvelled, almost referentially.
Ziva was not proud of her fratricide, at least not in more recent years, having learnt that Ari had a life and side to him that she’d known nothing about, including a fiancé. Eli had killed Ari’s mother, a Palestinian doctor in Gaza with whom he had a sexual relationship, to conceive her elder half-brother, and she could understand how that had destroyed any chance of them having a familial relationship. If Eli had killed her mother, she would have wanted to kill him, too.
However, back in 2005, a younger Ziva truly believed her father was omnipotent (much like this evil narcissistic Dybbuk); he genuinely believed his will was righteous and therefore must be obeyed without question. Eli used her to punish his son (and her half-brother), Ari, for failing to show unquestioning loyalty to him; using his execution to further bolster her allegiance to him personally, not Mossad. She was to reach that painful epiphany far too late to change the David family history. Just as Mike Franks had used Gibbs to execute the man who killed his agent, Kurt Mitchell and Gibbs’ family, whom the NIS agent was protecting. He’d won his loyalty by encouraging a bereaved young father to seek retribution that no judicial system would condone.
Revenge was what had ultimately landed her in this horrific situation. Now she must find a way out. She looked across at the unconscious man lying bloody and beaten, his breathing shallow, and every so often, he would moan. She remembered beating Tony’s father viciously because she’d been ordered to do so under the control of the nish’ta, despite not wanting to hurt him, since she had a soft spot for the old letch. Not to mention, he was Tali’s grandfather, and he had travelled with her daughter and Tony to Israel and Europe after she’d staged her death. Tali knew him, and according to McGee, she adored him. She must never find out what she’d done, or it would fracture their relationship, which was going to be shaky already, especially when she regained custody of the almost six-year-old and took her home.
Ziva felt a bolt of pain reverberate through her body and realised the Dybbuk was yelling at her inside her head. /“Do not ignore me, David. While you possess one or two skills that are useful to me, I find your daughter’s abilities much more enticing. I have been trying to capture her for almost a year now. If you refuse to serve me, I will replace you and make Tali my host. Her stubborn father may have been hiding her, but now that I have seized that pathetic Goa’uld Phraates’ Nish’ta, I can finally compel humans to reveal her whereabouts.”
She laughed evilly, /“I should have said, you will acquire the information for me since I understand that you are highly skilled in interrogating people. I look forward to watching your work!”/
Suddenly, many pieces of the puzzle fell into place. Tony had broken off contact with the few people he’d maintained contact with at NCIS: Eleanore Bishop (the silly little NSA agent, who Odette Malone was courting for an undercover CIA mission), Abby Scuito, Delilah and McGee. He must have found out about the Dybbuk and laid a false trail which she’d been merrily following, caught up in his slipcreek as they lay low.
But ma lahazazel!
Why not reach out to Gibbs for his help, even if the relationship between the two men was no longer close? Tony was an adequate investigator, she conceded grudgingly, but he’d never grown up. McGee said Agent Todd had likened him to Peter Pan, a perpetual man-boy, which explained why he loved to play pretend and dress up. Granted, it made him useful for going undercover, but he wasn’t tough, not like Gibbs was.
Leroy Jethro Gibbs would go to the ends of the earth and then he would likely plumb the depths of the underworld and beyond to protect Ziva’s daughter because he was a soft touch when innocent children, particularly when they were in mortal danger, were concerned. He also felt beholden to her because she killed her half-brother to save his life. Gibbs owed her!
So, it would now fall upon her to save Tali; she would do anything to prevent the demon from getting her hooks into her precious child. She should have asked Gibbs to look after her from the get-going! Meanwhile, she must keep the demon happy…make her believe that she was complying.
“What do you want of me?” Ziva managed to ask aloud, struggling mightily to sound submissive like she knew she must, for Tali’s sake.
“Don’t worry, obedience will become easier the more you practise it. I command you to demonstrate to me how you kill using a paperclip. It seems to be one of your favourite methods of execution, and I must ensure this is an effective technique for a Goa’uld to rely upon when stealth is preferred over weapons. I have enemies I want eliminated; if it pleases me, we will use it to get rid of those people who stand in my way.”
She pointed at a packet of silver-coloured metal clips on Senior’s desk. “As a method of getting rid of undesirables, it seems that even without weapons, they are a thing that many people have on hand. How ironic that this pathetic pile of excrement avoided a bullet only to die by a seemingly innocuous item of stationery?” she laughed evilly, the distorted quality of Ziva’s voice making her want to vomit.
“Pl…plea,” Ziva stuttered. Taking a deep breath, she tried again, her pride making it difficult to beg. “Please spare him. He is my daughter’s grandfather, pathetic though he may be,” she admitted.
/“He knows too much about our plans. If you refuse to show me this absorbing technique to kill, I will do so myself,” the demon vowed indifferently. “Then I will hunt down your daughter and take her as a host. I’m sure, as a very young child, she will be much more obedient than her foolish mother. And just so you know, it isn’t really recommended for a mature symbiote to take such a young host. Perhaps it will drive her insane, but no matter, I only need her to switch on some technology for me,”/ she taunted Ziva callously.
Feeling a maelstrom of emotions, chiefly unbridled anger mixed with a certain horror at what she was about to do, Ziva picked up the paperclips. She had never executed anyone (other than her brother, Ari) with whom she had a prior relationship. This was, for better or worse, a member of her daughter’s family, a part of her lineage. Someone she knew and was fond of, although he was vainglorious and shallow of character, he did not deserve to die. Yet she must protect her daughter at all costs, wasn’t that why she had staged her own death and left her child with the juvenile man-child Tony four long years ago?
Had she known how long it would take, she might have done things differently, but what was done could not be undone, no matter how much one might wish it were so. Preparing the paperclips, she opted to make this as swift as possible, grateful to Yehewa that the ‘Real Anthony DiNozzo’ was unconscious and would not know what was happening.
Taking a deep breath, knowing that when it came to choosing between Tali and Senior, there was no option, she glanced at him as she prepared to do what must be done and found he was conscious. The betrayal in his eyes told her he knew what was coming but not why.
Why did he have to regain awareness at this moment? Unaware that tears leaked from her eyes, she whispered, “I’m sorry. This is for Tali,” as she plunged the first paperclip into his carotid artery, ignoring his weak whimpering.
Hardening her heart against weak sentimentally, she elected to finish this execution as fast as possible. Normally, though not always, she used just one paperclip, piercing the carotid artery, but was desperate to finish this terrible act as fast as she could. Ziva used extra wires, plunging them in his brachial, femoral and radial arteries so he bled out as quickly as possible. Inside her head, she could feel the Dybbuk cheering as a random thought occurred to Ziva that she found distressing. If Athena used the Zat’nika’tel again, Senior would never even be afforded a proper resting place. At Least Ari was given a funeral, even if her father’s family had no clue how he died or that he had betrayed Israel and they’d been so solicitous to her at his funeral. Softly, she began to pray over Tony’s father (much as she had done for Ari); it was all she could do for Tali’s grandfather, unfortunately.
She was relieved that Senior bled out rapidly as she was forced to listen to the possessor demon crowing about how much they had enjoyed her demonstration and ranting angrily about how they were going to use paperclips to assassinate a bitter rival, a Russian oligarch who had disparaged her or the former host. Just as Ziva thought she was going to scream, there was a heavy pounding on the door.
“Police! Open the door!”
Ziva felt the Dybbuk pull the alien-looking weapon that had killed and disintegrated the blonde female whom Ziva had shot, out of the holster on her thigh, even as she tried to resist it, but the demon was stronger than she was.
So, she argued with her instead. “One of the neighbours must have heard the shots fired earlier and called the police. I can distinguish at least three voices; there may well be more, and they’ll shoot me even if you do hit one or two. We need to go,” she argued forcefully.
It wasn’t just because she did not want more lives sacrificed, but if the police shot her, the demon would just steal one of the cops to act as a host and go after Tali anyway. If anyone had any hope of defeating this monster, it was a highly trained Kidon operative trained to resist brainwashing and mind control techniques, not some simple LEO who likely was just a patrol cop. Fortunately, the Dybbuk must have realised Ziva made sense, operating the rings that allowed her/it/them to transport up to the tacky gold spaceship as the cops were in the process of kicking in the front door of Senior’s apartment. The first cop who came through the front door was hit by the zat’nika’tel, dropping like a stone, which prevented the rest of his colleagues from storming in just long enough for Ziva and the demon to disappear.
~o0o~
On Atlantis:
In the family apartment of Alex Paddington and his daughter Anabelle (Belle), resided and Atlantis, the living embodiment of the Alteran/Ancient/Ancestors who sacrificed her physical body many millennia ago, to become the impressive flying city now floating on the planet New Lantea, had been hard at work making changes. Those improvements included enlarging their living space, which had been quite generous for the father and daughter, but it had been much too cramped for another adult and two kids to live in comfortably. Josh DiNozzo (now Muir) wasn’t sure how it worked technically, and he wasn’t too sure most of the adults here, despite the star city overflowing with brainiacs in Atlantis, understood how she’d done it either. Yet she’d somehow joined two other apartments with Alex and Belle’s existing one, rearranging the huge space it created to make lots of extra living space for his mom, him and his sister, who had come here from another reality. Now with three extra bedrooms, a much bigger kitchen than before, and two more bathrooms, plus a larger living area with a private kids’ area for them to play in, it was a pretty cool space.
They’d formed a crazy, blended family with Alex (aka Tony DiNozzo) acting as an uncle to his mom’s two kids, Josh, who was almost thirteen and his cute baby sister, Mikelle. His mom, Paula, was now an auntie to Belle. Who was thrilled to have more family. Before coming to Atlantis, Josh’s family used Josh’s father’s last name, DiNozzo. But Josh was old enough to understand that bad guys were looking for his alternate reality cousin and uncle, so the pair had come here to Atlantis earlier this year to hide and keep Belle safe, just like the alt-reality refugees did as well. He couldn’t deny it was hard, losing their link to his dad by having to use his grandmother’s surname, Muir, instead of DiNozzo, but Tali was a cute kid. She was almost the same age as Hannah Rose would have been, his beloved sister who died when she was almost three, and he was determined to look after his alt-cousin even if it meant making sacrifices like changing their name as she had. At least they all got to keep their first names; Alex had given up both of his names to protect Belle (as she had too), and he’d been a DiNozzo a lot longer than Josh.
Right now, he and his best friend, Jack Hotchner, were playing a computer game based on flying the Alterans’ puddle jumpers, sort of like Star Wars, except it was a flight simulator their AI had built together with them in their computer programming class. Wrinkling his brow, Jack was still trying to make sense of the familial relationship that existed between Belle, Jack and the baby Mikelle, as Josh attempted to explain it to him, but only succeeded in getting Jack more confused.
“Why isn’t she your alt reality sister?” Jack questioned him.
Josh sighed in frustration because, to be honest, he didn’t completely get it either.
“Technically, she would be my alt reality half-sister because Alex isn’t married to my mom in this reality. Belle is still too young to understand the science behind alternate realities, but she knows about cousins because, before she came to Atlantis, she lived with two cousins in England. We figure it is easier to refer to Mikelle and me as her cousins,” Josh explained.
“Hey, I get it. I had no idea there were alternate realities,” he said. “It’s pretty wild!”
He’d no sooner made that highly astute observation than they heard a shrill scream from the darkened room (Belle’s bedroom), even though the little girl had gone to bed about an hour ago.
“What in New Lantea is that?” Jack asked, looking quite perturbed, although Josh wasn’t looking all that blasé either, as Alex sped past them with Josh’s mom hard on his heels.
“It’s Belle. She has nightmares sometimes,” he explained to Jack briefly.
Jack looked concerned. “Does she have them often? They sound bad,” he stated baldly.
“Yeah, they are. She’s had maybe four since we moved in. Mom thought it might be because of the changes with us moving in, or maybe she’s not an only kid anymore, but Alex says she used to have them a lot more at first after the bad guys tried to kidnap her. She started having them every night after that. Sometimes more.”
“Belle was abducted?” Jack sounded sympathetic.
“Nah, they tried to snatch her away from Alex twice, but they escaped. Mom says he’s a really good agent and a genius at getting out of trouble.
“So, if it weren’t for her dad, the bad guys would have taken her. Does anyone know why they tried to kidnap her twice?” Jack enquired.
Before Josh had a chance to reply, they could finally make out something the little girl was saying, over and over.
“Em-aa, em-aa, em-aa.
“I didn’t realise that Belle’s mother was Jewish?” Jack looked at his friend.
“No. How do you know?”
Jack grimaced. “She keeps calling out to her Ima. That’s Jewish for mama or mommy.”
Almost an hour later, Josh’s mom and Alex emerged from her room. His alt-uncle looked exhausted, and his mom didn’t look all that much better either.
“Is Belle okay?” he asked worriedly.
Alex gave a weighty sigh. “She’s asleep again, but I’ll probably sleep in her room with her tonight. It’s been months since she had such a bad nightmare.
“It was about her, Ima wasn’t it?” Jack asked his piano teacher bluntly. “She was Jewish?”
“That’s yes and yes, Jack, but please keep that information to yourself, other than your dad. We are trying to keep her Jewish heritage a secret, as even here, she isn’t completely safe. Gossip gets passed around, and the wrong person can hear it and pass it on,” Alex explained seriously.
“Don’t worry, I know how to keep a secret,” Jack promised. “I know I messed up before, and that’s why we ended up on Atlantis, but I’ve grown up a lot since then,” he said with such a serious air that Tony and Paula carefully avoided looking at each other, fearing they might offend his dignity by laughing.
His teacher nodded gravely. “Thanks, I appreciate you keeping that information about her mom under wraps. “I know she can annoy you at times,” he commiserated.
Jack pulled a face. “I just wish she’d asked someone else about why Nikki should eat Turkish Delight in the afternoons to make Erica come soon,” he said, blushing in embarrassment.
Alex looked blank, but Josh nodded. “I know. She asked me too, but I didn’t know either. Told her to ask my mom,” he said, shrugging. “Why were you upset about her asking you?”
Paula gave a gurgle of laughter that had Alex looking incredulous. “Oh no, she didn’t?” he asked, with raised eyebrows indicating mock horror.
Paula nodded solemnly. “She did!”
“Oh fu-uss,” Alex barely avoided dropping an F-bomb. “I’m really sorry about that, Jack,” he sympathised with the teenager. The teenager was quite sheltered, probably due to being in witness protection for quite a few years. He didn’t even realise that Davinia Dixon had a rather serious crush on him yet.
“Why is everyone acting weird about Turkish Delight? I mean it tastes gross, but I don’t get it,” Josh said, not having a clue about the subtext of their conversation, just like Belle, as Jack choked and blushed even harder while Paula and Alex laughed their heads off.
Later, during the early hours of the morning, when everyone was tucked up in bed asleep, the Muirs (even Mikelle) and Alex were woken by Belle having another nightmare, even with her father sleeping right beside her in her bed. When Josh, his sister and mother moved into the family apartment that Atlantis had prepared for them more than a month ago, he’d been curious about why Belle had such a really big bed for a little girl. Alex had explained that she sometimes had bad dreams after bad guys tried to abduct her, but if he slept beside her, it helped her settle quickly and go back to sleep. And his uncle was right…until tonight.
Belle kept sobbing and screaming that her mother was hurting her even in her sleep, and it took Alex and his mom a really long time to wake her up. He ended up taking his baby sister into his bed and turning on some music that Alex had recorded to put the little one to sleep. It took a long time for them to calm Belle down, and Josh heard Dr O’Shea coming in to help. She talked about night terrors, but when Belle finally woke, she was still frightened and upset and wouldn’t stop crying for hours.
Eventually, everyone went back to sleep about an hour before it was time to get up and go to school, so of course, they all slept in and were really late. His Mom wanted Belle to stay home and rest, but she was stubborn and wanted to go to school because she and her best friend, Kazumi, were doing a special project together. Alex looked very worried about her, but as Josh was learning, once Belle Paddington made up her mind, she was extremely determined, so they all ended up going late to school and work.
Josh just hoped he’d be able to stay awake in class!
