Reading Time: 127 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
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 threatening the life of Tali DiNozzo, in Atlantis.
Artist: Germankitty
Chapter 17
Alex was at work when he received a panicked comms call asking him to drop everything because Belle was distraught, wouldn’t stop screaming and was freaking out her classmates. He left a staff meeting at a dead run, asking Paula to take over for him. It looked like the experienced mom had been right after all, and Belle should have stayed home today, but she was her mother’s daughter in so many ways. She might have inherited both of his Alteran genes, but she was willful and refused to listen once she’d made up her mind over something, just like Ziva. You had to pick your moments if you wanted to have even a hope of changing her mind.
As he rushed to the school, he remembered how adamant Tali had been when Felix Girad offended her way back when they’d first arrived on Atlantis, and how she’d uninvited him to a movie night and couldn’t be talked into reconsidering. In desperation, he told her how it felt to be the only person on his team left out, citing his exclusion from Ziva’s housewarming/dinner party. A dumbass parenting choice that, in hindsight, had inevitably led her to speculate (correctly) that the person who hurt his feelings by excluding him was her mother.
Now, as he made his way back to her classroom at a dead run, he was replaying the conversation he had with Aoife O’Shea about Belle last night, or was it early this morning?
“She hasn’t had two nightmares in a single night for months. And she’s never had a bad nightmare before while I’m sleeping right next to her,” he fretted, tiredly.
“I’m sure there’s nothing to worry about, Alex.” Aoife patted him on the shoulder gently, aware that for all his tactility, he was now also wary of people touching him.
“There’s been a lot of changes in her life with the refugees coming, and while Belle’s is thrilled to have siblings, slash cousins, and an aunt in Paula, it’s still a big change for her.”
“You think this is because of sibling rivalry?” Tony asked anxiously, although it didn’t feel right to him. Then again, what did he know about bringing up children?
“No, not necessarily. Just that there have been a lot of changes on top of her coming to Atlantis, which has meant leaving behind her cousins, Skye and Aidan. Plus, seeing Paula with her children might have stirred up feelings of loss surrounding her own mother, which is normal,” she said kindly.
He laughed bitterly because Aoife was one of the few who knew how much that knowledge would pain him. As he raced to her schoolroom, he wasn’t so sure Tali’s nightmares were as simple as missing her mother and feeling she had to compete with Josh and Mikelle for his attention. She had never freaked out like this before, not while she was at school and he was still here on Atlantis. Once she had a meltdown when he was off-world, but that certainly wasn’t the case today.
Now, he worried about how this might affect her socially with the other kids.
He wanted her to have a normal childhood, unlike his own…even though he’d loved his mother. Perhaps it was the alcohol or the drugs that she tried self-medicating with, but if he were brutally honest, she’d never exactly been playing with a full deck of cards. Dressing him up in sailor suits when he was eight was not exactly normal, as he was to find out later at boarding school after she died. Nor was her insistence that he perform at dinner parties on their grand piano, wearing a bespoke Armani tuxedo to impress the guests (Senior’s investors/marks in his latest get-rich-quick schemes), something that regular kids ever did. Other mothers didn’t decorate their kids’ bedrooms in Louis 14th style décor when a Superman theme was what he’d begged for his 7th birthday, but Annabelle had deemed superheroes too bourgeois for her little prince. Then, adding insult to injury, the Trompe l’oeil painted on an entire wall of his room had regularly given him nightmares about vampires wanting to turn him into the undead after she let him watch Bela Lugosi as Count Dracula because Senior was ‘too busy’ to spend time with her.
As he exited the transporter, he could hear his daughter screaming. She sounded terrified, and unless she’d fallen asleep in class, then she couldn’t have been having a nightmare, so why was she flipping out? While he had already been running full pelt, he forced himself to go faster, finally bursting into the classroom that the younger children used. Aside from her teacher, Cassie Fraiser and Belle, the room was empty. Cassie was talking to her, trying to calm her down by distracting her, but he could tell it wasn’t working.
Belle’s features were ravaged by the evidence that she’d already cried a torrent of tears; her eyes were almost swollen shut from excessive lacrimation. The usually fastidiously clean child was covered in snot, and his sharp sense of smell detected the acrid odour of urine. If she hadn’t been so distressed, his daughter would have been utterly mortified, but it told him that Belle must have been utterly petrified to have wet herself, as she clearly had done.
Ignoring all her less-than-pleasant bodily emissions, he swept her up into his arms. He just hoped she would instinctively recognise his presence as he started to rock her like a baby, crooning to her, not even truly aware of what he was saying or if he was using words. Much later, Cassie would tell him he was speaking to her in a foreign language, one she didn’t recognise, and Janus Progenius informed him that it was an Ancients’ dialect. Looking back on the situation later, he didn’t understand what possessed him to do that.
Eventually, Belle realised who was holding her, but it took a long time for her to settle enough to tell him what was wrong. He wasn’t sure exactly how long had passed, although he was vaguely aware that Cassie was still there and Drs O’Shea and Dr Heng had joined them and were speaking softly. He vaguely heard Cassie explain that JP had alerted Maddie’s father, who’d come asap to remove the other children as they were also becoming upset, so that Cassie could remain with Belle.
After everything else failed and with his permission, Aoife had Dr Beckett (who was the medical doctor on duty) administer a small amount of a very mild sedative, not to knock her out, but to calm her down enough for them to try to find out what was wrong.
Even with the sedative on board, it apparently took Tali well over 25 minutes for her to calm down enough to communicate with him. And at first, it was mostly gibberish, something about Ziva, a monster who was coming to get her and Senior. It sounded like whatever her nightmares had been about last night, but it was getting progressively darker. He looked over at Aoife, and his look spoke volumes. This was more than feeling insecure because of Paula, Mikelle, and Josh coming to live with them. More than just missing her Paddington cousins or Ziva. He could tell she was trying to stay rational, but deep within him, an overwhelming feeling of dread was rising to the surface. He didn’t like the direction his thoughts zeroed in on, and he refocused his attention back on Tali.
Hoping that using her real name might get through to her and beyond caring about secrets, although Aoife knew her real identity, and he figured that Heng and Cassie could be trusted too, he called softly. “Tali, it’s me, Sweetheart; it’s Aba,” using the name she called him back when he believed she was not his own flesh and blood because why would her mother do that to her child?
Back when he first resigned and left NCIS, Tony tried to discourage her from using it, thinking it was wrong to encourage her to believe he was her father when it just wasn’t physically possible. After all, he’d never been ‘with’ her mother after he tracked her down in Israel to warn her Benham Parsa wanted them dead, which was when Tali had been conceived. Initially, Tony figured Adam Eschel was Tali’s father, since he and Ziva had been together when she returned to Tel Aviv to bury Eli. Then, once they were in Paris, Tali began imitating other children, and she started to call him Papa, but by then, he’d decided that it wasn’t such a heinous crime, even if he wasn’t her bio dad, and she used to switch between Papa and Aba, although, coming to Atlantis, the Aba salutation had become too dangerous.
The familiarity of the name seemed to be working because she turned to look at him, hiccupping from the disastrous effects on her breathing that her bout of hysteria had caused. “Aba?” she asked, as if she couldn’t trust her own eyes.
“Yes, it’s me, Sweetie, it’s Aba. I’m here, Aba’s here. You’re okay, Tali, you’re safe.”
After that, she calmed down gradually as she stopped fighting the sedative. “Aba, Ima n’est pas morte, et un monstre terrible, horrible s’est enfoui dans sa tête. It made her do really bad things to Grand-père. Ima put paperclips into his neck, his arms, and his legs,” she told him, speaking in a mishmash of English and French as she was wont to do when she was exhausted, distraught or excited.
To illustrate her point, she touched Tony’s neck where his carotid artery was located, then touched his upper arms near his brachial artery and then the radial artery, before continuing with her horrific account.
“He started bleeding. He bled and bled. He’s dead, Aba, he died. Grand père is dead; I saw him leave his body. Il avait peur et était en colère contre Ima. Why did she do that to him? Why?” she pleaded with him to make sense of what she’d seen as she started sobbing brokenheartedly.
Even as he held her close, trying to comfort her, he felt an icy certainty wash over him. Tali had the same Ancient Communication gene as him, but aside from the family and Jack, no one else knew that. Chaya Sar had told him that their communication gene also encompassed psychic abilities. However, she’d also told him that Tali was too young to read minds, and he was so fucked up emotionally that it probably wasn’t something he would need to worry about.
Somehow, his 5-year-old daughter (nearly six, he could almost hear her chide him) had made a psychic connection with her mother back in the Milky Way Galaxy, millions and millions of light-years away from Atlantis, or maybe it was billions of light-years?
He didn’t understand how it was possible or why she’d done it, but he knew that she had! He also knew that if he tried to explain that to anyone, they would tell him he was losing his marbles, which is why he knew he needed help.
“Atlantis, can you contact Chaya Sar and tell her that we need her help, please?” he said, as Atlantis replied in his head that she was already on her way.
He wasn’t sure if Atlantis herself had reached out to the descended Ancient, or if she’d somehow felt Belle’s fear and distress. All he cared about was that Chaya was on her way to help them because he had no clue what to do in this situation.
Rocking his little girl, he glanced briefly at Cassie and Aoife. “Alert Commander Au Claire and Colonel Sheppard that the High Priestess of Proculus will be arriving asap,” he said before redirecting his complete attention back onto his child.
~o0o~
The bullpen at NCIS was tense. They were working on cold cases since they were currently down two members. McGee was still being detained, had been for the past two weeks, by the Department of Defence, although the cover story was that he was assisting the NID with a situation. Of course, Bishop was fairly sure that ‘the situation’ was one that he’d help create if her DoD contact were to be believed, though they knew little else, and Tim’s wife, Delilah, remained incredibly tight-lipped. Even Director Vance seemed to be completely in the dark about where he was or when he’d be back. Although if Bishop’s contact knew what she was talking about, it wasn’t a done deal that he would be back, since apparently, his wanton hacking might have finally caught up with him. Ange Kerrigan (her contact) had hinted at a rumour doing the rounds that he’d pissed off the new POTUS, and if that was true, he might lose his security clearance, which would sound the death knell to his career as a federal agent.
As for the team, apart from being down one senior agent, Jack Sloane was off this week doing a professional development course at the FBI. Ellie hadn’t enquired too closely about what it was, although she knew that Jack needed to keep her psychology qualifications up to date. As a profiler, Jack was required to complete a mandatory number of professional development hours per year. Which left just herself and Nick Torres holding down the fort, working cold cases with an extremely grumpy Gibbs, already very pissed off because he couldn’t extract Tim from whatever difficulties he’d gotten himself into.
Plus, as Bishop knew only too well, their esteemed leader hated cold cases on a good day, when there were no active cases to occupy the MCRT. He had been furious when Special Agent Grantham’s team was given an investigation this morning that normally would have been assigned to their team. Apparently, the director had decided that with just the three of them, the major case response team would continue to be assigned to investigating cold cases until Jack returned or Gibbs agreed to having a TDA agent added to the team; whichever occurred first!
Sighing, she studied the case notes of a cold case investigated by the MCRT on the 16th of May 2005, where a female lieutenant, a medic serving onboard the USS Ronald Reagan, had been sexually assaulted and received severe head injuries that left her brain dead. If they ever caught the rapist, they would be looking at a murder charge. Bishop was reading the investigative report of the team profiler, Caitlin Todd, who, in Ellie’s humble opinion, had provided a standard profile of the killer; there was nothing in it that helped throw up new leads. She wished Jack were around to look it over and give her another opinion, since she obviously was not a profiler. Essentially, Todd believed that the lieutenant’s significant other had been the perpetrator because they had had several loud arguments in the days leading up to her death. Still, they were never able to charge him because he had a cast-iron alibi that even Gibbs couldn’t break during interrogation, so they’d been forced to let him go.
As she searched for the SFA’s report, curious to see what Tony had made of the case, she noted that Tim, Todd and Gibbs had handled the investigation without him. She wondered where DiNozzo had been during the case.
It was weirdly ironic that her phone rang right then, and when she answered, a man babbled something about wanting to speak to Eleanor Bishop. She’d picked up the phone, announcing her name and designation, but judging by how rattled the caller sounded, Ellie decided to cut the guy some slack. Some people had phobias about talking on the phone, so she reassured her caller that he was speaking to the right person.
“So, how may I help you, Mr…?”
“Boaz, Raymond Boaz, Ma’am,” he said quickly. “ I’m the building manager where Mr Anthony DiNozzo lives. Tony said that if anything happened to his father or he needed help, I should get in touch with you or Agent McLee.”
Ellie recalled he’d asked her and Tim about eleven months ago, before he’d gone off-grid, if they would keep an eye on his dad. He’d explained he would be hard to contact for a while, and they’d agreed. Tim, because he seemed to genuinely like hanging out with Senior, and Ellie, because Tony was a friend and mentor. She wasn’t so enamoured by his grifter father, though and thought it was pretty skeevy how Senior tried to flirt with her.
“I think you mean Agent McGee, Mr Boaz, but McGee’s off on assignment right now,” she lied about his whereabouts for her friend’s sake. “What can I do for you?”
“There’s been a murder in Mr DiNozzo’s apartment. I think that it’s Mr DiNozzo Senior, and the cops are here. I tried the number Tony gave me, but it says it’s out of service, so I was hoping you might be able to contact him?”
Ellie jumped up from her desk. “I’ll be there as soon as I can, Mr Boaz, and I’ll try to find him, if I can.”
As she put down the phone, Nick looked up from his cold case file with a hopeful expression. “What’s up, we got a case?”
As Ellie was about to reply, Gibbs rushed into the bullpen. “Grab your gear.”
“I thought we were on stand down until next week, when Jack is back on deck,” Ellie said distractedly, since she had intended to slip out and head to Tony’s father’s apartment. “Can’t someone else go, Gibbs? I’ve got personal business to attend to.”
“No, this can’t wait. This is NCIS business,” he barked. “I just got a call that the Chief was murdered,” he yelled at her angrily. “Come on, we can talk about this on the way.”
Ellie was surprised that Gibbs learned about Senior so quickly, as it wasn’t a secret at the office that he and Tony hadn’t stayed in contact after his resignation. Something happened when Gibbs got shot by one of the Lost Boys, and Gibbs had successfully forced Tony off the team. Oh, sure, DiNozzo found out that Ziva was dead, and he had a daughter who was already two years old, so ostensibly, he’d resigned to care for her. But Ellie had the distinct impression it was just the final straw he needed to head off into the wide blue yonder, putting Gibbs and NCIS far behind him.
As they entered the elevator, she couldn’t help asking, “Did Raymond Boaz call you too? I just got off the phone with him, less than a minute ago.” As she asked the question, Bishop realised quite logically that he must have called Gibbs right before he spoke to her.
“Who in the Sam Hill is Raymond Boaz?” he barked as he punched the G button for the ground floor, and the doors closed.
Nick asked (unwisely in Ellie’s opinion), “Who in the Sam Hill is the Chief?”
“The Chief is Anthony DiNozzo Senior,” Ellie explained swiftly, knowing Gibbs wouldn’t answer Nick and then replied to Gibbs’ demand as she saw his short fuse about to ignite. “ Raymond Boaz is the building manager in the apartment block where Mr DiNozzo lives. Boaz said that he thought he was dead and the cops were swarming all over the place.”
As the doors opened, they headed to the MCRT truck, piling in as Gibbs got behind the wheel. He pulled out of the car park, leaving a significant amount of rubber on the road in his haste to get to their destination across town.
“Damn the cops, they’ll be stomping around like a herd of elephants messing up my crime scene,” he responded furiously, continuing their dialogue.
“Your crime scene? How do you figure that, Gibbs?” Ellie asked, caught by surprise. “Did the director pull some strings to get us assigned the case?
“Was the victim a retired Navy or Marine?” Nick inquired pruriently
“The ‘Victim’ Torres was a member of our family,” Gibbs told him.
“Okay, but that doesn’t mean we have jurisdiction,” he argued, foolishly, albeit inadvertently pushing Gibbs’ buttons.
“The Chief worked as a consultant on numerous NCIS cases,” Gibbs insisted, although Ellie thought that was a bit thin.
“Did Director Vance clear it with the cops?”
“HE WILL!” Gibbs said, shooting her a glare that said, ‘if he knows what’s good for him.’
At which point she decided to hold her tongue; Gibbs wasn’t in the mood for a debate, and neither was she.
The trip to Anthony DiNozzo’s apartment was fast and terrifying! It was also conducted in furious silence as Nick exchanged ‘what the fuck is going on’ looks with Ellie, who could only shake her head and shrug. The truth was that after Tony resigned, everyone tried not to mention his name when Gibbs was around, especially when Tony’s departure had prompted a radical change in their boss’s demeanour. He became far less angry and belligerent. He gifted Tim with a watch that had been his grandfather’s, intimating that he looked on Tim as his surrogate son, something (according to Ducky), he’d reportedly once felt about Tony before he had become so antagonistic and adversarial towards him.
Plus, Tony’s departure had preceded their hunting down and execution of the execrable CIA operative Trent Kort, who they believed at that time was responsible for Ziva David’s death. Even before they learned that Kort hadn’t killed Ziva because she had faked her own death earlier this year, Ellie fancied that the four of them were already regretting their rush of blood in tracking Kort down and killing him instead of bringing him into custody and letting him face justice. It was certainly something she was very ashamed of, and Ellie assumed her team members felt the same as she did, too.
She thought about what they’d done every time they talked about Tony and Tali; therefore, it was just easier not to talk about them or even think about them too often. It was simpler to put out of her mind the sordid episode with Kort, the odious scumbag and assassin that he was. Then, eleven months ago, Tony emailed her to say he was going to be incommunicado and didn’t know when he’d be in contact again, so could she do him a favour and keep an eye on his father? If Ellie was being brutally honest, she’d felt an overwhelming sense of relief that he wasn’t going to be in contact. She wasn’t proud of herself, but it was the truth.
When Ziva, whose death they’d avenged, turned up alive and dared berate Gibbs and Tim for failing to realise she wasn’t dead, Ellie realised that none of them could afford to examine her death too closely. If they did, it would mean accepting the unpalatable truth that they’d killed another human being for killing her, who was obviously innocent of the crime they’d wrongly avenged, since Ziva David was never dead in the first place. Admittedly, the CIA assassin was a very bad individual, someone who wouldn’t even blink at killing people, and to prove that point, years before, Kort had tried to murder Tony and Dr Woods, nee Benoit, with a car bomb, taking out another person, a chauffeur instead. Yet the bottom line was that Ziva’s selfish actions, faking her death, led them to believe Kort not only killed her but attempted to kill Tali too and failed. That had pushed them over the edge of reason and turned them into monsters, no better than the people they tracked down and put behind bars.
A truth that was far too unpalatable, too unbearable to contemplate, and continue doing their jobs, hence, it was much easier to pretend it never happened. It was also easier not to discuss Tony or his daughter, to just enjoy how much more human and pleasant Gibbs was to work for now that Tony was no longer around. Even when Ziva returned, no one took her to task for the terrible harm she caused them all, but especially Tony and Tali. In fact, the others had greeted her as the long-lost prodigal daughter, welcoming her back with open arms, when the cold, harsh truth was she’d only come back because she needed Gibbs’ help to take down her adversary.
Now, as they careened round corners on what felt like two wheels, not four, Ellie couldn’t help feeling ashamed of how she’d stopped thinking of Tony as part of their family. Truthfully, she’d tried not to think about him at all. Now, after Ziva miraculously came back from the dead, the family they tried so hard to keep intact was literally falling apart. McGee was in extremely deep shit with the DoD, currently in some black hole, even if Gibbs insisted he’d get him released. Now, it seemed that Mr DiNozzo had been brutally murdered, and she couldn’t help but wonder if all their misfortunes were somehow related to more of Ziva’s foes, perhaps exacting revenge on her via proxy. That, or maybe it was karma catching up with them for their sins committed?
Silently, the abridged MCRT made its way to Mr DiNozzo’s apartment to confront his body as Gibbs forced his way inside with his usual pugnacious attitude to the local cops, as he argued with the detectives over jurisdictional issues.
“I asked you for Tony’s contact details, Gibbs, and you couldn’t even help me with a simple piece of information,” Lieutenant Andy Kochafis barked at him, clearly not welcoming his involvement or his showing up. “It wasn’t a fucking invitation for a joint investigation with NCIS. This is our case, and YOU have no jurisdiction.”
“Good, cuz you aren’t welcome at my crime scene, Kochafis. This is our case, Anthony DiNozzo Senior worked as a consultant for NCIS, he was one of ours, and we look after our own!” he said, responding to the first part of the lieutenant’s speech and ignoring the latter part that effectively told him to take a hike. He was spluttering angrily at the number of personnel already working the scene, with Metro PD’s crime scene unit already on site.
“Even if that is the case that he was a consultant, it doesn’t give you jurisdiction. Besides, if Tony were working at NCIS, it would still be our case, but you don’t even have a phone number to reach him, so the MPD can inform him about his dad. So much for being family,” the detective lieutenant scoffed sarcastically. “So, you can turn right around and take your ass back to the naval yard and stop contaminating my crime scene.”
As the two men were exchanging barbs and arguing jurisdictional issues, Ellie wandered over to stare at Tony’s father, partially aware that Nick had followed her and was standing to her left, also visually taking in the condition of the victim’s body. It was painfully obvious by the extensive bruising to his face and extremities that he’d been tortured before his death. As for the cause of death, she suspected that Jimmy would rule exsanguination (bleeding out) as his cause of death, as he was a waxy grey colour and lying in a large pool of blood. That’s if, of course, he got custody of Mr DiNozzo’s body, and that wasn’t a given.
Nick sucked in his breath. “They really did a number on this poor guy. Is it Tony DiNozzo’s father? I didn’t know him all that well, and he’s pretty messed up.”
Ellie nodded. “Yeah, it is. Whoever did this to him is…” words failed her because who would do this to an old guy in his eighties?
“One fucked up human, although my best guess would be that they were trying to interrogate him,” Torres said. “I’ve seen pictures of something similar, I think.”
“What about the pieces of wire?”
“Used to puncture multiple arteries, although just puncturing the carotid would probably have been enough to do the job. That’s no doubt how he bled out,” he spoke in a hushed tone. “Paperclips, that’s nasty!” he concluded, mindful that Ellie knew the victim.
There are a couple on the floor,” she pointed out the paperclips, looking rather green.
The disagreement over jurisdiction seemed to be reaching a crescendo, and Gibbs was becoming increasingly volatile at not getting his way. Then, just when she thought he might come to blows with the detective lieutenant (who seemed to know the boss), and get himself arrested, or have an apoplectic fit, another voice spoke over the top of both men.
“Right, I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you all to clear the scene. None of you has the security clearance to be here. Leave, immediately.”
Predictably, Gibbs eyed the smoothly attractive man in the expensive suit with a shit-ton of animosity. “Just who the hell do you think you are? This is my crime scene,” he snarled at him, predictably.
“Wrong, Agent Gibbs, this is way above your pay grade. It’s a matter of National Security. Please leave, or I’ll have you arrested,” he threatened calmly.
Ellie scrutinised the man intently. She guessed he was a spook; he just had that look about him. He was most probably with the CIA or NID. She didn’t think he was NSA as she didn’t recognise him, although it had been years since she worked for them, and she could be wrong.
Kochifis and Gibbs remained, stubbornly glaring at each other like a couple of snarling, snappy bulldogs, unwilling or genetically incapable of backing down, and now this unidentified guy was trying to chuck them out. This could get ugly, and she exchanged a look with her partner, Nick, who seemed to be finding the whole standoff comical.
With neither man willing to yield, the spook tapped his comms subtly. A bunch of black-clad personnel without insignia of any sort and armed to the teeth with P90 semi-automatic rifles, ghosted in and began escorting the various cops and crime scene techies, plus Ellie and Nick, out of the apartment. As Gibbs and the lieutenant were also physically ejected soon after, Ellie decided the spook was probably from the CIA’s SOG division, which would explain the paramilitary personnel.
What the hell could poor Mr DiNozzo have possibly gotten involved in that brought the CIA in to quarantine the crime scene? Elenor Bishop wondered if it was something that the Sherlocks had been investigating? Senior had been a lecherous old conman, but no one deserved to die like that, she concluded sorrowfully, thinking of Tony and Tali.
~o0o~
Tony was hanging around at the Midway II Station, feeling increasingly restless, trying to meditate in the cramped quarters they kept for quarantining personnel travelling between the Atlantis base and Stargate Command. There was a mandatory 12-hour period that he was tempted to circumvent; should he declare an emergency (and, as the head of the ISBI, it was within his purview to do so), but it would also call attention to him personally and professionally. With the situation regarding Ambassador Shen of the IOA and her plan to take over the world poised on a knife-edge right now, she would inevitably hear about it, potentially making her jumpy. Worst-case scenario, it might well spook her into leaping into action before they were ready to take her down.
Not that this situation had anything to do with the WoHZ situation… at least he didn’t think so, but she wouldn’t know that, and she might be very paranoid right now. To avoid spooking her into acting precipitously, Tony knew he had to cool his jets even though he badly wanted to be back on Earth tracking down Ziva. And how damned ironic was that?
For almost a month now, in his weekly sessions with Aoife, she’d been dancing around the delicate topic that perhaps he needed to reach the next level of acceptance and healing regarding Ziva’s betrayal of him in Tali’s conception and concealment of her birth, and perhaps he needed to confront her. He’d shied away from her gentle prodding, feeling like he wasn’t ready to see his former work partner and perhaps he never would be.
Things were good on Atlantis, so he saw no need to rock that leaky boat, but it seemed that the Head of the Psychology Department on Atlantis was on a roll apropos confronting your foes/fears. She’d been on John Sheppard and Rodney McKay’s case for weeks now about confronting the elephant in the room, and so far, had been met with extremely strong resistance by both men. Not that O’Shea was breaking her oath – did psychologists take the Hippocratic Oath?
Anyway, John (not Aoife), told Tony about her crusade, venting a little after a hard session with the head of psychology. As for Rodney…well, that man broadcast his emotions and thoughts all over the mess, even on a good day, which was how Tony knew she’d been trying to get the two men to discuss their issues, long before John vented to him about it. He also knew she was getting increasingly frustrated at their lack of progress, threatening to deliver a couple of what she referred to as a steevers (which he’d discovered was Irish for a kick in the backside) to both men. She was being a lot more gentle in her prodding him to think about confronting Ziva, but had confessed she’d grown increasingly fed up with the denial, avoidance and cnawvshawling that “several” of her clients frequently employed about the other party during their therapy times.
Somewhat ironically, Tony was now incredibly impatient to confront his former team member, who was also Tali’s mother, not because he wanted to discuss his feelings but because he needed to protect his daughter from Ziva. What the fuck did she think she was doing? He didn’t know, but it had to stop before she destroyed their child!
Knowing he was making himself crazy, he tried to relax enough to meditate, hoping to open up his mind to finding Ziva. He needed to shut down the link to Tali because their daughter didn’t know how she managed to open it in the first place.
Trying to centre himself since his emotions were a mess, he couldn’t help but marvel at the cruelty of fate. He had no desire to communicate with people on a psychic level, having spent a lifetime making sure other people couldn’t tell what he was thinking or feeling, so it felt like he was being a complete hypocrite. Yet, to save his daughter, he would do almost anything. Including confronting his former partner, who betrayed him on more than one occasion, and he wasn’t just factoring in the non-consent angle either. Ziva had cruelly lied to their daughter about being dead, and then she expected to waltz back into her life and take up again as her mother, just as if nothing had ever happened.
He doubted his ability to read minds, but he would do his best if it meant helping Tali control her ability, even if it was the absolute last thing he ever wanted for either of them to experience. It also painted an even larger target on her back, unfortunately!
Tony had genuinely felt almost giddy with relief months ago when Chaya Sar had revealed that, despite possessing the Ancients’ gene for communication, he was too emotionally damaged to make full use of it. Yes, he was quick at picking up various languages and could instinctively understand any of the Ancients’ languages (apparently, there were numerous dialects), but he wasn’t able to read people’s thoughts, thank goodness, even if he was gifted at reading non-verbal language. That ability frequently left people with the impression he could read minds; Gibbs being a classic example…until he closed himself off gradually to Tony as the years went by, and then abruptly shut down completely after Luke Harris, the young, radicalised teenager, shot him multiple times and he nearly didn’t survive.
Tony was no fool; he might play the fool, but he was highly intelligent and intuitive, and his intuition was probably related to the Ancient Communication gene, too. He was acutely aware that Gibbs had died on several occasions and not just while he was on the operating table onboard the Aircraft carrier, the USS Daniel Webster, while his surgeon, Dr Cyril Taft, had his chest cracked wide open. Tony had also stared into his cold, dead eyes once when he found him at the bottom of the Anacostia River, in a car that Gibbs had driven off a pier, the silly fool! After hauling his ass, along with the civilian Maddie Tyler, back onto the wharf, Tony was forced to revive both Maddie and Gibbs as neither had been breathing at that point he’d pulled them out of the river.
In hindsight, after resuscitating Gibbs and the young girl Gibbs had inadvertently drowned, it was probably at that time that Gibbs had first started to pull away from him. Not dramatically and completely like when Luke shot him, and Gibbs stood there and didn’t fire back. But slowly over the years, since the incident with Maddie, he had been withdrawing a little bit at a time. Tony found himself speculating, after his last brush with death, whether Leroy Jethro Gibbs even made it back to them at all, or was it someone else who stole his body?
Sure, it sounded like pure craziness, but in light of the Goa’uld taking humans as hosts and the Ancients ascending and leaving all their tech behind for less advanced races to find and utilise, not to mention infinite alternate realities existing in parallel, was it really any crazier than the bizarre things he’d see? Had a dark being hijacked his body, and the real Leroy Jethro Gibbs remained behind, trapped in the underworld? Who knew, but it was a conundrum for another day; Tali must be Tony’s focus now.
Now, he must engage with Ziva, who was one of the people he’d done his best to leave behind on Earth when Jack O’Neill devised the elaborate plan to conceal Tali’s whereabouts for her safety. So it was up to him to sever the psychic connection Tali formed with her Ima. His little girl was currently surrounded by people who loved her, watching over her back on Atlantis because she was too young to break the psychic connection. Chaya said she was too young, too traumatised to break it herself after witnessing her mother torturing and executing her grandfather, who, granted, wasn’t all that of a grandparent, but his daughter had loved him, nonetheless, and was horribly traumatised by his murder that she’d witnessed. No child should ever see what she had from reliving it from Ziva’s point of view.
Initially, no one aside from Chaya and Atlantis believed him when he explained Tali was reading her mother’s mind (who wasn’t dead; she had faked her death nearly four years ago), and, yes, he was willing to admit his theory sounded outlandish and unbelievable. He also knew it was the truth. To have his daughter recount in horrific detail how her mother carried out one of her much-vaunted assassination methods to dispatch her targets as a Kidon assassin was proof enough for him to know that the unthinkable had happened. Somehow, Ziva had reached out and made a connection with her daughter, possibly not consciously but in a moment of madness, because what else could possess her to kill Senior?
Granted, she had once come within a hairsbreadth of killing him when she held a gun up against his chest and his femoral artery in Tel Aviv after he’d shot and killed her lover, Michael Rivkin, in self-defence when the drunk Kidon assassin tried to kill him. All because Tony tried to arrest him for murder, she’d told him bluntly she wished he were dead. But Ziva had been genuinely fond of Senior; sometimes, he wondered if they’d slept together since he seemed smitten by her, too.
It was something he’d never asked Senior, thinking some things in life you were just better off not knowing! Of course, he might have known about Ziva’s inheritance of Eli’s diamonds and precious metals he’d put away for a rainy day. Senior had been like a pig scenting out truffles when it came to ferreting out wealthy young heiresses.
While Chaya had agreed after examining Tali that his suspicions were correct, she sorrowfully reminded him that she wasn’t permitted to heal her or help break the connection between them. She speculated that Ziva could also possess an Ancient Communication gene, which could explain how Tali had somehow formed a connection between them despite being in a far-off galaxy. Of course, Tali may well be incredibly powerful, although Ziva spoke many languages, more than he did. Then again, so did Daniel, and Chaya had indicated he didn’t have the Communication gene.
Anyway, bottom line, it would take an Ancient, or someone possessing the Ancient Communication gene, at least on par with Tali’s, to put a permanent block on the link to her mother. Chaya had coached him; that was permissible to her fellow Ancients, without her incurring their wrath, but despite being super motivated to block the link between Tali and her mother, they didn’t last long. Chaya suggested he return to Earth to the source to try, but when he agreed to go and confront Ziva, Tali became more distraught than ever, not wanting him to leave her. And who could blame her; she’d just watched her Ima kill her grandfather, and a rogue and grifter though he may be, his father didn’t deserve that.
But Tony was terrified that unless they broke the connection between his former partner and their daughter, Tali would be driven mad or into a state of traumatic catatonia. He could see that all three psychologists were gravely concerned about her mental and physical well-being. Chaya suggested that they could place her in one of the suspended-animation pods in Atlantis, although he’d shied away from it, nervous about the effect it could have on her young brain.
It was Dr Beckett who’d suggested that he put a block on her connection to her mother, and then sedate her using a form of twilight sedation, hopefully keeping her calm while he returned to Earth. There was a possibility it could extend the time that the barrier he created lasted, since she would be minimally aware of what was going on around her, but should she become distressed, however, they could reverse the sedation immediately.
Chaya gravely agreed that it was their best shot and proceeded to tutor him on how to use the psychic gift he’d never known about, and he never wanted to, either. Now, as he waited impatiently in Midway II to return to Earth, he was grimly concentrating on the meditation exercises Chaya assured him would help focus his ability to place a much more permanent block on the connection that had somehow been created between mother and child.
At one point, feeling frustrated and furious at Ziva, it occurred to him that a bullet might be the quickest remedy to this nightmare, but Chaya, having picked up on his rash thought, quietly indicated that her death might drag Tali along with her onto another plane of existence, which clearly wasn’t an option. So, he dutifully spent hours at the Midway Space Station practising with grim determination, hating every minute that strengthened his ability to enter the mind of another person. He had no choice; he hadn’t gone all the way to Atlantis to give his child as normal a life as possible, for Ziva to hurt Tali again. Although, despite his best intentions, it appeared that her mother had already harmed her.
Meanwhile, Lorne and Teyla had insisted on travelling back to Earth to watch his six, tried to talk him into getting some rest, but he was painfully aware that time was not on their side. Even with Tali being sedated, his ability to block the connection was not strong enough, and there was a limited time frame to find her and put a permanent block on the psychic link. He would rest when he was back on Atlantis with his baby girl safe in his arms.
Although he tried not to worry about how she could come back from this latest crisis, realistically, he knew there would be huge obstacles ahead.
Notes:
Ima n’est pas morte, et un monstre terrible, horrible s’est enfoui dans sa tête. – Ima is not dead, and a terrible, horrible monster has buried itself in her head.
Il avait peur et était en colère contre Ima. – He was scared and angry with Ima
The Special Operations Group (SOG) is responsible for operations that include covert and clandestine manoeuvres, which the US government may not wish to be explicitly associated with. Its unit members, called Paramilitary Operations Officers and Specialised Skills Officers, therefore do not typically wear uniforms.
Cnawvshawling – is an Irish slang word for grumbling, or complaining
Chapter 18
As the puddle jumper cleared the stargate, Tony felt far from surprised to see General O’Neill standing beside the newly confirmed Brigadier General Dave Dixon (and commander of the SGC), waiting for them in the control room. Lorne proceeded to park their puddle jumper beside several other jumpers in the dock, fashioned to store the puddle jumpers. They alighted from the vehicle and entered the open elevator, delivering them to the ground floor, their arrival coinciding with the two generals in the gate room. Tony noted the minimal security force to ‘welcome them’ and nodded appreciatively. Although he was wearing a ball cap and shades to help hide his identity, he still intended to be as cautious as possible.
After Lorne and the two generals exchanged salutes, brief introductions took place among Alex Paddington, Teyla Emagon, and General Dixon. Meanwhile, Jack wasted no time on small talk.
“Medical is all set to complete your exams ASAP,” he informed them briskly. “When we received word that you’d be visiting, we put them on standby. Once cleared, we’ll debrief immediately,” he said, obviously noting their tenseness but asking no questions.
As the trusted security detail moved to escort the trio to the sick bay, Jack spoke up. “A quick word, Associate Director Paddington,” he requested sombrely, looking at the SFs. “I’ll personally escort the director to sick bay. We have confidential intel to share,” he said, sending them on ahead.
“Alex, I’m not sure what brought you back here, but I was going to send Paul to brief you, so you saved him a trip,” he began as the commander of the SCG took the hint and let the head of the ISBI talk privately with his superior.
Once they were alone, he put a hand on Tony’s arm. “I’ve got some bad news about your father. He was found dead in his apartment yesterday. The medical examiner said it was exsanguination. My condolences for your and Belle’s loss,” he said formally.
Tony blanched, not because he wasn’t expecting the news, but just because it rammed home that what happened to Tali was not a figment of her admittedly sometimes florid imagination. But really, he already knew this nightmare was real.
“Where’s Ziva?” he asked, struggling to remain rational.
Right now, he felt nothing at the confirmation that his father was dead. He figured that after he dealt with the threat to his daughter, he could begin to process his emotions at the death of his dad…no Senior was never really a dad to him; he was his father or Senior. But right now, there wasn’t time for introspection or grief; he must remain focused on why he’d come back to Earth. He had a job to do, and then Tali needed him to come back home to Atlantis.
~o0o~
Back in the bullpen at NCIS, Gibbs had gone for coffee. Ellie and Nick had heaved collective sighs of relief. Ever since yesterday, when Gibbs was thrown off the crime scene of Anthony DiNozzo, father of the former NCIS special agent Tony DiNozzo, the boss was in a foul mood, yelling at everyone for the slightest infraction. Nick was in deep shit for smiling at someone. It reminded Ellie of when Gibbs came back after the Lost Boys fiasco, when Luke Harriss botched the attempt to kill him. Although not by much, she conceded, because if not for his surgeon, he wouldn’t be alive today.
After he was ejected from the murder scene yesterday, Gibbs was busily calling in his contacts and haranguing the director about getting the DiNozzo case transferred to them. She’d even heard him trying to pull Jack Sloane back here, saying they needed her, but so far, all his bluster seemed to have achieved nothing, and they were still ‘officially’ on cold cases.
Unofficially, Ellie had tried calling in markers with contacts at the NSA and the DOD. Briefly, she thought about hacking into SOG to see what was going on before Nick gave her a much-needed reality check, reminding her of McGee’s troubles, and about Delilah’s warning that Ellie was also on their radar. She mentioned to Bishop a stupid stunt she and Tim had pulled, hacking the IRS to figure out how Tony could afford a pricey Georgetown apartment on a fed’s salary. Tim’s wife indicated that TPTB knew all about that bit of dumbassery and were less than impressed with their hacking escapades, cautioning that she should be very careful not to end up where Tim was, too.
So, when Gibbs announced he was going for coffee, his two remaining agents were relieved. Nick leapt out of his seat and was at her desk in the blink of an eye, breathing a theatrical sigh of relief.
“Wow, I thought he’d never leave. I never got a chance to tell you this morning, but remember the paperclips at the crime scene yesterday?”
“Yeah, what about them?”
“Remember when I said that I thought I’d seen them used to execute someone before? I remembered where it was,” he said pumped.
“What’s this about paperclips at the crime scene, Torres?” Gibbs demanded in a deceptively calm voice that chilled Ellie to the bone, knowing it presaged the calm before the storm.
“Weren’t you going for coffee, Gibbs?” she said, more to divert him from Nick.
He held up his wallet, which she took to mean he’d forgotten it and returned to retrieve it, and they’d never noticed. She darted a nervous look at Nick, who was looking befuddled more than anything.
Gibbs stalked up to his agent, reminding Ellie of a jaguar, deadly but graceful. Standing nose to nose with Torres, he said in a bowel-voiding, preternaturally calm tone and remarked, “I believe you were about to share some intel about the crime scene yesterday with Special Agent Bishop. I’d like to hear it too. You mentioned something about paperclips.”
Nick opened his mouth to speak, and Gibbs got in his face, yelling, “Report, Agent Torres,” causing the junior agent to jump reflexively; any issues with his bladder or bowels were strictly his business, though!
Gathering his dignity, Nick tried to pretend he wasn’t intimidated. “I was just telling Bishop that I’d seen a paperclip used to kill someone before yesterday, but I couldn’t remember where. Last night I called a few contacts, and it turns out it is a method that Mossad has used in the past, specifically the Kidon Unit,” he said hurriedly, seeing Gibbs was growing agitated.
“Who was killed using a paperclip, Torres?” Gibbs barked at the unfortunate agent.
“Um, Anthony DiNozzo was, but not just one paper. The killer used seven to puncture the carotid, brachial, radial and femoral arteries, probably to speed up death by exsanguination,” he explained, shooting a what’s Gibbs’ problem’ look at his teammate.
Ellie gave him a subtle, ‘don’t ask me’ look just before their boss exploded.
“Why is this the first time I’m hearing about paperclips? You didn’t think to mention this before now?” he yelled at his agent furiously.
His reaction had several other agents from Thom Granger’s team stand and peer over their partition walls to rubberneck. Three agents on the foreign desks who usually worked the night shift started paying close attention to what was going on in the MCRT bullpen, too.
“When’s DiNozzo arriving, Bishop. Is Ziva coming with, or is she staying in Paris to look after Tali?”
“I don’t know, Gibbs,” Ellie answered. I haven’t been able to reach him. He warned us he was going to be hard to contact when he asked me to keep an eye on his father for him.”
“Well, call Ziva. She’s been in contact with him and was headed back to Paris to reunite with him and Tali,” he snapped.
“She’s not picking up either,” she told him.
“And you didn’t think that was odd, that they might be in danger. Get hold of the embassy in Paris; we need to find them.”
“Belay that order, Bishop.” Leon Vance’s voice floated down from the top of the staircase above them. “Gibbs, my office. Now!”
~o0o~
The trio from Atlantis, along with the Head of Homeworld Command, engaged in a quick debrief at the SGC before Jack ordered the group to reconvene at Homeworld HQ, where the investigation into Tony’s father was being handled by NID Special Agent Malcolm Barrett, on secondment to Homeworld Command. The four individuals were beamed up to the Daedalus and then down to Homeworld’s DC headquarters, where Paul Davis and Penelope Garcia were waiting for them. After briefly expressing his condolences, and Penelope trying to hug the stuffing out of him, the trio found themselves hustled into the latest briefing by Davis to join the investigation into Tony’s father’s murder.
Malcolm Barrett began by giving a comprehensive rundown of the crime scene, including a list of the fingerprints found in his father’s apartment, some of which had been identified as belonging to Ziva David, various members of the Sherlock Society he hung around with, and several of his neighbours, whom Tony confirmed that Senior had been friendly with. They found other fingerprints, belonging to the cleaning lady and the building manager who’d admitted he’d fixed Senior’s leaky washer in the kitchen the week before last, plus some fresh prints from someone unknown. When Tony inquired about the building security footage, since that had been one of the first things he checked out when Senior had moved in, Agent Barrett nodded.
“We have footage of two females entering the building together, one whom her former Mossad colleagues, Officers Tuvia and Ben Guidon, have identified as Ziva David and an unknown blonde female,” he said, clicking a remote control which had already been cued up to run, probably by Penelope, or Zane Donavan from the DOD, who had remained silent, just taking everything in.
Tony knew about Donovan, having been given access to all the people involved in the ‘Matter of Trust’ undercover op. He’d already heard about him ages ago from McGee, who was scathing about Donovan having been caught hacking, smugly declaring he was clearly superior to Donovan in skill and IQ because he’d never been caught.
Pushing aside thoughts of his former teammate, who’d been warned not to help Ziva but decided to, anyway, Tony concentrated on the footage even if he felt a surge of pure rage at seeing her for the first time since he left her on the tarmac in Tel Aviv back in the fall of October, 2013. Everything she’d done and how much he hated her, all the pain she caused him and Tali, flooded into his brain. She’d made them believe that Kort had killed her and tried to kill her daughter, too, leading to him crossing a Rubicon he could never undo. It had given him countless sleepless nights and probably always would. He felt the rage rising and threatening to engulf him and anyone else in the blast zone, or even worse, he was concerned that he might have a panic attack in front of everyone.
Pushing his chair back abruptly, he muttered something about needing air, knowing that they probably thought it was grief over his father’s death; everyone respected his privacy…except Teyla. He wasn’t surprised when he heard her familiar footfall behind him, and as he fought to prevent the emotions from taking over, she laid a calm hand on his arm, squeezing it to let him know she was there for him, like he’d been for her when she confronted the man who raped her. Except that he hadn’t confronted Ziva, he’d merely caught sight of her on CC TV footage. He took a deep breath, knowing he needed to get his head back in the game because there was a high probability that Tali’s sanity depended on him cutting the connection to Ziva; he couldn’t give in to his anger.
When he expressed these feelings to Teyla, she shook her head. “You must not be too hard on yourself. Yes, you will need to suppress your anger now, but later we will use the bentos rods to help you express your emotions. Remember the meditation exercise I taught you when you came to me wanting to learn to fight like an Athosian? Focus on the shell that Belle found when we went to New Lantea’s shoreline. I’m sure you brought it with you,” she guessed as he nodded.
Five minutes later, having recovered his equilibrium once more, he nodded gratefully to her, and they slipped back into the conference room, noting in their absence they’d taken a quick coffee break.
Can I watch the tape again? Something looked odd about Ziva; normally, she would insist on being in charge, but she exuded an air of subservience to that other female that was highly uncharacteristic,” he said. It was true: even with Gibbs, she had never yielded easily to authority, often ignoring the team leads’ orders, not just his.
“We have reason to believe that David is host to a Goa’uld,” Jack said gently, since he still believed they’d been together back(when Tali was conceived), even if he knew that Tony was furious with her behaviour since then.
“Evidence?” Tony requested, since she looked more like she was drugged up in the video, that a host to a Goa’uld. Weren’t they arrogant control freaks?
“The Metro Police received multiple reports of shots fired in your father’s apartment,” Agent Barrett replied. “When they were unable to get a response to the welfare check, they kicked the door down, and shots were fired. We think that the first cop through the front door got hit with a zat gun. By the time the rest of the cops entered the apartment, no one was there except for your father, who was already deceased.”
“How did they leave, via a window?” Lorne wanted to know. “Was there another exit to the apartment ?”
“No indication that they climbed out a window and no other exits, Barrett confirmed. “When Sergeant Lyons regained consciousness, he reported that there was only one female present in the apartment. She had glowing yellow eyes and disappeared in what sounds like a set of Goa’uld transportation rings.”
Tony thought back to what his daughter had said to him after she’d forged that damn connection to Ziva. She had been so disturbed by what she witnessed that she’d started out speaking a jumble of French and English: “Ima n’est pas morte, et un monstre terrible, horrible s’est enfoui dans sa tête.” [Ima is not dead, and a terrible, horrible monster has buried itself in her head.] “It made her do really bad things to Grand père. Ima pushed paperclips in his neck, his arms, and his legs,” she’d told him, tearfully.
A Goa’uld hijacking her made perfect sense, he concluded.
“I thought Ziva was under surveillance. How the hell did she get taken over as host by a Goa’uld?” he asked in frustration as he felt Teyla move closer to him, subtly brushing her hand against his knee under the table. As his mentor in Athosian Martial Arts, he was accustomed to her touching his body to correct him, but he was quite surprised to find that her touch calmed him. He took a deep breath and nodded, acknowledging he needed to remain composed.
Paul Davis looked at the General; Jack nodded his permission.
“David arrived in Columbus, Ohio, as was the plan. We had our people ready to go undercover, acting as former students who’d attended OSU with you, who would introduce themselves and then send her off on another of those wild-goose chases. Garcia had been working on some pictures of you and Belle with your ‘college friends’ around the local tourist attractions. Then David made an unexpected call to Timothy McGee, begging him to help her locate her daughter.”
O’Neill interceded. “Apparently, when she was in DC, she fed your former co-workers some cock and bull story about how you took Tali after she was first declared dead, and found her, lying low after she faked her death. You both made a pact that she would kill her foe, and you and Tali would wait for her in France. After Gibbs took out Mira Sahar Azam, she pretended she was going back to Paris to reunite with her family,” he said sarcastically.
“What a crock! None of that happened,” he protested furiously.
“We know. She was too proud to admit that she couldn’t find you, so she’d lied to the MCRT about it. But finally, the night she landed in Columbus, she broke down and called McGee, confessing she lied and begging him to help locate you and Tali.”
“Wasn’t Tim warned to stay away?” he asked, having been kept in the loop. He knew about Delilah getting warned off and that her warning included him, too.
“Yep, he was,” Jack confirmed.
“And he still agreed to help, knowing the risk he was taking?” he asked incredulously, thinking of McGee’s wife and twins.
“He didn’t think he was taking a risk,” Davis said sardonically. “He was convinced he could find you and Tali and escape our detection, even knowing we had him under surveillance.
“He has a very high opinion of his abilities, ” Donovan snorted as Penelope rolled her eyes.
“He’s gotten away with his hacking because he didn’t pose a large enough threat and has even served a purpose sometimes, but he was never flying under the radar of the various alphabet federal agencies,” O’Neill retorted cynically.
“Now he poses a threat to national security, and he’s learning he isn’t god’s gift to hacking, that he assumed he was,” Colonel Davis said.
Tony felt a flicker of guilt, but McGee was warned against helping Ziva and ignored a warning from the POTUS, no less. That was either damned ballsy or arrogant, he wasn’t sure which…maybe both! Damn, Ziva and her lies and power plays.
As he opened his mouth to ask how that equated to Ziva picking up a Goa’uld, Barrett’s phone beeped. He read the text message, then stood up, looking irritated. “Excuse me, but I need to take this.”
As he left, Garcia continued where they left off. “We don’t know why she suddenly called McGee, but after he agreed to help her find you and Tali, she turned around and went back the way she’d come. She ended up in Wisconsin, a little town called Brownsville. We went back through the footage of her first visit there, and Liat Tuvia noticed she had a brief encounter.
“They’re Kidon,” Tony asked.
O’Neill shrugged. On leave from Kidon, yeah. I think they have a personal stake in Ziva being curtailed,” he said in justification. “Anyway, Officer Tuvia noticed a local Wisconsin from a ranch (approximately 35 klicks out of Brownsville). who made physical contact with her when she passed through there before.”
Garcia had already cued up footage to the specific spot and clicked play.
She was sitting in the dining room of a simple country-style inn, eating what Tony thought was a bowl of vegetable soup of some description, when a man entered. Even Teyla, who was merely viewing the footage, reacted with a sharply indrawn breath. The guy was incredibly good-looking, literally oozing charisma with each step he took. Not surprisingly, he turned many female heads in the room and at least a couple of guys, too. As he strode confidently through the room, looking for all the world like a male model dressed in loose cream pants and a loose but stylish button-down cream shirt, clothes that to Tony’s eye were expensive, he suddenly seemed to notice Ziva. He appeared to subtly change direction so that he passed right past her, stumbling slightly as he passed by her table, almost as if to give himself an excuse to touch the nape of her neck, which was bare as she wore her dark hair in a messy bun, before his hand moved seductively over her shoulder.
His touch seemed to electrify her, as Ziva started visibly and turned to flash him one of her seductive smiles. After that brief interlude, he seemed to ignore her as he made his way across the room towards an empty table, which he occupied. His apparent disinterest seemed to surprise Ziva David. His dark, scruffy facial hair highlighted his intensely blue eyes, and Tony could see that she was captivated by the guy, but then, Ziva had always had a thing for tall, olive-skinned men, like Michael Rivkin, and this guy was way hotter than the Kidon assassin.
Steeling himself, he said, “I agree with Liat; David is definitely interested in him. Who is he?”
“Tyson Aneau,” Penelope volunteered. “We think he might be a Baal Clone.”
I thought Baal and his clones had been eradicated?”
“So did we,” Colonel Davis admitted, “But we think he used nish’ta to entice her to return to Brownsville. We found witnesses who saw her on the road driving out towards the Wittern ranch a few days ago.”
Teyla frowned. “What is nish’ta?”
“A biological compound that some Goa’uld use as a powerful form of mind control, delivered in the form of a gas, and absorbed into the body tissues. It makes a subject’s mind “extremely pliable” and open to suggestion,” Davis explained grimly, because after all, they didn’t have enough mind control drugs without having to worry about Nish’ta.
Penny said, “We think that’s why she returned to Wisconsin, because he had control of her mind and she was compelled to see him again.”
Barrett re-entered the room looking disturbed.
“Troubles?” Jack queried.
“Yeah, you could say that! There’s been another murder. One of the top three members of The Trust that Baal had a well-publicised disagreement over stocks on the share market a few years ago.”
“Have we put out a BOLO?” Tony asked.
“Yes, I know we were using her to flush out The Trust, but we need to bring her in,” the NID agent said with finality.
Tony knew that if Ziva had a Goa’uld symbiote who’d taken her as host, as Tali had said, then catching her would be much more complicated than anticipated. They were going to need a trap.
~o0o~
“What you’re saying about Ziva is bullshit, Leon,” Gibbs snapped at the director. “Someone is setting her up!”
“I told you, there is considerable forensic evidence, DNA evidence, Jethro. I don’t want to believe it either, but the forensic evidence is conclusive.”
“She isn’t even in the US. She flew home to Paris to reunite with Tali.”
“The NID claims there is no record of her leaving the country or flying into France. But there are repeated sightings of her around the Midwest, and there is CCTV footage of her and another female arriving at Anthony DiNozzo Senior’s place shortly before his death,” Vance said sympathetically. “I know you don’t want to hear this, but I don’t think this is someone setting her up. I hate to say this, but I think Ziva’s gone rogue.”
Just as Gibbs looked ready to knock his block off for daring to suggest such a thing, the director’s desk phone rang. Picking it up, he exchanged salutations before growing increasingly grave.
After hanging up, he walked to his drinks cabinet to remove a bottle of sour mash, pouring a glass for himself and Gibbs. He took his own glass, threw it down and after swallowing, announced in a monotone, “There’s been another killing. Ben-Machai, her former head of Kidon, has verified her photo at the scene in Oregon and the method of dispatch as one she’s used previously on Mossad disposals.”
“I don’t believe it! He’s always felt threatened by Ziva, and he’s intensely ambitious. He’s probably trying to clear the deck before he makes a run at the directorship,” Gibbs claimed nastily.
Vance gave a cynical smirk. “Well, you’d know more about that than I would, I suppose, but why? Ziva was supposedly on her way to Paris, not Israel. Why would the head of Kidon feel threatened by a civilian? Anyway, Agent Barrett just informed me that they’ve put out a BOLO on Ziva David for questioning on both murders.”
Jumping up, the former Marine threw his empty glass at the wall. “They might as well paint a massive bullseye on her back with the cops,” he yelled frustratedly. “It’s a stitch-up by the NID, and don’t tell me that this has nothing to do with McGee’s arrest, too. There’s no such thing as a coincidence.”
“Gibbs, you might be right about McGee being connected with this, but don’t do anything foolish,” Vance part-begged, part-ordered his hot-headed, stubborn agent.
“I’m going to get him released, and I’m going to prove that Ziva’s being framed for crimes she didn’t commit,” he vowed over his shoulder as he stalked out of the room.
Vance was left, shaking his head as he muttered sotto voce, “And God help us all!”
~o0o~
Back at Homeworld Command, Tony was trying to convince the others that instead of conducting a normal investigation and arresting her, they needed to trap Ziva and take her down alive. Jack understood, as did Colonel Lorne and Teyla, that taking her out rather than arresting her could threaten Tali’s life. He needed to break the connection between Tali and her mother, but Barrett and Colonel Davis, who hadn’t been read in on the psychic considerations and Tali’s Ancient abilities regarding her extra gene, both felt that since the Israeli Kidon assassin had a Goa’uld symbiote, the risk was too high.
He understood, from everything he’d read about Goa’uld and particularly Baal, who they presumed had taken David as a host, plus everything he knew about Ziva’s Kidon skills, just how dangerous she was. They had a point about the risk. But they also didn’t have a five-almost six-year-old daughter who stood to lose their sanity (or even their life, if Chaya Sar was correct) if he failed to shut down their connection to each other.
Thankfully, O’Neill pulled rank, ordering them to amend the BOLO to observe and report but not to engage. He also instructed the NID to continue to investigate both murders, looking for clues as to where they were hiding, including locating the Hat’uk that they obviously had, based on the testimony from the Metro PD cop who broke down Senior’s door. Meanwhile, he approved Tony to work on a plan to trap Ziva and the Goa’uld.
As they got down to work, Tony looked at his burner phone in irritation. Bishop kept calling and texting. Finally, in frustration, he replied, keeping it as brief as possible without being rude.
BACK STATESIDE. KNOW ABOUT SENIOR! TTYL
She must have mentioned that he’d been in contact with her because less than 20 minutes later, Tony started receiving voicemails about RULE 3 from Gibbs, with whom he had no contact in the last 4 years. He didn’t have time for Jethro’s crap, so he dumped his burner, stomping on it, and Lorne went out and bought him another one. Meanwhile, knowing that Shen was around the SCG and Washington DC for talks about their 304 Daedalus-Class Warship and Sun Tzu’s progress (which they were deliberately delaying), Tony had decided that setting a trap for Ziva and her Goa’uld symbiote would be too risky in Washington, where Shen might get suspicious. Something which was not advisable, as they were still only halfway through the massive vaccination program.
So, he was planning to set a trap for Ziva and her Goa’uld in the UK, where he could borrow Crispian and Lavinia’s property, since he was well acquainted with it. Plus, it made sense that he’d leave Tali with his cousin and his wife since he wouldn’t drag her to DC while he dealt with Senior’s death and his funeral. And to be honest, he didn’t have a clue what he was going to do about that, as he needed to get back to Atlantis asap. However, it would seem feasible to strangers and those who knew him that he’d drop her off to stay with Crispian and Lavinia and their twins at the Paddington estate, Summerton Hall in Essex, while he was in DC, tying up Senior’s affairs.
Ziva, thanks to her access to the Goa’uld spaceship, would be able to get to the United Kingdom relatively quickly. He just needed McGee to give Ziva a heads-up that Tali was staying there without him. Lavinia would take Aiden and Skye to the local police station, but Cris insisted on having Tony’s back. Since his cousin worked for MI6 (something he’d only discovered back in 2016 when he’d been working with Clayton Reeves, and Reeves had let it slip), thinking Tony already knew, he figured Cris could look after himself. There was also a formidable team to accompany him to the UK.
As her boss, Alex Paddington, Tony had organised for Amelia to take a brief leave of absence from FLETC, plus Malachi Ben-Guidon and Liat Tuvia from Mossad (well, Kidon to be precise) would be coming with them, plus Jack gave him a heads up on another former Mossad agent, Mikel Dayan, who Liat assured him had her own score to settle with Ziva. Dayan’s beef with Ziva was all well and good, but Tony made it crystal clear that his daughter’s life was threatened by her mother, so it was imperative to capture her alive. One of the co-owners of Leverage Inc, Eliot Spencer, a former Spec. Ops (who was reputed to be a one-man death squad himself, and also coming to Essex) told Tony that Michael Rivkin was her fiancé, and Michel blamed his handler (Ziva) for not pulling him from DC when he was struggling with alcoholism. Malcom Barrett was coming with them, plus Jack insisted on going along too, with Lorne, who refused to stay behind, ditto for Teyla.
With such a formidable group of warriors, he was fairly sure that Crispian would be okay, although he would have preferred if he’d sat this out for his family. Still, if Ziva had Summerton Hall under surveillance, having Cris wandering around would assuage suspicion; perhaps Teyla could pretend to be Lavinia. This sting had to go down like clockwork. He was terrified that the temporary block he used to interrupt Tali’s link to her mother might give way at any time.
They must not fail. If anything happened to Tali, he didn’t think he could survive.
~o0o~
Ziva was living in a nightmare where the Dybbuk controlled her, forcing her to carry out another two executions so far. One was an oligarch who owned a massive armaments complex in Belarus, and then there was a Gene Research lab and robotics facility in Turkey, which she carried out only a few hours ago. Naturally, Athena stole all the research before they’d burnt the place to the ground, and she had no idea if anyone managed to escape from the building. If she’d had even an inkling of the Dybbuk possessing Mayfield, who was now Ziva’s captor, forcing her to worship ground that she walked on and do her bidding, Ziva never would have killed the blonde CEO. The truth was that Charlotte (or as she now knew, the Dybbuk who called itself a Goa’uld) was inferior to Ziva in every way. If not for the mind control drug Mayfield used on David to force her to worship, her.
Yet she had shot and killed her because she was, by training and breeding, an assassin, even though she’d tried to fight against it. Thanks to the nish’ta, it had taken all her willpower to kill her, only for the Dybbuk to take its leave of Mayfield and possess her instead. And Athena, as she insisted on being called (who seemingly did not appreciate the disparaging terms, demon or dybbuk), was the vilest, insanely evil narcissist that Ziva had ever encountered. She had come across a lot of insanely evil narcissistic humans in her years working as a Kidon assassin; topping the list was her own father, Eli David, whom she both loved and hated in equal measure, long before his own assassination. His death had only complicated her feelings of love and hate. It had been why she’d tried to leave that loathsome life behind her and had been largely successful until Mira Sahar Azam sucked her back into the abyss she’d vowed to leave behind.
She remembered Ducky’s pale blue eyes regarding her calculatingly when he’d told her how much he’d admired her decision to leave the life of a Kidon assassin behind, saying it was brave and noble but not easy. She’d appreciated his candour because it was all true; it had been a lot harder than she’d anticipated, even with the indisputable joy she felt being Tali’s mother. Then Sahar turned up, posing a dire threat to her and Tali, and Ziva hadn’t hesitated; she’d swung right back into feral attack-mode, fiercely determined to take her out permanently, since no one could threaten her daughter and be permitted to get away with it.
So, it stung when Ducky chose to gently but firmly chide her in his mild-mannered way about what she’d been thinking, chasing down her nemesis for the last three years when she could have come and asked for their help right off the bat to protect her daughter and herself. Of course, he was right; Ziva could see why no one could reconcile spending three years of her life chasing her and missing out on those three years of Tali’s life. However, none of them knew that Tali’s father hadn’t given his consent for her to conceive her daughter with his sperm, and if they had known, they would have probably arrested her for rape. Besides, she never envisaged it would take three years to hunt down Azam and eliminate the threat she posed. It was only supposed to take a few months at the most. However, from Ducky’s perspective, her behaviour was rash, crazy even, and she had to agree, now that it was too late, he had been right.
At this point, Ziva was trying with all her might to fight the Dybbuk, trained by Mossad’s finest mentors to resist mind control, but it didn’t seem to make the slightest bit of difference. The best she’d been able to come up with was to wall off a tiny part of her mind, hiding away the most precious memories that she knew would make her even more vulnerable to the Demon’s control. Yet with every hour the Dybbuk inhabited her brain, she could feel it weakening the wall. The first one the Demon penetrated was Tali’s conception, which Athena announced by congratulating her for taking what she wanted.
/”I might have had no choice when you killed Mayfield, other than to take you as a host, but there is a delightful streak of depravity running through you that I deeply admire. I can only hope that your daughter shares the same characteristics as her mother. Hopefully, she won’t have inherited any deplorable morality genes from her father, who’s done everything possible to protect her from me.”/
Ziva would really like to know what the inept, Tony DiNozzo had done to thwart the Dybbuk; he had thrown up his job for goodness sake, but she knew that asking even inconsequential questions of the possessor would weaken the power she was trying to maintain over the demon, so she firmed up her resistance. But unfortunately, Athena was not done praising her yet.
/“Yes, Ziva David, your thirst for vengeance is a good match for mine. We will forge a successful, historic partnership to rival Ra, Baal or Anubis, the greatest of the Goa’uld System Lords that ever were, and with them dead, we will rule the galaxy. Tali will assist with her Ancient Gene to activate the Ancients’ technology that so far has been unavailable to the Goa’uld. Together, we three will be unstoppable,”/ she promised Ziva gleefully.
At which point, Ziva reached the conclusion that there was only one way to escape the horrific fate awaiting her, which was for her to sacrifice herself to kill Athena because she’d figured out that without the host’s body, the demon was helpless. Though Ziva David knew she must hide her plan deep inside her weakening mental fortress, she recognised that she had to enact her suicide, born of desperation, as soon as she could. because, slowly, inexorably, Athena was ever closer to breaking down her mental defences. It was now or never!
As she started planning her imminent demise, her burner phone rang. She tried to ignore it because it could only be Tim McGee. Days ago, she’d lost track of time by this point; she’d begged him to find Tali through his hacking ability, but now she had no desire to follow up on whatever he’d discovered, as she no longer wanted to find her; quite the contrary. Ziva was terrified that the Dybbuk might locate her. It was only now, when it was much too late, that she recognised that the use of nish’ta as the pretty Aneau caressed her bare skin in her summer top was what started this mess. Although she’d resisted the obsession to search for the handsome male (who, it turned out, was a human host of another dybbuk), which infested her with his mind-control drug, her focus on finding Tali had begun to crumble the further away from Aneau and his demon she got. By the time she reached Columbus, her desire for him was impossible to ignore, and her interest in Tali became harder to maintain. And so, Tim entered the picture, but in the past few days, she’d forgotten all about pleading with him to help her find Tali. Hardly surprising she had forgotten.
Hoping that Athena would ignore the phone call, it stopped. Ziva heaved a sigh of relief since she didn’t want Athen anywhere near her daughter. She was certain that Tim would have found Tali; he was an incredible hacker.
When the phone started ringing again, Athena demanded, /“Who is calling you?”/
“It might be a wrong number,” Ziva spoke out aloud.
The Dybbuk snorted. /“Unlikely. Who else? Don’t make me go digging for the answer, you should realise by now that you cannot resist me.’/
No, Ziva couldn’t resist, but she could hide some things for a while, like her plan to sacrifice herself to save Tali, so she gave in, not willing to risk the Demon rifling through her thoughts.
“It’s probably my friend Tim. I asked him to help me look for Tali and her father.”
/“Speak to him, but do not try to send him any coded messages. Remember, Tali might be too young to become a host, but if you try to deceive me, I will take her as my host, regardless. Are we clear?”/
“Yes, Athena,” she answered dutifully, while numbing her mind.
/“Call him back and put it on speakerphone,”/ the demon ordered Ziva, who obeyed meekly.
McGee picked up the phone, “Ziva? I’ve been trying to ring you.”
“I am sorry, Tim, I was in the bathroom. Did you find anything?”
“Yeah, Tali is staying in England with Tony’s cousin Crispian and his family at Summerton Hall. That’s in Chelmsford, Essex, and then he’s flying to DC for the funeral. You do know about his father’s death, don’t you?” he asked, and it struck her that he sounded somewhat nervous and his voice wavered.
“Yes, I heard about it. Tony must be devastated,” she said.
“I guess,” he said. She thought he might be thinking of his own father’s death from cancer.
“Thank you, McGee. I appreciate all your hard work,” she said, wondering if he knew yet about her bloody rampage. Although if he didn’t, he soon would, she was sure.
“Right, well, I gotta go before Gibbs busts my ass. You know how he is,” Tim said as he hung up rather rapidly before she had a chance to thank him a second time.
Not that she was grateful for the information, because Tim coming through for her by finding Tali threatened her daughter’s safety, so she was far from grateful. There was no way she was letting that demon get her hands on Tali. From the minimal amount of intel she’d been able to unearth from the Dybbuk, Tali had some freaky genetic aberration that meant she could operate alien technology, and it made her a much-wanted commodity, unfortunately.
~o0o~
“This is complete bullshit, Leon. Ziva didn’t kill, Senior. She liked the guy. I sometimes wondered if…” he bit off what he’d been going to say.
“Wondered if what, Jethro? They slept together. He was technically old enough to be her grandfather,” Vance said disgustedly. “Besides, she had a child with his son.”
“I know, but her feelings towards him seemed a lot less complicated; she had reason to hate DiNozzo for killing Rivkin,” he shrugged. “But she wouldn’t have killed Tali’s grandfather. It’s just ridiculous.”
“Well, evidence doesn’t lie, and she left a lot of it behind at the four crime scenes, ignoring CCTV that placed her in all four scenes. You always say there’s no such thing as coincidence,” Leon argued.
“But the evidence is clearly fake. How could she get from DC to Oregon, to Belarus, to Turkey without any record of her travelling? The NID is setting her up to take the fall for something she had nothing to do with,” Gibbs told him furiously, staring at the bourbon stain and a few shards from the shattered glass on Leon’s wall.
Vance thought he might be wishing he hadn’t been so hasty as to throw Leon’s crystal-cut glass. It was one that Jackie bought him for his new office when he was first made director in 2008. Yeah…no, he wasn’t giving Gibbs another precious glass to shatter, not to mention wasting good liquor.
“I don’t know about that, but it’s not our case.”
“Ziva family. Always will be,” Gibbs argued.
Vance decided it was news to him. After she resigned to save Gibbs’ ass and his job, Leon had been shocked by the lack of concern or responsibility Gibbs exhibited when NCIS realised that Gibbs’ former agents (who’d all resigned to save his career, already in its twilight), had never received even a heads-up by phone to inform them that Benham Parsa’s terrorists wanted to kill them. Some family, huh!
Equally, when Ziva didn’t return with McGee and DiNozzo but followed through on her resignation plan, no one was allowed to talk about her in Gibbs’ presence. In much the same way that Tony DiNozzo’s name ceased to exist in the bullpen since he left, although to be fair, that was an ongoing situation for the entire last year he’d worked at NCIS, Vance conceded. Tony was treated as a pariah by Jethro, and Bishop and McGee were complicit, pretending not to notice and never saying his name. Then there was the situation that had developed between Dr Sciuto and Gibbs that he never did get to the bottom of, either. The only thing he knew was that Jethro seemed unable to even be in the same room as Scuito. It was a relief when she left.
Yet here was Gibbs telling him that Ziva was family and always would be. Yeah, sure, they obviously must have very different definitions of family, was all Leon could come up with.
“Be that as it may,” he pretended to go along with Gibbs, “what would you have me do?”
“Rumours are circulating in the alphabet agencies that they’re planning a massive operation to take her down. I want to be there to make sure she doesn’t end up dead. I want to bring her in alive. Tali needs her mother!”
“I’ll admit I might have heard a few whispers that Mossad is involved, unofficially, but that’s all I know, and we don’t have jurisdiction.”
“The Chief was one of ours, Leon. Don’t forget that you owe Ziva for taking down the man who killed Jackie. You are friends of her family. You owe her!” Gibbs growled at him.
Honestly, Leon was anxious; Leroy Jethro Gibbs was ruthless enough to use that knowledge against him to get what he wanted. He always got what he wanted!
Leon admitted to himself that Jethro was correct; when Jackie was murdered, he couldn’t go after and take out Ilan Bodnar because of their kids. But Ziva had avenged Eli and Jackie’s deaths. Then there was the complicating factor that he and Gibbs had a complex relationship. At the top of the list was the inconvenient detail that Leon was almost positive Gibbs had sniffed out his secret identity, which Jackie had unfortunately divulged to Gibbs one night over dinner, even though she’d never known the truth either. At this point in his career, with the kids growing up and making lives of their own, Leon had made peace with the reality that he had a few too many black marks on his record. Any dreams of being appointed Secretary of the Navy, or even a shot at a career as a senator, were pie in the sky, too.
That didn’t mean he wanted to retire in disgrace or, worse, face prosecution and jail time for assuming someone else’s identity back in college when he was young and dumb as dirt. Not that Gibbs was gauche enough to threaten him directly, but the subtle hints about family made him paranoid enough to fold like a cheap deck chair on the Titanic.
“Look, I’ll give Orli a call. See if she knows something,” he said, feeling like this was not going to end well.
But Gibbs knew where all the bodies were buried, even his friends’, and like most people, Leon was afraid that Leroy Jethro Gibbs was ruthless enough to use what he knew against Vance to get what he wanted.
Thirty minutes later, the NCIS director alighted from the last step and stalked gracefully over to Gibbs’ desk. Unsurprisingly, Jethro was off getting coffee, according to Bishop. So, he dropped his note onto desk, containing the relevant details of the place where the NID planned to take down Ziva David with MI6’s cooperation, as the ambush would take place in the UK.
Walking away to head back up to his office, he decided it was better this way. Now he had plausible deniability.
Chapter 19
Right after Gibbs came back from his break, clutching three black Marine-style coffees like they were life preservers, he saw the note Leon had left for him. Sipping at his first cup of joe, he smiled as he read its contents. It paid to have a reputation as a bastard!
Grabbing his go-bag, figuring he’d need to call in a favour or two to get him to the UK in time, he headed towards the elevator, focused on achieving his goal. When he reached for the button, he was surprised to find Bishop and Torres with their own go-bags, seeming ready to accompany him. With guarded expressions, they looked back and forth, the pair silently negotiating who would poke the bear and asked where they were headed. Apparently, Torres was elected spokesperson.
“We have a case, Boss?” he said eagerly, clearly bored with working cold cases.
“No. Stand down. I have some business to take care of. You’re on cold cases,” he dashed their hopes as the elevator arrived at their floor and he stepped onto it.
He couldn’t help feeling satisfaction in crushing their hopes for excitement after days of working on cold cases, but it was their own fault. They shouldn’t be so transparent; it left them wide open to manipulation, which was a bad thing for a federal agent. As he exited the building, he figured they had a point about backup. He should have someone to watch his six!
If the rumours he heard were true (and he believed they were), then he was walking into a shitstorm, comprising a combined operation of special forces and Mossad operatives. He knew that Mossad never played well with others, and their agenda was probably the same one that had resulted in Ziva being ordered to kill her half-brother, as Haswari had not only been an inconvenience and an embarrassment to Israel.
If he was going to save Ziva from being executed like a common criminal, instead of being given a chance to defend herself, he needed help. And he knew just the man for the job. He placed a quick call to former FBI Agent Tobias Fornell, leaving a message for Tobias to call him ASAP, before turning to the conundrum of how to get to England as quickly as possible. He knew that the CONUS bases most likely to have flights to RAF Mildenhall were Dover Air Base, Delaware and Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst, New Jersey. But Gibbs reckoned that he could always hop a Space-A flight to Ramstein Air Base in Germany. They had multiple flights from there to RAF Mildenhall, although he’d prefer a direct flight if possible.
While he was waiting for Tobias to call him back, he called a couple of his contacts, individuals who he might have some serious career-ending consequences, ending up before a firing squad or ending their own life because of the shame for their family, kind of dirt on them. Hopefully, that would get him on the first available transport and on his way to Mildenhall. Plus, he would need a couple of weapons so he could protect his surrogate daughter from what anyone with half a brain could see was a witch hunt.
When Fornell failed to call him back, Jethro decided to drive to Fornell’s, where he was running a PI agency out of his garage, to harangue him into packing a go-bag. From there, they’d head to Dover Air Base, located in the Delmarva Peninsula, then hop a Space-A flight, probably a cargo, but that was fine by him as he hated commercial flights. The Air Base at Dover was a two-hour drive from DC, which, for Gibbs with the way he drove, equaled sixty minutes on a slow day. Getting a civvy on board might be somewhat tricky. He may have intimated that Fornell was a former National Guard member, but oh well, miscommunications happen! He was sure he could get him on the flight; he usually got what he wanted.
However, when he pulled up outside Fornell’s place, no one was there. It sounded fanciful, and he was not prone to flights of fancy, but despite the clipped lawns and the empty mailbox, the house felt abandoned. Fornell had rung him up in the middle of a case one day, some months ago now, and thanked him for getting him some work with a secret government department, which surprised him as he hadn’t. Maybe if it occurred to him, he might have, mostly because he’d gotten tired of listening to Tobias bellyache about process serving and divorce work, but it never entered his head to find him some meaningful work. If he was being honest, as much as he sympathised with him after he lost Emmily, Gibbs also preferred not to spend too much time around him, as his grief was a constant reminder that he’d lost his own princess.
Jethro remembered now getting an abrupt call when he was working on his boat, something about getting an offer from the secret government department for some contract work out of town. He’d wanted Gibbs’ opinion on whether he should take it. At the time, Jethro had a lot on his mind, plus Fornell still seemed to believe he’d set up the initial gig with the top-secret government spooks. This left him in an awkward situation. If he admitted that he couldn’t advise him because he didn’t know these guys, then he’d also have to admit he hadn’t recommended him for the initial work; so rather than coming clean, he fobbed him off. Told Tobias he was busy, but he’d check around and see what he could turn up, and then he promptly forgot his promise as he became subsumed by the MCRT’s latest investigation.
It was almost a week later that he discovered a text from Fornell that he hadn’t even read, saying he’d decided to take the contract and thanking him for his efforts. He’d texted back, wishing him luck, but never got a reply. He just figured it could have been Tobias being passive-aggressive, so he ignored it. But that was months ago, and Gibbs assumed he’d only be gone for a few weeks. After confirming with Mrs Stanislav, Fornell’s next-door neighbour, that he’d been gone for months and the local gardening contractor turned up once a month to cut the grass, he gave up in disgust. Ziva didn’t have time to waste.
Furious at the time he’d already wasted worrying about Tobias, he headed down to Dover Air Base, taking a roughly two-hour drive and trimming it down to 57 minutes. True, he’d taken even more risks than usual, since he didn’t have any passengers threatening to upchuck or whining like three-year-olds about the extreme speeds he drove at. He wasn’t just happy to have cut the estimated travel time by over half, but smug that he hadn’t incurred any stupid speeding fines. He drove fast because he was usually trying to solve a case or save lives.
While he never paid any of those fines, being pulled over and issued citations wasted valuable time, something which Gibbs greatly resented. He also abhorred the fact that he was expected to endure the self-righteous lecturing about road vehicle injuries and death from some wet-behind-the-ears rookie. Which was why he’d started projecting his “I am invisible to highway patrol cops” mantra when he drove anywhere where he could open up the car and drive significantly over the speed limit. And it worked!
Theoretically, he should have lost his licence years ago. Still, in the scheme of whether he should have been held accountable a long time ago, first-degree murder (Pedro Hernandez and Trent Kort) eclipsed speeding by a country mile.
When he arrived at the Air Base, he was furious to learn that although there was a direct flight to RAF Mildenhall, they were still only halfway through loading the cargo. Even more infuriating, yelling at them didn’t seem to impress them about the urgency of the situation. Frustrated, Gibbs decided to turn his attention to getting from RAF Mildenhall to Chelmsford, which was apparently in Essex, and he’d need a hire car.
He called Bishop, telling her to find out about hire cars. Jethro gave her his credit card details and told her to get him something fast, and he would need the fastest route from RAF Mildenhall, Sussex, to Chelmsford in Essex asap. When she tried to find out what he was doing, he cut her off, but not before Leon grabbed the phone from his agent. Probably had her phone tapped, Gibbs mused.
When Leon dilly-dallied around the topic, he cut through his tarrying. “What did you want, Director? I’ve got a Space-A flight to catch,” he said gruffly.
Sighing, Vance said, “There’s been another death, Gibbs. A Polish industrialist who was disembowelled. It’s almost like she’s trying to get caught. She does not attempt to hide from obvious CCTV cameras or worry about the trace evidence she’s leaving at the crime scene…”
“Precisely my point. She’s being set up. I don’t know how, but she is. We need McGee to figure it out. Do you think it’s a coincidence that he’s in custody when we really need his hacking skills?”
“Careful, Jethro, your tin foil hat is showing, ” Leon snorted cynically. “Orli confirmed this assassination mimics a target she was assigned a few months before she joined the MCRT. She left a message behind, again leaving the murder scene with no trace of how she exited his hotel room.”
“What message? Jethro demanded angrily.
“Save Tali,” the NCIS director said sombrely.
“From what?”
“No one’s saying, but Orli believes they think she’ll target Tali next.”
“That’s bullshit, Leon. She’d never hurt that little girl; she loves her,” he declared angrily before severing their connection.
~o0o~
The team from Homeworld Command were ready and waiting for their swift transfer from Washington D.C. to Summerton Hall in Essex via the Daedalus. Special Agent Barrett had insisted on going along, and because they were trying to keep the team small to avoid anyone deciding to be a hero and kill Ziva. Jack agreed that the NID agent could come too. It was crucial to ensure they capture Ziva and her symbiote alive, and to that end, Jack handed out Zat’nik’atels to each person on the team, to be used ONLY to stun her and bring down the Goa’uld who had taken her as a host. Guns were messy, and they didn’t want anyone getting trigger-happy and accidentally taking Ziva and her Goa’uld out with an accidental kill shot due to the threat to Tali’s life. Not that most of their team knew why, because the fewer people who knew about her abilities, the safer she would be.
Since it was the group consensus that Ziva and her Goa’uld would not show up at Crispian Paddington’s 6.5-acre property, Summerton Hall, without some backup, since he likely would have security, given who he was, they needed a small professional team to neutralise The Trust’s team. They agreed that in all probability, The Trust would use those operatives who’d tried to abduct Tali on two previous occasions when Tony had been fortunate enough to outwit and outshoot them. Modestly, he’d put his success down to being underestimated because he was just a former cop, something that a lot of people had been foolish enough to do over the years he’d been in law enforcement. After the final member of their entourage arrived, assigned and handpicked by President Washington, the transfer would take place right after Paul Davis made the Secret Service agent sign a non-disclosure agreement.
In the hours before beaming to Summerton Hall, they’d been studying not only the floor plan of the three-floor, eleven-bedroom, 6-bathroom, Victorian-era house. Tony also briefed them on its large outbuilding, which his cousin and his wife had converted into a huge home gym and pool room. Plus, he pointed out the tennis court, swimming pool and the 6.5 acres of accompanying land, which included an orchard and kitchen garden. They were all reasonably confident they could find their way around blindfolded, which was necessary as everyone agreed that they’d be breached in the middle of the night. Tony had suggested that they cut the power at the first indication they received from the Daedalus that they were being breached, before the intruders did.
Their team of eleven, not including Crispian Paddington, also spent considerable time analysing both of the unsuccessful abduction attempts carried out by The Trust. Tony’s description of the attempts to grab his daughter, combined with his keen eye for detail, proved crucial in Garcia’s ability to perform the voodoo she had excelled at back when she’d worked at the BAU for years. She swiftly assembled a rogue’s gallery of possible suspects, based on Tony’s descriptions of the men, whom everyone agreed were most likely former Spec Ops mercenaries, who had connections to The Trust or had worked in security for individuals and corporations strongly suspected of being a part of The Trust.
Of the fourteen to sixteen individuals, he’d been able to describe who’d tried to grab Tali, thanks to his observational abilities and Garcia’s keyboard magic; they were fairly confident they’d identified at least eleven of those thugs, with several more very strong possibilities. Due to time constraints, Zane Donovan was hauled in to work his cyber magic, helping Penelope put together detailed jackets of all the possible mercenaries likely to show up in Essex. Tony worked non-stop, trying to create profiles of the ones that the rest of the team weren’t familiar with, although, between the two current Kidon operatives, the ex-Mossad officer and Eliot Spencer, they had either worked with quite a lot of them in the past, or come up against them in the field. They were able to produce a detailed analysis of their strengths and weaknesses, which should assist in taking them out, and they studied closely.
Jack and Agent Barrett had stressed that, if possible, capturing The Trust’s henchmen was their secondary goal, as it would help them interrogate and track down more of the internecine organisation that was proving to be so difficult to eradicate. The ruthless mass murder of thousands of Jaffa, viewed by The Trust as acceptable collateral damage if it wiped out the Goa’uld, demonstrated just how dangerous the rogue group was. It was also very obvious to Tony that Jack and Special Agent Barret were still furious that the rogue NID agents who’d committed such a heinous war crime remained at large, years later. He could understand why they were so keen to force them out of the shadows and render the bunch of psychopathic oligarchs and their minions finally impotent. He knew just how much O’Neill longed to retire so he could finally enjoy his granddaughter’s childhood.
However, while they hoped to take them alive, everyone was also pragmatic enough to know that if these mercs were deployed, they were unlikely to surrender without a fight. Still, every single one of them that they managed to take out alive offered a huge opportunity to Homeworld Command and the NID to take the fight right up to The Trust and gut them once and for all. It was why their small but deadly team would be heading to Summerton Hall, posing as Crispian and Lavinia’s servants and small security staff.
By the time they beamed down from the Daedalus, with the late addition of Zane Donovan’s wife, Secret Service Agent Jo Lupo (who was also Spec Ops) and POTUS’ pick to protect the director of Homeworld, Crispian reported the house was clear. He’d sent all of their household staff off under the watchful eyes of MI6. His colleagues also had Lavinia and their twins in protective custody, tucked up at a safe house in Brightlingsea until all of this was over.
Elliot Spencer had immediately volunteered to pose as one of the outdoor staff, and Malachi Ben Guidon and Liat Tuvia volunteered for outdoor duties. Malcolm Barrett and Mikel Dayan fought fiercely over who would be the fourth member of that team, and in the end, Jack overruled them and said he would be positioned outside because he was fed up with riding a desk. Tony privately wondered if O’Neill wanted to split up the three Mossad and, if so, he was on board with that, but he thought it was a good idea to have a Mossad-trained former officer in the house to help them deal with Ziva should anything go wrong.
Teyla offered, with a twinkle in her eye, to play the role of cook, which, for anyone who’d eaten anything she cooked, would be quite funny and earned a brief chuckle from Tony, while Amelia Banks, rather ungraciously, agreed to play one of the maids. Tony whispered something in her ear sotto voce, and henceforth his almost ISBI agent ceased all her whining, nodding thoughtfully before grinning like the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland. Lorne would play Paddington’s butler, and Tony would fill in as Crispian’s guest, quipping that his undercover skills weren’t up to going undercover as a housemaid. Secret Service Agent. Their Secret Service agent, Jo Lupo, produced her own French maid’s uniform with a straight face as the Matter of Trust team studiously avoided commenting. Lupo had a reputation as an ass-kicker, and no one wanted to make her mad!
Meanwhile, Colonel Davis, Penelope, and Zane Donovan would remain on board the Daedalus, monitoring them remotely or as Penelope had quipped, the trio were the Eye in the Sky team. After they’d been beamed down and Tony had introduced everyone to Crispian and they’d done a physical reconnoitre in the daylight to ensure no one ended up unintentionally taking a dip in the pool later on, they settled in to bide a wee, as his cousin put it. Just like so many surveillance missions that Tony had been part of in the past, their mission right now consisted mainly of ‘a lot of hurry up and wait.’ The trick was to remain vigilant without being hyper-reactive or too relaxed. Some individuals were better at it than others – Teyla was a master practitioner, her serene outward appearance belying the predator within. It was like watching a panther or a jaguar, Tony thought fondly, watching as she prowled around Cris and Lav’s enormous modern kitchen cum breakfast room (not including the butler’s pantry or their larder), eyeing it all in wonder.
About five hours in, Paul Davis informed them that another industrialist, the head of a German Pharmaceutical Company, billionaire Gerhard Burg, whose company did genetic work (inserting mouse DNA into humans to switch on and off recessive genes), based on the work of Drs Beckett and McKay, had also been found dead. Again, Ziva had waltzed her way into his home, past the CCTV cameras and made a point of rapidly mouthing at the camera, “The Dybbuk wants Tali.”
The Israeli trio pointed out that in Jewish mythology, a dybbuk was a malicious possessing spirit of a dislocated dead person or a demon that might need to be exorcised. Jack and Tony exchanged looks, both thinking that for someone who didn’t know what a Goa’uld was, it was a pretty accurate description. Despite how much anger he harboured towards Ziva for the harm she’d caused him and Tali, he still found himself empathising with her for the suffering she must be experiencing as a host. No one deserved to be hijacked by a predatory parasitical creature and turned into an unwilling host.
And just like the other three murders she’d committed, where she was seen on CCTV arriving at the scene, there was no evidence of her leaving the premises; the consensus being that the Goa’uld (assumed to be Baal or one of his clones) was taunting them and then using the transportation rings from the concealed Goa’uld ship to leave the murder scenes unseen. In this case, however, unlike the other killings, it was not immediately apparent how this latest victim, Gerhard Burg, died, although he did exhibit signs of being tortured. According to the German medical examiner, the physical abuse was insufficient to have killed him. The three Israelis suggested occluded arteries being the most likely scenario, but poison was also a distinct possibility, so an autopsy would be needed to establish the cause of death.
By this point, everyone agreed that Ziva was attempting to delay or divert Baal by using his rivals in The Trust to distract him, then warn them that he was going after Tali, who she believed was staying in Essex. The theory was plausible enough, because the last thing she’d want was for the Goa’uld to get their hands on her daughter – it would be just like Ziva’s father Eli, who’d ruled (and ruined) his children’s lives, but turbo-charged. However, putting on his profiling hat, Tony was still unconvinced they were dealing with Baal or a clone. The man had previously created perfect clones of not only himself but also his human host, too, when it would have been much smarter for him to create a variety of hosts. It seemed that his extreme form of narcissism (even for a Goa’uld) wouldn’t permit him to ditch his outward physical appearance, even when adopting an anonymous one, when it would have been a helluva lot smarter. The Goa’uld they were after had apparently adopted the body of an incredibly attractive guy, destined to take the modelling world by storm, Tyson Aneau, before having the rotten luck to run into the Goa’uld that hijacked his body. Then the super narcissistic alien had jumped into Ziva. It didn’t add up!
Still, what truly mattered was that Ziva was almost certainly a host, going by the glowing gold eyes the Metro PD cop witnessed as she (and only Ziva) was transported up to a Goa’uld spaceship. Further, Ziva had indicated that the Goa’uld symbiote she carried wanted Tali. Plenty of other questions remained unanswered, including what happened to Charlotte Mayfield, who had entered Senior’s apartment with Ziva but never been seen again. Also, why had Ziva fired her gun multiple times, yet only one bullet had been found in the wall?
Tony knew he was also avoiding the most important question of all – how was Tali doing? It had been almost 24 hours since he’d said goodbye to her and promised to return. Had the temporary block he’d barely managed to achieve with Chaya’s careful coaching held, or was his little girl already in one of those horrible cryogenic stasis units? If she was in one, it meant he’d failed, and the block hadn’t worked. If she were in one of those cursed things, could she still experience everything her mother did, even if she was frozen? No one would be able to hear her scream in that stasis tube!
Just as he felt the panic rising, he smelt coffee, an expensive Ethiopian blend that he knew his cousin favoured. Teyla offered him a mug, and he felt momentary embarrassment at not offering to make the coffee. Crisp’s coffee maker required either an engineering degree or a barista-level of coffee-making skills to operate. During his stay, their cook, Moira, taught Tony how to navigate the mysteries of its operations.
“Did Crisp make this?” He checked it, before taking a sip, since as far as Tony knew, his cousin was clueless when it came to using the top-of-the-line Italian appliance.
“No, Evan did,” she replied as he pulled a face and took a minuscule amount, which proved to be perfect.
“Huh, he’s surprisingly domesticated,” he said. “That beast isn’t easy to figure out,” he said, referring to the coffeemaker. “Cassie’s a lucky lady to have found him; he’s a pretty good cook, too,” he confided while looking around cautiously.
“Who are you looking for?” she asked curiously.
“The General. Don’t want to be the one who drops Lorne in it about him and Cassie, especially while we’re on an op,” he explained.
“Too late. Vinia confessed to Cassie that she spilled the beans, or the tea? Maybe it’s the milk… but anyway, she thought everyone knew about them, so when she was on Earth, she split the…” she paused and lifted an eyebrow at Tony.
“Spilled the beans,” he supplied, appreciating her thoughtful way to pull him back from the edge. He set about explaining the subtle differences between the three Earth expressions before they drank their coffees in a companionable silence.
Nearly three hours later, close to midnight, Garcia gave them the heads-up they’d been waiting for. The Daedalus’ sensors had detected a cloaked Ha’tuk. Several minutes later, Paul Davis joined Penelope, advising them that the ship’s transportation rings had been activated. Crispian cut the power, plunging the property into darkness. It was happening!
Soon enough, Zane had joined the party, and the Eye in the Sky team was in full swing, using Asgard-enhanced heat-seeking infrared technology to provide detailed observations of the two teams, now making their way around the perimeter of Summerton Hall just as the Matter of Trust team had predicted they’d do. Jack had called on comms for everyone to report in before ordering radio silence, so they wouldn’t compromise their positions or alert The Trust thugs they were expecting them. Meanwhile, Garcia was providing a running commentary.
“So, my Lovelies, we are detecting 25 heat signatures, spanning out around the grounds,” Penelope reported, sounding wired.
“They’ve split into two groups. Looks like they’re planning a frontal and rear assault,” came the unfamiliar voice of SG-2 team leader Colonel Louis Forretti, not aware that they’d already profiled this as the most likely scenario.
Ferretti’s team, along with two other SGC field teams, would lead the mission to beam across to the unknown Ha’tak ship and seize control. Louis, having served under Jack O’Neill on the original mission to Abydos that destroyed the System Lord Ra, suggested to Colonel Davis that he provide operational support to Jack’s team on the ground, at least until he received his orders to board the Goa’uld spaceship. Colonel Davis, whose field and combat experience were quite limited, had accepted Ferretti’s expertise with gratitude.
While the support crew aboard the Daedalus appeared sombre because the odds sounded bad, 25 mercenaries, who, if they’d profiled them correctly, were former special forces. Add a Goa’uld who had a Mossad-trained Kidon assassin as a host, an undeniably formidable opponent, and on paper, it appeared that the Homeworld team were seriously outgunned and outnumbered. But appearances could be deceptive, not to mention their team was chock-full of bad-asses, led by a three-star general who got those stars honestly. In fact, the whole team was no ordinary team, and the enemy had no idea that they were expecting them.
By the time The Trust’s thugs reached the house, Elliot, Jack, Liat, and Malachi had already dispatched ten of them, zatting them once only, before swiftly zip-tying their hands and feet. The four black ops specialists swiftly disarmed them of a truly alarming number of arms, including stun grenades and, quite disturbingly, regular grenades, too. Then they slapped locator beacon devices on them so the Daedalus could beam them straight into the brig. So now the odds were better – 15 bad guys versus 11 of the good guys, and everyone on board the Daedalus breathed a little easier.
Tony had earlier ordered Crispian to get into his Kevlar vest that he wore under his T-shirt and brown leather jacket, and waited for Ziva to show up, pretending to play a game of chess in the large living room. Tony had chosen it not only for its huge size, but it also had hardly any furniture in it as Lavinia hadn’t gotten around to redecorating it yet, making it easy to move and fight, if necessary and less chance of breaking anything valuable.
“Remember, no kill shots, we need to take Ziva down alive,” he reminded the three men in the room beside him, for probably the tenth time, also speaking to the whole team over comms as they waited anxiously for the fighting inside to begin.
“Roger that,” Crispian replied in his upper-crust English accent.
Malcolm Barrett spoke from behind one set of curtains. “Understood, Alex.”
Lorne, wearing a butler’s uniform and hovering beside the liquor cabinet, gave him a steadying look and said, “We’ve got Tali’s back. Worst-case scenario, we shoot to disable her if the zat doesn’t bring her down,” he said, smiling at Tony reassuringly.
Tony nodded, relieved and grateful that these exceptional people were helping him and his daughter. Less than sixty seconds later, flash bangs began exploding at various points around the perimeter of the house.
At this point, Ferretti announced, “Bogey entered the rear of the property via an unidentified vehicle. Unable to identify; number plates covered. REPEAT, UNABLE TO IDENTIFY!”
Thanks to the comms, everyone had heard the colonel, but either they were already too busy engaging the enemy, or it wasn’t safe to respond without giving away their position. However, everyone registered the crucial intel. that there was likely an extra thug from The Trust running around.
No one had enough spare time to wonder why the bogey had arrived by automobile. However, Jack did wonder, albeit briefly, if it might have been Ziva and her Goa’uld, as they seemed to favour turning up physically at each of the past scenes rather than arriving via transporter rings.
Meanwhile, in the huge kitchen and breakfast room, fighting had begun in earnest as Teyla, Amelia and Jo viciously engaged the enemy, taking down mercenaries twice their size. The muscle-bound guys seemed shocked to be handed their asses so effortlessly by three petite females in maids’ outfits who seemed to be enjoying themselves immensely. They worked swiftly, hog-tying the Trust thugs with zip ties, piling them in a heap and slapping the five enemy combatants with a locator beam and requesting they be transported up to the Daedalus to face justice.
~o0o~
Mikel Dayan (the former Mossad operative, turned mercenary), who had a mammoth grudge against Ziva David for the death of her fiancé, Michael Rivkin, was shadowing the pampered and privileged daughter of the former director of the Mossad. Mikel hadn’t taken any part in the general melee in the massive kitchen/combined breakfast room, even though it was extremely tempting and looked like a great deal of fun. She hoped she got to spar with these awe-inspiring females someday. Perhaps along with Liat, they could challenge Spencer, Malachi and the other guys to a workout and kick their asses.
As for not joining in tonight, these three women didn’t need her assistance; they were extremely capable, and the trio had things well in hand. Secondly, Dayan knew with absolute certainty that the former Kidon assassin would use her team’s engagement as a distraction to make her way into the middle of the house, searching for her daughter and looking to remove further threats.
David would clear the ground floor before she searched the upstairs bedrooms, because to do otherwise risked being attacked from the rear. So, when her deadly foe stealthily entered the kitchen and ignored the fighting, Dayan shadowed her, hanging back as she headed up the massively wide hallway. Methodically, David (the woman who let Michael die because she failed to pull him out of the field when he was clearly intoxicated) checked the butler’s pantry, the laundry, and the utility room, as well as the library, and several reception and sitting rooms.
Dayan could hear fighting up the hallway, at the front entrance and figured that Spencer, General O’Neill, Malachi and Liat had a group of at least half a dozen of the Trust’s mercenaries boxed in at the front of the house. Her keen bat-like hearing detected a hand grenade exploding, which was probably used to blow the sturdy old front door clean off its hinges. She had also heard the breaking of glass, which suggested, as they’d suspected, when they first checked the house after BEAMING down from a spaceship, that the Trust mercenaries would probably choose to breach through the so-called smaller reception room at the front of the house, near the entrance. It was the obvious spot to target since the room had long windows on both intersecting external walls, making it highly vulnerable to forced entry.
As she continued to follow Ziva, intending to box her in when she entered the large living room, where Tony DiNozzo and his cousin, who owned Summerton Hall and was with MI6, were waiting as the sacrificial goats to lure her in. Also hidden inside the room were the federal NID agent, Malcolm Barrett, plus a rather mild-mannered Colonel Lorne, who seemed pretty harmless and was playing the butler, so Mikel was flanking David from the rear. This had been one of the scenarios they’d discussed, and so far, it was going to plan. David had just two more rooms to clear: a media room Dayan noted earlier had all the bells and whistles, and a room where a massive grand piano stood, gleaming in solitary splendour, which DiNozzo stated somewhat superfluously was the music room.
Meanwhile, various members of their team were reporting in on their comms, briefly providing SitReps on the status of the 25 mercenaries, their number steadily decreasing, when Dayan suddenly realised the bogey who’d arrived by car was still unaccounted for, unless that had been Ziva David. However, there was also a chance it wasn’t her, but that DiNozzo’s four-man team might have already taken down the unidentified bogey, but were staying off comms, not wishing to spook the former Kidon assassin before she entered their trap.
However, it seemed highly probable that General O’Neill, who was impressive for a desk jockey and clearly had Black Ops experience, would make the same leap of logic as Mikel. When, literally, a few seconds later, he ordered everyone to find number 26, she smirked, feeling vindicated in her assessment. Then, just as she watched David reach the door to the room where four men were impatiently waiting to confront her and take her into custody for the death and mayhem she’d caused, including the murder of DiNozzo’s father, Dayan felt a subtle, barely perceptible current of air change behind her, the sort of subtleties she had been taught to be sensitive to back in the Mossad.
There was no noise or odour to be detected, but as she swung around to check behind her, an arm went around her throat, starting to choke her out with ruthless efficiency by compressing her carotid artery. Dayan knew she was going to lose consciousness almost immediately, such was the skill of her opponent, and so she did the only thing she could. She pulled out the zat gun, which she’d previously loaded in the ready-to-fire mode. The weapon had a very foolish design in her opinion (because the time it took to load it might literally be the difference between life and death), so it was ready to fire. Dayan aimed and squeezed the trigger, firing off one single blast as ordered. General O’Neill and DiNozzo had been extremely clear that only one shot was to be fired at Ziva, no more. She didn’t believe it was because DiNozzo still had feelings for her, so there must be another reason why they were so adamant that she must be taken alive.
She tried to alert O’Neill or DiNozzo that she’d fired a shot, even if it seemed to have failed to land David anything other than a glancing blow, which she somehow seemed to shake off. Unfortunately, Mikel lost consciousness before she could inform the men waiting inside the room that Ziva had already been hit once. Her last thought was that the bogey, who clearly was a Tango, was dead meat if she got her hands on them!
~o0o~
Ziva David had been becoming increasingly desperate as the Goa’uld forced her to search for Tali in the massive Victorian house that had three floors. Tony had not been joking when he said his mother’s side of the family was staked.
She explained to the Dybbuk that it was important to clear the premises before looking for her daughter, since Crispian Paddington worked for MI6 and would likely have security protecting his family, especially if Tali was staying with them after two attempts to kidnap her. She was furious when Athena revealed how her colleagues had botched two violent abduction attempts. Now she understood why Tony dropped so far off the radar, why he’d stopped contacting the old team or even his father. Somehow, he’d assembled a new team of very scary special ops and military personnel who were helping him protect Tali, which surprised her because she’d never seen him as parent material or having those kinds of connections. She’d honestly expected him to cede parental responsibility to Gibbs the first time Tali threw up, but instead, he’d stepped up to the mark and kept her safe up until now.
Although she hoped that Paddington had the children safe somewhere away from these dangerous mercenaries who worked for The Trust, Ziva was ready to die to stop the demon who called itself a Goa’uld from getting hold of Tali. She just hoped these people of his had understood her warnings and would protect her daughter. With backsight, Ziva wished she’d never tried to find Tali; now, someday her daughter could learn that her mother had murdered her grandfather, whom Gibbs had told her that Tali was supposedly very fond of. All she could do now was take out this demon who wanted to possess Tali because of some stupid gene her daughter had, which allowed her to operate alien technology scattered around the galaxy. A gene that had put a target on her back that she had no idea she possessed.
This was not the future she wanted for her daughter – to be the host to an evil demon who wished to possess her because of some ability to use alien weapons and technology. To live for up to a thousand years, thanks to the regenerative powers of Athena, and what she called a sarcophagus. To be forced to commit heinous acts of cruelty every single day was not Ziva’s idea of living, nor did she want it for her daughter. Even when her father used her as the pointy end of the sword, her life was not as bad as hosting this demon.
When she walked away from Gibbs’ team, she’d dreamed of forging a new life, of finding repentance for the life that Eli had bred her for. Yet her own choices, including drugging and raping Tony to secretly conceive a child to save her soul, and then compounding it by choosing to go after Mira Sahar Azam, backfired rather spectacularly. There was no point in wishing she could do things over – it was not possible, but there was still hope for Tali, and she held onto that like a dog with a bone.
All she could do, all she’d been doing since she had first ended up under the mind control of the Goa’uld back in Wisconsin and then under the control of Mayfield and Athena, was to fight back. Secretly. After the nish’ta made her torture Senior before Mayfield’s demon possessed her, it gave Ziva an insight into the Goa’uld mind. Knowing of its insane, cruel plans for Tali and everyone on Earth, Ziva knew there was no choice but to fight back by secretly exploiting the Dybbuk’s weaknesses.
She used Athena’s cruelty and narcissism, two things she was intimately familiar with, to manipulate her by encouraging her to take out people Athena regarded as foes or had disrespected her, turning Ziva into a mass murderer that she hoped Interpol would try to set up to take down. Having spent only a few days as host of the symbiote, she would welcome the bullet with her name on it when it came, because she would find peace from this evil creature. She only hoped that Tali would be protected from all the other people who wanted to use her, even with Athena’s death. Her ability had placed a massive bounty on her that meant she would probably spend the rest of her life looking over her shoulder, and Ziva mourned her daughter’s loss of innocence. Tali wasn’t even six!
She stumbled, with her hand on the door to the room that she believed would herald Athena’s end, not because she feared death. To be completely honest with herself (which Ziva rarely was), she couldn’t wait for the blissful peace that she hoped awaited her. Sharing her body with the vilest individual she had ever encountered was torture without end. No, Ziva’s stumble was from being hit by a weapon that caught her with just a glancing blow, yet it still felt like all her nerve endings were on fire. She rapidly felt she was on the point of losing consciousness.
Despite her training as an officer of Mossad and then later, her more specialised training to ensure she would not succumb to pain and torture when she joined the Kidon Unit, the agony from the weapon almost caused her to seek solace in unconsciousness, which would have ruined her carefully executed plans up until now. Luckily, Athena took over; her sheer fury at being hit by what she spat furiously inside Ziva’s mind was a Zat’Nika’tel weapon that knew no bounds. Ziva focused that fury to push away the darkness that was so seductive right now, but oh so dangerous for her plan.
Ziva entered the last room in the hallway she had yet to clear to find Crispian Paddington and another man standing awaiting her. Pulling out her gun (the one she’d shot and killed Charlotte Mayfield with), she levelled it at the MI6 agent’s head, since her plan to sacrifice herself and destroy Athena to protect Tali was simple enough. It involved orchestrating her own death-by-cop, because she understood intuitively that Athena would never allow her to commit suicide the regular way. As she aimed a headshot, two other men appeared. One from behind the drapes, where he’d been concealed, and the other was behind the door as she’d stumbled in. Both were pointing Zat’nika’tel weapons at her, as did the other man beside Crispin, who looked vaguely familiar. Examining him more closely, despite his blue eyes and lighter coloured hair, she realised it was Tony DiNozzo.
He looked almost a decade younger than the last time she’d seen him in Tel Aviv. He looked fit. He was toned and lithe, having lost the excess weight he’d acquired over the years, reminding her of how he was when she’d first joined the team after Caitlin Todd’s demise. But more than his physical transformation, she immediately noted his bearing and attitude. Here was someone accustomed to being in charge, and he clearly embraced it. Long gone was the beaten-down agent who had little confidence in himself – he was someone she could immediately respect.
“Lay down your gun, Ziva. I’m arresting you under the authority of the Interstellar Bureau of Investigations on suspicion of five counts of premeditated murder,” he said officially. “Put your weapon on the ground,” he said, his eyes widening slightly as the door opened and someone walked through behind her.
As she said, “You can’t do that, Tony,” another familiar voice ordered harshly, “Everyone, lower your weapons. What the hell do you think you’re doing, DiNozzo? This is Tali’s mother; your lover. You’ve no authority to arrest anyone since you left law enforcement nearly four years ago,” he said, his tone mocking.
“Not happening, Gibbs. You, stand down. Put your gun on the ground and kick it over here,” Tony responded steadily.
“Don’t be more stupid than I thought you were. Anyone can see Ziva’s being set up,” he said furiously.
Tony shook his head in disbelief before ignoring Gibbs and addressing his remarks to his former partner. “I see you haven’t lost your touch. Still able to hoodwink De facto Daddy into thinking you’re a poor helpless victim, which, considering who you really are, is quite some feat.”
Rather than getting angry at him, Ziva smiled slightly. He used to refer to it as her Mona Lisa smile, re-aimed her gun at Paddington, wishing one of these stupid men would take the shot and take her life. She had no desire to shoot Crispian, but she would if that’s what it took to protect Tali. She decided to try to goad Tony into pulling the trigger.
“Where is my daughter, Tony? I want her.”
“MY DAUGHTER is safe, where you’ll never find her, Ziva. Oh, and when I learned what you’d done, I had your parental rights terminated by the courts, since I’ve long been expecting you to rise from the dead,” he informed her evenly.
Feeling shame because he knew what she’d done, yet, overall, she experienced a sense of peace that he would protect Tali, Ziva accepted the inevitable. It seemed that Crispian must be sacrificed to keep Tali safe, as she tightened her finger on the trigger and prepared to shoot Tony’s cousin. Tony cocked the Zat’nika’tel gun, and she hoped the glancing blast fired by the incompetent Mikel Dayan would count as a first shot because it looked like that was the plan, and she didn’t want to wake up, but she couldn’t risk it, so Crispian had to be sacrificed as well
As her finger applied pressure, Tony yelled at his cousin to take cover, just as pandemonium broke out right outside the living room window. Yelling and shots were fired, but Ziva was unable to see through the heavy drapes to assess what was going on, so she figured it was now or never as she fired off a headshot at Crispian Paddington, who was already taking evasive movements. He tried to return fire with his Glock 17, and she felt a bullet pierce her arm as she heard further gunfire and heard breaking glass right before she felt the unpleasant effects of a second blast from a Zat’nik’atel and dropped like a stone as Athena screamed in unbridled fury.
Ziva’s last conscious thoughts were ‘Ima loves you, my daughter. I’m sorry, Tali,’ before she knew peace at last. Ziva David was dead; she had defeated the Dybbuk Demon!
~o0o~
Jack exploded through the doorway from the hallway about the same time that Elliot Spencer landed through the window, wrestling violently with one of the Tangos they’d already taken down once but had escaped. Liat Tuvia had zip-tied him and was just about to slap a locator beacon on him when his eyes glowed gold. He snapped the zip ties like they were nothing and tossed the Kidon operative ten feet into the air, where she’d collided with a massive tree and went still. He hoped she was okay. Then, by mutual agreement, Ben Guidon went to check on Liat, and Spencer took off after the Goa’uld/mercenary who had disappeared around the side of the house.
Jack went down the wide hallway to look for Dayan, who wasn’t responding to comms. On his way, he issued a warning that at least one of the mercenaries was also a Goa’uld and that there may be more. He found Mikel, crumpled in a heap outside the doorway to the reception room where they’d planned to trap David. His heart in his mouth, he turned her over to check for a pulse, hoping she was alive, and when he detected a steady pulse, he placed her in the recovery position, noting no obvious injuries. As he burst through the door into the reception room, he was mindful that, in addition to the escaped Goa’uld mercenary Spencer was dealing with, they still had a bogey unaccounted for, too.
As O’Neill barrelled through the door, he saw Ziva fire her gun at Tony’s cousin, Crispian, who returned fire, trying to disarm her, but she switched hands. Barrett fired just the one blast of the zat at Ziva, who collapsed in a heap as her eyes glowed gold briefly. The Bogey, whom he immediately recognised as that damn fool, Leroy Jethro Gibbs (Tony’s former bastard of a boss), decided to open fire on Paddington right when Elliot and the Goa’uld came crashing through the window amidst all the gunfire. Lorne took deliberate aim with his own zat, taking Gibbs down while Tony, who was obviously in no mood to muck around, had also shot Gibbs in the arm with his gun, his lips thinned to a slash.
It occurred to Jack that he’d never seen the ISBI Associate Director so enraged, but he couldn’t blame him; he was in protective father mode and not to be messed with. That stupid asshat shot Paddington in the head, and Tony had raced to Crispian’s side to render first aid. Jack shook his head in disgusted disbelief because they had not factored Gibbs showing up in any of the various scenarios, because… who would? Meanwhile, as the Goa’uld/mercenary host and Elliot wrestled on the ground, neither able to gain advantage over the other, Barrett, who couldn’t get a clear shot at the Goa’uld, gave up, deciding to zat them both. As Elliot collapsed, unconscious, the NID agent fired a second shot at the Goa’uld, whose eyes glowed gold for a second and appeared to die.
Jack and Agent Barrett exchanged a grim but satisfied look, having instantly identified the dead mercenary as one of their most wanted rogue NID agents who’d been working for the Trust, former NID agent Jennings. Neither man would lose any sleep over the death of the rogue agent whom they both recognised as being part of the group that had stolen Osiris’s Al’kesh by bribing a scientist at Area 51. Jennings and his fellow NID co-conspirators and The Trust stole the Tok’ra toxin so they could kill millions of Jaffa who’d been forced for generation upon generation to serve as human incubators for the juvenile Goa’uld. They intended to eradicate Goa’ulds, including their larval young. For Jennings and his NID cohort that was aligned with The Trust, killing millions of larval Goa’uld was the only thing that mattered. The fact that Jaffa died along with them was merely collateral damage and one THEY deemed to be acceptable even if it was a horrific war crime. How very ironic in a divine retribution kind of way, for Jennings to have ended up as host to a Goa’uld himself.
Jack sent a terse message to Louis Ferretti, warning him that the cloaked ship they were preparing to board and seize was probably Osiri’s Al’kesh, not a ha’tak as they thought. There was also a strong possibility they’d encounter rogue NID agents lying on board, possibly Brookes and Hoskins, who may or may not have acquired Goa’uld symbiotes, though they should be prepared. Regrettably, they’d never been able to apprehend former NID agents Brookes, Hoskins and Jennings, who’d been responsible for firing all the missiles that delivered the symbiote poison, which had killed who knew how many millions of Jaffa with the stolen symbiote poison the Tok’ra had developed. But maybe they’d get lucky.
Meanwhile, Tony was shouting that they needed medical assistance immediately, and Lorne was restraining the unconscious Gibbs. He was slapping a crude but effective pressure bandage to his right arm to stem the blood flow from the bullet wound. He signalled to Jack, indicating that he was not in urgent need, and frankly, at this point, even if he were bleeding out, the head of Homeworld Command might just be tempted to let the bastard do just that. He doubted, by Lorne’s expression,that he’d object, and Jack momentarily forgot that he was planning on keelhauling him for dating Cassie.
Medics beamed down and immediately commenced lifesaving measures on Crispian, and by their grave expression, O’Neill knew his condition was critical.
“Beam him up and straight back to the SCG,” he ordered the medics, who nodded their agreement. “Tony, you go too. We’ll clean up here and send Lavinia and the kids asap. But he shouldn’t be alone right now,” he said gently to the distraught agent.
“But Ziva! I need to try to break the connection, ” he argued.
“We’ll transport her back to the SCG too, asap. But your cousin should have family with him right now. Decisions may need to be made,” he said carefully as Tony collapsed in on himself.
“This is my fault. I shouldn’t have agreed to him being involved.”
“No, DiNozzo, I approved the entire plan, so if you need to blame anyone, I bear responsibility,” Jack told him gently. “But the real villain here is that fucking asshat, your former boss. I’m going to bury him in some black hole somewhere for the rest of his miserable life.”
“How the hell did he know about this op?” Tony ranted as he was beamed up with Crispian and the two grim-looking medics.
Jack replied, even though DiNozzo had been transported to the Daedalus. I don’t know, Tony, but I won’t rest until I get answers,” he vowed as the temperature in the room dropped dramatically. ‘And when I find out, they will pay,’ he promised himself silently.
Meanwhile, in Washington, D.C., the director of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service felt as if someone had walked over his grave, which was a most uncomfortable sensation. Naturally, his thoughts immediately turned to Leroy Jethro Gibbs and what shit he’d pulled now. One day, the former Marine sniper would go one step too far, and Leon would be left with the bill and cleanup.
The only question was…would today be that day?
Chapter 20
Tony sat in the SGC sickbay with his cousin, Crispian Clive Paddington. Up until a year ago, he didn’t have many good things to say about his only surviving relative on his mother’s side, but that was all water under the bridge. Cris had reached out after hearing about the two botched attempts to abduct Tali and offered them a place to stay and cousins to play with. He should never have agreed to Cris being on the takedown team, even if they were using his house to trap Ziva and the Goa’uld.
The doctors had already been quite blunt about Crispian’s prognosis. It was as grim as their demeanour. The shot by Ziva caused superficial damage only, and they explained that it would probably cause nothing but a minor headache, and there was no way she missed, not at that range, which meant she intentionally missed. It was the shot fired by Gibbs that had done all the damage and was currently lodged near the brain stem, which they informed him was not good news.
They informed him in hushed tones that the brainstem was responsible for vital involuntary functions such as blood pressure, heart rate and breathing. It was also responsible for consciousness and wakefulness due to the reticular activating system located bang in the middle of the brain stem, which may mean he could be comatose or in a vegetative state. If that wasn’t bad enough, brain stem damage could also lead to motor deficits such as paralysis and sensory disturbances, including vision and hearing loss. There was a long list of other potentially serious outcomes, but they brushed them aside. Right now, they explained, their main concern was to stabilise him by maintaining his breathing, blood pressure, and ensuring his heart continued to function.
The next step would be to assess the possibility of surgery to remove the bullet if they could stabilise him. Unfortunately, the vibe Tony was getting from the doctors was that the surgery would be incredibly risky. Brain surgery was never without risks, but Dr Callahan did have one small piece of good news to impart. Cris seemed to have improved ever so slightly, just a little since he was brought in, nothing miraculous, but it gave the doctors hope that he could make it to surgery. It was possible he’d require more than one surgery, but they needed more sensitive brain imaging. Their focus was on removing the bullet that was putting pressure on the brainstem, affecting his heart and blood pressure and doing nothing wasn’t an option.
Tony wished that Lavinia would get here soon. She was Crispian’s next of kin and his medical proxy, which they’d need to do brain surgery. She also deserved a chance to say goodbye to him if he didn’t survive, which, according to Dr Callahan, was a possibility, despite his slight overall improvement.
And finally, he needed to sever the tie, if he could, between Tali and Ziva. Why hadn’t they arrived back here at the base yet? For all he knew, his baby girl had ended up in the cryogenics pod. If that was the case, then the sooner he severed the link between them, the better. Of course, that was assuming he could do it. Right now, this wasn’t like using the ATA gene; this was using an ability he didn’t want because it felt like a colossus invasion of privacy. Wouldn’t Caitlin Todd howl with laughter and point out his hypocrisy if she were still alive, because he used to drive her crazy snooping into her life to find out things she didn’t want him to know. But to Tony, investigating suspects, colleagues, friends and perfect strangers was different to being able to wander into someone’s mind and learn their innermost private thoughts.
Snooping was a challenge, and even if he picked up snippets of info, it still had to be pieced together, and you could spin it into infinite narratives. A true ability to read minds was a gross invasion of someone’s privacy because there was no uncertainty, no wiggle room. He would know someone’s exact intention or motivation, and they couldn’t stop him.
To Tony, it felt like the equivalent of using someone’s body for personal gratification without their consent, and he had a real problem with that. Even before his loss of autonomy, when Ziva used him as a source of DNA to create a child without his knowledge or consent, he couldn’t abide by rape, and that’s what reading someone’s thoughts felt like to him. He wouldn’t want people knowing his innermost thoughts and secrets (like who he and Tali were, and about the Ancients’ genes), but all his embarrassing and emotional shit. Like his secret fondness for the Star Trek franchise and his love of books, and other even more personal things, he didn’t want people to learn about him. Such as his fear of abandonment and feelings of inadequacy, his anxiety and his panic attacks since he understood how people used your weakness against you.
He’d watch Senior do that from when he was a small boy, to convince people to invest in his get-rich-quick schemes, which almost invariably failed, leaving those ‘investors’ out of pocket and his father continuing to enjoy the high life. He supposed people would argue that he used people’s weaknesses against them when he went undercover or interrogated people, and that was true, but only if he believed that they had broken the law or hurt people. Besides, even with psychological profiling of suspects, he based their profile on observations of behaviour, not reading their minds.
Still, if this ability could save Tali, he couldn’t regret having the ability. Maybe he could learn how not to use it unless it was literally a matter of life and death. After all, it was a somewhat analogous situation when it came to profiling, and Rossi and Hotch were able to consciously avoid profiling their friends and colleagues, well, mostly. And the psychologists: Aoife, Alain and Umwali, must face similar challenges, having to avoid diagnosing the residents on Atlantis or trying to counsel them uninvited. It might make him very uncomfortable, but if it saved Tali, he would embrace it if it meant she had a future.
Just as he felt something shift internally, a bit like a rubber band snapping, a sensation that wasn’t exactly pleasant, Jack strode in. Lavinia was beside him, her face streaked with tears, and Dr Callahan was a few steps behind, obviously there to brief her on Crispian.
Tony stood and went to her, embracing her gently. “I’m so sorry, Lavinia. I should never have let Cris take part in the mission,” he said brokenly.
She hugged him and burst into tears, crying for a minute or two, before pulling herself together. “No, Tony. Cris wanted to help you and Tali. He’s always regretted the way he acted when you came to stay with your Uncle Clive that summer, when he gave you money for college because your father cleaned out your trust fund,” she said, shaking her head.
“Cris was jealous, though, which was why he was such a jerk to you when Clive died, and accused you of not paying back the ‘loan’ even though he knew Clive gave you the money as a gift. Cris knew you tried to pay Clive back several times, and your uncle refused to cash the check. So Crispian has been wanting to make it up to you for the appalling way he’d treated you,” she told him tearfully.
Tony didn’t argue with her, but he still felt horribly guilty that Cris was injured because of him. Dr Callahan, a neurologist, cleared his throat, and Tony and Jack took the hint. They withdrew from the SGC’s intensive care room, wanting to give Crispian’s wife some privacy.
Once outside the closed door, Tony asked, “Where are Skye and Aidan?”
“They’re in one of the VIP rooms, and Suzy Dixon is looking after them. She’s got four boys of her own, so we figured she’d be the best one to stay with them. Because of Vinia, Suzy was read in on the SGC, so in the short window we had, she seemed like the best choice,” he explained, sounding unusually serious.
Tony nodded distractedly. “Good, that’s good. Where is Ziva? I need to try to break the connection between her and Tali,” he said urgently, hoping he wouldn’t let his daughter down.
Looking even more grave, Jack replied. “David is in Iso 2. But I regret to inform you that she died.”
Tony shook his head. “She can’t be dead. Cris only winged her; he deliberately didn’t hit anything vital, and Barrett zatted her just the one time, as we ordered. This must be a mistake, she can’t be dead,” he argued furiously.
Looking devastated, Jack explained. “Unfortunately, it wasn’t the only time she was zatted. Dayan says she partially hit her as she was entering the living room and said Ziva stumbled but recovered.”
Feeling rage and despair welling within him, he let anger win out. “WHAT? I knew it was a mistake to let her in on the mission. She let her hatred of Ziva for getting Rivkin killed override Tali’s welfare. Or was it because she blamed me for killing him? If Tali dies because of Dayan, I’ll tear her apart,” he yelled, looking and sounding totally unhinged.
Jack spoke in a deliberately calm voice, although he felt anything but calm. “It was a fuck up, it wasn’t revenge, Tony. She was flanking Ziva, and when they reached the living room, Dayan planned to follow her inside and box her in so she couldn’t escape. But the bogey (who we now know was Gibbs) attacked her, choking her out, and she lost consciousness.”
“Why did she zat her though?” Tony asked, angry and devastated.
“She hoped to bring Ziva down, but she stumbled and then seemed to shake off the effects. Mikel tried to inform us over comms that she hit her, but lost consciousness before making the notification,” Jack said, sounding extremely angry.
“Dayan said it was the most brutally effective choke out she’s experienced. Granted, it wasn’t her best idea deciding to zat her, but she also had no idea who Gibbs was or that he presented no threat to Ziva. Unable to make an accurate threat assessment, she made a split-second decision to take David down, knowing how crucial it was to take her alive,” he said.
“This is because of Gibbs and his interference,” Tony said, sounding bleak, his expression hopeless.
“Yes, it is, but we’ll worry about him later. You need to get into ISO 2 and break the connection between Tali and her mother,” he said bracingly.
“It’s too late for that, General. Chaya told me that if Ziva died while they were psychically connected, she’d take Tali with her.”
“No, she explained to me that she told you Tali COULD die. This wasn’t a situation she’d encountered before, so she was theorising the worst case. We contacted Atlantis, and I’ve spoken to Chaya. Her recommendation was to break the link from this end, but if not, you need to get back to Atlantis ASAP.”
“Tali’s still alive?” Tony asked sceptically, not daring to hope as Jack nodded.
His emotions had plunged into a black hole of despair at learning of Ziva’s death, but now a faintly flickering hope ignited at the news that his daughter was still alive. Albeit assuaged by the likelihood of her still being connected to her dead mother. Why the hell did his kid have to be born with the Ancients’ genes?
Wasn’t life complicated enough without dealing with a psychic six-year-old who had the rotten luck to have been born to a mother who was an assassin and a father who was a mess of insecurities. Not to mention passing on his weird Ancients’ genes to his kid.
“Yes, Tony. She’s still alive, but only thanks to Josh. When she started rapidly deteriorating, probably when Ziva got zatted a second time, he told his mother he’d already lost one little sister. He said he wasn’t going to let it happen again, so he grabbed Tali in a bear hug and told her she was not allowed to die.”
“Josh did that?” Tony asked in amazement. “He’s got the communication gene too,” he stated, trying to figure out what that might mean in the context of breaking their connection, even though Jack already knew he possessed the second gene.
“He somehow managed to anchor her to this world, but he’s only twelve. She stabilised, and even though he was using up a lot of energy, he refused to let her go. He says she’d die if he does. Unfortunately, his vital signs started to deteriorate, too, so the doctors decided to put them into a cryogenic pod together to keep them both alive. Of course, no one besides Chaya, Paula, Cassie or Lauren knows about Josh’s genes, so they don’t understand what’s going on,” Jack explained as Tony tried to wrap his head around the chaotic situation.
Unfortunately, they also didn’t have time to spare while he got his head together. He didn’t want his kids to spend a moment more than necessary in the cryogenic chamber, as no one knew what the long-term effects on young brains might be. Taking a deep breath, he prepared to head into the isolation room where Ziva’s body was waiting for him.
“So, the Goa’uld, was it Baal?”
“At this point, we have no way of knowing. Maybe one of the people we detained at Summerton Hall or on the Al’kesh might have that intel, but I’m not getting my hopes up either.” Jack answered with a shrug. “Are you ready to try and ‘consciously uncouple’ Tali from her mother?”
Tony glared at his boss. “Really, Jack? That’s where you chose to go? Go ahead, just remind me to crack really dumbass jokes when you get to use your extra Ancients’ healing gene to save someone’s life,” he grumbled, but secretly appreciated his attempt at humour.
“Yeah, point taken,” Jack looked momentarily penitent, before denial kicked in. “Hang on a minute. I can’t. The Asgard blocked the knowledge I needed to heal anyone, as I did with Teal’c.
“Yeah, you keep telling yourself that BS. Tell me you haven’t felt Chaya removing subtle blocks on your ability to access the knowledge,” Tony said.
Or, in his case, tinkering around the edges of the huge emotional blockages he’d unconsciously built that prevented him from using his genetic ability to read people’s minds. Chaya was sneaky, but every time they met on Atlantis, Tony felt an odd sensation when she greeted him in her glowing Ancients’ form. He’d assumed it happened to everyone, but after talking to Colonel Sheppard, he realised that wasn’t the case.
He honestly wanted to be pissed off at her interference, but also understood that as an Ascended Ancient, she would have access to the powers of all five extra genes, including the ability to foretell the future. Perhaps she knew that one day he would need this gene to save Tali’s life and Josh, too. She certainly doted on his daughter and seemed equally fond of Josh, Mikelle and Sarah O’Neill. All the kids she’d identified as having one of the extra genes, too.
Jack looked confused, and maybe a little bit disgruntled, which Tony picked up on; he felt the same. “What? That weird sensation that feels like a rubber band snapping inside my head?”
“Yeah, that! Even Sheppard hasn’t experienced it, and you know how she feels about him,” Tony pointed out. “But right now, I need to go and try to muddle my way through severing a psychic connection like I have even half a clue what the hell I’m doing!” he said, taking a deep breath and stepping into the isolation area.
The moment he stepped into the outer hallway, a nurse stepped up with a coverall like the one he wore at crime scenes when collecting forensic evidence, except the material was a lot thicker than he was used to. Nor was it made from natural fibres. He figured they must use them when dealing with alien life forms since there’d been more than a few occasions at the SGC when aliens contaminated the scientific staff and military personnel. She handed him thick gloves, a full plastic face shield and a neck guard that radiology staff used to protect their thyroid glands from overexposure to radiation from X-raying patients. Realising the neck guard in this instance was intended to thwart the Goa’uld infiltrating his body, he wondered if it was a possibility or if they were just being excessively cautious, as he pulled the coverall’s hood tight.
Taking a deep breath, he stepped into ISO 2, surprised to find Colonel Ferretti and SG-2. Each of the team members staked out in the four corners of the room, heavily armed, kitted out like himself, and obviously guarding Ziva’s body.
Nodding to the team, he asked Louis Ferretti, “Is this because you think the Goa’uld could still be alive?”
“We don’t know, to be honest, Agent Paddington, so we aren’t going to take any chances. My condolences for your loss. The general and I lost a close teammate after he was taken by a Goa’uld back when the SGC was starting up. General O’Neill said you needed to spend some time with Ms David before you had to return to Atlantis. I wish we could give you privacy, but you can’t trust a Goa’uld, and even with all the PPE, don’t get too close,” he cautioned.
Mentally groaning because he naively thought it would just be himself and Ziva, like when he’d said his goodbyes to Caitlin Todd and Paula Cassidy, he shrugged. He also didn’t have any desire to be snaked, either. Tali was depending on him. Grabbing a stool with castors, he positioned it approximately twelve feet away from the examination bench where Ziva lay. He briefly thought about all the times he’d seen her sleeping, and how her snoring had become a standing joke in the Bullpen at NCIS; it sounded a lot like a backyard woodchipper. But there was no snoring, just silence, and he picked up emotions of peace, regret and devotion.
Whoa! What the hell? Was he losing his mind, he wondered in alarm, before an image of the former Head Medical Examiner at NCIS, one Donald Ducky Mallard, appeared in his head. Ducky talked to the dead, but did he talk to the dead because they couldn’t walk away or interrupt his ramblings, or was Ducky able to read minds, even the dead? Maybe he possessed the Ancients’ communication gene, too.
Even so, Tony had more important things to focus on, like the two kids back home, depending on him to save them from being pulled into the afterlife with Tali’s mother, as crazy as that concept sounded. And speaking of which, was he going completely crazy, or was he picking up two faint echoes of his kids? It surely had to be his imagination, but there was a sense he had of a caring big brother with a protective streak a mile wide, willingly risking his own life to save a little six-year-old without any thought to his own life. There was also an even more familiar resonance, stubborn, opinionated, gifted, loyal and loving, and he instantly recognised it as Tali. She was stubbornly clinging to Ziva, refusing to let go, even as Ziva’s own psychic resonance grew thinner with each passing minute.
So, crazy as it sounded, his intuition told him Tali was refusing to let go of her connection to her mother, and Josh was refusing to let Tali go, but Ziva’s soul or whatever you wanted to call it, was finding it harder to remain on this plane of existence or to exist; Tony didn’t know. He had never been into any of this religious stuff or spirituality, and even now, he was having difficulty believing it was real. But he had no choice but to act like it was real because if he did nothing, he was going to lose his kids, and it wasn’t an option.
Rubbing those annoying unnatural fibres in his PPE gear and panicking at this point, trying to separate Tali from Ziva, which wasn’t working, he experienced a truly bizarre flashback to an afternoon tea he’d endured on the Winyan planet. He’d dropped in on Filiya Lavin, Lucius Lavin’s wife, whom the former baker abandoned, along with his two kids, after he discovered that accursed mind-controlling drug. Poor Filiya was struggling to feed and bring up Jeroze and Adrexa. Tony, feeling sorry for everything she had been forced to endure, had set her up in a spinning and weaving business in her home.
During an official visit to the planet, regarding the gang of men they’d arrested, Filiya shyly invited him to tea. She wanted to thank his “Boss, Thomas Magnum”, and himself for supplying her with a professional loom to produce cloth and a huge stockpile of plant fibres and animal fleeces from Earth. She’d shown him how some fleeces, like sheep, had tiny barbs that made the material easier to spin than those that didn’t because it grabs hold of the other fibres. He thought that Tali was probably like those barbed threads that Filiya had demonstrated. Her stubborn tenacity was making it hard to separate her from her mother, even if hanging onto Ziva was threatening to take her life, too.
Tony recalled how Filiya’s daughter was learning to spin, keen to help her mother, and Filiya showed Adrexa how to twist two strands of fibre together to make it thicker and stronger, calling it plying. Was that what Tali had done, not just grabbed hold of her mother, but twisted them together? Pulling them apart wasn’t working; maybe he needed to unwind their two psychic strands.
So, okay, he knew it sounded absolutely nuts, but Tony didn’t know what else to do. He visualised two, no three strands, since Josh was there holding onto Tali with a fierce determination not to let her go. He kept a grim hold of the two strands that were Tali and Josh in his right hand and took Ziva’s strand with his left hand, visualising pulling them apart. At first, the single strand separated surprisingly easily from the other two, but as he followed the thread, which he figured was the path Tali’s psychic connection had taken to reach out to her mother, it made him realise how strong his daughter’s ability must be. It freaked him out, but he couldn’t afford to think about that now. It became increasingly more difficult to separate them.
It isn’t working, he thought despairingly. He’d failed his kids, and they would lose both. At his wits’ end, he felt a tiny flutter in his mind before a whisper that he recognised told him to cut the strand. With what he wondered before he found his belt knife in his hand. Not questioning how it got there since he hadn’t worn a belt when he’d travelled back to Earth, he reasoned briefly – this wasn’t real, it was a visualisation.
He carefully cut the single strand and watched as the strand collapsed and fell away with a “Look after Tali, my hairy little butt.”
Tali cried out, “Ima. Stay with me! Please don’t go,” which ripped Tony’s heart in two.
Josh held her tight and told her firmly, “She can’t stay, and you can’t go with her, Belle.”
“But I don’t want her to go!”
Josh hugged her as she sobbed, saying softly, “I know, Belle. But she must go.”
The flutter in his mind told him, “The job is only half done, Alexander. You must return to Atlantis and repeat this process in the Pegasus Galaxy.”
“But there is still a small strand of Ziva that is tightly attached to Josh and Tali. Shouldn’t I try to untangle it first, Chaya?”
“It would take too long, Alex. The energy rebound created by forcing them apart wound the last end too tight when it released, and it would take too long to untangle. You need to go back to Atlantis and repeat what you did here with the other end of Belle’s connection. Your daughter will be a force as she grows up,” the Ancient warned him.
“I know, and I’m already dreading it, and Josh seems equally determined. I’m not even going to think about little Mikelle now,” he told her, trying not to freak out that he was communicating with an Ancient in a distant galaxy that would take their Earth ships at least three weeks to reach.
“I think that’s very wise of you,” she told him. “But you need to hurry back home. Tali and Josh need to be released as soon as you can.”
“Is there a problem?” he asked.
“Your AI, Janae Progenius, has searched his creator’s database and learned that Janus did not recommend its use for those whose brains are still developing.”
“Understood,” he told her.
Standing, he glanced over at Ziva, feeling numb at this point, and knowing he couldn’t afford the luxury of seeking a resolution. He nodded his thanks to Ferretti and his team for watching his six, his mind occupied with getting back home as quickly as possible. As Tony exited the ISO room, he wasn’t surprised to find General O’Neill waiting for him, having been watching the CCTV monitor.
“Did it work?” Jack asked impatiently.
“Partially. I managed to break the connection from this end, but I wasn’t strong enough to untangle it all the way back to the two kids on Atlantis. I’m going to have to do it when I return,” he explained. “Chaya said that Janae Progenius found a reference in Janus’ database about the cryogenic pods being harmful to immature brains, so I need to get there ASAP.”
“Damn! Okay, I’ll have the SGC medical team clear you on this end. It will be faster, and I’ll issue orders to Midway II so you can skip the 12-hour quarantine and continue straight on to Atlantis. Do whatever you have to do. Just get Tali and Josh safely out of the cryo-pod. Then report to Atlantis’s sickbay for clearance ASAP since the kids will be under medical supervision as well.”
“Thanks, General,” Tony said gratefully.
If the SGC docs cleared them quickly, they could be back in Atlantis in under an hour. It still wouldn’t be quick enough to stop him from freaking out, but it was a whole lot better than having to quarantine at Midway Station II for half a day.
“I’ll take care of everything on this end, and don’t worry about your cousin. Dr Callahan and his wife have agreed to wait for another eight hours to stabilise him before they operate to remove the bullet. The Docs have asked me to use the Goa’uld healing device to try to regulate his blood pressure and heart rate,” he said with a shrug. “Head back to the sickbay, and I’ll have Lorne and Teyla report for medical clearance so you can get out of here,” Jack told him, patting him awkwardly on the back.
Thirty-eight minutes later, Lorne was manoeuvring the puddle jumper through the SGC event horizon as they made the first jump to Midway II. Going through the security rigmarole, approaching it manually from the gate in space, not on the station, they had to physically dock the jumper manually after their security clearance was established. That was before they could enter the second wormhole via the stargate on Midway Station, which would then take them to Atlantis, that was indisputably a more secure process. It also added roughly ten minutes to their trip, but the two-wormhole mechanism was constructed for very valid security reasons. The Wraith hijacked the first Midway Station, with its original single wormhole, travelling straight through to Earth and attacking the SGC. Tony understood exactly why it was necessary, and on any other day, he would be applauding it, as it kept his loved ones safe. Today, he resented the extra time involved because every minute his kids were in that damn cryo-pod was potentially another minute that they might be harmed.
Back home in their own familiar gate room, they encountered another unexpected delay that had him on the verge of a panic attack or committing a homicide. Dr Keller came perilously close to being throttled because she was insisting he must proceed straight to the infirmary and receive medical clearance before he could save his kids, despite General O’Neill’s explicit orders allowing him to head straight to the cryogenic pods to save Belle and Joshua. Commander AuClaire, having received O’Neill’s order, told her to stand down, but she asserted her authority as CMO of Atlantis overrode him when it came to medical matters.
AuClaire glared at her before asking, “So, is this the last order you want to issue before the IOC and I remove you from your position, and you disappear into obscurity, is it?”
Unfortunately, it looked as if they’d reached a standoff when Barb Biro, who was the doctor rostered on duty, saved the day with an exceptionally reasonable suggestion.
“We have two doctors rostered on and one scanner, so while Dr Angel and I examine Lieutenant Colonel Lorne and Teyla Emmagen, Associate Director Paddington can be escorted to the cryo-genesis pods to complete the mission he was ordered to carry out by General O’Neill. I’ll have a security team accompany him in case the SGC doctors have failed to do their job properly,” she said sarcastically.
Perhaps realising she was pissing off too many people in authority, or she remembered that Tony had a presidential letter that granted him absolute authority in a security crisis, or maybe just that she was acting like a petty bureaucrat, Dr Biro and Lorne’s proposal gave Keller a face-saving way to back down. Tony requested that Major Teldy’s team be assigned as his security detail, having worked with them during the Winyan investigations, and he trusted them.
As he hurried to the cryogenic pod lab with Teldy and her team, Carson Beckett was already on standby to revive his two kids, so he could finish unravelling the psychic connection his little firebrand had created. That’s when it struck him, when did he start thinking of Joshua and Mikelle DiNozzo, aka Muir, as his children? Sure, he and Paula had already discussed their willingness to legally adopt each other’s offspring in case anything happened to either of them, so their kids were protected. He’d intended to talk to A.J. Chegwidden and Hotch about drawing up the necessary adoption papers before this crisis with Tali, because it was a prudent and responsible option. He already cared about Paula’s two kids, but more in an avuncular role, just as he did with Crispian’s twins, Skye and Aidan.
But his feelings were definitely far more paternal than he’d realised. He guessed it probably came about when he came to understand twelve-year-old Josh (nearly thirteen, he could hear him protest), and the connection he’d made, tethering himself and Tali to Atlantis. Josh was literally preventing her from being pulled into another plane of existence and had done so at a great personal risk to himself. Paula must be going mad with worry for them both, and he wished he could take a couple of minutes to reassure her that he had this and their kids would be okay. But too much time had already been lost arguing with officious CMOs. He hoped that if there were harmful effects from their being in those damned cryo-pods, Vala could heal them.
Still, first things first. After Carsen released them, he tried fruitlessly to separate them to examine and monitor their vital signs, but Josh stubbornly refused to let go of his ‘sister’, and Tony realised that until he severed the second half of the link with Ziva, the pair shouldn’t be physically separated. In fact, taking a blanket, he wrapped it around them both, hugging them tight as he began his visualisation for a second time. He did note that the hold that Ziva had on them (or maybe Tali’s grasp on her mother, he wasn’t sure which) wasn’t nearly as strong as it had been in Cheyenne Mountain. Hopefully, since he knew what to do this time, it would be easier.
And it was, he separated Ziva’s strand from the two kids before visualising his belt knife and cutting it, hard and fast as Tali’s eyes shot open. She started screaming hysterically, and Josh, also aware of his surroundings, held tightly onto Tali and Tony, almost as if the twelve-year-old let go of them, he would lose them or himself. And maybe he would, Tony mused, remembering that Josh possessed the Ancients’ communication gene too. Who knew what he instinctively knew.
While Beckett was trying to examine both children as the three DiNozzos clung tight to each other, Tali continued to cry hysterically, making it all but impossible to assess the two children. Tony realised the problem, and he was equally concerned about her physical state (since he already knew that she was severely traumatised emotionally), so he tried gently to extricate himself from his little limpet and her brother, but Tali’s distress amplified. He was unprepared for Josh to communicate with him psychically, telling him that Tali needed Paula and Mikelle to join in their group hug, even though it made perfect sense, both his suggestion and his mode of communicating.
After all, he had the gene too, but Tony hesitated, unsure if Becket would permit it as he hadn’t been medically cleared yet. Thankfully, Chaya stepped in. Clearly agreeing with Josh, she informed Dr Beckett that Belle needed the extra support of Paula and little Mikelle. As Tony had expected, Carson protested that Alex hadn’t been screened yet. Chaya informed him serenely that she’d already screened him before he encountered the two children, and he was free of unwanted passengers. Then she promised to monitor Belle and Joshua’s vital signs, but Belle needed the emotional support of her whole family to help anchor her as she grieved the loss of her mother, taken as a host by a Goa’uld.
Luckily, Chaya’s word seemed good enough for Dr Beckett, who agreed the poor little lassie needed extra support, allowing Paula and Mikelle, waiting outside and flanked by Teyla, Nikki and Cadman, to join them. Paula hurried to their side, worried to death over the two children. Tony noted absently that like him, she already regarded Belle as a daughter. He noted how Belle latched on to her, desperately needing a mother-figure as she tried to come to terms with the immensity of her loss and her extremely conflicted feelings about her mother and what she’d seen her do. He prayed that after witnessing Ziva being forced to kill Senior, she’d somehow been spared being a witness to the assassination of four, or was it five, highly placed members of The Trust, although he feared it wasn’t the case.
How the hell did a five-year-old see something like that and not be driven mad, he wondered bleakly. He knew that they had a long, hard road ahead, but she was alive, and he was grateful.
Finally, it might have been an hour, it might have been a day; he was drained, emotionally and physically. Tali stopped crying. Her physical distress had gradually been decreasing as exhaustion took over. He knew the mental trauma was a whole other ball of wax.
Speaking in a very un-Tali-like manner, she said through her hiccups, “I’m sleepy, and Mikelle needs a diaper change.”
Paula said gently, “Yes, you’re right, she does, little Bellybutton, so how about we get you both ready for bed?”
Tony was grateful that no one mentioned that his distraught, almost six-year-old had again lost control of her bladder, wetting herself in her grief-stricken meltdown. As they slowly parted and consulted with Carson, he explained that he wanted both kids to spend the night in the infirmary overnight and undergo brain scans using Atlantis’ advanced imaging equipment tomorrow. Paula and Tony decided to return to the apartment to bathe the kids and get them into their nightclothes, then the whole family would stay together in the infirmary.
Thirty minutes later, Teyla and Nikki had joined them as they took a few mattresses and a pile of pillows, making one big sleeping place so that Tali had all her family close by. They chatted about ordinary things: Thora Edwards was starting up a musical society, and the children could learn to play instruments from willing musical adults. They would also host concerts, and apparently, Jack Hotchner had already volunteered himself and his teacher (Tony) to give a recital. That snippet had Tony rolling his eyes since he wasn’t a massive fan of performing in public, as it brought back bitter childhood memories. Nikki informed them that Kaleb Miller’s drama club was working on a performance of Peter Pan, which seemed ambitious, but everyone was excited. Besides, their chatter seemed to calm Belle even more.
Just as Nikki and Teyla were thinking it might be time to take their leave, Dr Martens dropped by, carrying a small liver-coloured dog with a white patch on its chest.
“Is it okay to drop in?” she asked shyly.
Tony, realising instantly what this was and feeling a wave of gratitude for the scientist, smiled at her. “Hey, Holly, who do you have there?” he asked, hoping he’d guessed right.
“Um, this is Special Agent Poppy of the Interstellar Bureau of Investigation,” she said. “Is this a bad time for her to report to her boss for duty? she joked in her awkward, geeky manner.
He looked across at Paula, who was trying not to grin. “Actually, now’s a perfect time for Probationary Special Agent Poppy to report for duty. Her very important first mission is to guard Belle, Mikelle and Josh while they’re here in the infirmary,” he said with a twinkle in his eye.
They all watched as the very first robot dog created specifically for the ISBI, snuggled up between Belle and Josh. Belle began stroking her silky soft fur, and everyone could see the exhausted child calming down as her eyes grew heavy
It was into this sweet little tableau of domesticity of a dog and kids that Dr Jennifer Keller, Chief Medical Officer, bustled into the room they’d made their own, huffing that Alex hadn’t reported for his mandatory examination yet as agreed to earlier.
Giving her his best, do I look like I give a fuck, look, he grinned. “I’ve already had it,” he protested.
“What? When?” she bristled, too angry to notice anyone but him, not even their room redecorating.
“A couple of hours ago. Chaya Sar pronounced me clear of any unwanted hitchhikers. Carson was there,” he told her airily, and the others watched on, highly amused.
“That hussy! She’s not a medical doctor. She isn’t even human anymore.” Keller might not be with Rodney McLay anymore but it still seemed she hated Chaya
“Oi, she’s my daughter’s godmother, I’ll have you know,” he said, which was not strictly true, but she definitely saw herself as Tali’s fairy godmother. He could tell!
“I don’t care, she is not on staff here and has no medical qualifications,” Keller retorted snippily.
“Actually, Doctor, back when she was human, she was an esteemed healer,” he told her, and this time he wasn’t exaggerating.
“But she isn’t a member of my team, so I must insist that you report to me in 10 minutes when I sign on for duty, and I’ll conduct the scan, so everything is done per regulations.”
Shrugging, he said, “As you wish,” and Nikki gave a tiny snigger at his fatuous quote from The Princess Bride.
Nikki’s giggle resulted in Jennifer finally noticing the rearrangement of her hospital ward; too angry before to register that the hospital beds had been pushed against the wall. The mattresses were piled on the floor with soft blankets placed strategically, making a cosy nest with Paula and Mikelle snuggled up in bed with Belle and Josh. Nikki and Teyla were visiting, and Tony was standing next to that freaky DOD scientist, and a Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever was snuggled up between the only two patients who were meant to be there in her infirmary.
“What is that dog doing in my hospital? Animals transmit dangerous zoonotic diseases, and they are unhygienic. They constantly shed fur and dander and carry germs. Get it out of here immediately.”
“Hey, that’s Probationary Special Agent Poppy, of the Interstellar Bureau of Investigations and my work partner, you’re talking about,” Alex protested staunchly. “She is authorised to go anywhere on Atlantis so long as she is under my direct supervision or that of another ISBI agent like Special Agent Bates or Muir. These are her credentials, he said, producing her creds and badge and handing them to Keller.
“This is a beagle,” she said, examining the official ISBI creds before looking at Poppy. “That’s not a beagle.”
Tony grinned. “Oh, hey, you noticed that too? I could have sworn I requested a beagle?” he shot a teasing look at Dr Martens.
“True, Associate Director, you did, but I love Tollers.”
Getting frustrated with the situation, Dr Keller raised her voice. “I don’t care what breed it is; it cannot be in the infirmary. As CMO. I forbid it.”
“Actually, Dr Keller, as a fully trained animal therapy and emotional support dog, I think you’ll find that regulations permit her to come into the ward,” Holly explained.
“You didn’t?” Alex asked her in astonishment.
“Yes, she’s programmed for all aspects of law enforcement work and search and rescue, but after today, I thought it might be a good idea to program her for emotional support for PTSD and complex trauma and for assisted animal therapy, too,” she said, squealing in surprise as Alex seized her in a hug and planted a kiss on her cheek.
“Thanks, Holls, that’s so kind of you,” he said gratefully. “You’re the best!”
His reaction shocked Keller, who thought Martens was a freak, one step up from the creepy Artificial Intelligence program Janae Progenius – he thought he was Pinocchio. Meanwhile, his reaction amused Paula, Nikki and Teyla, but Holly was floored. Aside from Douglas Fargo, most people treated her as an oddity at best.
Just then, Nikki let out a sudden sharp exclamation, and Belle checked her out with the eagle eye of a dedicated baby watcher. She might be subdued, but when it came to Nikki and her baby Erica Leigh, she had a one-track mind.
“Are you having branches-hits contractions again, Nikki?”
“No, Belle, I’m having proper contractions this time.”
Seeing Belle’s confusion, her father explained. “That means Erica Leigh has decided she’s done baking and it’s time to come out and meet the world.”
“She’s not a cookie,” she responded automatically with a touch of her old asperity at his inability to grasp this crucial fact, eliciting muted smiles from the adults in the room at the normalcy of her response.
“We’re going to have another baby, Papa,” she told him, with a ghost of her old smile.
Tony hoped that Poppy and Erica Leigh’s arrivals would help Tali cope with her grief, although he knew that what Tali witnessed meant there would be a very long, hard road ahead. But even if their life had become extremely complicated, it was never boring being Tali DiNozzo, aka Annabelle Paddington’s father. On Atlantis, they’d found a real family who’d embraced them despite their eccentricities, and he had no doubt they would pitch in to help Tali on the long road back.
And first thing in the morning, he would talk to Hotch and A.J about drawing up adoption papers for the three kids because you never know what might happen tomorrow. He thought of his cousin dejectedly, wondering if Crispian would survive.
Smiling at his daughter lovingly, he said, “Yep, we sure are, Kiddo. Can’t wait, can you?”
