Work Text:
Nugatory
“Nope.” Fornell announced, popping the p.
Gibbs growled, putting his gun away. As much as he might like to, Vance would frown on his shooting Fornell and thus the gun was nugatory for now. “What are you doing here, Fornell?”
“We caught a hint of who is after your admiral. It crossed over with one of our active cases, unexpectedly.” Fornell explained.
Gibbs glared, silently demanding more information.
“We are, of course, open to a joint investigation with the FBI as lead.” Fornell started.
“Not happening.” Gibbs snarled.
“Look, Gibbs, the guy after your admiral is someone we’ve been chasing for years. There’s no way my higher ups will let you guys run the investigation. You can, however, continue to bodyguard the admiral while we use him for bait.” Fornell suggested.
“So what you’re saying is that the FBI can’t catch this guy on their own and need to use the admiral to catch him?” Gibbs sneered.
“If you want to wait a couple more years, for our research to pay off. The FBI will be quite happy to catch him without your admiral. I suspect your admiral, doesn’t want to wait that long, however.” Fornell smirked knowingly at Gibbs.
Sabrina silently slipped into the main room closing the door behind her, so that the admiral could change into dry clothes. She’d also booby trapped the window, so that if he tried to escape again he’d be in for a rude awakening. She hoped the admiral wasn’t stupid enough to try again.
“Fine. You have exactly three hours. That’s how long it will take DiNozzo to return. Then we’ll discuss your plan and see what needs to be modified to fit NCIS’ specifications.” Gibbs grunted, unamused by this turn of events, but knowing the admiral was not willing to wait. He hated giving up control or doing joint ops, but in this case he suspected his superiors would make him place nice when they found out, so he might as well give in now.
While they waited, however, he fully intended to chew McGee’s ear off to find out why he hadn’t found the FBI connection before they showed up literally at the admiral’s door step. He’d thought McGee was better than this. Gibbs was beginning to suspect that McGee himself was nugatory. Maybe, he should tell Vance to assign him back to cyber crimes, after all.
Then Vance could figure out what to do with him, since even his computer skills seemed lacking these days if he couldn’t even figure out the FBI had a connection to their admiral.

