Chapter Text
"There, where houses were scattered like islands
There was my childhood; and what of me?
I'm a gun loaded with memories"
- Iris Fields, Shlomo Artzi
Sunday, January 15
03:00 EST
It was high noon, and the valiant Elf Lord Althotar was rallying the troops against the evil warlord Jaghla when fate intervened. It was three in the morning on Sunday, and Tim McGee was online, liberating yet another virtual kingdom while firmly ignoring a novel draft, when his email alert pinged.
It wasn't work, because his colleagues would call him regardless of the hour. It also wasn't another gamer, who was more likely to see him online and IM him instead.
The subject line read U up? and the sender was Anat M. The body of the message was empty. Tim stared at the email. 3 a.m. in DC was 10 a.m. in Israel, and Israeli weekends ran Friday through Saturday. Anat was supposed to be at work, with even her work cell phone switched off, battery pulled out and stored securely. She was definitely not supposed to be on her personal smartphone, sending emails.
Tim grabbed his phone, thumbed down for Anat's number, and hit dial. Anat picked up on the second ring. "Please tell me you're all right."
"I'm all right," she said immediately. "Guess you're awake."
"Yes, I'm awake," he said. It came out a little snippy, but he was still trying to figure out what was going on. Anat was good with the time conversions; she was unlikely to ping him when it wasn't his Saturday morning or early afternoon. They skyped just about twelve hours before, and everything was fine and normal. Now, something clearly was not.
"How's the weather in DC?" she asked.
"What?"
"I asked -"
"Anat, it's three in the morning."
"I asked if you were up."
He could snap Your English or say something else sarcastic, but he wasn't so tired as to forget what a colossally bad idea it was to get into a snark war with Israelis in general and Anat in particular. Plus, Anat sounded off, somehow, shorter and more distant than usual. "Is there any particular reason you're asking about the weather in DC?"
"Yeah, I get, like, two hours to pack."
Suddenly, Tim was very awake. "You're coming to DC?"
"Unfortunately," she said. "Not that I don't love you, but my job just decided to suck worse."
"Did you just -"
"Yeah," she said, and she still sounded more irritated and miserable than anything else. "See you Monday."
10:00 PST (07:00 EST)
The ground floor of the OSP hub was relatively quiet when G and Sam walked in. The time being ten on a Sunday morning, this wasn't too big a surprise. OSP was active 24/7, 365 days a year, but some times were still quieter than others.
Upstairs in Ops, though, things were in full swing. The room was populated to a level that indicated a major op was cooking. Eric dominated three keyboards and five monitors; Nell was absorbed in documents in Arabic; and Hettie was standing by the central desk, focused on the main display.
"So kind of you gentlemen to join us," she said.
G and Sam exchanged looks.
"What's going on?" G asked.
"A-Tahaluf Al-Islami," Hettie said.
Sam straightened. "The Islamic Alliance?"
"The terrorist ring nobody is even sure exists?" G demanded as he and Sam approached the central desk.
Hettie turned towards them. "That is correct," she said.
"I take it something's changed," Sam said.
Longer breath, mouth stayed a little open: it wasn't so much a tell of Hettie's as it was a deliberate signal. "That would also be correct."
Sam crossed his arms. "What's going on, Hettie?"
"It would appear that The Islamic Alliance are about to attempt a kidnapping on US soil. Specifically," she said, carefully, "intelligence suggests that they intend to kidnap someone involved with the P-LAM project."
It was an easy acronym to recall. G stated it out for protocol. "The portable anti-missile laser." Ballistic lasers were a sexy weapon system; the P-LAM project promised to provide a system powerful enough and accurate enough to install on a wide range of boats and aircrafts.
"Exactly," Hettie confirmed. "Now, since the company heading this project is based out of Baltimore, and Mr. Hanna here is one of three experts on this organization in the country, both of you will be on the 10 p.m. flight to Washington, DC."
"DC has the lead on this?" Sam asked. The note of skepticism was faint, but there.
Hettie picked up on it, too. "Director Vance assigned this case to Mr. Callen's old friend, Jethro Gibbs."
Gibbs was good news. If they had to cooperate with someone, at least it was Gibbs. Gibbs was trustworthy, and his team competent as the very least. Sam's point was valid still, so G reiterated it. "Why give the lead to Gibbs, if Sam's the expert?"
The corner of Hettie's mouth pulled as she said: "The intelligence regarding this kidnapping attempt originated with the Shin-Beit."
Oh, great.
"Israeli domestic security?" Sam asked. This time, the skepticism was laid on thick.
"That is correct," Hettie said. She didn't sound any more fond of the idea than Sam or he. "As per protocol, the case officer is on her way to DC with all the relevant information."
That was precisely why G did not like this. He shook his head. "Our friends the Israelis are involved," he remarked to Sam. "This explains why Gibbs has lead."
"Ziva David," Sam replied.
"Worst Israel-America intelligence scandal since Jonathan Pollard," G agreed. Ziva David's defection was far worse, actually, but at least it was bad for the Israelis and not for his country.
Hettie lifted her hand from where she had her arms crossed on her chest, and pointed at him. "You do realize that you are going to be working with her, yes?" she asked pointedly.
G raised his arms in surrender, conceding the point. "I promise I'll play nice," he said.
Sam shot him a glance and then turned his attention back to Hettie. "Is there anything else we need to know?" he asked in his Back on track now, please voice.
"Ms. Jones will brief you on most of it," Hettie replied. "But there is one thing."
Monday, January 16
07:00 EST
"Wait, rewind that," Tony said. "I didn't know that you and Anat stayed in touch."
"Neither did I," Ziva added.
She sounded playful, curious and had about her usual degree of accent, so Tony wasn't going to start worrying about her just yet. McGee, on the other hand, was in serious need of a distraction; which was why Tony, being a kind and responsible Senior Field Agent, was providing him one.
And if Tony needed a distraction himself, then he was totally justified in that. Tim had already called both Tony and Ziva on Sunday morning to tell them of Anat's mystery phone call. Vance's very personal assistant had contacted all of them later that day to tell them to be extra early on Monday. It was now 7 a.m. on Monday, and Gibbs has already been with Vance for an hour according to Cynthia. It was increasingly looking as if Anat was going to be not just in DC, but working with NCIS.
Whatever it was that brought a Shin-Beit analyst to DC, it was clearly not a routine workshop with the FBI and there was no way that it was anything but bad news.
Frankly, they all needed a distraction.
"So tell me, McRomeo," Tony drawled.
"Tony, for the hundredth time - " McGee began, exasperation dripping from every syllable.
The elevator dinged. Tim was already facing the elevator; Tony and Ziva turned. Two people stepped out. Both wore street clothes, looked like they could handle themselves and had NCIS badges displayed prominently on their belts.
"Agents Callen and Hanna," McGee said, sounding a little surprised.
"Agent McGee," said one of the two arrivals – smaller guy, an inch shorter than Gibbs, Caucasian.
The other guy – several inches taller than Tony, African American, built like a truck – held out his hand when he and the first guy arrived at Team Gibbs' aisle. "Sam Hanna," he said.
"Anthony DiNozzo," Tony said, shaking his head. "And that's…"
Ziva cut him off, offering her hand. "Ziva David."
There was no question whether Callen and Hanna knew who she was; Callen's look spoke volumes.
"Callen," he said. No first name, but he seemed okay with handshakes. "We already met McGee here."
Finally, Tony placed the names Callen and Hanna. Spring of '07, when Gibbs and McGee went to LA chasing after a weapons dealer called Liam and found Michael Rivkin instead. Tony knew their names, but their files had no photos: OSP's two top agents were standing in the MCRT squad room.
"Agent Gibbs is…" Tim began.
"With Director Vance?" Hanna suggested.
Tony narrowed his eyes at him. "You already know what this is about," he accused. He didn't like being out of the loop in general, and particularly when someone else was in the know.
Of course, the two OSP agents were too good to actually respond: they exchanged a look, and Callen made a gesture that might have been an aborted shrug, but that was all.
Tony did not get to continue to question them, because the elevator dinged again. This time, three people stepped in. One of them was security. The second was Anat. Curled up in a puffy coat and looking about as happy as a wet cat, she seemed even tinier than Tony remembered. She had a backpack slung over one shoulder and was dragging a trolley suitcase. The third person had only a trolley, coat slung over her left arm. She could be stepping into her own living room for all that she seemed uncomfortable.
"Pick up that jaw, DiNozzo," Yael Dunski said. "I think you might need it later."
"I still hate you," Tony informed her.
"Thought you might say that."
"Brought more sweets to buy us off with?"
Her expression didn't even flicker. "I bought you chocolate, but I ate it all on the plane."
Callen, who's been eyeing both Israelis with the interest of a lion watching a couple of gazelles, chose that moment to interrupt. "You must be Yael Dunski," he said.
That got Dunski's attention, all right. Her face and body still had all the expression of a mannequin, but Tony figured that her turning constituted a significant enough a tell.
"And you are?" she asked.
"Callen," he said. No first name, no handshake. "My boss says your aunt is still invited for tea."
To Tony's surprise, that made Dunski smile. The expression even seemed to be warm. "Tell Hettie that Ilana says her mulled wine recipe is still the best."
"I will," he promised.
Hanna offered his hand. "Sam Hanna," he said.
She shook it. "Dunski," she said.
"And your associate is…?" Callen asked.
"Anat Mejaled," Anat said. She'd dropped her bags at the empty desk behind McGee's while the rest of them were talking, and rounded back up, still in her coat. She shook Callen's and Hanna's hands - seemingly indifferent to her entire hand behind about the size of Hanna's pinkie finger - and then turned around to Team Gibbs.
Tony didn't expect the brief hug and the kiss on each cheek, but he wasn't about to complain; Ziva got a similar treatment; McGee got a second and far more serious hug following the kisses.
Callen and Hanna were doing a good job of hiding their interest, but they were getting very interested nevertheless. I know what happened here and you don't, Tony thought.
"It is good to see you," McGee told Anat when they broke apart.
"I was planning on a vacation, damnit," she said. "Not on being kidnapped."
Callen and Hanna were definitely interested. Now Tony was, too.
"So, you're kidnapping your own colleagues, now?" he asked Dunski flippantly.
Dunski's lips twitched. She didn't reply, though; Ziva did.
"She did not actually kidnap us," Ziva said.
"No, she just let us be kidnapped by terrorists."
"I also had eyes on you the entire time," Dunski said. Her gaze shifted behind Tony's shoulder. "Good morning."
"I wish I could say the same," Gibbs said, arriving from the direction of the stairs; Tony was so focused on the conversation, he failed to notice.
Gibbs and Callen knew each other, Tony knew that; he also knew that Gibbs counted Callen among the people he trusted, as much as Gibbs ever trusted anyone. He still didn't expect the look Gibbs gave Callen - a less concerned version of the one reserved for Ziva - and certainly not the look Callen gave Gibbs, which was full of fondness as well as something else that was almost Abby-like.
Tony managed to not bite the inside of his cheek, but his jaw still clenched. At least Hanna was watching Gibbs and Callen like a hawk, too, even if he was doing a better job at controlling his emotions.
Gibbs didn't stay put for even a second. Rather, he turned around and tossed behind his shoulder: "Conference room, everybody."
Predictably, Gibbs took the seat at the head of the table. DiNozzo sat to his immediate left- also unsurprisingly - and David continued that line. G took the seat on Gibbs' other side, and Sam sat down next to his partner. He had a split-second to try and predict Dunski's choice of a seat. Her and DiNozzo's earlier exchange, as well as the way Gibbs' lips thinned whenever he looked at her, indicated that there was no love lost between her and Gibbs' team. That suggested she might prefer his and G's side of the table. On the other hand, sitting down next to David would be the kind of contrary and possessive behavior that wouldn't surprise him in an Israeli.
Dunski walked right past David; Sam had to wonder if the two women were that professional or if they were deliberately ignoring each other. He realized where, exactly, Dunski intended to sit only as she came around the foot of the table and her eyes met his casually.
G tensed when Dunski indeed sat to Sam's immediate right. There was nothing Sam could do about that. Still, between that, Gibbs' tense restlessness and the way DiNozzo was watching every single person outside his team, the atmosphere in the room was more charged than Sam preferred.
McGee and Mejaled arrived a moment later. Sam was entirely unsurprised by the mammoth mug of coffee that Mejaled held with both hands. The woman carried it well, like someone who was used to it, but she had probably not slept in forty hours or more. There was an entire story in the way she and McGee moved around each other. There was solicitousness in the way he positioned himself relative to her, but Sam thought that it was the instinctive protectiveness of a decent man; Mejaled was small and skinny enough to seem fragile, and was about a decade younger than McGee unless Sam missed his mark. The shades of emotion in her body language were harder to read, masked by her tiredness and the irritation that accompanied it.
That McGee sat next to David was entirely predictable, but Sam was surprised by Mejaled sitting next to him unhesitatingly. Israelis were clan-like in their loyalties and, in his experience, tended to revert to an almost hive-mind mentality in the face of outside adversity. For Mejaled to break line this way suggested some serious history.
Dunski began the debrief as soon as Mejaled settled in.
"Friday, 20:00 local, IDF patrol captured a group attempting to steal the border from Egypt to Israel, not too far from Rafah. The group included Gazaan Palestinians and Sinai Bedouins, as well as several Sudanese."
Refugees, Sam figured. They made their way up north, to Egypt, and then often attempted to cross the border to Israel. Israeli authorities tended to round them up in special prisons, but Egyptian security forces were more often the ones who shot them dead.
"Some of the Gazaans and Sudanese carried hardware and documents on their person, which the IDF handed over to the Shin-Beit. The documents contained maps and photographs pertaining to attempted kidnappings of defence R&D personnel. The targeted personnel were all involved in the same joint US-Israel project, and one was a US citizen. Once the immediate threat had been neutralized, the Southern Department handed the case over to the Non-Arab Affairs Division."
"I thought you were working Jewish terrorists," DiNozzo remarked acidly.
"The Jewish and Liaison departments are part of the same division," she replied, and smoothly continued: "Initial screen turned up a suspected connection between the captured Gazaans and A-Tahaluf Al-Islami. Interrogation turned up a strong likelihood that a similar attack is to be executed here in the near time range."
"How good in this information?" Gibbs asked, words laced with distrust.
Mejaled put down the half-empty monster mug. "Good enough," she said, in a totally different voice than before. The annoyance was all but gone, and the tiredness had been pushed under a solid layer of professionalism.
"The intended Israeli target was Raz Shachar, 32," she continued, "electrical engineer on P-LAM." She pronounced it pay-lam and not pee-lam; Sam suppressed a smile at the Hebrew-ism. "P-LAM is a co-developed American-Israeli weapon system with cutting-edge technology in target acquisition and laser batteries, either of which would be of interest to a terrorist group. Additionally, if they nabbed the right guy on this end of things, they could gain access to any of the systems, networks and protocols that P-LAM interfaces or can interface on. It's a cross-platform anti-missile system. Some of those interface systems, your military won't share with the rest of NATO or with us." She said that with perfect neutrality. "The P-LAM project presents at least four potential interests. The Israeli target was working two of them. It's my assessment that there is a kidnapping of a parallel target about to go down here in the near time range."
"And that," Dunski said, very dryly, "is why I nabbed her off the North Shomron desk." There was a certain humor in the dryness, but that was all. Mejaled's resentment notwithstanding,
if Dunski felt anything but professional appreciation for her colleague she hid it perfectly - not that that was a surprise.
Mejaled turned to Gibbs. "I only have a shortlist of names, so get your analysts on this or get me access."
On Sam's left, G said: "We have an analyst." To his right, Dunski said: "The FBI should've forwarded you her clearance."
They spoke simultaneously. Sam was momentarily relieved to be blocking a direct line of sight between G and Dunski. The chairs were nice and cushy, but Sam could still almost feel G. His partner was always on edge around new people, and Dunski sent up every red flag in the book, if one knew what to look for. The tacit warning Hettie had relayed to Dunski might be the only thing making it possible for G to cooperate with the woman at all.
At least G's paranoia hasn't caught on to Mejaled yet, Sam thought as the woman's attention shifted from Gibbs to his partner. "Share and share back?" she asked.
"Sure," G said.
"Everything should be in English, but it's not like I'm going anywhere."
"You're going to give me that flash drive and go to sleep," Dunski said. Her voice was still calm, still impersonal, but there was less intelligence handler in it and more military CO. "We'll do without you for two hours."
"Oh, the generosity," Mejaled said, voice dripping sarcasm.
"Four if it can be wrangled," Dunski replied, deadpan, and Sam wasn't wrong about that shade of military.
"It's only fifty-two."
"Kuterit."
"Shamati alayich, shiv'im-veshtayim."
That was Whiny grouch, and I heard about you, Ms. Seventy-Two.
"Shmone." Dunski replied. It was a correction, 78 and not 72. She held out her hand. "Flash drive."
Mejaled pulled a secure flash drive out of her pocket and tossed it across the desk. Cool as she presented, fifty-two was definitely the number of hours she'd been awake. Sam caught the drive before it would whiz past them and hit the wall.
McGee nudged Mejaled's shoulder. "C'mon, let's find you a flat surface in a dark room."
"Dark is for the weak," she muttered back, but it was automatic.
Gibbs tapped on the table, trying to get everyone's attention. He got his team's and G's, at least, and Sam kept in line with his partner.
"You talk to your analyst," Gibbs told G, "see what you make of this."
G nodded. "Will do."
"DiNozzo, Ziva, you head out to Optix."
"Give them the heads-up," DiNozzo said promptly, shoulders straightening and relaxing at the prospect of work and - Sam thought wryly - probably also at getting out of a room that had Dunski in it. "On it, Boss."
"Be advised that we did not rule out an internal component," Dunski said.
"I know how to do my job, thanks," DiNozzo shot back icily as he made to stand up, David half a beat behind him.
"I'd say the same thing to my agents."
Gibbs nearly started. "He's not one of yours," he said, sharply.
G tensed at that, and Sam knew that kind of tension. G had just classified Gibbs' reaction to Dunski as a tacit order. Because G needed to be any more paranoid about the woman, Sam thought sourly
"I'll stay with Callen and Hanna," Dunski said, "as I'm the other person familiar with this data."
"Stay with them," Gibbs emphasized, giving G a meaningful and utterly unnecessary look. He pushed himself up. "Let's go."
Ziva's and DiNozzo's steps synched as they exited the room, bickering over who got to drive. It seemed to Yael that they didn't notice. There wasn't pain in the thought, quite. It would be better if she substituted Ziva for David, but so far she had no success on that one.
Gibbs was the next one out of the room, walking briskly and with his weight pushed forward as if he was in a hurry - to get somewhere or just to get away, she wasn't particularly interested - and Mejaled and McGee after that.
Hanna and Callen didn't get up either, she noticed. They all moved very nearly together, Hanna pushing slightly back from the table and Callen and she angling their chairs towards him so that the three of them could all look at each other. She didn't consciously try to fit into their rhythm and she didn't try not to; fitting in with Hanna was easier than not, and Callen was synched to him.
Hanna was Special Forces. She knew that since first laying eyes on him, though she was still working out which unit, precisely. Callen's tells seemed to be taken at out half a dozen different profiles. So far the only assessments she had reasonable confidence in were that he'd been CIA as well as at least one more agency that was probably not the FBI, and that he trusted Gibbs on a personal level. The latter constituted biographical evidence: the people who attached to Gibbs tended to have a personal experience so dysfunctional that Gibbs was the best they could relate to.
Knowing that, the distrust and very nearly hostility he regarded her with were unsurprising. He was also one of Hettie Lange's, though, and Yael had heard enough Hettie Tales to expect a standard of professionalism from anyone who had her stamp.
"I think we can get a video link here," Hanna said.
"Are the files okay to send over a regular NCIS connection or do we need an MTAC line?" Callen asked.
"A regular connection should suffice," she replied. "The files were encrypted with that in mind. Your analyst can get the decryption key from the consulate."
"All right, I'll set us up," Hanna said. The smile he tacked at the end of of that seemed forced, and he was a beat late in pushing himself up. The obvious explanation was distrust, but Yael withheld judgment on that as it did not fit in with anything else.
There was quite some intensity in the way Callen regarded her. It's been years since she's been subjected to that kind of scrutiny from someone in her line of work, but skills acquired as a nineteen-year-old trainee held solid. She didn't avoid his gaze but she also did not pay him any particular attention as they waited for the vidlink to connect.
When the display blinked to life, the person on the other end was a man in his mid-to-late twenties. "Hi, guys," he said cheerfully. "What's going on?"
"Hi, Eric," said Hanna; Callen was still glaring at her. "Do you mind fetching Nell? We have something for her."
'Nell' was the analyst. 'Eric''s presentation and mannerism seemed more appropriate for collections - electronic intelligence, likely.
"Sure thing," 'Eric' said, rolling back on his swivel chair. "Nell!" he called out, not too loudly. "Call me if you need me," he told the screen.
"Sure thing, Eric," Hanna said. Yael could hear the forced smile; she did not need to turn her head.
'Nell' approached the camera. She was in her early-to-mid twenties, and unlike 'Eric' she did not fail to register Yael's presence. She scanned the video feed briefly, and then focused on Callen. "What's going on?"
Same words, different intonation: 'Eric''s had been a casual greeting, and 'Nell''s a request for information.
'Nell' was looking at Callen, and it was Callen who answered. "Nell, this is Officer Dunski from the Shin-Beit. Officer Dunski, this is Nell Jones, our intelligence analyst." The first sentence was spoken in a casual, neutral tone that seemed reasonable between familiar colleagues. The second had more tension in it, as if merely addressing her was distasteful to him.
Jones offered a polite smile. Yael nodded.
"We're sending you some files," Callen said. "Sam?"
"Sending."
"I'm seeing it," Jones acknowledged. "What am I looking at?"
"Analysis done since 16:00 Pacific yesterday," Yael answered. Jones' eyebrows shot up, head slightly tilted, so Yael explained: "There's a Shin-Beit analyst attached to the case. She'll be available in a few hours but, in the meantime, I'm familiar with the raw data and the bulk of her work."
Jones' shoulders relaxed at the clarification. "Great," she said.
Callen cut in with what Yael would've said next. "You'll need a decryption key."
Jones cut him. "Already got it from the consulate."
"Good," Callen replied.
Jones returned her attention to Dunski. "Is there anything particularly noteworthy in the new files?" she asked.
"Mejaled updated her target criteria assessment," Yael began. She did not add I'd imagine these differ from yours; comparison and intersection would be in order. In this case it seemed the lesser risk to see what approach Jones would engage on her own than to potentially insult a good analyst. "We remain undetermined on Egyptian versus Sudanese."
"I thought you're confident that we're dealing with Al-Tahaluf Al-Islami?" Callen asked.
Yael did not fail to notice the baiting tone or the pointed use of 'you' versus 'we'. It was the kind of behavior she would've expected from Gibbs.
Interestingly, Hanna got in first, and there was something in his voice that could be exasperation. His face, when Yael turned slightly to include him in her field of vision, betrayed nothing. "Problem is, we don't know that much about them."
"I'd expect that whether we are looking for Sudanese, Egyptians, both or others would affect our course of action." Yael added a very slight bite to the 'our'. "At present," she continued, splitting her attention between Jones and Hanna, "the assessment is that while there is no basis to consider other nationalities, neither Sudanese nor Egyptian can be ruled out."
"Sudanese means refugees," Hanna said. He seemed somewhat upset about that.
"We need to know who's where and how many in the area," Callen said. He glanced back at Hanna. "Question for McGee?"
"Seems reasonable," Hanna said.
"All right, I'll start with that," Jones said. She glanced at something on her monitor that was not the video feed. "Once the files get here." She shifted her attention back to Yael. "You said you're familiar with the files?"
"Which part do you want to start from?"
"I was thinking we could compare notes on Optix personnel?"
It was what Yael thought, too. "Let's do that."
Callen was still glaring.
13:30 EST
She'd been out by the fence some time before Tony came with their lunch. She'd gone exploring when he headed to the cafeteria; he'd called when he finally made it through the queue and back out, and then it took him a while more to make his way across Optix campus.
"Nice spot," he commented as he handed her her burrito. "Lovely view of... parking places. And the highway."
"Exactly," she said, biting into her burrito and swallowing almost without chewing. He was being sarcastic and she knew it. Pretending that she thought him serious was her brand of sarcasm, and this was such an easy serve he just provided her with. "If I wanted to case this place, that," she indicated the trees across the road, "is where I'd set up."
"Cameras?" he asked.
She shook her head. "For show," she said between bites.
He huffed and muttered: "Civilian contractors."
Her huff of agreement was automatic. The series of images came a bit later, memories fuzzy from disuse. In Israel, this would have never happened, she would've said, once: In Israel, the defence industry is subject to the same standard as the military. No: what she would have said was In my country. Israel wasn't her country anymore, though, and she did not say those things. That she even thought it was extraordinary.
"So, we should be checking things out over there," Tony said, filling in the silence she left.
"I don't know," she said. "There's acceptable security on the inside. If I wanted to grab an employee, it would be much easier to stage a kidnapping off campus than on it."
"We should check it out anyway. I know better than to argue tactics with you," he added hastily, "but you know what Gibbs would say."
"Point," she conceded.
"Better hope they narrowed down the list of names," he muttered. "There's over a hundred people on this project."
"I doubt more than twenty of them even made the preliminary list," she replied. "McGee and Anat should have everything ready for us by the time we get back."
"They seem pretty chummy, don't you think?"
She gave him a withering look.
His expression shifted, going from the Useless Frat Boy mask to something pensieve and serious. "What about you?" he asked.
"What about me, Tony?"
"Working with Israelis again," he said, the words a cushion against those that came next: "With Yael."
He could fool everyone else, but she noticed how carefully he pronounced the name, taking care to not have it sound like yell or Yale, and she knew to read the meaning in that. "I'm fine," she said, but her words were too sharp and the bite of burrito did not quite mask what her hard swallow was for.
"You were friends," he said. She knew that voice of his and she hated it: pitched soft and low, begging to be let in.
"So what if we were?"
"Ziva," he said, and this was an outright plea.
She re-wrapped the rest of the burrito in its paper, her movements too sharp.
"We were friends, now we are not," she said. "It is nothing."
"So you totally can't tell me where that sweatshirt is."
Yael's officer school graduation sweatshirt that she'd given to Ziva last May was at a front pile in her wardrobe, where she could always see the azure blue of it. She glared at Tony.
We are both professionals, she almost said but didn't: there was too much of Israel's defence culture in those words.
"I am fine," she said again, and this time the words were more convincing.
Tony was still giving her that look, though. "What?" she demanded.
He didn't flinch, quite, but his body did something flinch-like, becoming smaller and more distant somehow.
"Nothing," he said. It was a lie, but she didn't care enough to pry the truth from him. "We should had back if we want to avoid traffic."
"Or I could drive," she pointed out as they started walking in the direction of the main building, and the car.
He snorted. "I'd rather deal with traffic, thanks."
14:00 EST
They moved to the squad room, eventually. It was impolite to occupy the conference room for the entire day, for one thing, and for another, McGee needed his specialized workstation. There was also, G noted after a while, the matter of easier access to the vending machines: Dunski had loaded Mejaled's desk with a six-inch-tall pile of snacks and an entire coffee pot from the break room. Dunski had restocked the coffee three times and the snacks once in the past three hours, but G wasn't entirely sure that Mejaled fully noticed either. The woman has been singularly focused on work since she'd woken up from her nap.
They had two key tasks, and they split into two sub-teams. G, McGee and Dunski were working their way through Optix personnel files, honing and prioritizing the list of potential targets. McGee was at his desk; G had dragged a chair to a spot between McGee's and DiNozzo's desks from which he could easily look around; Dunski opted to sit on the floor. If it was supposed to send some sort of a message, G had no idea what it was. On the other side of McGee's desk, Sam was leaning against the cubicle wall by the spare desk that Mejaled had occupied; they and Nell had been arguing Egyptian-versus-Sudanese for hours. It seemed that Sam had taken up arguing the Egyptian angle and Mejaled the Sudanese, while Nell refereed.
G's phone rang. He glanced at it, registered Eric's extension and glanced up at Sam before leaving his tablet on DiNozzo's desk and walking away without a word. He only picked up once at a safe distance.
"Go ahead, Eric," he said, putting his back to a wall and settling so that he could watch everyone else. He had a pretty good idea what this was about, as he'd asked Eric a question, and he did not want surprises.
"So you wanted to know about Dunski's history with Team Gibbs," Eric said.
G knew that voice: whatever had happened, it was interesting like the interesting life one wished on one's enemies. Not that G had seriously expected otherwise. "What have you got?"
"Well, a little over half a year ago, a Navy lieutenant went missing in Israel while visiting her brother. Gibbs and his people went to Israel and, long story short, the lieutenant had been kidnapped by the Jewish terrorist group her brother was a part of."
"How does Dunski fit into this?" G asked, though he already had an idea. I thought you were working Jewish terrorists, DiNozzo had said to Dunski earlier.
"She was the agent assigned to catch that particular group." The discomfort in Eric's voice was obvious as he added: "In the process of that, DiNozzo and David also got captured. They were held for approximately half a day, with constant aerial surveillance throughout that time."
"She deliberately let them be kidnapped," G said, repeating DiNozzo's accusation that Dunski had not bothered to deny.
"All evidence points that way, except that she couldn't actually know that David would trip the terrorists in the interview, could she?"
G hadn't taken his eyes off the squad room. "I need that case file," he told Eric.
"I thought you might say that."
"What about Mejaled? How does she fit in?"
"Gibbs' people were set up with the people responsible for catching Arab terrorists in that sector. I can't actually tell, but if I had to guess..."
"She's part of that group."
"Yeah," Eric agreed. "She and McGee appear to have been in regular contact since."
Mejaled was an analyst, not a human intelligence officer. She probably wasn't trying to recruit McGee as an asset, but G wouldn't put it past Dunski to try and lean on the relationship. Mejaled had an honest vibe to her, and Gibbs' entire team seemed okay with her, including Gibbs himself. It was possible that part of her hostility towards Dunski stemmed from having reached the same conclusion, and resenting it as much.
"Keep digging," he told Eric.
"Duh."
14:50 EST
Chasing around the hellish bureaucracy that this kind of an operation created was not Gibbs' idea of a good way to spend a morning, and that was before one took into account that he returned to a squad room that had Israelis in it, that one of those Israelis was the damned Dunski woman - or the state he'd found his team's aisle in: takeaway and pizza boxes tucked almost but not quite out of sight, trash bins overflowing with candy wraps, and -
"What do you think you're doing?" he snapped at Dunski, who was sitting on the floor with a borrowed NCIS laptop, her back to McGee's desk.
"Profiling," she replied, not even bothering to take her eyes off the screen.
"We're down to a short list of potential at-risk persons," G said.
Gibbs still gave him an irritable glare, as G was perched at the very edge of a chair situated in the middle of the room, an unfinished takeaway box under his chair, a coffee pot within reach and a cup balanced precariously on the armrest. "How short?" he asked.
"Eight," G said.
"That's short?" Gibbs asked. It took a lot of personnel to protect eight people, when you didn't know what you were protecting them from, when or where.
"Tactical analysis should narrow that down," Dunski said. "Homes and commute routes make the likeliest points of attack."
"I assembled a comprehensive folder of maps, satellite images and traffic reports," McGee added, "but..."
The elevator dinged, its door sliding open to let DiNozzo and Ziva into the MCRT floor.
"I see we're just in time," DiNozzo announced with forced cheer as they approached the team's aisle. "Wow, it looks like a college study group in here."
"I had no idea that you know what study groups look like, Tony," McGee said. "Only frat parties."
"Ha-ha, McGeek," DiNozzo retorted, but whatever else he was about to add was cut off when he noticed just which chair G has taken over. "Is that my chair? And what is that coffee pot doing on my case files?"
G got up immediately, picking up the pot in the same movement. "I'm sorry," he said, with the too-earnest expression of a lifetime con man.
DiNozzo picked on that; his expression was dubious as he replied "Sure, no problem," and reached to wheel the chair back to the desk.
He failed to notice the cup that G had left on the armrest - until the cup crashed to the floor, splotching coffee on the carpet and on DiNozzo's too-expensive black suit.
Gibbs looked at G; so did Hanna, for that matter. G still had the mask on.
"Damnit!" DiNozzo swore. "What the -"
"I am sure it was an accident," Dunski said mildly. She - Gibbs did not fail to notice - got up from the floor and well out of range as soon as DiNozzo had commented on the chair. "Surely Agent Callen had forgotten he placed his coffee so unfortunately."
"I'm sure he did," Hanna said in fake agreement, still glaring daggers at G, who still had the innocent-bystander face on.
"Catch!" Mejaled called out. A split-second later a pack of wet wipes zoomed over the cubicle wall.
DiNozzo caught it with one hand. "Thanks!"
"Is everyone done, now?" Gibbs demanded.
Ziva was standing in front of her desk, DiNozzo behind his; Hanna relocated himself next to his partner, and both of them took up the space between DiNozzo's and McGee's desks; McGee was sitting at his desk; and Mejaled -
She poked her head out of the cubicle space. "Did somebody call a debrief and I missed it?" she asked and then, without waiting for an answer, got up from her chair and pushed it across Gibbs' desk, to the space between it and Ziva's. Dunski's eyes flicked to the space between Ziva's and DiNozzo's desks, but she remained standing by the cubicle wall.
"Right," Gibbs said. "Maps, tactical analysis. What else?"
"We alerted Optix to the situation and they upped their security," Ziva said, and then added: "As much as they can."
"Campus not secure?"
Ziva tilted her head in a half-shake. "Making it into any of the buildings wouldn't be a problem. Getting into the secure areas would be."
"Don't need more than the parking lot if you just want to grab somebody," Gibbs pointed out.
"We found no signs of surveillance around Optix park."
"Satellite imagery would make for good confirmation, if it exists," Dunski said. Her voice remained on the soft side.
McGee nearly spoke, but then glanced nervously at his boss. Gibbs glared at Dunski for good measure, but the woman might as well be blind. A moment later he transferred his attention to McGee and nodded subtly.
"I could check," McGee said. "Shouldn't be too much of a problem."
"You do that. What else?"
Hanna's and Mejaled's gazes connected for a second. Interestingly, Hanna ceded it to her with a small nod.
"On the human side we have profiling and analysis," she said. "We have months' worth of analysis in a day's work but I can't make even the outline of an op from it. But -" she gestured at Hanna.
"Eric and Nell are working out some sort of a meta-analysis," he said. "It'll take overnight to run -"
"- and we still need to clean up the data some more," Mejaled added.
"- but tomorrow morning we should have something," Hanna completed.
It went unsaid that Hanna could go undercover. Gibbs had seen the man's record; he was one of the best North and East Africa UCs that any American agency had. If anyone could insert himself into a terrorist cell in two days, in was him. They just needed to find him a terrorist cell to infiltrate.
They also needed to figure out which of the potential targets would be the easiest to grab, and where they were the most vulnerable. DiNozzo's knowledge of Baltimore's streets made him a natural choice for that assignment, but tactical analysis was another matter. Usually Gibbs would assign Ziva together with DiNozzo but then, usually there really wasn't a choice. This time he had G and his partner, both of whom did this kind of analysis as often as Gibbs' people ran background checks. There was also Dunski, but Gibbs dismissed that option immediately: he had a bad feeling about what might happen if he abandoned DiNozzo to that woman.
G was treating DiNozzo the way Gibbs remembered him treating new people, which meant badly. Hanna was so much of a SEAL that Gibbs would've known that without ever looking at his file. It made more sense to let Hanna run the intel of his own UC, though, and what he'd seen so far gave Gibbs the hunch that Mejaled, Hanna and Nell made too much of a natural team to break up. There was also that G and Dunski were the ones to assemble the map folder; G knew the material, and if Gibbs trusted anyone to stand between DiNozzo and Dunski it was him.
"Stay on that," Gibbs told Hanna and Mejaled.
Hanna inclined his head, and Mejaled gave a thumbs-up.
"Ziva, you with them."
She nodded once, sharply.
"DiNozzo, you know Baltimore?"
"Like the back of my hand, boss."
"Good. G's got a map book. I want you two to work a tac analysis from that."
"What about me, boss?" McGee asked.
Gibbs looked at Hanna. "That meta-analysis thing your guys are running, think they could use a hand with that?"
"Or a server cluster," McGee added. "Or - I'm really good at optimizing processes. And -"
Hanna cut him off with a tight smile. "I'll ask."
That was everyone, except for the spook in the room. She had to notice that he'd left her out, but Dunski's face of posture did not twitch or flicker. Gibbs debated it for a moment, and then told her, pointing for emphasis: "You, stay out of the way." It could be an admission of weakness but, here on his own turf, it was a clear signal that he did not need to worry about those things.
Still no response, damn her.
"What are you going to do?" G asked.
Of course it was G. Gibbs passed a hand through his hair. "Bug other agencies," he said. "Someone might know something and just not be in a sharing mood."
"Uh, boss?" McGee asked.
Gibbs knew what he was offering. "Analysis first," he told his agent. There was Abby, too, though McGee was the superior hacker. "Well?" he demanded.
At least he didn't need to add What are you all waiting for? Ziva finally went behind her own desk and sat down, and Mejaled pushed her chair the rest of the way over, the two women settling into what appeared to be a catch-up debrief while McGee and Hanna sorted things out over the phone with OSP's people in LA. DiNozzo had his biggest fake smile on and G was considering him like a live bomb under that indifferent front, but Gibbs was confident enough that they would watch each other's back. As for Dunski, she was picking up the boxes - just to be contrary, Gibbs was sure. She looked up just in time to catch him glaring at her and, expressionless as her face was, he would still swear that he saw a smirk there.