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Ziva turned to McGee. “Does he ever shut up?”
“Well he is collecting voice prints to match to the terrorist cell, Ziva.” McGee commented.
“Could he not make it more interesting?” Ziva questioned further.
“He’s chatting up strangers in a gated community I don’t think he has a lot of options.” McGee tried to explain in Tony’s defense.
Ziva quieted down for a minute before sitting up straight and reaching for the volume knob.
“What are you doing, Ziva?” McGee demanded.
“I’m turning him down. Surely we don’t need to listen to him at full volume? See if I turn him down just a little bit we can still make out what he’s saying, but he’s not so loud and annoying.” Ziva explained.
McGee nodded his head. “That makes sense.” He pulled out a magazine and started reading it only half listening to the conversations.
Ziva leaned back and relaxed. “Tony was a lot less annoying when you had to focus to understand what he was saying.” She thought to herself.
Amusing themselves with reading material and other things while they waited, Ziva began to feel her head start to pound again and made the leap from low volume to no volume and turned the sound completely off. McGee didn’t even notice.
McGee finished the article he was reading and that’s when he realized it was too quiet. “What did you do, Ziva?”
“I gave us our peace and quiet.” Ziva stated innocently.
“Ziva.” McGee made the one word a warning.
“McGee. He’s been on silent for the past 30 minutes if something important were to happen he’d call our phones. He hasn’t. He’s fine.” Ziva defended her decision.
“I guess that’s true.” McGee muttered having a bad feeling, but willing to let himself be talked into the facile decision.
What neither of them realized was that Abby had made sure all the microphones recorded and their entire conversation was saved at NCIS for posterity.
Tony returned to the car out of breath.
McGee looked over his shoulder at him. “What happened to you?”
“Don’t play dumb. I’m sure you enjoyed listening to my torment.” Tony gasped out.
“Actually we’ve not been listening for a couple of hours.” McGee continued while Ziva just looked at Tony.
Tony didn’t say anything then. The first priority was to close the case. McGee and Ziva drove back to NCIS thinking nothing was wrong.
Tony’s first stop once they returned was Abby’s lab. “Hey Abbs, did we get anything?”
“Analysis is running now.” Abby responded.
“You know that test I told you about, can you get me the results from it?” Tony questioned carefully vague in case anyone was listening.
“Sure, Tony. But you know they’d never do anything like that, right?” Abby immediately lept to Tim and Ziva’s defense.
“I know Abbs.” Tony was quite certain they had, but he didn’t want to break Abby’s heart.
Abby handed him the tapes from Ziva and McGee’s microphones, but before he could listen to them her computer went beep, notifying that it had matched the voice print.
Tony took the information and ran with it. It had been the break they needed to close the case with Ziva playing her old self, which Tony thought probably wasn’t far from her current self.
With the case closed and the killer locked away, Gibbs had sent everyone home. Tony had stayed though as had Gibbs. Tony finally had a chance to listen to the tape. As he had suspected, Ziva had been playing fast and loose with the rules when it came to him whenever she had a chance.
He had hoped he’d been wrong as he’d cared for Ziva in his own way. He loved Gibbs, but he did care for Ziva as a friend.