Fic: A Goat for Azazel, (Tony, Ziva, Team) [2/15]
Title: A Goat for Azazel, chapter 2/15
Authors: Hagar and Sailor Sol
Category: gen
Rating: overall M for captivity elements and intense emotional content
Summary: Goes AU after Aliyah. When Tony disappears two days before the Saleem op is a go, the team scrambles to find him - and to understand what an associate of La Grenouille and Israeli domestic intelligence have to do with it.
Chapter Title:Buried in Silence
Chapter Rating: T for canon-typical situations
Chapter Summary: A dead Navy lieutenant leads the team to a mysterious new weapons dealer, with alarming ties.
AO3 | DW | LJ Below:
Somewhere in the belly of the USS Laboon, Tim stood at the bottom of the ladder - stairs, really, but ships had their own language - and looked up. The angle made it impossible to see much, but Tim would not be surprised if up there, the sailors - like people everywhere - were doing a poor job of pretending to not be trying to snatch a look past the crime scene tape.
Not that there was much to see up there, anyway.
"You know what movie this reminds me of?" Tim called up to Tony at the top of the ladder, a little more loudly than intended. It was a deliberate serve: he couldn't actually think of a movie, but he hoped Tony would fill in with his own movie reference, as he often did.
Or used to. Tim couldn't even recall when the last time had been. Tim still made the serves, still hoped for some reaction - hoped for Tony to start acting like Tony, again - but the only reply he ever got never came from Tony.
"You plan on getting a job as a movie critic, McGee?" Gibbs barked.
Tim very carefully did not wince. "Uh, no, Boss?"
"Then quit talking about movies and get back to work."
"Yes, Boss."
The dead woman's name was Sara Roberts. She was an engineer, a civilian contractor, and on board Laboon to install a railgun prototype. Or she was, when she'd taken an unlucky fall down the stairs and broken her neck.
"DiNozzo!" echoed Gibbs' voice from upstairs again.
Tim suppressed another wince at Tony's prompt, but lifeless, "Yes, Boss."
"Are you sketching the scene?"
"No, Boss."
"Then sketch the scene, DiNozzo. With the body in it."
"Yes, Boss."
Tim sighed a little, and then turned to the witness. Lt. Rose Bryant, Laboon's Weapons Officer, had been with Roberts when she tripped. Bryant - a wire-thin athletic woman in her late 20s, with a strong jaw and dark curls that had to be hell to manage - was waiting by the scene tape and watching the proceedings with wide, dark eyes.
"Sorry to keep you waiting, lieutenant," he said.
"Oh, I understand. These things take time," she said. Her voice was low, and scratchy like a smoker's. It was also uneven and shaky, belying the calm of her words. By the looks of it, Tim suspected that she had been crying. Her eyes kept wandering over to Roberts' body and skittering away, like a person reaching and recoiling from a hot coal.
"How well did you and Ms. Roberts know each other?" he asked.
"Sara and I started working on this project together a few months ago, interfacing between the ship and her company. We'd get drinks after work sometimes, you know? Just go out, grab dinner. I guess you could say we were friends," Lieutenant Bryant replied.
Yeah, one could say that. "I'm very sorry," Tim told her.
"I still can't believe she's dead," she continued. "I mean, one second we were talking, and the next..."
"Can you tell me what exactly happened?" he asked.
"We'd just finished up for the afternoon and we were headed top-side. We were ahead of schedule, so we weren't working late, and Sara wasn't feeling well. She has - had - a cold, but she didn't want to take anything until we were done with work. Said it made her woozy, you know?" Bryant said. Her eyes went wide and Tim wondered if she was going to start crying again. "I made her take the cold pills before we started walking. Could this be my fault?"
"You shouldn't think like that," he told her. "Leave that part to us, all right?"
She nodded even as she looked towards the body again, hugging herself.
"Thank you," he told her, "and here is my card if you think of anything more, okay?" Giving her his card wasn't strictly necessary, as this was an accidental death if Tim had ever seen one, and he supposed she would have someone else to talk to, but he put the card in her hand anyway and gently closed her fingers around it.
She offered him a watery smile in return.
Gibbs walked into Autopsy with a coffee in one hand. Ducky hadn't called him yet, but Gibbs knew the doctor would have something for him. Contrary to what his team thought, it wasn't a matter of knowing with his gut so much as it was a matter of having been on this job long enough to know how much time was needed to get initial findings.
"What've you got for me, Duck?" Gibbs asked. The medical examiner didn't even look up from the file he was reading.
"A very bad cold, it would seem," he said. "And a young woman who, brilliant as she might've been as an engineer, also seems to have been quite foolish."
"You're going to have to be more specific," Gibbs replied. Ducky was probably the best ME on the east coast, but sometimes working with him was like pulling teeth.
Ducky finally looked up from the file. "The results of Abby's tox screen," he said, tapping the open document lightly. "In the hours before her death, Roberts had ingested a variety of drugs, including ibuprofen, dextromethophan, doxylamine succinate, dimenhydrinate and codeine, and all of them in significant doses."
"In English, Duck?"
"Painkillers, cold medicine and Dramamine, Jethro."
Gibbs resisted the urge to swear. With a combination like that, and with what Ducky considered "significant doses," the chances of this turning into a murder investigation were slowly climbing.
"You got her medical records yet?" he asked.
"Yes."
"Any history of motion sickness or a reason why she'd be taking the Dramamine?" That was probably the easiest of the three medications to eliminate a reason for her to have been taking purposely.
Ducky shook his head slightly. "There appear to be none. Jethro, at these dosages, I'd be surprised if she was straight on her feet. Granted, people often push the boundaries of safety with such common drugs, but still."
Gibbs had seen people overdose on common meds far too often, but his gut was telling him this wasn't necessarily the case, this time. Everything pointed in that direction, but if Roberts didn't have a history of needing Dramamine, being on board a ship in port didn't seem like a good enough reason to start. "Thanks, Duck," Gibbs said, turning to leave.
"Jethro," Ducky called out.
He stopped, but didn't turn around. He recognized the tone of Ducky's voice, and Gibbs wasn't sure he wanted to have this conversation yet. "Yeah, Duck?"
There was a very audible sigh, the creek of the old swivel chair and then the sound of Ducky's approaching footsteps. He stopped just outside Gibbs's field of vision. "The team is still one short," Ducky said, in that voice calculated exactly to be not too involved without being distant. "Or two, depending on how one does one's arithmetic."
Gibbs took a sip of his coffee to cover the moment he needed to push down the image of the look on Eli David's face when Gibbs left Ziva on the tarmac, of Tony's dead expression in the squad room since hearing about the Damocles.
"Not your problem," Gibbs replied shortly.
"Perhaps that isn't," Ducky acknowledged, "but when your team suffers, Jethro, so do you; and that is my concern, as your friend."
There were several things Gibbs could have said in response to that, but most of them involved shouting and swearing and voicing the helplessness that Gibbs was pointedly trying to ignore. He couldn't bring Ziva back to life, and he couldn't force Tony to snap out of his funk. So he did the only thing he could do, and walked out.
In her usual fashion, Abby had been working on several projects at once. Her main focus, at the moment, was on the cargo manifests from several shipments to Somalia. On the screen next to her, the decryption software was working its way through Sara Roberts' hard drive, giving Abby at least a few minutes to focus on the task at hand.
Between her and Tim, they had gathered all the information regarding Saleem Ulman and his operations that there was to gather. The CIA didn't seem all that interested in finding him, so most of it seemed un-analyzed, though Abby hoped someone had at least looked at it. The idea that the information had just sat on someone's computer bothered Abby, but intelligence analysis wasn't her job, at least not in that sense. But she finally thought she'd found the needle in the haystack that would pinpoint which of the various terrorist camps in North Africa was the one where Saleem Ulman was hiding.
The ding of the elevator behind her was hardly a surprise; Gibbs always knew when she'd found something, after all, and if this wasn't something, Abby would swear off caffeine forever.
Gibbs voice was short and clipped, even on the scale of Gibbs. "What have you got?"
Abby swiveled around in her chair and bounced across her lab to meet him by the work bench. "I figured it out, Gibbs!" she said excitedly.
"Figured out what, Abby?"
"How to find Saleem Ulman!"
He didn't seem as pleased as she thought he'd be. He did not seem pleased at all, actually. "Are you working for the CIA now, Abby?"
Abby frowned. Gibbs knew why Abby had been looking into Ulman's location. He'd been there when Tony had come down to her lab to ask for her help in finding him. It was the first thing Tony had showed any interest in since the beginning of the summer. "I was waiting for the files to finish being decrypted," she replied, trying to keep the hurt out of her voice.
"Well, why is this taking so long?"
She turned back to her secondary computer just as it dinged. She brightened a little. "It's done now. You can see what we found." She opened the folder with the decrypted files and displayed it on the large plasma screen on the wall, knowing how much Gibbs hated squinting at her monitor. He walked around the workbench to see better.
"This one, right here," he said. "She was looking to sell a house?"
Abby clicked on the e-mail he indicated, expanding the message. She scanned its contents quickly. "That's what it looks like." Even as she replied to his question, she started running a tracking program on the e-mail.
"Does she even have a house listed in her name? And how could she afford a house worth millions on her salary, anyway?"
"Well, she was an engineer, Gibbs. And maybe she inherited it?" Abby said, though even she didn't believe that.
Gibbs turned around, glaring at her. "She was not selling a house," he said flatly. "And whatever she was selling, that's what got her killed." He started moving, walking past her and to the door. "I want to know what that is."
I got it, said Abby's e-mail, splayed large over his screen. But Gibbs has me working on the Roberts case. Don't come until later.
Tony breathed in through his nose and out through his mouth, hands clenching and unclenching. To hell with the Roberts case; it wasn't interesting. Saleem Ulman was out there, too alive for comfort, and between him and a security-conscious freak who overdosed on cough medicine and fell down a ladder, Tony knew exactly where his priorities were.
He would've gotten up and gone down to Abby anyway except that Gibbs stormed into the squad room, and Tony needed to at least pretend any of this still mattered if he wanted Gibbs to back him on Saleem - and he needed Gibbs against Vance.
He grit his teeth and shuffled some papers, trying to do something work-like. The words just kept shifting and flowing off the page, anyway.
"Boss!" Tim's voice, too-loud as ever. "I think I got something!"
Even out of the corner of his eye, Tony registered the way Gibbs turned on him, sharp and focused and angry. "What, McGee?"
"I was looking at Sara Roberts' e-mail accounts to see where they had been accessed from, and..."
"You got a point there, McGee?"
"Well, most people access their accounts from multiple locations..."
Tim's voice, like the words on the page, washed out into static: blah, blah, computer stuff, blah...
"DiNozzo!"
"Yes, Boss," Tony said. His eyes were still on the smears of ink on the page.
The only answer that came was Tim's hand, brushing away the papers and stacking them. Tony forced himself to look up at him.
"Rose Bryant," Tim said. "We're picking her up."
Okay, Tony almost said. So? Except Tim was evidently waiting for him, so Tony pushed himself up.
Gibbs was glaring death at him, but Tony glared right back. On his screen, Abby's words were still burning: I got it.
He pulled the door to the interrogation room open with more force than was necessary and then pulled it shut again with just as much force, resulting in a particularly loud slam. The suspect jumped two whole inches in the chair. Gibbs' disdain for the woman who was supposed to be a US Navy lieutenant increased another notch.
He pulled the other chair and sat down, dropping the file on the table but leaving it closed for the time being. Bryant's entire focus was on him.
Good.
"You told Agent McGee," he said, speaking very evenly, "that you and Sara were friends."
"We were," she replied. Her chin tilted up just a little: defiant.
"How long did you know each other?"
"Six or seven months. Look, Agent Gibbs, can you tell me why I'm here?" Bryant asked.
There were several ways to address her question, and Gibbs opted for the one that would make her the most nervous: he ignored it. "Was that her first time on a ship?"
She looked confused. "No. She'd been on Laboon several times before then. You can't install something like the railgun overnight, you know."
He made a noncommittal sound. "How bad was her seasickness?"
"Seasickness?" The confusion appeared genuine, extending to her upper body and gesticulation and not merely limited to her voice. She was a better actress than he'd thought she'd prove to be.
"Yeah," he said, and if she was intelligent enough to try and pull this off than she ought to be intelligent enough to hear the edge hiding in his voice. "Seasickness."
"As far as I knew, she never had a problem with it," she said. Her confusion was fast fading into exasperation. "I mean, who does, when a ship is tied up at the pier? But it's not like I knew every detail of her life."
There was the defensiveness, finally. But it wasn't time to attack. Not yet. "Sara took Dramamine the day she died," he said, leaning in with his elbows on the table. "Now why would she do that? You were her friend, lieutenant." He leaned back. "You tell me."
"Maybe her cold was making her dizzy. Do you know every single medication your friends are taking, sir?"
"Yes," he said, matter-of-factly. "Especially if it's going to affect how they function on the job. Your friend Sara, she ingested enough Dramamine to knock out a man one and a half times her size."
The lieutenant's eyes widened, but it was measured, lacking surprise. "Maybe she had a tolerance. Honestly, Agent Gibbs, I didn't know she'd taken any Dramamine. She seemed fine to me."
"I'm sure she did, lieutenant," he said, his voice dropping several degrees without losing its evenness. "I'm sure she seemed just fine to you. You know what I think happened, lieutenant?" He leaned in more aggressively this time. "I think that you wanted your friend out of the way so you poured cold medication and the Dramamine in her coffee. She was so out of it, with all these drugs in her system, that maybe you didn't even need to push her off that ladder."
She glared back at him. Interestingly, her anger seemed untempered with fear. "Are you accusing me of killing my friend?"
"Yes, I am."
"You won't find any evidence. You know why?" she demanded, leaning forward in her chair. "Because I didn't kill her. She was my friend."
"Well, I'll give you that," he said. "If you're going to go around killing your friends, that's a relatively painless way to do it. Speaking of which, your roommate, Lieutenant Devon? She was prescribed Tylenol with codeine this past winter. And she never throws out her leftover meds, which I'm sure, as her roommate, you know. Except she can't find the remaining Tylenol."
"Have you seen the mess she calls her corner of our stateroom?" Bryant asked derisively.
"Yes, I have," he said. "Smart choice, lifting Devon's stash. Figuring out what Sara was up to, that was smart also. Or were you partners, right up until, what?"
"I don't know what you're talking about, Agent Gibbs," Bryant said, but her posture had shifted, her arms crossed defensively across her chest as she leaned back in the chair.
He considered her for a moment longer, and then leaned back, too. "Nah, you weren't partners. She never saw you coming, did she?"
Bryant snorted, and the look on her face said she realized a moment too late that she shouldn't have. Whatever she would come up with now would certainly prove to be interesting. "Sara wasn't the most observant person in general, Agent Gibbs. I think you'd have figured that out by now, from her having over-dosed on three different cold medicines."
His expression didn't flicker at all as he commented, idly almost: "I never said it was three."
Now she looked panicked, though she covered it up quickly. "You mentioned Dramamine and cold medicine in her coffee. I saw her take some pills before we were getting ready to leave the ship. That's three."
"Nice one," he said, letting his voice express not. "But what would be even nicer is if you told me how you figured out what she was up to. We've already tied your computer back to her e-mail account, and there's enough evidence to nail you for her murder, too. What was she selling?"
Bryant seemed to be considering things before she replied. "I want a deal."
"I already have you for murder and selling classified information."
She scoffed at him. "You don't even know what she was trying to sell. For all you know, it was a vacation house she inherited."
"There was never a house. Come on, Bryant. What was worth killing for?"
"Nothing that was on that flash drive," she retorted. "At least, not directly."
Wiping that smugness off her face was going to be fun. He raised his eyebrows at her. "So it was the blueprints of the railgun, rather than the prototype. Which makes our next question, who did you sell it to?" He put his palms on the table and stood up, leaning forward and looming over her. "Who is Gisele, Bryant?"
It hadn't taken Gibbs long to find Kort. For all that the man was supposed to be one of the CIA's top undercover operatives, he could be terribly predictable at times. That, and Gibbs knew Abby and McGee were exceptionally good at tracking people who didn't necessarily want to be found. He waited for Kort to finish adding sugar to his coffee and to turn around before addressing him.
"Hello, Trent," Gibbs said with forced casualness. He was tempted to just punch the man and save himself some time, but he needed information. Which meant having to play nice, at least for a little while.
"Gibbs," Kort said with marked displeasure, looking not unlike he'd just swallowed a lemon rather than a sip of coffee. "To what do I owe the pleasure?"
"Gisele," he said.
"Excellent ballet," Kort said. "You should go see it, sometime."
Gibbs stepped forward into Kort's personal space. "The weapons dealer. She damn well better be one of yours."
Kort took another sip from his coffee. "I should've known you weren't interested in ballet," he commented. "No, she is not one of mine."
"So the CIA dropped the ball on this one. Or should I say, you dropped the ball on this one, Kort, as the Frog was your op." It was only by virtue of being in public that Gibbs kept his voice below an outright shout.
Kort visibly bristled. "I think we both know who it was who undermined that operation, Gibbs," he all but hissed. "And she was not one of mine, either."
"Yet one of La Grenouille's former associates has taken over his little black book, and now you're telling me this Gisele character isn't one of yours. So either you're lying to me, or you fucked up big time. Now which one seems more likely?" Gibbs asked.
"Believe what you may, Gibbs, but I am not lying to you," Kort said. He seemed to have calmed down. "Also, as you may recall, this has not been ‘my' op in well over a year."
The urge to punch the smug bastard rose again, and Gibbs clenched his hand into a fist at his side. Kort wasn't necessarily lying, but he certainly wasn't giving Gibbs the whole truth. "Tell me what you know," he ordered.
"Even if I was involved in this operation, assuming it even is an operation," Kort said, sounding a touch too self-satisfied, "I do not answer to you. Now, if you don't mind, Gibbs, I have a desk to return to."
Gibbs narrowed his eyes at the slimeball even as he took half a step back, implicitly releasing Kort. "You had damn well better not be lying to me again, Kort. Because this time, you'll be dealing with me."
She was sitting in the visitor's chair in his office upon his return, legs stretched out in front of her and ankles crossed. Her position was only just too controlled to be called a sprawl, but it was still relaxed and proprietary enough to set his teeth on edge.
"Didn't I tell you not to do that?" Trent commented as he walked over to his desk, coffee still in hand.
"Break into your office?" she asked, toneless as ever.
"That too," he acknowledged, sitting down. He could be another chair, for all that her eyes lingered on him. "I just had a visitor concerning your pet op, Dunski."
Yael Dunski raised one shoulder in a highly stylized shrug. "Is that a problem?"
"I advised you to let sleeping terriers lie," he reminded her. Yes, she was extremely good at her job, but she was not the only one.
She didn't even blink. She had yet to move a muscle, other than that perfectly controlled shrug. "I'll take that as a no."
"Why did you break into my office, by the way?"
"To find out if we have a problem."
He hoped she did not expect him to believe that. He let the skepticism bleed into his voice as he said, "Well, you could've just called."
This time she smiled, thinly and humorlessly. Her eyes remained flat. "You should take this as a compliment, Trent."
"Thank you," he said dryly.
"Anything of interest?"
That was more like it. "He's convinced Gisele is someone's asset."
"Based on...?"
Kort tried and failed to suppress a grimace. "His famous gut."
"Noted." She pushed herself up.
He leaned back in his chair and commented, deliberately idle, "Not going to tell me to choose better handlers, next time?"
She deigned to look at him, but that was the extent of her expressiveness. "I didn't think I need to, Kort," she said, and then turned back to the door.
"I'd wish you a good day, Dunski," he said after her, "but I don't like you that much."
She didn't pause her step as she said, "This job is not about me," but she did turn around. "It's not about you, or him, or any one of us." She stood in place a second longer, probably considering him; her eyes were on him, but that was all that her body betrayed. "Have a good day, Trent."
He waited until he was absolutely sure she was gone, and only then he allowed himself to sigh.
Authors: Hagar and Sailor Sol
Category: gen
Rating: overall M for captivity elements and intense emotional content
Summary: Goes AU after Aliyah. When Tony disappears two days before the Saleem op is a go, the team scrambles to find him - and to understand what an associate of La Grenouille and Israeli domestic intelligence have to do with it.
Chapter Title:Buried in Silence
Chapter Rating: T for canon-typical situations
Chapter Summary: A dead Navy lieutenant leads the team to a mysterious new weapons dealer, with alarming ties.
AO3 | DW | LJ Below:
Somewhere in the belly of the USS Laboon, Tim stood at the bottom of the ladder - stairs, really, but ships had their own language - and looked up. The angle made it impossible to see much, but Tim would not be surprised if up there, the sailors - like people everywhere - were doing a poor job of pretending to not be trying to snatch a look past the crime scene tape.
Not that there was much to see up there, anyway.
"You know what movie this reminds me of?" Tim called up to Tony at the top of the ladder, a little more loudly than intended. It was a deliberate serve: he couldn't actually think of a movie, but he hoped Tony would fill in with his own movie reference, as he often did.
Or used to. Tim couldn't even recall when the last time had been. Tim still made the serves, still hoped for some reaction - hoped for Tony to start acting like Tony, again - but the only reply he ever got never came from Tony.
"You plan on getting a job as a movie critic, McGee?" Gibbs barked.
Tim very carefully did not wince. "Uh, no, Boss?"
"Then quit talking about movies and get back to work."
"Yes, Boss."
The dead woman's name was Sara Roberts. She was an engineer, a civilian contractor, and on board Laboon to install a railgun prototype. Or she was, when she'd taken an unlucky fall down the stairs and broken her neck.
"DiNozzo!" echoed Gibbs' voice from upstairs again.
Tim suppressed another wince at Tony's prompt, but lifeless, "Yes, Boss."
"Are you sketching the scene?"
"No, Boss."
"Then sketch the scene, DiNozzo. With the body in it."
"Yes, Boss."
Tim sighed a little, and then turned to the witness. Lt. Rose Bryant, Laboon's Weapons Officer, had been with Roberts when she tripped. Bryant - a wire-thin athletic woman in her late 20s, with a strong jaw and dark curls that had to be hell to manage - was waiting by the scene tape and watching the proceedings with wide, dark eyes.
"Sorry to keep you waiting, lieutenant," he said.
"Oh, I understand. These things take time," she said. Her voice was low, and scratchy like a smoker's. It was also uneven and shaky, belying the calm of her words. By the looks of it, Tim suspected that she had been crying. Her eyes kept wandering over to Roberts' body and skittering away, like a person reaching and recoiling from a hot coal.
"How well did you and Ms. Roberts know each other?" he asked.
"Sara and I started working on this project together a few months ago, interfacing between the ship and her company. We'd get drinks after work sometimes, you know? Just go out, grab dinner. I guess you could say we were friends," Lieutenant Bryant replied.
Yeah, one could say that. "I'm very sorry," Tim told her.
"I still can't believe she's dead," she continued. "I mean, one second we were talking, and the next..."
"Can you tell me what exactly happened?" he asked.
"We'd just finished up for the afternoon and we were headed top-side. We were ahead of schedule, so we weren't working late, and Sara wasn't feeling well. She has - had - a cold, but she didn't want to take anything until we were done with work. Said it made her woozy, you know?" Bryant said. Her eyes went wide and Tim wondered if she was going to start crying again. "I made her take the cold pills before we started walking. Could this be my fault?"
"You shouldn't think like that," he told her. "Leave that part to us, all right?"
She nodded even as she looked towards the body again, hugging herself.
"Thank you," he told her, "and here is my card if you think of anything more, okay?" Giving her his card wasn't strictly necessary, as this was an accidental death if Tim had ever seen one, and he supposed she would have someone else to talk to, but he put the card in her hand anyway and gently closed her fingers around it.
She offered him a watery smile in return.
Gibbs walked into Autopsy with a coffee in one hand. Ducky hadn't called him yet, but Gibbs knew the doctor would have something for him. Contrary to what his team thought, it wasn't a matter of knowing with his gut so much as it was a matter of having been on this job long enough to know how much time was needed to get initial findings.
"What've you got for me, Duck?" Gibbs asked. The medical examiner didn't even look up from the file he was reading.
"A very bad cold, it would seem," he said. "And a young woman who, brilliant as she might've been as an engineer, also seems to have been quite foolish."
"You're going to have to be more specific," Gibbs replied. Ducky was probably the best ME on the east coast, but sometimes working with him was like pulling teeth.
Ducky finally looked up from the file. "The results of Abby's tox screen," he said, tapping the open document lightly. "In the hours before her death, Roberts had ingested a variety of drugs, including ibuprofen, dextromethophan, doxylamine succinate, dimenhydrinate and codeine, and all of them in significant doses."
"In English, Duck?"
"Painkillers, cold medicine and Dramamine, Jethro."
Gibbs resisted the urge to swear. With a combination like that, and with what Ducky considered "significant doses," the chances of this turning into a murder investigation were slowly climbing.
"You got her medical records yet?" he asked.
"Yes."
"Any history of motion sickness or a reason why she'd be taking the Dramamine?" That was probably the easiest of the three medications to eliminate a reason for her to have been taking purposely.
Ducky shook his head slightly. "There appear to be none. Jethro, at these dosages, I'd be surprised if she was straight on her feet. Granted, people often push the boundaries of safety with such common drugs, but still."
Gibbs had seen people overdose on common meds far too often, but his gut was telling him this wasn't necessarily the case, this time. Everything pointed in that direction, but if Roberts didn't have a history of needing Dramamine, being on board a ship in port didn't seem like a good enough reason to start. "Thanks, Duck," Gibbs said, turning to leave.
"Jethro," Ducky called out.
He stopped, but didn't turn around. He recognized the tone of Ducky's voice, and Gibbs wasn't sure he wanted to have this conversation yet. "Yeah, Duck?"
There was a very audible sigh, the creek of the old swivel chair and then the sound of Ducky's approaching footsteps. He stopped just outside Gibbs's field of vision. "The team is still one short," Ducky said, in that voice calculated exactly to be not too involved without being distant. "Or two, depending on how one does one's arithmetic."
Gibbs took a sip of his coffee to cover the moment he needed to push down the image of the look on Eli David's face when Gibbs left Ziva on the tarmac, of Tony's dead expression in the squad room since hearing about the Damocles.
"Not your problem," Gibbs replied shortly.
"Perhaps that isn't," Ducky acknowledged, "but when your team suffers, Jethro, so do you; and that is my concern, as your friend."
There were several things Gibbs could have said in response to that, but most of them involved shouting and swearing and voicing the helplessness that Gibbs was pointedly trying to ignore. He couldn't bring Ziva back to life, and he couldn't force Tony to snap out of his funk. So he did the only thing he could do, and walked out.
In her usual fashion, Abby had been working on several projects at once. Her main focus, at the moment, was on the cargo manifests from several shipments to Somalia. On the screen next to her, the decryption software was working its way through Sara Roberts' hard drive, giving Abby at least a few minutes to focus on the task at hand.
Between her and Tim, they had gathered all the information regarding Saleem Ulman and his operations that there was to gather. The CIA didn't seem all that interested in finding him, so most of it seemed un-analyzed, though Abby hoped someone had at least looked at it. The idea that the information had just sat on someone's computer bothered Abby, but intelligence analysis wasn't her job, at least not in that sense. But she finally thought she'd found the needle in the haystack that would pinpoint which of the various terrorist camps in North Africa was the one where Saleem Ulman was hiding.
The ding of the elevator behind her was hardly a surprise; Gibbs always knew when she'd found something, after all, and if this wasn't something, Abby would swear off caffeine forever.
Gibbs voice was short and clipped, even on the scale of Gibbs. "What have you got?"
Abby swiveled around in her chair and bounced across her lab to meet him by the work bench. "I figured it out, Gibbs!" she said excitedly.
"Figured out what, Abby?"
"How to find Saleem Ulman!"
He didn't seem as pleased as she thought he'd be. He did not seem pleased at all, actually. "Are you working for the CIA now, Abby?"
Abby frowned. Gibbs knew why Abby had been looking into Ulman's location. He'd been there when Tony had come down to her lab to ask for her help in finding him. It was the first thing Tony had showed any interest in since the beginning of the summer. "I was waiting for the files to finish being decrypted," she replied, trying to keep the hurt out of her voice.
"Well, why is this taking so long?"
She turned back to her secondary computer just as it dinged. She brightened a little. "It's done now. You can see what we found." She opened the folder with the decrypted files and displayed it on the large plasma screen on the wall, knowing how much Gibbs hated squinting at her monitor. He walked around the workbench to see better.
"This one, right here," he said. "She was looking to sell a house?"
Abby clicked on the e-mail he indicated, expanding the message. She scanned its contents quickly. "That's what it looks like." Even as she replied to his question, she started running a tracking program on the e-mail.
"Does she even have a house listed in her name? And how could she afford a house worth millions on her salary, anyway?"
"Well, she was an engineer, Gibbs. And maybe she inherited it?" Abby said, though even she didn't believe that.
Gibbs turned around, glaring at her. "She was not selling a house," he said flatly. "And whatever she was selling, that's what got her killed." He started moving, walking past her and to the door. "I want to know what that is."
I got it, said Abby's e-mail, splayed large over his screen. But Gibbs has me working on the Roberts case. Don't come until later.
Tony breathed in through his nose and out through his mouth, hands clenching and unclenching. To hell with the Roberts case; it wasn't interesting. Saleem Ulman was out there, too alive for comfort, and between him and a security-conscious freak who overdosed on cough medicine and fell down a ladder, Tony knew exactly where his priorities were.
He would've gotten up and gone down to Abby anyway except that Gibbs stormed into the squad room, and Tony needed to at least pretend any of this still mattered if he wanted Gibbs to back him on Saleem - and he needed Gibbs against Vance.
He grit his teeth and shuffled some papers, trying to do something work-like. The words just kept shifting and flowing off the page, anyway.
"Boss!" Tim's voice, too-loud as ever. "I think I got something!"
Even out of the corner of his eye, Tony registered the way Gibbs turned on him, sharp and focused and angry. "What, McGee?"
"I was looking at Sara Roberts' e-mail accounts to see where they had been accessed from, and..."
"You got a point there, McGee?"
"Well, most people access their accounts from multiple locations..."
Tim's voice, like the words on the page, washed out into static: blah, blah, computer stuff, blah...
"DiNozzo!"
"Yes, Boss," Tony said. His eyes were still on the smears of ink on the page.
The only answer that came was Tim's hand, brushing away the papers and stacking them. Tony forced himself to look up at him.
"Rose Bryant," Tim said. "We're picking her up."
Okay, Tony almost said. So? Except Tim was evidently waiting for him, so Tony pushed himself up.
Gibbs was glaring death at him, but Tony glared right back. On his screen, Abby's words were still burning: I got it.
He pulled the door to the interrogation room open with more force than was necessary and then pulled it shut again with just as much force, resulting in a particularly loud slam. The suspect jumped two whole inches in the chair. Gibbs' disdain for the woman who was supposed to be a US Navy lieutenant increased another notch.
He pulled the other chair and sat down, dropping the file on the table but leaving it closed for the time being. Bryant's entire focus was on him.
Good.
"You told Agent McGee," he said, speaking very evenly, "that you and Sara were friends."
"We were," she replied. Her chin tilted up just a little: defiant.
"How long did you know each other?"
"Six or seven months. Look, Agent Gibbs, can you tell me why I'm here?" Bryant asked.
There were several ways to address her question, and Gibbs opted for the one that would make her the most nervous: he ignored it. "Was that her first time on a ship?"
She looked confused. "No. She'd been on Laboon several times before then. You can't install something like the railgun overnight, you know."
He made a noncommittal sound. "How bad was her seasickness?"
"Seasickness?" The confusion appeared genuine, extending to her upper body and gesticulation and not merely limited to her voice. She was a better actress than he'd thought she'd prove to be.
"Yeah," he said, and if she was intelligent enough to try and pull this off than she ought to be intelligent enough to hear the edge hiding in his voice. "Seasickness."
"As far as I knew, she never had a problem with it," she said. Her confusion was fast fading into exasperation. "I mean, who does, when a ship is tied up at the pier? But it's not like I knew every detail of her life."
There was the defensiveness, finally. But it wasn't time to attack. Not yet. "Sara took Dramamine the day she died," he said, leaning in with his elbows on the table. "Now why would she do that? You were her friend, lieutenant." He leaned back. "You tell me."
"Maybe her cold was making her dizzy. Do you know every single medication your friends are taking, sir?"
"Yes," he said, matter-of-factly. "Especially if it's going to affect how they function on the job. Your friend Sara, she ingested enough Dramamine to knock out a man one and a half times her size."
The lieutenant's eyes widened, but it was measured, lacking surprise. "Maybe she had a tolerance. Honestly, Agent Gibbs, I didn't know she'd taken any Dramamine. She seemed fine to me."
"I'm sure she did, lieutenant," he said, his voice dropping several degrees without losing its evenness. "I'm sure she seemed just fine to you. You know what I think happened, lieutenant?" He leaned in more aggressively this time. "I think that you wanted your friend out of the way so you poured cold medication and the Dramamine in her coffee. She was so out of it, with all these drugs in her system, that maybe you didn't even need to push her off that ladder."
She glared back at him. Interestingly, her anger seemed untempered with fear. "Are you accusing me of killing my friend?"
"Yes, I am."
"You won't find any evidence. You know why?" she demanded, leaning forward in her chair. "Because I didn't kill her. She was my friend."
"Well, I'll give you that," he said. "If you're going to go around killing your friends, that's a relatively painless way to do it. Speaking of which, your roommate, Lieutenant Devon? She was prescribed Tylenol with codeine this past winter. And she never throws out her leftover meds, which I'm sure, as her roommate, you know. Except she can't find the remaining Tylenol."
"Have you seen the mess she calls her corner of our stateroom?" Bryant asked derisively.
"Yes, I have," he said. "Smart choice, lifting Devon's stash. Figuring out what Sara was up to, that was smart also. Or were you partners, right up until, what?"
"I don't know what you're talking about, Agent Gibbs," Bryant said, but her posture had shifted, her arms crossed defensively across her chest as she leaned back in the chair.
He considered her for a moment longer, and then leaned back, too. "Nah, you weren't partners. She never saw you coming, did she?"
Bryant snorted, and the look on her face said she realized a moment too late that she shouldn't have. Whatever she would come up with now would certainly prove to be interesting. "Sara wasn't the most observant person in general, Agent Gibbs. I think you'd have figured that out by now, from her having over-dosed on three different cold medicines."
His expression didn't flicker at all as he commented, idly almost: "I never said it was three."
Now she looked panicked, though she covered it up quickly. "You mentioned Dramamine and cold medicine in her coffee. I saw her take some pills before we were getting ready to leave the ship. That's three."
"Nice one," he said, letting his voice express not. "But what would be even nicer is if you told me how you figured out what she was up to. We've already tied your computer back to her e-mail account, and there's enough evidence to nail you for her murder, too. What was she selling?"
Bryant seemed to be considering things before she replied. "I want a deal."
"I already have you for murder and selling classified information."
She scoffed at him. "You don't even know what she was trying to sell. For all you know, it was a vacation house she inherited."
"There was never a house. Come on, Bryant. What was worth killing for?"
"Nothing that was on that flash drive," she retorted. "At least, not directly."
Wiping that smugness off her face was going to be fun. He raised his eyebrows at her. "So it was the blueprints of the railgun, rather than the prototype. Which makes our next question, who did you sell it to?" He put his palms on the table and stood up, leaning forward and looming over her. "Who is Gisele, Bryant?"
It hadn't taken Gibbs long to find Kort. For all that the man was supposed to be one of the CIA's top undercover operatives, he could be terribly predictable at times. That, and Gibbs knew Abby and McGee were exceptionally good at tracking people who didn't necessarily want to be found. He waited for Kort to finish adding sugar to his coffee and to turn around before addressing him.
"Hello, Trent," Gibbs said with forced casualness. He was tempted to just punch the man and save himself some time, but he needed information. Which meant having to play nice, at least for a little while.
"Gibbs," Kort said with marked displeasure, looking not unlike he'd just swallowed a lemon rather than a sip of coffee. "To what do I owe the pleasure?"
"Gisele," he said.
"Excellent ballet," Kort said. "You should go see it, sometime."
Gibbs stepped forward into Kort's personal space. "The weapons dealer. She damn well better be one of yours."
Kort took another sip from his coffee. "I should've known you weren't interested in ballet," he commented. "No, she is not one of mine."
"So the CIA dropped the ball on this one. Or should I say, you dropped the ball on this one, Kort, as the Frog was your op." It was only by virtue of being in public that Gibbs kept his voice below an outright shout.
Kort visibly bristled. "I think we both know who it was who undermined that operation, Gibbs," he all but hissed. "And she was not one of mine, either."
"Yet one of La Grenouille's former associates has taken over his little black book, and now you're telling me this Gisele character isn't one of yours. So either you're lying to me, or you fucked up big time. Now which one seems more likely?" Gibbs asked.
"Believe what you may, Gibbs, but I am not lying to you," Kort said. He seemed to have calmed down. "Also, as you may recall, this has not been ‘my' op in well over a year."
The urge to punch the smug bastard rose again, and Gibbs clenched his hand into a fist at his side. Kort wasn't necessarily lying, but he certainly wasn't giving Gibbs the whole truth. "Tell me what you know," he ordered.
"Even if I was involved in this operation, assuming it even is an operation," Kort said, sounding a touch too self-satisfied, "I do not answer to you. Now, if you don't mind, Gibbs, I have a desk to return to."
Gibbs narrowed his eyes at the slimeball even as he took half a step back, implicitly releasing Kort. "You had damn well better not be lying to me again, Kort. Because this time, you'll be dealing with me."
She was sitting in the visitor's chair in his office upon his return, legs stretched out in front of her and ankles crossed. Her position was only just too controlled to be called a sprawl, but it was still relaxed and proprietary enough to set his teeth on edge.
"Didn't I tell you not to do that?" Trent commented as he walked over to his desk, coffee still in hand.
"Break into your office?" she asked, toneless as ever.
"That too," he acknowledged, sitting down. He could be another chair, for all that her eyes lingered on him. "I just had a visitor concerning your pet op, Dunski."
Yael Dunski raised one shoulder in a highly stylized shrug. "Is that a problem?"
"I advised you to let sleeping terriers lie," he reminded her. Yes, she was extremely good at her job, but she was not the only one.
She didn't even blink. She had yet to move a muscle, other than that perfectly controlled shrug. "I'll take that as a no."
"Why did you break into my office, by the way?"
"To find out if we have a problem."
He hoped she did not expect him to believe that. He let the skepticism bleed into his voice as he said, "Well, you could've just called."
This time she smiled, thinly and humorlessly. Her eyes remained flat. "You should take this as a compliment, Trent."
"Thank you," he said dryly.
"Anything of interest?"
That was more like it. "He's convinced Gisele is someone's asset."
"Based on...?"
Kort tried and failed to suppress a grimace. "His famous gut."
"Noted." She pushed herself up.
He leaned back in his chair and commented, deliberately idle, "Not going to tell me to choose better handlers, next time?"
She deigned to look at him, but that was the extent of her expressiveness. "I didn't think I need to, Kort," she said, and then turned back to the door.
"I'd wish you a good day, Dunski," he said after her, "but I don't like you that much."
She didn't pause her step as she said, "This job is not about me," but she did turn around. "It's not about you, or him, or any one of us." She stood in place a second longer, probably considering him; her eyes were on him, but that was all that her body betrayed. "Have a good day, Trent."
He waited until he was absolutely sure she was gone, and only then he allowed himself to sigh.