totally not my fault, IV: revenge of totally not my fault
1) I have been terribly remiss with helping SGA readers figure out what the hell I'm doing. A quick NCIS overview (courtesy of crack_van). It's a little outdated -- it's for Season Three, so the relationships are somewhat more developed now -- but a good start. And it has pictures. Except of Hollis Mann, who is my narrator and not a regular. This is the best I could find for her.
NCIS is... not about the realism. Plot-wise or worldbuilding-wise. Everyone is well-funded, has reasonable case-loads, excellent support from auxiliary services, and no paperwork. The forensics lab is ably managed by one (very quirky) person who does everything by herself for the entire headquarters and yet seems to never have anything to do but worry about Our Heroes and wait for them to give her evidence. Same for the ME. And that's not even getting into the investigative procedures or things like due process.
But.
NCIS is fabulous teamfic. There is a family dynamic and that is the true point of the show -- how they squabble and tease and prove themselves to each other en route to Bringing Down the Bad Guy, which often as not is a little on the random side (but not CSI levels of WTF). It's a guilty pleasure, but it is a pleasure. Which is why I'm not writing a story in a fandom I've (really) not really read any fic in. Which gets us to...
2) I can't even not write the story I'm not writing. I skip ahead of plot points I don't want to have to work on to develop... and then go back and work on them. I fail at shortcut.
ProdigalOn the website (one page)
On LJ: One | Two| Three | Four | Five | Six | Seven | Eight | Nine | Ten
... I apparently also fail at brevity.
Hollis was in the middle of trying to help Valdez come up with a professionally acceptable euphemism for "we found him by following the pee trail" when her phone rang.
"How soon can you get down to Pax River?" Gibbs asked without preamble.
She looked at her watch. "At this time of day?" she scoffed. Two hours would be overly ambitious.
If it was really important that she see things first-hand, he'd insist and she'd agree. She wasn't a fan of second-hand interpretations of crime scenes, but she wasn't a fan of sitting in traffic for a couple of hours just to show up to see the last of the photos being taken, either.
"I'll call you when we're heading back up," he said, apparently deciding that it wasn't worth her travel time to get what was left first-hand. "McGee'll email you the photos."
He hung up without waiting for her agreement and she mentally canceled what she'd hoped would have been her first early night this week. This month.
"What about 'emissions'?" Singleton offered.
"That's for jizz, man," Valdez sighed, the heels of his hands banging in frustration on his keyboard wrist rest. "What's that sign they put up at the pool that's a nice way of saying 'don't pee here'?"
"'No Expectorating'?"
"That's just the polite word for 'spitting.' I don't think there's a sign that says 'no peeing.'"
Hollis went back to her office after once again insisting that swapping out 'urine' for 'pee' made things workable if not elegant and saw the McGee had indeed already started sending her crime scene photos.
The murder was in a lab, but not the secretive kind of lab that had been the original crime scene at Meade. This looked like a high-school classroom, with ample equipment at regularly spaced intervals. The body was prone between two peninsulas of workbenches, then in later photos turned over so that she could see that the throat had been neatly and deeply sliced just like Kennedy's. There were also a couple of bloody footprints that were barely recognizable as such; there was no tread and the footbed was much too wide for any human foot.
Unable to glean much more than that without being at the scene to look around and ask questions, she might as well do what she could. And what she could do was Google.
If Andrew Litorsky had been involved in the kind of highly-classified research that Kennedy and Feng had been working on, it either wasn't recent or it wasn't his full-time assignment because the Navy wasn't interested in hiding his existence. He had a listed office and phone number in the Pax River directory, a Facebook page, and his own website. The last of which included a version of his CV, which in addition to listing his current position at Pax River put him at Fort Carson between 2003 and 2005.
Hollis called up the Fort Carson CID office and asked them to dig up intel on Litorsky. They got back to her less than an hour later -- Litorsky had worked in a weapons development lab, had taught a couple of PME classes (including one geared toward the operators in the 10th Special Forces Group), and had left to go back East after his parents had been injured in a car accident in Maine. Which explained the year teaching high school physics in Augusta before he returned to military employ, this time with the Navy, where he was apparently doing much of what he'd been doing in Colorado.
"Can you find out if he ever had a parking pass for any of the Air Force bases in town?" she asked the agent who'd returned her call, Clough.
"Uh, okay," Clough agreed. "Should I see if OSI's got anything on him?"
Hollis thought of General O'Neill and wondered how far his reach went, especially with his long connection to the area. "You can try."
Gibbs called her in the late afternoon, right around the time she was debating whether to go home or hang out in the office until she was summoned. "We'll be back in half an hour," he said. "Mushrooms or sausage?"
"Both," she replied. "And extra cheese."
Clough didn't call her back until she'd already started on her pizza and was involved in the (Gibbs-less) team discussion of the importance of eating crusts. She wiped off her hands, grabbed a pen from Gibbs's desk, and opened the phone. Gibbs hadn't returned from wherever he'd gone -- speculation was to see if Ducky had come up with anything yet, since Gibbs had been deemed too young for prostate trouble (the tips of DiNozzo's ears were still a little pink from lingering embarrassment when she'd given him a look) -- and so she had to balance herself and her pizza to reach over for a pad.
"Litorsky had on-base parking privileges at Schriever AFB in March and June of 2004," she announced after hanging up. "Don't know why. The base cops are not interested in discussing him or what he might have been doing there."
"That we can guess why," DiNozzo said sourly as he sipped at his soda. "Anyone want to place a bet on whether we get another call from General O'Neill tomorrow morning asking us to hand the case over to the invisible OSI agents?"
"Maybe they're O'Neill's aliens," David suggested, swiping the last piece of the red-pepper-and-black-olive pie from under McGee's outstretched hand. "And that is why we do not see them."
"Why not?" McGee replied sulkily, removing the empty box to get to the sausage and mushroom (with extra cheese) pie. "We have an alien working for us."
David hissed, then took a bit of her pizza.
"Don't be ridiculous, McGee," DiNozzo snorted dismissively. "Any life form intelligent enough to travel through the galaxy to find Earth would be too intelligent to spend its time here arresting airmen for check kiting. No, aliens would be hooking up with Karen Allen or doing something else that shows higher understanding."
"Like moving in with Pam Dawber," McGee suggested.
"Another fine example," DiNozzo agreed.
"Does your team have discussions like this, Colonel Mann?" David asked with a frown.
Hollis thought about how she'd spent too much of her morning. "On a good day."
By the time Gibbs returned -- with Ducky -- they had more or less gotten back to talking about the case.
"The wound was made by the same type of blade," Ducky confirmed, standing by McGee's desk and eying the pizza carefully before Gibbs handed him the white paper sack that had been sitting on his own desk. "But whether it was the same knife, I cannot say for certain. It is a very clean wound -- expertly done, hitting nothing unnecessary to the purpose of rapid exsanguination -- and it is a very common type of blade, especially in the circles in which our two victims traveled."
The marks were consistent with several types of general issue military knives, especially those favored by the Marines. Very well sharpened and kept in excellent condition knives, which cut down on identifying features or distinctive wound patterns.
Ducky made a pleased noise as he opened the foil-wrapped package that had been inside the paper bag. Whatever his preferred type of pizza was, Gibbs had gotten it for him. Hollis couldn't see the slices from where she was sitting, but a few minutes later, she thought she smelled anchovies.
"If Litorsky was living on the up-and-up since he left Colorado," McGee mused, "does this mean that whatever he was killed for goes back to 2004? Or are we assuming too much by saying that he's no longer doing classified research or working with anyone else, say Feng or Kennedy?"
"If a tree falls in an empty forest, does it make a sound?" DiNozzo asked.
"Yes," David replied, shaking her head. "That is a stupid question."
"It's the internet age," McGee continued. "People do all sorts of collaborative work without ever being in the same room together."
"Like voiceovers for animated movies," DiNozzo added. "Cameron Diaz and Mike Myers didn't meet each other until the red carpet of the Shrek premiere."
"The point being," McGee sighed, looking at Hollis and Gibbs, "we don't even know what we don't know."
"Rumsfeldian of you, Tim," Gibbs said dryly as he took a bite.
"Can't you search Litorsky's computer, see if there's something?" Hollis asked.
"Would if I could," McGee sighed. "It's gone. His laptop wasn't in his office or in his apartment. We brought back the external hard drive that was in his apartment, but it's been trashed."
That made it three-for-three -- by the time of the break-in at Meade, Feng's computer had been 'destroyed' after classified material had been removed by his bosses while Kennedy's computer had been so relatively innocuous that everyone assumed that there had been a second (now lost) computer with all of his real research on it.
"Can you un-trash it?" Gibbs asked.
"It wasn't merely wiped clean -- it was physically destroyed in a way that will take hours to rescue the bits that are left," McGee answered. "Which we're doing -- I've got a recovery process running down in Abby's lab now. But I'm not sure we'll be able to get anything off of it and, if we do, if what we get will be either useful or relevant. The flash drives were all cleaned up by someone who knew what they were doing, so it stands to reason that the hard drive has been similarly dealt with."
"Where is Abby?" Hollis asked. She knew Gibbs would have brought her along -- and had her favorite pizza, too -- if she'd been here.
"Bowling night," everyone replied almost simultaneously.
"Does the seemingly professional destruction of data lend weight to the theory that these murders are in response to a program of research someone would like stopped?" Ducky asked, dabbing neatly at his mouth with a napkin.
"It certainly doesn't make it more likely that they want the project to keep going," DiNozzo answered. "Or at least, not by the people currently doing it."
"But that's only if it's ongoing research," McGee pointed out. "If it's something that goes back to whatever they were doing in Colorado -- if they were doing something in Colorado -- then why go after them now?"
"Perhaps someone else, a part of their team, has made their own breakthrough and is killing off anyone who would be competition," David suggested.
"Wouldn't be the first time jealousy killed," DiNozzo agreed with a shrug. "Except how many geeks do you know who could sneak up and kill people with that kind of ease? There were no defensive wounds and nothing under the fingernails -- neither Kennedy nor Litorsky knew what was coming or had much of a chance to stop it once it arrived. Look at McGee -- you don't see him fitting our killer's profile and he has to pass a physical fitness test."
"I work out," McGee insisted, defensive and hurt.
"Exactly my point," DiNozzo retorted. "And what government pay grade are these researchers at? Enough to hire a hit man? Where would they even find one? Online? Aren't all the guns-for-hire on Craigslist undercover agents fishing for an easy bust out of the shallow end of the gene pool?"
"Let's get some hard evidence one way or another before we start getting carried away by any theories," Gibbs warned.
After they ate, they compiled lists -- what they knew, what they wanted to find out, what they had in terms of evidence, what they could use to make concrete connections between any of their two definite murders and one suspicious death.
The following morning, there was no phone call from General O'Neill. But there was a call from Abby to McGee.
"We've got some of the data off of Litorsky's hard drive," McGee announced, pleased. "It includes at least one name."
Hollis looked at Gibbs, who shrugged minutely. "Let's go see what she's got."
Abby was fully caffeinated and raring to go when they arrived and Hollis let Gibbs deal with her and McGee talking around, over, and with each other instead of getting to whatever the point was. He must've been in a good mood, as he let them go on for a whole minute and a half before shutting them down.
"You are no fun, Gibbs," Abby sighed after he'd finally gotten their attention. "You don't understand how amazing it is that we got something, anything, off of this hard drive. It was a paperweight. It still is mostly a paperweight. And the odds of us getting data segments big enough to actually be useful to you... This is really big!"
"I'll be impressed when you share what you've got," Gibbs told her.
Abby rolled her eyes at the resident buzzkill, but nodded. "Okay, so in addition to everything being completely and totally wrecked, everything we did find was encrypted. And not by amateurs, either. Whoever ended up with Doctor Litorsky's hard drive wasn't going to have an easy time of it even without the power drill decorating job."
"But you've decrypted some of it," Hollis prompted, eyes still on the big screen against the wall with its windows and Matrix-like data streams.
"We decrypted some of it," McGee confirmed. "Emphasis on some. But what was in that some was an email address -- or part of one, really. But the important part, because this--" he highlighted a jumbled bunch of text and symbols in one of the windows "--can get translated into this:"
Another window popped up with the first page of a service jacket and a photo.
"Air Force Major Evan Lorne," McGee introduced. "We don't know why he was either sending or receiving an email from Doctor Litorsky, but his .mil address was on Litorsky's computer."
"Is he another one of O'Neill's space-spies?" Gibbs asked.
"He could be," McGee said with a shrug. He didn't seem to think so. "His service record's pretty vanilla, but not vanilla enough that it looks like it's a whitewash. He flies KC-135s, deployments to everywhere from Korea to Kosovo to Kabul, a couple of minor awards, one night in the drunk tank at Osan with no charges filed back when he was a lieutenant. Currently doing a tour as a flight instructor at Altus AFB. We can track him down, see if he'll talk to us."
"Oh, he can talk to us," Hollis said darkly. McGee looked at her nervously.
"What else've you got?" Gibbs prompted.
"What makes you think we've got anything else?" Abby asked, sounding hurt. "Was this not enough? We got you a name and a face from an incomplete pile of gobblygook off of a hard drive someone went all City of the Living Dead on. You should be thrilled with us, Gibbs. Throwing us parties. Giving us kisses. Or at least Caff-Pows."
"What else've you got, Abbs?" Gibbs asked again, a smile playing on his lips. Abby could drive Hollis crazy with her quirks and her hyperactivity and the whole goth thing, but all of that seemed pretty harmless when she could get Gibbs to crack like this so easily.
"What seems to be part of of a Canadian postal code," she answered, giving in like Gibbs was an intractable child. Which he sort of was. A map of Ontario popped up on the screen. "This was actually a lot harder to figure out than the email because it made no sense even after it was decrypted and so we thought we'd failed on the decryption because there was so little to actually make sure we were getting it right -- it was all formulas and equations and stuff that doesn't look like it's in English even when it's English because it's all Greek letters and you think you're maybe looking at the Greek version of Wheel of Fortune when nobody can afford to buy a vowel. But McGee is a genius with the decryption thing and so it's not some puzzle from an impoverished, vowel-deprived Spartan, but instead most of a postal code."
A part of western Ontario was highlighted on the screen, P7K-5XX written on the yellowed region.
"We don't have the last letter and number, but from the first four, we can tell it's part of a postal code for Thunder Bay, Ontario," McGee picked up, "And while we can give you a list of every home, business, and government building in that postal code, none of it seems to have direct ties to Doctor Litorsky. At least without doing a lot of leg-work."
Hollis didn't exactly thrill to the idea of calling up the RCMP to go on a wild goose chase, but they might not have a choice.
"Was this in the same email as Lorne's address?" Gibbs asked.
McGee shook his head. "It wasn't in any email at all as far as we can tell. It was in a document that's not completely intact. Lorne's address was retrieved from a shred of an email where that's all we were able to get -- we don't even know if he was the sender or recipient. Hell, Litorsky could have been sending Lorne's address to someone else entirely. We really don't have enough of a picture."
Gibbs sighed. "Keep working at it."
"Will do, Boss," McGee said, turning back to the keyboard in front of him.
Hollis turned to go, knowing that Gibbs would be behind her.
"That's it?" Abby protested. "'Keep working at it'?"
Gibbs paused. "This is your job, Abby," he reminded her. Her frown deepened and Gibbs sighed again. "You did good. Both of you."
And with that, he walked past Hollis and she had to jog to catch up to him before the elevator, Abby's jubilant "Thank you, Gibbs!" following after.
McGee had sent the data on Lorne upstairs, since by the time they got back up to the bullpen, DiNozzo was getting off the phone with what was apparently Lorne's office.
"--53? Great. Thanks. You've been a big help." He hung up the phone and turned to Gibbs. "Major Lorne is currently enjoying the slightly windy skies of southwestern Oklahoma with a group of baby tanker pilots, but I did get his cell phone number from the Airman with the sexy voice. Colorado Springs area code, by the way."
DiNozzo then left a message on Lorne's cell phone, which apparently went straight to voicemail. "We'll see what that does," he said once he hung up. "Think he's legit?"
"Doesn't matter so long as he calls back," Gibbs replied.
Lorne didn't call back until the following afternoon. Hollis wasn't there when he did, but she heard the recorded version later on. Lorne apologized for the delay in returning the call -- he'd forgotten to charge his cell phone -- and seemed curious and perplexed why NCIS was interested in him at all. He didn't recognize the name Andrew Litorsky off the bat -- or at least he said he didn't -- but with a few more details recollection kicked in and he thought he might've driven the guy somewhere when he'd been doing his stint driving C-17s. Not Thunder Bay, though. As per direction from Gibbs, DiNozzo had asked if it was possible to send agents out to Altus to do a more thorough interview. Hollis had agreed that this might spook the guy if he was part of O'Neill's secret army, but instead Lorne offered to meet them in DC -- he was going to be in town next week anyway, or at least in Silver Spring to go to a wedding.
"So we've got nine days to poke a hole in his story," Hollis said once the sound file was stopped.
"You think he's lying, too?" McGee asked. "Gibbs--"
"Is right here," Gibbs said, showing up with a cup of coffee in hand.
"We have had a lot of people lying to us," Hollis told McGee. "And it just so happens that they're all lying about the Air Force's involvement in this case. So, yes, I want to have enough ammunition to try to catch Major Lorne if he's going to be less than forthcoming to us."
The week went by with very little in the way of breaks in the case. Hollis split her time between NCIS and CID duties, although most of her week seemed to be sitting in the small, cramped offices of the JAG corps.
There'd been some thought put into bringing Lorne in to NCIS headquarters, but it had been quickly dismissed -- at least by Hollis and then by Gibbs. They needed information and, with Lorne neither a suspect nor an official person of interest, there was no point (and little justification) in doing the informal perp-walk that was an invite to headquarters. Lorne was neither a suspect nor an official person of interest because his story was either excellent cover or completely legit; they'd been unable to find any obviously exploitable holes without performing the kind of search that would raise red flags in places where they needed to keep a low profile.
They ended up agreeing to meet in some cafe in Silver Spring that turned out to be less about coffee and more about 'ambiance.' It wasn't Hollis's kind of place, but she rather enjoyed Gibbs's obvious discomfort. David and DiNozzo, however, looked perfectly at home at separate tables in the background.
Lorne showed up alone and on foot, dressed casually and looking at ease with the world in general. He had a little bit of a pilot's cockiness, but none of the aggressive posturing that went with the fighter crowd. He didn't seem suspicious of the circumstances and had no trouble sitting with his back to the door. "Sorry about the place," he said with a wry frown as he sat and looked around. "I didn't do any recon before passing it on as a location."
He ordered coffee, looked properly horrified when the waitress asked if he wanted the hand-ground organic Kenyan or the coffee roasted by the rain forest tribes of Brazil who'd harvested the beans, and rephrased his order by asking for the darkest roast they had that didn't come with any flavorings in it. Which was more helpful than Gibbs had been, since he'd just repeated "coffee, strong coffee" until the waitress had gone away.
"So, apart from introducing you to some very pretentious coffee, what can I do for you?" Lorne asked, tucking in to one of the complimentary muffins. "I can't really help you much with Doctor Litorsky or why he died. I hadn't spoken to him in years."
"But you knew him," Hollis prompted.
Lorne shrugged. "Knew him? Yes, ma'am. Knew him well, not really. I was his glorified taxi driver for a couple of tests of whatever he was doing. He was nice -- nicer than most of the rest of the researchers, which is most of the reason I remember his name at all -- but it was really a situational thing and not anything that grew into what I'd call a friendship."
"How'd he get your email?" Gibbs asked.
Lorne leaned back as the waitress presented him with his coffee, then proceeded to frown at him as he poured in some cream. "My Air Force email? He could've looked it up, I guess. I might've given it to him..." he trailed off and took a sip.
"You two didn't carry on any correspondence, then?" Hollis took a sip of her tea. Which was just as pretentious as the coffee, but she'd forestalled a discourse on the matter by picking one that didn't look too bad and sounding like she would brook no suggestions.
Lorne made a face. "Honestly, I don't remember. If we did, it was purely in relation to whatever was getting loaded into the belly of the plane. I'd offer to look it up or print it out, but I don't save emails from that long ago unless they're going to be needed. I don't use that account for personal correspondance, so whatever it was, it had to do with work."
"Can you say anything about those missions?" she asked. "We know he was doing weapons design for the Army at that time, although he was also apparently doing a joint project with the Air Force. We'd like to rule that out as a cause for his death."
Lorne smiled. "You know about as much as I'm probably allowed to say, ma'am. A lot of those tests were duds, I can tell you that. We used to joke about how much fuel we were wasting when they could've just set the things up in their basements with the same effect."
"How'd you end up driving Globemasters?" Gibbs asked.
Lorne chuckled. "Long, long story. Short version is that I am not a morning person and have trouble accounting for time zone differences before I'm fully caffeinated."
"Missed a filing deadline?" Hollis guessed.
"Yep," Lorne confirmed, still smiling at what he obviously considered to be very funny now, although it had probably not been so much at the time. "Instead of training to move up to KC-10s, I ended up learning the finer points of long-haul cargo transport."
Hollis and Gibbs alternated with a few more questions, but Lorne didn't have much more to add. He was amiable and artless and seemed like the kind of nice guy officer whose ambition had gotten him so far and no further because he'd set his goals low. The question was whether that's really who Evan Lorne was or just who he was supposed to appear to be. To his credit, Hollis really couldn't tell.
"When's the wedding?" she asked as they were winding up.
"Saturday night," Lorne said with a headshake. "I get a few days out of the onesie and have to jump into a monkey suit."
"Air Force buddy?" Gibbs asked.
Lorne shook his head. "College roommate's finally taking the dive," he said. "I don't take leave and fly halfway across the country for anyone in the service getting married anymore. What's the divorce rate these days?"
Gibbs, thrice divorced for reasons that had something to do with the pressures of being married to the job, chuckled.
They parted after Lorne promised to answer any additional questions. David, who'd packed up to go at Gibbs's signal, was still fiddling with the contents of her purse outside the cafe door. She let Lorne pass and disappear around the corner, then picked up her tail after McGee, sitting in the car across the street, told her which way he'd headed. Gibbs paid the tab and he and Hollis left, walking in the opposite direction.
"What do you think?" she asked, looping her arm through his as they strolled. Like two lovers out for a relaxing walk instead of two wired agents waiting to see if they were being followed.
"I think he's a spook working for O'Neill," Gibbs replied.
"So this was what, a test?" She was willing to be convinced. "To see what we know?"
"Possibly," Gibbs agreed. "His bosses aren't having any luck closing us down."
It took another fifteen minutes before DiNozzo confirmed that there'd been no tail on them and they could circle around back to the SUV. David checked in and reported that Lorne was leaving the downtown area on foot and heading for a residential area. They fixed a point to retrieve her and everyone got ready to move out.
The conversation on the drive back to the Navy Yard was on everyone else's impressions. DiNozzo seemed to be willing to trust Gibbs's instincts without supplemental evidence, but David said that she thought he'd been trained in negotiating -- for hostages, not extra donuts from the DFAC.
"His body language is very good," she said. "Very poised, showing attention and the willingness to compromise without appearing weak. He will seem reasonable and invite discussion. He is probably very good at what he does."
When they got back to the bullpen, Gibbs asked McGee to dig up dirt on Lorne. "Go through everything we didn't go through before."
McGee made a pained face. "Can I not do that from here, Boss? Remember how much trouble I got into last time? They probably have my IP flagged. Abby's, too."
Gibbs cocked an eyebrow, like he expected a better answer.
"There's an internet cafe in the mall with the taco place," McGee offered. "I could do it from there. They'd still probably know it was me because I work for you and you're looking for dirt on Lorne, but there's less circumstantial evidence."
"Go," Gibbs sighed. "Don't forget the habanero sauce this time."
McGee blinked, realized he'd been handed lunch detail, looked as if he might ask for cash, then thought better of it.
"Fish tacos, McGee," David called after him as he headed for the elevator. "With extra lettuce."
Forty minutes later, McGee returned with news and tacos.
"Major Lorne's been drawing hazard pay adjustments continuously since he was a senior captain," he reported as he handed out parcels of food. "Including combat pay, which he is currently receiving."
"Baby pilots are dangerous, but not that dangerous," DiNozzo said, sniffing the packet McGee had given him and then handing it to David. "I guess the Gibbs Gut is right again."
"But what does that get us?" Hollis asked, unwrapping what turned out to be a trio of enchiladas. It wasn't as if confirming Lorne's status as a clandestine operator did much for their case knowledge.
"It might get us enough to get read in on whatever the hell's going on," Gibbs replied, holding his hand out to McGee, who was frantically looking around in the bottom of the bag. "Three dead men and three Air Force spooks says either that they can't find the problem or that they are the problem."
McGee sighed with relief as he dug out a plastic container filled with orange-red sauce and handed it to Gibbs.
"Whichever one it is," David said as she grabbed a stack of napkins, "I do not think that they will like our idea of a solution."
"Tough on them," Gibbs said, settling down to eat.
NCIS is... not about the realism. Plot-wise or worldbuilding-wise. Everyone is well-funded, has reasonable case-loads, excellent support from auxiliary services, and no paperwork. The forensics lab is ably managed by one (very quirky) person who does everything by herself for the entire headquarters and yet seems to never have anything to do but worry about Our Heroes and wait for them to give her evidence. Same for the ME. And that's not even getting into the investigative procedures or things like due process.
But.
NCIS is fabulous teamfic. There is a family dynamic and that is the true point of the show -- how they squabble and tease and prove themselves to each other en route to Bringing Down the Bad Guy, which often as not is a little on the random side (but not CSI levels of WTF). It's a guilty pleasure, but it is a pleasure. Which is why I'm not writing a story in a fandom I've (really) not really read any fic in. Which gets us to...
2) I can't even not write the story I'm not writing. I skip ahead of plot points I don't want to have to work on to develop... and then go back and work on them. I fail at shortcut.
ProdigalOn the website (one page)
On LJ: One | Two| Three | Four | Five | Six | Seven | Eight | Nine | Ten
... I apparently also fail at brevity.
Hollis was in the middle of trying to help Valdez come up with a professionally acceptable euphemism for "we found him by following the pee trail" when her phone rang.
"How soon can you get down to Pax River?" Gibbs asked without preamble.
She looked at her watch. "At this time of day?" she scoffed. Two hours would be overly ambitious.
If it was really important that she see things first-hand, he'd insist and she'd agree. She wasn't a fan of second-hand interpretations of crime scenes, but she wasn't a fan of sitting in traffic for a couple of hours just to show up to see the last of the photos being taken, either.
"I'll call you when we're heading back up," he said, apparently deciding that it wasn't worth her travel time to get what was left first-hand. "McGee'll email you the photos."
He hung up without waiting for her agreement and she mentally canceled what she'd hoped would have been her first early night this week. This month.
"What about 'emissions'?" Singleton offered.
"That's for jizz, man," Valdez sighed, the heels of his hands banging in frustration on his keyboard wrist rest. "What's that sign they put up at the pool that's a nice way of saying 'don't pee here'?"
"'No Expectorating'?"
"That's just the polite word for 'spitting.' I don't think there's a sign that says 'no peeing.'"
Hollis went back to her office after once again insisting that swapping out 'urine' for 'pee' made things workable if not elegant and saw the McGee had indeed already started sending her crime scene photos.
The murder was in a lab, but not the secretive kind of lab that had been the original crime scene at Meade. This looked like a high-school classroom, with ample equipment at regularly spaced intervals. The body was prone between two peninsulas of workbenches, then in later photos turned over so that she could see that the throat had been neatly and deeply sliced just like Kennedy's. There were also a couple of bloody footprints that were barely recognizable as such; there was no tread and the footbed was much too wide for any human foot.
Unable to glean much more than that without being at the scene to look around and ask questions, she might as well do what she could. And what she could do was Google.
If Andrew Litorsky had been involved in the kind of highly-classified research that Kennedy and Feng had been working on, it either wasn't recent or it wasn't his full-time assignment because the Navy wasn't interested in hiding his existence. He had a listed office and phone number in the Pax River directory, a Facebook page, and his own website. The last of which included a version of his CV, which in addition to listing his current position at Pax River put him at Fort Carson between 2003 and 2005.
Hollis called up the Fort Carson CID office and asked them to dig up intel on Litorsky. They got back to her less than an hour later -- Litorsky had worked in a weapons development lab, had taught a couple of PME classes (including one geared toward the operators in the 10th Special Forces Group), and had left to go back East after his parents had been injured in a car accident in Maine. Which explained the year teaching high school physics in Augusta before he returned to military employ, this time with the Navy, where he was apparently doing much of what he'd been doing in Colorado.
"Can you find out if he ever had a parking pass for any of the Air Force bases in town?" she asked the agent who'd returned her call, Clough.
"Uh, okay," Clough agreed. "Should I see if OSI's got anything on him?"
Hollis thought of General O'Neill and wondered how far his reach went, especially with his long connection to the area. "You can try."
Gibbs called her in the late afternoon, right around the time she was debating whether to go home or hang out in the office until she was summoned. "We'll be back in half an hour," he said. "Mushrooms or sausage?"
"Both," she replied. "And extra cheese."
Clough didn't call her back until she'd already started on her pizza and was involved in the (Gibbs-less) team discussion of the importance of eating crusts. She wiped off her hands, grabbed a pen from Gibbs's desk, and opened the phone. Gibbs hadn't returned from wherever he'd gone -- speculation was to see if Ducky had come up with anything yet, since Gibbs had been deemed too young for prostate trouble (the tips of DiNozzo's ears were still a little pink from lingering embarrassment when she'd given him a look) -- and so she had to balance herself and her pizza to reach over for a pad.
"Litorsky had on-base parking privileges at Schriever AFB in March and June of 2004," she announced after hanging up. "Don't know why. The base cops are not interested in discussing him or what he might have been doing there."
"That we can guess why," DiNozzo said sourly as he sipped at his soda. "Anyone want to place a bet on whether we get another call from General O'Neill tomorrow morning asking us to hand the case over to the invisible OSI agents?"
"Maybe they're O'Neill's aliens," David suggested, swiping the last piece of the red-pepper-and-black-olive pie from under McGee's outstretched hand. "And that is why we do not see them."
"Why not?" McGee replied sulkily, removing the empty box to get to the sausage and mushroom (with extra cheese) pie. "We have an alien working for us."
David hissed, then took a bit of her pizza.
"Don't be ridiculous, McGee," DiNozzo snorted dismissively. "Any life form intelligent enough to travel through the galaxy to find Earth would be too intelligent to spend its time here arresting airmen for check kiting. No, aliens would be hooking up with Karen Allen or doing something else that shows higher understanding."
"Like moving in with Pam Dawber," McGee suggested.
"Another fine example," DiNozzo agreed.
"Does your team have discussions like this, Colonel Mann?" David asked with a frown.
Hollis thought about how she'd spent too much of her morning. "On a good day."
By the time Gibbs returned -- with Ducky -- they had more or less gotten back to talking about the case.
"The wound was made by the same type of blade," Ducky confirmed, standing by McGee's desk and eying the pizza carefully before Gibbs handed him the white paper sack that had been sitting on his own desk. "But whether it was the same knife, I cannot say for certain. It is a very clean wound -- expertly done, hitting nothing unnecessary to the purpose of rapid exsanguination -- and it is a very common type of blade, especially in the circles in which our two victims traveled."
The marks were consistent with several types of general issue military knives, especially those favored by the Marines. Very well sharpened and kept in excellent condition knives, which cut down on identifying features or distinctive wound patterns.
Ducky made a pleased noise as he opened the foil-wrapped package that had been inside the paper bag. Whatever his preferred type of pizza was, Gibbs had gotten it for him. Hollis couldn't see the slices from where she was sitting, but a few minutes later, she thought she smelled anchovies.
"If Litorsky was living on the up-and-up since he left Colorado," McGee mused, "does this mean that whatever he was killed for goes back to 2004? Or are we assuming too much by saying that he's no longer doing classified research or working with anyone else, say Feng or Kennedy?"
"If a tree falls in an empty forest, does it make a sound?" DiNozzo asked.
"Yes," David replied, shaking her head. "That is a stupid question."
"It's the internet age," McGee continued. "People do all sorts of collaborative work without ever being in the same room together."
"Like voiceovers for animated movies," DiNozzo added. "Cameron Diaz and Mike Myers didn't meet each other until the red carpet of the Shrek premiere."
"The point being," McGee sighed, looking at Hollis and Gibbs, "we don't even know what we don't know."
"Rumsfeldian of you, Tim," Gibbs said dryly as he took a bite.
"Can't you search Litorsky's computer, see if there's something?" Hollis asked.
"Would if I could," McGee sighed. "It's gone. His laptop wasn't in his office or in his apartment. We brought back the external hard drive that was in his apartment, but it's been trashed."
That made it three-for-three -- by the time of the break-in at Meade, Feng's computer had been 'destroyed' after classified material had been removed by his bosses while Kennedy's computer had been so relatively innocuous that everyone assumed that there had been a second (now lost) computer with all of his real research on it.
"Can you un-trash it?" Gibbs asked.
"It wasn't merely wiped clean -- it was physically destroyed in a way that will take hours to rescue the bits that are left," McGee answered. "Which we're doing -- I've got a recovery process running down in Abby's lab now. But I'm not sure we'll be able to get anything off of it and, if we do, if what we get will be either useful or relevant. The flash drives were all cleaned up by someone who knew what they were doing, so it stands to reason that the hard drive has been similarly dealt with."
"Where is Abby?" Hollis asked. She knew Gibbs would have brought her along -- and had her favorite pizza, too -- if she'd been here.
"Bowling night," everyone replied almost simultaneously.
"Does the seemingly professional destruction of data lend weight to the theory that these murders are in response to a program of research someone would like stopped?" Ducky asked, dabbing neatly at his mouth with a napkin.
"It certainly doesn't make it more likely that they want the project to keep going," DiNozzo answered. "Or at least, not by the people currently doing it."
"But that's only if it's ongoing research," McGee pointed out. "If it's something that goes back to whatever they were doing in Colorado -- if they were doing something in Colorado -- then why go after them now?"
"Perhaps someone else, a part of their team, has made their own breakthrough and is killing off anyone who would be competition," David suggested.
"Wouldn't be the first time jealousy killed," DiNozzo agreed with a shrug. "Except how many geeks do you know who could sneak up and kill people with that kind of ease? There were no defensive wounds and nothing under the fingernails -- neither Kennedy nor Litorsky knew what was coming or had much of a chance to stop it once it arrived. Look at McGee -- you don't see him fitting our killer's profile and he has to pass a physical fitness test."
"I work out," McGee insisted, defensive and hurt.
"Exactly my point," DiNozzo retorted. "And what government pay grade are these researchers at? Enough to hire a hit man? Where would they even find one? Online? Aren't all the guns-for-hire on Craigslist undercover agents fishing for an easy bust out of the shallow end of the gene pool?"
"Let's get some hard evidence one way or another before we start getting carried away by any theories," Gibbs warned.
After they ate, they compiled lists -- what they knew, what they wanted to find out, what they had in terms of evidence, what they could use to make concrete connections between any of their two definite murders and one suspicious death.
The following morning, there was no phone call from General O'Neill. But there was a call from Abby to McGee.
"We've got some of the data off of Litorsky's hard drive," McGee announced, pleased. "It includes at least one name."
Hollis looked at Gibbs, who shrugged minutely. "Let's go see what she's got."
Abby was fully caffeinated and raring to go when they arrived and Hollis let Gibbs deal with her and McGee talking around, over, and with each other instead of getting to whatever the point was. He must've been in a good mood, as he let them go on for a whole minute and a half before shutting them down.
"You are no fun, Gibbs," Abby sighed after he'd finally gotten their attention. "You don't understand how amazing it is that we got something, anything, off of this hard drive. It was a paperweight. It still is mostly a paperweight. And the odds of us getting data segments big enough to actually be useful to you... This is really big!"
"I'll be impressed when you share what you've got," Gibbs told her.
Abby rolled her eyes at the resident buzzkill, but nodded. "Okay, so in addition to everything being completely and totally wrecked, everything we did find was encrypted. And not by amateurs, either. Whoever ended up with Doctor Litorsky's hard drive wasn't going to have an easy time of it even without the power drill decorating job."
"But you've decrypted some of it," Hollis prompted, eyes still on the big screen against the wall with its windows and Matrix-like data streams.
"We decrypted some of it," McGee confirmed. "Emphasis on some. But what was in that some was an email address -- or part of one, really. But the important part, because this--" he highlighted a jumbled bunch of text and symbols in one of the windows "--can get translated into this:"
Another window popped up with the first page of a service jacket and a photo.
"Air Force Major Evan Lorne," McGee introduced. "We don't know why he was either sending or receiving an email from Doctor Litorsky, but his .mil address was on Litorsky's computer."
"Is he another one of O'Neill's space-spies?" Gibbs asked.
"He could be," McGee said with a shrug. He didn't seem to think so. "His service record's pretty vanilla, but not vanilla enough that it looks like it's a whitewash. He flies KC-135s, deployments to everywhere from Korea to Kosovo to Kabul, a couple of minor awards, one night in the drunk tank at Osan with no charges filed back when he was a lieutenant. Currently doing a tour as a flight instructor at Altus AFB. We can track him down, see if he'll talk to us."
"Oh, he can talk to us," Hollis said darkly. McGee looked at her nervously.
"What else've you got?" Gibbs prompted.
"What makes you think we've got anything else?" Abby asked, sounding hurt. "Was this not enough? We got you a name and a face from an incomplete pile of gobblygook off of a hard drive someone went all City of the Living Dead on. You should be thrilled with us, Gibbs. Throwing us parties. Giving us kisses. Or at least Caff-Pows."
"What else've you got, Abbs?" Gibbs asked again, a smile playing on his lips. Abby could drive Hollis crazy with her quirks and her hyperactivity and the whole goth thing, but all of that seemed pretty harmless when she could get Gibbs to crack like this so easily.
"What seems to be part of of a Canadian postal code," she answered, giving in like Gibbs was an intractable child. Which he sort of was. A map of Ontario popped up on the screen. "This was actually a lot harder to figure out than the email because it made no sense even after it was decrypted and so we thought we'd failed on the decryption because there was so little to actually make sure we were getting it right -- it was all formulas and equations and stuff that doesn't look like it's in English even when it's English because it's all Greek letters and you think you're maybe looking at the Greek version of Wheel of Fortune when nobody can afford to buy a vowel. But McGee is a genius with the decryption thing and so it's not some puzzle from an impoverished, vowel-deprived Spartan, but instead most of a postal code."
A part of western Ontario was highlighted on the screen, P7K-5XX written on the yellowed region.
"We don't have the last letter and number, but from the first four, we can tell it's part of a postal code for Thunder Bay, Ontario," McGee picked up, "And while we can give you a list of every home, business, and government building in that postal code, none of it seems to have direct ties to Doctor Litorsky. At least without doing a lot of leg-work."
Hollis didn't exactly thrill to the idea of calling up the RCMP to go on a wild goose chase, but they might not have a choice.
"Was this in the same email as Lorne's address?" Gibbs asked.
McGee shook his head. "It wasn't in any email at all as far as we can tell. It was in a document that's not completely intact. Lorne's address was retrieved from a shred of an email where that's all we were able to get -- we don't even know if he was the sender or recipient. Hell, Litorsky could have been sending Lorne's address to someone else entirely. We really don't have enough of a picture."
Gibbs sighed. "Keep working at it."
"Will do, Boss," McGee said, turning back to the keyboard in front of him.
Hollis turned to go, knowing that Gibbs would be behind her.
"That's it?" Abby protested. "'Keep working at it'?"
Gibbs paused. "This is your job, Abby," he reminded her. Her frown deepened and Gibbs sighed again. "You did good. Both of you."
And with that, he walked past Hollis and she had to jog to catch up to him before the elevator, Abby's jubilant "Thank you, Gibbs!" following after.
McGee had sent the data on Lorne upstairs, since by the time they got back up to the bullpen, DiNozzo was getting off the phone with what was apparently Lorne's office.
"--53? Great. Thanks. You've been a big help." He hung up the phone and turned to Gibbs. "Major Lorne is currently enjoying the slightly windy skies of southwestern Oklahoma with a group of baby tanker pilots, but I did get his cell phone number from the Airman with the sexy voice. Colorado Springs area code, by the way."
DiNozzo then left a message on Lorne's cell phone, which apparently went straight to voicemail. "We'll see what that does," he said once he hung up. "Think he's legit?"
"Doesn't matter so long as he calls back," Gibbs replied.
Lorne didn't call back until the following afternoon. Hollis wasn't there when he did, but she heard the recorded version later on. Lorne apologized for the delay in returning the call -- he'd forgotten to charge his cell phone -- and seemed curious and perplexed why NCIS was interested in him at all. He didn't recognize the name Andrew Litorsky off the bat -- or at least he said he didn't -- but with a few more details recollection kicked in and he thought he might've driven the guy somewhere when he'd been doing his stint driving C-17s. Not Thunder Bay, though. As per direction from Gibbs, DiNozzo had asked if it was possible to send agents out to Altus to do a more thorough interview. Hollis had agreed that this might spook the guy if he was part of O'Neill's secret army, but instead Lorne offered to meet them in DC -- he was going to be in town next week anyway, or at least in Silver Spring to go to a wedding.
"So we've got nine days to poke a hole in his story," Hollis said once the sound file was stopped.
"You think he's lying, too?" McGee asked. "Gibbs--"
"Is right here," Gibbs said, showing up with a cup of coffee in hand.
"We have had a lot of people lying to us," Hollis told McGee. "And it just so happens that they're all lying about the Air Force's involvement in this case. So, yes, I want to have enough ammunition to try to catch Major Lorne if he's going to be less than forthcoming to us."
The week went by with very little in the way of breaks in the case. Hollis split her time between NCIS and CID duties, although most of her week seemed to be sitting in the small, cramped offices of the JAG corps.
There'd been some thought put into bringing Lorne in to NCIS headquarters, but it had been quickly dismissed -- at least by Hollis and then by Gibbs. They needed information and, with Lorne neither a suspect nor an official person of interest, there was no point (and little justification) in doing the informal perp-walk that was an invite to headquarters. Lorne was neither a suspect nor an official person of interest because his story was either excellent cover or completely legit; they'd been unable to find any obviously exploitable holes without performing the kind of search that would raise red flags in places where they needed to keep a low profile.
They ended up agreeing to meet in some cafe in Silver Spring that turned out to be less about coffee and more about 'ambiance.' It wasn't Hollis's kind of place, but she rather enjoyed Gibbs's obvious discomfort. David and DiNozzo, however, looked perfectly at home at separate tables in the background.
Lorne showed up alone and on foot, dressed casually and looking at ease with the world in general. He had a little bit of a pilot's cockiness, but none of the aggressive posturing that went with the fighter crowd. He didn't seem suspicious of the circumstances and had no trouble sitting with his back to the door. "Sorry about the place," he said with a wry frown as he sat and looked around. "I didn't do any recon before passing it on as a location."
He ordered coffee, looked properly horrified when the waitress asked if he wanted the hand-ground organic Kenyan or the coffee roasted by the rain forest tribes of Brazil who'd harvested the beans, and rephrased his order by asking for the darkest roast they had that didn't come with any flavorings in it. Which was more helpful than Gibbs had been, since he'd just repeated "coffee, strong coffee" until the waitress had gone away.
"So, apart from introducing you to some very pretentious coffee, what can I do for you?" Lorne asked, tucking in to one of the complimentary muffins. "I can't really help you much with Doctor Litorsky or why he died. I hadn't spoken to him in years."
"But you knew him," Hollis prompted.
Lorne shrugged. "Knew him? Yes, ma'am. Knew him well, not really. I was his glorified taxi driver for a couple of tests of whatever he was doing. He was nice -- nicer than most of the rest of the researchers, which is most of the reason I remember his name at all -- but it was really a situational thing and not anything that grew into what I'd call a friendship."
"How'd he get your email?" Gibbs asked.
Lorne leaned back as the waitress presented him with his coffee, then proceeded to frown at him as he poured in some cream. "My Air Force email? He could've looked it up, I guess. I might've given it to him..." he trailed off and took a sip.
"You two didn't carry on any correspondence, then?" Hollis took a sip of her tea. Which was just as pretentious as the coffee, but she'd forestalled a discourse on the matter by picking one that didn't look too bad and sounding like she would brook no suggestions.
Lorne made a face. "Honestly, I don't remember. If we did, it was purely in relation to whatever was getting loaded into the belly of the plane. I'd offer to look it up or print it out, but I don't save emails from that long ago unless they're going to be needed. I don't use that account for personal correspondance, so whatever it was, it had to do with work."
"Can you say anything about those missions?" she asked. "We know he was doing weapons design for the Army at that time, although he was also apparently doing a joint project with the Air Force. We'd like to rule that out as a cause for his death."
Lorne smiled. "You know about as much as I'm probably allowed to say, ma'am. A lot of those tests were duds, I can tell you that. We used to joke about how much fuel we were wasting when they could've just set the things up in their basements with the same effect."
"How'd you end up driving Globemasters?" Gibbs asked.
Lorne chuckled. "Long, long story. Short version is that I am not a morning person and have trouble accounting for time zone differences before I'm fully caffeinated."
"Missed a filing deadline?" Hollis guessed.
"Yep," Lorne confirmed, still smiling at what he obviously considered to be very funny now, although it had probably not been so much at the time. "Instead of training to move up to KC-10s, I ended up learning the finer points of long-haul cargo transport."
Hollis and Gibbs alternated with a few more questions, but Lorne didn't have much more to add. He was amiable and artless and seemed like the kind of nice guy officer whose ambition had gotten him so far and no further because he'd set his goals low. The question was whether that's really who Evan Lorne was or just who he was supposed to appear to be. To his credit, Hollis really couldn't tell.
"When's the wedding?" she asked as they were winding up.
"Saturday night," Lorne said with a headshake. "I get a few days out of the onesie and have to jump into a monkey suit."
"Air Force buddy?" Gibbs asked.
Lorne shook his head. "College roommate's finally taking the dive," he said. "I don't take leave and fly halfway across the country for anyone in the service getting married anymore. What's the divorce rate these days?"
Gibbs, thrice divorced for reasons that had something to do with the pressures of being married to the job, chuckled.
They parted after Lorne promised to answer any additional questions. David, who'd packed up to go at Gibbs's signal, was still fiddling with the contents of her purse outside the cafe door. She let Lorne pass and disappear around the corner, then picked up her tail after McGee, sitting in the car across the street, told her which way he'd headed. Gibbs paid the tab and he and Hollis left, walking in the opposite direction.
"What do you think?" she asked, looping her arm through his as they strolled. Like two lovers out for a relaxing walk instead of two wired agents waiting to see if they were being followed.
"I think he's a spook working for O'Neill," Gibbs replied.
"So this was what, a test?" She was willing to be convinced. "To see what we know?"
"Possibly," Gibbs agreed. "His bosses aren't having any luck closing us down."
It took another fifteen minutes before DiNozzo confirmed that there'd been no tail on them and they could circle around back to the SUV. David checked in and reported that Lorne was leaving the downtown area on foot and heading for a residential area. They fixed a point to retrieve her and everyone got ready to move out.
The conversation on the drive back to the Navy Yard was on everyone else's impressions. DiNozzo seemed to be willing to trust Gibbs's instincts without supplemental evidence, but David said that she thought he'd been trained in negotiating -- for hostages, not extra donuts from the DFAC.
"His body language is very good," she said. "Very poised, showing attention and the willingness to compromise without appearing weak. He will seem reasonable and invite discussion. He is probably very good at what he does."
When they got back to the bullpen, Gibbs asked McGee to dig up dirt on Lorne. "Go through everything we didn't go through before."
McGee made a pained face. "Can I not do that from here, Boss? Remember how much trouble I got into last time? They probably have my IP flagged. Abby's, too."
Gibbs cocked an eyebrow, like he expected a better answer.
"There's an internet cafe in the mall with the taco place," McGee offered. "I could do it from there. They'd still probably know it was me because I work for you and you're looking for dirt on Lorne, but there's less circumstantial evidence."
"Go," Gibbs sighed. "Don't forget the habanero sauce this time."
McGee blinked, realized he'd been handed lunch detail, looked as if he might ask for cash, then thought better of it.
"Fish tacos, McGee," David called after him as he headed for the elevator. "With extra lettuce."
Forty minutes later, McGee returned with news and tacos.
"Major Lorne's been drawing hazard pay adjustments continuously since he was a senior captain," he reported as he handed out parcels of food. "Including combat pay, which he is currently receiving."
"Baby pilots are dangerous, but not that dangerous," DiNozzo said, sniffing the packet McGee had given him and then handing it to David. "I guess the Gibbs Gut is right again."
"But what does that get us?" Hollis asked, unwrapping what turned out to be a trio of enchiladas. It wasn't as if confirming Lorne's status as a clandestine operator did much for their case knowledge.
"It might get us enough to get read in on whatever the hell's going on," Gibbs replied, holding his hand out to McGee, who was frantically looking around in the bottom of the bag. "Three dead men and three Air Force spooks says either that they can't find the problem or that they are the problem."
McGee sighed with relief as he dug out a plastic container filled with orange-red sauce and handed it to Gibbs.
"Whichever one it is," David said as she grabbed a stack of napkins, "I do not think that they will like our idea of a solution."
"Tough on them," Gibbs said, settling down to eat.