Disclaimer: I do not own NCIS or any of the characters.
A/N: Sorry that it has taken me so long to post, I recently got back from the American West and have since had family over. Updates coming soon! And PLEASE REVIEW!
Gibbs stepped out of the elevator with a bag in one hand and a coffee cup in the other. He had gone to grab some take-out for the two teams after listening to an hour of Barrett and Cruz's attempt to calm some very worried and highly paid people. He had then gone to try and chase down some dead-end leads (mainly combing through the house and crime scene for anything they had missed earlier) for the next two hours.
He had barely made it out of the elevator when Agent Barrett came running down the stairs. "Special Agent Gibbs, SecNav wants you up in MTAC ASAP," she said quickly.
Just then, his desk phone began ringing, as did his cell phone half a second later.
Gibbs flipped open his cell first. "Gibbs."
"Ah, Jethro," came Ducky's Scottish brogue. "I was going to call your desk, but the line was busy, and I needed to tell you more about another, ah, abnormality I found."
"Be down soon, Duck. Got to meet with SecNav first." With that Gibbs hung up and made his way to MTAC, glancing down at the empty bullpen and his now silent desk phone.
"Where is he, McGee?" Abby fretted, pacing in front of her computer. They had finally cracked the encryption on both the phone and the e-mails just as the results from the bullet identification test had come up, and McGee found what he was looking for on the security tape. None of the information was good. So they had called Gibbs when his Abby-found-something-radar hadn't brought him down to the lab. And he didn't answer his desk phone. And all they got from his cell phone was a dial tone
McGee was pacing as well, though from the door to the computer table. "I don't know, Abby. This isn't like him. I mean, he even has a rule about it!"
"Rule 3, never be unreachable."
"I hope you have something good for me, Mr. Secretary. I am rather busy at the moment, sir." Gibbs said as he walked into MTAC.
"I could say the same, Special Agent Gibbs. I have the JCS, the director of the CIA, and the ITALICS President END breathing down my neck wanting to know what the hell happened."
"I wish I knew, sir. I trust that Agents Barrett and Cruz," he nodded to the blonde agent standing behind him (Cruz had been temporarily called back to FBI HQ), "have filled you in on what we know at this point."
"They have, Gibbs. But-"
"Sir, I think you should see this!" Agent Cade said, standing up from the computer terminal where he had been working on tracing the leak.
All heads turned to the tall man.
"I searched the operation's database for already-analyzed documents that had been accessed in the past few days. I chose this because I think the person who did this believed that such documents would not be missed as much as the incoming ones, which were more carefully monitored."
"And you found..." SecNav prompted.
"I found that the missing information was about operations performed in conjunction with the Israelis and black ops performed on Israeli soil."
Dammit... Gibbs thought. What have you done, Eli?
The room was silent as each person reached the same conclusion.
"Mossad." SecNav and Barrett said simultaneously, with equal hints of disgust.
"I wasn't finished, sirs and ma'am," Cade cut in politely.
"Well then by all means continue, Agent Cade," SecNav implored.
"About an hour ago I found out which documents had been stolen. I set up a trace on the electronic footprint of the documents using a series of programs including-"
"Cut to the chase, Agent Cade," Gibbs said, a little exasperatedly.
"A double alert on the trace just went off. An e-mail containing some of the documents was just sent from one domestic account to another, and then to an overseas account."
"Names and addresses?" asked Gibbs.
Agent Levin joined the conversation with a sigh. "I think you know their addresses, sir. Their names are Ziva David and Anthony DiNozzo, Jr."
Ziva David lifted her tired head off of the thin mattress serving as a bed. Her eyes opened in time to see the door to her prison opened, a heap thrown in, and the door slammed shut.
She sat up, a few bruises as a result of rough-handling groaning in protest. Her head spun and vision swam at the movement, not helped by the aching in her stomach from not having eaten in what, about 24 hours, maybe? She could not remember what had led to her being here. All that her captor had given her was an unidentifiable plastic bottle of water she had found when first put into the room.
Pushing the discomfort aside, she got off the bed and felt her way over to the heap, light coming in from around the door being the only thing keeping the place from total darkness.
Ziva reached out her bound hands to touch the heap, and snatched them back almost immediately. It was not a bag of food as she had hoped, but if was a body. Not a dead body, though, this person was alive; she could hear some shallow breathing.
Knowing what to expect now, Ziva rolled the body onto its back (it had been lying on its stomach) and checked to see if its hands were bound. They were, and judging by their size, they belonged to a man. She then began to search him for weapons, particularly a knife, since every last one of hers had been removed. (That bothered her; most people would not be able to find all of them, unless they already knew exactly where they were.)
She could not help but notice as she searched the man that he was in rather decent shape, judging by the firm muscles she could feel under his dress pants and dress shirt.
When she had almost reached his neck, she stopped with a small gasp. She had caught a whiff of the man's cologne, and it smelled exactly like the kind he wore...
Her hands moved up to his face and were met with blood. She bit her lip, holding back tears that would normally not have come, and felt his bloodied features, searching for its source.
His nose must have been broken by his face-first landing into her prison, as nothing above his nose was very bloody. She gave a sigh of relief that one, he had not been shot, and that two, he was not going to die from drowning in his own blood, because she had thought to roll him over.
Ziva felt along his bad-boyish features, familiar to her from almost six years of looking at them from across the aisle.
Now that she was sure that it was him, she moved her bound hands to his belt buckle, where she knew he kept his knife hidden.
Tony awoke to find someone undoing his belt.
"Uhhh..." he groaned. The hands stopped, and his eyes slowly opened. He couldn't see much as his eyes adjusted to the darkness, but there was a person leaning over his midsection.
"Tony?" a voice asked. Then pain hit him, coming from his nose.
"M'nothe..." he complained, his broken nose message up his speech. The voice snorted.
"Yes, DiNOZzo, I noticed."
"Thiva?"
He still couldn't see her face, but from what he could see, it sure looked like her.
"Yes, Tony?"
"Ya 'Kay?"
She smiled slightly at his concern. "I am fine. But you are not. Does anything else hurt?"
Without thinking, he tried to laugh sarcastically, but the action only caused new blood to gush out of his nose, and cause a pain in his chest to spike.
"On'y m'ead, an' m'chetht an' knee."
He felt her hands move to his chest, and she gently probed until he gasped in pain.
"I see," she said simply. "You have been lasered."
"Oh, tathered."
"Tazered, yes. Now, if you let me have your knife, then I can untie my hands and help you." When he gave no sign of protest, she returned to undoing his belt.
"And do not move. We do not want to irritate anything."
"Yes, Doctor David."
While she retrieved his knife, his mind was left to ponder how he had gotten here. He had come home, and...and...God, why couldn't he remember? Must be the aftereffects of the taser, he thought.
Ziva sliced the knife through the rope binding her hands and flexed the stiff joints and muscles as she pondered which of Tony's injuries should be treated first. If he landed on his bad knee, then he was probably in a lot of pain. But there was nothing much she could do about that other than evaluate the extent of said injury. The taser probes could probably be removed, although it would have to be done while in better light, as taser probes are barbed and would require great precision to successfully remove. That left his nose, the bloody mess.
She crawled back over to the bed, and felt under it for the mostly full water bottle. When she had it in her hands, she moved back over to him, and slowly began to pour the room-temperature water on his face. He tensed a little when it first hit his face, but then relaxed when she cut off a bit of her soft shirt and used the scrap to gently wipe the drying blood off of his face.
After a few minutes she had cleaned the area around his nose, and now took a deep breath before working on his nose.
By now the blood had stopped flowing, but the scrap was covered in the stuff. So she cut off more of her shirt, once a nice, form-fitting, black top with a shallow scoop neck with short sleeves. If Tony's eyes had been open, he would have been able to google-no, ogle-at the patch of skin exposed.
Ziva wet the scrap with more of the water and carefully moved it along the side of his nose.
He sucked in a quick gasp of pain as she did so, which only sent up another wave of pain from his chest.
"Shh, Tony, you will be fine," she soothed. He again relaxes his body, but his hands tightened into fists as she wiped away his blood.
When she was finally done, he began to sit up before she laid him back down, insisting that he not move.
"Zi," Tony said after a few minutes. Now that the bleeding had stopped, he could talk more normally. "Why are we here? How did you get here?"
Ziva thought back, trying to remember, but all that she could recall were bits and pieces of the memory. She could try and strong them together, but she was not sure that she wanted to.
"I am not sure, Tony," she sighed. "But you should get some rest. Here, I will bring the mattress over to you."
She was being uncharacteristically kind to him, he noticed. He got the feeling that she knew the answer to at least one of his questions. And it was definitely not an answer she was comfortable with.
"There's a bed in here?" he asked. Now that he knew what to look for, he could make out the shape of a bed in against one wall of the room. What kind of cell has a bed in it? He wondered.
She didn't answer his question, instead just yanking the mattress off of the bed and barely missing his head in the process. They were not in a particularly large room, needless to say.
Ziva turned the mattress so that it was right behind his head. He caught her drift and slowly used his arms to push himself on the bed. Thankfully, the motion did not strain his chest too much, and he got his top half onto the mattress.
"Zi..." he whispered, after trying to pull his lower half onto the mattress. "I, umm..." he couldn't bring himself to admit that the pain in his knee was to great him to move it. She might laugh at him, saying that he was weak and pointing out that she had been in worse pain before.
"It is okay, Tony. I do not mind," Ziva replied just as softly. He heard her move, and then he saw her silhouette appear by his injured knee and gently lift it, being careful to keep it in its bend.
Tony grunted hid thanks and pulled himself the rest of the way onto the bed, while she moved along with him and then laid her burden on the mattress. He opened his mouth to ask her if she wanted part of the bed, but she cut him off.
"I am fine, really, Tony," she paused. "It is my turn to have your back."
