Comescu
by Eris
Chapter 1: Found
Marty Deeks
It's been five months since Kensi disappeared, and the team hasn't been the same without her. It's Eric who tells him about Dom, how they've been through this once before already, and Deeks thinks that because it's Kensi who's missing now, everyone's suffering is even worse. Hetty didn't even bring in a temporary replacement—that's how important Kensi is.
To everyone.
And that just makes him miss her even more.
Office of Special Projects Headquarters, Los Angeles
It was a slow day for OSP, having finished a case just the day before, so when Eric appears at the balcony yelling for everyone to, "Get up here! I've got a lead on Kensi," no one hesitates to rush to the Ops Center, because, busy or not, Kensi's abduction is pretty much the most important case on their plate.
"What do you have, Eric?" Callen asks, always ahead of the group and therefore the first to enter the room. Eric, Nell, Nate and Hetty are already there, and they'd clearly been discussing something before Eric found that lead. Or perhaps, they were talking about the lead itself.
"I created a program that uses Kaleidoscope to run facial recognition and fed it Kensi's picture. It's been running for five months now, and I just got a hit," Eric explains excitedly with a wide grin on his face. He pulled up an image that has Kensi in it, looking good and well and alive. "This was taken at the Fresno branch of the Union Bank of Switzerland."
"Wait," Deeks cuts in with disbelief. "Fresno, California?"
"She's been here all this time?" Callen adds with just as much disbelief in his voice.
"Seems so," Eric confirms. "Around thirty minutes ago, she withdrew fifty thousand dollars from an active account and retrieved something from a safe deposit box. Both the account and the box are owned by a Ms. Kaitlin Banks."
"Kaitlin Banks," Deeks echoes, smirking a little. "K. B. Kensi Blye."
"Don't be so sure about that," Sam tells him. "For all we know, Kaitlin Banks is someone else entirely."
"You still have her location?" Callen asks.
"I've got Kaleidoscope watching her right now," Eric assures him.
"Put her up on screen," Callen instructs. Eric does as he asks and brings up the program monitoring Kensi. Everyone observes her—or her car, rather—for a few seconds before Callen deduces, "She's heading for Fresno Yosemite International Airport."
"A meet up?" Sam wonders.
"No," Nate realizes. "It's a trade. Kensi's got no reason—that we know of—to stay away from us, and take fifty grand in cash and something else from a safety deposit. Unless she's being coerced."
"Or blackmailed," Sam sums up, and it clearly rattles everyone in the room, because Kensi isn't one to let herself get blackmailed or forced into doing anything unless her life, or someone she cares about, is threatened.
"It's got to be something significant," Nate reasons, "something important, to her, Kaitlin Banks and whoever she's meeting up with."
"Important enough," Hetty adds, "that she didn't come back to us for help." Her tone made it clear that she didn't approve of whatever Kensi was up to, and nobody could blame her—they weren't too happy that she was doing the lone wolf thing either. That was more Callen's style than Kensi's.
"What if she can't?" Nate asks. "What if she thinks she has to do it by herself?"
"What if she's gone Jason Bourne on us?" Eric adds. Everyone turns to look at him then, and despite the ridiculous suggestion, Eric has a serious look on his face.
"That's…a possibility," Nate allows. "Eric, do we have a description of Kaitlin Banks?"
Eric types for a moment, then brings up a file. "Caucasian female, twenty-eight years old, 5'8, brown hair, brown eyes," he says. "No image, but the description reads like Kensi. If Kensi isn't Kaitlin, then the similarity is probably how she got access to the account."
"Guys, Kensi just arrived at the airport," Nell announces, tapping on her own handheld device. Several windows have appeared on the screen, showing off the different camera angles of the airport's interior and exterior. On the far left window, Kensi's car appears, and she emerges with a bag, leaving her keys with a valet and handing the man what looked to be a bill. She then enters the airport, where she's picked up by another camera.
"She's not bothering to hide," Sam observes.
"She's staying in plain sight," Callen corrects him.
"That would mean she's in danger," Sam points out.
Callen sighs heavily. "I don't think she's stopped being in danger since the day she disappeared."
No one could disprove that claim. They wouldn't anyway, because they all look like they're thinking the same thing.
On the screen, Kensi makes her way to the locker rentals, and it's not long before she arrives at locker 20, where they see her stash her bag inside before leaving the area. She proceeds to buy a plane ticket and settles down at the waiting area. Less than ten seconds passes before she reaches into her pocket and answers her phone.
"Eric, can you get us audio?" Sam asks.
Eric is quiet for a moment, furiously tapping at the device in his hands. "Done," he announces with a triumphant "Ha!" as an unfamiliar female voice echoes through the room.
"She's speaking in Romanian," Callen says, sounding surprised.
"Could you provide us with a translation, Mr. Callen?" Hetty asks.
Kensi's voice, sounding raspy, but still recognizable, filters through the speakers. "I put the package in the locker, like we agreed," Callen translates. "It was empty though. Where are the files you promised me?"
The other voice responds, and Callen tells them that it means, "Do you have the box?"
"Da," Kensi says, and they don't need Callen to tell them what the word means, or that she sounded annoyed.
"The files are inside the box," the voice assures her.
"Then our business is complete," Kensi says, standing up. "Thank you for your cooperation."
"Catalina, you are a good woman," the voice adds before Kensi can hang up, and it's clear by the look on Kensi's face that the compliment is unexpected. "Why are you getting in the middle of that mess?"
Kensi frowns, clearly unhappy at the question, but answers, "I'm doing this for a good friend of mine." She hesitates, then adds, "Take care of yourself, Ilena."
"And you, Catalina," the voice replies. Kensi snaps her phone shut and leaves the area, heading to the sidewalk and taking a cab instead of retrieving her car.
"Guys, look," Nell says, pointing to the camera that had a view of the lockers. A woman with curling brown hair was opening locker 20, taking out the bag that Kensi put inside. She left the key hanging on the lock and walks to the chair Kensi had vacated, picking something up, before heading out to the sidewalk, where she hands something to the valet and waits until the car Kensi had taken pulled up in front of her.
"Mr. Beale, follow Ms. Blye and get us an address for her. Ms. Jones, keep an eye on that car and find out who that woman is. Mr. Getz, if you would please help them start the process of finding out who Kaitlin Banks is and what Ms. Blye could possibly be up to with this Ilena woman, and why she's calling Ms. Blye Catalina, it would be very much appreciated," Hetty tells him, and the three of them nod, manning three separate computers to do their work at once. She turns to the remaining three men, who look expectantly at her, and she exhales deeply. "Mr. Callen, Mr. Hanna, Mr. Deeks—wheels up in an hour.
"Let's go retrieve our agent."
1702 West Bullard Avenue, Fresno
Kensi Blye
When she returns to the house, she immediately opens the box and finds a single thumb drive nestled in a Styrofoam container. She's been searching for this for five months. She's been away from her family for five months because of the information she was looking for, and that's the reason why she doesn't waste time, plugging the drive into the laptop sitting on the kitchen table.
It's with a deep, relieved and excited sigh that she discovers that the flash drive isn't empty like she feared it would be.
There's a knock on her door more than an hour later, and it echoes in the empty apartment. Seeing as how she hasn't made any friends, there's only one person who could be knocking at her door. But she gets up with a smile on her face anyway, because although she's barely gone through the contents of the drive, she's seen enough to know that leaving LA wasn't for nothing after all. And although she feels so tired enough to drop into bed and sleep the rest of the year away, she's glad. Everything she did, everything she's sacrificed, for the past five months—it was worth it.
She opens the door, and any positive emotion she'd been feeling disappears at the sight of G. Callen standing at her porch.
Marty Deeks
He doesn't expect the woman who answers the door. All this time, he'd imagined having to rescue her, imagined a gunfight or some sort of daring and foolish rescue attempt involved when they finally found Kensi. He—to his chagrin—imagined her a little more injured and bruised when the imagined rescue attempted finally happened.
Instead, she stands in front of them with a hand on the door and a happy kind of smile on her face. The smile slips at the sight of them—of Callen—and then her face seems to blank out.
"Hi," she says almost perkily. "Can I help you?"
She says it as if she doesn't recognize them, and Deeks briefly considers the Jason Bourne scenario Eric had mentioned a while ago. But even if he was terribly confused and wanted to look to Sam or Callen for some sort of clue how to handle this unexpected reaction, he finds that he can't bring himself to look away from her.
"Kensi?" Callen asks tentatively, and her eyes—one hazel, the other darker with her birthmark—meet his, a polite, distant smile appearing on her lips.
"I'm sorry?" she says, still wearing that blank, slightly expectant look on her face.
"Kensi," Callen repeats, stepping forward. Kensi's eyes widen and she backs away in alarm, her hands pushing forward to shut the door. "No, Kensi, wait!" He wedges his foot in the doorway and it's ridiculous that he has to struggle with Kensi just to get past the door.
It's also ridiculous that he and Sam only stand back and watch Callen deal with Kensi on his own.
In a purely epic move, Kensi reaches behind her and whips out an umbrella that she uses to hit Callen on the head, and it surprises him long enough for her to kick his foot out and shut the door. The snapping of the deadbolt can be heard through the door, and Deeks can only blink as he processes what just happened.
"Dude," he says to Callen, still in a state of shock, "You just had your ass handed to you by Kensi and an umbrella."
Sam Hanna
When Eric says he's found her, when he sees that real-time video of her alive and well for the first time in five long months, Sam is relieved. Kensi's okay. She's not being tortured in the basement of some abandoned building like Dom was.
She's not dead.
But why the fuck hasn't she contacted them and what the fuck does she think she's doing running around in plain sight, in Fresno of all places?
Why hasn't she come home?
His questions are pretty much answered when they get to her house. It's leased to—surprise, surprise—Kaitlin Banks, and Kensi answers the door in the same clothes she was wearing when they first saw her again.
Sam knows Kensi Blye. He's had five years to learn everything about her, knows when she's playing a part, when she's lying, and when she's being herself.
She's playing a part now. He knows she'd recognized them, because her eyes had brightened up in that fond way of hers when she laid eyes on G. (He always had been Kensi's favorite agent, the same way G uniquely favored her over the other rookies they've had.) So Sam knows she's playing a part.
The question now was 'why?'
Kensi Blye
She calls the police, because that's what Kaitlin Banks—her cover name—would do. She tells them that a man had just tried to force his way into her home, and that the man had five other male acquaintances, and that she doesn't know what to do. They tell her to stay calm and arm herself with a bat, something that can injure, not kill, and that they would be on their way to help her.
When the local PD arrives, she watches from the window as Callen defuses the situation, telling the police that he was an NCIS Special Agent. They all show their badges, but thankfully, they don't reveal that she's one of them.
Her cover is safe. For now.
The Fresno police knock on her door, and a female officer slips through the door and assures her that the men outside are government agents working for the Navy, that they just wanted to speak with her.
But she can't, because she knows her team. They'll get under her skin and she'll eventually give in and tell them what was going on. And right now, she can't risk it. Them simply being in Fresno, flashing their badges and announcing their presence, was already dangerous—for them and for her.
So she asks the officer to inquire whether they wanted to talk about a case or a matter of state security, because otherwise, they had no right to barge into her home and scare her like that. The officer is sympathetic, goes to talk to Callen, then returns and assures her that they won't be bothering her again.
She knows them well, which is why she doubts they'd leave her alone, so once everyone had cleared off her lawn, she calls a hotel and starts packing her bags.
Again.
Marty Deeks
Callen waits an hour before leading them back to Kensi's address. He and Sam take one car, Callen another, and they help him tail her to a hotel near the airport. Eric tells them she's checked in as Katelyn Di Stefano, and that she's booked a room for the rest of the week. He, Sam and Callen then watch as a bellboy brings her bags up to the room while she proceeds to a minimart outside the hotel.
"Deeks, follow her in," Callen says, and Deeks doesn't complain—he simply exits the car and hurries after her.
She's moving past the aisles fast, and with the clerk's eyes darting between him and her, he's forced to slow his pace and pretend to browse the selections. When a teenage couple suddenly enters and the clerk chooses to watch them instead, he follows her into the restrooms.
It's empty when he gets there—the window above the middle stall shoved wide open.
G. Callen
He knows Kensi well—he taught her most of what she knew, after all—and he can tell she's working a cover. He also knows now (in hindsight) that she's worried their presence had compromised her, which is why she was checking into a hotel.
Didn't she remember that he taught her that too?
When Deeks follows her into the minimart, he moves around the building's perimeter, positioning himself in the alley behind it. Sure enough, he sees Kensi push the small window open and slide out into the alley, and she heads right in his direction, just as he'd predicted she would.
He grabs her, earning a surprised cry from her, and forces her against the wall when she lashes out at him with her purse.
"Kensi, what the fuck?" he asks her, pinning her to the wall.
"Please let me go!" she cries, still playing her cover. "Take what you need, just don't hurt me, please!"
He spins her around, hands wrapped firmly around her arms, and looks her in the eye. "Kens, just stop, okay? Let me help you," he tells her gently. "Since when did you stop trusting me?"
She stills, breathing heavily. "I don't know you," she murmurs, sniffling. There's honest-to-God tears in her eyes, and damn it, but if not for the fact that he knows Kensi Blye is a born operator, he'd be convinced that she's telling the truth. "Please, please, whatever you want, just don't hurt me."
Her words have him frustrated and worried and goddamn it, this isn't how he envisioned seeing Kensi again, wasn't how this trip was supposed to go.
He considers every possibility, every probably scenario, and there isn't a safe bet in there anywhere. But he's got no choice. If Kensi was undercover, than he couldn't be the one to expose her.
His only option was to let this play out, to let her go.
Again.
So he presses a kiss to her forehead. "Come back to me, okay?" he tells her. "I don't wanna have to make Sam or Deeks my new favorite agent. So you come back to me."
Then, unhappily, he releases the grip he has on her, letting her run away from him.
Sam Hanna
Neither he nor Deeks have the guts to tell G that he'd forgotten to turn off his earwig, that they'd heard everything. He's not insane, and Deeks isn't suicidal.
And they won't tell anyone else either, because whatever happens, G and Kensi are their partners, and partners will always have each other's backs.
Beyond that, they're a team, and a teammate always supported another teammate.
Through whatever crisis or storm.
Kensi Blye
She runs. Not for the reasons she's supposed to, but because if she doesn't, she'll stay.
And if she stays, if she breaks cover for even one moment, then the entire purpose of staying away for the past five months would be useless. And then she might never get the answers she's looking for.
So she runs, away from him, away from her family, toward certain danger.
She'd booked her hotel room for a week, but she's not going to stay there. She drives out to the beautiful villa she's been welcomed into, where a large bed and a hot bath await her.
She checked, but none of her teammates are tailing her, and she's relieved that she has Callen blessing to do this, to keep digging into dangerous territory.
She's greeted warmly when she enters the villa. "Catalina!" she's called. "Welcome, cousin."
"Thank you, Grigore," she says, kissing him on either cheek. "It is good to see you again."
"You are right on time," he tells her. "The children have just gathered at the dinner table, and we are about to eat!"
As a result of her team rescuing one of their own, the Comescu family had been greatly diminished. Grigore Comescu—having been in Argentina when her team invaded their beach house on the Black Sea—is now the head, and he'd moved the rest of the family into America, hiding right under everyone's noses. The remaining family members are still young—the oldest of them turning eleven in two months—and if Grigore Comescu hadn't proven to be such a bad man, she would've admired how dedicated he was to his nieces and nephews.
Clearly, family meant everything to him, which is why she was posing as his younger cousin, Catalina. Grigore Comescu had lived away from his late family, but he gladly took up the 'family business' when the rest of his relatives were killed. And the fact that she'd been injured—obviously targeted by someone—was one of the things that made it so easy to slip past his defenses and get him to trust her in less than five months.
So here she was now, literally dining with the enemy and the rest of his blood-kin. She has roast duck for dinner and soaks in a lavender-scented bath before sleeping in 'her' room, on a king-sized memory-foam bed.
She thinks of Callen before she dozes off. Come back to me, was all he asked she do, and she would.
She'd come home soon enough.
Author's Note
I hope you guys enjoyed this! Two more chapters to go!
xoxo,
~E
Disclaimer: In my dreams, I like, totally own NCIS: Los Angeles. Totally!