You Will Never Imprison My Mind
by channeld
written for: the NFA In Media Res challenge. The challenge requires that the story begin in the middle of the action.
rating: T for some violence
genre: drama, action
disclaimer: I still own nothing of NCIS.
"You can chain me, you can torture me, you can even destroy this body, but you will never imprison my mind."
~ Mahatma Ghandi
Whack! Came a blow from out of nowhere. No, not entirely nowhere. The pain-driver had been there all along, or so it seemed. Coming out of the darkness to swing a mallet into his head. The effect was not enough to knock him out. That would be kind, considering, and his captors had shown no kindness. Instead, it was to keep the pain in focus between the periods of other onslaughts.
His world was conical. A single bulb with a shade threw a triangle of light down on him; broadest at the floor where his burned, shoeless, sockless feet rested. Every now and then he got a glimpse of those feet, when his mind expanded enough to realize that he had a body and not just parts that ached in turn. The blood on the rough cement floor beneath his feet had dried and darkened. He could no longer guess how long he had been looking at those bloodstains; those signs of his life forces forced out of him.
"Where are the forces meeting?"
How many times had he been asked that now? Three times? A hundred? All his life?
He swore at them, describing a physical impossibility, as he had before, but his voice was weakened. It had been so long since they'd allowed him anything to drink or eat.
"Where are the forces meeting?"
"F…"
Something was coming next. Was it the isolation in the cold, cold cell? Followed by dousing with cold water? One would think that that would be best done with a naked prisoner. Yet, they had left him fully clothed (sans the socks and shoes), right down to his suit and necktie. It was as if they were jeering his position as a professional. The cold, soaked, now sweat-stained and torn suit drying on his cold body was another.
The physical blows were the least of his worries. They were far more tolerable than the white torture; the relentless terror of isolation…alone, sensory deprived, no sense of balance or of self…He hadn't experienced waterboarding, but wondered if that was to come. It was, he had heard, the ultimate punishment short of death.
But they weren't done with him yet.
"Where are the forces meeting?"
This one was accompanied by a hard crack against his shoulders…the same spot where he'd been hit…sometime, recently. His screams filled the shapeless, size less room. It jarred his lungs, and he coughed as he screamed; sputum forced into his throat. "No…more…"
Any sort of reaction from his torturers would have been welcome, but they might have been robots for all the emotion they showed to anything he said. He tried to think, to grasp his situation, to reason how he got here, and how he could get out. It was becoming harder and harder to do so.
"Where are the forces meeting?"
That was one question he would not answer…as long as he could hold out.
Massive hands yanked him up from the chair on which he'd been sitting, with his wrists bound behind him. Then he was dragged out of the dark room into another one—one his faltering memory told him he'd been in before—and there shackled to the stone wall, his feet dangling about a foot off the floor.
For once, one of the unseen captors addressed him. "Soon, you will have forgotten everything. Even your wife."
Jackie…
"I don't give a damn about full flights, Shonna! Get on the next military transport and get out here!"
From the Director's desk at NCIS HQ, Washington, Supervisory Special Agent Gibbs slammed down the phone loud enough to make Vance's secretary in the next room, Leslie Baker, jump. "Is there anything I can get you, Agent Gibbs?" Baker asked cautiously, from the doorway.
"Can you pull your boss out of thin air and free me from this electric chair? No? I didn't think so," Gibbs growled. "Oh…go find something to do." He waved the man away.
"Yes, Agent Gibbs."
"DiNozzo. Status."
"Checking out the leads from the greater Alexandria area, boss," Tony said over the phone.
Gibbs was beginning to feel like he always had a phone in one hand; landline or cell. How did Vance manage it? "And?"
"Um…nothing too solid yet. I've asked Schultz if her team could go look—"
"DiNozzo; you don't ask. You order."
"Um, got it. Order. So, is, um, Shonna Heywood on her way here?"
"Yep," said Gibbs, wishing he could be certain of that, and he ended the call. If the Deputy Director from San Diego didn't get here fast to assume command, Gibbs was liable to do something rash. Like put the agency up for auction.
Someone needed to be in command while Vance was missing, and Gibbs knew he shouldn't be that someone. He was much more useful being boots-on-the-ground. But until Heywood, with a mild phobia of flying, could be gotten onto a plane that would deliver her to DC, he was stuck filling in for Vance…
…and commanding the massive search party, from a desk.
"No, Mrs. Vance. I am sorry. You did tell me to call you 'Jackie'. I am sorry. There is no news yet. We are doing everything…I am sorry. I know this must be hard on the children. No, you are not a pest. You are welcome to call me any time…Yes; as soon as we know anything. Goodbye."
"You have a lot more patience than I do," said Tony, who couldn't help hearing the conversation.
"Mrs. Vance has reason to be upset," said Ziva, lowering her eyes in sympathy. "I cannot blame her. Her husband has been missing for four days, and we have no solid leads. Her job is to worry. We are the MCRT, Tony. We should be out, searching."
"Not until we have something solid to go on," Tony said, firmly. For once, he didn't relish his position as pro-tem team leader. He wanted to be out doing something, too. But if the really important break came through in the case in, say, West Virginia, he didn't want the team hours away in eastern Maryland. In the meantime, other teams could be out chasing down the less likely leads.
And there were so few leads to begin with.
Four days ago, the Director had left NCIS for a meeting at the Pentagon. He had never arrived. Three hours after he was to show up, his car had been found in Virginia. Both bodyguards (one of whom had been the driver) were dead. There was no sign of the Director.
The Directorship of NCIS was an important enough position that the SECNAV called in the FBI and the CIA for help. The agencies added manpower to the search and to the intelligence gathering. A few had attached themselves to the NCIS building; two dour-looking types were rumored to be checking out all NCIS employees to see if this was an inside job. Of course, that action was proper and necessary, but it still gave the staff unease.
And Gibbs in the Director's $2,000 desk chair further unruffled them, for it was widely known that he didn't have the patience for the day-to-day administrative tasks, even though the secretary took care of as many as he could.
On a personal level, though he would never say it out loud, Tony was not comfortable giving orders to Supervisory Special Agent Klara Schultz. As leader of the senior MCRT—Schultz' team filled in when a second such team was needed, or on off-shifts—he could order her around, but barely. He liked Schultz, but she was closer to Gibbs' age, and she intimidated him.
Tim hung up his phone. "Ducky wants to see us in Autopsy," he announced. "He has findings on the bodyguards. Gibbs will meet us there."
"About time," Tony mumbled. Four days! If Vance was still alive, so much time had already been lost.
The bodies of the two bodyguards, one male and one female, were laid out on tables. It was difficult (it always was) to look upon people in death whom one had known in life. One had been an NCIS agent who'd tired of field work and so joined the Director's staff when an opening arose. The other had been recruited from Homeland Security. Vance had often spoke highly of both of them.
"Well, Duck?" asked Gibbs.
"Patience, Jethro. Your desk isn't going anywhere," Ducky reprimanded lightly. "This is a very interesting case. The gunshot wounds that ultimately caused Mr. Lageroff's and Ms. Coltraine's deaths did not start their deaths. I'd been curious about that because there had been no indication that they put up a struggle. No cuts or bruising on their hands; no hair or skin cells under their fingernails."
Abby had joined them, and she pulled up on a computer a simulation. "This is what I think happened," she said. "Based on the entrance and exit wounds, the trajectory means they would have been sitting upright. Coltraine was driving. Lageroff was in the passenger seat. Well, that much you knew already."
"Except it couldn't have happened that way," Jimmy put in, eagerly. "The angles are wrong. They're crossed. Even though the shots were fired from about 40 feet away, you can tell."
Tim snapped his fingers. "They switched the bodies! Coltraine must have been the driver, and Lageroff was in the passenger seat."
"Why would they do that?" said Tony. "To throw us off? But how?"
"Lageroff usually drove," Gibbs put in. "Not always, but usually. He liked to drive more than Coltraine did."
"And it is curious," said Ducky, "that both died, apparently, sitting up. The car was not moving at the time…the blood splatters tell us that."
"But you said the shots came from about 40 feet away," said Ziva. "Not close enough for a traditional execution-style killing."
"That is correct, my dear."
"Then why did they stop? And how were they ambushed so fast?"
Abby put on a wry smile. "Ms. Coltraine didn't die in her seat. The blood type of the blood found on her seat (which is another reason why we're sure their seats were switched) wasn't hers. She was outside the vehicle when she was shot."
"We did not find traces of blood outside the car, Abby."
"And we searched that area a hundred times," Tony remembered. When the Director of NCIS' life was at stake, there would not be an atom that would go unscrutinized.
"Whoever did this had a couple of hours on you all," said Jimmy, grinning at the knowledge that the team hadn't yet twigged to. "Time enough to disturb the ground; scoop up any dirt or grass that had blood stains."
"Yes; I remember now thinking that the dirt might have been brushed," said Ziva. "The highway department has mowed the grass along the shoulders within the last week. The wheels broke up the dirt. But I thought someone else might have done so as well."
"There weren't any clues in the dirt," Tony argued mildly. No one should fault the MCRT for not being thorough.
"There wasn't anything to find," said Gibbs. "These people were pros."
"But why was Coltraine shot outside? And what was the point of switching places?"
"The time of death of the two is so close that I can't say for certain, but I believe that Mr. Lageroff died at least a few minutes before Ms. Coltraine did," said Ducky.
"Because he was shot first? Is that what you mean?"
Abby jumped back in. "Because he had something in his bloodstream that Coltraine didn't. Chockosgifide, a drug similar to the date rape family of drugs."
"Where did he get that from?" asked Tim.
"From his favorite brand of soda," said Abby, producing a can of Unweela Cola. "This was in the car. DNA traces matching his DNA were found in saliva on the can."
"Assuming it was in his possession the entire time, how does one get a drug into a sealed can of soda?" Tony demanded.
"It's easy if you know how," said Abby. "You start with a fake can with a false bottom…"
"An inside job?"
"So it would seem," Ducky said, moving around the corpse of the female bodyguard. "Mr. Lageroff was drugged to the point of being unable to defend himself. Ms. Coltraine, we've concluded, was shot afterwards. She had gotten out of the car, perhaps to congratulate the shooters? She was not running away, if you ask. She had turned away…" He gestured to Abby, who brought up the next graphic simulation on the computer. "…but only slightly. She was not afraid of whoever she met."
"And they double-crossed her."
"One less bad apple," Tony growled.
Gibbs privately thought that this sounded too simple. But, simple sometimes happened.
The important thing was, they were still at a loss to know where the Director was…even if he was alive.