Her code name was Kestrel.
The first time he ever saw her, or saw and remembered her, was in Paris, during that colossal cock-up that Jen had made by accidentally killing that deep cover French agent. Naturally, because he was her supervisor, he had taken responsibility and allowed himself to be arrested in her place. After cooling his heels for over eighteen hours in a French jail cell, he had been abruptly released. No explanations, no apologies, not even so much as an "au revoir" from the authorities.
Mystified, and frankly pissed off to no end, he stood on the steps of the gendarmerie and tried to turn his coat collar to the wind and rain beating the city to a pulp. The limp collar flopped inward instead, pouring icy rain down the back of his shirt, causing him to curse in three different languages. His ultra-sensitive ears caught a breath of soft laughter, carried on the biting wind through the sounds of the rain soaked traffic.
Like her avian namesake, she was perched above him, on the roof of a neighboring building. He could just pick out her outline; she was clad head to toe in black, and her face and hair were completely covered by a black balaclava, but there was no mistaking that figure for that of a man. She wiggled her gloved fingers at him in a mocking wave, and then sank back into the blackness of the night.
He swiftly and covertly searched the alley and the surroundings of the building for any sign of a woman in black, but came up fruitless. Whoever she was she had vanished as effectively as he had ever seen any agent do before her. And he was positive that she was an agent for *someone.* Yeah, there was no mistaking that.
The next time he saw her was six weeks later at a party in Aix-en-Provence that he and Jen were attending. Jen had forced him into a tuxedo, him whining all the while about the tight collar and the narrow evening pumps she had produced, but the effect was exactly what they were looking for: wealthy American newlyweds looking to enjoy the upper class social scene in France on their honeymoon. Jenny was wearing deep forest green satin, cut all the way to there and practically backless. Her hair and eyes were almost incandescent, and the four-inch green heels she wore made her already willowy figure even more mouthwatering. She had taken the opportunity to give him a quick preview of her black lace, barely-there lingerie and thigh-high stockings, laughingly dodging his hands, promising a private viewing later after the party. He fully intended to hold her to that. A long, slow private viewing was exactly what he needed as a reward for those shoes and the tie.
When they stepped into the palace hall, his senses were assaulted instantly by the bright lights and sounds of a very large, very good party in full swing. He gritted his teeth; the crowd was larger than they had been told it was going to be. Much larger. That was going to make it harder for them to find and then keep their eyes on their mark that night, a French drug cartel leader who "rented out" secure cartel shipping and transportation lines to terrorists moving arms and people around, including on US naval ships in port in Marseilles.
Jen reached up and whispered in his ear, "Your teeth are audible from here. Do you see Le Goff at all?" He pretended to laugh at her seemingly intimate comment, and snarled back in a low voice, "What do you think?" Jen smirked at him and brushed her fingers over his chest in a possessive and intimate gesture. "I think we're fucked," she murmured back in a very low voice, keeping the smile plastered on her face while she scanned the crowd, pretending to look bored and slightly jaded, "Where the hell did all these people come from? I thought this was supposed to be a small intimate party." He bit back the bitchy reply he was going to make, and instead searched the crowd of people, not recognizing a single face, and especially not that of their target. Jen snagged two glasses of excellent champagne from a passing waiter, and handed him one. As he lifted the glass to take his first sip, his eye was caught by a small laughing group clustered around a woman and a man.
The woman was perhaps in her late twenties to very early thirties, her silky skin clear and smooth without the aid of cosmetics. She was dressed in deep blue silk, the column of the gown skimming over generous and attractive curves. She had little cleavage on display, preferring instead to let the exquisite cut of the gown highlight her body, but drew attention to the shapely arms and shoulders slipping, creamy and silken, from the gown. Her skin was ivory, as pale ivory as Jenny's was, but instead of Jenny's rosy undertones, hers glowed with golden light, as though lit from within by sunlight. Her hair was the color of a ripe wheat field, dark gold with lighter tones here and there; the color was beyond the skill of any colorist or stylist, and he concluded that this was her natural hair color. She was telling the little group a story that seemed to involve a plane somehow, and they were clearly appreciative and attentive. There was a smattering of laughing applause at the conclusion to the tale, and she lifted her eyes up to gaze around idly for a moment and caught his.
Then he saw who she was standing with. Their target. Le Goff was laughing and talking to another well-dressed woman in the small group, but his hand was on her elbow and his fingers caressed the silky skin of her inner arm. Her eyes met Gibbs' squarely, sparkling more from mischief than the effects of the champagne, and a slow half-smile curved her lips.
And she wiggled her fingers at him in that same saucy, slightly mocking wave she had given him six weeks before.
Jenny whispered in an angry hiss, "What the hell are you doing, Jethro?" He merely nodded towards the woman and her companion, their target. Jen followed his eyes, and stood stock still for a fraction of a moment. Jen almost silently snarled, "Fuck!" and grabbed his hand leading him onto the dance floor, where the music and sound of feet and the skirts of ball gowns would mask their whispered conversation, but keeping them close to the edge of the dance floor, near their target.
"What is he doing?" demanded Jen, from the safety of his arms. "What's he doing with her?"
His head spun for a fraction of a moment. "You know her?"
"No, but she looks way too rich-blooded to be consorting with a drug cartel leader slash terrorist wannabe."
"They're on the move." Indeed, the woman had taken her companion's arm, smiling charmingly at him, and they were moving towards the garden, whispering seductively to each other. The garden would give the happy couple more privacy, but it was going to be way harder to keep an eye on the target in the darkness. There was no moon tonight and the clothing of the couple was dark enough to effectively hide them from view.
He and Jen moved rapidly off the floor and split up, Jen going directly to the dimly lit garden through the veranda doors, and he to the back gate. He lit up a cigarette, and drifted casually but quickly away from the group of other smokers, towards the back of the garden. He arrived just in time to see Le Goff being strong armed into a black limo by the woman in blue and two black-masked and garbed people. Where the hell had she gotten that gun in her hand so quickly? And where the fuck was Jen? The limo spun out, an impressive feat for a car of that type, and the woman leaned out to shut the open door. She shot him a cheeky grin and wiggled her fingers at him cheerfully.
The next several hours were spent at the safe house, a cramped and musty apartment over a cheap couscous shop, trying to figure out what the hell was going on. He had to confess to Jenny that he had seen her before, that she may well have arranged his mysterious release from the French jail, and that she was clearly an agent. Jenny was decidedly not happy with that turn of events, but had kept her protests to muttered curses and name calling, while they worked to unravel the puzzle. During the hours of frantic calls and arguments, a name surfaced: Kestrel. He dimly remembered hearing he name in passing and associated it with the code name of a contract agent who had worked for various agencies over the years, most of them part of the American alphabet soup of agencies, but sometimes MI-5, the French DCRI, and even Interpol. An agent who took the most dangerous assignments with the highest risk factors. Who she was working for now seemed to be bordering on a national secret, but that she was running an op out from under NCIS was obvious. Which pissed him off.
And he never got his private viewing of Jen in that racy French lingerie, which pissed him off even more.
The third time he saw her was back in Paris three weeks later. He was sitting at a crowded café on the Rue Monmartre, drinking coffee and reading Le Monde Diplomatique in English, waiting for Jen to finish shopping at a lingerie boutique nearby. She had finally promised him that she would give him the fashion show that she had teased him with nearly three weeks before in Aix, but she wanted something new to show off. He had happily deposited her in front of the boutique, humming to himself in anticipation of his coming treat.
"May I take this seat?" asked a voice in a broad northern English accent. "It's crowded here this time of day."
He looked up at the woman in front of him and froze. Her hair was short and nut brown this time, eyes the color of milk chocolate. The curvy figure had thickened and she was slightly limping. Her skin was coarsened and she had a slight scar on her chin. The clothing she wore was over-tight and cheaply made, right down to the fake leather flats on her feet. She looked nothing like she had at the party in Aix; even her cheekbones looked flatter, her eyes rounder. But he still knew it was her. Silently, he motioned for her to take the other chair at the table.
She lurched into the seat with far less grace than she had shown before, and set down her shopping bags. "Thanks kindly mate. Busy today here and my feet are killing me."
The harried waiter hustled over and took her order: black tea, English if at all possible, strong and hot, and a pain au chocolat, the pronunciation of which she massacred. She gazed calmly at him, and smiled that little half-smile, just a quirk of her mouth really, but still sexy as hell. To his shock, he felt his body respond to that smile, the stirrings of arousal at the base of his spine. "Is this work or pleasure?" he asked her, the words carefully neutral but weighted like a ton of bricks.
"Work mostly," she shrugged. "But sometimes pleasure." Her eyes raked appreciatively over his lean body. He was keenly aware that he was getting harder, and he knew now what a woman might feel like when a man undressed her with his eyes. She was clearly having fun now. "Sorry about Aix, mate. But it happens to the best of us sometimes. We just moved faster than you did." She gazed around the café apparently idly, but he could see her eyes taking in everything and everyone around them and filing the details away for reference, exactly the way that he and Jen had done earlier.
He followed her eyes to a tourist couple sitting at a nearby table, heads down, seemingly discussing a guidebook to the Louvre. Their camera was idle on the table, facing them. She blinked at him and then at the camera, conveying a silent message. They were likely being filmed he realized, and he gave her a barely perceptible nod. "Still, a bloody pleasure to get away from Durham. Bloody chavs taking the place over. Right proper nuisance 'tis. And taking hols somewhere else is right out; they follow you everywhere, they do! Don't care much for the Frogs, but I've got to take my hols somewhere, din't I?" He had to give her credit; she sounded exactly like the crass shop girl she was pretending to be. "Ah, here's the tea then. Ta, love," she simpered to the scowling waiter as he set her tea and pastry in front of her. "American you are then, right? Where from? Ah, wouldn't matter any road; only place I know in the bloody States is Texas anyway. Yee-haw!" she drawled in a horrific imitation of a Texas accent.
He choked back a smile and tried to hide it by folding up his paper carefully. By the time the task was accomplished, he had turned amusement into a condescending smirk; Jenny would have said that it came naturally to him, but he was genuinely amused by this woman. He shouldn't have been, he should have been pissed off and raging at her. Instead, he was amused by her audacity and impressed by her obvious skill. And his already close-fitting jeans were feeling tighter by the moment.
"Oh, I'm just here for the bird watching," he lazily commented, watching her conceal a smirk so like his own it was funny. "Lots of interesting and mysterious species in France. Some even keep popping up over and over." He looked at her with half-lidded eyes, appearing every inch the predatory male he was pretending to be. She slurped her tea in response.
"Oh, aye, birds," she repeated vaguely, murmuring softly as she eviscerated the pastry to get to the chocolate inside. "Lots of the little things in England. Got a mate in France interested in their migration routes. Me, couldn't care less, but ya know how it is; gotta pretend to be interested to keep their attention captured." Migration routes and a "mate" in France my ass, he thought. "He even gave me this keen bracelet before I left Durham. I like this un the best." She shoved her braceleted wrist under his nose, displaying a tacky charm bracelet. The charm she held out was a tiny pound note contained in a clear cube; he could barely make out the electronic wink deep inside the tiny cube even at this close range. He caught her hand, and pretended a closer look at the charm, while the pad of his thumb stroked lightly over the pulse point in her slender wrist. He saw her pupils dilate slightly at the caress and he smirked. She didn't pull away, but leaned closer to him instead, whispering, "Père Lachaise, Thursday noon. I'll be near Pierre Georges."
She pulled her arm away, giggling. "Aren't you a saucy un? I'd best go before you trick me outta my knickers, sly thing!" She glanced over her shoulder and saw Jenny bearing down on them, a frown clouding her pretty face. Quickly, Kestrel bent down and pressed a kiss to his cheek, casually brushing his paper into his lap, covering his now obvious erection. Before he could react, she whirled out of the café, shopping bags in tow.
Jen arrived swiftly at the table, stormy eyed. He stood quickly and tossed a few euros on the table to cover the bill, and grabbed Jenny by the elbow, steering her out of the patio. "..That?" she hissed through clenched and grinding teeth.
They pretended to be window shopping along the route back to the safe house, a lovely little apartment just off the Rue Monparnasse. He murmured the situation to Jen as they walked and flirted, looking for all the world like the newlyweds they were pretending to be and the lovers they truly were.
"So she wants to meet in Père Lachaise? And why Pierre Georges, whoever the hell he is anyway?" Jenny murmured as she reached up to kiss the side of his neck, pretending to giggle when he squeezed her tighter. "What is she up to Jethro? I don't like this at all."
He leaned down to nuzzle at her ear, enjoying the genuine shiver of pleasure that rippled through her at his caress. "Père Lachaise because it's public and open. We can stroll and talk and the chances of us being overheard are practically zip. Pierre Georges," he shrugged, "still marked on the maps but not nearly as popular as Jim Morrison or Sartre. I don't know what she's up to now, but she practically told me she's working for the French right now and that they're holding Le Goff."He knew who Pierre Georges was; Jen's knowledge of military history was lacking in this area. "Anyway, you now know everything that I do. We'd better meet with her, if nothing else than to get a good bead on her for future ops. She's an unknown right now, and that makes my skin itch in places it shouldn't."
Jen thought about that for a moment and then nodded. She was obviously still skeptical, but his last comment had caught her attention, just as he had known it would. "How about then," she purred softly and seductively, "we go home and I scratch some of those uncomfortable spots for you." She held up the suggestively tiny bag from the boutique. "And I'm dying to change out of these clothes into something far more comfortable." He grinned, anticipation writ large on his face, and grabbed her hand, pulling them towards the privacy of the safe house.