Ironic
I knew there was no turning back from the moment that Gibbs discovered Bankston's plot. That was the first moment I thought of him not as a victim, but as an antagonist. But, maybe it was before that: when I threw my life away by committing treason to keep Amanda safe. Ziva is right. I will never see her again, unless it's with me in handcuffs, or worse, on death row in a federal prison. But, it was worth it if Amanda, my daughter lives. Bankston pulls me flush against him. I am his hostage.
Before I entered law, aspiring to attend Harvard, I majored English literature. I followed my guidance counselor's advice. Writers often wrote about life and emotions, and as a budding law student, I should know what made a person tick. I learned about the human condition by reading Shakespeare, the Bronte sisters, Jane Austen, and Edgar Allen Poe. To me, this slightly seems like a Poe plot: the victim becoming the villain, and just when you thought the story was over, as with Langer's death, the plot thickened, getting more convoluted the longer it continued.
We back towards the exit, and into the open night air, a gun being pointed by Bankston at our pursuer behind him. I was never allowed around guns or knives, even though I grew up around them my whole life. My father said that I would be hurt if I played with them, and for that reason only I stayed away. My father knew best, I reasoned, and although my five year old self loved shiny things, as the revolver was, I stayed away.
He attempts to cross the street, I forced in front of him, but it doesn't pan out like he planned. A black SUV blocks our path, and honks his car horn. I wonder if it is an NCIS agent who was stationed around us, or an average citizen. I know that if some crazed man looked like he had a hostage and a gun tried to cross the street in front of my car, I would've let him pass in front of me. No one gets out to apprehend us or to assist Gibbs, who I assume is chasing us, so it must've been in the right place at the right time.
My father had strong views, and he had never believed in luck. My mother did, but she practiced it quietly, so it didn't affect me very much. My father believed that you made your own fate, your own destiny, and luck was for the people whose lives were going downhill and needed it. So, I aspired to be a great lawyer, being expert in domestic and international law. I guess how that's how I got here, the NCIS mole being held in front of the seller of American military secrets.
Bankston started walking down the sidewalk, towards what could've been a street sign, but turned out to be a bench. Bankston fired twice, but it didn't seem like he was a very good marksman, because the first sounded like it ricocheted and the second shattered glass, most likely a window. Suddenly, and very roughly, I was shoved up what seemed like stairs and onto something bright, a bus. My captor shoved the end of his gun into the bus driver's shoulder, telling him to drive. The bus started moving, even though the doors were still open. I noticed a sparse amount of people were on board with us.
My father despised buses. He thought they were vessels by which all the criminals and crazy people in town traveled. For that reason, I never traveled on one until I was in college, when it was either take the city bus or walk. I never noticed how bright and how the lights glared, as if judging you, on the bus was until now. All of a sudden, we came to a stop. I spared a glance, and saw that we were still outside the pub. We started moving up the aisle of the bus. I heard people getting out of the bus, their feet hitting the metal of bus steps, and a man trying to protest. He got hit with the butt of Bankston's weapon, and fell. By then, I was just concentrating on becoming dead weight, so he couldn't move faster towards the other passengers.
A gunshot, fired not by Gibbs but by Bankston, sounded. Glass again shattered, and then a scream by one of the female passengers. They were scared, but so was I. That fear of guns had carried over from my childhood, and I hoped Amanda would not even have to know about them, or at the very least, not be afraid of them. Especially if she ever had anything to do with a federal law enforcement agency, as I did. Seeing that Gibbs had entered the bus, Bankston tried to open the second door. He pressed the button, but then suddenly got impatient, and tried to kick it open. A young girl, who looked about twelve, was sitting in the seat juxtaposed to the alternate door. She screamed, and I couldn't help but to compare her to Amanda.
I remembered the first time I had seen Amanda. My parents wanted another child; they were going to have an empty nest soon, after all. With Michy, as my mother affectionately called me, going off to college, they naturally wanted another child to raise and act as a buffer between their clashing viewpoints. My mother, being a giving heart, wanted to adopt a child from our native land, China. She remembered the female infanticide, how parents only wanted male children, and decided that that was what their child's past was going to be. They would give her a better future. And one year, ten months later, we were standing in a terminal in an airport, watching our new family member arrive, strapped to a handler from her orphanage. I had sworn from that moment on I'd protect her, but I'd failed. I just hoped Amanda, the sister who I had raised from her infancy, would survive. That Tony and Ziva would find her in that safe house, unharmed and safe.
A woman got up from her seat, carrying to package, to run, and she was shot in the back. I knew that if she wasn't dead, she would be paralyzed severely. Another person who would be affected because of my actions. But, I knew she had no other choice, I had to protect Amanda. I felt for the woman's family, though. She had a mother, and a father, or possibly a husband, or a child. My parents had died in a car accident, while I was out at the library studying for my SATs, a month away. Amanda was home with the babysitter, and I didn't get the news until I arrived home, around ten, fatigued from reading paragraphs and fill-in-the-blank vocabulary sentences. From then on, I vowed to take care of Amanda. Protect her, look after her, like our mother would've wanted.
"Boss, Tony's got Amanda, she's safe."
Amanda was safe. Amanda wasn't in harm's way. I had to stop this bastard, this traitor, before he took any more lives. Any more parents. I grabbed his arm as he started aiming at the girl who reminded me of Amanda. Instead, his shot hit the window of the alternate door. He shot twice again, this time his arm forced away from the girl. His shots never hit whatever mark they were targeting. Our maybe he was firing wildly at this point. Maybe he knew our situation was hopeless, like I had discovered in the bar a few moments ago. It felt like it had been a lifetime ago.
I caught Gibbs's eye as I was holding his hands above our heads. I had watched enough late night crime shows in college while studying cases after Amanda was asleep: by the distance between Gibbs and me, he could aim at me, and shoot through my body. The bastard behind me would be shot as well. I would die, naturally. Anyway, my job was done, my goal completed. Amanda was safe. Luck was on my side; my life had been going downhill for a while.
"Shoot!" I mouthed to Gibbs.
His expression looked blank. He had to do this. Shoot through the shield, to hit the target. I nodded violently at him. He gave me a pained and disbelieving expression, like my father used to give me when I stated something obvious. One of those "Really?" looks. He shoots his SIG. Three shots. They hit me in a tight formation, in the chest. It felt like the time when I accidentally placed my hand in the way of a teapot my mother was pouring, increased a thousand fold. Except, I couldn't yank my hand away and go run it under the faucet.
My limp body hit the floor of the bus as Bankston dropped me. I heard him stagger backward, and drop the gun to the ground. It was followed by a thump that was his body. After that, he moved no more. I heard Gibbs moving towards me, and felt the vibrations of his footsteps under me. The bus lights were brighter now that I was looking up at them. But, maybe that was the bright white light that every author talked about when someone was dying. I move towards the light. Gibbs knelt next to me, but the only thing I could thin of was a literary element I had learned of in college: irony. My father thought criminals and crazy people rode the bus, and now Bankston and I, criminals in our own right, were dying on the floor of a city bus. I let the light engulf me.