Apparently Jenny Shepard was loaded for bear. She led Brenda to a beachfront cafe crowded by more than half a dozen people. There was a small dark woman who might have been Ziva David, or might not. She bore little resemblance to the frightened teenager of years ago.

"Which ones are your team?" Brenda asked. Jenny squeezed her hand.

"All of them," she said.

"All...?" Brenda swayed for a moment, inexplicably dizzy. Jenny Shepard had brought the entire NCIS Major Crime Response Team to Los Angeles to... to do what? "Jenny, how bad is this?"

"Nothing we can't handle," said Jenny, but her delicate nostrils flared just as they had in a club in Essaouira all those years ago.

"What do you see?" Brenda had asked her back then.

"Nothing," Jenny had said, nostrils flared. She walked outside and on the spot paid a ridiculous price for a morose camel. They rode double for several hours across the moonlit Moroccan sand with Brenda's face buried in Jenny's hair and the hard weight of the other woman's gun pressed against Brenda's abdomen from its place in Jenny's waistband. At a deserted traveler's camp, Jenny allowed the camel to lumber to a resentful halt.

"I want you to wait here," she told Brenda.

Brenda closed her eyes and shook her head 'no.' A second later she felt a fleeting touch, fingers barely brushing her hair, her ears, her eyebrows. Jenny was standing very close, so close that Brenda could see the pulse in her throat.

"Wait for me," she said. "I'll come back for you."

Brenda hand't had much choice about waiting. Jenny had taken the camel. Back then Jenny had not taken 'no' for an answer. From the looks of things, Brenda thought, looking around at the serious overkill in terms of protection level, she still did not.

"We can handle this," Jenny said, and the Californian sun gleamed in her hair as if she were in Morocco.

Brenda's phone rang, and she excused herself to answer.

"What is it, Fritz?"

"I have to fly to Washington."

"Why? I mean... why?"

"Work, Brenda, what else? I have to go brief some bigwig on the difference between his backside and a hole in the ground."

"Well, that doesn't sound very important!"

"You should see the security stamps all over it. Brenda, why are you being so... you're the one who can't leave work alone! Look, I have to go, and that's it!"

"Okay. I just wish..." She looked around her at the battalion of heavy-duty protection. "I wish I could see you one more time before you go. I love you."

"I love you too." The call ended and she dropped the phone in her purse. "My husband," she told Jenny, "has been called to Washington to explain something to some FBI bigwig."

"It's better that he's out of the way," Jenny said. "He's out of danger, and we have fewer targets to protect."

"He'll be back soon enough," Brenda said.

"I dunno," said the tall man with the enormous cup of coffee. "Tobias Fornell can be particularly dense when he wants to be."

Brenda blinked, then felt one of Jenny Shepard's fingertips touch her chin and lift her jawbone until her mouth closed.

"Let's go," Jenny said.