I'm sorry this update has been a while in coming! It's a busy time at the moment, so I can't promise that the next updates will be any quicker...but I'll try my best to make sure that they aren't any slower! Hope you enjoy, and thank you for reading.

Oh, and I've pinched a line or two from an NCIS episode in this chapter. See if you spot it :).

Jerusalem, 23 November 2002

Gibbs had never been much of a Bible man. Sure, he had gone to church as a boy, dragged there by his mother. He had been made to sit through Sunday school and learn all the stories and parables, the Gospels and the Ten Commandments, some of which had held more meaning than others to his ten-year-old ears. It had been something which he had to do, and was something that he stopped as soon as he was old enough to make his own decision. He hadn't set foot in a church since his mother's funeral. But, when Ziva had told him that they would be going to Jerusalem, he hadn't been able to help remembering those stories and characters that had been taught to him as history, but had actually seemed more like fairy tales or legends. He had also thought about the bits of later history that he had read before he moved to Israel, to try and understand some of the background to the situation that country was now in. And as the road wound around yet another bend and up another hill, he thought again of David and Solomon, Roman invaders and Ottoman crusaders, and how a small, provincial city in the middle of the desert had become, for many people, the centre of the world.

It certainly seemed, at the moment, like all roads led to Jerusalem.

Ziva's phone call the evening before had been from the National Police Headquarters in Jerusalem. Three men had been arrested after a home-made bomb at a bus stop near the Jaffa Gate had failed to detonate properly, and Latif and al-Tijani were two of them. The third, as yet, was unnamed. When the police had entered the names into their database, the alert from Mossad had flashed up, and they had been notified immediately. While Ziva had been elated, Gibbs had been slightly more cautious - it seemed like a massive stroke of good luck for them, but incredibly careless on the part of the Palestinians.

Too careless.

But still, it was the only lead that they had. And that was why they were on their way to Jerusalem at seven thirty on a Friday morning. As the highway twisted and turned its way up into the lower reaches of the Judean hills, Gibbs was grateful that Ben was driving. He might be slower than Ziva, but he would at least get them there in one piece - and, with a hungover Malachai next to him in the backseat, not getting thrown up on seemed like a pretty good priority to stick to.

'Are we almost there yet?'

He smirked as Ziva turned around and rolled her eyes at Malachai.

'You sound like a grumpy child'.

'He'll be telling you he needs a pee next'. Ben grinned into the rearview mirror. 'If you bothered to look out of the window, you'll see exactly where we are'.

Malachai grunted, and Gibbs checked his watch. They had been driving for almost an hour, which meant that they must be nearly there. Leaning over to look through the front seats, he saw nothing but more bends in the road.

'It is not far'. Ziva smiled round at him. 'But the first view is not as spectacular as most people imagine, at least not from this direction. You cannot see the Old City, or the Dome'.

She was right - as usual. They were into the suburbs of Jerusalem before Gibbs even realised that the city was ahead and, considering it was still so early on a weekend, the streets were remarkably busy. He could see that most people seemed to be wearing more traditional, Orthodox dress as they shopped or went about other business, while every single car that they passed had the Israeli flag stuck to the wing mirror. The streets and buildings - at least in this part of town - did not look particularly smart, and he was reminded of Ari's comment that Jerusalem was like a different world. He suspected that if he had come here to live instead of Tel Aviv, he would have experienced serious culture shock for the first time in his life.

'The National Police Headquarters is over on the other side of town, in East Jerusalem'. Ziva had turned around again to explain to him where they were going. 'An area called Kiryat Menachem Begin. The most direct way is past the Old City and the Damascus Gate, but that is best avoided on a Friday. Even at this time in the morning'.

Gibbs didn't bother to ask why.

The one thing, it seemed, that Tel Aviv and Jerusalem had in common was the heavy use of car horns, and half an hour of almost solid hooting and honking later, they pulled up outside the imposing sandstone complex that housed the Police Headquarters as well as several other government offices. Stepping out of the car and stretching, Gibbs took a deep breath, and noticed that, up here in the hills, even the air smelled different.

He knew that he would not be involved much this morning, and that his role would be one of an observer, not a participant. They were meeting with the police commander and then interviewing the men who had been arrested but, for ease and speed, they had agreed to stick to native languages. Which meant Hebrew for the police and Arabic for the suspects, and no English for Gibbs. His Hebrew was coming along, albeit at a snail's pace, and he thought he would probably be able to follow some of the conversation with the commander. But he had not even attempted any Arabic yet. One new alphabet at a time was quite enough, and he knew that, frustrating as it was, he would have to leave those interviews entirely in the hands of the others.

The back seat was not a place he was used to occupying when it came to investigations, and he wasn't sure that he liked it.

Once inside, they were patted down thoroughly and their gear bags were searched. It was a process that that everyone went through, everywhere they went in Israel - bus stations, large shopping malls, even before entering some of the more upmarket restaurants and nightclubs - but Gibbs suspected that, this time, they were getting away lightly because of the Mossad identification that they had shown at the front desk. They were even allowed to keep their weapons, and Gibbs didn't miss the satisfied smile on Ziva's face as she was handed back her gun, along with two knives and a screwdriver that had been lurking at the bottom of her gear bag.

'A screwdriver?' Gibbs murmured in her ear as they followed a young police officer through a maze of corridors to the office where they were to meet the commander.

She shrugged and smiled.

'You never know when something might need a repair, no?'

Fair point.

They were left in a waiting area while the commander supposedly finished off a breakfast conference call and, although Gibbs was slightly annoyed at the delay, Malachai fell on the coffee machine like it was heaven sent. Gibbs watched as the agent quickly made himself a black coffee with two shots of espresso, and then tipped five sugars, one after the other, into the cup and downed it without even stirring.

Gibbs raised his eyebrows.

'That the record?'

Ziva snorted, and shook her head. 'No. We do not talk about the record'.

'It got ugly'. Ben agreed, and ignored Malachai's scowl as he reached over to make himself a cappuccino.

Fortunately, the commander chose that moment to make an appearance. He was carrying three thin files, which turned out to be the only information that the police had on the three men, and a transcribed copy of the police interrogation the previous evening. It wasn't much, and it was all in Hebrew, but Gibbs still flicked through the transcription as Ziva began talking.

As far as Gibbs could tell, the Commander wasn't particularly helpful, but not because he didn't want to be. He simply didn't have much information himself. Latif, al-Tijani, and another man had been arrested after a rucksack, containing a home-made device packed with nails and ball-bearings, had been left at a bus stop at the east end of Jaffa Road, near the walls of the Old City. Witnesses had seen the three men together, and had seen one of them carrying the bag just minutes before they dumped it. Fortunately, it hadn't exploded, but only because an off-duty army officer happened to have been waiting for the number 94 bus and had been brave, stupid or reckless enough to open the bag and cut the right wire. It was only after he heard that that Gibbs realised why the men had been so apparently careless.

They hadn't expected to be caught. They had expected the bomb to detonate and any evidence -including any witnesses - to have been lost. And that was what should have happened.

He was able to follow the conversation enough to tell that Ziva had started with Latif and al-Tijani, working with what they knew and what the Commander knew to piece together their movements over the past twenty four hours. Gibbs knew that questions would be asked about their own surveillance, but he could see already how this had been missed. Their watch on the men existed only in cyberspace. They didn't have physical eyes on them twenty four hours a day, and perhaps they should have done, but it was too late for that now. Obviously, this was not something that had been planned over cell phones or encrypted email, and Gibbs began to revise his opinion. It looked as if the Palestinians had been very careful after all.

It wasn't until Ziva moved on to the third man that Gibbs noticed a change in her tone. When Commander Levy handed over the file, there was a faint flash of recognition in her eyes, a slight paling of her skin, before she got hold of herself again and began to ask the same questions that she had of the other two. But those questions, to him, sounded more urgent. It was a change that only he spotted, and only because, by now, he knew Ziva so well, but he couldn't follow what was being said. They were now talking too quickly for him to be able to distinguish anything properly, and he was just about to stop them and ask for someone to go over it either more slowly, or in English so that he knew what the hell was going on, when Ziva called a halt anyway.

She turned to Gibbs as the other three men went over a couple of points again, and gestured to the files.

'We need to talk to them. There is nothing more we can learn from this'.

Gibbs just raised one eyebrow, and she nodded, almost imperceptibly, before turning back to Malachai and Ben.

'If you could go with Commander Levy and get everything ready - we will do Latif first, I think. Malachai, you take this one, the rest of us will observe. Gibbs and I will be down shortly, I will just bring him up to speed on what these files contain'.

Commander Levy nodded, and looked at Gibbs as he spoke in halting English.

'You are observing too?'

Gibbs nodded, knowing what the Commander meant.

'Body language is universal'.

And Ziva's, just a few moments earlier, had spoken volumes.

He waited until they had left the room before taking the third file from Ziva's hands and opening it to look at the first page. It did not, as he had feared, say 'Ari David' in the space for the suspect's name, nor was it Ari's face that stared out at him from the small, square mugshot. It was not a name, or a face that he recognised at all, and he felt an odd sense of relief. It might not be as bad as he had first thought.

'So?', he said quietly, handing the folder back to Ziva. 'Who is he?'

She swallowed, and he saw that she still looked slightly pale. A sinking feeling in his gut told him that his relief had probably been premature, but he waited for her answer. When it came, his gut was proved right once again.

'Mahmoud Shehadah'. She paused. 'He is Aisha's brother'.