Chapter Twelve
The god of Death
Leroy Gibbs had no time to hand-hold a bunch of costumed, terrified adolescents, even though he had been the one to terrify them. There would be apologies later. Right now, he had a missing Agent.
Holstering his Sig, he closed with DiNozzo and McGee and flipped open his cell phone, pressed a speed dial code. "Tobias! Ziva's gone! Move in." He cut the signal without waiting for an acknowledgment and punched in a second code; this one to Headquarters. One ring. Two rings. Damn – three rings. FOUR.
/NCIS,/ a familiar voice replied. He stared at the phone in disbelief.
"Abby?"
/Gibbs, before you blow up listen, I know I said I'd stay–/
"Shut up!" He turned and brushed past the partially open curtain, stepped out onto the stage and jumped down to the floor level, followed by DiNozzo and McGee. In his mind's eye he could see Abby staring in shocked disbelief at the phone upon her desk.
Men and women dressed in dark blue FBI Field jackets converged with others in NCIS jackets before the stage.
They ignored the two thousand silent witnesses thronging the ballroom. The fans had assembled for entertainment, now they were witnesses to a real life drama.
x
Gibbs still had Abby on the speaker phone. "Ziva's gone. Are you in your lab?" He had to be sure.
/Yes./
"I want a GPS fix on her cell phone. NOW!" He prayed she still had it on her. The seconds ticked by, and he felt himself getting a year older with every tick. Images of Kate on that roof– "Abby!"
/She's less than two hundred feet northwest of you./ He couldn't prevent himself from looking around the packed room.
"Abby, we're in a hotel. I need an elevation!"
/I can't give you an elevation! Not with GPS./ If he could have throttled a phone, he would. /Wait! Are Tony and Tim with you? And do they have their phones?/
Both nodded. "Yes to both."
/I need them to get as far from you as possible, but in a triangle. The wider; the better. I can pyramid the signals./
"DiNozzo, far corner! McGee," he pointed across the room to the middle door, "get out that door and keep running until you hit a wall." Each ran as fast as he could. Gibbs clutched the phone in his hand. "Come on," he urged under his breath. "Come on!"
/Four hundred forty, four hundred forty five feet. I can't do better than that!/
"Great, Abby - stay locked." He charged for the door, a squad of Agents at his back and DiNozzo running to intercept. People stayed out of their way.
x
When they hit the outer hall, McGee was already at the elevator bank, holding a car open. And wonders – he had Tina Ambrosino with him, along with three uniformed Hotel Security Officers. McGee pulled her inside the elevator - an instant later it was packed to capacity. The balance of the NCIS and FBI agents impatiently awaited the next cars, but they would first have to watch the destination of this car.
"I -." Ambrosino started to explain that she had come up on response to a disturbance upstairs, but Gibbs cut her off and hit the button for the floor he had calculated.
"Have you got your pass key?"
"Always."
"Good. Stand by." She stared at him, bemused. She supposed he spoke to his Agents in exactly that manner, so she supposed she should almost feel flattered. She barely manages not angry.
"Gibbs, stand by." Abby's voice came out of his speaker phone. "Three … two … one … you're there." A moment later the doors opened. He had calculated correctly. "She's northeast by north of you, two hundred nine feet!" Ambrosino pointed to the right hand set of rooms, and down the left corridor.
The Agents had their guns out. With Gibbs and his team were two NCIS Operatives and three of FBI's. They moved silently with Ambrosino in tow. Two hundred feet and they stopped before a door. They could hear muffled cries from within.
"Layout!" Gibbs demanded quietly of Ambrosino as she pulled out her card.
"The zeros through forties are twin beds. On this side, beds are to the right, bath immediately to your left, television further in, left." There were more muffled cries from within. Ambrosino stuck her card in the slot, the light turned green, she pushed the handle down and Gibbs kicked the door out of her hand, charged inside with DiNozzo and McGee at his left and right.
"FREEZE! NCIS!" His voice packed the room.
x
Hogan had just switched the control off, cutting the power that had the two beautiful women writhing at his command when the door burst open. The men stopped, guns at full extension, the middle, older one who had shouted flanked by one on each side, spread as far apart as possible. All three covered him, neither interfered with the other.
When the door had flown open he had been startled, and twisted a special control all the way. Now, hands still on the controls, he addressed the three who'd intruded on his fun. He could see there were many others in the hall, they also had guns, but they didn't count because the three were in their way. "Hello."
"Get AWAY from the machine!" the one who had shouted, the one he didn't recognize, demanded. Really, he should have better manners. Perhaps he would teach him over the seared corpses of these two delectable bitches.
"I think not," he replied amiably, making no move to release the controls. He noted that while Supergirl had not stopped screaming for help ever since the three men had arrived; Zatanna, also from NCIS, was silent.
x
"I'm not going to say this again," the middle man said forcefully, "get your hands away from that machine!"
"I think you should know," Hogan replied coolly, knowing he had them all, "that in the instant you staged your oh-so-impressive rescue attempt, I turned the controls up to maximum. Maximum, gentlemen, is six thousand volts." The words were so delicious. Six thousand volts. He'll fry the bitches before they can even shriek. He had his thumbs on two dual switches. "DC now, not AC. I flip these switches, and you will never reach these two bitches before they are fried in their own grease."
He paused, considering. "I wonder how they'll taste."
x
Gibbs glanced at the two women tied spread so obscenely open on the beds; Nancy McCarren pleading desperately through taped mouth while Ziva, trusting, lay waiting, trying not to distract him. She was distracting, but he had to force that aside.
If they fired, each shot would be a fatal one. He and DiNozzo targeted the man's head, McGee would empty his gun into Hogan's heart, but could he guarantee they could prevent him from throwing the switches? Could he be certain they could stop the machine before its killing charge did its horrible work? Could he be certain that so massive a charge would even be sent, and that the women could survive the seconds that would be needed to stop it?
"What do you want?"
"Very good," Hogan said with an oily smile. "I knew you were a reasonable man." If there had ever been any doubt in Gibbs' mind that they had been hunting a madman, it was gone. "Now, each of you is going to go over and toss your gun out that window." He tilted his head to indicate the window at his far left. They would have to brush past him to reach it. "Then you are all going to leave, and allow me free exit from this hotel. Then you may have your women back."
x
Tim McGee, listening to the sheer lunacy of this plan, had had enough. He had not been able to save Kate Todd; he'd been on the street pinned down by fire when she had been shot on a rooftop. He had not been able to save Paula Cassidy, who had been beaten, kidnapped and nearly killed when she had been attacked in the woods only two hundred sixty five feet from him, who had been blown to... He had not been able to help Abby when she had suffered a nervous breakdown he could possibly have saved her from had he been there. Now Ziva was being tortured, humiliated, tied splayed open so obscenely and was seconds away from an agonizing death because he had indulged in a boyhood fantasy and manipulated her into going along with it!
No!
No more!
Not Again!
x
"No." Tim held his gun out in one hand and stepped forward.
"McGee." Gibbs tried to call the man off, not knowing what he was planning, but all too aware that they faced a true madman.
"No," McGee repeated.
Suddenly, as the Agents watched, something in McGee made a cold and clammy hand clutch each of their hearts. Timothy McGee was another man, one they did not know – one that they did not want to know.
x
"You made your mistakes with Greene, with Disla." He took another step and everyone in the room felt the icy chill of the tomb as he reached Hogan. They held their breaths, staring in horrified fascination as McGee's voice became the cold doom of the grave.
The universe cringed.
"You made a worse mistake with McCarren." He pressed his gun directly between Hogan's eyes, pulled back the hammer and it clicked into place.
His voice was Death.
"But you made your last mistake ... when you ... touched ... ZIVA!"
The universe huddled into itself and froze.
x
Very, very slowly, Hogan's hands came off the controls.
x
That was the signal for everything to happen at once. McGee yanked Hogan past him and Gibbs took him down in a joint lock that had him screaming. DiNozzo cuffed him and three more Agents piled into the room, turning their attention to McCarren who, from the instant her tape gag was removed, didn't cease crying. McGee hurried to Ziva, came around the far side of the bed, carefully ungagged her.
"Ziva, I am so sorry," he exclaimed as he worked swiftly, freeing her breasts of the wires that had tormented her and buttoning her shirt even faster, then very cautiously withdrawing the obscene monstrosity from her, throwing it so violently behind him that it slammed into the wall hard enough to dent it. He ripped off his jacket and used it to cover her. "I'm so sorry!" he repeated. "This is all my fault. I shouldn't have made you do it." He pulled out his pocketknife, opened it and sliced the ropes that held each of her ankles so tightly, so widely separated. She drew her legs together with a relieved groan.
"It's my fault, I am so sorry, please forgive me. I never wanted this to happen!" She stared at him, speechless, unable to think of what to say as he carried on a steady stream of apologies as he cut her wrists loose. "I can't imagine what I'd do if anything happened to you."
Freed of the ropes, she sat up, still staring at the man she suddenly barely knew, who had reverted from the 'god of Death' to the Tim McGee she had known, apologetic and solicitous. She didn't know what to think.
At his last words to Hogan something had gone through her, something she didn't recognize, something that frightened and thrilled her at the same moment.
He wrapped and tied the arms of his jacket about her waist and helped her off the bed. He got her onto her feet, never once pausing in his self recriminations and pleas for her forgiveness. "I can't imagine what I'd do if anything happened to you."
"Tim, I–" was as far as she got. His lips were on hers.
x
All Ziva understood was that Tim McGee was holding her very close. Suddenly the pain in her abused flesh, whether from surprise or otherwise, no longer existed. His lips were pressed to hers and it seemed, as the seconds went by, that a silence spread out from them to fill the room. First one person noticed, then two others, then more, and gradually everything in the room stopped. Every sound stopped. Every movement stopped. Time stopped. The Universe stopped.
x
The Universe no longer made sense to her, and then a moment later it made perfect sense and everything was right. Everything she'd ever known since meeting this man, everything she'd felt, was suddenly right. Her hands came up around Tim's back and she held on, returning his kiss with her own. Her body felt as it had when surges of electricity had been flaring through her, but now a billion times better.
There was no world around them. No universe. There were only themselves, this man and this woman and nothing else. Time was gone. Eternity was gone. Heaven was…
Heaven, she realized, was right here!
x
She had no idea how much time must have passed in the real world she had so blissfully left behind. She sensed it must have been considerable for, when she became only peripherally aware that Leroy Gibbs was standing behind her, she also saw that there were very, very few people with them. She didn't care a bit. She was aware in a very detached part of her mind that he was behind her and that, uncharacteristically, he had nothing to say. She was not at all interested in helping him.
x
"Ziva?" He waited a few moments. "McGee?" He might as well have been telephoning them. The ambulance had arrived, he really thought she should take it, but suspected he'd need a crowbar first.
x
Eventually, though reluctantly, she ended the kiss – though it was the slowest ending she'd ever experienced – and leaned back slightly; only far enough to see Gibbs out of the corner of her eye. She also saw that, with the exception of a massively stunned DiNozzo, they were alone.
She answered him with a smile she suspected was more silly than sexy, and though she addressed Gibbs, there was only one face in her vision. "I'm fine," she breathed. She wasn't sure what had happened, only that - something - had changed.
She moved one knee in an attempt to take a step, that knee buckled and she headed toward the floor.
An instant later she was in McGee's arms and couldn't quite recall just when it was that she had learned how to fly.