Chapter 11
"Ooo 'enry 'iggins! Just you wait until we're swimmin' in the sea. Ooo 'enry 'iggins! And you get a cramp a little ways from me."
Sarah heard the music blaring from the forensics lab as she walked down the hallway. She was exhausted and needed to get back to the house that she was staying at with G, but she knew that if she didn't stop by, and talk to Abby there would be hell to pay.
"When you yell you're going to drown I'll get dressed and go to town. Oh ho ho, 'enry 'iggins, oh ho ho, 'enry 'iggins, just you wait!"
She couldn't help smiling as she watched she watched Abby singing while typing on the computer.
"One day I'll be famous, I'll be proper and prim. Go to St. James so often I will call it St. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!" Abby screamed shocked to see Sarah there.
"Hey Abbs."
"I hate it when you do that!" Abby leaned up against feeling her heart pounding in her chest.
"You're just mad because your radar doesn't let you know when I'm about to arrive like it does for Gibbs." Sarah closed the door behind her.
"About time you got here."
"I'm sorry, I-"
Abby cut her off. "Had to get away for a while after the argument you had with Gibbs about Natasha in the elevator."
Sarah wasn't going to ask how Abby knew. For some reason Abby always had this strange connection when it came to knowing what was going on with Gibbs.
Abby turned back to the keyboard and continued typing, "I've been doing some digging and so far I haven't found anything out of the ordinary on Gibbs' Russian friend."
"Digging?" Sarah asked, innocently walking up to Abby.
"You know that I always check on the women in his life, and don't lie that you're not doing the same thing." Abby decided that now was not the time to tell Sarah about Doctor Samantha Ryan, who had been on Abby's radar for a couple of weeks now.
"Natasha Alianova Petrov born May 4, 1964, was selected to be in a secret program with the KGB when she was six years old."
"Six?" Sarah said shocked.
"It was kind of like the Black Widow Red Room thing, the girls were trained to do anything. She went up the ranks in the KGB and after that went on her own. She met and started working with Gibbs around 1997 and then with Callen in 1999. Other than that her record is basically clean." Abby said.
"Keep digging, I have someone who is also looking into this, they'll contact you if they find anything." Sarah told her.
"Sarah, what if I can't find anything?" Abby asked.
"Then we'll have nothing to worry about." Sarah said.
"What else is going on?" Abby asked.
"What do you mean?"
"Your face says 'everything is rainbows and unicorns' but your eyes say something different. Spill it Burgess!" Abby demanded.
She sighed, "I need some lab work done."
"Are you alright?" Abby concerned.
"I'm fine, I think."
"You think?"
"Something- just feels off." Sarah admitted to her.
"How long have you been feeling like this?" Abby asked.
"A couple of days. I was going to talk to Ducky about it, but I know that he would talk to Gibbs."
"And you don't want Callen to find out if it's something serious."
Sarah nodded.
"I'll label it as a Jane Doe, it might take a couple of days." Abby told her getting out the syringe and supplies out of a drawer.
"That's fine, looks like we'll be here for the rest of the week."
"Home sweet home," Gibbs said as he turned off the engine.
"Before we go inside and we have absolutely no privacy, I was wondering if we could talk about something." Natasha said.
He unbuckled his seatbelt, and turned to face her, waiting.
She reached into her jacket pocket and handed him a picture of him with Shannon and Kelly, "Why didn't you tell me you were married and had a child?" Natasha asked.
Gibbs looked at the picture, remembering that it was the day of Kelly's Kindergarten Graduation.
"I wasn't snooping, I promise. I was looking for something to read and I found a picture of them in one of your books." Natasha confessed.
"In 1991, while I was in Desert Storm, Shannon witnessed a Marine murdered by a Mexican drug lord. She went to the authorities and they put her and Kelly in protective custody. On the way to testify, the driver was shot and killed. The van crashed killing them both."
"Jethro," Natasha whispered.
"The only way for me to cope with the loss was to bury it and move on," Gibbs replied.
"They were your family! How could you just bury your feelings and let him get away with-"
"I never said he got away with it." Gibbs snapped.
"You killed him."
He didn't look at her but she knew that he had. She leaned back in her seat. "Now I know why you got so mad at me on that last mission. The girl in the alley who almost killed you was a couple of years older than your daughter."
"As you argued, you saved my life, but it didn't have to go that way."
"We saw two different people in that alley Jethro, you saw a child and I saw a killer. She was trained like I was, to do whatever they wanted without questions. She would have killed you and walked away, not even giving you a second thought." Natasha argued. "I'm still surprised you didn't tell me to go to hell when I called for help."
"People change," Gibbs said.
"Yeah, they do, and I want to thank you again for that." Natasha unbuckled her seatbelt and looked up to see the three men standing on the porch waiting for them. "Oh good, Larry, Curly, and Moe are here."
Gibbs tried unsuccessfully to hide a smile, "Be nice, remember they are here to protect you."
"You really think that the Comescu's would try to come after me here?"
"Nothing surprises me about that family anymore." Gibbs said, getting out of the car.
Sarah heard G talking in the kitchen as she walked into the house. "I'm getting worried Tony. It's not like Sarah not to text or let anyone know where she is."
"Shit." She whispered, realizing she still had her phone on silent as she placed her purse on the hook.
"I haven't called Gibbs yet. I was hoping she was with you."
G heard the door slam. "She just walked in, I'll tell her to call you tonight." He said with relief, and hung up phone. "Where have you been?" G asked as Sarah walked in the kitchen.
"I needed some time alone. It's been one hell of a day, and I needed some time to get myself back on track." Sarah said getting a spoon out of the drawer.
"What happened with you and Gibbs?" G asked, while watching her open the freezer and get out the container of raspberry dark chocolate chip ice cream.
"We had a discussion about Natasha being on the case, getting security, and staying with him." Sarah pulling off the lid and stuck the spoon into the ice cream.
"Went that well?"
"I was treated like a five-year-old, and was told I was being a 'jealous wife', because I don't trust Natasha. Poor Tobias stood there between us, with this look on his face, like he just entered the 'Twilight Zone', watching us yell at each other. I needed to get out of there and cool off, before I talked to anyone." she started eating out of the container.
"I feel like I'm being pulled all over the place, wife, teacher, agent, friend. I have to lie to everyone that I love. I'm responsible for protecting you. And no one says anything about Natasha being on this case, because Gibbs trusts her."
He walked over to the drawer, got out a spoon. "That's not entirely true," he said hesitantly
"What do you mean?" she asked with a mouth full of ice cream.
"The last time they were on a mission, it didn't end well. I didn't get much of the details from them, but I do know that Gibbs basically said that it would be a cold day in hell before he worked with her again. Maybe he finally forgave her."
"This doesn't make sense, Gibbs isn't the type of person who forgives that easily." Sarah said.
"I know. What do you think is going on, Babe?" G asked.
"I don't know, if she's hiding something we are going to find out."
Later that night, Natasha walked into the upstairs guest room, closed and locked the door. She went over to the nightstand, opened the drawer, and took out the basic burn phone there.
She turned the phone on, typed in the phone number that she had memorized and typed in the message.
I'm in.
She counted down from twenty not expecting a response and felt the phone vibrate in her hand. She turned over the phone and read the screen.
Told you that they would believe you.
She bit her bottom lip debating on whether to tell him her concerns of what was going on and decided that maybe it was the only way to get it taken care of.
Sarah is very suspicious.
She neglected to tell him that she nearly slipped up talking to G.
Let her be. You'll be contacted soon. Love you.
She smiled.
Love you too.
Quickly erasing the text messages and phone number, and placing the phone back into the back of the drawer.
When she sat, up she saw her reflection in the mirror, and she wondered who that woman was staring back at her? It wasn't the same woman that Jethro had met years ago. Who'd worked beside him on cases as an informant at first, and gradually gained his trust enough to where he would depend on her. Or the one whose life was saved so many times by Gibbs and G. Nor was she the woman who had let G Callen get so close to breaking down the wall she had built over so many years, and become a part of her life.
That woman was gone, and she knew that once again Jethro wouldn't understand what she had to do.
"Sorry Jethro."