"Did not!"
"Did too!"
"Did… oh, God. I've been reduced to children's arguments." Rhian buried her face in her hands as she sunk into a seat next to Wilson in the conference room.
"It is only fair, Agent Lawton. Tony is a child," Ziva piped up, smiling at the man who had followed the aggravated blonde into the room.
"You did… Hey!" Tony started speaking to Rhian only to be arrested by Ziva's crack. "Watch it, David."
Wilson cut across the chatter. "What did you find out about the jewelry?"
"Nothing so far." Tony was now all business. "Whoever has it, hasn't done anything with it. Yet. I called in a favor from a friend on the DC Metro squad. He said he'd keep an eye out for the pieces to surface for us. That sapphire ring sounds unique enough that he said it wouldn't be too difficult." He paused and smiled down at Rhian, who was studiously ignoring him. "She said it was a 'brilliant plan' since she didn't want to spend all day staking out pawnshops."
"I never said brilliant!"
"Did too!"
Rhian let out a small, frustrated scream, then turned to her boss. "What have you been doing while we were gone?
"We took a vid conference from… N…C…I…S… yes?" Wilson looked to Ziva who nodded proudly. Wilson shook his head. "Too confusing, if you ask me. Anyway, we were updated on their forensic findings and they were getting a little itchy to know about Helena."
"I imagine so," Rhian said dryly.
"Let's do this then, we'll go over the forensics afterward," Wilson said, taking a moment to make a phone call.
Rhian looked over at the two American agents. "What's said in this room must stay here. As far as we know our investigation was complete, however…" she spread her hands in a gesture of uncertainty. Her gaze flicked to the side as Wilson snapped his phone shut.
"Helena Downey." Wilson shifted in his seat and looked at the two Americans seated at the table across from him. "She was an MI-5 operative."
Tony nodded. So far they hadn't heard anything new. He glanced over at Ziva, then looked Wilson in the eye and waited.
A sigh escaped the older man. "Helena was in intelligence." He pressed a thumb and forefinger to his eyes and continued. "About six months ago I stumbled across evidence of a leak."
"A leak. You mean an information leak?" Tony wanted to be absolutely clear about who Helena was. A spook. A rogue spook, it sounded like.
Wilson nodded. "Because I had found the leak, I was allowed to put together a team and pursue it. It took time, however. The person had covered their tracks well and tracing the source of the leak proved to be time-consuming and difficult. We finally had it down to one office, but linking it to one person in that office was tricky. We had nearly finished building our case when Helena, our suspect, was sent to the States." He paused and reached for a bottle of water on the table.
"For what reason was this woman sent to the United States?" Ziva asked.
"That was her next duty rotation. Our Embassy in New York," Rhian answered back.
Tony cleared his throat. "What, precisely, was she accused of selling?"
"Helena's office handled secure communications. Including coded transmissions," Rhian said quietly.
"She was selling codes? And it took you six months to catch her?" Ziva was shocked.
"As we said, the perpetrator was clever and covered his or her tracks well. There were so many false leads to follow that we spent three months alone trying to eliminate everyone in cryptography." Wilson shook his head, obviously remembering the wasted time.
"As soon as we realized we'd been played, we moved on to the other areas that have access to the codes and split up the work, but it still took time. We had to be as careful in our investigations as our traitor was in their transactions." He sighed and Rhian nodded.
"It takes a great deal of time to build a case like this and we wanted to be certain this case was airtight." It was Rhian's turn to sigh. "We didn't have everything in place before she was assigned to New York. She was gone before we were ready to bring her up on charges."
"You didn't have her under surveillance," Tony stated flatly and Rhian glared at him.
"Of course we had her under surveillance! We had the whole office under surveillance," Rhian seethed. "I, personally, watched her get on the damn plane!"
Wilson chimed in, "If we had moved too soon, it would have been six months of work down the tubes and she'd have been in the wind."
"I would think that if she were a security risk she would not have been permitted to travel." Ziva still seem quite unimpressed with the way MI-5 had handled the case.
"There was no way to do that without arousing suspicion," Rhian tried to explain.
"You were the investigating officers. You mean to tell me you couldn't get the duty rotation shifted out of that office? Or put travel restrictions on them?" Ziva continued to press the issue.
"Only if we wanted to alert the entire office that they were being investigated." Wilson shook his head. "We had to keep everything running normally so as not to spook our spook."
"So if she was stationed in New York, what was she doing down here in DC?" Tony eyed the two investigators.
"How the bloody hell should I know?" Rhian took a deep breath and pressed her lips together a moment before going on. "Look, we don't create the assignments. We don't oversee Intelligence in anyway. We simply wound up investigating this hornet's nest of lies and intrigue only to find Helena at the bottom of it."
Wilson laid a hand on the woman's arm as he spoke to the Americans. "Please try to understand. The four of us all know a great many people in Intelligence. It's one of the reasons why I hand picked this team. We were aware from the very start that when the truth was uncovered, it was more than likely one of us would be arresting a friend."
Tony and Ziva looked at each other and then back at the two British agents.
"What?" snapped Rhian. "You think you could have done a better job than we have? Well I'd like to see you try! I'd like to see you have to spend six months investigating everything about your friends' lives in secret while still having to socialize with them every day. I'd like to see you have to find out that one of your very best friends, who was once a mentor to you, has turned into a traitor." She took a breath. "You want to know how Helena was able to elude us so easily? She was an investigator before she was a spook. And she was damn good at both jobs."
Ziva spoke up softly. "You never thought she could end up dead, did you?"
Rhian stood quickly, knocking her chair backwards and shoved her way out of the small conference room, her back stiff and straight.