Timing in Everything: Chapter 21
A/N: There have been some comments about some confusion with trying to follow the timeline, which I admit is a bit confusing. Everything is written in chronological order (or close to it) in real time, but with the time zones, it makes it seem like it's jumping around. For example, when it's noon in Bahrain, it's 0900 on the Truman, 0400 in Washington, DC, and 0100 on the west coast, where Tomblin was. I'll put a time stamp at the beginning of the chapters to help keep things in line.
And, as always, thanks to all my readers and reviewers; even when I'm too busy to respond to your reviews, I do appreciate them. I do try to respond to questions (unless it's about who did it-you have to wait for that!), so if you have a question and I don't get back to you in a few days, feel free to bug me about it.
Bahrain, 0500 (0200 Zulu) Sunday
Ziva David awoke feeling drained, such a stark contrast to her instant alertness on the carrier the morning before that she had to stop to take stock of the differences. On the Truman, she had slept less than five hours on a thin mattress on the top bunk in shared quarters; now that she was back on land, she was in the familiar and very comfortable king-sized bed that used to be in Tony's apartment, the spacious yet still bare master suite greeting her.
So it probably wasn't the bed. It was much more likely that it was everything else going on with the case.
After she told Tony that she leaving the Truman with the Israeli midshipmen and their training officers, it had been a long wait before they were finally given permission to take off in the boat, and then another long wait, during which the midshipmen were obviously losing their patience with waiting and the training officers were just as obviously losing their patience with the midshipmen, before the simple casket containing Midshipman Spivak's body arrived via helicopter. Ziva didn't know who had given the honor guard an Israeli flag, but she was glad they had. The young midshipman deserved that much. He deserved much more.
As they were still needed for the investigation, the remaining Israelis were given quarters on base and asked to refrain from causing problems, and Ziva finally left their ranks to get back to work. The first stop was her office, where one coworker—Avrum Dardik—shared with her his latest findings, and the other—David Cohen—seemed eager to be sent out into the world to do some 'damage control', as he liked to call it. Ziva had told him that if didn't leave her alone, he was going to have to speak to a Mossad psychiatrist about his violent tendencies. He had just smirked and went back to whichever movie it was he had been watching on his computer.
Avrum hadn't found anything new on the bomber, which prompted Ziva spend another three hours calling the other operatives under her control, spread out across several countries on the Arabian Peninsula and Horn of Africa. By the time she had made it back to her new house, she had several promises to look into it and nothing actually helpful.
No wonder she hadn't slept well.
She was feeling slightly more human after her run and even more human after breakfast and coffee, but still didn't know where to go to help move this case along. However, she did know where she could go to give herself a new perspective on the case, and in all likelihood, make her feel better.
"Ziva!" She had barely entered the NCIS forensics lab when she found herself wrapped in a tight bear hug. "Oh my God, it's really you!" Abby Sciuto continued, still holding on tight. "I mean, of course it's you, but, it's just been so long since I've seen you!"
"Abby," Ziva managed. "I cannot breathe."
"Right." Abby finally released her, but kept her hands on Ziva's upper arms, as if to ensure that the Mossad case officer wouldn't find a way to run away. "How are you? How's Tony? Where's Tony, anyway? And let me see that ring! I can't believe you guys got married, and you didn't even tell us! What—"
"Abby," Ziva interrupted. She was going to lose track of the questions if she didn't make an effort to start answering them. "I am fine. Tony is also fine. He is still on the Truman, working on the case." She held out the smoothie she had in her hand. "I do not know if Bahrain has Caf-Pow, but I doubt it. One of my coworkers is quite fond of smoothies. He says this one has enough caffeine to jump start an elephant." Ziva frowned. "I do not know what that is supposed to mean," she admitted.
"Oh! Thank you!" Abby gushed. "I haven't had any caffeine since, well, since I don't remember when." She took a long drink of the smoothie and made a face like she was thinking about what her opinion of it was. "Not bad," she finally declared. "I mean, it's no Caf-Pow, but it's pretty good by itself. And anything is better than trying to give up caffeine again." Ziva nodded; she remembered the caffeine-free Abby experiment and had been glad when it ended.
"The ring!" Abby exclaimed out of the blue after a few long seconds of sucking down the caffeinated fruit smoothie, almost making Ziva jump in surprise. "I haven't seen the ring yet!" Ziva dutifully held up her left hand to give the forensic scientist a chance to examine the engagement ring and wedding band in detail. "Wow," Abby said. "He did a good job. I mean, a really good job." She frowned and looked at Ziva sternly. "You didn't help him with this, did you? When my college roommate got engaged, her fiancée—well, now her husband, but then her boyfriend—took her with him to go shopping for rings, so he couldn't mess it up, and, I mean, that's a good and all, but there's just something about the guy picking out the engagement ring himself—"
"I did not help Tony," Ziva interrupted. "He did this on his own." Well, him and an octogenarian jeweler who was a little bit too good at his job and liked to make sure people knew it, a fact that led to him unintentionally being part of a plot that led to the death of a series of significant others of members of a large DC synagogue years before.
"Well, he did a really good job," Abby repeated. "So how's married life? Not that I've forgiven you for getting married without telling us, but, well, I'm curious."
"It is pretty much as one would expect of being married to Tony," Ziva replied. Abby wrinkled her nose.
"That bad, huh?"
Ziva couldn't help but laugh. "It is not bad," she informed her friend. "We have not been married long enough to have any major disagreements."
"You mean, more major than usual."
"Of course." With their entire lives taking place at work, it was no surprise that everyone at work knew everything about their lives, good and bad.
And speaking of work, she might as well kill two birds with one stone. "Do you have anything new from the case?" Ziva asked Abby.
"Yes and no," the forensic scientist replied, all thoughts of wedding rings and newlywed life on temporary hiatus as she got down to business. "I repeated the analysis of the bomb that was run yesterday," she said, nodding toward another part of the lab, where the usual three scientists were working. "I used the same sample that was collected at the scene from Agent, uh—"
"Freiler," Ziva informed her.
"Right, Agent Freiler," Abby repeated with an emphatic nod. "What's he like, anyway? He has this really neat handwriting—"
"Married," Ziva interrupted. "He is Mormon, and married, and his fourth child is due soon."
"Well, I didn't mean 'what's he like' as someone to date," Abby said with a roll of her eyes. "I was just wondering what kind of person he is."
"He is very nice and proficient in his job. Abby. The results?"
"Right. The lab results." She brought something up on the computer, none of which made sense to Ziva. "So, like I was saying, I tested the same sample that was tested yesterday morning, and got exactly the same results."
Ziva felt the slight bit of hope that this was all a lab error die with those words. "It is still generic Semtex that does not match any known bomber in the database."
"Yes and no."
"No?"
"That was from testing the same sample, but Agent Freiler collected a few samples from the bomb site. I used the photographs and sketches that he took to make a diagram of the scene." The one computer monitor Abby had been allocated was nothing like the set-up she had in her lab back at the Navy Yard, but she was apparently making do as she exchanged the sample results that made no sense to Ziva with a map of the exploded section of the Truman, with only a few keystrokes. "The sample that was analyzed was from the fuse, which was right here," she said, indicating an area right by the epicenter of the explosion. "I tested the other samples as well, which were from here, here, and here," she said, pointing at the corresponding sites on the diagram. "In all the other samples, there were trace amounts of kerosene, highest right here."
"An accelerant?" That could explain how the bomb did so much damage. Semtex was damaging, but not damaging enough to kill fifteen people and injure many more, not when it went off in a low-traffic area of the ship, such as a storage bay.
"Could be," Abby said, sounding like she wasn't quite convinced. "I think it might have been unintentional, though. If our bomber was going to use an accelerant, it would make sense to have it at the flashpoint, not on the other side of the room. The chemical signature's consistent with JP-5—"
"JP-5?"
"Jet fuel," Abby explained.
"Something that would be found on an aircraft carrier."
"Exactly!" Abby exclaimed excitedly. "I think our bomber set the bomb not realizing that there was some sort of container of JP-5 in the storage compartment as well."
"So it was unintentional," Ziva said, more to herself than to Abby, trying to figure out how this fit into the case. It actually made sense with what she already knew. Whoever set the bomb used a relatively unexciting explosive—especially considering there were nuclear materials on board—in a very unexciting part of the ship—a storage compartment—none of which was consistent with the usual patterns of goals of bombers. They liked to make big statements and cause as much damage as possible.
The bomb wasn't the main event. It was the distraction. It just got out of hand.
"Thank you, Abby," Ziva said, already pulling her phone from her pocket and heading for the door.
"But Ziva—"
"Come to my house for dinner tonight," Ziva said, stopping to write down her address on a scrap of paper. "I will cook for you and explain everything."