Chapter 25

Fornell had taken over Tim's vacated chair. He was sitting with an air of unconcern, reading through all the pages of material Tim had printed off from DARPA. He even started swiveling the chair back and forth as he read.

"Have you read all this, Gibbs?" he asked, after about twenty minutes.

"Nope."

"Good. If you had said you had, I'd know you're lying. Most of this stuff is way over my head and I'm smarter than you."

"And?"

"And what I do understand...you guys have got yourselves into deep water here. Even if it's only these three guys and whoever works under them, they've been doing this for years. They're very good at hiding from official scrutiny."

"You have any connections at DARPA?"

Fornell raised an eyebrow.

"Maybe. Why?"

"High connections?"

"Why?"

"Could you get them over here?"

"Have you thought about how this could affect your little hacker?" Fornell asked.

"In what respect?"

"I don't know if it's ever been told to you, Gibbs, but building bioweapons happens to be illegal...against international law," Fornell said in an exaggerated tone. "This guy has, by his own admission, been helping them with it for more than a decade! Depending on these people's intentions, he could be accused of terrorism."

"Hey! It was against his will," Tony protested. "They were threatening his family!"

"Things are tough all over, DiNozzo. I'm sympathetic, really, I am, but what you're really doing is giving DARPA a convenient scapegoat while they quietly make these things go away. If anything becomes public... it's Tim McGee who will pay the price. Everyone else involved will already have been shuffled out of the way."

"What do you suggest we do, then?" Tony demanded. "We can't just leave things like this! There's someone gunning for him!"

"Well, the kid is going to have to get a better grip on himself than he has now. He's unstable and that will only make things harder."

"He got shot and he's on painkillers," Tony said. "How coherent would you be?"

"What's your idea, Fornell?" Gibbs asked.

"Who says I have one? This is your thing, isn't it?"

Gibbs just raised an eyebrow.

"Okay, fine. I do have an idea, but I need to talk to this guy before I take any steps."

"He's pretty worn out."

"Fine. Let him rest, but if I'm going to stick my neck out, I'm going to be as prepared as possible. So, let me know when he's ready to talk to me. I get that you want to help him. I'm fine with that, but I'm not willing to take as much of a risk as this would require without knowing what I'm getting into completely...and this stuff?" He held up the sheaf of paper. "It's not going to solve anything. What it tells me is that you've got a mess on your hands. Before I start cleaning it up, I'm going to be ready for how deep the muck might be because I'm not willing to drown in it."

Fornell dropped the paper on the desk and got to his feet.

"I'll do some discrete questioning. Call me when your guy wakes up. I'm not taking a real step until I get some time talking to him, preferably without his dad hovering like a mother hen. If this kid really hacked DARPA and really has been working under threat for half his life, I expect him to act like an adult, and he shouldn't need Daddy to be his protector."

Fornell left the lab. After he was gone, Tony grimaced.

"What are we going to do about this, Boss?" he asked. "I think Fornell means it, but I don't want to depend just on him...especially if he's right about how DARPA would react. We can't let that happen to McGee, not when he's the innocent one in all this."

"He has done what we asked," Ziva said. "If we then let him be punished again for these things, I think he will not survive it...and his family would not accept it."

"I'm not telling Admiral McGee that his son might take all the blame. No way," Tony said.

"We don't know what's going to happen yet anyway," Abby said. "But it'll work out, and Tim can come and work with us when he's free!"

"I don't think it'll be that simple, Abbs," Tony said.

"Maybe not, but I don't think we should assume we're going to fail!"

"We will not assume, but we do need to acknowledge the possibility, Abby," Ziva said.

Gibbs looked at them and then he had an idea.

"I think we need to find Philip Orlen's body."

"How are we going to do that?" Tony asked. "All we know is that he was shot. They won't leave his body out for discovery unless they want it to be found."

"But if we had it," Ziva began, "murder is not something the DARPA people could simply ignore. It would not be worth it to go after McGee for the hacking he has done and these people for murder. Keeping the number involved limited would be better for them."

"Again, how?"

"They had to get him out of the building somehow," Abby said, "and a head shot is messy. If it got spatter on Tim, then, they'd have to be really careful not to lose some blood on the way out, even just a drop."

"But we don't have a warrant to go snooping around, and if they see us..."

"I think we might be able to get someone off their radar," Gibbs said.

"Who? Who in the world can we trust with what's going on who's also going to be savvy enough to catch something like that?"

Gibbs smiled. "A friend of yours, DiNozzo."

"A friend of mine?" Tony asked, his brow furrowing. "Who do you–? No. No, Boss. No way."

"What? I'm not following," Abby admitted.

"Only the guy who thought I was guilty of murder!" Tony said. "Jerk."

"Agent Sacks?" Ziva asked. "Why him?"

"Because they won't be watching for him," Gibbs said. "And he knows how to investigate. Not his fault you were being framed."

"Still said I was a murderer," Tony grumbled.

"The evidence did say that you were," Abby pointed out.

"I wasn't!"

"We all know that, and so does he," Ziva said.

Tony looked unhappy by the situation, but he didn't say anything else...out loud.

"Good. I'll call him."

Gibbs smiled a little as he walked out of the lab. He was pretty sure that Sacks would be surprised to hear from him.

x.x.x.x.x.x.x

Loren was sitting beside Tim, watching his son sleep. Joan had walked over to talk to Sarah, but if Tim needed to have him close, he would stay close. It was like he was seeing him as he'd never seen him before. Oh, he'd regretted what had made all this possible, but he'd never seen just how much he'd squandered his son's intelligence because of his insistence on following the family tradition. Watching Tim fly through all those codes without pausing, even while partially on painkillers and suffering from a gunshot wound, had shown him the true magnitude of his mistake, how much Tim had paid the price for it.

He didn't blame Sarah for hating him.

A hand on his shoulder startled him out of his thoughts. He looked up and smiled a little at Joan.

"He's still sleeping," Loren said.

"I know. I was watching you...and I hadn't ever realized just how much you two are alike."

Loren looked at Tim again.

"I don't see it, Joan."

"It's not just looks, but I think he got your good looks, too. You are so much alike...and once he gets out of this, you'll have years to see the similarities."

"I already squandered years," Loren said softly. "Our son is here because of me."

"No, Loren, don't go there."

"Joan...the way he worked up there. I am the one who refused to let him be who he should have been. You never would have kept him from that if I hadn't insisted that he had to be in the Navy. I can still see his face when he told us about going to MIT, how excited he was. I ignored that. And I can see his face when he told me that he hacked DARPA just to get away from the Navy. What father would let his son take the fall for something like this? We could have fought it. I could have fought it. I should have. Maybe I didn't have the clout for it back then, but I could have made a difference. I didn't even try."

Joan grabbed Loren's arms. "Loren, your son loves you. His forgiveness helped me find mine. Don't push away what he gave you years ago. Tim doesn't blame you for this. Tim doesn't think you deserve punishment."

"Tim is the victim of years of psychological torture, Joan. Even if we get him out of this, that doesn't go away. I can't take away those years. I can't take away the fear that he had, that he still has. I can't fix any of this. All I can see is that I put my son in the path of these people, and the damage they inflicted on him... I don't know if it's worse than what his own father did."

"Loren."

"No, Joan. I accept that Tim doesn't blame me for this anymore, but he should. I am to blame." Loren looked at Tim once more. "The problem is that there is no way to give him restitution for that. There's nothing I can do to fix what I almost destroyed."

For the first time, possibly since he'd been a child, Loren felt tears in his eyes. His father hadn't been accepting of that kind of emotional expression. Real men didn't cry, and Loren had learned that lesson. He leaned forward and stared at the floor, absurdly embarrassed by his tears, trying to hide them from view.

"God forgive me, I put my own son in the hands of monsters."

Loren blinked quickly, blinking away the tears before they could fall, before they could be seen.

There was a long moment of silence. Then...

"And that, Loren, is why you and Tim are so much alike," Joan said softly but with the tears that Loren wouldn't allow for himself.

"What do you mean by that?"

"You always want to blame yourselves rather than the people who actually deserve it. You didn't do this to your son. You didn't hurt him. You didn't want him dead. It's these people, these people who are not only hurting him but also could potentially hurt or kill hundreds, even thousands of others. They are the monsters and they deserve the blame. Not you for not knowing what they were really doing. Not Tim for failing to stop Erin from being murdered. There are things that happen to good people, and they happen whether they're wanted or not. These things that have happened to us, to Tim... none of us wanted that. What you wanted for Tim was what you had yourself, and yes, you were blind to what he wanted, but you had no desire for your son to suffer. If you had known what they were going to do, you would never have stood by. Never."

Loren had to blink away more tears before he looked at Tim, lying there so quietly. His face was pale. He looked thin and pinched...defeated, even in sleep. Joan put her arms around him and hugged him tightly from behind. He touched her hands.

"This is not what I wanted for my son."

"I know. So does he."

"I don't know if he really does."

"He does."

Loren looked at his son.

"I would stand between him and anyone. Now, I would do that. I don't know if I would have thirteen years ago."

"You would have. Maybe you don't know it, but I do."

"For now...all I can do is sit here."

"That's what he needs, Loren. You don't always have to come riding in on a white horse to save the day."

"I think mine threw a shoe."

Joan laughed softly.

"Sit by your son and help him remember what's real."

Loren sighed and nodded, wishing he could do more.

x.x.x.x.x.x.x

Fornell sat at his desk, thinking about how he was going to proceed. He was genuinely concerned about the man that Gibbs had decided to help. He just didn't know what DARPA would do to keep all this under wraps. The federal agencies were very careful about letting that kind of thing out into the public eye. Even when they were doing things right, people hated them. To be missing something like this...for fifteen years, no less...

He sighed. While it wouldn't be fair or right, he could easily see Tim McGee becoming the scapegoat.

"Fornell."

Fornell looked up and saw Sacks looking a bit confused.

"What is it, Ron?"

"I just got a call from NCIS."

"You what?" he asked. "From Gibbs?"

"Yeah."

"Why? They already talked to me."

"They did? Well, then, why are they asking me to go snooping around DARPA's headquarters to see if I can find evidence of a body being moved?"

"Philip Orlen?"

"They didn't say. If you knew about all this, why didn't you tell me?"

"I didn't know they were going to do that. They didn't say anything when I was there."

"You think I should do it? Agent Gibbs said that I needed to keep it quiet. I don't like the way they do things over there."

"They're good at their jobs, and...I hate to admit it, but they have a good reason to keep quiet this time."

"What reason?"

"They're operating under the radar to keep a man from being blamed for something he only did under duress."

"So...should I do what they want?"

"If you can do it without getting caught."

"I know I can do that," Sacks said confidently. "I just don't know if I should help them."

"You're not helping them. You're helping an innocent man who has already been shot by people hiding in the secret corners of DARPA."

"And you?"

"I'm helping them," Fornell said with a grin.

Sacks rolled his eyes.

"Whatever you say." Then, he walked away.

Fornell watched him go and wondered what had transpired since his departure. Why start another chaotic part of this already-twisted case?

Then, he got it.

"A murder that can't be blamed on Tim McGee," he said softly. "A murder means that they either have to widen their net or cast it somewhere else."

Oh, Gibbs was too clever by half. For all that he had no interest in the political side of things, he knew how political people operated.

"This just might work," he said to himself. So he started thinking about who might still be willing to acknowledge his existence in high places. He had to start somewhere. It was just a matter of how high he was willing to go.