Chapter 26

Sheltered, Weeks 2 - 7 Post Attack, July 11th - Aug. 21st, 2019

Their second week was a little easier, a little brighter. They had more e-mails and calls from the outside and Leon gathered the agents, Jimmy, Jethro, Ducky and Tobias around the phone one afternoon when his boss called.

"Secretary Porter, it's good to hear your voice. You're on speaker."

"Good to hear you too, Leon, I'm so grateful you're safe! Who's on with us?"

"Seven of our field agents, my CCU manager and Chief Medical Examiner of our new Albuquerque office, Ma'am. And three retirees."

"Oh wonderful! Then the internet is working?"

"Sporadically but it seems to be available for longer every day. We're doing searches, paperwork, reviewing cold cases and anything else we can do to help the case load for the field agents."

"Great, I'm proud of you all! Megan and I are in San Diego hanging out with the U.S. Navy; we stayed here with her paternal grandparents during the attack instead of leaving the mainland to visit my cousin. That just didn't feel right. We saw Abby Sciuto and her brother yesterday. She's starting work at the lab tomorrow; she'll be working an evening shift by herself. I understand the idea for that came from someone in Albuquerque."

"Yes Ma'am, we were concerned she not be overly stressed working with strangers and that idea evolved."

"I see. How are you all holding up? I have to say I can't imagine any of you twiddling your thumbs when the internet is down."

Rick smiled and Leon motioned him forward. "Secretary Porter, this is Special Agent Rick Carter. We downloaded case files before we left DC so we have those to work on. We also have all kinds of activities going on here. Along with a fitness center, we have a walking path and Director Vance has been teaching some of us how to box. We're keeping up with our physical fitness, learning new languages, playing chess and checkers, having dance lessons, learning how to play bridge, doing our part with childcare and several other activities. There's a task list for daily maintenance and we each have assignments.

"Fornell, Tim Gibbs and DiNozzo have been rotating cooking duties too although the Rourkes' from Elaine's diner ended up staying here and they've been cooking for us. Jethro has a workbench out in the tunnel and he's making shelves for our bedrooms, he's almost done now. Tim and some of us have been helping in the classroom; Tim's teaching high school and college level math and helping the kids and the rest of us understand what happened when the bombs hit. Bob Chalmers and his sister did a guest stint talking about the Philippines where they're from and DiNozzo talked about Italy. We have a young man with us who was one semester shy of finishing his prelaw undergrad work at GW and we have an attorney sheltering with us so she's working with him to complete his course work. He'll have to do it over when we're released but he'll have a leg up when it comes to applying to law schools."

"That's amazing, so you're tailoring, or the instructors are tailoring classes for the students' needs?"

"The older ones, yes, ma'am. Besides our future lawyer, we have four other college students and they're studying in their selected fields. We were able to get study material and syllabi for almost everyone before we left DC. With the addition of the foster kids, we have three high school students, four middle school, four in the second grade, four in first and one preschooler. And five babies."

"Agent Carter, are those foster children new?"

Rick looked at Tim who quirked his mouth and stepped forward. "Hello Ma'am, Tim Gibbs here. Four days before we left, the woman who's been our liaison with Child Protective Services called me, frantic. They'd evac'd all of the foster families in their jurisdiction but they had six children at the group home with nobody to shelter them. She was prepared to take them to Nebraska with her but hoped we could help. I put the word out and my godparents now have two teenagers, my uncle and aunt took in a 6-year-old girl, the DiNozzos now have a two-year-old son and the Vances now have four kids, they took in 18-month-old twins."

"Oh my heavens! You're angels, all of you, to do that! Leon, babies?"

"Yes ma'am! Zach and Zoey, beautiful children with big smiles and very healthy lungs."

She chuckled at that. "Do the children have separate rooms or do you have family rooms?"

Vance explained the rooms, finishing with "By parental decree, mine, there's a bathroom in between the teen girls and the teen boys with Dr. Mallard, Colonel Barnes and Mac Fielding, grandfather of the Gibbs' clan, sleeping nearby. Agent Bishop's aunt and uncle have their room on one side of the teen boys' room, they wear hearing aids and take them off at night so that serves two purposes. One, they can't hear the kids and two, if there's an alarm, the kids will wake them.

"We have a Garden room, which we're using to grow our own crops, get some Vitamin D under a modified grow light, mediate and practice yoga. The kids also have a playroom and use some of the fitness equipment. And of course, the pet shelter for the cats and dogs. The fish, turtles and birds live in our shelter. So far we're doing all right."

"I know I had nothing to do with it but I am so proud of all of you, well done!"

Tim shook his head, "Ma'am that's not true, you had everything to do with us being here. The day I advised you to leave town as soon as possible you gave me permission to tell my family and friends and to leave when I felt we should. And we did. We would still have left but I would have had to waste a lot of time being stealthy about it."

"We had no choice, Timothy."

"No ma'am."

"You'll hear soon enough but the news from the strike zone is grim. It's now believed that no one less than fifty miles of the impact zones survived the blast. The best guesstimate at this time is over a hundred thousand dead within the strike zones – DC, Arlington, and Alexandria and well, you know the names. The Census Bureau, Department of Labor, District, Maryland and Virginia Departments of Motor Vehicles and the IRS are working nonstop together to identify addresses and how many residents there should have been. Thank God for electronic records but it still takes time to do the searches.

"Tomorrow there will be a request going out for all those who were evacuated from within that zone and that includes me and most of you to call toll free numbers they're setting up by region, to report in with your name, address, number of residents and where you are sheltering - and current contact information. The radiation levels are so high the emergency workers can't be in the field more than two hours at a time. They sent them all out at once the first day and had to pull them back. They'll start again, this time in shifts, tomorrow."

Jethro, who'd remained with the others, frowned when he saw his son's face go blank, knowing he was mentally thinking about or actually writing a program to help the searches. Part of him, the concerned and worried father, wished Tim would let others do the work but the pragmatic agent and proud papa parts of him knew his son could do whatever it was quicker and more efficiently.

After the call, Tim stayed to talk with his boss. "Leon, they shouldn't need to do any crosschecking. The federal agencies have access to all databases, all they have to do is use the software I…we implemented five years ago and it'll do the sorting and searching for them. And weren't the evacuation records taken on tablets and smart phones? We registered with an Evac coordinator as we were leaving Saturday morning and that was on a tablet."

"Yes, and you're right, Gibbs, I forgot about that."

"I can write the code and implement it from here if the internet cooperates. It'll take just a few minutes to update the servers and then the program will find the information for them. It might come up with duplicates but it'll tag those and they can eliminate the ones that are truly double reported."

"All right, get busy with the code and - who do you usually have check it?"

"Ellie, Abby, then the CCU. Dallas, Lynn or Brady, sometimes all three."

"Ok, get your code written and I'll call SecNav back, let her know we can help. I'll stand in for Abby."

Tim nodded and grabbing his laptop, went into the library and shut the door. Jethro frowned again, while he was happy his genius son could help, he worried about his emotional health, he was far too involved with all this for his liking. He relaxed when Tim emerged from the library 90 minutes later, handing a thumb drive to Leon who plugged it into his laptop and studied it, line by line. Ellie sat at another table with another thumb drive, doing the same thing. When they both gave their approval, Tim had them sign something and then called his team. They downloaded the code and in another hour, Tim had their approvals. His code was good to go.

Leon took the thumb drive, "All right, SecNav gave me the name of the person who's handling this, let's send it on to him."

Tim twisted his lips, almost reluctant to say what he was about to say, "Leon, I can do it faster. I will pull the report, remove the duplicate records, and send the whole thing faster than they'll download it. They'll want to examine the code themselves even with the testing and approvals."

"You're right and you have my permission and Secretary Porter's." He gave him a half smile, "I knew you'd want to run this yourself. How long have we worked together?"

Tim didn't bother taking the time to roll his eyes at him although he wanted to. He returned to the library, Ellie and Leon following him with their own laptops. Between them, they found the database with the evacuation records. At some point Leon remembered to tell him that Secretary Porter had given permission for access to any database necessary for his work.

Tim set his program up, adding the evacuation database as a compare once the initial report was complete. The program took three and a half hours to run and Leon asked everyone else in the shelter to stay off the internet while it processed. When asked, Tyler brought the power cord for his father's laptop and Leon plugged it in. He had no idea when his agent's laptop had last been charged and wasn't willing to take any chances.

They waited and waited. And waited. Finally, the screen displayed a blinking message, the initial report was complete, the names and addresses had been compiled and duplicates had been tagged. The duplicates were copied to another file and the program was modified to ignore them on its next task, comparing the report against the evacuation records. Partial/incomplete matches would be sorted to appear separately. Tim first downloaded the entire report onto thumb drives so he'd have a backup. He'd used another username, a Vance-approved alias, when logging in and creating the report, hoping they wouldn't bother tracing it back to him. He was willing to do the work but hoped for anonymity.

The process took another three hours; by the time it finished, dinner was done, the babies and younger kids taken through their night time routine. Ned stayed with the laptops while the Gibbses and Vances saw to their children. He'd originally brought dinner in for them and stayed, occasionally bringing in water or coffee.

Tim, Ellie and Leon had been back in the library for nearly 30 minutes when the compare program finished. Tim peeked at the numbers with no matches to the evacuation program: 77,942. Now the group actually tasked with the count had definitive information to work with and no matter what, it was less than the guesstimated hundred thousand. They'd have to wait for the call-ins to be complete and compare them against the names and addresses of the 77,942. But if the calls were electronically recorded, they could run this again, substituting the call-in database for the evacuation database.

As she'd requested, Leon called Secretary Porter and she contacted the Cabinet member tasked with the gruesome duty. With Leon on the call and Tim waiting nearby, she explained what NCIS had accomplished, making sure she didn't mention Tim's name per his request. The Cabinet Secretary had her Team Leader on the phone with them in seconds and there were small smiles at the huge sigh of relief the man exhaled. He asked a few questions, with Leon answering them, and confirmed that the calls would be electronically recorded. Then they waited while the program and the reports were sent to the Secretaries and the Team Leader. When they confirmed they had the report, the Cabinet Secretary again thanked them profusely.

After they ended the call with the SecNav, Tim and Ellie collapsed into bed, happy with the work but mentally and emotionally worn out and horrified at the number of fatalities. A long sleep helped. When they woke, they found their children up, dressed and fed with the older two already in class. After thanking their parents, they ate the breakfast kept warm for them in the oven. Ellie sipped the herbal tea that helped with her morning sickness while Tim inhaled his first cup of coffee and relaxed over the second one.

Grabbing their laptops, they found their co-workers in the library. When they'd started back to work, the agents realized they needed a private work space. While the library wasn't always occupied, Ducky and Col. Barnes spent a few hours in there every day. That made things a little easier as Ducky still had his security clearances and Leon was reassured by the Colonel that he could also be trusted. To be thorough in these unusual circumstances, Leon ran it by Secretary Porter who agreed with his assessment. Colonel Barnes would keep anything he heard or saw to himself.

Now the 7 field agents, Tim, Jimmy, their laptops, phones and occasionally their boss crammed into the library. They had the library tables first used in the classroom and that helped, although phone work was dicey and they had to be innovative. Jethro was through with his shelf work and the tunnels soon became their private call area along with the bathrooms and their own bedrooms. Which weren't very private but it was the best they could do.

When Leon opened his e-mail that morning, the day after Tim's work for the casualty figures, he held back a sigh. There were two messages he thought would have complaints in them, probably veiled as questions, from his supervisory senior agents in San Diego and Seattle. He hadn't given a second thought to Tim sending his code to three of his former staff to beta, but he should have. The agency had transferred Tim's staff, they now reported to their local management, not to Timothy Gibbs. Although with Dallas Smits managing the San Diego CCU, he thought it wouldn't have been as much of a problem as it might have been for Camarillo in Seattle. As Director, he should have at least given his SSAICs in San Diego and Seattle a heads-up beforehand. He'd given Tim permission; it was on him. He guessed it would take some getting used to, working remotely.

He read the e-mails and smiled, both were pleased their staff contributed. He got the message though. No doubt, the two discussed it, deciding to be positive, knowing he'd figure out the subtext.

He thought about that. While the 7 field agents would continue working on paperwork, doing any electronic searches needed by other teams and on cold cases, Tim's time would be better spent doing what he'd been doing before all this started. It would mean some maneuvering but when they'd transferred Tim's people, they'd done it to keep them safe. Neither he nor Tim had considered to whom the cyber techs would report After.

It would also give Tim more opportunities to further assist in special projects which Leon foresaw heading his way from the president, various Cabinet members and the SecNav. He thought his agent would be fine with that, as long as he didn't have to leave the agency or travel anywhere, even after it was safe to move around the country. Leon would emphasize that with Secretary Porter; he was confident she'd support them all the way up the food chain. Although he could be wrong, the younger Gibbs could very well be interested in a career change.

His decision made, he punched numbers on his cell and flipping on the overhead light saw that no one else was in the tunnel. He spoke with his Seattle management, first apologizing for his oversight the previous day, which was gracefully accepted. His senior agent in charge admitted she had been more than happy to take several techs under her roof, so to speak, but she knew her CCU manager would be happy if they reverted to Tim's management. Her staffing was 98% before Tim's team members arrived and although they'd managed, it was proving to be a struggle for her. To Vance's relief, both Melankovic and Camarillo were fine with them remaining physically situated in Seattle while reporting to Tim.

One down, one to go, he called Lydia Worden, his SSAIC in San Diego and was happy with that outcome too. Communication with Galveston and Great Lakes was still intermittent so he left them for later. He wasn't worried about the reactions as Galveston was a very small office, the agents were really only there to shelter and Great Lakes a very large one. Vance thought one would probably be overwhelmed with the number of bodies in the office once they left their shelters and the other one might not have noticed there were more bodies with them. When it was safe, the CCU members in Galveston could move here.

Tim's smile brightened up the whole shelter when Vance told him some of his staff would resume reporting to him, albeit remotely, effective the following day. "Thank you! I realized this morning that I should have asked for their time yesterday. Director, this is wonderful, thank you!"

"That was my responsibility and I've cleared it up with Jane and Lydia. And Seattle is fine with your team reporting to you again while continuing to house them."

Tim nodded. "Great, I'll arrange for a Skype meeting tomorrow morning. Leon, do you know yet what we're going to do or where we're going once we're free of the shelter?"

"Not sure yet, love to hear any ideas. Unless you have plans to build an office building on the ranch, I think we can rule out the Gibbs' family property."

"But will we stay in Albuquerque?"

"Don't know. As you know FLETC has a location in New Mexico, in Artesia, we can open an office there I suppose. You can remote in while the field agents, well, we'll see. But we will have to establish a new headquarters somewhere. Don't forget we've also lost Quantico and I hear Parris Island is not in great shape. And the Navy - we'll see where the Secretary wants us. It's going to take a while; I think we'll be just fine here in Albuquerque for the near future. Who knows, we may end up sharing office space with your friends the Marshals."

He walked away, leaving Tim standing there blinking in surprise. Work in that building? How strange. At least it had the pool, fitness center and the rooftop garden. He went back to work, enjoying the pats on the back in support of getting some of his team back.

Ellie cheered when she was told and their kids came running, wanting to know. They'd met Tim's techs and were happy for their father.

NCIS NCIS NCIS NCIS

Not everything was rosy in the concrete cave. While there were plenty of productive and fun activities, each of the shelter residents had bad moments when he or she would remember home and the horrendous losses. When someone created a small memorial in the Garden Room, it helped. When others led meditations or prayers that helped. Those with pets felt that time with them helped. The aquariums became popular as watching the fish was soothing and the turtles were entertaining. Chirp and Coco cheered people up too. Most people coped. However, as their time inside wore on, one shelter resident was having a great deal of difficulty.

Toni Ware started to slip even further away from people. She was by nature an extreme introvert with social anxieties and living with 82 strangers in a concrete cave with no safe way out weighed heavily on her. She found as much seclusion as she could, eating at off times with fewer people around, withdrawing from the social activities she'd originally seemed to enjoy, disappearing for hours at a time. The doctors knew where she was, in the tunnel. When a chair she favored disappeared from the media room, the security cameras showed it in the tunnel with a floor lamp and a small table. Jimmy prescribed one of the anti-anxiety medications they had and she took it for 5 days before saying she wouldn't take any more. The doctors' hands were tied; they had no legal or moral grounds to force her to take them.

Pete was worried sick; in the 30 years they'd been married, he'd never seen this side of his wife. He'd always known she was shy but now realized the problem was far worse than that. He tried to talk with her but she said she was all right, just needed time to herself. When Pete went to bed, she wouldn't be there but if he woke during the night, she'd occasionally be curled up next to him, giving him hope, although she was always gone by morning.

The doctors had her medical records and had been concerned from the start with her clinical diagnosis: anxiety disorder along with social phobia, or fear of people, shyness taken to the extreme. After she rejected the anti-anxiety medication, the four doctors conferred, finally deciding Ducky and Kelly would have the best chance of getting through to her, to offer help. However, when they approached her hoping to alleviate some of her anxiety and fear, she grew frantic, begging them to leave her alone and they backed off after quietly telling her they were there to help, to listen, whatever it took.

They knew her emotional and psychological balance had been precarious for some time. From what investigative work they'd had time to do, they discovered that with her husband away so much, she'd dealt with her problems by herself, made sure she handled the bills and medical paperwork, hiding her medical appointments and problems from Pete. Her medical records chronicled the therapy, anti-anxiety and anti-depression medications that had been prescribed. There were also notes in the file that the prescriptions were seldom refilled and she rarely showed up past the first or second therapy appointment.

Now she was physically, emotionally and psychologically reacting to the stresses of living underground after a nuclear attack; restricted to the shelter and forced to live communally with a large crowd of strangers. When she refused their help, the doctors regrouped to come up with another plan.