Fallen Angels: Chapter 29


Unfortunately, McGee's early morning discovery of Harley McNamee's thesis and why it would be of interest to the Iranians, while opening doors to the case, created more work than it took away. There was a conference with Gibbs and Director Vance to discuss the implications of his discovery, which mostly consisted of sideways glances between the two older men as they discussed how they should proceed with that information and who they should inform. Based on the comments, he was pretty sure that neither would say anything to anyone and both would claim that they thought the other was going to be the one reaching out for interagency cooperations. McGee was starting to appreciate just how far off the book both men liked operating, and to be honest, it scared him a little.

Was that who he was destined to become? He hadn't had nearly enough sleep at this point to contemplate that.

After that meeting—from which he still didn't know what was decided, if anything—he was called down to Abby's lab, for what he was really hoping was good news.

"Timmy!" Abby called out, immediately before throwing her arms around his neck. "I have good news for you!"

He had never been so thankful for a friend who seemed to be able to read his mind so well.

"But you look awful!" she continued, now holding him out at arm's length with eyes wide. "Have you been sleeping well, Timmy? Because you know how you get without sleep. How much did you sleep last night?"

"I didn't," he admitted as soon as she gave him a chance to speak. "Dwayne and I were in the office all night, working."

"Timmy!" Now her voice had a scolding edge. "You know you can't be pulling all-nighters! You're not in college anymore, you know."

"I never pulled all-nighters in college," he said, wondering why he was getting into this conversation. "Abby, why am I here?"

"In a philosophical sense?"

"In a, you sent me an email telling me to come down to your lab, sense."

"Oh. Right." She led the way to the computer in her rarely used office and opened her email. "So I got the report from Tony's guys when I came into work this morning."

"On the plane?" he asked, his previous fatigue forgotten as he focused on this new break in the case.

"Are you waiting for a forensics report from the Middle East team on any other case?" Abby asked rhetorically. For the first time since he had come down to the lab, he noticed that her hair was loose over her shoulders, instead of bound in her usual pigtails.

Now he knew he was tired; those kinds of details were usually noticed peripherally and filed away in his mental folder of things that don't warrant further effort, because he'll never figure them out.

"Anyway," Abby continued, "your Captain McNamee was right. Tony's guys found a detonated charge on the primary electrical bus."

"What kind of fuse? Barometric? Timed? I guess contact wouldn't make sense, because the plane was still going—"

"None of those," the forensic scientist interrupted. "Definitely not contact, but you knew that. It was remote."

"Remote? As in, someone was close enough to two fighter jets at altitude—." He cut himself off, realizing exactly where this was going.

Lt. Antonellis flying next to Harley in formation. Lt. Antonellis defying his squadron leader's orders to return to the carrier. Lt. Antonellis falling from the sky into the dark ocean below.

He didn't know why, but Antonellis caused the power outages that almost killed two other pilots in his squadron, and killed him instead.

"Thanks, Abby," he said. He remembered her words about giving her a kiss on the cheek before leaving the lab, but decided that was just a little bit too, well, weird, considering she was someone he used to date.

"Wait! Timmy! That's not all! There were fingerprints! The charge was placed by Petty Officer Thomas Hathaway of the Bush's maintenance crew!" The closing of the elevator doors were enough to tell Abby that she had just missed the senior field agent. "He has got to stop leaving the lab in the middle of my presentations," she muttered to herself before returning her attention to her breakfast.


The nurses of 5 Center at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center responded to McGee's inquiries about the location of Captain McNamee by simply stating that she had been given off-ward privileges, before they returned to whatever it was that they had been doing without explaining to McGee what exactly 'off-ward privileges' meant.

Unfortunately, WRNMMC was a sprawling medical compound, surrounded by a base that, while small, was still an entire Navy base, with many, many places that a Marine captain could be. Fortunately, he found her after only twenty minutes of searching.

She was sitting atop a picnic table in one of the courtyards surrounding the immediate hospital facility, her feet resting on the bench. With her leather bomber jacket, jeans, and sunglasses—black-framed Oakleys, not traditional aviator sunglasses—she looked more like a visitor than a patient. The only thing that hinted at her real status was the fact that one arm was in a sling across her chest instead of inside her jacket sleeve.

Before he had an opportunity to alert her to his presence, Harley seemed to pick up on it on her own, turning and giving him a smile that he couldn't tell whether or not it extended to her eyes. "Hey, Tim," she greeted, scooting over on the picnic table slightly to give him room to sit. He sat.

"You were hard to find," he commented, and she gave him another smile.

"I know," she admitted. "I just needed the fresh air and change of scenery. There's only so much TV I can watch before I start to go stir-crazy." She turned away, her eyes at something in the distance, or at nothing at all. "Although it's a bit cold out here for my southern blood."

"Believe me, it's going to get worse," McGee commented, before realizing how silly that comment was. She was probably going to be back in Beaufort before the harsh DC winter even got close to starting. In late October, it was still in the low 60's, the air crisp and the leaves gold and red.

"I've always liked DC," she said after a long period of silence. "Which is odd, because I don't really have any happy memories with this place at all. I had a gymnastics competition here right before my fifteenth birthday and fell off the uneven bars. Dislocated my shoulder and tore all the ligaments of my rotator cuff." She glanced down at her immobilized shoulder and then back off into the distance. "I was training for the Atlanta Olympics, but you can't come back from an injury like that. Not ever, definitely not in a month before the Trials." The more she talked, the more she allowed her faint Southern accent to come out. "I didn't come down to DC often from Hopkins, and I definitely didn't come up much from Quantico when I was there for OCS. I was here, actually at this hospital, back when people still called it Bethesda, when I was an engineering officer. I came to get my eyes fixed. I wanted to fly, but I had been wearing glasses or contacts since I was a kid." He remembered one or two mornings when she showed up to the study group in glasses, thick lenses with black plastic frames before such things were cool. "I was here for a week. If I had known that you were around, I would have looked you up." She finally looked over at him and gave him a crooked smile. "Although I wasn't much company after the surgery. I mostly sat around my hotel room, crying at the bright lights and how badly they hurt."

"I can't imagine you being anything but good company," McGee said honestly. That got a smile out of her. "I wish you had," he said. "Looked me up," he clarified.

"So do I," she said softly. She held his gaze through her dark sunglasses for a long minute before looking away again. "I guess you didn't come here looking like you haven't slept in a week to talk about DC and the weather. More questions for me?"

It took him a moment to figure out what to say and how to say it. "You were right," he finally managed. She turned and gave him what he could only assume was a quizzical glance. It was hard to tell through the sunglasses. "The primary electrical bus on Colonel Perry's plane was tampered with. There was an explosive." Her eyebrows shot up over the top of those dark glasses. "It was remotely detonated," he continued, trying to figure out if there was a way to break this news gently. Somehow, 'your friend tried to kill you' didn't seem all that gentle.

"Remotely detonated," she echoed. "What kinds of ranges do things like that have? I mean, could it have been detonated from land, or from the carrier, or was it…"

"It probably would have been someone fairly close," he said, his voice soft. "No further than a couple hundred feet."

She turned away as she contemplated this. "You think Guido did it, don't you?"

"You said he was flying next to you during the exercise, and then he was there when Colonel Perry lost power, even though he had been ordered back to the carrier." She didn't have anything to say to that, just took a deep breath before letting it out again in a rush.

"Guido," she said quietly. "Shit." He let her absorb that information for a few minutes. "So what about the carbon monoxide?" she said a moment later.

"We still don't know anything about that," he admitted. "There wasn't any evidence of it in Lt. Antonelli's blood work, but they weren't specifically looking for it."

"What about the rest of the squadron?"

"Clean," he informed her.

"But it had been quite a few days since they were in the air," she said, finishing the thought that he had. "So you don't know if they were truly clean or not."

"Right." They sat silently for a few more minutes, McNamee just absorbing everything that he had said and McGee too sleep-deprived to think of anything potentially comforting to say.

He had no idea how long it had been before she spoke again. "You must be really good at your job," she finally said, turning her head toward him again.

"Why?"

She shrugged her shoulder and looked away. "I don't know," she admitted. "The details, I guess. The puzzle of the crime, putting everything together and figuring out what's going on."

"I haven't figured it all out yet," he pointed out.

"I know," she replied. "It seems to suit you, what you do. Law enforcement. I guess it wasn't much of a surprise to me that that's where you ended up. I don't know why. BME to federal agent… that can't be a normal career path, but it makes sense." She gave a chuckle. "Unlike this entire conversation."

He smiled in return, trying to figure out how to ask the question that had bugged him twelve years before. "Why my study group?" he finally asked.

"What do you mean?"

"Well, you were always late." She smiled and nodded in agreement at the memory, but he wasn't done. "There were afternoon study groups. Why did you pick a morning study group, when you had diving and NROTC?"

He was surprised to see a slight blush to her cheeks that he could have sworn wasn't there before. "Everyone said you were the best TA," she said. "My advisor and upperclassman in the major. For one, you actually spoke English, which isn't always common among BME TAs." He had to chuckle and nod in agreement to that one. "I didn't realize that my schedule was going to be that tight," she continued. "And by the time I saw that it was, I didn't want to change groups." Her blush deepened. "I was eighteen," she said, sounding defensive, "and, to be honest, I thought you were cute. In an awkward and geeky way." She laughed and gave a small shrug. "It was a long time ago."

He didn't know if it was the fact that he couldn't remember the last time he had been asleep, or if it was some strange celebration of figuring out why the power on her plane went out, or something else entirely, but he leaned forward and kissed her. And he didn't know if it was out of surprise or if maybe she was just as sleep-deprived as he was, but she kissed him back.