The Price of Honesty: Chapter 38--Conclusion

A/N: Don't worry, there's still one more chapter to come (an epilogue), so this isn't the end yet.

For everyone who said they were looking forward to a reunion between Tony and Ziva... Sorry. I tried to write something, but everything seemed all forced or cliche (or forced and cliche), so I scrapped any conversation that would have happened in favor of "actions speak louder than words". Sorry if you feel cheated, but to me, this feels more real to the characters. I hope you agree.

It took four days of solid paperwork and Mossad questioning of captured terrorists and video conferences with people at all points around the globe to get the whole situation figured out and squared away.

Elisheva Cremieux, born in France and raised by a paternal uncle, had plenty of pent-up anger on top of the typical teenage angst when she was approached by an extremist organization at fifteen. The ideal secret agent—young enough to be manipulated, intelligent enough to be worthwhile, pretty enough to get the wrong type of attention from the right people, Jewish enough to have a place in Israel—she had been a sleeper since she ran away from home at sixteen. An affair with a deputy director of Mossad had given her the leverage she needed to be assigned to Bahrain when the time was right; another affair, with the NCIS special agent in charge of the Bahrain Field Office, had given her the intelligence she needed to know where both Mossad and NCIS stood on the events in Yemen. The most likely explanation that anyone could figure out was that Stan Burley had been killed after he mentioned to her the fact that Special Agent Chad Dunham was coming to town to brief him on the increased activity of the camp.

Lt. Commander Jeff Cunningham, the pediatric infectious disease fellow who diagnosed Ethan Hoskins' anthrax infection, had called the only person he could think to call about it—NCIS Special Agent Kim Tomblin, who looked enough like Cremieux, down to almost-identical petite builds, that they could be mistaken for one another from a distance, a fact that the turned Mossad operative used to her advantage—from his unsecured cell phone, which had been bugged after his first meeting with Lt. Hoskins' son. Framing Tomblin for Burley's death had always been the plan, in efforts of removing as many agents as possible who might be able to figure out what was going on from the picture, and was why Cremieux had used the same kind of knife that Tomblin never made a secret that she always carried with her.

Kidnapping Dr. Cunningham had actually not been in the plan. He was supposed to be killed in a 'random act of violence' outside his off-base apartment in San Diego. However, the operative tasked with that mission—one who had been killed by Cremieux in Yemen—had done more thinking than he was supposed to do and thought that having a physician as a hostage could give them extra leverage. He had shown Cunningham a picture of Tomblin that Cremieux had taken, one carefully angled while Tomblin had been booking a suspect into the NCIS holding cells to make it look like she was the one behind the bars, and told him that they were holding the NCIS special agent, and would kill her if he didn't cooperate. They had him fill out the leave paperwork to give them a two-week head start before anybody started to look for him, and then they were off to Yemen.

When Tomblin had seen the fax of the leave paperwork after the fact, she immediately picked up on Cunningham's insertion of his duress phrase, which made Gibbs wonder if he was getting too old for the job—he never considered checking Cunningham's Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape paperwork for the pre-arranged duress phrase, evidence that he was being made to write something against his will.

It had taken DiNozzo, Tomblin, and Freiler a few hours to clear the Yemen camp; analyzing the intelligence that that had produced, they realized that four of the twenty terrorists who had been captured or killed were former detainees who had been released to Yemen in the early days of clearing out Guantanamo Bay. That sparked very heated debates—all out arguments, would be a better way to describe it—between Vance, Gibbs, DiNozzo, Tomblin, Ziva, and Cohen about how that information should be handled. Submitting it up the chain through NCIS would almost guarantee that the information would be hidden somewhere to keep from embarrassing the current administration by the fact that they had released terrorists who came very close to unleashing a bioweapon on American soil. Mossad, on the other hand, couldn't care less who they embarrassed, and would make sure that the world knew how badly the United States had screwed up, the same way they did after September 11, 2001, when they revealed that they had warned the Americans, months before the Twin Towers fell, that al-Qaeda was up to something involving pilot lessons.

In the end of these debates, Vance ordered all of them to keep their mouths shut, that he would take care of it. In the privacy of their room at the Gateway Inn and Suites that night, however, DiNozzo asked Ziva to give all the details to Mossad Director Ruthven. If an embarrassed administration would put more thought into their actions before releasing known terrorists, he was all for it. He knew that that action, which could be interpreted as releasing information to a foreign intelligence agency, could result in him losing his job—if not land him in prison—but he knew Ziva would never rat him out.

To nobody's surprise, Director Vance made Tony's position as the Bahrain SAC official; in response, Director Ruthven reorganized the Mossad operations coming from that office, making Ziva the katsa—case officer—for a dozen operatives through the Arabian Peninsula and Horn of Africa, with a smaller group of one analyst and one operative—Avrum Dardik and David Cohen, respectively—in the office itself.

By the time they cleared the terrorist camp in Yemen and returned to Bahrain, the gash in Ziva's left flank from Shava's bullet had been open for greater than six hours, too long to be safely stitched up without risk of infection. Dr. Earl, the surgeon in Bahrain, had done a pretty impressive job scrubbing it clean—Ziva was in so much pain from the procedure that she couldn't get off the table for an hour—before bandaging it up, prescribing more antibiotics, in addition to the doxycycline she had been put on in case of anthrax exposure, and giving very strict orders—looking directly at DiNozzo, who refused to budge from Ziva's side, despite his frustration with the fact that she didn't say a single word about getting shot until they were back on the helicopter after clearing the camp—to avoid strenuous activity, including sex, until it was healed.

On the morning of the fifth day after returning from Yemen, DiNozzo glanced up from the computer monitor on Burley's—his—desk to smirk at Agent Kim Tomblin as she walked into the office. "You're late, Tomblin," he said lightly.

"Sorry," she said with a grin as she unlocked her top desk drawer and stored her Sig. "Traffic."

"Yeah," he replied thoughtfully. "It is a bitch, coming from the hospital." It was the next building over. "And you need to stop smiling. It's been four solid days of you walking around grinning like an idiot. It's freaking me out."

She shrugged, her grin widening. "Sorry," she said again. "I can't help it." Freiler, from his desk on the other side of the room, just shook his head and chuckled.

"Your doctor boytoy's still hospitalized," Tony said thoughtfully as he studied the younger agent, her eyes rolling at the absolutely ridiculous nickname that he regretted as soon as it was said, "so I know you aren't getting any…" At that, Kim quirked an eyebrow.

"You sure about that?" she asked teasingly.

"You aren't, are you?" he asked, now confused.

"Jealous?" she asked sweetly.

"Give her a break, DiNozzo," Freiler chimed in. "She's in love. It was bound to happen eventually. Even to Kim."

She just smiled and rolled her eyes at that before nodding to Tony's computer. "What're you working on?"

"Administrative crap," he answered automatically. "I don't know how Gibbs has been a supervisory field agent for so long without getting fired. He never does paperwork." He frowned slightly as he studied Tomblin. "What about you?"

"Still working on that endless litany of paperwork from the camp and the subsequent interrogations," she replied, making a face. "Why? Something you need me to do?"

"I was thinking," he began slowly. "Cunningham's a witness, for both NCIS and Mossad, to quite a lot of terrorist activity. He should probably be kept in protective custody. Maybe an agent should be keeping an eye on him." He couldn't help but grin at the shining of her dark eyes. "And ideas of who I should send?"

"I'll see you later," she said quickly, already on her feet and retrieving her Sig and badge. "Later, Freiler."

"I'll have Bryn send over some cookies," he called after her retreating form.

"Don't you dare!" she called back.

---

When Tony DiNozzo and Ziva David entered LCDR Jeff Cunningham's hospital room a few hours later, they found him propped up in bed with both of his broken limbs elevated on pillows. True to his prediction in Yemen, nothing in his face had been broken, just bruised. He still had some redness on his forehead and a black eye—now a yellowish-green—but overall, looked much better, although that could have just as easily been explained by the fact that he, like Tomblin, seemed to have a smile permanently on his face since they landed in Bahrain. At the moment, his right arm was over Kim Tomblin's shoulders, his hand playing with the previously-ponytailed black hair as they watched something on Tomblin's laptop, both of them laughing.

"Two people in a hospital bed… never a comfortable arrangement," Tony remarked. Cunningham didn't miss a beat.

"Kim's so small, she really only counts as half a person," he said with a grin, earning an elbow to the ribs. "Ow. Broken rib, Kim."

"You didn't even know you had a broken rib until you saw the x-ray," she pointed out. "Pansy," she added as she leaned forward to stop the DVD. Although it was true that Tomblin's small frame didn't take up much room on the bed, Cunningham wasn't exactly crowding her—at five feet and nine or so inches, and around 160 pounds, he was a good deal taller than Tomblin but still far from giant. "What's up, DiNozzo?"

"We finally managed to get medical transport set-up for Cunningham that doesn't require a stop in Germany or DC first," he said. "Tomorrow morning, direct to San Diego."

"Oh," Tomblin replied, her smile disappearing. She looked over at Cunningham before returning her attention to DiNozzo. "Tomorrow morning?" she echoed reluctantly.

"He's still a witness," Tony pointed out. "Needs to be accompanied by an agent. Interested in a free trip stateside?"

And instantly, the smile was back. "I think that's an assignment I can deal with," she joked. "Thanks."

"That's not all." He handed her the papers he was carrying. "These are for you."

She studied them for a long minute before looking up again. "Transfer papers to the San Diego Field Office?" she asked.

"Not quite," he said quickly. "Yes, it's in the San Diego Field Office, but it's a new position that I pitched to the director; he's still trying to figure it out. Think of it as the agency's expert in terrorism related to extremist Islam. It'll probably involve a lot of travel, when agents need an on-site consultation for cases possibly related to terrorism, and a lot of one-on-one play time with Homeland Security. And it's only if you're interested," he added. "I already talked to Agent Henderson, told her it's your decision. You want the papers, you have them. You don't, you can shred them. It's up to you."

"Wow," she said, running her hand through her hair. She turned to Cunningham. "What'dya say, Jeff?" she asked. "Think you can put up with me full-time?"

"I don't know," he said thoughtfully. "You kick in your sleep."

"I kick when I'm awake, too," she shot back, making him chuckle.

His expression became serious again. "Are you sure you want this for your job, Kim?" he asked. "You told me you liked being stationed in the Middle East. You've always wanted…"

"There are terrorists in San Diego, too," she reminded him when his voice trailed off. "After all, one managed to kidnap you from right in front of your apartment." She smiled slightly at her own words. "And terrorists in a lot of other places, too. Maybe it'll be good for the agency, to have someone bouncing around pretending to be all expert-like." Her expression became serious, her voice softening. "You said it, Jeff. This situation sucks. I've done this challenge. Maybe it's time for another one. Like marriage and making babies."

"You want to get married and have kids?" Cunningham asked, making Tomblin frown.

"Okay, I said that to freak you out, and you not freaking out is kinda freaking me out," she said. He chuckled and kissed the top of her head.

"Well, you know how much I like kids," he joked, laughing at the look on her face. "Come on, Tomblin. When have I not called you out on your bullshit? How about we start with living on the same continent and go from there?"

"Deal." She grinned and tilted her head up for a quick kiss before turning back to Tony and Ziva. "I guess that means I'm not going to be able to clear out my apartment before I go. If you guys want to use it until you find your own place, I don't see a problem with that. Just let me know when I need to arrange to have the movers to pick up my stuff."

"Thanks," DiNozzo said with a nod. "It's going to be a bachelor pad for a few weeks, though."

"I still have things to arrange in Tel Aviv, as well as getting things wrapped at NCIS and two apartments worth of stuff to consolidate and arrange to be moved to Bahrain," Ziva explained. "It is likely four weeks' worth of work."

"It's true," Tony said. "Except it's wrapped up, not just wrapped."

"Yes, Tony," Ziva said dismissively before turning back to Tomblin. "I feel I should apologize to you. I was not as quick as Tony to doubt your guilt," she informed her. "When you asked me if I would not be angry if someone had killed Tony, I took that to mean that you had a relationship with Burley. I thought it odd if you were speaking only of work, because Gibbs is my boss, not Tony, and-"

"I guess I didn't think about that," Tomblin said with a slight laugh. "I guess I just kinda think of Gibbs as, well, un-killable. And speaking of Gibbs... where are Gibbs and McGee? I wanted to say good-bye before they took off."

DiNozzo checked his watch. "Probably on the tarmac," he said. "Flight's taking off in an hour."

"Then I better hurry," she said, scrabbling out of bed carefully to avoid jostling any broken bones. She leaned over and gave Cunningham a quick kiss. "I'll be right back," she promised. "No watching the movie until I return."

"Fine," he grumbled good-naturedly. She grinned and headed for the door. "Kim," he called out, stopping her. "I just realized… You still haven't told me what your tat says."

"Oh," she said with a chuckle, her eyes falling to her ankle, which was currently covered by her khakis. She looked back up at him and grinned at how appropriate those words were for the situation. "It says, 'Know what you want'."

---

Tomblin found McGee and Gibbs exactly where DiNozzo said they'd be: on the tarmac, waiting patiently for permission to board the Gulfstream that was taking them back to DC.

She gave McGee a quick hug goodbye and promised to keep in touch before she turned to the supervisory field agent, who was watching her as he sipped from his cup of coffee. "I just wanted to say… thanks," she finally said. His eyebrows rose at the word.

"Don't hear that much from people I arrest," he finally said. She chuckled slightly.

"Yeah, wasn't too fond of that," she joked before becoming serious. "But you didn't stop looking. You could have tossed me on a plane back stateside, and with that evidence against me, there's no way I wouldn't be convicted and sent to Leavenworth. But you didn't; you kept the investigation open, and because of that, you were able to clear me, and find Jeff, and stop God knows what from going down with that anthrax we found." She swallowed, her throat suddenly thick. "And, thank you, for the time I worked for you, but most of all, thanks for… that impromptu therapy session."

He smiled slightly and surprised her with a hug. "You were a damn fine Marine, Tomblin," he said, his voice low and his head tilted down to her ear. "And you're a damn fine agent." He released her and picked up his bag. "If Cunningham ever finds himself stationed in DC and you need a job, you have one on my team."

She nodded and smiled and watched him walk away toward the plane, Tony and Ziva heading to intercept them before they boarded. Ziva gave both McGee and Gibbs a hug. Tony stepped forward and shook McGee's hand before saying something with a grin, probably giving some sort of advice about how to survive as Gibbs' senior field agent.

And then Gibbs turned to his former senior field agent and shook his hand, and they were off.