Chapter 36: Back to School
Ziva was avoiding him.
He'd cornered her a couple times, but she kept slipping away. It wasn't a smart strategy on her part since it only made him more pissed. Still, Gibbs let her get away with if for a few days, until the elevator doors slid open in front of him and she was already in it. Trapped.
Unfortunately she wasn't alone in there. He held the doors and stared at the two guys – Gibbs was pretty sure they were from Cyber Crimes – standing between him and his agent.
But the cyber guys didn't seem to notice that the elevator had even stopped. Somehow didn't realize they were on the business end of a Gibbs glare. They were too wrapped up in their conversation, jabbering fiercely about . . . well, Gibbs had no idea what they were jabbering about.
"Hey," he said, breaking up the debate. They looked up at him as one, blinking like moles who'd accidently pushed up into sunlight. "Get out."
They scurried away without even bothering to check which floor they were on.
Ziva, aware he'd been standing there from the moment the doors opened, didn't look at him when he appeared. Not when he kicked out the interlopers. Not when he stepped into the silent car and stopped it between floors.
He leaned against the side wall and watched as she stood staring at the doors. As if he wasn't there.
"There ever going to be an end to it, Ziva?"
She didn't look at him, but she did speak. "An end to what?"
"These secrets."
Of course she said nothing. He'd been matter-of-fact, and when her defenses were up Ziva almost never responded to coaxing or reason, not unless she was already broken. Cruelty, brute force, suspicion – 'tough love,' putting a really optimistic spin on it – those were the tactics her first mentors trained her to recognize.
"You know," he said thoughtfully. "We've got a rack of Tasers down in the equipment garage. Would that help you open up?"
She stiffened, instantly angry. "No."
Gibbs kept control, but his own anger was there. Lurking beneath the words and easy to hear. "Yeah, didn't think so. But then I noticed that the kid didn't say a word either. You were right about that, didn't make a sound. Not when they broke him. Not even when they stunned him. You know," he pressed forward again, his tone mock thoughtful. "That's pretty surprising. I was surprised."
An oppressive quiet settled over them.
"But you weren't. Remarkable prediction on your part," he observed.
Ziva breathed deeply, evenly. Silently.
Gibbs pushed off from the wall behind him and came in close to whisper in her ear. "Do you think I need a Taser, Agent David?"
Her eyes jerked toward him finally, meeting his gaze with another wave of anger. Losing another layer of control. "I have been trained to withstand torture, Gibbs. I doubt you could make me say anything. Not without committing several felonies."
"Don't tempt me," he muttered. But he backed off.
She was talking – somewhat. And he was way too aware that she hadn't simply been trained to withstand torture. She had withstood it. Actual torture, not that she ever mentioned it. He doubted she ever would, not to him, anyway. Staying strong in front of authority was too engrained.
Ziva sighed and deflated a little, letting her eyes wander away from his. She understood his anger. She hated being behind these walls just as much as he seemed to hate that they were there. She threw them up on instinct, but she didn't always know how to take them down. Ziva breathed deeply once more, resolving to give him as much as she could. All that she could bear for him to know.
"Anyone with the training that I have received would revert back to it if faced with a coercive interrogation," she said smoothly. Pointedly.
Gibbs eyes widened subtly. "You think he's – what, gotten some kind of training? In coercion?" Coercion was code, of course. For torture.
"No," Ziva said, and hesitated. "I know he has."
Gibbs stared, and finally raised his hands, a gesture of impatience verging on explosion. "Yeah, and? You want to tell me how you know that?"
She glanced at him and Gibbs frowned. It looked like she was torn over revealing a confidence. He reigned himself in, trying to get a handle on an odd relationship he still didn't understand. The one between Gray and his agent.
"Look. He needs protection, Ziva. I can't do that if I don't know what I'm dealing with."
She was beginning to bend, Gibbs could smell it. He narrowed his eyes and stepped forward, crowding close. Full-blown intimidation always worked like a blast of electricity here, surging through the confined metallic space of the elevator car, charging the air with expectation.
"You knew he would flash back to something when they were questioning him. You thought a couple of twerps from the FBI were going to break him. Break that –" His hands curled into fists at his sides. He could identify what Gray was, even if he didn't like it. "Machine. And you were right." Gibbs' voice carried his lingering disbelief. "The kid's cracks are invisible but you knew they were there. You knew where. Your guard was up before he even stepped into that room - "
She blew out a breath and shook her head. "You think I have some piece of intelligence I have not shared! I do not know anything, Gibbs. It is all guesswork!"
"Tell me."
His voice settled over her like a block of concrete, and Ziva held up a hand in surrender.
"Alright," she said finally, avoiding his eyes.
Gibbs backed off, slightly. And waited through a long silence.
"You remember when he had the fever," she said finally. "Before we were pulled out of the jungle?"
He nodded sharply.
"He was unusually talkative. You said later that he gave nothing away, that he was drawing us out. That he – you thought that he was looking for information on me in particular, because he was not given my file . . . "
Ziva paused, but Gibbs remained silent. Of course he remembered.
"You were right about that," she said. "I told him that I was once Mossad, you recall?" She didn't wait for a confirmation. "He asked me what that was, as if he did not know . . . But he knew . . . " she trailed off. "He must have known."
Gibbs shook his head a little. Mossad wasn't all that well known outside of intelligence communities and law enforcement. "How do you figure that?"
She hesitated yet again. "I don't think he wants us to know this," she said lowly.
He waited her out, letting her come to terms with betraying a secret she wasn't even supposed to have. Normally he would press at this point. But there was something touchy between Ziva and the kid, like an injury that had just healed and was still tender. Not something to mess with.
Gibbs might be a bastard, but he wasn't brutal with his own people. He could be patient when the opposite would do more harm than good.
Ziva put a hand up to rub her forehead and began to pace back and forth in the tight space. He stepped back to lean against the far wall and followed her with his eyes.
"In the infirmary, when they first took him in, he was hallucinating." She looked at him quickly and Gibbs nodded. He remembered. How could he forget? The kid had been screaming, the cries echoing in that tin can of a base.
"He began to struggle and the men held him down. It was only a few hours after I told him I was once with Mossad. I do not know – that may be – " she cleared her throat. "That may have played a part in bringing certain memories forward."
Ziva paused. The others did not understand the broken Spanish. But she had. "The things he said – cried – when he was not conscious . . . "
She stopped her pacing and stood in front of a wall, staring at it in the low, buzzing solitude of the elevator. She drifted in the solitude of her thoughts, a world away from the proud man standing next to her. How could she explain? There were no words, and it loomed too large. To speak of it would invite it to subsume her. To touch that abyss would be to drown in it, even in her own mind. Even after all this time.
"They were familiar, Gibbs," she said finally, simply. "I believe he was trained to resist interrogation by a Mossad specialist. Or perhaps he was tortured by one," she said lowly. "The two are not so different."
She glanced at him. "That is all I know. The rest I deduced," she shrugged awkwardly, too aware of his eyes on her. "I assumed from the violence of the hallucination we witnessed that he would . . . that a difficult interrogation would hold unpleasant associations," she finally concluded, stiff and miserable."I have seen something similar before . . . in young detainees . . . trained in this way."
Gibbs digested that, studying her. There were plenty of ex-Israeli intelligence officers operating in South America, same as there were retired US specialists working there. Some of those operatives were legitimate, and played by the rules. But that kind of work also attracted men like Dean, who had been kicked out of their nation's service. Mercenaries willing to sell any violence asked of them to the highest bidder. No honor. No limits.
She was saying Gray had been tortured by a specialist like that - or perhaps trained to torture. Either one turned his stomach.
And the kid would most definitely not want them to know. That kind of experience would create windows, vulnerabilities. If you knew it was there. Ways to break him, just like they'd seen, even if the 'training' held true and he never spoke a word.
"You ever work there? In South America?"
"No," she said, with unmistakable relief.
But she had worked with young detainees, Gibbs noted. Any rough spots in that particular history would have been of interest to Kort . . .
"This have to do with whatever Kort has on you?"
She faced him finally, running her eyes over him sharply. "No . . . not directly."
Gibbs shook his head.
His team was the best, and he'd go to the ends of the earth for any one of them, just as they had for him. But being the best brought its own baggage. The crucibles that had tempered their skills, that made them so good in the first place, had also left their scars. And some days the baggage that they dragged around behind them and simply refused to let go absolutely drove him up the wall. "Well. I guess that answers the original question."
"What?"
"'Not directly,'" he mimicked. Exasperated. "Secrets, Ziva. There's no end in sight is there?"
She huffed. She had given him plenty, all the information he really needed, and she knew it. "Ah. And should I take you as my role model in that, Gibbs? By all means, go ahead. You first."
Gibbs let himself get pissed now, let his voice rise. He'd gotten as far as he was going to get with her today anyway. "I'm not talking about your personal life, Ziva. Whatever Kort has on you is about the job. Either you trust us with it – you trust me with it – or you don't."
The look she gave him wasn't shamed or secretive. It was confident, and colder than anything he had seen from her in a very long time. "You do not want to know all of my secrets. And Trent Kort knows nothing about me that will affect the team."
Gibbs could actually feel his blood rise, feel his neck get hot with frustration. "If Kort knows then you've got a leak. Anyone could know. Whatever it is it'll come out, Ziva." And he knew better than anyone how fucked up that could get. "Tell me about the situation and I can help you. We can prepare for it."
"There is no situation," she said firmly. "And there is no leak."
He ground his teeth. It wasn't that he didn't trust Ziva – he did. The problem always came back to her inability to trust him. To trust anyone.
To be fair, these days it was more reluctance than an inability. She'd come a long way. But Gibbs didn't really care about fair. He just wanted her to come a little further. "Alright. Mind telling me how you're so sure there's no leak?"
She took a deep breath and looked at him carefully, then away again. Finally she straightened her back, and Gibbs felt a tingle go down his spine. He'd seen that posture before. He wasn't going to like this.
"Kort knows about it because he was there," she said.
Gibbs stared at her for a good long time, then turned away and flipped the switch, looking at the doors as the car began to move. He sure as hell didn't want to look at her.
"You knew him before you came to NCIS."
"I had met him. Yes."
Gibbs' voice went quiet. "I don't remember that coming up when he was working with the Frog. When we were trying to figure out who the hell he was. Or when he was putting a CIA op over your partner's life." That last one was the most quiet.
"I did not know his real name, Gibbs. I did not know he was CIA – I knew nothing about him! When I recognized him with Rene Benoit I assumed that he really was working as an arms dealer. My prior . . . interaction with him – it was many years old, and a cover anyway – it was meaningless." She stared at the steel door in front of her, struggling stupidly to keep her voice steady. Cursing the fact that Gibbs' opinion meant so much to her, even as she chased it. "If I had relevant information at the time I would have told you. I swear to you."
Gibbs relaxed minutely. But when the doors opened he put out a hand to keep her in the car.
"I never dug into your time at Mossad, Ziva. That's not how I operate. I trust my people to tell me what I need to know. I show you what it means to be a team, to work together."
Well, most of the time. He was doing his best with that.
She said nothing and he stepped in front of her, leaning in close again, searching her face. "You've been working for me now for five years, but I don't know if you've ever really been on the team. And I've got to wonder if in all that time you've learned a damn thing."
She met his stare and he watched as a flash of hurt was chased out by the flat, expressionless veneer of the old Mossad operative. Damn. He'd - that was too hard -
"I have learned many things from you, Gibbs," she said quietly. Voice smooth and steady now, slick as glass. "So many that after only five years I am a different person. That is all you need to know. I believe that is all you would understand."
She stepped around him, heading toward her desk. Leaving Gibbs to stare into an empty elevator.
x
The next break came just a few weeks later, 0300 on a Friday. Gibbs and Tony were sitting in a dark car, windows slightly frosty in the December night, watching residents and their chosen parade of vices walk in and out of a fancy condo building. One of AK's lackeys lived there and the lackey's lackeys were visiting, so Gibbs and Tony were watching.
McGee and Ziva were on a stakeout across town, at yet another lackey's 24-hour convenience store. When Gibbs' phone rang it was right on the hour mark. He didn't bother to check the Caller ID – on a stakeout McGee always called to check in exactly on the hour.
"Yeah."
"Gibbs. Are you trying to get yourself killed?"
There was a beep on the line then. Probably McGee, coming through to call waiting.
"Hold on." Gibbs clicked over. "Report, McGee."
"Nothing's happening, Boss. Our guy stayed inside, no suspicious pick-ups or deliveries."
Gibbs grunted. "Call in again at 0400, then you can pack it up for the night."
He switched back to the other line. Trying to get himself killed?
"Just trying to live life to the fullest, Kort."
"You have a strange way of trying to live life at all. You do realize that DC distributors of Calera products don't need a warrant to hunt down you and everyone you know? They'll sniff you out if you keep arresting their little minions. He didn't drag you out of the jungle so that you could get yourself killed in your own backyard."
Yep, Gibbs got that now. As far as he could tell they'd dragged him back to DC so that he could keep the kid's ass out of trouble. "What do you want?" Gibbs normally wouldn't deign to ask, but . . . "He in trouble?"
"I'm surprised you haven't tracked him down and asked him that yourself."
Gibbs felt a twinge in his gut. He'd been feeling it ever since he went to bail the kid out and didn't follow him home. He'd decided to go with what Gray said he wanted. Let him keep the anonymity that he wore like armor.
But that meant relying on the kid's judgement. And wasn't that why kids usually had adults deciding things for them? Because their judgement sucked?
"He didn't seem to want me tracking him down," he said mildly. "Why, should I have?"
There was a long pause on the other end of the line. "Careful, Gibbs. You're dangerously close to earning some small measure of respect."
For the privacy, right. "I'll take that to mean he's fine."
"Yes. Gray's been in school, which is a good place to go if you want to learn the important things in life."
Gibbs sat up and glanced at Dinozzo, who was staring at the condo and listening hard. "Oh yeah? What kind of things?"
"You might have heard about a school shooting last week?"
"Yeah, there was something in the news. A nine-year-old."
No Navy connection, no drug connection. Gibbs hadn't paid it much attention.
"Yes. A boy was shot and killed on the playground after classes let out for the day. It was crowded but no one saw anything. All rather strange."
"And?"
"Go back to school, Gibbs." The line clicked off softly.
x
Ballou Elementary had metal detectors, rotating shifts of local LEOs assigned to it, and more students than the entire population of Gibbs' hometown.
Team Gibbs used their newfound popularity with Metro to grease their way into interviewing students. First stop was the principal, a petit dark-skinned woman with steel gray hair. Tony assumed she would be nice because they first saw her talking to a weepy third grader.
But when the kid turned away and her eyes fell on the agents all pretense of nice went out the window.
"Gentlemen." She nodded at Ziva. "And lady. I am Principal Kurtz. If you'll come with me."
She led them to a crowded office, neat but small, that smelled of old carpet and humid summers. Gibbs sat in one of the two available chairs, both covered in wooly orange fabric, and his agents stood behind him.
"So. You are here about Matthew's death."
"Yes, ma'am."
"We report at least a dozen incidents to the police every year. I have never had occasion to speak with military police, Officer – pardon me, is Officer your title?"
"I'm Agent Gibbs."
"Agent Gibbs. You do realize that my students are well under enlistment age."
Gibbs kept his face recruiter poker-straight. "Yes. We have reason to believe that the shooting here was related to an incident involving the murder of two Marines."
Tony reflected that "related" by six degrees of separation was still related.
Gibbs went on. "We understand that there were witnesses to Matthew's murder, but no useful information was brought to light?"
Principal Kurtz laced her hands in front of her and gave Gibbs a chilly smile. It was a smile that said she'd been on the receiving end of utter crap from generations of students. That his little brand of bullshit better step it up if he thought it was going to pass muster with her. "And you have the authority to interview my students without their guardians' permission or presence based on this 'related incident'?"
Damn. Tony shifted on his feet and exchanged an undetectable-to-outsiders wince with Ziva.
"No," Gibbs smiled. "Of course not."
Fact was, he'd been hoping to go ahead and do just that. The no-harm no-foul approach to interviews, provided no one's legal department got involved. Without parents or lawyers hovering around they could have pushed some kid or other into spilling his guts, Gibbs was sure.
Foiled, though. By the principal. Time for Plan B.
Gibbs should be pissed, but couldn't help laughing a little, inside. Way down deep inside. Sometimes he liked people who gave him hell. It was a hard thing to predict, but it looked like he was leaning toward liking Principal Kurtz. "We'd just like to introduce ourselves to any witnesses, explain who we are and what we're trying to do. Leave contact information in case anyone remembers something they would like to share with us."
Principal Kurtz's stare was as steely as her hair.
Gibbs raised an eyebrow. "Unless you aren't interested in identifying Matthew's killer?"
"Do not presume, Agent Gibbs, to understand my interests. It is my duty to keep the children in this school as safe as I possibly can. Coming forward as a witness to this particular crime is not conducive to student safety."
Gibbs frowned. "We'll protect anyone who comes forward."
Kurtz smiled thinly. "Don't make promises you can't keep, Agent Gibbs."
You could tell she'd used that exact same tone to scold decades of wayward children for sticking wads of gum to the bottoms of their desks.
She rose to her feet. "There were fifty-six students and two monitors on the playground that day. I'd prefer that the students miss as little class time as possible. You can speak to them in groups of six or seven and then interview the monitors separately. I'll supervise the meetings and put a halt to them if I hear or see anything at all objectionable, is that clear?"
"Fifty-six witnesses?" Gibbs didn't yell, exactly. It was his indoor yelling voice. "And no one saw anything?"
Kurtz stood there looking at him, a petite pillar of iron, and raised a flinty eyebrow. "Of course they saw something, Agent Gibbs. They saw a child gunned down on his own school playground. They saw him bleed to death before their eyes. Now they go to class and see his empty desk. Tell me, are you here to protect them from that?"
Gibbs opened his mouth, but didn't get the chance to say anything.
"No. You are not. You are pursuing some kind of vengeance," she looked him up and down. "For your dead Marines, perhaps. Or for yourself. You are not here for Matthew. My students are young, but they are not stupid, Agent Gibbs. They have learned well who holds the power here, and how to protect themselves." She moved toward the office door. "You use that tone with them and I'll have you removed from this building."
"What about the adults," Gibbs growled. "The monitors."
Principle Kurtz paused. "They have children of their own. Ones they would like to see grow up."
And with that she walked out, leaving an investigative trail of destruction in her wake. Tony and McGee and Ziva sort of averted their eyes, studying the minutiae of the office until the boss recovered and managed to adjust himself from Plan A, which involved using 40+ collective years of experience to interrogate easily manipulated children, to Plan B, which consisted entirely of giving a vague sort of speech under the watchful eye of Frau Kurtz. A plan that would almost certainly be useless and therefore a total waste of Valuable Boss Time.
Gibbs decided that he and Ziva would talk to the kids while Tony and McGee spoke to the monitors.
It was singularly boring. Fidgety, defiant, closed-mouthed six to thirteen-year-olds listened as he explained about the two U.S. Marines who had been killed. He asked every group if they had family serving and wasn't surprised when two-thirds of the kids raised their hands every time. He explained that NCIS was the police force that protected people in the Navy and Marines, and that Matthew's shooting might have had something to do with the death of the Marines.
Ziva explained that anyone with information about what happened to Matthew could come to the Navy Yard to speak with an agent or call the number on the cards they were given, day or night. Of course she also mentioned that the Navy had very sophisticated equipment available to track down prank callers, and that the punishment for pranking Navy cops was walking the plank, into a shark tank.
It was, after all, her number on those cards.
She asked if there were any questions, every single group of kids had a boy or two who wanted to see her gun – and, it was implied, the rest of her attributes – and then they moved on to the next group.
Gibbs thanked Principal Kurtz sincerely, his respect for her devotion to her kids clear, but stalked out of the school more pissed than a kid-oriented afternoon had ever left him. If children were afraid for their lives there was no way that a speech about protecting sailors was going to convince them to come forward.
It was a wasted day, a fool's errand all at Kort's call, and that pissed him off even more.
Four days later Gibbs was in no better mood when McGee interrupted him during an interrogation.
Gibbs was in the middle of leaning on what felt like the eight-hundredth dope peddler of the week, a kid who clearly did not go to Principal Kurtz's school of life, since he seemed too essentially stupid to even grasp Gibbs' questions. As soon as the interrogation room door swung shut behind him he turned on McGee, growling with all the fury that a whole week of painfully stupid pushers could kindle.
"You have got to be kidding me, McGee."
Tim talked fast. "Boss, security just called up. There are two girls here to see you, one of them elementary school age. They wouldn't say what they want to talk to you about and only the oldest girl would give her name. It's - she said it's Cassandra Gray."