Chapter 49: Tripwire

Occasionally, through the course of his days, Gibbs would find himself thinking about Gray, and Cassie. The little hints he'd gotten of the rest of them.

About how hard it was to gain their trust. Like moving a mountain one pebble at a time.

He didn't know if he would ever get there.

But among those they truly accepted into their world, between each other . . . what he had seen so far was evidence of an unbelievable team. A family, but not in blood. In the true sense of the word. Unbreakable devotion. Unconditional love.

His team had seen it, recognized it. A family built from ashes, on the bond that came from fighting together to survive. Learning to pull each other through all the shit the world could throw at them.

Now O'Donnell was here, had the gall to step foot in his agents' territory. To threaten a group of kids his team barely knew, but had come to admire. To recognize as their own, in a way.

The urge to lay themselves down, to fling themselves into O'Donnell's path - it was tearing them up.

He could smell it on them. On Tony and Ziva, at least. To hell with the law. To hell with their jobs, with the team, even. They wanted revenge. To get back what had been taken from them. To punish for all the dead pulled from the fires at Camp Six, and the faces still haunting Dinozzo's dreams. For Ziva singled out yet again as a rapist's prize, worth reduced to whatever power he could lord over her. She wanted that power back. Fought for it all the long hours she spent sparring, still wrestling with him in her mind. For the scars on Cassie's face, that she would carry all her life. And the black sweep of Gray's past, the horror that had made him what he was. Taken from him terribly, and forever.

It was more than enough to make them want to kill. More than enough to forget any reason not to.

But first they had to get out of Gibbs' house.

It had finally dawned on them that he had no intention of going anywhere, or having them go anywhere either, and it was pissing them off. They'd expected Gibbs to be angry. Not to sequester them.

McGee had arrived by the time Gibbs made it back up the stairs. He stood awkwardly in the living room, never all that comfortable in his boss's domain. But then, none of them were ever very happy when they were confused, or thought they were about to face a furious boss.

"Gibbs." Ziva dug in anyway, the moment he reappeared. Never let it be said his people lacked guts. "We need to get to MTAC - "

"Not yet."

The tone froze them all. And they seemed to notice, finally, that he was armed to the teeth.

He leaned the rifle against the wall of the dining room, close to hand, and passed the portable phone to his tech expert without a word. Then he sat in the chair facing the kitchen and snapped his fingers for the other two to join him around the table.

Gibbs sat silent and expressionless as McGee worked, no doubt further freaking the kid out. But freaked or not, McGee didn't get flustered by Gibbs anymore. He efficiently swept the immediate area for bugs and began to take apart the phone with lightening speed.

Gibbs assessed his people.

Dinozzo was too quiet. And not looking to Gibbs, not the way he normally would. Tony was staring away from them all tonight, focus totally out the window. The expression on his face was arranged into a sort of paper-thin calm - a distant man fighting a private war. One finger tapped lightly, soundlessly on the table. It was Tony circa Ziva's disappearance in Somalia. Trying to figure out where everything had gone wrong. Wondering how to grope forward, through unfamiliar territory. Regretting every second of inaction as it slipped away from him, feeling it like blood loss from a wound.

Across the table Ziva was completely still, gaze blank. She looked alert. But Gibbs doubted that she was really seeing any of them right now. She was hunting in her mind. Making the decisions that would allow her to move seamlessly into action the moment Gibbs released them.

He had no doubt what her plans for the night entailed. She'd been an assassin for a long time, from a young age. At the moment her approach to this situation was probably not all that unlike Gray's. Ziva would gather information on the source of the threat. She would hunt it down. And then she would quietly, irrevocably end it. No matter the cost. She'd as good as told him that. Protecting these kids - it meant redemption to her. It meant everything.

They were tipping toward the man he'd been when he set out to destroy Hernandez. Caught up in their anger. Not above the law, exactly. Just beyond caring about its consequences.

Gibbs felt a dull, unpleasant thrill shoot through his gut. He wasn't entirely sure that he'd be able to haul them back from this edge.

McGee, when he sat down with them a few minutes later, looked lost. And more lost for every moment that he continued to sit there and endure the silence of the agents around him. Left behind again, because he hadn't grasped a boy's hand and followed him into the dark. Hadn't watched the kid appear impossibly in the night, seen him tossed into the air like an infant and slammed back down to the ground. Heard him scream. And been horribly, treacherously glad all the same. Because he was tied to a truck, waiting to die. Listening for a woman he loved and a rape he couldn't stop. Hadn't lain dirty and tired and hungry and so glad, so grateful, on the hard floor of a cave. Listening to Gray suffer. For them.

Gibbs let Tony and Ziva sit there, sullen in the unforgiving light of his dining room, because they needed to remember. To feel it. What had saved them then. It wasn't their dedication to a job, some pale duty. And it wasn't the desire for revenge, to kill what had hurt them, or those they loved. It was care. Devotion. The team. It all started because the agents in front of him had simply refused to give up on their team, or on him. They'd forged alliances and worked together, not gone rogue. It was what made them great. And because of that devotion, when it was over and the fallout had come - the doubt over what they had done, the cost of it - they'd had each other to turn to. Still had the team.

Gibbs would be damned if it would end any other way.

McGee wasn't really into long awkward silences. "Ground floor of the house is clean at least, Boss. Found this in the receiver of the landline. They were listening to your calls." McGee handed him a small silvery chip.

So somebody out there had a good idea of just how infrequently he used his home phone. Gibbs held the tiny chip out and squinted at it, not bothering with his reading glasses. He placed it on the table.

"Cartel or FBI?"

"It's a really common device, Boss. It could have been anyo - "

Tim jumped in his seat as Gibbs slammed his fist down onto the table, shattering the bug, and the pretense of calm. Tony jerked as well, attention brought swiftly back to the room. But Ziva's dark eyes only shifted to evaluate the noise, dismissed it as a threat, and went back to stillness. Building the op in her mind.

Not if Gibbs could help it.

"Is there a point to this party?" Dinozzo, impatient.

"Waiting for one of you to tell me what happened today."

A long, three-way glance.

Finally Ziva spoke up. She had been the initial contact, apparently. And she was also the one with near perfect recall.

"Cassie called me at a little before 1500. We were in the bullpen, you had gone to meet Kort. She told me that her car was being tailed. That the pursuers were aggressive . . . "

McGee had loaded the photos onto an ipad Abby kept in the lab. He illustrated the story for Gibbs once Ziva got to the bridge, scrolling through the images of the FBI agents and O'Donnell.

Gibbs studied them, but didn't recognize any of the faces there.

" . . . A third man stepped out of the lead car. He was also armed but did not have his weapon drawn. I recognized him as Declan O'Donnell - "

"We need to know how he got here," Tony interrupted.

Ziva cast him a sidelong glance. "He spoke in Spanish at first, said 'Coptero -'"

Tony sat forward in his seat and glared at Gibbs. And then he stood up. "We need to know what the hell Kort was doing when this guy was strolling through customs!"

Gibbs had to look up to maintain eye contact. "Sit down."

"We need to - "

"And we will. But right now you need to sit down."

"Fuck this! I need to find him."

Tony spun away from them. Checking his sidearm as he stalked toward the front door. Leaving.

But then he stopped, halfway there, and fluidly reversed course, heading through the kitchen and slamming out the back.

Not leaving. Waiting for Gibbs.

Well. Could have been worse.

Gibbs tossed a Stay at Ziva and McGee and followed. His second was pacing a hole into the floor of his deck.

"What the hell, Dinozzo - "

"We're wasting time. We have been all along! We should have got him when we had the chance. We knew - "

"Shut up and get inside."

"We could have ended him. So fucking stupid! We knew, with Gray, we knew what he - "

"Shut up, Dinozzo," Gibbs ordered, suddenly cold and furious. "And get inside."

"Can't talk about this in there," Tony growled. One of his hands shot toward the house like he wanted to punch it. "With them."

Dinozzo's rage was incendiary, the force of it made usually graceful movement jerky, his voice hoarse. But he still didn't want to expose McGee, maybe even Ziva, to this. To the cool truth that he was going to kill O'Donnell. And it wouldn't be clean, wouldn't be legal. It would be murder.

"Well, we're not talking about it out here, either," Gibbs said. He got into his second's face and stared him down hard. "Get it together. And get back inside."

Gibbs left him there in the dark, returned to the rest of the team still sitting silent at the table. He felt the weight of McGee's wide eyes, and Ziva's shrewd ones, and waved for her to continue.

Dinozzo joined them silently after a few moments, still stiff with anger. Gibbs hadn't been entirely sure the other man would follow him back in. Apparently Tony had gotten close to Gray - that level of distress was personal.

" . . . and O'Donnell said, 'Alright, of course, it is just the information for one of my contacts at the FBI. They will be able to put you in touch with me if you would ever like to talk. But you can find him on your own I am sure. The name is Arena.'"

McGee broke into Ziva's flat monologue.

"Abby looked him up, Boss, and I got a photo off the FBI database. He wasn't one of them there today - " Tim pulled the ipad toward him again and scrolled for the folder where he'd stashed the picture. "Frederick Arena," he went on, still frowning at the screen, "he's part of the— "

"Frederick," Ziva said. And looked sharply at Gibbs. "Fred."

Gibbs nodded slightly.

"Fred?" Tony leaned forward with the intense, sudden focus of a shark scenting blood. "Someone we know?"

Tim was looking at the gadget on the table, just opening up the folder he'd been searching for. Tony had his eyes on the screen too, waiting to see if he would recognize Frederick, Fred.

Ziva was the one to register the subtle movement, a shift in the corner of her eye.

She was up, her gun drawn, centered on the target too fast to actually see it. Dinozzo and McGee followed instantly, like dominoes in reverse.

Alex stood at the top of the basement steps, the littlest girl standing behind him, looking down the barrel of Ziva's pistol.

There was tripwire silence for a moment.

And then Alex grinned. "Wow. Ziva, yeah?"

"What do you need, Alex?"

The kid tore his eyes away from Ziva reluctantly. Gibbs was still sitting calmly at the table that all three of his agents had abandoned.

Alex gestured to the little girl standing behind him. "Bathroom."

"Second door on the left." Gibbs pointed him up the stairs. Didn't want them shut into a ground floor room. Three sets of eyes followed the kids toward the stairs.

He had to rap the table with his knuckles to get his agents' attention.

They looked down at him, the comprehension sudden, and probably damn near total. Nothing trumped protecting a child. Not for Gibbs. Nothing made him more focused, or scarier, and - in some corner of his mind that he knew they had the intelligence to see - very little came closer to scaring him.

"Sit." They sat. "Continue."

Ziva finished her retelling of that afternoon's events. Her voice very slightly easier, Tony's posture less stiff.

Ziva explained to Tony and McGee, in dark tones, who Agent Fred was. One of the youngest members of Dargas' unit. One of the two who had interrogated Gray for the FBI.

Those agents had seen Gray, seen the scarring on his arms, heard rumors about him carrying a weapon. Suspected he was connected to the drug world. They could have a photograph of him. They had seen how Gibbs protected Gray. More than that, they'd been humiliated by it. If they pulled the parking lot footage they would have seen Kort. And they worked in a trafficking unit, close to drug runners. A breath away from the cartels.

Now Agent Fred was O'Donnell's "contact" at the FBI.

Fred must have decided to identify Gray by sniffing around among the FBI's informants. He'd searched until someone from the Calera cartel recognized him, and passed it up the chain to Diablo.

Fred was the leak.

Ziva paused when Alex and the girl stepped back through the living room to return to the basement. The kids were silent, visible only for a moment before they disappeared again.

When Ziva finished, Gibbs settled the full weight of his attention on McGee. He kept it there as the silence grew uncomfortable, and McGee began to fidget.

"Boss?"

"What's our goal, Tim?"

McGee's eyes widened at his first name.

Uncertainty. But McGee would always be the kid in the class who wanted to have the answer.

" . . . To bring down the cartel?"

"Do Colombian cartels fall under NCIS jurisdiction?"

McGee blinked. Gibbs could give a paper bag for jurisdiction, he'd never paid the least attention to it. But the meaning of the question was clear enough: wrong answer.

"No."

"We're not in the bullpen, Tim. We're in my house. What is our goal."

Gibbs studied McGee, and waited. McGee wasn't an assassin or a spy like Ziva, didn't have violence and deception in his blood. He wasn't a natural-born cop like Dinozzo either, didn't get his greatest thrills outsmarting perps and putting scumbags in lockup.

McGee knew naval bases and Johns Hopkins and computers and Gibb's team, just as Alex had said.

But what McGee knew was very different from who he was. Tim was the older brother on Gibbs' team. He was the son, the grandson - the closest thing to a family man they had. And there was one reason alone that he joined NCIS. One reason that made him an agent instead of a research scientist or a millionaire programmer, or even an admiral like his father.

McGee nodded, suddenly certain, sure of it to his bones. He tilted his head toward the basement door. "To protect them."

Gibbs quirked an eyebrow. "O'Donnell shows and they need our protection. Don't they have anyone else?"

McGee hesitated. "They've got Kort."

"Anyone else?"

" . . . Not that I know of."

"Alright. And who is protecting O'Donnell, McGee?"

McGee thought about that. Ziva and Tony stared at Gibbs. " . . . His contacts at the FBI," McGee said slowly.

"And?"

"The cartel."

"And?"

McGee just looked at him blankly.

"Who else, McGee?"

"The Colombian government," Ziva said quietly. "Kort warned us in the beginning that sections of the government itself were allied in the civil war with the most powerful cartels."

Gibbs didn't take his eyes off McGee. "And?"

Tim shook his head, glanced at the agents sitting still beside him.

"Who is the Colombian government's ally, McGee."

Tony sat forward, eyes sharp.

"We are," Tim said slowly.

"Are we going to get away with assassinating O'Donnell on US soil, Tim?"

The quiet that descended on the heels of that question was so absolute and still it felt like a solid thing, like concrete set between them.

McGee glanced between Tony and Ziva, sitting stonefaced on either side of him. "Protected by Colombia, the US and the cartel? Probably not."

"What's our goal, Tim?"

"To protect the kids."

"Can we do that from prison?"

"No, Boss."

"We will get him eventually," Gibbs said evenly. Still staring at McGee. "But not tonight. Anyone who needs to kill him now, needs it more than anything else, should leave. Shouldn't they, Tim?"

McGee stared back at him. An older brother and a father, and total understanding between them where there had never quite been before. "Yes."

Gibbs let his gaze drop to the table. Spoke to the room. "If any one of you can't commit to working with the team on this one you get off here. And I'll tell you right now, we're not going to move against O'Donnell. Not tonight."

No one moved. His agents were quiet. Not stewing in their fury now. Refocusing. Reconsidering their priorities.

There could still be something to save here, a happy ending among all the ways it could play out. If they pulled in their anger. If they did their jobs, as Gibbs defined them, and did them well.

"What's the plan?" Dinozzo, rare hesitance in his words.

"We don't know if O'Donnell is working alone or if he brought a platoon with him. According to Alex, Gray and Cassie are both out looking for him now. Team stays here to provide protection, at least until Abby calls with a lead or we have more intel."

"What about Kort?" McGee asked.

A pause.

But Gibbs never gave them the answers that they could figure out for themselves.

"Gray brought at least some of the children in need of protection to Gibbs' house," Ziva said. "Gibbs is in a good position to protect them, whether from O'Donnell or the FBI. Gray has probably enlisted Kort's help in hunting O'Donnell. Kort has more experience with the cartel than we do, and the CIA will be better positioned than we would be to work around the FBI. The cartel actually is in Kort's jurisdiction . . . If I was going to hunt O'Donnell," she continued, almost softly, "I would begin with Kort."

Tony's eyes flicked from Ziva, staring steadily back at him, to the basement. And from Gibbs' rifle to Gibbs. "Alright. So how about we bring in backup for the house? From NCIS?"

He was in, that meant. They were all in.

Gibbs felt something release inside him.

He could have worked this without Tony or Ziva, without both of them even. It just would have been a hell of a lot harder, and it was going to be hard enough on its own.