The entire NCIS Ops team has spent the last twelve hours pinging Kensi's phone with no success. They are locating people with closed circuit cameras and footage that might help. They are processing warrants. They are praying.
There are still unidentified bodies in the wreckage of the building waiting for site analysis to finish before they can be moved. FBI agents and LAPD officers present understand the NCIS connection to the scene. No one impedes their access.
Eric calls them back to the Ops Center, but Sam, Callen and especially Deeks have no intention of heading back. They've been there all night. It's getting easier after sunrise to see the blast patterns and make assumptions. They can tell where the blast originated. They can tell that it was both incendiary as well as shrapnel packed for maximum carnage and destruction.
The unprocessed bodies are covered out of respect while they finish their work, and Deeks is both waiting for news and hoping it doesn't come. He can't find any information on Kat, either, which he knows is a bad sign. Kensi and Kat were likely together. No record of them at the hospitals that took causalities, no Jane Doe's that match their description. No text saying they got drunk and stumbled to Kat's hotel room, which they also can't find a record of.
The second set of instructions comes from Mosely telling the trio there are things they can do to aid the investigation from the mission and she wants them back. That request likewise goes unanswered.
It isn't until a clearly disturbed Nell is in their ear that they even look up from the investigation in front of them.
"We need you back here now," she instructs.
"Nell, I can't leave here until we know what happened," Deeks half states, half pleads. Callen and Sam look at each other deciding what to do. It doesn't matter. Nell's follow up statement makes their next move clear.
"Kensi wasn't at Razzle when the bomb went off. Get to Ops. Now."
The three exhausted agents move quickly to the car. Questions to Nell are unanswered. She simply says that she has to concentrate on what she's doing. They let it go. It feels like Kensi not being in the bomb blast would be good news, but if the news was good it would already have been shared.
Sam uses a lot of horsepower to speed back to the mission. The engine roars but inside the car is silent as the three shell shocked men silently pray for hope. When the doors to the Ops Center open it's Callen who starts barking questions at Eric, Nell and Mosely. His voice fills the room before his body even clears the plane of the door.
"What do you have?"
Deeks makes his way behind the island table, leaning against it for strength. He grips its edge with force, his knuckles white in anxiety.
"This package was delivered to LAPD this morning addressed to NCIS Agent Kensi Blye. No clear shots of the man who dropped it off. No finger prints, explosives, chemical or biological agents, and no trackers. When the forensics lab opened it up they found this."
The room carefully looked at the images of the big screen - photos taken by the forensics techs of the contents of the package. Deeks stops breathing. It was a stack of neatly folded clothes, a phone with its battery and SIM card separated out, a knife, a holster, a gun and a badge. Kensi's badge.
"What the…" Callen's voice trailed off.
"That was what she was wearing when she went to meet Kat last night. That outfit." That ocean blue lacy set that he was supposed to take off her himself the night before. The badge that she loves. Her father's knife. The holster she wore under her shirt so she could be armed even when people didn't know what she did for a living.
"And this note," Eric said sympathetically.
Agent Blye killed two glorious patriots in Colorado. We could not let that go unanswered. She's with us now and either she'll join us or we'll make her a memorable example to all in federal law enforcement of what will happen if they interfere with our goals.
No one reads it out loud. Everyone's eyes move over the words again and again taking in every detail.
"She's alive," Deeks whispers, dropping his chin to his chest. In his position leaning in against the table his whole face is obscured and he uses that moment to process the tears that form in the realization that he hasn't lost her and the anger that someone has her and means to do her harm.
"There are no traces of smoke, blood or explosives on the clothes. She left in them prior to the explosion."
Nell and Eric pull up a series of images. The onsite closed circuit camera storage from the restaurant was destroyed in the blast, and the warrant for the cloud backup is still in the works. City cameras that covered the parking lot caught the image of an ambulance pulling up in the back before the explosion had detonated and unrelated to any 911 call. They all watch the footage play out.
The backdoors to the ambulance open and two men get out. They are too obscured for facial rec yet, but maybe after some work on the image. At the moment the room is more focused on what happened than who did it. At least for the moment. They jump down and reach back to grab a body – unconscious? Lifeless? Dressed in a suit. Definitely a man. They drag the body into the bar and are off camera for about three minutes.
That's when they come back out of the bar carrying someone else. This body is clearly Kensi. Not moving. Kensi unconscious and defenseless. She is pushed into the back of the ambulance and it drives away. And then Nell lets it play for fifteen more seconds until they see the lighting change abruptly with the detonation and dust, debris and smoke fill the air.
The ambulance was found abandoned under an overpass that morning. There is no footage of what happened, and no way to tell what vehicle was used to transport her from there to wherever they have her. But now they have a motive, which gives them a place to start.
"The Patton Project," Sam remembers. "Kensi's mission at the launch facility in Colorado. There isn't another Colorado mission that I know of."
"Me either," Callen agrees.
"The files from the Colorado situation aren't here. I contacted the FBI as soon as we saw the note. FBI Special Agent Mark Malone was in charge at the missile launch facility. He's on a plane and will be at the boatshed in five hours," Mosely informs them.
"What about Kat?" Deeks asked quietly.
"FBI in her area checked on her discretely. She worked a regular day yesterday, went out on a date night with her husband, stayed out late and certainly never flew to LA. I don't have a warrant yet for full access, but her phone appears to have been registered to a new device from an anonymous IP address sometime yesterday morning," Nell explains.
"So she's ok," Deeks confirmed. It would be one good piece of news to tell Kensi when he gets her back.
"Yeah," Eric agreed. "Someone logged into her carrier website and made it look like she upgraded her phone. The one she has isn't working, and her number is active on a completely different device. It's offline and untraceable right now, but the messages that were sent to Kensi that appeared to be from Kat were sent from towers in the LA area. Kat is completely unaware of anything but that her phone isn't working."
Mosely knows how unpopular her next instructions are going to be, but she gives them anyway. The storage room at the end of the hall had been fitted with cots. There's food in the bullpen. No one has eaten in sixteen hours or slept in thirty and Sam, Callen and Deeks smell like smoke and explosives. She tells them to eat something, sleep for a few hours, shower and be at the boatshed to meet Malone.
They all protest but relent in the end. They have no leads right now, so Kensi would tell them to catch sleep when they can. In just a few hours they will talk to Malone and there will be information and leads that will help them bring Kensi home. That's all they can think about at this moment. So they eat sandwiches without caring what's on them and close their eyes. The exhaustion catches up with all of them even though they think they are too wired to rest.
It's Callen that puts a hand on Deeks' shoulder and gets him moving. Callen hands him the go bag he's retrieved from the car and tells him to shower and change – that they are heading to the boatshed in twenty minutes.
"Do we know anything new?" Deeks asks him.
"Nothing we can do anything with. We'll talk to Malone, talk to the Ops team and make a plan to get our girl back."
Deeks likes the confidence. He needs it. He's fighting his own fear that he won't get to her in time, that he won't be able to save her. And it's eating him alive.
Thirty minutes later Deeks, Sam and Callen are introducing themselves to Malone. They know nothing about him. Kensi was told not to share any of the details of her trip to Colorado three months earlier, and she did what she was told. There were jokes about how she saved the world, but she laughed them off. They knew she did what she could and that it all turned out well. That had been enough.
But now Malone is here with the whole story. His respect for Kensi is evident in his words and expression, his concern for her safety palpable in the room. He asks if she has any family.
"A mother close by," Sam tells him. "And a fiancé."
"Well he's a lucky man," Malone says to underscore his regard for Agent Blye.
When Deeks says thank you the room gets quiet until Malone regroups.
Malone provides them a list of all FBI and military personnel that were onsite and had knowledge of the operation. Then he explains how the breach took place. Kensi's headgear had a light and a camera and he shares the footage, narrating it along the way.
The tunnel was too small for anyone else. She was the only person who could do it. Blowing the hatch. The SWAT team launching her into the tunnel with a gun and a grenade in front of her. The smoke blowing around her as she hauled ass down the tunnel. The reinforced section of tunnel that was barely wide enough for her. Her crawling with no vest towards the danger. The grenade toss and the way she tried to take cover in the tunnel. Her flip onto the floor to make sure it was done.
Callen, Sam and Deeks all need a minute. They'd heard she'd done good work that day, but none of them really understood what that meant until this moment. She had single handedly taken back the launch control center.
And someone knew that it was her. And they came for her.
Watching from Ops it was Nell who broke the silence. "We'll start running the list of personnel."
"And there was one civilian not on the list," Malone added. "Captain Miller's sister, Tiffany."
"Did she interact with Kensi at all?" Callen asked.
Malone nodded gravely, explaining that it had been Kensi who calmed Tiffany and got her to get Kevin talking. Tiffany had begged Kensi to keep her little brother safe, but that wasn't how it played out. When they brought Kensi up, covered in dust and being congratulated by everyone it wasn't hard to put together her role in the outcome.
"OK. Thank you," Callen said.
"I'm going to stay here a few days, just in case. If you think of anything you need, or if FBI personnel on the ground anywhere in the country can help, you call me."
Deeks shook the FBI man's hand. "Will do."
"Nell – we're coming back to Ops. Let's get everything on the big screen and make a plan."