Every screen is covered in pictures and faces and maps and data. Every workstation is busy with personnel they know and operators that Mosely brought in from the San Diego office to sift through the information faster. They are talking about the Patton Project and reviewing old case details looking for clues on who they are and how they got Kensi.
Then the email comes in. The subject line says Agent Blye, and the return address is a mixture of letters and numbers they would analyze for meaning later. The text of the email is pretty straightforward. "She will suffer until she repents or she dies. The same will happen to you unless you leave us alone."
That hangs in the air for a moment.
There is a photo attachment, and Nell hesitates to open it in a room full of people. They've all seen it arrive, and are frozen in a combination of dread and anticipation. Nell knows that Deeks isn't in charge here, he isn't even NCIS, but she also knows that he loves Kensi and so for this moment she lets him call the shots. She waits for him to be ready.
"Open it," he says and he steadies his face for whatever is about to appear on the big screen in front of him. And even with the moment he isn't ready.
It's her. A photo of Kensi, and Deeks exhales because at least she's still alive. Twenty four hours into a living nightmare, and he's grateful for anything that tethers him to his current situation and not the what-ifs and could-be's that are threatening his sanity. The darkness of the picture can't be missed. She is dressed in leggings and a tank top. A strand of her hair is matted to one side of her face by what looks like blood. She has a swollen eye and split lip, and she's tied to chair. They're beating her.
His arms cross in front of him as the room revolves around his reaction. He is keenly aware of their scrutiny and he fights back the tears and fights down the fear for her safety, not quite ready to share it in case he can't put it back in the bottle. The anger, though – the anger he lets write itself in every tense muscle. He feels the strong arm of Sam Hanna land on his shoulder. It tells him to stay angry. It tells him he's not alone.
And no one understands this moment better than Sam.
It's Callen that finally gestures to Eric to get the image off the screen. Even when it's gone Deeks stares where it had been until he's capable of speaking.
"So where are we?"
There are leads to follow and they assign them out. There is Tiffany Miller and Kat's phone and the bomb and the body that got carried into Razzle and the ambulance and the email and the photo and everything that they had yet to discover about the Patton Project. All of which is still too many steps away from finding Kensi and bringing her home.
Home.
Home terrifies Deeks right now. The idea of walking through that door without her – like he could just sleep in their bed while she's out there being beaten; shower and cook frittatas not knowing if she is eating. He doesn't know how to go home alone.
They leave Ops, and when Deeks reaches the bottom of the stairs he's greeted by Monty. Deeks looks around to make sense of his companion's presence and sees Mosley give a slight nod.
"We still don't know if your home is compromised. For now, you'll stay here. Both of you. Or the boatshed. Whatever makes you more comfortable."
She says it like she's giving him instructions, but they both know he wasn't leaving anyway.
The leads start to come together. It was Kevin Miller's sister who gave them Kensi's name. Two men who must have been connected with the Patton Project went to speak with her after her brother's death. They explained that her brother was a hero, they listened, they comforted, and Tiffany told them Kensi's badge said NCIS Special Agent Kensi Blye and that she'd been the one that went into the bunker. They had her name.
Then there'd been a small intrusion into the Navy personnel system. The first screen of many personnel files had been accessed. The Navy Cyber-Defense team thought it'd been random, but it wasn't. The Patton Project had been able to access the first screen of Kensi's personnel file and had her name, picture and work location. They had her picture and her duty station.
No one could determine how they made the connection between Kensi and Kat, but assumed it was some internet or social media posts from Kat that Kensi probably didn't even know about. Whatever it was, they identified a connection. They had a way to reach her.
The cloud storage from Razzle came through and Nell and Eric showed the team the scene inside the bar. Watching Kensi order a drink, watching Kensi look around, watching Kensi check her phone and text. Even knowing what was coming Deeks had a hint of a smile just watching her be her - as unguarded as she gets and excited to be seeing her friend.
Then the feeling in the room changes as they watch Kensi spot two men bring a third incapacitated man into the bar and put him in a booth against the wall. They drop a large duffle bag in the empty side of the booth. Kensi turns and says something to the bartender, presumably to call 911, and when she turns back to the scene the two men are on either side of her. A syringe to her neck came lightning fast, and she's out cold in seconds. The footage shows them carrying her to the back exit. They had Kensi.
It turned out the first 911 call from Razzle that night was actually the bartender before the explosion. Hours later when he came to he told LAPD he was calling to report the kidnapping when the bomb went off. The body turned out to be a Muslim of Indonesian decent that had disappeared the day before from a mosque in town. They killed that man, dropped a duffle bag full of explosives and nails, kidnapped Kensi and blew the place up. They tried to frame a Muslim for the act of violence. They killed fourteen people that night just to cover their tracks and get a head start.
By now the new tech support in Ops are comfortable enough to speak up and not just hand off information to Nell. They've finally worked the Razzle footage to the point where they can get facial rec to run on the two men who grabbed Kensi. The team is actually encouraged for the first time in three days when the next email arrives.
They don't ask Deeks anymore. They just open the emails as soon as they come in. "She will suffer until she repents or she dies. The same will happen to you unless you leave us alone." And then the photo. They are getting worse. The cumulative effect of her suffering is clear and Deeks steps back until his body meets the island in the middle of the room just in case his knees give way. He knows he's tough by some subjective standard, but watching her deteriorate every day and not being able to find her is killing him.
Literally killing him.
This picture shows no new marks, just the terror in her eyes when some piece of metal that has been heated until it glows red is being brought towards her face.
Deeks' breaths become shallow and for the first time since this started, he walks out. He goes to the roof, where Kensi found him when she got back from Colorado. Where he told her he couldn't go through what Sam went through. Where he told her she was everything – that she was his whole world. He meant it then and he means it now. All he wants is one of her plain grilled cheese sandwiches and to have her in his arms.
The photos are proven to be composites. They are digitally enhanced using graphics software. It's sophisticated and impossible to pull apart – impossible to know what is real and what isn't. Even the time stamps are altered, so now they aren't even proof of life because there's no way to verify when they were taken. They come in multiple times a day, but now they bring anxiety and no hope.
The team tells Deeks that the pictures aren't real – that the composite hides the truth, but he finds no comfort in that.
They ID's the men from the bar. They tear through their lives, their finances, their friends. They try to pick one of them up but it goes south. It comes down to Sam or the perp, and Deeks saves Sam knowing that it turns one more lead into a dead end.
All week the photos come. Multiple photos a day. Each one is a little worse than the last. The last one made Nell cry. Kensi looks like she is barely hanging on. Even knowing they aren't actually real, they are destroying Kensi's NCIS family. On the sixth day the attached file is a video, and Nell is afraid to press play. Mosely does it for her.
"Call out to one of them, Blye," they taunt her. The camera is close to her face. Ops can see something cause her pain, but don't know what it is. She locks her jaw and grits her teeth and refuses to scream. "You can be done for the day if you just give us the names of your team." Her eyes are shut tight. And then something hurts her again. She screams, but not a name, just frustration and pain. They laugh at her. "Fine by me, bitch. I have fun either way." He gently runs the back of his hand down her cheek, and the absurdity of the tenderness in contrast to the situation is disorienting.
The gentle hand touching Kensi is also disintegrating Deeks' sanity. It's the first time that he thinks he will actually lose the contents of his stomach. Yeah, the video is much worse than the photos. Deeks will now have the soundtrack of her screaming to add to his nightmares. And the video is real. No composite or deep fake. Just Kensi in pain.
Kensi is gone eight days when they catch the second guy from the bar. He tries to shoot himself before he's taken, but Callen stops him. He taunts the agents, but they all keep their heads screwed on straight. They get his phone and his laptop. They begin tearing his tech apart.
That's the day that Nate arrives.
Deeks is abrupt with Nate, wanting to understand his purpose here. He didn't come when Kensi was taken, so the timing must mean something.
"Are you here to get in his head, or ours?" Deeks asks him gesturing with his chin between the perp in the interrogation room they can see on the screen and the three agents standing at the table in the main room.
"I'm here in case Kensi needs anything when you bring her home."
Deeks doesn't believe him, but he appreciates what he's trying to do.
"But I think I might be of some assistance in speaking to him," Nate offered.
Callen thinks about it. Deeks had gotten in the room and punched him, and Sam and Callen had gotten nowhere. The Ops team was breaking the encryption on his tech and everyone was in a holding pattern. What could it hurt?
Derrick Vega was his name. Derrick tells them that there will be no proof of life if they don't let him go. He's told they know the pictures are doctored and can't be trusted. Derrick smiles like he knows the gig is up.
"Where is Agent Blye?"
"She's not really anywhere anymore," he says mysteriously.
"Where is Agent Blye?" Nate asks again.
"She's dead. She's been dead for a while." Vega laughs a knowing laugh. "The pictures were just meant to mess with you- drag out your suffering."
And through the walls Nate hears something that sounds a lot like a chair crashing across the floor of the main room.
The next thirty minutes are the worst thirty minutes of Deeks' life, but not only him - everyone is gutted. Even knowing that the man is threading truth and lies together to be indecipherable, it's still agonizing. At some point Sam, Callen and Deeks each have to be restrained from walking in on Nate and Vega and ending Vega's life.
Because now he's just screwing with them for fun.
He says he'll never tell them how, when or where she died. That they will never find her body. That they will know forever that she died alone and they couldn't save her. And when Nate pushes him, he decides to start playing a game, giving them ideas of how it might have happened, each one worse than the last.
Hypothetically, what if they used cut torture and she bled out on the floor somewhere calling for them. Hypothetically, what if they took her out from the marina and left her die in the ocean. Hypothetically, what if they water boarded her until she went into cardiac arrest. It went on and on. What if she realized they were never going to save her and it broke her, so they left a knife in her room and untied her and she killed herself.
And then there was laughing, but this time from Nate.
"Yeah, ok. I'm sure that's exactly what happened," Nate said sarcastically. "Make yourself at home. You're going to be here a while."
When he rejoins the others in the main room Nate is smiling, and Deeks is baffled.
"Let me have another run at him," Deeks pleads.
"No need," Nate tells him. "This is the game. They laid it out in their communications. She'll either join them, or they'll make an example of her. We all know Kensi – it's a safe bet she hasn't joined them. To make her suffer they would want her to give up on us coming for her. And to make an example out of her they need people to know what happened. Killing her in secret does neither of those things. She isn't dead."
Deeks looks at Callen and Sam. He almost needs permission to believe that Nate might be right. He's afraid to hope on his own. Callen nods and he lets out a breath he didn't realize he was holding.
And then the barrage of emails come to an abrupt stop. Hearing nothing leaves Deeks in a black hole of possibilities that consume him. Sam tells him it may be better than being fed lies by people who mean to do them harm.
In the afternoon of the ninth day they are in the Boatshed when the screen comes to life. The agents can tell the Ops Center is full of activity. It is Nell's voice that focuses them.
"I think we have something. We cracked the encryption on the phones and laptop from Vega and his partner. Vega's laptop is the one the emails and pictures are coming from. The original pictures are here before they got altered. That combined with the GPS history on the phone gives us a location of interest. It looks like a warehouse north of Burbank. Getting satellite coverage now and sending it to your phones."
"Get back to the mission and gear up, gentlemen," they hear Mosley say. "We'll have a QRF meet you there."
She wants to tell them to bring Kensi home, but is afraid that it's too hopeful.
In the boatshed the agents move to the door, but Nate calls them. His look is serious, and doesn't match the energy of the agents who are relieved to finally have a door to breach that might lead to Kensi. The look stops them in their tracks. He wants to join them, but they say it isn't a good idea. He tells them Kensi may need support and they say they will bring her home and he will see her soon.
But they are missing the weight of his intention. He was hoping he didn't have to say the words out loud, but now he knows there isn't time or space for subtlety.
"She may be in really bad shape, and not just physically. She may be withdrawn. She may be unresponsive. You're going in prepared for every tactical situation. You should be ready for every Kensi situation, too. That's all I'm saying."
Deeks doesn't answer him. After staying locked on Nate's eyes he shifts to Callen and tells him it's Callen's call. Then he says he'll meet them at the mission and leaves to prepare. He can't bring himself to consider any options but Kensi home and healthy. He isn't ready.
Callen looks Nate up and down.
"You aren't breaching with us, but you can ride to the location. Stay off Deeks in the car. You're good at what you do, Nate, but this isn't a mobile therapy session."
"Understood."
Nate keeps his end of the bargain. They ride to the location in silence.