"Hey, Tony?" McGee suddenly asked while he was looking through an old case file. He'd noted pretty early on that it involved an undercover operation and Tony was listed as the undercover. Thinking back, he realized that whenever their team needed something undercover done, Tony always seemed to be the one doing it. Unless they needed a woman, of course, then they either got Ziva to do it, or asked another agent. And then there were the times when he would disappear for weeks to months on end and Gibbs never said anything except he was taking care of 'business'.

"Yeah, Probie?" Tony asked absently, he scowled as he started writing the same thing on five different forms. Why did they need these many forms for one thing? Honestly, field agents had better things to do than a mountain of paperwork.

"How many undercover persona's have you had, and what were your favorites?" He asked bluntly. Tony stopped and blinked for a moment before turning to look at him curiously.

"What brought this on?" He asked. He glanced over at Gibbs and Ziva, only to see that they were looking over now, too.

"This case involves you going undercover." He held up the file he was reading. "And you go undercover or disappear on 'business' a lot, so..." He shrugged. Tony gave him a strange look, one that said he was trying to solve a puzzle, and took the case file from him.

"Ah ha." He laughed once he saw the picture of the main target. "This one. Oh, now this one was interesting. I never did quite figure out what was going on with that guy..." He muttered, and handed the file off to Gibbs when he got up and held out his hand. Gibbs merely smirked in amusement.

"Yeah, that guy was... something else alright." He said.

Tony settled back into his chair with a sigh and looked thoughtful for a few minutes. "Well... a lot of the undercovers I've done are actually still classified. I can probably get away with telling you what personas I've played, but nothing beyond that." He warned. Tim nodded his understanding. "I think you know about most of the times I've gone undercover with this team since you've been here, Probie. I think the first undercover I did with you around was when Vos killed Pacci." Gibbs nodded his agreement, that sounded right to him.

Tony looked thoughtful again. "With the team, I've been an arms dealer, drug dealer, smuggler... now that was interesting. Fellow escaped convict, disgruntled boyfriend... I've had to go in somewhere as a Petty Officer and every variant of that rank and title, I've been a Captain, lieutenant, come to think of it... I've been almost every Marine rank under the sun, and almost every Naval rank possible as well... well, I haven't gone in as an Admiral or anything, that would be a little obvious if nobody had ever heard of me before." He said with an eyeroll. "I was an Admiral's aide a few times, though. Do not recommend that as a career path..." He made a face. Not with that particular Admiral, anyway.

"What about outside the team?" Tim asked.

Tony pursed his lips as though trying to decide what to tell them. "Outside the team... I've worked undercover as a Navy SEAL, one of my covers was as a Gunnery Sergeant assigned to a unit in Iraq, I've been in a Marine Sniper unit, I've gone in as a Naval Fighter pilot a few times, those ones are always fun. I love flying those babies..." He leaned back in his chair, daydreaming for a moment.

"Wait, you know how to fly a plane? And a fighter jet?" Tim asked, surprised.

"And a chopper. I could fly commercial if I wanted to. If they need it for an undercover operation, they put me through the appropriate training to better fit the role. Having an undercover who is able to fly a fighter actually benefits NCIS because if for some reason they need a pilot." He held up his hands in a 'what can you do' gesture.

He went back to his recitation. "Whenever I get loaned out to other agencies, I usually end up being an arms dealer, or hired muscle of some kind. Or I'm in as the middle man for some sting operation. I've infiltrated Mafia groups, the Mob, Cartels, you name it, I've probably infiltrated it. I've even been in a few terrorist cells... the freedom fighter groups I've gotten in with always make life interesting."

"Wow." Tim was amazed. "You've, huh... gotten around then." It was a simple statement.

Tony snorted. "Yeah... you could say that. For future reference, if I end up going out on 'business', and it takes longer than a few weeks, you can be sure that I'm probably getting special training for the persona. Like when I go in as a SEAL, I gotta train a bit so that I can make the bare minimum of what a SEAL is required to do to be considered 'mission ready'. When I was training for my first op as a pilot, they had me in flight school for a few months while still working normal cases before they even told me why I was in flight school." He explained.

Gibbs snorted. "They didn't even know if the op was going to go forward. The guys we were after might have slipped up and gotten caught before the op was able to be put in play. But, they figured that it might come in handy if they needed an agent able to fly a fighter in the future. And, Tony was enjoying himself." They'd (the bosses) argued many times that it would be easier to pull an already established pilot in and train him to work undercover, but he knew that they were never going to get an undercover as good as Tony.

"A good undercover agent has a wide variety of skills, Probie. It's not all just talking, acting a certain way, or trying to read the situation right so you don't accidentally give yourself up. You gotta know stuff. You need to know what your talking about, and be able to physically demonstrate if need be. I've gone in as an IT tech more than a few times, and a few times as a hacker. I'm not nearly as dumb with computers as I act sometimes. If I couldn't do anything with them, I wouldn't be able to always get the intel I need." He shrugged.

Ziva nodded. "I am trained in many different areas as well. Piloting is one, languages, computers, all needed when infiltrating or assassinating." She said in agreement.

"Eh, I actually managed to get it stipulated in my contract with NCIS, no assassinations for me." Tony said, shaking his head. He had no interest in that side of... things. He knew that they happened within NCIS, he knew that Gibbs himself had been assigned a few marks back in the day to take out. But he was a cop. And that just... rubbed him the wrong way, even if he knew that sometimes... well sometimes arresting them just wasn't going to be enough.

"How many languages do you know, Tony?" Ziva asked in curiosity. She knew he spoke Spanish and some Italian, but he was right. To be a good undercover agent, he would need to have many different skill sets, and he probably kept them hidden until they were needed.

"Uh... five or six? Not including English." He said. "Italian, Spanish, Arabic- I'm not as fluent in that one, Mandarin, German, Hebrew." He threw her a smirk, and her eyes widened in surprise before narrowing dangerously, but with a playful glint. "And I'm actually working on a few Middle Eastern dialects just because." He shrugged. He wasn't going to tell them that learning languages was made easier with the language feature that most movies had, along with subtitles. Of course, the subtitles weren't always accurate, and sometimes they spoke too fast for his untrained ears to pick up what they were saying, but it helped get how the language was supposed to sound in his head.

Especially when he was learning Mandarin.

Tim stared at him in shock and awe before he shook himself. "What would you say your favorite undercover assignment so far has been?"He asked again.

"Oh, the ones where I get to fly the fighters, definitely. I've had two of those, oddly enough, but I loved it." And... Tony was off in dreamland. Wow, he must really love flying.

Gibbs smiled slightly at the sight. Oh, yes. Fighting to keep DiNozzo in flight school at the time was worth it. Like he said, Tony had been enjoying himself. Whether the op actually went through or not, that made it worth it in his eyes.

"Ziva, I'm assuming you can't talk about any undercover assignments you've been part of?" Tim asked the Mossad assassin.

She shook her head. "If I were to tell you about any of them, I would have to kill you." She actually, almost sounded apologetic there.

"Boss?" He asked.

Gibbs tilted his head. "I've been an IT guy a few times." He chuckled at their disbelieving stares, and shrugged. "I knew enough about what I was doing to do it. And I don't do much undercover work anymore, if ever. If you want some good undercover stories, talk to Ducky. Now he has stories he could tell." Although, most of Ducky's stories were still classified, so it was a trick to getting him to stop before he revealed too much.

"Ducky?" Tim asked.

Gibbs nodded seriously. "He wasn't always a ME. No, he used to be a field operative for M16. Which is how we met, actually. That's one story, you will never know." He looked around in warning.

They all protested, eventually gave in and agreed not to ask, but they all resolved to find out the story someday. Gibbs would just need to keep their knowledge of such a promising story a secret.

"Hey, Boss, remember that time when..." The paperwork was forgotten on the desks behind them as they had all rolled their chairs to sit in a circle in the middle of their area.

Gibbs and Tony swapped and shared stories of some of their more interesting undercover assignments, without giving out any details that might be deemed classified, of course. Ziva shared what little she felt she might be able to get away with, and nobody noticed when it got dark out and everybody else started going home for the night.