The dates of the photos laid out in front of them made little sense in regards to the actual pictures, but made all the sense in the world when she realized it wasn't just a case of mistaken times, but a code.
Not a bank account number, they decided. Too many digits, but a safety deposit box would be just the right amount of numbers. What they'll find she's not sure, but it meant they were making progress on tracking down what Decker left for her.
"Do you always sit on your ass before a fight?" She had been cleaning her gun, something that calmed her in a way she couldn't quite explain.
Franks snorts, "Something else I should be doing?"
She rolls her eyes, "Assessing the situation, making sure we don't get killed. Anything of that sort."
Mike shakes his head, clearing amused by her suggestions.
"You really are by the book, huh?" He chuckles, "Locks are Deadbolt, Schlage brand. Same as the front as in the back. Building has a wood-frame, stucco exterior, lath and plaster walls, stone in the rear. Provides good cover. That enough assessing for you, Director?"
All she can bring herself to do is glare at him, because there's almost nothing she hates more than being shown up. It's why she called him though, because he was good. One of the best.
The sun outside is high and beaming down through the windows, catching every piece of dust that rises when she moves.
"I never said thank you." She tells him as she looks off into the horizon.
The click of a lighter alerts her that he's lit a cigarette and she has half a mind to tell him smoking will kill him if he makes it out of this.
"Didn't do anything yet, no need to thank me."
"I was relieved you know, when they said Decker had a heart attack."
Mike snorts, "Gibbs did say you were complicated."
"I was relieved that he died of natural causes, and not killed. I knew there was always a chance this could come back to haunt us because I couldn't pull the trigger."
He doesn't say anything, only raises an eyebrow.
"I've made choices I'm not proud of."
"Haven't we all." He snorts.
"Even Jethro?" She questions.
"Let you go, didn't he?"
"I walked. It wasn't his choice to make."
They sit in silence for a while. She staring out the window while he took slow drags off his cigarette. It was odd to admit but she was grateful for the quiet, it gave her a little more time to try and make peace with things in her head.
But the stillness becomes too much too fast and she finds herself pacing around the diner, looking again for something she might have missed.
"Found some tea." She says, holding up a half empty box. It wasn't another code but the heat was making her more thirsty by the second.
"Is it Lemongrass?" He asks, leaning forward in his seat, "I don't drink nothing else."
When she flips the box over she's amused to see it's exactly his preference, "You don't strike me as the tea drinking type."
"And people say I don't open up." Mike grabs a discarded jug on the counter and inspects it, "There's a water tank out back. I gotta hit the head anyway, I'll fill this while I'm out there."
There's no protesting with Mike Franks and she knows that, so she watches as he disappears out the back door.
She wonders where Gibbs is. Surely at the agency, going about his day without a clue as to what was happening on the other side of the country. There's a letter in her desk somewhere, an incomplete knockoff of the one she left on the plane. It has only two words on it, and she wonders if when she's gone he'll find the urge to go looking through her things for answers only too find the words 'Dear Jethro' written alone on a piece of paper. It's been weeks since she first wrote them, long before Deckers death but at the prime of her health scare. She hadn't known what to put down then, and hadn't tried to once she knew she wouldn't be dying from illness. If only she had planned ahead for this.
A noise brings her back to reality and she thinks it's Mike returning with the water, but when she glances out the window and sees three black vehicles pull up she knows the fight has finally found her.
Mike wasn't back, so when she picks up her gun she knows she's on her own.
This was it; her Swan Song. Her chances of getting out unscathed are slim to none, but if this was the only way to make sure her mistake doesn't cause anymore of a ripple affect than it already has, she would gladly sacrifice her life to save another.
The first shot she fires comes moment after the door opens. It's clean, one shot to the chest and he's down in an instant.
She listens for the door behind her to open, but she's knows deep down Mike won't get back in time and she's on her own.
Glass shatters to her left and on instinct she drops to a knee and fires two shots through the door. The bullets cut through the metal with ease but shooting blind was a risk game that rarely wins.
Another door is violently thrown open and punctuated with a gunshot, aimed too far to hit but clearly meant for her.
She ducks behind a counter and shoots in their direction, praying that her skills aren't as rusty as she feels they are in that moment.
The popping of gunshots hurts her ears and there's a sudden burning sensation spreading along her left arm.
Another shot hits and the man falls to the ground, gun clattering at his side as he clutches at his bleeding shoulder. She takes the opportunity to sprint to the opposite side of the counter, firing two more shots over top before crouching back down and by her count there are a total of five men against her.
"Shit."
Bullets. She planned on having Mike's gun at her side but hadn't planned on more ammo for herself and she knows there's only about four shots left before she's empty.
Four shots, five men, only one of her. If there was even the slightest chance she would make it out alive it has been completely thrown out the window.
In one fluid motion she stands upright and fires at the man straight ahead, but she miscalculated, and the bullet whizzes by his head and imbeds itself in the concrete behind him.
Three bullets, five men.
Another window shatters somewhere. The man she hit in the shoulder only minutes before is reaching for the gun he had dropped and she shoots again, landing a slug straight into his chest.
She goes to shoot again, but out of the corner of her eye she sees a figure raise its gun in her direction while another rushes straight towards her.
It's a one final Hail Mary as she aims in front of her and pulls the trigger, but it's the man to her left that hits the ground first.
Tony DiNozzo standing beside Mike Franks is the last thing she expected to see, but there's no time for her to ask questions.
Another shot is fired and she drops to her knee and shoots again, managing to nick another man in the side but not completely bring him down.
Mike fires once; but she doesn't get the chance to see if it lands or not, only that Mike's attention switches to the other side of the diner.
It's pandemonium; between the sporadic gun shots and toppling of furniture she's not sure who's been hit and who hasn't. The shouts are in Russian but she can distinctly make out Ziva's voice amongst the voices as she calls out to Franks.
A bullet flies by Tony's head and hits the wall behind him and something clicks in her mind that this was her fear all along; more deaths caused as a result of her mistake.
She doesn't think, only rises to both feet and moves out from her place behind Tony. There's one bullet left in her gun and one man left standing.
But before she has a chance to fire he drops to the ground.
Gibbs is standing in the doorway, gun clutched in his hand as he looks down at the body in front of him.
"Probie," Franks says, clearly not phased by the fray they just lived through, "Nice of you to drop by."
Gibbs looks up and to his former mentor before his eyes shift to her.
"Would have been nice to have been invited."
She's stunned and furious and too many other things to even begin to speak.
"You're bleeding."
It's Ziva who says it and she almost thinks she's talking to Tony, but when she looks down at her arm she can see the dark splotch of red seeping through the sleeve of her shirt. At it's center; torn fabric and a raw patch of skin.
The adrenaline must have been too much for her to even notice.
"It's a graze." She mumbles, "I'm fine."
The burning was bordering on intolerable once she became aware of the wound but she wasn't going to let anyone know that.
Gibbs is staring at with such intensity however that it makes the scorching pain almost preferred over the amount of betrayal she can see in his eyes.
She tries to think of what to say; to him, to Ziva, to Tony, to anybody other than perhaps Mike in order to explain just how they all found themselves in this situation, but her mind comes up blank no matter how much she wants to offer them an explanation.
Luckily the sound of sirens saves her from having to speak.
"DiNozzo," Gibbs snaps, "Call the L.A branch and have them send a team out here. Keep the details at a minimum, we don't need anything spreading about this. Ziva, take the Director to the ambulance and get that arm looked at."
It doesn't escape her how he uses her title instead of her name, or how he's refusing to speak to her directly.
"Mike, we'll talk outside."
She wishes that Mike would have just left when she told him too. The last thing she wanted to do was complicate his relationship with Gibbs. It's why she was hoping he would help her with what she needed and then hop on the next flight back to Mexico. It would have been better for everyone if it was a secret they both took to their graves.
As he walks past her and towards Gibbs he pauses for the briefest second to lean forward and whisper something in her ear.
"Don't forget our deal."
Her stomach drops at the reminder because she knew if she didn't tell Gibbs the truth, Mike would.
The journey from inside the diner to the hospital feels like one big blur. She knows Ziva had led her out the door and right to the ambulance, and that sometime between then and the right to the NCIS building in LA the EMT's had peeled off her button up and wrapped her wound. Just a graze, like she had said. More superficial than anything.
It was chaos from the moment she entered the building. Assistant Director Vance was clearly distressed by her sudden arrival but had extended the courtesy of shielding her from the majority of people wanting answers. It took some insistence on her end to convince them she wasn't injured to the point of not being able to talk, but they eventually led her into his office with a select few agents.
The story she gave was mostly true, that she she was at the diner putting together a code because she knew Decker left a message for her. That she and him had a mission where they might not have gotten out clean and she had suspicions she wasn't able to prove at the time.
She omitted the part where she knew she was being hunted down and that she had planned on following Deckers fate to protect someone else.
Vance told her the case would be reopened and followed up on to find who's behind the ordered attacks, and that once she's transported back to DC it'll be a co-op investigation between them both.
By the time she makes it to the hotel that had been arranged during her meeting with Vance she felt as though she may pass out from exhaustion. Whether emotional or physical, she doesn't know.
Agents had been stationed all around the building and the outside perimeter, but it was Tony and Ziva she found standing outside her rooms door. They were both exhausted and it was clear they had volunteered. She wants to dismiss them and tell them to get some sleep, but she's done enough bossing them around for a while.
She doesn't know why she is surprised when not ten minutes later she finds Gibbs knocking at her door.
Her head is hung low when she opens the door and she can't make eye contact with him just yet, so she stares intently at the ground in front of her.
"You wanna explain now or later?" He asks her.
Never would have been the preferred option, but he wasn't willing to let her off that easy.
"I'm surprised you even came asking," She says solemnly, "I assumed Mike would have filled you in on the gaps."
She wants to tell him not to be mad at his former mentor but she can't quite bring herself to do it yet.
"He did, but I want to hear it from you."
She looks at him finally, expecting to see anger in his eyes but only finding desperation and she doesn't know what's worse; an angry Gibbs or a saddened one.
"I was supposed to pull the trigger but didn't," She finally relents, "Decker had known, and it was always a possibility that it would come back to haunt us."
"You should have told me when it happened." It's firm and reminds her of the days she spent as his probie.
"Probably," She admits, "But I didn't. It was my bed to sleep in after Decker died, and I knew you would be the next target. The woman - the one I couldn't kill - is behind it I think, but I can't be sure. I couldn't involve anyone else in my mess."
"Except Mike Franks."
"I needed someone good and not part of the agency. He taught you, and he came when I said you were in danger. Once it became close to a fight I told him to go so he wouldn't be in harms way. He chose to stay." She knows the explanation would do nothing to pacify the situation but it's the truth.
"I would have stayed." He says, "If you told me the moment you knew you were in danger you know I would been by your side."
"Hence the problem," She says, taking a few steps away from him, "I had to do this alone."
She hadn't planned on having this conversation.
"You haven't changed." He practically snaps and it makes her recoil away from him on instinct.
"What's that's supposed to mean, Agent Gibbs?"
The Director tone made its way into her voice out of habit more than out of intention.
"You only think about yourself," He says, "You walked off the plane because you wanted a job more than anything else. You went after the frog because of your own vendetta. And then you dismissed your security detail so you could, what, go be a hero all on your own? Or get yourself killed without even thinking what it would do to everyone else. Face it Jen, you're selfish and have been from the start."
She's seeing red by the time he finishes speaking and it takes all her self control not to smack him.
"You have some nerve saying that to me." She practically yells, "Everything I have done through this was to make sure no one else was hurt because of my screw up. Everyone would have been a target, especially an active agent. I was trying to keep that from happening. You do not get to call me selfish.
She's so god damn tired.
And this mess is far from over, because there's still someone out there who wants them both dead.
"Please Jethro," She's almost begging, a new low for her but she can't bring herself to care, "I can't do this right now. Not tonight. We can scream at each other tomorrow, but I can't do this right now."
The last thing she expected was for him to pull her again his chest in an almost crushing hug. Screaming she had expected, but this?
This caught her off guard.
"You don't ever do that to me, ya hear?"
She lets out a defeated breath, "Okay."