Hi Everyone,

Welcome back for chapter 8. I've been really busy, but hopefully the next chapter won't take as long.

Spoilers: This story is set just after Ziva David left NCIS (S11 E02: Past, Present, and Future). I don't take in account what happened in the series after that event. As there have been many seasons (and many Tiva developments) since, let's just say that this is a fun AU.

Rating: T

Disclaimer: I don't own NCIS, I don't earn any money with this story, I'm just enjoying playing with the characters.

Playlist: Every chapter is inspired by a song. For this chapter, it's Orphaned Land - Mabool. Check out my profile for more details!

I hope you enjoy!

Temples of Gold

Chapter 8: As Ashes You Return To Earth

Ziva pulled gently on the ties that held her right hand. She was confident that she could get out of them without having to break her thumb. Her left hand, however, was more tightly bound. She would need to cut the tie. That meant grabbing the knife first before getting rid of the woman who was holding Naheem and her hostage. The timing was tricky. Ziva regretted leaving her trusted boot knife in Israel, but she would never have made it through airport security with it.

Her brain had switched into "assassin" mode as soon as Zaneerah had mentioned her brother, Benham Parsa. That meant that Zaneerah, or whatever her real name was, had no intention to keep them alive. Ziva didn't have all the information about Parsa, she could only go by what Tony had told her when he had found her in Beer Sheva. Parsa was a smart terrorist, more interested in money and revenge than martyrdom. His sister seemed cut from the same cloth.

Currently, Zaneerah was walking back and forth between Naheem and Ziva, angrily punching numbers on a satellite mobile phone. Whoever was on the other side was not picking up the call, which seem to aggravate the woman more at each attempt.

'Your brother is ignoring you?' taunted Ziva. With a little luck, Zaneerah would move to another room to call again. That would leave enough time for Ziva to free herself.

'Shut up.'

With her legs untied, Ziva thought that she had a chance to kick the woman and knock her out, but she would have to move away from the table to have enough space. There again, tricky. The safest course of action right now was to make the woman talk. Naheem seemed to come to the same conclusion.

'Zaneerah,' he said calmly, 'you haven't done anything wrong so far. We can all walk away from this. Nobody needs to get hurt.'

The woman slammed the blade of the knife on the table in front of him and spat, 'My name is Hayat, imbecile.'

Hayat Parsa. Ziva vaguely remembered Tony mentioning that name when he gave her a rundown of what they knew about the terrorist. The days spent in Beer Sheva seemed so far right now.

'Hayat,' said Ziva, 'you clearly know me, but I know almost nothing about you or your brother. I left NCIS months ago. I did not come here to do you harm.'

Hayat shrugged. 'You were not supposed to be here.'

She seemed lost. Ziva wondered how involved in Parsa's business Hayat really was. 'Naheem shared with me some concerns,' Ziva explained. 'I understand that you have been working very hard on the school project. I admire you for it. Who I am doesn't matter, compared to the good you have been doing.'

'That school is a blasphemy. It was never going to happen. Children should be taught Allah's law.'

'I don't understand.'

'You are so naive. It was so easy to manipulate you. All your efforts, all your money. It would have come to us. To the Brotherhood of Doubt.'

Ziva's eyes crossed Naheem's, sharing silently his surprise. A small part of her had been hoping that Hayat's presence was just a coincidence, that she was still committed to the project but hated Ziva's involvement. Rule 39: There is no such thing as a coincidence.

'How?' she asked.

'We found you in Haifa. I wanted to have you killed, but Benham had a better idea. You seemed to have come into a lot of money, so we decided to exploit it. Your money, Mossad's money stained with the blood of our brothers and sisters, would help our cause. I found it poetic. But of course you had to ruin it and come here before we could finalise the transfer.'

Ziva thought about the instructions she had left to Chaviv and Magda. They were to work on sending the money to Naheem as soon as possible. Maybe they had even done it while she was in the plane. She hadn't checked her account. She hadn't felt the need to.

'You won't get a penny,' Ziva said, her voice choked with anger and fear. She had to get out of this trap and prevent the money transfer at all costs.

'Maybe, but I will get to kill you. That's a nice consolation prize,' replied Hayat, casually.

She began pacing again, holding her knife in the left hand and her phone in the right. Ziva needed to distract her.

'That's your plan, then? Kill us both here, in the house of an Imam? Isn't that a sin against Allah?'

Hayat moved towards her so quickly that Ziva thought she was going to stab her here and then. Instead, the woman slapped her so hard that Ziva's hijab fell from the top of her head onto her shoulders. Hayat said something about sins and sinners in quick Pashto slang, but Ziva's ears were ringing too loudly for her to understand. Her attention was elsewhere anyway: the movement had allowed her to move back almost a feet. Her right leg wasn't encumbered with the table anymore. Another movement and she would be able to stand up without hindrance.

Ziva breathed deeply a few times. She needed Hayat to keep talking. 'Were you following me this whole time? Since I left NCIS?' she asked.

'I was in charge of the men who found you in Yavne'el. After you killed them, we lost your track. We would never have found you again, without our associate.'

'Your associate?'

Hayat's phone rang, interrupting them. 'Finally!' she exclaimed as she answered the call. 'How far are you?'

Ziva exchanged a glance with Naheem, who shrugged. She could hear a masculine voice on the phone but it was not intelligible. Somehow, she doubted that it was Parsa on the other hand of the line.

'It's the last house on the right. Hurry!'

'Is your brother in Pakistan?' asked Ziva as soon as the woman ended the call.

'That's none of your business.'

But Ziva needed to push her. She had to keep her distracted. 'Who is your associate? Do you need permission to kill me?'

Once again, Hayat slapped her, then she put her knife under Ziva's throat, pushing both her and the chair a few inches back. 'I don't need anyone's permission to kill you.'

Ziva swallowed carefully and checked that her left leg had now a full range of movement. 'Then what are you waiting for?' she taunted.

It worked. Hayat pulled back the knife to gather momentum, clearly intending on planting the blade in Ziva's chest. A professional assassin would have swept the blade against her throat, never relieving the pressure, never giving her a chance. Hayat wasn't a professional assassin.

But Ziva was.

In one swift kick, she swept Hayat's legs from under her. The woman fell heavily on the floor, dropping the knife to free her hand and slow down her fall. A well-placed kick to her jaw pushed her further back, while Ziva's heel secured the knife that had fallen next to Hayat. But she didn't need the blade yet. She stood up, carrying on her back the chair that was still attached to her wrist, and kicked the woman once more, behind the ear. Blood darkened Hayat's hijab.

It wasn't over. Hayat tried to stand up but Ziva kicked her in the face and she fell back on the floor. Then Ziva pressed her foot on the woman's throat. And pressed. And pressed.

'ZIVA!' shouted Naheem. 'That's enough!'

Ziva blinked several times. This isn't me. I'm not a killer anymore. But her foot kept pushing down.

'Ziva!' repeated Naheem in a softer voice. 'You don't need to do this.'

But she couldn't stop. The adrenaline had taken over.

'If you kill her, we will never be welcomed here again. We won't be able to build a school. Ziva, please.'

Months of work on her charity. On herself. Gone in smoke. Ziva shook her head. She had changed. She had other priorities. And killing Hayat Parsa wasn't one of them.

Ziva finally released the pressure on the woman's neck. She turned and crouched near the knife, and freed herself from the chair in two snaps of the blade. Without a glance at Hayat, she moved towards Naheem and took care of his ties. He stood up as fast as his age allowed him, then went to check on the bloodied woman on the floor. Ziva saw him take her pulse, then nod. Hayat was still alive.

'I didn't know if you were going to stop,' said Naheem, after a moment of silence.

She shrugged. 'Me neither.'

'We need to call the authorities in Karachi.'

Ziva secured the knife to her belt. 'It might take a while. She said that her associate was coming. We need to get out of here.' She didn't intend of being surprised a second time.

'We can't leave her here. What if the Imam returns and sees her that way?'

Naheem shook Hayat up but the woman didn't wake.

'We don't have time for this,' warned Ziva.

'Help me!' Naheem grabbed the unconscious woman and passed an arm around his neck. 'I can't carry her on my own. We need to bring her back to Karachi.'

Ziva groaned out of frustration, but she didn't want to waste more time arguing. She took Hayat's other arm and transferred some of her weight on her shoulder. 'Let's go!' she pressed.

The car was in front of the house. They had only a few meters to go to be safe. It was only a matter of seconds. Seconds they didn't have.

A loud detonation startled Ziva. Suddenly, Hayat's weight was fully on her. When she looked to Naheem, all she saw was a growing red stain on his shirt.

Then she saw him in the middle of the street, holding a riffle. His insufferable smile was as arrogant as when he had threatened her in her office a week before.

'I told you, Ziva, that you shouldn't have associated yourself with terrorists,' said Omar Isaak.

—

Abby had spent the night in her lab and was currently resting her eyes, sitting in front of her computer with her head in her arms. It was the morning already and she yearned for a huge cup of Caf-Pow and a hot shower. She was so exhausted that she would have settled for a simple coffee, provided that it would have been brought by Gibbs.

She had analysed all samples of the poison that the team had collected in the glasses of the twelve victims, as well as samples from their stomachs that Ducky and Palmer had sent her. She had also inspected the large collection of evidence brought from the crime scene, with no luck so far.

What was keeping her busy now was the partial print left on the glass that hadn't been drunk. Because of the pattern in the crystal, it was almost impossible to reconstitute a viable print that she could run through AFIS. However, she had got her hands on a new interpolation program that was capable of predicting the shape of the ridges from a small part of the print. It was not easy, and not 100% reliable, but maybe it would help. The downside was that the program was taking ages to calculate the probabilities and, ten hours later, she was still waiting for the results.

She knew that the rest of the team had gone home late at night, as it was clear that there would not be any progress in the case before the morning. Gibbs had ordered her to do the same, but she had disobeyed. Again.

She too had rules, and the first of them was "Never disappoint Gibbs". She had broken it and she regretted it deeply. She had been torn between her allegiance to the boss and her friendship with the others. Not to mention that she really wished she had found a way to stop Parsa once and for all. She should have known that without the direction of Gibbs, she couldn't win.

Now she could see in his eyes and in his tone that he was not trusting any of them. Tension was lower since the Director's return but Abby knew that Gibbs hadn't forgotten their betrayal. With her too, Gibbs was cold and distant and it was breaking her heart.

A tear ran down her cheek. Guilt was eating at her. Another tear followed. Then a faint sob.

It was worse than when she had thought that Mikel Mauher was trying to kill her. Worse than her nightmares about autopsy. Worse than when Ari had shot through her lab's window. Even worse than when Harper Dearing had targeted the Navy Yard. Because no matter what had happened in her life, Gibbs had always been there. And now… she sobbed harder. Gibbs would never want to cheer her up again, not when he knew that she had conspired behind his back.

She was so distraught that she didn't hear the door of her lab open, or the sounds of rapid steps coming to her.

'Abbs! Are you alright?'

She raised her eyes full of tears and saw that it was Gibbs, looking worried.

'I'm sorry, Gibbs! I really am!' she cried out.

She could see that he didn't understand her outburst, but she couldn't stop. She felt almost hysterical.

'What is it?' he said, shaking her gently.

She couldn't calm down. All the stress, all the anxiety, all the fears that she had harboured in the past weeks were getting out at this very moment. Everything that she had kept inside since Ziva had left, since Tony had almost died, since Parsa had become a constant threat.

Gibbs seemed to understand that she was not in control because he wrapped his arms around her and held her tightly against his chest.

'There… there…' he whispered in her ear. 'I'm here. Don't be scared.'

Slowly, she relaxed her muscles. She hadn't even realised that she was so tense. She was still crying but the painful sobs coming from her chest became less frequent. Gibbs slowly stroke her back, and she felt soothed.

'How are you feeling?' he asked, after a while.

She didn't want to leave his arms so she didn't reply. Tears were still running on her cheeks. She didn't want to go back to "cold Gibbs", the Gibbs who was furious a her for disobeying. She much preferred it here, in his warmth. But he was not fooled and disentangled himself from her tight grip, so that he could look her in the eyes.

'Tell me,' he said simply.

'I don't want to lose you!' she tried to explain. 'I'm sorry I disappointed you, I really am! Please, don't be angry with me anymore.'

'That's what this is?'

She could hear his surprise. He knew that she didn't cry for nothing. But the thought of losing him was not nothing.

'I'm scared,' she admitted. 'This case… something is wrong, I can feel it!'

She expected him to sweep away her doubts but he replied, 'I know.'

She felt like crying again. If even Gibbs was powerless against Parsa, who would stop him?

Gibbs grabbed her face in his palms and wiped the last tears on her cheeks with his fingers. 'Don't be scared,' he said softly. 'You will never lose me.'

'I am sorry Gibbs.'

'Rule Six.'

'I am sorry,' she repeated firmly. He needed to learn that sometimes saying you were sorry was not a weakness.

Somehow, he seemed to understand because he smiled. Slowly, he closed the distance between them and left a light kiss on her cheek. She closed her eyes and decided to smile too. Gibbs would never, ever leave her.

The moment was broken by a beep coming from her computer. The software had finished calculating the interpolation of the fingerprint ridges. She opened her eyes and saw that Gibbs had already come back to a more reasonable distance. And she realised that he had put a giant cup of Caf-Pow on her desk.

He followed her gaze and said, 'It seems that you have results that deserve it!'

She laughed and grabbed the cup to take a sip, before typing on her keyboard to see the possibilities that the software had left her. There were ten different prints, all possible given the parts that she had.

'Yes! It worked! This programme is impressive.'

'Any ID?' asked Gibbs.

'Not yet, but I'm much closer now.'

She decided to run them first against everyone involved in the case, even thought she knew that it was very unlikely. Running ten prints through AFIS afterwards would take more time.

'I'll call you when I have something,' she added.

He nodded but didn't have time to exit the lab. Abby's computer beeped again after scanning one of the prints, and a photo appeared on her screen.

'Oh no…'

Gibbs jogged back next to her and watched closely what was on the screen with a concerned face. If Abby was to believe her results, there was 84.17% chance that the print they had found on the glass belonged to a man she had learned to hate. The only man she had not wanted to see on her screen today.

The fingerprint belonged to Benham Parsa.

—

Naheem fell to his knees, dragging the still-unconscious Hayat down with him. Ziva couldn't hold them both. She let the woman fall and grabbed Naheem's arm instead.

'Leave him,' ordered Omar Isaak.

Ziva ignored him. She moved Naheem to the side and helped him lie down on the ground. The blood stain was large. Too large. She removed her hijab frantically and applied the fabric on the wound. The blood wasn't stopping. It was too fast.

Busy trying to save Naheem's live, she saw too late that Isaak was coming behind her. He hit her on the side of the head with the butt of his riffle.

'I said: leave him!'

Ziva fell to the side, fighting to stay conscious. She couldn't be knocked out, she had to help Naheem. She closed her eyes for a second, then managed to sit upright. She moved her body towards Naheem but the sound of the riffle bolt stopped her in her track.

'I will not repeat myself again. Next bullet will go between your eyes.'

Powerless, Ziva saw Naheem struggling for air. The blood was leaking to his side.

'This is all he deserves,' commented Isaak. The man seemed hypnotised by the scene, as though it was the best spectacle he had ever seen.

Ziva carefully looked around the street. It was desert. Inhabitants would have fled at the sound of the riffle shot, but more importantly Isaak seemed to be alone.

'Why are you here?' she asked.

Isaak ignored her. Naheem seemed to struggle more and more to breathe. The bullet might have gone through a vital organ. Ziva felt her panic growing. It was bad, really bad.

'How did you enter Pakistan? Fake passport?' she asked again. She needed to engage him, distract him from Naheem. Like with Hayat, find an opening.

But Omar Isaak was not an amateur. He pointed his riffle at her assuredly and for a second Ziva thought he was going to pull the trigger.

'Silence,' he finally said. 'I've waited for this moment for too many years to let you ruin it. Revenge, at last!'

Ziva understood immediately. Naheem had warned her, but she hadn't wanted to listen. Omar Isaak was a man with a mission: avenging his wife's death. And since the real killer had died as a martyr, the scapegoat was Naheem. No matter how hard Naheem had worked to atone his sins.

'Naheem was a bad father,' she pleaded, 'but he's not responsible for his son's actions.'

'Like you're not responsible for your brother's?'

He was wrong. Ziva had payed for Ari's sins tenfold. She had stopped him, killed him. She had undone his web of lies, his dark stain on the world. 'You associated yourself with Benham Parsa. You have no moral ground here.'

'A necessary evil,' he replied. 'Benham Parsa is nothing. He doesn't care about Israel.'

Ziva snickered. 'How naive you are! Parsa is extending his reach everywhere. Israel is not safe from that man, no one is.'

Isaak shrugged, 'He's too busy in Washington putting his plan to destroy NCIS into action. It's happening. Today. And after he's done, he'll have all the Americans after him. CIA, FBI, all the other letters, they'll want a swift revenge. He won't survive much longer than your old team.'

A cold sweat ran down Ziva's back. 'What do you know?'

'Not much. I just know that he's targeting Special Agent Gibbs. And that he has an accomplice.'

'I have to warn him.'

'You misunderstand my intentions here,' Isaak said, smiling. 'I'm not here to stop Benham Parsa. I am enjoying seeing Naheem Gajani suffer and die, but I don't intend on leaving any witness behind. Not you,' he kicked Hayat who was still unconscious on the floor, 'and not this scheming bitch. No one will know I was here.'

Ziva noticed that Naheem was not moving anymore and for a second she thought he was dead, but then she saw his chest raising softly and falling again. He was still breathing. Perhaps the bullet hadn't reached an organ after all. In that case, she needed to act fast.

Isaak's riffle was still pointed at her. She assumed he was trained and proficient with it. But he was also almost hypnotised by Naheem's agony. It was a distraction, and she needed to exploit it.

'Your wife was an interpreter, right? Working for the UN. Working for peace.'

Isakk averted his eyes from Naheem and tightened the grip on his riffle. 'Do not speak about my wife. You know nothing about her.'

Direct confrontation was too dangerous. She needed to mellow him, not antagonise him. 'You knew my father… Did he ever mention my sister, Tali? She was the most compassionate and generous person I've ever known. And she was funny too. She loved cartoons and opera. Such a weird combination, but it worked. She made everyone and everything better. That's why I named my charity after her.'

Naheem coughed faintly. Isaak ignored Ziva and turned his eyes to his victim. A few seconds, that's all she needed. It had to be clean.

'I honoured my sister's memory very poorly after her passing,' she continued, moving her hand down, millimetre after millimetre. 'I only saw rage. Hamas had taken her from me so I would take everyone they loved. I was a soldier, and a good one. But I was disgusted at myself. Every man I killed, even if they deserved it, dug a bigger hole in my soul. With my charity, I'm just trying to make amends. To rebuild, to honour my sister.'

As she expected, Isaak wasn't listening to her anymore. On the ground. Naheem had a convulsion. She hoped that it didn't mean that he was choking. She needed a few more seconds to reach the knife stuck in her belt.

'But I also know that I am not entirely a charitable person and that, when it comes to it, I will need to get my hands dirty again. Like right now.'

Her fingers touched the blade. Isaak turned back one second too late. The knife swished through the air and ended right into his neck, severing his carotid artery. He never had time to pull the trigger.

Ziva's heart skipped a beat, but she couldn't allow herself to think about what she had just done. Naheem had another convulsion on the ground. Without a glance at Omar Isaak's lifeless body or Hayat Parsa's unconscious one, Ziva rushed to Naheem and immediately applied pressure to the wound.

'DOCTOR!' she shouted. 'Is there a doctor here?'

She saw shadows behind blocked windows, but nobody dared to show themselves.

'He's dying!' she pleaded. 'Naheem Gajani is dying! He needs your help!' She wasn't even sure who she was imploring.

'PLEASE!' she shouted again.

There was a movement in a nearby house, then a door opened. Several men rushed to her and surrounded Naheem. One of them, a thin man who was no more than twenty, kneeled and took Naheem's pulse, then delicately removed Ziva's hand from the wound to examine it. She saw him wince. Not good.

'Get he inside,' he said with a thick accent.

The other men grabbed Naheem as gently as possible and carried him to the house they had all come from. Another man kneeled next to Isaak and Hayat's bodies.

'She's a terrorist,' Ziva said, 'don't underestimate her.'

The man nodded and Ziva followed the procession inside. The young doctor, or more accurately the only man who seemed to have any medical knowledge, was cleaning the wound.

'How is he?' she asked, scared of the answer.

'The bullet. It go away. Better than inside.'

His broken English was enough for Ziva. Through and through. There was no bullet to get out. The young man applied clean gauze to the wound and pressed strongly, then wrapped a bandage around Naheem's abdomen to keep it in place. It didn't stop the bleeding entirely but slowed it down.

He then went to a cabinet near the table and extracted a stethoscope that was partially covered with rust. Nevertheless, he applied it on Naheem's chest and listened attentively. 'Good,' he said after a minute. 'Heart slow but good.'

'Are the organs intact?' Ziva asked.

He shrugged. 'Not know. But not dying now.'

'Are you sure?'

Ziva couldn't allow herself to hope for nothing. The young man seemed to understand because he nodded vigorously.

'Yes, yes. Not dying. But he go hospital. Now.'

'Where is the nearest one?'

'Makli. I work. Not far. I show you.'

He waved at the other men, who once again carried Naheem outside in the direction of an old truck that was parked near the house. There was a small crowd where Isaak's body was still lying, but Hayat was nowhere to be seen. Ziva didn't care. Only Naheem mattered.

She sat at the back of the truck near Naheem and the young man, and for the first time in years surprised herself saying a prayer in her head. She crossed the doctor's eyes, who smiled reassuringly. She smiled back, letting herself share his confidence. Naheem was going to be ok. He had to.

No one else would die today.

—

Ellie Bishop was sitting cross-legged next to her desk, with her laptop in front of her. It was late and all her NSA colleagues had left long ago. She, however, could not resign herself to go home. Jake was at a conference in Tampa and she didn't want to be in an empty flat. Not while Parsa was still out there.

Fear had come back almost immediately after her meeting with Special Agent McGee. It was like it hadn't really left her, like the last two years spent rebuilding hadn't existed. It didn't help that Jake had to leave so soon after their holiday. She now felt like a target all the time. She was surprised that Parsa hadn't tried to contact her already. It gave credit to her theory that he had gotten everything he needed from her and didn't care about her anymore. Still, she had never felt so scared.

She had spend the last days observing her chess game, the insane amount of intelligence data that only made sense to the few people who knew how to interpret them. She had looked for specific signs that would give her an idea of what Parsa was up to, but so far she could not understand the pattern, if there was any. The only valid clue was the deaths of the members of the Brotherhood of Doubt. Tim McGee had sent her the report on the twelve men found dead in the hotel during the day, along with the partial print identifying Parsa as the culprit.

It made no sense to her. Parsa had spent years building his organisation from the ground up, recruiting the right people and finding the best way to profit from his attacks. He had been smart, had avoided capture and got rid of any nuisance swiftly. He didn't make mistake, and more importantly, he wasn't sloppy. This whole flashy poisoning streak didn't fit the profile she had painstakingly put together years before.

She decided to get up, stretch her legs, and get a snack from the vending machine. She caught sight of the clock on the wall and sighed when she saw that it was already two in the morning. She knew it was a bad sign. It had started like that too, the last time she had been on Parsa's scent. She had spent countless nights in the office, aimlessly looking at data, determined to understand his intentions and save lives. And it the morning she had woken up to yet another attack that she hadn't been able to prevent, yet another list of victims to add to her already worn out shoulders. She was terrified that McGee and his colleagues would be the next names she would see in the news, fallen because she hadn't done her job.

A long time ago, her father had taught her how to play chess. She had immediately fallen in love with the game, with its complex patterns and strategies. It had felt like home, uncomplicated and challenging at the same time. Very much like her father was. It hadn't taken long for her to win every game against him. He moaned and grumbled of course, but she could see that he was proud of her, his little prodigy of a daughter. She wonder what he would think of her, now that she kept losing, over and over.

She walked back to her laptop, gnawing on a granola bar. Her father would probably encourage her to think differently, to choose a different angle and put herself in her opponent's current frame of mind. What was Parsa thinking right now? He wasn't laying low, that much was clear. His murders were loud, almost obnoxious. She had seen the symbol of the Brotherhood of Doubt painted on the hotel room wall. He was demanding attention. NCIS' attention, but perhaps also hers.

In the past, he had gone out of his way to make sure she wouldn't forget about him. He could have left something for her to find. A clue, a trace, something that she would be the only one to recognise. She hadn't received any weird messages or gifts, so it was something else.

Parsa was in town during the last murders at least, she bet he was still there, somewhere. She opened a satellite view of Washington D.C taken during the previous day. She marked the locations of the crime scenes, but there didn't seem to be any pattern to them. She then observed the area of the Navy Yard. There again, nothing seemed out of place.

On a hunch, she moved the view to her apartment building in Alexandria. And repressed a yelp. On the roof of the building, clearly visible from the powerful NSA satellite, were giant words, written in bright red paint:

WELCOME BACK TO THE GAME, ELEANOR

I hope you enjoyed this chapter! Next time: Ellie and the team go after Parsa! And Ziva makes an important choice.

Let me know what you think so far by leaving a review!

Thank you for reading,

Loufoca