The conversation with the embassy went about as well as Jethro had expected that it was going to. There was a reason he hated politics.

Once he was informed that the hotel suite had been cleared, his team headed straight over to the Adams House with Prince Sayif.

Jethro had been busy handling hotel security, so walking back into the hotel room he was a bit surprised to find someone already there that was chatting rather vocally to the young Saudi prince on the other side of the room. "Who's that with Sayif?"

"It's his older brother Prince Abdalla," McGee replied. "Lives here in D.C. He's a deputy minister at the Saudi embassy."

"They do not know I speak Arabic," Ziva said.

He smirked, immediately thinking that could be useful. "Ah, good."

"Sayif is getting chewed out for his Western ways," Ziva translated easily. "His brother believes that his pleasure-seeking lifestyle brought on the attack."

Just then Prince Sayif used some very colourful language and stormed angrily into the bedroom, not wanting anything to do with his brother at the moment.

Ziva made a funny face. "That is too disgusting to translate."

Jethro stifled a laugh at the look on Ziva's face as the brother started to walk over to where they were standing. He didn't understand that part of what had been said, but that didn't make Ziva's reaction to the comment any less amusing.

Prince Abdalla walked up. "I apologize for the family disagreement."

"Prince Abdalla," McGee introduced, "this is Special Agent Gibbs."

"Pleasure," the man said as he shook Jethro's hand. "What happened this morning is very disturbing, not only for the assassination attempt on my brother but the tragic death of Walid. He was not only Sayif's aide but a family friend."

"You think that Jihad Al Hurriya was involved?" he asked.

Prince Abdalla gave a curt nod in reply. "It's very possible. They are the sworn enemy of our government."

Just then, DiNozzo walked into the room.

"Hey, Boss. We got agents posted in the lobby and the garage," DiNozzo informed him. "The Royal Guards are covering the stairwells and the corridors."

Jethro opened his mouth to speak but didn't get the chance as Prince Sayif came out of the bedroom, changed into athletic clothes, immediately heading for the door.

"Excuse me," DiNozzo said, quickly stopping the younger man in his tracks. "Where do you think you're going?"

"Fitness centre," Prince Sayif said as though it was obvious.

His Senior Field Agent gave a sarcastic little laugh at that before then adopting a much more serious expression. "I'm afraid not," DiNozzo told the younger man. "We have to make sure it's secure, and you need to be accompanied by an agent."

Prince Sayif sighed. "Fine." The young man then eyed Ziva. "I choose her."

Jethro couldn't quite hide the amused upturn of his lips at Ziva's reaction. He did feel a bit of sympathy, but so little caught the young woman off guard that it was more than a little funny to see.

Heading back to NCIS, Jethro quickly grabbed himself a cup of coffee before making his way down to autopsy. While there, Ducky informed him that x-rays confirmed the long-time medical examiner's initial determination. Blunt-force trauma was indeed the limo driver's cause of death.

Ducky didn't have anything else for him yet, so Jethro headed across the basement to the evidence garage to see where Abby was at with the remains of Prince Sayif's car as he knew she was there.

Walking into the evidence garage, Jethro found Abby underneath the burned-out hulk of the car, dressed, well, he wasn't exactly sure how to put it. Then again, she always had been very much her own person. "Abby. What are you doing?"

"Don't say it, Gibbs," she said. "I know. My shoes and socks. It's 'Mismatch Monday.'"

"For who?" he inquired.

"For me," she replied.

"How about it's "Make my Day Monday?" he stated. "For me."

"Okay," Abby agreed, coming out from under the car. "I am searching for the signature of a bomb maker. I found fragments of a bomb. And I think it's homemade."

"Why?" he asked, extending his hand and gently pulling her to her feet.

"Because my schnozola has detected a trace of nitromethane," she explained. "I heard Tony's father's in town."

He dipped his head slightly. "Yeah, he is. What triggered it?"

"I found remnants of a timer. I'm hoping to find more," Abby informed him more than a little excitably. "What does he look like?"

"Who?" he said, taken slightly aback by the abrupt change of topic.

"Tony's father!" she exclaimed.

"I haven't seen him," Jethro informed her. He'd heard the man was in town, obviously, given that was what McGee had wanted to tell DiNozzo earlier after the conversation with the State Department, but hadn't crossed paths with him yet. "Anything else?"

"Yeah," she said, "I'm wondering if Tony and him have the same sense of humour."

"I'm wondering if you're gonna focus on the case," he gently chastised, wanting her to get back in topic.'

"Right," Abby said. "Um... Okay, so I salvaged the vehicle's onboard nav system. I'm going to download the data to a hard drive. And, uh, hopefully, the little magical zeroes and ones will let us know where the vehicle's been and when."

Just then Jethro got a phone call from McGee telling him that he was needed up in MTAC immediately. "Right, McGee. Be right there." As he ran out of the evidence garage he called out to Abby. "Thanks, Abbs!"

The conversation in MTAC definitely left him slightly unsettled.

As he entered MTAC, Vance told him that the terrorist chatter they were hearing was concerning and directed Jethro to the screen, where an NSA agent was standing by. He was then informed them that the problematic keywords in the chatter - "Prince Omar," "assassination," etc. - came from a specific computer and NCIS had traced it to the business centre at the Adams House Hotel.

Since that was where the ever pleasant Prince Sayif was staying, at his own insistence, DiNozzo and Ziva were both immediately sent to the hotel.

That hadn't gone as expected, whatsoever, as nobody had expected Anthony DiNozzo Senior to be the one they took into custody.

"Hi," he said, extending his hand to the other man, "Jethro Gibbs."

"Oh," the man said, shaking his hand. "Agent Gibbs. Well, you finally get to meet the real Tony DiNozzo."

Jethro gave a small half-hearted laugh. "I didn't expect it was going to be under these circumstances." He then pulled out a chair for the other man. "Have a seat. You've got some explaining to do."

"Well... I was just, uh, e-mailing some of my business associates - I'm developing a resort on St. Bart's," the elder DiNozzo began to explain, not moving from the spot where he was standing. "Um, Junior wouldn't explain, but, uh, what warranted guns being pointed in my face and being brought down here for questioning?"

"You used certain keywords that were picked up on a global surveillance network," he explained. "Monitors, voice and data transmissions."

"Wow! That stuff really exists?" the man immediately asked. "I thought that was only in spy movies. How does it work?"

He eyed the man. "It's classified."

"Oh," the elder DiNozzo said, glancing around the small interrogation room and back to Jethro. "This where you bring the, uh, bad guys for the third degree?"

He fiddled with the pen in his hand, opting to ignore the last question. "You mentioned 'Prince Omar' and 'assassination' in your e-mails. Why?"

"I confess," the other man said, finally taking a seat. "I'm a bit of an opportunist. Uh, money's tight these days, and I'm missing a key piece of financing. So I thought that fate had interceded when I heard that Al was going to be in town."

"Al?" he inquired. "Oh, yeah, that's what Prince Omar Ibn Alwaan's friends call him... yeah. So I was notifying some of my investors that, uh, Al was going to be in town because of the assassination attempt on his son."

"Ah," he said. "Why are you at the Adams House?"

"Oh, I'm staying there," the elder DiNozzo enthusiastically told him. "It's my favourite in Washington. Donald, the concierge, he's a miracle worker. He can get you anything you want: Theatre tickets, restaurant reservations..." The other man then gave Jethro a questioning look. "Have you ever been to the Rooftop Grill?"

"No," he replied honestly.

"Oh," the elder DiNozzo said. "They've got the best rib eye in town."

Deciding that he wasn't likely to get anything useful from the man in front of him, he got up and made his way out of interrogation.

The younger DiNozzo was waiting outside in the hallway for him and Jethro quickly got his attention. "You keep your father clear of the Ibn Alwaan family."

His Senior Field Agent nodded. "Right, Boss."

"Make sure he gets the message," Jethro said. He paused. "And Anthony..."

"Yes?" the younger agent said, looking at him quizzically.

He took a step forward and gently squeezed his Senior Field Agent's shoulder. "You're one hell of an agent, Anthony... and you make me proud." He eyed the younger man. "Remember that." He sensed that this was one of those rare times where his number two needed to hear the words.

DiNozzo nodded his head but didn't speak.

Jethro walked into Observation a moment later and was surprised to see Abby inside, her curiosity having got the better of her. He quickly had her leave, though, so that he could have a private conversation with Ducky.

"What are you thinking?" his friend asked.

Jethro eyed the older man. "He's not involved."

"But?" Ducky pressed.

"But he's got an agenda," he stated. And that was the crux of it, why he had said what he did to DiNozzo earlier. He wouldn't deny being concerned.

"Agreed," Ducky said, concern evident in his voice as well.

Pushing the concern aside, he left Observation and headed to the squad room to see if McGee managed to find anything.

"Sayif's rented car went in for its 10, 000-mile service the day before the explosion, McGee informed him, playing the surveillance footage up on the plasma for him. "The dealership was losing tools, so they installed surveillance cameras to cover all the bays. Now, the mechanic didn't see anything unusual on the vehicle. And, as you can see, nothing was placed under it while it was there. We backgrounded the mechanic. He is clean. So, the explosive device had to be planted on the vehicle after it left the dealership. I'm going to focus on that time period."

Just then Ziva walked in.

Jethro turned towards her as she walked over to him. "Hey. How'd it go at the hotel?"

"Prince Sayif is a chauvinistic royal pain in the tush," she exclaimed.

"Well," he said, in complete agreement, "he's not used to anyone saying no to him."

"You may have to hire someone to protect him from me," she retorted.

Vance then walked up behind them and told them he'd heard from British MI-6. They apparently have a deep-cover mole inside the same terrorist organization that claimed responsibility for the bombing earlier.

The claim was bogus; the group was just trying to get media attention.

Frustrated, but figuring that they could all use some rest and to get a fresh start in the morning, Jethro sent Ziva and McGee home for the night. It wasn't as though they had any new leads.

After dinner, Jethro was relaxing on the couch with a cup of tea on the coffee table and a book in his hand, Shannon doing the same a couple of feet away. He had just started reading the book "Endurance," by Alfred Lansing. The book was a little on the shorter side of things and was about the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition in 1914. His wife, in the same vein, was about half-way through rereading "And Then There Were None," by Agatha Christie for maybe the fourth time.

Their attention was pulled from the books though by a knock on the door.

Jethro immediately got up off the couch and let Tobias in. His friend had texted him a couple of hours earlier saying that they needed to talk.

As expected, Roy Evans was going to make a full recovery. It also turned out that once word had gotten out about the arrest Long's people started flipping on each other and giving up names in order to save themselves. Nobody had ratted out Benson Long yet, but they did hammer even more nails into Evans' coffin.

That, they had known for most of the week. That night, however, caught them a bit off guard. Roy Evans, knowing that he wasn't getting off on the charges against him and being pressured by Tobias, finally ratted out his cousin. Once Roy Evans started talking the man sung. He discussed their operations, the murder of Marine Sergeant Nick Tanner in Oceanside back in '91, being party to the conversation between his cousin and Pedro Hernández when Benson Long ordered Hernández to kill both Shannon and Kelly. They'd arrested Long earlier that day.

"There's more," Tobias said. The slightly older man shot Jethro a rather amused smile and then eyed Shannon. "Your husband has friends in high places." He turned back to Jethro. "My office got a call from both Colonel Bushnell and General Ellison earlier this evening. A couple of other people too."

"DOD leaks like a sieve," he quipped, head spinning a little.

Tobias gave a snort. "News travels fast in Washington. News about the infamous Leroy Jethro Gibbs apparently travels even faster." The man glanced between all three of them. "In any case, as you both know it can take a case a couple of months at least to actually go to trial. In this case, however, we're proceeding to trial immediately."

"When?" his wife asked.

"The twenty-seventh," Tobias replied.

Shannon tensed slightly. "That's so soon."

"SecDef wanted it next week," Tobias explained, "but I was able to convince him that it was fast-tracked enough and you three would need time to prepare." The FBI agent glanced between the both of them. "I assume you're all willing to testify?"

"Yes," he and Shannon immediately agreed.

As soon as Tobias closed the front door behind him Jethro pulled out his phone to call Kelly. This was going to be one hell of a conversation.

Honestly, Jethro wanted it done sooner rather than later. The quicker that these people were behind bars, the safer his family was.