The rest of the week picked up, and Jethro found himself quite busy and thrown into a situation that he hadn't seen coming; becoming acting director of NCIS. Thankfully, he'd been able to make it to Emily's birthday dinner before all hell broke loose and to do a little something for Ziva's as well.

The team had been assigned to protect Ziva's father when his attendance at a local conference led to some, well, interesting surprises.

He'd figured it would be fine until things rapidly took a turn for the worst. Presumably, the door-bomb was rigged to explode when someone entered the safe house which now left Jethro in a rather chaotic situation and talking, futilely, to a walkie-talkie, the NCIS and Mossad directors' security detail lying on the floor amidst a pile of rubble.

The longer that Jethro didn't get a response, the more anxious he felt.

"Hadar," he pressed, "acknowledge." No response came. "Leon, are you there? Eli?"

Now beyond certain that they were in trouble, Jethro ran into the building. He made his way over to Vance who had somehow reached for his gun and was currently aiming it at the door, frightened and out of it.

"Leon. Leon." Jethro managed to gently disarm Vance who clearly wasn't fully aware of what was going on. The man was really out of it. Jethro moved to get Vance onto his back so he could better open his airways.

"You're crazy," Vance said, still not fully aware and trying to sit up.

"Hey, come on." He cupped Vance's head. "Come on, look at me. Look at me."

"I can't believe that happened again," the man said, more alert now. Vance then tried to sit up again and Jethro saw a bloody shrapnel wound in the man's abdomen. Vance passed out a few seconds later, really concerning him.

Jethro used his hands to try and stop the bleeding. "Come on, Leon. Stay with me."

He accompanied Vance to the hospital.

"Perforated organs and he's losing blood," the paramedic said. "BP's at 90 over 40, doctor. Pulse ox at 80 percent, falling, eight litres, O2."

While Vance was being wheeled down the hall, Vance pulled the oxygen mask off his face and asked for his wife. The man then told Jethro to put a security detail on his family but started to fade before Jethro could get any answers about what Vance remembered or where Eli David had vanished to.

The doctor ended their little chat at that point, unsurprisingly, and Vance also decided to hand Jethro the reigns so to speak. "You're in charge, Gibbs."

"I'm not you, Leon!" he said in protest. Jethro really wasn't a politico kind of guy and the director's job was all politics.

The man's reply was instantaneous. "I trust you, Gibbs."

He was not looking forward to being the acting director for an indefinite period of time but decided to just deal with it and focus on figuring out who tried and might yet succeed in killing the man who'd started to become a friend of sorts.

"Boss," McGee said, walking up to Jethro with purpose, "I don't understand. Every other member of the Palestinian Liberation Front is dead. Karif Yasin is the only one still alive and he's in custody."

Quickly wracking his brain, he eyed his youngest agent and decided on his team's marching orders. "Call Tony. Call Ziva. Lock down the crime scene, process and canvass. Shut down Vance's conference. Transfer everyone back to the Navy Yard."

"Got it," McGee said. "Anything else?"

"Yasin," he said. "Get him back in interrogation. Find out what the hell we missed."

Once the younger agent left the hospital waiting room, Jethro pulled out his cellphone, replied to a message from Kelly, and called Shannon to let her know he was probably in for a long night. Probably a long few days, if he was being honest. Jethro was just glad that he and Shannon were okay. The dust had settled.

He'd been really concerned about the Hernández situation throwing a wrench into their relationship regardless of what Shannon had initially said.

"Do you want me to go to the hospital or stay with Jackie?" she inquired.

"She doesn't know yet," he explained. "I'm heading there now." He sighed. "And I'd be more comfortable with you not at the hospital until I know what's going on."

"Okay," Shannon agreed. "Anything I can do?"

"Lock the doors," he said. "Stay home."

After the brief chat with his wife, Jethro then hopped into his pickup truck to go talk to Jackie and set up the protection detail that Vance had requested.

Jethro then had to deal with higher-ups which he never enjoyed.

With that rather irritating mess momentarily dealt with, he headed to the squad room and started sorting through boxes of files. Finally, McGee walked into the squad room. "McGee, witness statements."

"Yeah," McGee replied tiredly. "People heard the blasts, but no one saw anything. Tony and Ziva are following a blood trail. The thinking is, Eli was abducted."

"Making Vance and Hadar collateral damage," he commented. "Karif Yasin?"

The man had killed three people. Although the ship that the murders had occurred on sank, they'd salvaged enough evidence for Jethro to realize that the murders were a cover for the trafficking of some extremely shady people, who Mossad was tracking. Mossad agents were also in D.C trying to stop the assassins from killing Ziva's father who'd come to the District for Vance's conference. Hence the safe house that they had been hiding out in when the bomb went off.

"Last of the Mohicans is en route," McGee told him, "but the timing doesn't compute. We were on 'em, boss. They didn't make that safe house. It had to be someone else." Just then one of the former agents from the conference walked in. "Agent McCallister... Now, remember, you're supposed to ask me before using the men's room."

"Shut up!" the man snarked back at the young agent. "Permission to smack your boy with my cane, Gibbs?"

"Denied," he drawled.

Agent McCallister eyed Jethro's desk. "I guess secret goes out the window when it's evidence in a murder."

"Or a kidnapping," he stated. "Eli David is missing."

"Missing doesn't necessarily mean kidnapped," McCallister countered. "Attacking an NCIS safe house requires inside information. And given this little conference was destined to become a shouting match between and Vance and Eli… He could be a victim. What I know of the man, makes more sense..."

"If Eli David was the suspect, even with his own bodyguard dead?" he replied.

"You mean his only witness," McCallister retorted. "I'm just spitballing. Heck, it wouldn't be the first time Eli tried to kill Vance."

That little comment instantly caught Jethro's attention. He then watched as McCallister started rummaging through one of the boxes of files, selecting one. The former agent then passed the file to Jethro. "I'd start here. Operation Trident."

Curiosity piqued, Jethro opened the file and started to read it.

Apparently, Leon Vance's first-ever mission involved a target who was simply known as "The Russian" in 1991. The op was in Amsterdam and the very green agent was talked through it by Agent McCallister himself.

Jethro didn't get through even half the file though before he needed to head down to autopsy to see if Ducky had anything for him.

Ducky told him that Hadar's C.O.D was massive trauma to the heart and blood loss. The entry wounds are all to the back and sides. The blast had an upward trajectory, but Ducky was at a loss for the weapon since the shrapnel didn't match any .12 gauge the medical examiner had ever seen. Ducky thought that the pattern was more like that of an IED.

With that useful piece of information, Jethro took his leave and headed to the elevator, pulling out the Trident file once more.

Not finding anything useful in it yet, Jethro sent McGee to Abby's forensics lab and was rather surprised when Eli David walked in with Ziva and the two other Mossad agents.

Setting up a closed interrogation with the man, he sat down with the man to hopefully get some answers about what was going on. One thing that had become clear when he read the file was that Eli David was intimately involved in the operation back in '91.

The man seated there in front of him knocked on the interrogation table three times as he spoke. "Leon and I are forged in fire and blood."

"So, you met for the first time in Amsterdam?" he asked, placing the Trident file down in front of the Mossad director.

"This file is not the complete picture," the man replied easily. "Leon and I had hoped to reveal all sides during the review conference."

His gaze flickered to and from the file. "You two arranged this conference together?"

"I urged Leon to include Amsterdam. His role in that mission was not what he was told. Did you know that? In the almost 20 years since all of the players have scattered around the globe."

"You found them. Director Vance invited them." He eyed Eli. "To unearth what?"

"Not what. Who." The Mossad director then gave him a rather pointed look. "Who is it that wants Leon dead, Gibbs?"

"The Russian operative," he inquired. "His name is redacted."

"I never knew his name," Eli said. "Another detail I had hoped to uncover."

"According to Vance's report," Jethro said, gesturing to the aforementioned document, "you yourself told the Russian that Vance was sent there to kill him?"

"Yes," the Mossad director admitted. "That is true."

"So you knew that that made Vance a target."

"Yes. It did." Eli then eyed him again. "Leon never forgets anything. Did you know that about him?"

He gave a curt nod. "I do."

"It is what saved his life this morning. When we walked in that door, he had seen it before." The man went on to explain that he himself had taught Vance how to make that particular style of explosive.

That was something that Jethro wasn't entirely surprised that Eli knew how to do.

"Leon was credited with the role he played in eliminating the hit team," Eli continued to explain. "The Russian vanished from Holland. I was not able to keep track of him. It was at that time that I was being reinstated to Mossad."

"And resuming your rise to the top," he added.

"You make it sound like fait accompli," the man gently chided him. "You have no idea what it was like in that dingy little room. Neither one of us had any idea of what we were about to start."

Jethro had been right. He was definitely in for a long few days if not weeks. This mess was going to give him a migraine. I need coffee.