After the little chat with the Mossad director, Jethro touched base with his agents and after a quick chat with both his wife and daughter, Jethro headed to the hospital to see how Vance was doing. He was admittedly worried about the man. Vance had been seriously injured and it hadn't even looked like he'd make it through surgery at first.

Talking to Shannon had calmed him some. She'd been the one to call him. "Hey, Shan. Is everything okay?"

"Yeah," his wife said. "I just called to hear your voice."

"I will take care," he'd replied, the words he'd used to say to her regularly while in the Corps to reassure her leaving his mouth. "I'll come home safe."

"You'd better," she said. "You don't have permission to end up beside Leon, Marine."

They didn't talk long, but the both of them had needed the although brief contact.

"I gotta go, Shan." Even as he said it he didn't want to end the call. "I love you."

"I love you too," she replied without missing a beat.

Jethro quickly knocked on the hospital door after flashing his NCIS credentials to the security detail and walked in, surprised to see that not only was the man alone but that Vance was trying to get out of bed despite his condition.

He immediately ran over to the bed. "Leon, take it easy. What are you doing?"

He gently forced Vance back onto the bed.

"I got to go to the bathroom," Vance said, clearly still wanting to get up.

He laid the seriously injured yet stubborn man back down. "That's a good thing, Man. What do you think that tube is for?"

The director eyed him. "I hate this."

Jethro understood entirely being of a very similar disposition and having been there himself more times than he could count. Focusing on that wasn't going to help Vance though, so he decided to change tactics. He started to pour his unlikely friend a glass of water. "Your wife go to get the kids?"

"Uh-huh," Vance said tiredly. "Jackie caught me up on everything I missed."

Jethro put his hand behind Vance's head to help support the man and put the glass of water to his lips.

After drinking some water, Vance immediately started in on the shoptalk. The man still looked completely drained though. "You talked to Eli."

"Yeah," Jethro confirmed. "He told me about the Russian."

"Eli doesn't think that this attack was the Russian out for revenge."

"No," the combat veteran agreed. "He thinks it was one of ours."

"He always has. I don't know what happened to the Russian after Amsterdam, Gibbs. Shake the tree. Someone at that conference must know."

He decided to ask the question he'd been wanting an answer to since the mess began. "How long has this been cooking, Leon?"

"SecNav signed off almost two years ago," the man explained. "Even the suggestion of a dirty house back in the day is unacceptable." Vance tried to sit up again.

"Hey," he said softly, gently forcing the injured man back onto the bed. "Easy, Man."

"I never felt so weak," Vance informed him, starting to repeatedly push the button on the morphine as he spoke. "So vulnerable."

Jethro took the bottom away and pulled a knife out of his pocket. "Rule number nine."

"How the hell did you get that past security?" Vance interrupted, impressed.

He shoved the knife into the wooden food tray and leaned into Vance's ear. "Never go anywhere without a knife," he continued unperturbed. Jethro then caressed the man's forehead before heading towards the door. He usually wouldn't have, but seeing Vance like this was hard and the man clearly needed some measure of comfort.

Apparently, Vance had more to say. "Gibbs."

Jethro immediately turned around to face the man as he spoke.

"I don't care," Vance said. "I don't care if they were us before we were us. I don't care if they built NCIS brick by brick." Take them down.

Jethro gave the injured director a curt nod, easily understanding exactly what the man was saying, before closing the door and heading back to work.

As Jethro left the hospital room, he immediately ran into DiNozzo. "Hey, Boss."

"Israelis?" he immediately asked Senior Field Agent.

"Making travel plans for their fallen comrade," DiNozzo informed him.

"Abby?" he inquired.

"She hit a brick wall," the younger agent stated, shoving an NCIS procedure manual into his hands that had been compiled by a woman who was about to get a fun little visit to Jethro's chat room. Special Agent Whitney Sharp. She'd been making things difficult from the beginning of this mess. "If we want to solve Hadar's murder, we got to play the game better than the guys who made the rules."

"That's a good place to start," he said, eager to get back to the Navy Yard.

Not wasting any time, Jethro got Agent Sharp in interrogation the second that he was back at NCIS headquarters.

He showed her the procedure manual. "You wrote the book."

"I'm saving my royalties to buy a pack of gum," she quipped.

"Hey," he said, rather unimpressed, "it's not a joke." Jethro flipped to the index and started listing several things off of the same page. "Information Security, Redaction, Witness Protection." Jethro looked up. "Those are chapter headings."

"So is Interrogation." She eyed him. "Want to try a different angle here? Maybe tell me what I'm being accused of?"

"Amsterdam," he said, picking up and showing Sharp the Trident file. "What made you choose Leon Vance?"

"That's my crime?" she asked, seemingly confused. "For picking the man who would become the director?"

"Well yeah," Jethro said. "He didn't exactly fit your 'ideal agent parameters.'"

Special Agent Sharp sighed. "Back then we were thin in Europe. Post the Gulf War, all resources were being diverted to the Middle East. I scoured the academies looking for smart candidates, unafraid of risk."

"Yeah," he said. "'Cause it was dangerous."

"Yeah," Sharp agreed.

"Yeah," Jethro said, feeling more than a little disgusted. "Nobody's gonna miss a poor black guy when everything went wrong."

"No," she said immediately. "I mean, yeah, he had no family but Vance was qualified."

"How?" he demanded. "What in his background made him qualified?"

The lady gave him a pointed look. "Let's just say that there were inconsistencies in his background that he obviously preferred we not explore."

He glared at her. "You threatened him."

"No," Sharp insisted.

"Yeah, you did!" he scoffed. "You leveraged him right into the meat grinder."

"You worked with McCallister," she said. "You know he would have had his back had Eli not gotten in between them.

"The Russian was a killer," he countered.

"Not for sport, only for cash. Some Communist, huh?"

"You knew him?" he inquired.

"Only what I read in McCallister's mission plan," Sharp stated. "Wait a minute, who do you think would have paid this guy to kill Vance?"

"You remember the Russian's name?" he questioned.

He could see the wheels turning as she tried to remember the target's name. "It was... Something with a Z and a V. Like Zurov, Zubov…"

"Zhukov?" he suggested, not sure if he was hoping he was right or wrong.

"Yeah."

"Anatoly Zhukov?" he asked again.

"Yeah, that's him." She was clearly a bit confused by Jethro's new line of questioning. And he definitely didn't like what all this meant. "Wait… That's him. You think, what, he came back to clean up after himself?"

"No," he said, shaking his head. "No. He's long gone."

"You sure?" she asked.

"Yes," he said, "I'm positive." And he was. Anatoly Zhukov was a hitman for the KGB and later arms dealer and assassin for hire. He was also the man Jethro had been sent to Paris by Agent McCallister to take out in 1999.

That was a hard pill to swallow and Jethro was seriously angry. He'd been used. Agent McCallister had clearly used him. That man was the only connection between both the assignation attempts in '91 and '99.

Jethro had always been under the impression that Zhukov was more bloodthirsty than anything because that's what he'd been told. Hence his actions on the mission to handle Zhukov. But…. if someone paid Zhukov a lot of money to kill Vance, then suddenly it made sense that Zhukov would be a loose end to whoever that someone was. … Which is why McCallister sent Decker, Jenny, and Jethro to kill Zhukov.

McCallister had to be the leak and he used Jethro to cover his attempt to kill Vance.

Furthermore, it also meant that Agent McCallister had hired Svetlana Chernitskaya and Viggo Drantyev to murder William Decker, Jenny Shepard, and Jethro himself. Killing Jenny, well, Jethro took that very personally.

More than a little pissed off and fully aware that Vance was in very real danger, Jethro ran out of the interrogation room. He then quickly chatted with security who informed him that McCallister had left the building a few minutes earlier.

More scared than he'd liked to admit, he ran out of the building and started driving to the hospital Vance was at. He just hoped he wasn't too late.

Getting to the hospital, his respect for Vance grew tenfold and his opinion of the man's medical team dropped exponentially.

McCallister was laying on the floor, bleeding out, a nurse and doctor there trying to help the bastard out while Vance was there overdosing by the looks of it on morphine, something that was no doubt McCallister's doing.

Calmly, Jethro made his way over to Vance and unplugged the morphine drip, Vance clearly much too weak to do it himself, a neon sign that something was very wrong.

He and Vance shared a look of understanding, and Jethro put his hand over the other man's heart, relieved he was eventually going to be alright.

He stayed at the hospital for a while but eventually decided to call it a day and head home to his wife. Hopefully, the rest of his time as the acting director would be a little less, well, eventful than the last twenty-four hours had been.

Finally walking through the front door of his home just after 2130, he walked up to his wife who just got to the bottom of the stairs, finding himself immediately pulled into a bearhug by the redhead. "Told ya I'd come home safe, Shan."

Her lips curled upwards. "I don't know how I ended up married to such a good man." Shannon gave him a look as they both slowly made their way over towards the couch. "Who I'm still mad at."

Jethro gave Shannon a rueful smile. He knew that the thought of him being so close to an explosion had seriously scared her and he couldn't blame her. "Nature of the beast. I know that -"

She didn't allow him to finish, swallowing his words with the press of her lips, pushing him back against the edge of the couch. Jethro's body stiffened as his wife gripped the sides of his belt, pulling herself against him. She was not patient with her kiss, which suited Jethro just fine.

It was demanding, forceful, sliding her tongue against his lip to draw it between her teeth, treasuring the small moan it drew from him. His arms were soon around her, gliding down her back, letting himself sink into this moment and chase the turmoil he was feeling away with her warmth.