Disclaimer: See chapter 1 for the disclaimer.

Randall Stockwell's Condo, McLean, Virginia/September 15, 2010, 1521 Romeo

It'd taken him awhile longer than Gibbs would've liked, but FBI Agent Tobias Fornell eventually showed up with the complete case file on the Stockwell killing. He and Gibbs filled each other in (in the privacy of Gibbs's office) and, somehow, peacefully agreed to co-operate on an even level for the investigation. The next day, Fornell and Sacks managed to get a look into the Callaway file, as a second set of eyes to hopefully catch something the first set might've missed.

Team Gibbs did one better and re-processed the FBI's crime scene.

"Oh, man," Tony said as he stood up straight and bent slightly backward, causing a few vertebrae to crackle and pop like bubble wrap. "I haven't crawled around under a bed that much since I was seven."

"I'm telling you, Tony, there's nothing the FBI missed," McGee's voice came through the earwig Tony wore. The subtle communications equipment had been "acquisitioned" to allow McGee to communicate from outside, where he'd been banished to after losing the rock-paper-scissors game to dumpster dive in the alley behind Stockwell's condo for evidence. Not only did it contain Stockwell's garbage and the garbage of a few dozen other residents though, the area around it also seemed to serve as the resident living center for the homeless in the area.

McGee had been, understandably, very displeased when he climbed in, lost his footing, and landed right in something McGee didn't ever, ever want to identify.

"You haven't even been in here, McStinky-stinky-stinky," Tony said. "You don't get to say what is or isn't here."

Ziva, meanwhile, was going over her notes of the case file. She slowly moved throughout the living room where Stockwell had been murdered, her eyes locked on the notepad and her mind's eye seeing what happened. She then raised her head and scanned the room, matching it to her mental movie to see what matched and what didn't. Just as she confirmed it matched almost perfectly, Tony waltzed in.

"Bedroom's clear. I'm starting to think the killer didn't even set a foot anywhere outside the living room and the kitchen."

Ziva, however, seemed to ignore him as she moved to stand where the killer was speculated to have been standing when he'd killed Stockwell.

"McGee came up short in the trash too, save for his new aroma," Tony continued, obviously peeved that Ziva wasn't replying. For her part, the female probie simply looked around the room, carefully, from her proverbial spot in the killer's shoes.

Tony set his jaw in annoyance before trying one last thing to get her attention. "Actually the smell kinda reminds me of this one time I walked in on Gibbs and Abby in the act."

"It must have been the smell of whatever has killed so many of your brain cells." Ziva replied without even looking at him as she locked her gaze on a nearby air conditioning vent in the floor. Drawing her knife, she walked to and knelt beside it as Tony joined her.

"What're ya doing?"

"Following my gut," Ziva replied, again without looking at him as she used her knife to unscrew the vent.

"Probies aren't allowed to have guts," Tony responded as he watched Ziva shine a light down the black hole with one gloved hand, and dive in with the other. When it came back up, the white latex was filthy and grimy with dust, but held between her thumb and forefinger was a single brass shell.

"Woman's intuition, then," Ziva said with her famous smile.

Gibbs hung up and turned to Fornell. "They found a shell casing in an air conditioning vent. It's dusty, but they're bringing it back for Abby to work on."

"What good's that gonna do?" Fornell asked. "All she can do with it is confirm the bullet came from the casing, and therefore the casing came from the murder weapon. Problem is we have no weapon to compare it with, so we don't actually have anything."

"She'll find something," Gibbs replied simply before taking a sip of his coffee. Fornell's phone rang, and the FBI agent pulled it out of his pocket.

"Fornell…yes…think he's legit? No kiddin'? Alright, bring him in, we'll talk to him."

"What was that?" Gibbs asked as his friend hung up.

"A guy from the CIA we were lookin' for called us up. He just got back from business in Cairo and found out about Stockwell. Now he's saying he has info about it and wants to share."

Gibbs popped his neck before standing. "Let's go share then."

NCIS Headquarters/September 15, 2010, 1614 Romeo

When Elliot Cress of the CIA was picked up by an FBI agent and an NCIS agent, his first words had been, "Callaway's dead, too, isn't he." It'd definitely been a resigned statement of fact, and Gibbs's interest had definitely been grabbed. For convenience's sake, they decided to interview him at NCIS Headquarters, so that if Abby's magic turned something up on the casing, they could simply head downstairs to find out what rather than drive all the way from the Hoover Building.

Now Gibbs, Fornell, and Cress sat in a conference room, a notepad before Gibbs and a tape recorder between him and Cress, who appeared to be in his early forties and looked tired and defeated. Finally, Fornell started off.

"So what have you been doing lately, Mr. Cress?" he asked.

"I've been in Cairo on work-related business for, I'd say, about a month," Cress replied. "It's really hard to reach me out there unless you're with the Agency. Different times of day, weather conditions, and whether or not I'm working are big factors in if I can take a call."

"Did you know Randall Stockwell?" Gibbs asked. He already knew the answer, but it was a formality of the questioning.

Cress nodded. "Before I got my current position, I used to be Stockwell's assistant in the SOG-JSOC coordination department of the CIA's Special Activities Division, which the SOG is a part of. I actually ended up in that spot after 9-11, first working for a guy named Jordy Verill until Stockwell replaced him in '03. Stockwell kept me as his assistant until '08, then we both went our separate ways and on to better things. During those five years though, he and I were like professional Siamese twins…until the end of our partnership, at least."

"You keep in touch with him afterward?"

"Not really. An occasional card or call, that's about it. In all honesty, after one of our last jobs together, I really didn't want anything to do with him. Buuut, my mother raised a polite fool, so I simply kept contact to a minimum."

"What were your duties as Stockwell's assistant?" Fornell asked.

"To be appraised of the same intel he was, help him keep things organized, and if necessary fill in his shoes should he be absent. I actually had to do that once, and I didn't like it at all."

"And what exactly did Stockwell do?" Gibbs chimed in.

"As the SOG-JSOC coordinator, he was part of a five man…'committee,' for lack of a better term, one of two such groups. This committee deliberated and decided upon force deployment and operation execution for joint SOG-JSOC outfits in the Middle East, where exactly is classified. Two of the other committee members were strictly from SOG/SAD, the other two from JSOC, and then Randy to help them function together."

"Mr. Cress, when we picked you up you said 'Callaway's dead, too, isn't he,'" Gibbs said, steering the conference into his jurisdiction. "How did you know Captain Callaway, and how did you know he was dead?"

Cress sighed, reached into his pocket, and pulled out a pack of Winterfresh. After withdrawing a stick and returning the pack, he unwrapped the chosen piece of gum and bent it into his mouth. "I gave up smoking fifteen years ago when I was in my twenties," he said offhandedly. "Doesn't matter that I only smoked for four years, every day I feel the need for a nice, full cancer stick. When I get stressed, it gets even worse." He gnawed on the gum as he seemed lost in thought, then he spoke again.

"Callaway was one of the JSOC representatives on the committee. He was still there when Randy and I left. I only remember him especially because he and I frequented the same lunch spot. Nice enough fellow, but we never really became friends, so I didn't keep in contact with him after I transferred."

"Doesn't explain how you knew he was dead," Gibbs said, carefully watching the man before him. He seemed guilty, but his gut told him it wasn't the crime itself that wrenched…not entirely.

Cress was silent for a moment, then he began to unload his burden. "Couple days ago, just before I left Cairo, I got a call from an unknown number. Surprised the hell outta me, 'cause no one takes the effort to reach me unless it's work related, and I know those numbers by heart. So I answered and talked to a guy here in the States. He told me that he was a retired operator, and that he'd worked in JSOC until '08. He told me about a mission he'd been on, and my gut clenched up because I knew what op he was talking about. It was one that our committee had been in charge of."

Cress closed his eyes and massaged his forehead before continuing. "A small team of DEVGRU operators was gonna infiltrate a small city. Can't say what country or province, but suffice to say it was a very anti-coalition locale. They'd go in, snatch three high-value targets, then exfil. If exfil wasn't possible because, say, their cover was blown, we'd send in an Army Ranger company in a vehicle convoy to basically strong-arm 'em out. Well, the op goes down, and wouldn't you know it, their cover was blown. They managed to hole up in a shack on the main road of the city near its outer limits, within easy travel distance for a well-armed convoy…they'd been in that shack three days when they finally managed to fix their radio and contact us. If they'd called even eleven hours before they did, we would've sent that convoy and gotten them out with nothing worse than enemy casualties and maybe a few civilians."

Gibbs and Fornell shared a look, then returned their gazes to Cress. "But you didn't send them?" Gibbs asked.

"No," Cress replied. "Much as I hate it, politics and the will to win of those back home have more impact on the battlefield than any foot soldier, tank, or bomb. By the time the team had called us, the scene back home had changed, and a large deployment of troops to that area of the country would've been political suicide. Unfortunately for the men on the ground, most of the committee had political aspirations after the military and the Agency…"

Cress sighed again and shook his head in an odd mixture of regret and disgust. "The committee decided four to one in favor of withholding the Ranger convoy. Randy and Callaway were two of the four. The committee's next transmission to the team in the city was to inform them that help was not available, they were to do what they could to escape on their own, and they were wished the best of luck. All communications were then terminated."

"What happened to the team?" Fornell asked.

"The man who called me in Cairo said that he was the only one who made it out. He walked on foot to a friendly zone and carried one of the targets on his shoulders the whole way. Not long after that op, he retired from the Navy and tried to get on with his life. He said that for the past two years he'd tried to come to grips with the loss of his team, but he was failing miserably. Finally, he decided to find and talk to the men responsible and get a definitive answer. He thought that if he knew for a solid fact why his team couldn't be saved, he might find some semblance of closure."

"So he'd gotten to digging, calling in old favors from his days in the field as both a Navy man and a borrowed SOG operator. He'd gotten to me as an assistant and was pleading with me to at least give him a few names."

Cress stopped chewing, let out a deep exhale through his nose, and lowered his chin in shame. "I believed him. Every word. So I told him the two names I really knew, Randy and Callaway's, and told him what I could remember of the other three: Hanson, Margott, and Merdetzky. Then I got home and heard about Randy…and that whoever did it was a professional. I called the FBI as soon as I could. Then you two showed up, and all I did was connect the dots."

"Those names you gave, the committee members', did you give any first names?" Gibbs asked as Fornell wrote the names down.

"No. I didn't know 'em, just their names and that Hanson was in the Army."

After Fornell asked how to spell "Merdetzky" and Cress told him, Gibbs's phone rang.

"Gibbs…uh-huh…be right there Abs." After hanging up, he turned to Cress. "Alright Mr. Cress, what you've told us today has been very helpful. All we need to know is one more thing: what was the name of the man who called you?"

"Hauser," Cress said, and his face was pained as he said it. "Vince Hauser."