Chapter 9

As Tony and Ziva walked down the hallway, a smartly dressed FBI agent stood and looked at them condescendingly. "You sure took your sweet time getting here. I thought NCIS was supposed to be a cut above or something like that."

"Well, if the FBI is so great, why is your witness refusing your protection?" Tony retorted. "We're a cut above you, that's for sure."

Before the FBI agent could reply, Ziva stepped in between the two men. "If you two would stop your silly..." she paused, searching for the correct word. "...macho posturing, maybe we could focus on the important things, yes? Is he in there, Agent...?"

"Gyllenskog," he answered. "Yeah, he's right in there."

"How is he?"

"He lost a lot of blood, but the doctors say he'll heal up just fine. He refused to go to any other hospital."

"Why did he pick the Naval Hospital?" Tony asked, with a trace of his previous antagonism.

Agent Gyllenskog grimaced. "He said that the Navy cared more about its patients than the FBI did about its witnesses."

"Thank you, Agent...Gyllen...skog," Ziva said, tripping a little over the unfamiliar syllables. "We'll just go in and introduce ourselves. He has still agreed to have FBI presence, hasn't he?"

"Yes. This is still our case. You guys are just helping out."

"Don't worry, Gyl," Tony said, teasingly. "We won't spread it around... not too far anyway."

Ziva elbowed him sharply in the stomach. Tony doubled over as they left the agent's presence and headed to the secured room. "Honestly, Tony. Do you have to insult every other agency in this country?"

"He's a dork, Ziva. Those guys screwed up and now they want us to keep their tails out of the fire."

"Nevertheless, your ego is not at stake. Could you at least try to act like a professional?"

Tony's response was a snarky grin and a slap on Ziva's rear end. She responded by elbowing him a bit lower than his stomach. As Tony tried not to sink to the floor, Ziva smiled brightly as she stepped past him into the room.

"Hello, you are Terence Ainsworth?" Ziva asked politely.

The man lying on the hospital bed looked anything but trusting. He looked down at a piece of paper in his hand and back up at Ziva. "You don't look Italian," he said nervously.

"I'm not. I'm Israeli." Tony staggered in behind her. She jerked her head toward him. "He's Italian."

"Which one of you is David, then?" he asked in confusion, pronouncing Ziva's last name with a short "I."

"I'm Officer Ziva David and this is Agent Anthony DiNozzo." Ziva was willing to cut the man a little slack considering his recent experience. "We're here from NCIS."

"You're Israeli?" Terence asked. Ziva noticed that he had a trace of a British accent which waned as his nerves calmed.

"Yes. I'm...on loan from Mossad."

Terence smiled wanly. "A long story, I take it?"

"You have no idea."

"Well, I'm glad you two are here."

Ziva found herself responding to the overt relief in his voice with a sympathetic smile. Terence Ainsworth was a middle-aged bookish man with a receding hairline. He looked like a professor or a librarian. And he also looked completely overwhelmed by the strange world in which he'd landed.

Tony finally recovered from Ziva's "rebuke" and approached Terence. "Can you walk us through what happened, Mr. Ainsworth? We've been sitting on the Beltway all morning, and we didn't have a chance to get caught up on this case."

"The Beltway, huh? I heard on the radio that there was an accident a few hours ago."

"Yeah, it was bad," Tony agreed, thinking of Tim.

"You knew someone in the crash?"

"How did you know that?" Tony asked, surprised by Terence's intuition.

"I could just tell by the way you spoke. Is your friend okay?"

"He'll be fine."

Terence nodded. "I'm glad. I know what it's like to lose someone." He faltered and then took a deep breath. "Okay, so you need to know everything?"

"Yes, if you could."

"That's fine. It's just an accident that I'm involved in this at all. I work in special collections at the archives. I'm not an agent or anything, but sometimes, the local police or the federal agencies request analysts for reading texts, breaking old-fashioned codes, examining art, that sort of thing. I've been a consultant for the FBI, the police department, even for the Navy a couple of times."

"And this time?"

"This time it was the FBI. I'm regularly a part of a counter intelligence group. It's called National Counter Intelligence Working Group. Creativity doesn't seem to be one of the FBI's strong points," he commented wryly. "It's a group of people from the FBI, academia, businesses who meet occasionally. It's supposed to be a way to foster awareness of the dangers of espionage and to explain how to prevent it. What generally happens with me is that I'm called in to help out with various cases that fall under my purview. However, this time I came to them."

"Why?"

"They'd intercepted an illegal shipment of what looked like museum artifacts: artwork, old books. It's my area of expertise, and they wanted me to authenticate the pieces."

"How long does that kind of thing usually take?"

"It depends. If there's even a suspicion of forgery, authentication can take days. I was working on the project for about two weeks, mainly because I was only working on it when I had a break from my regular job. Most of the stuff was so obviously forged, I looked at it more closely than I had planned."

"Why? That seems a little backwards."

"Too much time with the FBI, I guess." Terence laughed. "No halfway decent collector or curator would have been fooled by these things. I don't know why they would have even bothered. What was stranger though was that there were a few genuine artifacts among all of the junk. I still don't know why that is. It doesn't make any sense."

"What about the forgeries?"

"It turns out that they weren't actually supposed to be forgeries. They were disguises."

"Disguises for what?"

"Information. It was quite clever, really. If the FBI had given this project to someone unused to the concept of counter intelligence, it probably would have gone unnoticed. Whoever these people are, they embedded sensitive information under the surface of the paintings and texts. I found it because I used ultraviolet light and X-ray fluorescence to bring up the images beneath the paint. It's a non-invasive method of investigation, and until very recently, Stanford was the only place to get it done in the country. They did all the work on that Archimedes palimpsest that came out last year."

"What kind of information did you find?" Tony asked, passing over the irrelevant material. He knew Tim would have been sidetracked by the techno-babble, but he was not interested in how Terence had found the information, just what the information was.

"FBI intelligence. It's evidence that they have a mole. I don't know who the mole is, but once I took what I'd found to the agents in charge of the case, they immediately put me under 24-hour surveillance. I trusted them to protect me and to protect my family. I guess I never really thought I was in danger. That's the kind of thing that only happens on television." He swallowed hard. "I was terribly wrong. Two days ago, my wife and I were going out, and someone shot at us. I only got hit in the shoulder, but Jillian... she's in a coma. The doctors don't know when or if she'll come out of it."

"I'm sorry, Mr. Ainsworth. Most people would pull out after something like that, not just request different guards."

In an attempt to disperse the pall that had fallen over the room, he smiled weakly and said, "It's a flaw in my genetic makeup. Don't back down to bullies. I just never thought they'd go after my family as well. My children have been whisked away somewhere. I don't know where. I'm going to be separated from them until the mole is found. I don't know where Jillian is either. I only get reports on her progress, or lack thereof." He looked at them earnestly. "I just want to survive this. I'm no hero. I'm a glorified librarian, and I'd like to tell what I know and then go back to that. That's why I asked for you to be a part of this case. I don't know who the mole is, but I know it's not in NCIS."

"Hero or not, Mr. Ainsworth, I'm impressed with your attitude."

"It took me five years to become a U.S. citizen. I'm not going to cut and run at the first sign of trouble."

Tony and Ziva smiled at each other. They found themselves truly liking this British librarian. The initial interview complete, the two agents set up the security detail and cleared it all with Agent Gyllenskog. Then, they settled down to wait.