A/N: Whoops, got so caught up in writing I forgot to post another chapter. This is the first time I've written on the fly like this. Dang story was supposed to be fifteen pages, max. It's, uh, more than that. I apologize if that results in a few more typos than usual - tell me if you spot them. I'm all right with that kind of crit.

Deja Vu All Over Again
Chapter Four

Gibbs' anger was working up to boiling point. He harbored great fondness for DiNozzo, though he worked hard to demonstrate otherwise. It was their thing, the prickly affection masquerading as impatience tolerance. He knew DiNozzo also understood him better than anyone else on the team, though that, too, was not for full public knowledge. He wasn't sure DiNozzo even knew that one. There was just something about DiNozzo that was exasperating and endearing almost at the same time. Gibbs might fight the urge to slap the back of the guy's head at least four times a day, but he liked Tony.

Sometimes, though, Gibbs' best agent was a serious pain in his backside. Like right now, for example. Ducky and Palmer had left half an hour ago, were probably already back in the morgue, but the rest of them were stuck here because Tony had decided to up and disappear on him.

"Tony!" Ziva's voice was faint, that was how far she'd circled out.

"Tony!" McGee shouted, seconds after Ziva's call faded into the water. "Hey, Tony!"

Something ate at his gut, something more than irritation at DiNozzo's antics. The longer this went on, the more concern took the place of annoyance. More accurately, the annoyance failed to mask the concern, even in his own mind. Tony was many often aggravating things, but he wasn't irresponsible on the job. He wouldn't go anywhere he couldn't get back from in time for the on-scene wrap-up. That was why he was angry. Concern and anger were close companions, not-so-strange bedfellows. He was angry with DiNozzo for vanishing and at himself for letting it happen practically under his nose. The absence of evidence rankled. Nothing was done without leaving a trace, yet Tony was just … gone. He didn't like it.

"Boss, I got something," McGee called, voice almost lost to the wind, as if he'd had a line to Gibbs' thoughts.

McGee was at least a hundred yards from him, waving his arms like he thought no one would see him otherwise. Gibbs broke into a swift trot and wasn't surprised when Ziva quickly caught up from her own search a hundred yards the opposite direction from McGee. She was young and ex-Mossad, but it was still annoying how quick she was, reminded him of his own age and mortality. He pursed his lips as they approached McGee, wondering about DiNozzo's mortality. The kid had better not be what McGee was gesticulating about.

He wasn't, but that didn't make Gibbs feel much relief.

"That is Tony's hat," Ziva's eyes immediately left the shoreline for the icy dark water. "And it is very wet."

"Yeah, it's wet," Gibbs said.

Wet, like had been submerged. Gibbs felt a headache forming, the kind that wouldn't go away until his agent was back where he was supposed to be.

"I honestly thought for a while he was pranking us. You know, a pre-Halloween spook," McGee muttered.

"Tony hates Halloween," Ziva said flatly. "As juvenile as he is, I'm not sure this is the kind of prank he'd pull."

"Yeah, I know. I know. But how would he have gotten past us and all the way down here?" McGee looked baffled enough for all of them. "It doesn't make any sense."

It made sense if water currents were taken into consideration. Tony could have gone in back at the pier.

"Bag it, and keep looking," Gibbs said, tone clipped. His gut ached now too. "I gotta make a call."

This was beyond his team now. He needed to let Vance know what was going on. They'd need another team, maybe Coast Guard search and rescue (not retrieve, no). Gibbs couldn't fathom Tony going into the water, but he couldn't fathom where else he would have gone without leaving a trace. Hell, he was starting to wonder if Ensign Yee hadn't been the only disappearance-slash-death in the last month or so, but the only one NCIS'd get called to. Civilian drownings didn't mean much for their jurisdiction, but a dead sailor and a missing agent escalated this. Still, it shouldn't be too hard to determine if there'd been any civilian disappearances in the area recently. He'd avoid bringing FBI in if he could, but he knew they'd be on it in a flash if dots were there to be connected.

He kept his conversation with Vance short and to the point. Half an hour wasn't a long time for someone to be missing and Gibbs had the sense to know if anyone else had called this in, Vance would have told them to not jump to conclusions, give it a few minutes. DiNozzo's hat could have fallen off, he could have followed a trail and lost track of time. Etc, etc. But, like it or not, Vance knew him too, knew he wouldn't panic and report an agent missing if said agent weren't actually missing, particularly an agent that had up and gone missing on him several times over the past nine or so years. DiNozzo had a shitty track record, never his fault, but it'd had come way too close way too often.

Gibbs wasn't going to allow this time to toe over that line. He was going to find Tony, and he was going to wring his neck for putting them through this again. That would take place after, of course, he put whoever had his man behind bars or below the ground. He strode back to Ziva and McGee, both sticking close to each other now and another fifteen feet down. In fact, they were standing stock still, looking down. He picked his way to them, cursed his old knees the whole way.

"Camera," Ziva said. "It looks severely damaged."

He recognized it as obviously the one he'd just seen Tony wielding at the Yee scene. Gibbs took off his hat, ran a hand through his hair and then jammed the hat back on low, to cover the frustration in his eyes.

"Yes, it does," Gibbs said.

Something else glinted in the late afternoon sun. Gibbs walked the several feet himself, squatted down and found a cell phone.

"That's not Tony's."

"No. Doesn't mean whoever owns it isn't involved somehow. Witness, maybe." Involved in or witness to what was another question, and one he wasn't too eager to find out lest he not like the answer. Gibbs tossed the cell into the bag Ziva had prepped. He scowled for a second and said, "McGee, get that all back to Abby and help see if you can salvage anything from it. She needs to know what's going on, but try not to alarm her. Ziva and I'll stay here to wait for Coast Guard divers."

"Got it, Boss," McGee said, but looked like he'd rather stay.

Truthfully, Gibbs couldn't have McGee around. McGee would talk. The kid would pull random, nervous commentary he had yet to shake from his habits, which would only set all of them further on edge. His own brain's random, nervous commentary was more than enough. With Ziva, he'd still get the worried looks, but she was nearly as tight-lipped as he was himself. They continued searching until reinforcements arrived, and all the while Gibbs kept thinking like McGee had, that Tony might spring out from somewhere with a shit-eating grin on his face. It would piss him off to no end, but he'd rather an elaborate prank gone out of control than to see Tony's face the way Ensign Yee's had ended up.

Once the search switched to marine, there was an hour, maybe an hour and a half of adequate light left, and he knew the divers could operate at night but wouldn't like to. The air was cold and the water colder. Gibbs closed his eyes, hating this feeling as much today as he had anytime something happened to someone who was his responsibility, someone he cared about. He thought about Mike Franks, going out for a walk and dying in a bloody mess on a quiet, residential street. He thought about Jenny Sheppard, who he suspected had chosen to go down guns blazing instead of letting a disease take her. He thought about Kate Todd, who saved his life one moment and had hers stolen the next. He thought about Shannon and Kelly.

But this wasn't like any of those scenarios. Tony was like a damned rubber ball, and if he was in the water, he needed to bounce to the surface right now. Except, Gibbs knew, if he did that, he'd be dead. If Tony was in the water, he was dead. That was it. He was four seconds away from screaming to turn the boat around, his man couldn't be out there, when the call was taken from his hands. The silent wait on deck was over for the night, with no results. He and Ziva had no choice but to go back, hope Abby had found something useful on Tony's camera.

The ride back to NCIS headquarters was as wordless as the time on the boat, only Gibbs was starting to think that was just as bad as McGee's talking would have been.

"I am worried, Gibbs," Ziva said when they were in the elevator, the first she'd shared with him in hours. "This is not the first time this has happened."

"No, it's not," he said, "but we're going to find him. You can be sure of that."

He knew it was wholly inadequate as far as comfort went but it was all he had. There wasn't a question the Yee case had been handed off, Vance had assured him of that, though something about it niggled. Ducky would fill him in when asked, but the first place both he and Ziva needed to go was Abby's lab. He was hoping his amazing forensics scientist would have something for him to go on that was more substantial than his gut. His gut had gotten them nowhere, because his gut was telling him Tony was in the drink and that was simply not an option. His gut, rarely wrong, was wrong here.

"No, I'm telling you, McGee, it was right here," Abby's smoky voice could be heard from down the corridor. "I don't lose evidence."

"I know you don't, Abs," McGee said, voice placating. "I wasn't implying otherwise, but it is gone."

Bickering right now almost sounded like music in Gibbs' ears, but not quite. They had to focus, and it sounded like neither McGee or Abby were managing that. He didn't know how much he had in him to be a hardass about it. He put an iron expression on his face as he and Ziva crossed the threshold into the lab, which was decked in gaudy Halloween decorations. Despite the macabre element, Gibbs hated the festiveness on sight.

"What's gone, and where?" Gibbs asked.

Both Abby and McGee lurched, startled, and exchanged guilty glances. After some sort of mental dialogue, ala waggling eyebrows and hand gestures, McGee turned to him.

"The cell phone we found near Tony's camera."

Damn. And shit. And fuck.

"You mean our only potential lead on who might, at the very least, know what happened to DiNozzo?"

"If it's any comfort, I already pulled the data from it."

"I'm not sure how comforting that's supposed to be."

"Probably not very. There wasn't much on it. I've never seen such a clean phone, at least at first glance, so it might have been treated as a disposable. We'll find it because I do not lose evidence and I can take a closer look," Abby said. She chewed her lower lip for a second, and her eyes looked haunted. When she spoke again, her voice was small. "You didn't find Tony?"

"No, we did not," Ziva said.

Gibbs knew there were other things to focus on, the camera, namely, but he was bothered by the loss of the phone. He didn't know why, but thought perhaps it had something to do with it being junk. Abby was the last person he wanted to dog about something that probably had very little to do with finding Tony; she was too good to have misplaced evidence, which usually meant something else happened to it.

"How could a phone just disappear?" The same way Tony did. Poof. Like magic. Like the monsters Tony was researching (yes, he knew about that and chose not to say anything) had come to life. "What happened?"

"That guy," McGee and Abby said simultaneously, as if they only just remembered the possibility.

"What guy?"

"He said his name was Agent Smith, which, wow, now that I say it out loud sounds really suspicious." Abby waved her hands around. "I didn't recognize him. He said he was from the Northwest field office. He popped in for something. What was it he wanted? Do you remember, McGee?"

"I dunno, he somehow got us looking at the camera and what images we could save from it…"

Alarm bells started to ring loudly. Abby wouldn't lose evidence, which meant someone swiped it. This Agent Smith seemed a good candidate, but why the phone? He was starting to get a bad feeling. Not his regular bad feeling, either, the special, worse one where he knew things were going to get unfortunate and strange.

"But he didn't take the camera or the SD card?" Ziva asked.

"No, it's right here."

"Speaking of cameras, pull up when our mystery man appeared in the lab, Abs," Gibbs said. "I've got a feeling I need to check before we go over what you found."

No one questioned his gut. The Gibbs gut was legend for a reason. He waited semi-patiently as Abby retrieved the security footage as requested, though he could tell she was itching to ask why and to discuss Tony, not some random man. But when the images came up, Gibbs knew he'd made the right call. The recognition took a bit, as the man looked different from the first time Gibbs had laid eyes on him. Older, rougher. Healthier. Their first encounter flashed in his head like a fucking movie montage, brief glimpses in a hospital stairwell.

"Son of a bitch, that's not possible," he swore. "How long ago was he here?"