Chapter Five
Coordinates
'No,' Zabeth decides, allowing the weapon's telescopic sight to drift slightly, changing from targeting the grey haired Starfleet Intelligence Officer's head to observing the trio in the storefront office two hundred meters away. The office is the workplace of her cover persona, and if Intelligence Officers are there then Starfleet hunts her now. They may have discerned her mission and may well have the Commodore secure, but if she kills these Intelligence Officers others will follow and they will be motivated to avenge their fellows.
She'll continue to observe. If Starfleet has Rolonio secure, he may be at the Federation's outpost, a duckblind within this primitive world's closest military base. If they don't have him, perhaps they may lead her to him.
At any rate, she has one confirmed location and time where she will intercept and eliminate him.
She will bide her time.
xxx
Abby's lab is a cacophony of noise when Gibbs walks in and goes directly to the radio, but Abby beats him to it with impressive speed and blocks the white instrument. With a smirk, she draws her white lab coat open. Gibbs, quite surprised by this wordless move, reads the message emblazoned upon her tee shirt.
'For better music,' the white letters stretched across her impressive chest proclaim, 'turn these knobs.'
He falls back a step and her smirk widens. Reveling in her victory, she turns, lowers the volume and faces him, the triumphant smirk morphing into a saucy smile. "So, Gibbs, what can I do with you?"
Safest to focus on work when she's in one of her outrageous moods. She occasionally gets it into her head to tease him, knowing she's absolutely safe from his falling for it. She hadn't always been safe from his thought to give her a 'wake-up' in a place he doesn't use on his team, but as long as he never does give in to the temptation she'll continue her game.
"I need to know what this says." He hands her the evidence bag containing the pad retrieved from Elizabeth Stillwell's bedroom. Though the top sheet is blank, he hopes Abby can discern what had been written on the previous one.
"Invisible messages," she takes the bag from him, leads him to her worktable, "I love them. Do you know that in High School my boyfriends and I used to write each other the porniest messages in lemon juice? You could only read them by getting hot."
"Too much information, Abs." He'd decided it was too much when she'd used the plural to describe her amorous adventures.
"Come on, Gibbs," she urges as she crosses the room, opens a cabinet and withdraws a perforated metal tray set atop a low machine that has several small fans visible on each side, "didn't you ever write your innermost desires to a girl?" She brings the tray back, sets it down and plugs in the unit.
"Never put anything in writing."
"That one of your more famous rules?"
"Should be McGee's." He hopes to deflect this outrageous conversation.
Abby signs the Evidence Chain Log at the top of the bag and, using latex gloves, breaks the seal and withdraws the pad. She tears the top sheet off, sets it on the silver tray and covers it with a clear sheet of Mylar.
"Gibbs, I'll bet McGee's got notes addressed to Siobhan on his computer that'd curl your hair." She glances at his head. "Well, maybe curve it a bit."
x
She turns on the perforated tray and a vacuum pulls the Mylar tight against the sheet. "Now Tony, he should never write down anything. Some of his email could probably get him ten years." She crosses the room again, gets a ten inch long silver magnetic wand and a container from the same cabinet and returns to the table. Before reaching it, however, she slows to a stop. She looks for a long moment at the rod, then up at him and gives him a very slow smile.
"Abby."
"Just a thought." Her eyes lose none of their devilish glint as she plugs in and passes the wand slowly over the paper, charging it with static electricity.
Next she opens the small container and sprinkles metallic black powder onto the paper, covering the whole surface. She places a large sheet of white paper onto the table and carefully tilts the tray, letting the powder slide off.
"Whoa..."
Gibbs has to agree. The wand has magnetized the entire paper but the indentions are more affected. The words that adhere to the paper might as well be written in ink.
'Execute Commodore Rolonio at coordinates 875-020-709, Stardate 27548.845.'
xxx
"We have where and when Stillwell's going to take out Rolonio," Gibbs announces as he strides into the bullpen.
"All right!" DiNozzo exclaims, seeing an easy end to this Trekkian nut case. "We blanket the area, pick her up when she arrives - problemo endo."
Gibbs pulls out his camera, extracts and tosses the memory card to the exultant man, who puts in into his computer with a flourish and sends the single image to the plasma screen. The four agents can almost hear his face fall to the floor.
"McGee," Gibbs calls, "what the hell does this mean?"
The man's face is a disturbing mixture of blank and distressed, never an expression Gibbs likes. "I - I don't know."
Gibbs stalks to his desk, glances at Michelle. "Get Ducky and your husband up here, I'm sick of working blind." He makes the last a general warning as he sits down and restrains the urge to slam something. "Palmer, did you find Rolonio?"
She places her hand over the receiver. "Sorry, sir, no." She uncovers the unit. "Honey, both of you up here fast, before you have to autopsy all four of us." She hangs up, quickly resumes her report before her prediction comes true. "He works alone in his florist shop, no answer on his phone, no hits on his credit card. I asked Special Agent Lamb's team to go out there again in case he came back or anyone saw him, I'm waiting on word."
"You assigned another team to field our case?"
Her eyes take on that fearful look he'd been familiar with in the past, and had hoped he wouldn't see again. "I'm sorry, sir. I was assigned to research, they were in the field on their own case but not too far and ..." she swallows hard. "Yes, I did."
"Good thinking."
He turns to Ziva, purposely not noticing Palmer's gratified smile.
x
"I have obtained a list of the heads of the seven groups Rolonio supervises in Maryland," Ziva reports, handing over a paper. "They call them 'Captains', they are more like Club Presidents."
"Did you reach all of them?"
"I managed to reach two of them thus far, Patricia Holmes of the 'SS Columbia' and Michael Edson of the 'SS Saratoga'. Holmes is at work but her family provided me with the address and phone. I am waiting to hear back from Edson."
"No, you're not."
She reaches for her telephone. "No, I am not."
x
"What do those numbers mean?" Gibbs presses generally, pointing to the image of the note that still shines on the plasma screen. He's annoyed he's had to ask the question a second time.
"They look like coordinates," McGee says over the ring of the elevator bell down the corridor.
"Ya think?" Gibbs doesn't cross the room to jump-start the man's brain this time, but he's certain he will. Not only could he have gotten that from the context of the note but the word 'coordinates' is in it. "But to what? They're not longitude and latitude, what else is there?"
"I - they - I –"
"Spit it out, McGee."
"They look familiar. I can almost place–"
"They're to the Gideon Council Chamber," Jimmy Palmer announces. All eyes turn to where he's standing next to Ducky in the bullpen entrance.
"Of course!" Tim exclaims.
"What is the Gideon Council Chamber?"
McGee is certain of two things, he has the answer and he hates being upstaged. It's bad enough when Tony does it but he'll be damned…. "In the classic episode 'The Mark of Gideon', during a diplomatic mission to finalize the planet Gideon's acceptance into the Federation, Captain Kirk is transported onto an exact replica of the Enterprise."
"It's a plot," Jimmy swipes the narrative when McGee draws a breath, "to obtain a strain of a deadly virus so an overcrowded planet can reduce its population through disease–"
"The plan," McGee snatches the exposition back, annoyed at the interruption, "involves Kirk meeting the daughter of the planetary ambassador and her trying to convince him to stay–"
"So the Gideons give the Enterprise," Jimmy cuts in, "two sets of nearly identical beam-down coordinates, only two digits transposed–"
"One to the Enterprise mockup where they trap Kirk–"
"And this one to the actual Council Chamber!" Jimmy concludes triumphantly.
As the two men contrast looks of annoyance and satisfaction, Gibbs notices the expression on Michelle's face, one of almost hero-worship as she beams with pride at her husband the investigator. "You looking to take a stint in Autopsy?"
She favors him with a sweet smile. "Jimmy's the only one who examines my naked body."
Tony DiNozzo winces, virtually convulses with his desire to retort, but he must swallow the jibe back.
It hurts going down.
x
Gibbs is less pleased than ever. A link to a forty-plus year old television show he hadn't glanced at since he'd had free time with his daughter Kelly has now introduced kidnapping, political intrigue and germ warfare into the mix.
And though, in the old days, germ warfare involved laboratories and military or government operations, now all it potentially needs is a syringe of HIV-infected blood.