The motorcycle slowed to a halt outside the boundaries of a public park. Under a pool of light, a solitary man wrapped up in a long coat sat in the middle of a bench seat with his back to her. His bald head shone strangely in the artificial light. Shepard put a foot down to guide the bike to a halt, kicked the stand down and twisted the key to silence the engine. She lifted the helmet and left it hanging from one of the handlebars, swinging her leg over the back of the seat to dismount. Pulling black leather gloves from her fingers, she approached the seat.

Without preamble, she said, "let's walk."

Trent Kort rose swiftly to his feet at the sound of her voice and matched her pace. The CIA handler looked straight ahead, his voice nothing more than a low rumble.

"I'm listening."

"You said this would not end well for me, I can only imagine how it will end for you if Benoit went public." Shepard growled.

"You turned him down?"

"You knew he was coming to me," Shepard spat. She had put two and two together. The Frog had been targeted, he had to have explored the possibility that the CIA could have been the perpetrators. She had put NCIS firmly on the Frog's radar by having Tony DiNozzo from Gibbs' team get close as a Honey trap to the Frog's one weakness, his daughter. Tony's cover had been blown. He had been discovered. Kort was well aware of both this and Benoit's name interlinked with her Father's death since the latter was most certainly common knowledge within the agency fraternity. "And what I would say," she finished tartly.

"Where is he?" She asked flatly.

"I'm sure you have some idea," he replied smoothly.

Shepard bit back a laugh. Kort didn't know, or at least, was unsure.

"I've been waiting a long time," she gritted out. She was certain she would have been able to get close to La Grenouille before this, if it weren't for the CIA.

"Tell me," encouraged Kort. "About the night of your Father's death. Benoit was there?"

"I understood they got into an argument. I know now that I couldn't have saved him, but I will see that bastard dead for what he did." The vehemence in her voice bled into every word. With the CIA involved, every word of what she said felt true. The fist of hatred squeezed around her heart. The story she gave sounded more real each time she retold it. She had been home. She shied away from the memory of the gunshot, recalling instead Benoit leaving the house. "You'll know what I need, when I need it."

Kort's pace slowed and Jenny mirrored it, seething with impatience. "Having the CIA owe you a favour can be a good thing," he offered after a slight pause. She felt her lips twist, he was going to let her have what she wanted. He would give her the latitude to hunt down Benoit without interference.

"I'm going to have to collect on that," she warned. Apparently home alone all evening, she would have no alibi and only the well known storyline of her abhorrence for The Frog to fall back on. It was hardly enough to exonerate her when questions started being asked. No-one would expect her to follow through her disgust of Benoit with actually killing him. It wouldn't make sense, given their adversarial relationship was so public. The only person who might give it house room was Gibbs. As far as she was concerned, he was the only one would need to be convinced.

"Pleasure doing business with you," said Kort, looking at the sliver of moon emerging from behind clouds and sticking out his hand. It made the side of his face closest to the light take on a silver sheen, like some sort of mechanical mask.

Shepard stared at it and then shook his hand once with distaste. It had however, given her an idea. She held on to his hand a moment too long for it to be cordial. Glittering eyes scanned her face. He took a small step closer. "If you ever found yourself looking for a younger partner," Kort offered in response. It took a split second for what he said to register. He wasn't taking about a partner in the field.

She hadn't had a partner in the field since she took on the Director's chair. Gibbs had made it abundantly clear where he thought her place was on her return to American soil, and that was with him, as an active agent. Off duty, well, Gibbs had made that pretty clear too, he'd like nothing better than for her to be within touching distance, the closer the better.

She remembered what it was like, to be around him all the time. Her body had become so attuned to him, she could tell when he walked into a room, even if the room was full of other people and the door was a hundred yards away. Pinpricks of sensation smarted at the base of her spine. She wanted to turn her head and check. She didn't, fighting the ghost of a memory that begged to have the dust blown off. She liked the dust, needed it as a protective coating for her feelings, still red raw after all these years.

"I haven't had a partner for some time," she said deliberately misdirecting, "but, I'll bear that in mind," she closed grimly, schooling her face into a tense smile.

Kort would be an efficient fuck she decided. Get in, get the job done, get out. No time for the niceties. There could be a place for that, if all else failed, if it weren't for the fact that he reminded her of a reptile. She could just imagine him with flat, cold scales and a flicking tongue to taste the air with. For tonight at least, and in the days to come, she needed his goodwill, and she was prepared to do whatever was necessary within reason to secure it. She was beyond seeing her body as anything but yet another tool in her armoury to reach her goal. It was the leap that Gibbs would never have expected of her, it might even hurt him, she considered.

Kort slipped his hand from hers, turned on his heel without another word and disappeared swiftly into the gloom. Shepard waited thirty seconds and retraced her steps, wiping her palm unconsciously on her leathers. Kort was a cold fish and didn't bother to hide it.

Her mind wandered to a Mossad operative she had worked with in Europe a handful of years ago, and one night in particular, when they had shared some tricks of the trade. The agent, Ziva David had been cold too, ruthlessly efficient, incredibly driven and covered all of it in a layer of femininity people found impossible to penetrate. Some of the tricks were new, some she knew, and had already used in anger.

It was the same night she had met Ari, dropping by his half-sister's apartment with no notice, his soft eyes and hard soul. Ziva had commented, half joking after he left, that with Gibbs gone, she would have tried a honey trap for Shepard too.

Shepard had taken the statement to heart, casting a jaundiced eye over every advance that came after it. It was hard not to see Gibbs' behaviour in the same light to some degree, although the thought of that being true hurt more than she could say, it was one of the reasons she kept him at arm's length. The trouble was, it had become such second nature, she wasn't sure she could turn it off. Too long ago, she had learnt to separate herself from the memory of an unmade bed in a garret room, where the breeze made the curtains stream in from windows that opened outwards and pebbled the warm skin shifting under her fingertips.

She found herself at the edge of the park and approached the motorcycle with caution, scanning both the bike and its surroundings for anything out of the ordinary. The CIA might be a sister agency, but Trent Kort was more than a mere operative. With the scale of the gun running that The Frog had been involved in, she had a suspicion he was operating well outside of the limits of his brief. She made a mental note to contact Agent Fornell if she survived tonight, to have someone keep an eye on him. Power was to some people nothing more than good coffee was to Gibbs. To others, it was an illegal high they craved more and more of until their world exploded. She had Kort pegged firmly as the latter.

The thought of Gibbs and his attention to detail stayed with her while she checked the motorcycle thoroughly with her bare hands, wincing at the heat still in the exhaust metal. It was clean. She sat astride and hauled on her gloves again, starting the bike before swiftly fixing her helmet. What would he think of her out at night, alone, doing what she was about to do. He would applaud. He would be appalled. He would pick up the pieces. She shrugged off the pre-emptive guilt, tilting the heavy machine under her to one side and kicked at the bike stand to make it fold. The engine revved once, purring and responsive to her mood, as the bike and its rider tore away from the kerb.

She took the scenic route to the Marina, stopping once to dismantle and ditch the burn 'phone she had used to call Kort for the meeting. She picked these handsets up at random when she was out in the field and held a small stock of them at home. They were an invaluable aid to an active agent, allowing them to make virtually untraceable calls. She smiled wryly to herself, in spite of her frequent reminders to Gibbs that she was no longer a field agent, the things that he had taught her were so firmly ingrained, that she barely recognised the actions as anything out of the ordinary.

To an extent, everything was traceable these days. The serial number of the cell phone or the battery or any of the hundreds of components could be traced back to a store. She made sure she never patronised the same store more than once, picking small establishments that might have CCTV, but were unlikely to have a sufficiently advanced sale/stock take to trace a specific handset to a day, let alone a purchaser. Cash was still common place enough to make her transaction nothing out of the ordinary.

The air became crisper and colder as she drew nearer to the bay. What little traffic there was at this time of night thinned to a rare vehicle passing from the opposite direction.

When the lights from the harbour started to spike the horizon with colour, she pulled over into a layby and killed the engine. Carefully, she removed her helmet and took a few deep breaths in the silence. Stiffening her resolve, she pulled a new cell phone from an inside pocket of her jacket and dialled, using a number that had been used to call her earlier in the evening. She was far enough away that the sound of halyards tinkling against the mastheads was absent. For the person on the other end of the line, she could be anywhere. The cell rang, clicked once as the call went live and was silent.

"You know who this is," she announced into the void. The silence stretched out to a point where she rechecked the screen to confirm that a connection had gone through. An accented voice she knew so well spoke softly.

"I wasn't expecting to hear from you."

There was the sound of creaking over a faint rumble that could have been the sound of an engine from inside a wheelhouse and a click that could have been a door closing.

"We need to talk," she said between gritted teeth. The more likely he was underway, the less likely he would come back for her and would soon be out of her reach.

"I have already left." He confirmed.

"I'm close to the Marina," she urged, willing him to listen. "A meeting would be mutually beneficial," she offered.

"In what way?" He sounded like he was listening, she reasoned, perhaps looking for ways to take her up on her offer. If she was wrong, all she was doing was leaving it longer before she got hold of the coastguard to put them on alert. Without a warrant though, she had nothing to hold him for, and there was precious little she could do to exact her revenge while he was in custody. He had to remain beyond the law, but within her reach. The coastguard would delay him, make it easier for his enemies to reach out and do her dirty work for her. Silently she ground her teeth. It wasn't enough. He was so close, she was so close, she could taste his defeat. Besides, she couldn't afford to have him loose, not with what he knew about her Father's death.

"I've had some time to reconsider," she suggested. "Coming to my home," she drew in a breath, "you put me in an impossible position."

"Gibbs?"

She didn't answer. She didn't know how to. Gibbs in the scenario that played out in her Study held an unassailable role. He represented everything that was good about the rule of Law, and everything that was wrong with it. Gibbs was right in that within her role of Director, she should have offered Benoit protection, but he had also allowed a seasoned criminal to walk out of her property without so much as a scratch on him.

She worried for a moment that Rene would ask for Gibbs in her stead. Their history was different, less personal. The Frenchman halted her train of thought. "How do I know I can trust you?"

"You don't have a choice," she replied evenly. He was tempted, she was sure of it. The protective arm of NCIS versus the World. Gibbs represented that arm, not her, but she could use the shadow of it to get what she wanted.

"Alone?" He pressed.

"I am," she confirmed. "Are you?" She hoped convincing him she was alone, it would be enough to put him at his ease. She was a lone woman, offering an olive branch, what harm could she possibly do him without harming herself first. She held her breath, waiting for his decision.

"Wait for me at the South gate," he said briskly. The muted roar of an engine rose in pitch in the background. The kind of noise a boat would making being forced into a turn too tight to be comfortable. He was coming back.

The line clicked off. Shepard pursed her lips and shut off the line from her side, taking a shaky breath. She tapped the cell against her lips.

"Oh, I'll be waiting."

A/N: Next update 02/08/14