Gibbs, Tony, McGee, Ziva, and Lance Corporal Finnegan waited around for more than an hour for the phone call from Colleen's captors. McGee had hooked the phone up to his computer in order to generate a trace on the call, and they had set the phone to speaker, so they could monitor what information was passed on. Finnegan had been given explicit instructions on what to say by Gibbs, as soon as he had an opening, he was to demand to talk to his daughter, and he was to tell them that he would not follow any more of their instructions until he had proof that she was alive and well. They were completely ready, and had been for the last hour, now it was just a waiting game.
The phone did ring a few times in the interim, making them all jump, but they were inconsequential calls, and Finnegan got off of the phone quickly each time. When the call they were waiting for finally came in, they all sat forward in their seats, eager to hear get this ordeal over with.
On Gibbs' signal, Lance Corporal Finnegan answered the phone, his voice shaking, despite obvious attempts to sound strong and sure. "Hello?" The word sounded more like a question than a statement, even to Finnegan's own ears.
A mechanical voice answered, obviously not just disguised, but a recording as well, "The blue metal garbage can two blocks over to the left, look for another video." As soon as the recording finished the person on the other end hung up.
That was all they got, less than 10 seconds of recorded voice. The call was nowhere near long enough to trace, and it would take Abby and McGee a good while to get anything from the recording.
As they sat there in a confused silence, Gibbs looked to his team, "Well, what are you waiting for? You know where to look, so go look!"
They jumped up, as though their chairs had suddenly grown quills, and rushed to the door. As they reached the sidewalk, Ziva turned one direction, and the guys turned the other. Looking back over his shoulder, Tony called out to her, "Where do you think you are going Zee-Vah?"
She looked at the other two with a bemused expression, "I am going to get the video of course. I think the better question is where you are going."
They met back in front of the house, and McGee, trailing behind Tony, joined the conversation, "No, they said to go left, and if you are looking at the house, this way is left, so we should go this way to get the video."
Ziva rolled her eyes before replying, "No, they said to leave the house and go left, meaning that you are going the wrong way." With that she turned and walked away, leaving Tony and McGee to stare after her. Turning to the senior agent, McGee asked uncertainly, "Do we follow her even if she's wrong?"
Tony scoffed and turned back in the direction they had been originally headed. McGee trailed after him, glancing over his shoulder uncertainly after Ziva.
A quarter of an hour later Tony and McGee arrived back at the Finnegan house, the latter covered in random bits of rubbish, and smelling like he had bathed in sour milk. Gibbs just glared at them, and then looked to his right where Ziva was sitting, triumphantly holding up a small brown paper package.
Tony smirked at her and turned to McGee, "I told you we should have gone the other direction, but no, Mr. MIT thinks he knows everything."
McGee started to stutter a protest, but Gibbs interrupted him by standing and grabbing his kit and heading for the truck. The others hurried to follow suit, Tony and Ziva keeping a good distance between themselves and McGee. As they climbed into the truck, McGee in his usual spot, Tony turned the air on full blast and opened both of the windows. They hadn't gotten very far when Ziva, again sitting in the middle between Tony and Gibbs, reached over and rolled up the windows again. When Tony glared at her, she just smiled innocently at him, "I'm cold. If the smell bothers you, breathe through your mouth."
Wrinkling his nose, Tony turned to Gibbs, gesturing to the window between the cab of the truck and the back "We should get them to put glass in the window back here."
Without removing his gaze from the road, Gibbs replied, "You didn't seem to mind the smell when you were making McGee sift thorough the trash DiNozzo."
Not wanting to provoke Gibbs, Tony shut his mouth and tried to picture himself anywhere else but the smelly truck. His mind drifted again to Kate, and to the vacation they had been planning. They had finally decided that they would tell Gibbs that they were together. Tony had wanted to keep it a secret for a while, but Kate had been insistent, and she was right when she pointed out that Gibbs was a trained investigator, it would not take him long to notice, and although he would not be happy about the situation, he would probably take it better if they told him rather than if he found out on his own. Besides, Kate desperately wanted to tell Abby, and they both knew the bubbly Goth wouldn't be able to keep it from Gibbs for long.
They had decided though that it might be safer for them if they both took a week off after they told Gibbs so he could have a chance to come to grips with the fact that they had broken rule number 12 without them there.
They had not decided where they were going to go yet. They couldn't agree on the destination, Tony wanted to take her to Italy, to show her where his family came from, but Kate wanted to go to Alaska. She had been almost everywhere else in the US and many places outside of it when she was with the Secret Service, but she had never been to Alaska, which she told Tony, she had heard was beautiful. Had the dispute gone on much longer, Tony would have given in, he knew, but it was a habit for him to argue with Kate, and old habits die hard.
Tony was jolted out of his thoughts of a vacation with Kate when they pulled back into the garage at NCIS. Shaking his head to clear it, he tried to re-focus his mind on the task at hand. The last thing he needed in the middle of a case was to get distracted; it could only lead to someone getting hurt. As soon as they got to the elevator, Gibbs hit the button for the third floor. As McGee tried to follow them in, Gibbs gave him a silent stare, and McGee stepped back to take the stairs, and to change before joining them in MTAC. They brought Finnegan to the conference room and made sure he had something to eat and drink, then headed for MTAC, stopping to let the director know what was happening on the way.
When McGee had finally joined them, Gibbs gestured for the video to start, and then moved back to sit by the director to watch the newest installment in their ever growing video collection.
A woman's face filled the screen, surprising them, they had been expecting the same man from before. In a soft, but menacing voice, she spoke, "Hello NCIS. I hope I am talking to the members of Special Agent Leroy Jethro Gibbs' team, because I have a special surprise for you." This caught their attention. Who was this woman, and how did she know Gibbs' team? She continued, "Most of you do not know who I am, but at least one of you has met me before. You may not recognize me now; it was many years ago, you were not much more than a child really, but we will get back to that later." They all looked around to each other, each of them trying to figure out if they were the one who had met her in the past.
Gibbs… I heard that name a lot in the past. It is a name that will forever haunt my memory, the name of the man who is the reason I lost my husband. He was obsessed with making you suffer, but what he did not realize was that I was suffering too." Gibbs started to think back as soon as she said this, trying to figure out who her husband was.
"But that is history, and we are here to talk about the present, and the future. I know you are searching for Colleen Finnegan, and let me assure you now, she is fine, relatively speaking, and she will not be harmed any further, she was merely a means to an end, I just needed to catch and keep your attention. As long as you do what I say, she will be back with her father before end of day tomorrow."
She turned away from the camera, obviously speaking to another person in the room, blocked from their view, "There are four basic mediums for torture, and over the next four days we will explore each of them, while your team watches, unable to help." This took a minute to sink in, and when it did, it did nothing to lessen the confusion they were all feeling. Who was she talking to? What member of their team did she have with her? They all glanced around as though to confirm what they all knew, that none of them were missing. The woman opened the bag and pulled out a set of knives, "The first medium is sharp objects. This is the most basic and least creative method, so we will begin with it and work our way to the others."
She moved around behind the chair and laid the blade against the neck of another woman shackled to a chair, with a bag over her head. She made a very shallow, short cut in the skin over the prisoner's collar bone. She continued to make small shallow cuts over the neck and shoulders. Tony flinched with every cut she made, almost as though he could feel the blade himself. He knew what it felt like to be tortured, and he hated thinking of anyone else going through it. The woman moved around to the side and drew the blade across the top of her captive's leg, just above the knee, making this cut deeper and longer than the others. She made more cuts parallel to this one, and matching ones on the other leg. When the prisoner finally began to shift in the chair, in a vain effort to pull away from the blade, the woman stopped for a moment, and turned back to the camera, "I'm sure by now you're all wondering who this poor woman is, and what she has to do with you aren't you? I'll show you, but that is all you get for now, when I am sure that you have seen this video I will send a messenger with my next instructions."
She moved behind the chair once again and grasped the top of the bag that was covering the captive's head. As she pulled the bag up and off, revealing the face, she pulled the knife back, and sank it into the other woman's lower back on the left side. The other woman slumped forward and her captor walked around to the camera and shut it off, a vindictive grin on her face.
No one spoke for almost a minute, all of them to stunned to think. Ziva was the first to recover from the shock, "Rewind and freeze the video on the prisoner's face," The video tech did what he was told, and they all stared at the screen again.
Tony couldn't tear his gaze from the image frozen on the screen. He still couldn't believe what he was seeing. The hair was longer, the face was battered, bruised, and half covered in a gag, but he knew those eyes. They were eyes had promised himself he would never forget.
…Kate