DISCLAIMER: I don't own any of NCIS.
Chapter 2: The Choice
"Pack your gear," Gibbs called as he strode into the bullpen. "We're going to Baghdad."
"Baghdad?" McGee and Tony both asked in unison, Aliza blanching.
"Like Iraq?" Tony asked.
"Well, no, DiNozzo," Gibbs said sarcastically. "Baghdad, the vacation resort. Yeah, we're going to Iraq. Get your gear!"
"Why are we going to Iraq?" Tony persisted.
"There's a ballet on that I want to see. Get your gear!"
"But… but it's Iraq. There's a war there. People get blown up there."
"Welcome to Baghdad, agents," called Special Agent Simon Isek as the team disembarked at Baghdad International Airport. "I'm Simon Isek. Director, it's a surprise to see you out here."
Jenny laughed, the loose scarf already pulled up over her head. Aliza was evidently less thrilled with her location. "Good to see you're alive and well, Agent Isek. Let's get started, shall we?"
"Lance Corporal James' body was taken back to base camp after our agents had fully examined the scene. One of the agents found a second body after headquarters was notified. We think it may be the lance corporal's killer. There's no ID on the body, but there is a marking we believe is uniquely identifying. The John Doe appears to be of Middle Eastern descent, in his forties or fifties. He's missing his left hand."
"What's the marking?" Tony asked, hauling equipment and suitcases into the trunk of the transport vehicle.
"Tattoo. It's a six-point star. Two swords crossed in front of it and a lightning bolt piercing it."
"Where?" Jenny asked sharply.
"On the right shoulder blade. You know the symbol?"
"I'm surprised you don't, Isek, to tell you the truth," Tony said. "It's the mark of a Mossad specials ops officer."
"Komemuite. You don't know them?" Jenny asked with a frown.
"You don't see a whole lot of Jews in Iraq, ma'am. Not many of them are crazy enough to come in."
"Metsada are," Gibbs sighed.
"Boss, this is too easy," McGee said slowly as he placed another shell casing into the bag. "The scene seems staged."
"It does, McGee," Gibbs said grimly as he stood up. "DiNozzo! Look around, see if you can spot any lurkers!" he called.
"Got it, boss!" Tony called back, casually beginning to take a stroll around the block.
Nobody seemed to stand out, until he saw the motorcycle. A woman's build, dressed in black, the visor on her helmet covering her face. When she seemed to notice Tony, she revved the bike and started driving off.
Undaunted, Tony hopped on the motorcycle he had begged out of Gibbs and tore off after her.
"Damn it, Tony, stop following me…" Ziva muttered to herself as she cast a glance into her mirrors. She had led him on a merry chase throughout Baghdad and in the outskirts. She had nowhere else to go but back to the safe house.
Putting an extra burst of speed, she managed to outpace him.
Still shaking when she entered the house, Ziva pried off her helmet and peeled off her riding gear. It had been unusually hot as of late, so beneath the riding gear, she had worn only a thin undershirt and her panties. Sighing, she dropped to the couch. Nothing left to do except wait for the extraction team.
Closing her eyes, Ziva tried to think through what she would negotiate with her father, fingers still trying to play with her absent necklace. The terms they had set out before the mission would have been forgotten by now. A 5-year contract with NCIS. Her name went on no records of this hit. He would withdraw his surveillance and leave her alone… Her phone rang and she jumped at it. It had to be the extraction team, they wouldn't risk leaving an operative alone inside an Arab country for long. "David."
"The risks are too great, Officer David," came her father's voice, cool, detached, professional. "There will be no extraction." He hung up before she could protest.
Ziva stood in shock for a minute, staring at the receiver. They wouldn't keep the utilities running at all now, even if they weren't going to blow the house up. She had no ID – she couldn't get out of the country without smuggling herself out, and that was nearly impossible in a war where soldiers were searching every cargo hold, every truck, every crate, every trunk and bag.
She was essentially being condemned to death. She'd been deceived – her father had never intended to extract her. He had decided she was a liability, but he had no plausible grounds to order a hit.
Ziva screamed curses at him in every language she knew for the better part of two hours. Then, she got up, got dressed and packed her bag. She couldn't take the motorcycle – she couldn't risk walking around in her regular clothes, and it would be too noticeable that she was not a native if she tried to drive with the robes on.
Pulling the robes on, Ziva was careful to wind her veil so that it ran no risk of exposing her face. In some parts of the Middle East, she would pass a glance test, but not here. She wasn't dark enough – damn her damn father for being European! If she'd been full-blooded Sabra, she might've passed the glance test.
She couldn't risk calling NCIS – Mossad would have their land phones tapped, their cell phones traced, the team under surveillance – probably by some mousy little Beth Shalom student they'd never suspect. The Iraqis would know as soon as they heard her speak – they would hear the Israeli accent, the Hebrew lilt. The last Mossad agent to pose as Muslim had been slowly dismembered and sent back to Tel Aviv in over fifty small parcels.
It slowly hit her that she was going to die here. She was going to die here and Tony would never know how close he came to seeing her once more.
"Lost track of her, boss," Tony said as he returned to base camp. "Woman on a bike."
Gibbs looked up. "You catch a view of her face?"
"Nope. Visor was down," Tony replied. "The other vic have any ID on him?"
"Nope," Gibbs replied. "Didn't really expect him to. We'll have to e-mail a photo over to Mossad, get them to identify him. I have a bad feeling this might be the Israelis' fault."
"So we're going to Tel Aviv, boss?" McGee asked, looking up. Aliza also looked up at mention of her home.
"Yup. Going to Tel Aviv. Pack your gear, boys. We can dump Aliza there and swipe Ziva on the way."
"Sounds good to me, boss," Tony said quickly, gathering up his equipment.
Aliza Akiva was fervently wishing right about now that she could figure out a way to stop them from investigating further without letting on that she understood what they were saying. They never taught this in class.
NCIS could not be allowed to know that Ziva was most likely dead. That Mossad had ordered a hit on a US Marine, that a hit had been ordered on the officer responsible, and then that officer purposely abandoned. They could not know.
"Well, no, Jen, I don't think there's a link at all," Gibbs said sarcastically. "A dead Marine with a dead metsada barely a gunshot's length away? Coincidence."
"Jethro, we can't just waltz into Mossad headquarters and demand the information on a highly-sensitive case and accuse them of murdering a Marine!"
"No, you're right, Jen. We don't waltz, we storm. Did you get that memo, director? You don't kill an ally's soldier unannounced, it's bad politics. Even I know that."
"Do I need to say the name 'Ari Haswari', Agent Gibbs?"
Tony and McGee looked at each other in resignation. Gibbs and the director would be bickering the entire way to Tel Aviv.
The accompanying Marines stopped them for a brief period when they heard the shouts of insurgents and the scream of a woman.
"One seconds, agents," the captain said apologetically, just as they saw six men appear from around the corner, all restraining a young woman fighting violently to free herself. She wore the robes and the cloak of a conservative Muslim woman, the veil around her face dislodging with every kick and pull at her arms. She was fighting so desperately, and the men's grips were so tight that her clothes were ripping with every yank.
"Stop! Stop, release her!" one soldier yelled, approaching. One man whipped out an AK-47 at that order, screaming something angry in Arabic.
The woman screamed something back at him, and the blow she received in rewards snapped her head to one side so drastically that NCIS thought for sure that she had snapped her neck.
Tony didn't claim to know Arabic, but he thought he heard the same phrase screamed over and over, and he could swear the word 'Komemuite' was in there.
The young woman fell unconscious in the men's arms, and in their surprise they nearly dropped her weight. The momentum made the veil finally fall away, briefly revealing a face much too light to be Iraqi. Long black curls tumbled free and blocked her face before anybody could get a good look at it.
More insurgents began appearing around the airfield, and the captain said, "Let's go. Forget it, let's get out of here before they start blowing us up…"
And as the plane took off into the air, the last they saw of the captive woman was the men dragging her motionless body off the airfield and into a waiting truck.
"Wonder what she did?" McGee muttered to Tony.
"I'm not so sure she did anything, probie," Tony replied quietly.
They arrived at Mossad headquarters about two hours later, and by now, Gibbs was good and steamed over the dead Komemuite officer.
Tony didn't need to be able to read Hebrew to know who they were being introduced to – he had heard about the man innumerable times, and never in a good capacity.
"This is Deputy Director Benyamin David," Jen said quietly to the team assembled behind her. "Director David, this is Special Agents Gibbs, McGee and –"
"DiNozzo," David replied coolly, his blue eyes glinting like icy pools as he met gazes with Tony. "Yes, I know."
His accent was weird, Tony noticed. He could hear the Israeli part of it, the same slightly chant-like lilt that Ziva had, but there was something else, something guttural. Almost Germanic…
"So where
did you learn all these languages?" Tony asked one night, breathing in the intoxicating scent of her hair as she nestled comfortably against him, her head tucked into his neck.Ziva laughed slightly. "When you grow up where I did, Tony, multilingualism is a necessity. You learn Arabic and Hebrew in everyday life. You learn English and French and Spanish in school. You learn Yiddish and Polish and German and Russian from your parents and your grandparents. You pick up things like Italian and Turkish and Greek."
Tony shook his head. "God, I didn't think the human brain could hold that much information. Do you actually speak all of those?"
"Hebrew, Arabic, German, Yiddish, English, French, Spanish, Italian, Turkish. Not so much Polish and Russian and Greek. My father is German by birth, naturalized Israeli."
"Who is this? He's Komemuite," Gibbs asked without precursor, holding out a photo of their dead Mossad officer.
David barely glanced at it before he said, "He was a traitor. Al-Qaeda information seller."
"Doesn't answer my question, David," Gibbs said dangerously. "Who is he? I want his name, his personnel file, his list of recent targets. I want everything."
"That is Officer Shiloh Sharon. Moshe here will get you the information you need, Agent Gibbs. We will set up a space for you in our conference centre." He delivered a curt order to the young man standing wordlessly at his side, and the officer nodded and disappeared into another section of the office. "If I may speak to Officer Akiva for a moment?"
Tony lingered behind for a moment, watching David berate the young officer before clearly banishing her from his presence. Aliza left rapidly, fighting back tears as she headed down the hall in the opposite direction of the conference room. Tony took off after her and slipped inside the secured doors just before they closed.
It looked like the hallway of a school, but he saw none of the posters that he remembered from his own high school years. As he advanced into the hallway, he could see into the classrooms through small windows in the doors. Outside each classroom was a sheet of paper with lists in Hebrew posted.
The first class looked to be about kindergarten age. As he progressed, the children inside the classroom grew older and older, until he reached what looked to be the later junior high years. The children's expressions and behaviours changed drastically at that point: earlier on, they had still been children, playing, horsing around, giggling and laughing. Now, they were more serious, studious and almost robotic in their movement. The high school students even seemed to be doing some weapons training, interrogation training. By the time he had reached the end of the hallway, and what was likely the graduating class, they were little soldiers, each with the exception of a few wearing a gun and a knife holstered at their side. A few of them were even wearing military uniform.
"You should not be here," came a voice from behind him, and Tony jumped and whirled around. "Come, Agent DiNozzo, before they spot you."
"How do you…"
"Officer Malachi Meir, Agent DiNozzo, I work Intelligence. I was part of the team dispatched to Washington last year to conduct surveillance on Ziva. Come, you must not be seen in here."
"What the…" Tony trailed off and chose not to ask why Ziva was being watched. "What the hell is this place?"
"Beth Shalom School," Malachi replied. "More colloquially known as 'Mossad school'. Almost all the officers in Mossad have graduated from here. Most of our parents went through it, a lot of us have grandparents who founded it. The conference centre is down the hallway and to your right."
"That last classroom…"
"The graduating class. Some of them have already turned 18 and are serving their conscription, that is why some wear military uniform and some do not."
"The ones without sidearms?"
"Either lucky enough to escape Mossad enrolment or assigned to a non-field unit. More likely to be the latter than the former."
"Something's off here," Gibbs muttered as the Americans were gathered in a small corner of the conference centre while David was busy with some sort of missile recon mission on the video screen. "This dossier isn't nearly as complete as I expect out of Komemuite."
"You think it's another pacifier, Jethro?" Jen asked softly, watching the screen for a moment.
"Wouldn't put it past him, Jen," Gibbs replied, just as there was a shout of dismay from the few officers seated at the control panel and a yell of rage from David.
Somebody had cut into the satellite feed into Mossad and the screen now showed a dark room with only a few dim lights. A voice echoed over the speakers in Arabic and a distant cry of pain filtered through.
An Arab face that looked eerily familiar filled the screen whilst David was howling at the frantic and horrified officers. A dark and looming threat echoed into the room. The face moved aside and into the bad light of the room came two others, hauling a woman with them. She was dressed in torn robes, the veil falling around her shoulders and hair tumbling down over her face, head dropped forward. As the first face moved behind her, he grabbed hold of a fistful of curls and yanked her head back.
It was Ziva. Mere seconds later, David's poor flustered officers had retrieved the original feed and he was calmly returning to the recon at hand.