Chapter 5: Coming Home
Ziva bit back the gasp of pain as the truck rumbled over another pothole, jolting her body again. It seemed like eternity had passed in this dark hole. How long before they passed Israeli borders? How long before she could escape and return home – home to what, she didn't know, but home still the same.
She could hear the driver and the passengers talking in Arabic, the one nearest to her making no effort to avoid kicking the canvas which hid her – she had the distinct impression that they all knew they had the body of a Mossad officer there.
They were discussing an attack planned on one of the major thoroughfares of the West Bank. They were to meet with an Israeli guard at the Israel border in the next hour or so to deposit the cargo and discuss the plans. Since they believed her to be dead, they were making no effort to hide the identity of the guard.
"Ha-Or will try to deliver the Jewess Salim killed himself. He will be a liability at this point, however. He has no idea that the Jewess is an old classmate, and he may refuse his task as a result. One of our Tel Aviv brothers will deal with him if that happens and finish the delivery."
***
"Director Shepard, can I assist you with something?" Motel asked dully as the team entered David's office. "Deputy Director David has no time for a meeting today." The angry howls of David could be heard from outside the closed door.
"Damn it, he'll make time," Gibbs growled, shoving past him to push open the door. "I'll make him. David!" He opened the door to find three young officers standing silently in a row as David berated them. They bore the unmistakable marks of an undercover mission gone wrong.
Tony recognized one of the young men as the officer who had kicked him out of the school the day of their arrival. As he and McGee slipped in silently behind Gibbs and the director, the young man – what was his name again, Meyer, Mair? – sent a sympathetic glance in his direction.
"Agent Gibbs, you will have to wait!" David snapped at him.
"Damn if I wait for you to finish covering up Ziva's murder as though it never happened!" Gibbs snapped back.
David dismissed the officers curtly and then turned back to Gibbs, the two men practically nose-to-nose in their rage. "I do not cover up my officers' deaths, Agent Gibbs. We simply do not dwell on it as though it was unexpected. The metsada know that they may die by enemy hand every time they leave on a mission. Making a big spectacle out of an officer's death simply increases the danger to other officers still undercover."
"Don't give me that line," Gibbs snarled. "You deliberately ignored her. She might still be alive if it wasn't for you."
"Agent McGee, Agent DiNozzo, can you wait outside please?" Jen asked quietly as she stepped forward to try and defuse the situation. The two younger agents nodded and backed out, joining the officers outside.
"Your boss is fighting a losing battle," the assistant said quietly. "If he thinks he will win this fight, he is sadly mistaken. If the deputy director could be swayed by anybody – "
"A lot more officers might still be alive," one of the officers finished grimly.
***
Ziva barely managed to stop herself from gasping in shock when she heard the voice of the Israeli guard.
"Did you bring the deliveries?" Yehudi was asking quietly, as he was pretending to search the truck. "I'm going to Tel Aviv directly after this."
Ziva braced herself for the pain as one of the Hamas officers roughly kicked her canvas-covered body out of the truck. "Yeah, there it is. Make sure you keep the little Jew-girl covered, hey? Wouldn't want to take away all the shock value the newspapers will have when she shows up on Mossad's step."
"Wouldn't dream of it," Yehudi replied, his boots making a resounding thunk and clouds of dirt as he jumped back down from the truck barely inches away from Ziva's outstretched hand. "Everything else is going according to schedule. Drive on. It's clear!" he called to his partner at the gate. As he leaned down and lifted Ziva's body into his arms, she had one horrifying moment as she thought he realized she was alive. But the moment soon passed, and Yehudi placed her into a crate of some kind, closing and nailing shut the lid.
Ziva's heart began to race. If she wasn't dead now, she soon would be, unless there was a crack of some kind… She quickly disentangled her head from the canvas, spotted a knothole and breathed a sigh of relief. As she relaxed slightly, she managed to move carefully enough to make herself as comfortable as possible, wrapping the canvas around her as a blanket and piling some of the spare fabric beneath her head.
***
Beth Shalom had gathered in the dark bar across the street from Mossad after shift, a dark and looming cloud over their heads.
"You remember when we were in seventh grade," Etan said dully, "and –"
"Who doesn't remember seventh grade?" Malachi said dryly. "We locked Motel in the janitor's closet of Yad Vashem and Officer Wiens didn't realize it until we were back in Tel Aviv."
"And the whole way back, Ziva kept trying to interrupt his conversation with Ms Domenic to try and tell him we'd left Motel behind," Sarah laughed.
"And by the time we got back there," Simon added, downing another shot, "somebody had found Motel and kicked him off the property."
"Didn't we spend the next fifteen hours trying to track him down in Jerusalem?" Myriam asked.
"You did," Motel confirmed with a small smile. "And I had actually gotten on a bus to go back to Tel Aviv."
"Ziva had actually called Ari to ask if Hamas had captured him for ransom, remember?" Reuven continued.
"Officer Wiens and Officer Horowitz must've yelled at us for two days straight after that," Lev said fondly.
"The first and only time I ever got to laugh at your expense," Motel said.
Leib sighed as he looked out the window, watching one of State Security's trucks arrive in front of Mossad and idle for a few minutes. "Truck number 16939. Etan, whose truck is that?"
"Yehudi's, if I'm not mistaken," Etan replied. "He was stationed with Transfers at the Syria border last I heard. I couldn't get a hold of him to tell him about Ziva."
"Somebody should go tell him before he leaves," Sarah said quietly.
"I'll go," Simon volunteered, getting to his feet.
***
Ziva froze when the truck stopped and Yehudi began to pry off the lid of her prison crate. Was he honestly going to just dump her body in the streets? Closing her eyes as the last nail was pulled out, Ziva started to pray again.
She heard the sharp intake of breath when he lifted the lid off. "My God, Ziva…" he whispered, tossing aside the lid. "You were the officer they killed in Baghdad? My God…" She heard the sound of his sidearm being loaded and her heart began to pound wildly. There was no way she could overpower him in time if he decided to shoot her again.
The sounds of a silencer being screwed to the sidearm only intensified her panic. Then the sound of Simon's voice calling Yehudi from outside distracted him.
"Damn," he muttered. "Damn, I knew I should've taken somebody else's truck…"
***
The truck rumbled off just as Simon was approaching from the bar and the NCIS agents were exiting the Mossad building. Something rather large and wrapped in rough canvas tumbled from the back of the truck, falling heavily to the ground without moving.
"What the hell, Yehudi?!" Simon howled at the disappearing truck. "Don't touch it," he called warningly to NCIS, who looked like they were about to go inspect it. Advancing cautiously, Simon could estimate the unknown object at roughly the size of an adult. Hamas had been tossing murdered officers in the streets lately – it wasn't all that impossible that they had stolen Yehudi's truck to make the drop.
A red stain was slowly spreading across the canvas, one limp, battered hand protruding from the canvas and a barely-recognizable face was uncovered by the canvas when it had landed.
Oh, God. It was Ziva's body, dumped in the streets for every reporter in Tel Aviv to jump at.
"Guys!" Simon yelled in Hebrew as he and the NCIS team all went rushing at the body. "Sarah! Leib! Motel!"
"Ziva!" Gibbs was yelling, even as DiNozzo was dropping to his knees next to her body, trying to disentangle her limp form from the canvas.
"Ziva, Ziva, please answer me," DiNozzo begged.
But there was neither answer nor movement from the young Israeli, as chaos exploded around her.