"Anyone seen Spencer today?" Chief Vick asked as she poked her head out of her office. The Mayor's office had called three times already and she was getting annoyed.

"Not since he and Guster left yesterday." Lassiter spoke up from behind his desk. The phone was cradled between his shoulder and ear and he was frantically typing on his computer. "How about you O'Hara?" His fingers paused as he spoke into the phone. "No I don't want to hold anymore! I've been on hold for an hour now and I've getting pretty pis….no!" He frowned. "They put me on hold again." The statement wasn't really to anyone in particular.

"Nope I haven't seen him either." Juliet picked up her phone and dialed the familiar number only to get the very exuberant voicemail. "Shawn when you get this call me, the Chief is looking for you." She hung up and sat in silence for a moment. "You think it was odd that both Shawn and Gus knew our victim?" It was a question that had been rolling around in the back of her mind since yesterday and with Shawn and Gus MIA at the moment she was beginning to wonder.

Lassiter snorted. "When have those two ever done anything that wasn't odd? Remember last Christmas when they dressed up like toy soldiers and marched around on the pier on Christmas Eve? Said it was to appeal to the snow Gods to give us a white Christmas? I rest my case."

Juliet tilted her head to the side. "True." Shawn and Gus did do some wacky, crazy, things but she got the impression that this wasn't one of those things. "Should we just work the case until Shawn makes an appearance Chief?" She asked her still lurking Boss.

Chief Vick sighed. "Go ahead but keep trying to reach Spencer!" She barked as she retreated back into her office, phone ringing, to take another call from the Mayor's office, she was sure.

Elsewhere. "Dude this is so cool!" Shawn had his face plastered to the plane window. "Why don't I do this more often?"

"Because you're broke most of the time and I never leave my credit cards within your reach." Gus informed him as he flipped through a magazine.

"Oh yeah." Shawn smiled at the pretty lady pushing the drink cart. "Yes I'll have a pineapple daiquiri please." He requested. First class so totally rocked! He'd worry about his fathers reaction to the two first class tickets to Washington D.C. made on his credit card when they got back to Santa Barbara.

"What do you mean you're going out of town? We're in the middle of a murder investigation! Do I need to remind you that you know the victim? We got questions for you. Lots of questions." Beckett had followed Castle to the break room after he dropped the bombshell.

"My hands are tied." Castle held up his hands and crossed them at the wrist to demonstrate his point. "I gotta go to D.C." He began to prepare himself a latte.

Beckett frowned. "This have anything to do with the phone call you made after IDing the body yesterday?" She wanted to know.

Castle was quiet for a moment as he focused on his coffee. "Can you please just drop it?" He told her quietly as he finished and took a sip of the steaming liquid.

"I can't." Beckett countered. "Just tell me how you know him."

"I knew him fifteen years ago." Castle repeated what he said earlier as he continued to sip his drink.

"Ok so you were what twenty-four, twenty-five, when you knew him?" Beckett did the math in her head; being a diehard Richard Castle fan she knew his birthday off by heart. Not that she'd ever tell him that. "Did you meet at a club? Party? School?"

Castle knew Beckett was like a dog with a bone when she got hold of a puzzle. And right now he was the puzzle. "I'll take choice D, none of the above." He told her with a cocky little smile which faded quickly. "Look if I knew anything recent about the guy I'd tell you. But how is me telling stories about my misbegotten youth going to help you solve this case?" It was a legitimate question. Setting his cup down he checked his watch then grabbed his coat that had been slung over a nearby chair. "Now I really have to go because my flight leaves in two hours and with all the extra security it's going to be a nightmare." With that said he left.

Beckett chewed on her bottom lip for a moment before heading to her desk. "Ryan where are we on getting a positive ID on the body?" She called out as she sat.

Pulling a page from the fax machine Ryan waved it in the air. "Got it right here. Dead guy is one Thomas Maddox age forty-five." He skimmed the page. "Says here he's former Air Force. Received an honorable discharge back in two-thousand." He sat down at his own desk and typed in the mans name. "Uh-oh." He looked up at Beckett across the room. "We got a problem."

"What?" Beckett got up and walked to his desk. "What is it?" Leaning down she scanned the mans employment history that was displayed on the screen. But it was the flashing red flag in the bottom right hand corner of the page that caught her attention. "He's been flagged? By who?" She questioned.

"Doesn't say but that can't be good, can it?" Ryan questioned as his eyes landed on Castle's empty chair. "You think he knows more than he's telling us?" He motioned with his head.

Beckett followed his eyes and sighed. "I honestly don't know."

"Gibbs been in to talk to you yet Agent McGee?" Director Leon Vance asked as he entered the conference room. He made himself comfortable in the chair right across the table from the one McGee was in.

"No." McGee shook his head slightly. "He's either letting me stew until boredom forces me to talk or he just hasn't gotten around to me yet."

Vance took a moment to survey the youngest member of Gibbs' team. "You don't seem broken up by either of those options." He pointed out as he chewed on his ever present toothpick. "Gibbs' worried about you. Thinks you're in some kind of trouble. He right?"

McGee frowned and wondered how his boss made his way to that line of thought. "Not at the moment." He answered his Director as honestly as possible.

"I gotta say that I was more than a little bit surprised when I received a phone call early this morning from Sec-Nav. Didn't even know he had my home number." Vance said in amusement before continuing. "He told me some pretty interesting things about an op codenamed Whisper. Also told me some very important people are flying into D.C. today and that I should ask you for further details since even he isn't privy to everything the op entailed."

"I honestly don't know where to begin." McGee's frown deepened. "We were told never to speak of it to outsiders." He answered honestly.

Vance tilted his head to the side. He completely understood where the younger Agent was coming from. He, himself, had been on an op or two that had the same rules and as far as he knew still did. "Okay then how about starting at the beginning? I've always found that to be a good place to start a story."

McGee swallowed and nodded. "First thing you got to understand is that I was always bright. I skipped two grades in High School which didn't make me very popular with the older kids. I ended up in college when I was just sixteen and that's where Adam recruited me. He was in one of those recruiter booths for the Marines and I never gave him a second look until he saved me from getting pounded by a group of seniors. He offered to teach me self-defense and with dad deployed….I guess I wanted someone to look up to that was actually there for more than a few months at a pop. After classes I'd meet up with him at the campus gym and he'd teach me a wide variety of self-defense styles. It was hard at first but then I started learning them faster and easier. Soon we were talking about other means of defense and he started asking me what I wanted t do once I finished my degree. I should have suspected he had ulterior motives but with brilliance doesn't always come common sense. For my eighteenth birthday he took me to meet a group of men and woman that he told me could change my life. That very day he became my official handler. I didn't find out until much later that he had been acting in that capacity for the previous two years. That's how certain he was that I'd join." He shook his head. "I was a young fool. I guess we all were." By then he was looking at the table top and not at Director Vance.

"So basically you were recruited and trained for this particular op when your were just sixteen? A kid?" Vance bit down a little harder on his toothpick.

"Yeah but we were all young when they started grooming us." McGee pointed out. "And our particular skill sets only improved as we got older and were able to take on a more rigorous training schedule. I was barely twenty when I received my sniper certification and…." He hesitated.

Vance folded his hands in front of him on the conference room table. "Your certification and what McGee?"

McGee reached up and scratched his collarbone which had started to itch. "My badge or that's what our handlers called them. They all had them and said it was their duty to pass it on. But in order to receive the badge we had to excel at our appointed skill set. I was the first of the group to get it." He couldn't keep the pride out of his voice not even after all these years.

"I take it the badge, as you are referring to it, is the same tattoo our dead Lieutenant Colonel has?" Vance already knew the answer to the question but wanted McGee to say it out loud. "It have a meaning?"

"We were never really told what it means." This was even more taboo than talking about the op with outsiders. "I asked once and Adam told me that he thought the bird was us and the skull was death." McGee shifted uncomfortably. "And that'd we'd always be the ones left standing no matter what."

Vance nodded. "That's a pretty big promise."

McGee shrugged. "Ended up being true. At the end of the day or at the end of a mission we all made it back alive and in one piece. All except…." He trailed off.

"All except the mission that you thought Adam Wallace died on?" Director Vance finished for him.

"Yeah when he never made it back to the rendezvous we went looking against the other handlers strict orders. We found him in an alley, thrown there like a piece of the trash he was laying on, bullet hole right through the forehead; dead center." McGee reached up and touched his own forehead in the spot. "We checked for a pulse, not that we were expecting one with that wound, and with time running out until our extraction we were forced to leave him there." It was a decision that haunted him for years. "Boomer was a good man Director. And as harsh as this may sound I think I was closer to him than my real dad." He glanced down at his watch. "Am I free to go? I need to pick my friends up from the airport."

Director Vance gave the younger Agent a long hard look then nodded. "Go on. I'll tell Gibbs that I talked to you and cleared you to leave." He stood and headed for the door but stopped before exiting. "Your unit was close, I get that, but I hope I don't got to tell you that revenge isn't the answer. I don't do I?"

McGee gave the Director his most apologetic smile. "I don't know whats going on exactly but I do know it'll be handled. Maybe not by me or my friends but an act such as this can't go unpunished." He was certain of that.

"That's what I thought." And with that said Director Leon Vance left the room, buttoning his suit jacket along the way.

"Its just the way things are." McGee said quietly as he quickly made his own exit before any of his teammates could corner him and demand answers. He didn't even bother to return to his desk instead deciding to take the fire stairs down to the main floor and leave from there. He knew he was being watched the moment he stepped foot outside NCIS headquarters but he brushed it off when he caught sight of a hastily concealed Ziva. "Not today." He said to himself as he ducked beside the building and caught a ride out with one of the other departing NCIS teams. He had Special Agent Agor drop him several blocks from the navy yard where he then called for a cab to take him to the airport. Once there he rented a car, his friends would need one anyways, and settled in to wait for his friends' arrivals.