Jerek reached out, took a white pawn and moved it two spaces forward.
Ducky took a deep breath and performed the same move with one of his own.
For a while, the only sounds were of chess pieces softly clicking against the board, and the flicker of Trent's camera.
It was Jerek who made the first capture. His hand shot out, captured Ducky's pawn and shot back, like a scorpion retreating into a burrow with its prey.
Minutes later, Ducky did the same, taking out a pawn with a rook.
"I sacrifice the one for the lives of others," Jerek murmured dreamily.
As he contemplated one particularly tricky move, Ducky looked up and saw Tony walking by, munching on a bag of popcorn. He waved cheerfully at Ducky and then went to stand next to Trent's camera.
Ziva walked up behind Jerek and gave Ducky a look that said, "Say the word and I'll slit his throat."
Ducky gave a slight shake of his head. Tempting, but no thank you. Ziva shrugged and vanished back into the shadows.
Ducky became aware of more people walking into and out of the room, watching the game. The Afghan ambassador. McGee, holding a book on game theory. Abby, wearing a black-and-white checkered coat with chess piece earrings dangling from her ears. Vance, with a personnel file in his hands.
And Gibbs, standing in the corner with arms folded over his chest, watching as if this was just another interrogation session back at NCIS headquarters.
The game got progressively deadlier, with pieces disappearing from both sides of the board. Ducky had always prided himself on being an expert chess player, but the ruthlessness of this game unnerved him.
"How many will you save, Dr. Mallard, and how many will you take?" Jerek kept asking.
Ducky tried to ignore him, and just concentrated on capturing pieces and keeping his king out of check.
His hand twinged painfully, and he rubbed at it.
"Your hand still plagues you. Javid's dear baby sister certainly has skill with a knife."
Mosuma Daoub appeared and walked slowly around them, wearing her florist's apron over her clothes and carrying a pot of chrysanthemums.
By the last moments of the game, both sides had suffered heavy losses, but Jerek's pieces still outnumbered Ducky's.
Jerek suddenly looked at Ducky's queen, a thoughtful look on his face. "Who is your queen, Ducky? Is it the lovely Jordan? Or do you still pine, as I suspect, for the radiant Maggie? You certainly left young Angus with quite a dentist's bill."
Stop it, Ducky thought, his hands trembling. Stop it!
"And what of your other family? Is the mallard still mourning a lost duckling from all those years ago?" Jerek's hand shot forward and captured one of Ducky's rooks. "I speak, of course, of dear little brother Nicholas."
"How dare you bring my brother into this!" Ducky yelled, his breath coming in ragged gasps.
"How do I not dare! In my profession, Ducky, anything is fair game!" Jerek gripped the edges of the table as he stood up and glared down at Ducky. "I know everything about you…I watched you as you made your rounds in the medical tents, talked to the other doctors, wrote letters home. I found out your strengths…and your weaknesses. And that's how I knew to use Javid. A boy, to break a man. A pawn, to capture a knight."
Jerek smirked as he sat back down, taking in the stricken look in Ducky's eyes. "Yes. That is exactly how you saw yourself, my dear Dr. Mallard – the knight in shining armor, riding in to save the day. And that desire to save the day is what has caused you untold misery and heartache."
He stopped for a moment to let these words sink into Ducky. "And now I believe it is your move."
Ducky stared helplessly at the remaining pieces on the board, fresh waves of guilt and grief washing over him. Threatening to drown him.
"What did you tell me, Duck?" Gibbs called from where he stood in the corner.
"Jethro?"
"You told me yourself. What did you find out while you were doing his physical?" Gibbs prompted.
Remembrance dawned in Ducky's eyes.
Gibbs grinned and disappeared into the shadows.
"Dr. Mallard…" a voice whispered as Ducky felt a hand - no, two hands - on his right shoulder.
He looked up. It was Javid and Mosuma.
"Ducky…" Another two hands came to rest on his left. Jordan's, and Mr. Palmer's.
Ducky moved one of his remaining pawns down to the eighth rank, the very last row.
A promotion.
"Which piece should you like to promote?" Jerek asked.
Ducky thought for a moment, studying where each of Jerek's pieces were on the board.
"I would like my knight back," he said finally.
It wasn't the usual thing – players usually got their queen back on the board, or even brought in a second queen. But Jerek shrugged and handed the knight to Ducky, who put it in the place of his pawn.
"I remember, Marcin, discovering during your physical that you have a congenital immunity to pain," Ducky said as Jerek made his next move.
"This is not news, Ducky. Not to either of us or anyone else."
"No, it isn't. But…what it told me was that it meant you couldn't tell when you'd gone wrong." Ducky's voice took on an edge. "When you'd gone too far."
With that, he moved his knight two squares down and one over, and he looked Marcin Jerek, Mr. Pain, square in the eye.
"Checkmate."
Everyone else in the room vanished, leaving Ducky and Jerek alone with the game board.
The two men pushed back from the table and stood up, facing each other but making no attempt to shake hands. Jerek's jaw was quivering with barely suppressed rage.
A rumbling noise could be heard, somewhere off in the distance. "Whoa, sandstorm coming. Batten down the hatches," Abby's voice said.
A sandstorm did blow into the room – a sirocco. It sent Trent's camera crashing to the floor and blasted everything in the room with needle-sharp grains of sand.
Ducky held up his arms in front of his face to shield it from the sand as the sirocco bore down on them, sending chess pieces and board whirling into the air.
Jerek remained standing, still gripping the edges of the table – and to Ducky's amazement, he started to fade away in the sandstorm.
"The king is dead," Jerek hissed, his voice eerily magnified and distorted.
Ducky gasped as his eyes snapped open, his heart racing. He was staring up at the ceiling over his bed, as dawn started to appear on the horizon outside his window.
There came a loud pounding on the door. "Ducky! Ducky, shine and rise!" More pounding.
"The term is rise and shine, Ziva!" Ducky called. "I'll be up in a minute – and stop that pounding or you'll wake the entire hotel!"
Ziva's footsteps died away down the hall. Ducky returned his gaze to the ceiling, Jerek's final words echoing in his ears.
The king is dead.
"Long live the king," Ducky whispered.