Chapter 6

"As it seems, no one has yet officially claimed responsibility," the speaker of the evening news announced.

"Is it true what they say?" Marissa asked when she just entered the 'office'. McGee and Tony who had been standing in front of the plasma screen between their desks turned around.

"No idea so far. Even if CIA knew, they wouldn't tell NCIS," McGee commented. "You alright?"

"Yes, I was far enough away from the explosion," she said. Agent Jones had been among the agents searching the lower floors of the High School building which directly bordered to the sporting area of the complex. Due to the explosion, the windows had burst and also injured agents in the classrooms. Marissa had been of the lucky ones. Only a few, slight scratches decorated her face and you could see that she wiped away the blood with her right sleeve. She just came from the General Hospital where she had accompanied several other agents and helped out due to her medical training.

"Anything else I missed?" she asked.

Tony shook his head. "The gym is the only location where the bomb detonated. The explosion devices in the kindergarten were disarmed and nothing was found at the other targets. A school and a kindergarten were the less secured areas but also the most cruel ones to attack."

"That's probably why they warned us before," Gibbs said who just walked down the stairs from a meeting with the other teams' bosses.

"You mean they didn't want to get anyone hurt, just blow stuff up?" Tony asked.

"Exactly. Both Al Qaeda and an Indian terror cell claimed responsibility as well as the Russian Criminal Society so none of them could have done it."

"Great, that means these people are still out there. But what was their motif?" Marissa asked.

"That's not our problem. CIA and Homeland Security will be working on it. We're just told to carry on with 'whatever stuff we have to do'. So go home, all of you. See you tomorrow," Gibbs said and sat down at his own desk. When the agents noticed that no more instructions were to come, they took their rucksacks and left the building again.

The next day started slower and calmer than expected. Tony arrived at work at exactly eight twenty and checked his e-mails. Surprisingly, there were none except for advertisements sent by eBay or Amazon. Only a little while later, both McGee and Marissa arrived as well. There hadn't been a call for a new case yet and Gibbs did not appear as well. Tony used the time to write some old reports which were overdue and sent them immediately to the Internal Data Storage. Around half past eleven, McGee was called to the Video conference room to monitor another's team interrogation with a naval officer over sea. Tim and another computer expert had to supervise the audio and video footage recorded during the talk.

He hadn't come back until half past twelve when Ducky came upstairs from the autopsy and proposed to Tony and Marissa to spend lunch time together in town. 'Like the old times', he had wanted to say but both he and Tony knew that it would never be 'the old times' again.

"Do you remember the last time we ate here?" Tony suddenly asked when they were half-way through their meals and ran out of discussion topics.

"The day Kate was kidnapped," Ducky said, making clear that he did not wanted to be reminded on another agent's death.

"Who was Kate?" Marissa asked interested.

"The agent who worked in the team before Ziva," Tony explained. Only a week ago he wouldn't have managed to approach the topic without bursting into tears. And he knew that the psychiatric help had been needed. "It was more than eight years ago since we last time ate here in this restaurant. There were different owners back then but the French fries still taste the same."

"Katelyn was abducted by an Israeli Mossad agent who had once intruded NCIS with a Hamas hostage situation. Only a year later, he shot her during a mission. At the end, he got punished for his crimes," Ducky gave her the short version.

"Not enough," Tony commented silently. "So," he tried to get back some of his former mood, "I would say your job is haunted, Marissa. Better keep both eyes open," he said with a smile.

"No problem, I'll do," she laughed back.

"Anything new?" McGee asked when he entered Abby's lab.

She quickly closed the open programs on the monitor. "No, not at all. I mean, how am I supposed to find something new when we're not working on a case? This is completely impossible, Tim–"

"Calm down, Abby," he interrupted her and looked at the task bar. "You hiding something?"

"No, of course not. What should I? There's nothing to be hidden."

"You know you're a bad secret keeper. What's up?"

She sighed, fully aware of her lousy lying skills. "The new director had asked to run a full diagnose of the explosion from yesterday. I got some materials from a friendly FBI guy working in digital forensics. We worked together on programming a 3D-analysis of the attack from yesterday, showing both the explosion of the hospital and how it would have looked at the kindergarten if it had blown up."

"And what did you find out?"

"It's ultra classified, McGee. And with ultra I mean, highly, intensively classified," she argued.

McGee only raised his eyebrows.

"Okay, I'll show you," she decided and started to run the program. First, it showed a 3D-animation with the camera flying once around the gymnasium, also picturing the school complex behind in great detail. Then it switched to displaying the location of the explosive devices. "There were four C4-packages on each wall of the building and also two on the inside and outside of the corner arcs," Abby explained.

A countdown started and first the devices in the corner exploded, the building started cracking and the corners starting to fall down, leaving both the roof and the main walls intact. Only twenty seconds later did the other devices go off, tearing down the walls as well. This led to the destabilisation of the integrity of the roof which then collapsed and broke into three main pieces before even hitting the ground.

"You see how they did it?" Abby asked.

McGee only nodded, still amazed by the great computer graphics and the detail of explosion. "They planned it very thoroughly."

"Exactly. And we ran several tests. This is one of the safest way to completely destroy a building. The most explosions leave an unstable ruin which could fall down anytime, leaving a great risk. But this gym collapsed completely, burying everyone inside. It was supposed to show how deadly such an explosion can be. And it was definitely done by professionals."

"I assume they're already searching the most advanced bomb experts which are currently available on the black market?"

"Yes, they are. And this guy from digital forensics told me that CIA had fifteen of them under surveillance. And they lost three of them only one week ago. And these three people's bodies appeared last night floating on the Thames."

"They wanted to get rid of the weak links," McGee realised. "Thank you, Abby."

"You never got this information from me, understood?" Abby shouted after him but McGee had already left the lab.

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