a/n - and it begins. Enjoy.

Tobias squinted at his phone as he checked the caller ID. He was beginning to think going without sleep was a requirement to work with NCIS. Trying to not sound sleepy, he flipped it open. "Fornell."

~What in the hell are you doing to my agency, Fornell? You've got one hour to get in here with McGee.~

"Director Vance? Sir, we're already scheduled to meet in your office later today."

~I'm not waiting that long to find out why someone tried to blow up our autopsy room tonight. Get McGee and get in here.~

"We're on our way, sir. You do understand that Agent McGee is still recovering from his injuries?"

~Unless he is currently leaking blood, I expect you both in my office in one hour.~

He was expecting the slamming of the phone, but he still jumped, much to Myers' amusement. Jason rolled off the sofa and stretched, popping his back in a way that made Fornell jealous. Fornell just rolled his eyes as he walked towards the bedroom. "I'll wake the kid, you start the coffee; and make it strong; I think we're going to need it." Tobias stopped as the both heard the shower kick on. "Guess he heard the phone call."

Jason fumbled with the filters one handed as he reached for the coffee grinds. "The way Vance was yelling, I think most of the building heard that phone call."

In the shower, McGee turned the water as hot as he could stand it, hoping to fill the small room with steam. He soaped quickly and rinsed before shutting the water off. With luck there would be enough hot water for the others, but he needed the steam this morning. Cautiously he took another shallow breath, then another a little deeper. The ache in his chest was sharper this morning and he had developed a slight cough. He hadn't been able to take a deep breath since the shooting, but today was definitely worse. As he dried off he hoped to have a few minutes to see Ducky while they were at NCIS, but from their track record so far, he wasn't counting on it.

With just enough time to get to the Navy Yard without raising Vance's ire even more, the three men left the apartment safe house. Fornell was a little surprised McGee had turned down the coffee, but looking at the young man surrounded with stacks of printouts and a pocket full of flash drives, he decided McGee was probably jittery enough without the extra caffeine.

---NCIS---

"Man, they've really ramped up the security since the last time I was here." Myers looked up in the rearview mirror to see Fornell glaring back at him. Realizing that his boss was hoping that McGee was too distracted to notice, he tried to backpedal. "Guess it's the monthly drill we're all supposed to do."

McGee had been too well trained by Gibbs to not notice. "This is no drill." He looked over at Fornell who was studying him closely. "I was right, they made a run at the body?" When Fornell just nodded, Tim asked the one question he was dreading. "Was anyone hurt?"

Fornell knew his answer wasn't going to be believed. "I don't know, kid. Honestly, I don't know. Vance wasn't big on details."

Once their car, their bags, their badges and their signatures were carefully scrutinized, McGee was allowed into his own agency with the two FBI agents one step behind him. Leon Vance was waiting just inside the doors, two agents on protection detail flanking him and two armed soldiers to his side. Vance rarely looked happy, but Tim had never seen the man look this angry.

"So nice of you to leave us a present, Agent McGee. Tell me, how long was there between the time you knew the danger you put this agency in and when you finally got around to letting us in on the little secret?"

The reassuring hand on his shoulder fanned his bravery. "Four or five seconds, Sir. We had no proof or evidence, but I informed Agent Gibbs as soon as I had a suspicion there might be trouble. What exactly did happen last night?"

Vance pointed to the elevator. "Let's talk downstairs." The group moved to the elevator, but Fornell stopped Tim just outside it.

"You've got four people with you that haven't been vetted by the task force. Either they stay up here or we do."

"What are you suggesting?" Vance stared at Fornell with an incredulous expression. "Are you suggesting my agency has a turncoat?"

Fornell was just tired enough to not care about insulting the brass. "Well, Director Vance, I'd hate to think you're the only agency in the entire government to not have that pleasure right now."

For the first time since they arrived, Vance took a good look at the three men. They looked frayed and worn. His wife would have a fit if she'd seen how they had been greeted. Giving in, he dismissed the protection detail and waited for the three to join him in the elevator. No one spoke during the trip down, both Vance and Fornell noticed McGee rubbing his chest and shoulder when he thought no one was looking.

The elevator stopped at the sub-basement rather than the basement, much to McGee's surprise as Vance explained tersely. "Autopsy is sealed, we'll talk in here." He lead them into the lab where the rest of Tim's NCIS team were waiting along with Ducky, Palmer and Abby. The Goth seemed unsure of herself and was watching McGee closely.

Ducky was bandaging Ziva's arm when they arrived, several butterfly bandages closed a gash along Gibbs' hairline, indicating he'd already been treated. As McGee asked what had happened, Jason moved up behind him in a show of support. Gibbs turned to Ziva as he started the explanation, as much for McGee's benefit as for Vance's.

"I was almost home when you called about a possible attempt on the body. I called DiNozzo and David and ordered them to return here immediately. Ziva was the first to arrive." He nodded at her and she took over the retelling of the events.

"I was going through the main gate when Gibbs called me, so I had the guard at the gate radio for assistance and I immediately returned. I came through the garage entrance and…"

~flashback~

Ziva didn't even bother to throw the car out of gear as she came to a stop next to the coroner's van. She slammed against the door, cursing the time it took for the eye scan to recognizer her and allow her into the building. Weapon already in hand, she crept down the stairs to the lowest level. She could hear sounds coming from behind the steel doors. Ducking down to not be seen through the glass, she made it past the doors to press against the wall and see inside. A masked figure, all in black was inside the room, pulling the drawers open in an apparent attempt to locate the body.

Behind her, a sound caught her attention and she turned to face a second intruder. He dropped a large glass jar of liquid, allowing it to shatter on impact. She recognized the smell of rocket fuel instantly. Ziva drew down on him as he laughed, flicking a lighter in his other hand. She fired, not at him, but at the lighter in his hand. The bullet tore through his fingers and sent the lighter flying to land away from the spilled fuel. She fired again, but he managed to get a round off at the same time, grazing her upper arm before hitting the glass window in the door. The attacker fell, unmoving, as the door to autopsy burst open, hitting Ziva's wounded arm and knocking her gun out of her hand.

For a split second Ziva stared at the ice cold blue eyes visible through the mask before they both dove for the gun. His first blow was to her injured arm, a move designed to cause pain, to incapacitate. For many, it would have succeeded, but not against a Mossad operative fighting for her life. The few seconds it did gain him cost her dearly as the fight dragged on.

When the sound of gunfire echoed through the stairwell, Gibbs abandoned all pretense of stealth and tore down the remaining stairs, sparing only a quick glance through the small window in the door before bursting through.

In the dim light he could see Ziva on the floor struggling with someone. They were too tangled together for Gibbs to take a shot, so he holstered his weapon and entered the fray as the masked man lunged back into autopsy, dragging Ziva with him. The door swung back, hitting Gibbs in the face as he slipped on the fuel slicked floor. The blow didn't slow him down much as he was quickly back onto his feet. The assailant struggled to get across the room, ignoring the two agents trying to control him. In a move that almost felt anticlimactic, his threw a sharp jab to the man's face, knocking him unconscious. Gibbs pulled his weapon back out and cautiously cleared the room while Ziva handcuffed him. Footsteps in the hall caught her attention and she eased into position next to the door. Through the cracked glass she could see that the new arrival was not masked

~end flashback~

DiNozzo picked up the tale. "After Ziva decided not to kill me, we cleared the rest of the basement and secured the explosives."

"Explosives?" To answer McGee, DiNozzo pulled up a picture on one of the monitors of a large stack of C-4 blocks partially wired to a detonator.

"Between the C-4 and the rocket fuel, it would have destroyed both the basement and the sub-basement and cremated everything biological. Those are some freaky scary people you've gotten yourself tangled up with, Probie."

Fornell was more interested in suspects than blame. "You captured one of them alive?"

"Oh, that's the best part." DiNozzo gave a wry grin as he continued. "Bubba was sitting there grinning like a loon, kinda like the nutty clerk was before she went sidewalk diving, and then he announced that he had missed his time for the antidote and dropped over dead. So now Ducky has all three bodies sealed up and we get to figure out what to do with them after they finish getting all the explosives and rocket fuel cleaned up."

DiNozzo glanced at McGee. Tim had been quietly coughing off and on ever since he had arrived and Abby was plying him with a Caf-Pow. Every time he set it down, she would hand it back to him. She seemed more settled now that she was fussing over him, but he looked haunted as he listened to what had happened. Concerned, he pressed on in hopes of reassuring his partner. "Whatever is going on, apparently you've done a good job at it cause they're playing hardball and now it's time to let us play too."

Gibbs, too, had waited long enough. "Are you ready to tell us what is going on?"

McGee and Fornell exchanged a look before Fornell answered for him. "Let's take this up to MTAC, we'll need the security."

---NCIS---

If the technicians were surprised to be told to leave MTAC, they didn't show it as they filed out and Gibbs closed the door behind them. At first Fornell objected to the supporting members of the team being part of the discussion, but McGee quickly informed him that he trusted them and they needed to understand the significance of the tests Abby would be running when autopsy was opened back up. A strange look passed across Abby's face as McGee talked about trust, and DiNozzo and David watched her closely. Behind McGee, Myers watched all three of them.

Vance still seemed annoyed, but Fornell was beginning to think it was a perpetual state for the man. "All right, McGee, why don't you start by telling us who you're after and what's going on. Just start at the beginning."

McGee rubbed at his chest as he looked at Director Vance, using the formality of a report to keep his emotions in check. "Several weeks ago we discovered unusual deaths occurring at some nursing homes, starting in Iowa. Upon investigating, it was discovered that Edmund Moore had taken over a controlling interest in those chains of homes."

It was apparent that all the agents and operatives in the room recognized the name, but Palmer and Abby did not, so Fornell broke in to bring them up to speed. "Moore has been on our radar as a homegrown terrorist for years now, but we've never been able to pin anything on him. Every investigation up until now has ended with the deaths of one or more of the agents involved and always in a way that we couldn't connect to Moore. Everything from car accidents to allergic reactions. The man's like Teflon; nothing sticks to him."

Ducky looked at McGee in alarm at the mention of allergies, as Palmer asked a question of his own. "What exactly has Moore done that can be tied to him?"

Fornell was pacing as he rubbed the back of his head. "That's what made it so hard to nail him. We can't directly link him to anything, but he's always been in the background whenever there's been a major incident that we can't prove was an accident, like the mine collapse a few months ago. Moore was recruiting in the area literally days earlier."

"They operate in the guise of a church, call themselves the Dawn of Tomorrow." McGee picked up where he'd left off. "Some of their rhetoric is really scary. For the last few years it's all been about wiping away all the non-believers from the country and repopulating it with his own kind."

Even Gibbs paled at the implications. "So the nursing homes…"

Feeling the pressure of not knowing what Moore's group was planning to do with the money and the knowledge they were gathering, McGee cut straight to the chase. "They're the first layer of whatever he has planned. They're running illegal drug testing on some of the patients; probably to raise the necessary funds for whatever he's planning to do."

"How many," Vance looked over at Gibbs before clearing his throat and trying again. "How many victims are we talking about so far?" Before he answered., Tim pulled a stack of papers out of his backpack and handed it to Vance. The black clip at the top was barely holding the pages as the Director glanced through them. "So far we've identified more victims of his fundraising than have died from every terrorist attack on this country combined."

If felt like the air had been sucked out of the room as the members of NCIS stared at McGee and at each other, trying to absorb the sheer numbers of deaths McGee was claiming to have happened. DiNozzo was the first to react.

"That's not possible, somebody would have noticed. Why wasn't it noticed?"

McGee was hunched over slightly, holding his left arm tightly against his body. "Tony, he controls hundreds of nursing homes and rehab centers in forty two states. He uses the patients that are unable to communicate or have no family, and it's been going on for more than ten years."

"You said that Fornell didn't drag you into this; that you went to him." Gibbs words were gentle, something rarely heard by his team, as if the discussion would somehow fracture the young team mate who had carried this investigation on without them. "How did you discover what was happening?"

Tim was even paler now and dots of sweat on his forehead caught the dim lights in MTAC as he sat down for the first time since they had arrived. "The first identified victim was Mitchell McGee… my father."

Everyone else in the room ceased to exist as Gibbs squatted down in front of McGee. "When?" Even as he asked, barely breathing the word, he knew. He knew when he'd seen that broken, haunted expression even if he didn't recognize it at the time. "Kale, it happened when we were tracking Kale, didn't it?"

The one think Tim never wanted to see was the guilt in his mentor's eyes as he tried to answer, but the pain and the pressure were becoming too much to bear. He tried to curl his body more, to relieve it somehow, but he sensed he was running out of time, out of strength, out of air as he fell forward.

Time stretched and warped as Gibbs asked his question. He saw the sadness cross Tim's face, the confusion, the pain, and finally the resignation as his body went slack. As time snapped back into normal he lunged forward, his knees hitting the hard floor as McGee's limp form tumbled into his arms.