Consequences of Love and War: Chapter 5

A/N: Last night on call, I discovered why people specialize in critical care (not that I'm going to do so, but I can understand it now). I didn't save a life (not really), and my patient will probably never realize just how much work went into what we did, but I discovered just how rewarding it can be to know that you sacrificed sleep and sanity, and in the end, it paid off. To him, it was just a blimp on the screen of the events that had been shaping his life for the past four days, since he ended up on the wrong end of an IED in Afghanistan, but to me, it's knowing that I did something to help him get better.

I think it's about time I stop complaining about my RL. When I think about it, it's pretty darn cool.

McGee knew Abby wanted to work alone, but he also knew that she would only protest his presence for a few seconds before resigning herself to it. To make those few seconds go a little bit more smoothly, he took a quick detour to the base convenience store for a fresh Caf-Pow first.

"Aww, McGee, you didn't have to do that," she crooned as she registered the presence of the highly caffeinated drink. Despite her words, she wasted no time in grabbing it and sticking the straw in her mouth. "You wanna see how this program works?"

"You have to ask?" He pulled a labstool up to her computer bench and took a seat. She turned her head toward him quickly and grinned, her black pigtails flying. He hadn't realized until that moment just how long her hair had gotten; between her and Ziva, there was long black hair everywhere. He wondered if long hair had gone back in style, but quickly dismissed the thought. It wasn't that it wasn't necessarily true, it was just that neither woman was really into high fashion, but for entirely different reasons.

She took another long drink from the Caf-Pow before she began speaking. "So this is a brand-spanking-new program that the FBI boys came up with, and I mean 'boys' in a strictly gender-neutral kinda way. I mean, there could have been women on the programming team, too. There probably were, actually. Government agencies have this big thing about making sure that they're being equal-opportunity when it comes to their hiring. That's why we have those quarterly equal-opportunity briefings, which are more than just a little ridiculous, because—"

"I go to them, too, Abby. I know how ridiculous they are."

"Right. Sorry, McGee. I'm on my third Caf-Pow already this morning. Didn't get much sleep last night."

"Oh, yeah. Last night was that concert, wasn't it? Legally Dead?"

"Lethally Dead," she corrected. "Yeah, I know. It's a little redundant. They were pretty good, but they were having some sound issues, so the set started pretty late, and after they were done, Jack and I decided to go to this one diner and get some coffee and pie, and—"

"Jack?" McGee interrupted with a frown. Abby turned from her computer screen and also frowned.

"Yeah. My cousin Jack, from Louisiana? It was her band. Oh! You met her, that one time."

"Oh," he said, remembering. "The one with the…" His voice trailed off as he gestured to his jaw.

"She got laser hair removal. The full beard is gone." She shrugged. "It's too bad circuses don't have freak shows anymore. She could have made a lot of money as a bearded woman."

"Doesn't she make a lot of money by having a band?"

"Please, McGee. Have you ever heard of Lethally Dead?" The keys clicked softly as her fingers flew over them. "So like I was saying, this is a brand-new program, which means there may some problems if this goes to court." He shuddered slightly at the memory of another time her science came into question at court and the hitman the defendant hired to take her out just in case.

"I think at this point, we're more concerned with finding the lieutenant than court," he replied to distract himself from the thought. Abby made a face at him.

"I know that, McGee," she protested indignantly. "I was just trying to make conversation."

"When have you ever had a hard time making conversation?"

"When I was starting kindergarten, when I was five," she replied promptly. Her fingers were still flying over the keyboard, the program running. He was always impressed at her ability to multitask; she could tell a nonsensical story while running some of the most complicated forensics tests he knew of. "I spent most of my time before that with my parents, of course, and we didn't talk at home."

"Because they're deaf."

"Right. So this program is different from other enhancement programs in that it actually uses video, not stills. It was originally written to be used to identify people wearing ski masks and uses their movements to extrapolate the features." She selected the hooded figure in the shadows of the video and clicked a few things, blowing it up and enhancing the pixels. "I'm not sure how it'll do on this one, because this guy is wearing a hood, not a mask. A mask is a lot tighter on the face and you can actually see some movement with changing facial expressions, but the hood covers up a lot more." They watched silently as the video ran, the screen remaining focused on the head of the hooded figure as it approached Dr. Aachen and threw a similar hood over her head before leaning forward and ending the connection. "I've watched this like, a dozen times, and that still creeps me out," Abby admitted. "Okay, so it uses the light and the changing shadows as the figure moves to extrapolate what is under the hood," she continued with the explanation. "The light in the video is pretty good, since she was in an office. The bad guy starts in this corner, which is a little shadowed by that filing-cabinet thing—"

"It just looks like a stack of black plastic boxes," McGee interrupted.

"Is that really relevant?" she shot back in return. "Okay, it's not getting a fix on anything in this first few seconds—"

"Wait," McGee said, a frown on his face as he leaned forward in the labstool. "Pause it. Go back to the beginning of the video. Has this guy been there during the whole conversation, or did he come in sometime while they were talking?"

"Good question," Abby agreed as she went back to the beginning of the video, zooming in on the shadowy corner where the man had been lurking. "We'll have to enhance it, give it a little bit more light," she said, more to herself than to McGee as she entered the commands into the keyboard. "There he is. He's been there throughout the whole conversation."

"That doesn't make any sense," the field agent said with a frown. "She had been in the office for over an hour, working on patient charts. Wouldn't she have noticed him coming in?"

"Unless he was there already," Abby pointed out.

"So he was just standing there, waiting for over an hour and a half to abduct her?" he asked, still frowning. "Why wait for her to call her husband? If he had snatched her right away, they could have gotten her out without anyone noticing. Unless…"

"Unless he wanted to be noticed," Abby finished. "So what does that mean? Are we going to be getting a sketchy follow-up video from a terrorist cell, with shaky camera work and shadows and vague threats about what's going to happen to our lieutenant if we don't release the following five bad guys?"

"How did he know that she was going to be calling anybody?" McGee asked. "Was he planning on waiting there for hours or as long as it took for her to use Skype, so this abduction would be on tape?"

Abby shrugged. "Maybe she calls at the same time every day."

He sighed as he pushed the stool away from the bench and stood. "It sounds like I have some questions for Mr. Kirkan," he said reluctantly. He didn't have anything against the author—he had only met him once, after all, and they had barely spoken more than simple pleasantries—but the last thing he wanted at the moment was to get into a conversation that could lead to a discussion of his writing, especially with someone who was currently much, much more successful at that than he was.