Consequences of Love and War: Chapter 20
A/N: I feel almost dirty for admitting this, but NNMC is a much nicer hospital than Walter Reed (probably why they're closing Reed and moving it over to Bethesda...) That being said, Navy doctors are crazy. Seriously. You know it's bad when the intern wearing an Army Combat Uniform is the most sane person in the room.
Anyway, to sum up the case thus far (at least the important points): the NCIS Bahrain team has found and released Ezra Hardoon, sending him back to Tel Aviv with his control officer, Raanan Thal, after questioning him about Dr. Aachen's abduction. He didn't know anything, but he did point them in the direction of a man who might, an arms dealer/drug dealer/persons trafficker/all-around-bad-guy financing Taliban cells in the Kabul area, near Camp Phoenix, where Dr. Aachen was abducted from. He's going to be in the Hamptons for the weekend, at a party hosted by Tony's father, Alessandro DiNozzo, and between Stan Burley and Ziva, they convinced Tony to agree to go to the Hamptons to apprehend and question him.
When Peter Kirkan walked into NCIS, he had bags under his eyes and a look of confusion on his face. He stopped at the edge of the bull pen, almost afraid to enter. There was some sort of intense staring going on between Agent DiNozzo and Officer David, where they would both appear to be working on something, then would glance at the other with a look that made him think they were trying to beam some sort of telepathic communication to each other, and as illogical as he knew it was, he was afraid of physical injury if he stepped into the crossfire. Although he knew it was silly, he continued past their desks and crossed to the other side behind the staircase, to where Agent McGee was surreptitiously watching them with an amused look on his face.
"What's going on?" he finally asked. McGee blinked in surprise before turning to face Kirkan; the writer was sure that the agent hadn't even noticed he was standing there, he was that focused on his co-workers.
"Tony and Ziva are going undercover," he finally said, nodding to the other two occupants of the bull pen. "Well, kinda undercover. They're going as themselves to the house where Tony grew up."
"How is that undercover?" Kirkan asked with a frown.
"Well, none of the guests at the party are going to know that they'll be there to question one of the, well, one of the other guests."
Kirkan's frown deepened as he processed that sentence, trying to figure out why DiNozzo and David would be going undercover to a party. "There was a break in the case," he finally said.
"Kinda," McGee allowed, then hesitated as he weighed how much he should be sharing with the abductee's husband. "The NCIS agents in Bahrain found a Mossad operative who had been undercover in a Taliban cell. He was captured about a month ago and spent some time in American detainee centers ever since. He didn't know anything about where your wife—uh, Dr. Aachen—is or who would have kidnapped her or why, but he did have the name of an Eastern European arms dealer who is rumored to be financing Taliban cells around Kabul. They also found out that he's in the Hamptons for a few weeks for a pre-season party."
"At the house where Agent DiNozzo grew up?"
McGee nodded. "I couldn't make this stuff up if I tried," he confided. Kirkan bit back the first thing that came to his mind: he had read McGee's—or, rather, Gemcity's—books, and knew that statement to be true. After meeting the Major Crimes Response Team, he couldn't help but wonder if there was anything in the Deep Six series that was fictional. Of course, he didn't have too much room to talk in that department; he had written Mitch Lindholm, Bryan Lindemann, Jess Ting, and Alyse into each of his stories, and characters based on Colleen O'Conner and Wyatt and Ellie Reynolds had appeared in at least two of his four novels. "Tony's father is the CEO of a holding company and has made some very good business decisions over the years. His net worth is in at area of the millions where it doesn't really matter what the actual number is, because you have so much money you can't possibly spend it all if you tried."
"And his son works for NCIS." There was no judgment in his tone; after all, he himself had a wife who definitely didn't need to work for the Navy, but did so anyway. He would never look down on somebody in the armed forces or chose to work with those in uniform, no matter what their reasons.
"That's apparently some long and involved story," McGee confided. Kirkan was sure that the younger man didn't know the details, or maybe was saving them for the next book. He smirked inwardly; Alyse was always teasing him about his generally cynical view of other people. He replied that someone who listed House of God as one of her favorite books and claimed that the first season of Scrubs summed up internship perfectly didn't have any room to be calling anybody else cynical. "All I know is that Tony is not looking forward to going up to the Hamptons, undercover or not."
"It doesn't help that their anniversary is in two days." Both men turned to face Abby Sciuto, wearning an expression on her face that was a combination of bubbly and understanding. McGee frowned.
"Already?" he asked, appearing to be mentally calculating dates. Abby nodded, her black pigtails bobbing.
"Two days," she repeated. "And Tony was really excited about it, so I think he had something planned, but I doubt that something had anything to do with going to the Hamptons to hobnob with the type of people he grew up with."
"Something planned?" McGee asked with a frown. "He wasn't planning on proposing or anything, was he?"
Abby scoffed. "Proposing? Tony and Ziva engaged? Right." She shook her head again. "I have no idea what he was going to do, but it would probably be something a lot more Tony-and-Ziva-ish to celebrate their two-year anniversary. Like helicopter lessons or a trip to a nuclear weapon firing range or something."
McGee nodded absently at the assessment before frowning slightly. "Anniversary of what?" he asked. "Is there a point where they actually started dating?"
"I asked Tony that last year," Abby confided. "He uses the first time they slept together. Ziva goes along with that because, well, because she's not really all that sentimental. Besides, it would be really hard for them to find another relationship landmark."
"I guess that's as good a date as any," McGee agreed. Seeing the confused look on Kirkan's face, he explained, "Tony and Ziva started dating, if you want to call it that, two years ago while they were on another undercover mission."
"So now they have this thing about going undercover together," Abby rushed in. "They don't like doing it at all. Tony said it's like a reminder of how screwed-up their relationship is."
"Tony tells you a lot about their relationship, doesn't he?" McGee asked with a frown.
"You guys do realize that we can hear everything you're saying, right?" DiNozzo finally asked, his eyes not lifting from the document he was studying. Ziva looked up at them and raised her eyebrows before glancing over at Tony and then back at her computer screen. McGee looked embarrassed; Abby just shrugged. As entertaining as the sidebar with Agent McGee and Ms. Sciuto was, Kirkan decided that if he wanted information about what this undercover-but-not-undercover mission was, he should probably ask the people going.
"What's in the Hamptons?"
"It's more of a who," DiNozzo replied after a long silent pause, during which there was some sort of unspoken communication with Officer David. "And we don't really know yet."
"What do you know?" Kirkan asked insistently. DiNozzo raised his eyebrows at the tone, but Kirkan wasn't about to apologize for it. He was a reporter; he knew how to press for information.
"International bad guy, giving all sorts of money and goodies to the Taliban, now apparently rubbing elbows with my father," the NCIS agent said bitterly. "Knowing my father's taste in friends, he'll probably be invited to his next wedding."
"Your father is getting married?" Ziva asked. DiNozzo shrugged.
"Bound to happen sooner or later. He doesn't go long without a wife, and wives don't last long. I stopped counting how many times he's been married a long time ago."
"I should go with you," Kirkan said suddenly. Both DiNozzo and Ziva turned to him, eyebrows raised in expressions that were almost comical in how similar they were. "If this guy has anything to do with who took Alyse, I should go with you."
"Good luck," DiNozzo offered with a falsely light tone. "It's not exactly easy to wrangle an invite to these parties."
"That wouldn't be a problem," Kirkan argued. "My publisher is always trying to get me to get out more, trying to get me to promote my own books. She says the eccentric recluse thing only works for Salman Rushdie. She'd find a way to get me in if I said I wanted to go. If I could just go, to see this guy and show him—"
"No," Ziva interrupted with a shake of her head, rising from her chair to step closer to where Kirkan was standing. When she spoke again, her voice was low and intense. "Men like this, this Zajac, the type of men who finance terrorists and traffickers, they do not care about anybody but themselves. Families do not matter, with the exception of their own families." She remembered being tied to a chair in a hotel room, listening to a man calmly explain to a couple he thought was expecting a child about the sacrifices that he had made, how he would much rather be celebrating his own daughter's birthday than sitting in a hotel room in DC, about to kill them. "They do not care about other people's husbands, or wives, or parents or children, because they do not think of other people as people, merely objects that can be manipulated for their own gains."
"You don't know—"
"I know the type of people who go into this line of work," Ziva interrupted again. She didn't break eye contact with Kirkan. "They do not become arms dealers and traffickers because they are good people out of their luck."
"Down on their luck," Tony corrected automatically. She ignored him.
"They know that what they do hurts people, but they do not care. The only concern that they have is lining their own pockets. They do not have morals. They do not care to rationalize that the ends justify the means, because they do not even think about the means, as long as the ends are reached."
"Did that even make sense?" DiNozzo asked with a frown. She again ignored him. Kirkan shook his head slowly.
"I can't just sit around doing nothing," he said, his eyes traveling from Officer David to Agent DiNozzo and back, finally settling on DiNozzo. "I spent the first six years of my adult life in the Corps, and they didn't exactly teach us how to wait for other people to solve our problems. Hell, I went off to war because we made it our business to solve their problems." He took a deep breath. "I know that this is what you guys do for a living and that you're good at it, but this is killing me. This is my wife; she's the most important thing in the world to me by far. I need to do something. Anything. Even if it's just being in the same state while you question the guy who might know where Alyse is being held." He searched DiNozzo's eyes for some understanding, and while he saw it, he also saw that the NCIS agent wasn't going to cave. "Please."
DiNozzo shook his head. "You took care of the country," he said. "And your wife takes care of those who take care of the country. Our job is to take care of her. Let us do our job. We'll get Alyse back."