Consequences of Love and War: Chapter 33
A/N: Just in case you've forgotten what's happened in the last few chapters... Tony and Ziva were at his father's estate in East Hampton for a party after Mossad operative Ezra Hardoon told them that Niko Zajac, an international arms dealer/drug dealer/all-around bad guy who might be behind Dr. Aachen's abduction, would be at said party. He was at the party, but didn't have anything to do with their current case (I'm sure they got him on all sorts of other charges, though). While they were rubbing elbows with the rich and famous, Lyndi Crenshaw (of the episode "Rock Hollow") got an email from the kidnappers telling her that they had Dr. Alyse Aachen and would release her for $5 million. The publishing house offered to pay the ransom, in exchange for Peter Kirkan going public about the fact that his wife was being held hostage (nothing boosts sales like sympathetic publicity, I guess).
Peter Kirkan tugged at the sleeves of his sports coat uncomfortably, wishing he were anywhere but the press room on the floor below Lyndi Crenshaw's office. In the three years since his first book hit the shelves, she had only been able to talk him into two public appearances, and he was still convinced that he was tricked to do the first. He was much more comfortable sitting in the press section of these things than waiting in the wings to go up to the podium. She tried to get him to wear a tie, too, but he would only cave so far. If his mother couldn't get him to wear a tie at his own wedding—it was a pretty casual wedding in a national park at sunset; a tie would have been ridiculous—there was no way his publisher was going to get him in one for a press conference he didn't want to be having in the first place.
"Pete." He turned toward the source of the sound, and did a double take in surprise. Almost against his will, he felt a smile tugging at his lips.
"Captain Ting," he drawled, "didn't know you still owned a uniform." As a surgeon, she wore civvies to work before changing into her scrubs, completely eliminating the need to wear a uniform everyday.
She rolled her eyes as she smoothed imaginary wrinkles from her service blue uniform. "Bryan came by Reed with it after I finished rounds, told me to hurry up and get my ass changed so we aren't late. Made me take a day of emergency leave and miss the one interesting case I've had all month. That boy is rather bossy for a guy with only one leg."
He smiled thinly. "Where is 'that boy'?"
"He was parking the car." They both turned to face Bryan Lindemann as he approached from behind them, subtly resting his hand on the small of his girlfriend's back before dropping his arm. "She made me drop her off under the awning so she wouldn't have to wear her beret." He opened up his suit jacket to show the black beret tucked neatly into his belt. "And then she made me carry it."
"Well, you gotta be good for something," she replied before rising to her toes to kiss his cheek. "Go find us a place to sit. I need to talk to Pete."
"The abuse I put up with," he muttered as he turned and headed for the back of the room. Both Kirkan and Jess watched him walk away before turning to face each other before he nodded toward the prep area just behind them.
"What the hell, Pete?" Jess asked quietly. "Alyse is one of my best friends, and I have to hear about the fact that she's missing from Bryan, days after the fact?"
He sighed. "Jess—"
"No," she interrupted, shaking her head emphatically. "No no, no no," she said in the tone that he used to think was teasing, but later realized was her forceful denial. He heard her use the same tone to nurses and medical students who made mistakes with her patients. "You do not get to give excuses, not about this. You don't get to play the loner, eccentric writer card who doesn't need anybody's help, not when it comes to Alyse. She's pretty much the only internist I have any respect for, but more importantly…" Her voice trailed off as she looked away, and Kirkan was surprised to see her blink away tears. She looked down at her left hand and began twisting her West Point ring—"That's where you wear a West Point ring. Says you're married to the Army," Bryan had explained once—before speaking again. "I couldn't have survived internship without Alyse. There was a lot of shit that went down that went down that year, on top of the usual internship shit, with the whole Josh situation and getting back together with Bryan, and she kept me from going unglued. I owe her a lot. I owe her everything."
"Jess, I'm sorry, but—"
"You've been deployed, Pete." He blinked at the sudden change of topic before frowning, wondering where she was going with that. "Alyse is on her second deployment. I'm less than three months from making major, and if you count West Point and my years on scholarship at Yale, I've been in the Army for fourteen years, and the closest I've come to danger is driving back from Baltimore after a thirty hour call at Shock Trauma. Do you know what I was doing when Bryan was getting his leg blown off in Iraq?"
He frowned and tried to count back the years. "Studying at Yale?" She snorted.
"More like drinking at Yale. It was switch weekend—the weekend between rotations in the third year of medical school, a weekend without responsibilities—when I got the call from one of our West Point classmates about what happened. So what did I do? I finished my drink, hooked up with a first year med student, went back to the party, and proceeded to drink myself to the point where one of my friends had to take me to the ER."
He was pretty sure he knew the point she was trying to make, in her usual roundabout manner. "You can't feel guilty about what happened to Bryan. Or Alyse. Training to be a trauma surgeon—"
She shook her head slightly, interrupting him again. "I've seen a lot of people I'm close to head off to war, and thankfully, the majority of them come back without a scratch, but it still freaks me out. I can't… What happened to Bryan, I can't go through that again. It was two years after he got back from Iraq before I saw him again, and that was just because we literally ran into each other at the hospital. He was at Reed for months; it's not that long of a drive from Connecticut. I made that drive a dozen times my intern year. I just... didn't go."
He knew that there was nothing he could say to make her feel more confident about the situation, not when he was feeling like his world was spinning out of control already. He also knew there was no way he could apologize for not telling her what was going on sooner, so he didn't even try. "Bryan doesn't hold anything against you," he said instead. "Not the fact that he got hurt while you were in school or anything else that happened in those years."
"I know," she said. "I don't... I don't feel guilty, per se. I just... I'm just the most pathetic excuse ever for an Army officer." She rolled her eyes and gave a self-depricating smile. "I've seen so many of my friends be deployed, and my entire military career has been at West Point, Yale, and Walter Reed. I haven't done my part."
"That why you haven't told Bryan you don't want him to take the West Point position? Because he's 'done his part' and you haven't?" She looked at him sharply, her dark eyes widening. She opened her mouth to respond, but didn't get the chance.
"Peter?" He turned to see Lyndi standing by the open door leading to the press room with an impatient expression on her face. "We're ready to get started."
He nodded and turned back to Jess. "Go," she said. "We'll catch up later. And drink away the last few days with half priced bottles of wine at Olazzo." He offered her a tight smile before taking a deep breath. He turned to Lyndi with a nod.
"I'm ready."
Dr. Alyse Aachen sighed before going back to mentally running through Advanced Cardiac Life Support algorithms, trying to keep her mind on something—anything—other than the fact that she was being held hostage in an abandoned hut on an isolated corner of base, likely for some obscene ransom that they expected Pete—or, more accurately, the New York Times bestselling author Gregory Aachen—to pay. The whole thing was so random that if it weren't actually happening to her, she would have thought that it was something out of one of Pete's novels, as opposed to real-life events.
She frowned. It sounded like one of Pete's novels because it was something that Pete would write—which meant it was something that he would do. If he even thought about coming to rescue her himself, she'd be the one to kill him. Sure, he kept himself in shape and never went two weeks without visiting the firing range, but sometimes the man seemed to forget that he was on the wrong side of forty to be pulling the type of stuff he did as a scout sniper.
She sighed again, leaning her head against the wall and closing her eyes and trying not to think about her husband or her life back at home. Once she realized that her captors weren't out to hurt her, the headaches subsided somewhat, no longer causing the rolling nausea and vomiting of just a couple of days before, but just being in the situation she was in made her so tense that she still felt an intense ache that wrapped around her skull, causing her head to swim, her vision to darken, and her body to feel ready to collapse under her weight any time she tried to move. She used to wonder why Drew had allowed his flight surgeons to medically ground him and discharge him from the Corps for headaches that she was capable of controlling well enough to survive college, medical school, internship, and residency; if her brother's headaches were anything like this, she couldn't blame him for not wanting to be in the cockpit of a fighter jet.
Her eyes opened at the sound of the door opening, and she carefully turned her head toward the source of the sound. "Doc," the young man greeted once he realized that she was awake. He carefully closed the door before holding up a plastic bag. "I brought you some food," he said haltingly. "They had some Washington apples in the DFac, and I remember you saying something about being from Washington, so, uh…" His voice trailed off. "It's pasta bar night, so I got you some spaghetti with meatballs, too."
"Thanks, Specialist," she replied, leaning forward as far as she felt comfortable to accept the bag. She was pleased to see he also thought to include some napkins and plastic utensils. Not having had anything other than Gatorade since the evening before, she opted to go straight for the pasta. "And I'm missing Olazzo for this," she grumbled as she opened the styrofoam container. Although she wasn't confident on the passage of time or the time zones separating her from Maryland, she was pretty sure the gathering at Olazzo would have happened a number of hours before, but just the thought of one of her favorite restaurants in Bethesda still caused a pang of loneliness. She remembered the last Monday night dinner at Olazzo, the week before she left for Afghanistan and three days before Drs. Wyatt and Ellie Reynolds left for the Philippines, the mischievous glint in Jess' eye as she poured Alyse another glass of wine. Pete had asked if she was trying to get his wife drunk; the surgeon replied that she accepted thank-yous in the form of signed novels. Alyse had wryly remarked to Bryan that if Jess seemed to think alcohol was required for sex, that he was doing something wrong.
If there even was a dinner at Olazzo the evening before, she doubted it was as high-spirited as the evening she remembered.
She sighed at the thought as she brought a forkful of the pasta to her mouth, grimacing slightly at the taste. It wasn't horrible, but, well, it was Army dining facility food. If it weren't for the fact she was pretty sure it was the only meal she was getting until dinner the next day, she'd pass. She wondered if they were keeping her hungry and thirsty to keep her too weak to make an escape, or if between their duties at the hospital and keeping guard on her, that that was as often as they managed to visit any of the many places on base to get food.
Alyse glanced over at the uniformed medic, seeing him shoveling food into his mouth with an intensity she was pretty sure they taught in boot camp. She had laughed at Jess for eating like that during their week-long C4—Combat Casualty Care Course, a combined Army, Air Force, and Navy medical corps field training exercise during internship—and her friend just looked at her sheepishly and replied that whenever she was out in the field, she reverted to her West Point training of just trying to eat as much as possible before moving onto the next exercise or class or whatever else they had to go off and do.
She ate another bite of spaghetti before reaching for her Gatorade. "How are things at the hospital?" she asked conversationally after taking a sip. "They still looking for me?"
"Yes, ma'am," Specialist Adam Jenkins replied, his face flushing slightly in embarrassment at the question. "There was an NCIS agent here for two days to ask some questions, but he was mostly asking about your detainees and the attack on the convoy."
She frowned. "So they think the Taliban took me?"
"Yes, ma'am, I think so."
"How are you guys going to collect a ransom if they think I'm a POW?"
"Oh," Specialist Jenkins said. "Well, ma'am, I think they did think that, but Stemplinski sent an email to your husband's publisher telling them that we have you and that we'll return you for five million dollars. We were going to send that directly to Gregory Aachen, but we couldn't find his email address."
"That's because there is no Gregory Aachen," she said slowly to emphasize her words. "I've told you guys that a dozen times. It's a pen name. He asked if he could use my last name after we had been dating for a few months. He said that way, if his books ever got published, they'd always be on the first shelf." She took another few bites of the room-temperature pasta. "His publishing house probably gets hundreds, if not thousands, of emails a day. They might never find yours."
"Oh," Jenkins said again. "Actually, they already did. There was a press conference and everything. I got a part of it on my iPod." He pulled the thin black device from the bottom cargo pocket of his ACUs and brought up the right video. "Here you go, ma'am."
"Thanks," Dr. Aachen replied distractedly, taken aback by the paused image of her husband on the screen. She put the ear buds in and pressed play.
Her eyes filled with tears at the sight of Pete, looking like he had aged a decade in the days since they last spoke on Skype, the morning of the convoy attack. She hoped it was just the lighting in the press room, but his hair looked even more gray, the dark circles under his eyes more pronounced than she had ever seen. He looked pretty much like how she felt—like hell.
She blinked back the tears and forced herself to pay attention to the ZNN video, with the words Wife of Author Gregory Aachen Abducted in Afghanistan along the bottom. "Last week, my wife Alyse, a Navy physician stationed at Camp Phoenix outside of Kabul, Afghanistan, was kidnapped from her office," he was saying. "I'm not going to talk about an on-going investigation, but I will say that recently received a communication from the people holding her captive. To those people, whoever and wherever you are, I will give you everything you ask for. In return, I just have one request: please don't hurt my wife."
"That was Peter Kirkan, a reporter for Stars and Stripes and perhaps better known as the bestselling novelist Gregory Aachen, at a press conference earlier today," the blond ZNN reporter said at the cut-away. "The Naval Criminal Investigative Service has confirmed that Dr. Alyse Aachen, an active duty Navy lieutenant currently deployed to the field hospital at Camp Phoenix, has been missing since late last week. As Mr. Kirkan said, they can't comment on an on-going investigation, but NCIS director Leon Vance has promised that this case has been a top priority since they were first made aware of Dr. Aachen's abduction, and that they will not rest until she is returned safely to her post in Afghanistan. This is Cindi Montgomery for ZNN; Brad, back to you."