One Less - Part 49

by joykatleen

"Why did your mission target only the Catholics?" Gibbs continued after a moment. "Surely your religion doesn't have the corner on the evil homosexual market."

"It was the way God chose to tell me who was doing the most evil," Thayer said. "Men would come to me and confess their sin. I would counsel them, tell them they had to resist. I would give them a chance to repent, to turn away from their wicked ways. When they didn't, I knew they had to be removed before they could cause more harm, take others down with them."

"When did Petty Officer Ferrara come to you?" Gibbs asked.

"A short time before his death," Thayer said, "God rest his soul." He crossed himself.

Gibbs suppressed a sudden desire to break his nose. "You told us he'd been talking to you for some time," he said instead.

"He had. But he didn't confess the nature of his struggles at first. Once he did, I tried to work with him. But he was resistant. He didn't want to repent. He wanted to justify his sin. He wanted to argue with me, misquote scripture, convince me that the Church was wrong on this issue." Thayer shook his head sadly. "He was deeply in denial and no matter how I counseled him, he resisted. I knew then he had to be removed."

"So you told Petty Officer Lewiston to take him out," DiNozzo said.

"To help him see his sin," Thayer corrected. "I prayed with Danny Lewiston. I told him Frank was resistant. That due to his injury and how hard he fought to return to the navy, it would be very difficult to convince him to leave voluntarily. That they would have to be forceful with him. I did not tell them to kill him. Salvation can only come while the soul is still present within the body. Frank needed time to realize the evil of his sin. Once he'd been removed from the navy, he would have been more able to escape temptation, to see the wrong path he was traveling. He would have overcome, eventually. He was strong. He wasn't supposed to die."

"What about Major Ortiz?" Gibbs asked.

Thayer frowned. "Major Ortiz?"

"Was he supposed to die?" Gibbs asked.

"Of course not," Thayer said.

"So why did he?" DiNozzo asked.

"I don't know. I'm a priest, not a doctor."

"He died because he was hurt so badly. Why did that happen? Why was he hurt so much worse than the others?" DiNozzo asked. It was his turn to take the lead. He couldn't have said how he knew, he just did. He also knew it was time to up the priest's stress level.

"I don't know how badly they hurt him," Thayer said.

"Yes you do. You were there," DiNozzo said, his tone hardening. Thayer frowned, cocked his head. He opened his mouth and closed it again. DiNozzo continued.

"Your attack team went into Dubai and beat him up. They returned to the dock and met you there. They told you where they left him. You went into the city and found him. You had to make sure he paid for his deception. For hiding among you for so long."

"Who told you that?" Thayer asked. He'd begun shaking his head back and forth in denial. Not denying he'd done it, but denying it was possible that they knew.

"You must have been really angry," DiNozzo continued aggressively. "He'd been working your mission, helping expel the evil, pretending to be one of you. Then suddenly you find out he's one of them. How did you find out?"

Thayer said nothing and after a moment, DiNozzo continued.

"He was a Watcher, already part of the mission. He was threatening to report you. He wouldn't have been stupid enough to confess to you."

"Major Ortiz was not a stupid man," Thayer agreed almost absently. His mind was clearly racing. Trying to come up with a lie?

"So how'd you find out?" Gibbs asked, his voice merely curious.

Thayer's expression darkened. "He exposed himself," he said. DiNozzo blinked, glanced at Gibbs, then back at Thayer.

"Exposed himself? Like…" DiNozzo trailed off. "Explain."

"I saw him, in a club. In Naples. It was… disgusting. He was dancing with other men. Bodies pressing together, hands everywhere, kissing…" Thayer stopped. His tone was disgust, but the look on his face didn't match. Gibbs frowned slightly.

"It turned you on," Gibbs stated, almost to himself.

"No," Thayer denied vehemently.

"What were you doing in a gay nightclub?" DiNozzo asked.

Thayer took a breath. "I was… doing my job. Searching for lost sheep."

"Right," DiNozzo said, clearly disbelieving.

"Tensions in the Gulf region were running very high," Thayer said. "The war in Afghanistan was heating up, and our men were putting themselves in harm's way on a more frequent basis. When they got liberty, they were going overboard, unwittingly taking extreme personal risks, compensating for the constant pressures they were under aboard ship. Senior officers and enlisted were ordered by the Captain to make ourselves obvious in town, to remind the junior men of their duty as representatives of the Unites States Navy. I took the assignment seriously. I was in the habit of seeking out the more high-risk areas of town. I stepped into the nightclub, completely unaware of the nature of the clientele. As soon as I realized where I was, I turned to leave. I didn't anticipate that any of our sailors would be found in such a place. It was only providence that made me notice Major Ortiz."

"Providence," Gibbs repeated.

"Yes. There was a Judas among us. If I hadn't seen him that night, I might never have known the mission was corrupted."

"So what did you do about it?" DiNozzo said.

"I told the men. Whatever they did in their anger was their sin, not mine."

"You must have been pretty angry yourself, over him keeping such a secret. You believed your mission was from God, and he was putting it at risk."

"It was from God," Thayer objected.

"Okay," DiNozzo said. "So you were doing what God told you to do, and this sinner, this Judas, was betraying you." His tone told Thayer exactly how pissed he should have been.

"I was upset. I did feel betrayed," Thayer agreed.

"So what did you do about it?"

"I already told you," Thayer said.

"You went into the city, you found him," Gibbs said, tearing Thayer's attention back to him again. "We have it on video."

"What?" Thayer asked. He was startled, and the agents could almost smell his sudden fear.

"You think they don't have security cameras in Dubai?" Gibbs asked, stretching the truth more than a little. "It took a while, but we found the tape. It shows you with him after the attack team was done."

"So what?" Thayer asked, his bravado false. "I didn't do anything unauthorized."

"Unauthorized? Under whose law?" DiNozzo said incredulously.

"Under the law of God," Thayer said. "He had to be punished for his betrayal."

"Punished more than the others?" Gibbs asked.

"Yes."

"Punished more than the men you sent could handle," DiNozzo said.

"That's right," Thayer said. "He needed to understand the severity of what he'd done. I needed to be sure the lesson was properly taught."

"So you found him, and you punished him," DiNozzo said. He was choosing his words carefully now, guiding Thayer in the direction they needed him to go. "You punished him for his sin, and for trying to stop what you were doing in the name of God. You punished him as a father punishes his wayward children."

Thayer cocked his head and narrowed his eyes. Tony took that as a sign.

"Like a child, you showed him the natural consequences of his behavior," DiNozzo said.

"Natural consequences," Thayer said softly.

"That's right," DiNozzo said, agreeable now. "You showed him what would happen if he didn't return to the righteous path."

"That's right," Thayer echoed.

"You showed him what happened to men who lust after other men," DiNozzo said.

"Yes I did," Thayer said. "I showed him the natural consequences of continuing to pursue a life of sexual perversion."

"What did you use?" Gibbs asked. He asked matter-of-factly, no censure, no condemnation.

"The same pipe they beat him with. They left it there, beside him."

"You sodomized him with it," Gibbs said. Thayer suddenly recoiled as if he'd been hit, pushing back into the wheelchair. His expression showed revulsion.

"No!" he almost shouted. "I did not!"

Again, Gibbs and DiNozzo exchanged looks. Thayer was clearly telling the truth.

"So what did you do?" DiNozzo asked, a little confused.

"I beat him. In the groin. I made sure the next time he tried to engage in sodomy, there would be no pleasure in it for him, if he was even able to perform at all. And then I marked him and dragged him onto the street."

"Marked him? How?" Gibbs asked. There'd been nothing about that in the injury report.

"I wrote a message on his forehead, to whomever would come next. To let them know he preferred men."

There was stunned silence. Finally, Gibbs spoke. "You set him up to be raped," he said.

Thayer shrugged. "I showed him what lay down the path he had chosen."

Another few moments of silence. Both agents needed a minute. The cruelty of that, to mark a man as homosexual in a city where the ruling religion dictated such men be stoned, was hard to fathom. They'd seen how cruel men could be to one another. In this conspiracy, they had it on tape. But to think that a man of God would do... that. It gave them pause.

"So you weren't surprised when he didn't return to the ship," DiNozzo said to get the conversation going again.

"No."

"You knew it was likely he'd be found and that someone else would attack him."

"Yes."

"In fact, you hoped they would," Gibbs said.

"Truthfully, yes. He needed to learn." Thayer looked past Gibbs toward his own reflection in the mirror.

"He learned," Gibbs said. "Why didn't the flight deck fence keep your commander from going overboard?"

"It was down," Thayer said, still looking at himself and apparently unphased by the sudden return to that topic.

"Which meant it should have caught him," Gibbs said.

"The lift mechanism on the section where he fell was broken. The section was hanging straight down. It's part of the reason there were no flight ops that night."

"How many times did you walk past that section before you decided to push him overboard?" Gibbs asked.

"I didn't decide to do anything," Thayer said.

"Before God showed you how to escape your temptation," DiNozzo supplied the answer.

Thayer thought about it. He looked at DiNozzo, then back to the mirror. "A few. We were talking for quite a while. I was trying to help him see his evil. There were a handful of planes parked on the bow end of the deck, so we were making circles from middeck to stern. The missing section of fence was on the port side of the fantail."

"You noticed the section was down, you knew no flight ops meant no one was likely paying attention to what was happening on deck. Were the deck lights on?" DiNozzo asked. Of the two agents, he'd been the one more recently afloat, and he had a pretty good image in his head of the conditions as they must have existed that night.

"No," Thayer answered the question. He was only peripherally paying attention to the agents. Gibbs wondered how much further they could push him toward confession before he realized what he was doing.

"So it was pretty dark."

"After the sun set, yes. It always is, out on the ocean."

"There wasn't much chance you'd be seen, on the flight deck in the dark, no one watching from the tower."

"That's true."

"You waited until you were next to the missing fence section and you pushed him," DiNozzo said. "He must have been surprised."

Thayer sighed. "He was surprised," he said. "He had no idea he was about to face judgment. I gave him many opportunities to confess, to seek forgiveness." Once again, there was regret. "He wouldn't see truth. He wouldn't leave me alone."

"Did he scream? When he went overboard?" DiNozzo asked.

"No," Thayer said. "He was brave, right to the end. Misguided and morally corrupted, but brave. It was a real shame he wouldn't turn away from his sin. He was a good leader, a brave man, and credit to his country in every other way."

"What evil thing did he do to you that you tried to make him stop?" Gibbs asked. That brought Thayer's focus back.

"It was nothing."

"Was it a hand job? Oral sex? Something more serious?" Gibbs asked. His voice was matter-of-fact.

"Stop it," Thayer said with a frown. "You're being disgusting."

"He gave you a blow job, didn't he?" Gibbs guessed. "And you liked it, because it felt good. There's no shame in doing what feels good."

"Yes there is," Thayer said, shaking his head. "It was wrong. It was evil. Detestable."

"Did you take down your pants, or just open your fly?" DiNozzo said. Unlike Gibbs', his tone showed contempt. It was carefully cultivated.

"Stop it!" Thayer said more loudly, and turned away from DiNozzo. His breathing had sped up, and both the agents could see the vein in his neck pulsating.

"It felt good. You wanted it," Gibbs said calmly, holding Thayer's attention. "And the Bible says both the active and the passive participant in sin are just as evil."

"Yes. No. I mean, yes, that's what the Bible says. But I didn't want it."

"So you had to get rid of him," DiNozzo said like that was the most reasonable thing in the world. "Because he wouldn't stop causing coming after you. It might as well have been rape."

"That's right," Thayer said. "He wouldn't stop. I had no choice. I had to remove him."

"So you pushed him overboard," DiNozzo said. "You killed him. You had to."

"I had to," Thayer said. "He wouldn't stop."

DiNozzo looked over at Gibbs, who nodded slightly. It was enough. They let the silence settle again. Thayer was trying to get his breathing under control, looking down at his lap and squeezing his intertwined fingers.

"You have anything else you'd like to tell us?" Gibbs asked finally.

"Why didn't you kill me?" Thayer asked. Like the priest before him, Gibbs didn't pretend not to understand.

"It's what you wanted us to do. And it would have been too easy. You need to pay for the lives you destroyed."

"Everything I did was the will of God's. I will be judged by Him."

"You'll be judged by us, too," DiNozzo said. Thayer shrugged.

"God's will be done," Thayer said, and crossed himself.

to be continued, one more time.