A/N: Yay, a chapter! Actually, I have a few ready to post. Thanks for your patience!
And special thanks to Trina109 :)
Abby marched purposefully into her darkened lab. She flicked on her computers, ignoring the other equipment. She wouldn't need it for this. As she waited impatiently for the boot cycle to finish, she criticised herself mentally. Why hadn't they thought of a text to speech program? Especially as it had been so significant in the search for the terrorists who'd ended up killing Cassidy. She should have thought of it herself, so why hadn't she? Why hadn't Keating? She dismissed that; Keating didn't have the instincts to come up with that one. And they depended on McGee to find answers to the technological questions. Dimly she found it ironic that a seriously injured McGee had been more help to this case than Keating.
No text to speech program of any kind had been found on the lockup computer; she knew that from working on it. And no-one had been near the computer anyway when the call had been made, she reminded herself. Which meant that the computer had been accessed remotely, and whoever had done it had left little to no trace behind. Keating had searched the computer for such traces and had pronounced it clean; but he'd been looking for the traces that would be left behind by someone of middling skill. If what Tim had suggested was true, then Adams had better computer skills than his bio had led them to suspect. Finally she was able to access the mirror she'd created of the lockup computer. Wistfully she glanced at the empty chair, the one that was usually occupied by McGee when they went on one of these quests. It just wouldn't be as much fun without him. She shook her head and set to work.
...
McGee startled awake with a jerk, sweating. His heart pounded uncomfortably and his hands trembled from the after effects of the nightmare. It had been so real, so vivid. He could almost hear the deafening roar of the blast, almost taste the dust. He'd hit the ground and turned his head to see limbs strewn across the ground, and known in horror that they were his. He'd woken on the point of screaming.
He lay back, staring at the ceiling while his breathing and heart rate slowly returned to normal. After that, he didn't want to return to sleep. It was as dark as it ever got in a hospital room, and quiet. He wished for a moment that he didn't have a private room; he wanted someone to talk to, to keep him awake.
As the thought formed in his mind, the door creaked slowly open, admitting the one person that hadn't come to visit him. Tony. He moved quietly across the room and settled in the chair without speaking. McGee waited; Tony had come all the way here in what was apparently the dead of night, so something had to be bothering him. And waited. Finally impatient, he spoke.
"Never thought I'd say this again, but it's good to see you Tony."
As if the words were the catalyst he needed, Tony started to talk.
"I'm sorry, Probie."
The unexpected apology threw McGee off guard for a moment.
"I'm sorry for it all, Tim. Your arm, your career, everything. If I had just been where I was supposed to be-"
McGee cut him off. "Then you'd be dead."In the dim light from the corridor, McGee saw Tony blink in surprise. Evidently that hadn't occurred to him. "You saw Abby's simulation, right?"
"Yeah." Tony's response was questioning, as if he was unsure where McGee was leading to.
"Then you know as well as I do, if you'd been leading you would have gotten hit right in the chest when the bomb went off. As it was, if you hadn't made me turn when you did, I'd be dead now." The force of his words made Tony sit up a little straighter. "As for my career" McGee continued "I didn't want to tell anyone in case I can't do it... But Vance told Gibbs that if I can pass the usual tests, I can come back as a field agent."
...
It had taken hours, but she'd done it. She'd managed to find the minute traces that signalled that someone had hacked into the lockup computer. There'd been numerous attempts to cover the traces as well as the massive amount of firewalls and encryption she'd had to break through to find the traces in the first place, but she'd done it. Now it was just a matter of back tracing the intruder's IP address and linking it to a physical address. She picked up her Caf-Pow off the bench and tried to take a sip, grimacing when she realised the oversized cup was empty. She tossed it into the trash can, where it joined several others. With a start she noticed the light filtering in through her bullet-resistant windows. She'd been here all night. Shrugging off the tiredness that hit her with the dawn, she hit the button that would start the trace.
She heard the elevator ding just as her computer beeped. Bouncing up and down a little in her excitement at the result, she spun as Gibbs entered her lab with a fresh Caf-Pow.
"Gibbs! I figured out how Adams made the call! Well, it wasn't just my idea, it was McGee's."
Gibbs' usual gaze became more intense at her words.
"How?"
"He hacked into the lockup computer, Gibbs. Tim thought he might be using a text to speech program, like the guys that killed Cassidy's team. So I traced it back to an IP address. It's registered to Samuel Adams."
"So if he's got a text to speech program on his computer..."
"Then we've got him, Gibbs."
"That's good work, Abs."