Tim shoves the EM-40 in his pocket the moment he hears footfall above him and Tony. The two sets of steps they hear are terse and careful but moving together rather than sequentially—whoever it is above them isn't trying to clear the house.
Tony recognizes the pattern of their teammates' footfall before he does, nodding and motioning Tim upstairs, even as Tony pushes Tim behind him to make sure he walks up first. The basement door opens before they can get past the lower landing. Tony has his hand on his gun, but other than that, Tim can't see anything because his partner's moved completely in front of him. Tony relaxes immediately, and when he steps to the side, Tim can see first Gibbs and then Ziva walking down to greet them.
The team retreats back to the work bench together, in silence. Tim pulls the EM-40 back out and places it on the center work table where everyone can see it and the blinking red light of doom. A moment later, Ziva withdraws another small machine from a cloth bag. She rests it beside the EM-40, turns it on and adjusts the EM frequencies. The EM-40 goes green right away.
"You didn't get that from the Yard," Tim points to the multi-spectrum mask she brought in—a model 131a by the labelling, which means it's military grade.
"A loan from a friend," she acknowledges.
Tim hesitates. He knows Ziva believes Mossad will generally act in her best interests, and by extension, the best interests of the NCIS team, but this problem is both a little bigger and a little smaller than anything they've shared with Mossad before, and Tim's uncertain whether they might use him against his father if they knew who he was.
Ziva lays a hand over Tim's, demanding his attention. "It was Hadar," she clarifies, eyes clear and uninsulted. "He has promised me privacy, and I believe him. The only reason Hadar has ever worked against me is when my father has ordered him to do so, but Abba cannot speak against that which he does not know."
Tim swallows hard, but he has to believe in someone, and of course he believes in Ziva. "My sister?" he asks.
"At the Israeli Embassy," Ziva clears her throat. "She is unhappy according to Hadar, but she is safe, and she has promised me that she will remain there tonight."
"You spoke with her, yourself?" Tim has to be certain. It's not as though he could have placed a call to Sarah himself from his unsecured cellphone.
"Yes," her voice is as clipped as her response.
Tim nods, feels himself nervously licking his lips, and then he not-so-subtly pushes Ziva over to check out the MS-131a himself—running his finger along the seams, changing the frequencies to make sure there's a proper corresponding change in the EM-40's response. He can't find anything wrong with the device Ziva's brought in, but now that he knows someone's listening or maybe just trying to listen at this point, it's so much harder to speak in this moment than it was four days ago in this room when he reached out to Gibbs alone.
Ziva pushes back into Tim's space, pulls his hands from the counter-surveillance device and squeezes them too tightly, "We have been patient," her whole face pinches around her mouth, "Sarah is safe, and I would die for you, but I need to know why." She pulls on his arm, beckoning him into her space. He follows her.
"The blond man at the hospital," she demands, and the floodgates open: "Did he really help you at all at the crime scene? Did he threaten you? What does the shooting have to do with the Russian mafia? Why did the driver of the car follow your orders? And…"she hesitates, "Their Pakhan, the way he looks," she leads but doesn't finish.
"Hey, what she said," Tony tilts his head in Ziva's direction, adding a bit of brevity just where Tim needs him to.
Tim grabs Ziva back, answering the most important part of her diatribe right away, "I don't want you to die for me. I don't want any of you to die for me." Tim blinks and looks to Tony, who grasps Tim's shoulder, his grip as tight as Ziva's. "I don't think that's what this situation is, in any case."
Tim takes a deep breath and begins again where he can, "The man at the hospital," Sasha, his mind provides but instead Tim says, "Alek, he said to call him—is Avtorityet. He's basically a crew master," technically, Tim's words are a guess, but he knows he's right, "but he's probably under the direct authority of Pakhan."
"And the Pakhan is kind of like the Godfather, right?" Tony guesses, getting the accents in all the wrong places.
Tim swallows, the harsh motion tearing at his throat. "Yes," he nods. "Pakhan…he, yes." Tim can't breathe, can't think of anything but the way Papa kept his eyes up and away from him the whole time. Behind him, Gibbs reaches for Tim's shoulder, rests his hand there, and squeezes. Tim purses his lips, blinks but manages to keep his eyes open, and even though he's infinitely glad and grateful that Gibbs has his six, a part of him can't help but wish it were Papa at his back right now.
"You look like him," Tony points out again, as if one of his teammates might possibly have missed it. "You look a lot like him," Tony pushes the issue that Ziva couldn't quite press, perhaps because she empathized too deeply with Tim's situation or maybe just because she already knew.
McGee locks his jaw, lets himself lean back into Gibbs' steadfast grip before he nods in acknowledgement, "I look more like my father every year," Toli somehow manages to spit out the words.
The silence that follows is overly long. McGee doesn't look at his partners, not ready to know what they're thinking.
"Nikolai Markov's wife and son, Anatoli, went missing over 20 years ago. The boy was ten years old," Ziva recites part of what Hadar must have told her or emailed to her over her secure line in the last couple hours since Tim had last seen her. "His father refused to have him declared dead, and was actively searching for him until four years ago."
Toli leans forward onto the table, wondering if it will keep him up. "He stopped looking four years ago?" he asks, watching the furrow of Ziva's brow deepen.
Ziva shifts closer. "Three years before that, he halted the official search," she clarifies, her tone sure, her posture open to him, "and his pursuit for his son changed. He hired new private investigators. He completely shut out authorities, whom he'd been nominally complying with in regards to the search for his son up to that point."
Toli shakes his head, still holding onto the table even as he leans once more into Gibbs' steadfast grip. His father had moved on years ago, then. Toli has no right to be disappointed. He has utterly no claim to this devastation taking root in his gut. He'd wanted Papa to find him, he realizes now. He'd had some bizarre idea in his head that maybe he could have both his life as an agent and a right to his past, a right to be his father's son again.
"McGee," Ziva demands his attention, forces him to keep her gaze, "Your first book, with your photo on the back cover, was published that year. The resemblance between you and your father is startling." She grabs his hand as if desperate to pull him into her own understanding. "He stopped looking for you because he found you."
He doesn't get what she means at first. Tim turns to Boss, grabs hold of Boss' hand to keep it on his shoulder, to keep him grounded. "He's known where I am for the past seven years?" Toli only comprehends once he speaks the words aloud. He shakes his head. "Why?" Why wouldn't he come for me? Toli thinks, even as he knows how ludicrous the idea is. It was Toli's place to return to his father, not Papa's place to come after him.
"What did Hadar say about Alek Sokolov?" Tony asks, shifting on his feet in Tim's direction, while Tim's still trying to put the new information in context.
Ziva straightens and breathes heavily, "He is former FSB."
"Wait!" Tony squints, "You mean he was a part of the modern KGB?" Tony jabs at Tim's middle with his elbow, as if to try to make Tim physically feel the humor Tony's trying to distract him with. "I was wrong. This is a Bond movie!"
Tim drops his head, but tries to smile at Tony's joke anyway. Appreciating the attempt at levity mostly because of its inappropriateness.
"Hey," Boss tightens the squeeze on McGee's shoulder, demanding his attention, "What did Alek Sokolov say to you?"
That he's my brother, Tim swallows the words, not willing to speak aloud—even to his team—possible truths that might be better kept in the Bratva. Until he can find out how much of the Brotherhood realizes Sasha's possible parentage, it's impossible for Toli to judge whether that knowledge is more dangerous to his team or to Papa and Sasha. Nonetheless, Tim has no doubt that the information isn't safe to know. "He wants to meet me tomorrow at 6 am in the café across from the Orthodox Cathedral on 17th Street."
"Well, that's a bad idea," Tony interjects in seconds.
Ziva nods her quick agreement. "You cannot trust that man! FSB is filled with nothing but paramilitary spies!"
Tony and Tim squint at each other and then turn to Ziva as one.
She blinks, "Mossad is completely different!" she argues at once before they can point out her double standard. "Israel fights for its very existence!" she crosses her arms over her chest. "What does Russia fight for?"
Tim wisely shifts the subject, "Alek is from Moscow?" he asks, disliking the way the name feels false in his mouth, despite the fact that it really is another of Sasha's nicknames.
"As far as Mossad can tell, yes," Ziva squints at him. "He told you this?"
McGee shakes his head. "My father is from Petersburg."
"St. Petersburg?" Tony questions, confirming Tim's use of the abbreviation.
Tim nods. "The accent between the two cities is very different," he confides, "So are the loyalties." Toli clears his throat and looks to the rest of his team. "It is very unusual," he understates, "that a Moscow-born man would work for a man from Petersburg."
"I have been to both places," Ziva begins carefully, puzzled for the reasoning of the conflict, but not for its existence. "The people had different traditions to be sure, but I found them more similar than different."
"I've only been to Petersburg once, as a child," Tim begins, not certain how else to explain it than by example. "I was six years old, so the city was still called Leningrad then. That was the first time the Muscovites tried to have me killed." McGee shakes his head, "It's not the everyday people, but the ones who try to seize power that are in conflict with one each other. When the revolutions started happening, right before the USSR fell," Tim shakes his head, remembering the depth of his mother's fright, the way her fear had scared him, "it only got worse. Loyalties became more polarized."
"Your mother took you and left your father in 1990?" Ziva poses it as a question, but of course she already knows.
Tim nods, "In the middle of the Autumn of Nations."
"She was scared for your life," Ziva realizes gently, "she wanted you away from the warzone."
"Yes…" McGee could have left it at that, but the inflection of the word is all wrong coming out of his mouth.
"But…?" Tony leads, rolling one open palm over the other.
"But," Tim admits, "That wasn't all. You have to understand," McGee tries to equivocate before he speaks his betrayal. "My father, my father was always unbelievably good and kind to me. When I was a child, I never questioned how much he loved me. He was," Tim swallows hard, "He was a very good father…" And again, Tim trails off with too high an inflection.
There is silence among them for a long second. It's Ziva who breaks it. "He was a good father, but not a good man," Ziva finishes what Toli can't bring himself to say aloud, even now.
Tim blinks and feels his eyes drop, but he doesn't really see anything, "Maybe," he admits, feeling his disloyalty in every cell of his body.
It's not until Ziva grabs his hand, forcing his eyes back to hers that he realizes that she may be the one person who can understand his conflicted loyalties better than anyone. He squeezes back and offers a small smile. She smiles back, much wider than he can manage, and kisses him on the cheek.
"What does govnosos mean?" she demands, gleam in her eye as she distracts him from his guilt.
"I have no idea," Tim shakes his head, lying easily.
Boss barks in laughter across from them.