An Eye for an Eye Leaves Everybody Blind

by SASundance

Can there ever be a justification for choosing revenge over justice, especially when you work for a federal law enforcement agency? This is an AU Aliyah story and NB that this is not a TIVA story. Warning, contains a major character death - for more info on the identity please see author's note in chapter 1 Now Complete

4. Chapter 4: An Inquiring Mind

Beta: This story has benefited greatly by the awesome beta-skills and input of Arress and I want to extend huge thanks to her for all her assistance. And you all know the drill... any boo-boos are my bad :)

A/N Thanks to everyone who reviewed, alerted or faved this story. I appreciate your support and hope you'll enjoy this chapter. Just to clarify, in this story Jimmy takes on the role of narrator and is written in 1st person while everyone else is written in 3rd person pov.

Well hopefully it's been worth the wait as the cliffhanger is finally revealed. Thanks to those people who have waited so patiently to find out who died :) I hope you enjoy this chapter.

An Eye for an Eye Leaves Everyone Blind

Chapter 4

Jimmy Palmer:

Standing in the ER Trauma Room 1, I stared sadly at the devastated mother who was cradling her teenage son's body begging him to wake up as his unseeing eyes stared back at her. The young man, more of a kid really, had ended up committing death by cop after they'd tried to arrest him for selling drugs near an elementary school. It had been a particularly bad shift with an MVA with fatalities, one of which had been a toddler, always especially tough, the usual assortment of strokes, infarcts and drug overdoses, but then to top it off there'd been a suicide by cop. Frankly, there was not much that we could do; the idiot was still alive when the EMTs unloaded him, but he'd bled out before we had time to do anything.

I'd already been on duty for over 24 hours and was dead on my feet. As it was quiet for now, I decided to sack out in the doctors on-call room and hope for once I'd get a decent nap. Tony had taught me the power of napping years ago and I was finding that trick invaluable now as I battled my way through my residency in the ER. It wasn't the blood, gore, suffering or the medical procedures and studying that I struggled with, it was the exhaustion and holding people's lives in my hands when I was dropping with fatigue.

I smiled thinking of my friend Tony; there wasn't a day that my thoughts didn't wander to him since I missed him so damned much. Of course, today had been an especially bad day for recalling the less pleasant memories that I had of Tony because of one as the unis that accompanied the young drug dealer. I'd seen the pain in his face at having been forced to kill the kid in self-defence. I've seen similar pain in my friend's eyes on way too many occasions, and I just knew that in the six years he'd served as a cop he'd seen a bucket-load of ugliness and suffering. The problem was that he'd always taken everything to heart and ended up blaming himself for everything. As the child of two alcoholic parents, he'd learnt early on that he had to be the parent in the family and took on responsibilities that he wasn't developmentally ready for.

Of course, there is no way on earth that a small child could be responsible for his mother and father, since to live with alcoholics is to live in chaos. And sadly it was almost inevitable that when his mother died when he was the ripe old age of eight, Tony was going to feel like he had failed her. It didn't matter if she was an abusive mother who was too ill to see to his most basic of physical or emotional needs. Then there was his alcoholic father who was a self -absorbed conman with a quick temper, a man who was at the very least emotionally abusive, but probably physically, too. Tony always denied being hit by his dad, but children of alcoholics grow up as accomplished liars. Hiding how bad everything from outsiders is a common denominator with these kids; it is as natural as breathing for them and equally as necessary for them to cope, so I never put much store by his denials.

What it did do, though, was to affect him deeply at a critical time in his development. It made him feel that it was his responsibility to look after everyone, and his mother's death also affected him profoundly. I'm not sure if it was more abusive crap from his father telling him it was his fault that his mother died or if it was just the internal dialogue that children tend to engage in naturally, combined with his perception that he was responsibility for his parents' welfare, but he blamed himself for her death. Not such a shock that he would as a college student go racing into a burning building to try and save strangers, but it does seem that fate was cruel to the young Tony to force him of all people have to live with the tragedy of not being able to save that little girl. Becoming a cop is just another example of his need to protect not only the people he cared about but perfect strangers, and what a way to set yourself up for heartache.

I've spent countless hours trying to understand why even when he was given the chance to have his own team, Tony continued to let his team mates heap so much abuse on him. I finally concluded after completing a rotation on the psychiatry wing and a lot of prescribed reading that he thought that the abuse was SOP. Having grown up with not one but two alcoholic parents, he only knew dysfunctional patterns of interpersonal relationships, but like so many kids whose parents had substance abuse issues, he was a master of dissembling. Taught that outside help was to be avoided at all cost, he was adept at covering up his pain, and while Tony was incredibly adroit at dealing with superficial social situations like which fork to use with each course of food and how to charm his father's business associates, he was utterly clueless about intimate personal relationships.

In fact, the first time he probably had a real opportunity to see normal relationships between individuals would have been when he arrived at college and was willingly accepted into the two subgroups of his sports teams and his frat brothers. The problem was, though, that most of his new team mates or frat brothers had all come from an average family background where they learnt what was normal behaviour for individuals in a close knit family group. Now, although banding together into subgroups, they were also trying to finish the individuation process that heralded the onset of adulthood, and so Tony had a rather skewed view of appropriate ways for friends/family to relate to one another.

It had often been observed by others that Gibbs had assembled a bunch of individuals with daddy issues, himself included, but Tony had much more than just daddy issues. The other team members had strong maternal figures during their formative years and all of them had siblings who provided a buffer against their daddy issues and served as an important socialising role. It helped Abby, Ziva, McGee and dare I say even Gibbs to experience relatively happy, normal childhoods in spite of their individual deficiencies.

Sure, they each had their own individual challenges, like Abby who had to straddle both the deaf and hearing communities, and no doubt she probably felt like a fish out of water, never fitting in properly in either world. Ziva felt trapped by her father's expectations that she had to follow in his footsteps and become a super spy/assassin, and McGee felt that he couldn't live up to his alpha father's paternal expectations. Yet none of them ever questioned being loved and cherished members of their family, either. The contrast between them and Tony couldn't be greater. For example, Admiral McGee bought his only son a car, and a pretty nice one, for his 16th birthday, while Tony's experience of paternal love was that for his 12th birthday he was disowned and banished to military school.

So, while Tim had a chip on his shoulder the size of Texas about being bullied and not being able to live up to the expectations of a domineering father, he still had the love and support of his mother, sister and his paternal grandmother to help him succeed. Ziva similarly, although having a sociopath for a father who might have been difficult if not impossible to please, still had a loving sister and a half-brother, mother, aunt and uncle, not to mention numerous cousins to help buffer the effects of having Eli as a father. Gibbs might have clashed with his old man, but he had a nurturing mother to instil in him his worth. So, I cannot excuse the way that all the team went after Tony to inflict pain upon him that sometimes bordered on extreme abusiveness since each of them had received loving socialisation within functioning family systems. The problem with Tony in having no such socialisation to draw upon was that when the team frequently wounded him, he truly believed it was simply par for the course for family to hurt him, and he undoubtedly rationalised that he deserved what he got.

So, while any normal person would have headed for the hills long ago, Tony probably thought that all the taunts and insults were part and parcel of being in a family. Hard for someone like me to grasp since my mom was so loving, but his own experiences had been of a neurotic mother dressing him up to be ridiculed by other kids and a father that conditioned him to believe he would end up in the gutter because he was so useless. (Yeah, okay, maybe I can see why he stood there and took everyone's crap.)

If you also factor in his abandonment fears, I guess it meant that he couldn't/wouldn't leave the team behind that he mistakenly thought of as family because he thought that it meant he was abandoning them. In his cognitive process it probably equated to what his father had done when he disowned him, and I know that he vowed to not be like his father. The truth was that Tony had taken semper fi very much to heart and probably observed it even more rigidly than Gibbs did, since he left the team and then came back without considering how it would affect the team. But in his striving to uphold that principle of 'leave no one behind', no one had ever attempted to teach Tony that he was also of equal importance to everyone else, and it was one of many crucial lessons he'd never got a chance to learn as a child.

And that there was the ultimate tragedy, because if Tony had had even a fraction of the normal upbringing of Tim, Ziva, Abby or Agent Gibbs, he'd never have tolerated the appalling treatment he received at their hands. And he wouldn't have found himself attacked by a revenge fuelled assassin when he valiantly tried to protect her from the mess she had gotten herself into. He would have been long gone, perhaps to the FBI or another alphabet agency or perhaps to Rota Spain and his own well deserved team.

So ironic that although he had essentially reared himself, he still had more integrity and loyalty than those people he sought to protect. And because of that inherent flaw, he was left absolutely vulnerable for Jenny Shepard to ride roughshod over him once again. When Shepard decided to clean up a huge crapfest that she'd successfully managed to conceal in her earlier career and decided to clean it up on her own when it returned to bite her on the ass, she ended up making Tony pay a terrible price for her hubris. She placed him in an untenable position when she ordered that he and Ziva stand down from their protection detail guarding her during her visit to LA to attend a funeral. She deliberately withheld information that she was in danger from them and went off on her own. Dr. Mallard felt that her last actions were prompted by her trying to make amends for her earlier failures and was trying to protect Special Agent Gibbs, but I'm not so charitable, I'm afraid.

I think that she was trying to look out for her own reputation and clean up the mess she'd created because she hoped that no one would find out how badly she messed up. Maybe she deluded herself into thinking she did it for Gibbs, but in the end she did it to make herself feel better. Her actions were incredibly selfish and she threw my friend under the bus when she decided to 'commit suicide by dirtbag'. And when you think just how incredibly hypocritical that was because her own father's suicide had destroyed her life, she was the last person who should have forced Tony to live with that horrible burden. Yet clearly she didn't care that she was sentencing him to a lifetime of guilt and regrets as he second guessed why he didn't ignore her direct orders and refuse to stand down.

The problem was that he'd been torn between following his instinct that said that something was wrong and his desire not to be caught up in anymore of her personal vendettas. The fact that he'd been badly burned by her a few months before was what ultimately made him follow her orders and stand down, and was then sentenced to a life-long legacy of regrets. It probably wouldn't have hurt so much if he hated her, but he still continued to care about her even though she had deceived him. While he was furious with her for hurting Jeanne for petty reasons of revenge, Jenny had befriended him when he was alone and adrift. She had made him feel like he was competent and wanted, which was something he had been striving for ever since he was a child. Jenny was also his handler, and the fact it had been such a secret further cemented their relationship. Although he hated what she'd done, he was far too loyal for his own good, and when she died he couldn't forgive himself.

And of course as much as he blamed himself for her death and the fact he failed to prevent it, Special Agent Gibbs' attitude didn't help him either in processing what had occurred. His mentor's displeasure at arriving at the scene to find it had already been processed against his orders because Leon Vance had taken control of the investigation was palpable. When he finally got around to telling Tony he wasn't responsible, the delay in doing so was enough to convince an already guilt laden SFA that Gibbs, too, blamed him for Shepard's death. It just reinforced his own perception he was to blame for Jenny's selfish desire to protect her reputation and die in a blaze of glory by diving in front of a bullet rather than die in a hospice.

I'm not really sure if his delay in telling Tony he wasn't to blame was due to Gibbs' fury that the scene had been processed in his absence or because he did blame Tony for not protecting Shepard. I suspect that it was probably six of one and half a dozen of the other, but whatever the reason, the delay was enough for Tony to beat himself up even more than he had done already, since Gibbs was his mentor. By the time they returned from LA he was crippled by doubt, and then Vance came along and reinforced the guilt even more by banishing him to sea. The new director effectively ensured that no matter what we said to Tony later, he couldn't accept that he didn't cause Jenny Shepard's violent death.

If she hadn't chosen to hurt so many people, most specifically Tony, and commit suicide by bullet, I would have wished her luck and said 'have at it'. But she decided once again to do what she wanted and damn the consequences it would have on anyone else, especially the two agents that were tasked with protecting her. Her desire to die what she would have seen as a noble death obviously superseded any responsibility she should have felt to her agency or her agents. As someone who had been so severely affected by the suicide of her dad, she of all people should have been a Hell of a lot more considerate, but she was so affected that she couldn't accept that he topped himself. There were plenty of other less dramatic ways to kill herself that wouldn't have left a permanent festering sore on Tony's psyche.

It left my friend even more incapable of looking out for number one and desperate to save his remaining team mates and 'family', and unfortunately that had included his lying partner. What a shame that care wasn't reciprocated! Woulda… shoulda… coulda. If only…

Flashback:

A devastated and heart-broken Leroy Jethro Gibbs and his counterpart and crony from the FBI, Tobias Fornell, sat watching over the unconscious figure in the bed, recovering from emergency surgery. Sipping on coffee that was strong enough to clean the grease off car engines, Fornell watched his friend as he tried to make sense of what had happened.

"How could this have happened, Tobias? Why did she do it?"

Tobias Fornell had no answer to this question, even if it hadn't been rhetorical, since he didn't think that Jethro would like what he had to say. Instead he had a question for the senior agent.

"Did you know that she attacked DiNutzo in Tel Aviv? Knocked him down and pointed her gun at his chest and his thigh and threatened him?" He saw the shocked expression on Gibbs' face, "So you didn't know?"

"Damn it, Tobias, of course not. Why didn't DiNozzo tell me and how the Hell do you know this? Damn it, if he'd just told me I would have changed how I dealt with her tonight. My God, I pushed her over the edge."

Fornell glowered at Gibbs, knowing that he had been holding out on him and he needed to pin Gibbs down on what he meant by it. But he couldn't resist addressing the issue of why he thought DiNotzo hadn't reporting her. "I don't know why, Jethro, but I do have a couple of theories. First off, I would hazard a guess that he probably thought you already knew. You spend so much time cultivating the fallacy with your team that you are all knowing about everything that goes on with them, you end up cutting off your nose to spite your face because they think that there is no need to tell you when something important happens." Fornell took a breath before he continued.

"The other likely reason that he didn't tell you is that it is obvious to everyone that Ziva and Abby are your surrogate daughters. You favour them and let them get away with things that DiNutzo or McGee would get their asses well and truly kicked for, if not fired. Apart from that, Tony probably knew how hurt you were to find out that Ziva had been lying to you."

Fornell narrowed his eyes as he formed his thoughts. "Then there's explanation C, that he didn't report her to you for exactly the same reason he didn't take back up with him when he found out the terrorist's computer had been used to access the internet at Ziva's apartment. He was stupidly trying to protect her because you taught him that rule #1 superseded everything else. As a cop it was ingrained in him to always have his partner's back, and Tony probably knew that it would destroy the team if he told you. So I don't know… pick one. It really doesn't matter anymore since what's done is done.

Gibbs realised there was some truth in what Fornell was saying, but that didn't mean that he wanted to hear it, or even more importantly, listen to what he wasn't saying. So, instead he responded in the way that was the most predicable, not to mention the most comfortable for the former Marine – with anger.

Scowling fiercely, he growled at his friend, "So how come you know about it, then?"

Tobias shrugged. "Ducky dragged it out of him when he drugged him up to his eyeballs to reset his radius, which David displaced when she attacked him in Israel. He said DiNutzo's arm was in a bad way, but he didn't dare get it attended to in Israel. Told Ducky he felt like he was in danger over there - looks as if he was right."

"How did he manage to hide the displacement all the way back to the US?" Gibbs wondered out loud, but Tobias refrained from answering since he felt like the more pertinent question was how Gibbs had missed it, or even more critical, why Tony felt the need to hide it from his team leader. It was a question he was determined to discover the answer to, and judging by the furious expression on Ducky's face when he relayed Ziva's assault, it hadn't been pleasant.

Still focusing on the here and now, he slipped into interrogator mode. "You said you pushed Ziva over the edge when you saw her tonight. Tell me what happened."

"She came and saw me earlier in the basement. I thought she wanted to talk about lying to me, to apologise and make things right." He stared off into the distance and Fornell needed to prod him to continue.

"So, why did she come to see you, Jethro if not to apologise?"

Gibbs looked like he really didn't want to be having this conversation. "She said that she didn't believe DiNozzo and she couldn't work with someone she didn't trust. She said one of them had to go," he admitted, reluctantly.

"What did you say?" Fornell asked.

Reading between the lines, the Fibbie knew that she had used emotional blackmail to try and have DiNutzo thrown off the team. It was blatant to everyone that knew them that Ziva was treated like a favourite daughter, and he'd never been able to get Jethro to explain why he trusted her so implicitly, but Tobias knew how he was when it came to Abby and Ziva. When they pouted, stamped their feet or cried, he was putty in their hands. No doubt, in their pleading eyes Jethro saw echoes of his long dead Kelly and was unable to refuse them. They were his Achilles heel, his soft underbelly and they knew it, too; perhaps not consciously in Abby Sciuto's case, but Ziva had profiled him for her half-brother Ari and Mossad, and she definitely knew how to play him. So, he was surprised that in this instance she had overplayed her hand so spectacularly.

"You know I couldn't let a subordinate force my hand, Tobias. She gave me no choice. I told her I'd have her reassigned ASAP."

"And if she had given you a choice?" he asked looking at the figure in the bed.

Gibbs was silent, but he finally answered grudgingly. "I would have probably agreed to her request."

Fornell was shocked. He could never understand how Gibbs could trust Eli David's daughter's loyalty so completely when she owed her allegiance to her father and Mossad. As Ari's handler who had prepared the dossiers on Gibbs' team, which allowed her brother to target Gibbs and Special Agent Caitlyn Todd as the most effective way to psych out Jethro, along with her stubborn refusal to consider that he was rogue, Ziva had contributed to Todd's death. Yet, she had never seemed to be held accountable for at the very least, not doing her job effectively. He'd even heard some creditable rumours that Deputy Director David had told his daughter that Haswari was dirty and she'd ignored the Intel.

Now it turned out that once again she had covered up for an out-of-control Mossad operative, one that killed ICE Agent Sherman. Shades of the past repeating itself at the very least here, Tobias thought. Gibbs had given DiNutzo a heap of shit for keeping the fact that he was working undercover for the Director from him and the team because it was a need to know mission and he'd been ordered not to tell his superior. Yet Gibbs was prepared to overlook Ziva's lies and deception? Definitely a double standard going on there, in his humble opinion, the fed decided bemusedly.

Staring at his old friend incredulously, "You said if you'd known about Ziva attacking Tony you'd have done it differently?" He asked, still not able believe what he was hearing. "You would have let her railroad you into forcing DiNutzo off the team when he'd done nothing wrong and she'd been lying to NCIS, to you?" He asked, "Really?"

"I owe Ziva and she's been betrayed by her family and her lover. When I chose Tony over her she would have thought I was betraying her, too, Hell, she even predicted it! Which I guess I did by not choosing her. If I'd known how irrationally she was behaving, then I would have probably overlooked her behaviour."

Tobias thought that given her propensity to threaten people and the fact that she killed a suspect in the NCIS elevator when he wouldn't shut up, perhaps Gibbs shouldn't be so surprised to hear that she tried to kill DiNutzo, or consider it so out of character; all of which he decided to keep to himself at this stage since he was investigating a shooting. Instead he snorted cynically.

"Well, I guess we don't have to search all that hard about her motives for breaking into Tony's apartment. She probably thought that with him dead, she would gain back your approval. How sick is that?"

Gibbs opened his mouth to reply, but his phone (which he'd stubbornly refused to switch off) rang, despite clear directives that cell phones be turned off around medical equipment. He answered it reluctantly after observing who was calling him. Fornell listened and it was clear that Gibbs was not happy. Hanging up with a grunt he stood up. "Vance wants me to go in to help with damage control. I'll talk later." With a final glance at the prone figure in the bed, he left the room.

Fornell watched the still shape for a few more minutes before he decided to get some fresh air while he waited for the patient to regain consciousness. As he exited, he looked to his agent, Jacobs. "Do not let anyone except medical personnel on that list in to see Special Agent DiNozzo. I'll be back."

Meanwhile… inside the room, Tony cautiously opened his eyes and looked around before grimacing in pain. After rolling out of bed on his arm and falling on it, he'd displaced it spectacularly, this time ending up with a compound fracture that needed screws and a plate to repair it. They'd also taken the opportunity while he was anaesthetised to clean and stitch the flesh wound he'd received when one of Ziva's three shots pierced his thigh, and to also set his fractured clavicle. As GSW went, it was a little more serious than a scratch, but it was just a flesh wound, and he'd been lucky that the other two bullets went really wide. It also didn't escape his attention that being shot in the thigh was quite ironic, as less that 24 hour earlier Ziva had threatened to shoot him there at point blank range. Tony was just glad that it was his thigh and not his chest where she would have been aiming; any gun-shot wasn't a whole lotta fun, but chest wounds really sucked, if you even survived them.

Tony knew that life as he knew it had ceased when Ziva made the decision to kill him. How was he supposed to live with what she'd forced him to do? He'd walked away from his corrupt partner instead of turning him in for heaven's sake, so how was he supposed to live with the fact that she hated him so much she tried to kill him? More to the point, how was he supposed to deal with killing her, even if it was in self-defence? It was the second time he'd been put in that situation of killing a fellow professional in the last few days. When he crawled over and kicked away her gun and pulled off the ski mask, he was sure that he was hallucinating or it was a terrible nightmare, but here he was in hospital and Ziva was dead by his gun.

And listening to Gibbs' broken rambling, that was completely out of character for the hard-as-nails Marine, and it was devastating to him. Also hearing that Gibbs had chosen him over their liaison officer simply because Ziva gave him an ultimatum was hurtful. But even apart from that, it was like Jenny's death all over again, except that this time he'd killed Gibbs' precious daughter, not his former lover. Gibbs treated her like a precious jewel and he had shot her, and now the Boss probably hated him almost as much as Tony hated himself. He didn't even want to think about Eli David – he would probably dispatch a posse of Kidon assassins to exact revenge for his daughter.

He briefly considered just making it easy for everybody and putting his gun to his head and beating them all to it, but his gun had been seized as evidence and his back-ups were all in his apartment, and who knew how long it would remain a crime scene. Since it was the crime scene for the death of the daughter of the Mossad Director, he had to figure that he wouldn't be getting in again anytime soon. But as much as a part of him wanted to take the easy way out and stop all the pain, Tony's innate strength of character and strong survival instinct battled against his desire to give up. And that survival instinct had plenty of practice battling against his reckless nature, and he'd ultimately resolved the issue by becoming a cop so he could help others.

Now, Tony knew that his world was shattered, that ultimately Eli David, with the resources of Mossad behind him, would have his revenge, but Tony vowed not to make it easy for him. He would use whatever time he had left helping people who didn't have a voice, and if that cost him his life, then he would have cheated Ziva's father out of his perverse retribution that had created this whole FUBAR in the first place. Of course, that meant that he would have to disappear.

Staying at NCIS would make it too easy for Eli to find him and it would put people that he cared about at risk, since he doubted if a bit of collateral damage would cause the director to lose sleep. Apart from which, he couldn't trust his superiors anymore. And he couldn't deal with Gibbs' devastation over losing Ziva or his own guilt when he had to look into his mentor's eyes every day and know how much he'd destroyed him. Or if he was being honest with himself, to have to daily confront the knowledge that if Gibbs had been forced to make a choice between which one of them should live, that he would choose his surrogate daughter, as difficult as the choice might be.

Once a long time ago, he thought that Gibbs thought of him as family, but then Gibbs got blown up and disappeared to Mexico, and then he returned to take back the position he'd thrust on Tony with a "you'll do" tossed out as almost an afterthought… like you'd toss a dog a bone. And things had fallen apart piece by piece, culminating in Jenny's death when he botched her protection detail. It had been the final nail in the coffin and he should have resigned, and then he wouldn't have to live with the knowledge that he had destroyed the lives of all the people he cared about. Jimmy, Abby and McGee would all be devastated when they knew he'd killed Ziva.

There was no time to waste. He needed to make plans and he needed to lay his past to rest so he could hit the road ASAP. That meant making a statement and getting cleared of a wrongful death so he could head out of DC fast. Although he knew that no matter what IA and the Fibbies said about the shooting, he would always feel responsible for killing her, always wonder if there was something he could have done to prevent it from happening.

Pressing the call button, he waited for his nurse Lana to come in so he could get her to call Fornell so he could make a statement. As he sat up, a wave of nausea overtook him and he decided that he needed to stay put for a bit longer while the anaesthetic worked its way out of his system. But ultimately, he needed to get out of here and stop off at one of his bolt holes that had his emergency hit the road because someone wants your ass stash containing fake but professional IDs, guns with permits in corresponding identities and sizeable cash reserves.

Lana came in and smiled to see that Tony was awake and although as she started taking vital signs, she realised that he has reacting to the anaesthetic agent with symptoms of nausea as he started vomiting up a thin stream of bile. The nurse swiftly injected the prescribed anti-nausea meds into his IV port and checked that the fluids and IV antibiotics where running correctly. Checking the colour of his arm and making sure he could wiggle his fingers and had normal feeling, she finished up the examination by checking both incisions for any sign of inflammation. Finally, offering her patient some ice chips, she smiled and asked if there was anything he needed.

"Yeah, could you call Special Agent Fornell and tell him I'd like to talk to him ASAP."

"Sure, Tony, I can do that. Meantime you might want to get some more sleep." She smiled as she exited the room and he closed his eyes to wait, too keyed up to sleep.

~ An Eye for an Eye Leaves Everyone Blind ~

Standing in the Major Threat Assessment Centre waiting for a call to be connected to the Director of Mossad, Gibbs and Director Vance waited anxiously, knowing this was going to be a bitch of a conversation. Gibbs was torn between his empathy for the news that Ziva's father was about to hear, and at the same time he was furious at the man for the way he had raised his daughter and treated her as an asset, a commodity, as a trained killer, which had ultimately led to her untimely death. Not to mention the fact that he was trying to deal with his own grief and guilt and his concerns about how this would impact his senior field agent. DiNozzo was going to be hit hard by this!

He glanced at Vance who was chomping through his toothpicks at a rate of knots, no doubt trying to calculate how much harm this was going to cause between the two agencies. Damage control indeed!

One of the techs glanced at the Director, "Director David is standing by, Sir."

Vance took a deep breath, glanced at Gibbs and nodded. "Go ahead, Edwards."

Instantly the pixels arranged themselves into the stern visage of the Mossad Director. "Shalom Leon, Shalom Gibbs," he greeted them, his lip curling perceptively as he greeted Gibbs. "To what do I owe this pleasure since we spoke less than 24 hours ago? Have there been further developments on the terrorist situation?" He asked with a touch of impatient eagerness.

Leon shook his head. "Shalom to you, too, Eli and there's nothing new on the terrorist front. No, I'm afraid I have some bad news, my friend. I'm sorry, I wish there was an easy way to tell you this but Ziva broke into the apartment of Special Agent DiNozzo in the middle of the night after cutting power to the building. She tried to kill him and was shot by DiNozzo in self-defence. I'm so sorry to have to tell you that she is dead, Eli. My sincerest condolences to you and your agency and anything I can do, just ask."

Both men saw a flicker of emotion cross the Mossad Director's face before a stony mask was slipped into place. "Thank you, Leon. I would like to receive copies of all the investigative reports and would appreciate if you permit me to send a representative from Mossad to observe the investigation into her death. I will be contacting the Embassy to organise her return to Israel as quickly as possible. I would appreciate your cooperation, my friend."

Vance nodded, he'd expected no less. "Of course, Eli, I'll do everything that I can to help. I'm sure that it wouldn't be a problem for a representative of Mossad to observe the investigation. I will confer with the FBI Director, but I don't envisage any problems."

Director David frowned, "I do not understand, why is the FBI investigating, Leon. Was not Ziva one of your own?"

"Yes, she was, my friend, but she tried to kill a federal agent and this automatically falls under auspices of the FBI." He explained, trying not to show how angry he was that it had been taken out of their hands.

"Surely, Leon, under the extenuating circumstances, you and SecNav could pull strings and have the investigation transferred back to NCIS. I would prefer that you oversee this one personally. I trust you!"

Director Vance grimaced. "I understand your concern, Director. I am not happy either, but this comes from The Hill I'm afraid. One of the first responders called them in and we've been ordered to cooperate fully but take no active role in the investigation or interfere in the process at all. Because it is who it is, DOD and DOJ are insisting that the process be transparent and impartial. I am sorry, but there is nothing I can do; however, the lead agent, Special Agent Fornell, is a close friend of Gibbs'. So as I say, I'm sure he will understand your need to have a representative observing the process."

Eli was clearly not happy, but nodded grudgingly. "So, can either of you gentlemen tell me what happened that caused my daughter to try to kill the Meatball? She had ample opportunity to kill him while they were here in Tel Aviv. I know for a fact that she had him down on the ground with a gun to his chest and leg, and although she wanted to pull the trigger, she pulled herself back at the last moment. So, what changed in the few hours between landing in DC and her getting shot by a man who has now killed two of my most valuable agents. Why would she try to kill him?"

Gibbs was shocked. A part of him couldn't believe that Ziva would actually have attacked DiNozzo and held a loaded gun on him, whatever her feelings, despite what Tony had told Ducky. He also couldn't believe that knowing her feelings about her partner, her father hadn't done something to prevent this from happening.

"If you knew she was feeling that angry about DiNozzo, why didn't you do something? My God, you could have prevented this." He ground out, angrily.

"I did try, Special Agent Gibbs," he snarled. "I told Ziva not to return to America, that her duty lay at Mossad and she needed to take Michael's place and carry out his mission. She ignored my wishes and got on that damned plane. What would you have me do?"

Leon jumped in before Gibbs could. "Why didn't you give us a heads up on her mental and emotional state, Eli? We might have been able to prevent this tragedy."

The Mossad Director smiled without humour. "Because she had become someone I did not recognise; out of control, emotional and weak. Before she joined your team, Gibbs, she was strong, decisive and she followed my orders. You and America corrupted her, Gibbs, made her weak. I was angry… she was an embarrassment and a loose canon… out of control and dangerous."

"She was your daughter, how could you let her back on the plane without saying something?"

"And she was disrespectful of me as her Director. She was no longer viable as a one of my agents. She made her choice when she picked you over me. She was supposed to win your trust, not become the lie. So, she was of no further use to me. I also did not realise her assassin skills had become so weak either."

Gibbs didn't know what the Hell he was talking about and right now he didn't care. "Damn it, she wasn't an asset. She Was Your Daughter!" He roared.

Eli David leaned forward his expression cold and remote. "Do not presume to judge me, Gibbs. You and I are not so different. We both chose duty to our country before the duty to our families. And now we have to live with those choices."

Gibbs clenched his fists and his jaw so tight he felt like they might shatter. If David had been in the same room and not an ocean away, he would have ripped him apart, limb by limb.

"We are nothing alike, Director, nothing! I would never take my child and make them into a cold blooded killer, an assassin, or order a Kidon operative to sleep with her and deceive her into thinking his feelings for her were genuine. We are nothing alike!" Gibbs spat out at the screen and turned and strode out of MTAC knowing that Vance was going to be pissed, but he wasn't going to stay and listen to such a crock.

~ An Eye for an Eye Leaves Everyone Blind ~

Eli David returned to his office and locked the door before falling onto his couch as he allowed his grief to overwhelm him. His daughter, his Ziva, his shining star was dead and she died with her heart full of hate, for him, for Michael, and for that bumbling Agent Meatball. His last remaining offspring was dead and the bumbling Inspector Clouseau was still alive, having survived the attempts by two highly skilled Kidon trained assassins to kill him. It seemed like some dreadful cosmic joke. There was no justice it would seem, but he would soon fix that.

Drying the tears that he had shed, Eli David crossed to his desk and sat down. Picking up the phone he called the US Embassy and began the arrangements to bring Ziva home, and he instructed Officer Hadar to liaise with Director Vance and the FBI Special Agent Tobias Fornell on the investigation into Ziva's death.

Then picking up one of his untraceable burn phones, he called Michael's younger brother, who had failed to qualify in his Kidon training. It wasn't that Samuel Rivkin was incompetent when it came to the technical aspects of being an assassin; he was actually highly skilled. It was that he was psychologically unsound. But for this particular mission, that wouldn't be a handicap; it may well prove beneficial, and Eli explained the mission, urging Samuel to get to DC as soon as he could. With luck, their target would still be vulnerable and helpless in hospital when the hit was carried out. It was a shame that Agent Meatball was estranged from his father and had no close family. He would have relished making him suffer by killing his father before killing him.

Having set in motion his sword of retribution, he turned to the difficult task of informing the family, starting with his sister Nettie, that Ziva was coming home for the final time before working his way through the rest of the David clan. Thinking of the outrage of the self-righteous Leroy Jethro Gibbs, he smiled a cruel coldly cynical smile. He had told him that they were not so different under the skin. Two fathers who had lost their daughters and both of them demanding retribution. The only difference was that as a lowly gunnery sergeant in the Marine Corps, Gibbs was free to disappear off the grid and exact personal vengeance while he as Mossad Director could not simply vanish to indulge his need to have revenge for his Ziva. But just like Gibbs, he would demand his revenge for the death of his last daughter.