Chapter 3
in a Gulfstream C-37A jet, somewhere over Utah
Kate Todd - the Special Agent in Charge of the Major Case Response Team operating out of NCIS's Washington/Navy Yard field office - loved her job.
For all its stresses and challenges, its ups and downs, she wouldn't trade it for almost anything in the world, not even the Secret Service.
There were a lot of perks that came with her chosen career, one she never would have considered as a long-term career a decade ago.
As she sipped on her freshly poured coffee, she pondered being on this plane, flying cross country, and, just briefly, the chain of events that led her here.
Kerry. Ross. Air Force One.
Gibbs.
NCIS.
Tony, Abby.
Haswari. What he did to her.
Jenny, Ziva, Paula. Haswari's return.
That day that was twilight, dusk and nightmare rolled into one.
The month of funerals.
Vance, Stan, Stella, Hetty, Noah, Katie. Sharif. Langer, Keating, Lee.
She and Stan; she minus Stan.
Israel, Eli, Bodnar. Miami, Horatio. Kensi, Callen, L.A., Rivkin. New York, Mac, Danny, Lindsey, Castle, Beckett, Reagan. Demming.
E.J. Jonas. Franks. Dearing.
Mossad. Save Eli, save Jackie, kill Bodnar. Rule 12 - his, not hers - broken in Berlin.
Then. Now.
Kate felt around for her phone and couldn't find it.
"What time is it? Anybody?" she asked aloud, figuring someone in the small Gulfstream cabin would know.
"5:29 a.m. Pacific, 6:29 Mountain, 8:29 Eastern," said her medical examiner, Noah Rooney, returning from the head. "We are presently over the Mountain time zone, Caitlin, headed towards the Pacific."
Once, at a crime scene, Mr. Rooney was mobbed by fans convinced that he was a certain TV star and demanded he account for the actions of one Gaius Baltar.
"Did you look at your watch or did your invisible robot friend," Kate joked. It was one of their many inside jokes - she figured the man sitting next to her in the cabin, FBI Senior Agent Tobias Fornell, would not get the joke.
"Actually, I looked at my cellphone," said the clean-shaven Englishman, who also had to dodge the occasional questions about his relation to a certain superstar footballer (answer: no relation). "I left Number Six at home."
"How is Mallory," Kate replied, asking about Rooney's girlfriend.
"Relaxing ahead of her trip," he said, launching into the beginnings of a very long story about his girlfriend's trip to South Sudan to work with Doctors Without Borders; her desire to complete her task of vaccinating an entire town; and his hopes to join her, while...
"...taking a side trip," he continued. "That reminds me of the one safari my father took me on when I was seven. We left Heathrow-"
"Noah," Kate interjected, politely. "I'd really love to hear about it. Let's wait until we land and get to a slow point. Besides, I want you to rest as much as you can before we land."
"Ah. Not a problem, Caitlin," he said, returning to his seat, and falling asleep promptly.
Kate didn't have the luxury of sleep. She was on her third cup of coffee, with no idea how many more she'd go through before this very very long day came to an end.
She and the other eight men and women were grateful for making the long flight from Andrews Air Force Base to Los Angeles International Airport in relative - if cramped - comfort, and not on a jam-packed commercial flight.
The only person not yawning and drinking down coffee was Senior Special Agent Ziva David, who was the most awake of everyone not in the cockpit.
"You mainline caffeine, David?" said her seatmate, Special Agent Tom Demming, who joined Kate's team nearly two years ago after serving as a homicide detective for the New York Police Department. "Zap? Or do you even need caffeine – or rest?"
Demming held up a nearly empty, 24-ounce can of Zap, a popular energy drink. Ziva looked at him amusedly.
"I drink this" - he said, pointing to the can - "so that on days like this I can function."
"Days like what, Tom?" Ziva answered. "Jetting cross-country in luxury?"
"No, days like yesterday. Chasing some crazy-ass major and his petty officer girlfriend all the way down to Hicktown, middle of Virginia, tire gets blown out, we get shot at while I'm changing it, run the idiot down, on foot, for a mile, nearly get hit by a state patrol car, finally catch up to the guy just as he runs into a dozen federal agents outside a rest stop," Demming said without taking a breath.
Then, he yawned, loudly.
"You're welcome," Kate replied, glancing back at him. "Sound tired. Want some coffee?"
"I want some Zap, boss," Demming replied, before taking another drink from the can, then realizing the can was all he had.
"Is your drink gone?" Ziva asked.
Demming laid it down on the floor before remembering Kate's rule 35 - and tossed it into the garbage can sitting next to FBI Senior Agent Tobias Fornell's seat.
"Nice shot, Demming," Fornell told him. "You should've made it last. I called ahead earlier, we'll have donuts, bagels, coffee and energy drinks to go when we land at LAX."
Demming turned around in his seat, and looked back at Fornell and Kate.
"What I should've done is grabbed three or four of those cans, not one, out of the fridge before I left," he said. "I could've used every last drop."
Demming saw a can flying through the cabin towards him; Ziva was much quicker and caught it before he reached out, and handed the can to him.
"Great. Diet Caf!-Pow," he said, as he looked towards the person who threw it from the back. "Katie, how do you drink this crap?"
A young woman, wearing an outfit that included a large smiley face pin on her jacket lapel, stepped forward. "You gonna complain, Tom Demming?" said Katherine "Katie" Yates, NCIS's chief forensics analyst for the past six years. "It's Diet Caf!-Pow. It gets me through the day and has zero calories. Now drink up."
"She made me drink two," said Ned Dorneget, also sitting in the back. "It's just now kicking in."
"That's right," said Katie, whom Demming noticed was a little sleepy, but just as chipper as usual. "I'm going to drink one more, and I should be wide awake when we land. Now drink up, Sam Anders."
Sam Anders - a character from the rebooted Battlestar Galactica television series - was one of Katie's nicknames for Demming. He, in turn, nicknamed her Kaylee Frye, for her very close resemblance to the character from the Firefly television show.
"Alright, Kaylee, since you asked," he said. "Don't complain next time I go down to the lab and bring you Zap because the cafe was out of Caf!-Pow."
"Tom, be careful when you remove the tab so you do not spill any on your crotch, like last time," Ziva added, before giggling.
"It was pitch black dark in the middle of the night when we were on that undercover op and I had no idea that soda cans...did that when you shook them and left them lying for a week, okay? Okay?" he said, to chuckles across the cabin. "Now I'm going to drink Katie's Diet Caf!-Pow and" - he said, holding the can away from himself and Ziva - "open it carefully."
It sprayed onto the cabin wall.
"Cleaning bill's coming out of your paycheck, Demming," Fornell joked.
While Katie went to wake up Sheldon Jin - the team's technical analyst – and NSA liaison Ellie Bishop, Ziva giggled at Demming.
"What? I didn't get any of that on you."
"I am glad, Tom," Ziva said. "When I worked with former Director Shepard in Serbia, we once stayed awake for 52 straight hours, pursuing and being pursued by Herzegovinian Independence League members intent on killing us both. We did not sleep. We did not get tired. We completed our mission with success."
"You were also 21. When I was 21 I spent an entire weekend awake, studying for finals, chasing down a really hot cheerleader, and cutting loose at this three-night, end-of-the-semester party thrown by the soccer team," Tom retorted. "When you're 21 you can do stuff like that. When you're our age, you need some help."
Kate listened to Ziva and Tom's banter, and smiled.
"Remind you of someone?" Fornell said.
"Tony and Ziva, after Jenny brought her to the team," Kate replied. "Those two, now, make me wonder about the partnership she and Tony could have had if he, you know..."
Kate's voice trailed off.
"Kate. What could've been, isn't," Fornell said. "What you have is a great team, one of the best I've seen...the group of detectives you'll be working with in Los Angeles is one of the best of its kind in the entire country."
She reached down and picked up the information folder the FBI had prepared for her on the Priority Homicide division and its chief.
"Before we land - and I realize there's no private room on this plane - we need to discuss Brenda Leigh Johnson," Fornell told Kate, lowering his voice. "Deputy Chief Johnson is many, many, many things, Kate. I met her once when I went to Los Angeles to help the local office investigate a interstate gambling ring. One of the victims turned out to be a former UCLA football star, and a high profile one at that. Her division got the case, and I saw her in action for myself."
"How was she to work with, Toby?" Kate asked.
"Everything the report said, negative and positive," Fornell continued. "This was right after she and Agent Howard divorced. She was zeroed in on the case, and she went after the suspects...there was a girl, the granddaughter of the deceased, who was kidnapped by one of the killers. Brenda put everything into finding that girl, more than finding the killer. So anyone you run into who says she has no heart, she's all about herself and closing her case, that's not true."
"Sounds like you're defending her," Kate said, reaching into her handbag. She pulled out the report from Hetty Lange on her team's case with Priority Homicide. "This says otherwise."
"Deputy Chief Johnson made a near-fatal mistake with two of your agents and made it much worse with her reaction after the fact," Fornell said. "I don't disagree with Henrietta's conclusions. All I want to tell you is there is more to this woman than what Griffin Park made her out to be."
Kate thumbed through the report, found the portion she was looking for, and read it aloud to Fornell.
"'One informant dead, 13 LAPD Special Operations Bureau officers dead or injured. Agent Blye injured and out of action for weeks, Agent Deeks got out with a sprained elbow and nearly had his arm torn off in the crossfire'. She not only not apologized, she tried to turn it around on us, Toby. No wonder Hetty and Callen were pissed!"
Fornell sighed.
"Kate, I spoke with people in LAPD and in the L.A. FBI office after that...incident," Fornell said. "I've spoken a lot with Fritz. Kate, if anyone has reason to demonize her it's him. I won't get into the personal issues he divulged, but I know too well how nasty divorces can be. He still thinks she's a good investigator, and at heart a good person. The way he described her to me, in a single word, is 'misunderstood'."
"Misunderstood?"
"She wasn't warmly received when Pope brought her into to lead her division," Fornell said. "She gradually earned the trust and respect of those under her, and her peers, and others throughout the department. She began to lose some of that with the divorce, and then with the Four-Week Gang War, and Griffin Park...when the former chief of police died in that wreck, she lost her biggest supporter."
Kate paused. She understood fighting to get respect as a woman, and respect as a team leader. Her respect from Vance was...well-earned, she would tell others.
But she either stuck to the rulebook or kept it in sight, and never treated her team nor other NCIS personnel, nor outsiders, poorly.
"Misunderstood," Kate repeated. "Sounds pretty clear to me, Toby."
"There's more to her situation than appearances suggest," Fornell said. "It's the opinion of the Bureau that, due to recent events and her sometimes unwise reactions, she feels cornered and she is cornered. If this victim was some rapper or politician or star actor, we'd sit back and watch. This victim is the highest ranking military officer in the nation, and neither we nor NCIS nor Secretary Porter are going to sit back and let this investigation get derailed by LAPD politics."
Kate leaned forward, put her elbows on her knees, and rested her chin on her intertwined fingers. God I could use a few more hours sleep before we start.
"Thanks for the advice, Tobias," she said, after straightening up. "I want to read through your brief again."
Fornell handed the brief on Brenda to Kate, and she began reading through it, sorting out the b.s. from the truth, and trying to get a grasp of this woman who, whether they realized it or not, had so many men worried sick.