The Investigation

Mar 16, 2012 14:38



Just inside the door, he is a probie again. It doesn’t matter how much death and destruction he has helped to cause on the battlefields of the planet, seeing civilian blood spilled in the course of human events sets him on edge, his teeth grinding together as he is blasted by the smell of copper, dust, and gunpowder.

Behind him, Tony and Ziva stand still, holding themselves as he does. They have been working already, collecting the bodies, photographing, saving evidence before the pizza oven heat of the diner cooks everything past usability. But now he stands, watching their work; they have learned well from him, have done what needs to be done. Now it is his job to direct the investigation, to make sure the Director did not act out of concert, that the Assistant Director is done justice, that the strangers in the diner are treated with the same respect. It is his job to piece together what they will present him and give the answers to those above him.

His phone will not stop buzzing. Updates from Heather, demands from the local teams, questions upon questions from the SecNav, even Jenny’s mother and Vance’s wife. For a moment, just a moment, his heart goes out to her. She doesn’t deserve to have the truth of her husband’s betrayal of his country revealed in this manner. A breath and he steps forward, toward the blood pools. He isn’t lost in the mess of blood, wondering whose is what and where. He isn’t trapped in his own head, much like he knows Clarke will be when he sees this. No, he’s focused because focusing helps.

The orders are the same orders he’s given thousands of times. The team doesn’t need to be told to do anything different than what they have always done. Break down. Analyze. He’ll worry about the finer details once the forensics are processed. The last order given, he takes out his camera and starts snapping his own photos. Mike will contact him at some point and then he’ll disappear, off to question, to cajole. At some point the bodies will arrive in DC and Ducky will call. At least the SecNav is taking care of informing Mrs. Vance of the death of her husband.

In the silence of the diner, the click of the flash echoes.



Only after confirming the bodies are secure in DC does Gibbs allow himself more than the five second break where Heather updates him. The techs are still gathering and discerning blood spatter and somewhere he knows Jen’s old flame has shown up and is also lending a hand. How convenient, he thinks, that the kid was around. But they need all hands on deck. Even the locals are going to be helping for the next few weeks. This isn’t some agent involved shooting. The director is having her chest cracked, the assistant director is dead, the deputy director is far too involved for Gibbs’ liking, and that isn’t even taking into account the international angle. He recognizes one of the gunmen from the ring in Paris and the tingle on his arms tells him Svetlana is near.

Oh the threads left to unravel in Paris. He’d known it would all come back to haunt them. He hadn’t predicted it would lead to the potential downfall of an agency.

Outside, under the falling dusk of a California night, Gibbs leans against the dusty body of his agency issue car and runs what he knows in his head. McGee is already on background checks, including anything the Director and Assistant Director were in to. Files and files and files are being emailed to him - faxing is too risky. He knows of Jenny’s involvement with the death of The Frog, knows there were connections to Jeanne, knows that the CIA had to bail her out. He knows she’s been implicated in the death of other connections to The Frog. But he also knows this is about more than that.

Vance wouldn’t get involved in some two bit CIA based operation that would only come back to haunt him. No, this went further back, back to other arms dealers they were directed to take out back before the United States turned its attentions to terrorists in bombing vests, not terrorists with Russian accents.

Watching the stars emerge, his mind made leaps. Logical leaps from Jenny to Vance to the Frog to Paris to the loose ends left behind not by a weakness in capacity but an empathy for humanity that Gibbs worried Jen had lost. Gone were the gentle eyes of the agent who argued with him, reminding him that there were innocents in the lives of those they were mandated to kill. What had Jen known or suspected?

His mind leapt. From Svetlana to the argument they’d had before Jen left him to the look in her eyes when she learned the truth about Heather. Their personal connection would seem to be of little consequence, but Jenny’s willingness to ditch her detail and chase after Svetlana on her own, to be tracked down, to end it, came not from professional drive but her personal demons. It was not only him who haunted her, but her choices, her missteps. Jen’s argument rang in his ears, that she could not kill a woman so like herself.

What was he missing? Why had Svetlana waited so long to come after Jen when Jen had spent time in Europe? What was Vance’s connection to this Russian when his ties had mostly been to Mossad?

Staring up at Orion’s Belt, his eyes following the path of the stars from one corner to the other, one constellation to the other, he tracked out there ideas that, when lines were drawn, made sense.

Mossad connected to Vance connected to old, rogue KGB outlets, connected to Svetlana, connected to The Frog, connected to Jenny, connected to him. Tied not by bonds of weapons but blood.

Was it then that Svetlana had been pregnant? Was that was why Jenny could not then raise the gun. What had even stilled Gibbs’ hand when he went to clean up her mess. She had been pregnant. Then and perhaps now.

And she was still out there and nothing fueled a woman more than protection for her children.

Another leap. Another thought. Lines connecting dots like stars on a constellation map. Orion, the hunter. Gemini, the twins. Perseus, the hero. From one to the next, outlines in the sky of what had perhaps been a story to tell on a Paris street eight years ago in France. Gibbs stares at the door to the diner, wondering.



Talking to Jenny hadn’t calmed his nerves. Despite Heather’s best attempts to get him to relax, he’d paced most of the three hours he’d given himself to rest. Focusing on Heather’s sanity was all that kept him from going completely off the deep end and so when his mind did let him sit still, he kept her in his arms, calming her, calming both of them. She clung. He calmed. For as often as she had been his caregiver, it felt good to be the one caring for her. They both ached for James, both knew she needed to go home soon. But until Jenny was out of the woods, Heather wasn’t going anywhere. The rest of the time, however, he paced.

The look in Jenny’s eyes haunted him. There was so much more to the stories of the gun runners left behind in Paris, more than how green she’d been during the operation. So much he didn’t know what he needed to learn in order to unravel this mess, but he knew he needed to learn it quickly. The code word followed each breath. Ohshimida. The one thing to get them out of trouble. The one word that would protect them in case of anything. Jenny had used it. That meant Will had used it, had managed to get her a message before her death. Had meant for her to share it with him.

Vance’s involvement picked at him. He’d never trusted the minion, but couldn’t imagine him being involved all the way back in France. It had to be a new development, but what he knew had died with him, his story told only in the hints of the forensics left behind. Vance’s office was seized; his team was going through each paper, each email, every social networking connection made by Vance and Vance’s assistant. Already they’d found forged information but the purpose left to be discerned through interrogation and investigation.

Sitting alone in the conference room they’d taken over at the Air Base, Gibbs sifted through papers. His coffee long cold, food completely forgotten, he tracked through travel logs of people connected to the gun runners they’d once traced. For a while he left the current mess behind and ventured into the past, knowing that the answers he sought were there, in the annals of a history they all wanted to forget. For a long moment, he stared at the grainy image, taken a decade ago, of a Russian woman standing next to a man who was now dead. She clung to him, her nails digging half-moons into his sleeve coat. They looked at each other with a mixture of love, lust, but with a connection that only co-workers who had fallen for each other could make. Such a dangerous combination; he had finally learned the importance of having sanity at home.

His phone buzzed. Heather. Checking on him. Reminding him to eat. She couldn’t handle both him and Jenny falling apart. He responded with a promise but kept his attention on the photograph. What had he missed? What wasn’t being told? What had they ignored? Why was this now coming back to haunt them?



He’s pissed. Not his usual “grumpy bear persona” as Heather likes to tease but full on pissed. From what he’s uncovered over the last few days, he has a right to be.

Given what Jenny revealed to him in the hospital, protocol requires that he pull all cases Jenny had an active hand in since their days in France. Since the case involving Svetlana. Gibbs is surrounded by boxes and laptops, file upon file upon file of anything and everything from Jenny’s past. He’s locked himself away in the conference room, trusting no one but himself. The one break he did take, to go back to sleep and make sure Heather was okay, he took the key with him. No one had access. When he checked in with Tony and Ziva, they met in the Assistant Director’s office, monitored by the cameras.

Most of her work in the Middle East was redacted. Mossad’s overly obsessive need for secrecy was unfortunately tied into Ziva’s own loyalty to Israel’s national security and her father. She was less than forthcoming. Tony was impossible - feeling so guilty for what had happened he wanted to work twice as hard to redeem himself. Gibbs knew reasoning with him was impossible but the truth was that Jenny did what Jenny wanted to do.

Once Jenny’s world turned to the Office of the Directorship, the files were even more difficult to decipher. He started with three piles: suspicious activity, The Frog and the Tadpole, and gun running connections. But as time wore on, the piles slowly became one. Her entire life had been about getting the gun runners off the streets. Her life, like Tony’s now, was focused on atonement. It was not just revenge for her father but penance for letting Svetlana live.

A file caught his attention. Post her clearing of her murdering The Frog, it was the file on Jeanne and the Tadpole - including what happened with Jenny’s little Tadpole. No, it wasn’t fair to call him that. He was a good kid and had taken a beating, but it was a beating he hadn’t needed to take. Whether or not he understood the inherent risks involved when being the lover of the Director of a Federal Agency (or a senior agent for that matter, he checked on Heather with a quick text message) his protection had failed him and through that, Jen had failed him. But he had also failed Jen. His ranting on his … blob … blog … whatever … had outed her illness not just to Heather but to Vance, who had used it to start an investigation. His and Jenny’s … posts on that site with the bird … had been a red flag to Vance’s people. As it was, he kept coming back to one. It seemed innocuous to anyone who wasn’t part of Clarke’s inner circle, but to read about how it was the anniversary of her killing him, ate away at his gut. People spent far too much time on the internet. Himself included, and he barely knew how to turn on his laptop and follow instructions.

Vance was smart and savvy enough to not just follow bread crumbs but to sit down and feast when the table was laid before him. Like the English soldiers marching through Washington, he would celebrate before burning, but burn he would. Clarke’s innocent eagerness as a part of a generation Gibbs did not understand was not the beginning of Vance’s tirade against Jenny, but it had opened doors where otherwise Vance would have had to crawl through windows.

The trail became clear six months before Jen’s appointment as Director, when she was serving as the lead agent in Europe, she made a phone call from her blackberry. Thirty seconds, to a pre-paid cell with a Russian prefix. Nothing then until she took the Director position when the trail picked up not with Jen, but Vance, making a call to a pre-paid cell with a Serbian prefix. And then nothing. Those two records, unearthed by McGee, went into his “suspicious” pile.

What he could glean from Jenny’s file with the Frog was that whatever she did, Vance had a record of it. The guy was a computer wizard, something Gibbs had never given him much credit for, and the hacking of Jenny’s files was well documented in his private logs. What, had the guy been planning to write a book someday?

The CIA cover of Jenny’s murdering of the Frog started another stream of contacts from Vance to pre-paid cells in Europe. France. Serbia. Russia. All places where Jen had worked undercover tracking down known enemies of the state and bringing them to the covert definition of justice. There was a gap, a break in Vance’s personal logs and the files, a gap Gibbs knew would be the answer to everything. But he worked around it, still digging.

Vance knew about The Frog, the Tadpole. A personal log line commented that Jenny had handled the situation with movie-like precision, but that it would not be difficult to keep a murder investigation alive if The Agency so wished. They had wanted Tadpole dead and Jenny, for once, had been a perfect patsy. There were lose ends to be finished and his gut told him that somewhere, Jeanne Benoit’s bones were being finished off by sharks. The Agency left nothing to chance and Vance had been working with someone there. Someone who, if Gibbs’ gut was right, had helped to lead him directly to Svetlana.

What bothered him more than anything were the records and records Vance had been keeping on Jenny’s personal life - everything from her affair with Clarke to her recent dance with binge drinking. Vance’s distaste and distrust of Clarke was clear - he didn’t trust anyone who had been personally recruited by someone who was supposed to be focused on running the Navy. To him, it meant Clarke was a potential threat, someone with the ear of the SecNav, someone who could give direction outside of the usual chain of command. Gibbs knew better, but in Vance’s mind, it would make for interesting drama. There were extensive notes on Jenny’s use of “social media” (he guessed Vance meant websites) to vent her frustrations and commentary, including questions and cited medical notes, on how drinking, drug use, and the stress of the directorship could affect her medical condition.

Gibbs took heart knowing that he was also in there, used as an object that helped to precipitate Jenny’s “emotional breakdown.” There were notes, again with questions and medical citations, about how ALS patients with no family support deteriorated faster. There were plans jotted down, half thought out ideas to keep Jenny distracted and at odds with Heather by sharing hacked and forged emails, pictures, and other personal items. All the while, it was clear, that the path was meant to keep her mind focused elsewhere other than the Assistant Director’s office - even after Gibbs had been transferred - had been designed to cause her death.

The problem was, there was no proof of connection from point A to B to Svetlana. There was evidence of conspiracy; clear paths everywhere but the one redheaded Russian. But he was sure of one thing. Until Svetlana was caught, Jen needed protection outside of the NCIS detail. He barely trusted his own team, let alone people who had let a terrorist get to Clarke. He needed secrecy and he needed someone as willing to bend the rules as he was.

Gibbs picked up his phone and dialed. After three rings, someone on the other end answered. “Hey, Stan,” he spoke quietly to his old friend, “I need a favor and your office is the only one who can pull it off.”

[who] jethro gibbs, [plot] judgement day, [fic]

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