Silent and Grey, gen, T, by Hagar
Title: Silent and Grey 1/5
Pairing: gen
Rating: teen
Spoilers: references to late S6 and early S7.
Content Advisory: mild swearing, some violence in later parts
Summary: When a US Navy lieutenant goes missing, Team Gibbs must travel to Israel to find her. The investigation into what appears to be a terrorist act is complicated by prickly Shin-Beit operatives, a curious lack of helpful intel and the impending shadow of Memorial Day.
At AO3, DW and below:
1. Under the Cypress Tress
“Flowers in season
And rain in its time
For the missing ones to return
We need nothing more”
We Need Nothing More, Shlomo Artzi
Four in the afternoon on a Wednesday found the NCIS MCRT squad room a little more lethargic than the usual. Except, that is, for Agent Gibbs’ team, who were extra cranky and loud as ever.
Agent DiNozzo was moodily staring at the window. Agent David was assessing Agent DiNozzo.
“Tony, what has the window done to you?”
“The window hasn’t done anything to me, Ziva. It’s a window. It can’t do anything.”
“It can if you throw someone through it.”
“No, then you’d be doing something to someone using the window.”
“Are you contemplating making use of the window, then?”
“No, Ziva, I believe that is more your style then mine.”
Agent McGee raised his eyes from his keyboard. “Unless he was going to jump out himself,” he added, and then hastily raised his hands in surrender as both Tony and Ziva glared at him. “Hey, I was just saying!”
Predictably, that was the moment at which Agent Gibbs materialized behind McGee’s desk. “You were just saying what, McGee?”
“That, uh, Boss, uh...”
“That Tony would sooner throw himself out the window than another person,” supplied Ziva.
Gibbs turned his attention to her. “Who are you planning to throw out the window, David?”
“No one. But Tony is considering the window conspicuously.”
“For the hundredth time, Ziva, I am not looking at the window.”
“Then what are you looking at?”
“Do you see what’s that, outside?”
“It’s the Navy Yard, Tony,” said Tim. “You see it every day.”
“It’s rain,” said Tony with a put-upon expression. “It’s not supposed to rain this hard in May!”
“Actually, the month of May has the highest average precipitation in Washington DC,” Tim told him.
Ziva snorted. “You are not made of sugar,” she told Tony. “You won’t melt.”
“Oh, easy for you to say -”
Preoccupied by their bickering, the three agents failed to notice Agent Gibbs’ phone ringing. Thus, they all startled when Gibbs said, loudly, “Grab your gear. We have a missing Navy lieutenant.”
“Where, Boss?” asked Tony as the three agents reached for their bags and got up.
It took Gibbs an extra half a second to speak, and that was warning enough for his agents before he said: “Karnei Shomron.”
“Gesundheit,” said Tony automatically.
Ziva’s expression froze and her face paled. “Israel?” she demanded. “A US Navy lieutenant has gone missing in Israel?”
“That’s right,” said Gibbs, too evenly.
“One impending diplomatic crisis, coming right up,” muttered Tim, grabbing his emergency toothbrush from his drawer and putting it in his bag.
“Boss, are we going to...” began Tony.
But Gibbs was already halfway to the elevator. “Let’s go,” he called behind his back. “We’ve got a plane waiting.”
Gibbs did not say another word about the case until they were in the air. Then he produced a folder and passed it around.
“First Lieutenant Dana Weissman,” he said. The woman in the photo had strawberry-blond hair, brown eyes and a light tan. “25. She was on vacation in Israel, visiting her older brother and his family.”
“She was born in New England,” said Tony. “What’s her brother doing living in Israel?”
Ziva shot him a withering look. “He must have made Aaliya,” she said. Then she turned her attention back to Gibbs. “Has she gone missing from his house?”
“He reported her missing.”
“Karnei Shomron is across the Green Line,” she said. “It’s surrounded by Palestinian towns, the inhabitants of which are none too happy with the Israeli Settlers taking away land that should be theirs.”
Tony blinked. “Should be?”
“It’s across the Green Line,” repeated Ziva impatiently.
“It’s in the West Bank,” said Tim. “Part of the territory that Israel occupied in the 1967 Six-Day War.”
“The West Bank?” asked Tony. “Isn’t that area forbidden for US citizens?”
“Karnei Shomron is in the area under full Israeli control.”
“Isn’t the entire -”
Gibbs cut them off. “Geopolitics later,” he said. “Case now. Ziva, you think this could be a terrorist act?”
She shrugged. “Could be; chances, I don’t know. We’ll have to talk to the Shin-Beit.”
“The Israeli NSA,” supplied Tim before Tony could ask.
Ziva continued. “IDF Intelligence Corps would also be active in that area,” she said, “but the Shin-Beit will probably be easier to establish cooperation with.”
“We’ll also need the IDF’s intel,” said Gibbs.
“The Shin-Beit will have it.”
“No inter-agency turf wars in Israel?” asked Tony.
“After two Intifadahs?” Ziva retorted grimly. “Not anymore.”
They left Washington on a Wednesday, late in the afternoon, with temperatures in the 50s; they arrived at Israel early on Thursday afternoon to obscene brightness and temperatures in the high 70s. Tony felt himself begin to melt around the edges just stepping out of the plane’s belly. The heat out on the tarmac, in the blazing sunlight, was insufferable.
There were two cars and one man waiting for them, not fifteen feet from the ramp. The cars were an SUV and a sedan, both dark. The man was leaning against the latter with his back and one foot, arms loose to the sides of his body. He was 5’9”, about 170 pounds, solidly built; his hair was short-cropped, thinning and noticeably grey; skin medium-tanned, for an Israeli, with the expression lines showing around his mouth; his eyes were hidden behind a pair of elegant thin-frame, dark-tinted sunglasses that Tony approved of very much; and he wore khakis and a short-sleeved button-down that was on the smarter side of things, for an Israeli. All around, Tony estimated the man to be in his late thirties.
The man waited until they all stepped off the ramp, then pushed himself forward and folded his glasses on his shirt in a single compact motion and offered his hand.
“Section Chief Erez Shalev, Shin-Beit,” he said shortly, but not tersely. “I’m in charge from my organization.”
“Gibbs,” said Gibbs shortly, and somewhat more curtly. “These are Special Agents DiNozzo, McGee and David.”
If Shalev recognize Ziva’s name - he should at least recognize the Israeli pronunciation, Tony thought - he didn’t show it. He merely nodded and tossed Gibbs a set of keys. “The SUV’s yours for the duration,” he said. “I’ll show you to HQ.”
“We’d also like to talk to Isaiah Weissman,” Gibbs said.
Shalev nodded. “There’s GPS in the SUV,” he said. “Leave there by seven.” He fished out his wallet, produced a calling card and handed it to Gibbs. “Details of the Sector Officer. She’s already there. I’ll let her know you’re coming.”
“What, we get to wonder around Israel without a babysitter?” asked Tony.
Shalev’s expression didn’t flicker. “It’s a 50 kilometer drive if you take Route Six and the GPS is reliable. Leave at least an hour before dusk and you won’t run considerable risk of getting shot at. Shootouts aren’t common,” he continued, “but I’d rather not explain to your bosses why you were shot at on my watch.”
“Understood,” said Gibbs. He started in the direction of the SUV.
Tony snuck a look at Ziva. She seemed unfazed, but...
“DiNozzo!”
“On your six, Boss!”
Tim might have had more awkward half-hours in his life than the drive from Ben Gurion to the Shin-Beit HQ, but he couldn’t recall any. Ziva had gotten into the back seat of Shalev’s company car, which forced Tim to ride shotgun. Neither she or Shalev had said a word during the drive; Shalev had the radio turned to some talk-show in Hebrew, and Tim didn’t dare to ask him to change the station. Shalev reminded Tim of some Marines he’d met, who seemed to only ever consider people with an eye for the kill.
Ziva was all wrong, too. It was expected, as this was her first time in Israel since they had left her behind following Rivkin’s death, but that didn’t make it any easier. It wasn’t all that unusual for Ziva to be quiet, or be more interested in the scenery than in the people around her, but Ziva was never so still. He could see her, partially, in the mirror as he tried very hard not to fidget. She didn’t move at all, muscles relaxed, as if her body was uninhabited. It reminded him of the first few months after Somalia, and that made his lungs tight.
The sight of the Shin-Beit HQ was a relief, both because they have finally arrived and because it was so different from Tony’s horror tales of the Mossad HQ. Tony had described a warren of bare concrete cubes; this was a modern, elegant tile-and-metal building. The spacious atrium, where he and Ziva were issues visitors’ passes and checked in their cell phones, was marble and blissfully chilly, and the elevator was large and silent.
Then they stepped into the hallway, and if the floor was linoleum and the walls whitewashed instead of both being bare concrete, it was still cement and disconcertingly narrow. Tim’s heart sank.
They passed by six security doors before finally Shalev stopped by one.
“Check your cards,” he said.
Tim didn’t get it, but Ziva passed her card across the reader. The light blinked green and in the complete stillness of the hallway, Tim could hear the lock click open and then, after a moment, click shut again. Rather than wait for Shalev to turn that cool gaze on him, Tim tested his card too. This time, when the door unlocked, Shalev pushed it open and indicated for them to step in.
Tim wasn’t quite sure what he expected, but this wasn’t it. They were standing in a small hall that opened into several other rooms, and they opened into even more rooms. Some had doors, but most appeared to be open, and all were packed full with people and workstations.
“It’s like a hive,” he said before he could think better of it.
“Kaveret,” said Shalev, like he was agreeing, and Tim figured that that was the Hebrew word for ‘hive’. “That’s what we call it. This way,” and he started in one direction. “You’re free to go inside the hive, but please do not wander the halls unaccompanied, even to the bathroom. That’s on the other side of the hall, by the way. Coffee corner that way; anyone can direct you.” He stopped in one of the open chambers, where a woman in her late twenties appeared to be waging a war against three phone lines and two computer monitors. She looked up at them and waved, but did not pause what she was doing. “This is Ravid Kogan,” said Shalev. “She’s XO for this section. Anything you need, ask her or me. My office is here,” he said, pointing to a door behind Kogan’s desk, and then pushed another door open. “This one’s assigned to you.”
The room was as claustrophobic as any other workspace in the hive, but it had four desks, three computer stations and two phones.
“Thank you,” Tim said.
Shalev nodded once, and turned to his own office without a word. The door closed behind him on its own.
“Chatty guy,” Tim remarked as he deposited his bags on the floor and reached for a keyboard.
“He has work to do,” said Ziva shortly. She didn’t look in his direction, let alone at him.
Tim felt himself flinch. This was Tony’s place, or Gibbs’. There was nothing Tim could do for her. Nothing, that is, except focus on the case. Except that - “This operating system is in Hebrew.”
“The icons are the same,” said Ziva. She was busy with her own computer. “All the data we need should be accessible through the shared network folder, the shortcut to which is on your desktop.”
There really was a shortcut to a folder named Weissman on the desktop. “Handy.”
She said nothing.
It was going to be a long afternoon.
The last - and only - time Tony had been to Israel, it’d been straight from the airport to Tel Aviv and back. The area around Ben Gurion was primarily fields, he remembered that much; otherwise, it was all new to him.
The fields turned to tree-covered hills, which reminded him of Ziva saying This is like the forest I played in as a child, and then the trees turned to half-grey shrubs. As they drove north, the hills became smaller and lower, and the towns increased in number and density. By the time they exited the highway to the smaller road that would take them to their destination, the area around them could be best described as suburban. Then, as they turned east, the hills began to rise again - the grey, shabby-shrubby variety - and the towns were again distant things at the top of the hills.
Tony knew exactly when they crossed the Green Line, too, because there was a road block and a bunch of bleary-eyed uniformed teenagers (not one of them over twenty, to Tony’s eye) who made him and Gibbs step out of the car and circled them like so many alley cats in the twenty minutes it took them to get phone confirmation that the two NCIS agents were, in fact, who they said they were and were not smuggling weapons in the SUV.
From there the hills kept getting higher and shrubbier until, finally, they reached the industrial outskirts of the town of Karnei Shomron and then the town itself, with its 6,300 townees (according to Wikipedia) in their red-roofed houses.
Very near the town entrance, a dark car identical to Shalev’s was parked, and against it lounged a person in a nearly-identical posture. This, though, was a 5’5” woman. She wore beige cargo pants and a matching cargo vest over her black t-shirt, and the loose-fitting clothes made her figure harder to assess. Her hair was light brown, and pulled back in a ponytail, the tip of which touched the base of her neck. Her eyes, too, were brown, but her skin was fair.
She waited for them to approach her before she straightened.
“Yael Dunski,” she said, brusquely. Her first name was two distinct vowels in a quick succession.
She did not, Tony noticed, offer her hand.
Gibbs offered her a half-nod. “Gibbs and DiNozzo,” he said.
She nodded once. “I’ll take you to the Weissmans. No need to bring that clumsy thing,” she jutted her chin at the SUV, “into town, if you’re okay with that.”
“Is it okay to leave it here?” asked Tony, blinking against the view. It was chillier up there, and there was a nice wind, but it was still very bright.
“Yes.”
“What kind of a crime rate does a town like this have, anyway?” asked Tony as they stepped into the car. Gibbs rode shotgun. Of course.
“Nonexistent,” said Dunski. “Unless toilet-papering the school before graduation counts.”
“Kids will be kids,” said Tony cheerfully.
In the mirror, he saw Officer Dunski smile.
“Is that why you have floodlights for street lights?” asked Gibbs in that misleading agreeable tone he sometimes used.
“Neighbouring towns are Palestinian,” said Dunski matter-of-factly. “Cars get stolen, but that’s the military’s problem, not the police’s.”
“Wow, you’re just rocking the PR, aren’t you,” Tony said.
Surprisingly, that earned him another smile, albeit sardonic. “It’s a sad world,” she told him, “so we laugh.”
“I bet it sounds cooler in Hebrew.”
“Ha’olam atzuv, az tzochakim,” she said, and made eye contact through the mirror. “Does it?”
“I’ll get back to you on that,” he said. “Just so we’re clear, are we really talking Hamas having kidnapped a US Navy officer?”
“Not Hamas,” she said. “This is the Bank, not the Strip.”
“Doesn’t mean there aren’t terrorist here,” said Gibbs.
“If there weren’t,” said Dunski, “I wouldn’t be here either.” Then she stopped the car. “We’re here.”
Back on the plane, Ziva had said that the Shin-Beit would be more cooperative than the Intelligence Corps. Two hours after arriving at the Shin-Beit, Tim thought that if this was cooperative, then he didn’t want to see non-cooperative.
The Northern Shomron Section Chief himself had picked them up from the airport. The Weissman folder was exhaustive. It had maps, aerial photographs of the area, everything the State of Israel knew about the family, and way more outright intelligence than Tim thought they’d be given. As for the physical conditions, the computer could be newer but Tim had seen older machines at NCIS itself, the two phones were in fact two lines, and they had more room than plenty other people in the same hive, sad as that was.
On its face, the Shin-Beit was being exceedingly nice to them. In practice, Tim wanted to scream.
The first sign was when, about half an hour after they arrived, Tim decided that a coffee sounded like a good idea and went in search of the aforementioned coffee corner. Ravid, still battling with the phones, pointed him that-a-way, rattled off a list of instructions too long for Tim to remember, tacked a distracted smile at the end and turned all of her attention away from him.
Tim managed to follow through on the first three turns, or he thought he had; when he asked for directions again he discovered he had missed the first one. So he went back to the starting point, managed to follow on three turns but by the fifth had to ask for directions again. All in all, he had to ask for directions six times to get to the ‘coffee corner’ - which turned out to be a fully-equipped kitchenette - and four to get back. Each time, all the inhabitants of the room he was in looked up when he said “Excuse me,” and then all but one immediately resumed their work; each time, the instructions he’d been given were detailed, but quickly spoken; and each time, just as the person’s attention had turned to him fully and with an odd, distracted courteousness, it disappeared just as fully once the instructions had been delivered once.
He’d asked for instructions in the coffee corner, too, and made Ziva’s instant coffee from the tin that the Israelis eyed with a semi-fond exasperation while he used the Nestle for his; percolators did not exist in Israel. Ziva’s expression cleared when she tasted her coffee, and for a second Tim thought that the excursion was worth it, but then she grimaced as if in pain, muttered something that sounded like Jol mejurban (no, Chol mechurban, the Hebrew consonant was rougher than the Spanish one), and pushed the cup away.
Well. He’d known that one might backfire.
So the interface was in Hebrew and all the programs that were not standard Microsoft-issue were new to him but, mostly, he managed. Some kind, hard-working soul had even translated most of the Hebrew documents and conversations on file to English, which had to be quite a bit of work considering the Israelis had less than a day to prepare for them.
Tim still missed quite a bit of context, though, and Ziva was busy analyzing chatter-patterns from the nearby villages and ignored him wholly and, anyway, international banking was not her thing. It wouldn’t have been a problem, really, except that he did not have access to anything outside the section’s own computer cluster, and that meant no dictionary, Wikipedia or any other resource.
That was when Tim discovered that the Shin-Beit people offered professional help the same way they offered instructions to the coffee corner: you were told precisely what you asked, nothing more, and only once.
Which Tim could have handled - because he was smart enough and, after years under Gibbs, reasonably independent - but he’d been awake for 24 hours, give or take a few, during which he’d had about half the calories he should and had been dealing with a foreign culture, and that’s to say nothing of the seven time zones crossed.
He needed help, and nobody was helping.
He had five minutes to try and get a grip on himself while Ziva found someone to escort her to the bathroom, and then she came back, closed the door behind her which Tim had deliberately left open because the room was too small and he was tired, looked in his general direction, and said: “Stop panicking.”
“What?” He followed her with his eyes; she’d already returned to her desk. “What are you talking about?”
“You annoy them,” she said, eyes on the computer. “Stop panicking.”
“I am not panicking!”
“That,” she told him.
“That’s not panicking.”
“It’s uncontrolled temper that is not murderous rage.”
“And that’s called panic, now?” he asked, knowing exactly how irritable he sounded and unable to help it.
She looked up, briefly, but her eyes went to some point on the wall behind his head. “It’s the Shin-Beit,” she said.
“You say that like it explains everything.” Her chin tipped down, and Tim spoke quickly, before he’d lose her attention. “Help me out here!”
“There is a Hebrew idiom for people who won’t solve problems they might be able to solve on their own, if they cared to,” she said coolly. “It’s small head.”
“Oh, is that what you think I’m doing?” he demanded, pushing himself up.
“Well, clearly -”
“Because from where I’m looking at it, there are things I need in order to do my job, Ziva, and no one is telling me how to find them!”
“That’s because you’re supposed to find them yourself!”
“Well, excuse me, but in case you haven’t noticed this is not my office I’m working out of, here. It’s not even my country, or my language, or...”
“Deal,” said Ziva shortly. “It’s what everybody else does.”
He opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again. “Is this also how these people help each other?”
“‘These people’,” she said, and he could hear the air quotes, “do not expect anyone to look after them, nor do they burden colleagues with things that are irrelevant to their job.”
“Things like suffering the human-typical effects of being tired and jet-lagged?”
She snorted. “You’ve only been awake 24 hours,” she said. “No one here notices before it’s at least thirty.”
“You’re unbelievable, you know that?”
She said nothing. Her gaze was studiously on her computer, but her shoulders were tense.
“Unbelievable,” he muttered. He was going to add I’m going for coffee, but she would have only said something else nasty - probably about not bothering anyone with his not magically knowing the layout of the hive - so instead he just went out, and informed the first person who looked at him that he needed an escort to the bathroom.
Isaiah Weissman’s file told Tony that there would be little children. Three children under the age of eight and a baby, to be exact. Standing by the car in the street and looking up the stairs to the two-story house, Tony listened to the racket and said: “That sounds like a lot of people.”
“Naomi Weissman’s family lives in town,” said Dunski. “Her parents, two siblings and a sister-in-law were over when I left to fetch you guys, as well as three of Isaiah’s friends. And their rabbi,” she added, as if in an afterthought.
That summed up to eleven adults, but that still did not explain what Tony was hearing. Pointedly, he said, “That sounds like a lot of kids.”
“Eight, including Isaiah and Naomi’s,” said Dunski.
“Great,” muttered Tony.
“Why are they all here?” asked Gibbs.
“For Isaiah,” said Dunski, plainly, as if nothing could be more obvious. She crossed the road and started up the stairs. “You coming or what?” she called over her shoulder.
The yard was surrounded by a hedge, and so Tony couldn’t see into it until they climbed the twenty stone-paved stairs and reached the garden gate. The front yard wasn’t very large, and the swing set took up half of it. Tony counted three boys playing on the swings and monkey bars. Two toddlers were playing on the porch, supervised by two women in their 20s or 30s, one of whom was holding a baby. Both wore full-length skirts, shirts which sleeves reached past their elbows, and headscarves.
It could be a peaceful domestic scene, but it wasn’t. Both women radiated tension, their shoulders tight and their lips pursed. Tony plastered on his best smile, but neither woman seemed to even notice.
Dunski greeted the women in Hebrew and they replied in kind. She didn’t head for the front door but rather cut through the porch and entered the house through the French doors. Gibbs followed without a comment; Tony followed, feeling slightly uncomfortable.
The French doors opened to a living room, where six men sat and talked. Isaiah Tony recognized from the photo; he was also the palest one, and the only one red-eyed. The two older ones had to be the rabbi and the father-in-law. The remaining three, Isaiah’s friends, eyed the two agents with thinly masked suspicion.
In the open space kitchen he could see two women, tight-lipped and anxious. One was in the same age bracket as the women on the porch and the other older; they bore striking similarity to each other and to one of the women on the porch. Tony figured these three for wife, mother-in-law and sister-in-law. The remaining man and two children were - by the sound of it - upstairs and playing a video game.
Isaiah and the two older men stood when the three of them entered.
Dunski said something in Hebrew that had to be an introduction, because she gestured at Gibbs and him with one hand and said their names. Then she said, in English, “Agents Gibbs and DiNozzo, these are Isaiah Weissman, Netanel Carmi and Rabbi Shlomo Ben-Ezra.”
All three men offered their hands to shake.
“Thank you for coming,” said Isaiah, even as the rabbi closed both his hands around Gibbs’ in a similar sentiment.
“Just doing our job,” said Gibbs.
Two of Isaiah’s friends got up. “Please,” said one of them, looking at the two agents and gesturing at the two overstuffed chairs he and his friend just vacated, “sit.”
“Thank you,” said Gibbs. He and Tony took the chairs; Isaiah, his father-in-law and the rabbi sat on the couch; and the two other men fetched themselves chairs from the dining table. Dunski remained standing, positioning herself to the side of the couch, with a clear view of both the front and French doors. He and Gibbs could only see the latter.
They were going to have quite the audience for this interview.
“I understand your sister stayed with you, here?” asked Gibbs.
“Yes, of course,” said Isaiah. “She hasn’t been to Israel in four years, since before Moriya was born.”
“Moriya’s your middle daughter?”
Isaiah’s expression relaxed minutely. “Yes.”
“Has your sister been with family the whole time?”
“Most of the time, yes. We’ve been to Jerusalem together. But she also rented a car, so she could have day trips without three children in tow.” He smiled a little, but his hands clenched in his lap. “She was going to visit Rosh Hanikra. When she didn’t return by the evening...”
“Rosh Hanikra iz norf,” said the father-in-law. Tony supposed he meant “is north.” “All de way to Levanon. We did not expect her back before de night.”
Isaiah’s hands twitched again. “They found her car...” he said. He turned slightly, looking up at Dunski.
She nodded. “It’s still being processed,” she told the agents. “I’ll show you it and the preliminary report when we get back.”
Gibbs nodded slightly. “Where was it found?” he asked.
“To the side of the road,” said Dunski. “Same one you came in on.”
“Was it her first time driving on her own around here?”
“No, it wasn’t,” said Isaiah. He sounded disturbed. “She drove on her last visit, too - it was much more dangerous, then. She knew to not go off the road. She knew to not stop for anything. I can’t think why - I just don’t understand.”
“Leave that to us,” said Gibbs. “That’s what we’re here for.”
“Thank you,” said Isaiah again as they got up to leave. Some of the other men present echoed the words, others just nodded. “Please bring my sister home safe,” he added.
“We will,” said Gibbs. “You take care.”
Isaiah only nodded.
This time, when they passed through the porch, the women nodded at Tony and Gibbs also.
When they were back on the street, Gibbs asked, “You searched where her car was found?”
“Trackers and dogs,” Dunski said. “Still ongoing. By the fuel in the tank, she never made it out of the Shomron that morning. Fingerprints are a negative - just the family.”
“I want to see that spot.”
“Trackers should be waiting for us there.”
There were five people waiting for them where Lt. Weissman’s car had been found: a tracker, a Shin-Beit operative with a full scene-investigation kit, two soldiers to keep an eye on the cars, and a very bored military driver with an mp3 player and an alarmingly large supply of smokes. The guards and the driver looked as young and worn out as the soldiers at the block had; the tracker looked even wearier, but at least he and the operative didn’t make Tony itch to ask if they were fully legal.
Dunski introduced everyone and then detached her attention from Gibbs debriefing with the tracker and the operative to Tony. “You’re not made for this weather, are you?”
In the full-blown sunlight of three in the afternoon, not even the hillside breeze could make Tony not feel like a slow-cooking turkey. “No,” he said. “Not really.”
Dunski grinned, a sudden, mischievous expression that disappeared as quickly as it appeared. Then she turned to the three men.
“Hi, Tzadok,” she addressed the tracker, “we getting that extra security?”
He shook his head. “It’s that or the search,” he said.
Yael nodded once, sharply, and turned to Gibbs. “Only one of you can go on the field,” she told him. “By the book I should have two armed guards on each of you, and Tzadok and Ariel here make one and a half.”
“Got our own guns,” said Gibbs.
Her voice didn’t lose its perfect mild composure as she said, “I don’t need to tell you why that is not a good enough answer.”
“No,” agreed Gibbs after a bit. “DiNozzo.”
“Yes, Boss?”
“I’ll call when I’m back.”
Tony opened his mouth to ask And what am I supposed to do?, thought better of it, and said instead: “Yes, Boss.”
Once Gibbs and the two Israelis were far enough, he turned to Dunski and asked, “Are you really out of manpower, or did you have a precog moment?”
“Half and half,” she said. She turned back to her car. “Come on,” she tossed over her shoulder. “They’ll be gone for a while. I’m giving you a tour.”
Dunski drove them out of the West Bank, and then turned north where Tony and Gibbs had arrived from the south.
“Where are we going?” he asked.
“You’ll see,” she said.
“Not if we die in a fiery crash before we get there.”
“Hey, I have never so much as put a scratch on a car.”
“I have no idea how,” Tony said through gritted teeth. Dunski had driven normally enough before, but once on their own she turned out to be nearly as bad as Ziva.
“Five minutes and we’re there,” she promised.
Five minutes turned out to be an accurate assessment, and ‘there’ turned out to be another town, the name of which Tony wasn’t even going to try and pronounce. It seemed smaller than Karnei Shomron and possibly a little older, the plants having had more time to grow; between that and its hills being rounder and not as steep it felt softer, somehow, and not as alienatingly sharp.
“Nice place,” Tony commented.
“I grew up here,” she said.
Tony turned from the window to her. “Really?”
“Really,” she said. Her smooth calm had still not wavered.
Driving down the main street of her childhood town, Tony found it to be a little more creepy and a little less a show of professionalism.
She turned into a cobbled street that seemed to border with the town’s center and parked. “First stop,” she said.
“What’s here?” he asked as he followed her out of the car.
“Most everything that isn’t houses,” she said as she walked along the street. “See that building over there, cropping up on the other side of that mound?”
“The orange-y one?”
“Yeah. That’s one of the school buildings. You can’t see the lower classes building from here. But right there, over the treetops, that’s the junior high.”
He had absolutely no idea what she was up to, but in the short time he’d known her he’d already learned that there would be a point. “High school?” he asked.
She shook her head. “Town’s too small,” she said. “There’s a bigger town a couple of klicks from there. They take high school students from the entire region. From Karnei Shomron and its nearby towns, too.”
He huffed. “Policing your own back yard?”
She smiled, but there was no humor in it. “Come on,” she said, turning back. “Next stop.”
She turned the car around and they drove back up where they came from. At the town’s entrance, she turned the other way and parked it in a small gravel yard.
“What’s here?” he asked.
“You’ll see in a moment,” she said. She bent down, picked up a few pebbles from the gravel, and handed him one.
“What’s that for?”
“Tokens of remembrance.”
“What? Hey, wait up!”
He followed her across the road and up the gravel lane that led into the trees, cypress planted among wild pines. Then the lane turned right and Yael with it, and Tony realized where they were.
“Cemetery?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said, voice tight. She turned right and down again, into a smaller section distinct from the main part of the cemetery. Here the gravestones were all of an identical make, and the ground was paved stone.
“Why does this part look different?” he asked.
She stopped at the middle of the section and turned to him, tipping her face up to look him squarely in the eye. “You already know.”
“It’s the military section,” he said, quietly.
“Military,” she agreed, “and Intelligence, and those killed in terrorist acts.”
Intelligence, like her, like Mossad; terrorist acts, like Ziva’s sister that they never talked about. Tony turned around, slowly, counting headstones.
“How big is this town, again?” he asked.
“About five thousand,” she said. “It’s been here for about twenty years.”
Tony swallowed. Too many headstones.
Dunski moved, walking among the graves, slowly, her hand brushing the tops of this headstone and the other. “Shachar,” she said. “He was shot dead in Lebanon when I was little. His family lived next door. Ilay,” she said at another, “military medic, killed in a second-blast bomb when he ran to help the victims of the first. His little sister was in my class. Roy, training accident. He was in my class.” She went on, matching names to a total third of the headstones, leaving a pebble on each. Then she circled back around to one of the headstones, the dates on which told Tony that here lay a child.
This grave, Dunski knelt next to, turning her back to him as her hand all but caressed the stone.
“Tali David,” she said.
Tony’s stomach dropped miles deep into the ground.
Ziva’s sister.
“It was the last week of August,” Yael continued. “They went to the amusement park. A girl only three years older than Ziva blew herself up.”
Tony swallowed, looked down at the pebble in his hand, swallowed again, and then walked over, knelt by Yael and placed his pebble next to hers. There were no other pebbles on Tali’s headstone.
“You knew Ziva?” he asked.
“Same class,” she said. “From kindergarten to twelfth grade. I sat Tali’s shiva’a with her.”
The schools she’d shown him, Ziva had went to; the playground across from it, Ziva had played in; the forest on the other side of this very hill, too. Tony’s throat was tight.
“The coming Monday,” Yael said, her conversational tone turning to flint, “is Memorial Day. You understand?”
Ziva’s second year in the States, Abby had made the mistake of wishing Ziva a happy Memorial Day. The bruise that Ziva’s slap had left took days to disappear. “Yes,” he forced himself to say.
She turned her face to him. Her eyes were too bright. “This Monday at eleven in the morning there will be a service here,” she told him. Her voice had gone steel and stone, ferocious. “Their father will go to the central State service like every year. Their mother died last year. Ziva is going to stand here this Yom HaZikaron, do you understand?”
“Yael...”
“She is going to be here and witness her sister’s death and her own grief honoured with everybody else’s,” she said flatly. She pushed herself up. “You went into hell and brought her back; you make this happen, too.”
On their way out, she stopped to wash her hands in a basin. “Jewish ritual,” she said, voice still uneven, before he asked. “Leave death where it belongs.”
“Can we...?” he asked as they drew near the car.
“Their old house,” she completed. “Of course.”
“I’m not making promises,” he told her.
“No,” she agreed. “Not to me.”
“Oh, god.”
Tim looked up at the sound of a woman’s voice. Ravid the XO was standing at their office door. She must have taken the eye contact for tacit permission, because she stepped into the room, grabbed herself one of the chairs and all but crashed in it, the picture of exhaustion, legs stretched forward and her head tipped back, staring at the ceiling.
“All set for tomorrow,” she declared.
“What’s tomorrow?” he asked.
“Friday,” she said, in a voice that said Dufus.
“Muslim holy day,” said Ziva, hiding behind her monitor.
“Muslim gossip day,” said Ravid. “And I’ve been on the phone chewing people out since six in the morning, getting us all the CommInt coverage we could need and the extra translators we’ll need to sift through all of that intel in time.”
So that’s what she’d been preoccupied with, every time Tim passed by her desk. “Thank you,” he said.
“What the hell for?” she asked, with vehemence that surprised him.
“For...”
She cut him off. “That’s my job,” she said, in the same. “It’s just my job. You don’t thank someone for that.”
“Why not?” he asked.
She shifted her head and looked at him. Her gaze was half incredulous and half flint. “Because it’s what I’m supposed to do,” she said, carefully, as if she wasn’t sure he’d understand. “It’s not...” She paused, struggling to find words.
Tim took advantage of that. “Does that mean it should be taken for granted?”
That earned him another incredulous stare. “Duh,” she said. “That’s expected. Oh, god,” she repeated, massaging her neck. She made a face. “Can I just hide in here in quiet for a few more minutes? And then I’ll go and make us all coffee. Deal?”
It was the nicest thing anyone had said to him in nearly thirty hours. “Deal,” Tim said firmly.
The sound of Tony’s voice, loud and clear across the hive, came as a blessed relief for Tim. He’s had worse afternoons and could, in fact, name a handful off the top of his head, but those all involved the death or serious threat thereof to someone Tim cared about.
Things were seriously wrong in the world if Tony made his head hurt less, not more. Even if watching Tony grin so hard when Tim was feeling this miserable made him want to punch that grin off Tony’s face.
“I,” Tony announced brightly and loudly as he and Gibbs entered the NCIS office, “have a new favorite beverage.”
“Good for you, Tony,” Tim said.
“Ice Aroma,” he declared.
Ziva made a short, harsh bark that was too far removed from laughter. “Of course,” she said.
Oh, thank goodness, Tim thought. Tony was here and Ziva would be mean to him instead. “What’s Ice Aroma?” he asked.
“Too much sugar, some cream and a little coffee, in the texture of finely crushed ice,” said Ziva.
“It’s a coffee slushie,” said Tony. “A really, really good coffee slushie.”
“I’m glad to know your afternoon was productive,” Tim said. “Because mine was a complete waste.”
“Oh, that wasn’t even the highlight of my afternoon, McGrouch.”
“Then what was?” Tim asked, knowing Tony would only become worse if not given his serve.
“Meeting an old school pal of Ziva’s,” Tony said. “Remember Yael Dunski, Ziva?”
Ziva’s head snapped up. “Yael?” she demanded. “How is she involved?”
“She’s the Sector Officer,” Gibbs said. “Is that a problem?”
Ziva’s lips were pressed into a very thin, very flat line. “The only reason Yael can be trusted on the matter of the day of the week,” she said, “is because that information can be very easily verified.”
“You’re saying she can’t be trusted,” said Gibbs.
“I’m saying Yael lies,” snapped Ziva. “I’m saying Yael has been practicing her handling since she was eleven. She can be trusted to do what she believes ought to be done.”
“And that may include lying,” said Gibbs.
“Often, it does,” Ziva said. She frowned. “You say she is a Sector Officer?”
“Problem with that too?” asked Tony.
Ziva glared daggers at him. “Yael has served as a handler in the Intelligence Corps,” she said. “She’d been recruited into the Shin-Beit directly into a coordination position when she was twenty one. It would have been reasonable for her to be a Sector Officer four years ago.”
“So?” Gibbs asked.
“I don’t know,” Ziva said.
Gibbs nodded once and sat on the edge of one the computer-less desks. “The lieutenant’s car was found to the side of the road,” he said. “Broad daylight, no prints, no signs of a struggle. The brother doesn’t seem to know anything.”
“I went through both their lives,” Tim said. “I think we can rule out all the usual motives, Boss.”
“Nothing specific in the chatter,” Ziva said.
“So basically,” Gibbs said, “we got nothing.”
Pairing: gen
Rating: teen
Spoilers: references to late S6 and early S7.
Content Advisory: mild swearing, some violence in later parts
Summary: When a US Navy lieutenant goes missing, Team Gibbs must travel to Israel to find her. The investigation into what appears to be a terrorist act is complicated by prickly Shin-Beit operatives, a curious lack of helpful intel and the impending shadow of Memorial Day.
At AO3, DW and below:
1. Under the Cypress Tress
“Flowers in season
And rain in its time
For the missing ones to return
We need nothing more”
We Need Nothing More, Shlomo Artzi
Four in the afternoon on a Wednesday found the NCIS MCRT squad room a little more lethargic than the usual. Except, that is, for Agent Gibbs’ team, who were extra cranky and loud as ever.
Agent DiNozzo was moodily staring at the window. Agent David was assessing Agent DiNozzo.
“Tony, what has the window done to you?”
“The window hasn’t done anything to me, Ziva. It’s a window. It can’t do anything.”
“It can if you throw someone through it.”
“No, then you’d be doing something to someone using the window.”
“Are you contemplating making use of the window, then?”
“No, Ziva, I believe that is more your style then mine.”
Agent McGee raised his eyes from his keyboard. “Unless he was going to jump out himself,” he added, and then hastily raised his hands in surrender as both Tony and Ziva glared at him. “Hey, I was just saying!”
Predictably, that was the moment at which Agent Gibbs materialized behind McGee’s desk. “You were just saying what, McGee?”
“That, uh, Boss, uh...”
“That Tony would sooner throw himself out the window than another person,” supplied Ziva.
Gibbs turned his attention to her. “Who are you planning to throw out the window, David?”
“No one. But Tony is considering the window conspicuously.”
“For the hundredth time, Ziva, I am not looking at the window.”
“Then what are you looking at?”
“Do you see what’s that, outside?”
“It’s the Navy Yard, Tony,” said Tim. “You see it every day.”
“It’s rain,” said Tony with a put-upon expression. “It’s not supposed to rain this hard in May!”
“Actually, the month of May has the highest average precipitation in Washington DC,” Tim told him.
Ziva snorted. “You are not made of sugar,” she told Tony. “You won’t melt.”
“Oh, easy for you to say -”
Preoccupied by their bickering, the three agents failed to notice Agent Gibbs’ phone ringing. Thus, they all startled when Gibbs said, loudly, “Grab your gear. We have a missing Navy lieutenant.”
“Where, Boss?” asked Tony as the three agents reached for their bags and got up.
It took Gibbs an extra half a second to speak, and that was warning enough for his agents before he said: “Karnei Shomron.”
“Gesundheit,” said Tony automatically.
Ziva’s expression froze and her face paled. “Israel?” she demanded. “A US Navy lieutenant has gone missing in Israel?”
“That’s right,” said Gibbs, too evenly.
“One impending diplomatic crisis, coming right up,” muttered Tim, grabbing his emergency toothbrush from his drawer and putting it in his bag.
“Boss, are we going to...” began Tony.
But Gibbs was already halfway to the elevator. “Let’s go,” he called behind his back. “We’ve got a plane waiting.”
Gibbs did not say another word about the case until they were in the air. Then he produced a folder and passed it around.
“First Lieutenant Dana Weissman,” he said. The woman in the photo had strawberry-blond hair, brown eyes and a light tan. “25. She was on vacation in Israel, visiting her older brother and his family.”
“She was born in New England,” said Tony. “What’s her brother doing living in Israel?”
Ziva shot him a withering look. “He must have made Aaliya,” she said. Then she turned her attention back to Gibbs. “Has she gone missing from his house?”
“He reported her missing.”
“Karnei Shomron is across the Green Line,” she said. “It’s surrounded by Palestinian towns, the inhabitants of which are none too happy with the Israeli Settlers taking away land that should be theirs.”
Tony blinked. “Should be?”
“It’s across the Green Line,” repeated Ziva impatiently.
“It’s in the West Bank,” said Tim. “Part of the territory that Israel occupied in the 1967 Six-Day War.”
“The West Bank?” asked Tony. “Isn’t that area forbidden for US citizens?”
“Karnei Shomron is in the area under full Israeli control.”
“Isn’t the entire -”
Gibbs cut them off. “Geopolitics later,” he said. “Case now. Ziva, you think this could be a terrorist act?”
She shrugged. “Could be; chances, I don’t know. We’ll have to talk to the Shin-Beit.”
“The Israeli NSA,” supplied Tim before Tony could ask.
Ziva continued. “IDF Intelligence Corps would also be active in that area,” she said, “but the Shin-Beit will probably be easier to establish cooperation with.”
“We’ll also need the IDF’s intel,” said Gibbs.
“The Shin-Beit will have it.”
“No inter-agency turf wars in Israel?” asked Tony.
“After two Intifadahs?” Ziva retorted grimly. “Not anymore.”
They left Washington on a Wednesday, late in the afternoon, with temperatures in the 50s; they arrived at Israel early on Thursday afternoon to obscene brightness and temperatures in the high 70s. Tony felt himself begin to melt around the edges just stepping out of the plane’s belly. The heat out on the tarmac, in the blazing sunlight, was insufferable.
There were two cars and one man waiting for them, not fifteen feet from the ramp. The cars were an SUV and a sedan, both dark. The man was leaning against the latter with his back and one foot, arms loose to the sides of his body. He was 5’9”, about 170 pounds, solidly built; his hair was short-cropped, thinning and noticeably grey; skin medium-tanned, for an Israeli, with the expression lines showing around his mouth; his eyes were hidden behind a pair of elegant thin-frame, dark-tinted sunglasses that Tony approved of very much; and he wore khakis and a short-sleeved button-down that was on the smarter side of things, for an Israeli. All around, Tony estimated the man to be in his late thirties.
The man waited until they all stepped off the ramp, then pushed himself forward and folded his glasses on his shirt in a single compact motion and offered his hand.
“Section Chief Erez Shalev, Shin-Beit,” he said shortly, but not tersely. “I’m in charge from my organization.”
“Gibbs,” said Gibbs shortly, and somewhat more curtly. “These are Special Agents DiNozzo, McGee and David.”
If Shalev recognize Ziva’s name - he should at least recognize the Israeli pronunciation, Tony thought - he didn’t show it. He merely nodded and tossed Gibbs a set of keys. “The SUV’s yours for the duration,” he said. “I’ll show you to HQ.”
“We’d also like to talk to Isaiah Weissman,” Gibbs said.
Shalev nodded. “There’s GPS in the SUV,” he said. “Leave there by seven.” He fished out his wallet, produced a calling card and handed it to Gibbs. “Details of the Sector Officer. She’s already there. I’ll let her know you’re coming.”
“What, we get to wonder around Israel without a babysitter?” asked Tony.
Shalev’s expression didn’t flicker. “It’s a 50 kilometer drive if you take Route Six and the GPS is reliable. Leave at least an hour before dusk and you won’t run considerable risk of getting shot at. Shootouts aren’t common,” he continued, “but I’d rather not explain to your bosses why you were shot at on my watch.”
“Understood,” said Gibbs. He started in the direction of the SUV.
Tony snuck a look at Ziva. She seemed unfazed, but...
“DiNozzo!”
“On your six, Boss!”
Tim might have had more awkward half-hours in his life than the drive from Ben Gurion to the Shin-Beit HQ, but he couldn’t recall any. Ziva had gotten into the back seat of Shalev’s company car, which forced Tim to ride shotgun. Neither she or Shalev had said a word during the drive; Shalev had the radio turned to some talk-show in Hebrew, and Tim didn’t dare to ask him to change the station. Shalev reminded Tim of some Marines he’d met, who seemed to only ever consider people with an eye for the kill.
Ziva was all wrong, too. It was expected, as this was her first time in Israel since they had left her behind following Rivkin’s death, but that didn’t make it any easier. It wasn’t all that unusual for Ziva to be quiet, or be more interested in the scenery than in the people around her, but Ziva was never so still. He could see her, partially, in the mirror as he tried very hard not to fidget. She didn’t move at all, muscles relaxed, as if her body was uninhabited. It reminded him of the first few months after Somalia, and that made his lungs tight.
The sight of the Shin-Beit HQ was a relief, both because they have finally arrived and because it was so different from Tony’s horror tales of the Mossad HQ. Tony had described a warren of bare concrete cubes; this was a modern, elegant tile-and-metal building. The spacious atrium, where he and Ziva were issues visitors’ passes and checked in their cell phones, was marble and blissfully chilly, and the elevator was large and silent.
Then they stepped into the hallway, and if the floor was linoleum and the walls whitewashed instead of both being bare concrete, it was still cement and disconcertingly narrow. Tim’s heart sank.
They passed by six security doors before finally Shalev stopped by one.
“Check your cards,” he said.
Tim didn’t get it, but Ziva passed her card across the reader. The light blinked green and in the complete stillness of the hallway, Tim could hear the lock click open and then, after a moment, click shut again. Rather than wait for Shalev to turn that cool gaze on him, Tim tested his card too. This time, when the door unlocked, Shalev pushed it open and indicated for them to step in.
Tim wasn’t quite sure what he expected, but this wasn’t it. They were standing in a small hall that opened into several other rooms, and they opened into even more rooms. Some had doors, but most appeared to be open, and all were packed full with people and workstations.
“It’s like a hive,” he said before he could think better of it.
“Kaveret,” said Shalev, like he was agreeing, and Tim figured that that was the Hebrew word for ‘hive’. “That’s what we call it. This way,” and he started in one direction. “You’re free to go inside the hive, but please do not wander the halls unaccompanied, even to the bathroom. That’s on the other side of the hall, by the way. Coffee corner that way; anyone can direct you.” He stopped in one of the open chambers, where a woman in her late twenties appeared to be waging a war against three phone lines and two computer monitors. She looked up at them and waved, but did not pause what she was doing. “This is Ravid Kogan,” said Shalev. “She’s XO for this section. Anything you need, ask her or me. My office is here,” he said, pointing to a door behind Kogan’s desk, and then pushed another door open. “This one’s assigned to you.”
The room was as claustrophobic as any other workspace in the hive, but it had four desks, three computer stations and two phones.
“Thank you,” Tim said.
Shalev nodded once, and turned to his own office without a word. The door closed behind him on its own.
“Chatty guy,” Tim remarked as he deposited his bags on the floor and reached for a keyboard.
“He has work to do,” said Ziva shortly. She didn’t look in his direction, let alone at him.
Tim felt himself flinch. This was Tony’s place, or Gibbs’. There was nothing Tim could do for her. Nothing, that is, except focus on the case. Except that - “This operating system is in Hebrew.”
“The icons are the same,” said Ziva. She was busy with her own computer. “All the data we need should be accessible through the shared network folder, the shortcut to which is on your desktop.”
There really was a shortcut to a folder named Weissman on the desktop. “Handy.”
She said nothing.
It was going to be a long afternoon.
The last - and only - time Tony had been to Israel, it’d been straight from the airport to Tel Aviv and back. The area around Ben Gurion was primarily fields, he remembered that much; otherwise, it was all new to him.
The fields turned to tree-covered hills, which reminded him of Ziva saying This is like the forest I played in as a child, and then the trees turned to half-grey shrubs. As they drove north, the hills became smaller and lower, and the towns increased in number and density. By the time they exited the highway to the smaller road that would take them to their destination, the area around them could be best described as suburban. Then, as they turned east, the hills began to rise again - the grey, shabby-shrubby variety - and the towns were again distant things at the top of the hills.
Tony knew exactly when they crossed the Green Line, too, because there was a road block and a bunch of bleary-eyed uniformed teenagers (not one of them over twenty, to Tony’s eye) who made him and Gibbs step out of the car and circled them like so many alley cats in the twenty minutes it took them to get phone confirmation that the two NCIS agents were, in fact, who they said they were and were not smuggling weapons in the SUV.
From there the hills kept getting higher and shrubbier until, finally, they reached the industrial outskirts of the town of Karnei Shomron and then the town itself, with its 6,300 townees (according to Wikipedia) in their red-roofed houses.
Very near the town entrance, a dark car identical to Shalev’s was parked, and against it lounged a person in a nearly-identical posture. This, though, was a 5’5” woman. She wore beige cargo pants and a matching cargo vest over her black t-shirt, and the loose-fitting clothes made her figure harder to assess. Her hair was light brown, and pulled back in a ponytail, the tip of which touched the base of her neck. Her eyes, too, were brown, but her skin was fair.
She waited for them to approach her before she straightened.
“Yael Dunski,” she said, brusquely. Her first name was two distinct vowels in a quick succession.
She did not, Tony noticed, offer her hand.
Gibbs offered her a half-nod. “Gibbs and DiNozzo,” he said.
She nodded once. “I’ll take you to the Weissmans. No need to bring that clumsy thing,” she jutted her chin at the SUV, “into town, if you’re okay with that.”
“Is it okay to leave it here?” asked Tony, blinking against the view. It was chillier up there, and there was a nice wind, but it was still very bright.
“Yes.”
“What kind of a crime rate does a town like this have, anyway?” asked Tony as they stepped into the car. Gibbs rode shotgun. Of course.
“Nonexistent,” said Dunski. “Unless toilet-papering the school before graduation counts.”
“Kids will be kids,” said Tony cheerfully.
In the mirror, he saw Officer Dunski smile.
“Is that why you have floodlights for street lights?” asked Gibbs in that misleading agreeable tone he sometimes used.
“Neighbouring towns are Palestinian,” said Dunski matter-of-factly. “Cars get stolen, but that’s the military’s problem, not the police’s.”
“Wow, you’re just rocking the PR, aren’t you,” Tony said.
Surprisingly, that earned him another smile, albeit sardonic. “It’s a sad world,” she told him, “so we laugh.”
“I bet it sounds cooler in Hebrew.”
“Ha’olam atzuv, az tzochakim,” she said, and made eye contact through the mirror. “Does it?”
“I’ll get back to you on that,” he said. “Just so we’re clear, are we really talking Hamas having kidnapped a US Navy officer?”
“Not Hamas,” she said. “This is the Bank, not the Strip.”
“Doesn’t mean there aren’t terrorist here,” said Gibbs.
“If there weren’t,” said Dunski, “I wouldn’t be here either.” Then she stopped the car. “We’re here.”
Back on the plane, Ziva had said that the Shin-Beit would be more cooperative than the Intelligence Corps. Two hours after arriving at the Shin-Beit, Tim thought that if this was cooperative, then he didn’t want to see non-cooperative.
The Northern Shomron Section Chief himself had picked them up from the airport. The Weissman folder was exhaustive. It had maps, aerial photographs of the area, everything the State of Israel knew about the family, and way more outright intelligence than Tim thought they’d be given. As for the physical conditions, the computer could be newer but Tim had seen older machines at NCIS itself, the two phones were in fact two lines, and they had more room than plenty other people in the same hive, sad as that was.
On its face, the Shin-Beit was being exceedingly nice to them. In practice, Tim wanted to scream.
The first sign was when, about half an hour after they arrived, Tim decided that a coffee sounded like a good idea and went in search of the aforementioned coffee corner. Ravid, still battling with the phones, pointed him that-a-way, rattled off a list of instructions too long for Tim to remember, tacked a distracted smile at the end and turned all of her attention away from him.
Tim managed to follow through on the first three turns, or he thought he had; when he asked for directions again he discovered he had missed the first one. So he went back to the starting point, managed to follow on three turns but by the fifth had to ask for directions again. All in all, he had to ask for directions six times to get to the ‘coffee corner’ - which turned out to be a fully-equipped kitchenette - and four to get back. Each time, all the inhabitants of the room he was in looked up when he said “Excuse me,” and then all but one immediately resumed their work; each time, the instructions he’d been given were detailed, but quickly spoken; and each time, just as the person’s attention had turned to him fully and with an odd, distracted courteousness, it disappeared just as fully once the instructions had been delivered once.
He’d asked for instructions in the coffee corner, too, and made Ziva’s instant coffee from the tin that the Israelis eyed with a semi-fond exasperation while he used the Nestle for his; percolators did not exist in Israel. Ziva’s expression cleared when she tasted her coffee, and for a second Tim thought that the excursion was worth it, but then she grimaced as if in pain, muttered something that sounded like Jol mejurban (no, Chol mechurban, the Hebrew consonant was rougher than the Spanish one), and pushed the cup away.
Well. He’d known that one might backfire.
So the interface was in Hebrew and all the programs that were not standard Microsoft-issue were new to him but, mostly, he managed. Some kind, hard-working soul had even translated most of the Hebrew documents and conversations on file to English, which had to be quite a bit of work considering the Israelis had less than a day to prepare for them.
Tim still missed quite a bit of context, though, and Ziva was busy analyzing chatter-patterns from the nearby villages and ignored him wholly and, anyway, international banking was not her thing. It wouldn’t have been a problem, really, except that he did not have access to anything outside the section’s own computer cluster, and that meant no dictionary, Wikipedia or any other resource.
That was when Tim discovered that the Shin-Beit people offered professional help the same way they offered instructions to the coffee corner: you were told precisely what you asked, nothing more, and only once.
Which Tim could have handled - because he was smart enough and, after years under Gibbs, reasonably independent - but he’d been awake for 24 hours, give or take a few, during which he’d had about half the calories he should and had been dealing with a foreign culture, and that’s to say nothing of the seven time zones crossed.
He needed help, and nobody was helping.
He had five minutes to try and get a grip on himself while Ziva found someone to escort her to the bathroom, and then she came back, closed the door behind her which Tim had deliberately left open because the room was too small and he was tired, looked in his general direction, and said: “Stop panicking.”
“What?” He followed her with his eyes; she’d already returned to her desk. “What are you talking about?”
“You annoy them,” she said, eyes on the computer. “Stop panicking.”
“I am not panicking!”
“That,” she told him.
“That’s not panicking.”
“It’s uncontrolled temper that is not murderous rage.”
“And that’s called panic, now?” he asked, knowing exactly how irritable he sounded and unable to help it.
She looked up, briefly, but her eyes went to some point on the wall behind his head. “It’s the Shin-Beit,” she said.
“You say that like it explains everything.” Her chin tipped down, and Tim spoke quickly, before he’d lose her attention. “Help me out here!”
“There is a Hebrew idiom for people who won’t solve problems they might be able to solve on their own, if they cared to,” she said coolly. “It’s small head.”
“Oh, is that what you think I’m doing?” he demanded, pushing himself up.
“Well, clearly -”
“Because from where I’m looking at it, there are things I need in order to do my job, Ziva, and no one is telling me how to find them!”
“That’s because you’re supposed to find them yourself!”
“Well, excuse me, but in case you haven’t noticed this is not my office I’m working out of, here. It’s not even my country, or my language, or...”
“Deal,” said Ziva shortly. “It’s what everybody else does.”
He opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again. “Is this also how these people help each other?”
“‘These people’,” she said, and he could hear the air quotes, “do not expect anyone to look after them, nor do they burden colleagues with things that are irrelevant to their job.”
“Things like suffering the human-typical effects of being tired and jet-lagged?”
She snorted. “You’ve only been awake 24 hours,” she said. “No one here notices before it’s at least thirty.”
“You’re unbelievable, you know that?”
She said nothing. Her gaze was studiously on her computer, but her shoulders were tense.
“Unbelievable,” he muttered. He was going to add I’m going for coffee, but she would have only said something else nasty - probably about not bothering anyone with his not magically knowing the layout of the hive - so instead he just went out, and informed the first person who looked at him that he needed an escort to the bathroom.
Isaiah Weissman’s file told Tony that there would be little children. Three children under the age of eight and a baby, to be exact. Standing by the car in the street and looking up the stairs to the two-story house, Tony listened to the racket and said: “That sounds like a lot of people.”
“Naomi Weissman’s family lives in town,” said Dunski. “Her parents, two siblings and a sister-in-law were over when I left to fetch you guys, as well as three of Isaiah’s friends. And their rabbi,” she added, as if in an afterthought.
That summed up to eleven adults, but that still did not explain what Tony was hearing. Pointedly, he said, “That sounds like a lot of kids.”
“Eight, including Isaiah and Naomi’s,” said Dunski.
“Great,” muttered Tony.
“Why are they all here?” asked Gibbs.
“For Isaiah,” said Dunski, plainly, as if nothing could be more obvious. She crossed the road and started up the stairs. “You coming or what?” she called over her shoulder.
The yard was surrounded by a hedge, and so Tony couldn’t see into it until they climbed the twenty stone-paved stairs and reached the garden gate. The front yard wasn’t very large, and the swing set took up half of it. Tony counted three boys playing on the swings and monkey bars. Two toddlers were playing on the porch, supervised by two women in their 20s or 30s, one of whom was holding a baby. Both wore full-length skirts, shirts which sleeves reached past their elbows, and headscarves.
It could be a peaceful domestic scene, but it wasn’t. Both women radiated tension, their shoulders tight and their lips pursed. Tony plastered on his best smile, but neither woman seemed to even notice.
Dunski greeted the women in Hebrew and they replied in kind. She didn’t head for the front door but rather cut through the porch and entered the house through the French doors. Gibbs followed without a comment; Tony followed, feeling slightly uncomfortable.
The French doors opened to a living room, where six men sat and talked. Isaiah Tony recognized from the photo; he was also the palest one, and the only one red-eyed. The two older ones had to be the rabbi and the father-in-law. The remaining three, Isaiah’s friends, eyed the two agents with thinly masked suspicion.
In the open space kitchen he could see two women, tight-lipped and anxious. One was in the same age bracket as the women on the porch and the other older; they bore striking similarity to each other and to one of the women on the porch. Tony figured these three for wife, mother-in-law and sister-in-law. The remaining man and two children were - by the sound of it - upstairs and playing a video game.
Isaiah and the two older men stood when the three of them entered.
Dunski said something in Hebrew that had to be an introduction, because she gestured at Gibbs and him with one hand and said their names. Then she said, in English, “Agents Gibbs and DiNozzo, these are Isaiah Weissman, Netanel Carmi and Rabbi Shlomo Ben-Ezra.”
All three men offered their hands to shake.
“Thank you for coming,” said Isaiah, even as the rabbi closed both his hands around Gibbs’ in a similar sentiment.
“Just doing our job,” said Gibbs.
Two of Isaiah’s friends got up. “Please,” said one of them, looking at the two agents and gesturing at the two overstuffed chairs he and his friend just vacated, “sit.”
“Thank you,” said Gibbs. He and Tony took the chairs; Isaiah, his father-in-law and the rabbi sat on the couch; and the two other men fetched themselves chairs from the dining table. Dunski remained standing, positioning herself to the side of the couch, with a clear view of both the front and French doors. He and Gibbs could only see the latter.
They were going to have quite the audience for this interview.
“I understand your sister stayed with you, here?” asked Gibbs.
“Yes, of course,” said Isaiah. “She hasn’t been to Israel in four years, since before Moriya was born.”
“Moriya’s your middle daughter?”
Isaiah’s expression relaxed minutely. “Yes.”
“Has your sister been with family the whole time?”
“Most of the time, yes. We’ve been to Jerusalem together. But she also rented a car, so she could have day trips without three children in tow.” He smiled a little, but his hands clenched in his lap. “She was going to visit Rosh Hanikra. When she didn’t return by the evening...”
“Rosh Hanikra iz norf,” said the father-in-law. Tony supposed he meant “is north.” “All de way to Levanon. We did not expect her back before de night.”
Isaiah’s hands twitched again. “They found her car...” he said. He turned slightly, looking up at Dunski.
She nodded. “It’s still being processed,” she told the agents. “I’ll show you it and the preliminary report when we get back.”
Gibbs nodded slightly. “Where was it found?” he asked.
“To the side of the road,” said Dunski. “Same one you came in on.”
“Was it her first time driving on her own around here?”
“No, it wasn’t,” said Isaiah. He sounded disturbed. “She drove on her last visit, too - it was much more dangerous, then. She knew to not go off the road. She knew to not stop for anything. I can’t think why - I just don’t understand.”
“Leave that to us,” said Gibbs. “That’s what we’re here for.”
“Thank you,” said Isaiah again as they got up to leave. Some of the other men present echoed the words, others just nodded. “Please bring my sister home safe,” he added.
“We will,” said Gibbs. “You take care.”
Isaiah only nodded.
This time, when they passed through the porch, the women nodded at Tony and Gibbs also.
When they were back on the street, Gibbs asked, “You searched where her car was found?”
“Trackers and dogs,” Dunski said. “Still ongoing. By the fuel in the tank, she never made it out of the Shomron that morning. Fingerprints are a negative - just the family.”
“I want to see that spot.”
“Trackers should be waiting for us there.”
There were five people waiting for them where Lt. Weissman’s car had been found: a tracker, a Shin-Beit operative with a full scene-investigation kit, two soldiers to keep an eye on the cars, and a very bored military driver with an mp3 player and an alarmingly large supply of smokes. The guards and the driver looked as young and worn out as the soldiers at the block had; the tracker looked even wearier, but at least he and the operative didn’t make Tony itch to ask if they were fully legal.
Dunski introduced everyone and then detached her attention from Gibbs debriefing with the tracker and the operative to Tony. “You’re not made for this weather, are you?”
In the full-blown sunlight of three in the afternoon, not even the hillside breeze could make Tony not feel like a slow-cooking turkey. “No,” he said. “Not really.”
Dunski grinned, a sudden, mischievous expression that disappeared as quickly as it appeared. Then she turned to the three men.
“Hi, Tzadok,” she addressed the tracker, “we getting that extra security?”
He shook his head. “It’s that or the search,” he said.
Yael nodded once, sharply, and turned to Gibbs. “Only one of you can go on the field,” she told him. “By the book I should have two armed guards on each of you, and Tzadok and Ariel here make one and a half.”
“Got our own guns,” said Gibbs.
Her voice didn’t lose its perfect mild composure as she said, “I don’t need to tell you why that is not a good enough answer.”
“No,” agreed Gibbs after a bit. “DiNozzo.”
“Yes, Boss?”
“I’ll call when I’m back.”
Tony opened his mouth to ask And what am I supposed to do?, thought better of it, and said instead: “Yes, Boss.”
Once Gibbs and the two Israelis were far enough, he turned to Dunski and asked, “Are you really out of manpower, or did you have a precog moment?”
“Half and half,” she said. She turned back to her car. “Come on,” she tossed over her shoulder. “They’ll be gone for a while. I’m giving you a tour.”
Dunski drove them out of the West Bank, and then turned north where Tony and Gibbs had arrived from the south.
“Where are we going?” he asked.
“You’ll see,” she said.
“Not if we die in a fiery crash before we get there.”
“Hey, I have never so much as put a scratch on a car.”
“I have no idea how,” Tony said through gritted teeth. Dunski had driven normally enough before, but once on their own she turned out to be nearly as bad as Ziva.
“Five minutes and we’re there,” she promised.
Five minutes turned out to be an accurate assessment, and ‘there’ turned out to be another town, the name of which Tony wasn’t even going to try and pronounce. It seemed smaller than Karnei Shomron and possibly a little older, the plants having had more time to grow; between that and its hills being rounder and not as steep it felt softer, somehow, and not as alienatingly sharp.
“Nice place,” Tony commented.
“I grew up here,” she said.
Tony turned from the window to her. “Really?”
“Really,” she said. Her smooth calm had still not wavered.
Driving down the main street of her childhood town, Tony found it to be a little more creepy and a little less a show of professionalism.
She turned into a cobbled street that seemed to border with the town’s center and parked. “First stop,” she said.
“What’s here?” he asked as he followed her out of the car.
“Most everything that isn’t houses,” she said as she walked along the street. “See that building over there, cropping up on the other side of that mound?”
“The orange-y one?”
“Yeah. That’s one of the school buildings. You can’t see the lower classes building from here. But right there, over the treetops, that’s the junior high.”
He had absolutely no idea what she was up to, but in the short time he’d known her he’d already learned that there would be a point. “High school?” he asked.
She shook her head. “Town’s too small,” she said. “There’s a bigger town a couple of klicks from there. They take high school students from the entire region. From Karnei Shomron and its nearby towns, too.”
He huffed. “Policing your own back yard?”
She smiled, but there was no humor in it. “Come on,” she said, turning back. “Next stop.”
She turned the car around and they drove back up where they came from. At the town’s entrance, she turned the other way and parked it in a small gravel yard.
“What’s here?” he asked.
“You’ll see in a moment,” she said. She bent down, picked up a few pebbles from the gravel, and handed him one.
“What’s that for?”
“Tokens of remembrance.”
“What? Hey, wait up!”
He followed her across the road and up the gravel lane that led into the trees, cypress planted among wild pines. Then the lane turned right and Yael with it, and Tony realized where they were.
“Cemetery?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said, voice tight. She turned right and down again, into a smaller section distinct from the main part of the cemetery. Here the gravestones were all of an identical make, and the ground was paved stone.
“Why does this part look different?” he asked.
She stopped at the middle of the section and turned to him, tipping her face up to look him squarely in the eye. “You already know.”
“It’s the military section,” he said, quietly.
“Military,” she agreed, “and Intelligence, and those killed in terrorist acts.”
Intelligence, like her, like Mossad; terrorist acts, like Ziva’s sister that they never talked about. Tony turned around, slowly, counting headstones.
“How big is this town, again?” he asked.
“About five thousand,” she said. “It’s been here for about twenty years.”
Tony swallowed. Too many headstones.
Dunski moved, walking among the graves, slowly, her hand brushing the tops of this headstone and the other. “Shachar,” she said. “He was shot dead in Lebanon when I was little. His family lived next door. Ilay,” she said at another, “military medic, killed in a second-blast bomb when he ran to help the victims of the first. His little sister was in my class. Roy, training accident. He was in my class.” She went on, matching names to a total third of the headstones, leaving a pebble on each. Then she circled back around to one of the headstones, the dates on which told Tony that here lay a child.
This grave, Dunski knelt next to, turning her back to him as her hand all but caressed the stone.
“Tali David,” she said.
Tony’s stomach dropped miles deep into the ground.
Ziva’s sister.
“It was the last week of August,” Yael continued. “They went to the amusement park. A girl only three years older than Ziva blew herself up.”
Tony swallowed, looked down at the pebble in his hand, swallowed again, and then walked over, knelt by Yael and placed his pebble next to hers. There were no other pebbles on Tali’s headstone.
“You knew Ziva?” he asked.
“Same class,” she said. “From kindergarten to twelfth grade. I sat Tali’s shiva’a with her.”
The schools she’d shown him, Ziva had went to; the playground across from it, Ziva had played in; the forest on the other side of this very hill, too. Tony’s throat was tight.
“The coming Monday,” Yael said, her conversational tone turning to flint, “is Memorial Day. You understand?”
Ziva’s second year in the States, Abby had made the mistake of wishing Ziva a happy Memorial Day. The bruise that Ziva’s slap had left took days to disappear. “Yes,” he forced himself to say.
She turned her face to him. Her eyes were too bright. “This Monday at eleven in the morning there will be a service here,” she told him. Her voice had gone steel and stone, ferocious. “Their father will go to the central State service like every year. Their mother died last year. Ziva is going to stand here this Yom HaZikaron, do you understand?”
“Yael...”
“She is going to be here and witness her sister’s death and her own grief honoured with everybody else’s,” she said flatly. She pushed herself up. “You went into hell and brought her back; you make this happen, too.”
On their way out, she stopped to wash her hands in a basin. “Jewish ritual,” she said, voice still uneven, before he asked. “Leave death where it belongs.”
“Can we...?” he asked as they drew near the car.
“Their old house,” she completed. “Of course.”
“I’m not making promises,” he told her.
“No,” she agreed. “Not to me.”
“Oh, god.”
Tim looked up at the sound of a woman’s voice. Ravid the XO was standing at their office door. She must have taken the eye contact for tacit permission, because she stepped into the room, grabbed herself one of the chairs and all but crashed in it, the picture of exhaustion, legs stretched forward and her head tipped back, staring at the ceiling.
“All set for tomorrow,” she declared.
“What’s tomorrow?” he asked.
“Friday,” she said, in a voice that said Dufus.
“Muslim holy day,” said Ziva, hiding behind her monitor.
“Muslim gossip day,” said Ravid. “And I’ve been on the phone chewing people out since six in the morning, getting us all the CommInt coverage we could need and the extra translators we’ll need to sift through all of that intel in time.”
So that’s what she’d been preoccupied with, every time Tim passed by her desk. “Thank you,” he said.
“What the hell for?” she asked, with vehemence that surprised him.
“For...”
She cut him off. “That’s my job,” she said, in the same. “It’s just my job. You don’t thank someone for that.”
“Why not?” he asked.
She shifted her head and looked at him. Her gaze was half incredulous and half flint. “Because it’s what I’m supposed to do,” she said, carefully, as if she wasn’t sure he’d understand. “It’s not...” She paused, struggling to find words.
Tim took advantage of that. “Does that mean it should be taken for granted?”
That earned him another incredulous stare. “Duh,” she said. “That’s expected. Oh, god,” she repeated, massaging her neck. She made a face. “Can I just hide in here in quiet for a few more minutes? And then I’ll go and make us all coffee. Deal?”
It was the nicest thing anyone had said to him in nearly thirty hours. “Deal,” Tim said firmly.
The sound of Tony’s voice, loud and clear across the hive, came as a blessed relief for Tim. He’s had worse afternoons and could, in fact, name a handful off the top of his head, but those all involved the death or serious threat thereof to someone Tim cared about.
Things were seriously wrong in the world if Tony made his head hurt less, not more. Even if watching Tony grin so hard when Tim was feeling this miserable made him want to punch that grin off Tony’s face.
“I,” Tony announced brightly and loudly as he and Gibbs entered the NCIS office, “have a new favorite beverage.”
“Good for you, Tony,” Tim said.
“Ice Aroma,” he declared.
Ziva made a short, harsh bark that was too far removed from laughter. “Of course,” she said.
Oh, thank goodness, Tim thought. Tony was here and Ziva would be mean to him instead. “What’s Ice Aroma?” he asked.
“Too much sugar, some cream and a little coffee, in the texture of finely crushed ice,” said Ziva.
“It’s a coffee slushie,” said Tony. “A really, really good coffee slushie.”
“I’m glad to know your afternoon was productive,” Tim said. “Because mine was a complete waste.”
“Oh, that wasn’t even the highlight of my afternoon, McGrouch.”
“Then what was?” Tim asked, knowing Tony would only become worse if not given his serve.
“Meeting an old school pal of Ziva’s,” Tony said. “Remember Yael Dunski, Ziva?”
Ziva’s head snapped up. “Yael?” she demanded. “How is she involved?”
“She’s the Sector Officer,” Gibbs said. “Is that a problem?”
Ziva’s lips were pressed into a very thin, very flat line. “The only reason Yael can be trusted on the matter of the day of the week,” she said, “is because that information can be very easily verified.”
“You’re saying she can’t be trusted,” said Gibbs.
“I’m saying Yael lies,” snapped Ziva. “I’m saying Yael has been practicing her handling since she was eleven. She can be trusted to do what she believes ought to be done.”
“And that may include lying,” said Gibbs.
“Often, it does,” Ziva said. She frowned. “You say she is a Sector Officer?”
“Problem with that too?” asked Tony.
Ziva glared daggers at him. “Yael has served as a handler in the Intelligence Corps,” she said. “She’d been recruited into the Shin-Beit directly into a coordination position when she was twenty one. It would have been reasonable for her to be a Sector Officer four years ago.”
“So?” Gibbs asked.
“I don’t know,” Ziva said.
Gibbs nodded once and sat on the edge of one the computer-less desks. “The lieutenant’s car was found to the side of the road,” he said. “Broad daylight, no prints, no signs of a struggle. The brother doesn’t seem to know anything.”
“I went through both their lives,” Tim said. “I think we can rule out all the usual motives, Boss.”
“Nothing specific in the chatter,” Ziva said.
“So basically,” Gibbs said, “we got nothing.”