Pit of Arrogance – 2/5 – SASundance (2024)

Reading Time: 140 Minutes

Title: Pit of Arrogance
Author: SASundance
Fandom: NCIS
Genre: Angst, Crime Drama, Drama, Episode Related
Relationship(s): Gen, background pairings.
Content Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Canon typical violence, discussion of infertility issues, surrogacy and adoption, not MCRT friendly.
Word Count: 160,158
Summary: When the deputy manager of HR, Delores Bromstead, witnesses the MCRT’s junior agents’ insubordination of the Senior Field Agent, she decides she has had enough. If Gibbs refuses to enforce the chain of command on his team, then it is time for her to act. She might not be able to make Special Agent L.J. Gibbs follow agency rules and regulations, but she refuses to stand by and let the rookies continually get away with insubordination. Her actions will end up having far reaching repercussions for every member of NCIS, including Delores. Set during Forced Entry S02e09.
Artist: Kylia

Maureen ‘Mo’ Cabot stared at Agent Caitlin Todd, feeling frustrated. The woman was incredibly infuriating, and her arrogance remained a stolid wall of implacability. Even after she’d been informed that Jeremy Davison was proven to be a liar. Not just a liar but a serial murderer and a rapist to boot.

Based on Todd’s track record as a profiler since joining their agency, the senior supervisory agent concluded cynically that her empathising with Davison so soon after meeting him should have been reason enough to immediately assume he was guilty, given her unerring knack of bonding with guilty individuals. Caitlin Todd was like the proverbial canary in the coal mine – if she bonded with a person of interest on a case, it was more than likely that person was guilty!

While Mo was sceptical concerning Gibbs’ so called gut, perusing the case files of the MCRT since Todd had been hired, Mo was hard pressed to find any examples where Todd profiled a perp and been correct. Hell, she’d vetted a journalist while she was a secret service agent who subsequently tried to kill the POTUS, no doubt leading to her swift departure from the Secret Service and being hired by NCIS. In terms of screwing the pooch, you didn’t get a bigger fiasco than that, surely.

Which was why Maureen struggled to figure out why Gibbs had wanted to hire her, given his boasting that he only hired the best.

Right now, Cabot was trying not to throttle Todd for her attitude towards a young male ensign who was attacked and sexually assault while on leave. Todd was much more sympathetic towards the two young female sailors who were sexually assaulted on a case right after Human Resources had placed her on Mo’s team. The only thing that Mo could see as different from the two cases was that Ensign Billinghurst was a guy and his attackers were male. Todd seemed to think that ‘if he was raped’ he and/or his rapist must therefore be gay. Like that mattered. But it was clear to Mo that Todd had major issues regarding hom*osexuality.

Similarly, when they were called in to investigate a murder/suicide of Marine Lieutenant Lorena Wallace and her husband Gordon Wallace who was an actuary at an insurance agency, she’d displayed biases again. Despite the initial evidence at the crime scene pointing to Lorena shooting the gun that killed her husband and turning the gun on herself, at first Cate had argued that the scene had to be staged by Gordon because murder/suicides were always males who suicided after they killed their wives or girlfriends.

Patrick Iverson, one of Mo’s team, had finally gotten pissed off with Cate’s I’m-a- profiler attitude and let her have it, correcting her bluntly. Normally he wouldn’t dream of slapping anyone down in public. The fact that the ME and his gawky assistant Jimmy were still on scene readying the bodies of the Marine and her spouse to be taken NCIS when he decided to school her meant that for Pat, this was straw and camel time.

“That’s not entirely true, Agent Todd,” he told her. “Roughly ninety percent of the killers in murder/suicide deaths are male so while rare, around ten percent are females. As for the victimology, approximately seventy percent of murder victims were female.”

Not appreciating someone disagreeing with her, she argued. Even if that were true about the killer, then only ten percent of victims would be male, not thirty.”

“The reason why it is approximately thirty percent, is because sometimes a male child will be a victim, or a male killer will murder a male lover, or they target their present or former spouse’s partners. Murder suicide doesn’t only take place between intimate partners or former intimate partners. It can also involve other family members like children or grandparents, or as I said, the new partner of a former spouse or lover. It’s rare; overall, murder/suicides account for about five percent of all deaths, but they do occur.”

“Where are you getting those dodgy statistics from?” Todd queried him archly.

“From my master’s thesis into domestic violence in psychological profiling I completed several years ago at Yale,” he told her tersely. “Where did you do your post grad degree in profiling, Agent Todd?”

She refused to answer, although Cabot noted she was a lot more subdued during the case afterwards. Plus, she avoided Patrick as much as she could. But it didn’t stop her holding forth on matters that she was not qualified to express opinions on, and Mo watched as her team became less and less likely to cut Todd any slack as time went by. Her attempts to order the other team members around were met with anger – her Senior Field Agent, Ruth Jacobs had been particularly pissed off. And rightly so.

Even if Todd was half as good as she thought she was (which she wasn’t, in Mo’s opinion) having spent barely a year as an investigator, she continually failed to learn from her various blunders. No one expected a newbie to be perfect, they were expected to make a few mistakes, it was a given. But they were expected to have the nous to recognise and acknowledge their errors, to learn from them, then refrain from making the same mistakes again. Cate seemed to be incapable of seeing when she wrong, and Mo’s team, especially Jacobs had had it with her snotty insubordinate attitude.

As near as Cabot could judge, Agent Todd had a problem with SFA Anthony DiNozzo when she was on Gibbs team because he was a chauvinist who dated a lot of women and came from a rich family. Her problem with SFA Ruth Jacobs was apparently because she was living in sin and her lover was another female. Plus, with a degree in feminist, gender and sexuality studies, Jacobs was constantly correcting her when she was quick to cry sexism when she didn’t get the dues, she felt she deserved.

When questioned about how she’d arrived at that conclusion of Jacob’s sexual orientation, she prudishly informed Mo, “Ruth was talking on the phone one night about plans to share a bubble bath after a romantic dinner. I asked if she had a hot date and she said it was date night with her partner Jean.”

Mo briefly thought about telling her that Ruth’s partner Gene was actually male. Actually, it was Mo who was living in ‘sin’ with her female lover Beth, but decided Cate wasn’t worth her effort. She was in no doubt that Cate would deny that DiNozzo was messing with her despite the fact that when Vivien Blackadder had been on the MCRT, he’d been a totally different person. She thought that he’d probably decided that if she had such a warped opinion of him, then that’s what she get. He may have decided to use the opportunity to perfect another persona for undercover work, for all she knew. Hell, having spent a month (four inordinately long weeks) with Todd on her team, Cabot could hardly fault him for trying to piss her off.

The truth was Caitlin Todd was a dogmatic bigot, and she much too quick to judge other people, yet she shied away from any degree of self-examination of her own less than admirable traits. Those less that sterling qualities included her unwillingness (or perhaps an inability) to listen to other people’s points of view, her refusal to learn from others and regrettably she possessed an unerring faith in her own infallibility. Even her overly active empathy, normally seen as a good thing in an investigator, hindered her ability to investigate or profile effectively. She frequently let killers sucker her in with a sob story or their ‘kind’ eyes.

To put it simply, the woman was a menace. Mo would be glad to see the back of her.

However as a senior supervisory agent, she would be remiss if she didn’t offer this foolish young woman some much needed (if unwanted) career advice. That was how she’d ended up with her in Conference Room 3, the smallest one if you didn’t count Gibbs ‘office.’ They’d barely gotten started and already the team leader had an overwhelming urge to throttle her.

Taking a deep breath, she tried to remain civil. “Agent Todd, I don’t think you understand the situation you are in. If the insubordination charge is upheld against you and observing your behaviour while you’ve been on the Family and Sexual Violence Unit, I’d say that’s likely, you’ll be lucky to retain your position. Considering the reason you left the Secret Service, no OTHER federal agency will hire you again.”

“Gibbs said he’d fix things so I could go back to the MCRT,” she said stubbornly.

Indulging herself in a mental eye roll, Mo replied, “Maybe. But if you are serious about wanting to become an investigator or a criminal profiler, then I’d think long and hard about going back onto his team.”

Looking affronted, she told Cabot, “I don’t want to BECOME an investigator or a profiler. I AM already!”

Cabot permitted a shake of her head. “Todd, you can put lipstick on a pig and a tiara on its head and called it the Queen of Sheba but that doesn’t make it so. It will still be a porcine wearing lippy and a crown. When it comes to investigations you’re a rookie…no worse than a rookie because you think you know it all. You’re a menace!”

Seeing Todd’s look of outrage, Mo smothered a smile.

“As for being a criminal profiler, I called in a favour with a friend at the Secret Service to get some information. Your profiler training was focused on training you to picking out whack jobs and terrorist threats in crowds posing a threat to POTUS. Hell, up close and personal you weren’t even able to identify that journalist before he tried to take out the president, so forgive me when I scoff at the thought of you calling yourself a criminal profiler,” Cabot told her, speaking bluntly.

Agent Todd shot her a look of pure poison and opened her mouth to argue but Cabot got in first.

“I’ve read the reports where you used your ‘criminal profiling’ on cases, including the one that led to your being assigned to my team. You have an infallible knack of connecting with killers, though. So anyone you think is innocent is probably going to turn out to be a stone cold killer, so there is that, I suppose,” she said watching the transformation from proud to seething anger as Todd realised she was dissing her profiling.

No, not belittling. It wasn’t belittling if it was true, and Mo was speaking the God’s honest truth!

“You took a killer into your home, who you’d coached to lie to the doctors about her memory returning, solely to get her released from the hospital. After her memory did truly return, which you failed to realise, she killed herself and her married lover and put other peoples’ lives at risk (including your team), by blowing up a naval contractor’s premise.”

Todd flushed bright red. The senior supervisory agent wasn’t entirely clear if it was embarrassment at Mo pointing out Cate’s mistakes, or she was pissed off at being held accountable for her errors, since holding her accountable was something Gibbs never did.

“Your ‘profiler’ training failed to ID the person among the five suspects who’d murdered a submariner to take his place aboard the sub.”

Cabot continued, pointing to the eco-terrorist case aboard the submarine, calmly but implacably. She may have only been her supervisor for a short time, but she had a responsibility to remind the junior agent of her failings and try to get her back on track. Someone had to try before she was let go or got herself, a colleague, or a member of the public injured or worse, killed. Sometimes it truly sucked to be in charge, but it went with the job!

“It was Gibbs insight, plus crucial information supplied by DiNozzo’s investigation back here that stopped the eco-terrorist posing as PO Drew, from killing everyone on board with sarin gas. Your profiling, which was what you were there for, proved useless to identifying the suspect,” Cabot told her frankly.

“With respect, Maureen that’s wrong,” Cate refuted, visibly affronted. “I identified that Petty Officer Thompson was lying about finishing school a year late because he caught mono. And I was right!”

“True, but so did Gibbs, who doesn’t identify himself as a criminal profiler. Plus he also identified that the other four were lying about something too which you failed to do. But Thompson, despite lying about why he finished school late was not the killer, PO Drew aka Sean Travis was. Gibbs picked up on Travis’ lie about being married when posing as PO Drew.. You didn’t,” Cabot pressed her point home relentlessly.

Her temporary team leader watched on with suppressed amused as Cate opened and shut her mouth several times. Mo knew from Todd’s month on her team that Cate never shied away from sharing her opinions with them. She could tell that the rookie was desperately biting her tongue. Maybe the last frustrating month for her team hadn’t been a total waste if she was learning to keep her opinions to herself!

“The reason you were picked for the assignment to the USS Philadelphia was you were supposedly a trained profiler, yet you failed to ID the imposter. The truth is any halfway competent agent could have done what you did, including acting as a decoy with the COB while Gibbs went off to question PO Thompson.” While harsh, it was also the truth.

“It was also Gibbs who correctly profiled the eco terrorist would have a backup plan if he was caught, not the so-called profiler on the team,” Cabot continued to point out her failures.

“I AM a profiler,” Cate told her furiously.

“Then how could you as a profiler fail to realise that that Ensign Evan Hayes was at risk for suicide? The agent afloat gave you a big heads up about him being psychologically vulnerable; she told you he was being badly bullied by Commander Dornan,” Mo said, referring the tragic case where the MCRT believed he’d killed his tormentor, Commander Dornan. “You spoke to Ensign Hayes mother and didn’t pick up on his father bullying him. Had you’d profiled the kid, the MCRT would have known he was a victim, and his going UA wasn’t due to guilt but suicidality.”

Mo shook her head. “You may be able to pick out terrorists or deranged individuals within crowds of people based on their behaviour. Once you are up close and personal though, your emotions and biases come into play, and you make snap judgements. Once you form an opinion you won’t let go of it, even if you’re wrong.”

“I do not,” Todd protested shooting her a poisonous glare.

“You connected emotionally with Suzanne O’Neil, Ari Haswari a trained assassin and Jeremy Davison. All of them were killers who you decided were innocent victims. Yet when encountering a real victim of abuse, where was your overly developed sense of empathy? The fact you never met Hayes should have made it easy to profile him, yet you missed all the classic signs, even though Paula Cassidy was bending over backwards trying to protect Ensign Hayes.”

Mo gave her a calculating look. “I had a profiler friend at the BAU look over the case, omitting the death by cop outcome, but Agent Prentiss immediately flagged him as at risk of suicide. There was data available that should have made you suspicious of his vulnerability, especially when you have proved how willing you are to give murderers like Haswari the benefit of the doubt. Emily immediately zeroed in on Evan giving away his credit card to a bunch of obnoxiously entitled teens. She said even without Agent Cassidy’s evaluation that he was troubled; the credit card should have had alarm bells ringing because suicidal people frequently give away their possessions before they kill themselves.”

Cate yelled at her, apparently she’d touched a nerve. “He didn’t commit suicide. I shot him.”

“Death by cop is still suicide, Agent Todd. He was being bullying and then NCIS decided he killed Commander Dornan, and he couldn’t see a way out. Even if he could prove he didn’t do it, he still was facing the prospect of dealing with his father, who’d bullied him his whole life.”

“Why are you torturing me like this?”

“Because we have people’s lives in our hands, and you claim to be a criminal profiler, but your actions don’t back it up.” Mo told her candidly. “If you want to become a criminal profiler then you have to do better!”

“I want you to realise that if you and McGee had your way, Laura Rowens would have been hauled into an interrogation room and subject to questioning when she was innocent of any crimes, all due to you inexperience with sex crimes. Rapists always lie and your godawful profiling of the perp as Mrs Rowens’ poor innocent victim would have created even more trauma for the victim,” she lectured sternly, glaring Cate into submission as she tried to argue with the seasoned team leader of the Family and Sexual Violence Unit.

“ You’d have let a serial killer and rapist skate, and you don’t seem to possess even an iota of self-awareness about how badly you misjudged the situation,” she raised her voice. She wasn’t able to remain calm in the face of Todd’s pigheadedness.

“I’m, in your words, ‘torturing you’ because you aren’t willing to acknowledge when you mess up. You just keep making mistakes. You could have learned a lot in this last month working here with Patrick, just like you could have learnt from Agent DiNozzo. You have an over-inflated opinion of your abilities and are too arrogant to recognise individuals who know a helluva lot more than you do and try to learn from them, Agent Todd,” she continued ruthlessly.

“You wanted to know why I’m being so hard on you and attempting to school you on you poor attitude, even though I’m probably wasting my time? It’s for all of the above and because you think that your better qualified than Agent DiNozzo and Ruth Jacobs to be a senior field agent, but you refuse to respect the chain of command. Which by the way, just proves how unworthy you are to supervise others if you honestly believe you’re up to the task You are deluding yourself!.”

“I’ve been a federal agent for eight years. A lot longer than DiNozzo,” Cate protested mockingly. ”He’s only been an agent for three years.”

“Plus, he was a cop for six years which adds up to nine years as a LEO. And seven of your eight years as a Fed you served as a Secret Service Agent on protection duties, not investigating crime. And even then, you couldn’t follow regs, could you?”

Seeing Todd’s shocked expression, Mo chuckled. “What? You thought that if you handed in your resignation ahead of being fired for ignoring fraternisation regulations, it would prevent you ‘indiscretion’ from leaking out? How very naïve of you, since DC leaks like a sieve and cops and Feds are the biggest bunch of gossips.”

“Everyone knows?” Cate squeaked in horror.

“Yep, pretty much. It also hasn’t won you any fans since you and Major Kerry didn’t just break fraternisation regs, you knowingly threatened National Security, despite your oaths. To be honest, you were damned lucky that NCIS hired you.”

Mo’s blackberry pinged, indicating a text had arrived. She pulled it out of her pocket and read the message and gave a tiny grin. It was from her partner, Angela. They were headed to Canada in a couple of months to be married…not because it was legal there but because Angela was Canadian, and her family had offered to throw them a wedding. Since Ange was a ER doc and Maureen was a Fed, neither had the time or the inclination to arrange a wedding but Angela’s mother and her sisters had insisted. So they’d been bombarding her with wedding details, and she was passing them on to Mo for her input.

To be honest, she’d done the whole big wedding before, back when she was fresh out of college and trying to deny that she was attracted to females. She would have been more than happy with a simple service and a small celebratory dinner. But Ange’s family insisted on giving them the whole shebang and she realised that her partner secretly wanted that, even if she wouldn’t admit it. So dutifully, Maureen responded to the menu options before sliding her phone back into her pocket with a tiny sigh.

“Sorry about that,” Cabot apologised. “And just so you know, plenty of female agents think it’s hypocritical that you start whining about how sexist it is when you’re given probie jobs when you singlehandedly set gender equality back thirty years by failing to control your damned hormones and act like a professional. Could it get any more cliched than falling for a man in a uniform?” Mo asked her mockingly.

“It takes two to fool around,” Cate protested weakly.

“Yes, however Major Kerry is dead, but you aren’t. He kinda paid for his failure, don’t cha think? But you! You got hired and given a slot on the MCRT with no experience whatsoever. Think he got the worst end of the deal,” she said.

“Then, instead of thanking your lucky stars for your good fortune, you’ve proceeded to diss Agent DiNozzo, who had eight more years of experience investigating crime than you did. What’s even more deluded is you think you genuinely deserve his job.”

Cate went home that evening after her interview with SSA Maureen Cabot, thinking about the SSA’s parting advice which she’d immediately rejected out of hand when she heard it. But it kept playing on her mind.

“If you don’t lose your job, Agent Todd, I’d think long and hard before returning to the MCRT, where the team leader tells you that he is the only one who gives you orders. After eight years at the Secret Service, you can’t claim ignorance regarding the chain of command, yet you’ve been disrespectful to Ruth too, which was again bordering on insubordinate,” Cabot frowning as she studied her file.

“Quite frankly, unless you’re willing to accept that you are a rookie and therefore must work your way up the ladder by learning from people who are more experienced investigators, then you should really think about a different line of work. Something where you don’t hold people’s lives in your hands if you refuse to learn,” the older agent told her honestly.

She’d been dismissive, almost rude to Cabot over her ‘advice’. Cate was so sure that the insubordination complaint would be dismissed…it was DiNozzo after all, and no one took him seriously. Besides Gibbs had assured her he had it in hand, and she just had to be patient for a little longer.

Actually, he’d told her, ‘his team, his rules,’ so she’d taken everything that SSA Cabot told her with a grain of salt. Okay, that was until she happened to hear Agents Jacobs and Cabot talking softly in their bull pen several hours after her interview with the head of the Family and Sexual Violence Unit.

“How did it go,” Ruth asked her boss.

There was a lengthy silence before Mo answered, sounding frustrated. “About as well as you’d expect, given her entitled attitude. She’s convinced that Gibbs is going to magically make this all go away because he told her so,” she said sardonically.

“ So basically, she fell for his whole my team, my rules bullsh*t,” Jacobs huffed incredulously. “Scuttlebutt is that HR are fed up. They’re gonna to start digging up the bodies, so he won’t have anything left to leverage.”

Cate had immediately realised that the two women were talking about her, and she knew it wasn’t the smartest idea to eavesdrop on their conversation, especially if she got caught. But if they were talking about her, didn’t she have a perfect right to know what they were saying? She glanced around to see if anyone was watching her but thankfully, the Family and Sexual Violence Unit was deserted, aside from Cabot, Jacobs, and herself, hidden from their view in the alcove underneath the staircase.

Cabot huffed but didn’t comment.

“You disagree?” Ruth asked her boss curiously. “Have you heard something?”

Mo shook her head. “Not really. Just been talking to a few other SSAs is all.”

Jacobs paused and Cate imagined she was giving her boss an expectant look and a beckoning gesture with her hand which she often used when she wanted a report on what you’d found. “Okay, spill!”

Cabot was silent. Todd, unable to see them, speculated that Mo might have been considering whether or not she should share, before eventually yielding. “Fine, but it goes no further, Ruth. We figure that all HR needs to do to nobble Gibbs is target junior agents whenever they break agency rules.”

“Which happens on the regular,” the SFA observed. “But won’t he just threaten to dig up skeletons of people who piss him off to get his own way, though?” Ruth objected.

“Maybe,” Mo conceded. “Or he might want to keep them buried until HE needs them. Man’s a narcissist and it depends how much he sees the juniors as extensions of himself. He might decide that they aren’t worth him calling in favours for,” she reasoned.

“Do you think they’ll get fired?”

Again, Cabot remained silent, apparently considering her words carefully. “Ordinarily, if a charge of insubordination was found to have occurred with a probationary agent, there’d be no question,” she said cautiously.

“But?” Jacobs asked cajolingly.

“His father is an admiral, as was his grandfather. He’ll likely as not get off with a warning but it he slips up again on probation, he’s toast.”

“That’s so not fair,” Jacobs bitched.

“Whatcha gonna do, Ruth? Life’s unfair.”

“And Todd? Will she be fired?”

“If someone had complained about even one of her massive screwups before her probationary period ended, then I’d say yes. Particularly given her failures over the Yankee White attempted assassination prior to being hired, which were so egregious she would have had little leverage. Now it isn’t so easy to get rid of her, mores the pity.”

“But Mo, she messed up badly on a heap of cases, especially the two bombings, plus her constant insubordination. That whole transgender sh*t when Pacci died – not cool,” Jacobs said disgustedly.

Cabot responded, “I know, but unfortunately other complaints regarding her never seemed to get filed. It was serendipity that the deputy manager of HR witnessed McGee and Todd’s outrageous disrespect and had enough influence to make sure the complaint didn’t mysteriously disappear. Bromstead isn’t someone to be messed with,” she said dryly.

“So they’ll get to go back as if nothing has happened?”

“Probably but HR will be watching their every move from here on in. It’s only a matter of time before Gibbs has McGee hacking without getting a warrant first or Todd messes up a profile or ignores DiNozzo’s orders again and that will be it.”

“Hence why you advised her not to return to Gibbs team?”

“Yep. She doesn’t understand how extremely lucky she was that they hired her in the first place after she messed up that badly but there won’t be a third shot. No one will hire her when she gets fired from here. Not even Coast Guard Investigative Services would even risk hiring her,” was Mo’s dire prediction.

“You sound pretty sure she’ll mess up again, Boss?” Jacobs commented.

“I am. Two things, Ruth. She and McGee are on Delores and Marla’s radar now. Gibbs might know where all of the Capitol Hill movers and shakers have buried the bodies, but those two women are formidable foes.”

Ruth shivered verbal as she thought about Bromstead and Sweeten – they were scary enough individually but together they were terrifying. “ Uggh! True enough, I wouldn’t want to be under their constant scrutiny, but what’s the second reason you’re so convinced?”

“Todd’s arrogance. Remember the adage that pride goeth before a fall? Given all of the cases where her self-hyped profiling skills have let her down it’s a dead certainty it will happen again,” Maureen predicted grimly. “Plus, she’ll never be willing to accept that DiNozzo is her superior, not just in rank but ability to competently do the job. Her ego won’t let her,” she predicted cynically.

“Gotta agree that’s a pretty likely scenario, since she’s borderline insubordinate to me too,” Jacobs admitted. She thinks she’s better qualified than me too.”

“And that you’re a lesbian,” Mo told her dryly. “Little Miss Parochial was quite disapproving of your lifestyle.”

“What on earth gave her that idea?” Ruth’s astonishment was genuine.

“You told her your partner’s name is Gene and you were taking bubble baths together,” Mo said with a smirk.

“Oh, good lord! And I guess my complete and utter lack of interest in makeup or clothes played into her bigoted concept of lesbianism,” she said scornfully. “Save me please from religious nut jobs.”

“Guess she’d be shocked to her core to learn that plenty of lesbians are as feminine as she is, or that a lot of masculine hunky guys are gay,” Cabot quipped, tongue in cheek.

“Does she know HR asked you and I to write reports on her performance and attitude and Shepparton and Lopez to do likewise for McGee?”

Cate felt like she’d been hit by a bus. Oh no, she was in big trouble since, she’d been openly defiant towards Ruth because she ticked all the boxes. Short spikey hair cut, absence of makeup, always wore androgynous clothing. Why wouldn’t she think the woman was a lesbian? There was no way Cate would take orders from someone as flamboyantly gay as Ruth Jacobs.

And she admitted, if only to herself, that it ticked her off that Jacobs had a degree in gender studies. She was always quick to point out that Cate was a female chauvinist, believing that females were superior to men, so her claim to support gender equality was a heap of crap. She did not like being called out as a hypocrite and that had made her dislike the woman and want to defy her.

“No, she wasn’t listening to a word I said, so I figured I’d rather save my breath,” Mo replied tiredly. “I’m all for supporting the sisterhood, especially my fellow agents,” she said dispiritedly.

“Trust me, we all appreciate what you’ve done to help those of us who’ve come after you, Mo,” Ruth assured her warmly.

“But when it comes to hiring more female feds, I don’t believe that merely having ovaries and a set of boobs is a reason to accept incompetent agents. Particularly deluded ones who believe they know better than experienced investigators.”

“Hear, hear. And you’re right, she doesn’t listen – she thinks she knows better. Although, at a pinch, someone might hire her in the private sector though,” Ruth mused. “Private security outfits are always on the lookout for young and telegenic females to work as bodyguards for celebrities clients.”

“That’s pretty sexist,” Cabot remarked with evident distaste.

Ruth snorted. “ Yep but it’s true. And a friend who works for DHS told me that’s how she ended up on the President’s protection team, apart from being able to keep up with him when he went out running.”

“Patronising much?

“Maybe, Mo but Kara Andrews said there were two other female agents who were equally as good, who were in line for the job but nowhere near as attractive. The rumour doing the rounds was that the White House’s advisors put pressure on the Secret Service to hire Todd because he said she looked good on camera.”

“That doesn’t prove anything, though. Don’t have time for scuttlebutt,” Cabot objected.

“No it doesn’t but let’s be frank. Cate’s protection skills aren’t exactly exemplary. That case where an ex-SEAL escaped prison and got past the protection detail she was in charge of to see his kid – he could have killed them all or kidnapped the kid had he wanted to.”

“If I’d tasked you with looking after two grandparents and a young boy and his mother with barely any backup, what would you have done?” Cabot asked curiously

“I’d have insisted that I needed at least two agents inside the house and two outside. Ideally, I’d have moved them to a safe house. Since he was considered to be a dangerous escapee and spec ops trained, it would have made it much more difficult for him to find them. It was a shocking failure that he was able to contact his kid,” Ruth said bluntly.”

“And your previous job wasn’t guarding high profile targets, but Agent Todd’s was,” her boss replied patiently.

Cate could hear the fondness and respect in her voice and once again, she questioned the advisability of eavesdropping on their conversation given their lack of esteem for her skills.

“Yes, Gibbs was team leader, but he gave her the assignment based on her supposed skills in protection. She should have called him out on the poorly designed protection detail, since I’m fairly certain he used the kid and his grandparents as bait to lure former Petty Officer Jack Curtin out of hiding. Not much point endangering the bait if you can’t apprehend the perp,” she pointed out cynically. “Not sure how he expected her, and a TAD McGee (who wasn’t a field agent ) would be able to arrest an ex-SEAL though.”

Ruth sounded surprised. “I never thought about it, put it down to Gibbs being parsimonious about letting other teams help out. But protective details are supposed to be her forte, so yeah, she should have spoken up. Made a case for more agents.”

“Even if she was a probationary agent at the time?” Mo said, playing devil’s advocate.

“Oh please. When would that ever stop her telling him what she thought. Tony said she tore strips off him when the commandant at Norfolk said she couldn’t be on the sub because women weren’t allowed,” she said disdainfully. “Besides, she was supposed to be highly qualified as a protection agent- this was in her wheelhouse.”

The two women were silent, and Todd thought they were done but Ruth after a long pause, commented. “And let’s not forget that highly embarrassing faux pas, given their combined experience, when Todd and Gibbs failed to properly clear the house when they went to search when those two Marines were killed.” Jacobs continued.

Cabot must have looked confused because her 2IC supplied more details, “ You remember Mo, the killer was a sweet little old lady who wore Estee Lauder perfume, who was hiding upstairs in a wardrobe.”

“And DiNozzo immediately recognised her perfume from when they’d previously questioned her ,as soon as he entered the house. Why was he late to the party though?” Mo frowned trying to remember the particulars of that case.

“He was out searching the barn, which he discovered was where PFC Thomas Dorn was dismembered. He came inside to give Gibbs a Sit Rep and immediately realised she was hiding in the house,” Ruth told her chuckling. “Gibbs was furious because everyone was calling him Tony Jim Ellison for weeks afterwards.”

Cate scowled, remembering all of the juvenile stupid sentinel jokes. Gibbs had been extremely pissy about Dr Chambers getting one over on them and most definitely hadn’t appreciate DiNozzo’s new nickname.

Hearing someone returning to the bull pen, the mortified and angry agent had no choice but pretend she was just walking into the bull pen and strolled out into the bullpen to sit at her desk. Once seated she seethed as she proceeded to work on the report from the teams’ last investigation. Later after reading her attempt, she ended up deleting and rewriting most of it again.

Later that night, she was still feeling embarrassed and angry at what SSA Cabot and SFA Jacobs had discussed, but then they say that those who eavesdrop never hear good of themselves. Well that certainly seemed to be true, at least in this case. Cate also found herself going over what Cabot had told her in the interview she’d had with her today. It was certainly not a pleasant experience to listen to such harsh feedback on her performance and neither agent had pulled their punches.

She found herself thinking about how sure the two female agent had been that if she ended up keeping her job and going back to the MCRT that it was just a matter of time until she messed up again. Much to her surprise, she discovered that she enjoyed investigating crimes. Sure it lacked the cachet of protecting the President, but she’d felt like it was something that she excel in after her first career had crashed and burned. A job that would let her use her skills and seniority so that her years climbing the ladder in the Secret Service wouldn’t have been in vain.

Yet it seemed that the skills she was so proud of, her profiling and her protection skills weren’t exactly looked upon with awe by other NCIS agents. Forced into listening to all her failures laid out together like she had, Cate had to admit that they sounded less than exemplary. Then there was Agent Iverson who hadn’t been shy about correcting her wrong assumptions during this past month on their team She’d been quick to dismiss him as just another male asshole who was threatened by a strong competent female, but she thought about what Cabot had said about the BAU profiler – Emily Prentiss’ assessment of her skillset.

Cate was loath to admit that she’d thought that after a couple of years at NCIS, she’d apply to join the Behavioural Analysis Unit at the FBI. But it had been a huge awaking to hear that the recently appointed female profiler, Emily Prentiss had labelled her profiler training at the Secret Service as nothing more than crowd threat assessment and terrorist training. That made her take stock, and it wasn’t very comforting.

Tonight after she went home, she’d researched the bios of the BAU and various other criminal profilers to investigate their qualifications and found that most had an extensive law enforcement backgrounds before their criminal profiling training but increasingly, new criminal profilers were highly trained, possessing higher degrees in criminology, forensics, and psychology. Her year of justice studies in her degree plus the basic psych units that a lot of college students undertook just didn’t match up to Pat Iverson’s Master’s in profiling. He’d almost completed a Ph.D. too that he failed to mention.

She felt extremely embarrassed; he was a lot more qualified than she’d imagined. No wonder he’d been able to rattle off stats correcting her when she opened her mouth to share the wealth of her wisdom with the team. She briefly thought about asking him for advice, but she was too proud, too embarrassed, too stubborn to ask for his help, especially when she’d been so dismissive of him. Although she was reluctant to do so, in the end she reached out to Rachel, her big sister to get her take on the situation.

Rachel was the eldest sibling; Cate and her big sister bookending their three brothers by being the first and last of the Todd siblings. Somehow Cate had always felt like she was constantly being compared to Rachel and continually failing to measure up to the eldest Todd. Rach was perfect and Cate… was not.

Her sister studied psychology at college, gained a PhD. in clinical psychology. She interned at Walter Reed, specialising in trauma and now she had a successful private practice while working one day a week at Bethesda with injured vets. She’d married a doctor specialising in maxilla-facial reconstruction – a plastic surgeon who helped repair the faces of people who suffered horrendous disfigurement through accidents or their military service. And if that wasn’t enough to make her eligible for Favourite Daughter and Sainthood status, she also managed to pop out two daughters and a son who Cate’s parents absolutely doted on.

Cate on the other hand always felt as she was being subtly chided by her parents for not having a home, a husband, or kids. At least they’d been proud of her when she’d been placed on the POTUS’ protection detail. She felt like finally she’d been able to one up her sister, particularly with her skill as a profiler and she was not above lording it over Rach either. Of course, when she was caught out fraternising with Major Timothy Kerry and resigned before they fired her, her parents couldn’t understand why she’d thrown away a high-profile job to work for a federal agency no one ever heard of.

Needless to say, she may have left out the pertinent info about her fraternising which was against regulations. She’d given them a lame excuse about the close call of the POTUS to being assassinated, but they remained perplexed about her throwing in her job. And she’d certainly never explained.

It was unfortunate that Rach knew all about how she’d come to be working at NCIS, but working at Bethesda, it was almost inevitable she would find out. Her sister called her not long after she’d resigned and been surprisingly supportive. And she’d never told their mother and father, who would be terribly disappointed in the youngest daughter for ignoring fraternisation regs. Rachel had even dragged her along to Arlington cemetery to pay their respects to Tim’s grave since Cate felt it would be inappropriate to have attended his funeral. She’d already dumped him right before he was murdered, plus they’d both broken fraternisation regs which was massive.

Cate was just grateful that the powers that be had allowed him to be buried with a full military funeral. Rachel had said that to deny him a military funeral, they would have had to explain to his family why it was being denied and that would mean there was a good chance that the media would get wind of their fraternisation. Besides, the Secret Service and the White House had agreed that it would be better to not to release details that there’d been an attempt to assassinate the President. Cate was just grateful that Tim’s parents, not to mention her own would ever learn about their affair, since it would devastate them all. And given that Tim Kerry had been targeted and died because of his position as the President’s ball carrier, she felt he deserved to be laid to rest in Arlington.

So as much as it pained Cate to talk to Rach about what had happened at work, she’d bitten the bullet and come clean. Rach hadn’t soft-soaped it either, agreeing with what SSA Cabot had said about her not being qualified as a criminal profiler. She’d spent time explaining the difference between what her sister had done at the Secret Service and what criminal profilers did.

“Aside from the fact that you seem to empathise with murders and assassins, Cate, which believe me is a HUGE problem, there is another big stumbling block that precludes you being a successful criminal profiler, even if you had the necessary training.”

“And just what would that be, Rachel,” she demanded hotly. Maybe this wasn’t such a great idea after all.

“Your attitude to anything sexual is far from open minded and accepting, little Sis. And before you ask, that IS a problem because criminal profiling needs to be able to take a holistic look at humanity, not judge people on the basis of if they go to church, believe in your God or are heterosexuals.”

“But hom*osexuality is a sin, Rach,” Cate objected.

“According to the Catholic Church, so is sex before marriage and birth control. I know you aren’t a virgin, and you don’t have any kids, Catie. Tell me, do you go to confession every time you have sex with someone for reasons other than to procreate?”

Seeing her sister’s discomfort, she smirked. “Yeah, that’s what I thought. Seems when you disagree with a sin being a sin you ignore it, but because being gay, bi, or trans make you uncomfortable, then you don’t mind using the whole you’re gonna-burn-in-Hell pedagogy to justify your bias.”

Getting pissed, she’d asked crossly, “Your point, Rach?”

“Unless you can reconcile the fact that people have different sexual orientations, then any profiling you do will inevitably be biased and lacking efficacy. It could blind you to someone’s guilt or innocence. You’ll do a half-assed job of looking at evidence… I know you Baby Sister. You’ll be reading through the evidence that is sexually explicit or kinky and be inwardly cringing, thinking that you’re going to go to Hell. And meanwhile you’ll miss something crucial.”

Cate didn’t want to admit it, but what Rach said did make sense. She thought about her other stumbling block – suicide. She struggled over Suzanne O’Neil and Evan Hayes’ suicides, and she realised that perhaps profiling wasn’t such a good fit. She wasn’t sure she was willing to challenge what others perceived to be her biases. Her religious beliefs were important to her…okay aside from the whole sex before marriage thing.

But where did that leave her?

When she said as much to Rachel, she scowled at her. “As an agent who isn’t a criminal profiler, Caty. It leaves you learning other ways to investigate. Or forensics. You could train in forensic accountancy or cyber investigation where the world is much more concrete… much more black and white. I think it may suit your personality a whole lot more, and it would be less likely that your personal biases would affect the conclusions you draw.”

Although she felt a pang at the thought of losing the profiler label, Cate realised that it didn’t give her nearly as much credibility as she’d previously imagined after listening to what the Family and Sexual Violence Unit thought about her skills. They’d all been fairly scathing and having Patrick on the team, she guessed her skills did pale by comparison to his.

“But what am I going to do if I get off with a warning, like Cabot predicted. Gibbs wants me back on his team. Should I go back?”

Rachel paused, looking at Cate contemplatively. “Don’t take this the wrong way Catydid, but have you ever asked yourself why Gibbs hired you?”

Feeling prickly despite the childish nickname, she retorted, “Rule 5, don’t waste good.”

“But by your own admission, you had no experience investigating crimes, Cate. You argued with the ME over the time of death of the football carrier. You asked dumb questions about why sketches were needed when they’d already taken photographs of the scene. Your profiling, along with the Secret Service’s vetting procedures failed to identify the terrorist assassin,” she said bluntly, even though Rachel had an apologetic look on her face as she delivered the coup de grace.

Cate tried hard not to get defensive. She had asked her sister’s opinion, so she had to be prepared to accept it when she offered it. But darn it, it sucked!

“What’s your point, Rach?”

“Look, at this stage, I’m thinking out loud, even though I KNOW you don’t want to hear this. Do you want me to stop?”

She did, but Cate also wanted someone to tell her if she should go back to the MCRT if she was given another chance.

“No, let me have it,” she said with a sigh.

“Okay, and despite being told to turn over Commander Tripp’s body to the FBI, Gibbs managed to pull a switcheroo right under your nose,” Rachel mused.

“Trapp,” Cate corrected, reflexively.

“What was a trap, Caty?”

“No, Commander Trapp, not Trip,” she grimaced.

Rachel had painted a picture of her as a complete incompetent. Why indeed would Gibbs want to hire her? She’d not been entirely deaf to the mean gossip mongering among the other agents that he’d hired her to get into her panties. Looking at it from an outsider’s perspective, she had to admit that it did seem like a logical conclusion, even if it was false

“You think he hired me to have sex with him?”

Rachel gave her a flinty look. “Why, has he ever put the moves on you?”

The younger sibling thought back, there was the time on the shooting range where he corrected her stance which could be deemed as a come-on she supposed, and the time she’d ended up plastered to him aboard the sub when it made an emergency resurface and he’d made an inappropriate comment.

“A couple of questionable times but most of the time, he hangs around with some redhead who drives a BMW convertible, so I don’t think so,” she said.

Cate was not going to admit that she’d found herself getting jealous of him flirting with that red-headed harlot, Melissa Dorn and how he flirted back. That was immaterial to the discussion. She did NOT have the hots for Leroy Jethro Gibbs.

“I’ve heard a lot of scuttlebutt at Bethesda about Gibbs from the other Marines,” her sister continued. “Everyone says he was the real deal when it came to the Corps, but he’s also considered to be a real hard ass. He’s said to hold his people to an incredibly high standard, especially Marines and if people fail to live up to them, he is brutal.”

Thinking about her shot up Blackberry, despite her range scores, trained as a Secret Service agent, she could attest to that.

After listening to her story, Rachel frowned. “See here’s the bit that doesn’t make sense to me, Hon. You and Major Kerry broke fraternisation regulations. Kerry would have been court martialled for endangering his Commander-in-Chief, had he lived. And you were equally culpable, so why would the former Marine offer you a job on the prime investigative team at NCIS?”

Cate was feeling hurt at her words even though she knew it was the truth. She shook her head. “I don’t know.”

“Sorry sweetie, but he could have had the pick of any of the highly trained agents at NCIS. Yet he picked someone who’d brought his beloved Marine Corps into disrepute. He picked someone who didn’t know the first thing about investigating crimes. It just doesn’t make sense.”

“Unless he wanted an agent who broke the rules and didn’t know the first thing about investigating crimes?” she said reluctantly.

One look at Rachel’s face and she realised her sister had probably already considered the possibility and wanted Cate to come to the realisation by herself.

“You knew?”

Rachel shook her head, “No, but I did wonder. Even when you first started, it never made sense. But it still leaves unanswered WHY?”

“Because Gibbs breaks the rules. He doesn’t let anyone tell him what to do; he has his own rules,” she said stiffly. “He expects us all to follow them.

“And he thinks you’ll ignore NCIS regulations because you ignored the fraternisation regs. I guess the fact you ignore chain of command and been reported for insubordination of your direct supervisor confirms his expectations,” Rachel said brutally.

There was utter silence for several long moments. Cate wasn’t sure how long exactly before her sister asked. “And what about this Timothy McGee? Does he ignore rules too – unless they’re Gibbs?”

“He loves to hack, even when we don’t have a warrant.”

“So he hacks suspects?” Rachel probed.

“And classified and top secret data when we are investigating a case,” she said reluctantly because it sounded kinda bad.

“Navy?” Rachel asked tentatively.

“Yeah, and FBI, CIA, NSA. The Pentagon too,” she conceded as she saw the look of horror on her big sister’s face.

“Cate,” her sister said gravely, “do you really need my opinion about whether you should go back to work for Gibbs? I’m almost certain that he’s got some pretty massive skeletons in his own cupboard. And even if he hasn’t already done so, sooner or later he will step too far over the line.”

She looked into her baby sister’s eyes that were full of fear, confusion, and conflicted loyalty. The man had deliberately hired her because no one else would and a part of her recognised that he’d bought her loyalty by giving her a spot on a team she didn’t earn on merit. The realisation was crushing.

Feeling horrible about kicking Cate when she was down, nonetheless as the eldest sibling, Rachel felt it was incumbent upon her to warn her sibling.

“Ask yourself if you’re willing to be an accomplice to his crimes and then you’ll have your answer, little sister,” she counselled her sister earnestly.

Tony was tired. It had been a rough month. Ever since they caught the case of the serial murderer/rapist who had targeted Laura Rowens, wife of a Marine Major who’d shot her would be attacker Jeremy Davison, Gibbs had been extra difficult to work for. Losing both of the junior officers who’d been charged with insubordination and transferred to other teams in the interim while the charges were investigated had not made for a happy Gibbs. He did not appreciate people messing with his team and Tony was fully aware that Gibbs blamed him, even though he wasn’t the one who called his superior full of crap or delusional.

He also knew that while the Boss was pissed off with him, he was biding his time to let him have it. Mostly he figured because with just Gibbs and himself to investigate, the Boss did not want to get into a scene with him and jeopardise their cases. For Gibbs’, the case always came first, everything else would always take a back seat and so he put aside his fury at Tony for getting McGee and Todd into trouble to focus on their cases. But he knew at some point, Gibbs would make him pay…it was merely a question of when.

Tony snorted quietly. Ha! It wasn’t as if he set them up intentionally and he had no idea that the human resources deputy manager was on their floor, listening to their discussion either. After all, Ms Bromstead was certainly no fan of his!

Although if he had been aware of her presence, he didn’t know if he would have censured himself, because what he said was true – rapists lie. You couldn’t believe what they said and even a piss poor profiler should have known that. Known that rapists were so damned good at lying because often they believed their own BS that they didn’t rape anyone, just like many paedophiles were convinced that they loved children and that having sex with them wasn’t wrong or evil. Therefore, the normal tells when someone lied often didn’t apply when you were interviewing a rapist or a paedophile and every word out of their lying mouths needed to be treated with extreme scepticism.

Yet, just like Ari Haswari, who shot Gerald, allegedly to maintain his undercover identity, although Tony was far convinced about that since he could easily have put a bullet in him in a non-vital spot. The guy had medical training after all, attending Edinburgh Medical school, Ducky’s old alma mater no less. Yet that sad*stic bastard opted to put a bullet in Gerald’s shoulder socket, necessitating the use of a tourniquet to stop the bleeding as Ducky didn’t have the surgical equipment to remove the bullet and repair the damage. It was pure luck that they were able to free the hostages in time, so he didn’t end up losing his arm, no thanks to Haswari.

Yet, Cate had claimed to have had a chance to kill him in autopsy and hesitated because she thought he had kind eyes.

And even knowing now that he was a Kidon trained assassin, and he’d managed to kidnap her on a DC street to play his mind games with, she still insisted he was a good guy. He might be a spy, working for Mossad (although Tony was far from convinced about that) but he was still a psychopath. He’d knowingly placed that bullet, knowing that even if Gerald didn’t lose his arm, he would never have full use of it again. As someone who had done a lot of undercover work in his time, Tony had sometimes had to do things he wasn’t proud of but given a choice such as Ari faced, he would have chosen a flesh wound over a bullet in a ball socket from point blank range, particularly of an innocent civilian like Gerald.

Plus, who could possibly forget the crazy bomber lady that Todd had bonded with? Tony certainly couldn’t, that was for damned sure. Todd had dragged Jane Doe aka Suzanne McNeil back home to Cate’s apartment to help her regain her memory.

Just because she’d been found in a shallow grave did not mean she was instantly a harmless victim, but Todd had been suckered in by her eyes, telling Gibbs that Suzanne McNeil’s eyes pleaded with her for help. And what was it with Todd and people’s eyes, anyway?

Considering McNeil had already killed the head of BFF’s security prior to her being terminated and dumped, her whole ‘mistress scorned so I’ll blow myself and my former lover up sh*t’ made Todd look like a pathetic foolish dupe. The type of sucker who would buy a whole passel of land with water views aka swamp and lose their life savings, not someone who kept telling them all she was a profiler. Yet despite her god-awful judgement in this case and many other times when her so-called profiler skills let her down, she never bothered to learn from her mistakes so once again, Jeremy Davison had managed to make her look like fool.

Tony couldn’t help being pissed off with Cate over the way she’d completely changed her opinion about Davison. When they’d gone to the base hospital at Quantico to get prints off the intruder and seized his clothes for forensic examination, perhaps get an opportunity to interview Jeremy Davison if he was conscious, Cate had literally been out for blood. If there had been a pair of blunt scissors handy, Tony was fairly sure that she’d have happily castrated the guy, if given the opportunity. Her empathy had totally been with Mrs Rowens, which in cases sexual assault and rape, was wholly appropriate. Victims were always assumed to be telling the truth, unless there was clear evidence to the contrary, because this approach ensured that victims of sexual crimes weren’t further traumatised.

Thankfully, things had changed quite a bit from the bad old days, when investigators (mostly older white males) thought it was permissible to beat confessions out of suspects they thought were guilty, even if they had no proof, just their gut feelings. The bad old days where LEOs thought that rape was a crock, usually believing that: victims were making it up, had asked for it by flirting and dressing to invite assault, had consensual intercourse, and then regretted it the next morning, or were hysterical, delusional females, imaging something that never happened. Back then, many cops and courts wouldn’t even countenance the possibility that rape could occur within a marriage. Unfortunately some of those investigators were still around, although most had retired, replaced by hopefully much more enlightened and well trained investigators, especial in SVUs.

But to hear Todd and McGee lecturing him about keeping an open mind on Davison, had been too much. He wasn’t sure how many cases he’d investigated working the Homicide desk at Baltimore as a detective, plus all of the rapists he seen as a Philly Vice cop, but it had been a lot. So many of the sex workers had been attacked, sexually assaulted and raped but didn’t even bother to report it, particular the trans sex workers, and for good reason. Often the courts and cops weren’t exactly diligent about investigating or prosecuting offenders since sex workers tended to be viewed by a lot of people as subhuman unfortunately, or morally depraved and therefore not credible.

He knew that there were cops who raped sex workers, considered it a fringe benefit of the job. It make him equal parts sick to his stomach and homicidally angry and Dumb and Dumber had struck a nerve that day. One. that he couldn’t ignore, no matter how much it pissed Gibbs off!

After he’d played a little hard and fast with the truth, keeping Lieutenant Pam Kim RN busy at the nurses station while Cate stole into the intruder’s room to get the perp’s fingerprints because Lt Kim refused them access until the next day. Both agents knew that Gibbs would kill them if they returned without the means to ID him as since the guy had no identification on him when he was shot, but hey… that wasn’t at all suspicious, no siree bob. Cate clearly had lost sight of why a romantic rendezvous would entail making sure he didn’t have any form of ID on him. Not even after Davison had regained consciousness, grabbing hold of Cate’s wrist, leaving fingerprint ink around her wrist where he’d grasped her.

Which should have given her a second vital clue about his nature; hell if Tony has grabbed her wrist like that, Todd wouldn’t have had the slightest compunction about putting him down hard. Maybe it was the perp’s eyes though; in hindsight they’d learnt that he was a serial killer and rapist. Clearly Cate was a sucker for killer’s eyes. Anyway, Davison had spun her a farrago of lies about how Rowens had set him up. He’d claiming that the Marine’s wife was the sicko, and he was the victim here. And Tony probably shouldn’t have been surprised that his teammate had fallen for his sob story, hook, line, and sinker.

So the secret service trained ‘profiler’ had become the champion of Davison, who was clearly a better profiler than Cate was, since he’d be able to zero in on her vulnerability and exploit it. To hear her advocating for the dirtbag, deciding that he was the innocent victim had made Tony seethe. He’d been unable to control his reaction, finding it ludicrous that someone who called herself a profiler could execute a one hundred and eighty degree turn about from hoping Davison died on the table to defending him as a pathetic victim was inconceivable to Tony. Particularly when she’d never investigated a sexual assault or rape case in her life.

When the Probie chimed in too, suggesting they should keep an open mind when Tim been a field agent for all of two months and also had absolutely no experience with rape or sexual assault cases, was like waving a red rag to a bull. Neither rookie liked him correcting their assertions, responding to him disrespectfully and he lost it. He was damned fed up with Gibbs treating him as a glorified clerk, good enough to fill in all the paperwork which was part and parcel of the rank of a senior field agent, but not allowed to discipline the underlings, or assign them tasks. Which was why Gibbs was so pissed at him. Gibbs had already made it clear that he didn’t get to give the juniors orders, assignments or correct them when they screwed up, but Tony was fed up and currently considering his options, not sure that he would stay on the MCRT.

He was biding his time. However, he would wait until Gibbs either accepted that McGee and Todd had moved on and found other agents to replace them, or he bulldozed them into returning. Having spoken briefly to Cate even before the investigation conducted by the DoD was handed down she was thinking of accepting a spot on the Mya Lawson’s team at Norfolk as the junior agent. Tony knew from Ruth Jacobs, Mo’s SFA that Cate decided that if she wanted any chance of remaining a federal agent, she needed to follow the rules.

Tony was reasonably sure that she didn’t want back on the MCRT…no, not that she didn’t want to return, more like she’d had a nasty wakeup call about how tenuous her position was. One more screw up and she would be kicked to the curb with no one willing to hire her. Going to Norfolk to Lawson’s team there was a lot less temptation for her to break rules and Maya was reported to a being a stickler for the NCIS handbook.

As for McGee, his sources told him that but for his old man pulling strings to prevent him from being fired. Admiral John McGee had also demanded that he be permanently removed from Gibbs’ team because he didn’t want his son tainted by Gibbs corruption or idiocy. Since McGee had been busting his gut trying to get onto the MCRT ever since they’d run into him at Norfolk on the eco-terrorist case back in late 2002, Tony hazarded a guess that McHackster would not be happy with being banned from going back to the MCRT. If he knew Tim, the probie was trying to find a loophole that would let him return to Gibbs’ team asap.

It amused Tony when Ducky sometimes declared that Gibbs and Tony were a lot alike. Apart from their desire to serve and their drive to solve crimes, as far as Tony could see, the only thing that they really had in common was that both of them were obsessively private, Although Gibbs in a dick move took great delight in tossing out titbits about him to his co-workers that would give them more ammunition to mock and disparage him. He enjoyed a joke as much as the next person and was known to tease Gibbs and his fellow team members, but he would never weaponize private family stuff like they did. He was pretty sure if he’d spilled the beans about Gibbs family tragedy, Gibbs would pull out his Sig Sauer and shoot him, but his dirty secrets apparently were fair game for their great and wise leader’s amusem*nt.

However, Tony thought that McGee and Gibbs had at least as much in common with each other as he did with their fearless leader…probably more. Tim and Gibbs both had a healthy disdain for the law insomuch as it impeded them achieving their goals to find the truth. Neither man thought that they should be held to the same laws as the mere mortals who they pursued, which was the height of narcissism when you thought about it. He was also reasonably certain that both of them got off on breaking the law…not just breaking the law to solve cases (like that was sufficient mitigation) but they both revelled in the thrill of getting away with it.

Of course, McGee had been able to get away with all his illegal hacking sh*t because of Gibbs reputation, which shielded him from consequences. Being transferred permanently off the team would hopefully put paid to him illegally hacking without facing sanctions, though he didn’t imagine that would make him a happy little Elf Lord. Of course, he wouldn’t want to give up all that fun hacking stuff, so Tony felt it was a safe bet he was not all that happy about the transfer.

Then there was Gibbs and Tim’s shared little conceit that they were smarter…better than the rest of their co-workers. Okay more than a little conceit, it was a honking big one and their smugness was hard to tolerate. It oozed out of every pore, along with their passive aggressiveness – one thing he wouldn’t miss if he left Team Gibbs was that arrogant, “Ya think, DiNozzo.”

Okay so Tony’s throw caution to the winds and see what happens side sometimes wondered how Gibbs would react if Tony were to do it back to him? Gibbs makes some statement with the gravitas of Moses on the Mount, and he responded with a annoyingly condescending, “Do ya think, Boss?” Or if Tony were to head slap Gibbs when he made an inappropriate remark at his expense. But then he’d remember that this was Gibbs he was talking about and while people often told him he must have a death wish to work with Gibbs and if he did either of those things, Gibbs would probably shoot him.

Anyway, as he thought about his future on the MCRT, while he might not be all that smart, Tony was smart enough to know that once Gibb filled the team positions (either with McProbie and Todd or newbies) his life would be made miserable as Gibbs extracted his revenge. So when they weren’t solving cases with the help of TADs and newbies from the agent pool, he was polishing up his resume. He was also reaching out to people to let them know he might soon be looking for new challenges.

In the meantime, the cases kept coming in from dispatch and Gibbs seemed to have settled into a polite if not warm détente with Tony that was downright uncomfortable, leaving him emotionally exhausted at the end of each case. As much as he longed to depart off Gibbs team and start afresh somewhere new, it wouldn’t be professional of him to up and resign, leaving Gibbs without any agents to help shoulder the workload. So reluctantly, he stayed because he could be a good partner even though the tension between them was unbearable.

Of course, he was the first to admit that the Jeffery White case kinda blew up in their faces. He’d ended up rubbing shoulders with yet another serial killer who they’d mistakenly believed was just a weaselly little pipsqueak of a thief, who stole Iraqi antiquities the Navy was supposed to be repatriating back to Iraq. Tony had gone in undercover, posing as pilot caught flying drugs over the board from South America. He was chained to White on the way to prison when Tony staged a breakout and dragged Jeffry White along with him. The guy seemed to be a whiney loser, but he’d ended up almost killing Tony when it turned out he and his accomplice were in fact serial killers. Somehow they’d survived the security vetting of the Navy’s contractors cataloguing and packing up a bunch of priceless Iraqi antiquities, to steal the shipping container or priceless relics that had illegally found its way into the US smuggled aboard navy vessels right out from under the noses of the Navy.

Talk about your embarrassing oops – that really did take the cake!

White, the dweebish one had killed his partner Lane Danielson aka Billy Collins when he showed an unhealthy interest in him. Tony wasn’t sure if that interest was of a ‘why don’t we get to know each other better kinda way or I hate your guts and wanna spill them cause I don’t trust ya kinda way. Either way, he figured he’d gotten lucky because White cut Collins aka Danielson’s throat while Tony was sleeping…drugged from the liquor he’d been forced to swallow by Collins and if not for White’s actions, he could have ended up taking a dirt nap.

In the end he had no choice but to shoot and kill Jeffrey White, even while the guy’s knife left a superficial slash across his throat as he tried to kill Tony like he killed Danielson- Collins. Just as he’d done to at least five other guys, not including his partner in crime, Danielson/Collins. It had been way to close for comfort and Tony was still having flashbacks and nightmares about it.

Sure they got the antiquities back, along with the guy who was going to buy them, but to kill someone who was sitting right behind you in a car was very different from taking down a perp from farther afield. Since it was a head shot, White’ blood, brain matter and skull fragments had ended up covering him and he would wake up in the middle of nightmares, the smell in the car after he shot Jeffery fresh in his memory. And that had been before he learnt later on date that he was a serial killer. The cops had initially fingered his partner, Billy Collins as the serial killer. The nightmares and flash backs had only intensified after realising that the five victims had all been killed in identical fashion to Collins’ grisly death and how he’d nearly ended up, too. Paradoxically, it also helped Tony to process what he’d had to do to survive, when he shot him up close and personal.

At that point in time, he’d built up a rapport with the nerdy White, who confided to him that his father physically abused him. Tony ended up identifying with Jeffery a little too strongly and that made killing him feel like he’d shot a puppy. When he’d made the mistake of admitting to Gibbs that he’d liked the weaselly thief, he knew the moment he’d let his mouth do the talking while his brain was out to lunch. Knew that it was an epic mistake to let down his guard to him. Normally he tried not to be vulnerable around Gibbs because experience had taught him that the Boss would take advantage of the slightest sign of weakness; that he’d stick the knife in and twist it around good to ensure it had maxim effect.

Unfortunately, he was still trying to centre himself as he came off a massive adrenaline surge and, in that instant, with no idea who White really was, he was feeling guilty that he had to kill him. Tony stupidly needed to connect with some who understood what he was going through. And par for the course, Gibbs hadn’t hesitated to put the boot in and make him feel even worse. Sometimes Tony thought it was as automatic to his boss as breathing.

With an ironic glance into the back of White’s car, which was a gory crime scene where White’s corpse was, he quipped sarcastically, “Yeah, DiNozzo, I can tell.”

He was too much of a mess to get out of the car to haul off and punch Gibbs in the throat, the adrenaline dump leaving him feeling shaky and his legs like jello as he stumbled out of the car, mentally yelling at the arrogant prick, ‘f*ck you, Gibbs.’

So he wasn’t all that upset when he threw up all over Gibbs dressed in his ubiquitous polo shirt and trousers. After all, the dumbass hadn’t answered the phone Tony had lifted, back at the cabin this morning trying to broadcast his location to him. If he had, Gibbs would have gotten to the meeting point for the buyer much sooner and Tony might have been able to avoid having to kill Jeffery, who had started out once upon a time as an innocent kid before his father decided to abuse him.

Meanwhile, Gibbs wasn’t happy that he puked all over him, but Tony had put it down to the drugs he’d been forced to swallow last night and his idiosyncratic reaction to them which was well known. Although Tony knew it was mostly down to a combination of shock, his guilt, and an unbridled fury at Gibbs heartless humour at Tony’s expense. It was also a little too close to another close call when Vanessa, the disturbed barmaid kidnapped him and locked him up in the sewer tunnels under DC.

As Tony began writing his report the next day after crashing for eighteen hours of sleep interposed by gory dreams, he pondered what the hell was it about the NCIS major case response team that they encountered so many serial killers? Jeremy White and Jeremy Davison were both serval killers as was Vanessa, who was abducting the Marines who’d tried to smuggle their Filipino girlfriends back to American, only to die of dehydration and starvation. Statistically speaking, catching three serial killer cases in eight months was extremely improbably for a Major crimes team. At this rate, he should check with his buddy Derek Morgan at the BAU, to see if they had an opening.

Despite them closing the case and retrieving the missing antiquities, they’d been on stand down for almost a week while IA investigated him shooting and killing a civilian, plus they had to be certain that White had killed Billy Collins who Tony knew as Lane Danielson. It was standard operating procedure after an agent shot and killed someone, but it meant he wasn’t cleared to go out into the field, plus he had mandatory counselling and a psych assessment before he was allowed to return to active duty. Naturally, Gibbs didn’t handle the compulsory stand down of the MCRT well, making life difficult for everyone on the floor and when Tony was finally declared fit for the field, their first case was a cold one which had suddenly turn hot.

The mysterious disappearance of Naval pilot Brian McAllister, from a wealthy family who went missing a number of years ago and hadn’t been seen since, led to the case going cold. That was despite there being a massive search launched for the pilot and his grief stricken father, fearing the worst, posting a million dollar reward for information leading to the capture of his murderer. Yet a few weeks ago, a former NYPD detective, turned private investigator called Munroe Cooper (who also wrote true crime fiction books and had become a minor celebrity), claimed he’d solved Brian McAllister’s disappearance. He’d contacted the local sheriffs’ Department, asserting he’d tracked Brian’s car to Black Lake where the car had ended up, submerged in the lake. It turned out that he was right, they’d finally located Lieutenant McAllister’s car and when they hauled it out of the lake they discovered a body inside the Ford convertible.

Initially, it looked as if McAllister had had a tragic accident. Cooper had claimed to have figured out where he ended up due to satellite data, theorising that the lieutenant had taken the more treacherous route and gone back home to visit his father and brother. Due to a bad storm that had washed out the safer route, he took the dangerous alternate route and he’d been driving too fast for the conditions and taken a curve to fast. After getting the car and the skeletonized remains back to NCIS, Ducky confirmed that the remains DNA and dental records matched the data the navy had on file, proving that the bones were those of McAllister. After so much time, there was no way Ducky would have been able to determine cause of death, except that while examining the Ford convertible, Abby had found bullets from a gun lodged in the side door suggesting that McAllister death wasn’t accidental after all, it was a murder.

Munroe Cooper kept trying in a not-so-subtle fashion to accuse the lieutenant’s brother, Thomas McAllister of killing his brother so he could claim the reward. Sadly for Cooper, Abby’s forensic tests confirmed that the bullet in the lieutenant’s car had only been fired a few weeks prior to the car being found. Gibbs found Cooper returning the gun belonging to Brian McAllister’s deceased father, which he’d acquired (likely stolen it) using the gun to stage another crime against the psychic who had inherited a chunk of money from McAllister’s dad. It was also the same firearm also used make the lieutenant’s death look like it was murder and when Gibbs found him breaking and entering, the test for gunshot residue on his clothing – his ubiquitous gumshoe trench coat came back positive.

While Tony protested that the GSR test was circ*mstantial evidence and they needed more to get a conviction, because it proved Cooper fired a gun very recently but not which gun, Gibbs ignored him. Sadly, he’d called it correctly, as a competent lawyer soon had the charges of attempted murder of the psychic dropped, but at least Cooper never got to claim the million dollar reward either.

The next case was another goat rope of an investigation with Gibbs caught playing grab ass with someone he met at Bethesda Naval Hospital, a civilian employed by the navy, Karen Wilkerson who turned out to be their perp, killing PO Dion Lambert. And as mitigation – he couldn’t even claim that Wilkerson was a red head, either. Tony was frankly fed up with the unprofessionalism of both Gibbs and Ducky both dating women who were involved in their investigation. If he’d tried it, Gibbs would have torn him a new asshole, but it was a classic case of the Boss’ unnumbered rule, ‘do as I say, not as I do.’ Both of them were old enough to know better!

He just hoped like hell that it didn’t come back and bite them on the ass when the cases went to trial or court martial, in the case of Ducky’s girlfriend, Dr Janice Byers. He did briefly question how Gibbs and Ducky would deal with him head slapping them both since they both needed a damned wake up call for pulling such dumbass sh*t that was also, not surprisingly against regulations.

Eight months!

Gibbs couldn’t believe that it had taken eight freakin months for NCIS to get their first break in the bodies in the barrel case. He was also shocked that their first lead had come through Ducky’s gawky, foot-in-mouth assistant, Jimmy Palmer. He’d noted that one of the victims had lost a thumb and doctors had amputated his big toe to fashion a makeshift one for the victim. That was just wrong on too many levels.

Last May, a barrel filled with body parts and preserved with alcohol was found dumped at Bethesda Naval Hospital and NCIS had been assigned to investigate the case. So far, the investigation was hinged upon the medical examiner getting an ID of the victim, although it soon became obvious over time, that there was more than one body and far too many body part to make reconstruction of the three bodies an easy or quick undertaking. The grisly task was carried out interspersed by many other cases that were more immediate but whenever they had down time, Ducky and Palmer would continue reassembling the macabre human jigsaw puzzles.

And now it seemed that thanks to Palmer’s eagle eye they had finally got a bead on a possible ID of one of the bodies, because having had his big toe amputated and attached to his hand to create an opposable digit was definitely something that helped to ID the victim due to how uncommon it was. Speeding up the process even more, the big toe had sparked a memory in Ducky of a district attorney in Baltimore who he’d worked with a decade before who had a big toe for a thumb. Honestly, Gibbs thought in amusem*nt, Ducky’s memory for inconsequential details was most impressive – his mind was as sharp as the proverbial steel trap!

Now with a possible identity, they obtained ADA Michael Grant’s dental records for comparison after DiNozzo discovered there was a missing person’s report filed after his disappearance last year while hiking on the Appalachian Trail. Once his identity was confirmed, it was a fairly simple process to identify the other two bodies: a judge Roland Davis who went missing around the same time as Grant disappeared last summer and a jury foreman, Carl Foss, also reported missing around the same time.

The only connection to Bethesda Naval Hospital where the three bodies were dumped was a trial in Baltimore into the violent death of a Navy Lieutenant Sylvia Waksal, who worked at Bethesda in the pathology department. The young pathology tech had been stalked by a man who was studying to become a medical examiner. When his attempt to rape her failed – due to his impotency the dirtbag become enraged, and he beat her to death. Ducky had also been a chief witness for the prosecution and the jury had found Vincent Hanlon guilty of second-degree murder and the judge sentenced him to eight years prison.

Which meant that Ducky was also a likely target for the serial killer and Gibbs couldn’t believe that the case had come at a worse possible time for the MCRT, being two agents down. He really wished Palmer had made his brilliant observation a couple of months ago when his team was at full strength. Plus, Ducky was refusing to remain at the office until they caught the sicko who’d already killed three men. While it would have been tiresome to be confined to headquarters, he had a lounge in his office which he could have slept on. But the medical examiner pointed out that his ninety-four-year-old mother, Victoria Mallard was battling Alzheimer’s Disease, which made it impossible for him to not go home at night. Besides, if the killers couldn’t find him, they might take his mother to lure him out instead.

That meant they would have to put a protection detail on them both Mallards and being two agents down that would make it impossible for him to protect Ducky and his mother and investigate the case. He’d peremptorily demanded that Tom give him back his two agents again, but the NCIS director has smirked.

“I don’t think so Gibbs,” he’d countered. “Besides, even with an additional two agents which I’m going to temporarily assign to you, that is not enough to properly protect the Mallards AND investigate whose killed the prosecutor, jury fore person and the judge in the Vincent Hanlon case.”

“I look after what’s mine, Tom.”

“Yes, but you’re forgetting that Ducky doesn’t just belong to the MCRT, he’s the Medical Examiner for the whole of the DC office. He is the NCIS chief medical officer for the entire agency, often serving as a consultant to other NCIS offices on difficult cases; he is a highly valued asset, not to mention I consider him a personal friend. His safety matters to all of us,” Tom objected sharply. “And to protect Ducky and his mother, who you well know has dementia, is going to require a hell of a lot more than one or two agents round the clock. Get real!” he told him with a shake of his head.

“I’ve known him longer than anyone else,” Gibbs argued.

“Then I would have thought you’d be falling over yourself in gratitude that I’m going to give you extensive resources to protect him and the formidable Victoria Mallard properly,” the director told him firmly. “This shouldn’t be about some macho posturing about turf.”

“Trust my agents. Don’t trust people I haven’t trained.”

“You trained your former agents to ignore the chain of command, you dumbass. Hypothetical here! If McGee and DiNozzo were supposed to be guarding the Mallards and DiNozzo noticed a threat and told McGee to take the pair and hide in a bedroom and he didn’t follow orders because you taught him that he could ignore his senior field agent, you’d be culpable for anything that happened to them!”

Gibbs opened his mouth to argue but Tom pointed a finger at him. “NO. I’m not reassigning McGee or Todd back to your team. This case affects us all so I’m calling for volunteers from all teams to help mount a proper round the clock protection detail, with two exceptions, since I can’t trust either agent to follow orders.”

He scowled at Gibbs intensely. “In addition, I’m assigning Balboa and his team to help investigate the case. The sooner we apprehend the killer, the better. Figure out between you, which team lead will supervise the protection detail,” he ordered before getting up and leaving his office to head to MTAC to forestall any further tantrum throwing by Gibbs.

Gibbs was pissed off at Morrow for being so intractable but focused on the most critical thing which informing Ducky that he was now on stand down. Plus, he needed to go with a team of agents to collect Victoria Mallard and bring her back to the office while they formulated a plan to protect the pair. While Balboa’s team accompanied Duck to pick up his mother, Jethro stormed off with DiNozzo to interview the family of Vincent Hanlon. Hanlon had died a couple of years ago, not long after he’d served his prison sentence for killing Lieutenant Waksal a decade before.

His parents, Mary and Fred Hanlon owned and ran a funeral home. Vincent’s mother was exceptionally hostile and domineering, while her husband was submissive and servile. Mrs Hanlon made no bones about the fact that she blamed them for the death of her precious son and his incarceration which triggered it. She was in complete denial about him being a murderer, maintaining he couldn’t possibly kill someone – he’d been in medical school. Gibbs couldn’t help but think about all the monsters who’d been medical doctors who turned into sick murders during Hitler’s reign of terror, or Ari Haswari for that matter who went to Ducky’s alma mater for his medical training.

As they got into the car afterwards and drove off to go talk to Vincent’s brother, Jonathon who was a taxidermist, DiNozzo glanced at Gibbs.

“Well she didn’t hold back did she?”

“Ya think,” Jethro snarked, at him passive aggressively.

The younger agent deliberately ignored him. “She was taunting us, trying to psyche us out. But she also was too damned smug. I think we need to investigate her precious little Vinnie’s death.”

Gibbs grunted his agreement. “Need to get an exhumation order,” he said, driving in his usual suicidal manner as Tony reflexively clutched the oh-sh*t handle, and he continued to mull over the encounter.

And if Gibbs wasn’t convinced that the family was involved in the three murders before, after interviewing Jonathon he knew they’d found their culprits. Jonathon was a seriously freaky dirtbag who had described to them the death of his brother in a car accident in which he’d been a passenger in the car. He dispassionately recounted how it hit a tree and exploded, before expressing his regret that the laws didn’t permit him to stuff his brother.

As they left Jonathon’s workshop, Gibbs waited, knowing that DiNozzo wouldn’t keep his feelings to himself. And he wasn’t disappointed.

“Well he didn’t do a lot to hide his resentment at Vinnie being the favourite son. Talk about sibling rivalry.”

“Wanting to stuff his brother give you a clue?” Gibbs snarked.

“Yeah, Ron’s resentment was pretty transparent, but it wasn’t directed at us so much as at his parents and his brother.”

“Jonathon,” Gibbs corrected him, wondering why DiNozzo grinned. He and his father were the weak links in the chain – they’d crack in interrogation easy enough, but Mary was a whole different kettle of fish.

Once they got back to the office, they found Mrs Mallard with two of her corgi’s trailing around behind her creating havoc as she accosted agents, warning them she carried a knife in her brassiere and demanded that anyone who was female show her their knickers. Ducky was looking increasingly frazzled as his mother showed a remarkable propensity for slipping away but he was also finding it embarrassing having her around his colleagues and treating him as a naughty child. But Victoria was certainly confirming the director’s point that it would require multiple agents to guard the mother and her son properly. That pissed Jethro off, not liking to be proved wrong.

He noticed DiNozzo approach Ducky, speaking sotte voce to the older man whose harried expression immediately cleared.

“That is an excellent suggestion, Anthony. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it, he said gratefully. “I’ll attend to it immediately,” he said slipping out of the conference room.

Tony turned around to see Gibbs glaring at him with his ‘ I want a sitrep NOW’ stare.

“I suggested that it might be less stressful for all concerned if Mrs Mallard’s daytime caregiver be allowed to stay with her while she’s here at NCIS. At least she knows her, and Mrs Mallard will find it less stressful if there’s another familiar face here with her.”

Gibbs nodded. “Makes sense. I wonder why Ducky didn’t think of it.”

“He’s under a lot of stress. Bad enough that someone is taunting him, but worrying about his mother who is compromised must be torture,” he said with a grimace.

As Ducky returned with Director Morrow, they approached Gibbs and DiNozzo. The ME looking a great deal happier.

“Mother’s caregiver Moira Edwards has agreed to keep an eye on Mother while we remain here at NCIS,” he informed the pair. “The danger will be minimal to Moira here. And young Mr Palmer has already sallied forth to organise for some bedding and puppy pens to corral Contessa and Tyson from a doggy rescue group Abby works with.”

“What’s with the pooches, Duck?” Gibbs said gruffly. NCIS was no place for animals.

“Mother. She was most insistent, Jethro. She and Moira were just about to go for a stroll with her two favourite corgis. It’s part of her regular exercise routine,” he explained gravely. “Fortunately, Agent Lyndhurst was able to persuade Mother to cooperate by telling her she could go for a walk around the navy yard with them. Emmaline managed mother most adroitly,” he said with tired grin.

“And as stressful as she is finding it being here in unfamiliar territory, I’m sure the presence of her beloved pets are familiar and comforting to her,” Tom commented sympathetically.

“Yes, you are quite correct, Director. Her corgi pack are really her life now. All of her contemporaries have already passed away, are too frail to socialise or cannot deal with her mental deterioration before their eyes. Alzheimer’s is a cruel disease,” Ducky concluded sadly.

Gibbs kept his mouth shut but he wasn’t happy. He’d be having a word with Lyndhurst later for bringing those snappy little ankle biters to NCIS. Especially Tyson. He’d made the mistake of patting the little sh*t one day when he dropped something off to Ducky and the blighter bit him.

Ducky explained that he was named after Mike Tyson the boxer, or as Duck described him, the pugilist, not because of his scrappy personality but his proclivity to bite. Damn thing was dangerous!

Crazy thing was, Victoria Mallard might not recognise people anymore, not even her son at times. Yet despite her deteriorating mental state, she could still recognise every one of her seven Welsh Corgis without confusing their names or identities. The damned pesky yappy little things all looked alike to him. Give him a gundog any day!

Meanwhile, the director had called all those present in the conference room to order so they could discuss the situation with Gibbs, DiNozzo and Balboa’s team and some of the other senior supervisory agents who were able to attend. After a brief rundown of the situation, he announced that until they caught the killers, Ducky was on stand down and under protective custody, as was his mother. He’d organised for a temporary replacement, a Dr Jordon Hampton to fill in for him until this situation was resolved.

Gibbs gave a short summary of what they’d found out about possible suspects and what had gone down when they interviewed the Hanlons. Balboa asked DiNozzo about his impressions which irked Jethro, although not as much his agent constantly referring to the parents Fred and Mary as Molly and Arthur and the other agents smirking or outright chuckling. When he mentioned that it was pretty telling that Ron expressed disappointment at not being permitted to stuff his dead brother’s body, most people looked sickened.

“Yeah, I think Ron feels a lot of barely repressed jealousy for Percy who he sees as Mommy’s fav,” he stated as people chuckled some more.

Gibbs was starting to think DiNozzo might be cracking up when Tom frowned at him and said, “Haven’t you heard of Harry Potter, Jethro?”

Glaring at the director, he said curtly, “Nope. What’s his connection to the Hanlons?”

Rolling his eyes, Tom replied, “I’ll fill you in later.” Addressing Tony, Morrow asked, “So I take it that you think that Ron and Arthur are our best avenues to put pressure on?”

DiNozzo grinned. “Probably, but Molly’s definitely calling the shots and she was taunting us. But then the fact that another barrel turned up at Ducky’s home while you were there collecting Mrs Mallard’s a definite gibe. She’s calling us out and trying to psych Ducky out too.”

At the first part of his statement, Gibbs was frowning angrily at the mention of the barrel which they’d learned about when they got back to the office, he nodded.

“She’s one angry mother bear and would revel in inflicting torture on Duck, but she was too damn smug, like she has some surprise up her sleeve,” he said feeling furious.

“I take it that’s why you want Vincent Hanlon’s body exhumed to ensure he’s really dead?”

“The fact that his parents were probably the ones who handled the funeral of their son makes it logical that they could have faked his death if anyone could,” Gibbs shrugged. “And Mary Hanlon was hiding something, and I don’t think it was that she killed men she blamed for convicting Vincent.”

SSA Robyn Stanton shook her head in revulsion. “Is anyone else grossed at by the thought that the Hanlon’s would conduct their own son’s funeral or am I the only one who thinks that odd or…” she struggled to find the right words to express her thoughts.

“Inappropriate?” Ric Balboa asked as others nodded.

“Depraved,” DiNozzo offered. “I agree with Robyn, but what we need to keep in mind, this family is like a twenty first century version of Morticia and Gomez Addams. Hell, Jonathon was all cut up, not because his brother died, but because the law says taxidermy is illegal for humans.”

Charlie Zeng, the youngest agent on Balboa’s team whispered to his teammate, Em Lyndhurst, “That’s so wrong. What a f*cked-up family!”

Zeng’s whisper wasn’t as quiet as he thought and most people heard him, nodding in agreement. It was definitely messed up.

Although Gibbs glared at the baby-faced agent, he didn’t disagree with his sentiments. The whole family gave off a real sick puppy vibe, as Abbs would say.

“Do we have any idea of who was in the barrel that they dropped at Dr Mallard’s house?” Morrow wanted to know.

“Waiting on dental confirmation. The lead detective from Baltimore was reported missing about a month ago. Dr Jordan is waiting on the dental records to arrive,” Balboa reported shortly.

Gibbs gritted his teeth. “It’s him. Has to be.”

“Why is the killer targeting Dr Mallard? Why didn’t they simply kill him like the others. It wouldn’t have been that difficult to catch him unawares,” Matt Anderson asked curiously.

“Good question, Matt because most perps put most blame on a judge or the prosecutor,” DiNozzo complimented him. “Two possible explanations, the Hanlons are obsessed with death. The parents own a funeral home, so dear old dad conducts funerals while mom is the embalmer and mortician. Jonathan is the taxidermist and Vincent was studying to be medical examiner, so the ME who testified against him is the most significant one in their universe. They feel a kinship because his life too is consumed with dead people.”

“What the second explanation?” Tom asked as Ducky stared at him inquisitively.

“Something a whole lot more personal,” DiNozzo replied. “Vincent wanted to be a medical examiner to round out the family ‘business’ and his career was thwarted by a medical examiner. It makes sense that he would want to taunt and torment the person he identified strongly with and also blamed for ruining it. Targeting Ducky is extremely personal.”

“And that’s why you think Vincent Hanlon faked his own death?” Agent Lyndhurst asked.

Ducky nodded. “It certainly makes a great deal of sense that he could be the killer,” he said. “He wants to teach me a lesson and if he is the killer, he is no doubt enjoying how long it took me to identify the first three bodies. But for Mr Palmer, and the prosecutor’s thumb reconstruction, it is possible that they would forever remain three John Does, he said dolefully.

“He must be pretty co*cky,” Balboa observed. “As Matt said, he could have taken you at any time for months with none of us being any wiser about what was happening,” he said as everyone pictured the gruesome image of Ducky ending up in a barrel like the others.

“Killing wasn’t enough payback. He wants Ducky to be afraid. Not just for himself but for his mother,” Gibbs voiced the thought that others were thinking.

“Which is why we should turn the tables on the monster,” Tony blurted out. “Bait ourselves a trap.”

“And how do we do that. DiNozzo?” Gibbs asked sarcastically.

“Doppelgangers. He looked at Emmy critically, “Agent Lyndhurst is about the right build and height to be Mrs Mallard. We put a wig on her, dress her in a Laura Ashley dress, a cashmere cardigan and pearls and spray her in Chanel number 5. Of course we’ll need to get a professional makeup artist in to add sixty years to her face and hands but I’m pretty sure it will work,”

Lyndhurst was nodding enthusiastically. “Count me in,” she said. “Luckily I’m a dog person and Mrs Mallard’s corgis liked me, so that’s not a problem.”

“Finding someone to play Ducky will be a bit trickier but I’m sure we have someone who can fit the bill. I can’t because I’m four inches too tall, although I can do a passable British accent,” he said musingly.

“To what end, Tony” SSA Robert James asked.

“We make them think that we only have one agent watching Ducky and Mrs Mallard while in reality we have the house wired and agents hidden inside and outside. We lay a trap,” he replied with a feral grin.

“And Mrs Mallard?” the director asked?

“We send the Mallards to a safe house. Look, I know that going to strange places causes her distress,” he told Ducky, ‘But you’ll be there with her, and she has Tyson and Contessa to help ground her and you’ll both be safe,” he said persuasively.

Ducky looked like a balloon that someone had pricked. Apparently DiNozzo had pre-empted all of his arguments and reminded Duck that Victoria needed him to remain alive more than he needed to be involved in the capture. While Ducky was far from just a highly respected medical examiner, he was also a man who was in his early seventies and playing safe was not a sign of failure.

The director gave the go-ahead for them to lay a trap to catch their killers, departing to locate a suitable safe house that they could use to that was dog friendly. Luckily they already had dog beds and pens that Jimmy Palmer had previously collected. He’d send him out to acquire some bowls and food for the critters too.

After the meeting ended, Balboa and Gibbs started to draw up a plan. They had a sociopathic killer to catch.

As word spread around the office, an email from SSA Balboa was issued asking for volunteers to help out with surveillance. Agents Todd and McGee both volunteered, as did most other agents who didn’t have familial responsibilities caring for young or elderly family members. Both of Gibbs former agents were fond of Ducky and didn’t want anything to happen to the veteran medical examiner, but it was safe to say that both agents also saw it as a way to earn brownie points.

Caitlin Todd had after all, had been on the President’s protection detail – she was far more qualified than anyone and was rather miffed that she hadn’t been placed in charge of the whole shebang. McGee reckoned that while he was not as experienced as Cate and Tony as a field agent, his expertise with technology meant that he’d be a boon in the electronic surveillance aspects of the operation. He was surprised that they hadn’t approached him directly, since he was the logical person to be in charge of the tech side of things.

When they were both called to a conference room for a meeting with the Director and SSA Balboa, they were shocked when Balboa thanked them for volunteering but declined their offers.

Cate was mortified. “Why are you declining our help? I am former Secret Service and I…”

“Protected the President. We. Know,” Balboa interrupted her.

“I’m more qualified than anyone here,” she argued belligerently.

“Maybe you are,” Ric said, his tone suggested he was humouring her. “But the fact remains, other agents have refused to work with you. Both of you,” he specified looking at McGee.

“Why?” she asked, cluelessly and indignant.

“I’d hazard a guess it’s because they’ve seen you ignore orders from higher ranking agents. This Op is far too important to take chances with the Mallard’s lives,” Balboa said bluntly. “Plus, aside from being insubordinate, there is the mess you made of your last protection detail when you let an escaped felon gain access to your protectees – two elderly people and a child…”

“He was innocent,” she protested.

“Yeah, lucky for you. But you had no way of knowing that when he snuck past and disarmed you and restrained you,” Balboa said harshly, as Cate saw McGee looking smug and kicked him under the table.

“Then there’s the massive elephant in the room. You act so damn superior – take every opportunity to remind everyone you were an agent for years and protected the POTUS. Do you even have a clue how much federal agencies leak? Feds are the biggest bunch of gossips, and we know why you resigned from the Secret Service, Agent Todd,” he said disdainfully, as McGee’s ears pricked up.

“None of the team leaders want you working with them because aside from your inability to observe the chain of command, you placed the national security of the US in peril ignoring fraternisation rules. Your affair with the president’s football carrier might have seemed like a bit of fun to you, but your colleagues at the Secret Service, particularly the female agents are very pissed off at you that you got off so easy.”

Morrow nodded. “Balboa is correct. No one wanted you placed on their team and SSA Cabot finally agreed to give you a shot, although from the reports I’ve been receiving, she is probably regretting it. And as for you, Probationary Agent McGee, stop smirking at your colleague’s expense,” he said sharply. “No one wanted you TAD on their team either. Between your illegal hacking, your investigative inexperience despite your sizeable ego and your father and grandmother pulling strings to prevent you being terminated, you strangely enough haven’t won any friends amongst the field agents in DC, either.”

Balboa contained his grin as he said, “Strange as it seems, someone with nine weeks field who ignores their direct supervisor and thinks he’s qualified to lecture him on investigative matters when that supervisor has almost a decade of law enforcement and investigative experience is seen by other SSAs like me as a liability in the field, McGee. The ONLY team leader who agreed to take you on was Shep and probably only because he served with Admiral McGee and owed your old man a favour,” Ric scowled at the so-called computer genius.

“We don’t care how good you are with all that computer and technology crap, McGee. If you can’t follow orders and respect the chain of command then perhaps you should think about a different line of work because there is no I in team.”

“But we were following Gibbs orders,” Cate protested.

“It’s not fair. Agent Gibbs said we only had to obey his orders, not Tony’s,” McGee complained speaking simultaneously.”

Morrow looked at them both incredulously. “You were in the Secret Service Agent Todd. You know how the chain of command works. Tell me, if an NCIS agent – say for example Agent DiNozzo was put on your team with no protection experience or training and your boss Agent Bauer told DiNozzo he didn’t have to follow your orders only Bauer’s, how do you think people would react? How would you react?”

Cate’s face went bright red and then a sickly pale green, looking like she might be about to puke.

Morrow turned his attention to McGee. “Your father and grandfather achieved the rank of admiral, and you grew up on navy bases with your sister, so I know you understand all about how chain of command works, McGee. If an Admiral told his ship full of Marines and sailors that the only person, they were to obey was him, would it be okay to ignore the chain of command?”

McGee looked like someone clobbered him with plank of two by four hardwood.

Seeing that his analogies might have finally hit home, Tom sighed. “Thank you for volunteering but until you both are able to demonstrate you’re willingness to follow the chain of command and an understanding that you both have minimal investigative experience, then your colleagues will continue to regard you both as liabilities. Now get back to work,” he barked at them crisply.

Both agents walked away, their shoulder slumped in defeat, perhaps for the first time since Ms Bromstead filed the insubordination complaint against them. Maybe, just maybe they were beginning to see exactly how much of an mess they were in.

Tom hoped so because being a team player was more than just being able to work with your immediate team.

~oOo~

In the end, the case was wrapped up rather swiftly. After Gibbs and Tony’s visit to the Halon’s at their funeral home, it seemed that Mary Hanlon and Vincent (who’d faked his own death with the help of his delightful mother), were infuriated by their visit or felt that they were getting too close. For whatever reason, the pair seemed determined to finish what they started, and their sting went to plan. Albert Wallace, a former agent who’d retired several years ago but still worked as a consultant and lectured at FLETC stepped up to help them out.

Wallace was a similar build and height to Ducky and immediately agreed to play the medical examiner, especially when he was briefed on the security detail involved. Other than his similar appearance he was able to manage a half-ways decent British accent – not good enough to pass muster up close with someone who knew the real medical examiner but suffice for this operation. Luckily he had an English daughter-in-law and by the time the Hanlon’s realised they’d been duped, the trap would be sprung.

While his long suffering spouse hadn’t exactly been all that keen on the idea, Albert had jumped at the chance to get back in the game again. He’d reminded Lorraine that Ducky had probably saved his life when he’d been the first responder on the way back from a crime scene some years before. Albert’s team had been involved in a motor vehicle accident which had been fairly serious. Albert had a collapsed lung from a broken rib and Ducky had inserted a chest tube to remove excess air and allow him to breathe again and given him oxygen. After that reminder of the debt that Wallace felt for the ME, Lorraine had stopped objecting, but exhorted him to be careful. Wallace had told Tom he would be there as soon as he could drive in from Bethesda.

While they were waiting for Albert to get to the Navy Yard to prepare before heading out to Ducky’s place in Reston, Agents Lyndhurst (playing Victoria Mallard) and Zeng, who was designated as their official ‘bodyguard’ for the evening were collecting the surveillance gear needed for the sting. Once Wallace, Lyndhurst and Zeng returned to Ducky’s house they would set up cameras and bugs so the agents upstairs out of sight and the agents stationed outside around the grounds would have eyes and ears on them at all times. Plus ‘Ducky’ and ‘Victoria Mallard’ would be wearing tracking devices and wires, plus lapel pin cameras just in case the worst should happen.

Everyone else was gradually making their way to Reston to get into position before doppelganger Ducky, Victoria and their bodyguard, Charlie Zeng arrived back at Ducky’s home to settle in for the night. Some agents were going in undercover as lawn maintenance and the extra workers in the van would sneak away while tending the lawns. Others would park in the street behind Ducky’s and make their way in surreptitiously, including the agents who would be waiting upstairs so they could be on the scene quickly. All three agents would also be armed, even Wallace since his status as a consultant and his own licence to carry a weapon meant he was armed too. Since agents remained targets of people they’d sent to prison, many former cops and agents felt safer being armed, just in case.

They were notified that Vincent Hanlon’s exhumation had been approved by a judge and Morrow had already arranged for the Mount Ephraim Cemetery to standing by ready to begin exhuming his body asap so they should know later on today if Vincent was truly dead or not. Tony had suggested to Gibbs that perhaps it might be a good opportunity to find out what Jonathon Hanlon knew, especially if they informed him that Vincent’s body was going to be examined. Fred Hanlon was another possibility, but it was doubtful that his wife would permit him to talk. There was no doubt who held all the power in their relationship, according to Tony who’d dubbed them as Molly and Arthur Weasley on steroids.

Morrow had to stifle a laugh at Gibbs’ angry expression. He clearly did not have a clue about who the Weasley’s were, nor did he appreciate the fact that everyone else seemed to get the joke, when most people in the conference room chuckled at the mental image Agent DiNozzo’s joke had invoked.

As the team of Gibbs and DiNozzo departed to collect their creds and weapons before bringing in the taxidermist, one smartass commented. “Hope Mary Hanlon ain’t a redhead, though!”

Jethro clearly heard it since he scowled at the SFA Lyall Jennings from Sherry Whately’s team. Still even if he didn’t get the Weasley joke, he must have figured with his penchant for redheads, that the crack was made at his expense. It was after all, common knowledge that his three ex-wives were all red head, plus there was the mysterious auburn-haired girlfriend with the silver BMW convertible.

By the time Gibbs and DiNozzo had returned with Jonathon Hanlon and situated him in the interrogation room, Tony had easily built up a rapport with Jonathon, the creepy taxidermy guy. He’d complained to Jonathon that his dad played favourites, always siding with his younger sibling because he was much smarter that Tony was and wasn’t always joking around. Plus, when his older sister came home after getting making a big mistake in her last job and was asked to leave the company, his father made her vice president of the family business even though Tony had been the one in charge before she returned home.

Balboa and Morrow were in the observation room with a stony-faced Gibbs, as Tony warmed up Hanlon so that Gibbs could go in and crack him like an egg. Both men wondered if Gibbs had caught on to the fact that Tony was establishing a connection with the taxidermist by essentially using the dynamics of Gibbs agents to add authenticity to his chattiness. He’d told Johnathon he was sorry to keep him waiting but his boss would be along to ask him questions when he got around to it.

Jonathon had looked uneasy at that information. Clearly the taxidermist was feeling nervous. “Can’t you ask me the question’s Agent DiNozzo, so I can go home?” he asked, his eyes darting around the room constantly.

“Hey, call me Tony. We could be here for hours, so there’s no need to stand on formality,” he said sociably. “Unfortunately, the boss won’t let me question suspects. He thinks I’m not smart enough,” he said, looking downcast.

“Sounds like my mother. Vincent was always the golden child, I was the disappointment,” he grumbled.

Tony huffed. “Tell me about it. My Dad used to tell me that I’d end up in the gutter and that I’d end up alone,” he said looking depressed.

A little while later he arranged to have food sent in and ordered enough for himself so they could share a meal. Over hamburgers and fries, when Jonathon inquired about how much longer Gibbs would be, Tony informed him that Gibbs was probably down in autopsy huffing and puffing over the exhumed body of his brother, since Gibbs didn’t believe Vincent was dead. Then he looked frightened.

“Hey, I wasn’t supposed to tell you that,” he said, “My boss will kill me if he finds out. Please don’t tell him.”

Balboa looked at Gibbs and Morrow. “Oh he’s good,” he said admiringly.

When Gibbs went in fifteen minutes later with a big fat file, mostly stuff from other cases and memos to pad the file which had the name Jonathon Hanlon on it, he barked at Tony, “What do you think you’re doing, DiNozzo?”

“Mr Hanlon was hungry.”

“Not what I meant. Who said YOU could eat?”

Tony looked nervous. “No one, Boss.”

“That’s right. You eat when I say you can. Now get back to work and stop wasting time. Next time I catch you goofing off, you can find somewhere else to do it,” he snapped at DiNozzo as he jumped up obediently.

Tony was doing one helluva job in acting cowed and servile. It was something he and Gibbs had discussed in advance, with Tony acting resentful, jealous, and fearful while Gibbs would humiliate him, disparage and bully him. Having seen the way his mother Mary acted with her husband, it was a safe bet that creepy Jonathon, who was the opposite of charismatic and confident, would be despised by his mother and their plan was to exploit it to crack him.

Yet even though he knew their interaction was performative theatre for Hanlon’s benefit, the director felt an uncomfortable feeling overwhelm him. He could only describe it as a sort of presentient gaze into a future a la Dickens A Christmas Carol that made Morrow feel like while this was just an act right now, given enough time, it could be real. It felt a snapshot peeking five or ten years into the future that might be if DiNozzo should stay too long in Gibbs shadow.

If Gibbs didn’t get an attitude adjustment, Tony’s servile cowed demeanour could easily become a reality. He vowed not to let that happen because as confident and brash as Tony DiNozzo came across to the world, Morrow was smart enough to know it was merely his default setting, a defence mechanism to protect a man whose psyche had been deeply wounded growing up. Somehow, as good as his shields were, and he managed to shield a lot of people who never managed to see beyond the most superficial, Gibbs had managed to cut right through, leaving him vulnerable as hell to Gibbs’ powerplays.

As Gibbs advised Hanlon of his Miranda rights, he was ready to cave, waiving his right to a lawyer, happy to drop his mother in it for faking her favoured son’s death. It seems that Vincent was the apple of his mother’s eye, the one smart enough to go to medical school. Jonathon claimed his brother came out of jail a broken person, filled with anger that his medical career was over and that no one wanted to hire him. After Vincent almost killed them both one night driving drunk and running into a tree, Mary Hanlon came up with the bright idea of faking his death to give him a start over. While Gibbs accused Jonathon of removing his brother’s teeth and sticking them into a corpse from the funeral home since it would be right up his alley as a taxidermist, he was quick to reject his allegation, blaming his mother for removing them all from Vincent.

And honestly, there was nothing sick about a mother ripping out every tooth in her favourite son’s head while he was alive and kicking and putting them in someone else’s mouth. Any doting mother would do the same, Morrow thought mockingly. Mary Hanlon sounded like a real piece of work, alright. No wonder Jonathon was as creepy as f*ck with a mother like that, and if she had a personality like Molly Weasley, no wonder she made sure to emasculate the men in her life.

Balboa must have been thinking along similar lines since he’d murmured, “Wonder if his mother is into the whole S&M scene?”

Shortly after, with Dr Jordan confirming that the corpse was not Vincent Hanlon, only his teeth were buried with a John Doe, and Jonathon Hanlon had provided NCIS with a statement, and stuck in the cells overnight. Ducky and Mrs Mallard were dispatched to a safe house with a four-agent protection team and other agents lined up to replace them in eight hours. Meanwhile with the other agents already in place at the Mallard’s home in Reston, Wallace dressed in bow tie, suspenders, Ducky’s coat and his rather battered but favourite hat and Lyndhurst dressed as a ninety-four-year-old English lady and Agent Zeng as their ‘bodyguard’ were already well ensconced at Reston House. The makeup artist who DiNozzo had hunted down had done a remarkable good job at making them up to resemble Victoria and Donald Mallard – at least from a distance.

Within twenty minutes of arrival, the two current and one former agent had the house wired and cameras strategically installed, and they had settled in to wait, hoping that Mary and Vincent Hanlon would take the bait. As it turned out, Wallace who had spent years working with Ducky, not only managed to produce a respectable accent, but he’d obviously bothered to listen to some of Mallard’s rambling stories and was recounting them enthusiastically.

Lyndhurst was also enjoying herself playing a women who was six decades her senior, torturing her team mate, accusing him of being a gigolo who was trying to seduce her and informing him that she carried a knife in her brassiere if he was inappropriate with her. Plus, Ducky had told her that his mother was constantly asking visitors to rearrange the furniture in the living room or parlour as he called it, so she was torturing Agent Zeng, although he took it in good humour. Charlie Zeng was a personable young agent and Tom knew that Lyndhurst’s teasing was harmless. It was for the sole purpose of selling the sting rather than there being any malice as Balboa’s team had a healthy team dynamic and Em was a team player.

The Hanlons, mother and son came at 2300 as the NCIS agents slowly but inexorably closed the noose around their quarry. Balboa disabled their van, which they left down the street a ways, arresting Fred Hanlon (their wheel man) on conspiracy to abduct for the present with other charges pending. Ric told Tom, who was watching on in MTAC, that the man was a pathetic worm, masquerading as grown man and offered little resistance but a lot of excuses. No doubt he would turn against his wife to save his own worthless hide so long as he didn’t have to confront her. Gibbs gave the order for the perimeter to close in when Mary created a diversion, releasing a small yapping dog they’d procured and encouraging it to start barking up a storm.

Clearly, they thought that Victoria in her dementia, would assume it was one of her Corgis and be lured outside with the bodyguard racing after her, leaving Ducky alone and vulnerable. Morrow wondered how successful Gibbs former team would have been in dealing with the Mallard’s protection detail had he tried to take care of this situation without all of the other agent’s assistance. Would he really have been stupid enough to have left only one agent inside and another outside while he and the fourth agent chased down leads. In all likelihood, he would have, seeing he’d assigned Todd inside the house and McGee outside in a car to guard a child and his two grandparents from an escaped killer. In a house and grounds, the size of the Mallards’ it would have proved a disaster.

Gibbs ordered Lyndhurst aka ‘Mrs Mallard’ to go into the front yard to check out the dog barking, with Zeng on her six. Once outside they staged a diversion to make Vincent think it was clear to apprehend Ducky, unaware that not only was the fake Dr Mallard armed and dangerous, but six agents were upstairs poised to spring their trap.

“Come on, Mrs Mallard,” Charlie to her. It’s just one of your dogs, barking at a squirrel or something. It’s not safe out here,” he said pleadingly.

“Don’t be ridiculous young man. That’s not my dog. I’ve never seen it before.”

“Of course it is, Mrs Mallard,” he said playing along.

“That unfortunate stray is not mine. I only have Welsh Corgis, young man and that is certainly no corgi, you Oriental gigolo. You lured me out here to have your wicked way with me, didn’t you. But I have a knife in my brassiere,” she informed him sternly.

Meanwhile Vincent had gained access via the rear of the Mallard residence, breaking a window, and grabbing ‘Ducky’ who was dozing in a chair by the fire. Threatening him at gunpoint, he bustled the older man toward the back door of the home, threatening him to make him comply. As Vincent dragged ‘Ducky’ across the manicured back lawn, the former agent managed to get Hanlon to confess that he was going to kill Dr Mallard like he had already killed the prosecutor, judge, jury foreperson, and lead detective. Fred Hanlon had revealed he was supposed to collect his wife and then drive around the block to the property directly behind the Mallard’s home because Vincent was taking him out the back way. After Fred’s confession, Gibbs ordered the takedown.

The agents hidden upstairs exited via the back door stealthily, while the agents assigned around the back and side perimeter converged. Vincent was so surprised at being challenged that the former Agent Wallace was able to punch him in the solar plexus before moving out of proximity, so he didn’t become an unwitting hostage. Both Hanlons were taken into custody, although Vincent, realising that he was caught red-handed had tried to create a death by cop scenario, aiming his gun at fake Ducky but the spotlights which had been set up by the agents that afternoon posing as the gardening crew were switched on, momentarily blinding him.

Gibbs took much satisfaction in shooting him from close range in the forearm, the gun falling from his hand as he wailed with pain and anguish, knowing the fate that awaited him. With four premeditated murders, attempted kidnapping of a federal agent and conspiracy to commit a fifth murder, he was likely to be in prison a damn long time.

Mrs Hanlon when she heard her son’s howl of pain, emerged from the shrubbery and lunged at Mrs Mallard, shocked when the ninety-four-year-old took her down and subdued her easily on the ground. The former Marine chuckled as Zeng handed her a set of cuffs and she arrested Mary Hanlon, dragging the monster to her feet and handing her off to her team leader and temporary SFA.

“Nice takedown, Em,” Matt praised her. Learn that in the Marines?”

Lyndhurst grinned at him cheekily. “Damn straight I did.”

Now finally, after eight months they were finally able to close the case of the bodies in the barrel. Morrow was extremely relieved, and so was Ducky. The four Mallards, Donald, Victoria, Tyson and The Contessa would be allowed to return home later on the next day.

It was almost a week after the successful conclusion to the bodies in the barrel case, also known as the Meat Puzzle Case, which could easily have cost them their medical examiner. While Vincent Hanlon had sustained a gunshot wound to his mid forearm, it was not too serious. His mother ended up with a fractured mandible from Agent Lyndhurst takedown though, and Emmy was awaiting the review, to determine if she’d used excessive force in taking Mary Hanlon into custody, though no one was concerned about the outcome. Gibbs, who usually ignored agents on other teams, had been quite effusive in his praise for the former gunnery sergeant’s efforts, giving Lyndhurst a Oorah and an approving nod.

In spite of all the adulation, Lyndhurst was her usual modest self; she’d just grinned and said that should teach Molly Weasley to go around picking fights with ninety-four-year-old women. When the agents went out to celebrate the successful conclusion to the case, there were plenty of her colleagues vying to buy her drinks. She was gratefully but as she said, even if she was a badass Marine who could hold her liquor, she still had to front up for the inevitable inquiry into Mary Hanlon’s injury during her arrest the next day and confined herself to drinking just a few beers.

Thankfully, the only injury occurring for NCIS during the sting was to probationary agent Wendy Childs who was protecting the Mallards. She’d been bitten by one of Mrs Mallard’s corgis, the notorious Tyson while she was lifting the stumpy legged canine into the agency sedan when he refused to get into the car and Childs was forced to lift him in. Fortunately, she had been wearing a pair of stainless-steel mesh metal gloves supplied by Ducky that he used when he had to lift his mother’s favour dog into the car to take him to the vet. She ended up without a scratch but the Welsh Corgi, named after the boxer Mike Tyson, who famously chowed down on an opponent’s ear, cracked a canine tooth, and ended up requiring dental surgery.

Director Morrow and the MCRT were bracing for the official findings from the Department of Defence’s head of human resources, James Reinbold due out at any time. He’d become involved after Marla Sweeten became aware that Admiral John McGee was involving himself, trying to influence HR’s investigation, so she’d decided it would be fairer if an external investigation were to take place. Particularly since one of the complainants (and witnesses) was a member of the HR department. Gibbs gut told him that escalating the investigation up the chain of command to the DoD was probably not Admiral McGee had in mind when he interceded, trying to avoid his son losing his job. Though he rather suspected that Delores and Marla were more than happy to turn the whole matter over to their colleagues in HR at the Department of Defence, they’d wanted that from the outset, and he played right into their hands, the dumbass.

Reinbold’s investigation had concluded finally, and he released his finding and recommendations just now. . He’d found both McGee and Todd were guilty of gross insubordination, not just in the Jeremy Davison investigation but there was evidence of systemic insubordinate attitudes and behaviour. Gibbs wasn’t surprised by the findings – he actually hadn’t given a f*ck if technically, they were insubordinate to DiNozzo, since the only one who got to give orders on his team was him. He encouraged the two rookies to give DiNozzo as much sh*t as possible, according to Gibbs because it made the former cop even more motivated to prove he was a superior agent. Which to be fair, he was. And that was a problem!

As good as DiNozzo was, he was too damned straight, too ready to obey rules and regulations. He was always trying to make the team obey the law, as if the prey they hunted ever bothered to obey the laws. Gibbs thought that to bring down their prey they needed to act like the lawless dirtbags and ignore rules that impeded their ability to catch criminals. While Anthony DiNozzo was a trained investigator and had a natural flair for it, aside from his training and experience. Todd and McGee had little to no experience to back up their co*cky belief in their abilities, but importantly, both possessed a quality that Gibbs needed.

McGee with his puppy-like eagerness to hack into even classified and top-secret data bases, while Cate’s willingness to put her own craven desires over the security of the commander-in-chief demonstrated an individual that when it suited her purposes, was willing to ignore rules. Gibbs was more than happy to give her and McGee incentive to ignore regs that he saw as getting in his way by pandering to the oversized egos, making them and DiNozzo compete for his hard-won approval. That approval earned them choice assignments and ensured that both rookies would continue to act as renegades not protesting when he needed to take an unorthodox method to catch monsters. That was his primary motivation and it worked. They had a superior case closure rate!

Their less than subtle undermining of the SFAs position and the toxically competitive dynamic also had a secondary benefit. It made DiNozzo much more reluctant to object to McGee’s hacking than he otherwise would be. Cate had already showed that she wouldn’t let rules get in the way of her own needs, plus she was so driven to show up DiNozzo who she’d profiled as an idiot frat boy who happened to be there at the right time when Gibbs was looking for someone to fill the slot. She genuinely assumed that Gibbs’ undermining of the senior field agent was because he was planning on promoting her to be his 2IC, which was pretty damned arrogant.

Similarly, McGee thought he was way smarter than DiNozzo and therefore should be senior field agent despite publicly denying it. But seriously, who would dream of assuring a superior on his very first day on the team that he didn’t have designs on DiNozzo’s job. Even verbalising the ludicrous statement that he wasn’t after Tony’s job implied that he believed he had the ability to do the job when he had zero experience and DiNozzo had nine years combined as a cop and a fed. No wonder DiNozzo didn’t believe him…Gibbs didn’t either, but it worked a treat in fuelling the SFA’s insecurity issues and Jethro sure wasn’t complaining about such a serendipitous happenstance.

Now, suddenly it was all in jeopardy. Jethro couldn’t believe that after so much effort to get the perfect fit of personalities and train them all to bend to his will, that the NCIS dragon lady, Delores Bromstead could undermine everything he’d striven for, everything he’d accomplished. Sure, he was expecting that the review would probably rule against Todd and McGee because technically they were insubordinate, but they were doing exactly what he’d recruited them to do so he could achieve maximum efficiency for this group of individuals. At the end of the day, his team had attained the best closure record in the agency and was the envy of not just his fellow NCIS team leaders but all of the other alphabets too.

Still he was counting on the fact that Reinbold would only make recommendations, he couldn’t actually fire anyone. Ultimately it would be left up to SECNAV to accept or reject his recommendations about what to do with Todd and McGee. And he remained convinced that the threat of Gibbs spilling the beans on one of the man’s hinky sexual fetishes shared with Gibbs by Davenport’s person assistant cum sex therapist would be enough for the two agents to skate with a smack over the knuckles. While he was pissed at having to use up one of his bargaining chips he wasn’t too perturbed about having to relinquish his leverage over Davenport. There were more than one skeletons in Philip’s cupboard, including his corruption when awarding navy contracts to his buddies and a hit and run incident twenty years ago that could f*ck up his life in a big way.

He ignored the small voice inside his head, reminding him that even if Todd and McGee survived, Cate had decided to find a new team and Admiral McGee was putting pressure on Davenport to transfer McGee to San Diego as punishment and keep him away from Gibbs. He remained supremely confident in his ability to get his team back the way he wanted it again. And he wanted it…he wanted it right now!

This working with a newly resurgent DiNozzo and a bunch of TAD agents as needed on various case just wasn’t cutting it for Jethro. He didn’t know if it was a result of the insubordination charges or just the particular trait of the temporary agents that Morrow sent them. Hell it could just be because of the agents who Very Special Agent Anthony DiNozzo Mark II picked out of the agents pool, but they refused to hack illegally. They also refused to look the other way when he decided to take a little excursion over the line into illegal waters and it was frustrating his need to be in control and hunt his prey. Every time he was forced to wait for a warrant to get into a building, or advise some lowlife of their rights, every time he had to wait for approval to snoop into people’s financial records or find out who they talked to on their cells, it made him crazy. His frustration level was through the roof. He was fed up!

So, now that Reinbold FINALLY released his report, it was a relief. The head of the DOD’s Human Resources Department rejected their mitigation that they were following the orders of their boss. Reinbold had asked them if their team leader ordered them to rob a bank would they have followed that order too? He also pointed out tartly that both agents had worked for NCIS or the Secret Service long enough to make a mockery of any claim that they didn’t understand about the importance of the chain of command.

Although he recommended that McGee, as a probationary agent be terminated from serving as a field agent, Reinbold noted that he was unable to recommend he be fired from the agency since he had spent a year previously working at Norfolk. Technically, it made it problematic to fire him outright, but he could and should lose his field agent status immediately. Reinbold stated categorically that an field agent who refused to follow orders in the field was not only a danger to themselves and their fellow agents but to the general public too and that should never be tolerated. He also recommended that McGee should undergo immediate psychometric testing to determine his psychological suitability for further field work. He contended that any probationary agent arguing about investigating rape and sexual violence crimes based on nine weeks of field experience (none of it pertinent to sex crimes) was either dangerously deluded and/or had massive delusions of grandeur considering his skills. Neither of which were desirable traits in a field agent.

Agent Todd was likewise found to have been grossly insubordinate and equally unfit to be arguing about how to effectively investigate sex crimes as she had no experience or specialist training. As she had completed her probationary period, her offence, though serious was not enough to terminate her employment. There was past history of poor judgement or incompetence during her period of employment, to wit her role in the Bombe Fermentdeckung Fabrik US headquarters being blown up by explosives and also the attempt on the life of Captain Rivers and resultant damages sustained by the USS Foster, both extremely serious lapses. Unfortunately, as inexplicably, neither incident had resulted in appropriate official warnings being issued during her probationary period, technically Todd couldn’t be fired either. However, Reinbold was placing an official record of this charge of insubordination in their personnel file, and it would affect further promotional opportunities.

Jethro got that James Reinbolt was scathing about his failure to censure Todd for her screw ups, but he seriously didn’t give a rat’s what some stuffy pencil pusher thought. Reinbold didn’t lead the best MCRT in the US – Gibbs did, and Jethro was going to keep on doing things his way, because he got results and made people like SECNAV look good. But at least with Cate, having a permanent censure on her file, surely she’d find it nigh near impossible to transfer to another team – that’s if Morrow was being up front with him and not playing mind games about her request to transfer. Given her performance at the Secret Service, he couldn’t see many people who’d overlook that, but she had one crucial quality that he needed. Her arrogance succeeded in stirring up every insecurity issue that DiNozzo had and that made him much more malleable. Well, aside from his campaign to rein in Jethro during the hunt for Haswari with his smartass cracks about Moby Dick. But aside from Ari, he’d been far less ready to argue with him about his ‘off books’ methods since Todd joined the team.

As for McGee, his belief that he was the smartest person at the agency meant that Gibbs very much doubted he would be able to settle for being on a team that he felt was second best. His hubris would simply not allow it. Since no one else had anywhere near the clearance rate of Gibbs’ team, it stood to reason that McGee would want to return. The truth was that Cate and McGee needed him as much as he needed their unique skill sets. They’d be back…how could they not?

It never occurred to Jethro to question that the guy who played the biggest role in creating their phenomenal solve rate might ever think about leaving him. He’d slung DiNozzo a life raft when he was drowning in betrayal after discovering his partner was corrupt. Jethro was also there a few months later when his fiancée Wendy left him the night before their wedding; Gibbs had helped him put back the pieces again. He gave DiNozzo a higher purpose, a reason to get out of bed every damned day and face life by chasing down dirtbags and locking them up.

He’d checked the Baltimore cop out thoroughly before deciding he needed him on his team him, (although in fairness, Pacci had done the deep dive for him) and he knew about the kid that the college student DiNozzo had saved from a fire in Baltimore and the one he couldn’t save. He knew that for a college kid with no proper support system to deal with that trauma, it was almost inevitable that he’d end up as a cop seeking redemption for his failure to save Amber King. So, Gibbs was perfectly happy to help him with that quest and couldn’t help but be thrilled at the man’s uncanny ability to slip into someone else’s shoes. With his chameleon like ability and his out of the box thinking, he could get inside other people’s heads and know what they were thinking, Gibbs included. DiNozzo could become someone else in the blink of an eye and that was valuable to the MCRT!

Yet beneath it all, he’d learnt that DiNozzo had a strict moral code that interfered with Gibbs own compulsive need to hunt down and acquire his own form of justice for victims of crime. It was the only thing that marred their perfect compatibility but having Todd and McGee join the team had definitely muted that tendency, since as co*cky as DiNozzo acted, he was incredibly insecure. Normally that didn’t extend to his career as a law enforcement professional, but with Pacci’s thorough deep dive into his background, Jethro’s own contacts plus his observations while working together for a year as partners, the former Marine had a damn good handle on how to push his buttons to create job insecurity.

Everything had been going so well until that stupid Bromstead bitch had stuck her nose in where it wasn’t wanted or needed. Gibbs admitted he hadn’t anticipated his agents being targeted. He’d managed to ensure that any complaints about him, like his head slaps never went anywhere. He’d earned the reputation of being Teflon coated for a damned good reason. Yet he’d foolishly never anticipated that those dragon ladies from HR would switch from trying to control him to targeting McGee and Todd. Clearly that had been a mistake that he would need to address as soon as they returned.

~oOo~

Tony had been in limbo for weeks. He knew that Gibbs was pissed at him for getting Cate and Tim suspended. He knew the score by now – he was supposed to do the SFA paperwork like a good little boy, but he was not supposed to carry out any of the other duties pertaining to the job of senior field agent. Perhaps if he’d never had a taste of seniority, had always been appointed to just handle the piles of admin work that the MCRT generated, it might have been different, but when various probies had come and gone over the last three and a half years, even when Don Dobbs and Vivian Blackadder had hung around for over four months and they were starting to feel like a team, he’d been allowed to lead the team in Gibbs absence.

Gibbs trusted him to choose which agent to bring to Rota where they were setting up a sting to capture Hussan Mohammed. Although in hindsight, his decision to bring Vivian along was not the smartest move, since she’d ended up tipping off Mohammed. He’d gotten the drop on Gibbs, flinging a stun grenade at the Boss who took a header down a ladder. Gibbs with a concussion, was not a pleasant experience and it sounded the death knell for Viv who’d slunk off back to the FBI. But the point was that everything changed when Gibbs hired, first Cate and then things deteriorated even further with McGee on the team.

Cate when she joined, made little effort to hide her opinion that he was a joke – incompetent, and that she was far superior to him, having more years racked up as a federal agent than he did. And while it was true that her eight years compared to his two years when she’d first joined the MCRT was a lot more than him, he had six years as a cop, including serving as a homicide detective. To be a detective at his age was an accomplishment in itself, but to be appointed to the homicide table at the Baltimore PD was considered to be a plum posting by anyone’s standings.

He was the first to admit that her disdain for his experience and skills, plus the hypocritical attitude to gender equality (but only when it suited her purposes), caused him to act out. Yes, he was playing into her false profile, but he was also testing her, wondering how the hell she could call herself a psychological profiler when she failed to see that he was so much more than she gave him credit for. But on their second case with her on the team, after Tony had assigned her a task at a crime scene before Gibbs got there, only to have Gibbs tell her to do something else because he was the only one that she needed to listen to, it felt like the die had been cast. As senior field agent, it had always been within his purview to direct the probationary agent in the Boss’ absence and to have Gibbs countermand him had shocked and hurt him.

It made him think that maybe he wasn’t as good at his job as he’d always imagined. Maybe Gibbs hired Todd to replace him as SFA when her probationary period was up. He knew that he was far from perfect – he talked and joked way too much, but some of it was because it seemed like Gibbs was allergic to talking and he tried to fill the vacuum. He’d grown up in the huge house on Long Island, a lonely only child who never got to go on play dates or have friends over after school. He was constantly told to stop being childish by his father (even though he was a child) and he was severely discouraged from being boisterous. The most childlike behaviour he recalled was climbing the big old pine tree out the back, where he felt like he was a million miles from the suffocating atmosphere inside his house. Of course, when he finally deigned to return to earth, there would be consequences, sometimes he couldn’t sit down for days but it didn’t stop him retreating up there when everything became too much for him to cope with.

He knew that he craved attention but perhaps if his parents hadn’t been too busy making love to their G and Ts (in his mother’s case) and McCallen scotch (in Senior’s case) they might have paid more than just lip service to their child. He preferred to be hit by his father than ignored, and that fierce craving for acknowledgment and validation had never gone away. The trouble was that there had to more to his life and his job than Gibbs’ head slaps and his increasingly rare compliments, which were always negated by an accompanying sarcastic putdown. As much as he craved affirmation, Tony always felt worse after Gibbs praised him and then cut him off at the knees.

He flashed back on the night he returned from the sewer after he’d been drugged by that most rare of criminals – a female serial killer – Vanessa the barmaid and locked up with an emaciated Sgt Atlas and one of his former platoon, now a decomposing corpse. The horror of the experience, plus the fact she’d given him a dose of BRON (a co*cktail of methyl ephedrine, codeine and chlorpheniramine) to take down a horse and hours after he’d come to, it left him feeling buzzed and vulnerable. He’d been desperate for reassurance that Gibbs (anyone) would miss him if he hadn’t got out alive. Gibbs had taken his face in both hands, a hugely intimate gesture that made him thrill and simultaneously feel way too exposed, as he told Tony he was irreplaceable. Yet when they exited the bullpen from the lift, he yelled out to McGee who was ensconced at Tony’s desk, not the spare one, telling him that Tony was still alive so he couldn’t have his desk after all. At any time, it would have been a cruel taunt, but in the emotionally heightened and drug addle state Tony was in, it devastated him.

Little by little, his self-confident dwindled away, he argued less with Gibbs about his increasingly lawless methods and just tried to find ways to justify their arrests that wouldn’t get their cases thrown out of court. Not that he was always successful and when that happened, he felt an overwhelming sense of failure. As a cop who had once reported a forensic irregularity at a lab when he was a Dee in Baltimore, it didn’t sit right with him when Gibbs rode roughshod over the rule of law. More and more he struggled over the conflict he felt between the loyalty he owed Gibbs for saving his sanity after Danny was exposed as a corrupt cop and Wendy his fiancée dumped his right before the wedding. Now his earlier admiration for the agent was becoming increasingly tarnished as he tried to remain true to his oath to serve and protect.

Honestly, he was starting to seriously question if after three and a half year, surely he’d paid his dues? Did he still owe Gibbs anything for rescuing him from the mess back in Baltimore when his boss undercut him at every turn? Just how long did he have to sacrifice his career and his sense of purpose to repay someone who did not have his back?

Four years? Ten years? Until Gibbs retired in 2060…dragged out of the orange bullpen in a casket, having succumbed to old age mid head slap?

Well, if he were to leave, with Cate now free to return, at least Gibbs would have a senior field agent to do the admin crap. And who knows, maybe the Boss would be willing to let her do the rest of the job too. Perhaps Gibbs whole campaign of hobbling Tony professionally had been all about forcing him to resign and move on, and he was just too dumb to see it.

Tony struggled with his desire to leave the MCRT. As much as he loved being on the premier investigative team, allocated all the complex crimes, he was tired of failing to measure up to Gibbs impossible standards. Plus it didn’t sit right to be expected to look the other way when Gibbs had a yen to break the rules. One thing he wasn’t sure of though, was if he transferred to another team in DC if Gibbs would make it impossible for him to stay. There was no denying that the former Marine was good at holding grudges, so it made sense to look for a posting elsewhere.

He winced, suddenly realising why Stan Burley had decided to take the position as Agent Afloat to get as far away from Gibbs as he possible could. Not that Tony wanted to become an agent afloat – he would go loco on a ship for months on end, plus having the entire crew view him as the enemy would suck. Even when he was a cop walking a beat, he’d managed to win the trust of a lot of people in the community. Playing nanny to a bunch of squibs and jarheads who were playing penny-ante poker games and other misdemeanours would be his idea of Hell on Earth. Yet if he were to transfer to another field office it would also mean having to move and leave his apartment.

He loved his apartment. He knew Cate assumed it was some tacky, bachelor pad with mirrors on the ceiling in the bedroom and satin sheets. And he was happy to let her think that because he wasn’t about to correct her faulty profile of him. But he’d bought his place about six months after starting at NCIS and created what was literally his first real home. While the house he grew up in – at least until he was twelve and had been disowned by his deadbeat drunken father for some imagine crime – was supposed to be his home, the ostentatious mansion had never felt safe or homey. In DC he’d created a beautiful, yet homey place for him to escape the horrors that he encountered while on the job and he wasn’t sure if he could leave it behind.

Maybe that meant looking to the FBI or Metro PD for a job. He tentatively started to put some feelers out there about any jobs that might be going. He might get lucky

In the meant time, Tony kept waiting for the Terror Twins to come back to work. He hadn’t talked to them much since they’d been transferred, mostly because they’d been told not to approach him or communicate with him by any means, including through third parties. It hadn’t proved to be that hard to avoid them as both Shepparton and Cabot’s teams’ bullpens were located on the floor below, but he guessed they were pissed at him, although he’d had a talk to Cate about her considering taking a spot on a team at Norfolk a few weeks ago. As for Gibbs, he knew he was pissed at him but because Tony was the only agent still currently on the MCRT the Boss probably didn’t think he could afford to voice his displeasure.

Tony was under no illusions though that when the team was back up to full strength, he would be made to pay by Gibbs, by Cate and by the Probie. Hence his burning desire to make for the hills and save himself a world of heartaches.

—

Notes:

BRON a co*cktail of methylephedrine, codeine and chlorpheniramine which is an OTC cough syrup in Japan.

“What do you mean,‘theyaren’tcoming back?’McGee and Todd got let off with a warning,”Gibbs yelled at Director Morrow.“I told themI’dfix it, and I did. Of course,they’recoming back!”

“Actually, no,they’renot. InMcGee’scase, his old man called in his markers with SECNAV so that Probationary AgentMcGee’ssecond chance wasabsolutelycontingent upon him being reassigned to the (SWFO) in San Diego to work for a year in Cyber. If Agent McGee can keep his nosecleanhe’llget another shot as a field agent slot when one comes up, if he passes his psychometric personality tests. If he messes up,he’sout,”he said dryly.

Inwardly, Morrow was enjoying the look of fury on the team leader of the MCRT – well, what was left of it.

“And Todd, damn it?Tell me who scuttled her return to MY TEAM, Dir-rect-or?”Gibbs spat at him angrily.

The Senior Supervisory Agent was sailing very close insubordinate waters himself, but like always, Gibbs considered himself to be Teflon™ coated. Tom acknowledged that was a fair assessment, unfortunately.

Jethro, as an NCO, had the typical attitude to the officer class, althoughTom had the opportunity to observe his interactions with his former COColonelRyan and with bigwigs like the Commandant of the Marines, General Ellison. He’dalways been appropriatelydeferentialto them. As an NCIS agent, his attitude to people in management certainlyhadn’timproved any. If anything, it seemed to have deteriorated. Gibbswas openly disparagingthe‘Brass’,not wanting to be told what to do, yet he displayed no ambition to go higher than his current rank.

Some people felt that his attitude to management might be a case of sour grapes since his lawlessness made that seem almostan impossibility. Morrow had never bought that scenario, though. Jethro would gobat-sh*tcrazy sitting behind a desk; he needed to be part of the takedown of his so-called dirtbags. It was his raisond’etrefor leaving his basem*nt every day, and if hedidn’thave that, he was sure Gibbs would resign and head on down to join Mike Franks and drink himself to death in Mexico.

“Well, admittedly, Special Agent Bauer may have made a disparaging comment about NCIS rewarding a disgraced Secret Service Agent for breaking fraternisation regulations to the Commander-in-Chief,” he revealed, shocking Gibbs since he thought Bauer was an okay guy, even if he tried to turn over Commander Trapp’s corpse to the FBI.

”Unsurprisingly, the President was also not amused about it, calling SECNAV into the White House for a‘please explain,conversation,’that was rumoured to be highly awkward,”Morrow shrugged because would you expect?

While Tom admitted to experiencing a strong sense of schadenfreude at that snippet of information, the director had successfully concealed it (well, mostly) under his cool, dispassionate directorial façade.

Whatever it was that Gibbs had on Philip Davenport, he speculated, it had to be massive for it to eclipse the consequences of drawing the ire of the Secret Service, plus the President’s extreme displeasure. Given the amount of vetting that took place before Davenport would have been appointed to the role of Secretary of the Navy, it also had to be something buried pretty damned deep. Like halfway to China or else something relatively recent.

“However, SECNAV ordered that since Todd completed her probationary year, McGee was let off with a second chance because while he is a probationary field agent, strictly speaking, she would have a permanent censure placed in her file, too. However, she has to take some classes at FLETC.”

“Thenshe’scoming back after the bastards make an example of her by making her retake classes,”Gibbs looked smug.

Tom had long ago realised that for the former Marine, questioning authority and being able to defy it without consequences was manna from heaven to his ego. The whole getting away with his ‘sticking it to the Man’ attitude was something Leroy Jethro Gibbs got off on. Being able to thumb his nose at authority had always been a strong part of who Jethro was. The chip on his shoulder at the world around him was, no doubt, already there when, fresh out of high school, the young recruit joined the Corps, but boot camp had tamped that part of his personality down a lot while he was an active-duty Marine.

After the loss of his family, the chip on his shoulder metastasized, threatening to engulf Gibbs’ whole persona as he embarked on a futile bid to replace the love of his life and failing, rather than deal with the enormity of what he’d lost. His stubbornness meant that he ended up with three ex-wives and several more red-headed ex-lovers destined to engage in acrimonious breakups when they failed to compete with the ghosts of his first wife and daughter.

Unsurprisingly, the more his personal life tanked, the more critical it became for him to impose an iron-like control over the other parts of his life. Since there was very little that Jethro held dear, aside from woodworking, building boats in his basem*nt, and dating and/or marrying feisty, red-headed females who took a dim view of coming in a distant second to a ghost, it was understandable why he immersed himself in his job at NCIS so intensely.

Given Gibbs’ inability to maintain healthy emotional relationships with the revolving door of red-headed Shannon wannabes, it should hardly have been a surprise that with each relationship wreck, he became ever more obsessive in his ruthless drive to close cases. A need to succeed so unrelenting that it eclipsed everything and everyone else, sucking them all into the maws of its insatiability. To achieve his closure, he was more than willing to ignore procedures and regulations that got in the way of him being able to bring down the perp. By the time he hired Caitlin Todd because ‘she was a profiler who had big balls,’ Gibbs was already a tour de force when it came to blowing off what he called dumbass rules. Sadly, failure by the Brass to hold him accountable when he broke rules, just made him even more arrogant. He became increasingly habituated to the addictive rush of being a renegade.

Thinking back toGibbs’psych evals (the ones the lawless agentwasn’table to ditch the wayhe’dsuccessfully avoided every annual mandatory polygraph over the years), onepsychologist’scomments stood out starkly. She felt that it was very likely that he fulfilled the diagnostic criteria for oppositional defiance disorder as an adolescent. The death of his family was, she felt, the catalyst for its reemergence in adulthood after his marriage, family and career in the Marines had ended in violence.

A different psychologist had described him asdriven;an apex predator addicted to hunting down perpetrators who were caught inGibbs’defence mechanism of projection, the predators serving as surrogates to him hunting down the killers of his own daughter and wife. Something he got to do over and over again on the MCRT. Dr Boyd explained that the hunt for killers had created a neuro-feedback loop of feel-good neurotransmitters, which wasextremelyaddictive.

Conversely, anything that impeded him in his goal-orientated hunting behaviour was viewed negatively,and that includedrules and laws that protected thesuspect’sright to a fair trial. It also included seeing anyone in authority who tried to regulate his actions as a foe. Even more disturbing, Dr Boyd believed when hewasn’table to chase the endorphin high, he suffered from symptoms (physical and psychological withdrawal),that fed his pathological rage. It helped create a toxic work environment, not only for histeam,but, other agents who worked on his floor.

Sighing, Tom broke through the bubble ofGibbs’smugness.“Actually, it was AgentTodd,who requested an immediate transfer to another team. Not just another team, but another office, Jethro.”

“Bullsh*t, Tom! No one else wanted to work with her. Why would she leave?”

“I’m no mind reader. All I know is that she ignored the chain of command. And thanks to it being recorded on an agent’s cell phones, the Department of Defence’s HR had no difficulty in finding her guilty of insubordination,” he told the team leader firmly.

“Maybe she realised that if she went back to work on the MCRT, she would become insubordinate again and needed a fresh start.”

“That’sa pile of horsesh*t, Tom. Cate was not insubordinate, shewas trying to referee two of her teammates who got into a heated discussion. She was being the grownup in the room,”he said furiously.

Feeling like he wanted to throttle Gibb for his wilful blindness, Director Morrow immediately countered that blatantly false narrative. “No, Gibbs. She interfered with her direct superior, who was trying to do his job and educate a couple of newbies who’d never investigated a rape or sexual assault before. A superior, who I might remind you, has investigated more than his fair share of sex crimes than anyone else at the agency, except the Family and Sexual Violence team. Including yourself.”

SeeingGibbs’do-I-look-like-I-give-a-sh*t expression, Morrow huffed loudly.“It might interest you to know that SSA Cabot has been after me for some time now. She wanted to recruit DiNozzo and/or get his assistance to help her run training sessions for the other field agents, especially those in the NCIS RUs and field offices, whodon’thave dedicated Family and Sexual Violence teams.”

Looking murderous, Jethro snarled at him, reminding Tom of a junkyard dog.“He’smine, I found him.”

Smirking, Morrow shook his head.

“You may have recruited him, some three years ago, but you don’t own him. DiNozzo’s not one of your woodworking tools, nor is he an indentured slave, although you’d hardly know it by how you treat him. He’s an autonomous flesh and blood federal agent with thoughts and feelings,” he scolded the unrepentant Jethro fiercely.

Gibbs glared at him incredulously, but Morrow interruptedGibbs’diatribe.

“You listen to me, Jethro! You can call him your loyal Saint Bernard‘tilthe cows come home, but even the most loyal hound dog will finally get fed up with being abused and find a new home. Quit using him as a personal punching bag cum doormat,”Tom’stacit,’You idiot!’was hardly subtle nor intended to be.

Gibbs caught his subtext and scowled at the director, smacking the conference table violently.“You trying to say thatDiNozzo’sbailed on me too, Tom?”

“Not to my knowledge, but Ihaven’tspoken to him yet. Maybeit’stime for you to extract your head out of your ass, Agent Gibbs. I think the toxins might have caused you to lose a significant portion of brain cells,”he said acerbically.

IgnoringGibbs’evident fury, he continued,“We were discussing McGee andTodd’sbreathtaking insubordination, I believe. When McGee got shirty for being verbally called out by a superior ranked agent, Todd took it upon herself to interfere despite beingtotallyill-equipped to do so. Why she felt it was her place to interfere, perhaps you should be contemplating, butI’dsay it was because you failed to enforce the chain of command in the MCRT,” he told Gibbs sternly.

“My team, my rules, Tom. Cate was the equivalent rank to DiNozzo when she was on the POTUS’team,”heargued,heatedly.

“And she endangered national security because shecouldn’tcontrol herself. Todd was having sex with Major Kerry, which was against regulation. When she got caught out, she resigned before they fired her. Yet you hired her despite her awful profiling skills and lack of investigative experience,”Tom pointed out bluntly.“So not AgentDiNozzo’speer…in reality, we are talking about a very junior agent, barely out of her own probationary periodwhotook it upon herself to begin issuing orders she was not authorised to give.”

Gibbs did not like Morrow pointing out the flaws in Gibbs warped little narrative but coming up with rebuttals that consisted of more than denials and BS was not his forte. Tom took advantage of his linguistic deficits to hammer home his argument.

“And Agent Todd had the unmitigated gall and unprofessionalism to tell SFA DiNozzo and Probationary Agent McGee they were worse than her psychotic brothers. She blurred the lines between professional dynamics, like this was some toxic family spat, instead of understanding this was a team of agents in a federal agency.”

“My team, my rules Di-rect-or,”Jethro, ever the barely functional mute, seethed.

Tom shook his head metaphorically and quite literally.Oh no! Gibbs was not going to get away with his hackneyed BS this time. Not this time!

“You still have to follow agency rules and procedures, Gibbs; to say nothing about following the law, Dumbass! This occurred in the middle of the bullpen where anyone could and did hear Todd’s overt disrespect for SFA DiNozzo when he was completely within his rights to deliver a dressing down a probationary agent of nine weeks standing…after McGee told him he was full of crap.”

“Maybe y’all should ask why McGee said what he said. I never have a problem with him being insubordinate,” he said, contemptuously.

“Because you would head slap him into a coma and transfer him off the team faster than you demanded Blackadder’s removal if he did,” Tom retorted acidly. “A more pertinent question is why you wouldn’t respond identically when he is insubordinate to your 2IC. Is it because you actively set out to undermine his authority with your public putdowns and telling junior agents the only agent they have to obey, is YOU?”

Gibbs just smirked, and Tom found himselfwishing,that he could cleanJethro’sclock – metaphorically and literally.

“Ijust realisedwhat’sbeen staring me in the face,”he said in bemusem*nt at his lack of insight.“You, Leroy Jethro Gibbs, former gunny and Retconsniperare threatened by Agent DiNozzo. But you also recognise that you need his considerable skills, so it creates a huge dilemma for you,doesn’tit?”

Gibbs scowled at him.“That’sBullsh*t! I fear no one,”he told Morrow heatedly.

The director ignored him, “And it’s why you demean him, undermine his authority, permit rookie agents to disrespect him, but if he was as bad as your treatment of him implies, he’d have been off your team quicker than I could blink.”

~oOo~

To say that Gibbs was royally pissed off was like saying that water was wet. Of course, he was pissed off! Who the hellwouldn’tbe?

The director had just finished telling him that McGee and Todd would not return to the MCRT, and that was despite all the markershe’dbeen forced to cash in to ensure theyweren’tfired for some bullsh*t charge by that dried up bitter old she-dragon from HR!

Bromstead had it in for him. The fire-breathing she-dragondidn’tapprove of the way he ran his team. Yet HIS team was the one that consistently beat out every othermajorcrimes team in the agency and every other federal agency due to him. All because of how he ran his team.

HR’sdumbass bleating about the chain of command was a pile of sh*t. There was only room for one leader on his team, and that was him…obviously!

Besides, competition between agents was a much better model to push them to achieve the sort of results other teams could only dream of. Well, that and a healthy dose of respect for yours truly, mixed in with a large side measure of fear of what he’d do to them if they failed to deliver results, he smirked mentally.

It never failed to spur them all on when leads in an investigation had dried up. A pat on the back to one agent or a ‘good job’ was always enough to create insane jealousy amongst the others. It inevitably led to them tearing at the bit to one-up the ‘teacher’s pet’ and they were soon pushing past their limits to earn his favour. Worked every f*cking time!

It was really no different to an elite athlete. Everyone knew that sooner or later, they’d hit the wall during a race or a match, hurting from lactic acid buildup or physical pain brought about by the odd knock they’d taken along the way. But to win the game or the race, successful athletes needed the mettle to push past the pain barrier in order to win. Or in the case of the MCRT, to push on past the barrier of physical and mental exhaustion or their failure at that point to find him a lead. To find him something concrete so he could catch the dirtbag and give victims their closure, plus his hit of adrenaline, and a bunch of other feel-good hormones.

Exploiting competition between his agents drove them to find the vital information before theirteammates,so they could win his approval. The key was to ensure his approval was not too effusive. His praise needed to be parsimonious for it to be valued more than theirowncomfort, especially since there was always a next case waiting in the wings for their attention.

The Gibbs’ Way was why he had the best closure statistics, and why he’d been given carte blanche to run the MCRT how he saw fit. And Delores Bromstead and her fellow she-dragon, Marla Sweeten, could kiss his sweet ass if they didn’t like it. It worked, and that was really all he cared about, and so should they!

That and hedidn’tsee the need to have any more of a hierarchy of command than with him in charge. Wait…scratch that, DiNozzowasusefulfor doing his paperwork, as well as his own…so there was that.

Gibbs thought back to the meeting in Morrow’s office, shaking his head at why the director was being such a jerk about the damned chain of command issue – it was a dumbass model. His method was way more effective. Tom should be falling all over himself, thanking him for making NCIS and, by extension, Morrow look good. Not throwing obstacles in his way and making his life more difficult.

Jethro was bound and determined to get HIS team back together again. He’d barely filled the fourth and last spot with McGee after working with him on and off for a year on TAD assignments to observe if he’d fit in. He had no intention of letting all his good work go out the window. Since the unfortunate lapse by DiNozzo, who had forgotten his place and caused the incident that allowed the overly officious Bromstead to go f*cking with his team (damned the woman) the MCRT had been thrown into total chaos.

Once he got things sorted out and everyone back where they belonged, DiNozzo WOULD realise the error of his ways. He was going to assign him all of the rookie sh*t to remind him he was not top dog. But as he was his only agent right now, unfortunately, disciplining him would have to wait until a suitable time!

He would approach McGee tonight at his apartment, and he wasfairlyconfident he could persuade him to return since he had a tumultuous relationship with his old man. If Gibbs pushed the right buttons, McGee would regard defying the Admiral as heroic. Never for a moment did he believe that John McGee would really exert political pressure to have his son terminated. He was bluffing… of that Gibbs was certain. Just had to convince the kid of that.

Getting Cate back again would be easy enough. Ithadn’tescaped his notice that shewasn’twell-liked. She had a habit of acting shrewish and co*cksure. She wascertainlysexually repressed, and he grinned evilly. Being on the Family and Sexual Violence team must have been damned uncomfortable for her since they got some real kinky cases.

Cate was also a rabid feminist, which was one of the reasonshe’dhiredher,despite her total absence of investigative experience. Her determination to make her male counterpart look stupid and incompetent made herabsolutelyperfect for his competitive leadership style.

He was pretty sure when she’d immediately decided DiNozzo was a stupid male chauvinist that she’d be just perfect to rile DiNozzo up. He was the best-damned investigator that Gibbs had ever seen. Not that he had any intention of ever letting him know that, but he’d rightly assessed that she would make the former homicide detective strive to even greater heights. Ducky had sometimes remarked on their rabid sibling rivalry to earn his approval, although he’d also mention their unresolved sexual tension, which amused Jethro greatly. There was no way he ever had to worry about them sharing sheets.

It was the sibling rivalry, though that was why he hired her, and she continually referred to herself as a profiler. Even Gibbs, who never put much store in psychology and head shrinkers, knew enough to know she sucked as a profiler, but everytime he called on her to profile their dirtbag, Jethro was fully aware of just how pissed off it made DiNozzo, who had had more police training in criminal profiling that Cate did. Asking her to profile the dirtbag always made the former detective pull out all the stops to find the criticallead,so he could show her up.

And while closing the case was his clear motivation, itdidn’thurt that he ruffledDiNozzo’sfeathers into the bargain.Two birds…one stone!

Still, while she fit into the MCRT dynamic perfectly, he knewshe’dstruggle to fit into average teams with her abrasiveknow-it-allmanner.He alsowas awarethat outside of Abby,she’ddone little to make friends with the other field agents orotheremployees.

She had been working at NCIS for seven months when Pacci was killed, and she barely knew who he was.His desk was just a few down from the MCRT, and he wasasociableguysoit spoke volumes about her standoffishness right there.By comparison, DiNozzo, at the end of his firstmonth, knew the names of not just every field agent but all the intel analysts, evidence clerks, motor pool personnel and security people and joined the baseball team, too.

SowithCate’sdifficultpersonality and high opinion of her abilities, hewasn’ttoo concerned thatshe’dbe welcomed onto anyoneelse’steam. Maybe hewouldn’teven need to cajole her into returning. Likely, she would come crawling back when she realised shehadn’tbeenexactlygreeted with open arms by her fellow agents. Itwouldn’tdo her any harm to realise just how much she owed him for giving her such an incredible job, and it would give him leverage to hold over her head when she pissed him off.

Okay, he had a plan to get his team back on track!

Step one was to cajole the Probie into coming back by framing it as a f*ck you for his Old Man. The bottom line was Gibbs had spent too much time finding the right computer hacker for his team. McGee’s submissive personality combined with his passive-aggressive desire to prove he was better than every alpha-type male was gold. It made him far too easy to manipulate into hacking, sans legal warrants, that Gibbs had no time for because a) he abhorred lawyers and b) going the legal route took time. Too much f*cking time.

Step two was to totally ignore Todd and let her find out just how little her fellow NCIS agents wanted the likes of her in the agency. Endangering the President with her shoddy profiling, not to mention playing ‘grab asses with one of his ball carriers, was never going to win her brownie points. The only reason she wasn’t hazed unmercifully over it was because no one dared to cross him. Well, she was in for an attitude adjustment, and once she came to her senses and realised, she owed him for saving her career, she’d beg him to let her come back.

Step three was to demonstrate to DiNozzo how much he f*cked up by starting that bullsh*t in the bullpen with McGee and Cate. Of course, they were both talking out of their assholes, but it was not his job to school them. That was his job!

Jethro figured that along with all the probie jobs, dumpster diving, carrying all the gear at crime scenes, and bagging and tagging, DiNozzo would soon get the message. Hecouldn’tmake him gas the truck because he already did that, buthe’dmake him ride in the back to crime scenes. And Gibbs would make him clean the interrogation rooms too – Jethro would make it his goal in life to make sure that as many of those dirtbags as possible peed and shat themselves or puked their guts up when he questioned them.

At least it would get janitorial services off his back, the damn wusses!

There was only one leader on Gibbs’ team, and by God, it was past time that DiNozzo figured out that he needed to keep his damned lip zipped and let Gibbs lead!

That night, after trying to sleep for over an hour, Tom couldn’t stop tossing and turning. Aware that he was disturbing his devoted wife Lynnette’s blissful slumber, he arose, and wrapped a light cotton robe around himself, fumbling for the scuffs he left under the bed, Tom slipped them onto his bare feet and padded softly downstairs to the kitchen. He sought the trite but true panacea for sleeplessness – warm milk – and headed to the refrigerator. After fixing himself a mug of the magic remedy, he searched in the cookie jar for a few to go with it, carrying the mug and his cookie stash in to sit in the wing-backed leather chair in his study and think about his encounter with Gibbs and his sudden insight into why he believed Jethro had become such a bastard to Tony.

It was so clear to Tom now why he was ruthlessly undermining the authority of his senior field agent like someone had switched on a spotlight that illuminated what until today, had been in shadow, amorphous. DiNozzo’s abilities as an investigator were second to none. Partly, due to his intuitiveness and partly to do with his non-linear thinking, it allowed him to make connections where others failed. The reason for Jethro’s disgraceful behaviour towards Special Agent Anthony DiNozzo was directly related to the threat he posed to Gibbs. However, it was further complicated by Jethro’s unpleasant realisation that he needed him on the MCRT.

Understanding he needed to make sense of all of his chaotic thoughts chasing each other around in his head, preventing him from resting, Morrow resolved to try to process them into some semblance of order before he could sleep. He figured what was needed was something akin to a stream of consciousness and not what he’d indulge in at the office, but here in the sanctity of his own home, perhaps he could be excused from the self-indulgent scatter-shot attempt to focus his thoughts. If, not here in his private retreat, then where could he do so?

Tom thought how ironic he found it, that Ducky always maintained that Gibbs and DiNozzo bore a strong resemblance to each other. Despite the amusem*nt this statement attracted from the rest of the DC personnel, Tom could see why Ducky might think that. Both men had an impressive work ethic, were intuitive, had ‘massive’ trust issues and were highly adept at interrogation. Although Tony was equally skilled at extracting vital clues from witnesses who didn’t seem like they were worth the bother of interviewing, at least in Gibbs’ eyes, since he was always in such a hurry. Yet, for all those similarities, the manifestation of those traits was so different that most people scoffed at Ducky’s contention.

It was the way those similarities expressed themselves that superficially made Ducky’s observation seem rather ludicrous. Tom knew that some people who weren’t all that familiar with Dr Donald Mallard might think him a dotty old fool for his insistence that they had much in common when he was anything but. In fact, a shrewder individual than Ducky would be hard to find, despite his years and even now, he was contemplating the feasibility of pursuing a master’s degree in psychology. On the other hand, Abigail Sciuto, the somewhat kooky forensic scientist, would probably say that Gibbs and Tony were like Yin and Yang. Tom, might describe them as the two sides of a coin. He supposed a mathlete might speak in terms of positive and negative integers, but whatever imagery floated your boat, both men did have some things in common.

Gibbs worked outrageously long hours because his poor social skills and refusal to emotionally bury his wife and daughter left him with nothing meaningful, aside from using cases as surrogates of his own family tragedy, which effectively allowed him to hunt down the killers again and again. DiNozzo’s problems with abandonment (dead mother, abusive/neglectful father) and his fiancée calling off the wedding the night before, had all combined and contributed to leaving him rather battered and bruised. Little wonder he, like Jethro, sought refuge in his job.

Then there were the trust issues that plagued both men, but it was how they each chose to deal with them, that made them seem like fire and water. Gibbs was like a porcupine, his quills ensuring that no one ever got close enough to earn his trust. DiNozzo was a lot more subtle – more like a goofy golden retriever who seemed unthreatening, overly familiar, and affectionate so as not to repel people. Underneath the loyal companion still lurked the predatorial wolf who you didn’t want to back in a corner.

They both possessed intuitivenessbut, again,how they utilised it was vastly different.Gibbsbludgeoned people with it; DiNozzo downplayed his and used it to finesse people. Tomwasn’tsure if DiNozzo did it aiming to be underestimated or if he was deliberately avoiding turning it into a dick-measuring competition with his boss because it seemed clear that Gibbs’was threatened by him. However, it could just aseasily,be that it came as second nature to him.Nodoubt, it served the undercover agent well for him to suss out people when he had no backup.

Gibbs frequently used his omnipresent ‘gut’ to shut down dissent or debate, since few people were up to the task of going against Gibbs’ gut. Mind you, Tom would argue there were numerous times when his famous gut let him down spectacularly. Not that Jethro ever seemed to engage in navel-gazing though. It was too close to admitting he made mistakes, and it was something Gibbs wouldn’t tolerate. He wasn’t the sort of man to admit he was wrong, even when he was. Ignoring the past was his go-to solution to ensure he never had to. Should Jethro ever have to acknowledge culpability, people might expect him to apologise…and that just wasn’t on Gibbs’ bingo card!

Both men could extract information out of a stone or, more importantly, information out of stone-cold killers, psychopaths, and terrorists, but it was the method of executing interrogations that showed the diametrically opposed methods each used. Gibbs, of late, was all about the shock and awe, although initially, he leant far more towards the Psyops continuum than shock and awe. His interrogation of terrorist Amad Bin Atwa had been a masterful display of his talent, but since then, he’d been content to use pure intimidatory methods to scare suspects into divulging intel and confessions. A tactic that carried with it the risk of gaining false information.

DiNozzo’s methods were far more nuanced, often extracting information by annoying the perps into letting things slip. Rarely would he try to intimidate anyone, often preferring for his target to underestimate him so he could slide in a question out of the blue that couldn’t be anticipated. The main difference in their styles was that Gibbs was frequently accused in court or military tribunals of obtaining coercive confessions via threats and bully-boy tactics. Even when the testimony was allowed into the record by a judge, the tactic did not play well with juries.

Tom thought, distastefully of the confession he’d acquired from the former petty officer turned terrorist bomb maker Roland Alan Moore. He and Ducky had allegedly softened him up before Gibbs questioned him by letting him witness an autopsy, so he knew what would happen to his corpse after his own ‘suicide’ if he refused to talk. Of course, Gibbs had denied the charge. In contrast, Agent DiNozzo’s interrogations, which admittedly, were often quite unorthodox, still tended to be viewed by juries as fairer. Subsequently, juries were far more inclined to believe any confessions or damaging information he ferreted out while conducting them.

Was it little wonder then, why JAG attorneys preferred trying cases where DiNozzo was the interviewer…well the prosecutorial judge advocates did. The defence judge advocate preferred it when Gibbs did the interviews because they could frequently get it thrown out as it was seen as coercive. Failing that, they would use his intimidatory tactics to sway the jury, creating reasonable doubt in their minds, and it did work sometimes. But for some reason, Gibbs never saw those losses as a reflection of the way he conducted investigations – he blamed either the lawyers for being incompetent or the jury for being dumb asses.

As for the two agent’s ability to worm information out of witnesses, once again, their methods were as different as night and day. Gibbs would show that he could treat frightened children and grieving military spouses (particularly wives) with surprising sensitivity and deftness. Most other witnesses, particularly ones who didn’t present as likely sources of information, were a whole different kettle of fish. Perhaps it was Jethro’s abhorrence of listening to conversations he deemed to be inconsequential yabba-yabba, yet it was just this type of witness that Agent DiNozzo excelled in being able to procure information that often proved crucial to solving cases.

Hispersonalflair for communication, witty repartee, banter, and verbal deflecting meant he was adept at engaging with individualswho werereluctant to give up what they knew.DiNozzowas equally good at teasing out information that witnessesdidn’tofferup,simply because they failed to understand that it might be relevant.Hisunorthodox ability totake disparate data sets and form theminto narratives gave him a distinct advantage.Gettingpeople to talk – to essentially engage in free association and isolate the vital facts needed to solve a case presented a valuable gift to his team leader with a tremendous advantage in how quickly they could solve a crime.

While the two agents did share traits, even if they manifested in inverse ways, there were also myriad ways in which they were very different. Their thought processes, for one – Gibbs was so concrete in his thinking, the agent seemed incapable of thinking except in terms of everything being either black or white, or maybe he was merely just unwilling. For the love of Mike, Jethro only had a black and white television that belonged in the Arc, but perhaps Gibbs found it soothing.

Gibbs saw his fellow humans through a prism where people were either his allies or his enemies, although Tom allowed that foes were weighted along a continuum as being mere nuisances or incompetent idiots, to out-and-out threats to his person. Rules helped him to achieve his ends and, therefore, he abided by them, or they hindered him in reaching his goals, so he ignored them. He refused to be burdened by self-flagellation for his fair share of disasters – perhaps with the one obvious exception to that rule.

That exception was his way too self-indulgent, out-and-out misguided blaming of himself for his wife and daughter’s deaths. Usually, though, he was more than happy to blame others – without allowing that his own behaviour also contributed to mistakes. Gibbs was opposed to any type of navel-gazing and introspection.

As Tom sipped slowly on his remaining warm milk and wished he brought more cookies, he couldn’t help contrasting DiNozzo’s thinking to Gibbs. He was the antipathy of a black-and-white thinker – Anthony DiNozzo saw the world as nuances. Black, white, as well as achromatic greyscale (hues of black and white), but DiNozzo could see chromatic greys too. All of the grey colour variants, the cool blue-greys and the warm greys. Perhaps this ability to discern nuance explained his skills in undercover work, why he blended in so completely with the landscape.

Hetrulywas chameleon-like in how he managed to change personas so effectively to fit in or to fulfilothers’perceptions of him. Theease with which he did it utterly terrified Morrow since he wondered how it was that Tony had never lost himself.Surely, one dayhemight merge so effectively into the background that people stopped seeing therealindividual. SometimesTomthought that Gibbs had already lost the ability to see the real DiNozzo for who hetrulywas.

Tom was also aware that his incredible ability to perceive such subtly gave him benefits that Gibbs lacked, enabling him to think outside the square and see patterns where no one else did. However, it was also not without its own risks.

Morrow knew something of his troubled childhood. Tomrecognised that, like other offspring whose parents had drug and alcohol addictions, DiNozzo was always a little too quick to admit whenhe’dmade mistakes. Bynecessity, these kids were forced to adopt the role of caregivers within the family dynamic – to be the responsible adults in the family despite just being kids. Inconsequence, kids of addicts and alcoholics often had an overly developed sense of responsibility that could tooeasilyleave them overburdened by guilt for things (such as theirparents’addictions and behaviours) that were beyond their control.

By contrast, taking responsibility for mistakes, even his own monumental ones, was something that Gibbs never would do. Tomthought about DiNozzo getting abducted after his drink was spiked by a serial killer and kidnapped because she felt threatened. Evenafter NCIS was able to recover him, along with one of the victims (who was perilously close to death), DiNozzo beat himself for getting drugged by the last person expected to be the perp. Eventhough the truth of the matter was that the blame for what happened should have also been apportioned not just to the serial killer for drugging and abducting him but to Gibbs, as team leadforhim failing to assign another agent to watchDiNozzo’ssix.

The funny thing was that if the FBI borrowed him, as they were wont to do sometimes for undercover work, andhe’dbeen drugged and abducted by a serial killer, Gibbs would have gone ballistic had they not given him back up. YetJethro had mulishly refused to acknowledge the parthe’dplayed inDiNozzo’sabduction. Asto theconundrumof why that might be, Tom could only conclude that perhaps the all-encompassing guilt and grief he nursed over hisfamily’sdeaths left Gibbs no room to acknowledge or feel regret for other actions.

Whatever the reason, it was certainly not an attitude that Tom was willing to condone, especially for a team leader. Unfortunately, he was not the NCIS director when Gibbs was appointed the leader of the MCRT by Davenport’s predecessor. He would not have agreed to Gibbs’ appointment, but then, George Thornton had presided over the NIC and its early reincarnation as it morphed into NCIS during a particularly anarchistic period.

It was dominated by the larger-than-life personalities of such luminaries as Mike Franks, Owen Granger, Riley McAllister, and Witney Sharp. And then there were the younger generation, the up-and-comers like Jethro Gibbs, Lara Macy, Jennifer Shepard, and Leon Vance. Although in some ways, Gibbs had more in common with agents such as Franks, McAllister or Sharp than fitting in with the younger, more tech-savvy crowd.

Hell had he been making those decisions about personnel back then, Tom wouldn’t have hired Gibbs as a field agent, but those choices had not been his to make. Despite his brief stint as an MP in the Corps, Gibbs’ investigative experience was rather minimal, and having Mike Franks as a mentor to the devastated widower and father was a disaster waiting to happen. Franks was nothing more or less than a cowboy who considered himself a law unto himself. Little wonder then, Gibbs had taken his example and run with it, gradually creating a fiefdom for himself, which inexorably had led to where they were now, with Gibbs storming out of his office today in a snit!

With a martyred sigh, Tom guessed Jethro was already plotting a campaign to get Agents Todd and McGee back on his team. Morrowwas sure that SECNAV was his first stop. Itwould be in keeping with his stubborn refusal to accept that youcouldn’tforce a square peg into a round hole, even if it meant beating it into submission. Itwas, Tom concluded wearily, one of the intrinsic differences between Gibbs and DiNozzo. Gibbswould use a sledgehammer to force the peg into fitting in, embracing the chance to impose his will on the peg, even if it meant that the peg was irreparably damaged or permanently stuck in the hole.

DiNozzobycontrast, would consider the peg and the hole, then finesse the situation.He’dwork on the square peg so that it was less square while at the same time working on the hole, making it less round. Hewould cooperate so the peg and the hole could work together without damagingeither’sintegrity through brute force.

While Gibbs MIGHT succeed in pressuring Todd to return to the team, Morrow was pretty certain that Admiral McGee would ensure that his son was as far away from Gibbs’ sphere of influence as possible. John McGee wielded quite a lot of sway, not just because he was a flag officer in the US Navy, or because his own father, Nelson McGee, had also served as an Admiral. For some time now, there’d long been credible scuttlebutt suggesting John McGee had his sights on a political career. If so, he would not want his son embroiled in an embarrassing controversy that would impact his eligibility to gain a political posting or run for office such as a senate seat.

Then was also the fact that Admiral Nelson McGee’s widow was no shrinking violet herself. Penelope Langston (who used her own name rather than her husband’s) was legitimately scary in her own right. She had an impressive intellect combined with a ‘don’t give a f*ck attitude’ and her own brand of political activism that was centre left of her more conservative son. She was also inordinately close to her grandson and very protective of him. No way were the McGees, despite their political differences, going to stand by and watch Gibbs destroy Tim’s career. Jethro might despise officers, but politically, the McGees weren’t a family to be messed with and they would band together.

Agent Todd was a lesser-known quantity, although assigning her to Maureen Cabot’s team had apparently been a good strategy by Marla Sweeten and Delores Bromstead. According to Mo’s reports, Todd had struggled with the chain of command, particularly when it applied to Cabot’s 2IC Ruth Jacobs. Todd’s absurd ideological justification was she was uncomfortable around her because Ruth Jacobs was a lesbian – something that was news to Morrow, having met Jocob’s husband at a couple of end-of-year parties. Yet, even if it was true, that did not justify Todd ignoring Jacobs’ orders. Todd was entitled to her own religious beliefs, no matter how misguided; what she was not entitled to do was bring them to work with her and use them to justify not following regulations.

Cabot reported that Todd was struggling to learn the Family and Sexual Violence Unit had its own qualified criminal profiler, Patrick Iverson who, quite justifiably, had been quick to correct her incorrect assumptions when it came to the art of criminal profiling. Maureen informed him Todd had not coped well when she expressed her doubts about her suitability to undertake the training necessary to call herself a criminal profiler, refusing to concede her profiler training at the Secret Service was inadequate for her to claim criminal profiler status.

Tom wondered how she had handled the news that DiNozzo had more training in criminal profiling than she did, having completed FBI courses run for LEOs in advanced law enforcement techniques, which included SCAN and Hostage Negotiation training undertaken while he was a police detective in Baltimore. Yet he didn’t consider himself a qualified criminal profiler despite, his master’s degree in criminology.

However, Tom had a distinct impression that very recently, Caitlin /Todd had undergone a paradigm shift reflected by her sudden decision to look for a position on a new team. Hewasn’tsure what may have caused an epiphany that she was not the hotshot investigative agent she had believed herself to be, though he was happy to accept it. Maybethere was hope for her after all.

The tricky part had been finding her a spot on a team where a team leader was willing to have her, as her reputation preceded her. He wasn’t all that sure about how she’d fit in on the team at Norfolk because the DC teams had been less than complimentary about her and McGee’s antics. Agents talked…hell, they gossiped like a pack of old women with nothing else to do. Tom was sure that Cabot’s reticence to offer her a permanent place on her team after having her as TAD, having managed to alienate the other agents, would soon get around. As would the fact that none of the other DC team leaders had been falling over themselves to take her on either.

Todd hadn’t done herself any favours when Gibbs hired her for the agency’s elite MCRT (already possessing outstanding closure rates) with her lack of investigative skills and a LOT of professional baggage left over from the Yankee White debacle. Her haughty know-it-all behaviour and lack of gratitude for being given such an incredible opportunity after her spectacular public failures infuriated many agents. Her failure to respect her SFA hadn’t made her any fans, either.

Not that she’d tried very hard to fit in. Aside from Abby, she’d done little to make friends, not even amongst the female agents.

So, assigning her to a team stationed outside DC, perhaps in the surrounding field units or offices, made more sense IF she seriously wanted a fresh start. Given her current level of experience, she should have been assigned to a team that investigated routine, less complex crimes from the get-go. That way, she could acquire skills in a less high profile and less pressurised environment and not be placed on the top team handling major crimes. However, given how highly she regarded her abilities, Tom was uncertain how she’d cope with being on a team with far less prestige. She might decide to return to Gibbs’ team again.

Finishing his milk and heading back to the kitchen for another biscuit, Morrow remembered his time as an associate director at the South West Field Office in San Diego. Fortunately, at that point, Franks had retired, taking his files with him he’d probably used to keep his ass out of trouble. Mike had resigned in 1996, right after the bombing of the Khobar Towers, when his warning that Osama bin Laden was responsible for the terrorist attack fell on deaf ears. Back then, SAC Riley McAllister was still a thorn in Tom’s side, though, he became increasingly irrelevant when his dogged insistence that the Russians were behind all the mayhem in the geopolitical landscape following the end of the Cold War sidelined the guy’s career.

The ass! He and Franks were a little too alike, outlaws both, and neither agent reflected the future of the agency that Tom wanted to promote.

Morrow knew that both Leon and Gibbs too, back when he was still a field agent and wasn’t exactly enamoured with either agent. As the AD for the SWFO in San Diego, he was aware of scuttlebutt regarding the Corps investigation into Gibbs’ involvement in the death of the head of a Mexican drug cartel. Pedro Hernandez was the guy Franks held responsible for sanctioning the hit on Shannon, Kelly Gibbs, and NIS Special Agent Kurt Mitchell. Mitchell was one of Franks’s team, and he was furious about Mitchell’s death. Even when the JAGMAN investigation was closed, presumably due to a lack of evidence, in Morrow’s mind, that did not absolve Gibbs of being involved in the crime.

Given that Franks recruited the Marine sniper not long after Hernandez died, and Mike was in charge of Jethro’s wife and child’s security, it stunk to high heaven of a conspiracy to commit murder. So, when McAllister, after Franks stormed off to Mexico, tapped Gibbs for Black Ops missions in Europe, Tom hadn’t objected. Honestly, he was glad to see him go.

Equally, Tom felt there was something off about Leon Vance, but he couldn’t identify what. Perhaps it was the way he’d been recruited for a rather dubious undercover operation dealing with Riley McAllister’s obsession with the Soviets. Especially since it was a mission, in Tom’s opinion, that could easily have been handled by a trained field agent. It should have been, especially as the target, Anatoly Zhukov, escaped, leaving Gibbs to have clean up several years later when he reappeared in Eastern Europe with his mistress, working as an assassin or hire. However, wiping down the countertops in the kitchen and switching off the light, Tom admitted his reservations about Vance might be due to McAllister and Witney Sharp being the ones who recruited him.

Climbing the stairs as he decided to head to bed, Tom knew that guilt by association wasn’t fair. Yet there was something about Vance, his arrogance, that didn’t sit right with him, particularly when Leon was nothing more than a competent agent. Maybe his chumminess with the then up-and-coming Mossad operative, Eli David who’d risen through the ranks to now be deputy director, bothered him. Scuttlebutt had him gaining the directorship of Mossad sooner or later, and Tom wasn’t sure that being too friendly with Eli David was ever a good thing. There were persistent rumours that he kept a huge amount of compromising intel on politicians, the judiciary, terrorists, mercenaries, and average run-of-the-mill criminals and that made Eli incredibly powerful…and dangerous.

Disrobing and laying his lightweight robe on the bedroom chair, he thought about the SWFO, sent there as a newly minted associate director from the Central Field Office in Great Lakes, Illinois. Therewas a stench of lawlessness or maybe corruption there, but there was something else hecouldn’tquite pinpoint. ApartfromLeon’spretty dubious recruitment by Sharp and McAllister (givenMcAllister’sdeeply racist leanings), Morrow was also somewhat disturbed aboutVance’sabrupt change in behaviour before his recruitment to NIS, Lieutenant 2nd Class Leon Vance had graduated from Annapolis after his enlistment in the Marines in 1991. Granted, Vance was an above-average student, but he was far more interested in physical pursuits, including boxingthanmore intellectual pursuits.

Morrow slipped into bed, AfterLeon’sboxing accident whenhe’dbeen forced to resign his commission, his focus had shifted, some would say quite dramatically whenhe’denrolled in the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. Beforehis discharge, he was described by the staff of Annapolis as highly social and a real team player. Afterenrolling at Newport, various lecturers described him asan extremelydetachedloner,whose competitiveness made collaboration with fellow students problematic.

Trying to get settled without disturbing his wife, Tom wondered what had brought about such stunning changes in his personality by the time he got to the Naval War College. Haddisappointment when his dream of serving as an officer in the Corp was destroyed been enough to crush his spirits so dramatically, he wondered?

Whatever had caused the dramatic changes, they remained. Leon Vance was now the associate director of the SWFO in San Diego (Tom’s former position) and remained intensely private and guarded his family zealously. Whatever it was about the guy, Tom’s intuition warned him something was amiss, even if he couldn’t put his finger on what was wrong. If he was being honest with himself, Vance seeming so cosy with not just Eli David, but Philip Davenport, concerned him. As did SECNAV’s other golden child, Jennifer Shepard, who coincidentally also had a close personal relationship with Eli David. Since Vance and Shepard were extremely ambitious individuals, he had vague concerns that personal ambition may take precedence over their oath to the agency and its agents, should either one make it into the director’s chair one day.

Tom, an averred pragmatist from way back, had seen ambitious directors from his and sister agencies sacrifice the welfare of individuals in the past, citing the greater good. His cynical side recognised that‘the greater good’all too often was political-speak to hide the fact that they were first and foremost thinking of their own advantage and was terribly subjective.

In his opinion, individuals most suited to run a federal law enforcement agency were rarely singled out for the honour. Usually, such individuals lacked the single-minded ambition to attract the attention of The Powers That Be. A self-effacing desire to serve was nowhere near as likely to attract the attention of the brass than the over-the-top flamboyant arrogance of the often average but overly ambitious individuals who excelled so well in self-promotional BS.

As he drifted off gently embracing the welcoming arms of Orpheus, he acknowledged that Tom was not the sort of director that Philip Davenport would have picked to run NCIS. Justas Owen Granger, the former MarinewhomMorrow believed to be the best qualified, would get his job when he retired.

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