This is my 40th NCIS Mystery, the story to cap my Fourth Season. I'm pleased to announce that it's also my 100th FanFiction posting.
NCIS is owned by Belisarius Productions. The usual legal Disclaimers about not making money nor claiming the characters apply. I only own Rev. Siobhan (O'Mallory) McGee, Apprentice Pathologist Dr. Samantha Sky and original Agents. You can find all my stories listed in order in my Profile.
For Dramatic reasons, minor details of the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center (FLETC) have been adjusted.
My many Affairs are an homage to David McCallum.
Rated T or NCis-17
Please Review.

The New Mark Affair
by JMK758
Chapter One
Tumult

Janet Levy pushes open the apartment door and her parents Ira and Sarah follow her in. It had been a good walk in the August heat, but as the hour closes on 11, or 2300 by Janet's reckoning, the unwinding of the day can now make way for sleep. Ira, as she has always known him in summer outdoors, is dressed in white shirt under now open black vest and black trousers, the gray ringlets before his ears flirting with his glasses. Sarah, less traditional, wears a more comfortable house dress. Janet, least traditional, chose a green tee shirt over jeans.

Sarah turns on the large television in the living room and the words the Newswoman on the screen says snaps their attentions.

"-tro Police are still withholding details on the shooting of a Federal Agent in DC an hour ago."

"Oh dear," Sarah says, her voice heavy with sympathy.

"They lead such lives," Ira says to his daughter. "That is why I am glad that you are out."

"Dad, please."

"- ities have released only that there had been an exchange of gunfire on Tilden Street in Spring Valley between unidentified gunmen and Federal Agents." Janet's attention already high, these words sharpen it. Being an Agent herself, she has known too many close calls but then a too familiar face appears inset in the upper left corner of the screen. It's the official portrait photo of

"Special Agent Lisa DuBois,"

"Oh My GOD!"

"of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service,"

"LEESE!"

"suffered multiple gunshot wounds in the exchange where two assailants were killed. She has been rushed to Sibley Memorial.

"We take you to Eileen DiSalvo on the scene with a Live report."

x

Janet grasps the chair back, shaking, breath rapid as shock edges into terror and the image changes to an outside night shot of the hospital behind an intense woman holding a ZNN microphone. There's a crowd of vehicles behind her, most of which display a variety of colored flashing lights. Janet instantly picks out the black and white MCR truck, but her attention is on the woman with the microphone.

"Donna, we're here at Sibley Memorial where Special Agent Lisa DuBois of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service was admitted with multiple gunshot wounds. There are numerous Officials on the scene but so far we have limited information. Special Agent DuBois is listed in Critical condition and is currently in surgery."

Janet feels the fist clenching her heart crush and twist as her breath races.

"We're told the gunmen were killed in a firefight with one or more agents. Just a moment." She turns left, her hand out. "Sir? Please! Just a moment, please."

The view expands to a too-familiar man in black cap and summer field jacket, "I'm here with Deputy Special Agent-in-Charge Leroy Gibbs. Agent Gibbs," she pushes the microphone toward his mouth. "What can you tell us, sir?"

"Nothing."

"Have you any statement?"

"Just got here."

"How is Agent DuBois?"

"You know more than I do."

The next view is of his receding back.

DiSalvo recovers the center scene. "We will bring you more information as soon as it becomes available."

Janet pulls her cell phone from her jeans pocket. It's off! She'd turned it off for a quiet evening. It takes forever to boot up and the screen glares at her. '11 Missed Calls', '9 Voice Messages' and '5 Text Messages'.

"OH MY GOD!" She fights tears, rips her car keys from her pocket and turns. Ira has his black summer coat and wide black hat back on, his own keys in his hand.

"You pray, Janaleh, I will drive. Come, mother."

xx

In the car Janet, seated next to Ira, Sarah in the back, keeps her hands pressed to her mouth, not to contain her tears and terror but rather to hold back the scream to her father to drive faster. She grants his speed is high of legal but she wants to get across the District and to her partner Now. She's run through the texts and voice messages, they tell her little more detail than the radio does. That simply repeats the basic sparse information, she turns the dial and a new voice finally gets around to saying the same news in different words.

She won't call anyone; no point in distracting anyone when she'll be there and ready to help - yeah, help - shortly.

She'd been with Leese a few hours ago. A damned few hours! She should have gone with her and screw Regulations!

They'd talked about Jan's future children, her long dream of children. This time she'd settled (for now) on a boy and girl, astronaut and concert pianist. Last time it'd been two girls and three boys, at one time it had been five boys and four girls. Or was it five girls and four boys? Either way it was the first mixed Major League Baseball Team. No matter what, the pleasant dream of children has been her long enjoyed obsession, the plans the overwhelming center of her life.

And she wants to stay an Agent, a balancing act Jan can never conceive. Conceive. Agent and Mother, head of a team and nurturer of a brood.

'They're gonna carry me out of NCIS feet first," Jan had declared this evening, "after I'm Director. Carry me out of NCIS feet first, feet first, feet first….'

"Damned Fuk!" startles her proper parents as she rips her cell phone out and stabs the prime contact. It rings once.

/Lamb. Janet?/

"How is she?" Four eternities anyone else would call seconds, four eternities while a woman's loud summons comes out of some too loud speaker. "KEVIN?" The sounds recede, he must be looking for a quiet spot.

"Bad, Jan. She's bad."

The fist about her heart crushes it. "Oh God!" Tears tear at her, she won't let them out.

"Bastard shot her three times point blank. She went Critical even before the Ambulance got there. She's in surgery now."

"What do they say?"

"Nothing. They say nothing."

"We're..." she finds a sign, "on Nebraska passing Albemarle. We'll be there soon."

"Jan..." his voice drops. "Better prepare yourself."

"I'll prepare myself to find her alive!"

xx

By the time they arrive the huge building is lost to dark at its high top but illuminated from within and flashed by red, blue and yellow strobes and slashes of rotating light without but Janet cannot bring herself to look for omens in such things. Her omen comes when, looking for a parking space in the huge lot, they pass a vintage wooden Morgan, Ducky's distinctive vehicle.

As soon as they're parked Reporters, like sharks smelling fresh blood, converge on her father's door before he's fully through it. "A moment and I will tell you everything I know," he says and she runs toward the building.

It will take the Reporters some wasted moments to discover that their accommodating subject knows very little more than he'd learned from ZNN and from the car's radio.

Janet doesn't give any thought to anything but running and she sprints so fast, not for the main door up front but the side Emergency entrance, that when she reaches it it doesn't open in time to admit her and she bangs her shoulder on the frame while slipping through. When she charges into the receiving lobby she skids to a halt before more agents than she's seen in any one place in months.

Every face in the crowd is grim.

"SOMEBODY–" and her voice breaks. The loud word pulls scores of eyes to her. She fights for control, fights not to cry, for if she does she knows she won't be able to stop. She clamps her teeth together and forces the words through lips that barely move, "tell * me * Something!"

Kevin Lamb comes out from the group - she hadn't picked him out and that's bad - and approaches. Her heart turns over when she sees he's wearing an orange NCIS coverall with Forensics embroidered on the pocket. It proclaims too well what had happened to his clothes.

"Kevin?"

"She's" he says in a voice that ends in a strangled whisper "still Critical."

x

She clamps her hands to her mouth because if she doesn't either a sob or a scream will break through.

"She's still in surgery, no estimate on how long. But they doing everything they can."

"Those Fu*king Bastards, are they all Dead? No one got away?"

"There were two. Now there aren't."

She reaches out, he draws her into the hug and she tightens her face, fights hard, won't let the tears come, won't let them break through. As long as there's a chance, she's not going to cry.

If Leese dies, she'll cry. Until then...

xx

There is something about the danger to one of their own that pulls people together. Whatever their shift, whether or not they know her well and regardless of whether they can do anything, Agents continue to arrive from all over the District, all over the bi-State area, Active Duty and long Retired, the News report a call, wherever or however heard. Men and women having nothing in common in their lives other than a gold badge, continue to arrive and, barring specific work to do, they will stay until commiseration or relief moves them from their vigil.

When word comes that too many congregate in the Emergency anteroom they move to the Doctor's lounge closest to the ER and the overflow haunts the hallway outside it.

Near silence suffuses the rooms, no matter how many arrive; conversations conducted in whispers or, for some, eloquent looks. Some, like Chaplains Siobhan McGee and John Grant, who wear their NCIS CHAPLAIN jackets, Lt Cdr Melanie Burke, her uniform highlighted with crosses above her gold wrist bands and Psychiatrists Milton Gyves, Samantha Ryan and Rachel Cranston, the late Special Agent Kate Todd's sister, move undirected through the growing crowd, available to any who want to talk.

Pulled into a corner by Michelle, for the moment out of earshot of whispers, Jimmy listens to words he knew his wife was going to say even before they arrived. "I can't help it."

"Help it," he advises and tries very hard not to sound as callous to her as he does to himself.

"I keep thinking. She knew. Su Lin knew. It was so short a time. She knew this would happen."

"'Chelle–"

"She knew so much. She told us so much. If she'd warned us we could've–"

"'Chelle."

"She knew if Lisa lives - lived or died. She could've –"

"'Chelle."

"What?" It had taken her teeth grated name to get through and she sounds derailed.

"You know better."

x

"Damn it, I know I do," she whispers as softly as she can, sounding like she wants to scream it. "This is my lecture to you. I know she couldn't tell us any more than we can tell anyone about her or the ten thousand things she knows that we have to wait on time to beat us up over and over again over. We can't even say what our knowing what will happen changed what happened - will happen. But with whatever we do or don't do will there even be a daughter waiting for us?"

"'Chelle..."

"I was going to call her Mai Ling but she's Su Lin. What else has–?"

"'Chelle, you're going to make yourself crazy."

"How do you know I'm not already?" grates through clenched teeth. He looks behind him, this has attracted glances but agents look away.

He keeps his voice as low, as level, as he can. He doesn't want Lisa DuBois on the table before him any more than he wants this discussion. "'Chelle, none of us can, but you are not crazy, neither am I, nor is our daughter. We have to take things day by day. We've been given a glimpse, a tiny glimpse, and it's enough for me to know our daughter, no matter what we call her, is going to turn out okay."

"How can you know?"

"We have to have faith that what she told us will come through, that we'll all be okay."

"She told us about a War!"

"She told us that we have to let things go as they will and be ready not to react but to act, with knowledge, when they do. And one of those things is to accept that there are things we are not meant to know."

Her hand goes to her womb. "I know! I know she's right because I'm certain I'm the one who taught her, but with Lisa maybe dying–"

"Or surviving."

"It hurts like Tartarus! I should go in there! I should Help!"

"You can't do that."

"Yes I Can!"

She can relieve pain, she can channel life energy to boost someone - as she did once for him - but "You can't do that while she's in surgery. Later, when she's in a room."

"There may not be a later!"

"You can't go in there and use magic to sustain her."

"I Did It For You!"

"That was different."

"Right! This time it's not my husband!"

"Technically, I was your fiancé–"

"Goddess damn it if you contradict me one more time I'll Slap Your Face Off!"

Unseen until he's stepped beside them Tim McGee, her usual partner in the field, asks quietly "Hey, you guys okay?"

x

She looks high up into his eyes, then beyond him. There are a dozen agents pretending they hadn't noticed the commotion. She looks back to him. "No, Tim, I'm never going to be 'okay' ever again."

She turns and quickly walks down the corridor toward an uncertain future she knows too much about and can never speak of.

Neither man speaks. There's hardly a need. Tension is so high among those already here and being added to by new arrivals, no one expects there will be only a few emotional outbursts tonight.

xx

Michelle halts at the first secluded place she can find, a stretch of wall between two doors, hand clamped to her mouth, still unsure if it's a sob or a scream that batters her teeth. She raises her clenched hand before the wall but can't make herself move. 'Real mature, Palmer, standing in a hallway pounding on a wall. Great way to come off as a got-it-together adult.'

She lowers her hand, uses it to brace herself against the wall. 'I could do it. I should do it. I should go home, cast a Circle…. But with that damned Life Source how can I do it? Those Solitaries sent their undirected, raw power out through their Circle - stupid asses - but what if I–? No. I don't know. Do I touch off this hell? Am I going to be the one who destroys things six years early?'

'History records that you warned Kendra Little tonight,' her daughter had said.

'That's what I should do.'

xx

Inside the lounge, in the northeast corner, Jennifer Shepherd addresses her Lieutenants: Leroy Jethro Gibbs, Kevin Lamb, Fred Higgins, Melanie Kelman, Rosa Arnell, Rosemary Hauss, Thomas Baxter, Terry Leigh, Gene Blakey, Donna Kaiser, John Vinchense and Philip Maxwell. The Supervisors had been gathered when Shepherd had taken Lamb through his 'After Action' Report, wanting to go through the thing once for all to hear.

"You don't have to say it," Higgins says.

"No, I don't," she declares. "This was an ambush, only luck kept Lamb from going down too and how the Hell did they know when and where to hit?"

"They weren't watching Fisher's place," Hauss summarizes. "They were ready."

"They were imbeciles," Arnell counters. "They went for a Grandstand play when they should have shot them both in the back. Sorry, guy."

"No, you're right," Lamb declares, focusing hard on procedure and logic and intellect when he wants most to explode, hunt down the elusive monster McGillicuddy and settle the score in pain and blood. "That would've been it. Can't say I'm sorry they weren't smarter."

"It doesn't work," is Higgins's position. "To borrow a phrase, who the hell hired those bozos?"

"Not someone who wanted us to think we're dealing with an idiot," is Maxwell's contention. They had all seen through that ploy.

"Too idiotic," Gibbs says.

Shepherd wonders how she'd ever gotten onto a situation where the survival of two assassination victims and the deaths of the assassins could in any way be considered a problem. "Abby is already on her way back to her Lab with the guns. I want full histories on them and anyone she can raise who used them. Blakey," she says; it's crossing into Gamma shift. "Concentrate on identifying those two. If they weren't street muscle heads, they may be our best clue on who hired them. Tonight each of you coordinate with our sister Agencies; Cynthia is bringing the various Directors up to speed. I want each of you linked directly with another Agency's team, share all information."

"Full disclosure?" Kaiser asks. This is a common degree of coordination when an Agent is hit but

"I don't care who takes this bastard down, I want him - or her - on Ducky's table."

"You got it," Gibbs swears.

x

Janet, on the fringes of this conference, watches intently, feeling the pain her friend felt poignant in her own body. What she does next is far beyond the limits of protocol but she'll plead temporary insanity later. She steps through the knot directly to Shepherd.

"Director."

"Agent Levy?" The woman is guarded, equally taken aback by the interruption and who is doing it. Her voice is steady through effort that shouts 'I am trying to get through this night,' but her manner says 'not only are you interrupting but this conference is for Active Duty Agents'.

"Director, I want in on this." She sees something in Shepherd's eyes, and in Kevin's, but won't break her focus to learn what. "Leese has been trying to get me to come back. Maybe if I had, she wouldn't be in here."

No one will say there could have been three agents dead. Instead, Shepherd tells her that

"There are no Temps at NCIS, Agent Levy. If you're back, you're back."

"I'm back."

"Then hold on to this." From the pocket of her dress she pulls and presses into her hand Lisa's gold shield on its oval leather backing. "Use it until you come in to pick up your own at my office."

Silent, Janet stares at the metal sigil and then, with tight chest, she pushes the clip onto her jeans belt. "I'll use it until I give it back to Leese."

"I thought you'd say that." She reaches back into her pocket and hands her a familiar leather case containing her ID sans shield. In their locked gazes, neither woman has to say anything.

x

"If they weren't staking out the apartment," Rosemary Hauss says, her tone strongly announcing what a waste of time and manpower that would have been, "who knew you would be there?"

"Beside yourself, Director, one other person knew we'd be there and when."

"Who?"

"Clayton Jarvis. SECNAV."