Loose Ends

Disclaimer: I don't own NCIS or any of the show's characters. If I did, I think we would all know the direction that the show would be going.

Summary: A murdered Marine lieutenant, a Chinese spy, and a Navy lieutenant working for the NSA come together in a way that makes things very complicated at NCIS. When something from her past comes up, the lieutenant learns that she's going to have to trust the MCRT if she wants to take care of the last of her loose ends before she can move forward.

A/N: This was written for LJ's NCIS Big Bang and has absolutely nothing to do with my previous series of stories. It is, however, related to my story on FictionPress (link to my FP account is in my profile), and takes place a couple of years after that one (and by "years", I mean in a completely fictional capacity, the type of situation that allows for 1991 to have 1000+ days and one second to take four months). There's nothing in this story that requires reading that one first, but doing so gives you more background for some of the characters.

Preface: June. Outside Beijing, China

He stared at the young woman sitting across the desk from him, and she just stared back. That in itself was unusual; he could count on one hand the number of people who dared meet his gaze for longer than a few seconds before looking away with fear or envy or nervousness or all of those. His own parents weren't even on that list.

He wasn't surprised by her unusual actions; after ten months of working with this woman, he knew that there was very little about this woman that was usual. Ten months, and he still didn't know how to begin figuring her out. He knew the bare facts, knew the story that she told automatically whenever she was asked—she was Dr. Helen Chang, a Greek-born, American-educated mathematician. After a few years of playing the academia game in the States—and playing it very well, from everything his intelligence agents had reported to him—she defected to her father's homeland of China, bringing with her all the best that an MIT education could offer to the People's Republic of China's top intelligence agencies, where she spent most of her time in the cryptography unit, breaking American and European codes as if she had completed more complicated puzzles before she was five.

The mystery that he still couldn't figure out was in what kind of person Dr. Helen Chang really was behind that impassive stare and exotic green eyes, that aloof personality and Greek accent. She offered no details of her life before she suddenly appeared in Beijing ten months before, not even sharing what inspired her to leave her tenure-track position at CalTech to offer her services to the Chinese government. His suspicions, as well as those of his superiors—most of their foreign assets were recruited; despite what the American movies would have one believe, not many people were willing to spy against their home nations and risk certain death, not even for healthy compensation—led to a more thorough search into her background. It didn't take too much digging to find that her father was a former political prisoner from the Cultural Revolution who had left Beijing to seek asylum in Greece more than thirty years before. When confronted about that piece of intelligence, she coldly replied that her father's ideals were not her own, and that if they wanted to judge her based on something a man she barely spoke to did years before she was born, she would take her talents elsewhere. And with her detached air, they believed that she would do exactly that. She didn't seem to care who she was working for, as long as the pay was good and the work interesting.

Much to her obvious frustration and annoyance, her first several weeks in China were spent on a series of tests and dummy codes, their inabilities to figure out what she was doing there keeping them from trusting her with anything much more sensitive than the Beijing phone book, but if she was a spy, she was a damned good one. Better than good. Paranoia was the rule, rather than the exception, among intelligence operatives, and if they couldn't find any suspicious activity, it meant that there was none to be found. Other than her father's history, there were no flags in her background, no communications to anyone outside of her cryptography unit, with the exception of emails to a woman in Greece who may or may not have been a former lover. They had a senior officer within that same cryptography unit peruse those emails carefully, looking for anything to indicate that she was communicating with someone covertly, but there was nothing to be found.

"What do you need, Dr. Chang?" the man finally asked, getting bored with the staring game.

"I just received word that my father has passed away," she said, as calmly as if she was reporting the weather. "I must return to Greece to settle his estate."

"There is no one else?"

She shook her head. "My mother has been dead for several years. I have no brothers or sisters. It is only me. It will not be permanent, likely three months, four at the most."

They went back to staring at each other, challengingly. She was challenging him to say no; he was challenging her to just leave. Finally, he shrugged. "Your passport and documents will be flagged," he informed her. She nodded, her expression showing that she wasn't surprised by the move.

"I expected as much." As well she should; at this point, she had a not-insignificant number of Chinese secrets in that very attractive, half-Chinese head of hers. She gestured toward the door. "May I leave?" He just shrugged, and watched as she rose from the chair and headed to leave. He enjoyed watching her leave; her body was another one of those things that was unusual in this place. Most of the members of the cryptography unit were short and squat—and male—but Helen Chang was close to 190 centimeters, and while the shapeless gray smock she wore—practically the uniform around such places—covered up most of her figure, it didn't hide the fact that below it were long, lean lines and a tiny waist. He may not completely trust her, and certainly didn't understand her, but that didn't stop him from fantasizing about the body below the smock or how it would feel to have those legs wrapped around his waist. He licked his lips involuntarily, a lapse of control that was unusual for him and instantly cause a surge of annoyance at himself and anger at her for having that sort of control over him.

She turned back toward him before walking through the door. "I will return soon," she said. He wondered if the reluctance that tinged her voice was just his imagination; probably, given that her Greek accent made it difficult to interpret. He didn't say anything in response as he looked right into her remarkable green eyes. She blinked once, and then was gone.

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Chapter 1: November. Washington, DC

Petty Officer First Class Michael Sanders grinned to himself as he slid the motorcycle helmet over his head. Since starting his current billet at the Pentagon, it wasn't often that he got to leave work early, and he was bound and determined to take full advantage of it, especially with the unseasonably-warm weather. He made a mental note to send his CO's nine-year-old daughter a stuffed animal to thank her for getting sick in school while her mother was on vacation, making it necessary for Captain Jenkins to leave to pick her up and take care of her personally. In a rare demonstration of kindness—or maybe realism, as they couldn't do much without the captain—he sent his staff home as well.

He was about to take the usual surface roads through downtown DC when he abruptly changed his mind, taking a corner onto Beach Drive tighter than necessary. The route home through Rock Creek Park may be twice as long geographically as going through Washington, but it was much more scenic and infinitely more fun to ride—twisting roads, only a few stoplights, and hardly any traffic to get in his way. With the November weather typically far too cold for playing around on his motorcycle, he reluctantly admitted that it was probably time to retire the bike for the winter, and one last fun ride was just what he needed.

It wasn't long until the city was behind him and he was on the other side of the park in Maryland, idling as he waited for the light to change at Connecticut Avenue. He gunned his bike as soon as he saw green, crossing the usually busy road to stay on Beach Drive as he reflected on his daily commute. If he had his say, he'd be saving money and living in Virginia, enjoying a house with a yard for less than the two-bedroom condo he shared with his girlfriend, but for as long as he wanted to keep the girlfriend, he wasn't going to be getting his way. She was a corpsman, the non-commissioned officer in charge of the ENT clinic at National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, and she liked the convenience of the North Bethesda condo—it was close enough to bike, or even run, through the park to get to work whenever she wanted, and close enough to the White Flint Metro station for when she didn't want. He did have to admit that the running trails through Rock Creek Park were nice, definitely nicer than just running on sidewalks all the time, and the scenery was certainly nothing to complain about. He grinned as his eyes traveled over the body of a woman running along one of the paths—definitely nothing to complain about. A second later, he registered who that body belonged to and quickly averted his gaze. It wasn't until after they moved in that they discovered one major flaw to their building: it was crawling with officers, mostly medical students at the Uniform Services University of Health Sciences and doctors at Bethesda and Walter Reed. He couldn't even go to the Chipotle across the street from the building without finding himself surrounded by khaki and various patterns of digital camo, all marked with gold bars and silver railroad tracks, and apparently couldn't even ride his motorcycle through the park without seeing one of those doctors, in this case Katie Cox, a Navy lieutenant and one of the ENT surgeons who worked in the clinic with Amanda. She was apparently quite a prima donna, or, as Amanda liked to say, "a real bitch." Almost a year ago, they had seen her being escorted out of one of the bars in Bethesda by two of her friends, too drunk to stand on her own power. Amanda confided to him the other day that she still couldn't look at Dr. Cox without biting the inside of her cheek to keep from laughing out loud.

He was almost at his exit from the park at Grosvenor Lane when he noticed something out of place. Frowning to himself, he turned his bike into one of the widened areas of the road that served as parking areas for two or three cars at a time, allowing people could go jogging or biking on one of the nearby trails. This de facto parking lot, however, had only one car, a hybrid Honda Civic with its hazards blinking, which was what caught Sanders' attention in the first place. Idling his motorcycle, he lifted the visor on his helmet and inched forward to get a better look, to see if anyone was around or needed help. His frown deepened when he noticed that the car was empty, and a cursory glance around didn't reveal anybody nearby—no middle-aged man making a quick pit stop behind a tree, no teenaged couple out for a quickie—until he looked down.

"Holy shit," he murmured. He reached into his pocket and fumbled for his cell phone to call the police, not even bothering to check to see if the petite red-headed Marine lieutenant was still alive.

In his experience, one didn't last long with her head three feet away from her body.