Chapter Thirty-Eight
Gibbs decided to take the stairs to the second floor where Tony’s room was located rather than the elevator. If he had known what was going on in Tony’s room at that precise moment, he would have run up the stairs, not taken them at the leisurely stroll that he did.
When he got to Tony’s floor and headed to the door, the Marine on duty, checked his ID against a list of approved visitors and let him in to see Tony. Tony was laid prone on the bed, gasping behind his oxygen mask and Gibbs’ gut told him immediately that something was wrong.
“What’s wrong, Tony?” he asked, rushing to his side and grasping hold of his hand. His fingers were twisted and stuck out at odd angles, the hand wasn’t broken, but it sure looked like it.
“I don’t know, having problems catching my breath, but the doctor said what he gave me should help,” Tony said, gasping between each breath for air.
“What doctor?” Gibbs asked, his worry level rising.
“He just left, he said he was one of Dr. Foster’s interns and was just giving me some new medication that should help with the heart problems,” Tony explained.
“What new medication? What was it called?”
“Dunno, he just gave it to me in my IV, said it would make all my problems disappear and left.”
The monitor attached to Tony’s chest showed a lowering heart beat, and although Gibbs knew that the pacemaker in his heart would stop it becoming a life threatening problem, he wanted Dr. Foster here to explain everything. He headed outside to the Marine guarding the door. “Get Dr. Foster down here now! And I want the name of the last person in here, did he show hospital ID?”
“Yes, sir,” the Marine said, heading off down the corridor to alert the nurses’ of Gibbs’ request.
Gibbs returned to Tony’s side, one eye on the monitor and the other on the man. His lips were a shade of blue, his fingernails as well. Whatever that ‘doctor’ had given him was certainly causing Tony problems. The monitor that tracked Tony’s vitals was showing a slow pulse, low oxygen saturations and a lowered blood pressure - there was something really wrong and Gibbs didn’t know what to do, he thought it would be best to just keep Tony conscious and talking until Dr. Foster arrived and could assess the situation.
“Tony, stay with me,” Gibbs said, watching as Tony fought to keep his eyes open.
“I…I…it’s dark…I…need…to…sleep,” Tony gasped out.
“No, Tony, you need to stay awake. Dammit, DiNozzo I am not losing you now!”
“Watch…out…Gibbs…the monsters, they…they’ll…they’ll…get…you.”
“What monsters? Tony, open your eyes!” Gibbs shouted, not caring who heard.
“Watch…out!” Tony screamed, before his eyes closed and his body went limp. The monitor showed a flat line and Gibbs guessed that Tony wasn’t breathing. There was no sign of Dr. Foster, so, doing what he had learnt in the Marines, he pulled the pillows out from below Tony’s head so that he was laid flat and started to do mouth to mouth and CPR until someone else arrived to help him.
Dr. Foster chose that moment to saunter in; he took one look at Gibbs working on Tony and called a code. The room flooded with other doctors and nurses and soon Gibbs was pushed back so they could work on his Agent.
It took then two shocks of the defibrillator to get Tony’s heart started again, but his breathing was still reliant on someone breathing for him. They hadn’t ordered an intubation and Gibbs wondered why until Dr. Foster came over to talk to him.
“I don’t know what’s happened, he’s displaying all the signs of a narcotic overdose, but his chart says he hasn’t had anything for at least three hours and nothing in a size large enough to cause this kind of episode,” Dr. Foster said.
“He told me that there was one of your interns came him and gave him something through the IV not five minutes before I arrived, and he was like this when I arrived, only breathing.”
“I don’t have any interns.”
Gibbs’ mind clicked as to what had happened the second he heard that. Kamisnski must have been there to try and finish Tony off, how he got past the Marine on guard he didn’t know, but a search of the surrounding area and the sharps bin for the syringe he used would tell them - and give them enough evidence to prosecute him for attempted murder on a Federal Agent.
“He’s been given heroin,” Gibbs told Dr. Foster quickly, he raised his eyebrows and looked at Gibbs.
“How do you know?”
“Trust me, I know. This is an attempt on his life and unless you do something, it’ll have worked,” Gibbs snapped. The doctor nodded and shouted across the room that they should give Tony Narcan immediately. They pushed it quickly into his IV and after five minutes Tony started breathing on his own, his eyes open.
“Hey, how do you feel?” Gibbs asked him, grabbing his hand amidst the doctors and nurses, he didn’t care who saw him shower affection onto Tony, so long as Tony was okay - that was all that mattered.
“A bit dizzy, and sick, but otherwise fine. A little confused also, what happened?”
“It seems Kamisnski got past the guards and gave you a heroin overdose, we caught it in time though, didn’t we, doc?” Gibbs asked, giving the doctor a questioning look.
The room was emptying of medical personnel and soon it was just Tony, Gibbs and Dr. Foster. “We’ll have to run some tests, but since you came back pretty quickly, I should think they’ll be no further problems,” he said, reassuring Gibbs.
Once Dr. Foster had taken some blood and left, Gibbs used the phone in Tony’s room to call McGee and Ziva and tell them that once they were done at Woodman’s place, to head over to Bethesda and help him figure out what had happened and how on earth Kamisnski had managed to make an attempt on Tony’s life when there was a Marine guarding him. As soon as they were through at the hospital, Gibbs was going to hunt down Kamisnski and bring him in - dead or alive.
~*~
McGee and Ziva arrived at the hospital, having searched and found the relevant documents at Petty Officer Woodman’s room at Norfolk. It took them a while to get to Bethesda, and that was with Ziva driving as fast as McGee’s stomach would allow.
Once they had arrived, Gibbs set them to work in emptying the sharps bin and finding the offending syringe. That meant taking the contents back to Abby for testing of what they had contained and matching any fingerprints with hospital staff. The hope was that Kamisnski had been so confident at not being caught that he wouldn’t have thought to wear gloves and would have left them something to tie him to the attack on Tony.
Tony was sleeping, thanks to a sedative given to him by Dr. Foster, as well as the usual dose of painkillers and anti-sickness medication. Gibbs told them not to disturb him as they worked because his body needed the rest to repair the damage done by the heroin overdose, so they took the sharps bins out of Tony’s room and into the hallway to deal with.
Gibbs had left the Marine in charge of guarding Tony’s door and taken his notes of who had entered Tony’s room that morning between the time he left and the time he returned. He intended to interview every nurse, doctor and orderly on that list until he found the alias that Kamisnski had used and found out why he’d been issued proper hospital ID. He also wanted to know how he’d found out what room Tony was in since that was privileged information, but he blamed either the mole at NCIS or the fact that he had presented himself as a doctor and could have easily convinced someone to part with the information.
Having already spoken to two of the nurses on his list, Gibbs left to find Dr. Hearts who had supposedly been the one to give Tony the injection of heroin. He found him in Cardiology. He was a young looking doctor, a similar age to Kamisnski if he had to guess, he also had similar facial features to Kamisnski, if Gibbs hadn’t known that the man was likely to have disappeared the second he had delivered the near fatal dose to Tony, he would have had his weapon and cuffs at the ready.
“Dr. Hearts? Special Agent Gibbs, do you mind if I have a word about an incident that occurred earlier today on the second floor?” Gibbs asked the man.
“No, that’s fine, I’m about finished here, just give me a moment to write up these notes,” Dr. Hearts replied. “I assume it’ll be best if we discuss it in my office?”
“That would be best, yes,” Gibbs said. He waited for the five minutes it took the doctor to write up whatever notes he needed to and then he followed him down the hall to his office.
“What seems to be the problem, Agent Gibbs?” the doctor asked, taking a seat behind the big mahogany desk and gesturing for Gibbs to take a seat on the other side of it.
“One of my agents has been in the hospital for just under a week. He’s got a Marine guard monitoring who is going in and out of his room for his own protection and today, someone, using your ID, entered and gave him an almost lethal dose of heroin,” Gibbs explained. “Can you tell me how he managed that?”
“I don’t know, I keep my ID here in my office in case…” Dr. Hearts started, before looking for his ID to show to Gibbs. “I can’t seem to find it.”
“Does anyone else have access to this office?”
“Well, my staff do, it’s never locked.”
“So, anyone could have taken it?”
“I guess so.”
“Right. In future, keep your office locked. Thanks for you time,” Gibbs said, not bothering to shake the outstretched hand - because of this man’s incompetence, Tony had nearly died and he wasn’t quite ready to forgive him for that.
He headed back to Tony’s floor and found McGee and Ziva with several needles and syringes in evidence bags, ready to head back to NCIS to give them to Abby for testing. Hopefully, they would turn up some fingerprints as well.
“Let me just look in on Tony and I’ll follow you back,” Gibbs said, before entering Tony’s room. Finding him still asleep, he leant down and kissed his forehead, whispering, “we’ll get him for this, Tony, just you wait and see.”
Author's Chapter Notes:
Who will catch DiNozzo when he falls?
Chapter End Notes:
I'm wary of medical mistakes in this entry, please be aware that I'm not a doctor - I just spend a lot of time in hospital being prodded by them