Title: Desperate Measures
Chapter: 02/07
Author: Ceindreadh
Email: Ceindreadh@eircom.net
Website: n/a
Permission to archive: Yes to WWOMB, anybody else, please ask first.
Fandom(s): NCIS
Genre (general, hetero or slash): Slash/Action/Angst
Pairing/Characters: Tony DiNozzo/Tim McGee
Rating: FRT
Summary:
Warnings:
Disclaimer. I don't own the NCIS characters, I'm only borrowing them, and I promise to return them in minty fresh condition when I'm finished.
Notes: Thanks to FatCat for her Beta'ing
Previously on Desperate Measures
Tony was handcuffed to a radiator in a burning building. McGee showed up just as Tony was about to take drastic measures to free himself. McGee went in search of an axe to try and free Tony.
"Come on, McGee," Tony said to himself, even as the smoke started to sting his eyes and sear his throat. "Where are you?" He pulled at the handcuffs again, on the off chance that some small miracle might have occurred in the last few minutes and that the metal would have suddenly rusted through, but it was no use. Distracted by his vain efforts, he didn't hear the footsteps crossing the room until they were almost beside him. Even as he turned his head to look up, something struck him and everything went black.
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To be continued.
[Part 2]
A few days earlier.
"So, we don't know whether Andrews took the money or not. We have no evidence placing him at the scene of Petty Officer Oliver's murder. Ducky's not even sure if Oliver was murdered. Hell, we don't even know if Oliver *had* an accomplice to the thefts, let alone whether Andrews was it." Gibbs turned around from the plasma screen, which was displaying pictures of Andrews and Oliver.
Gibbs was not a happy camper, in spite of having consumed three mugs of coffee and working through his fourth. A series of thefts had been discovered at a local base. Petty Officer Oliver had been a supply clerk who was a whiz at computers and had manipulated the software to hide the fact that he was diverting goods intended for military use to be sold to the highest bidder and pocketing the money. Gibbs had been about to take him into custody when Oliver had gotten wind of the investigation and panicked. By the time they'd arrived at his quarters, Oliver was dead of a drug overdose and Ducky had been unable to determine whether it had been self-inflicted or not.
"There's no sign of bruising on the body," Ducky had told Gibbs, Tony and McGee as they watched him slide X-rays onto the light box. "He has no broken bones, there's no sign that any force was used."
"Yeah, but if he was killed by someone he knew then he could have been taken by surprise," pointed out Tony. He had been pushing the accomplice theory all along, on the grounds that Oliver was such a weenie that he'd never have had the nerve to come up with the plan in the first place. "Or maybe the guy just slipped him a Mickey Finn and bam, Oliver's out like a light and all the perp has to do is pull the plastic bag over his head and wait for him to suffocate."
"It could have been a woman," suggested McGee. "There's several women working in the same section as Petty Officer Oliver. One of them could have been working with him."
"Ooh, a femme fatale," said Tony, grinning. "She seduces him into doing her dirty work for her and then once the heat is on she kills him to avoid suspicion. Nice!"
"Except for the fact that Abby find any other prints on the bag," snapped Gibbs.
"Yeah Boss," said Tony, "But didn't she say that Oliver's prints were all smudged over the bag, so maybe the perp just wore gloves."
"Or maybe the pills didn't work quickly enough and Oliver tried to change his mind and pull the bag off his head," pointed out McGee. "That would account for the smearing."
Tony shot him a 'who's side are you on look'.
"Okay," said Gibbs, finally. "Go over the financial records of Oliver, *and* everybody he was in close contact with. See if there's a pattern. If nothing else, we still have to find out what the hell he did with all the money."
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Twenty-four hours later and after not having slept for much of them, Tony and McGee were no closer to finding out where the money had gone. The only thing to show for all their efforts was that Tony had fixated on Petty Officer Andrews as Oliver's accomplice. "It all fits," he told Gibbs excitedly as he detailed out the connections between the two.
"It's circumstantial at best. There could be any number of people with just as close ties to Oliver," said Gibbs.
"Sure Boss," replied Tony, "But how many of them have been draining their bank accounts over the past few months. McGee traced through Andrews's transactions. In the last ten weeks, Andrews has been siphoning off a lot his cash, and my guess is that he's converting it into something a bit more portable. I think he was planning on disappearing even before we started investigating the thefts. And now that Oliver's dead..."
"He's going to make his move." Gibbs frowned. "Do we have *any* concrete evidence linking him to Oliver and the thefts?"
Tony shook his head, "Nothing that'd give us a reason to haul him in for questioning. Of course you don't really *need* a reason..." Tony stopped when he saw Gibbs looking at him.
McGee stepped into the breach before Tony dug himself a deeper hole, "But if you bring him in for interrogation now, we've got nothing to hold him on or even threaten him with to make him give up the money. He's got to have hundreds of thousands of dollars stashed away somewhere, but if we've got no proof then he can just deny everything."
"Yeah, and even if you scare him into confessing, Boss, we may never find the money."
Gibbs looked back at the plasma screen and sipped his coffee while thinking over what McGee and DiNozzo had said.
Tony looked at McGee and shrugged, before speaking up, "So what do you want us to do Boss?"
"Follow him."
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So Tony and McGee had spent the last twenty-four hours following Andrews as he went about his business. Normally Tony would have been delighted to spend twenty-four hours alone with McGee, but soon after they had started into their relationship, McGee had insisted on a rule of his own "McGee's rule number one," he had solemnly announced to Tony. "No messing around while we're working. Whatever Gibbs might say about us sleeping together, do you have any idea how pissed he'd be if he caught us making out when we're on the job?"
"Wouldn't that be part of the fun?" Tony had grinned in response. "The thrill of doing it when Gibbs could catch us?"
"Um, not really, no. I mean, I don't mind trying the odd dangerous thing, but I draw the line at pissing off Gibbs, I mean, *really*."
So Tony had agreed to McGee's little rule, and he had to admit that spending the days working side by side with him and not being able to touch, somehow made the nights sooo much more satisfying.
By the end of the first twenty-four hours, Tony was convinced that Andrews had spotted them or something. "He hasn't done anything out of the ordinary," he complained as they followed Andrews's car. "Maybe we spooked him or something."
"Or maybe he's just not our guy," pointed out McGee. "We have no proof to suggest that he is."
Tony looked at him in surprise, "I thought you thought he was the guy?"
McGee shook his head, "*You* thought he was the guy, so I figured we should go with your hunch. It's not as if we had any better leads."
"So you just went along with me. What were you doing, just humoring me until I thought of something else?" Tony snapped at McGee.
"That's not what I said," McGee, replied, trying to calm Tony down. After twenty-four hours stuck in the car, he could tell that Tony was getting frustrated.
"Yeah, well it sure sounded like it. Next time maybe you should..."
Tony was interrupted by McGee yelping, "He's stopping, pull in!"
"Don't tell me how to follow somebody, *Probie*," Tony muttered under his breath as he quickly pulled into the side of the nearly deserted street. Andrews's car had turned into a small alleyway about twenty or thirty meters ahead, and a quick check of the map showed that it was a dead end. Even as they watched, Andrews left the alleyway on foot, carrying a large duffle bag and went into an abandoned looking building beside the alleyway.
Tony quickly checked his weapon. "Stay here, McGee," he ordered.
"What do you think you're doing?"
"Andrews could be trying to shake us. While we're waiting here, he could be sneaking through that building and out the back way. I'll check it out, you drive around the block. If you see him then phone me." Tony was out of the car before McGee could argue.
With hindsight, it probably hadn't been the best of plans, but it had been a long stake out and Tony was anxious to do something instead of just sitting in the car. Easy though it might sound, it was still tiring to have had to concentrate on watching the suspect for so long, and Tony's reactions had been dulled by the inaction. At least that was the excuse in his mind when he'd entered the building and turned in response to a noise behind him only to find Andrews pointing a shotgun straight at his face.
There had been nothing Tony could do. Any attempt on his part to bring his gun to bear on Andrews and the guy was going to blast his head off. All Tony could do was go up the stairs to the third floor and sit on the ground in a room with the windows boarded up. Andrews had instructed Tony to give him his phone and then handcuff his wrist to the pipe and throw away the key. Tony had tried to escape by pretending to drop the cuffs first, but Andrews had simply rammed the barrel of the shotgun into his stomach, winding him badly. By the time Tony had been able to move again, his wrist had been securely fastened to the radiator and Andrews had been applying superglue to the lock.
"Just in case you have any little lock picks hidden about you," Andrews had said quite cheerfully. "I don't want you getting loose before the fire starts. That would ruin my plans completely."
"Fire?" Tony had asked, still a little dazed.
"Oh yes," Andrews had replied, quite gleefully. "How else do you think I'm going to fake my own death? You see, as you may have guessed, I've been planning this for a while. And I figured that the best way to give myself a head start was to fake my death. All I needed was a body and a building to 'accidentally' burn down."
Tony shrank away in horror, "You'll never get away with this..." He jerked at the handcuffs. "N.C.I.S. will figure out that this wasn't an accident."
"Oh I wasn't going to use your body for mine, that'd be quite absurd. No, I've already got a body in the basement. He's a little older than I am, but once the fire does its work, all that'll really be left will be a skeleton and nobody is going to know the difference. And as for you, well it'll simply be assumed that I overpowered you and left you here - not entirely untrue - and then was trapped by the flames before escaping. It'll actually make the whole thing even more plausible."
"You...you bastard," Tony was thinking frantically, trying to figure a way out of this situation. "Hey, our M.E. is pretty smart, he'll check your dental records and everything."
"Ah, it's rather unfortunate that," Andrews sighed almost regretfully. "You see, poor dental hygiene growing up, coupled with an unfortunate car accident in my youth and..." He fiddled with his mouth and produced a dental bridge, showing them to a dumbstruck Tony before replacing them. "These are a new set of course, from my new identity. The original bridgework is in the mouth of my doppelganger down below. Your M.E. will of course automatically check the reference number on these with all local dentists, and will of course come up with *my* name. So you see, I think I have everything covered." Andrews looked at his watch. "And now I must go, I have a plane to catch. Enjoy what little remains of your life. I estimate that the fire should have reached this floor long before the fire department will get here. Even assuming that they're notified. It seems some reckless individual may have disconnected the alarms. Such a tragedy when that happens."
So Tony had been left to his fate, and only minutes after Andrews had left, he had heard the first sound of the flames.
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To be continued
Author's Chapter Notes:
Just how did Tony get himself into such a dangerous situation?