Now this was a beautiful car, Abby thought. The gleaming jet black Buick LeSabre, brand new, had a gray leather interior, tinted windows and bullet resistant glass. It was standard enough government issue–for important government people, anyway. No one had ever offered her a ride to court in one of these babies.
It was also just about pristine. Oh, she’d lifted several fingerprints from both the inside and outside of the vehicle, but instinct told her that none of them would belong to anyone who wasn’t supposed to be there. There was no sign of a struggle, no sign of anything…
Except, of course, for that weird blue gunk on the ceiling. Reaching up carefully so as to scrape some into an evidence container without knocking the rest down all over herself and her favorite red jumpsuit, she studied the stuff speculatively. It had a consistency somewhere between Jell-O and shampoo, with a color so electric blue it almost glowed. In spite of that, it was surprisingly difficult to disengage from the gray felt which lined the interior ceiling of the vehicle.
“Come on, come to Momma, you big blue baby,” Abby murmured in a low voice. She blinked as a clump of the goo suddenly loosened with a faint squeak that sounded almost like the sigh of a teeny tiny person. Like microscopic tiny.
“Interesting…” She peered at the lump now resting at the bottom of her evidence jar. It was almost as if the stuff had responded to her command, but Abby quickly shoved the thought aside. While it was possible–she’d certainly seen stranger things–it was more likely that her weird dream about the Doctor had sent her imagination into overdrive.
“Find anything?”
Abby jumped a good six and nine-tenths inches, almost hitting her head. “Geez, Gibbs! Stop sneaking up on me like that!” Schooling her face into her best scowl, she wriggled out of the back seat, screwed the lid onto the evidence container and held it up to show him.
Gibbs took the container from her hands and peered at its contents. “What the hell is that?”
“Well, it could just be upholstery shampoo that someone forgot to wash off the ceiling,” Abby said cheerfully. “Or, it could have something to do with the Admiral’s disappearance. I won’t know until I run a few tests on it.”
He nodded, handing the jar back to her. “Anything else?”
“Only the expected fingerprints,” was the answer. “Which might narrow down our list of suspects.”
“Or it might not,” Gibbs countered. “Keep digging. Let me know anything else you find.”
“Aye aye, Gibbs.” Abby saluted and immediately pulled out a dolly and lay down on it to inspect the undercarriage. She’d no sooner wheeled herself under the car than she heard the elevator open and DiNozzo’s voice.
“Hey Boss. Abby find anything yet?”
Gibbs’ voice was flat as he answered: “At the moment I’m more interested in what you’ve found, DiNozzo–or rather who. And why the hell you brought them back here without my authorization.”
Intrigued, Abby rolled back out again just in time to see Tony’s face turn scarlet. “Ah…”
“Director Shepard instructed us to bring them back here,” Ziva answered in her usual brisk manner.
“You went over my head?” Gibbs did not sound happy. Abby flinched in anticipation of the head smack DiNozzo was almost certainly in for.
“We didn’t have a choice, Boss. The Director said to notify her immediately if and when anyone from the UK wanted in.”
Abby sat up then and studied the two newcomers, intrigued. Both of them were watching Gibbs and didn’t seem to notice her at all.
“So?” Gibbs demanded.
Ziva stepped up. “They are with UNIT. The Unif–”
“Unified Intelligence Task Force,” Gibbs interrupted her. “Yeah, I know who they are. What the hell does that have to do with anything?”
“Apparently Admiral Sullivan has a long-standing affiliation with the agency. When he failed to check in, they sent people to investigate.”
“Which would be where we come in,” interjected the taller of the two strangers, a brown-haired brown-eyed scarecrow of a man wearing a long tan coat with a blue suit that really didn’t match it. He stuck out a hand, grinning like a maniac. “Hello! John Smith. This is Martha Jones.”
Gibbs met his gaze evenly. He ignored the offered hand, instead raising his coffee cup to his lips before turning on one heel and marching back into the elevator. He didn’t say where he was going, but Abby would put money on it being the Director’s office.
DiNozzo laughed uneasily as the elevator doors slid shut. “That would be Agent Gibbs, the boss. And this is–”
He didn’t get any further, because the minute Smith’s eyes landed on Abby, his face lit up like a Christmas tree and he blurted out, “Abby Sciuto! Look at you! You haven’t changed. Well, not much anyway. Far less than one would expect, considering. And fighting crime, well, of course! Should’ve known. Brilliant, just brilliant!”
Abby took a step back. Oh no. Please tell me this is not some drunken one-night stand from London that I forgot about, back to haunt me. “Do I…know you?” she asked dubiously.
All the glee drained out of Smith’s face, replaced by a look of disappointment that was weirdly familiar. “No. No, of course not. I suppose you wouldn’t.”
Then he looked beyond her. “Oh, is this the car, then? Mind if I have a look?”
Before anyone could say so if they did, the skinny guy had already slid his butt into the back seat and began touching things, instantly contaminating the scene.
Tony and Ziva just stared, aghast, and Abby surprised herself by not bodily hauling the man out of the car before he could do any more damage. “It’s okay. I already went over the car, every inch of it. Still…don’t tell Gibbs, okay?”
“Are you kidding?” Tony said. “I think I’d like to keep my small intestines.”
The girl Smith had called Martha stepped forward now with an apologetic glance at them both. “He does that. I’m sorry.” She held out a hand in greeting. “I’m Martha. Did he say your name was Abby?”
Abby shook it then nodded. “It is. How’d he know that, though?”
“He knows all sorts of weird things.” Martha shrugged. “Though it’s possible Agent DiNozzo or Officer David told us, and I just forgot.”
Now that made sense.
He was now going over the car with a little silver wand that for some reason seemed vaguely familiar to Abby. “Traces of transmat energy. Very faint, though. Whatever sort of device was used, it was either very small or operated at a distance. Powerful enough to transport the entire car, though.” He paused then, looking up at the ceiling and poking a finger into the blue goo she’d found earlier. “Hullo, then, what’s this?”
“No idea,” Abby answered. “I have to run a few tests on it before I’ll know anything for sure.”
Smith promptly popped the fingerful of goo into his mouth, prompting Tony to make a loud gagging noise: “Oh, God, that is disgusting!”
The other man ignored him, frowning. “It’s inorganic. A conductor, too–got a bit of a jolt on my tongue there. Maybe some sort of enabling agent, designed to facilitate matter transport at some distance from the actual transporter?”
“So you’re saying he was teleported out of the car?” Martha guessed a second before Abby had a chance to put together all the technobabble and come up with the same conclusion.
“Wait, teleported?” Tony asked, surprised. “What is this, Star Trek?”
John Smith glared at him in a way that suggested more annoyance than the question merited and Abby wondered what on Earth Tony had done to him. Then she glanced over at Martha: young, hot, wearing clothes that were both stylish and showed off her figure…Abby grinned. Then again, all Tony probably had to do was just be Tony.
“Hardly,” Smith answered in a sober voice. “What I’m talking about is very, very real.”
To the untrained ear, Ziva’s next remark would’ve been totally flat, but Abby could hear the incredulity lurking beneath the surface. “So you believe that Admiral Sullivan was, what? Abducted by aliens?”
Smith shrugged, pointing his little silver wand at the goop as if he had a portable lab in there. “Wouldn’t be the first time.”
Tony blinked. “Wouldn’t be the first time for what?”
Smith just ignored him, and Abby chuckled under her breath. On second thought, maybe she did know the guy from somewhere. Something about him did seem familiar: she just couldn’t pin down what. Not that it really mattered: the minute Gibbs found out he’d been rambling on about aliens, he’d be off the investigation so fast he and Martha Jones would be back in England before they realized they’d left. He might indulge her belief in them, but these people weren’t even NCIS, let alone his team, which meant an automatic lowering of Gibbs’ BS threshold.
UNIT sounded vaguely familiar too, for some reason. Oh well. She’d probably heard Gibbs or Ziva or someone mention it before and just forgotten.
“Look, I’m going to get this back to the lab.” She waved the evidence jar of goo at them. “On the unlikely chance you find something I missed? Let me know right away.”
Smith poked his head out of the car and smiled at her, a smile that inexplicably warmed her down to her toes. “Oh, you bet I will.”
+++
Once Abby had left, Martha crossed to where the Doctor was still inspecting the Admiral’s car and crouched down beside it. “Well,” she remarked in a voice deliberately pitched too low for the others in the room to hear. “Hasn’t this trip just been one big bundle of revelations.”
The Doctor looked at her quizzically. “How do you mean?”
“Abby,” she said simply. “You did know her, didn’t you? Just for some reason she doesn’t remember you.”
“Oh, she remembers me all right,” he answered absently, still waving the sonic screwdriver around the interior of the car with a little frown on his face. “Just not this me.”
Martha frowned. As explanations went, that was a bit cryptic even for the Doctor. “I don’t understand.”
“It’s all a bit complicated, really,” the Doctor dodged the question. “Easier to show than tell, but considering the circumstances involved in that, well, rather not for the moment if it’s all the same.”
Behind them, the lift dinged its arrival and the doors slid open to reveal the young man Tony had called “Probie” but Ziva had addressed as McGee. He stepped out hesitantly, clearing his throat. “Um, Tony? Ziva? Gibbs sent me down to tell you…the Director wants to see us. All of us, and the, ah, guests.”
Martha poked the Doctor. “That’d be us.”
“What? Oh, yes!” Coming back down from whatever intellectual height he’d been exploring, the Doctor crawled out of the car and stood behind Martha. “Love to meet your Director.”
McGee blinked. “All right…um…well, she’s…in her office.”
The Doctor made a melodramatic gesture. “Lead on, MacDuff!–always wanted to say that.”
Martha couldn’t help but smile. “Well, leastways you didn’t say it to Shakespeare.”
Tony pointed a finger in the exact opposite direction. “I’ll just check in with Abby.”
Ziva’s hand clamped down so tightly on his arm that his mouth opened in an exclamation of pain. “Ow!”
“Oh no you don’t,” Ziva informed him crisply. “If you expect me to walk into a confrontation between Gibbs and the Director with only McGee for back-up, you are sadly mistaken, Tony.”
“All right, all right,” he conceded, following the rest of them into the lift. “Take it easy, Ziva. I wasn’t really going to skip out.”
“Coming from a man who has, in fact, done so on more than one occasion?” Ziva snorted. “I find that difficult to believe.”
The two glared at each other until Martha discretely cleared her throat. Once she had their attention, she asked. “So why does your Director want to meet us anyway?”
“Probably to apologize on behalf of the US Navy for misplacing your Admiral,” Tony answered with a grin. “And assure you that NCIS will do everything in its power–meaning our power, since it’s our case–to recover him safely.”
“Therein lies the problem,” the Doctor said grimly, pocketing the sonic screwdriver. “If I’m right…it may not be in your power.”
McGee gave his two colleagues a confused look. “What’s he talking about?”
“Mr. Smith appears to be under the impression that the Admiral was abducted by aliens,” Ziva answered in a voice so subtly mocking Martha almost didn’t catch it.
“Now, I didn’t actually say aliens,” the Doctor protested. “It’s entirely possible whoever it was could be human. But if so, then they’ve got their hands on some very advanced technology. Too advanced.” He looked thoughtful for a moment, then asked, “Don’t suppose Torchwood operates this side of the Atlantic, do they?”
Upon receiving three blank looks in return, he nodded. “Right. Well, there’s a mercy anyhow.”