WHACK-A-MOLE
Summary: The term "Whack-a-mole" is sometimes used to describe a repetitious and futile task: each time a mole is "whacked", it only pops up again somewhere else. That's what it felt like was going on at OSP. Will they ever find out who the one running the game really is? Spoiler alert and Tag to 06x16 "Expiration Date"
A/N Someone, I won't say who, demanded this story be in her inbox the next morning. My plot bunnies changed direction on me from the original. If this does not prove acceptable, don't look for my body – it will never be found. If it is, I will go back to working on Quinn once this one is completed. Yes, I fear that person - a lot.
Disclaimer: Thanks to Donald P. Bellisario, and Shane Brennan, for teaching me to play with the fantastic characters and sets that they have created. Since I don't own them, they made me promise that I return them by their curfew. Although they might be slightly (?) battered and bruised, I did send them home. All the other original characters that you do not recognize, are slaving away for me, trying to come up with an original idea for the next story that I might write.
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Whack-A-Mole
First there was Mattias Draeger. He probably was working for the Iskorenit cartel in Russia, but that could never be proven. He tried to kidnap Hetty and take her back to Moscow, or, failing that, to make sure she met her permanent end. But his plan to break into the OSP and force her to join him on a plane ride to the Russian capitol failed. Granger shot and killed him, supposedly as he was going for another gun, and everyone thought that they might be in the clear. Down deep they knew that Mattias was not the mole, but he was no longer available for questioning. They had whacked that one, now all they had to do was wait until the mole popped up in a different spot.
And the mole did pop up, with a vengeance. Assistant Director Granger was in a car accident, that, when brought under closer scrutiny, was not an accident. Tests at the hospital proved that he was poisoned. Since the car was totaled, no one thought to take notice that the driver's air bag did not deploy. The focus remained on the Assistant Director, and how the aconite poison got into his system.
When the poison was found in Granger's office, Hetty initiated a lock down of the mission, so the one who did it could not escape. She had Eric start to run background checks on everyone that worked there, and ordered Nell to conduct a lie detector test on everyone, including her.
Seven people, Eric Beale included, were singled out with some sort of suspicious anomaly that needed to be explained. In Eric's case, they were certain that he was being framed, because $50,000.00 had been deposited into his account that morning. Nell had just started to look into this, but then, in another part of the building, the body of Helen Trapper, a quiet, well liked woman from the Human Resources department, was found, an apparent suicide. All of the seven suspects were herded down into the armory, where they were locked in, away from all the other employees. Kensi and Deeks found evidence that Helen had been murdered, and may have had traces of skin under her nails. Since the NCIS database only contained the DNA records of the agents (mostly for postmortem identification purposes), the detective and agent went to the armory to get comparison samples from their suspects.
Carl Brown, an information technology specialist assigned to one of the other teams at the OSP, pulled a syringe and threatened to inject Eric in the neck with poison. He got them to lay down their guns, and pulled Eric out into the corridor with him, locking everyone else in and shooting out the lock's key pad, so they could not chase him. Callen and Sam had Nell open up the carport door for them to get in, while Kensi blasted away at the locking mechanism for them to get out. Nell then called Eric's phone, because Brown had already destroyed the tech's com. Eric got the message to herl that they were going down into the basement of the "old" building, and she directed the team to catch up with him there. They rescued Eric and took Carl into custody when he ran out of ammunition.
At the boat house, Carl Brown was all smiles. He wanted to work out a deal with the. He wanted to become a dangled mole, working for NCIS as a double agent, against whoever recruited him to work against them to begin with. With that, Callen called in two other men, speaking to them in Russian. They told Brown that he was now in their custody, and they would find out all he knew at some "black site". When Eric asked if they were really gonna do that, Sam said that he was going to an animal shelter in Barstow after riding around for a couple of hours in a car with a bag over his head. They expected him to tell everything he knew.
Unfortunately, that wasn't very much at all. They were no closer to the mastermind than they were before this mole popped up to get whacked.
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Hetty went to the hospital to check up on Granger.
When he woke up and saw her sitting there, he asked her, "What the hell happened, Hetty?"
"You were poisoned, ...and crashed your car." the little ninja told him. She noticed that his facial expression did not change one bit as she gave him this news. It was as if he was not surprised at all at the fact of his poisoning.
"While you were sleeping here, the mole popped up, Carl Brown, from the IT department. But we got him."
"Do we know who he was working for?" the man asked.
"Not yet, but we will figure it out, all in due time. What you need to worry about now, Owen, is that you get better. You are safe and don't have to worry about this any more."
A sly smile came across his face, before he turned it into a grimace of pain by moving in his bed.
He then looked at her and asked, "Are you gonna tell me that you are here to watch over me?"
"You might say it's something like that," Hetty responded and gently patted his arm.
Owen Granger knew that he would have to lay low for a while. They couldn't trace the money transfer to Eric back to him. He had three separate people handle the money, in three separate countries, before any electronic transfers took place. With the banking laws in the Camen Islands and Switzerland, they would never trace it to him.
Brown had received his instructions in the same way. If he spilled his guts, the arrogant fool or someone else in the chain of instruction delivery could be eliminated, permanently. He was not beyond killing those who had helped him. They were accomplices in high crimes and treasonous acts. He could justify his involvement, but their participation could never have any justification.
The only thing that he regretted doing was ingesting as much of the aconitum poisoning as he did. By taking in only tiny amounts from a dehydrated plant he had bought at WalMart the year before, he thought he had built up enough in his system that it would show up, but not affect him adversely. He never thought he would pass out, be involved in a car crash, and nearly die.
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Nell got the final report on Granger's car and found something odd about it. Why hadn't the air bags deployed in the crash? Were they disabled? Who would do that, and why? A dark thought went through her mind when Granger made a speedy recovery from his poisoning after being "at death's door". Lisa Manning, Granger's assistant, had also been poisoned, probably in the same amount as her boss was. Yet it sounded like she was going to be hospitalized a lot longer than he was. Could it be that he was just the very lucky and tough son of a bitch they all thought him to be? He was the one that killed Mattias Draeger. Was the mole going after him because of that? Something just didn't add up.
Eric had been released as a suspect and was back up in Ops working with her.
"Hey, Eric, have you ever written a program that can swipe the information from another computer without the two being hooked up in any way?"
"What do you want something like that for? Are you planning on going on a spending spree with someone else's credit cards and need to find their passwords?"
"No. Nothing like that. I was wondering if those wire transfers you were hunting down came anywhere from here. I know we can look at the company computers, but how many people bring in their own personal devices? Those are the ones I think we need to look at."
"And you wanna take a peek at those hard drives?"
"We just can't ask them to turn their devices over to us, but sooner or later they come in close proximity to our mainframes. Could something like that be set up?"
"Sure," Eric said. "It wouldn't be too much of a problem to rewrite one of my old programs to do it."
"Okay. Just make it small enough to fit on my laptop, could you do that?"
"Yeah, but it won't have enough room to copy the whole drive."
"I don't think we will need the whole drive, just the e-mail sections, sent, received, deleted."
"That might make it a little easier. Give me a couple of hours, and I'll see what I can come up with. Do you have anyone in particular in mind?"
"Nope. But I know some people will be less willing to share that type of information, and Hetty once said, 'The best spies are those you least expect.' I want to be able to find them before they hit again."
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Eric spent the next several hours, off in one of the unused offices of the old water plant building, working on writing the program that Nell had requested. He had brought up several of the older laptops, that were sometimes used as undercover props to help the agents sell their identities. None of them contained any sensitive material on the hard drives, but their e-mail accounts were filled with the personal stuff that one would expect to see.
He took a break and went over to Ops to check in on what was happening there. He found Nell busy working at her computer, several programs running at once. She turned her head when she heard the doors swish open, and saw him walking into the dimmed room.
"Hey, Eric, how you coming on that program?" she asked.
"I think I'm almost there. Just have to get a few more things to mesh together, so no one will ever know that their computers have been compromised. I just needed to take a break for a few minutes."
"Weeeell, if you really wanna take a break, maybe we should go down to the break room. I hear that someone brought some double stuff Oreos and I know there is some cold chocolate milk in the fridge."
"Let's go. That should help my poor frazzled brain to find the last pieces to that program puzzle."
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The break must have been just the thing that Eric needed. Two hours later, he reappeared in Ops, smiling from ear to ear.
Nell looked at him and asked, even though she already knew what the answer was going to be, "Did you get the program to work?"
Eric said nothing, but since there was no one else in the room but the two of them, reached into his pocket and pulled out a USB flash drive, and handed it to her.
"Is it safe to use? I wouldn't want it to bring down the mainframes for this little project of ours."
"Oh, it's safe. It won't hurt any computer, either the one on which it is installed or the one whose information being transferred. I left earlier today and placed a call to one of my hacker friends and asked him about programs like this. He knew a guy who was using one to steal pass codes for bank accounts. He said the guy didn't use it very often, and didn't take very much out of the account each time, but he had been using it for over three years, and had not appeared to raise any red flags with the banks yet."
"So, what have you been doing in that little room all this time, Beale?" Nell asked, with an accusing scowl on her face.
"First I had to take off all information that might lead back where I got this, like I promised. Then I had to make certain modifications to the program, to bring it into the parameters we need for our mole hunt. Finally, I had to figure out a cool name for it."
"Oooookay. What did you call it?"
"It is now known as the NCIS program (No Computer Is Safe). It allows us to open up any hard drive, without being invited up to see their etchings."
"Eric, you've been watching entirely too many old romantic movies."
"Well, maybe you should come over and choose a different one for us to watch." he hinted.
"We've got way too much work to do here, Eric, than to even think about watching movies. You wanna load your program into the main computer, and we can get started?"
Nell had to admit that Eric had truly outdone himself with this program. Not only did it surreptitiously look into another person's hard drive, but he had put in an extra bonus. You could direct the program to whatever computer you wanted to snoop on, and it would go to just that one. After you got into that hard drive, you could set it to automatically copy the e-mails present on that computer, no matter where they were filed, or you could look at the complete list of files on that computer, and open up whichever one you wanted, provided it wasn't encrypted.
Both Eric and Nell agreed to split the employee roster at the Office for Special Projects, and look over the e-mail accounts for any abnormalities. Nell started working from the beginning of the alphabetical list and Eric started from the end and worked his way back. This meant that Nell was the one who had to check up on all of the members of their team. The only one that Eric violently disagreed with was the possibility of his having to check Hetty's e-mail account.
"You are going to have to do Hetty's accounts. There is no way in the world that I am gonna do it. She would kill me if she ever found out. Hetty likes you. She would forgive you." Eric said with a quiver in his voice.
"Aren't you ever gonna put long pants on and pull them up, Eric?" Nell said disgustedly. "She has told us to try and find the mole. She let me run a polygraph on her. She wants this over as soon as possible."
"But that's just my point. She let you do it to her, not me."
"Allll right...just remember, you owe me." She turned her back to him and went to work.
Eric breathed a sigh of relief and wiped the sweat from his brow, as he turned back to his computer and started on his list of employees to check.
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Neither of them were making any progress, because all their searches were coming up negative. When Eric's name came up on Nell's list, she turned her head, and saw that he was busy going through someone else's information. She quickly downloaded Eric's information into her computer, and then took off all the indicators that would disclose whose account she was dealing with.
Nell concentrated on Eric's e-mails with his bank, wanting to make sure that she could back up his innocence on that $50,000.00 deposit, that made him a suspect when Carl Brown was trying to poison people. She found the one with the deposit listed, but could find nothing wrong with it. She started looking at prior ones, to see if she could find where his account was broken into, and trace that back to possibly find out where the attack originated.
She continued going back, until she found one that was encrypted. Thinking this might be the one, she applied the decryption program that Eric had loaded into her computer for just this purpose. What she found she could not believe. The bank must have sent him a request to change his password. That e-mail must have been deleted. What remained was his changed password, and that was the unbelievable part. Staring her right in the face was the word: 2015ERIC+NELL. She looked over at Eric and thought, What the hell was he thinking? This was something that just was not happening. Not this year...not any year. Friends we can be. Partners even, up here, maybe once in a while for movie night, but beyond that, no, no no, NO.
She must have let out a little squeal, because all of a sudden, she realized that Eric was talking to her. She clicked a different screen up quickly, so he couldn't see what she had been looking at, before she turned to him and asked, "What's wrong?"
"That's what I wanna know," Eric said. "All of a sudden you were saying, "No, no, NO."
Nell had to think quickly for a minute, because she had no intention of telling Eric what she really saw. "Oh, I don't know," she lied. "I guess I'm just getting so frustrated. I don't like all this looking into the private lives of the people here. It's like we are mini perverts, finding out their secrets and keeping them locked up in our minds, and then trying to act normally with them when we see them next. That's not right."
"But it is necessary. This is the job that we have to do, just like when the field agents draw their weapons and shoot at people. They have no choice in the matter. Neither do we," Eric reassured her.
Oh yes, we do, Nell thought, and it's a good thing that I do have a choice. Because what I choose to do about this, is probably not gonna be what you want.
"I guess so," she said to him, as both of them went back to checking out their friends and coworkers.
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Both of the wonder twins felt like they were banging their heads up against a concrete wall. Each of them came across a few anomalies, but nothing that had to do with the object of their search. Then Nell started in on the e-mails of Detective Marty Deeks. She found an order and on-line payment for a monkshood plant from Hashimoto Nursery in Los Angeles. The directions for delivery told them to deliver the plant to a second floor apartment, of a building in East LA and just leave it outside the door, knock on the door twice and just leave.
Nell did not recognize the address, certainly it wasn't where Deeks lived. Checking the employee roster she found that no one from the Office of Special Projects was listed for that address. She checked with the city records and found the company that owned the building. Putting in a call to the property manager, she found that all of the apartments on the second floor of that building were presently unoccupied, for renovations that would begin next week. All the security cameras were turned off, because there was nothing to secure.
So someone, with that knowledge, and knowledge of when the security cameras at OPS were pulled down for maintenance, took the plant and placed it on Kensi's desk. It was hard to believe that the Detective was the one they were looking for. His fear about Nell's coming in contact with the plant, when she bagged it up, was too genuine. Was Deeks was the mole, or was this another diversion, just as Eric was a diversion to Carl Brown's traitorous activity? If Deeks was a "red herring" did that mean that some other agent would be the next place they had to look for their mole to pop up? After all, both Eric and Brown were members of the IT staff here at the mission. And if one of the agents would play the mole, who was the mastermind behind it?
Was there enough there to go to Hetty with it? She just wasn't sure. Filing it in the back of her mind, she continued her search through the electronic messages of those who remained on her list.
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Nell received the password for Owen Granger's work computer in an encrypted e-mail from Director Vance. He knew what she was doing and considered it enough of a national security threat to trust her with it. She was hoping that she would not have to have Eric try to figure out Granger's password for his personal laptop, because she was worried about what the fallout would be if the Assistant Director ever found out.
What she was not worried about, was that the Assistant Director had any involvement in this matter, other than that of a victim. The aconitum poisoning nearly killed him. The car crash was not staged, and resulted from his blacking out. He couldn't have staged a scenareo that brought him that close to death, could he? Would the mastermind of this plot cut it that close with risking their own life. Nell didn't think so.
Opening up Granger's e-mail files she found one that seemed to be rather cryptic. It had been sent two weeks earlier to the Erlanger Hof, which she later found to be a hotel in the eastern part of Berlin. All it stated was, "June 17-19 as usual". Did this have something to do with Mattias Draeger? She called the Director back, and asked him if there were any operations or meetings planned within Germany for the middle of June. Receiving a negative reply, Nell thanked the Director and decided to take what she found on all the possibilities to Hetty.
"Hetty, I've found out a little more about that monkshood plant, but I still don't know who put it on Kensi's desk. According to on-line records, Deeks is the one who ordered it and had it delivered to an apartment in East Los Angeles that was being renovated. There were no security cams available of who picked it up and placed it here. Knowing 'the thing' that the two of them have for each other, I would find it hard to believe that Deeks would place Kens in a position where she could get hurt."
"I would agree with your assessment on that point, Ms. Jones. Is there anything else that either you or Mr. Beale came up with?" Hetty asked.
"We have gone through most of the people here. There are only about five left for us to check through. Speaking of which, when would it be convenient for me to go through yours?" Nell asked, as she gritted her teeth and gave Hetty a sick smile.
"So you gave in to Mr. Beale?" Hetty said with a smile, as she sipped her tea.
"How did you..." Nell started to say, "Of course, you know, I should have known that you know everything."
"It's a gift that I have been developing for many years. And as far as your question is concerned, you can do it at any time. I have nothing to hide from you, my dear."
Right, that's why you have all those encrypted files, that are locked away on all those private servers, in your own little dungeon. Nell thought.
Hetty looked at the younger woman, who looked like she still was debating about bringing something up with her. "It isn't my e-mails that concern you, Nell, is it?"
"No, Hetty, is isn't. Would you know why Assistant Director Granger would be e-mailing a hotel in Berlin? I asked Director Vance if there was anything going on there for the middle of June and he said there wasn't anything he knew that was agency related. It could be nothing, but the e-mail just doesn't make sense."
"What did it say?"
"Just 'June 17-19 as usual', and it was sent to the Erlanger Hof." Nell reported.
When Hetty heard the date and the name of the hotel, she was so shocked, she almost spilled the remaining tea in the cup she was holding. The elderly woman had trouble placing it down on the saucer, her hand was shaking so much.
"Hetty, are you all right?" Nell said with concern in her voice. She had never seen her boss as rattled as she appeared just then.
"I'm okay. It's just that I have not heard the name of that hotel in some thirty-five years. And I know that date brings up unpleasant memories for both the Assistant Director and me."
"O...kay, and I take it that it is something that is above my pay grade."
"Would you kindly inform Mr. Beale that I will be up in Ops shortly, and require a private, secure connection to Director Vance.
"Yes, ma'am. Nell left to deliver the message to Eric, and make sure the other techs had left the room, before Hetty even arrived.
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Hetty again visited Owen Granger, who was still hospitalized. She sat down next to his bed, and looked at him with her gorgon stare. "I have talked to Director Vance, and we have figured out who was the mastermind to our mole problem, Owen."
"And who would that be?" he asked.
"You, Owen. You are the one who is behind everything." she said with ice coating every single word.
"And how did you come to that conclusion, may I ask?"
" June 18, 1980, ...East Berlin, ...the Erlanger Hof." Hetty said quietly.
Granger knew that the game was over. All of his plans, so carefully laid out, had come to naught. He didn't realize how much that poison he ingested had taken out of his body, yes, even his spirit. Right now he would be glad just to let go completely, and join Anja and her beautiful smile in whatever afterworld they could find.
"So, what's it gonna be for me, Henrietta? A quick visit to a black site, a long stay in Guantanamo, a quick execution here in the hospital?"
"Our agency will no longer concern itself with a dishonorable agent like you. You have been removed from NCIS completely. We have also gotten word to the Iskorenit cartel that you were the one who killed Mattias Draeger. You do know that he was working for them, didn't you?" Hetty asked. "It seems that they do not take kindly to having their agents killed. We have decided to let them deal with you."
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This year, Owen Granger did not make it to Berlin on June 18th, to put flowers on Anja's grave.
The game was finally over. The last mole got whacked.