The Obfuscation Correlation Affair
by OughtaKnowBetter
Obligatory disclaimer: only in an alternate universe, and the train leaves in half an hour...
Gibbs set down the phone. Thus admonished, the handset settled itself into the cradle and didn't budge—fear was a powerful motivator. "Get your gear, people. We have a dead seaman at the Naval Yard."
Gibbs didn't bother to hide the tight-lipped frown. Seaman Adrian Berbeau was too young to be a corpse. The kid looked to be all of eighteen, probably just out of high school with peach fuzz on his face to match, and Gibbs wouldn't have been surprised to learn that his enlistment date was less than a year ago.
"Enlisted four months ago, boss," McGee confirmed, reading details from one of his electronic doo-dads. "Originally from Quaker Bluff, Oklahoma—"
Probably read every sea-going story he could get his hands on, dreaming of the sea, surrounded by Dust Bowl desert.
"Graduated middle of his high school class. Surviving relatives: a mother—"
Who would never see her son ever again. Not on this side.
"—father unknown. Two sisters, whereabouts unknown—"
Translation: the girls left the small town behind in an effort to survive the economic depression.
"No obvious connection with what went on here," McGee finished up.
Just a kid who tried the best way he could to make something of himself. Enlisted to have a decent job, see the world, and do a little good along the way.
You did that good, kid. You served your country. Not as long as you deserved to, but as long as you could.
I'm going to make sure that your country thanks you by bringing your murderer to justice. It's not much, but it's the best I can do.
Dr. Donald 'Ducky' Mallard creakily straightened himself from where he had knelt to examine the corpse, checking the reading on the long thermometer he had just used. "Several hours, Jethro." He did the calculations in his head. "Somewhere around four in the morning, I should say. I'll have a better estimate for you once I have this young man onto my table."
"I'll get the stretcher," called his assistant several yards beyond, swiveling back toward the coroner's wagon that he'd just exited.
"Thank you, Mr. Palmer. You do that." Ducky turned again to Gibbs. "Preliminary cause of death: single shot to the back of the neck, delivered from a high-powered rifle from a distance. I shall provide you with the definitive cause shortly."
Gibbs raised his eyebrows. "You got a bullet hole wide enough to drive a buffalo through, and you need more time, Ducky?"
The medical examiner favored his friend with a look of reproof. "This time shall not be any different than any other time, Jethro. You are well aware of that. I categorically refuse to offer a definitive opinion until I have the facts to bolster my initial opinion. I offer you my preliminary cause of death as a courtesy only, subject to change upon further examination. There is indeed a hole in the back of this young fellow's neck that has likely severed his spinal cord at C-2 leading to almost instantaneous death, but I cannot as yet irrevocably rule out that he was dead before that fleshly crevice was created. The minimal darkening around the entrance wound suggests that the weapon that fired the bullet was greater than thirty meters away from the boy and possibly further."
"A sniper." Gibbs had already deciphered that piece of evidence.
"I have no doubt," Ducky agreed, "and I shall deliver the corroborating details into the very capable hands of Ms. Sciutto for verification." He doffed a nonexistent hat, both to Gibbs and to the victim. "I shall see you at Headquarters upon your return, Jethro." He moved off to assist Palmer with the last services that he could offer the serviceman.
Gibbs himself had other duties, and he moved onto the more immediate aspects of the crime. He surveyed the scene, watching his team process the evidence.
Seaman Berbeau had been guarding Warehouse 19; a post, Gibbs remembered, that was noted for its unending periods of boredom. Somehow it had developed the reputation for being a place where a misbehaving young enlisted man would be sent for punishment for some infraction not great enough to merit a formal reprimand. Not so onerous as the kitchen patrol, not even dirty enough to qualify as a place to send new recruits to work off excess energy—it was just…there. Boring as all get out.
What was inside Warehouse 19? Gibbs hadn't the faintest idea. Deliveries didn't happen frequently, he recalled. Perhaps once every six months or so, a package or even a large crate would arrive around dusk or dawn, to be hauled inside and placed on a dusty shelf somewhere, never to be viewed by man again. Gibbs recalled catching a glimpse of rows upon rows of shelving when he himself as a young and obstreperous sea biscuit had caught the disapproving eye of his lieutenant and had earned the post for a week. It had been one of the more unpleasant weeks of his career. Not of his life—no, there were episodes where he'd wished that he would only have to put up with being bored. It was just, to employ words that Special Agent Anthony DiNozzo might use: annoying.
Where had that memory come from? That had been years—no, decades ago. Never mind. Gibbs had a better way to start the ball rolling toward figuring out just why someone was interested in Warehouse 19. "McGee—"
"Yes, boss. Accessing the database, figuring out what might be inside the warehouse that might of interest to someone." McGee was tapping fingers rapidly onto his tech toy.
"Ziva—"
"The lock to the warehouse has been picked," the Israeli Mossad officer announced. "There are scratches around it, bright and shiny to indicate that the intrusion was recent. I will investigate further."
Interesting. That confirmed that the warehouse had been the target, suggesting that the seaman had been a mere barrier to the target rather than the target himself. "DiNozzo—"
"Area around Warehouse 19, looking for the sniper's nest." DiNozzo scanned the rooftops that circled the area. "Could've been any one of those roofs, easy."
"Then get your tail up onto those easy roofs, DiNozzo, and check 'em out," Gibbs growled.
DiNozzo clearly wasn't fazed. He'd heard his boss growl on more than one occasion, and could identify a routine growl and one that had a little more bite to it. "On it, boss." He padded off in the direction of the neighboring buildings, military establishments every one of them, to investigate just where a potential sniper might have positioned himself.
Gibbs had a different objective: what had the murderer been after? There was always the outside possibility that young Berbeau had been the goal no matter what the preliminary evidence looked like, but on a military base Gibbs tended to doubt it. There were easier places to kill a kid, and Gibbs intended to assign one of his underlings to rule that out. Gibbs, himself? Gibbs would see if anything popped up inside Warehouse 19.
A guard barred his way to the warehouse. "Sorry, sir. You can't go in there. Commander's orders."
Not when Gibbs got through with him. "Then you get on the phone with the commander, son, and you tell him that this is an NCIS crime scene. And that if he doesn't want his superiors breathing down his neck, he'll rescind those orders before he takes another swig of coffee."
All right, so this guard, young as he was, had a little more intestinal fortitude than most. He managed to cover up the gulp of dismay that tried to emerge before dialing the appropriate number into the phone tacked onto the side of the guardhouse on Warehouse 19. Gibbs marked him as a seaman who would go far if he managed to outlive his stupidity. The kid has guts…
The guard hung up the phone, trying to keep his shoulders square. "You can go in, sir."
Gibbs gestured. "Ziva, McGee. Let's go."
The guard started to object; his orders had been only for Special Agent Gibbs.
A single glance; the guard subsided. Not as stupid as he looks, either…
Ziva and McGee followed Gibbs inside, into the cavernous warehouse, their footsteps echoing hollowly, making new tracks in the dust.
Warehouse 19, Gibbs decided, was larger than the entire NCIS Washington headquarters building by a factor of ten. It was huge, and it was filled with row after row of shelving, all packed with boxes of varying sizes and shapes. Some of the crates were too large to sit on shelves, and so nearly a third of the rows consisted of wooden and steel crates that would, depending upon their size, be plopped on top of each other to form vision-proof walls. Others managed to leave large holes in those walls, and Gibbs could swear that he could see through from one end of the warehouse to the other—if only there had been enough light to see with.
Gibbs advanced to examine some of the boxes stored there. Each was carefully labeled with some arcane alpha-numeric system that bore no resemblance to coherency, and behind him he could hear McGee choking in dismay over the small utilitarian desk perched alongside the wall.
"McGee?"
"Doesn't look good, boss. As far as I can tell, no one has ever cataloged anything in here into a computer d-base. In fact, there is no computer. Everything has been recorded by hand. That's assuming that they recorded everything," he added dourly.
Gibbs darted his tech whiz a dour glance. "You got some way of telling what our perps were after, McGee?"
"Uh…no, boss. Except by going through the catalog. Card at a time." McGee indicated the wall of shallow drawers above the desk, each drawer presumably holding several thousand small cards that would inform the searcher where an item was located. The problem, it was clear, would be in determining just which card held the pertinent information.
Gibbs had no intention of subjecting himself to that onerous task. There was a reason that enlisted men had been invented, and junior NCIS agents fell into the same category. "Better get to it, McGee. I want to know what's been stored here, and why someone would shoot a navy sea biscuit to get at it."
McGee gulped. "Yes, boss."
Gibbs had a better task for himself: tracking down the foot prints that dotted the aisles. There weren't many of them; dust had settled thickly over everything, proving that the budget cuts had hit the housekeeping department of the armed forces as heavily as every other, and it was easy to eliminate almost two thirds of the shelving simply by following the path laid out. "Ziva," he called.
She materialized in his wake, sharp brown eyes examining and discarding things just as he did. The steps that they followed led down one stream of shelving and up another, crossing over and back as though the perpetrators themselves weren't certain of where they were headed.
"Four," Ziva announced.
Gibbs agreed. There had been four of them, all men by the size of the footprints and the length of the stride, and they had been most interested in whatever had been located in and/or around Space 134H. "McGee," he called out.
"Boss?"
"134H. Look it up."
"Right, boss." There was a suspicious pause. "Uh, boss?"
"What is it, McGee?"
"Uh, this might take a while. The cards are kind of, uh, messed up."
"Then straighten 'em out, McGee."
"Right, boss." There was a healthy dose of 'this is going to take most of next year' in McGee's voice. 'Despair' was also prominent.
Gibbs ignored him. There was a murder to be solved, a soul to be put to rest and a National Security question to be answered. He didn't know what was in Warehouse 19 and neither did a substantial number of people in and out of the armed forces, but somebody did and they had likely removed something significant. Knowing what that significant item was would go a long way toward solving the murder of Seaman Berbeau and, oh by the way, keeping the country safe from whatever.
Gibbs examined empty Space 134H. The remaining dust suggested that the box had been close to a bread box in size, large enough to hold a laptop computer and a little bit more besides. The height of the shelving bore out that supposition, allowing for some two feet for that measurement. Smears of dust made Gibbs wonder if any of the perpetrators had been kind enough to leave any fingerprints behind.
"On it, Gibbs," Ziva murmured, pulling out her kit and demonstrating yet again that she had mastered the technique of reading Gibbs's mind. She lightly sprayed the area with a lacquer-based fixative, snapping several pictures of the resulting smudges for the forensics portion of the hunt.
What the hell was going on here? What had the perpetrators been after? In all the years that he'd been a Marine and then associated with NCIS, Gibbs had never had the opportunity to do more than the rare guard duty for Warehouse 19. Sure, he'd heard the tales passed around the barracks: the zoo for the monsters that the mad scientists had dreamed up, which was where the Sasquatch came from. Strange machines capable of blowing up the sun. An old hide that the Loch Ness monster had shed, with scales that could deflect a torpedo. Best of all: a potion that would attract women for miles around. Old Gunny Rodriguez had come up with that one, swore that he'd seen one of the commodores using it one night before going out on the town. The whole boat had laughed at him—until the commodore announced that, come the end of his enlistment, he'd be mustering out and marrying this wealthy, high-end European chick with a title.
There wasn't much in the warehouse to either prove or dispel such notions. There were boxes and crates and the occasional tarpaulin. The whole place was as dead as a tomb, with nothing more than the occasional creak of contracting metal to let him know that there was a world outside with better things to think about. If there was a cage with the Loch Ness monster inside, the monster was taking a very long nap.
So what was so important here that it needed a twenty four/seven guard from the United States Navy?
McGee too had mastered mind-reading; that, or he'd come up with the same question independently. "Boss, these cards aren't going to give us much information, either. They give the location of—I'm assuming—everything in here, but they don't give many hints as to what's being stored. For example: this 'MCD' could stand for anything."
Gibbs shrugged. The answer was somewhere. Everything had an answer; the trick was finding it. "Let's see if anything will give us a clue. Where is this MCD thing?"
McGee consulted the card in his hand. "Aisle 459, Row M."
Ziva was willing. "Perhaps it will help us to understand this catalog system. It is like none I have ever known."
The trio hunted down Aisle 459, Row M—which, for some unknown reason, was located closer to Row Q than to Row L and contained boxes labeled with A, G, and X—and found several smaller boxes with labels that appeared to be decades old. Three or four labels had given up any pretense of sticking to their assigned boxes and had fluttered to the floor. Further evidence of the lack of housekeeping detail—no one had bothered to sweep them up.
"These labels weren't printed out, boss," McGee observed. "They're from a typewriter. Not a printer. See? There's white-out on this one, and on this label somebody just typed the correct letter over and over a bunch of times until it looked like a C."
"So they're old," Gibbs grunted. "I learned to type on a typewriter." He impaled McGee with a look just short of a glare. "I did my reports on a Royal. A manual one, McGee. Not electric."
"Uh, didn't mean to imply that you're old, boss." McGee hastily backpedalled. "I mean, you're not. Old, that is. The paper is. You're not. Old."
"Find the damn box, McGee."
"Yes, boss."
Ziva darted her hand forward. "Here it is, Gibbs." She pulled down a small box that looked as though it could handle a baseball cap with room left over. The box was sealed, but the seal had been broken and then re-sealed. The paper label on one end of the box had been imprinted with the simple initials of 'MCD'. There was no other identifying marks that any of the three could discern.
"Should we open it?" McGee asked. "I mean, this is top secret stuff—oh."
Gibbs already had the box open, the seal slit through with a single fingernail. He flipped open the lid.
Inside lay a pair of thick glasses, the frames heavy and black in the style of the 1950s. The lenses too were thick, with silver sparkles shot through the curved glass. A small black box accompanied the glasses with slender wires wrapped around it in an effort to keep things neat and tidy. Gibbs lifted out the index card that he found inside, while Ziva went for the glasses. She tried them on. "Attractive, no?"
"No," McGee told her. "Boss, what is this thing?"
Gibbs held the card at arm's length, trying to make the printed words come clear. "Looks like MCD stands for Mind Control Device." He snorted. "This some kind of a joke?"
McGee took the index card from him, better able to decipher the smaller font. "Boss, this was an experiment from a while ago, like fifty years or so. The date is right here, see? Nineteen fifty-seven, December something-or-other. I can't quite make out the date with the faded ink. You put the glasses on, flip the switch on the box, and think about whatever it is that you want the person in front of you to do." He sniffed. "Pretty crazy, what they thought. They actually thought that they could brainwash someone in an instant. No wonder people settled on drugs and psychotherapy. Takes longer, but it works. Not perfectly, but better than something pretending to affect brain waves at a distance."
"Are you so sure, McGee?" Ziva, still wearing the glasses, plucked up the box with the wires, inserting the wires into the frames. She flipped the switch, and stared at McGee.
Then she sighed. "You were right, McGee. This device is incapable of affecting someone's behavior."
"You tried to get me to do something," McGee accused. "What was it, Ziva?"
Ziva smiled viciously. "To head-slap Gibbs."
The roof was significantly hotter than the street below. That was the first fact that hit DiNozzo in the face as he emerged from the staircase onto the flattened surface of the building that overlooked Warehouse 19. The second fact was that it would be a delightfully short examination of the forensic evidence: there it was, laid out in front of him, inviting him to kneel down and pluck up the shell casing. There was exactly one.
It wasn't hard to guess that this was the sniper's nest, and that a single shot was all that had been required to move the rest of the perpetrators past the late Seaman Berbeau. Pulling on latex gloves, DiNozzo carefully bagged the shell casing after first snapping several pictures of the scene. There was a single footprint in the dust but it was smudged and indistinct after several hours of exposure to the elements. DiNozzo dutifully measured the print; likely a size twelve men's, though it could be a size or two more or less, which eliminated some forty percent of the population of DC. Oh, joy. Going for a search warrant on the strength of that evidence—not.
DiNozzo leaned over the edge of the precipice, kept from falling by the thick stack of bricks that rimmed the square edge of the building's roof. Perfect angle for bagging one unsuspecting guard, especially in the dark of night. DiNozzo tightened his lips. The kid didn't deserve this. His only crime had been to be in the way of the perps. They could have tied him up, dragged him inside to wait for his relief to come get him in the morning. The sniper and his crew were not nice people, and DiNozzo—as he had so many times in his career—vowed to bring them to justice. It wouldn't bring the kid back, but it would prevent them from doing the same to anyone else.
Then he frowned. Hell of a good shot. The distance between this nest and Berbeau's position had to be more than five hundred yards. Do-able, sure, but it had to have been done by a professional sniper with proper equipment. Just another piece of evidence that this had been a well-planned excursion for several somebodies with very little respect for others.
Something glinted in the hot sun, something reflective and attached to the wall directly below him. DiNozzo leaned over to take a second look.
It was a small lens inserted into a tube, likely a security camera aimed at the entrance to Warehouse 19. DiNozzo resolved to figure out which desk officer had control over the footage, to find out if they would be lucky and see how many dark figures entered the warehouse after dispatching Seaman Berbeau. DiNozzo frowned; the security camera looked a lot smaller and hardier than anything he'd seen the Navy use. His tax dollars at work? He'd be speaking to his Congressman; Warehouse 19, the tail end of nowhere, didn't need a security camera on top of a security guard. Dust didn't require a lot of guarding. Somebody in a private security company was earning a healthy fee for doing little to no work.
There wasn't anything more to be seen up on this roof. DiNozzo had been lucky; this was the first of three possible locations and he'd gotten it right on the first try.
Now he had to go give Gibbs the good news.
"Ducky?" Gibbs walked into the morgue, seeing his colleague hard at work.
Gibbs never liked the place; it held too many unpleasant memories. It was cold, and it smelled of formaldehyde. No, he didn't really know if they still used formaldehyde, but anachronistic Dr. Mallard probably did out of sheer cantankerousness. It smelled, and he hated it.
The corpse was neatly laid out on the autopsy table, a bright light illuminating every crevice in the body. A careful Y-incision had already been carved across the chest, with flaps of skin pulled back to reveal parts of the man that most people were lucky enough never to see. The eyes were closed, Gibbs noted. Just like the medical examiner, to respect the dead as much as he did the living. Seaman Berbeau wouldn't have liked to observe an autopsy, and there was no reason why he should have to watch his own.
Ducky was unaffected. "Ah, Jethro. You're just in time for the preliminaries."
"Something wrong with the corpse, Ducky?"
Ducky lifted his eyebrows. "I remain eternally amazed at your powers of perception, Jethro. Yes, there is something 'wrong' with the corpse." He moved on to his main thesis. "The lethal wound was indeed the projectile injury to the back of the head. It pierced the spine at the location of C-3, and death was all but instantaneous for our poor young seaman. I find no other injury save a healing scratch to the left knee, most likely incurred some three days ago."
"What's wrong with that?"
Ducky turned around to face the NCIS team leader. "Jethro, it was a remarkable shot. It pierced the third cervical spine at the exact center of the area, shattering it with the impact and velocity." He cocked his head. "In my experience, injuries are rarely this neatly performed and certainly not at a distance. The site of entry is almost invariably a millimeter or two off to one side or the other. Not in this case, Jethro. The entry wound was as precise as if it were created by a computer with a microscope at short range, though there are no powder burns on the surrounding tissue to support the concept of a close range explosion."
"And DiNozzo found the shell up on the roof," Gibbs reminded him.
"Yes, well." Ducky peered at the x-ray of the hapless seaman's spine. "A remarkable marksman, then. I would recommend extreme caution, Jethro. I shouldn't like to see you targeted by the man who performed this shot. He appears to be rather good," he added by way of an understatement.
"I'll do that." Gibbs was impatient. "What else?"
Ducky snorted. "Always in a hurry, aren't you, Jethro?"
"Ducky…"
"Yes, I do have an additional detail for you." Ducky indicated the corpse. "The entry wound itself was unusual. I would have expected to find a large-ish sort of hole, consistent with a long distance projectile, the edges blurred and crisped by the bullet itself. Instead, as I said, this entry wound was clean and precise. Granted, those perpetrated from afar tend to have less of the splatter effect, but this had rather less than is commonly seen."
"Which means?"
"Frankly, I'm not quite certain," Ducky admitted. "It's unique in my experience. I shall have to research the literature to determine which weapon was the most likely culprit." He jerked his chin in the direction of the Forensics lab. "Perhaps Ms. Sciutto will have better luck. The bullet itself is already in her capable hands, and I understand that Special Agent DiNozzo has given her the casing."
Today's excursion into the cave known as Abby's Forensic Lab involved more microscopes and computers than bubbling Bunsen burners. To be honest, Gibbs admitted to himself, Bunsen burners didn't bubble, they flickered. And scientists and researchers tended not to use them any more; they had better and more high tech solutions that didn't emit soot into the air and had less of an inclination to go boom when least expected.
Today, however, there was a bank of something mysterious toward the wall of the lab where lights were blinking like a night time crowd taking pictures of a winning home run at the World Series. Abby was ignoring it, so Gibbs did, too. Instead he concentrated on the flat screen in front of her, the one that was carefully—and unsuccessfully—attempting to align two bullets.
Gibbs took a moment to concentrate on his lab rat, as well. He never realized quite how tall she was until he stood next to her. Somehow he always expected her to barely reach his shoulder; a pixie that would flit from test to test. Instead, there was only a few inches of height that separated them. Black hair, startling green eyes that sometimes were blue depending on which colored lenses she selected for the day's work. Gibbs had seen the Marilyn Monroe costume pictures that DiNozzo had snapped—didn't think I knew about that, did you, DiNozzo?—and never wondered about the various eager young men crowding around his lab rat. Just toying with them, aren't you, Abby? You don't even realize that most of 'em couldn't care less about the magnificent brain you keep inside your skull. Brilliant little innocent, sitting in your lab like Rapunzel, waiting for someone close to your equal to come sweep you away. Gonna be a long wait, Abbs.
He pulled his thoughts back to the case. "What'cha got, Abby?"
She scowled. "Not as much as I'd like."
"Then give me what you do have, Abby." Gibbs settled back to let the data flow.
"I'm running the blood samples that Ducky gave me," she informed him. "Some of the tests still have to finish running, but nothing looks positive. Our victim, whatever his faults, was doing his guard duty like a good boy. I'm not finding anything recreational about his blood at all, aside from the fact that he probably didn't want to be standing guard over a dusty old warehouse through the night. If I were him, I'd have gone for a caffeine buzz."
Nothing strange about that. "What else?" Gibbs pointed his gaze at the bullet-laden screen.
That earned another scowl; it was the focus of Abby's displeasure. "I'm not finding a match, Gibbs."
Okay, that too wasn't horribly unexpected. Disappointing, sure, but the database only had copies of bullets used in crimes. If this was a new weapon, straight off the shelf, there wouldn't be a match—
"That's not what I mean, Gibbs." Abby interrupted his thought, well aware of what her boss was thinking. "I mean, this bullet doesn't match any weapon known to man." She warmed to her topic. "I've compared the bullet parameters to every weapon ever manufactured in America, Russia, Israel, China, and a whole bunch of other countries. I've even tried the former Soviet Union. I've gone back to weapons that haven't been made for like fifty years, Gibbs! Nothing! Nada! Zilch! Zip! Nicheva!" She stared up at him. "Gibbs, somebody is manufacturing their own guns. And they're doing a really really good job of it."
"Gun running?" Gibbs's thoughts turned in the sensible direction. "That would fit. Warehouse 19 looks to be storing some pretty nasty things. They could have been after a crate of two of guns, something from a line that never caught on, thought they were easy pickings—"
"Gibbs, no," Abby broke in. "I mean, like this bullet has never been seen before. I mean, this is from a gun that doesn't exist!"
"Doesn't exist?"
"Never been built," Abby confirmed, "except that it has. Been built, I mean. And used. Like that." She pointed at the screen. "Gibbs, this bullet—when it was being used, before it got flattened by hitting what it supposed to hit—I mean, it wasn't supposed to hit Seaman Berbeau even though that's what the Mr. Sniper Guy intended—"
"The point, Abby."
Abby pulled it back. "This bullet is nothing known to modern man, and it has nothing in common with bullets made decades ago, either. It is a highly structured piece of ammunition designed for distance and accuracy. The alloy contains titanium, something that is extremely unusual to find in a bullet; it's too expensive to use on something designed to be destroyed in use. That's the conventional thinking. The explosive powder inside which was used to propel the bullet is also unusual. The residual composition contains lithium, likewise something that is no longer commonly used in gunpowder." She turned to face him. "In short, Gibbs, we're looking for a gun that was invented within the last year or two and is likely known only to a single government at the highest levels. And I'm not even sure at all that it was our government doing the inventing." She made a face. "How are you going to find something that tippy-top secret?"