Chapter 9
The next morning the two teams found themselves in the big conference room to discuss the plan of action for the day. After all had their coffee Gibbs turned to the "geek squad", as Tony called, the scientific quartet of McGee, Abby, Yiannis and Yelena.
"So what do we have for Petty Officer Winslow?"
"Well, Boss not very much more than yesterday. We checked him out very thoroughly. We rechecked his service record, which is exemplary by the way, we checked his financials again and he doesn't have anything suspicious. No secret accounts, not a penny more less in his accounts and his expenses than the amount expected form his income of his Navy salary. Not any suspicious travels anywhere abroad and minimum movements out of base." McGee answered.
"Phone records?"
"We checked all the phone calls, texts, e-mails, skype phonecalls he had incoming and outgoing, both personal and professional. We matched the numbers, names and addresses with the people he talked. Nothing. All the calls of personal interest were all addressed to his sister and a cousin of him in Montana." Yiannis replied.
Gibbs looked at him.
"What about the calls and the encrypted e-mails you told me last night?"
"They are legit. The owner of the number is his sister's boyfriend, who is the sheriff in the town his sister lives. The encrypted e-mails, were all sent to said boyfriend related to the surprise birthday party he is going to attend in about six weeks."
Gibbs was clearly very frustrated.
He turned his attention to the Forensic Female Duo.
"You two. What have you got?"
"We've started checking all the of the base personnel's backgrounds to see if we can find someone with the proper educational background to set up this thing but up to now we've got nada, Gibbs." Said Abby and she turned to Yelena looking for something more
"Also we checked again all the evidence for anything that might escaped our attention and we got again nothing more than we had the first and the second time. We confirmed the signature by trying our own chemical experiments and checked all the bases personnel for any relationship with any person that might have even the slightest connection with arson. Again nothing."
Gibbs turned to the old ME.
"Ducky did you find anything at all in the psychological evals of the personnel?"
"No, Jethro, but most of them weren't real evaluations. They were personality tests taken by the people before enlisting or commissioned. The only people in the base with real Psychological evaluations are the few that have been in battle conditions and none of them shows any signs of any kind of psychological deficit."
Gibbs growled of frustration. He couldn't believe that between his team and the Greek team, two teams with so much talent and experience combined they got nothing.
The last few days he had observed the members of the Greek team and he was the least impressed. Those five people were working like a fine tuned machine, much like his own team, and they had managed to cooperate without any problems.
"So, all of you. Are you telling me that none of you has anything new to add to this crap of investigation?"
He looked directly to Dinozzo as always. His Senior Field Agent almost had come short of answers. Then he looked to Nina and Ziva challenging them. At last he looked to Kostas.
Tony who was deep in reading some files in front of him didn't answer for a minute. Then he shouted a victorious yell.
"Ha. Well boss, the Geek squad didn't have any answers and so did the spook squad but…"
"DiNozzo. Bottom line" Gibbs interrupted head slapping him. The other people looked at Tony with a venomous glare.
"Ouch. Boss this hurt. Anyway. After a piece of good old fashioned police work following the paper trail I give you Lt Edward Nanos."
The whole lot of people in the room looked at him. How could he do that? He had just started looking those files.
"Who is he DiNozzo? What have you got on him?"
Tony looked at McGee.
"Probie, put him on the screen."
When Lieutenant Nanos' file appeared on the screen, Tony started talking.
"Nanos, Edward, Lieutenant. Born in 1979. Father Zamir, Albanian emigrant in the U.S and Political Refugee."
With that Kostas, Gibbs, Ziva and Nina looked at each other. Tony catching something was going on stoped for a moment but after a look from Gibbs, continued
"Mother Jessica, American. His Father came to America in 1975 as a political refugee after he defected from Albania. First he came to Greece and then asked for political asylum in the U.S. The Lieutenant joined the Navy at 2002. He served in various ships as technical officer. In 2009 he was transferred in NSA Suda Bay as Fueling ops supervisor. He is PO's Winslow boss. He has signed all of the invoices for fuel for all the base's activities. Also…" Tony made a pause and all of them looked at him.
"…there's this. Or she."
A female photo came in the screen.
"Dardana Kasami. The Lt's wife. She is also Albanian. She is a second generation Albanian immigrant in US with a Master's in chemical engineering in plastic and Petroleum byproducts from Caltech which by the way is the first ranking educational institute for chemistry in the U.S. She's working as chief of operations in the offices of the Gas Mining Company. So ladies and gentlemen I give you a Person of Interest with means and the knowledge. I don't have a motive but … I can't do the entire job myself."
This earned him another head slap along with a "good job, Tony" from a smirking Gibbs. The others where astonished, when a whistle from Kostas brought them back to reality.
"Yianni, Ziva, Nina. Search them. Find everything you can about them from the time they came to country up to now. I need to know any associates they may have, any trips to Albania, any known connections with the other thing we were looking. Anything."
He turned to Tim.
"Geek squad. Look again the security tapes and all the logs. I want you to recreate the LT's movements in and out of the base for the last 3 weeks. I want you to check his financials, his phone calls and his computer, chat and e-mail history. Check even his social networking accounts."
"Tony. Take Antonis and setup surveillance on his wife."
Gibbs looked at him.
"What are we going to do?"
"What do you think? We're going to squeeze PO Winslow to see if he has anything to do with all this. As I recall nobody has taken his statement up to now."
A few hours later.
Ziva, Nina and Yiannis were working full time on Lt Nanos' file. Up to that time they had found that the Lt and his wife were taking trips in their homeland every other month and that they also were outstanding members of the Albanian Association in the island. After that they had made a discovery. Searching the members of the Association they found that the brother of one of the leading members of the Association was known for his affiliation with the Movement for the Liberation of the Great Albania. With a little more digging they found photos from the said member and his brother having diner in a known restaurant in Chania with the Lt and his wife.
Seeing the photos Nina was furious.
"Why are we figuring this now? Why didn't we deem the Lt and his wife as person of interest after that meeting? Yianni find me the report that came with the photos."
Yianni gave her a printout of the report.
"Those idiots." She screamed.
Ziva approached her and took the report.
"They couldn't identify him?"
"Yes, those idiots in the Police Security and Counter – Terrorism Division. They couldn't identify him or his wife. After they saw that the Lt didn't meet any more with the member of the movement they deemed that it was just a coincidental meeting and they didn't notify anyone for him."
Ziva understood very well Nina's anger and frustration. She had to deal a lot of times with the lack of cooperation between the agencies and the incompetence of less trained or less dedicated officers both in Mossad and the NCIS.
She looked at Nina.
"Now?"
"You'll see."
Nina took her cell phone and called a number. In a few brief sentences ordered a full investigation of all the movements' members, their current location and all their communications and financial records. She also ordered the phone tapping of all of these people and 24/7 discreet surveillance of the man that had meet with the Lt.
Ziva was looking at her with astonishment.
"Don't you need a warrant for all of this surveillance and phone bugging?"
Nina smiled mischievously.
"If they were Greek citizens, and if they weren't deemed possible threats of the state I might needed one. But you have to remember Ziva. Here we operate much more like Mossad than NCIS. Now shall we go back to our job of checking those records?"
Meantime at the Lab.
McGee was doing his thing with the financial and the communications records while the two girls were making the review of all of the Lt's movements in the base. Now that they had a certain face to search, the facial recognition program they had would return results much faster than before. Also they had taken all the time stamps from the security logs were the Lt's access card was used. They combined them with the time stamps from his credit card purchases and his phone calls. When they had results from the facial recognition program they would put them too in the timeline along with the results of McGee research of the Cell phone towers that the Lt was near when he made or received his phone calls.
While they were doing it Yelena broke the silence.
"Does he always do that?" She asked the other two.
"Who does what always?" was Abby's response.
McGee although he seemed all concentrated to his work caught Yelena's meaning.
"Yeah, most of the times Tony does something similar. Whenever we are stuck with a case he comes up with a lead that no one else could even think of or with a lead that no one knows when he had the research done. It's just like he finds them out of thin air and the most frustrating thing is that he is right most of the times."
"You know when I met him for the first time when all of you came to Greece, my first impression was of a 40-year old teenager who is sexually frustrated so he is drooling over every woman he sees in front of him. Then I saw a man who couldn't take anything seriously and was compelled to compare anything with the movies he had seen, which I might say they are remarkably many. But, now this? This contradicts everything he has shown us till now."
"Nah, you just fell for his act. It's his way to get under everyone's skin and get what he wants. He makes you to underestimate him and then he gets you. You know even the great Eli David fell for it. Only Gibbs and Ziva could always see behind this act." He added.
Abby all this time was looking on her monitor the video footage from the security cameras.
"Gotcha" she squealed alerting the other two.
They both looked in the screen. The lieutenant was walking to a hangar, a very familiar hangar. He entered the hangar. Abby found the footage from the hangar camera. It was certainly the Lt, but they couldn't see what he was doing because he went behind some barrels. They checked the time stamps. It was just forty five minutes prior the explosion.
In the interrogation room.
Gibbs and Kostas had spent the last hour talking with PO Winslow.
"PO Winslow I'm special agent Gibbs. I'm here to ask you some questions about the explosion that happened last week."
"You can ask me anything sir. Anything to find those bastards sir."
"So PO where were you at the time of the explosion?"
"At the E-club sir. I had just got off of my shift and I stopped there to find some of my buddies. We had arranged a two on two basketball games in the courts just outside the E-club. After that we thought we could watch there a game."
Gibbs passed him a paper with the numbers of the barrels of the JP-8 used for the bomb.
"Do you know what this is PO?"
Winslow looked at them and nodded.
"They are barrel numbers sir. We use them for the refueling in the furthest of the hangars because the pipeline doesn't go there."
"Are you familiar with those specific numbers PO?"
Winslow looked at them again more carefully.
"Yes sir. Those numbers belong to the barrels of the last batch I used to refuel the hangars A – 12 to A – 14 but I don't remember which barrels went exactly where. Anyway in the invoice that the hangar supervisors signed for the delivery must say where every barrel went."
"PO do you know how the explosion occurred?"
"Only what I heard from the scuttlebutt sir. They said that someone put a bomb near the fuel sir."
"PO I'm gonna ask you a question and I want you to answer as better as your expertise allow you. Is there a way that the barrels exploded all together without a bomb or a triggering advice connected to every each of them?"
"Sir?"
"Answer me PO. How could the barrels explode all in the same time with out a detonation device?"
"Sir that's simply not possible. All the barrels where sealed when I delivered them. For all of them to explode at the same time without explosives someone should have taken off the shield, let enough fumes come out and then throw a match or another fire source near the fumes. But if someone did that he would be dead at the same instant."
Kostas decided to intervene.
"So PO how do you know that the barrels were sealed?"
The PO started getting antsy by this time. He looked at Gibbs
"Am I accused of something sir?"
"Have you done anything wrong PO?"
"No sir"
"Then, answer the damn question."
He threw in front of the PO the photos of the charred and broken bodies of the dead men from the explosion
"Because I sure as hell want to know how these 4 people came to this condition."
The PO was now petrified and he looked like he was going to become sick.
"Sir, the barrels were sealed. I'm absolutely sure sir."
"How can you be so sure PO?"
"Because I double checked them before I got them from the Supply and when I delivered them to the hangars. The first time I checked them with the supply supervisor before I signed getting them out of the supply and the second with the hangar supervisors when they signed that they got them. It's a SOP especially in late spring and the whole summer when the temperatures are so high and the air is arid."
Gibbs and Kostas looked each other. It was clear to both of them that the PO was just a pawn played without even knowing he was played.
Kostas turned again too the PO
"PO do you see those invoices?"
"Yes sir"
"The first one says that you delivered 8 barrels to those hangars 2 days before the explosion. The second says that you delivered another 8 barrels just 3 hours before the explosion. Is that a normal occurrence?"
"No sir. Normally the eight barrels we deliver each time for the portable fuel pump are enough to refuel the pump and use it for at least a week or more since it's used only for emergency refueling if a fuel truck isn't directly available. But if this happened the portable would be totally empty and the hangar supervisors would ask for resupply."
"Who asked for the resupply?"
"I don't know. I get the invoice directly through the system. The hangar supervisors submit any request there trough the phone or in person to the supply office. They give their code for the request. Then I get an Invoice through the system and I make it happen."
Gibbs looked at Kostas if there was anything else he wanted to ask. Kostas nodded negatively. Gibbs turned to the PO
"Ok PO that would be all. Needless to remind you that you don't tell to anyone what we talked about here."
Winslow got up, saluted and left the two men talk about the things they had found from that interview.
"He was played. The whole system was played. To get those barrels there anyone should have the supervisor's code to order it."