The next week, Jethro's team, unfortunately, didn't seem to be getting anywhere with the Harper Dearing mess. And not improving Jethro's mood in the slightest, one of the probies, Ned Dorneget, got a small surprise while at the dentist. A bug in the mouth. There'd been a breach of security at NCIS for God knew how long. And it definitely did not look like they were going to make it to Palmer's wedding.
Jethro didn't really think that Dorneget was in on it, but the Supervisory Special Agent was still pissed at the situation.
"I have a statement from the dentist," Ziva said as she walked in with Dorneget. She held out a specimen jar that had the bug in it. "And the evidence."
Jethro reached out to take the specimen jar from the young Israeli.
The probationary field agent nervously approached him and tried to make assurances. "Agent Gibbs, I have no clue what's going on, but I can assure you..."
Jethro wasn't impressed and continued walking across the room, intending to head to the forensic's laboratory. "You better hope you can." The probationary agent tried to follow him. Jethro turned to him. "Hey. Stay."
Jethro resumed walking towards the elevator.
Dorneget turned to DiNozzo and McGee. "I called Gibbs, he called Ziva."
DiNozzo eyed the very green agent. "And?"
"And I think I'm in a lot of trouble," Dorneget admitted.
The visit down to Abby's lab was anything but reassuring for all parties involved. Yes, Dorneget was cleared, but it opened a whole other can of worms.
"It's definitely some kind of acoustic listening device," Abby said.
"Somebody thinks Dorneget is more interesting than we do," Ducky quipped.
Ziva turned to the medical examiner, clearly somewhat amused by the quip. "Dorneget said the implant had been there for years."
"Never," Ducky countered. "That device wouldn't last more than a couple of months in a place as inhospitable as the human mouth."
He agreed with Ducky. "Did he have work done recently?"
Ziva gave a curt nod of the head. "Actually, two weeks ago. Dorneget's regular dentist called and said there was a recall on his implant and that it needed to be replaced."
"Did he?" he pressed.
"Yes," Ziva confirmed. "Then yesterday, that replacement was knocked loose by..."
"Popcorn kernel!" Abby commented enthusiastically. "I can see the pieces."
"Tried to go back to his dentist," Ziva continued explaining to the small group, "but he wouldn't return his calls."
"The plot thickens," Ducky deadpanned.
"So he went to see a new dentist," Ziva said, "and he discovered the…" She pointed to her mouth and clicked her tongue. "… bug."
He turned to their head of forensic science. "Can you trace the signal, Abs?"
"On a unit that small," Abby replied, "it would be a really short range. It probably used Dorneget's cell phone as a booster. I'll have to look." The goth's eyes widened a short moment later. "Holy molar!"
That immediately caught his attention. "What?"
"Graphene," Abby stated simply. "That's the electrical source. It looks like it's acting as a piezoelectric substrate. It's genius."
Ziva leaned in to get a better look. "If you say so."
"Piezoelectricity is the conversion of pressure into an electric current," the ever-bubbly forensic scientist explained. "So, every time Dorneget would chew..."
"The pressure on the graphene charged the battery," Ducky finished, catching on.
"It's brilliant," Abby reiterated. "Someone should patent this."
He turned to the goth. "Maybe somebody did."
Abby smiled affectionately at him. "I like how you think." She started typing away on the computer and running a search of the patent office. "Got a hit. Patent was filed for eighteen months ago."
"By who?" Ziva asked.
Jethro quickly scanned the document she had up on her screen. "Harper Dearing."
Ducky adopted a visibly grimmer countenance. "Oh, dear."
Ziva mirrored Ducky's expression. "The newest addition on our Most Wanted wall."
The medical examiner shot the young Israeli an even grimmer look. "And I just got my blood pressure under control."
Back up in the squad room, the MCRT team went over everything they knew. Mainly that Harper Dearing was the CEO of a VC group and a terrorist who was using faulty wiring on Navy ships to target them for thermite bombs. The field agents all figured that Dorneget was bugged because the green agent was a floater between all of the departments as well as was a big talker. Dr. Ryan, the liaison that the DOD sent, finally got there and had the last communications between Maple and Dearing.
With the new information from the good doctor, Ziva and DiNozzo paid another visit to Dorado Falls Investments, where the company's president, Vincent Maple, did nothing but reiterate the fact that he hadn't seen or spoken to his boss in over a year.
Jethro and Dr. Ryan questioned Dorneget's dentist, the one who replaced the implant with the bug. The dentist swore up and down that he didn't know Harper Dearing, but then Dearing called him in MTAC, blowing that defence right out of the water.
The group decamped to MTAC, and Harper Dearing was impossibly there up on the big screen. That was something that shouldn't have been possible.
Dearing had guts. "Hello, Dr. Berman."
Jethro eyed the dentist. "You recognize him now?"
The dentist squirmed on the spot. "I, um..."
Dearing then made a move Jethro didn't expect. "No point in lying now, doctor. You have my permission to tell NCIS whatever they wanna hear. Your cooperation may well carry some weight with the judge."
"How gracious," Dr. Ryan said sarcastically.
Dearing turned his attention to her. "I try to be considerate, Dr. Ryan. Mark Twain said, 'Always do right. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest.'"
"Is that why you called?" he questioned. "To quote Twain to your dentist?"
"Agent Gibbs," Dearing said, "nice to finally meet you. No, I did not call specifically to speak to Dr. Berman. I called specifically to speak with you."
"About?" Dr. Ryan asked.
"It's important to know thy enemy," Dearing replied simply, "don't you think?"
"I'm not your enemy," he replied calmly. Admittedly, he was a little concerned that the man evidently knew them all by sight. The man was smart. Scary.
Dearing chuckled. "Says the man who'd certainly kill me if he had the chance."
"Turn yourself in," he advised. "Nobody else needs to die."
"Well, that's where you're wrong, agent." What does he mean? "People die for a cause every minute of every day."
"These are innocent Navy personnel being targeted," Dr. Ryan replied without missing a single beat. "Explain the cause."
"Ask Agent Gibbs," Dearing said rather matter-of-factly. "After all, this is all his fault. I called because I think he should know that."
Leaving MTAC, Jethro had the Cyber division start scanning the entire office for bugs, Dorneget sitting in DiNozzo's chair while Dr. Ryan grilled him. They needed to make sure that he hadn't discussed any classified material in the previous two weeks.
What Jethro really wanted to know, though, was how Dearing knew Dr. Berman was at NCIS and how the man managed to punch through MTAC's firewall.
Palmer wandered through the squad room talking loudly to Breena about Abby asking her what kind of tattoo he wanted. Everyone stared at Palmer until he left.
Focusing back on the case, McGee arrived and said he spoke to Dr. Berman who finally admitted to bugging Dorneget. The dentist said that one of Dearing's goon's roughed him up and said they'd kill him if he didn't cooperate. Of course, Dearing also paid him $10k in cash. McGee also got a sketch of the aforementioned goon.
He wracked his brain for his next move. "Tony, BOLO."
His Senior Field Agent nodded. "On it, Jefe."
He then turned towards Ziva and issued her orders. "Ziver, get down to Abby. Get her the money. See if she can pull prints off it."
Once Ziva was out of earshot, Dr. Ryan walked up to him and put a hand on his right shoulder. "Hey, no matter what Dearing said, you know this isn't your fault, right?"
"Yeah," he said, not really sure if he believed it. "Yeah, I know."
"Unfortunately," Dr. Ryan said, "I get the sense that Dearing actually believes it."
It didn't take too long before Jethro heard from Abby. The forensic scientist had been running Dearing's face to try and get some sense of where he's travelled in the past to maybe find him now. Eerily, the hit she got was from the Navy Yard. Even more eerily, it was apparently a live feed.
Jethro immediately coordinated - with DiNozzo and McGee - a full lockdown of the yard and a search via walkie-talkie.
Jethro looked up and saw a Marine sniper team up on the roofs of every building in the Navy Yard. God, how had the situation gotten to this point?
"And we'll find him," McGee said. "Couldn't have gone that far."
"Far enough," he countered. "He didn't come here to get caught." Jethro pulled out his own walkie-talkie. "Anybody got anything?"
One of the more senior MPs almost immediately responded. "Sir, all stations report no sightings. Continuing the lockdown and search."
Ziva and Dorneget both ran up to them. Jethro hoped she had something. "Ziva."
The younger agent didn't exactly look as though she had good news, though. "Dearing signed in at the walk-in gate as a civilian contractor."
"He had all the necessary credentials," Dorneget said.
"Not hard for a guy like him," DiNozzo said.
"The guard says he left almost immediately after he arrived," Ziva added.
That's odd. What was he doing here then?
"Did he bring anything in?" McGee asked, stealing the words from his mouth.
"Just a briefcase," Ziva replied.
"McGee," he said, "let's see the tape." Jethro turned to Dorneget. "Dorney."
Going by the easy response, the probationary agent was quickly learning to anticipate him. "Supervise a sweep of the surrounding area."
They looked at the footage, and it was clear that Dearing wanted to be seen. The man looked right at the camera. Calm and collected.
"He wanted us to see him," DiNozzo stated.
Ziva sighed. "Ryan did say he was a narcissist."
The man had also left a flower from a nearby bush on the bench he'd been sitting on the entire time that he'd been in the area.
"Could be a contact poison," McGee suggested.
"Or another bug," Ziva suggested.
Jethro started walking over to the bushes.
"Boss?" DiNozzo asked.
He continued walking over to the bushes, reached in with a glove, and pulled out a toy boat. A scale model of the Kelly that Jethro built back in 2006.
McGee's eyes widened. "That looks just like..."
DiNozzo was baffled too. "Is that your boat?"
"Yeah," he confirmed. "Right down to the spade rudder."
The guy clearly wanted to play mind games with him. Leaving a reference to the death of Kelly for him? Yes, Kelly ended up being alive and well, but Jethro hadn't known that until years after he had begun building the boat. Is this all connected to the man's son Evan somehow? What's going on? What's his motivation?
Evan Dearing was killed in a suicide attack on a ship in port. Jethro had looked into it. There was a defect in an early warning system that could have stopped the attack. The Navy was in the middle of replacing the system but at the time they'd also been in the middle of a war. It could easily be about payback, particularly given the way that all of the attacks exploited flaws in the fleet.
Unfortunately, the search of the Navy Yard turned up empty. They all continued to try and track him down, but with no new leads for them to follow, Jethro ended up sending his team home to get some rest at 2030.
When he walked through the front door of his home, Shannon was at the table with a hot cup of tea, chatting enthusiastically with her mother. Joan had evidently decided to join Shannon for dinner that particular evening.
Jethro kissed his wife, politely greeted his mother-in-law, and then grabbed himself a drink before taking a seat beside Shannon, intending to spend time with the pair.
The evening was going well until his phone rang. Less than thrilled about what the call more than likely meant and the look that he was getting from Joann, he answered the call. "Yeah, it's Gibbs."
It was his Senior Field Agent. "Hi, Boss. I didn't interrupt anything, did I?"
Jethro just sighed in response. He knew his mother-in-law was going to make sure he heard about this. The last thing he needed was to give her more ammo to use against him whenever she wanted to give him grief.
DiNozzo had eventually caught on to the tension. "Pretend I didn't ask."
That works for me. "What, DiNozzo?"
"BOLO came back on the guy who blackmailed Dorneget's dentist," the younger agent informed him. "A Local LEO found the car."
Jethro shot Shannon a genuinely apologetic look and she, clearly not surprised by the situation, gave him a small smile in return.
Apparently, he'd let the silence drag on for a touch too long. "Boss?"
"On my way." Phone call over, Jethro closed the flip phone and shoved it back into his pocket. He then moved to grab his wallet and truck keys.
"I have to go," he said. "A BOLO on a suspect just came in."
"It's okay," Shannon said. "Go." She walked up and kissed Jethro on the cheek. "They need you. It's alright, I'm not mad." She smacked his bottom playfully as she headed into the kitchen to presumably grab herself a refill.
"Some things never change," Joann said, pursing her lips. His mother-in-law was mad about him getting called back into work.
He shoved his hands in his pockets. "Do you really want to do this again, Joann?"
Joann now had a slight closed-lipped smile. "Go do your damn job, Jethro."
Sighing, Jethro grabbed his gear and headed out the door. He had a job to do.
