The next morning, Tobias picked Jethro up and the pair headed to McGee's apartment. He left Tobias in the car and went in to get both Diane and McGee. Abby had a lead on the case and they needed to follow up on it sooner rather than later. He was caught off guard, though, when he spotted the pair passed out on the couch.
Jethro was, well, staring and trying to figure out how to best handle this very awkward development when Tobias barged in to see what the hold-up was. "Hey, Gibbs, what's taking so long? Come on, people!" Tobias clapped his hands. "Chop, chop!" Eventually, Tobias followed Jethro's line of sight and stopped abruptly in his tracks. "Holy Fourth of July weenie roast! What the hell am I looking at?!"
Diane moaned slightly as she started to stir, incidentally waking McGee up as well. The pair's eyes widened as the situation dawned on them. Jumping, Diane ended up falling roughly to the ground. "Whoa!"
Sitting up now, McGee addressed him. "Boss, this is not what it looks like."
He raised an eyebrow. "What does it look like?"
Luckily for McGee, Diane explained for him as she sat down on the couch. "W-We were talking and, you know, we fell asleep on the couch."
"Intertwined like horny rabbits!" Tobias exclaimed.
"What's it to you?" Diane asked. "So what if something happened?"
McGee shook his head. "No, no, nothing happened." The sad part was, Jethro believed the younger man. Diane's credibility led something to be desired just then, but McGee wasn't a liar. Tobias didn't seem to bite, though.
"We're not married anymore," Diane continued unperturbed.
"No," Tobias agreed, "but you are!"
"Why are you always...?" Diane whined.
"Enough!" he barked.
The bickering immediately stopped. Jethro rarely raised his voice so when he did they all knew they'd pushed it and needed to listen.
Satisfied that he had their attention, he address them. "We need to all put a pin in it. Abby's got a lead on an accountant."
Heading back to NCIS to speak with Abby about the lead, he pulled McGee to the side to speak with him. Learning that apparently Diane had been extremely upset the night prior and ended up crying because of everything going on. She'd almost had her daughter's father killed, her husband Victor was considering leaving her, and then she had found out that her own life might be in danger.
Jethro actually felt a bit bad for Diane by the end of the conversation, not that he was about to admit that to anyone. She could be extremely difficult but he did care. And it wasn't like he'd been the easiest person to live with or that she held all the blame for how their relationship ended. She'd been competing with a ghost and knew it.
Unfortunately for McGee, the younger man was still in Tobias' bad books when they all went to check out one of Oliver Lambert's rental houses. Lambert wasn't at the place, but they did find a ton of frozen fish. That wasn't the only thing that they'd found. In one of the ice containers, there was a human body that belonged to the drunkard at the bar Jethro and Tobias had spoken to the previous day.
The dead guy's story was pretty unhelpful. Given files they'd found at the man's home, though, it looked like the drunkard, Viggo Kiln, had been working with Seaman Brown and the accountant. Kiln had apparently provided the assist, playing the lovable barfly chatting people up, and getting the details about these people's lives so that the group could steal their identities. Once the accountant had enough information, he would file a fake return then collect the refund check.
Ducky and Palmer had extracted two bullets from Kiln's brain cavity. The drunkard had been executed. The ever-bubbly forensic scientist immediately ran ballistics, matching the two .22-caliber low-loads to a gun registered to an Oliver Lambert.
Clearly, the man had been murdered in an attempt to protect the identity/ weird fish smuggling scheme. The only issue was, their only living suspect, Oliver Lambert, was in the wind. Probably on the run.
Heading into the squad room after grabbing coffee with Tobias, it seemed like Ziva and Diane had managed to find something.
Ziva looked quite serious. "And it's right on the border with... North Korea. That is the third in a row. Too many to be a coincidence."
"And nobody likes those," Tobias said as they walked up, "especially when they involve North Korea or couches."
"What do we got?" he asked before Diane could retort.
"We were going over the shipping manifests we found in the fish house," Ziva informed them, "and we noticed a pattern.
"All of the fish are being exported to small fishing villages," Diane explained while Ziva pulled several photos up onto the plasma screen for them. "All on the borders of some very interesting countries."
Tobias read the list aloud. "Syria, North Korea and Iran." The man shot Jethro a look of concern. "The Axis of Evil 2.0."
Jethro was equally concerned. "Well, that doesn't look good."
"And what's with sending fish to fishing villages?" Tobias questioned, more than a little confused. "Doesn't it usually work the other way around?
"Well, we're not sure what that means." Diane glanced between Jethro and Tobias. "I know a customs agent I could talk to, see if he'll issue a BOLO on similar shipments." Not a bad idea. "That might shed some light. Tobias, go back to the FBI, do the same thing. Leroy, MTAC. See if there's any new intel on Syria, North Korea or Iran."
Tobias eyed him as Diane walked away. "Did she just give us orders?"
"Yeah," he confirmed. "But they're good ones."
"I know!" Tobias replied unhappily.
The orders were good ones, so both men immediately went to do as Diane had asked. Issues with Diane aside, they were professionals and needed to act like it. This wasn't the place or time for pride or other personal issues to interfere.
Neither of Tobias or Jethro's inquires had led anywhere, but Abby had struck gold. She found cell phones hidden in all the fish. It'd take forever to go through all the phones, but they were all part of the same batch so Abby had been able to pull up the specific manufacturing batch electronically and learned that one fish phone was active and had been used to leave Oliver Lambert a voice mail. The forensic scientist was also able to successfully isolate the location of the caller for them.
The whole team went undercover at the park, not really expecting to find anything. He was playing some chess with Tobias while Ziva was jogging. DiNozzo and McGee were playing frisbee not far from the chess game.
"This is a wild-goose chase," Tobias said as he made his chess move. "Guy made one phone call from here. He's long gone."
"Well," he replied as he made his own move, "you can always go back to NCIS, wait for Diane to come back from ICE."
"But we should leave no stone unturned," Tobias quipped. The man adopted a slightly more serious expression. "Speaking of the Spawn of Unholiness, I did some checking with a buddy of mine at the IRS - know what I heard?"
"That's she's not leaving Victor," he replied, "it's Victor thinking about leaving her?"
"How did you know that?" Tobias asked rhetorically. "Can't say I'm surprised either. You ever notice how she never gets sick? Even germs don't like her. But this Victor thing explains something else that I heard; something that I suspect you don't know, since you don't look nauseous."
He took a sip of his coffee. "I don't get nauseous."
"We'll see about that," Tobias replied.
He gave a little hum.
"Ask yourself something," Tobias said. "What are the odds of Diane being assigned a case in your jurisdiction?"
"Pretty good," he stated. "She was."
"No," Tobias said. "She wasn't." The FBI agent leaned forward slightly as he continued addressing him. "She was originally working a different jurisdiction on this tax fraud thing. When the identity theft was traced to a Navy bar, Diane asked to be transferred to your jurisdiction."
Jethro's face blanched slightly.
"That's right," Tobias teased. "I can hear those stomach acids gurgling from here."
"Her father was Navy," he pointed out. Diane can't seriously still have feelings for me? "I worked for NCIS. Diane, she's just more familiar with the military."
"You keep telling yourself that," Tobias countered. "Because you know what I think? I think she asked for a transfer because she was hoping to run into you."
He smiled awkwardly while shaking his head.
His friend shot him a very cheeky grin. "Looks like someone's still holding a torch. And it ain't for McGee. So, what are ya gonna do?"
That was the million-dollar question, wasn't it? Especially considering the impression that she'd given him when they talked back during the Victor kidnapping mess.
In the end, they did actually find Lambert. The man confessed to stealing the money from the IRS to pay off gambling debts, and then he died from what appeared to be several stab wounds. Lambert clearly wasn't the brains behind the operation; the man lacked the accounting knowledge. Clearly, someone was killing off loose ends, but at least they knew that they were looking in the right direction and were now that much closer to wrapping this thing up.
