January 20, 2004

NAVFOREUR – London, England

0825 Greenwich/ 0225 Eastern

Major Jack McBurney exited the taxi he had taken in from the airport. One of the benefits of catching a flight that arrived early in the morning was, if you could just sleep on the plane, you could possibly get in a full day's work when you arrived. Given the implied time crunch, that was his firm intention. McBurney did not want to be the cause of any further delays, which is why he'd come straight to NAVFOREUR HQ rather than finding his VOQ and dropping off his luggage.

His first stop was at the security desk, where he presented both his identification and a copy of his orders. The sergeant behind the desk directed him into the security office, where McBurney got a set of building credentials issued. This way, he wouldn't need to be continually signing in for a visitor's pass, but could simply show his ID and pass and continue on. He also left his bags there, for safe keeping as well as security reasons. After that, he stepped into an elevator, following the directions he'd been given as to the conference room where Admiral Morris was working out of.

Unfortunately for McBurney, another person was also getting into the elevator that morning. Harm was running late, having had an early morning meeting at Mattie's school with her History teacher. Both he and Beth had forgotten to sign a permission slip for an upcoming trip to Blenheim Palace and so he had been called that morning about the matter. So, Harm had been forced to go there first and drop off the required form, as well as Mattie. The teacher had taken a couple of moments to explain the importance of turning things in on time, bringing a smile from the teen as well as from Harm, once he'd gotten outside the classroom.

So, now he found himself face to face with the man who had prosecuted him for the murder of Lieutenant Singer. Judging from the pained look on the Marine's face, it was clear the other man remembered as well. However, Harm held no grudge against the man, although he did wish there had been a more thorough investigation done before he'd been locked up and put on trial. Maybe that was his fault, though. He'd certainly acted guilty enough.

"Captain Rabb," McBurney said, nodding his head.

"Major McBurney," was Harm's solemn reply.

"I believe I owe you an apology, Sir."

Harm reached out and pushed the stop button on the elevator.

"Major, don't apology for doing your duty."

"No, Sir. I'm apologizing for not doing my duty. I should have asked for more time, made certain of the evidence…."

"I wasn't the best defendant, either. Everything I did just made me look even guiltier," Harm said. "And maybe if I hadn't looked so guilty, NCIS would have done a better job of investigating the case and discovered that Lindsey was the real killer before I was ever put on trial."

"That's all true, Sir. But, it doesn't necessarily make me feel any better about my part in the whole thing," McBurney said.

"Well, Major, all you can do is learn from the experience and move on. Trust me, I have."

With that, Harm started the elevator once again, effectively ending the conversation. McBurney looked over at the other man, satisfied that at least they had been able to talk. When he'd seen the Captain, he'd been worried that the man would hold him to blame and that the tension could be a problem. Instead, he'd found a man at peace with what had happened, or at least McBurney's role in it.

When the elevator finally stopped on the correct floor, the two of them parted as they went to their own destinations. McBurney continued down the hall to the conference room, while Harm entered his office. Each had pushed the brief conversation aside, as they prepared to face the challenges of their days.

Conference Room, NAVFOREUR – London England

1315 Greenwich/ 0815 Eastern

Jack McBurney had spent the morning going over the transcript of the court-martial and clearly saw that he had his work cut out for him. Captain Krennick was making some interesting counterarguments which he would clearly have to deal with if he was to have any hope of scoring a conviction. What made it even worse was that the victim was Captain Rabb. Part of McBurney wondered if this was Karma or just a joke being played on him by the fates.

Another part of him was disappointed that he didn't have any notes from Commander Alexander, so he was trying to puzzle out her strategy as he went. Now, however, he was done with the transcript and debating whether to move on to the evidence or take a break and find some lunch. After a moment, he decided that food could wait until he'd at least looked at what was in evidence and match it up against the transcript.

An hour passed as he did that, making detailed notes on his legal pad as he went. A couple of things stuck out to him. First, the documents entered as evidence by Captain Krennick were not as descriptive as she had made them out to be. Nowhere in them did Rabb's name appear, nor any other name for that matter. Just that she had made certain purchases around Hilton Head on the weekend in question. Why Alexander hadn't been more forceful in rebutting those documents, he wasn't sure. If it had been him, he'd objected to their probative value. Maybe he would have won and maybe not, but now that they were in evidence, he couldn't object to them. So, he'd just have to attack their credibility.

The flight manifests, though, posed an interesting set of questions for McBurney, however. Looking back through the transcripts, he could only see them being introduced into evidence by Commander Alexander and the objections raised by Captain Krennick. What their value was was presently unclear to him, so he started at page one and began going through them as any thought of lunch faded from his mind.

What was immediately apparent was the date. He had, as he paused to thumb through the entire stack, probably every flight that had left or arrived at either Andrews or Oceana from April 5, 1996 to April 8, 1996. A little bell started ringing in the back of his head, as the dates sunk in. He had seen something else in the transcript connected to that date, he was almost certain. Going back to his notes, he scanned until he found it. Taking a pen, he started writing questions out quickly in short-hand, before turning back to the papers looking for answers.

The first document with the name Krennick that he found was for the fifth. He removed it from the stack, put a post note on the next page to mark its place and continued on looking. Two hours and a cup of coffee later, he found the second one, this time on the evening of the seventh. Repeating his previous step of marking the place, he set this one aside as well while he continued on through to the very last document. Now, he looked over the two manifests that he had removed, looking for the name Rabb.

McBurney reread the documents, making certain that he had not missed something. No, the name Rabb did not appear anywhere on the pages. So, taking a glance at his watch, he gathered up the documents and placed them into a briefcase. This he locked and then took with him, having finally decided that he needed to see about getting something to eat.

Going back downstairs, he stopped at the security desk and asked for directions. After getting a couple of options, he went outside and walked a couple of blocks to a little family restaurant. Settling in, he had an order of fish and chips along with a mineral water. As he ate, he simply let his mind drift over the case, letting what he'd discovered so far sink in. However, he couldn't escape the feeling that there was something more, something that he was missing.

NCIS Offices – London, England

1554 Greenwich/ 1054 Eastern

Agents Weber and Garcia were standing in the basement of the building, watching as one of the evidence specialists finished firing a pistol and set the weapon down. As he made the weapon safe, they approached the bench and watched as the man collected the slug. This he set on the bench, next to four others, then he removed his ear and eye protection and became aware of his audience for the first time.

"Agent Weber, hovering over me is not going to speed up the process."

"I know, but patience isn't my strong suit right now," Weber told the man.

"Well, maybe you should try some herbal teas or meditation. Maybe even yoga," was the man's smiling response, drawing a laugh from Garcia and a withering glare from Weber.

"How long?"

"Well, I need to take these and compare them against the slug removed from Commander Alexander. If they match, we have the weapon that was used."

"They'll match," Weber said, quite certain.

"That, Sir, is an assumption and I deal in facts, not assumptions," the tech responded.

Taking the five slugs he had just produced, the man moved over to a work bench in the rear of the room. There, he had access to several different microscopes with which to examine the evidence. Preferring to beginning with the easiest, at least on the eyes, he selected the one connected to the overhead monitors. Sliding the objects into place, he rotated them as he watched. Finally, a smile came to his face as he looked at the images. On a scale of 1 to 100, he'd put those at around 90. Taking a moment, he checked which of the rounds he'd fired corresponded to what was on the microscope before changing it out.

This time, he was looking at the very first round he'd fired. After rotating this one, his smile got even bigger, if possible. They had their gun, now to match it with their shooter. For his part, Weber didn't say a word as he went out the door and down the hall to a different part of the basement. Garcia just smiled an apology to the man before rushing after her partner.

The next stop was to see the chief forensics specialist assigned to London. Fortunately, she had been on the receiving end of too many visits by Agent Weber to be at all phased by his brusque nature. She just smiled as she watched the pair of them enter her lab, before going to her desk and collecting a report.

"Please tell me you've got something," Weber said.

"What I've got are answers which lead to more questions, Pops," the woman said. "We completely stripped the weapon, checked for blood, organic material, fingerprints and fibers. We found trace amounts of skin cells under the rear of the slide. We also found a fingerprint…."

"On the gun?!" Garcia asked, in shocked disbelief.

"No. One of the remaining cartridges."

"Did you get a match?"

"We did," the woman said, with a smile as she opened up her report and removed a sheet. However, the face was not the one that either Weber or Garcia had been expecting to see.

"Who the hell is he?" Weber asked.

"You might want to take a seat, both of you." Once the two agents had sat down, she turned and clicked on the display mounted to the wall of her lab. "This is Brigadier General Jonathan Gordon, USMC. Currently, he is the Deputy Commander, MARFOREUR. As such, she spends most of his time in Stuttgart, Germany. However, he is here for a couple of days every six to eight weeks, meeting with NAVFOREUR's staff on plans. Remember, the Navy controls the ships the Marines ride on, so coordination is essential."

"Alright, that gives us a who. Now, we need to figure out the how and the why," Weber said, picking up the file and hurriedly walking out of the lab. Garcia followed him upstairs to the office assigned to the team, sitting down at her desk. Fortunately, McCall was also in the building, so they were able to quickly bring him up to speed on the recent developments in the case.

"I've got a problem with this, Pops," Garcia said. "How in the heck does a Marine, less than maybe five feet from his target miss that badly?"

"The pillow cuts both ways, Garcia. If he was using it to muffle his shot, maybe it affected the angle of the round enough to prevent a clean kill," Weber replied.

"Well, I may have something else that will help," McCall told them, before going to the whiteboard they used for assignments. Erasing a section, he quickly drew the rough shape of a human head. "Talked with the doctors over at Guy's Hospital and asked if they could figure out the basic path the slug took in Commander Alexander's head. This is what they showed me, assuming that this is the rear of the head."

Taking a blue dry erase marker, he drew a line from midway on the left side of the skill toward the lower right corner, where the jaw and cheek joined together.

"The wound was relatively shallow as it transected the rear of the brain before lodging here, near the hinge of the jaw. The only way that the doctor could see that happening is if Commander Alexander's head was turned towards the side at the time the shot was fired."

"Good work, Bobby. Now, let's see if we can tie General Gordon to the shooting. Motive, means, and opportunity. Bobby, you see about finding out where he was last weekend. Garcia, see if you can come up with a reason why he'd want to kill Commander Alexander. I'll work on further tying the pistol to him. Let's go, people, the clock is ticking."

With that command, the agents turned to their computers and began working. For McCall, his first steps were to review the last few days of flights from Germany into London. Getting on the telephone with a contact in the UK's Immigration Service, asking them to see if General Gordon had come through on a commercial flight. While they were checking that, he turned his attention to US Air Force flights from Germany into England. Thankfully, these were largely on the computer and easily searched for specific names.

As McCall was working on that, Garcia was pulling up the service records for both General Gordon and Commander Alexander. Once she had them, she laid them virtually side-by-side and went chronologically. She looked at where each of them had been stationed, then also pulled up a copy of the cases that the JAG officer had been assigned that might have taken her elsewhere. On her first look, she saw nothing that connected the pair, so she started at the beginning and went back through. Garcia then checked Commander Alexander's prior cases to see if she had ever prosecuted or defended any Marines. From those cases, she then looked to see if any of the Marines had a connection to General Gordon. She found a pair that did, but the connection was prior to the cases Alexander had been assigned rather than a current connection.

Garcia was just about to give it up, when she suddenly stopped and smiled. She had been so tied up in finding a connection to the people that she hadn't even considered thinking about the timing. Why now versus just why. And the only thing Commander Alexander was currently working on was the Krennick court-martial. Turning back to the computer, she pulled up a copy of Krennick's service records and laid them next to Gordon's. That's when she found the connection she was looking for.

For Weber, his work started with the serial number on the pistol. Knowing that and the manufacturer, he was able to begin tracing the history of the weapon. From the manufacturer to the dealer and onward to the purchaser, all of the information was recorded somewhere. He just needed to find it and see how or even if it connected to the case. The biggest problem for Weber was, how had the gun gotten into the country. Under German and British law and Marine Corps policy, the weapon was illegal and that meant if it was General Gordon's, he faced additional charges from that as well.

Pages upon pages of documents were being printed by the agents, all intended to form the net that would ensnare their suspect.