- A Metro cop in Washington, DC, finds a set of severed fingertips which prove to be those of a Marine corporal; Gibbs and company investigate; McGee finds the corresponding body in the local morgue; Ducky concludes that the corporal was a victim of stretching to death on a rack. McGee and Ziva meet Max, who used a credit card of the dead Marine; excitement occurs while McGee interviews her; Tony and Ziva meet and interview another interesting chick; McGee pursues with Max. Gibbs asks whether the corporal died because Max, a former girlfriend, made a record score on a video game. Ziva gets a lead on a major game programmer, but he has disappeared; Gibbs meets an arms dealer. Tony and McGee find the body of the missing programmer, with mutilations identical to those on the Marine. Gibbs and McGee get a confession, then the gang search for a particular computer; McGee guides Gibbs, who finds it and announces "game over". Tony makes a date for McGoo.—DocRushing
- A Metro cop finds the severed fingertips of a Marine corporal; Gibbs and company investigate; Ducky says that the victim died on a rack. McGee and others meet two interesting chicks, Gibbs ends a video game, and Tony makes a date for McGee.—DocRushing
- A pick pocket works the crowd at an outdoor mall, coming away with a wallet and Chanel purse. A police officer stops him and asks to see inside the purse. He drops it. Finger tips roll out.
At NCIS, Gibbs gets angry at his computer. He whacks it with a bat. McGee works on it.
Tony and Ziva arrive and McGee says his horoscope advised him to avoid relationships.
Gibbs arrives to report pieces of a dead marine, Corporal Zach Armstrong. There are also teeth. The pick pocket grabbed the purse off someone at a hot dog cart.
McGee reports the county coroner has a body found tied to a tree, missing his fingers and teeth.
Back at the lab, the DNA confirms the body is Armstrong. He was shot in the head after he was dead. His records say he's 5'6" but the body is over 6 foot.
Almost every bone in his body was dislocated. He was tied up and stretched to death.
Back upstairs, they find he was a decorated soldier, set to go to Afghanistan. He captured two high profile terrorists while in Iraq.
Witnesses saw him arguing with a woman outside a movie theater the night before he was killed.
Blake Martin (Jason Beghe) from Fiber Key security drops by, doing private security for the Pentagon. He's investigating several computer breeches from NCIS. Vance assigned McGee (the hacker) to help him.
McGee gets an alert that Armstrong's credit card has been used. They go to a laser tag facility. The gamers know him as "McGeeminator".
They find the Max who used the card. It's Maxine (Beth Riesgraf), Armstrong's ex-girlfriend. She says she dumped him a week or so ago when she found out he was cheating. She took the card because he owed her money. She seems surprised to learn he's dead. She says he gave her an envelope to hold on to while he was in Afghanistan.
Ziva encourages McGee to go with Max to get the envelope, even though he protests he's supposed to be avoiding relationships.
In the lab, Abby has started a defense fund for McGee. She traced the knock-off Chanel purse to a factory in Indonesia. Duckie found patchouli in the scratches on Armstrong's face.
McGee escorts Max home and they dork talk about gaming. She heard the "avoiding relationships" line to Ziva and assures McGee he's not her type. She hands over the envelope.
He notices her super deluxo computer and then recognizes her gaming handle as holding the high score on every on-line game he plays.
"You're awesome," he tells her.
She admits he is her type.
He composes himself and says he should go. But then shots come in through the window and he grabs her and covers her on the floor. She suggests he stay.
Later, Ziva and Gibbs check out the scene. Ziva teases McGee that Max is his girlfriend. They can't legally open Armstrong's envelope because it's sealed.
Some of Max's neighbors saw a strange car in the area.
Gibbs sends McGee back to NCIS to run the partial plate.
Blake Martin chats up McGee making him extremely nervous. Martin was a former force recon Marine but now just does security.
Abby has matched the bullets from Max's house to the one in Armstrong. Armstrong's will was in the envelope, leaving $1 million to his mom and $5 million to various charities -- except that he's broke.
Martin suggests maybe Armstrong hid his money and they should use a forensic account.
McGee gets a hit on the partial plate: Lisa Bock, a martial arts teacher assigned to anger management classes.
Tony and Ziva crash Lisa's yoga class.
She calls Maxine a "man-stealing piece of-" and says they both dated Armstrong. He gave her a fake will when he left for Afghanistan. She knew it was fake because she found a bunch of copies when she went through his desk. He kept them to make women think he was rich, the same reason kept a bunch of fake Chanel purses.
Lisa smells like patchouli and says she might have hit him when they broke up. She was teaching a class when Max's apartment was shot up.
Lisa says Armstrong was on a million dating sites and they should check them out.
McGee and Abby go through Armstrong's computer and find an eavesdropping program installed two days ago before he was killed.
It's only monitoring game ports, but he has no games.
McGee and Gibbs talk to Max about her gaming. She admits she might have used his card to buy games. She realizes someone was trying to bug her.
Two days ago she was playing a game and broke her record, but she hit a "kill screen" and the game crashed.
She said it was weird and looked like encrypted data. She has screen shots.
She remembers the time -- Armstrong's computer was bugged one minute later. "So Armstrong is dead because she won a video game?" Gibbs asks.
McGee shows Gibbs the "kill screen" Maxine stumbled on while playing Fear Tower.
Ziva talked to the head of L9 games, who make the game. Reed Synder was the lead programmer. He disappeared two days ago.
They find records of several large wire transfers to Synder, including one from Agah Bayar -- an arms dealer.
Gibbs interviews Bayar, who says he commissioned Synder to create a video game to showcase some of his "more exotic merchandise."
He shows Bayar the kill screen shots. Bayar offers to help decipher it. He says he was in Vera Cruz with the governor two days ago. The State Department confirms his alibi.
In the office, they find Snyder is suspected of hacking the Pentagon. They think Snyder is putting secret codes in video games and selling the decryption keys. Hitting the kill screen accidentally exposed them.
Gibbs visits Duckie in the lab for a psych profile of Snyder. He left a manifesto calling for a revolution against computer society. He liked to play WWII board games -- on the side of the Axis.
Ziva joins them and reports Snyder recently purchased a home in Morocco. They also got a hit on his car.
Tony and McGee head to the location, an abandoned sort-of power plant. Tony asks McGee if he's going to ask Maxine out and encourages him to go for it. They find Snyder. Dead.
Back in the morgue, Duckie finds Snyder has been dead since before Armstrong was killed. His fingertips were also cut off.
Abby has decoded the kill screen code. He was selling his hacking program. If the game was downloaded on to enough computers they could be harnessed to hack the most protected servers.
Gibbs goes to call the Pentagon, but McGee thinks someone there might already know.
He questions Martin, and accuses him of knowing about the leaks out of NCIS a long time before reporting them.
Being there now would allow him to follow the Armstrong investigation. Snyder's hacks made him look bad, and he worried he's lose his private security contract, so they think he killed Snyder and then Armstrong when the kill screen was triggered.
They tell him they found his finger print on the hot dog cart.
Martin says no one could get enough evidence to get Snyder and he wasn't willing to wait.
They have his confession, and admit they didn't have his finger print.
Abby summons them to the lab.
She found an insurance policy in Snyder's program -- if he didn't enter a code every week his hacking program would launch. And it has launched and is already attacking Pentagon servers with the unwitting help of 15 million gamer's computers.
McGee says if they can find the mainframe, he might be able to shut it down.
They head back to where Snyder's body was found.
McGee guides Tony, Ziva and Gibbs from MTAC. With less than three minutes left, they bust through a wall and trigger a security system.
Gibbs flips on a camera and McGee guides him through the abandoned plant. McGee realizes it's like a giant video game -- sort of like Gibbs is Pac-Man going through the maze.
Something explodes, but it's just dust and Gibbs is fine. The clock is under one minute.
Gibbs reaches Snyder's mainframe and McGee tries to slowly guide him through how to shut down the computer.
He hears shots.
Gibbs blasted the computer.
McGee runs into Maxine as she's leaving NCIS. Tony finished up her debriefing. She thanks McGee for his message, and says eight o'clock works great for her. She thanks him and kisses him on the cheek as she leaves.
Tony informs McGee that he has a date for laser tag with her. McGee says thanks and means it. Gibbs tries to get his computer to work but ends up yelling at it. McGee runs to help. "Don't shoot!"
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