Well, McGee (Sean Murray) just learned he’s definitely right to be suspicious of Laroche (Seamus Dever). The realization comes after the agent saves the deputy director’s life from a hitman in the latest NCIS episode.
To McGee’s confusion, his wife Delilah (Margo Harshman) gets off the elevator at NCIS with Laroche and are seemingly getting along. (She calls him Gabe.) She thinks he’s nice, but McGee protests, showing a mint (Laroche’s brand) he found under his desk, an indication, as he sees it, that he’s been spying on him. And this isn’t about losing out on the job to him, he insists, but rather about him hiding things from the team and playing politics with cases.
After an anonymous tip, the team arrests and interrogates a hitman known as The Poet, only for him to die by suicide via capsules he had embedded in his arms. Laroche then gets involved in the case … and surprises McGee by asking about any dietary restrictions because it turns out that he and Delilah planned a dinner with their spouses (her idea). McGee, of course, tries to find excuses (including needing a babysitter and to work), but Vance (Rocky Carroll) sees it as a good time to exchange updates about the case.
Meanwhile, Torres (Wilmer Valderrama) goes undercover as The Poet to try to find out from the broker, Gemma, who hired him for his recent targets. The broker is a jeweler in the diamond district, and one of her clients is Parker’s (Gary Cole) nemesis, Kansas City mob boss Carla Marino. So, of course, he thinks she’s involved. But why would she order a hit on two naval officers and be interested in the nuclear fuel on the Atlas train? Well, it does run through her area. Parker’s ready to fly out to arrest her the moment there’s any evidence.
While the rest of the team finds the broker gone, the security guard at the jeweler’s dead, and a safe in the floor, McGee and Delilah sit down for dinner with Laroche and his wife, Tammy (Brooke Lyons), who talks about the advances made in biocompatible devices: They use AI to decode a brain’s messages and bypass spinal compression using a wireless implant. As Laroche puts it, she’ll have patients tap dancing by 2030, but he wonders, does the world need more tap dancers? That’s a sore subject for McGee, who tap dances. Laroche does, too, he shares — political tap dance, that is, which is what he calls what he does: To get what you want in this town, sometimes you have to tell one person one thing and another the complete opposite. To McGee, that sounds like lying. Laroche remarks the job isn’t for everyone.
Unfortunately for McGee, he can’t even escape: per photos in the safe, Laroche is the next target. Laroche, however, refuses to go back to NCIS for protection since the hitman’s dead. He also doesn’t want to scare his wife unnecessarily. But why is he being targeted? This is when the rest of the team begins to think McGee was right about him all along. It turns out that he was on the top secret board of directors for the Atlas train’s security protocols — and the drills to simulate a disaster scenario were run near Kansas City.
Thanks to Delilah giving him a good excuse — she pours raspberry sauce on his pants so he has to go clean it up in the bathroom — McGee sneaks into Laroche’s office. The deputy director catches him, just after he’s found a file on himself, with his phone and bank records. Laroche says he’s just keeping tabs on him since McGee is doing the same to him. McGee accuses him of being the mole back when Torres was undercover with Nexus, but Laroche seems genuinely surprised. As for why he kept his connection to Atlas secret, he says he couldn’t even tell Vance — and accuses McGee of being a sore loser. (Ouch.)
The team catches Gemma trying to flee the country, and she reveals that she knew the client was trying to clean house when she found her guard dead. There’s another hitman out there to eliminate all loose ends — including outstanding targets, like Laroche. She also insists that Carla isn’t the client. Rather, it’s someone not from Kansas City, and he had a tattoo.
With that, McGee’s in charge of Laroche’s protection (if he hasn’t shot him himself yet, he’s showing remarkable restraint, Parker says), and they prepare to head to NCIS. Laroche struggles to open his gun safe (Tammy has to remind him of the code), but before the four of them can leave, there are shots fired outside. The hitman’s there and has killed the police. Delilah and Tammy hide in a room without windows, while McGee stays with Laroche, even after the deputy director tells him to go, too, since anyone he’s with is also in danger. This is also when he reveals that McGee was supposed to get the deputy director job, but then he sent SecNav a report advocating for a shakeup and criticizing NCIS for being too close-knit and acting more like a family than a federal agency. He knows now that’s not a bad thing. He also doesn’t think he can tap dance his way out of this until McGee comes up with a plan: He poses as the hitman and makes the new one think he’s shot and killed Laroche, until the team can arrest her. And so, Laroche has McGee and the Kevlar vest that Vance got him when he got the job to thank. He thought he’d been joking when he said he might need it some day, and McGee says he was just looking out for his family.
They still don’t know who wanted Laroche dead, however, with the new hitman not talking. But they do know whoever went to Gemma about it was part of the Nexus cartel by the tattoo. They’re back and planning something, and they don’t know how Carla is connected (but we do know that both are part of the finale).
McGee and Laroche have now cleared the air … just in time for the reveal that the tip about the hitman came from inside the government. Thanks to a program from Delilah, they have the name Nocturne — which McGee saw written, with numbers and letters, on a Post-it on a notebook in Laroche’s desk in his home office. And so when Laroche stops by to thank him again for saving his life, McGee shakes his hand, then leans in close to warn him he knows about Nocturne and is coming for him.
