Vyšetřovatelé tentokrát přijíždějí do motelu poblíž malého městečka vyšetřovat vraždu poručíka Rihamy Shaheenové. Musí se potýkat s místní policií a hlavně horlivým šerifem Tomem Barretem, který se svým týmem sesbíral stopy, provedl pitvu, našel podezřelého a pokoj, ve kterém došlo k vraždě vyčistil a uvolnil pro další návštěvníky.

Podezřelým z vraždy je Masoud Tariq v jehož domě naleznou součástky z bomb. Gibbs zjistí, že Tariq byl pod ochranou USA jako informátor a poručík Shaheenová byla jeho nadřízeným důstojníkem. McGee navíc zjistí, že důkazy o vině Tariqa narafičil do jeho domu zástupce šerifa Barrett.

Při výslechu Tariqa vyjde najevo, že poručík Shaheenová vedla vyšetřování dvou dalších informátorů z Iráku a svého nadřízeného majora Rainese. Major Raines zpronevěřil 500 000 dolarů, na což Shaneenová přišla a musela zemřít.

A very nice man staying at a motel has snuck out, wrapped only in a towel, to collect something. When he turns around to go back into his room, he is locked out. How embarrassing: his towel barely covers his bareness. He tries to raise his neighbor, asking them to phone the office. He talks to the neighbor through the door. Then he feels something squishy under his bare feet: he looks down: blood has soaked the mat on which he stands and it is coming from under the door of the neighboring room in the motel.

Gibbs talks to the commanding officer for Marine Lt Shaheen, lately of Iraq war, and gets an explanation of how she was a good officer and that she was bilingual and helped with the collection of intel.

In the squad room, Tony and McGee are at the plasma screen, and arguing, as ever. They are trying to locate a small town on the map on the screen, but no matter how hard he searches, McGee cannot get the computer to locate the town. Gibbs arrives and Tony reports that its "boondocks, boss". Gibbs answers "Pack a toothbrush". Ziva inquires as to the meaning of "boondocks", which Tony and McGee explain by singing "ba-da Barbar barbar barbar baaaarrrr" at each other in a rendition of Duelling Banjos. This becomes the soundtrack music as we see the car driving through the beautifully green countryside, to small town USA where Marine Lieutenant Rihama Shaheen has been found dead in that motel room. Shaheen was born in Kuwait and had been serving military intelligence in Iraq until she returned six months ago.

Ducky has gone in his van, ready to collect the body. They all arrive at the police and do introductions. The folks from the big smoke are trying hard to not patronise the country hicks, and the souls of the earth local police are trying to be courteous to the fancy pants agents. Most of the cops seem to be related. After some discussion, Gibbs expresses a desire to get to the crime scene: the local cop points out that it has been cleared up and probably a new guest in that room already. Gibbs' team is shocked. Local cop points out that there must have been a lack of communication: they had processed the crime scene etc when they first found the body, three days ago. The body was a Jane Doe until the fingerprint results came back with an ID and then they called NCIS. The autopsy has already been done, the forensics have been done, there ain't no scene to process. But there is a suspect. Gibbs asks "when did you plan on telling me that?" and the laconic local officer points out "I did, just now".

The team get a presentation by Ruby, the local forensic officer, and she is sweet, very very inexperienced on homicide (its her first one), eager to please, gives them detail they don't need but seems to leave out details they do need: she keeps saying "all my results are in the report". Gibbs is sceptical, all the more so when Ruby admits that the body had two bullets but she could only find one shell casing. Ruby knows that he doesn't like her. McGee, on the other hand, is very sympathetic to Ruby and takes her medium-seriously.

The prime suspect is Masoud Tariq, an Iraqi man who recently moved to the town and is now missing. Determined to search for clues the sheriff may have missed, Gibbs inspects Tarig’s empty house, where he and Ziva find evidence of dismantled mobile phones and explosive liquids. “I think we just found ourselves a bomb factory,” Ziva says. McGee does the processing of the "crime scene" in Tariq's garage. Ruby is not permitted to help (Gibbs refused), so she only offers advice to McGee about not forgetting to check for bomb chemicals in pockets, because bombers forget to keep their hands out of their pockets. Tony, to his delight, has been sent back to Washington DC to pursue information about Tarig. When there, he has a one-to-one with Abby in the lab, where they discuss secrets and the urge to spill them. (See quotes below). Tony's dual life as NCIS agent and Jeanne's boyfriend is getting to him.

Gibbs learns that the whole town was suspicious of Tariq, including his neighbour, who has photographs of the Iraqi meeting with two other Arab men outside his house. The picture looks even more damning when Tony discovers that Tarig is a former member of the Republican Guard and is living under an assumed name.

Gibbs and the local police leap into action when Masoud Tarig drives up to his house, sees the officers waiting for him, and makes to flee. The sheriff and his sidekick open fire despite Gibbs’s calls for a ceasefire, and Tarig is wounded in the shoulder. After being treated in hospital, the Iraqi explains that he has been deer hunting and only tried to escape because he was scared. He and Ziva cautiously converse, recognising each other as being from countries that don't trust each other. But then the local head cop's brother (brother and brother cop) arrives to have a go at Tarig, being racist along the way. He makes a very snide comment about how Masoud should be with his seventy virgins by now, and calls Islam a screwed up religion. Ziva defends Tariq, and forces an apology out of the redneck, saying, "when you insult his religion, you insult mine, and your own."

Tariq denies the bomb-making equipment is his and seems to win Gibb’s sympathy when he reveals his wife and daughter died in Iraq. “I’ve seen enough bombs,” he says. Tarig reveals that he worked as an informant for the US military in Iraq and was rewarded with a passport and a new life in the States.

Tariq’s innocence is confirmed when McGee discovers that the bomb-making equipment was planted after the house was first searched. “Someone’s setting him up, boss,” he tells Gibbs. He knows this because if the fingerprint powder residue he found: it is Ruby's powder which is different colour from NCIS powder. Using Ruby's ruse, McGee gets Deputy Tyler, (the racist redneck) to remove his trousers and, there in the pockets, we get a positive swab for the explosive residue. Tyler, is the culprit of framing Mossad: “I was just getting him before he got us,” he says.

However, Tarig still has to explain how he knew the murdered Shaheen. He tells Gibbs that Shaheen was the case officer who brought him to the US. She contacted him recently because she was investigating two other Iraqis who were granted US passports at the same time – the two men who were photographed with Tariq. He says the men visited him to find out what he had told the US military, but Tariq lied and said he had been passing on bad information. The other two had passed on bad (low grade) intel to the Americans.

Gibbs’s attention is now focused on these two unidentified Iraqis. It would seem that, unlike Tarig, they were of little use to the US military – so why were they rewarded with US passports? Shaheen was investigating the same mystery when she was killed. Did she get too close to the truth?

The team pack up to go back to DC. Gibbs and Ziva have a conversation in the car park of their motel, firstly desultory bickering about coffee quality in motels and then more of an argument over "what is wrong with Tony?". Ziva makes clear that she is worried about Tony: he has lots of hospital appointments (which we know are fake because he is undercover dating a doctor, but Ziva and Gibbs do not know that). Ziva thinks that Gibbs sent Tony back to DC because Tony is sick. Gibbs sneers "You two got married and didn't tell me!" Ziva keeps pressing the point. Gibbs get more and more irritated, but does point out that there are reasons other than illness that would explain all of the mysteries she has recounted. In the end, the only way Gibbs can silence her is by reversing the car out of the car park so fast that Ziva almost goes through the windscreen.

As the team say farewell to the local cop hosts, Ruby realises that McGee has not got around to reading her report. McGee shuts her up by promising that he will read it.

Abby has been re-processing Ruby's forensic evidence: she explains to Gibbs that it is like two different shooters as the bullets seem to have been two different velocities.

Tony is being scathing to McGee in the bullpen, as probie reads Ruby's report. McGee gets excited and, to Tony's astonishment, phones Ruby and just says "Get down to DC".

Gibbs is summoned to Abby's lab, where Ruby has assembled a demonstration of her hypothesis about the two bullets, two velocities, one shooter, one missing shell casing. She shows that one bullet had an oily residue which made it phutz, whereas the second bullet worked and blasted the bad bullet out of the chamber. Bad bullet was slow, good bullet was fast, made a two-for-one shot. Tellingly, Ruby hypothesises that the shooter must have an injured hand, as the barrel of the gun would have exploded.

Gibbs calls in the commanding officer of Lt Sheehan, and interrogates him with McGee present. They ask him to remove his glove. His hand is all messed up, in fact, it looks as though a gun might have exploded in it. He claims he had "an accident" over the weekend. They show him that the ammunition box from his garage (which they searched with a warrant, served to his wife) has the same oily residue as Ruby found. He confesses. The other two Iraqis, despite giving basically useless information, were rewarded with new identities, passports, and life in America... because they paid him for it. Half a million. But the officer is quite sure they weren't baddies, just rich kids who wanted to go to America. Harmless. He killed Shaheen because she was wondering about why they got rewarded, and was investigating. She would have found out he was taking bribes, and ruined his career.

Ziva and Gibbs go to check on the other two Iraqis, (Ziva, during the car ride, rants about Tony again, to Gibbs' disgust) whom the bad officer had given wrongful asylum as "informants". Gibbs notes that, for people who were rich kids wanting a good life in America, they don't have a flash house. As they go down the side of the house, they find that there are three people and they are running a bomb-making factory and their garage walls are daubed with terrorist slogans, which Ziva can read. The innocent rich kids were apparently baddies after all.