Dr. Mallard chce provést pitvu mariòáka zemřelého umrznutím. Dotyčný se však vrátí mezi živé na poslední chvíli. Tým NCIS musí vyšetřit, kde se voják pohyboval poslední dny, aby odhalili co se mu stalo a kdo ho případně ponechal svému osudu.

Ducky chats to the corpse in the body bag in his autopsy room, as he sets about making his early morning cup of tea on a winter's morning. When he opens the bag, the kettle's whistle emits its piercing noise. The body wakes up and the man sits up, eyes wide open. After the opening credits, we learn that the man is a marine found with a body temperature 20deg below normal. The familiar dictum that the body is not dead until it is warm and dead is repeated by Ducky to Gibbs. Gibbs knows that this is a marine called O'Neill with no next of kin, but he is called to the hospital as a relative has turned up. To Gibbs' surprise, the relative is his old boss/mentor, Mike Franks. O'Neill is his long, lost son who only traced Franks 2 years ago. They met, spoke, and then the son deployed to Iraq. Franks explains that his boy looks like the mother, whom Franks only knew for 6 months and whom he left, not even knowing she was pregnant. If the boy didn't have his marine cut, his blond hair would fall over his face just like the mother's. The mother died a few years ago.

Back to the investigation. It transpires that O'Neill went back to Iraq on a private visit for just a few days, using Fast-Flight freight transporters. The man running the freight company is ex-RAF and says he gave a marine a lift. We later learn that he was actually people-smuggling. We also learn that O'Neill went to a loan shark and was turned down for a loan of $25k. So O'Neill is looking less innocent. A green powder substance is found on O'Neill, which Abby has to analyse (it turns out to be henna). Mike Franks' fingerprint turns up in O'Neill's abandoned car, showing that he was in contact with O'Neill before O'Neill was bashed on the head and had his face held down in the snow (which was the cause of his coma).

Meanwhile, DiNozzo arranges to go on a date with Jeanne. It turns out to be at a climbing wall. Jeanne challenges Tony to a race: first to the top has to say I love you to the other one. Tony is first up but asks for sex instead of saying I love you. Subsequently, Tony takes some teasing or nagging from Ziva about his inability to get Jeanne to take his calls. Eventually Tony goes to visit Jeanne who tearfully tells Tony that the challenge to say "I love you" was actually a test of the relationship. Tony appears to be in a quandary (and they both seem to have forgotten that he said it on the phone in the episode Friends and Lovers...oh, well it's the writers who appear to have amnesia). Now Tony cannot say the three magic words because they are too late.

McGee, Abby and Ziva track down various pieces of information, that tend to make O'Neill appear to have been very shady and which show that Franks has been complicit in it. Throughout the episode, Abby believes that Gibbs is psychic and tries to "test" this theory. She believes this because Gibbs turns up in her lab whenever she has results for him, without her paging him. One time he turns up whilst she is still waiting for the mass spectrometer to finish testing the green powder found in the Marine's car. The results spit out of the machine whilst Gibbs is there. Abby finds this startling evidence of Gibbs' ability to foresee the future. Gibbs insists he is not psychic. Each time Abby shuts her eyes and asks Gibbs to tell her what she is thinking, Gibbs disappears. Wisely.

The news from the hospital is bad and Franks asks Gibbs to go and needs a witness. Gibbs attends the hospital, waits outside O'Neill's room whilst Franks goes in and gives the nod for the ventilator to be removed. Franks gets the staff to leave the heart monitor's audible signal on, so we hear his son's heartbeat slow and disappear until he flatlines. We see Gibbs listening from the nurses' station to the sound of life slipping away. When Gibbs goes in after it is over, Franks has already disappeared out another door.

The role of Shaloub, the loan shark visited by O'Neill, becomes clearer when it turns out that he flies with FastFreight. On further questioning, it seems he is the silent partner/investor in the ailing business. A raid on the premises by Gibbs' team reveals a bunch of dead people, shot and left. These include the ex-RAF owner of the business. There is a Koran (Qu'ran) on the floor. Gibbs picks it up. The people-smuggler and the smuggled people have been shot.

Franks has disappeared. His rental car is found and the murder weapon is inside. Abby's tests reveal that it has glass dust on it. There is a glass factory next to the airfreight company.

Shaloub is interrogated and the soles of his shoes checked for glass dust residue. They find it. Shaloub had killed the ex-RAF owner of FastFreight for illegally people-smuggling (which, if detected, would bring other official attention on Shaloub). When asked why he killed the others, he shrugs.

Gibbs tracks down Franks to his real car, just as he is about to leave for Mexico. Franks informs him that he witnessed Shaloub dumping the gun at the crime scene, in a dumpster next to the glass factory. Franks took the gun and put it in his car, so that Gibbs would find it and work out the connection to Shaloub. Franks is heading for Mexico. Gibbs looks in the car and finds an Iraqi woman in head scarf. Franks explains that she is his son's fiancee, who was discarded by her family for bringing dishonor. His son had needed the money to pay for her to be smuggled into the USA. Franks had gone to the Fast-Freight company to collect her. Franks points out that it has nothing to do with the murder investigation. Gibbs agrees. He walks to the car, smiles at the woman and hands her her copy of the Koran. As Gibbs walks away, he hears a baby cry. He looks back and sees the woman put a blond-haired baby to her shoulder. Gibbs smiles at the sight of Franks' grandson whom he is about to take back to a new life in Mexico.

Final few seconds: new scene. We see a desk, with a long-lens camera next to a computer screen and a female hand working the mouse, clicking across a series of digital photographs. The images are of Tony and Jeanne at the climbing wall. We see a 1/8 profile of the person's face: long hair is obscuring the face. We do see a nose. We know not who is spying on Jeanne and Tony. It seems that it is a woman. The final photo closeup is of Jeanne and Tony kissing at the top of the climbing wall. The photo snaps into the closing black and white shot.