An anachronistic discovery in a Civil War coffin leads to the exposure of a graverobbing ring.When Dr Elaine Burns of the Smithsonian Anthropology Laboratory opens a 140-year-old cast-iron coffin in front of TV cameras, she expects to see the body of Civil War general.Instead she finds a broken mobile phone – and the body of a man who died a lot more recently.Back at NCIS headquarters, the team is surprised by the return of Ziva David, a Mossad agent who has been assigned as a permanent liaison officer by agency director Jenny Shepard, much to Gibbs’s apparent annoyance.“Mossad trained her to spy and kill, not to investigate crime scenes,” Gibbs reminds Shepard while discussing his ‘personnel issue’.“Send her to the CIA.” And with Tony protesting when Ziva tries to sit at Kate’s desk, it seems that the team are not yet ready to welcome a replacement for their recently killed colleague.Despite their reservations about Ziva, the NCIS agents still have work to do – and jump into action when it emerges that the dead man in the coffin was actually a Marine.Ducky’s autopsy reveals that cause of death was not the musket ball found in the man’s neck, but suffocation: he was buried alive and ran out of oxygen as he was trying to dig himself out.

In the lab, Abby and McGee fix the mobile phone and make the grisly discovery that the Marine made several, unsuccessful 911 calls from the grave.

But a more significant discovery is that of an encrypted text message to a bank, making reference to a safety deposit box.

When Ziva and McGee are dispatched to find the box in question, they learn that someone claiming to be the dead man’s brother had been asking if he could get into the box.

Did he kill the Marine so that he could get to the box’s contents?

Inside the box is a map and, on top of that, a mummified hand wearing a 19th-century ring.

Unfortunately, the agents do not get a chance to peruse the map before a mystery man outside the bank takes it from them at gunpoint and shoves the surprised pair into a nearby fountain: it looks as if he and his cohorts have used the agents to get into the box for them.

Fortunately, Ziva’s photographic memory enables her to recreate the map and the agents head for the site in question, together with Dr Burns.

They are led to a Civil War re-enactment, where Ziva discovers a group of people in full costume robbing the graves at a Civil War burial ground.

In one grave are thousands of dollars’ worth of period guns, which, it transpires, the dead Marine had been planning to give to a museum.

The case is coming together; it seem that the Marine’s killers had decided to get him out of the way so that they could lay their hands on the valuable weapons.

But as Ziva holds the robbers at bay with her gun, Dr Burns emerges from the bushes with her own firearm pointed at Ducky.

Will Gibbs and the rest of the team interrupt this stand-off in time to save their own?

Or will Ziva end the situation in her own inimitable way?

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