Callen, Sam and the team are awoken in the middle of the night by Hetty's distress signal and jump into action. They know Hetty is not at any of her homes and is not responding to their messages. They locate her in the boatshed and see that she is sitting in a chair in the middle of the room but there is a shadowy figure with her. They try to devise a plan but Callen heads straight through the front door. They find Hetty sitting there perfectly fine and the new Assistant Director, Allan Granger, was the one who sent the distress call, only to test the team. Granger already is ruffling feathers but the team gets down to business when a man, Glenn Bolton, who is part of a think tank that works closely with the DOD, is shot to death. His wife is a suspect but she claims people had been following them for weeks. Granger decides to send Nell into the think tank to gather evidence on the inside. Callen and the team go to stake out the area around the think tank and speak to Bolton's wife Michelle. They discover spies posing as food vendors outside the think tank and that Michelle has been unknowingly helping one of those spies. Michelle agrees to assist them in planting a fake flashdrive that the spies think is real. The team tracks the flashdrive and manages to takedown a spy ring that was threatening national security and capture Bolton's killer. Hetty and Granger have an obvious history together and there is no love loss between them. Callen is suspicious of Granger and concerned about what his presence means for the team; Hetty assures Callen that Granger is the one who should be concerned.
