The NCIS: LA team is called in to investigate the murder of a Naval Technology Scientist named Kevin Samuels, who was en route to a hospital for a gunshot wound when a unknown assailant stopped his ambulance and killed everyone aboard. A postmortem examination reveals that Kevin was killed by a stab wound to his chest, and that there was physical evidence of some other object being embedded inside him. Callen and Sam go to speak with Samuel's supervisor, who shares that Samuels had an advanced intelligence prototype embedded in his body, meaning that whoever killed him could potentially sell the technology to a US enemy. Nell and Eric track down a video of the murder on a private file sharing site and learn that the video was posted by Lance Edison, a paranoid man suffering from bipolar disorder. They try to track him down at his favorite surf spot in Malibu, but he manages to slip away from them. Eventually, the team tracks him down and interrogates him. When Edison learns that one of his surfer friends also turned up dead, he admits to trying to blackmail Samuels' murderer with the video, then turns over the full video to Eric and Nell. The full video enables them to get a facial recognition hit on the killer, and the team tracks him down and neutralizes him before he can sell the prototype to a middleman working for Al Qaida.
