FBI: International – Indefensible – Review

In this episode we see greed, anger and deception and how businesses can take advantage in a foreign market. We also get to see some glimpses of perhaps some new romance on the horizon.

At the beginning of the episode, Jamie is at the Hungarian Police force and is helping to do some training with some new officers. It is so enjoyable to see that the FBI has a great relationship with the local authorities where their office is and are invited in to help with training. Kellett also demonstrates how tough she is as she demonstrates a take down with Lieutenant Benedek Erdos, and she ends up injuring him but he tries to shake it off.

We then see a man on the phone who is emptying out a safe of documents. He goes to get into his car and it explodes. The explosion also injures a young girl who is walking her dog along the sidewalk and someone comes out of their home and calls for help.

Kellett and Smitty arrive and Forrester tells them there was a car bomb and Vo presents the case. The victim is Neil Cobb, who is a lawyer out of Houston, and represents a company called Avercol, which is a US based company that has a plant and workers in Budapest. Avercol is in the middle of a class action law suit and Cobb was lead defense. They are accused of using Cadmium in their plants, which poisoned their workers, and then when things went south, the company relocated. Avercol is still trying to negotiate a settlement in Budapest and Cobb was heading that up. In addition, Margo Halmi, a 14 year old walking her dog was also injured in the blast and is in critical condition.

We finally also find out a bit more about Smitty’s background when Forrester asks her to be on the ground due to her 10 years in the explosive disposal unit. It also can only make one wonder if this was the unit she was working with when she and Scott initially worked together. It will be nice when we get the fulsome details of their past together, including if there was ever any romance.

The team heads to the bomb site. Lieutenant Erdos is on scene to brief them on what they have found so far and he is wearing a sling on his arm, but tells Kellett it is just a precaution. He tells them that the bomb was wired to the ignition and Cobb was killed instantly and unfortunately the only witness just went into surgery. Erdos says they feel the motive was related to his job, and that Avercol had come to Hungary to exploit their infrastructure and tax laws, and the company does not have many allies in the city after they lined their pockets, poisoned the people and then left.

As one of the more recognizable faces of the company, Cobb had made several complaints to police about being harassed. He did not say by who but they suspected likely by the plant workers who have rallied together for the lawsuit. They could unfortunately find no substance behind his complaints and Cobb then accused the police of scheming against him, and they all felt he was a little paranoid, but Kellett brings up that perhaps he was right considering he was just assassinated.

Smitty says the residue has been sent to the lab and if they conduct a proper post blast search they may be able to put the device back together and Erdos says he can help arrange that. Seeing Smitty’s knowledge and leadership with this part of the investigation clearly indicated Forrester was correct in putting her in charge of that part of the investigation. Forrester goes to check in with Raines and Vo. Kellett and Erdos discuss his arm and Jamie says that she would feel better if a doctor said it was fine. Erdos tells her that Hungarian tradition says that if you break someone’s arm, you have to dispense with formalities and to call him Ben. You definitely cannot ignore the heat between these two characters, and to be honest, it is great to see Jamie showing some interest in love again after what happened with Scott. Although they still appear to be close friends and trust each other as colleagues, it was certainly sad to see the ship sail on their romance last season. Perhaps Jamie having a new love interest will spark some old feelings and it will be interesting to see Scott’s reaction if they do indeed become involved.

Vo and Raines are in Cobb’s apartment, and Raines tells Forrester that there was a prepaid burner and a leather document bag in the front seat of the car, both burnt to a crisp. Forrester asks Raines to try to get something off the records from the burner. They also found a safe that was cleaned out. The team is trying to figure out if they just wanted Cobb or were after something he had or knew when a woman arrives and is making a scene about getting into the apartment. She is an associate of the law firm and her name is Elia Cruz. She tells them their job was to ensure the case did not go to trial and that Avercol pays as little as possible, and that of course was going to ruffle feathers. She is worried that if they were trying to take Cobb out, what if they are not finished and Vo says they can put her into protection for now. She says she had not seen Cobb in two weeks since the last deposition. Suddenly Kellett comes up and has a note that was left on their car that says “Secure the Files”.

Raines runs the note and there is no DNA and also no witnesses to who left if because they parked around the corner. They discuss that perhaps the empty safe in the flat was where the files were, which means they burned up with Cobb. Vo comes in with a report from Smitty and the main ingredient in the bomb was TATP so it could have been homemade. They also identify one plaintiff with a criminal record. Daniel Simion was a truck driver for some companies after Avercol shut down, which would have given him access to chemicals, and Raines and Vo are sent to check him out. Daniel however is dying and there is no way he would have been well enough, but his wife agrees to allow them to look around but asks them to be quiet as he needs to rest. She tells Vo that the Cadmium targeted lungs, kidneys and bone, and that after he gave everything to that company, and all they did was take from them.

Forrester and Kellett go to see the lawyer representing the plaintiffs in the class action lawsuit, Zalan Madares. He tells them the only crime his clients had was being naïve that their employer would care after they poisoned them. He says the case has been going on for 3 years and his clients only want to settle but Avercol just wants to erase their story. He tells them that he is going to Rosa Chapel for a meeting with his clients to discuss how Cobb’s death will impact the case and tells them they can come along, but tensions are high so they will want to keep their badges hidden.

Raines contacts Forrester and tells him that Cobb had called another local burner before being killed. Raines calls the number and the phone of a woman at the meeting begins to ring. She runs but Kellett and Forrester stop her. She tells them she was working with Cobb and he was going to turn over all the evidence to help them and was working against Avercol and that is why they had him killed.

Ama Kovach tells them that she is from a working class family and when Avercol said they were opening a factory in Budapest they saw promise and opportunity. She says the company knew they were being exposed to cancer and then they buried it. Neil had made copies of everything Avercol thought they destroyed and she feels that this is why Avercol silenced him. Neil believed Avercol was about to take drastic measures and he trusted her so she was going to connect him to a contact she had in the press to leak the story about the cover up. She says that the Avercol CEO is Sam Gilroy and he is pure evil and he was the only person that scared Cobb.

Raines does some research and it turns out Cobb and Gilroy have known each other and been friends and colleagues for years and got filthy rich together. Kellett says maybe after years of protecting him, Cobb had enough. One of the best parts of the investigations in this show is how deeply the team delves into the lives of the victims and suspects but also that they are open minded to look at all the possible motivations and reasoning for the actions they are seeing, and are even willing to give people the benefit of the doubt when other law enforcement agencies are not so open minded.

Smitty calls and says the bomb is a dead ringer for ex-military. They are also still looking for the detinator. Jamie goes to see Ben and asks for help to see if the tolls picked up Cobb’s license plate. He now has a cast on his arm and says Hungarian tradition says if you break someone’s arm you have to buy them a beer. Jamie signs his cast with her phone number. An officer also brings in a piece of evidence that was removed from the young victim during surgery and Jamie takes it to Smitty.

Scott and Andre go to see Gilroy and he tells them he was going to pay Cobb a bonus when the case settled. He said they had known each other for 30 years and when you get rich the way Cobb did, there was no way he had a change of heart. He says they had factories on 3 continents and sometimes things happen that he is not always aware of. Raines is appauled that Gilroy did not even deny the conspiracy or cover up, and Forrester says that men like him just like to hear the sound of their own voice. Smitty calls and what they pulled from Margo during surgery was the detonator and it has writing on it in Bulgarian.

Vo goes to let Ama know that the phone she turned over to them had spyware on it and someone was monitoring her calls with Cobb. They are trying to identify where it came from but wonder about a malware attachment sent by another plaintiff, but she says she was the only one in communication with Neil, and thinks they came for Neil because of her but Madares tells her she cannot blame herself.

They caught Cobb’s car prior to the bombing and in one image, it is being driven by Elia Cruz. She not only saw him the night before he blew up, but she also had his car keys. Vo and Kellett question her about it and she tells them that he was too drunk to drive and says she had picked him up at a gentleman’s club and that he was a bit of a mess ever since his wife left him. They ask how Cobb’s relationship was with Avercol and she says lucrative. She tells them that she got an alert one night that Neil downloaded some files before they were purged from the system. The files are gone for good but there should be a digital footprint on the server, and they ask to review it. She also says she overheard a call last labor day that she should not have been on. Neil was “tearing Mr. Gilroy a new one” and lawyers do not speak to their clients that way and that Neil said what Gilroy did was indefensible.

Raines also uncovers that Gilroy was having an affair with Cobb’s wife. Forrester and Raines confront Gilroy. He says there was a brief fling and then he made up with his wife. They show Gilroy evidence that Cobb accessed Avercol servers and downloaded the files, and not the doctored ones they used, but the real reports of the actual levels of Cadmium that the employees had ingested. They tell him this proves Cobb had something that Avercol did not want getting out. Gilroy says the cover up was Cobb’s idea. He says that if Cobb had leaked the info he would have come after him in court for attorney client priviledge and then there would have been a change in lawyers which only would have delayed the settlement for another two years or more.

The team tries to decide if Cobb did what he did because of caring about the plant workers or if it was all about payback for the affair. Vo then brings in the video from the gentleman’s club entrance and they see someone following Cobb and Cruz after they leave the club. They identify the car and it is registered to a man who passed away. They go to the farm he owned and when they go inside there is a motion sensored bomb. Everyone gets out just in time, and are overall unharmed, so they search the other buildings on the property and find the bomb making materials and a computer and Raines tells the police to check the drives. The vehicle is returning and tries to run them down. It breaks through the barricade and they put out spikes to stop the car. The driver shoots at Kellett and Forrester with a machine gun before driving into the spikes. One of the officers then takes him down using the technique Kellett showed them in class. This was a great linkage back to the opening of the episode and that clearly Kellett is an effective instructor and knows what techniques really will control a fleeing suspect.

Hale Corvelov is a former member of the Bulgarian armed forces who was dishonorably discharged and became a hired gun. Smitty and Forrester tell him to give up the person who hired him and maybe they can work something out so that he does not end up living out his years in a Bulgarian prison, but he needs to give up who hired him. He tells them it was Zalan Madares. They go to Madares’ office and he is trying to escape out the window. They chase him down and arrest him. The team digs deeper and Raines and Smitty share that Zalan Madares has made a lot of bad business decisions this last year and he had a lot of debt to clear. He borrowed from the wrong people, a group of Hungarian Loan Sharks, and most recently he borrowed the exact amount to hire the bomber and the Loan Sharks had even made the introduction to Corvelov. His only hope to pay back his debt was the payout on the class action case, which he would have gotten if it were not for Cobb. He said that if Cobb blew the whistle it would have meant more money for his clients and him, so why would he have done that. Vo and Raines say because he was out of time. Raines says they confiscated his PC and found the monitoring software for the spyware that was on Ama’s phone.

They tell him to come clean and say the Bulgarian rolled on him. He asks to make a deal too and they say he is too late and what about the 18 people he was supposed to defend. They bring in Ama Kovach and she shows him pictures to remind him of his broken promise. He cries and says he is so sorry.

They let Ama know the victims will get more money from the settlement but she is upset that Gilroy gets to walk away but Smitty, Raines and Vo let her know that when he admitted the cover up was Cobb’s idea, he implicated himself and now the FBI can open an investigation in the US. They tell her she is very brave for her conviction to help those hurt by the company.

In the final scene, Kellett is having a beer with Erdos. She tells him she is thinking about all the collateral damage of this case and who is looking out for anyone. She asks him to take a drive and she orders some food to go. They go to the hospital and she takes meals to Margo’s family. She tells him she owes him a proper drink and that that is an American tradition.

So we were not only able to see the effectiveness of the Fly Team and their investigative prowess this week, but we are also able to learn about some team members history, and perhaps a glimpse of someone’s romantic future.

Let us know what you thought about this episode in the comments below.