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Morris Fletcher was repellent.
In a lot of ways, really. Ethically, intellectually, sexually. It was deeply unfortunate, decided Monica Reyes, but almost impressive.
Reyes sat dumbfounded beside her also-dumbfounded partner, John Doggett, in the interrogation room after Fletcher’s removal. He had summoned them down to the Coast Guard Base in Miami Beach (asked for them specifically!) with the promise of information. But he was painfully obviously simply a lecherous con man trying to use FBI Agents to escape something. In this case something most likely stood in for consequences he probably deserved.
All that being what it was, however, Doggett and Reyes had somehow still been conned into taking custody of Fletcher, thereby relieving the Coast Guard. The DOD normally didn’t enjoy losing custody of anything to the DOJ. But they were prepared to make exceptions.
Doggett broke the silence. “Remember what I was sayin’ earlier—that you ’n’ I should branch out and get our own eccentric informants instead of reusin’ the ones that came with the office? Forget I said it. I changed my mind.”
“I think we’ve been had, John. Whatever he claims to know about Super Soldiers aside, this doesn’t seem to be informing so much as using.”
“Yeah—But I wonder what all that guy does know. How’d he know mentionin’ Super Soldiers would get our attention?”
“He’s either smarter than he seems, or we’re not very subtle.”
“Or maybe it’s the Peter Principle—you know, people gettin’ promoted to the height of their inability?” There was a beat. “You think we’re subtle? You ’n’ me. Subtle.”
There was a scoff in his tone that she didn’t altogether like. “Well, the part of our job that involves detangling conspiracies about Super Soldiers requires some circumspection.”
“Circumspection isn’t the same thing as secrecy. If it was, I wouldn’t’ve written that report I gave Kersh outlining in direct and straightforward language all the corruption and evidence I found that indirectly implicated him.”
“I suppose he has been giving us a wider berth than I expected. Although he really did try to conveniently lose you in Mexico.”
“I think we’re safer if he’s afraid of us. And Scully ’n’ Mulder are too.”
“Not that I’m disagreeing with you, but I didn’t think blackmail was your style, John.”
“It’s not blackmail. It’s tellin’ the truth, instead of keepin’ secrets. It’s all there, documented in the officially filed and indexed reports. Although if somethin’ does happen to me, you might wanna tip an enterprising journalist to file a FOIA request on some of those cases. Do me a favor, though, and skip the one with the man-bat.”
Reyes smirked. “No secrets, John; you said it yourself. And speaking of enterprising journalists, let’s take Fletcher and pay our favorite three a visit. With what he said about the associates of this supposed Super Soldier, they’re the logical first place to check out his story. But you lead the way; I don’t feel like getting my ass pinched today.”
The offices of the Lone Gunmen were already in the midst of an uproar, even without the pending addition of Morris Fletcher. The commotion had been instigated by a transformation that had quietly occurred over the past year or so, but had only been recently discovered by Fox Mulder. The discovery apparently offended him.
“Why the fuck wouldn’t you tell me about this?” He kept his eye on the baby crawling around the floor, but William was too young to repeat his profanity, and the space that had previously been full of dangerous, sharp equipment was cavernous and empty.
In fact, Mulder had been avoiding bringing his son to visit the Lone Gunmen in their offices because he didn’t trust either the cleanliness of the space, nor the clutter of electrical gizmos that could be easily grabbed off the floor and stuffed in a mouth. But he had needed them for last-minute babysitting in the middle of the night a few weeks ago and had been unpleasantly shocked by the sudden-to-him change in layout. It had been nagging at him ever since.
“You’ve had a lot going on lately, Mulder,” Frohike gestured toward the baby. He also meant to include, of course, the whole abduction-death-and-resurrection ordeal. Most of the people who loved Mulder didn’t want to reference it directly, so, despite how centrally traumatic it was, it predominately remained in alluded subtext. “We didn’t think our problems should add to yours.”
Mulder stared for a moment. He had the audacity to look hurt. “I thought we were friends. If you have problems this serious—especially ones I can help you solve—I want to know about them. After all you’ve done for me—all you’ve done for Scully—how could you not tell me when you needed help? ”
“You are our friend, Mulder, “pleaded Byers. “You’re our friend. We don’t want to reduce you to a funding source.”
“I have always been your funding source, and you know it. Come on, guys, it’s me. You’re trying to tell me that you really have no idea where your anonymous funding comes from?” The Lone Gunman publication had never had particularly wide circulation, but it did have its appreciative patrons. It wasn’t something any of them ever talked about, but the Gunmen weren’t naive. They could guess. Especially when there was a noticeable drop in funds following a specific date in 2000.
“We weren’t going to sponge off your widow and unborn child,” snapped Frohike. He had felt the loss of his friend bitterly, and thinking about that time had the tendency to make him gruff.
Mulder recoiled reflexively, but the determined look on his face indicated that he was going to remind them that no one actually needed four expensive houses that they didn’t live in, and that Scully was also their friend who would want to help them (and, anyway, he mused privately, she seemed intensely disinclined to want any part of his money while he was alive; he doubted very much his being dead had changed that).
Langly managed to derail that particular track of the argument by interjecting, “You understand honor, Mulder. Yves was our comrade, our partner-in-arms. When she got kidnapped, it was our fault. We had to do whatever we could to track her down. We couldn’t have lived with ourselves otherwise; it wouldn’t have been right. But that’s our responsibility. Not yours, and not Scully’s either.”
Mulder pursed his mouth. He was remembering his long, exhaustive, fruitless search for Scully in 1994. He would’ve searched anywhere, done anything, risked everything, paid any price to get her back, but in hindsight (and honestly with the benefit of perspective gained from the CBT he was still in to manage his PTSD), he could recognize the not-insignificant amount of self-loathing penance involved.
He mulishly didn’t think that was the same, since he’d have called in the Gunmen in a heartbeat if he had thought they could help him with a lead. And, well, same with Antarctica. He’d asked them for the help they could reasonably give, but none of them were in “adventuring through frozen wastes” shape.
(He hated to admit that there were a lot more examples for him to be defensive about. He was internally adamant that none of them were the same thing, but the more times he had to think that, the more he was beginning to suspect that he was guilty of this exact same honorable bullshit.)
Mulder’s minor internal crisis was interrupted by a buzz at the intercom announcing Doggett and Reyes, accompanying, so they said, “A friend of yours.”
None of the Gunmen actually considered Morris Fletcher a friend, and they weren’t exactly happy to see him. They were furious, in fact; the argument they had been having with Mulder paled in comparison to their raw acrimony at the sight of Fletcher. As it turned out, Fletcher had facilitated the kidnapping of their friend Yves. Alex Krycek, then. With more sleaze and less charm.
Doggett, looking grim and faintly annoyed, interrupted the cavalcade of insults. “All right. You three know this woman; I want your help. We need to track down this Yves Adele Harlow.”
Mulder would normally have left to go home a few hours ago—this wasn’t his job anymore, and, anyway, he didn’t have a lot of insight into Super Soldiers: They seemed to have suddenly appeared around the time of his abduction (though their physical strength and shape-shifting did remind him of the Alien Bounty Hunters). Plus, even though William was taking a nap now, he would be up soon, and Mulder expected he would start to get fussy and bored.
But Doggett and Reyes had gone off in pursuit of a possible lead, leaving Morris Fletcher alone with the Gunmen. And it was true that Mulder wasn’t generally known for his level head, nor for sober delay in following up on leads. But leaving Morris Fletcher alone and unsupervised with the Gunmen just seemed like a bad idea to him.
As the Gunmen were struggling to search databases using old equipment that made Mulder remember their earlier argument with some annoyance, Fletcher stopped trying to pick fights with them in order to wander over and inspect him. He looked Mulder up and down, and then gave a wistful shake of his head. “Bet you get a lot of chicks with a body like that.”
“Plenty of men too,” said Mulder with enough of a flirtatious inflection to achieve the much-desired effect of removing Morris Fletcher from his immediate vicinity and also removing his appearance and sexual experiences from future topics of conversation.
(In truth, Morris Fletcher wasn’t any more appealing to Mulder than he was to Reyes. The overall quality of some of his exes aside, Mulder did have standards. He also wasn’t nearly as much of a libertine as any of his would-be body snatchers seemed to think.)
By the time the room had been joined by a hapless-looking young man named Jimmy (searching for Yves, it seemed, all over the world, and Mulder felt a burst of sympathy for him because he’d been to Antarctica, after all), who brought the upsetting declaration that Yves had killed somebody at a college in New Jersey, Mulder was thinking once again that he should probably be going. Let Doggett and Reyes deal with the weird murder in New Jersey.
By the time a misanthropic hacker named Kimmy showed up to help and trade insults, Mulder was wondering about his friends’ taste in friends, and, really, that was a dreadful position to find oneself in.
“You’ll never guess what we did today.” Mulder and Scully had settled onto the floor after dinner, watching as William crawled from one to the other of them and attempted to pull himself into a standing position. He was also fond of trying to grab his mother’s hair and put it in his mouth. (He wasn’t particular about the source of the hair. William liked all hair; his father’s was simply harder to grab. Mulder once mused that maybe he should grow a beard and see what William thought, but Scully vetoed the idea, and, anyway, Mulder wasn’t sure if the fading scars on his cheeks would significantly impact the growth of his beard, and he wasn’t all that eager to find out.) Mulder offered Scully the challenge with what he hoped was an enticing smile. She would, in fact, never guess, but he was in a playful mood and wanted to draw her out.
“Hmmm,” Scully pursed her lips and made a show of thinking. “Did you put the laundry away?”
Mulder glanced over to the couch where there was still a pile of laundry. Babies, small as they were, seemed to generate a never-ending supply of it. At least the pile was clean. He gestured at it. “Observe the evidence, Agent Scully.”
She made an exaggerated pout at William that he expected was also for his benefit. And if it wasn’t intended to be, it was working anyway. “Well... did you take a walk?”
“Hm, that’s true; we did do that. But we also did something else.”
“Did you go and study clues left by a supposed monster that is going to turn out to be an explainable natural phenomenon?” She directed this question at William, who looked back with his big, serious blue eyes. Mulder was thoroughly charmed by her version of baby talk.
He considered Morris Fletcher for a moment. Nah. “Not today.”
“Did you discover any more mysterious bedroom furniture that suddenly appeared in the apartment ostensibly without explanation?”
She was needling him, but two could play at that game, especially when their son didn’t yet have advanced verbal comprehension. “Is that your way of asking me to put a mirror back above the bed, Scully?”
She gave him a coy smile and he was tempted to scoot closer to her and see how much groping he could get away with in front of a nine-month-old, but then said nine-month-old decided he was tired of the current activities (was probably overtired in general), and they all quickly pivoted to the activity of soothing a baby to sleep.
...
A few hours later saw the entire family in bed. They were making a trial of having William sleep in the corner of the living room by the fish tank, which he liked to watch. Even though there was a baby monitor by their bed, and they didn’t even close their door all the way, and the apartment was very small, and the fish tank made for an enchanting night light, it felt strange to have their son in the living room. He was just as safe there as in their bedroom, and there was no reason for them to worry that someone would break into their apartment and try to harm him. But paranoia had been seared into them both.
They each acknowledged, privately to themselves, that they were going to need a different place to live soon. But they were still occasionally ginger and uncertain around each other when it came to their future and their commitment, which made the necessary discussions unhelpfully fraught.
The current arrangement, however, better allowed quiet bedroom discussion, along with a degree of increased freedom during... other bedroom activities. Having finished with the latter, Scully segued into the former by propping herself up on one elbow and turning toward Mulder, who was flat on his back with his eyes closed. She traced his profile with her finger.
“You know, Mulder, you never did tell me what you did today.”
“Mmm? Oh, that’s right,” he opened his eyes and turned his head to face her and was momentarily distracted by the sight of her bare breasts peeking out from beneath the bedsheet at his eye level.
He regained mastery over himself, cleared his throat, and looked up at her smirking face. “We, uh, we actually went to visit the Gunmen today.”
“I take it you were there to find out what happened to all their equipment?”
“Yeah, that was it originally. I never used to take Will there because I didn’t want him getting into it. But now that there’s nothing for him to get into... Long story short, they lost a friend and went through all their resources trying to find her again...” he trailed off, remembering. The playfulness faded from Scully’s expression, and a wrinkle had appeared between her eyebrows before he suddenly realized that she had things to remember, too. He shifted positions, reached for her, and pulled her against his chest where they could both be soothed by the skin-to-skin contact. There were still scars there too, along his chest and torso, but like the ones on his face, they continued to heal at an almost-unsettlingly rapid rate. He’d grown enough used to them to no longer feel self-conscious around Scully. (For her part, Scully had sobbed and sobbed when she had first seen the horrific extent of the damage there, but he had also been dead at the time. The scars themselves reminded her nowadays of resilience and healing, and they made her grateful.)
“I wish they had told me, though... I guess they decided it was their fault, and so they figured getting her back was their responsibility. No matter what the cost.”
“Hmmm.” Scully had encountered that mindset before.
“As we were getting into that, though, Doggett and Reyes show up with a skeezy guy named Morris Fletcher. Real charmer, Scully. He’d probably be all for putting a mirror over the bed—maybe you’d like him.”
The only reply he got to that was a snort.
“Actually... I feel like I’ve seen the guy before. He used to be some sort of shady government operative. Maybe I saw him during one of our various run-ins with shady government types.”
“Are you sure you didn’t see him in an entirely different sort of shady establishment, Mulder?”
“Not completely. Anyway, Fletcher turned out to be the guy responsible for the abduction of their friend, so the guys were pretty pissed about seeing him again. Especially when he claimed that their friend was a Super Soldier, which is why Reyes and Doggett were even entertaining what he had to say.”
“Who is this friend?”
“Yves. With a ‘y.’ Or Lois, I guess her actual name was. Lois Runtz.”
“Yves with a ‘y’ is usually a masculine spelling.”
“Not when you go by Yves Adele Harlow and other anagrams of Lee Harvey Oswald.”
She raised her head off his chest to peer down at his face. “You’re kidding.”
“Nope. Told you you’d never guess.” He tugged her back down again and idly played with her hair. “The guys spent most of today searching for her with whatever new leads Fletcher could give them. Although I don’t really remember him doing anything useful other than trying to goad them into an endless game of ‘mine is bigger than yours’ conspiracy edition.”
“Did you play?”
“You know, I offered, but he turned me down. Anyway, I couldn’t quite understand why he’d abetted this woman’s kidnapping and made her disappear only to want to publicly locate her again. Either she got away and he’s pissed about it, or else he’s a spineless worm who got in over his head and wants Reyes and Doggett to save his sorry ass.”
“If she got away, maybe the Gunmen should let her stay gone. No matter how much they might want to see her again.”
“I’d agree with you if it weren’t for the fact that Doggett and Reyes are involved, too. If Fletcher expects to cart her away again, I can’t imagine they’ll just stand back and let him do it. Also, she apparently murdered a professor at Hartwell College in New Jersey.”
“What?!” Scully sat up off his chest again to stare at him. She felt strongly that this was burying the lede.
He tugged her back, thoroughly enjoying the back and forth. “Doggett and Reyes are there now. I don’t know all the details. I could only process so much of it, and then when Jimmy and Kimmy showed up—”
“Who are Jimmy and Kimmy?”
“Jimmy is their former... intern, I think? He went searching for Yves, and he’s the one who discovered the murder in New Jersey. Kimmy is a hacker friend of theirs, I guess, and they called him in for reinforcements. He must be good because I can’t imagine his personality recommends him.”
Scully was frowning in concentration. Those names seemed familiar somehow. “You know, I met their friends Jimmy and Timmy, but I don’t know Kimmy.”
“Was it the same Jimmy? Jimmy Bond?”
“His name is James Bond?”
“I didn’t really clarify that point,” muttered Fox Mulder, with a touch of asperity. Then, “Wait, when was this? How do you know friends of theirs that I don’t?”
“Las Vegas. And, actually, now that I’m thinking about it, they can’t possibly be the same people. Jimmy was run over by a bus. I did his autopsy. And Timmy turned out to be a nefarious agent in disguise who was working on the anoitic histamine project.”
Mulder frowned and swept his hand up her back. He still didn’t like that she had been lured away without him and ended up drugged. “Well, the last I heard before we came home was that Doggett and Reyes were in New Jersey looking into this murder potentially committed by Yves. The guys are at HQ with Jimmy and Kimmy and Morris Fletcher, and they’re all still searching. I figured that was enough people to contain Fletcher, and they wouldn’t miss me too much.”
There was a moment or two of reflective silence. Then, “You’re right, Mulder. I never would have guessed any of that.”
He kissed her hair. “I am right on occasion.”
“Mmm. Not so often as you think.”
“But more often than you think.”
As luck or fate would have it, Dana Scully was to become more personally acquainted with this case bright and early the following morning. It was a Saturday, and she was just finishing her cereal, preparing to trade off with Mulder and let him eat while she took over feeding William, when the phone rang.
“I wonder if that’s my mom,” she posited to Mulder while she went in pursuit of the phone. Maggie Scully was their most frequent babysitter, and she still came over once a week to help Mulder with William. But Scully, herself, had not seen her mom in a few weeks, and she liked the idea of a weekend visit.
It was not her mom.
“Hi, Dana. We’re sorry to ask this of you, but we have a body with some sort of post-mortem bioluminescent wound—” Reyes broke off to attend to Doggett’s interjections, “—I was getting to that, John,” before talking directly into the mouthpiece again, “and grafted cartilage in the chest cavity that we think was designed to hold some sort of missing payload.”
Scully blinked a few times. It took a moment for her to take that all in. “Is that your Super Soldier?”
“No—and you must have been talking to Mulder. This guy was a college professor who specialized in immunology in sharks. By all accounts, he was mild-mannered, a good teacher, and a respected researcher.”
A sigh. “Ship him to Quantico. I’ll see what I can find out.”
Scully decided, while the mysterious body was in transit with Doggett and Reyes, that she should go with Mulder to visit the Gunmen and find out if she could get more information from the source. (They called Maggie Scully themselves to ask her to watch William. Mulder insisted that too much exposure to Morris Fletcher would be a corrupting influence.)
The Gunmen proved to be out investigating a lead on the location of their friend, reducing the population of their headquarters to Jimmy, Kimmy, Morris Fletcher, and a few sad-looking computers. Kimmy was sitting at one of them, typing away and occasionally muttering invective at it. Scully thought that there was a sort of poetic parallel between the paucity of electronic equipment and the current lack of good company. The soul seemed to have gone out of the place.
Morris Fletcher, while still suspicious of Mulder, was delighted to meet Scully, and whistled low, “What a fox. Who’d I have to be to get with you, Sweetheart?” He had a faint impression of having met her before, though in his mind she was giggly and receptive. Today, however, she cast him a cold, disdainful look and withdrew marginally toward Mulder. Fletcher was philosophical. Chicks always went for guys like that. He wasn’t going to take it personally.
Mulder rolled his eyes and stepped a little closer to Scully. He considered wrapping his arm around her waist, but decided that was maybe too possessive. He split the difference between letting her handle it herself and publicly claiming her by giving Morris Fletcher a withering, disgusted glare.
Jimmy also glared and scoffed openly.
Scully cleared her throat. “Mr. Fletcher, I’m here on behalf of the FBI. I believe you’re cooperating with an ongoing investigation.”
“Mr. Cooperative, that’s me.”
She ignored equally the interruption and the smile he gave her. “I was contacted by Agents Reyes and Doggett because of significant anatomical abnormalities in the murder victim they found in New Jersey. Would you happen to know anything about that?”
“Weird organs—no, never heard anything about it.” Fletcher examined his fingernails.
“No projects on bioluminescence?”
“Not a one.”
“What about immunological research into the elasmobranchii? Human applications of the antiangiogenic properties of a cartilaginous skeleton?”
“I don’t know what you just said, baby, but keep going.”
“Oh, come on,” protested Jimmy, for whom the barrage of harassment directed at the nice scientist lady who had come to help them find Yves represented the crudest kind of ingratitude.
That apt summation of the conversation turned out to also serve as its conclusion, since any further exploration of the topic was interrupted by the arrival of Doggett and Reyes and the inferable arrival of Scully’s pending autopsy at Quantico.
Then the deliberations were again interrupted by a call from the Gunmen, who had caught up to Yves at the Hotel Farragut. They were afraid she was going to kill someone else. Reyes and Doggett (both of whom, after all, had field training and were currently armed) dashed off to try to intercept her. Scully departed for Quantico to study the glowing professor. Mulder found himself alone with Jimmy, Kimmy, and Morris Fletcher. It wasn’t the most enviable situation.
As Jimmy and Kimmy were discussing an improbable-sounding plan to hack into the Hotel Farragut security system, Fletcher was once again regarding Mulder in a curious sort of way that suggested he was about to attempt to engage Mulder in a crude appraisal of Scully.
Mulder, who had himself long found Scully’s tendency to spout science a turn-on, had no desire to share the appreciation of it with Morris Fletcher. He forestalled the impending conversation with a quick once over and, “You’d have more of a chance with me, hot stuff.” (Whether this was actually true was an open question. Fletcher’s chances with either of them were not high.)
Fletcher cast him an alarmed and disgusted look and quickly withdrew, and Mulder was once again blessed with solitude. Men who dished it out so aggressively could very rarely take it.
Presently, Jimmy finished arguing with Kimmy and came to sit next to Mulder in a tentatively friendly manner. “You have experience with all this sort of thing, right?”
“Yeah, you could certainly put it that way. Though I admit a glowing college professor’s a new one to me. Scully’ll be over the moon.”
Jimmy frowned and looked down at his folded hands. “What about friends—good friends—who suddenly turn into murderers?”
Mulder felt a pang of sympathy. The kid was easy to like. “I almost murdered someone once. I was drugged and completely out of my head. Scully had to stop me.”
“How’d she do it?”
“She, uh. She shot me, actually. Just in the shoulder, here.” His hand brushed over the one scar he had that was a mark of devotion. (It, too, had exhibited additional, unnatural healing after his return, which he and Scully had each noticed and each chosen to pretend that they didn’t.) Jimmy stared at him. Mulder shrugged. “Love’s a funny thing.”
The long-anticipated return of Yves (along with all three Gunmen, Doggett, and Reyes) to the offices of the Lone Gunmen was accompanied by a sufficient flurry of action.
She was not, in fact, a Super Soldier. Morris Fletcher was lying—of course he was. How shocking, mused Mulder, although the implied critique of gullibility was hypocritical of him, all things considered. She was improbably attractive. Upon meeting her, Mulder remembered Invisigoth and wondered if all lady hackers were this attractive, or if there were any of them who looked more like their male counterparts. (Given that he was half of the most improbably attractive pair of FBI agents ever to grace federal service, this line of thought was also quite hypocritical.)
Fletcher’s goal had been to track Yves, kidnap her, and return her to her international arms dealer of a father. Who was, as she put it, “the scum of the earth. My father is a murderer and a supporter of terrorism. I hate everything he stands for.” Yves’s goal was to try to stop her father’s latest act of biological terrorism, which involved accomplices with shark-enhanced immune systems serving as biological couriers of a nefarious virus.
All that was rough. Mulder could relate. Technically, anyway. (No matter what influence that cigarette-smoking bastard had claimed to have on his genetics, Fox Mulder still regarded Bill Mulder as his father. Who had been a troubled man with his own failings, of course. But Fox’s love for his father was genuine and deep, though complicated by the love he also held for Samantha and a dawning, disconcerting awareness of just how profoundly both of his parents had failed him. Becoming a father himself brought into sharper focus what he had mostly intellectualized as their response to trauma; Scully’s barely-suppressed disapproval was making an increasingly uncomfortable kind of sense.)
According to Yves, the murdered college professor was only one of two planned couriers. She had been prevented from taking out the second by the Gunmen, Doggett, and Reyes. Since she estimated that they had only five more hours until the virus was released, this was a pressing problem.
As Langly and Kimmy bickered over whose hacking could find the escaped suspect the fastest, Mulder called Scully. She didn’t pick up right away. She was probably still busy with her autopsy, but he fretted anyway and debated calling Maggie to tell her to take William and get the hell out of Washington. The problem was, of course, that he had no way of knowing if this attack was going to target Washington at all; they might be safer staying here.
Scully called him back about forty-five anxious minutes later. He didn’t have enough background on this case to be of any help, and it was making him feel useless. “Mulder, it’s me. I think the cartilaginous vessel in the professor’s chest was originally holding some type of virus. I’ve sent samples of the cartilage for culture and microscopy—I don’t know the characteristics of the virus yet, but if it can be aerosolized, it’s potentially very dangerous. I’m going to try to do a more in-depth study of the his immune system next. If it was specifically enhanced to tolerate the virus or the vessel, tracing those modifications could tell us more.”
He sighed. “Yeah, we got a corroborating story from Yves—the guys found her and brought her back with them. She claims that it’s a biological terrorist plot: there were two couriers, though and she only got the one you’re looking at right now. That shark capsule is a time bomb with a fuse that’ll go off in five hours, after which the virus’ll travel for five or six miles.”
Scully sucked in a breath. “How reliable is she?”
“I don’t know. I can’t really make a judgment yet myself. The guys vouch for her, and they’re all pretty adamant about that. I mean, you—the evidence you found seems to back her claims.”
“If she’s telling the whole truth.” Scully sighed. Saturday was turning out to be much worse than she had hoped. She thought of her mother and her son and a six mile radius. “Did she explain the mechanism for the release of the virus?”
“Cellular death... uh, programmed cellular death. Genetically engineered to a specific rate that will result in the rupture of the the capsule at a pre-selected time.”
“All right. Thanks, Mulder. I’ll get back to the lab and see if I can get anything useful, either for containment or for detecting any other couriers.”
A few hours later, they located the suspect—a man going by the assumed name of Leonard Southhall—via hacked satellite. Doggett and Reyes raced off to intercept him, back to Hartwell College in New Jersey. Scully didn’t have specifics on the virus yet, but she suggested sending a full hazmat team. The anxiety level in the Lone Gunmen headquarters didn’t exactly abate, but it did ease a bit. (Doggett spared an uneasy thought for the lax cybersecurity of satellites and hoped fervently that it wasn’t a government satellite. Mulder thought government satellites deserved whatever they got.)
A few hours after that, the anxiety level spiked because Leonard Southhall turned out to be the wrong man.
Doggett, annoyed and embarrassed at having importuned an entire hazmat team for no reason, started to suspect that Yves was using them as surely as Morris Fletcher had. The Gunmen remained steadfast in her defense. Reyes harbored a suspicion that Southhall was actually the correct man and the medical team had missed something. She wanted to call in Scully, but Scully was still busy with the first autopsy. Mulder thought that the evidence Scully had found so far was consistent with the story Yves told, and Yves therefore deserved the benefit of the doubt. This wasn’t a comfort to him, since that meant Southhall was a decoy, and they had one hour to find a domestic terrorist who was a walking biohazard.
The potential suspect list quickly narrowed to focus on a colleague of the late professor. He was due to attend the International Bioethics Forum in Washington, scheduled to start within the hour. As a suspect he was, indeed, promising: he had the knowledge, background, and suspicious recent movements. But they didn’t have the time for another mistake.
(Also: the International Bioethics Forum? Really?)
Up to a certain point, their theorizing, searching, and planning was harmonious and efficient, driven by joint pursuit of a crucial goal. And then Mulder suddenly realized, in the middle of a serious discussion about the type of access allowed to the press, that the eclectic occupants of the room were regarding thwarting a deadly bioterrorist as an operation to be done themselves. He stared at them as though they had all gone insane. (The assessment was justified, but hypocritical considering the source.)
“I have a better idea. Call the authorities.” The three Gunmen stared at him as though he had broken a sacred compact. “No, I’m serious. You’re liable to get killed if you try to stop this yourselves with some half-assed plan. None of you have any field training. And the government takes terrorist threats real seriously right now. You could probably even drop this on Bob Mueller’s doorstep, ring the bell, and run away and still have it investigated, but I’m going to suggest the more efficient method of calling Scully and having her call Skinner.”
“I can’t believe that you—” started Langly, outraged by the thought of trusting the authorities, rather than Mulder’s facetious strategy of ding dong ditching the FBI Director.
“Yeah, I know, I know. Believe me, I know. Up close and personal. Have any of you ever seen the results of a terrorist attack with a biochemical agent?” He sighed and broke off, remembering, presumably, that shady government officials had been using him and the FBI and had allowed the New Spartans to kill a theater full of innocent people. “Look, I know Doggett and Reyes are still in New Jersey, and I know better than most that official government channels are more corrupt and less-effective than they should be. But stop it with this honor bullshit, all of you. This isn’t something you can solve with misplaced nobility. You want to know what misplaced nobility gets you? It gets you killed.”
The emotional undercurrent of this argument was lost on the non-Gunman audience, but it still made its impact. Phone calls were made, a biological hazard team was hurriedly assembled, and Scully made the search for the suspect considerably shorter and less prone to error with instructions to use an IR lens to search for a person with a distinctly stronger infrared signal than normal. Filtered this way, the bioluminescence resulting from the genetic engineering should serve as a quick identifier.
The Gunmen watched, relieved and victorious, via pirated breaking news feed as the subject was detected and immediately removed into a mobile quarantine unit. Skinner took questions and was diligent in crediting unnamed civilian sources who tipped off the FBI. The atmosphere at headquarters was celebratory, but Morris Fletcher complained about the lack of champagne until Reyes and Doggett reappeared to arrest him on charges that began with filing a false report. Jimmy and Yves stuck close together throughout the after-party, burgeoning feelings on the cusp of being revealed.
Mulder went home shortly after the situation was clearly resolved, feeling relieved and drained and more like being alone than celebrating with the crowd. He had never been drawn to large celebratory outings after solving a case (if this even counted as a case for him anymore), preferring to digest on his own—or, later, quietly with Scully. He felt a little bit adrift, but he told the Gunmen before he left that he wasn’t done with their earlier conversation, and he’d be back to finish it.
The Gunmen seemed to have resigned themselves to hearing him out. “Bring the kid!” from Frohike was the only response they offered.
Scully picked up William from her mother’s—she hadn’t seen much of her mother recently, and Mulder didn’t want to deprive her of the family time. He viewed family as vitally important, despite (or maybe because of) his own family history. Truthfully, he was also glad to leave the explanation of where they had been all day up to Scully.
In the evening, after William had been put down to sleep, Scully lounged in bed with a book, and Mulder melted into her. The conversation turned, inevitably, to processing the day’s events.
“The Gunmen were planning to stop a bioterrorist by themselves?” That Scully thought this a foolish idea was evident from her tone of voice.
“They were before I stopped them.”
She paused in her slow ruffling of his hair. “Let’s get clear that you weren’t planning to do this either, Mulder.” Her voice was fond, but there was also a real fear in it that he could hear.
He raised his head to look at her then and opted for sincerity. “No. It didn’t even occur to me—I told them to call the authorities, or at least the trustworthy ones. In this case, you.”
“I’m the authorities now?” She was a little bit offended.
He smirked at her. “You represent trustworthy authority, Scully. Although I also included Skinner in my suggestion to the guys, which complicates the bit of lascivious subtext I was carefully building just now.”
“It’s not subtext if you bring it out into the open.”
“She decreed with authority.”
She rolled her eyes and gave him a look, then shifted the conversation back to a more earnest tone. “Do you believe in calling the authorities now, Mulder? Do you actually think the government has improved that much?”
He sighed and flipped around so that he was facing her, with enough room between them to easily see each other. “No... not really. I guess it’s more of... there’s nothing wrong with asking for help when you need it. Especially when there are trustworthy people who are willing and able to help you. There’s strength in it—even wisdom. Discretion is the better part of valor.”
There was considerable wisdom in that, though she honestly hadn’t expected to hear such a thing from Mulder. She knew herself well enough to admit that they both suffered alone unnecessarily—and they both hurt each other with their isolation. This moment wasn’t enough to magically fix everything, of course, nor to immediately alter the ingrown habits of two very stubborn people. But it felt like something. She smiled at him and pulled him close again.