The characters and situations are the creations and property of Chris Carter, 1013 Productions and the Fox Broadcasting Corporation and have been used without permission. No copyright infringement is intended and no money shall be made with this piece of fiction.
I can only hope that the aforementioned can find it in their hearts to forgive this fan for taking hours out from watching their show and using their tie-in products to create and showcase a not-for-profit piece of work. To them, I say...please don't hurt me!
Synopsis: This story was
written during the Fourth Season as a reaction to "Reflections of
a Cigarette Smoking Man" an episode that not even William B. Davis liked.
I thought they took a complex, murky character and reduced him to a petty
pawn/assassin. They never addressed his motives, his moral bearing, or
the nature of his recruitment into the UFO Syndacate. And I don't even
want to think about that "Forrest Gump" rip-off. So, instead I wrote
a "Day in the life" piece. E-mail me. Let me know which you like better.
Morleys and Secrets
The damn things made too much noise, that was the first thing to fix. The second was the seats. Like sitting on bleacher seats that somebody had slapped an acute backrest onto. Less than a half hour since they lifted off from the Army Air Field in Tempe and already his ears were muffled and his shoulders moaned in pain. Good ships though, he thought, pondering the ruddy smear of the desert wasteland beneath them. The new helicopters could take off completely vertical, could hover, and could still manage speeds nearing a hundred miles per hour. He looked forward to riding in one twenty years from now. Once they worked some of the bugs out.
Nervously, he looked around at the other riders in the 'copter. He knew none of them, but could read the hardness in their faces and the slight boredom in their eyes. This wasn't their first. Not even the escort soldiers who held their carbines loosely and joked amongst themselves seemed in any way daunted by the ride on this new machine or the assignment that waited for them.
"You look like you're going to puke," said the man sitting across from him. A tall, lithe man in khakis and an aviator's leather jacket, who at that time was called Thwaite.
"I've never been in one of these before," he answered. "I'm not used to it."
Thwaite grinned wildly from behind a lit cigarette and slipped on his wire-rimmed sunglasses. "Bullshit," Thwaite shouted to be heard over the horizontal propeller. "You're scareda what we're chasing. You should be."
"Is it that bad?" he shouted back, feeling his dormant fear prick up its ears.
"We're almost there!"
But that wasn't Thwaite anymore.
"Sir? We're almost there," said the young operative who sat across from him, a bottle of Canadian water dangling from his long-fingered hands. The man nodded and sat up in his seat. He'd been without sleep for several hours when the call came in, and the combination of the luxury seats of the Bell Twin helicopter and the soft, rhythmic throb of the rotor-beats had lulled him into unconsciousness almost immediately. He remembered the dream, it was an old companion--a re-creation of old times.
But the past doesn't die, he knew. Cracking his neck, working the kinks out of his back and shoulder, he looked over the cabin of the small helicopter, now speeding over the vastness of Montana at over two-hundred miles per hour. The operative sitting across from him looked younger and even more fresh-faced than he'd been in the dream--even though the op was a good decade older than he'd been on that mission. His escorts on this trip sat in the front of the cabin, as they always did. Their uniforms were crisper and slashed with white and grey tiger-stripes, and they didn't mishandle their weapons. Instead, they cradled their H&K submachine guns professionally across their laps. They didn't joke or banter, being too focused for that.
"We've arrived, gentleman," came the pilot's voice over the intercom, and the chopper tilted slightly in descent. The man reached into his coat and pulled out his hard pack of Morley's. he didn't bother to offer them to the other operative or the escorts. The escorts didn't smoke, drink, use drugs, or engage in any other vices that might compromise their effectiveness, and the operative didn't smoke because he was of the new sensibility that worshipped health and foolishly believed that one could exert a meaningful amount of control over one's intake of toxin. He lit up and was on the third drag by the time the helicopter extended its landing wheels and gently set down on the concrete helipad.
"Sir, proud to have you," Colonel West saluted crisply. "I think you'll find everything in order, here. We run a tight ship."
He didn't salute--he wasn't military--instead he exhaled a wan column of smoke. "You've just had a major security breach. That doesn't sound like a very tight ship to me."
Colonel West's face didn't flinch or twist in apprehension--he knew, after all, why this visit was taking place. But he was scared. He'd screwed up and let down a group of people who did more than hand out demerits for failure. "That was an unfortunate error, yes, but my people assure me that no substantial download could have taken place within the window of opportunity they established."
"I'm not reassured," he said, "at least not to the point that I wouldn't consider having my associate take a look at your system."
"Of course, sir," West nodded quickly, envisioning a new failure. "I'll escort you to the Operations Center."
The Colonel and his guards led them into the concrete and steel intestines of the complex, pointing out the various areas and structures with tight pride, as if he himself was responsible for it. The man scowled slightly at every chest-puffing declaration--he didn't suffer fools easily. West's involvement in the project was tangential, limited to little more than a glorified office manager.
The Operations Center--the nucleus of the complex--was a large, hexagonal room that protruded from the bulk of the complex, connected by a three-hundred-foot corridor lined with steel doors and triple-insulated. Should the complex ever be compromised by an invading force or should the mini-reactor that powered the complex ever go critical, they could seal themselves off from the rest and survive for about three weeks on the stored oxygen reserves and recyclers, until, presumably, a rescue effort could be mounted. The man knew this was mostly a delusion. That all pertinent information would most likely be downloaded from the computers via the satellite link they maintained, while the personnel here were left to die. That is, unless there was a compelling reason to excavate.
The room was arranged in concentric rings of control banks--some were computer-access terminal, some were environmental and containment controls. The main database controllers sat in the center of the circles around a three-sided console. The operative easily nudged aside one of the programmers there.
"With a ten-millisecond hole in the alarm system, I doubt there was much the guy could have gotten," Colonel West said with authority he didn't have. The man left him sweat in silence while the operative connected his laptop to the terminal and began typing.
"We've revamped the safety net, of course, " West continued, slightly rattled, "and done extensive testing..."
"Here," the operative said, cutting West off. He turned the small laptop so they could see the screen. The man didn't know what he was looking at--a highlighted list of codes--and he doubted West did, either. "The intruder left a timebomb. A program inserted in the moment he breached the system, before the security program shut the door. It's basically a virus that'll open a hole undetectable by the security programs."
"Well," the man said, taking the cigarette from his lips and staring West down, "it seems our intruder did manage to accomplish a little something in the minuscule time-frame he worked with."
West did his best to look authoritative, turning his attention to the matter at hand. "If we can extrapolate how long this virus would take to take effect, we could set a trap for this guy, couldn't we? A computer trap to nail this guy?"
"Actually, we already have him," the operative said, typing furiously at the laptop. "He's an egotistical little bastard, like all of them. He signed his work. I'm transmitting a copy of this to Washington, they'll be able to dismantle it and get a fix on the hacker who did this."
The man smiled. "Good. Why don't you stay here and do a thorough cleansing of the system? After all," he pointed his smugness at the Colonel, "we'd hate for there to be any little viruses we missed, wouldn't we?"
West's expression was one of pure hate, but it didn't matter.
He walked into the depths of the complex, flanked by his escorts, though he felt no danger. West was a lackey, nothing more, a man without vision, comprehension, or insight. A trained animal loosed on the areas he could effectively maintain. West wasn't to be feared because he could not afford the luxury of ambition. This metal bubble was the extent of his influence and his knowledge.
They stopped at the entrance to Main Containment Area 13--a thick, steel door, guarded by two submachine gun-toting sentries and sealed by an electronic lock which required an alpha/numeric code, a key card, and a retina scan. He went through the motions by rote, with more ease than most people retrieved their house keys, and the foot-thick shielded door slid open. He turned and addressed his escorts. "Three minutes. That's all." The ranking sentry tipped his head in understanding.
If he did not return in three minutes, the wing that MCA-13 occupied would be sealed and the room pumped with napalm.
He stepped through the door way into a closet-sized antechamber and, per Standard Containment Regulations, waited for the shielded door to slide shut behind him and the antechamber's lights go from red to white, indicating that it had locked. Only then could he crank the round handle on the armored submarine hatch and step into the containment area.
The room was roughly the size of an aircraft hanger, lined with dark stasis cylinders, and lit only by the fluorescent lights running along the walls. He walked down the aisle between the cylinders, the central aisle that was most bathed in shadow. He lit a Morley and checked his watch. Thirty seconds.
The tank dominated the far wall of the room, was lit by UV and black lights to best simulate the lighting system they'd found in the craft. Of course, they hadn't been able to make heads or tails of that, but a photon-mechanics team formerly of MIT had ascertained the type of light they'd emitted. The rest of the tank's interior was murky with the swirls of methane and chlorine that they pumped in to keep the thing happy.
Set into the bullet-proof glass of the tank's exterior was a keypad and monitor. He tapped in the necessary commands, saw the viewscreen come to life. READY, it said.
"The equations worked," he said, checking his watch. One minute. "We managed to bring elements of the drive system on-line. Soon enough we'll be able to access the other areas. One domino falls, the rest follow."
From the depths of the roiling mists, red ovals burned brightly, like bonfires showing through fog. The response scrolled across the monitor.
YOU THINK.
"I know," he said, and inhaled smoke. "You're not equipped to deal with this lesser species. You still believe that you can broadcast yourselves with impunity. Allow your thoughts, your knowledge to dance in and out of our minds. You didn't think we'd catch on. Didn't know we could extract your buried imprints and piece them together. You hadn't planned for this contingency."
YOU DO NOT KNOW.
"And you believe that cryptic speak and skulking in clouds gives you the upper hand. Which is why you must be reminded from time to time that you are a prisoner."
AS ARE YOU.
And he felt the wave of vertigo sweep him, transform the world around him into a moist, hot jungle, rife with bugs and distant, calling birds. And distant, pounding shells. Indochina.
Bill Mulder was shouting. "We've got to secure that valley! If the Frogs have it, we'll never get a team in there!"
"I've taken care of it. I've given our friends some equipment."
A bird screeched in the high jungle canopy, but not in the canopy in his head, in his skull. He staggered back a step, away from Indochina, Bill Mulder, The French, and Dien Bien Phu. The cigarette had burned down, he felt its heat closer to his lips and he hurriedly checked his watch.
Two minutes, forty seconds. It had only given him a taste, knowing that its existence was contingent upon his.
And like humans, they were not well-versed in the virtue of self-sacrifice.
"We'll have it all soon enough," he hissed and deactivated the monitor before it could reply.
He shut the antechamber hatch behind him with three seconds to spare.
Indochina haunted his flight back to Civilization, even though he felt nothing personally about his actions. It was simply...duty. The contact point was buried in that valley, and the French hadn't allowed access to it. They'd been coy, played the war into that region and turned the whole thing into a strategic decision, but those who traveled the lower circles understood the maneuver and had been called upon to take the appropriate measures. In the end it had only required a simple realignment of alliances. The Vietnamese had turned out to be amazingly resourceful and required only a bit of help to haul the artillery up the mountains and into position. When the smoke cleared, and the Vietnamese had taken the surviving French prisoner, they'd simply walked right in dug into the contact point.
Easy, if one simply put one's priorities in order.
But the memory haunted him, even as the chopper skimmed beneath the
silver clouds of night and the lights of Manhattan glared through the windows.
Bill had been a good operative back then, a good man. Pity things had to
turn out the way they did. Most people would have found murdering a former
colleague repellent, monstrous, but again it was all in the priorities.
"This latest breech of security is troubling," the Chairman said, reclining in his burgundy office chair. The man didn't understand the Chairman's behavior during meetings. He had mahogany desk large enough to shield someone from a handgrenade, yet chose to forsake its sanctuary to sit in the loose semi-circle.
"I don't see why," he said, watching his smoke climb the oak-panelled walls that blocked out the sounds of New York's West 77th St. "My expert assures me that the virus has been deactivated, the system flushed, and we have the identity of the perpetrator. We'll be taking care of him within the evening."
The colleague from Germany--a beefy, moon-faced man with a bristly haircut and a perpetual scowl--leaned forward and spoke in his accented English, "I cannot speak for the others, but the frequency of these breeches is becoming alarming. This is the seventh in the last year and one-half. Perhaps it is time we seriously reconsidered our current measures."
"I agree," concurred the colleague from Spain.
"As do I," added the colleague from Denmark.
"Perhaps we should," he said quickly, "but I will oversee it."
"That," said the colleague from Japan, "would be a colossal mistake."
"You presume to doubt my loyalty?" the man spat, hot fury creeping into his cheeks.
"I doubt your effectiveness."
"You have no right!"
"He does," the Chairman said. "We all do. You have produced two leaks that necessitated termination. Each time we take such brazen action, we risk exposure."
"Those people were not my direct responsibility! One sat in this room along with the rest of us, lying to us, deceiving all of us. The other had been...tainted. Surely you can't hold me accountable for the actions of a peer and his loyal subject."
"But we can hold you responsible for other events, can't we?" said the silver-haired colleague from England, folding his well-manicured hands before him. "We can even hold you responsible for your methods, your manner. Sending your black operations assassins out whenever a problem arises, as if a storm of bullets and a wall of bodies can insulate us from detection. Rather than resort to disinformation, manipulation, a host of other, less graphic ways of dealing with a traitor, your only thought is to kill. And you don't even kill the right people all the time, do you? You've managed to give our opponents enough incentive to hunt us down--making their crusade personal, now. Never mind the hopeless bungling you made of the DAT tape affair, and the operative who stole it. Mr. Kryczeck, I believe he was called."
"Is this a performance appraisal?" he asked testily. "Are you going to hold me responsible for the outcome of the Piper Maru incident? If you recall, we recovered the cargo from that plane."
"And your attempt to compromise Assistant Director Skinner--in usual fashion by sending an assassin--was a complete failure."
"We are not here to argue over past operation," the Chairman said matter-of-factly,
"but to decide upon the proper measures that should be taken to tighten
our security." He looked at the man. "You will eliminate the one who breached
our security tonight. And you will do it without gunfire."
The helicopter set down on the scrub-laden ground, its propeller raising clouds of dust that made him cough as he piled out with the rest of the team. He stumbled on a patch of loose earth, almost falling but for the man next to him who caught him by the shoulder. He nodded his thanks to the guy, who, he noticed, wasn't much older than he was. "Your first?" he called over the sound of the heliocopter.
"Yeah, yours too, I imagine. You with CIG?" The sound of the heliocopter was fading into the distance as they climbed a steep hill, Thwaite and another man led the way, and they were flanked by soldiers, their carbines at the ready.
"Central Intelligence Group," he affirmed. "Do you know what we're in for?"
"No. I've heard stories, but, no." Then his companion extended his
hand and gave his name. At that time, neither of them realized that names
would lose meaning, become expendable. The other man would have gone through
scores of them by the time he would be executed for leaking information
to Bill Mulder's son.
"There," the operative sitting beside him said, pointing over the steering wheel at the lanky, poorly-dressed man with greasy, shoulder-length hair, and an unkempt beard.
"Of course. Who else would it be?" He drew on his cigarette and watched as the scruffy man walked haltingly to the corner of the street, checking over his shoulder and to all sides, as if a squad of commandos would suddenly materialize in the middle of the street. "When does it happen?"
"Now."
The light changed and the hacker began crossing, stalling, watching his back. The black Trans Am peeled out of the parking garage and was eating up the distance between them before
the hacker noticed it. He froze in the typically human fashion--the instant of surprised paralysis before brute instinct takes over--but it that instant the low-slung front end slammed the hacker, tossed him like a rag doll into the intersection where traffic sped, unable to brake in time to miss the sudden interruption. A neon green 4x4 with a black grill protecting its headlights picked him up and carried him away from their view.
"Most accidents take place just a few hundred feet from the home," the operative said coldly.
"I've heard that." The man sucked sweet smoke. "I trust we have people at the hospital. Just in case the emergency room is as efficient as the ones on TV?"
"We do."
"Good."
The secure apartment they kept for him was spartan and clean, but he barely had time to register it. The phone rang the moment he stepped inside. He picked it up, enjoying the luxury of not having to fuss with scramblers or diversion lines.
"The team has arrived in Lake Antiquican. They've requested a supervisor. The plane is being readied as we speak."
Lake Antiquican, Alaska. The town that had suddenly grown fuzzy to the
surveillance satellites passing over it. They'd assumed it was a malfunction,
a burst of UV radiation, a reflection of X- and Y-rays. This contact meant
it was something bigger. Much bigger. Lake Antiquican. He felt cold just
speaking the hard consonants.
The Learjet had landed in Anchorage where he caught a puddle-hopper to B-7 Air Force field. Waiting for him at that miserable speck in the Alaskan wilderness was a white Huey helicopter and an escort team. The hardy chopper flew the remaining hundred and sixteen miles deep into a glacier-carved valley where the ice had turned into Lake Antiquican and where the small town, which had popped up as a trading post and waystation a century earlier, had taken the same name.
Night hit hard in Alaska, the way it did Arizona decades ago, before the proliferation of power lines, urban expansion, suburbs had lit it up. Back when the euphemisms were new, and the terminology refreshingly honest. Back when they called UFOs "Flying Disks," and Extra-terrestrial Biological Entities were simply called "Aliens" or "Spacemen."
Out of the darkness, high-intensity field illuminators carved the shapes of old log houses, simple brick buildings, radio antennae, and ill-paved roads. Occasionally, white-clad troops darted through the field of light, moving purposefully and casting long shadows.
He pulled on his thermal-lined parka, gloves and watch cap. When the Huey set down and the door slip open, he thought of the 9mm pistol beneath his seat. He took it out and slipped it in the coat's pocket before hopping out onto the cold, firm ground. The incursion team's commander, a big bruiser of a colonel named Henderson whose face sported a web of scar tissue crisscrossing the right side, jogged up to meet him and saluted crisply. He'd dealt with Henderson before, and knew the man to be quite unlike West in his thoroughness and understanding of the scope of his involvement in these matters.
"Sir," he called over the Huey's rumble, "we've been over this town three times now. No sign of anyone. Possessions all appear to left here, based on what we found. Expensive, valuable stuff: vehicles, hunting and fishing equipment, electronics, home entertainment. Not the sort of things you leave behind."
He walked, leading Henderson and rest of the soldiers away from the idling Huey whose blades were sending too much subzero wind their way to be tolerable. "What's the population of the town?"
"Hundred and twenty regulars," Henderson replied, matching step beside him. "But up to three times that many in the height of hunting season."
"Hunting season ended a little over a week ago. There were probably a lot of sportsmen still hanging around." He continued walking, not anyplace in particular, heading for a sentry-guarded intersection. It seemed as functionless as a geologic formation in the midst of this ghost town.
"I thought so, too. Radio station's dead, all equipment fused. Animals left here--pest and livestock--dead of hunger." Henderson pointed at a Hummer idling in a curtain of its own steaming exhaust. "But there's something more you should see."
The Hummer drove a short, smooth ride just beyond the outskirts of the tiny town to a long, rectangular, well-illuminated lot. The driver parked and they piled out. The earth here was untended, uneven and crumbly beneath their boots. Henderson led him to the edge of a dark, rectangular pit, then shone his torch into it. The edges of the pit were smooth and evenly dug by some kind of machinery. "What?" he said impatiently, then noticed the rest of the rectangular pits and their neat, even alignment. He feared the answer even as Henderson's light caught the tablet at the edge of the pit. A marble headstone. "The cemetery?"
"Affirmative," Henderson's swaggering tone faltered just the slightest. "All of them exhumed."
He felt the wind slice through the parka, slice through his flesh, his
bones, his organs.
The lights of Civilization did not comfort him on the flight back, and the heat of the jet didn't warm him. At least one-hundred and twenty people gone. The graves exhumed. This didn't fit into any of the projects, wasn't representative of any of them. No known quantity had ever operated on this level. None dared upset the balance to this degree.
Which could only mean that something new had visited that town.
He was not a man accustomed to fear, hadn't felt it since the Arizona
desert, but he felt it now. Now, it held him fast.
He did not communicate this fear in his report to the Chairman. He knew too well that fear is weakness. Fear can be manipulated. They all did it every day to keep their secrets. He delivered the bare facts, his summary, and his course of action.
"This is highly unusual," the Chairman said. "It is also quite disturbing. We have not seen this degree of interference since...before the beginning."
"Nineteen-thirty to be exact," he said on a puff of smoke. "Canada. Nearly an exact duplicate. That was, however, before the examination into extra-terrestrial visitation began in earnest. The incident was never thoroughly investigated. We have the opportunity to do that this time. That is how we should view this. As an opportunity."
"Let's view this first as a huge liability. Your handling of the computer breech was quite adequate, but this situation is far more sprawling. How do you intend to deflect attention?"
He tilted his head consideringly. "The town was isolated, populated mostly by those who wished solitude. That in and of itself affords us some camouflage. Colonel Henderson's team will deter anyone attempting to pass through while the conduct a thorough search and our teams conduct their investigation. When scrutiny is borne, a cover story will be tacitly leaked--an outbreak seems the most logical choice. It's far from inconceivable, given the close quarters, that someone afflicted with cholera or ebola would be able to infect the whole town in a relatively small amount of time. Say an Eastern European, journeying over the Bering Strait in search of superior Western medicine. Requests for remains will, of course, be denied by order of the CDC who would have cremated the bodies according quarantine regulations."
The Chairman relaxed in his seat, a positive signal. "That is acceptable. There is, however, the other factor. The FBI factor. Agent Mulder has proven more intrepid and resourceful in these matters than we'd believed. He could be on his way out there now."
He drew on his cigarette. "That would only be to our advantage. Agent
Mulder is a gifted investigator and any information he finds would be advantageous.
As a security risk, he is negligible. While dogged and relentless, Agent
Mulder really walks away with only as much as we allow him to."
He returned to his secured room on the upper West side where he ordered in--seafood pasta in a vinegar sauce and a bottle of Heinekan. He laid it out on the table beside his automatic pistol and his hard pack of Morleys. He ate while he watched an old movie. Nineteen-thirties, he thought, maybe forties. Men in trenchcoats and fedoras strode through the fog of pre-War New York. He became quite involved in the plot. He was able to find such facile forms of entertainment engaging--it filled the space between work that other men occupied with family or friends. The business of socializing. He none of those things, had forsaken them the moment he'd become involved in MAJIC, trading them all for secrets and the possibility of power.
The movie pleased him, threw in some curves and surprises, and he found it enjoyable. He watched a bit of the banality that followed it and then drifted off to sleep, knowing that the alarm on his wristwatch would wake him and that the gun was in easy reach.
He dreamt.
The hot, Arizona wind had suddenly whipped up small dust storm as they mounted the ridge--as if nature herself was protesting the presence of this outside thing, this sliver in her finger. They broke into teams as they scrabbled down the blast-crater; his new companion went with the unnamed operative, taking three sentries, while he went with Thwaite and their three. The top of the crash was visible as a gleaming, silver arc, scuffed and blackened in places from its burning rush through the atmosphere, exhaling a steady plume of weak, grey smoke from a thin, jagged rip. The other team was setting up a perimeter, while he and Thwaite made their way to the rip. They would spearhead the investigation, the incursion into the crash. They advanced on the rip, twenty yards, closing. He drew his .45 sidearm from the holster at his hip and cocked it. "Yeah, you'll need that," Thwaite said, ignoring his own gun. At ten yards, he saw the first body, sprawled over a small mound of earth, in death the same color as the bare terrain. Except for the eyes, which had gone a dead, glistening black. It had been thrown from the wreckage, but from the rip extended the frail limbs and crumpled digits of other occupants.
He gasped--not ready for this sight, though he'd known he'd have to face it--and then smelled the stench of the body, of its death.
"Potent, isn't it?" Thwaite said, turning to him,"Try these, they cover it up."
He offered a pack of cigarettes.