CHAPTER 1

This was a hell of a story that Miss Grant was spinning. And Kara thought she could make an educated guess as to what was in the X-Files. Nevertheless, she needed a lot more.

"You're telling me the Bureau had a department that investigated alien activity?" she asked.

"Not just aliens. Based on what Mulder told me, the X-Files were any case in the Bureau that had been designated unexplained," Cat told her. "Don't ask me why they were filed under 'X' and not 'U'. Even he didn't know. What he did know was that those files seemed to deal with just about every supernatural and paranormal event that you can imagine – or more accurately, the kinds of mutants and metahumans that have been attacked Metropolis, National City, and just about everywhere in between for the past few years."

It said a lot about what Kara was hearing that she suddenly felt the need to sit down. The Girl of Steel felt like her legs were suddenly made out of gelatin.

"How do you know all this?" she asked.

"That's a long story. I'll try to give you the Cliff Notes version, but I'm telling you up front that even that version may end up taking longer that the next novel in the Game of Thrones series." Cat admitted. "So I'll just limit the story to my own involvement, and I what I can confirm."

"Where does it start?"

"My first year at the Daily Planet," Cat told them. 'It was June of 1990. I'd been making a good impression with my editor – sexist bastard he might have been – but I still had yet to break a big story. I think it was because I was being such a nuisance that he gave me the D.C. beat."

"Your first year?" Kara was impressed.

"It says something about my ego at the time that I was pissed about it," Cat admitted. "Saddam Hussein was rolling into Kuwait. The Berlin Wall had fallen, and it was pretty obvious the Soviet Union didn't have much more life in it. The last thing I wanted to do was listen to something I could just as easily see on C-SPAN. But Perry White – who was still a journalist at the time – pulled me aside and told me that the D.C. beat might seem boring right then, but eventually I might find the story that I was looking for. The one that would make my reputation. He was right about that. The problem was, in doing so; I missed a far, far bigger one."

"In any case, I swallowed my pride, and went out to Washington. Of course, because my editor was a prick, he had sent me there while Congress wasn't in session and while the President was in Kennebunkport. I didn't expect to find anything worth a damn aside from Agricultural Reports and stories of tax reform, which were even less exciting then they sound. You wouldn't think that by giving someone the D.C. beat you would be trying to bury them, but that was my theory for the first few weeks."

Cat paused. "It's disgusting looking back on it how we get our first big stories. Mine was built on the back of murdered children."

"Mass shooting?"

"Worse," Cat said far too casually. "Two months into my first beat, the FBI, working in consultation with Quantico, arrested a man, who over a period of a decade, had been responsible for the kidnapping, strangulation and murder of thirteen young girls up and down the Eastern Seaboard."

Kara liked to believe in the good in humanity. It was stories like this that occasionally gave her reason to doubt it. "Who was he?"

"He was a vacuum cleaner salesman named John Lee Roche," Cat said grimly. "After he murdered each other girl – none of whom, by the way, were older than ten -, he would take a trophy. He was cut out a heart from each of their nightgowns. That's why he was classified as the Paper Hearts killer."

"There was barely such a thing as a twenty-four news channel back then, but it was big enough to make every major paper, network and local station for the next couple of days. The Bureau did what it does so many times, when it's working right. They focused on the arrest, and kept the details to a minimum. So I looked for an angle. And that is how I first met Fox Mulder."

"He arrested Roche?"

"Better. He came up with the profile that led to his capture." Miss Grant shook her head. "He was mentioned maybe once at the press conference. I was covering it. And that's when I had my first great idea."

"Given that every series that CBS or NBC produces these days has something to with profiling, it's hard to imagine there was ever a time when only law enforcement knew about it, and basically considered it the same level of calling in a psychic to solve a crime."

"James told me there are still some that think this way," Kara mentioned.

Grant nodded. "I have lunch with a couple every month. And for that matter, in 1990, the idea of profiling hadn't hit the mainstream. About a month after my article, The Silence of the Lambs hit theaters, and it became hard to avoid. Unfortunately, the move went out of its way to glorify the killers. I decided to try and celebrate the profiler."

"I'm guessing it wasn't easy."

"The Bureau was never big on commenting on procedure, and Fox Mulder was even harder to chase down. In the meantime, I did my homework. He was an Oxford-educated psychiatrist. He was considered some of a prodigy back then – his senior thesis had been responsible for catching a killer named Monty Propps, and his instructors Reggie Purdue and Bill Patterson both thought he was the most gifted profiler ever to come out of Quantico. The only sign of his flirtation with the paranormal back then was his nickname." Cat paused. "They called him 'Spooky' Mulder. "

"That doesn't sound like much of a compliment." Kara said.

"Purdue made it very clear that Mulder's nickname was because he had the gift of being able to get inside the head of killers so thoroughly that it unnerved even his fellow profilers." Grant told her. "Patterson said if he kept his nose to the grindstone, they'd renamed the Hoover building for him at the turn of the century. That's what they said. But I could tell they really didn't want to me to talk to him."

"But you convinced them."

Cat sighed. "Full disclosure. Fox Mulder was – and probably still is – a damn good-looking man. I have no doubt that they figured it would be easier for him to turn on the charm – and he had that, too - and I'd ignore his predilections and write a puff piece about him. And nine times out of ten, it might have worked. Not with me, of course, but probably with most of the would-be Murphy Browns who thought they were women journalists back then." She hesitated. "And to be fair, if I'd have thought that it would have gotten me a better story, I might've been willing to play along a little."

That was a hell of an admission for Cat to make. Her entire career had basically been based on the idea that she was the face of feminism.

"In any case, it was a moot point. Mulder was charming in our initial interview, but he was strictly professional. He was modest, self- effacing, and went into more detail then he should've when it came to about the process of profiling. And had this been all we talked about, our story would've ended right there."

"What did he say that made you think there was more?"

Cat thought for a long moment. "We were near the end of the interview, and almost out of the blue he just asked: 'Do you trust the government?'"

"Even back then, I was rarely at a loss for words. I went to my fall-back response. 'I'm a journalist. We're cynical by nature. And no one should trust a politician.'

'That's not what I meant. Do you trust the government?'

"My instincts weren't nearly as razor keen as they would become just a few years later. But somehow, I could tell that there was a lot riding on the question. I didn't owe the man anything. There was absolutely no reason I should've answered honestly. I did anyway."

"Not particularly. No.'

"He gave me one of those penetrating stares that probably could read right into the mind of John Lee Roche and God knew how many other human monsters. Then he gave me his card. 'In our business, we need to trust people. Can I trust you, Miss Grant?'

"Now when a government source offers you their phone number, you take it. Doesn't matter how high or low-ranking they are. I took it, and he told me he'd been in touch. At the time, I just added it to my File-O-Fax and went on with my beat. "

Cat paused again. "How much geometry do you know?"

Kara was now used to her boss' seeming non sequiteurs. "I was pretty good at it in high school."

"I never was, and it's one of those things I've never seen much point to instructing teenagers. I graduated magna cum laude and have been Time Magazine Person of the Year three times. I've never once had any use for the Pythagorean Theorem. But I do remember a couple of things that are pertinent. I know that on a geometric axis, you can sometimes have lines that are parallel, and sometimes you have lines that are intersecting. At the time, I thought that Mulder and I might be on parallel lines, and that we could use this arrangement to move upward and onward." She paused again. "In actuality, our first meeting was that of two intersecting lines. Mine was heading up and his was heading down. And my guess is, admittedly knowing what little I do about the man; he probably wouldn't have changed a thing."

"It didn't seem that way at the time, of course. He went back to his job, and I went back to mine. I stayed in D.C for the next year, and dealt with typical Washington business. I attended my share of briefings about the First Gulf War. I interviewed members of the Congressional Black Caucus, and I was first on the scene when Anita Hill showed up and put sexual harassment front and center in a way it never had been before. And every so often, Mulder would call and give me a heads up when something major Bureau investigation was about to unfold."

"No one ever made a link between you and him?" Kara asked.

"Most of them had nothing to do with him. It's possible the people at Quantico may have remembered the interview I did of Mulder, but if they did, there were no consequences. Certainly no one tried to shut me out, and even if they had, the Planet was right up there with the Times and the Post for papers you didn't want to get on the bad side of." Cat told her. "I'd like to think my burgeoning reputation was at least part of the reason, but the truth is, I still wasn't considered much more than a Beltway journalist back then, and they were a dime a dozen. The oddest thing about my relationship with Mulder was that for the first year he was my man on the inside, he never asked for a quid pro quo. Maybe he was saving up his favors until he really needed them. At the time, he certainly didn't."

"When did that change?"

"It was November of '91. The Cold War was on the verge of coming to an end. Democrats were going to the rare effort of declaring they wouldn't run for President against the seemingly invincible Bush 41. Nevertheless, the editor said that I should probably start making a trip down to Iowa anyway. He called me about three days before I was scheduled to fly to Ames, and asked if we could talk. This was odd in itself. He'd been calling me on and for the past year, but we'd never met face to face since then."

"By all rights, I should've told him I didn't have the time, because I didn't. This was going to be my first primary campaign, and there are a lot of things you have to do for those trips. But he'd been a good source for me, and I figured I at least owed him a coffee. I said I'd meet with him that afternoon, and he jumped at the chance." Cat shrugged. "In all candor, I kinda thought he was going to cash in his IOU. And he did, but it wasn't nearly what I expected him to ask for."

"I don't follow you," Cat was still trying to get a handle on what Mulder was asking for. "I'm just a reporter. You really think if I ask they'll just give me these files?"

"No, I don't, "Mulder admitted. "But being a member of the Fourth Estate, you can at least act upon the public's right to know. Believe me when I tell you, the public needs to have access to this information."

"You're going to have to give me more than that, Agent Mulder," Cat asked.

Mulder hesitated for so long that Cat genuinely thought he might just walk away from the whole thing. Finally, he looked at her dead in the face. "When you did the initial story on me, what did you learn about my family?"

This seemed like a very strange thing to ask. "It was a year ago, I'm not sure I remember," Cat tried to hedge.

"You're a journalist. They never forget anything they've researched."

Cat gave a small smile. "I know that your father, William Mulder, worked at the State Department until just a few years ago. I know he divorced your mother in 1976 for so-called irreconcilable differences. And I had to guess, it had something to do with the disappearance of your sister, Samantha in November of 1973."

Mulder took this in. "My sister didn't disappear. She was taken."

This wasn't in the file. "She was kidnapped."

"Abducted."

"That's semantics."

"Depends on who took her."

"And you have suspicions. That the government's involved somehow."

"They're involved, but I don't necessarily believe they have here."

This was becoming exasperating. "Agent Mulder, in forty-eight hours, I have to be on a flight to Des Moines. Now I agreed to meet you because you've been very reliable in the past, and I suspect you will be in the future. But I didn't come here to engage witty banter and worthless wordplay. Now, unless you're willing to tell me what the hell you want –"

"I think my sister was abducted by aliens when I was twelve years old."

For a moment, she didn't think she'd heard right. "Say that again."

"My parents were next door with the neighbors. The power went out. There was a bright light, and she started floating through the air." Mulder paused. "I know how it must sound."

"I don't think you do." Cat's power as a reporter – to take in even the most insane story and react reasonably – had momentarily failed her. "Even if I were to accept the premise that aliens exist – which I don't, by the way – I find it impossible to believe that would be as cruel and malicious as to abduct an eight-year old girl."

"That doesn't even begin to cover it". Mulder seemed willing to double down on his craziness. "A few months ago, I received access to a department in the Bureau that deals with cases involving just this kind of activity."

"Department?" Cat raised an eyebrow.

Mulder sighed. "All right, it's a file cabinet in a storage closet. A place where the Bureau dumps its refuse of cases they don't even want to try to explain. The supposed reason is that they are outside the Bureau mainstream. The real reason is that if anyone even bothered to read them, they'd look at them with the same scorn and disbelief that you are right now."

That remark managed to momentarily penetrate the barrier Cat had put up. She was supposed to be objective, and she was treated she'd considered, until five minutes ago, a reliable source like he'd opened his trench and shown that he was wearing a feather boa. "What kind of files?"

"I've spent the last few weeks going through them, and I have a feeling I've only scratched the surface." Mulder said with the first real excitement she'd heard in his tone from all the time she'd known him. "All of the supernatural creatures that we consider urban legends, all the stories that we dismiss as modern myth seem to be here. And permeating all of them is the possibility that extra-terrestrial life not only exists, but has been visiting this planet for a very long time."

This was madness. And yet insanity had never sounded more logical than in Mulder's tone. Cat Grant didn't believe the government was being truthful about a lot of things – she'd been honest when Mulder had asked her that question. But that was miles away from believing spaceships or little green men. She decided to play this out a little longer.

"Where are they from?"

"A galaxy far, far away."

"Agent Mulder, you're asking a hell of a lot from me. Now is hardly the time to be glib."

"I don't know where they're from. I couldn't even give you a reasonable description of any of them. What I have found in those files is case after case of men and women being abducted and put through tests and procedures so torturous it makes the Nazis look like pikers. And since you know my mother is Jewish, I don't use that term lightly."

That sounded a little more realistic. "What kind of procedures?"

"Drilling and surgery without anesthetic. Exposure to radiation levels not seen in nature. Extraction of women's ovaries. So many different cases, you would think it impossible for no two to be alike. And in the soft tissue, one finds microscopic implants with purposes that no one find a purpose for. Only that it involves technology that is years, if not decades ahead of what we are seeing in the most advanced supercomputers."

"And you think things like that happened to your sister." Cat was trying to find something to ground this in.

Mulder's exuberance faded. "The brother in me is holding to the idea that she is somewhere safe. The realist in me, late at night when I can't sleep, almost wishes that she'd been abducted by someone nearly as deviant as the men I spent years trying to catch at Quantico. Because at least then there might be an end to it."

It was this statement, more than anything else that Mulder had said about aliens that almost convinced Cat that there might be something to this. She had talked to some people whose children had disappearing and were still missing after years, and no matter how long they had been missing, some part of them was still holding out the faintest of hopes. Mulder had undergone this loss, understood it better than almost any profiler in Quantico, and if part of him really wanted to imagine his sister dead because that might be preferable to the alternative, that was a level of commitment that Cat didn't think she'd ever be capable of.

"If I were to do this," she said very slowly, "where would I even begin to look?"

"I've made requests using my clearance to try and get access to government files referring to Air Force bases around the country. All of these files have been marked classified."

"What does the government have to do with any of this?" Cat demanded.

"You already think I'm certifiable," Mulder told her. "If I tell you any more of what I believe without evidence, you're going to call for the men in white coats."

"Fair point," she conceded.

He took out a slip of paper. "I want you to see whatever information you can find involving these dates and locations. Just do me one favor. Don't send it in until you're in Iowa, and it'll be harder to pin down your exact location." The doubt on her face was palpable because he added. "You're a good reporter, Catherine. I don't want a bus that you're on to blow a tire and crash into a snow bank."

"You're not exactly convincing me about the level of your sanity here," Cat said, as she took the paper.

"You know my reputation. That ship sailed years ago."

"That was the last time I saw Mulder for more than a year." Cat told Kara.

"Did you follow through with his request?"

"As hard as it may be to fathom considering where I am now, I left that meeting convinced my source was experiencing some form of burnout from his time in Quantico," Cat told her. "It would be increasingly common for profilers over the decades. In fact, one of Mulder's bosses, Bill Patterson, about five years after I talked to him, he suffered a psychotic break, and killed three people. Given how tightly wound Mulder was, I really thought he was going through some kind of PTSD." Cat paused. "But that doesn't answer your question."

"Given the whole atmosphere of the time, it would've been understandable if you decided to just forget what had happened," Kara said gently.

"Aliens were considered the stuff of bad sci-fi movies at the time," Cat admitted. "And even given my relative inexperience as a reporter, I knew that to even hint about that in circles was likely to end with you being sent doing local news on dog pageants in Central City. It says something for how persuasive Mulder could be that I considered it plausible for a few seconds. I put the paper in my pocket, and then I buried myself on the trip to Iowa."

Cat sighed. "Presidential campaigns trips, particularly primary ones, are thuddingly dull. And the one leading up to '92 was even more so, because everybody knew that Harkin was going to win the caucus. I was assigned to following the Kerrey campaign – Bob, not John – and that was even duller. After two weeks following him, I was beginning to wish I'd stay in D.C. These campaigns were so long, you barely had time to pause and do laundry. On one of the rare off-days, I was going through my wardrobe, trying to see what needed to be washed." She paused. "And there it was. I was sure it had been lost, but it followed me all the way to Ames."

"So what did you do?"

"I put it in a file, wrote as bland a request as I could, and sent it in. Then I forgot about it until the caucus and we were about to leave for New Hampshire." Cat paused. "It's funny. I was as grounded and realistic as a person as you could think of back then. But the first time I really think I believed in the paranormal had nothing to do with what Mulder told me four months ago. It happened when I came to my motel, and there was this envelope waiting for me, from the DOD. I took the file, locked myself in the room I had been five minutes away from checking out of, and tore it open. "

"What was it?" Kara hated that she was asking the obvious question.

"Nothing," Grant told her. "Oh, there were thirty pages there, but they were almost all entirely redacted. I swear, on some of the pages they had blacked over everything but 'a', 'an' and, 'the'. It was like to trying to read a document from the Communist regime."

"Couldn't you have used some kind of technology to read it?"

"It was the '90s, Kara. The technology that's now all but available on every IPod was barely available in government offices. And to be perfectly honest, I thought that this was some second-level bureaucrat playing some kind of third-level joke. So I dumped the papers in a wastebasket." Cat heaved a sigh. "It was one of the biggest mistakes I ever made as a journalist, second to saying that America wasn't ready for a black president in 2007."

"You never got the papers to Mulder?" This didn't sound like the Cat Grant Kara had gotten to know over the past year.

"In retrospect, he probably not only could've found the tech to scan them, but would've had the patience to go through them line by line." Cat actually looked ashamed. "Now I don't remember many of the words that were on that document, but there were three that should've set off alarm bells if I'd had any idea what I was looking for."

Kara thought for a second. "Don't tell me."

"Roswell, New Mexico." Cat held her head in her hands. "In my defense, Roswell wasn't anywhere near the buzzword it was back then, but that alone would have told Mulder he was on the right track. God knows how many years I could've shaved off his quest if I'd just mailed him the damn file."

"So this is your mistake?" Kara could see why Cat was beating herself up over this.

"I'm afraid the story actually gets worse after this, Kara. Not only did I screw the pooch monumentally with this, I had multiple occasions in which to correct this wrong over the next decade and I continuous and stubbornly continued to drop the ball." Cat looked at her. "I prefer to look at this as one huge mistake as opposed to a series of small ones, but no matter how you look at it, I took a bad situation and made it worse."

"Not only did I not see Mulder for more than a year, I didn't even think about him for nearly as long. The campaign began to slowly but surely get more interesting as Bill Clinton managed to rise from the ashes. I followed him and the rest of the contenders for four months. After Michigan, when it was all but over, they were impressed enough by my work – though it was far from my best – to cover many of the larger senatorial and gubernatorial races. 1992 was called 'The Year of the Woman', so why not have a woman journalist covering it?" Cat looked pissed. "My god, my early editors were unimaginative. In any case, when the votes were all counted, this barely stable Neanderthal figured it would be adorable for me to go back to D.C. to see all these women being sworn in. By this time, I had become so ambitious that I had almost completely forgotten Mulder or his request. But he had not forgotten me."

"I arrived in D.C. on January 17, 1993. The day before Clinton was sworn in, I learned that I wasn't done with the X-Files. More intriguingly, I got the second half of the story."

Cat paused for a long moment. "Kara, do you believe in the idea of a soulmate?"

This was even more out of left field than the story of the X-Files. This time, however, Kara had a ready answer. "Not really. I think it's a Hollywood trick."

"I'm inclined to agree. I think it's something out of badly written 80s rom-coms, and even worse written 90s TV shows," Cat told her. "I do, however, believe that are meetings of people who, no matter how opposite their belief systems are, are in every possible way, perfect compliments. There aren't a lot of them. In my entire life, in fact, I've only met three. Clark Kent and Lois Lane, as much as pains me to admit it. James Carville and Mary Matalin, honestly I never saw that one coming. And as for the third set I saw, but as far as I know, the two of them never were willing to admit it to themselves. Maybe not until it was too late."

"Excuse me?"

"I'm getting ahead of myself. In January of 1993, I met Mulder's partner, Dana Scully. " Cat looked ahead. "She was a forensic pathologist, one of the few professions I absolutely know I could never handle."

"You've been to war zones," Kara reminded her.

"There's a huge difference from seeing death, and actually having to see what causes it. I've been to my share of autopsies; I don't think I could actually handle a career of performing them." Cat looked at her. "In appearance, she was even less imposing than I am. She was two inches shorter than me, and maybe even a little skinnier. Battling to get through the Bureau's physical requirements for field work must have been a battle in itself. But just as in my case, appearances were deceiving. I didn't find this out until after our first meeting, but in her senior thesis, not only did she try to debunk Einstein, she came damn close to actually doing it." She held up a hand. "Don't ask me to explain. Physics has never been my strong suit."

"How did you meet her? Did Mulder introduce you?"

"That would've been too easy. By this point, Mulder was now, more or less, in charge of The X-Files. In the time between by departure and return to DC, he'd gone from golden boy to gadfly. Scully was a rookie agent who'd been teaching at the Academy, and because she had a background in science, the powers-that-be thought that she could provide a counterbalance to Mulder's work. At least, that's the story they told her. She thought that she was there to debunk the X-Files. Mulder thought she was there to spy on him."

"Which was it?" Kara asked.

"If I had to guess, Scully was there to do both." Cat told her. "But just as they had seriously underestimated Mulder's persistence, they also misjudged Scully's integrity. I realized that the first time I met her."

January 19, 1993, Georgetown

"Catherine Grant?"

Cat turned to see a small, red-headed woman approach her table. She was a little surprised by the introduction – she'd stopped going by 'Catherine' during the debates. "I'm sorry, have we met?"

"No, but I know you by reputation. Your articles in the Planet on why journalists should not run for public office was superb." She offered Cat her had. "I'm Special Agent Dana Scully."

Ever since Cat had started as a reporter, she had always greeted everybody, male or female, with as strong a handshake as she could muster. She knew that most of the men she interviewed thought that women were weaker by nature, and that woman in positions of power were always afraid to show any sign of weakness. She greeted this stranger with the same firm grip, and was rather surprised to see this woman, who she could probably beat in a street fight, met her with an equal measure. No doubt Dana Scully probably faced an even higher class ceiling than she did.

"You have me at a rare disadvantage," she said. "I haven't had a contact in the FBI for nearly two years."

"That's what I wanted to talk to you about. We have a mutual colleague in common."

Finally, it clicked. "You're working with Fox Mulder?" she said, offering Agent Scully a seat.

"For the past couple of months, yes." Scully sat down. "I haven't known him for that long, but one thing I've quickly picked up on is that he doesn't trust a lot of people Not in the Bureau hierarchy, not in the corridors of power, and not in the press. In fact, the only reason I know that he trusts you was because he saw you at the first press conference after the election, and said that you were the only reporter there who had the balls to take on the establishment."

"His words or yours?" Cat asked.

"He used a less explicit term," Scully said with a smile. "He said he knew he could trust you because you never burned him as a source, and you did the absolutely right thing when he asked you for a favor."

For the first time in a long time, Cat felt something close to guilt. "What did he tell you I did?"

"You didn't laugh him out of the room. " Scully told her. "I don't know what he asked you for, but he told me that he never for a moment expected you to go through with it. You were one of the few people who he'd ever revealed his beliefs to who never judged him."

Cat wasn't sure how to take that, especially considering her mixed response to it. She decided not to reveal what she had found – a decision she would bitterly regret later on. "What do you think of what he's told you?"

"I haven't been working at the X-Files that long," Scully tried to wave off the question.

"You must have formed some kind of opinion."

Scully considered this for a moment. "Agent Mulder believes we are not alone," she said simply. "I told him early on that I thought that the belief of extraterrestrial life was illogical at best and unscientific at worst. But at this point, I am withholding my final decision."

Cat decided she liked this woman. Which was a shock, because Cat Grant didn't like a lot of women, even those who pursued a career. "Why did you come to see me? Don't tell me Mulder has you running his errands."

"He wouldn't dare," Scully gave a smile. "Actually, this was my idea. Mulder told me early in our partnership that the only reason he's been able to maintain his position in the Bureau is because he's managed to make well-placed allies in Congress. I pointed out to him how fickle the electorate could be, and that it might not hurt to make a friend or to in the press. He said that you were the only journalist that he trusted."

Cat almost found herself blushing at this, considering that she hadn't exactly been willing to go along with the one favor he'd asked of her. "I haven't exactly built up much of a reputation yet," she reminded her.

"He mentioned that might be an argument for your involvement," Scully shrugged. "You don't have much of a career to wreck on him."

"I'm not sure that's his strongest argument."

"He also said that you believed in the truth. And even though I haven't known him for that long, I know for damn sure that's one of the things he holds the most dear."

Both parts sounded like the Fox Mulder she had come to know over the year they had collaborated. And even though she was an ambitious woman and really didn't want to throw her career to the tabloids, she figured there was a good argument that she still owed him. "I'm only going to be in DC until the Inaugural Ball," she reminded Agent Scully. "And you know as well I do how difficult it can be to reach any reporter on assignment."

"We're both well aware of that," Scully pointed out. "Which is why Mulder wanted to know if you had heard of the Internet."

"If anything should date me, it's the fact that I barely even knew of the Internet's existence at the time," Cat told Kara. "In my defense, it was barely heard of outside of the DOD and some of the more obscure tech people back then. The Daily Planet wouldn't establish an email account until that fall."

It said a lot about Kara that it was even harder for her to imagine a time when the net was limited to a few thousand people discussing Star Wars. "And I assume the only reason Mulder and Scully knew about it was because they worked for the government."

"Bingo," Cat said. "And I think it was for just that reason that Mulder figured this would be the safest way for us to make contact. That, and he had something of a taste for the theatrical back then. Maybe he still does."

"So what happened next?"

"Scully gave me an email account, and told me that either she or Mulder would communicate with me through it periodically." Cat shook her head. "The only reason I still get communications from AOL is because of the original account I set up in February of 1993. I don't even know if spam existed back then."

"For the next year or so, every couple of weeks, I would receive an email from an account with the user name Reynard. Scully made it clear before I left that I was not to write any stories fro the Planet. I was merely to forward it to certain selected websites, and other users I never identified."

Now Kara felt a little insulted. "He was using you as a go-between."

Cat raised a hand. "Mulder was a gentleman above all else. The entire time I knew him, he never so much as threw a pass at me. And I imagine he was trying to protect me above all else. He had no problem torpedoing his career – I think he'd decided it was a lost cause long ago – but he didn't want mine to be collateral damage as well. And I'm pretty sure on more than one occasion he tried to keep Scully from torching her own. Not that it made much difference in the end."

"What kind of information did he ask you to disseminate?"

"The lion's share of it had to do with either alien abductions or government conspiracies, both of which I'm sure were mother's milk to him. The stories I remember would've kept Hollywood in business for decades. He told me about the crash of a UFO in Wisconsin that may have been responsible for the deaths of a dozen people, including a multiple abductee called Max Fenig. A eugenics project in the Cold War that eventually involved two young girls who murdered their parents. A mutant who had the ability to conceal himself inside any confined space, so that he could harvest and devour people livers every thirty years – and that the government, once they had him in custody, released him to an ordinary family. All of the stories he or Scully sent to had material that was decades ahead of its time, but to be perfectly honest, right then I thought he was just feeding an uninformed public fairy tales." Cat told her. "And considering some of the stuff you see on Facebook these days, there's a part of me even now that still shudders at what he might have let loose."

"When did it end?" Kara asked.

"That was one of the oddest parts of what is already a very strange story," Cat told her. "It was April of 1994. I can't remember the exact date, but I'll never forget the communication. I got an encrypted email, and unlike all of the ones I'd gotten before, Mulder personally addressed this one. I can remember it, word for word, even after twenty-two years."

"'Clear all available schedule with Daily Planet. Will have definitive proof of extra-terrestrial life confirmed within the next twenty-four hours. This will change the world.'"

"Now Mulder had always been circumspect in his communications with me, always keeping in vague terms, saying nothing was available for general audiences. I knew that for him to go this big was a huge deal, and that he had to be sure. But even then, I wasn't going to do anything until I saw this proof."

Even knowing that there was alien life, Kara had chills down her spine. "What went wrong?"

"I waited twenty-four hours. Nothing. Forty-eight hours. Still nothing. I was beginning to think that he shafted me, and despite my skepticism, I was a little pissed." Cat paused. "Two days after that, Mulder called me. Now even though we'd been in communication for the last year, he hadn't tried to talk to me since then, and I hadn't given either him or Scully my new number. I'm still not certain how he managed to find it. But that would become the least of my concerns."

"Mulder, what the hell happened?" Cat demanded, in the indignant tone was already coming to know. "You make it sound like you have the biggest story since the discovery of the A-bomb, and then radio silence. What the hell…"

"Do you still have records of all the stories I sent you?" Mulder sounded a lot different than the other times she talked to him.

"What does that have to do with anything?"

"Yes or no."

Cat considered this for a moment. "I still have them saved on my hard drive."

"Erase them. If you have to, destroy the hard drive."

Cat blinked at this. "What are you talking about that?"

"After that, I need you to delete the account you set up to disseminate the stories I sent you." Now Cat recognized what was different about Mulder's voice. He sounded hollowed out, defeated. "And after that, I want you to forget you ever heard if or met me or Agent Scully."

Cat stopped dead. "Mulder, I don't understand."

"Damn it, Catherine!" Now Cat was really alarmed. Not only had Mulder shouted at her, he had used her full name. Nobody did that any more. "I'm trying to protect you! Enough people have already lost their lives because of my pursuit of the truth. I don't want you to be another casualty."

Mulder sounded worried. Really worried. Whatever had happened in the last week had thrown the fear of God into him, and he had always been an agnostic. She didn't want to give up on a big story, but she knew something really terrible had happened if he was about to torch this relationship.

"All right, Mulder. If that's what you really want."

"I don't want to," Mulder actually sounded despairing now. "You may not realize it but you've done a great service to me, even if it didn't seem like it. But there are just some things I can't sacrifice. And you've got your whole future ahead of you."

"And you don't?"

There was silence on the other end for so long, Cat thought he might already have hung up. "My life is my own. I have to take other people into consideration. Otherwise, I'm no better than them."

There were so many questions in that statement to unfold. But she knew Mulder had told her everything he was going to. "Promise me something," she said instead.

"If I can."

"That you won't give up. The world needs more people like you."

"Basement dwellers?"

"Truth-seekers."

Another long pause. "I won't give up. Not as long as the truth is still out there." He paused. "Don't you give up, either. The world needs more people like you, too."

"Never." Cat swore. And she meant it.