Title: This Is How The World Ends
Fandom: X-Files
Rating: M
Disclaimer: I do not own The X-Files or any of its characters but I have asked Santa so that might change in the next few hours.
Author's Notes: MERRY CHRISTMAS SHIPPERS! I hope you're all enjoying the fic as it develops. I don't have much experience writing these characters or this universe so I would love to hear what you think, once the busy season blows over and you go back to reviewing fanfiction. Thanks soodohnimh for feeding my appetite for feedback :)
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The call could not have been less welcome.
"Tell him I'm busy," Scully said to the operator, but then quickly corrected herself. "No, wait. Tell him it's one-thirty in the morning." And I'm not taking wild goose chases from anyone, let alone you, at one-thirty in the morning.
She left that last part unsaid. She knew it would be inherent anyway.
"He sounds American… I think it's a national call," the operator said slowly, confused. She thought Scully believed the caller was in another time zone, ignorant of the inappropriate hour. Scully twisted the pen she held between her fingers as she tried to hold onto her patience.
"I don't care where he is," she said crisply. "Just tell him."
"Alright…" and the operator was gone, back to her other external line. Scully hung up.
Goddamn Mulder. She knew it was him, even if the new operator said the caller was "Braidwood; he said he's a contact of yours?" It wasn't a good cover. It wasn't meant to be. It was just meant to entice her to answer the call and go running off into the dark after some phantom Mulder had decided to chase. Sometimes, for reasons she couldn't always explain to herself, he preferred to have her running beside him. Destination, oblivion.
Not tonight.
She turned her attention forcibly back to the surveillance screen behind her.
"What did I miss?" she asked briskly. Warren Colt, her youngest agent, looked back at her from his seat as she crossed the office floor to stand behind him.
"Nothing much, ma'am," he said, ever polite. He pointed at one of the views on the split screen. "He got to the door and stopped outside. Hasn't moved from there."
"Waiting for someone?" she asked. She leaned over his shoulder for the other set of headphones and fitted them over her ears. The soft voices of the agents sitting in the back of the surveillance van filled her ears, talking amongst themselves while they waited for their wired colleague to reach the target. Four strategic cameras had been placed in secret in the hallways of the apartment block over the past few days, lying in wait for this opportunity to catch the suspected bomb-builder and arms dealer in the act of selling his services to a known anti-government radical.
"It looks like it," Colt agreed. He sat back in his chair slightly, pushing his thick hair back off his face. "Just standing around…"
"Did he knock? Make any sort of signal to the person inside?"
"Nothing. Just walked straight over and leaned on the wall." The young agent suddenly squinted and leaned closer to the screen again. "What's that he's doing with his hand?"
Scully leaned in, too. The man they'd targeted, Alistair Craig, was relaxing against the wall beside the suspect's door, one arm tucked between his back and the plasterboard. The resolution of the feed wasn't perfect but it appeared that there was some movement of his hand or fingers behind his back. Tapping? Clicking? The rest of his body was still, head hanging loosely, casually, looking idly at the hallway floor.
"Can we enhance this image?" Scully asked, but Colt was already shaking his head. Instead she scanned the other camera views available to her for the position of their wired agent. Only two floors away, still in the stairwell, carrying a paper bag of groceries. Scully tapped her pen tip to the screen. "Then can we slow him down? I want to see what the tapping is about."
Colt obediently opened the channel from his mike to the agents in the van. Scully listened to the message as it was transferred across the bridge of the internet. That this could be going down on the other side of the city and she could be here, watching and leading in real time from her office in the FBI's headquarters, was quite the feat of technology. It wasn't available to her in the nineties during her first decade with the Bureau, and it certainly made things more comfortable and flexible. The back of a surveillance van with a gaggle of super-serious counter-terror agents at one-thirty in the morning was not her first pick of places to be, and considering this was not even her case – the boys had come to her because she was more senior and more popular with their Assistant Director, and more likely to get the go-ahead if she proposed the sting instead of one of them – she felt she more than deserved to be in the comfort of the office while the younger agents ran their own operation.
Technology had not yet, however, overcome the barrier to radio waves that was a concrete stairwell, and though she heard the message relayed to the wired agent she saw no change in his pace and heard no response from him. She frowned, and Colt glanced up at her anxiously. He tapped his microphone.
"Boys?" he checked. "What's the story?"
"Desmond isn't responding," a surveillance agent reported unnecessarily. "Must be interference from the stairwell."
Scully narrowed her eyes further, wishing she'd grabbed her glasses, and tried to make out what Craig's hand was doing. There was definitely movement. Repetitive movement. Patterned movement…
"Morse code," she realised, just as she heard the phone ringing again behind her. She reached for the microphone and Colt automatically opened the channel for her. "Stop Desmond. Craig's communicating with our suspect."
"Placing his order?" Colt wondered. Someone else had answered the phone. Scully shrugged uncomfortably.
"Maybe. More likely he's made us."
Colt blinked. "How? We haven't even made contact yet."
"Alistair Craig has made a life of hating the United States government and anything connected to it," Scully said, twirling her pen agitatedly as she tried to come up with an answer. Her mind flew through the profile she'd read, developed by one of the agents in the van. "He's hyper-paranoid, observant…"
Sounds familiar.
"You think he spotted one of the cameras?" Colt asked incredulously.
"Or he recognised Desmond in the entryway." An idea struck her and she directed her next question into the microphone. "Was Desmond part of the surveillance team watching Craig these last few weeks?"
Pause.
"We all worked on this case equally," the agent she would have said was in charge answered evasively. Now she was exasperatedly glad to say she was in charge instead. These agents, despite being highly intelligent and well-trained, lacked the sideways thinking she'd developed in her years investigating the unexplained. They couldn't think for themselves.
"Isn't it feasible," she asked irritably, "that a paranoid radical would develop a good memory for faces?"
The lead agent in the van was silent for another moment. "What should we do, Agent Scully?"
"Agent Scully." The agent behind her held out the phone receiver. "Call for you."
Irritated with the timing, Scully dropped the headphones, microphone and the pen she'd been carrying around onto the desk. She pointed at the view of Alistair Craig as she backed away.
"Get that message down," she ordered Colt, who snatched up her pen immediately. She strode over to the phone. "Scully."
"Agent Scully, I'm sorry to bother you again-"
"You told him, didn't you?" You got rid of him, didn't you? But the little red light was glowing beside the number 2, and she knew all too well the voice she would hear if only she pressed that button. So close…
"The time? Yes. But he's quite… insistent," the operator explained, sounding embarrassed.
"Well, so am I," Scully said firmly. "It's still one-thirty in the morning and I'm still not taking his call."
"He said-" The operator caught herself, and Scully frowned.
"He said what?" she couldn't help asking suspiciously. The red light was so bright. She could change lines easily, with one button. A weak part of her wanted so badly to do it, to hear his voice and go running back to him and to collapse into arms she knew would be open for her and only her. But she'd been strong this long. Mostly. She reminded herself of what had gotten her through all the other times: Mulder was unreliable, Mulder was obsessed, Mulder was reckless. Mulder couldn't answer the phone when she needed him, yet he expected her to jump to attention for him when he cared to drop her a line every now and then.
Not happening.
Scully glanced back at Colt and the screen, where now another two agents were watching on, cringing with nervous anticipation. No change, then. Desmond was still marching into an uncertain situation and from what she could see, Craig was still at the door. On the phone, the operator was quiet, and her quiet sounded awkward. She didn't want to pass on Mulder's message, which only made Scully more determined to hear whatever inappropriate thing he'd said.
"What did he say?"
The answer was timid. "He said it's one-twenty-four, and he'll buy you a new watch if you fly to Boston."
Ugh. As if Scully needed another reason to roll her eyes at her former partner.
"Please tell Mr Braidwood that if he wants to call me directly, he's welcome to get over himself and press 'call'," Scully said coolly, though she knew he wouldn't. Mulder knew her number by heart but he never called it. She never bothered learning his anymore. He burned through cell phones like no one's business, switching them off after a week or two and cycling to another one in his collection or a new one altogether, convinced that smartphones were being bugged to track users and their calls. He was also suspicious of Scully's work colleagues and was certain that others in her office had access to her phone and would scour through the call log and messages for information about him. Eye roll, Mulder – like she just left it lying around. So he called only the office, under different names, and left himself wide open for rejection. Which she didn't always do, but tonight was really not the night for him to test her patience with his baiting bullshit. "Otherwise he can call back at eight a.m. tomorrow and I'll take his call then, during business hours. Until then I don't care what you have to tell him. I'm busy. Good night."
She hung up slightly harder than was strictly necessary, though still not hard enough to totally banish Mulder from her thoughts. Even thinking about him was a distraction, one she really didn't need. In honesty, she would like to see him. She would like to hear his voice. But she had a job to do, with deadlines and lives on the line, and he would inevitably distract her from it. He had a case for her – that was the only thing he would be calling her for, since personal calls had proven too difficult for them both – and, simply put, she didn't want to know about it. Cases from Mulder were invariably hard work with little pay-off, highly reminiscent of their X-Files work. She made herself look all around the room as she came back to Colt. Agents. Surveillance. Files open on desks, full of facts, dates, scientific findings, evidence, statements made to police or law enforcement. Straightforward, solid, tangible things – the things she dealt in before she met Mulder. Thoughts of Mulder were in direct opposition to the state of mind she was determined to maintain. Mulder was chaos. A natural disaster. He was the wind, immaterial, unreliable, here one day and evaporated the next; he was the tornado with its one straight, relentless path of focus while all else was left untouched, unnoticed. Or maybe he was the comet, the outsider, alien and ambiguous, brilliant and admired but trapped on a predictable gravitational path he couldn't control, elliptical in the way it crossed Scully's own orbit every so often before flinging him back out into the far reaches of space, dragging her slightly off-course each time he did.
She didn't have time for off-course. She didn't have the energy for it. She spent too much time and energy telling herself so.
"Sounded pleasant," Colt commented innocently when she jammed the headphones back on. She shot a glance at her probationary agent. He was extremely professional, quick-thinking, possibly brilliant – she liked him, despite herself, probably better than a lot of the other fully qualified agents in her department. She'd resented him before she met him, much as Mulder had likely resented her on paper before she arrived in his basement, this accelerated-through-the-academy, hand-picked-from-the-army boy with no field experience. And when he'd come in for his first day, he'd been given the desk next to hers – a big hint, she supposed, that she was meant to take responsibility for him, though no one had officially asked her. She didn't need a responsibility. Hadn't asked for one. Had even told AD Tan that she didn't want one. But then he started work, and now, almost three months into his probationary period, she couldn't imagine the office without him. He was young and eager to prove himself, driven, determined, the way she remembered herself being; the manners hammered into him by the grandmother who raised him and his two years in the army prevented him from protesting the injustice of being withheld from sting after sting, of being made to stay back here in the office with the boss watching screens while others got to throw their lives on the line and get into the thick of the action. He was just itching to get a turn at playing the hero, but Scully couldn't bring herself to let him. Not yet. He was so green, so idealistic and optimistic and so black-and-white, like she was once, and she knew that once she sent him out into the field the lines between good guys and bad guys, right and righteous, truth and fact, would start to blur.
Sometimes, if she could take a trip back in time and cover her own younger eyes, she would.
"New operator," Scully answered begrudgingly as she quickly assessed the situation on the screen. Alistair Craig was still tapping, looking up and down the hall now. Agent Desmond was one short flight away from the stairwell door. The voices in her ear told her the rest of the team was still trying to get in touch with him. "Anything?"
Colt shook his head apologetically. "Sorry, ma'am." He was watching the tapping closely and trying to record what little he saw on the corner of the pad in front of him. "It's too blurry. I can't decipher it." He tapped the screen thoughtfully with the end of the pen. "He stopped. Is he… listening?"
Indeed, the suspect had stilled his hand and seemed to have angled his head down, ear directed towards the door.
"They're communicating," Scully stated. "Room 623 taps back. Get on the mike," she urged Colt, "and get him out of there."
It was one thing to send an agent waltzing past a suspect's door with a stage show of fallen groceries, as Desmond was supposed to have up his sleeve, designed to open a brief dialogue with the suspect and to get a miniscule sound recorder underneath or at least beside the door. It was quite another to send that same government agent into an enclosed hallway where an anti-government radical and a bomb-builder were in secret communications with each other about said agent, possibly planning an assault in response to Desmond's unwanted presence. This was not meant to be a confrontation; Scully had not accepted this proposition from her team and taken it for approval to her superiors with the intention of making an arrest tonight. The risk assessment had come up 'low' because she'd believed that the suspects would be unaware of the FBI presence.
That did not seem to be the case.
Colt repeated her message. The agents in the van reported again that they couldn't get through to their agent on the ground, and Scully had them patch her through directly. She knew there would be a lag, which was why she'd opted to communicate just with the surveillance team and let them relay her orders through to their agent as necessary, but this snag was frustrating and her many years of active, high-stakes work on the X-Files had left her almost incapable of standing by while things started to going wrong if there was any chance that by jumping in herself she might be able to resolve it.
"Agent Desmond, this is Agent Scully," she said clearly into the microphone, hoping. "Stand down. I repeat, stand down. The mission is compromised. Return to your team."
Desmond on the screen made no indication that he'd heard her. Craig went back to tapping. The agents in the van kept fretting and Colt pretended not to. She appreciated that.
"Desmond," she heard the agent in the van stress as the wired agent reached the door, "do not exit the stairwell. I repeat, do not exit the stairwell."
Agent Desmond did not hear the instruction and opened the door. One step into the top floor hallway and the voice of his colleague finally reached him. The agents watching from afar all held their breaths. Alistair Craig looked toward the door, Morse code message paused, fingers still. Desmond hesitated; Scully snatched at the microphone again.
"Agent Desmond, do not react," she ordered in a low voice, seeing the unnatural way he faltered in response to the unexpected voice in his earpiece. Amateur. How was he selected for this task, exactly? And why had she agreed to be named as the mission's supervising agent? "Just keep going. Walk." Like you're meant to be there. He swayed on his feet, eyes locking with those of the likewise frozen Craig. Scully looked to Colt and demanded, "Can he hear me? I thought you said this was a live connection?"
She hadn't even finished asking when the screen showed Desmond recover and continue down the hall, but Craig was not taking any chances. He pushed off the wall and turned on his heel, smacking his hand twice on the door of room 623 as he quickly departed. A warning signal. Made.
"Goddamn it!" Scully ripped the headphones off and tossed them down on the desktop again. It wasn't even her case but she still felt the frustration sharply. The two agents watching on groaned as well. So close! Onscreen, Craig strode out of the camera's line of sight and failed to reappear in any of the other frames. Desmond carried his groceries straight past 623 and further along the hall, following after the target at a pace that could be argued was more casual, but Scully was willing to guess that once Craig was in the stairwell at the other end, he would be running.
Craig knew they were onto him and his bomb-builder. Their whole case might have just gone up in smoke. They'd just lost their chance at getting something concrete they could actually use. They still had no name, no face, nothing to match with the occupant of room 623, and now Craig was going to be twice as difficult to tail as before.
But at least Desmond was safe. Craig hadn't had any plan for deterring the FBI more sinister than simply walking away, which was a relief.
Colt offered a sympathetic smile and gestured at his own headphones, which he was still listening to. "The boys are asking for instructions, ma'am."
Instructions? This was their sting, not hers. She was just a name on the file to make it more appealing to the men upstairs. Her return to the Bureau, proven ingenuity and discontinued relationship to Mulder had ensured her a gleaming reputation. But the agents in the van were not like her. Boy scouts, they functioned better under orders than by their own impetus. She made a mental note – if they wanted her as a supervisor again in future, she'd need to interpret that as 'lead the mission, please'.
"Fall back," she said reluctantly. Colt passed it on. "Make no attempt to apprehend Craig if you see him exiting the building. He's more useful to us on the streets than in a cell, and we've got nothing new on him that'll hold before a judge."
New anti-terror legislation made it legal for Scully to make arrests for much less, to search that apartment on a whim if she so pleased, but she was reluctant to sink to that level. Her exceptional solve rate was hard-earnt; cases thoroughly investigated using ethical procedures and good old-fashioned police work, not slippery laws and convenient loopholes. It had been years now but the memory of hiding Mulder from their own government, who would use the law as a disguise for lies designed to silence his loud and unwanted truth, was forever burnt into Scully's subconscious. She wasn't likely to forget, not even now that she worked for them once again, and that helped her to keep perspective. No government should ever be given that much power, and never in exchange for individual rights. Sometimes the lines blurred – ten years ago she wouldn't have imagined a version of herself that valued any illusion of security over the public's right to truth or personal freedoms, yet here she was, with a whole new interpretation of what it meant to be free and secure, working in Counterterrorism. But there was a truth she was never going to unlearn, no matter who she worked for, no matter whose rules she appeared to obey.
Trust no one.
Colt relayed her directions and Scully rubbed her eyes, tired after a long day, trying to ignore the sound of the fax machine in the corner sparking to life. She had a good idea what that was about, since nobody faxed anymore.
The X-Files were long shut down, one of those hastily torn-out pages several chapters back in the FBI's past, the back cover slammed shut and a brand new blank ledger flicked open in its place. Counterterrorism was Scully's domain once again. Her medical background, her exceptional service record and the impressive increased solve rate her previous (mostly unacknowledged) department had seen when she briefly led it in Mulder's absence, not to mention the decade of meticulous investigative experience in chasing the elusive and the instinct for the detail out of place she'd developed in working so closely with Mulder, which Skinner had forced the interview panel to recognise, had driven the Bureau out to re-recruit her when news filtered back that she'd quit her position at the hospital. In a post-9/11 world, Counterterrorism was a bigger department than when Scully had worked it in the late nineties, staffed to the hilt with people both as paranoid as Mulder and as methodical as Scully. It was serious business, and memories of chasing up the fertiliser purchases of rednecks seemed silly now. Maybe someone still had the job of making those calls – someone being punished, no doubt, as was her burden at the time – but Scully was kept much too busy with managing genuine internal threats to the American public. If it wasn't a bomb scare it was a hijacking, a planned public execution, a hold-up… There were no monsters. Just people in files, on screens, and their extreme beliefs and actions and the consequences. No ghosts, no mutants, no flying fucking saucers and no missing months of memory. It was challenging but straightforward. There was a near-constant stream of misinformation to sort through, a stark contrast to her later years working with Mulder with absolutely nothing to go off, not even lies, and the goal was always clear. Protect the people. Find the culprit before anything happens. Contain the fear.
Cover it all up and pretend like nothing happened.
Make the decision everyday whether the weight of being party to these secrets was worth the cost to the conscience.
Mulder was disappointed in her, she knew. He wouldn't say it but she knew, and that hurt. Part of the policy of misinformation now. A sell-out. One of Them. Fuck him. She'd tried the other road. She'd spent twenty years chasing the truth with him, and she'd seen where it went. Sometimes ignorance is bliss.
Colt pushed his headphones back and let them hang around his neck with a sigh.
"He knew we were onto him," he commented. "Do you think he recognised Desmond? Maybe next time it should be someone else."
Nice try. "There won't be a next time, at least for a while," Scully said, trying not to get dejected as she crossed the room to the fax machine. The inevitable fax. It was as though Mulder had known that ultimately her very important business here at the office would blow up in her face and she'd suddenly find an opening in her schedule. Checking the fax seemed like admitting to it, which she didn't want to do. She'd told him she was too busy. She didn't want it to be a lie; didn't want him to get thinking he could hook her whenever he wanted. "Craig alerted our guy to our presence. We have to assume now that he's going to be on the lookout for any suspicious activity."
"At least we know now not to knock," Colt said cheerfully. He turned back to his screen and put his headphones back so he could engage with the other agents as they wrapped up their surveillance. Scully nodded reluctantly. He was right. It wasn't a total bust. They'd learnt how to communicate with the bomb-builder, and learnt that knocking was as good as admitting they were cops. But there was nothing they could do with any of that information tonight.
Scully reached the fax machine and collected the single sheet of paper that had printed out. A page of a medical file, she recognised from the layout even before she turned it the right way or started reading. More precisely, a transfer order of a body from the HealthAlliance Hospital to Boston's morgue on Albany Street, which had then been amended in pen to the Berkshire County Morgue. The double underline for emphasis below the time printed at the top (1:28am) made her want to rip the document up but the familiar handwriting scrawled hurriedly across the page, ignorant of the text it was cutting through, made her stomach flutter a little with anticipation.
Three's a crowd, he'd written, along with two case numbers. Cryptic fucking Mulder, unable to resist toying with her. Couldn't just write 'I found a case that matches some others in regards to point X, Y and Z'. No. A riddle, a bit of work required before he would issue any reward. As it had been for always.
She stood and read the file carefully, looking for the clue that had caught Mulder's attention. Thirty-eight-year-old female victim. Johannsson, Rebecca Rose. Married. Mother of three. Died in hospital two and half hours ago, where she'd been under treatment for Diffuse Alveolar Haemorrhaging Syndrome – bleeding of the small blood vessels of the lungs.
No alarm bells were ringing in Scully's mind.
As with back in their days of working together, Mulder seemed to delight in the game of hooking Scully, baiting her into certainty that their case was a hoax, a false alarm or some other perfectly explainable phenomena, so that he could quickly turn the tides on her with the detail-out-of-place that made it an X-file and then go racing off through the rough surf with her clinging to the fishing line with the strength of her curiosity. Generally he liked to lead her to that detail so that she would discover it for herself, but nothing stood out here.
Maybe she was losing her touch with this sort of thing, or maybe Mulder was wrong. It wouldn't be the first time.
But it would be uncharacteristic.
She knew she should bin the document. It was only going to cost her time, effort and sanity. Mulder would be waiting for her at the other end and he would want to play the usual game, pretend they were still friends and string her along like old times. She had things to do here, a report to file about this failed mission and agents to debrief and send home. She did not need to get herself wrapped up in more of Mulder's rubbish.
He was bad for her. He'd screwed everything up. She was better off here, far away, and this case would only drop her straight back into his destructive path.
"Colt," she said, returning to her young agent's side, "are you still logged in? Can you run these case numbers for me?"
She sometimes wondered whether it ever even crossed his mind to refuse, so quickly did he always fulfil her commands. She sometimes wondered whether Mulder had ever noticed how much he bossed and directed her, the way she was aware of her reliance on Colt's obedience.
"What are they?" he asked, curiously, as he glanced at the string of numbers and letters and typed them into the search. Behind them, the other two agents were packing the files away, neatening the office, preparing to go home for the night.
"I have no idea," Scully admitted. "Some dots somebody wants me to connect."
The first case file came up onscreen. Recent. 2014. Scully made no attempt to deter Colt from reading along with her.
"What's this got to do with Craig?" he asked after a moment of reading.
"Nothing at all."
"This came as a fax. Who sent it to you?"
"A jerk I used to work with," Scully said mildly, still scanning. An agent called Harlow had opened this file. A whole family was found dead in their home. Father, mother, teen daughter, preteen son. The police report of the scene was quite specific of the reasons for passing it on to the FBI – the house was tightly locked and no keys were found inside, the family members were found huddled in corners of the locked basement in frightened, cowering positions, and the father had made a petrified call to the police nine days earlier, convinced that someone was going to try to kill him and his family. The report indicated this had been investigated but any documentation was absent from the file. The word 'unsubstantiated' had been added later, in different pen ink.
The case had been closed by one Agent Pierce when the coroner's report showed that the family had died of Diffuse Alveolar Haemorrhaging Syndrome.
Which was not genetic.
Which was not transferred from person to person.
Which was not even a disease, but a symptom of a number of actual conditions, from autoimmune disease to lung infection to drug abuse. The chance of it occurring in four healthy young people at the same time and striking them all suddenly dead was… well, it was at the extreme edge of possibility. Not fucking likely.
"And the other one?" Scully prompted, and Colt had the second file ready in seconds. The Bureau had spent years digitising all of their files, but Scully was still surprised every time one of these came up on a screen. She really thought they would have burnt them all rather than immortalise them in databases.
"An X-file?" Colt questioned, noticing the tag. "What does that mean?"
Oh, to be young and ignorant. "A case we couldn't classify, categorise or easily reference. Something," Scully said, reaching over him to take the mouse so she could scroll down, "no one else wanted to touch. 1981? Really?"
It was a disappointed really, because cases that old invariably had little-to-none to work with, but as she read the disappointment wore through. A college Biology professor and his elderly mother found dead in their apartment. Doors locked, keys taken. Phone disconnected and power disrupted by circuits broken at the switchboard. The scene read like a murder, but the bodies read like a medical tragedy. Blood on their faces was found to have come from the lungs, which had been haemorrhaging. They'd coughed up blood until they died.
No diagnosis had been made for this case, though the symptoms did match the other. The 2014 case looked to have been buried; this one seemed just forgotten.
But Fox Mulder hadn't forgotten a single one of them, Scully was sure.
Different cities, different people, same poorly explained cause of death. Scully gathered that Mulder thought there was something else here, something that was worth crawling out of his self-imposed exile to badger her at one-twenty-four in the morning. She kept scanning, looking for it. Police report… Unhelpful medical examination… Obituary…
She and Colt spotted it at once. Simultaneously they pointed at the single detail that made it all make sense, this whole stupid game of Mulder's.
…survived by his daughter, Rebecca Rose, 4…
Scully pushed away from the desk and went back to the phone. She dialled the operator.
"This is Agent Scully," she said. "I assume Mr Braidwood left a number?"
