Investigation
A/N: Ty to hobbit_hedgehog on Ao3 for the beta!
Fox Mulder: I've seen too many things not to believe.
Scully: I've seen things, too. But there are answers to be found now. We have hope that there's a place to start. That's what I believe.
Fox Mulder: [sighing] You put such faith in your science, Scully, but... from the things I've seen, science provides no place to start.
Scully: Nothing happens in contradiction to nature, only in contradiction to what we know of it. And that's a place to start. That's where the hope is.
25
They were trundling down a dirt road not unlike the one they had gone down on the night of the meteor impacts. Keith sat in the passenger seat, a topographical map open on his lap and a GPS open on his phone, trying to cross-check locations on both. Lance had a small smile on his face and his grip tight on the wheel as they moved forward, dust kicking up behind the car in the waning light of the evening.
"I think I've got the locations," said Keith, using a pencil he'd tucked behind his ear to mark an X on the topographical map. "There are actually a few around here, and it'll just be a matter of—"
He was cut off as Lance hit a bump in the road and he was shot off of his seat a few inches, dropping both the pencil and his phone as he did. He grumbled as he picked them back up. Lance muttered only a half-hearted apology.
"There are three locations," said Keith, pushing his hair back from his face once he'd retrieved his fallen tools. "One is just a standard Department of Transportation building—I'm not expecting much there. Another is an old weather station that was built back in the 60s."
"What's the third one?" asked Lance.
"That's where it gets interesting," said Keith. "There's a third building listed here, but I had to search for it. I mean, whoever put this in the database really just wanted people to look right past it."
"They didn't count on someone as obsessive as you, did they?"
"No. Shut up. Anyway, it's just listed as 'Military Test Site.'"
"Nuclear?"
"I'm assuming." Keith looked from the map to the road and back again. "There were a bunch of places like it back in the 50s and 60s. Only a couple dozen, officially, but…"
"You think there were more?" Lance asked the question, but he knew the answer.
"Let's just say the site we're visiting isn't listed on Wikipedia."
"I guess I could've guessed that." He pointed up ahead, at the small shack off in the distance. "Is this one the weather station?"
"That should be it," said Keith, double-checking against his map. "Yeah, that's it."
In another minute or two, they were pulling into the small driveway to the building. The driveway wasn't much of anything, and was less discernible from the rest of the desert than the bumpy road they'd travelled out on was. The building itself looked like it was barely held together at all—the desert wind and dry dust had done their duty on the building, and it seemed like a stiff breeze would be all it would take to knock the whole structure over. The one thing that didn't seem like it was falling apart was the array of antennae on the roof of the building. There were a few that extended straight up, and a few that branched out like old TV receivers. There were also a couple of satellites positioned near the back of the building. Though they still had the same thin film of dust that the rest of the building shared, they didn't seem to be as in danger of falling apart.
Keith barely waited for Lance to get out of the car before he began to power-walk toward the door, his hand hovering over where his gun was concealed. Lance closed his door behind him with a little more force than he needed to in his haste and jogged to catch up with Keith.
"What're you doing?" he asked, placing his hand on Keith's arm.
Keith jerked his arm away from Lance. "I'm going in. They could be holding sensitive information here."
"Yes," said Lance, keeping his voice even, "or there is a weather lab in here. Let's start by asking questions rather than going in all hostile."
Keith scowled but pulled his hand away from his firearm. "Fine," he said, looking away from Lance to the side of the building. "You're probably right." He paused, and then: "And I don't see any other cars. I don't think anyone's here, anyway."
Lance nodded and let Keith take the lead again. Keith knocked on the door and, when no response came, tried the doorknob. The door opened easily, and Keith stepped inside, Lance following close behind.
The inside of the building looked about as what could be expected from a weather monitoring station. A few CRT monitors stood on the far side of the room, and there were a couple of smaller monitors against the left wall. A few desks stood, most of them clear but a few with some files left on them. A clock hung on the right wall over a door, the hands stopped at seven and nine.
The air in the room was stale, and both Keith and Lance found themselves walking a bit more carefully than they really needed to, being the only two there.
"Hello?" asked Lance, moving around the left side of the room as Keith went around the desks in the center to the right.
No one responded. Keith looked at a file left on one of the desks. It had a weather report on top, a slightly faded document detailing barometric pressure, humidity, and wind speed, among other things. "This is dated for 2005," said Keith.
Lance poked at one of the small monitors before turning to the desk closest to him. It was clean, but there was a day-by-day calendar propped up in the corner that was last pulled on September twenty-third, 2005. "Yeah, so's this calendar."
"There's enough dust in here…" said Keith, pulling his finger across the surface of the next desk over.
Lance pressed the power button on one of the CRT monitors, following up by pressing a few random keys on the keyboard propped in front of it. "I'm not sure this place even has any power anymore."
"Well," said Keith, turning around the room. Lance followed his gaze, and saw the specks of dust floating in the beams of light shining through small holes in between slats in the walls or through less-dusty areas of the windows.
Keith turned and tried pulling on the door under the clock, and after peeking inside, closed it again. "Bathroom," he said by way of explanation, and shrugged. "There are three other spots we still have to check," he said, "so I'm not too concerned that there's nothing here."
"I guess a few weather balloons actually are that," said Lance, grinning. Keith didn't find it as funny as Lance did, and Lance found himself frowning once Keith had turned back to the door to head back to the car.
Lance followed more slowly. He knew that it wasn't going to be immediate, Keith's forgiveness, especially after what he'd said to Shiro, but they were working together, finding real leads, and Lance was trying to find some levity in that. He wouldn't admit it aloud, but it hurt a little that Keith wouldn't work with him at least in lightening up the mood a bit.
He jogged a bit to follow Keith, closing the door to the weather station behind him and casting one last glance at the decrepit building before getting back in the car.
26
The Department of Transportation building was still occupied when they pulled up. A few pickup trucks were parked in the lot, some with the Department of Transportation logo on them, some without. There was a thin haze of orange dust all around them, kicked up by the trucks as they pulled in and out of the lot, presumably. As Lance and Keith stepped out of their car, however, the parking lot was still and quiet.
Keith led the way to the door. He looked like he was about to knock, but then he just went ahead and opened it.
They walked into a poorly air conditioned road that was lit by a row of fluorescents that ran down the center. They probably didn't need to be on at all, thanks to the large windows along one wall, but they gave off a soft, warm glow over the disorganized room. It was clear that this room wasn't really used for any actual work, but for the workers that drove out on the roads to congregate. There were a few guys in tee shirts in the back of the room, one of whom had his boots propped up on the break room table. Off to the left, near an old-looking coffee machine and minifridge, stood a few more drivers, one of whom seemed to be telling the rest about her recent vacation to Corpus Christi. Everyone in the room looked to Keith and Lance as they stepped inside.
"Good afternoon," said Keith, handing up one hand in greeting. Lance pulled out his badge and flashed it to everyone in the room.
"We're with the FBI," said Lance, "and we just wanted to ask a few questions, if that's okay."
The employees grunted a few affirmative reactions, those around the coffee put turning back to each other so that the one talking about her vacation could continue with her story, which involved Bud Light Lime and a few Frisbees. Keith looked to Lance, then nodded toward the few men at the table near the back of the room. They headed over together.
"Hello," said Keith on approach. "I'm Agent Kogane, and this is Agent McClain. We'd just like to know a bit about any discrepancies in the roadways around here, any unusual traffic, or any disruptions—specifically at night."
The guys looked to each other before one in an old Van Halen tee shirt kicked his boots off of the table and leaned forward. "I know you two are sort of fresh around here, and I get it," he began, "but I don't think you'll find we have much traffic around here at all."
"Nothing unusual recently?"
"Nope." He leaned back in his chair and picked at his teeth with his pinky finger, looking to the agents. "Nothing more unusual than talking to the Feds, I mean."
This elicited some laughs from the others at the tables, and Keith shook his head, turning away from the table. "Thanks for your time," said Lance, following Keith as he moved toward the other group of people.
"Afternoon," said Keith, cutting off the recent vacation-goer in the middle of her story. "We're just going to need a minute."
"Um… okay?" said the woman who'd been speaking, crossing her arms across her chest. She had the residual color of a spray tan on her skin, visible beneath her still-new Corpus Christi tee shirt. She raised an eyebrow, and Lance saw it obvious that she definitely didn't think their investigation was any more important than her vacation.
"Have you seen anything unusual lately?" asked Keith. "Traffic patterns, disruptions in the roadways…"
"Nothing like that," said the woman, dismissing them with her eyes, trying to turn from them to the rest of the group. Keith started, as if he were about to say something, but Lance nudged him out of the way.
"Did I hear you say that you just got back from Corpus Christi?" asked Lance. The woman turned back to face him. She grinned a half-smile.
"Yeah, maybe," she said. "What's it to you?"
"Oh, not much, just I went there last February, and it was a great time."
"It really is!" she said, her shoulders relaxing and her face softening. "I was a little unsure of what the sun would do to me, but John—that's my husband, see—he said I was out in the sun all day here, too, and I guess he was right. Plus, and don't go spreading this around, but the spray tan was a little bit of help, too." She said this with a wink, and Lance offered her a polite laugh in response.
"I could hardly tell!" he said, grinning a charming smile. He leaned in, brushing the woman's arm with his hand as he did. "What was your favorite spot to eat? I found the seafood just delectable."
"Oh! I found this great place for shrimp, right by the shore, and John, he didn't want to go, but I told him that this was the kind of place you had to go if you wanted to eat well, the way the locals did!" Lance nodded along, making sure she knew he was listening. "So we went, and it was great—I mean, John got food poisoning, but that could've been the mayonnaise on his sandwich earlier in the day. Who knows, when you're out of town? You know how it is."
"You've got that right," said Lance, laughing along with her. "I'm feeling it around here, really."
"Oh really, where are you from?"
"Arizona, actually."
"Not too far!" The woman playfully slapped him on the arm. "Well, I can recommend a few things, if you're looking for some good food. Like Pip's—it's this little Italian place out in one of the residential neighborhoods in the northwest of town. You'd not even notice it if you didn't know where it was, but it's worth checking out. Take Benjamin Street up from Main and then the third left. It'll be right on your right." She gave a slight laugh, as if saying the word "right" twice was a joke of some sort. She gave Lance another playful slap on the arm before her brow furrowed. "But don't take Route 84 back—there've been some issues out there lately. The army's been using it for Hummer practice or something, and it feels like it's always during my commute. It's a bitch to deal with."
She sighed, rolling her eyes. "What'd you say your name was, again?" she said. Her eyes darted down his fame quickly in a way that almost made Lance feel self-conscious.
"Agent McClain," he said, but he checked his wrist fast enough that she would not have been able to tell he wasn't wearing a watch. "But it looks like Agent Kogane and I have another engagement elsewhere." He offered a small frown. "I'm so sorry I can't spend more time talking—it's been a pleasure…"
"Deenah."
"Deenah. Have a great afternoon."
He led Keith out of the Department of Transportation building just after, and Keith stayed silent until they got into the car. Once they pulled out of the parking lot, Keith turned to Lance.
"What was that?"
"What?"
"Were you flirting with her?"
"Yeah, a little," said Lance, grinning despite himself. "I mean, it doesn't mean anything. She's married. And she vacations in Corpus Christi. Who does that?"
"You do?"
"I was lying, Keith." Lance rolled his eyes. "I was getting information out of her. She wasn't willing to talk to you."
"They didn't know anything, anyway."
"Hey, conspiracy theory man. You tell me: are there any government bases out on Route 84?"
A silence hung between them for a moment as Keith rustled through his map and quickly referenced his cell phone. He looked to Lance. "No, but…"
"So I'd say I figured something out that might be right up your alley. If the government's covering it up, they're going to need a base of operations nearby."
Keith didn't say anything at that, simply circling the section of Route 84. He traced his finger down from that circle to where he'd put the X on the old nuclear facility. He frowned. "It looks like our old nuclear facility isn't along 84, which means that it might not be where we're going."
"That makes sense," said Lance, pulling off of the dirt road and back onto the paved road that led back into town. "You still want to check out the third site?"
"I'll admit your detective work was good back there," said Keith, "but our best lead is still this place." His finger was pressed down against the map, pinpointing the X on the facility he wasn't able to get much information on. He turned to Lance. "There might be tight security here, because what the government has here isn't something they want the public to stumble upon."
Lance nodded. He drove the forward in silence for a moment before he smirked.
"What?" asked Keith.
"We are the government, kind of," he said.
"We're—we're not…" Keith trailed off, pretending to look back at his map as he slouched in the passenger seat of the car.
27
The dirt road they needed to follow to get to the abandoned nuclear facility was so worn and dust-covered that Lance actually drove past it before he had to make a U-turn to go back for it.
"Wait, there it is!" said Keith, pointing through the windshield at a barely-discernible indent in the desert. Lance squinted toward where his partner was pointing and was able to find his way onto the long driveway.
There weren't any markers along the road, and Lance had to pay close attention to where he was going in order to keep on track. He was getting a bit worried that he was even going in the right direction when he saw a chain link fence ahead of him, stretching in both sides through the desert. There was a gate across the road, and beyond it Lance could see the road stretch a little further on. There were no other markers or indications that there was anything different from the rest of the desert except for this fence, that the fence was actually enclosing anything at all.
Lance pulled up to the gate and parked the car, and both he and Keith exited to examine the gate.
There was a large sign on the gate that had, at one point, been a bright yellow with red lettering, but the desert had faded it to a dull, patchy yellow that was showing through with rust, and the lettering was only half-discernible: "GOVERNMENT PROPERTY. DO NOT ENTER UNDER PENALTY OF LAW."
Beneath this was a padlock and chain that held together the two sides of the gate. "Hold on," said Keith, heading around to the trunk of their rental sedan and returning with a set of bolt cutters. He walked past Lance as if this were completely normal and, after a brief moment of struggle pushing together on the bolt cutters' handles, Keith snapped off the gate's padlock. He pulled the chain through the links and threw it to the ground just off of the road. He began to push the gate open when he caught Lance's eyes and saw the shocked expression on his face.
"What?" asked Keith. "You said we were basically the government anyway." He pushed the side of the gate all the way open. "We just happened to have forgotten our keys."
Lance hesitated for a moment, watching his partner bring his bolt cutters back to the trunk of the car, and he shrugged before pushing open his side of the gate, as well. It was already unlocked, after all.
They rolled slowly through the gate, both on the lookout for any signs that their entrance might have been detected, but it seemed like their suspicions of this facility being abandoned were pretty warranted.
There was a long stretch to drive between the fence and anything even resembling a building. Whatever this thing was, it was clear that the government didn't want anyone simply stumbling upon it, or catching a glimpse of it from the road.
Ahead of them, a nondescript, box-like gray building rose from the desert. It was only one story high and had no windows, just a metal door on the front and another metal door and a garage door on the side, near the back. Unlike the Department of Transportation building, this one had not vehicles in the nonexistent parking lot.
Lance pulled the car up to the single door and parked. He pulled his suit jacket off and he exited the car, folding it over the seat. "I figure this place doesn't have any air conditioning," he said with a grin. Keith almost seemed to smile back as he shucked his jacket as well.
They reached the door and Keith tried the door handle, finding it locked. He shook his head. "Let's try around back."
They walked around to the side of the building, where the garage door and the side entrance were located. Lance tried the door handle on the side door to find it to be just as locked as the front door.
"Locked?" asked Keith. Lance nodded. "Let's see if we can get through the garage door."
Keith was squatting at the base of the door, working his fingertips underneath it. "Wait a sec, Kogane," said Lance. Keith looked up to him but did not withdraw his fingers.
"What?"
"What if this is just a nuclear testing site?" He saw Keith's eyebrows narrow a bit, and he held up his hands in defense. "I mean, you said the government has a ton of unlisted nuclear sites. Not every one of them is going to be the spot for an alien conspiracy. They could be regular conspiracies."
"And you don't want to know, either way?"
Lance was ready to shoot back a retort, something about radiation and Keith's lost brain cells, but he held himself back. He had to admit that he was curious. He hesitated a moment more, Keith looking up at him the whole time, before sighing and squatting down next to Keith, putting his fingers into the tiny gap between the door and the floor, as well.
"One, two, three…" counted Keith, and they both lifted up as hard as they could, in unison. The door lifted a few inches off of the ground and then was abruptly halted by a chain latched on the inside of the door. Keith squatted down a little further to see the chain extending from a ring inset to the concrete floor of the garage reaching up to the inside of the door.
"Hold that," said Keith as he let go of the door without any real warning. Lance strained for a second, almost dropping the whole weight of the door onto his fingers. He felt a pull in his back as he kept the door open the little bit by himself.
"Yeah, thanks for the heads up!" Lance shouted after Keith, who disappeared around the front of the building. He could feel the sweat beading on his forehead, and resisted the ache in his arms and thighs as he held the door open those few inches.
It seemed like an eternity before his partner rounded the building again, and as he approached, Lance could see that Keith was carrying with him the bolt cutters he had used to get them into the compound in the first place.
Kneeling down, Keith slid the bolt cutters right underneath the door and, after a moment of effort, was able to snap through the chain. He withdrew the bolt cutters and looked up to Lance.
"Come on," said Lance, "grab ahold!" He wasn't able to hold it on his own for much longer. Keith got to his feet and squatted down next to him, helping him to pull the garage door open all the way. It was a heavy, metal plated door, and it took them more than a little effort to push it up high enough for them to move underneath. Lance nodded to Keith, and he slipped underneath, holding onto the door while Keith slipped under just after. When they were both through, Lance let the door fall, his arms feeling like rubber.
The inside of the building was dark, the lack of windows leaving no natural light to come into the space. Lance wished he'd brought a flashlight with him or something, but Keith opened up his cell phone's flashlight in seconds. Lance realized this was the obvious solution and did the same just after.
The room was mainly empty. It was definitely a garage—there were a few shelves near the back of the room, as well as a toolbox that must have been kept there for whatever cars or trucks stopped here. All of the walls were a plain cement that matched the smooth cement floor. In the back of the room was another door, this one with a reinforced glass window. Keith led the way to it, and turned the handle to find that it was unlocked. Lance followed him through it to the main area of the building.
This room took up most of the space in the building that was not taken up by the garage. There were six lab tables, clean black counter spaces, that held on them a couple of different scientific instruments: some beakers, a few electric microscopes, and some older-looking desktop computers. On one wall hung a row of lead-lined aprons, the type that doctors wore when taking x-rays.
Both agents swept the beams of their cell phone flashlights across the space. Keith and Lance moved to different lab tables to see if they could find anything relevant to their investigation, but the tables had been cleaned up after whatever had last occurred here, and there was nothing that particularly helped them, nothing that indicated at all what had taken place here.
Lance thumbed the power button on the desktop computer and monitor, but there was no response from them. It made sense—they were at a supposedly decommissioned and nondescript government facility. There was no real reason for anything to be powered or working.
"Keep looking around," said Lance, "I'm going to check the rest of the building.
Keith nodded to him in the beam of his flashlight, and Lance moved from the lab tables and main work area to the back of the building, near where the garage was. There was a small area unaccounted for by the larger room in the back of the building. Part of this was taken up by a bathroom, but there was a space in between the bathroom and the garage that was too wide to just be a wall. Lance knocked on the wall gently, not wanting to make too much noise even in the abandoned building. The sound that came back to him was hollow.
He glanced back to Keith, who was carefully inspecting the different instruments and tools left on the desks. He was occupied enough to be busy while Lance checked out this empty area. Lance moved from the main room to the garage to find if there was any resonance on that wall, as well.
He knocked on the wall in between the empty shelves on the back side of the garage and found the same empty thud that he found when knocking in the other room. This was not a solid wall at all. There was something hidden in this part of the building, something that the government might not have even wanted its own secret employees from knowing about.
He took a step back and looked at the wall he was probing. There was nothing on it, a smooth, concrete block wall, except for the shelves that lined it. They were wooden with metal brackets holding them up, and they seemed like they might have once held things such as tools, motor oil, and extra wiper fluid—standard garage stuff. However, they were all cleared now.
Lance felt around on the top shelf, and felt nothing but a thin layer of dust. It was a layer of fine particulates, settling from the dry desert air. He withdrew his hand and looked over the set of shelves. There was nothing strange about them, but there had to be some clue as to what lay beyond the wall. There was something there, he knew it.
Lance leaned an elbow on one of the shelves and crossed one ankle behind the other, facing the door the garage and thinking. There would be something in the garage…
He almost dropped his phone and the light coming from it as his elbow pushed the shelf downward. At first, he thought it was the old wood breaking beneath his weight, but as he less-than-gracefully caught his balance, he saw the way that the shelf rotated around a central support, its endpoints pivoting around, until both ends touched the top and bottom of the shelves below and above it.
Lance glanced quickly to the door to the other room, where Keith was continuing his investigation, and turned his attention back to the shelf. He held it between his hands and pushed it just a bit more in the way it was twisting, and something within the wall sounded a quiet click. The dust to Lance's right was disturbed by a slight breeze. He looked to the side of the shelves, and sure enough, there was a tiny crack in the cement block wall just by the edge of the toolbox.
Lance pulled on the shelf he had turned, and the wall pivoted toward him, revealing a previously hidden secret passage. Cement stairs led downward from the opening in the garage wall. Lance shined his cell phone flashlight down the new opening. The stairs went down another fifteen feet or so before terminating at a plain metal door not unlike those on the outside of the building.
"Keith?" he called to the other room. He heard some sort of a response but wasn't really listening as he took a few tentative steps downward into the hidden passage.
"McClain, what is it? You couldn't just bring it to me—"
Keith cut off as he entered the garage, stopping at the top of the stairs.
"Lance, what…"
Lance turned back to Keith, his eyes wide. Keith didn't say anything else; he swung his cell phone flashlight beam down the stairs toward where Lance was going, as well. He stepped carefully behind Lance, and they descended the stairs together.
Lance glanced over his shoulder to Keith as he put his hand on the door handle, and Keith nodded. Lance turned the handle and opened the door into the basement level of the facility.
Both agents stepped into the room, leaving the door open behind them. In front of them were shelves. Not just a few, but dozens of shelves, all stacked with folders and ledgers and other paperwork, stretching back into the basement area, which was clearly much larger than the building above it, as far as their cell phone flashlights reached. The air was cooler down here, but that was not where the chill Lance felt originated.
"This isn't a nuclear weapons testing facility," he said, his eyes wide as he swept the beam of light around the room.
"No," said Keith, "it's not. It's something much, much more dangerous."
Melissa Scully: Why is it so dark in here?
Mulder: The lights aren't on.
