Disclaimer: Same as before, etc.

Chapter III

Washington, D.C.

0350-July 7 2030

John Doggett eyes shot open as he realized the phone was ringing. He heard his wife murmur something, and John reached for the phone on the nightstand. "Doggett," he answered curtly. After a lifetime in the Marines, the NYPD, and the FBI, he was used to getting calls at unusual hours, but that didn't mean he was going to be pleasant about it.

A voice he hadn't heard since Christmas was on the line, "Meet me at the bench across from the Jefferson Memorial at the Mall in one hour. Go unarmed." The line disconnected, and Doggett hung up the phone. "Who was it?" John glanced over at his wife and former partner of nearly three decades Monica Doggett nee Reyes. She was wide-awake, and rolled over to look him in the eyes. John looked at her for a moment before answering. Not because he was thinking of a lie, or even thinking of the meet. No, after almost all this time he still found his wife attractive. Even after being woken from a sound sleep at four in morning.

"Sounded like Walt, and he wanted to meet by the Mall, near the Jefferson Memorial in an hour."

"You going?"

"Don't see why not. Sides, it won't kill me if I go for a bit of a long run today." He was referring to the fact it was a good ten miles to the Mall from the house they shared on the outskirts of DC.

John swung his legs out of the bed, and got up. Nude, he went over to the dresser, and pulled out an old faded pair of olive drab shorts and a short-sleeved crew neck shirt, this one red with MARINES in big gold letters on it. Monica stayed in bed, and watched as her husband got dressed. She asked, curious, "He say about what?"

"Nope, though I figure he will when get there." John quickly put on his old PT shorts and the shirt their son Walter had given him on the Marine Corps birthday. As a former Marine, he had been taught to never wear underwear in the summer to prevent crotch rot, and now, a half century later, he still didn't. Picking up his Timex from the nightstand, he put it on and kissed his wife on her forehead. "I'll be back, so don't cancel brunch with Fiona and Walter."

"Think that will be enough time?"

John smiled, "Of course, I want to see if the future Mrs. Doggett Walter's bring over is anything like the lady I was blessed with." Walter was a second lieutenant with the Marines who had come back from an exchange with the British Royal Marines with an English fiancé.

Monica smiled, and nodded and went with him to the door, locking it and going back to bed as her husband stretched and took off for the Mall at a fast clip.

Dodging traffic from time to time, John Doggett continued his run at a pace that people decades younger then him would have found hard to keep up with. As it was, few people would guess that he was approaching his 71st birthday after watching him run all day at a fast pace, knock out a buck fifty (150) pushups in a couple minutes without breaking a sweat, or hit the bull-eyes at 25 yards in a dark room with the issue SIG that the FBI still had after almost forty years of service. Doggett was long retired from the FBI when he had had to at 55, but still worked as a contract teacher at Quantico. Doggett thought of it like the Dogs playing poker painting: the old dog teaching the eager young puppies how to survive out in the field. Monica had gotten out shortly when Walter came along, and indulged herself with writing a series of detective novels for the young crowd.

Doggett ran, and thought how lucky they were compared with their friends Dana and Fox. Outside of Christmas cards and a wedding gift, they hadn't had any contact since the day the X-files were shut down for good. John knew the agency considered them to be missing people, but nobody had set aside then or now much assets to look for them. Doggett had been reassigned to a kidnapping response unit whilst Monica had been sent to Organized Crime. The two had been fortunate that they were assigned to the New Orleans office, and over the course of a year had fallen in love while still looking out for their friends from the X-files. It had saddened both of them that two people that had set them upon a good path, a couple they thought a great deal of, couldn't be on hand for the wedding, and later the birth of their son Walter and his sister Beth.

"MORNING, SIR!" A throaty bellow greeted him. It was a group of young, tanned, and crew-cutted men wearing OD PT gear a lot like his own, and running at an equally fast pace. Judging by their looks, John guessed they worked at the Pentagon and were getting in a weekend run. "Morning, Marines." Running in step with them, he shot the shit with the young jarheads, who had greeted because they figured him for an officer. John laughed, and told them he had just been another Marine like they were, only he had done his time with the 24th MAU in Lebanon way back in time.

The young pups humored him for a while before they split, and John found the meeting spot. Looking at his watch, he saw that it was 0435, and had a bit of time to kill. Stretching out onto the bench, he looked towards the Jefferson Memorial, and wished Monica was here. He had been on a stakeout in this same area, and the only good note of the experience had been to see the sunrise, and the angle of light and shadow had been positively beautiful.

His thoughts of Monica made him think, for not the first time, which he had received and made use of a second chance on life. The first marriage had gone to hell after Luke had died, and it had taken him a long time to bury those ghosts. Yet he had, and now, he had a wife, a son any father could be proud of, and a daughter who was finishing up college and going to med school to become a pediatrician. All in all, not bad considering how wild and crazy his ride on the roller-coaster of life had been.

"John"

A figure wearing a black suit sat down next to him on the bench and looked towards the memorial.

"Walt" Doggett greeted his former boss, Walter Skinner, who was retired even longer then he was and working as a security consultant for some defense contractor in Richmond, VA. Skinner set aside a small paper-bag, which held two glass jugs of orange juice. Taking them out, he handed one to John and cracked it open. "How's my godson doing?"

"Walter? He's bringing home the next Mrs. Doggett today."

"He enjoying himself? In the Corps I mean?"

John shrugged, "Yeah, it ain't like it was for me, or for you for that matter." Skinner had done his time with the 4th Marines in Vietnam, and had fought at Hue in '68 as a very, very young and frightened kid. Walter Doggett had been an officer for a couple of years, planned on going career, and had been blooded with his British counterparts during a tour in Indonesia.

They spent a few more minutes talking of small things, Doggett's family mostly, before John asked, "I know this isn't a social, Walt, so what's happening?"

Skinner sucked in air between his teeth, and asked him after a sip of juice, "You watch the news lately?"

Doggett frowned, "You mean the Blevins scandal? Yeah, that's all they talk about Quantico." The Blevins scandal had come out three weeks earlier when a string of arrests in the upper-echelons the Administrative Services Division (which was Skinner's old haunt) concerning corruption with Russian Organized Crime. Apparently a great deal of money had changed hands over a very long period of time in which the Agency's undercover operations had been compromised, with at least twenty agents dead due to the leaked information. Despite the fact the current Director, a former Assistant Director named Burnes, had managed to stomp out the problem by using an agent to infiltrate the ROC's own organization to hunt down the moles within, Burnes it looked like was still going to get the ax before Congress.

Skinner took another sip, and replied, "I'm giving you heads-ups for a recall to the Bureau." This got Doggett's attention as Skinner explained, "My old job, they want someone of the old guard, with impeccable credentials and a long history of service to the Bureau, watching over the department that got hit the hardest." He shrugged, "and if they have to burn someone else on your watch, then nobody whose career is active will be hurt, a perfect solution."

Doggett took this news in stride, and shrugged, "So I'll be getting a bigger office, and a lot more headache. Anything else?"

Skinner gazed at the Memorial, and the Mall. "One of the things that you will be ordered to do will be to reactivate the X-files." Doggett sat up, his attention really picked now. He had spent the better part of a career trying to reactivate that unit, and now, when the agency was its lowest ebb in a while, they were. It didn't make much sense, especially not in a department which was being examined all the more closely due to its recent scandal. For the moment though…

"Walt, what's your role in all of this? You being recalled, too?"

"Yeah, as a special advisor to the new Director, Fred Kranze, the Third Appeals District judge. He had heard of me, and asked if I was willing to take a pay cut to help him out for a couple of years getting the Bureau back on its feet. I accepted."

"Congrats. You ask him to reactivate it, or was it someone else?"

"Wasn't me, and the only reason I heard of it was because Kranze brought it up. He said that it was explained to him that every department in the Bureau was to examine just how much damage had been done over the years by the compromise of information to the Russian mob."

John was still lost, "So what does that have to do with the X-Files?"

Skinner pulled off his glasses, and rubbed his eyes. "A full accounting of the agents we have lost over the years will be conducted, and Kranze decided he wanted the X-files brought back after reading some of my old papers." Skinner shrugged, "He liked the idea of Admin having a small, flexible investigative capability, one to handle any special or unique cases. Kranze has already decided to give that capability back as soon as he takes the office."

Doggett took a sip of his juice and wasn't surprised to find it empty. It was Tropicana, and he always found himself guzzling it….

"So when will I hear about my new job?"

"Probably tomorrow, when you go in for class. Kranze is taking over tonight, so that there won't be as much chaos during the change if it were done in the middle of a working week."

"Any specifics on how, rather who, will be working the files this time?"

"That will be up to you, but it will be the same as it was back in our time. Two agents, working in the basement, one drawn from the technical side of the house, the other from the investigative side."

Doggett nodded, and wondered just who the other Assistant Directors would try to foist off on him. Despite the fact that both him and Monica, for that matter Mulder and Scully, had had superb records when they had been assigned to the X-files, it had been the kiss of death for many careers. John had never raised higher then Special Agent in Charge (SAC) of the office in Charlotte, NC office. Mulder and Scully, of course, had vanished, and Monica had gotten knocked up and retired. That sort of reputation had become legend, and John knew that the other divisions were probably going to try and foist the ash and trash of the Bureau to man the new section.

Skinner suddenly tossed his head back and laughed. John looked over at his friend for the past three decades, and asked, "What's so damn funny?" John had a sneaky suspicioun the thought of having sort out the bad from the worst the FBI had to offer had occurred to him as well.

"Just occurred to me that ever time the X-files has been opened we have had two agents in place. One male, one female, except for this one agent who was supposed to be there temporarily…"

"Krychek?"

"Yeah, but the point is every time…" Skinner shook his head, snickering, obviously amused. It was then it hit John what he was getting at.

With the exception of Krychek, every time they had had a team of agents on the X-files, the couple had literally ended up a couple. Doggett had to wonder what was going to happen this round.