Chapter 8
Having dealt with kryptonite as much as he had over the years, Superman had managed to build up a certain degree of resistance to it. Kara hadn't been dealing with the substance nearly as long, and considering she'd just gotten a serious dose in the chest, it had sent her reeling against the wall of the motel.
"Forgive the cliché, but I believe the exact phrase is: ''Supergirl. At last we meet,'" Malcolm was now standing outside the limo, his bow now at his side. "You know even after everything my new friends told me about this particular material, I didn't think it would work that well that fast."
By now, Kara had managed to yank the arrow from her chest, but she was still having a little trouble standing right now.
"I have to say, I'm a little disappointed. Not just by your falling so easily to this trap, but by your utter brazenness at your lack of disguise." Malcolm was loading another arrow. "At least your colleagues have the good sense to wear masks to hide their true identities. Did you really think the boldness of the color scheme would keep people from recognizing who you really are?"
"God, are all of you villains that vain? Or does being in an evil Syndicate mean you just like the sound of your own voice?"
For the briefest of moments, Malcolm actually looked disconcerted. "You're not exactly who I thought would come to Supergirl's rescue."
"I may not wear a costume, but that doesn't mean I still don't protect people," Mulder said, his gun pointed right at Malcolm's head. "And for all my years in the Bureau, I didn't really get a lot of opportunities to save a damsel in distress."
Now Merlyn was smiling a little. "Is that how you intend to beat me? Not with superspeed or super-strength or good aim? Just your wits and a gun?"
"They've gotten me farther longer then the rest of them," Mulder leaned down to Kara. "How you doing?" he whispered.
"I'm going to need a few minutes to be back to full strength," Kara said slowly.
"Get out and recover," he said quietly.
Kara no longer looked stressed; she looked confused. "Mulder granted I don't know him that well, but you can't expect to beat this guy."
"I have no intention of doing so," Mulder said softly.
"Then what are you going to do?"
"Appeal to his lesser nature," Mulder said.
Malcolm had a far better poker face than Kara did, but he clearly seemed a little baffled himself.
"I don't know how familiar you are with classic cinema, Mr. Merlyn," Mulder said slowly "but one of my favorite films is Michael Mann's Heat. Pacino is a cop; DeNiro is a bank robber. Pacino's been chasing DeNiro for so long that they both know each other better than they know the women in their lives. So in the middle of the movie, Pacino pulls DeNiro over. Not to arrest him, he just wants to talk with him. And DeNiro goes. And for ten minutes, they sit in an LA restaurant and just talk. It's a mental chess game; both think they're not going to give their position away; they've just been doing this for long, they need their adversary to know about what's they think is going to come next."
"And that's what you want to have happen here," Malcolm said.
"I have three heroes, a cop and my partner on my side," Mulder told them. "Granted, I don't know you that well, but I know how the Syndicate operated, and you would not have planned this attack if you didn't have an exit strategy with all possible outcomes mapped out. Now you want to know what we're going to next as much as we want to know what you're going to do next. And here we are."
Merlyn considered this for a moment. Then he started to chuckle. "You know, I read a lot about you in your file. I didn't think you were this bold. But why would I tell you anything we're going to do?"
"As someone who had more than his share of experience with your predecessors," Mulder told him "trust me when I say they loved the sound of their own voices."
"A vice you have been guilty of yourself," Malcolm countered.
Mulder shrugged. "I have to tell people the truth. And I never liked hanging around on message boards."
"You're not going to convince me to change sides," Malcolm said.
"No more than you're going to convince me," Mulder countered.
"I know your people are listening in."
Mulder shrugged. "It'll save me the trouble of telling them later. Besides, from what I understand, none of them ever had the patience to hear you out."
Malcolm nodded. "What the hell. An opportunity like this may never come again."
"Well, you put down your bow and I'll put down my gun, and we'll try to talk each other to death like civilized people."
FXFX
Joe West had seen some weird shit the last two years, but when Mulder had told Oliver and Barry to fall back after Supergirl had been hit, he'd thought that was the craziest thing he'd ever heard
Until five minutes later. He wasn't alone in that particular line of reasoning.
"Look, I don't know your partner that well, but if he thinks can get anything out of Merlyn, he's crazier than everybody thought he was," Oliver told them in sheer disbelief.
"What makes him so sure that Merlyn won't kill him right now?" Diggle said. "This isn't the old Syndicate. They don't deal with threats like Mulder the same way those old men did."
"This isn't the way to play this," Barry agreed. "I say we grab him up and take him back to Star Labs."
Only Scully seemed unnaturally calm about this entire scenario, though realistically she had to be the most worried of any of them. "Is what Mulder said about Merlyn right? That he wouldn't have planned this without an exit strategy?"
"He always has another way out," Oliver admitted. "We're not going to be able to grab him no matter what the odds."
"Then let's let this play out," Scully said.
"You don't think your partner's in danger," Joe said doubtfully.
"He's always in danger. He was in worse danger twelve hours ago as you'll recall," Scully reminded them. "I've been worried about Mulder for so long I actually think it's something of a default position for me by now. I also know he knows what he's doing even when he doesn't."
That didn't make any sense, but then what in their lives the last few years had?
"Besides, he's less than fifty feet away from me," Scully said. "If Merlyn lays a finger on him, I will kick his ass so hard he will pray Supergirl had beaten him up instead."
Joe didn't doubt that for a second. Neither did any of the heroes in that room. They knew how pissed off the women in their lives could be if they put themselves in harm's way.
FXFX
"I wish I could hold you in the same contempt that Oliver and the rest of his people do," Mulder began slowly, "but honestly, I'm not just that surprised by it."
"You understand the desire to protect your own," Malcolm said slowly.
"I can understand the appeal of it. Hell, I nearly gave in to it myself a couple of times," Mulder admitted. "And given what you've been told, I can understand why any father would try to protect his children. But I think your colleagues have been withholding vital information from you."
"I have no doubt they are about the specifics, but they certainly aren't about the nature of the threat," Malcolm countered. "Your misconceived notions that somehow you can defeat a force of this magnitude must mean you acknowledge it as well."
Mulder nodded. "An alien invasion is an imminent. Problem is, it's been imminent for so long, I'm beginning to doubt how real the threat actually is, or whether its just another in a long line of scare tactics."
Malcolm actually hesitated for a moment. "The reason it hasn't come so far is because my colleagues are trying to stop it."
"I've heard that song before," Mulder paused. "Have you?"
It didn't last for long, but Mulder saw a brief look of puzzlement flash over Merlyn's face.
"Their predecessors – the men I spent more than a decade fighting – claimed that they had delayed an alien invasion by making a deal with the invaders. They were proud of the fact that they sacrificed their children and their wives in order to get the necessary material to keep the aliens from coming."
Merlyn was definitely disconcerted. Mulder saw it, and pounced.
"Covarrubias and her colleagues left that part, didn't they? That the men she worked for sent their families away to have horrible experiments performed on them for more than a quarter of a century, so that they could get the genetic material they needed to create an alien-human hybrid to withstand the upcoming apocalypse?"
Mulder actually started walking. "You were willing to make a deal with a devil – not far off from the real one – to save your daughter's life while the world ended. Now here it is – what, less than a year later – and you're doing it again. Only this time the people you've allied with, they'll have no problem at all using your daughter as their own personal science experiment to keep their portion of the world safe. You really willing to do that, Malcolm? Or is your idea of being a parent as twisted as the people in the Syndicate?"
"I thought you weren't going to try and change my mind," Malcolm said as calmly as he could manage.
"I'm not. But I am going to tell you what these people are capable of. Someone should learn from their mistakes." Mulder told him. "They clearly haven't."
"You know my history," Merlyn said slowly. "It's going to take a lot to really shake me when it comes to the cruelty of man."
"I would expect no less from the man behind the Undertaking," Mulder said quietly. "You know, for that alone, the old Consortium would've rejected you outright. They were never that overt in their machinations."
"Part of the reason I would never have gotten along with them" Malcolm was clearly a bit more comfortable. "From what I've been told, all they did was meet in smoke-filled rooms and try to control things. They were so rigid when it came to their plans that even when they were in mortal peril they stuck to their guns."
"And started killing the only voices of reason," Mulder acquiesced. "So what makes you so certain that this new generation is any more qualified than the old one? After everything that's happened, you think they've learned from their mistakes."
"What makes you so sure we haven't?"
We, Mulder thought. So he's committed. "Covarrubias was their messenger for two and a half years."
"Which means she witnessed firsthand where they went wrong."
"That includes the fact that she was their test case for the vaccine?" Mulder countered.
"It's been nearly twenty years and she's still pissed about it," Malcolm countered. "You know, just because most of the Syndicate went up in flames in El Rico didn't mean that all of them were gone. Part of the reason Marita agreed to go along with the new regime was so that she could finish purging the old one."
Malcolm said that so casually it took a moment for the words to land. They really had cleaned house. "How much of that was about what happened to Krycek?"
"Her ex-lover? She didn't shed a tear when she learned he was dead." Malcolm told him cheerfully. "She did learn one thing from you Mulder: trust no one. But then, considering the fates of her predecessors, she got off cheap."
He was good. No question. "This purge: why did she leave him alive? And don't try to bullshit me about not knowing who I'm talking about."
"The human ashtray?" Malcolm said. "In her own words, she didn't think the bastard could die. The last time she'd seen him, he was smoking from a hole in his neck and his wheelchair had just been thrown down a flight of stairs. When she learned he was in New Mexico, she couldn't wait to send the helicopters there. No human being could've survived being burnt to a crisp, and that was in the days before metahumans and aliens openly walked the earth. We know any further efforts are pointless, so they spent the last ten years taking away every avenue of power the man may have left. Personally I prefer actually dead to politically dead, but in this case I will make an exception."
I wouldn't Mulder thought but kept to himself. "Don't underestimate him. Every time the son of a bitch comes back, he's more determined and crazier."
"Well, you would know better than I would," Malcolm admitted. "You being his son."
"That's probably the worst kept secret in the Syndicate," Mulder said smoothly. "Besides, considering that everything that came out of his mouth was a lie, what makes you think that would be the one truth out of him?"
"Because a father wants to protect his children," Merlyn countered.
"That won't fly, considering what he did to the son he acknowledged was his," Mulder argued.
Now a real look of puzzlement crossed Malcolm's face. "Well, Marita didn't exactly know that part," Mulder pounced. "Jeffrey Spender, son of Cassandra, the old man's wife. You did hear about that part? Taken and experimented on for decades? Only brought back because she was going to be the crucible for colonization. When Jeffrey learned about his father's involvement, he broke from him but not in time to save her from be baked alive. Then he arranged to get me and Scully back on the X-Files. Then his father shot him in our office. But it wasn't enough to just kill him. No, he spent the next three years in a lab being experimented on until he was unrecognizable."
This was clearly uncharted territory for Malcolm. Whether or not it would strike at the soul of a man willing to align with Damian Dahrk was a different matter. But Mulder knew his only weakness was his love for Thea. The only way to try and get to him was to hit it hard.
"These are the people you're working with Malcolm," Mulder walked a few steps closer to him. "I know you think given everything you've lived through before you left Star City and the last four years that you can deal with the worst of humanity. Bear in mind that a lot of your new allies aren't human. And the ones that identify as Homo sapiens are willing to sell out their planet of origin so that they can survive. I'm not sure what your colleagues new strategy is, and to be perfectly honest, it doesn't matter that much. Because they still believe in the maxim of the old guard."
"And what's that?" Malcolm asked.
"That victory, somehow, is the absence of defeat." Mulder told him. "You're just going to serve in hell, not reign. And I have a feeling that I man like you would never be interested in serving."
Malcolm clearly had been kept out of the loop on this. "And what? You think your approach is going to work any better?" he said slyly. "You tried fighting them for more than a decade, and it cost you everything. Now you're back with the same old song trying to win every heart and mind except the ones that matter. You may think that by this point you have nothing lost, but all the old blind spots you had before are still there."
"The difference is, people are listening now," Mulder said.
"The key word is now," Malcolm now seemed to have his control back. "The masses are sheep. You may have their attention at the moment, but the world has been deluged with so many crises, it's only a matter of time before they move on to the next perceived injustice. You may think because you've convinced some of my old enemies that you've actually got power now. What you have is a handful of troops against an organization that has been around for decades and a force that has been doing what it has been done longer than anyone can remember. You may have thought it was hard when it was just you and Scully against the world. But you're no fit to be a general then you were to be a soldier. Every single loss you suffer – and trust me, there will be many of those – will gut you from the inside out until you're just a husk. Then you'll make the risk too big that not even you can take back."
"You don't know me at all," Mulder said.
"No. But I know Oliver. And you are just as thick headed as he is and as emotionally withdrawn." Malcolm looked at him. "I may not have been of a master profiler, but I know more about the psychology of evil than you ever will."
"Somehow, the phrase 'takes one to know one' seems woefully inadequate," Mulder managed.
Underneath his deadpan, Mulder was reeling a little. Malcolm may have been new to the Syndicate but he'd clearly done his homework.
"Which file did you read on me?" Mulder asked cautiously.
"Just the highlighted portion. By now, they have an entire cabinet devoted just to you." Malcolm said serenely. Any dent that Mulder had made in his armor was completely invisible now. "Information is power. And controlling information is one of the things our people do best."
Why did he always try to play Marquis De Queensbury with these people? When you have the referees paid off, fighting clean was never a good option. Then again, Mulder had never liked getting down in the mud.
"One last thing before you go," Mulder said slowly.
"You suggested this meeting. Now you're cutting it short to nurse your wounds," Malcolm said slowly.
"Aren't you curious as to how Thea is?" Mulder asked gingerly.
Malcolm paused.
"All this conversation about why you're doing this and you never actually asked how your daughter was," Mulder said. "I thought you'd at least be curious."
FXFX
"He's treading on very thin ice," Oliver said slowly.
"In his position, you wouldn't do the same?" Barry asked.
"Yeah, but I can take the bastard in a fight," Oliver reminded them. "Mulder crosses the line; Malcolm will put in an arrow in his chest."
"In that case, maybe one of you had better get into position," Scully said carefully. "I know my partner. On his best day, he never knew where the line was, never mind when he crossed it."
"Thea knows I have only her best interests at heart," Malcolm said slowly. "When the time comes, she'll make the right decision."
"Do you know why she's no longer fighting alongside her brother even though she believes in his quest?" Mulder asked. "She saw what she was becoming and didn't want any part of it. In her own words, she was her father's daughter. Now as someone who thought he had lived through the worst possible case of bad parenting, I know that is not a compliment."
"You don't know my daughter any better than you know me," Malcolm countered.
"I think we've established by now that you don't need to have met someone to know them inside and out," Mulder said carefully. "Actually, I had a very interesting conversation with her a couple of days about this very subject. She honestly didn't think it was possible to have a worse parent than you. But then again, I had more than one bad example."
"Trying to be a father figure because you never got to be a real one?"
There's that knife again. "I left my son to keep him safe," Mulder said slowly. "I don't expect you to understand that because you did the exact opposite."
"I will always protect my children."
"And you're doing a bang-up job," Mulder was actually baiting him now. "The man who claimed to be my father was a monster. The man I thought was my father was a neglectful drunk who traded my sister for his own safety and spent the rest of his life somehow thinking I was responsible. And that's without talking about my mother, but you know that story. You lived it. All of this is a roundabout way of saying I know something about horrible parents. I wouldn't trade places with Thea for all the money and power you've got."
Someone who knew Malcolm Merlyn at all would've been concerned about how quiet he was becoming. Mulder had dealt with enough of his kind to know that he was just a hair trigger away from doing something dangerous. So for nearly a minute, there was absolute quiet.
"I think we're done here," Malcolm finally said.
Mulder didn't believe for a minute this would end nearly as peacefully as it did in Heat, which is why he started walking backwards away from Malcolm. "I know you try to come down on the winning side, but trust me when I tell you this, Malcolm, there is no winning on the side you've chosen."
"At least my side will survive. Which is more than I can say for you."
Mulder's hand had been on his gun for the last minute, but he knew what he was up against. At his peak, he'd never been as a good a shot as Scully, and after nearly fifteen years, he was still rusty at drawing his weapon, Malcolm Merlyn was just one step removed from being a ninja, and even with an artificial hand, he was still quicker than Mulder and had nearly a decade on him. He knew he was dead.
And he continued to have that thought even as a blur went past him. Before he could blink, Barry had Malcolm pressed up against the car.
"You know, I don't think I ever thanked you for leaving us to die against Savage," Barry told him with a ferocity that Mulder hadn't seen in the man before.
"Let him go," Mulder said with a firmness that surprised even him.
The look of shock was obvious on both Barry and Malcolm's faces. "He was going to kill you!" Barry shouted.
"It comes with the job," Mulder said slowly. "I made a promise to him…"
"...which he had no intention of keeping"! Oliver seemed nearly as shocked as Barry.
"Oliver, how many chances have you had to kill this man over the past two years?" Mulder pointed out. "I'm well aware who he is to Thea, but I'm willing to bet that never stopped you before."
"I was wrong not to do it then," Oliver said slowly.
"And you would be wrong to do it now." Mulder looked at Barry. "I could have been you. The chance to be a player. But I didn't have the heart. I've been exactly where you are, Barry. You don't want to be like them. It's not fair, and I know they'd never do the same if they had the chance, but this isn't a war where the winner is the one who causes the highest body count to the other side. Let. Him. Go."
Mulder and Malcolm both knew that if Barry or Oliver chose to act right now, there was nothing either of them could do to stop it. It was hard to tell who was more shocked when Barry did exactly what Mulder asked him to do.
"If you expect gratitude…" Malcolm started.
"I would be a bigger fool that I probably am," Mulder replied. "Parting words, for however you choose to take them. This is the difference between the sides we're on. Our ideas of justice are very different. You betrayed my side, and I showed mercy. When you betray your side – and I do know your history, Malcolm, so let's not pretend – they won't. Your ability to survive over the last four years is nearly as remarkable as his. But you've been on borrowed time ever since Oliver came back. And I've got a feeling it won't last much longer."
The moment Malcolm's car had pulled out of the alley, Scully appeared. She ran to the man she loved.
And slapped him across the face.
"Seven years in the Bureau ditching you, four years on the run and this it was drives you over the edge?" Mulder said with incredulity. "Also, ow!"
"Don't you ever learn how far to push people?" Scully shouted.
"I've faced worse threats with less backup," Mulder reminded his partner.
"That doesn't mean you make the bull's-eye on your chest bigger!" Scully argued.
Mulder looked around his new colleagues for support. Oliver shrugged. "Every time, I do something stupid, there's always been at least one woman yelling at me what an idiot I am," he said sincerely. "I honestly thought given your experience, you'd be used to it by now."
"You know how many times my friends have told me not to run risks like this?" Barry asked rhetorically. "By the way, you're lucky I didn't slap you for letting Merlyn go. And trust me; I hit a lot harder than your partner."
"What exactly was your reasoning behind that?" Scully demanded.
"Every time I encountered members of the old Syndicate, more often than not the longer you let their mouth run, the better chance there was they'd give something vital away." Mulder told them. "Smokey and his ilk were so convinced of their position; they had no problem telling you how stupid you were to oppose them."
"And what did you glean from that conversation?" Barry asked.
"That Malcolm joined up without knowing what he signed up for," Mulder told him. "You know how long it's been that I knew something that someone in the Syndicate didn't? Being on the other side of it, it will shake you to your core now matter how inured to it you think you are."
"You definitely got under his skin in a way I never managed to," Oliver admitted. "And trust me it takes a lot to unnerve Malcolm Merlyn."
"All right, he's shaken," Barry said in a calmer tone. "How does that help us?"
"These people don't trust each other that much to begin with," Mulder reminded them. "He was right about one thing. We don't have a big enough force to win in a fair fight. So we're going to have to use a tactic I never had much use for, even though it is effective."
"Psych ops," Diggle said.
"If there is one thing these people are good at, it's placing doubt that you're on the right side," Mulder pointed out. "A lot of the new breed have made something of a career at it. They will do everything in their power to tear us apart. So I think it is only far that we do the same to them."
For the first time since Mulder had gone into the alley to help Supergirl, Team Flash and Arrow began to see Mulder might not have been as crazy as they thought he was. The Syndicate already had one member who was trying to play both sides as well as one who had done so in the past. If they could somehow manage to get to Malcolm Merlyn…
"And think about it," Mulder pointed out. "Thea wasn't within twenty miles of here, but I used her as effectively against her father without having to put her at risk."
"You think he'll reconsider trying to approach her?" Oliver asked.
"He might reconsider why he's doing in the first place," Scully pointed out.
"And if he does try to approach her, it might be to convince her that he really has changed," Oliver said. "He's done that before, only this time he might be on what passes for the up and up with him."
"And lest we forget the most important thing," Mulder reminded them. "He left without what he came for. The Syndicate will be royally pissed with him, and this is not an organization that tolerates failure, even among the higher echelon."
"You think they'll kill him for that?" It was hard not to notice the hope that was in Diggle's voice.
"We should be so lucky," Oliver said with some sarcasm.
Mulder shook his head. "I doubt it. The old guard was willing to tolerate multiple failures. The only thing that guaranteed you a quick death was capture by the other side or betraying the one you were on. And based on what you told me, Malcolm's senses are good enough that he can pick up when that's going to happen."
"He knew that much long before I returned to Star City," Oliver admitted.
"And we knew a couple of people like that before we met you," Scully told him. "People like Merlyn are survivors. Apocalypses can happen and they'll walk away unscathed."
"So what do we do now?" Barry asked.
"Well for starters, we have to get Dr. Ianelli out of here." Oliver told them. "This location has been compromised even if Merlyn didn't bring her back."
Detective West shook his head. "At least they didn't blow this place up."
Scully looked at Joe. "Watch this place carefully," she said softly. "Blowing shit up was one of the few things the Syndicate could do competently. I can only managed they've refined their manner of approach since then."
Joe nodded and got on the horn. Mulder turned back to Barry. "I guess we're going to finally see just how safe STAR Labs is," he told him.
"I echo your skepticism," Barry replied.
"You know, that's the last word anyone would use to describe me," Mulder told him.
Barry smiled for the first time.
"Kudos to you," Cisco said. "I knew you and Scully were tough, but I didn't realize how much of a bad-ass you truly were til now."
"Yet another word rarely used to describe me," Mulder said. "Maybe we're evolving in our middle age."
"You need to get back to STAR Labs," Caitlin said.
"We're bringing Ianelli back now," Scully replied.
"That's not the only reason."
STAR LABS
3:42 AM
"I'm becoming less and less thrilled by surprises these days," Scully told them.
"Then you really chose the wrong line of work," Mulder replied.
Mulder had to admit he was a little puzzled himself. Caitlin and Cisco had told them to hurry back, but had refused to go into details…to them. The rest seemed to know what was going on, but had suddenly turned close-mouthed.
"You think this is some kind of hazing?" Mulder asked. "Considering all the bullshit we've put most of our new friends through, I'm beginning to think we might be due some."
"I'm more worried about what their ideas of a surprise are," Scully pointed out. "Just the Cliff Notes version of what they've been through over the past few years makes me really afraid of what they're going to drop on us."
"So who do you think is waiting for us?" Mulder asked. "Batman? Superman? "
"Those are the best case scenario," Scully reminded him. "For all we know, they've managed to recruit some of the people from the darker levels of ARGUS."
Mulder shuddered at that. "They're on our side now."
"You still want to meet them?" Scully asked.
"Not particularly." Mulder admitted. "Still, I have a feeling we're going to be crossing the dark side more than I'd like to. I'm just not entirely sure I'm ready for…"
By this time they had entered the main room of STAR Labs. When they saw who was there, any future conversation died on their lips.
You'd think given the number of times they had seen dead people over their careers, seeing yet another famous one wouldn't be so shocking. But when someone who had so publicly died, leaving a video confession of his guilt in the murder of Nora Allen, it was bound to come as a shock. And even after you've been told about alternate universes, well, it's one thing to believe in them, and it's another to have physical proof.
Which was the main reason they were momentarily stuck dumb when they saw Professor Harrison Wells standing next to Team Flash.
"I will admit, Cisco, this was more than worth my making the journey," Professor Wells said. "Though I must admit I'm a little surprised that they would deem to need my help in particular."
"We're going to need all the help that we can get," Barry said. "This isn't just one rogue speedster."
"As I was told, Mr. Allen," Wells said. "One can't spare resources. "
Mulder and Scully still hadn't spoken.
Wells frowned. "I thought they'd be used to these kinds of things by now. Or were their jobs vitally different in this universe?"
"No." Caitlin told him. "But that doesn't mean they encountered exactly the same things as they did in your world."
"That would make things to easy." Wells stepped forward. "Forgive me. I'm Professor Harrison Wells. And it's a privilege to meet you."
He looked at Mulder. "Mr. Director." He turned to Scully. "Madame Secretary."
That finally got a reaction from Mulder. "Madame what now?"
