J. Edgar Hoover Building
Washington, D.C.
September 16
He wasn't worried at nine, but he couldn't settle either.
He put his feet on the desk, then put them on the floor, and got coffee twice, and pretended to do the crossword in the newspaper. It was a USA Today. He got stumped on three down. The clue was, not the ground, and it was three letters, but he simply couldn't bring himself to write sky. In Fox Mulder's universe, life simply didn't work like that.
He called her at nine-seventeen, first on her cell, then at home. Nobody answered.
He wasn't worried at ten. Not really. He got a stack of X-Files from the file cabinet but didn't bother to check the file names before he read them, and after he was finished, he couldn't remember a word.
At ten forty-five, the office phone rang, and he picked it up, and then dropped it, and then picked it up again. "Yeah?"
"Is this Mulder?"
It was a woman's voice, but not Scully's. "Why?"
"This is Melba Maybourne the accounting department. I need to talk to somebody about these two-twenty-ones. There are some discrepancies. We're very concerned."
Two-twenty-ones. Those were reimbursement forms for out-of-state travel. "I'm sorry," said Mulder. "You've got the wrong number. You're looking for the other Fox Mulder. One 'l'. You might try calling the FBI." He hung up.
He drummed his fingers on his desk for a moment, staring at the phone. After about five minutes of that, he got up and stretched his legs. Then he thought, there's no harm in asking, and left the office. He got halfway up the stone stairwell when he collided with someone coming the other way. He bit his lip sharply and had to catch himself on the railing. When he looked up he met the stony stare of his nominal boss, Assistant Director Walter Skinner.
Mulder grimaced and pressed the back of his hand to his lip. "Morning, sir."
"Agent Mulder. I was just coming to see you." He didn't look very happy about it.
"What can I do for you, sir?" Mulder was extra earnest. The two of them had reached détente in the last few months, and Mulder saw no reason to mess with it. The goal was to hoard Skinner's patience and endurance over long periods, so it could be used up when it really counted.
"Are you aware that Agent Scully did not report to work this morning?"
Mulder evaluated this question. "I thought she might be late."
"She didn't call in," said Skinner.
Mulder fixed his gaze somewhere over Skinner's shoulder "That's very unlike her, sir."
"Yes," said Skinner. "I thought so too."
A silence settled between them. Mulder thought: he knows what happened to her. He let his dealing-with-Skinner manner drop and met Skinner's eyes. Skinner always looked kind of like he'd just found a finger in his chili, and his tone of voice could peel paint, but that was typical with FBI senior management. That hard, stressed expression was issued by the FBI immediately after the first departmental budget meeting. Mulder judged his boss's actual state of mind by the depths of his crow's feet and the bags under his eyes. And they were deep and dark today.
Skinner had been woken up early—maybe by a phone call?—and informed of that something bad had happened. Not a death. If it was that, Mulder would be called up to the AD's office and Skinner would sit him down and say something formal like, We've had some very bad news. He wouldn't trudge down to the basement for a tête-à-tête. Mulder felt a stabbing pain in his jaw.
Skinner said, "She's in North Carolina."
Mulder dispensed with silly questions like why and skipped right to the meat of the issue. "Is she all right?"
Skinner rocked his head from side-to-side in a doubtful gesture. "That's a complicated question."
But of course, if you had to answer it like that, it wasn't a complicated question at all. It was the opposite. It implied things, and Mulder didn't like the look of it. He turned around and started back down the stairs, thinking about North Carolina. It was a big state, and there was a lot of country in it. Thick forests. Out on the coast it was still practically the mid-Atlantic, but once you got about sixty miles inland, you might as well be in Alabama. But there were certain things that might draw Scully there. The Research Triangle. Duke University's medical school and hospital. Chapel Hill. Yes, if all he would ever have to go on was North Carolina, he would start his search for Scully in Raleigh and Durham. They were fairly familiar places to him.
He felt Skinner's heavy hand on his shoulder. "Wait."
Mulder turned.
"She's not hurt," said Skinner. "As far as I've heard. But she's in some trouble."
"What kind of trouble?"
"I'm not entirely sure," said Skinner.
He paused, to give Mulder the opportunity to spill the details. Everything was a negotiation with them. It was calibrated. Give a little, get a little. So if Mulder knew anything, now would be the opportunity to give it up. If Mulder refused to cooperate, it would tell Skinner something about the depth and nature of the problem. If he spilled the beans and asked for help, likewise. Either way, it would settle the question of whether they would be allies or enemies on this case, and establish the terms of the treaty.
If Mulder knew anything. But he didn't. He ran his hands through his hair. "She's not on an X-File. We closed out the hot dog case on Tuesday. We've got nothing on the docket. Anyway, she'd call me."
One way, or the other. Allies, or enemies.
"She'd call me," Mulder repeated.
In the end, it wasn't much of a conflict. Skinner liked Scully. Scully was a likable person. She still gave a damn about what other people thought of her, and she was still in a position to earn their respect. Mulder did not think of himself as a shy man, but he had to go out of his way to deal with people. He had to work at it. Scully made it look easy. So there was that, weighing in on the allies side of the scale.
Then they both heard a sound at the top of the cement stairwell. Like a rustling. Like maybe someone was standing at the top, just beyond Mulder's field of vision, eavesdropping. For Mulder that was just ordinary paranoia and he tried not to let it influence his life in undue ways, but Skinner set his jaw. The expression put them on the same side. A common enemy.
"Let's not do this in the building," said Skinner.
So it's that kind of problem, Mulder thought.
Skinner told him, "Go up to the third floor and request a car. Pick me up in the parking garage."
Mulder tried not to let himself imagine a shifting silhouette at the top of the stairs. He leaned in and lowered his voice. "How bad is it?"
"Well," said Skinner. "The person who told me about it works for the Raleigh police department. Homicide Division. Relax, agent. She wasn't the victim."
#
The logistics department gave Mulder the worst car in the pool. It was a low-riding black Buick with a dented door, a gummy transmission, and four antennas. It had seen its best days busting hippies and staking out the Black Panthers back in 1975. He could have gone out in a black-and-white patrol car and been less conspicuous. It said FBI like it was wearing a fedora.
Mulder waited for ten minutes in front of the elevators, and then Skinner hopped in the passenger seat and gestured for Mulder to go somewhere that wasn't so thick with FBI guys. It was the middle of the day in D.C., and that was like rush hour with sandwiches. Mulder drove to the Mall, and then started driving around it, the whole rectangle, going tourist speeds. You could have a whole meeting without ever paying for parking.
Mulder took a deep breath, and prepared himself for bad news. "Give it to me."
"Early this morning," Skinner said, "Agent Scully was taken into custody in connection with a suspicious death." Skinner passed a manila file to Mulder. Not an X-File, or even a top-secret file. Just an ordinary file. Mulder held the steering wheel with his knees and opened it. It was an eight-by-ten color picture of a dead man. He'd been white, about thirty-five, dark hair, a bit overweight, not remarkably handsome, not particularly ugly.
He'd died ugly though, though. The skin around his lips and cheekbones was dusky blue, and there was a pink crust around his mouth. His eyes were wide open and bloodshot. He'd fought for that last breath. Pictures of the dead came with the territory, of course, and Mulder had been doing this for more than a decade. In fact he had built his adult life around looking at pictures like this. Studying them. But he knew this one would come back to him a few times before he was able to let it go.
The picture was the only thing in there. No autopsy report, no case notes written in cop scrawl.
"Mulder," said Skinner.
Mulder looked up and braked sharply. A school group crossed in front of them. Middle-schoolers, all wearing the same neon green T-shirts. Skinner and Mulder pretended to watch them.
"What do they think she did to him?" Mulder asked.
"They don't think she did anything. She's the one who called 911 when it happened. She was a material witness. It was voluntary. More or less."
"Was?"
"According to my friend at the Raleigh PD," said Skinner. "About five minutes after that picture was taken, a group of men came to the station. They showed ID—"
Mulder felt a cold thing in his chest. He knew where this was going. "What ID?"
"Does it matter?"
Mulder waited.
"They were State Department badges," said Skinner.
Mulder squeezed the steering wheel until his hands hurt. There were a dozen intelligence shops within three hours of Raleigh—and that was if you didn't count the military. You didn't really feel like you were in charge of a government department until you had your own spy agency. The Department of Education had one. The State Department had at least three. Would a metro cop be able to tell one badge from another at five in the morning?
Would they care?
"I know." Skinner shrugged. "They took the body."
"What was their reasoning?"
"What do you think? National security."
Mulder put the car back in gear. They took another wide, slow bend, passing the capitol. "And they took Scully too. They kidnapped a federal agent. Right out of a police station in the United States of America." He swallowed. A missing woman. Scully. This was not going to be easy. "Is that what you're telling me?"
"You know what it's like," said Skinner. "Oklahoma City. The thing at the World Trade Center in '93. The Unabomber. The rules are changing, Mulder. Every day. Nobody wants to be the guy holding the bag when some nutjob drives a fertilizer truck up Pennsylvania Avenue. Someone says 'national security,' you say, 'how can I help.' Or the Raleigh police do. Especially if it takes a problem off their hands."
A problem. Was that how they saw it? "Did they say where they were taking her?"
Skinner was silent.
Mulder tried a different approach. "OK. Do we know who the victim is?"
Skinner nodded. "Here's where it gets bad."
Mulder hit the brakes again. The Buick's tires squealed. A car almost rear-ended them. Mulder was very angry. "Here's where it gets bad?"
"I don't want you to—"
Mulder kept his eyes on the road. "You don't want me to what?"
"I don't want you to try to draw conclusions," said Skinner. "At this point. It is what it is. Don't read anything into it."
"Sure," said Mulder. "Whatever."
"The deceased is a Doctor Chandler Wickham."
"Should that mean something to me?"
"Maybe," said Skinner. "He was a physicist. Well-known in his field."
One of Scully's people, Mulder thought. A scientist.
"He worked at North Carolina State. A full professor. But he was on sabbatical. He got a consulting job."
"With who?"
Skinner paused for a moment. He weighed it. He'd been weighing it this whole time. But Mulder would find out eventually, no matter what Skinner did or didn't do. "The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency."
Mulder nodded slowly. "Someone says 'national security'."
"Right," said Skinner. "It was like that."
"And what did he do for DARPA?"
"You know," said Skinner. He put his elbow on the window and leaned on his hand. "I ran that down. Before I came to see you. As a favor. Obviously the precise nature of Doctor Wickham's work is classified. But at NC State, he was second in command at the nuclear science department. His colleagues think he went to work on the next generation of nuclear weapons."
Mulder let the car idle for a moment, while the traffic flowed around them, or got backed up and honked. Eventually the Capitol Police would tell them to shove along, but with the four antennas and the dented door, and two guns and two badges in the car, Mulder wasn't too worried about it. He was thinking about Scully, with her undergraduate degree in physics.
"Don't read into it," Skinner repeated. "It's not worth the places it takes you. Not without more information. Believe me."
Did Scully know Wickham? Was that the connection?
His instinct was to go straight down to Raleigh and started kicking down doors until he found her behind one of them. But that wasn't Scully's way. It's delicate, she'd say. The DARPA-Wickham-nuclear stuff made it weird and dangerous. Stay on the paper side of things, she'd say. Do the safe stuff first. You have to do it anyway, and it might point you in the right direction. Start with Wickham. His face. What could do that to a guy?
Could radiation sickness manifest like that?
He didn't know. It wasn't his area of expertise at all. It wasn't even an X-File. It was a missing persons case. It was regular police work that anyone with a good pair of shoes and a sufficient amount of obstinacy could do. But Scully would count on him to do it. She would expect him to come get her. He knew, because he had been on Scully's side of the equation before. Mulder would rise up out of his own grave to work this case.
Skinner knew it, and so did Scully. And so did he.
Mulder took a deep breath and blew it out through his teeth. He didn't handle stress well. The psychologist in him worried. "Does the Raleigh PD think he was murdered?"
"They don't think it was natural causes. The man was thirty-seven years old."
"Any guesses as to what happened to him?"
"Poison," said Skinner.