Whispering Pines Motor Court
Raleigh, NC
7:15 p.m.
When Mulder checked in, with a small bag of office supplies from the NC State bookstore and nothing else, the woman at the desk recognized him. Not as a type, but him, personally. She did a double take.
It took Mulder a moment to recall why. Then he remembered: he and Scully had spent about four days here babysitting a Federal witness with the improbable name of Dash Kearns. Dash had never quite made it to court. But he had cost the Whispering Pines Motor Court one desk, six square feet of cheap carpet, a couple of gallons of paint and a door. In Mulder's experience, the hospitality industry took a dim view of that kind of thing, but the stars had aligned when this motel filed its complaint. Uncle Sam had opened his wallet, cash and apologies had flowed, and management began to look forward to the FBI destroying a few of its rooms every year.
It's the little things you do for people that make a difference in this life.
"Two rooms, right?" said the clerk.
Mulder held up one finger, and the clerk frowned.
She tapped on the keyboard, frowned again, and handed Mulder a key. "Take six. There's a fifty dollar deposit. Against phone calls and the TV. We've got HBO now." She squinted at him. "Playboy Channel."
"All the comforts of home," said Mulder.
"What?"
"Nothing."
Moments later, he let himself into the room, closed the door behind him, put his gun on the bedside table, and sat on the bed. The room had dark carpet that smelled of mildew, a heating unit with a squeak, dim lighting, ugly art. Big government largesse at its finest. Mulder had spent a good part of his adult life in rooms just like this one. From time to time he had found them comforting. Life stripped down to its bare essentials. Instant home base, anywhere in the country. Mulder heard that there were these punks who cooked drugs in motel coffeepots. The image of some businessman—or some mild-mannered FBI agent—making his morning coffee and getting the trip of a lifetime amused Mulder a bit. Not that he believed it; it wasn't much more credible than the one about the body in the box spring. But it was possible. At the moment, though, he felt a little bit like he was sitting inside a crime scene.
The silence was stifling. He hadn't spoken to his partner in over eighteen hours.
The heater shook and squeaked. Mulder put his hands on his knees.
"OK," he said, to nobody at all. "Time to go to work."
#
First he made two phone calls. One was short and the other was long.
Then he got up on a chair and hung the map of North Carolina on the wall. He secured the corners with pushpins, and then stuck a red pushpin in the approximate location of Raleigh police headquarters. He cut about five inches of string from a roll. He took one end and tied it to the pushpin. He tied the other end to a Sharpie, then drew the pencil in a circle around the map. Everything inside the circle was within forty-five miles of Winn's station.
Scully's kidnappers had come from somewhere inside that circle.
She could be inside that circle. For all Mulder knew, she could be in the room next door. Or she could be in Hong Kong by now. No way to tell.
He took out the picture of Wickham and pinned it to the map, outside the circle. Then he opened a package of Post-its with his teeth. On one he wrote strychnine? and stuck it to the picture of Wickham. On another he wrote rock band in a hotel room (4-6 men) and stuck it to the map. He added another beside it that said, professionals. Finally, he wrote, nuclear weapons and put it on the map. Then he took a moment to survey the geography.
There was one thing he hadn't put on the map yet.
He took it out of his pocket. It was a leaf. It was not a pretty green leaf or a crisp fall leaf, though both were in abundance in North Carolina at this time of year. This leaf had strange ripples on its surface. An rainbow of oil-slick colors crept up the stem and stained the green part. The edges were singed. It looked a little bit like someone had stuck it in a microwave for a few minutes, and this was not far from the case. Mulder had gotten it from a scientist at the Applied Atomic Sciences department at North Carolina State University.
#
"What d' you know about nuclear weapons?" A frighteningly young postgrad named Bradley Amos had asked Mulder that evening.
Brad was earnest and blue-eyed, and he had bleached and spiked the top half of his head. He shared a closet and a desk with two other elementary school students who were both Chinese immigrants. Together they made up the working class of Applied Atomic Sciences. Chandler Wickham had been the department's aristocrat. He had a much larger office around the corner. Mulder had already taken a look at it. It had been neat and sparse, appropriate for a lean-living physicist who had left four months ago for a fatter paycheck and the pride of public service.
"Assume that I don't know anything." Mulder had squeezed into the four inches of empty space between the door and the desk. This put him at eye-level with a set of postcards depicting the testing of atomic weapons in the desert, back in the 1950s. ATOMIC SUNRISE. GREETINGS FROM THE NEVADA TEST SITE.
"Good," said Brad. "I was going to tell you to forget it all anyway." He tapped one of the postcards. A black and orange mushroom cloud. The worst fear. "Everyone thinks it's still like this. Doctor Strangelove. On the Beach." Brad tipped his head back and forth. "The risk is still there, I guess. We've still got the missiles. But this has much of a relationship to the modern nuclear arsenal as… as this does to the first computers." He took a compact cell phone from his pocket. "It's not the Cold War anymore, Agent Mulder. In ten years all our missile silos are going to be yuppie survivalist condos and paintball courts—thank God. But we're not getting out of the nuclear business. We can't. We're diversifying."
Brad had showed Mulder some interesting things.
The same technology that had promised global annihilation on a hair trigger just four years ago was being harnessed in ways large and small, for purposes both sweet and sinister. Brad showed Mulder a device the size of a pack of cards that, when armed, could disable every electronic system in a thirty-story building in less than a second. Nuclear power plants the size of municipal garbage cans would drive the next generation of submarines and spacecraft. "And who knows," he said, tutting thoughtfully. "Maybe your kid's school, too." Nuclear imaging allowed people to see through walls—and skulls. Brad's colleague Martin Liu was using his lab time to design a new course of treatment for inoperable brain cancer. "But that's nothing," said Brad. "You want to see something that will blow your mind, I'll show you what Jian is working on."
He led Mulder down a winding set of corridors to a metal door with AAS LAB (BIOLOGY) stenciled on it. He banged loudly on the door. "It's Amos," Brad called.
A loud burst of static came from a small intercom next to the door. A tinny voice snapped, "What? I'm busy."
Amos gave Mulder a scientists-what're-you-gonna-do shrug. "Hit the button. I've got another guy in to see the mutants." He arched an eyebrow at Mulder.
The tinny voice said, "Hold on."
After a brief pause, they heard a loud electric buzz from inside the lab. Brad opened the door and gestured for Mulder to enter. Mulder stepped into a large clean room crammed with scientific equipment. A young man in a lab coat and green medical mask pointed at him. "Behind the red line." A moment later he approached and laid a small bundle in Mulder's arms. It turned out to contain a mask, latex gloves and little paper booties to go over Mulder's wingtips. The physicist—Jiang—wouldn't let Mulder cross the red line until he'd suited up.
Feeling just a little bit like Mike Dukakis riding the tank, Mulder did so.
"So where are the mutants?" Mulder wondered.
There were no cages or cells in the room, just a couple of chemistry hoods, half a dozen beige computers and a tall and baffling device. Mulder had to stare at it for nearly a minute before he realized he was looking at a scanning electron microscope. Mulder glanced over his shoulder at Brad, who had not put on the gear. He had stayed behind the red line, slouching against the door.
Brad just smiled. "Give him the politician show, J."
"The mutant is here," said Jiang. He tapped the screen next to the microscope. On it was a black-and-white image made up of tiny linked hexagons. Jiang was a soft-spoken man with a slight accent. His most distinguishing feature was his eyes, which. He had the attitude of politely and patiently indulging a very stupid interloper. The politician show. As Mulder took this in, Jiang pounded a red button on one of the chemistry hoods. "And here." The lights in the clean room dimmed, and a series of loud metallic noises emitted from the inside of the hood. Mulder understood that whatever objects were under the hood were being hit with strong blasts of radiation. Jiang hit the red button again. The lights came slowly back up, and Jiang inclined his head at the screen.
The differences were subtle. Microns. But the tiny hexagons had shifted and warped.
"These are wheat seeds," said Jiang, tapping the glass on the hood. "We try to trigger controlled genetic changes in the seed before it germinates."
Mulder was disturbed—and fascinated. "Why?"
"My friend Jiang," said Brad, with an air of easy pride, "uses his lab hours to speed up biological evolution."
Jiang sighed at his colleague's hyperbole. "We target specific parts of certain genes," he said. He typed a command into the computer and the microscope pulled back, until they were looking at the fuzzy twists and curls of chromosomes. "Here," said Jiang, gesturing. "And here, this one, here. We change on the genetic level. If the experiment works, we grow a wheat plant that cannot get wheat rust. Stronger wheat. Healthier crops. More food."
Mulder bent down to get a better look at the image. "Has it ever worked?"
"We're very close," said Jiang.
"Yeah? How long have you been very close?"
Mulder got the impression that Jiang was chuckling underneath his mask. "Come back to my office," said Jiang. "I'll give you a souvenier. So you can remember me when everyone has bread and nobody has wheat rust."
That was where the strange, warped leaf had come from. Jiang had taken from a desk drawer and pressed it into Mulder's hand. "It's a cherry leaf," said Jiang. "We did some of our early work with cherries."
"Is it radioactive?" Mulder wondered.
Brad said, "No worse than your cell phone."
"Great." Mulder turned the singed leaf over in his hand. "Was Dr. Wickham involved in this project?"
"It was not his particular area of interest," said Jiang. "He supervised many projects."
"Yeah, but could he duplicate this experiment?"
Jiang shrugged."With sufficient equipment..."
Mulder asked the question that had been sitting on the tip of his tongue since he saw the politician show. "Could you do it to a person? Alter their genes?"
"We're decades away from that," said Jiang. He seemed a bit peeved that Mulder had even asked. "This isn't science fiction."
"So why show me at all?"
"We show everyone," said Brad. "It's good for funding." He took a deep breath and let it out through his nose. "Listen. Dr. Wickham was a hell of a nuclear scientist. He could probably do just about anything he wanted. But he was a hardware guy at heart. You want to build a Star Trek phaser, you get him. You want to cure cancer, you get Martin Liu. You want to rewrite the genetic playbook, you get Jiang."
Mulder said, "And what about you?"
"What about me?" said Brad.
They were all crammed together in the peasants' office, nearly knee-to-knee. Mulder said, "What do you do?"
The kid gave him an amiable, surfer-dude smile. "Public relations."
#
And that was all Mulder had ever gotten, or ever expected to get, out of the Applied Atomic Sciences department on the subject of Chandler Wickham. The politician show and a radioactive leaf. Mulder pinned the leaf to the map, underneath Wickham's dusky chin.
He had never wanted to talk to a scientist more in his entire life.
And without Scully's perspective, what did he have?
State Department intelligence guys who weren't from State. Nuclear weapons that weren't weapons. A dead scientist who suddenly seemed to in charge of every morally ambiguous Doctor Frankenstein project east of the Mississippi. A pile of suspicions and anxieties with nothing to channel them or anchor them down. And a forty-five mile circle with almost two hundred and fifty thousand people living in it.
"Scully," he said. "We're nowhere."