September 17
Mulder doubted he would sleep at all that night. If he allowed his mind to clear and settle, it might bring new insight into the mystery of Wickham's death, but it was more likely that he would travel back to the months when Scully had been taken, and when she was suffering and dying in the hospital. That had been a difficult time. He had not handled it very well, and he knew there were still depths to be plumbed. A smart man would not venture into those deep waters alone and unarmed. These were different circumstances, he knew; despite how little he knew of the situation, his instincts were solid on the issue of Scully's safety. His original impression had not changed. Wickham's death was the end of a thread that led to exposure and embarrassment, but only for the next few days. Any longer than that, and holding Scully became a Constitutional issue; any less than that and they would have let her go, trusting that whatever-it-was would be over before they could mount a serious investigation. If they meant to harm her, they would have stolen two corpses from the Raleigh PD's pathology department.
She was fine. Scully didn't need Mulder's help to handle a few DARPA thugs for two or three days. He knew that by now.
But the dreaming mind was not so trusting—or trustworthy.
Mulder soon found himself in a nasty paranoid dream in which he had returned home, but all of his office furniture was the size of skyscrapers. He had his gun in his hand and he was tracking the smell of cigarette smoke. He pressed his back against an immense file cabined and then stepped aggressively around it, cutting the pie like they taught you at Quantico. But the figure he drew down on was not the Cigarette-Smoking Man, with his implacable malevolence and confidence, but Winn, the young detective from Raleigh police headquarters. She had Wickham's sad and desperate expression. A corpse's eyes. Mulder saw reflected in them the images of tiny mushroom clouds, black and orange and ringed with smoke.
"Sorry." He holstered his weapon. "I think I have the wrong office."
She held her cigarette like she was making a point. "Do you?" She blew a thick cloud of smoke from her mouth.
"Yeah. I'm, uh." He ran his hand through his hair. "I'm not supposed to be here."
"How the hell would you know that?" She arched an eyebrow. "I mean, if you look at it from a probability standpoint, everyone is where they're supposed to be."
Mulder squinted. "Huh?"
"Balanced against an infinite universe, your existence is a statistical impossibility. Everyone's is." She shrugged. "But here we all are. In order for reality to continue, you need to be wherever you are. Your physical location is atomic destiny." Her dead, nuclear gaze flicked to something over his shoulder. "Are you gonna get that?"
"Get what?"
"The door," said Winn.
Mulder woke like someone had dumped a gallon of ice-water on him. Someone was banging on the door. Sharp knocks. At first he thought it might be his partner, but that hope was soon dashed.
"Hey, Mulder, open up."
Mulder frowned and padded over to the motel's flimsy door. He threw it open. It was predawn-dark outside, and the air was crisp. Lowering his gaze a little he took in a trio of men. The first impression they made was baffling. He wondered for a moment if he was still asleep. Sadly, no. If there was one thing you could say about the Lone Gunmen, it was that they were quite real. Mulder glanced at the digital clock on the bedside table. 5:41 a.m. He put his face in his hands and rubbed the grit from his eyes. Leaving the door opened, he found his shirt and pulled it on.
The three hackers stood in the doorway.
"We brought your go bag." Byers hefted a small duffel and gave Mulder a soulful, apologetic look.
Langley eyed the room, crossing his arms. "You know this is an FBI hangout."
Mulder nodded. "I've heard that."
"You sweep the room for bugs?"
"No," said Mulder. "I wasn't…" He spread his hands. "I wasn't actually expecting to talk to anyone."
Langley scowled. "Have we taught you nothing?"
Mulder started to speak, and then decided to let that one go.
"You OK, Mulder?" said Frohike.
"Fine." He paused. "What are you guys doing here?"
"Hey, you called us." Frohike pointed out.
This was true. The call to the Lone Gunmen office had been the long phone call Mulder had made as soon as he came to the motel. It was his own fault. "Yeah, I didn't expect you to pile in the VW and drive down."
They came into the room, quickly turning it into a mobile version of the Gunmen's own, relatively secure headquarters in Anacostia. Byers shut the door and drew the heavy curtains. Langley found the Gideon's Bible in a drawer and turned it over in his hands. "Hold on." Langley left. When he returned, the Gideon's Bible was gone, and he had a slim laptop under one arm and a surge protector in the other. "Tell me this place has an outlet."
Mulder pointed.
While the Gunmen brought in a small collection of information technology, Mulder explored the contents of the go bag. As a traveling cop, you learned to keep a bag packed. Mulder kept one at work and one at his apartment. This one had already been rifled through once. There were no clean shirts or ties in it. In fact, unless you wanted to shoot hoops, clean a gun or fight vampires, the kit was pretty much tapped out. At least there was a razor in there.
Behind him, Byers applied a small, round device that looked like an earmuff to the phone's receiver. Catching Mulder's eye, Byers said, "In 1965, the KGB perfected the art of turning a phone into a microphone." He tapped the handset. "Why go to the trouble off bugging a room when there's already a receiver in it?"
"Yeah." Frohike was peering up at Mulder's crime wall. He looked over his shoulder. "Three guesses as to who they got that idea from."
"The CIA." Langley unfolded a small gray satellite dish on the motel's tiny desk and plugged it in to his laptop. "Of course." Langley typed something on the computer, then began to calibrate the satellite dish using a compass. "Ha!" he muttered, to himself. "Dial-up is for losers."
"Don't worry. We're not just here for you and Scully," said Byers. "They're having I-Con East this weekend at the convention center. We're doing a presentation on open mesh nodes."
"Wow," said Mulder.
"Don't worry about Scully." Frohike kept staring at the picture of Wickham's corpse. He settled his chin in hand. When he spoke again, his voice was distant. "These guys who took her. They're not very good at their jobs."
"Yeah, they suck." Langley beckoned. "Lemme show you."
Mulder said, "Frohike, if it bothers you, you can take it down."
In the past few years, Mulder had gotten so accustomed to including the Gunmen in investigations that he sometimes forgot that it was like inviting the Boy Scouts to an autopsy. There was an element of cruelty in it. They were civilians, after all.
Frohike murmured, "Hold on." He took the Post-it labeled strychnine from Wickham's picture.
"You know about triangulation, right?" said Byers. "With cell phones?"
The problem with these guys was, you got whiplash. "Yes." Mulder squeezed the bridge of his nose. "I know about triangulation." Every cop and FBI agent did by now. When they first came on the scene, mobile phones had caused a bit of a conundrum for law enforcement. The physical location of a land line was, more or less, a matter of public record. You could hunt down anyone with a phone book and enough persistence. For a couple of years the situation had looked pretty dodgy, until some clever spook realized that all of a sudden, everyone was carrying around their own radio transmitter. As long as someone was within range of at least three cell towers—not a problem, in D.C.—you could not only see where they were, but track them.
"You sure you're OK, Mulder?" Frohike watched him carefully. "Cause you seem a little…"
"Yeah, I'm all right. I just got a headache from being woken up before dawn by the Keystone Cops," said Mulder. Then he realized he was being a little. "Look, I just need a minute. And some coffee. I appreciate what you're doing."
"OK." Frohike abruptly left the room.
Langley watched him, then shrugged. "OK, so we have Scully's number." He had pulled up a detailed map. Mulder recognized the Hoover building. Langley pointed at a red dot in its depths. "This is Thursday, end of the day, she's going home." The red dot moved through the building, eventually hitting the metro station and rolling out to Annapolis.
Mulder set his jaw. "You guys shouldn't do that to her."
"We only use our powers for good," Byers assured him.
"Whatever."
Langley continued. "She's at home all night. She gets a call around eleven." The red dot in Scully's apartment lit up, and a phone number appeared next to it." -252-555-0173. "Pretty late, right? But he must be a friend because she leaves right after that." He sped up the tracking. "Five hours later she's here in Raleigh." He pointed at the dot. "She meets up with the dude who called her. Zero-one-seven-three. At four a.m. they're both here together in the park. They have words I guess, but they're pretty short ones, because a few minutes later, she calls 911. OK, so far, so boring. Here's where it gets good."
Langley fast-forwarded through the record. Scully's phone went to the hospital, and then, shortly afterward, to the Raleigh police station. He continued, "Not long after that you got three cell phones coming into the building. They're cheap burners, totally anonymous, like you buy in Wal-Mart." Langley took his own burner phone from his pocket, then pointed at a set of new phones in the police station. "A total dead end. But here's the thing. They're not total morons because they make her turn hers off." The light indicating Scully's phone winked out. "But they're still morons." Langley tapped the screen. "Either that, or they just don't care."
Mulder stared.
The burner phones stayed on.
#
"Where do they go?" Mulder asked.
"Well, it's pretty weird," said Langley.
"How weird?"
Byers said, "It's a place called Lawdon—"
Frohike came back in with an open book in his arms, turning the pages frantically. It was a huge textbook. It rather dwarfed Frohike, and Mulder recognized it. It was called Forensic Pathology: A Diagnostic Handbook. He had a copy of it in the office. It was, in all, a gruesome book, providing full-color images of murder victims and other bodies in various states of distress. Not something you'd find at your local public library. Frohike balanced it on one arm, licked his fingers and paged through it. He crossed the room, heading back to Mulder's shrine to the crime.
"Lawdon, North Carolina," Byers continued. "It's on the shore. The place was always kind of miserable. They used to make some kind of special glue there. For upholstery. It was toxic. The factory was shut down and the whole town became a Superfund site. The population dropped by three quarters in a year. It's a ghost town. The only people who stayed are the ones who can't afford to move."
Mulder sighed. "I went into the woods because I wished to live deliberately."
"Yeah," said Byers. "They want privacy."
Mulder picked up his go bag and began gathering his other supplies. "We're going to find something there," he declared. "Something big." Despite himself, he felt a little kindle of excitement. "I think I already know what it is."
"No," said Frohike.
Mulder stopped.
"You can't go." Frohike's nose was still in the book.
"Frohike—"
"Listen to me," said the hacker.
"What's up, man?" said Langley.
"We're wrong." Frohike dropped the book on the bed. "About what this is."
The men gathered around it. It was a two-page spread. On one side was a black-and-white image of a man lying in a hospital bed. On the other was a color image of a mummy. They were both very old images. But they still had an effect. The victims had dark patches on their cheekbones. Their lips were pale. And they both had wide and bloodshot eyes.
One by one, the men looked over at the picture of Wickham on the wall.
Mulder glanced up at the chapter heading. Diseases.
He cleared his throat. "Frohike, what did these people die of?"
Frohike took a deep breath. He closed his eyes. "Influenza."
"The flu?" said Langley.
"In nineteen-eighteen, there was a worldwide epidemic," said Frohike. "Very contagious. Very deadly. And then it just… stopped. This guy, the mummy, he was an Eskimo. He died in the plague. The CDC dug him up last year." Frohike looked over his glasses at Mulder. "I wrote an article about it."
Byers pulled at his beard. "You know, I think we ought to skip the convention."
"Yeah," said Frohike.
A cold nausea climbed up Mulder's throat. "Where's my phone?"
The Gunmen were silent.
Mulder said, "OK, this isn't silly season. I need my phone back. Now."
The men looked at each other. Then Byers took Mulder's cell phone out of an insulated bag and handed it over. Mulder dialed 411. "I need the number for the Raleigh police. The detective bureau."
"Emergency or non-emergency line?" said the operator.
She'd been sick, Mulder remembered. A little red around the eyes. Sneezing. I'm sorry, she'd told him. It's flu season.
"Emergency," he said.