Lawdon, North Carolina
9:25 a.m.

He thought it would be difficult to find: a small, cramped office in an abandoned building, or maybe one of those portable military bases they put in airfields and fairgrounds—a fly-by-night operation.

Instead he rolled off the highway and onto a two-lane road that ran through a treeless Eastern Shore salt marsh. A few minutes later he passed a sign, Welcome to Lawdon—Pop 25,000, and then a wooden billboard, Proud Headquarters of the Waddington Adhesives Corporation since 1968, featuring a multiracial cast of grinning workers. The paint was bubbling and peeling. The highway dipped down to the ocean, which at that time and in that place was dark and still. Not a beach town, but a marsh town. The town hugged the highway, and in between the outer city limits and the sea was the factory.

It was huge. It wasn't a factory but an industrial operation: manufacturing, shipping, serious logistics. You could see the whole story in the campus. Solid corporate ambition, a well-planned town growing up to house thousands of workers, decades of prosperity, a great place to raise kids. Then a sudden decline. A rash of unexplained illnesses, maybe, or a savings-and-loan bust, or a hostile corporate takeover. Then the sudden evaporation of everything, followed by a costly closure by the EPA. The jobs and prosperity gone, the retirement fund gone, the town, essentially gone. Maybe it had all been an illusion in the first place.

An old American story.

Mulder pulled over about half a mile away and stepped out of Winn's BMW to inspect the place and snap a few pictures, thinking gone but not forgotten. There was a new and well-maintained chain-link fence, capped with barbed wire. There was a heavy gate, which was closed, and a manned guardhouse. Every twenty feet was a security camera and what the Army called a tipsy, a TPS motion detector. There were signs chained to the fence. He couldn't read them from here, but the letters were in red and black. No doubt they warned of the spectacular risk to life and limb associated with entering a Superfund site. There was still a faint chemical tang in the air, mixing with the dead-fish stink of low tide.

Well; that was an old American story too. The cleanup of Superfund sites was a federal responsibility, and a secure industrial operation in the hand was worth two in the bush. He collected his gear and jogged along the edge of the highway, shearing off before the approach to the gate and the guardhouse. He shivered as he walked. It wasn't raining particularly hard, but the clouds were thick and low, and it was unseasonably cold. He did not take any special precautions as he approached the fence. Even with the Lone Gunmen's help, there wasn't much you could do about things like motion detectors.

Getting in had never posed special problems for Mulder.

He stared up at the camera for a moment, then carefully took hold of the insulated end of the bolt cutters. He slammed the metal end against the fence. When it didn't spark, he grasped the links. They were ice-cold, but they didn't shock him. Quickly he snapped several links and opened up a gap in the fence. Now he was standing in a large and poorly maintained parking lot. An ocean of cracking tar, yellow marsh grass growing up to knee height. The nearest building, a gray warehouse, was a long way away. A shooting gallery.

He glanced back over his shoulder and took a sedate walk to the only vehicle in the lot, a deuce-and-a-half. It was abandoned, too—part of the old Waddington operation, not the DARPA operation. It sat on its rims, the tires long deflated, the windows shattered, and it was covered in rust. It would probably be there until the end of history itself. Mulder took one turn around it and hopped up once to look in the bed. Finding nothing, he drew out his gun, tipped the clip out of it, and put the clip in his pocket. He put the gun on the ground. He took out his FBI badge and put it on the truck's front bumper. Then he hopped up to sit beside it. He put his hands on his knees and watched the seagulls.

It took about five minutes. A single Jeep peeled out from the area behind the guardhouse and zipped toward him. Not the best security operation Mulder had ever seen. He could have gotten to the gray warehouse in five minutes. Two years ago, he would have tried. Not today. Today, the buildings held almost no interest for him. He wanted to observe the inhabitants.

The Jeep was Desert Storm brown, and inside were three burly MPs, two black and one white, all of them with the same expressions and haircuts and attitudes and sidearms. When he could see the whites of their eyes, he hopped off the truck, kneeled on the tarmac and folded his hands behind his head. He made a flip comment about taxpayer dollars and the cost of securing a Superfund site these days, and they ignored him. His badge and gun caused them a bit of consternation, but since he had blatantly violated both the perimeter and federal law, they arrested him. It was, Mulder realized, the eleventh time he'd been arrested on government property since the beginning of his X-Files career. He judged these guys as pretty rough for local cops but about average for MPs; he got away with a scrape on his chin, one on his ankle, and his fingers tingling because they secured his hands behind his back with a plastic ziptie. Eight out of ten was the score he gave them as they trundled him into the back of the Jeep.

He did not envy their paperwork.

#

They took Mulder to what must have been the Waddington Adhesives administrative offices, once upon a time. It was a long, low brick building. The campus didn't seem to have an actual jail. Instead, they brought him to an unheated conference room, where he refused to talk to the MPs. Then they took him to a small office, where he refused to talk to a lieutenant who wore a Navy uniform. Then they took him to a slightly larger office, where he refused to talk to a captain. After that they locked him in a bathroom for a while, while they either figured out what to do with him, made the obligatory call to D.C., or both. The toilets didn't flush, the windows had bars over them, and Scully wasn't there. At that point he was damp to his bones, but there was nothing to do but wait.

It had taken Mulder a while to see it, and he'd been looking for it. All the people who worked at the facility were men. That wouldn't have been remarkable even ten years ago, but these were the enlightened nineties and they were not in combat or on a submarine. You expected at least one junior officer or clerk… or scientist. And then, of course, the men were all done in the style of the MPs who had arrested him. Not one of them looked a day over twenty-five. Not one of them had a single cut or bruise or blemish. Not a pimple or a shaving nick among them. All of them were built like pro basketball players, lean, quick and well-muscled.

Mulder's inner skeptic answered this observations with a sort of shrug. So what? This was the military, after all. Recruitment favored young men in good health, and it wasn't like they were in a war. The confirmation, as far as Mulder needed it, was in their faces, and most especially their eyes. With the first three guys, it could have been training, but he soon learned that they were all like that. The whole Wickham operation was like that. Six weeks of boot camp added just a thin veneer of discipline over the fundamental humanity of soldiers, but not here. Make a joke or a sudden move, complain about the service, demand your Constitutional rights: nobody laughed, nobody rolled his eyes, nobody got pissed off. How likely was it that you would be in the presence of a squad of young soldiers and not meet a single slacker, clown or jerk?

You'd have better luck in a room full of Ken dolls. It was weird.

One of the reasons Mulder had had such a spectacular—if brief—career in profiling, and the reason he still had one of the FBI's best case-closure rates today, was that he didn't let things like improbability get in the way of his assessment of reality. In his experience, lots of things were totally impossible right up until the moment they punched you in the face. So he started with conclusions and worked backwards. Or he started with a conviction and built a case around it.

He preferred 'what if…' to 'and so…'

Back at NC State, the Applied Atomic Sciences group had been engineering plants to be free of wheat rust. A humanitarian mission. But what if you could use the same technology to make people stronger and healthier? What if you could have a generation of soldiers who didn't get sick, or who had extraordinary strength and endurance... or who were never in danger of suffering from moral anxiety or combat stress?

Of course the military wouldn't want to wait eighteen or twenty years to see if such a thing were possible. The next war might be over by then. Or the test subjects might turn out like Jiang's leaf, twisted and shriveled. Useless. There was another way. Mulder knew a bit about research into genetic engineering, and he knew that you could use a virus to insert a piece of genetic code into a cell. So what if they had used Frohike's flu virus to rewrite these soldiers' genetic codes? Anyone who got sick would become deathly ill, like Wickham and Winn. But some—soldiers, who were already especially healthy, or who had been prepared in some other way—some might survive it. The whole scheme was very unlikely, but in Mulder's opinion it was a great deal less likely than the idea that any army would pass on an opportunity like that.

He shivered. In a world where chimpanzees and humans shared ninety-nine percent of their genetic code, how different would someone have to be before you started talking about a different species? And what if it had gotten out among the population? That wasn't the worst thing he could think of.

The worst thing…

He went over to the bathroom mirror and looked himself in the eye. If he was honest with himself, he looked pretty lousy. He'd been going for more than twenty-four hours, and he hadn't stopped for things like food and hygiene. But breathing was good—no cough or congestion. He didn't feel feverish. He was all right.

If it was out there, worst thing wouldn't be catching it yourself. One way or another, that wouldn't matter much. The worst thing would be the moment you looked across the office or the bedroom or the living room and saw someone you loved transformed into something else.

He kicked the door. He started a little ruckus. "Hey! Open up out there!"

A moment later, one of the dead-eyed automatons opened it.

"I'm ready to talk," Mulder said. "I want to speak to your commanding officer."

One minute later, someone came with a pair of wire cutters and released Mulder's hands. As he rubbed the feeling back into them, he deposited himself in a leather chair in a large corner office that must once have belonged to Mr. Waddington himself. It was now the domain of one Major Mike Kovach, once of the United States Army and now head zombie of the zombie corps.

#

"I'd like my gun and my badge back," Mulder demanded. He had decided to do it the FBI way. His authority was like a slingshot compared to DARPA's cannon, but the sooner they could steer this whole mess down official channels, the more likely it was that Mulder would make it out of here alive.

"And you will have them," Kovach promised, "when you leave this facility."

Mulder said, "I'm here on official business."

"What business?"

"I have reason to believe that you're holding an FBI agent against her will."

Kovach had no reaction to that. He didn't claim innocence, he didn't press an intercom button and say bring Agent Scully to my office, none of the things Mulder expected.

Mulder said, "Is she here?"

"I'm sorry," said Kovach. "We don't take prisoners." He gestured to the door. "You're free to go." Perfectly calm. "Sergeant Hansen will drive you back to the gate."

Mulder stayed where he was.

Kovach said, "If we could prove that your colleague isn't here, would that satisfy you?"

Mulder answered honestly. "I doubt it." He took a deep breath. "But it would help."

He looked into Kovach's pleasant, empty, Ken-doll face. Another man, a normal man, threatened with exposure of this depth and nature, might show some signs of stress or panic. Maybe he would have Mulder killed or thrown in a brig forever. But if they were holding Scully here, the most rational reaction would be to release her, kick them both out, and hope there was no legal, political or investigatory blowback. After all, how many FBI agents could you disappear before the cover-up drew more attention than than the crime? Mulder had always known that, but this was the first time he'd come across a military bigwig that knew it just as well.

Kovach rose and gestured for Mulder to follow him. He turned out to be about an inch shorter than average. Not completely perfect after all. He followed Kovach to another desert-tan Jeep, which was being driven by one of the MPs who'd arrested Mulder in the parking lot. Kovach got in the passenger seat. Mulder hesitated, then got in the back. The Jeep rumbled and the MP pressed the gas. They turned, not toward the gate, but toward the inner sanctum of the Waddington Adhesives Corporation.

#

Several hours later, Mulder was as sure as anyone could be that Scully was not there and had never been there. He was still at square one on that. But he was deeply troubled, anxious and unsettled in his mind. Normally he was an eager consumer of the truth, but the last two days had left him at a loss, and now he felt he had been made to witness an atrocity. Mulder did not comment on his suspicions, preferring to let them percolate, and Kovach revealed nothing—naturally. Mulder was still a spy and an unwelcome guest here.

But still. Mulder knew what he had just seen.

The MP had driven them from building to building, and Mulder had been given the rare privilege of being permitted by these armed soldiers to get out of the car and search each one to his satisfaction. He did not find his partner. But he did find ample evidence that a large and expensive project, of both a military and medical nature, had been conducted at the Superfund site. It was now being dismantled piece by piece, the pieces loaded in trucks, the trucks all headed west. Men had lived here for some time, in barracks. There had been a well-equipped hospital suite and a library and an industrial kitchen. An armory.

A morgue.

There was housing here for something like two hundred men, but there were only about fifteen or twenty working at the site, including Kovach and the MPs, and they were all the same, as long as you disregarded the little details like hair and eye color. Mulder asked what happened to the others, and Kovach said they'd been reassigned. Mulder asked where, and Kovach refused to reply. There were rooms full of file cabinets, and computers, but the file cabinets that Mulder opened were unlocked and empty, and the hard drives were gone. The only factory in town, going out of business all over again. An old American story.

What had prompted this sudden dismantling? Not Wickham's death. This had been going on for more than a few days. They'd moved heavy equipment out of here.

Some of the buildings still smelled sharply of industrial glue, and Mulder got light-headed and his ears started ringing. But he kept going. He followed the trail all the way out to the seawall, and when he got there, he sat on the edge and took deep breaths. At several points he had needed Scully's expertise and missed it, but what he missed most was her steadiness, her moral conviction, her organized and scientific perspective. It all seemed a bit cold and nightmarish without someone to catalog and verify it with him, to process it into reality. And of course there was the question of what was happening to her right now. He could no longer tell himself, I'm sure she's all right.

The soldiers waited politely a few feet away until Mulder rose and approached them. It was two o'clock in the afternoon and Mulder had done a job on the chemical plant. No team of Quantico recruits could have searched it better.

He had been honest with Kovach before and saw no reason to stop. It wasn't as if Kovach was going to react badly to the news. "I've got another problem to deal with. But I'm coming back here. Soon. Tomorrow. With FBI people."

Kovach folded his hands behind his back. "You found evidence of a crime?"

"I found enough." Mulder wondered if that was true. Maybe—if he could convince a dive team to drag the plant's water-reclamation tanks.

"But you're satisfied now," said Kovach. "You'll leave willingly."

"I've got someplace to be," Mulder said.

Kovach nodded. Hands still folded behind his back, he glanced over Mulder's shoulder and cocked his head about half a millimeter. Mulder barely picked up on it. It was a command, intended for the Jeep driver. The blow came out of nowhere. It was a hard-driving thing.

Mulder went down like someone had clicked the remote and turned him off.