Chapter 5
UNDISCLOSED LOCATION
Laurel Hitchin liked to think she was fearless. She knew that she had to be to do the things that the Cabal needed her to do. On any given day, she might have to fly to Kabul or Yerevan, negotiate with ISIS warlords, cut deal about illegal arms sales to countries that America was not supposed to be dealing with, make decisions about palace coups in Africa.
She had no problem doing the Cabal's dirty work. She'd barely been phased when Raymond Reddington had literally dropped the body of the Director in her lap. Part of it was the nature of the work, part of it was being involved with the Cabal in the first place. Any sign of weakness, and you might end up falling from the sky.
This assignment, however, unsettled her. Quite a bit. And for her, that was the equivalent of a Navy SEAL shitting his pants. It wasn't because of what he did for the Cabal. It was the fact that almost everybody in the Cabal had survived a tenure with him. And everyone knew that their survival was far more likely due to his whims than to their own abilities. Everyone on the Cabal had control over how the government worked. Very few had gotten their hands even remotely as dirty as this man had. And none of them had ever enjoyed it as much as he seemed to.
There had been a while - a very long while - that everybody on the Cabal had presumed that the man was dead. He'd been dead before, of course, but there'd been confirmation of it the last time. There had been a general air of relief when he had gone - sure, he had been a legend in his time, but the overall consideration was that by now, he has long since passed his usefulness. Things would be a lot easier now that he was gone.
Then, on December 23, 2012, the Cabal had received a message on one of those servers that nobody had utilized in over a decade. It had been just seven words long, but those words had been enough to cause terror to run through the hearts of everybody else.
"You Missed. Back to Business. Merry Christmas."
There was no signature. No sign of who'd sent it. It didn't matter. There were only a handful of people who'd known about the code, and only one who wasn't in the room when it happened.
No one knew how he could've survived all these years. No one knew how he'd come back. The one thing they'd known was that one of their own had given the order. And if they were lucky, he'd just want a pound of their flesh in return.
Three days later, there had come a Skype. And there he was. Ten years older and considering how he'd looked last time anyone had seen him, he looked remarkably well, albeit though he was still smoking through that hole in his neck. He looked energized.. as if the rumors about aging serums whispered about were true.
He looked at them all, amused. His message was short and to the point. He knew that they'd tried to kill him. He knew that they'd thought his project was in ashes. He told them point blank that they were wrong, and now, they were all in his debt. His demands were simple. They would keep him appraised of their work, not because it mattered to him, or even in the grand scheme of things, but because he wanted to know in case it inconvenienced him and those who worked with him. They would know nothing about what he was working on, or who he was working with, and count their blessings. Should any of them try to 'intervene' the same way they had before, they would pay a price that would make what had been done to him seem like child's play.
Then - and it had to have been an illusion, there was no way he could've known where she had been standing - he had looked right at Laurel and told her that she was going to be his intermediary between the Cabal and his people. She was going to come alone, when he told her, and she would be searched every time. No arguments. No hesitation. If Assad and Netanyahu were negotiating peace in the Middle East, she was to drop everything.
Then he had given a ghastly, nicotine stained grin, and said: "Try not to blow anything important up." And the transmission had ended. They hadn't bothered to try and trace it. It would've been pointless.
There had been discussion. The kind of endless professional discussion that only came up when the most important people in the country were trying very hard to act as if they weren't terrified. Laurel had recognized it because she was just as shocked.
Perhaps not entirely by coincidence, Raymond Reddington had disappeared and shortly thereafter turned himself in to the FBI. Laurel had almost been relieved when that mess had landed on her doorstep; at least he was a known quantity. Reddington was a problem, but at least dealing with him had the feel of dealing with Mutually Assured Destruction. You couldn't handle the Smoking Man the same way.
And it had nothing to do with the rumor that he had invented the strategy.
Now, after years of dealing with all of the problems that Reddington had created in his maneuvers with the Cabal, they now had to deal with something that might be considered a serious issue.
Under the normal scope of things, Laurel would've considered the X-Files something even less significant than the Task Force Reddington was a part of. Fox Mulder was, in the Cabal's eyes, a problem not even worth considering eliminating, little more than one of those callers to an obscure talk radio station at three in the morning. Except, like a broken clock, every so often he was right. And after he had made contact about a government conspiracy that had sounded very close to what a branch of the cabal had been handling, there had been a decision made to have him eliminated. It didn't hurt that the Smoking Man was presumed dead at the time.
The day after the decision was made, a note had come from one of those servers. Very simple. "Don't you dare." That had been how they knew their man had missed.
For the rest of his career in the Bureau, despite the fact that Smoking Man was presumed dead the last year, and that Mulder had been confirmed dead for three months of it, they had decided they wouldn't touch him, and let the Bureau handle it internally. When he had gotten tossed out on his ass, and no one had done anything to stop it, they had decided, he was no longer an issue. And that had been it.
Until now.
And now, Laurel had to deliver this news to a man who, even by the standards of the people she had to negotiate among, had a level of ruthlessness that not even they were prepared to deal with. The rumors, if they were true, said that he had subjected his wife to decades of testing and torture. Who had helped raise his son to a position of power, only to subject him to the same tests when he failed him. Who had been responsible for experimentation and killings at a level that even they would never dream of? And yet, for reasons which boggled the mind, had let this gadfly flitter around, practically unfettered for over a decade. And now, he was on the verge of becoming a real problem for them.
"He'll see you now." Another nameless lackey. Though really, she shouldn't complain that much. Most of the people she dealt with didn't have names.
The man looked no healthier in person than he had during that Skype three years earlier. Laurel had no idea how old he was - the most conservative estimate had him at 88. That it in self was impressive - very few people in their business managed to last as long as Laurel had even if they managed to avoid all the 'accidents' that traditionally befell them. But she knew that there was a ridiculous amount of vitality in him.
"I don't recall my scheduling an appointment," he said before she was even within distance of hearing him.
"I realize that your schedule is very busy, sir." Great. Now she was practically genuflecting to the man. "But an issue has arisen that requires your attention."
The old man considered this. He then reached into his suit pocket where the ever-present pack of Morleys resided. A man who had undergone a tracheotomy had no business with them. But she had a feeling that if a cure for cancer existed, he'd use it.
"Your name has come up in connection with a task force in the Bureau," she began.
"That would be remarkable, since I'm pretty sure you don't know what it really is." The bastard had a way of sounding unsurprised amused by everything, even the fall of nations.
"Someone that the Bureau has had as a source has you on a list," Laurel wanted to see if this would unsettle the man. "Reddington."
The old man took it. Then held the cigarette to his voice box. "I understand he's been causing your people a fair amount of trouble over the last few years."
Your people. Not ours. As he did at every one of these meetings, he distanced himself from the problems that caused her and the Cabal such grief. Irked that he was being so dismissive, she decided to try and rattle him. "Most of the people that Reddington has given to the government have ended up dead over the past two years."
The old man took this in. Seemed to actually be giving it some consideration. Then he shook his head. "So, you're telling me this out of the goodness of what passes for your heart. Or because you're afraid of what damage I can do to your operations."
Every time Laurel came here, she wondered if this man really was still alive. "We are very aware of your importance to our operations."
"Such concern. Very gratifying." He considered this. "Personally, I've never understood why your little organization thinks so much of this man. The matters that he engages is, even by your standards, are petty, and by my standards, barely a flyspeck on top of another flyspeck."
Laurel knew that revealing your true emotions in front of this man was a wasted effort. But she and her organization were risking exposure by making this meeting, and he was treating her and them as if they were lesser beings. Suddenly, she wanted to hurt him. "One might consider your similar concern regarding Fox Mulder."
He considered this for a couple of moments. "I'm well aware that the X-Files have been reopened," he said slowly. "Mulder and Scully spent more than a decade trying to bring me and my people down. You know how well that turned out."
"The rest of the Consortium might disagree with your attitude."
He blinked for a moment. Had she gotten under his skin, or was he merely overcome by nostalgia for simpler times? "They were good men, the ones who worked with me. To the end, they were willing to follow by guidance. " Apparently, he was glossing over the time they had tried to have him killed. "But outside forces were responsible for their demise. The FBI never got close to laying a glove on us. I don't see why they would now."
"Even if they're working in concert with Reddington?"
He pulled the cigarette away from his neck, and finally looked directly at her. For the first time, she had clearly told him something he didn't already know. And as petty as this was, she wanted to hurt him. "The task force working with Reddington has been assigned to work with Mulder and Scully. Which means that even as we speak, they're probably giving him every last detail they know about you. Of course, maybe you still are as untouchable as you say you are. But given how effective Reddington has been at removing people in high position..."
Laurel let that last sentence trail off, trying to see how the old man would take it. He was silent for a few moments.
"We always knew Raymond was clever," he said slowly. "We actually tried to recruit him twice, once when he was still with the Bureau, the other time after he'd disappeared. He was crafty. Had he been working in consort with our people, who knows? Maybe more of us would be alive today." Now he fixed his stare on her. "I suppose I have your people to thank for that."
There it was the look that had supposedly seen presidents die. And somehow he had once again managed to turn this into her problem. The fact that this actually was her problem had not even crossed her mind for a few moments.
"I didn't come here to play who lost China," she told him.
"If this was a problem that you could handle on your own, you wouldn't be here," Somehow the old man had managed to regain complete control of the conversation. "I've known of Reddington's activities for nearly thirty years. And I know his weak spots far more than you."
Now she made another mistake. "Why the hell didn't you have him removed?" she practically sputtered.
"Like I said, a flyspeck on a flyspeck. Whatever he thinks he knows is all about his own self-interest. But if Mulder and Scully can point him in my direction, he might well move beyond the irritant stage."
"So he'd be a problem for you."
"Which would make him a problem for you. That's the real reason you delivered this timely warning, isn't it?"
Once again, the control was completely back in his hands. Laurel realized it had been an illusion that she had ever had any. "What should I report back?"
"I'll need real time progress reports on the task force from here on out." he told them. "As for the rest, I'll be handling it internally. We were able to handle leaks when it was far more difficult to ferret them out. We're even more efficient at it now."
Again, the all-purpose 'we'. Who were his people? Most of his associates were now dead. Was it someone within the Cabal's pocket? The circle kept getting smaller for all of them.
"You can go now."
Dismissed like a waitress at a greasy spoon, with no real hint as to what he planned to do. Still, Laurel considered herself lucky as she left, even though, she still felt like she had to do something that all her other dirty work never caused her to do.
Take a long, hot shower.
TASK FORCE LOCATION
John Doggett hadn't been on the inside of a major FBI task force - well since he had led the hunt for Mulder. The fact that he was inclined to trust this one even less than Mulder and Scully were didn't change the fact that their layout was pretty damn impressive, especially to someone who had basically been shoveling shit for a decade.
It was also good to see Ressler, who had actually been one of the few men he still knew from the job when he had come to DC. They'd had similar backgrounds as well as a meat and potatoes approach to the job. The fact that he'd actually been willing to head the hunt for Liz Keen after she'd killed the Attorney General actually impressed him more - he knew what it was like to go up against people who thought what you were doing was a fraud.
"Hell of a layout, I'll give you that," he told him. "Still not sure whether it's worth it, though."
Ressler nodded. "Lot of the time, I wonder the same thing." he admitted. "But you have to believe in some kind of moral compass, no matter how muddy it gets."
"I tried doing that the years I ran the X-Files," Doggett admitted. "But when you see some of the things I saw, compasses just don't work at that world."
"Mulder says you never really ended up chasing the things he and Agent Scully went after." Ressler told him.
"God's honest truth, I never could get my mind around those aliens he ended up chasing. I sure as hell never even met that chain-smoking guy we're going to be after." Doggett told him. "Honestly, I'm not sure how much help Mulder thinks I can be finding this guy."
"Then why'd you come? I realize diving through fertilizer isn't thrilling, but at least it's honest work." Ressler was being surprisingly open. "Not like this hunt is going to jump start your career again."
"I think you know by now that being assigned to the X-Files pretty much guarantees the end to your future at the Bureau." Doggett glanced at Monica surreptitiously. "There are fringe benefits, though."
"Like?"
"Getting the truth. Finding this bastard will mean ending the career of a monster. And if the guy should disappear of the face of the earth, I don't think there's anybody in this room who would lose any sleep over it."
"I think we've got something." Aram told them. "I've been trying to cross reference anything with Roush Pharmaceuticals to any projects in the Mid-Atlantic States. In 2010, they opened a group of plants involving neonatology and fertilization drugs in a facility in Wilkes-Barre."
"I'm not seeing the connection." Liz said.
"I do." Mulder told them. "In February of 1997, I investigated an office in that area that was doing oncology studies." He looked at Scully. "In it, I found a group of men who were supposedly the end products of the same kind of experimentation that Agent Scully had been subjected to two years earlier."
Cooper looked at them. "A group of men?"
Mulder exchanged another look with Scully. "Human clones." he finally said. "Clones that had been produced from ova extracted from women like Scully who had been subjected to the same experiments."
Doggett had read that when he had first joined the X-Files. He hadn't believed it then, and even now it was still hard to believe. He couldn't imagine what the rest of this taskforce was thinking.
Samar reacted first. "The technology you're talking about just isn't there," she said slowly.
"I'm well aware of that. But I've seen these clones." Scully told them. "And if Roush is involved, I find it very likely that this is only the tip of the iceberg. In any case, I think it's our best place to start looking."
Doggett was well aware that Mulder was leaving a vital part out of his story, but since they had no idea whether they were chasing aliens right now, he decided to follow Mulder's lead.
"What exactly is the play here?" Ressler asked. "We still don't have a name for this guy. There's no way to tell if he's on their board of directors."
Mulder looked at Aram. "Any leads on that alias we gave you?"
"I've gone through hundreds of searches looking for anything connected to C.G.B. Spender." Aram told them. "There isn't anything on him more recent than 2001. You're probably right that it was purged after the last time you thought he was killed."
Nobody was really that shocked. Then Scully spoke up. "What about Jeffrey Spender?"
They had gone through the files there, too. Liz had told them Jeffrey was the Smoking Man's legitimate child. The son of a supposed alien abductees named Cassandra; he had been assigned to head the X-Files in the fall of 1998. Considering he didn't believe in anything paranormal; it was clear that Jeffrey had been sent there to obstruct any real work. Eventually, he had come to realize what his father was and turned on him. The father had supposedly murdered the son in February of 1999, but according to one of the files written by Doggett, Jeffrey Spender had reappeared in April 2002, horribly scarred, the victims of some kind of dreadful biological experiments. The last time anyone had seen him had been at Mulder's trial.
"You were pretty sure that the man was on his last legs, and that was fifteen years ago" Ressler had told him.
"Maybe it runs in the family." Mulder said with a certain degree of bitterness.
"You also told us the last thing that man would do was work with his father," Liz pointed out.
"We're also pretty sure he's the only person who wants him dead more than we do." Scully sounded even angrier than Mulder. Doggett knew why, because he was damn sure they hadn't given that file to the Task Force. And he had no intention of telling that secret to them.
Aram, in the meantime, had apparently gone about doing that search on his own. "Last record I have of him is in 2011."
That attracted their attention. "Where exactly?" Cooper asked.
"There's a record of a ticket being sold to him on a diplomatic flight to Tunisia in October of that year." Aram said.
"You got any video on that?" Mulder asked.
Aram did some typing. "Holy fuck." Scully said.
There on the security footage stood a forty-ish man with dark brown hair, dark brown eyes, and some fairly severe scarring over the rest of his face. "Looks pretty good for a dying man." Scully said.
"Looks pretty good considering how he looked when we last saw him," Agent Reyes told him. "Where in Tunisia was he headed?"
"Sidi Bu Zayh." Aram told them. "It's an area known for holding a lot of political dissidents."
"It was also one of the international hubs for a lot of the Syndicate's work," Mulder told them. "And we know exactly the person who could've provided him with the credentials to get there."
"Marita Covarrubias," Liz said. She'd read the files nearly as thoroughly as Doggett had. "Start running facial recognition software. We need to know where Jeffrey Spender has been going and what he's been doing."
Now John was puzzled. "I may not have trusted Jeffrey Spender any more than you have, but the last thing he told us was that he wanted to destroy everything his father had built. There's no way in hell that he would've switched sides again. These are the people who tried to kill him."
"They tried to kill his father, too." Mulder sounded more cynical than he ever did. "The old man had no trouble going back to work for them. Why should it be a shock that the apple didn't far that fall from the tree?"
Assuming, of course, that's still him. But Doggett knew that the word 'aliens' was not going to come up in this conversation. Mulder wasn't sure he bought into it anymore, and he sure as hell wasn't going to tell the taskforce otherwise.
"All right. First things first. Let's follow up on Roush. " Cooper looked at Mulder and Scully. "I assume you'll want to go to Pennsylvania."
"I'd like nothing better, but there's a good chance we're still on the Conspiracy's radar." Mulder told them. "Besides, we were both involved, even if it was nearly twenty years ago."
"I'll do it." Monica told them. "This was well before my time on the X-Files. But this still presents the problem of how we're going to find a link to this man."
"Let's just get into the building." Ressler told them. "We'll worry about the rest of the intel when we get in."
Liz, who had been remarkably quiet considering this had been her project, finally spoke up. "Reddington brought this man to our attention, and he knew a lot about the experiments. There's a very good chance that he could find out some of the parts were missing."
All of the agents assigned to the X-Files immediately flared up, especially Mulder. It was clear that no matter how evil and horrendous they considered everything the Smoking Man had done, nobody wanted to get anywhere near Reddington. If Reddington had walked up to them with the Smoking Man in chains, there was a very good chance Mulder would've let him go, rather than having to owe him anything.
"If you want to go to Reddington, you can do that." Mulder was speaking with a coldness that Doggett hadn't even heard when the man had been sentenced to death. "You are, after all, a private citizen now, who owes nothing to any law enforcement agency. But let me make this clear, in case you forgot: if you give us any information that comes from an illegal source, I will see to it that you are sent back to prison."
Now, the tension was raised to 11. "You can't be serious," Ressler found himself saying.
"I'll put the cuffs on myself." Mulder told them. "We made our terms very clear when we agreed to help you. This may just be crossing off a name on a list to you. It's very personal to us. And I will be goddamned if I let the Concierge of Crime do anything to piss all over this manhunt."
Liz couldn't believe things had gotten so fucked up this quickly. She looked at Scully for sympathy, and found her face was, if anything, even angrier than her partner. She looked at Agent Reyes, who had seemed so empathetic a moment ago.
"We're grateful for your help," Monica said slowly, "but believe me when I tell you that you and your taskforce are in over your heads. You're nowhere near qualified to handle someone like this man, and what he represents. If you want to throw us out of here for being insubordinate, go ahead. It's part and parcel to being assigned to the X-Files. But Mulder's right. You need us more than we'll ever need you."
And to his surprise, Doggett was inclined to agree. This taskforce might have more technology and resources than the X-Files had ever had, but they hadn't seen the things that they had seen. He might not have ever been able to fully wrap his head around some of what he had witnessed, but at least he was willing to seek the truth. The people on this taskforce might be doing good work - no matter how congenial they seemed, John had been buffaloed far too many times to think they could be trusted - but they were grounded in the real world. They were utterly unprepared and unwilling to go chasing UFOs. And as much as he'd like to see Reddington put through the tests that Mulder had been forced to endure, even that monster knew he was unprepared. It was why they were there in the first place.
Considering the lack of faith anybody had ever shown in the X-Files, as well as everything they had just said, Mulder wouldn't have been shocked that they would ask him and the rest of the unit to leave. Hell, he had spent his entire career at the Bureau doing his best to lose friends and negatively influence people. He would've been shocked to find out he had lost his touch. But apparently these people had more patience for this than they had twenty years ago.
"We made a deal with you earlier, and we intend to stick to it," Cooper told them. "No one in this unit is going to make contact with Reddington."
There was just enough ambiguity in that statement for loopholes. But considering that they weren't being completely honest either, Mulder decided to let it go.
"Agent Reyes, you and Samar will go to Wilkes-Barre. See if you can find any leads in Roush that might narrow down the field." Cooper then turned to Aram. "Start checking security footage to and from Tunisia. See if we can pick up the trail on this Jeffrey Spender."
"What about Covarrubias?" Scully asked. "I never trusted the woman, but if there's any possible link to this conspiracy still alive, she has to be connected to it."
"I'll handle it." Mulder told them. He looked at Aram. "Check Jeffrey Spender's credentials. They'll be some kind of backchannel that will lead to her."
Ressler must've sensed the barely reined in level of aggression that had been in Mulder's voice. "How are you going to handle it?"
"At my trial, Skinner called her to testify for me, and I pulled him off before he could press her too hard." Mulder gave a small smile. "I'm just going to remind her that she owes me one."
"They've resumed their investigation into the work."
Garrett had never liked having to hear from go-betweens. The only reason he was willing to tolerate it this time was because he knew who this man - whose gray hair hadn't changed in nearly twenty years - was the key go-between for.
"Can it be handled internally?" Garrett demanded.
"Not at the moment."
"Why not? And don't give me that 'turning one man's religion into a crusade' crap."
"Because it's no longer just one man."
If Garrett hadn't been pissed before, he sure as hell was now. "How many years have we been telling that old fart that it was too dangerous to leave Mulder alive? Now we're all exposed!"
"Do you wish me to deliver that message to him?"
Another rhetorical question. "What I want to know is how he expects us to proceed given the fact that a spotlight is going to be shining on us very soon."
"The people that Mulder has allied are in concert with Mr. Reddington. I've been given to understand that members of that task force have come to untimely end because of their investigations. Mulder and his colleagues can't be touched. No such protection may be delegated to those people working on the task force."
Garrett got the message. "Any instructions on how he wants it done?"
"Just don't fuck it up like you did the last time." With that, the Grey-Haired Man terminated the communication.
Always hinting at the failures. Well, if Mulder and this task force were heading to Pennsylvania, he supposed he owed it to them to show them a brotherly welcome.