Chapter 4
STAR LABS
"Thanks for getting here so quickly." Caitlin paused. "I mean, obviously you had help?"
"That's the thing about having metahumans for friends," Samantha Mulder said. "It's easier than waiting for an Uber."
Barry nodded. "Well, you could have been flown here but…"
"I've had enough experience with alien travel, no offense," Samantha said to Kara.
"Actually I don't take this personally," Kara said. "I'm trying to figure out the irony considering why we needed you here in the first place."
Approximately two hours earlier STAR Labs had received a communication from the Waverider. Caitlin and Cisco had been expecting contact – it was the whole reason the Legends had agreed to this in the first place – but not the nature of it.
What they had received was both incredibly valuable and obscure at the same time – something that everybody on the task force was getting used to but exhausted by having to deal with. On their first trip back Mulder had provided them a scan of a photograph that they'd heard about in the X-Files but was still shocking to see actual evidence.
"This is as close to a yearbook photo of the Consortium that we're going to get," Cisco said when he saw it.
"Shame that they didn't bother to sign it when they gave it to each other," Barry said.
"Where's the fun in that?"
The picture was of the Syndicate at the Strughold Mining Company in West Virginia. Mulder had obtained it not long after he been left for dead in New Mexico and it had led them to the one man in the Syndicate they had an ID who they had a name for: Victor Klemperer. The most evil Nazi to be brought over to America in Operation Paperclip.
Of course, as they all knew but had been two delicate to say, that wasn't the only person they had a name for. But trying to find information on Bill Mulder's work in the State Department and whatever connections he had to the Syndicate had been as difficult as trying to find the identities of the men they didn't have names for. Fortunately they had clearance to get through some of William Mulder's files. Unfortunately there was still very little on his work that Fox himself didn't already know.
William Mulder, like many men of his generation, had served in the Second World War, serving with distinction in Operation Torch. He'd returned stateside and married Teena Weiskopf. In 1949 he had joined the State Department in conjunction with HUAC.
Mulder had known about his father's connection with the State Department – it had led him to Arthur Dales in 1990, which in turn had led him to the X-Files in the first place. But the files from that era were heavily redacted and most of the information long gone. Mulder had said that they might be able to learn more on that end but right now it wasn't helping them much.
What little information they had found had been vague but occasionally illuminating. In August of 1953 Bill Mulder had been sent on a junket to Honolulu to talk with an individual who had been involved in what was referred to as Z-F Incident. They knew enough from the current X-Files to know this was a link not even Mulder himself had been aware of.
"This may be where it all started, " Barry said when he read the file. "At least as far as the Syndicate's part of it. "
"Sure as hell shows how bloodthirsty they were," Caitlin said reading through it. "119 men go on a mission, only six come back alive. None of them ever got an explanation as to what they died for."
"And Mulder's father knew all about it," Barry shook his head. "And I thought my issues with my father were complicated."
It had taken some work in conjunction with ARGUS but they'd managed to track down the travel records. Airports were almost all private in the 1950s and most of them were government operated. Bill Mulder had been sent out that August with two other men.
"Want to take odds that one of them chain smoked all the way through the flight?" Cisco said.
The names listed on the manifest were Charles Bloodworth and Ronald Pakula. This one they actually did know – Ronald Pakula was the real name of Mulder's first informant, who he had only referred to, perhaps tongue in cheek, as Deep Throat. Apparently at that point Deep Throat still had enough confidence to be using his real name. Bloodworth was an alias – but considering that one of Smoking Man's had been C.G.B Spender it seemed like a strong possibility.
"You think this is where they first worked together?" Oliver asked.
"Hard to know," Diggle said. "Mulder is certain that the Syndicate began operations after Roswell in 1947. Spender and Deep Throat always claimed firsthand knowledge of it but we can't trust the Smoking Man and Deep Throat could have come on after the fact."
"That leaves Bill Mulder and we have a reliable source on his involvement," Barry said. "He must have interacted with them at least by 1952, maybe earlier."
Even knowing where to start did little to make their job easier and what little they were able to find told them little they didn't already know. Pakula and Bloodworth appeared in many files up until the late 1950s when both men's name disappeared. They were able to trace some of the links by using the other known alias C.G.B. Spender but most of his files, unsurprisingly, were heavily redacted. They'd been hoping that the Legends were able to come up with information that they could use.
The photograph had been the first key link. And it wasn't just Klemperer and Bill Mulder who were recognizable. It was clear that some of the other men had familiar younger faces, among them the Smoking Man and Deep Throat. Mulder and Scully had each had encounters with a couple of the men in the photograph in the 1990s but neither had a name to go with the faces.
Cisco and Caitlin had sent this to every resource they had: the DOA, Argus and Felicity who was a resource unto herself. They were running it through all facial recognition software and cross-referencing the data with anything that was in the archives but they knew there was a lot to go through, that very little had been kept in recorded annals and what little there was might very well have been destroyed decades ago.
Then Oliver had realized that they did have a direct – and more important, trustworthy – link to the Syndicate as an ally.
"Where exactly did you get this?" Samantha asked.
"Your brother had it in an old file since 1995," Oliver said.
"What aren't you telling me?" Samantha asked.
"Many, many things," Cisco told them. "Kind of how you and your brother wanted it done in the first place. Only share information when we need it."
Samantha's attention wasn't entirely with them. Kara thought she knew why. "When did you learn about your father's involvement?"
"Early on. He never showed up for the tests but there were times he came. " Samantha sighed. "I heard them fighting."
"Him and the Smoking Man?"
"Mr. Spender." Samantha had a bitter look on her face. "I knew him from before, of course. I'm sure Fox had told you that our parents were old friends. He'd show up at our summer house from time to time. Neither of my parents were ever happy to see him."
"Based on what we know, his own family wasn't," Caitlin said.
"Did he ever explain why you were with them?"
"If there wasn't a term called gaslighting, they'd have to invent it for him," Samantha said. "He told me I was his daughter. That any memories I had of another family were a lie. Jeffrey knew better of course but he was too busy trying to protect his own mother."
"You'd have a better reason for wanting to put these people on a list then I ever did," Oliver said with sympathy.
"The difference is, they're already dead and gone," Samantha said. "Nothing can be gained by hating them anymore."
"So you know some of them?"
Samantha nodded. "All of this is essentially intelligence. You need to learn from the past to fight the future."
"We've been trying to gather as much information from our own resources." Caitlin said. "Anything you remember that can shorten the distance between two points can only help."
"The bad news is I only know a handful of the men in this picture, and none by name," Samantha said. "Most of the people who worked on me were the scientists rather than the men in suits."
"Okay, that might help in a different way," Barry acknowledged. "Though it probably won't shock you to know that most of them were evil well before they ever got near the plans for colonization."
"I'm familiar with our involvement with the Nazis," Samantha said.
"What about 731?" Barry asked.
"They got involved later on," she told them. "Given all of our problems with Red China immediately after the second World War, it took a long time for the Project to overcome the objections of winning over anyone from East Asia. And given the bigotry of the times it was a lot harder to obtain funding until after the fall of Saigon. Most of the Japanese scientists who worked for the project had to work out of Canada."
"Didn't stop these proud men from taking pictures with someone who was right up there with Mengele," Cisco could help but mention. "So much for the Greatest Generation."
"You're not kidding. I've figured out a lot about the Syndicate over the years. I still don't know what made my father throw in with them," Samantha said. "Fox tells me that it was his idea to stall in order to build the vaccine. But even trying to call these good intentions doesn't make him any less of a traitor."
None of them needed to point out that the only source they had for that was, to put it extremely mildly, an unreliable narrator.
"Anyway there's a real possibility you're going about this the wrong way," Samantha told them.
"Not impossible since we're not sure what the right way is to begin with," Kara acknowledged. "Where would you start? Or have you already been down this road and had no results?"
"I've made my share of false starts myself since I went on this quest," Samantha said. "I'm guessing that's a Mulder family tradition."
"It doesn't help when everybody's lying to you to begin with," Barry said sympathetically. "Or in your brother's case, being given false idols to follow."
Samantha nodded. "He's been delicate about that particular part. Not that I blame him. It's hard enough to deal with the fact that your family's involved in a plot for colonization; I can't imagine what it's like to learn your sister is essentially Patient Zero."
"Hence the reason he's personally involved on one part of this trip. We're looking at things from a more linear direction."
If Samantha thought anything odd about Oliver's choice of words she kept it to herself. "I can think of two approaches in addition to whatever you find from this photo. The first is start with the scientists who were involved. The men in this picture might be able to keep themselves anonymous; in order to get the science they needed; they wouldn't have that option."
"You want us to start with Paper Clip itself," Barry reasoned.
"When this came to light after the Cold War ended, our government did everything to keep the names of the officials who arranged it buried," Samantha concurred. "But considering how prominent so many of the scientists they hired were in regard to the Space Race, that was impossible."
"But according to Mulder's own files most of them had been killed by the spring of 1999," Oliver said.
"The scientists, yes," Caitlin said. "Not the science. In an age before computers and with work this important they'd have as much information and redundancies as possible."
"And there's no way you could do any of this work without lab techs or all kinds of technical employees," Cisco agreed. "That's before the fact that the companies they used still exist in some form."
Kara got it too. "Not to mention all the equipment they'd need. We know they used corporations as much as government. There have to be purchase orders somewhere."
"'Follow the money' was good advice when it came to Watergate," Samantha said. "Stands to reason it would work on a grander scale. And somewhere there will be links to the men in this picture."
"You said two approaches. What's the other?" Oliver asked.
"This one will be trickier but it might lead to direct results." Samantha said. "The night that I was taken, as I'm sure you've been told, I was brought to an air force base. I was far from alone. The Syndicate essentially handed over their wives and children over to the colonists."
Barry got it. "Cassandra Spender. Jeffrey."
"That bastard might not use his real name anywhere else, but he sure as hell had to use something on his marriage license and Jeffrey's birth certificate." Samantha said. "These people were barely human beings but the people they handed over definitely were and they had to exist somewhere."
"We might have gotten somewhere with that already," Kara handed over one of the files that they'd already had access too. "I don't know if your brother got a chance to show you this photo yet but…"
She handed Samantha a picture of C.G.B. Spender and Bill Mulder, the one that her brother had seen with he first learned one of the Smoking Man's aliases. Samantha looked at it for a long time.
"The man who killed my father," she asked slowly. "Is he dead?"
"Yes," Oliver told her. "Trust me, that won't bring you peace any more than avenging the man who killed mine."
"That's not why I'm upset," Samantha said. "There's something you don't know. Something I haven't even been able to tell Fox yet."
Everyone was a little confused. "He knows about the depth of William Mulder's involvement," Kara said.
"No," Samantha said grimly "No he doesn't."
UNDISCLOSED LOCATION
NEW MEXICO
"I'm kind of surprised you didn't have me blindfolded and handcuffed coming here," Cat Grant said.
"For all I know that's considered foreplay," Tad O'Malley said deadpan.
"Trust me, even when I was younger, that 50 shades nonsense was never my kind of thing." Cat said simply.
They'd driven for close to an hour after O'Malley had picked her up. They had stopped at a drive-thru on their way there, though it had been a Dairy Queen rather than a chicken place. Cat Grant still wasn't surprised when she found that their destination was a warehouse: it did check with what she'd learned about O'Malley over the years.
"All right," O'Malley said. "This is your meeting. What did you want to talk about?"
Now that she was in the lion's den Cat Grant was momentarily thrown. However she decided to start with something close to the subject matter at hand.
"How much of what you say do you believe?"
O'Malley had clearly expected this question. "More than you'd think; less than my listeners do," he told her. "Do you want to go broadcast by broadcast?"
"Let's start with what's happening in cities very much like mine."
O'Malley wasn't surprised by this either. "Make yourself comfortable." Cat had tried her best to keep a poker face but it must have shown. "I admit this isn't the Ritz."
"It's not even much better than a Best Western but I'm guessing you don't have a lot of visitors," she said as she took a seat in a folding chair. "I know you don't go as big with some of the talking points of your most famous competitors."
"I believe in law and order. But I also believe in the criminal justice system. And as someone who's read the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, I must have missed the section where the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a guy with a crossbow whose motives are still undetermined."
This was as good a place to start as any. "That's a reasonable approach. Would you back away from it if I told you I was in agreement with it?"
"I'm not that reactionary," O'Malley said. "But from the woman who introduced Supergirl -"
Cat held up her hand. "One costumed freak at a time. You do acknowledge there's a difference between say the situation, say, in Star City as opposed to Crescent City?"
"But not that far removed from what's happening in Gotham," O'Malley countered.
The man had come prepared.
"I'm not like my competitors. I know the whole red state-blue state dynamic is bullshit. America is and will always be purple. Some place it has a brighter shade of red, some place its more blue but it's still purple all the way through."
"Haven't heard that on any of your broadcasts."
O'Malley gave a small smile. "I say anything close to that, I'd lose a million listeners. But to your larger point I know that all cities have their own problems and this clear with whatever man or woman in a costume is supposedly saving the day."
There was a pause. "If you're asking to me to question your modifier, I'm not going to," Cat Grant said. "I see the same villains with horrible fashion sense and bizarre plans of attack on media as you do, and I can't categorically deny that they didn't start showing up in these cities because of the heroes in costume. They say things will get worse before they get better but even allowing for that, they haven't gotten close to getting better yet."
"So you can understand why some people – such as myself – might take the position that these vigilantes are themselves part of the problem," O'Malley said.
Cat had no intention of using his words against him – vigilante was a term that one heard bandied about no matter which city these heroes were in. And she couldn't dispute his larger point: she'd actually seen Mulder's study proving that there were numbers bearing that out. She wasn't, however, going to say so in his presence.
"Let's put a pin in the vigilante part of it for now," she said instead. "You do acknowledge in the last, say five years, we've seen increases in bizarre phenomena across the country."
"Roughly a quarter of my broadcasts have at least one item involving 'bizarre phenomena'; you're going to have to get more specific," O'Malley asked.
"How about starting with the explosion of the particle accelerator at STAR Labs three years ago?"
"That's interesting. Considering Lois Lane first interviewed Superman four years ago," O'Malley said.
"Aliens are on the agenda, Mr. O'Malley. Just not yet," Cat Grant said.
"Fair enough." O'Malley waved his hand. "Continue with your point."
"There have been bizarre things going on around this country – hell, this planet – well before these vigilantes started showing up and certainly before Superman did," Cat Grant said. "To argue that these costumed vigilantes are the root cause of so much of this would seem a premature conclusion."
"I'm in agreement with you there. Where I differ with you is the idea that these people claim to be a panacea for this particular problem. And I believe that they are at best, as much a symptom of it rather than the cure that they claim to be."
Cat Grant shook her head. "This would be so much easier if you frothed at the mouth or were standing in front of a chart arguing insane conspiracies," she said. "I've been the victim of more than my share of these freaks in the past year and even I can't really argue that your larger point is wrong."
"Look at us. So civilized and rational with our arguments. Are you thinking what I am?"
"That this would make extremely boring television?" Cat Grant nodded. "That's the problem with the business were in. Civilized reasoned debate on any issue isn't as entertaining as watching people call each other names and screaming talking points."
"They say the public doesn't want to hear that kind of things from their elected officials but they don't want to watch them talk about policy either," O'Malley said. "That's the thing about our society: when it works absolutely perfectly its completely dull. "
"It's made people like us rich and successful, though," Cat said. "That's the paradox. We're in this to make money, not to raise the discourse of society. If the public really wanted to see elevated discourse and discussion…"
"…PBS would be the highest rated network on television," O'Malley agreed. "There has to be a way for civilized debate to exist in a free and just society. But getting people to be interested in it, I think we both know by now that's never gonna happen." He looked at her. "So why do you do what you do?"
Cat was silent. "You know it's been a long time since anybody asked me that and didn't expect a sound bite," she said with a sad smile. "The truth is, like everybody else I did get into this with the best intentions. Raising the public consciousness, trying to elevate the dialogue, they're all cliches now but I did want to do that. I believed in truth and justice and all those childhood fantasies. And I like to think that I've done more in my career to meet those expectations and give something for women – hell, people to try and aspire too at least occasionally."
"But?"
Cat sighed. "I also embraced the worst parts of it. I don't deny its infinitely harder to be a women in this business than a man and you have to work twice as hard to get as far as they do. You have to play dirty, you have be ruthless and underhanded, and as much as you're hanging true to your principles they keep getting pushed more and more aside with the next goal. And pretty soon, you've reached higher pinnacles than you can ever hope to achieve but you find yourself divorced, with a child who won't talk to you, a lot of colleagues but almost no friends, and you're admired more than you're liked. And then you wake up and you realize as much as you've tried to lift people up, you've torn as many people down."
"Is that why you put so much effort into elevating Supergirl?"
It was odd. Cat Grant had actually come to this meeting wondering how she could make O'Malley talk about her so they could find out what he knew. She'd planned on finding a way to lead the conversation there so it would seem like O'Malley's idea that he'd brought it up. Now that she'd opened this vein of honesty, the fact that she'd gotten what she came for almost seemed disappointing – part of her had forgotten that this was at least partially a con.
"I won't pretend my ambition and ego weren't part of it," she admitted. "Given all of the discussion of costumed heroes and metahumans – and Superman was just part of the crowd – the competitor in me wanted to have one that she could introduce to the public. Supergirl may have been as much a story to me than she was a hero first. That may be a sin, but at most it's a venial one."
"That's the right thought and hardly done with the worst of intentions," O'Malley acknowledged.
"But?"
O'Malley gave a similar sad smile. "It argues Supergirl is an ideal and not a flesh and blood creature. She may be there as a symbol to inspire good, but you can't deny the fact that there's been just as much evil that's appeared in National City over the past year since she showed up. This seems to be the pattern not only with her but every one of these costumed figures. They show up at a time of darkness, things get better momentarily and then things get much, much worse. And it's bad enough when it kept relatively local as is the case with so many of these vigilantes but for someone like Supergirl it seriously seems that her existence is as much a threat to the planet as the aliens that are now coming to attack it. Hell, you might even argue that she's some kind of alien Bat-Signal that shines out over the planet summoning them."
Whether it was intentional or not O'Malley had come very close to one of the effects of Supergirl arriving in the first place. The Kryptonians that had caused so much trouble last year had only been drawn to Earth by the fact that they'd learned of Supergirl's existence. Once again Grant wondered how much O'Malley had been told by the new Syndicate and how much he could have figured out on his own. Right now she was more inclined to believe the latter – O'Malley clearly wasn't an idiot – but it was also clear he didn't need much information to prove what he clearly thought was true.
"So that is what this is about," she said. "The fear of an alien invasion."
"That flying saucers already sailed," O'Malley reminded her. "Your own network tells us as much. I'm not saying anything that hasn't been said in the last year, and certainly not from more prominent sources."
They were here. Time to get down to it. "I'm as lucid as you are on the threat we face," she acknowledged. "And I know damn well there's no Bill Pullman out there who can rally us to unite mankind against this common threat."
"You're assuming the threat started the day Superman made his presence known to the world," O'Malley said. "I think we both know it's been going on far, far longer than that."
Now to test the waters. "Sleeper agents."
"Or hiding in plain sight." O'Malley said. "I'm not as insane on the subject as some of my competitors but I did get my share of triumphant phone calls the last couple of years. I would have preferred to never have gotten them but I can't exactly tell them that they should put their tinfoil hats back on."
"Did you share their beliefs?"
"Not always," O'Malley said. "For a long time I thought everything having to do with flying saucers and alien technology was part of a different conspiracy that is far easier to accept: that these were all smokescreens for the military-industrial complex along with mankind's worse impulses."
"I heard your one interview with Oliver Stone," she said.
"Even I wouldn't have him back. That guy's nuts." O'Malley said. "That guy never got over Vietnam and he's been taking his PTSD out on film-goers everywhere for the last twenty years. He's going to be talking to himself until he dies. I can believe the government is capable of horrible things but the idea that anyone but Oswald killed Kennedy, that's where he and I part ways."
This guy's saner than Mulder. That's scary. "When did you begin to change your mind?"
"About two years before Superman made his grand debut I got my most recent packages from the FOI request." O'Malley said. "This time it made bells ring because I recognized one of the names. A man named Michael Kritschgau."
Only decades of keeping up a poker face helped Cat Grant keep her composure. "How do you know him?"
"One of my first interviews on the air was with an ex-DOD official. It's a measure of how desperate I was for airtime that I took him seriously. The guy was on such a spiral he made Fletcher Prouty look like Cronkite. I'm kind of impressed I kept a straight face all the way through it. But one of the few things that stuck with me was when he went on a long line of all his colleagues who had been killed because of what they had known."
"How seriously did you take him?" Cat Grant asked.
"I thought the guy was talking out of his ass. That said, I did my due diligence and I followed up on every one of the names he mentioned."
"And Kritschgau was one of them."
"The guy named thirty-four sources. It took me months to finish running them down. I checked all of the obituaries, all the ME reports. Only five of them died in conditions that could seriously be considered suspicious. Considering that Kritschgau had been found shot with half his apartment burnt down, I figured he was at least a legitimate possibility."
"You did you're usual background checks."
O'Malley chuckled. "To be clear fifteen of the people he said were killed were very much alive. Three of them remembered my source. And they were more than clear that while he had worked in their offices in the State Department, it had been as a janitor. By the time I heard the story of how crazy the kind who emptied his wastebasket was I was tempted to issue a retraction."
"Why didn't you?"
"Honestly I was afraid he'd sue me," O'Malley said. "The guy's actually one of my competitors now. He has half the listeners that I do but their twice as devoted and ten times as crazy as mine. At least once a month, he goes on the air to denounce me as being as a tool of the establishment and if doesn't show how far gone we are, I don't know what will." He paused. "And the other critical reason is that in some cases, he may not be entirely unreliable."
"Such as this Michael Kritschgau," Cat said.
"Kritschgau worked in the Department of Defense for roughly thirty years before he was cached from the government in the fall of 1997. Before he did so he was called before an FBI executive committee to testify in the matter of a murder of another employee Scott Ostelhoff."
Cat Grant knew the truth behind this story; she wanted to hear the 'official' version. "Who was Ostelhoff?"
"I'm still trying to get the complete record on him after twenty years." O'Malley told him. "What I know is that Ostelhoff was involved in several black bag operations, wiretapping, covert ops and in many cases, contracted killings. Which of these was responsible for his death isn't clear because when he was found murdered in a Georgetown apartment, his face had been blown off and the government never acknowledged what he was doing there in the first place."
"Did Kritschgau shed any light on the matter?"
"No, his claim was more up my alley. His argument was that the government had been involved in an unprecedented build-up of the military-industrial complex since the Cold War. He named several corporations that were involved but seemed more determined to get on the record that his son was a victim of the government's operations."
Mulder had left this part out. "And you verified that?"
O'Malley nodded. "Michael Kritschgau Jr. died the same day his father testified before the Bureau. I suspect that was the major imperative for his coming forward in the first place."
That part matched the official version.
"I finally managed to track down Kritschgau's official record two years ago. It's fascinating reading. According to him, everything that is related to UFOs from Roswell on out was in truth part of this same military cover-up. It was done as misdirection to make sure anyone who might come across it would go down blind alleys to make them look completely insane." O'Malley said.
"Did you buy that part?"
"It's a brilliant cover story. Use the context of alien invasion as a coverup for something more banal but no less insidious." O'Malley told her. "Considering that's been the pattern of the government from the Tuskegee study to Henrietta Lacks all the way up to Guantanamo, it is very hard to refute the logic."
"That's lucid and rational. But if the aliens are just a cover story why did Kritschgau's file convince you otherwise?"
"Because of something I tracked down, something he managed to get to a colleague the day he died." O'Malley said. "By that point he'd been cached out of the government and had taken up what amounted to a hermetic lifestyle. But something must have changed and he sent a notification to one of the few people left into the government who was still talking to him."
Cat Grant knew something of this story too. "What was it?"
"After everything that happened to him the last time he stuck his neck out, he was understandably circumspect," O'Malley told him. "Much of it was a combination of a mea culpa with little information. Save for one thing that makes no sense: "God exists and he is American.'"
"Why do I think I've heard something like that before?" Cat Grant said.
"It's a quotation from Watchmen." O'Malley must have noticed. "Yes, I am a nerd and apparently so was Kritschgau. It's how Dr. Manhattan is introduced years after the fact." He paused. "But that's later. The official quote was…
"The Superman exists and he is American," Cat Grant noted. The thing was she knew the truth about what Scully had discovered while this was going on and what she had learned about what Mulder might have become once he'd been exposed to the pieces of the alien ship. Neither version was accurate but both could very well have been considered so in 1999.
"You don't really think Kritschgau was killed because he found out about Superman, do you?" she asked O'Malley.
"I've believed in some fringe theories but I'm not that crazy," O'Malley assured her. "What I can tell you is that he must have learned something in his last days to go from arguing that aliens are a cover story to the idea that extra-terrestrials very well might exist. And whatever it was, it must have disturbed the powers-that-be enough for him to be murdered."
"How did you follow it up?"
"Unfortunately the trail was already cold years ago on Kritschgau. But it was enough for me to keep trying to figure out anything else he might have been connected with over the years. I did some digging as has my staff but we came up empty, save for one detail that doesn't really add up to anything."
"And what's that?"
"The same day Kritschgau appeared on the radar, there was a double homicide in a warehouse in Georgetown. One of the men found dead was an anthropologist named Arlinsky, who was connected with a hoax several years earlier that claimed to be proof of extraterrestrials."
Cat Grant had knowledge of this but many of the details weren't in the files. "Any connection between Arlinsky and Kritschgau?"
"None that I can find. What I do know is that the previous week he had been part of an expedition in the mountains of Canada where he had been chasing something that he believed was incontrovertible proof of extraterrestrials. When he returned to the site two days later, all but one member of the expedition – a man named Babcock – had been killed. Two days later he and Arlinsky were both dead and there was no sign that they came back with anything."
"You're thinking there was some sort of coverup?"
"Of what?" O'Malley said. "All the notes of the expedition has been torched, all the recordings had been destroyed and the only evidence anyone found of anything was a giant puddle. Ten men were murdered and not only is there no reason as to why, there doesn't even seem to have been a real investigation. All I see is a trail of dead bodies and they add up nothing, which is odd enough considering that one of them seemed to be a Section Chief at the FBI."
That part Cat Grant knew about. "And you think somehow this adds up to aliens?"
"I don't know what it adds up too. All I know is that everything on Kritschgau has a lot of dead bodies, a group of redacted files and one photograph that can't possibly be what it looks like."
That was news. "What? Evidence of the sasquatch?"
"I wish." O'Malley looked through the drawer. "Supposedly this picture was taken in a government facility and it was found in connection with Kritschgau's file. And if you believe it...well, take a look."
O'Malley handed her the photograph. Cat Grant had seen some bizarre things in her life – hell in the last year – but even with everything she knew about the X-Files and Mulder, this fell into the category of weird shit.
It was clearly a government facility. The first thing that caught your eye was the metal gurney with the body of what appeared to be an extraterrestrial.
And the next thirteen things that caught your eyes were metal gurneys with those same apparent alien bodies.
"I never liked Ronald Reagan," Tad O'Malley told Cat Grant. "But this sure as hell looks like he knew what he was talking about when he said government was the problem."
AUTHOR'S NOTES
A lot of this is mainly X-Files references. So I'll give you the cliff notes
We know Bill Mulder was working at the State Department as early as the 1950s. The incident where a young Bill Mulder, a young Smoking Man and we presume a young Deep Throat interview one of the survivors of the Zeus Faber is seen in the teaser of Apocrypha, the first episode that involves the black oil. How much Mulder knew of his father's involvement in the conspiracy is open to debate; the most we hear of it is in 'Two Fathers/One Son.'
Ronald Pakula is apparently Deep Throat's real name as we would learn in one of the episode in Season 11 (Mulder and Scully go to his tombstone) Raul Bloodworth is an inside joke; that's the pseudonym CSM uses in the novels he can't get published in 'Musings of A Smoking Man."
Samantha Mulder was supposedly kept with Jeffrey Spender as we learned in 'Closure'. We know the Mulder's hung out with the Spenders as early as Talitha Cumi, though it's never clear if Cassandra or Jeffrey were invited to these dinners. The families were among those who were massacred with the Syndicate at El Rico, but as far as we know some never came back.
I wanted a civilized conversation between Cat Grant and Tad O'Malley, and to be clear many of my own thoughts on how cable news are expressed in this article. I tried not toe editorialize to much so forgive me if I sounded preachy. I also think that the media would be clever enough not to lump all vigilantes under the same umbrella the way they frequently did in the Arrow-verse and that it might very well differ from city to city. There is a difference about what's happening in Star City and Crescent City and similarities between Star City and Gotham and it wouldn't take a genius to figure that part out.
Michael Kritschgau did show up in the Season 4 finale of The X-Files and essentially told Mulder the same story O'Malley narrates here (with far les purple prose than we got on the series). Kritschgau did work for the DOD and his son did die in the Gulf War, so its possible the terms are accurate. He resurfaced at the Season 7 premiere The Sixth Extinction and went from firm opposition to the existence of aliens to a complete about face in one encounter with Mulder. (I never said the writing of the series made sense.) He was killed for no real reason by the second episode of the season by Krycek because, conspiracy so I gave at least a partial motivation that ties to the story.
The events I described near the end took place in Gethsemane with one critical element that O'Malley doesn't know: the expedition found evidence of an alien body preserved in the ice. Of course it was then proven not to be an alien but a fake which means it probably was a real alien – honestly it depends on what Chris Carter was thinking any given day. The murders were committed by Scott Ostelhoff who worked for the DOD and who Mulder ended up killing. He visited the DARPA basement and found basically an entire basement full of these aliens, which mean…honestly I just think Carter put them to there to look cool. He wasn't really trying that hard in Season Five. I added the photo because it is the kind of thing that could be taken out of context and is exactly what a fringe talk show host would consider evidence.
And yes Watchmen is apparently a work of fiction in the Arrow-verse. Don't think about it too hard.
Keep reading and reviewing.