Chapter 6
CATCO OFFICES
"I don't know why I'm surprised by this anymore," Felicity said, shaking her head. "I guess at the end of the day a billionaire does think they can do anything whether they're disguised as a vigilante or just wearing a pantsuit."
"Am I supposed to be flattered or offended you're comparing me to your fiancée?" Cat Grant asked.
"I think you need to take it in the spirit of which it's given," Quentin Lance said flatly.
When Cat Grant had broken off communications no one had been nearly as terrified as one might have thought – this was the kind of thing Team Arrow was used this and realistically speaking Cat Grant had been in more dangerous situations than this. This was a woman who'd interviewed one of the leaders of the Taliban a full year before the War On Terror had begun; by comparison Tad O'Malley was a cream puff.
That didn't mean the next six hours had been a lot of fun for those she'd left behind; Felicity had been on the verge of sending out a call to Star Labs when Grant had asked them to send the corporate jet to Santa Fe. She assured them nothing horrible had happened to her and that her meeting had been informative. Beyond that she'd refused to say anything until they were all back in CatCo with Quentin, Felicity and the reporters who knew what she'd been planning.
"I have to admit Catherine, if any of us had done this sort of thing even if it were to follow a story, you'd be chewing us out for at least an hour," Kara informed her boss. "Is this really just a 'do as I say not as I do" kind of thing?"
"I had the feeling that this was the default for every single member of this task force at some point or another," Cat Grant reminded them. "Is this kind of thing just allowed for people who are still flush with youth? I've actually faced far worse threats from the comfort of my own office as you yourself are well aware."
"Would you let us have this one, please?" Felicity asked. "Do you how rarely it is we get a chance to chew out the grownups?"
"Fair point. Do your worst."
Felicity opened her mouth, then closed it. "No, the hypocrisy would be too great even for me," she admitted.
"Hard to argue with that," Quentin admitted. "What exactly did you learn from your little sojourn into the belly of the beast?"
Cat Grant then summarized her meeting with O'Malley.
"Well, we've had far worse first encounters," Kara admitted.
"Are you kidding? This is actually unheard of," Felicity said. "The two of you had a civilized exchange of ideas and didn't even raise your voices once. I don't think Oliver has the ability to do that, no matter what face he's wearing."
"Well, don't name me ambassador to the UN just yet," Cat Grant said. "It's not like I was able to get him to do more than agree to more than future meetings."
"Diplomacy isn't the strong suit of any of us, myself included," Quention reminded them.
"Your jobs are different from the kind I've had to deal with over the years," Cat reminded them. "Much as I admire Mike Wallace, sometimes David Frost can get the job done just as easily."
"This guy wasn't exactly Richard Nixon, but I see your point," Quentin agreed. "And as far as he knows you're just the voice of Supergirl, nothing more."
"'Knows' is different than 'suspects'," Grant reminded them. "If I had any doubts about how clever O'Malley was before, they're completely gone now. At the very least he must believe I've always known Supergirl's real identity. I did nothing to give anything away one way or another but he's enough of a journalist to know about sources."
"You don't think he'd believe the truth?" Kara asked.
"Need I remind you I had figured it out after three months?" Cat Grant pointed out. "Your optical illusions did nothing to disprove my original suspicions. They merely caused me to stick a pin on them until I had more evidence."
Kara wasn't about to argue the point. "Did he ask any questions about that?"
"The problem isn't that he knows who you are. The problem is," Cat sighed. "he's scared of what you are. And don't forget that even before we began this little dance that there were more than a few people who felt that way in the first place. That's the reason that this Syndicate is reaching out to O'Malley. Whatever he said, he's not saying it in a vacuum."
"It's actually worse than that," James said. "Most of these kinds of people are either complete bigots or cherry-picking their facts. O'Malley's discussion isn't dangerous because he's lying but because his interpretation is not only understandable but rational. We know that he's wrong about a lot of what he told you but the only reason I know that is because we're on the inside."
"And I'm guessing you couldn't tell him why he was wrong for that same reason," Felicity guessed.
"The fact is even if they know the truth it probably won't change a lot of people's minds," Quentin admitted. "Oliver admitted more than once the last few years he's had doubts about whether he's changed things for the better in Star City. We're trying to win hearts and minds, but that's tough on smaller issues rather than the big ones."
"I'm beginning to wonder if this may be a part of the Syndicate's plan all along," Cat Grant said. "Whenever someone on one of my rivals brings up terms like an 'existential crisis' I wince. I know there are major problems with our society even before we had to deal with the possibility of an alien invasion. And I also know the reason we can't deal with them is because all of us are so busy with everyday problems that we don't have the time to deal with the bigger ones."
"You're saying their hoping for world indifference to lead to an alien takeover?" Winn wasn't entirely doubtful as he said that.
"You know those people who say: 'it's not the money, it's the principle?' Most of them can afford to have principles because they have money," Cat Grant said sadly. "I'm no different. I'm only able to raise awareness of the kind of good causes and works I do because I'm a billionaire media mogul. O'Malley has a point when he chooses to call me out on that. The date may very well be set but most of the people on the planet are too busy trying to survive on to face the next day to deal with the future."
"This is getting really depressing," Felicity said.
"I'm sorry for dragging down the fun factor of fighting an alien invasion. Shall I provide you with a laugh track?" Cat Grant said in a very Cat Grant tone. "How about we deal with more pressing matters?"
"Like how he may be closer to the truth about the original conspiracy than we thought," James said. "I'm guessing you didn't give away you knew the players in the story."
"It was an interesting perspective on what I read in the files," Cat Grant admitted. "I had a conversation with Skinner before I got her. He confirmed everything that O'Malley told me about Kritschgau save for one detail."
"The alien bodies in the DOD," Felicity said. "Well, from the files we know that Scott Ostelhoff committed all of those murders for the sole purpose of convincing Mulder to go public with what he knew about the body that was proven to be fake. And we know that Mulder was looking for a cure for Scully in DARPA and he saw all of those bodies. What we don't know is whether they're part of the hoax or actual aliens."
"Considering that we have two conflicting conspiracies, it could very well be either one," Kara admitted. "Considering that Mulder was investigating the one that was part of the fraud, that would seem to lead one conclusion. But lies have been hidden between truths before."
"What does O'Malley believe?" Quentin asked.
"His version of events is closer to Mulder's original one," Cat Grant said. "Based on what he knows and the other evidence he's collected over the years, it's the simplest explanation. Now for that very reason he himself is inclined to doubt it – his own motto is that the simplest explanation is rarely the truth – but his independent research has led him to believe it."
"Was he willing to go any further than that?" Felicity asked.
"Not unless I was willing to show a couple of cards of my own," Cat Grant said.
THE PREVIOUS DAY
"If you want me to tell you the government's hands are clean on anything you know I won't," Cat told him. "Hell, I've spent a fair amount of time airing their dirty laundry. And I'm well aware that are propensity for killing innocent civilians goes well before we started doing drone strikes."
"I don't exactly expect you to interrupt your network with this as breaking news," O'Malley said. "But considering that just a few months ago you were willing to go forward with two prominent sources who have been covering these kind of events before either of us had either a pot to piss in or a mike to shout in, you know more than you're telling."
"I couldn't have just had a come-to-Jesus moment after everything that happened to me last year?" Cat was actually skating close to the truth.
"That might come more convincing from a self-declared atheist," O'Malley countered.
Cat Grant decided to play one card. "I'm not that different from you in theory," she said. "Over a long career you develop sources. Some of them are little more than 'I know a guy who knows a guy' but that knowledge occasionally pans out."
"And they were one of your sources," O'Malley said.
"Actually they were the ones that didn't pan out," Cat Grant wasn't going to give away the store. "And don't pretend that our journeys were the same. I had to work harder for legitimacy. That meant discarding the kind of stories that would have gotten me working the gossip column at the Weekly World News if I was lucky."
O'Malley, to his credit, didn't deny that. "So you knew of Fox Mulder and Dana Scully but you didn't know them."
"Only Mulder." A partial truth. "And then only from his early work in VICAP. After I left DC I heard he'd gone down a rabbit hole and I didn't have the time to crawl after him. That didn't mean when his face wasn't on one of the TV I didn't recognize it. I just didn't point out we knew each other."
"Probably the smart call," O'Malley admitted. "I heard about them fairly early in my career but not until after Mulder was named on the ten most wanted list. After that, tracking him and Scully down was a moot point."
"I assume you've made FOI requests for their work over the years?" Now Grant knew she needed to find out.
O'Malley shook his head. "I'd only heard whispers but what I learned made me seriously think that whatever they'd done, the secretary had disavowed any knowledge of their actions long ago. I'm already on the government's shit list; I didn't want to give them a bigger reason to target me."
Cat Grant didn't want to tell him he'd been walking in their footsteps with the last tidbit he'd just revealed. "But you clearly knew who they were."
"That has taken a lot of time and energy, neither of which I have a huge amount of given my schedule," O'Malley told them. "It's been what amounts to the one of the longest side-quests I've been working on for the last five years."
"Does your staff know about it?"
"Only indirectly," O'Malley told her. "Every so often I'll given them dates and places to do some research on. I tell them to be more careful then usual and I've been preparing false IDs for them to fall back on in case anyone asks them. For their protection, not mine."
"You're following their backlog."
It wasn't a question but O'Malley answered anyway. "They had to file expense reports, register in motels, book airfare and rental cars. Essentially I have my staff going out into the cheapest motels in the dirtiest of backwaters to find out information that's at least twenty years out of date. This is a luxury only someone like me could afford and even then I can't have them do it that often."
"Very impressive work," Cat Grant had admitted. "Sort of half-investigative reporting, half-historian. How much of a picture have your staff put together?"
"I imagine it would be easier to find records of obscure Civil War battle," O'Malley said. "Almost all of the information is second-hand at best, and its usually third or fourth hand." He sighed. "I've had to engage in methods that wouldn't qualify under the ethics of the journalistic code, from bribery to lying that this will be appear on a podcast down the road. It's probably the only way I could get any of this information at all…"
"If it makes you feel any better I'm guessing the higher-ups wouldn't be so kind to these sources," Cat Grant admitted.
"A little. But not much." O'Malley said.
PRESENT DAY
"O'Malley's been following Mulder and Scully's old trail," Felicity said.
"Does he qualify as a fan or a stalker?" Quentin asked.
"Well, he's trying to figure out what they were on to and he's made no overt effort to make contact with the two of them," Grant said. "So right now, it's closer to option A."
"How much has he found out?" Kara asked.
"Considering very little information about the X-Files ever made the public record, surprisingly well," Cat Grant said. "That said, the lion's share of it have less to do with the conspiracy part of the files and far more to do with the monsters they chased across the country."
"That might actually be safer for him, all things considered," Felicity acknowledged. "What does he know about the rest of it?"
"Almost nothing," Cat Grant told them. "I had to dance pretty fast to make sure I didn't give anything away but from what I can tell all he knows is that they spent a fair amount of time investigating alien abductions and certain government coverups. He has no idea about what they spent the better part of their careers investigating and while he is aware that both Scully and Mulder went missing for three months seven years apart, he doesn't know anything more than that. He assumes they were taken because they got to close to something but he has no idea as to what."
"And you didn't leave a bread crumb to the major events we know about?" Kara told him.
Cat shook her head. "I was just there to find out what he knew; I wasn't going to point him in the direction we wanted him to go until I could establish trust."
"And he's willing to listen."
Cat Grant nodded. "He told me I'd given him a lot to think about. He said that he'd be willing to reach out later on but there were conditions. He would be the one to initiate contact and I would agree to the meeting point."
"It couldn't be that simple." Everyone looked at Felicity who stood firm. "You do remember some of the shit we've had to do just in the last several months?"
"It's not." Cat Grant admitted. "He reminded me of the term quid pro quo. By agreeing to this meeting and by willing to share a lot of what he knew, he'd given away quite a bit. Next time, he makes contact he wants something in return."
"Don't tell me he wants to know who I really am," Kara asked.
Cat shook her head. "I wish he was asking for something that easy. He knows that Mulder disappeared in May of 2000. And he knows Mulder was found dead in a field three months later. So understandably he's curious as to how he managed to break into a top secret government facility in May of 2002."
"You don't think he'd settle for the fact he just got better?" Felicity joked weakly.
"I think he knows that. The problem will be telling him how."
ONBOARD WAVERIDER
There are no apparent changes in the timeline reported.
"What about the man who interrogated me?" Snart asked
The man who interrogated Mr. Snart appears in the government records as William Leroy Hanover. Born June 13, 1945. Last reported seen on June 12, 1996.
Everyone looked at Mulder. "That tracks with when I found his body," Mulder replied.
"How exactly do you think they learned about his link to you?" Sara asked.
Scully sighed. "That may have been my doing. While Mulder was in Canada with Jeremiah Smith, I sent out the signal that Mulder used to summon him. He came to Mulder's apartment telling me that we needed to protect Mulder's mother."
"Which turned out to be a false flag," Mulder said. 'Someone in the Syndicate learned that they had an information leak, and they clearly had my apartment under surveillance."
"I'm still confused," Jefferson said. "How did you ever find out to summon this…X character well enough to send up what was essentially a Bat-Signal?"
"It was a variation on something I'd done with Deep Throat before," Mulder said. "By the time Scully and I were partnered I was convinced the Syndicate was watching my apartment in some form at least since I'd started working on the X-Files."
"Very hard for me to argue that point," Scully said. "And considering that I may have used that signal twice while you were ditching me, I can't disagree."
"What information do you have on Hanover?" Sara asked Gideon.
Information remains hard to unlock as most of the files remain heavily redacted.
"Well, that's about as unsurprising as anything," Mick growled.
Mulder turned to Snart. "What did you think of him?"
Snart was slightly. "I'd think you knew better than me. You told us that there was a good chance he'd be leading the team that snatched me up."
"That was a hunch more than anything," Mulder admitted. "X was a very dangerous man. He killed at least three men who worked for the Syndicate in my presence and he was more prone to violence than anyone who I met with over the years who worked for the conspiracy."
Scully nodded. "He and Skinner got in a brawl once and I tried to hold him at gunpoint and he easily turned it on me."
"Same here." Mulder said. "I have a feeling his role in the Syndicate was wetworks as much as anything. I got that impression one of the last times we crossed paths. He was clearly privy to a lot of information but I have no idea where in the pecking order he was."
"I thought everyone worked for Smoky," Rory said.
"It didn't seem that way in the meeting we observed," Stein said. "Spender – if I may use his alias – called the meeting, but he didn't seem to be the one driving the train."
Ray nodded. "There's a reason that the resistance replaced Hunt. They might have been hoping to influence the decision making process rather than just kill off the men who were making the decisions."
"Hard to argue that" Mulder acquiesced. "They might have disagreed with him but they listened to him. That meant Hunt – or whoever he really was – had influence. So there's a chance that X was on equal footing or at the very least, was higher up on the food chain than most of the button men the Syndicate used."
"That does makes sense," Scully agreed. "That said, he always seem sure of himself. Superior in a way that Deep Throat didn't the one time I met with him. "
"The man was capable of violence," Snart agreed. "If there's one thing I've learned over the years it's how to asses a threat. And Hanover clearly was there to kill me."
Everyone had known that was going to be X's endgame. That didn't make it unsettling for Snart's relative calm about it. Then again, he had faced far more dangerous threats over the last few months alone.
"This was clearly an authority figure," Snart said. "The two men guarding me; they clearly tensed up the moment he entered the room. And it wasn't the normal tension you get when a superior walks in. They were genuinely afraid that he might kill them when he was finished with me."
"Do you think he would have?" Mulder asked.
"He was capable of it. Of that I'm positive," Snart said. "He was the kind of person who could've ordered one of those guards to kill me and the second I was gone, put one in the forehead of the man who did it. I've met hitmen who had shakier nerves then this guy."
"So he was clearly a killer and he clearly was high up." Mulder said. "Sadly that doesn't tell me anything we didn't already know."
"I wouldn't say that" Snart argued. "From what you told us and from what there is in the files about him, he was involved in the government end of the conspiracy and he clearly knew about the plans for colonization. But as far as you knew, he didn't have any knowledge of the aliens themselves the way that Smokey and some of the higher-ups did."
Mulder thought for a moment. "I can't say for sure one way or the other but he always seemed more on the shadow government part, yes. Why does that matter?"
Snart looked around. "As my old friend and I are well aware of, in every kind of structure in organized crime, there's a chain of command and the lower down you get the less personal knowledge you have of what the people above you know."
Mick thought for a moment. "Yeah. When we were looking for targets for smugglers, they'd point us to warehouses where goods were being kept, but they didn't know whether it was hot cars, diamonds, or fur coats."
"Furs?" Sara said with a raised eyebrow.
"Beverly Hills. There's still something of a black market for it," Snart explained. "From what you yourself have told us many of the people lower down the food chain followed orders blindly and were even willing to die for the cause even without knowing why."
Neither Mulder or Scully could argue with that. "And you think X was that low on the food chain?" Mulder asked dubiously. "No, he knew too much."
"There's knowing and experiencing," Stein clearly got what Snart was driving at. "It's one thing to know that your government is dealing with extra-terrestrial life; it's quite another to have been in the presence of them."
"Precisely." Snart agreed. "This is based solely on my impression but given the way he reacted when I started predicting the future in front of him, I don't think X had gotten this close to something paranormal in his career yet."
Scully looked at Mulder. "How many times had you met with him prior to this point in time?"
Mulder thought for a moment. "Twice in person and once when he made a secretive call. I find it hard to believe he wouldn't have at least encountered something like by then."
"Maybe he had and chose to compartmentalize it," Scully said slowly. "I'm not saying he didn't believe in what happened but maybe he just chose to put it of being secondary to the kind of work he did."
"Speaking from experience?" Mulder said with a familiar brow raise.
Scully had the good grace to blush a little. "I'm not so much talking denial as I am practicality. There is a possibility he was given more extensive briefings about what he might possibly encounter over the years and when he saw it, just chose to accept it is intelligence from a higher source."
"My father admitted he had to deal with that sometimes over the last few years," Sara concurred. "Diggle too for that matter."
"That's part of it, definitely," Snart agreed. "Something else. The men who held me prisoner and who attempted to beat information out of me, they were clearly military." He looked at Mick. "I'm guessing everyone you saw was in uniform as well."
"Yeah" Mick said carefully. "And we clearly broke into a garrison of some kind. How exactly the shadow government managed to hide it in a place that according to the maps didn't have a military facility within fifty miles would be weird but I'm guessing that's where they were monitoring Strughold to begin with."
"It would explain how they got there that fast when we were there," Mulder agreed.
"X wasn't in uniform but neither of the men guarding me blinked when they saw him," Snart said. "Which means either he was in charge of this area or had enough pull that no one had a problem with a civilian just taking charge in what should have been a government operation."
"Or they were used to people like him taking charge in the first place," Jefferson said. "You have to figure the shadow government can't afford to let too many different people run this kind of operation. Otherwise plausible deniability becomes harder to maintain."
"That would fit with your sources," Scully said. "There's no way that Deep Throat would have been able to get me into Fort Marlene if he didn't have some kind of military connection. And X would have had no way to get access to military files if he'd didn't have pull with the military."
"The man clearly had some kind of background as a soldier," Snart confirmed. "I recognize that strut and posture. It used to be I only saw those kind of people as private contractors for security forces. Apparently there was another position that didn't require leaving the government altogether."
Mulder thought. "The file on Hanover said he was born in 1945, which means he couldn't have been there at the start of the conspiracy."
"Was that really a shock?" Sara asked.
"Not really," Mulder acknowledged. "But it does beg the question how he knew so much about it in the first place. I mean, you saw that meeting in February of 1999. With the exception of Krycek, everyone there was Cancer Man's age."
"And he sure as hell wasn't in that photo we took from your office," Ray said.
"Maybe that was done out of deference to Klemperer, " Jefferson said. "From what you told us he was loyal to the studies of the Nazis, which means he probably held pretty close to the rest of their beliefs. And considering how much they needed him, the last thing they'd do is make me feel uncomfortable."
"How do you make a Nazi Cross?" Mick said.
"Tread on his corn," Stein said automatically. "Somehow I doubt Klemperer would have much of a sense of humor on the subject."
"All of which is a roundabout way of saying that when I claimed to have talked to the dead, it shook the hell out of him," Snart said.
"I find it hard to believe a guy like him spent all that time being a spook and didn't know the real thing existed," Mick said. "You think it might have been because you knew what he actually was?"
"I can't rule that out," Snart admitted. "This was, after all, a man who went out of his way to make sure no one ever had a hint of who he was or what agency he worked for, even among the feds. For a complete stranger to show up and claim to be the Ghost of Christmas Future would be unsettling to anybody, much less someone who has to already have a lot of death on his conscience."
"You're assuming he had one in the first place," Mulder said grimly. "This was a man capable of killing at a moment's notice and staring a gun in the face without blinking." He paused. "Though sometimes I wonder."
"What are you talking about?" Scully asked.
"When I ran into him in the hospital garage after – you came back, he showed up and he laughed at me when I told him that you weren't dead yet," Mulder said. "He said I was a damn schoolboy. But he also told me that "I used to be you. But I don't think you have the heart.' Then I went after the man who took Scully's blood with the intention of taking him into custody. That man broke free and was almost certainly going to kill me and then X killed him."
Scully hadn't heard that part of the story but she knew the rest of it. "That night when Melissa came to your apartment," she said.
"X told me that he was giving me the men who took her. They were going to come to my apartment. Where I would 'defend myself with terminal intensity.' His words."
Sara knew more about this kind of darkness than anyone here – she had, after all, been in love with a woman who followed this calling. "Did you think you could do what was necessary?" she asked with no judgment.
"I was in a very dark place," Mulder acknowledged. "There's a part of me that thinks X was testing me, and I don't know if I passed his test or if I failed it. I did the right thing, of course, but we all know that the Syndicate grades on a different scale."
"He would have done it, no question," Snart responded. "Hell, for all we know he might have done that exact thing once. But he was right, you don't have the heart. That's not a bad thing, though I have to admit I question your wisdom on the subject."
"I don't know why I thought I could," Mulder admitted. "The day before, I'd gone to Smoking Man's address and stuck a gun in his face. I couldn't pull the trigger then either. If anything he was capable of worse things than the men who took Scully in the first place and he sure as hell deserved worse than a bullet in the brain. But I couldn't do it, not then, not later."
"That makes you a better man than me. Not necessarily a smarter man, of course, but definitely one with a better moral compass," Snart said. "If X had one, I didn't sense it and I'm pretty good at picking up on these things."
"That night, he told me I was his tool, that he came to me, not the other way around," Mulder said. "I didn't pay any attention but in retrospect, he may have been the only one of my informants who was ever honest about why they came to me in the first place."
Scully got it. "To service their own agendas. If they happened to coincide with yours so much the better."
Ray thought for a moment. "Do you think you were the only person any of them came to?"
Mulder had never given the question any thought before. Neither had Scully for that matter. Why did these shadowy figures come to someone would was basically considered a joke among his peers and with no real reach? It wasn't like the information that any of them had given to them had led to so much as a ripple in even the cases they'd worked on.
"There is a possibility that we were being used for a larger purpose," Mulder said carefully. "Covarrubias admitted as much on one of the cases she gave information on."
"Deep Throat did lie to you at least once that we know of," Scully remembered. "And didn't X once take advantage of you to get to someone you wanted to protect?"
"They might have wanted to help you," Stein said. "But they all had larger masters they had to serve first. And those agendas were always going to be at odds."
"Two of them did pay for it with their lives," Sara reminded them. "And Covarrubias nearly did."
"But at the end of the day they all had a connection to the same master," Palmer brought out the photo.
"Maybe that's the reason they came to you in the first place," Scully pointed to a young Bill Mulder…and then a man who she clearly recognized as a younger Deep Throat.
Mulder looked at it for a long time. "You know ever since I found that in my father's things I've been lying to myself. Kind of ironic for a man who claims that the truth is out there, waiting to be found. One of the biggest was right in front of me and I spent so much time ignoring the implications."
"You acknowledged their connection," Scully pointed to the younger Smoking Man, who was right next to his old friend
"But not the more obvious ones. All of those meetings that Smokey and the others were part of, I knew my father's connection to him and the whole damn project and because I never believed a word he said it was easier for me to ignore the fact he was at meetings like them all the time."
"You think they all came to you because they worked with him," Sara had put into words what Mulder had spent his life ignoring.
"Deep Throat went to his grave never saying it to either of us but there he is in black and white," Mulder said sadly. "X never told me why he came to be but he admitted he was carrying out his predecessors work and he knew about the connection between Smokey and my family."
"After your parents divorced," Stein said slowly. "you fell of touch with your father. You said you didn't even talk to him into the woman you thought was your sister returned to you."
"That's right," Mulder said. "I hadn't talked to him in more than a decade."
Stein was silent for a long moment. "How did you learn Samantha was back?"
"He called me." Mulder thought for a moment. "What are you implying? That he knew she was a fraud?"
"From your own stories he had some role in your sister being handed over to the Syndicate," Stein said. "And based on what happened at El Rico, it was only when colonization was about to happen that you or anyone else was going to see their families again."
"I thought about that," Mulder admitted. "But that conflicts with Smokey's own actions. When he was trying to convince me to join him Samantha showed up at my doorstep. It's just as likely that was another clone of her but I'm not sure what story he was selling."
He sighed. "I think it's time I stopped dicking around and we went to the next stop on the itinerary."
"You sure about this Mulder?" Scully asked. "This won't be easy by any standard."
"Why do you think I insisted on making the easy stops first?" Mulder asked. "Ever since you told me about this ship I've known you were going to have to go back to this point in time. I'm not the kind of person who believes in destiny but I wouldn't be who I am if it weren't for my sister's abduction. I've spent my entire life trying to figure out what happened to me that night and after nearly half a century, I can see for myself. And now…"
"The worst things in the world are not getting what you want and getting it," Stein said. "Wilde didn't say that about knowing the truth but the principle applies."
"You don't have to do this," Rory said with something close to tenderness.
Mulder shook his head. "No, one way or another the conspiracy solidified that night. If we're to have any chance of understanding it, we have to see exactly what happened the night Samantha was taken. We need to find out who took her and where she went."
"You know where she went, Mulder," Scully said kindly.
"I know what I was told," Mulder reminded her. "We all know that doesn't make it true."
"Do you think it'll bring you any peace?" Jefferson asked.
Mulder gave a bitter laugh. "Some truths are better not to know. But you still have to know them anyway."
Author's Notes
If you saw the revival of The X-Files you know I've softened O'Malley's rhetoric slightly. I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt because the writers had a lot of trouble figuring out what his character was supposed to represent. He was closer to an Alex Jones type in the series but I figured it would be more interesting to make him deeper than that.
The idea of the existential crisis is partially related to today's events but it's also in keeping with the revival as well. One of the storylines in Season 11 was that aliens did plan to colonize but humans had done so much to destroy it that they no longer felt it worth taking over. It was a dark storyline but part of me thinks it is relevant. (I'm trying not to be too political. This is supposed to be fun.)
The series never told us how O'Malley learned about Mulder and Scully to begin with. This is my attempt at an explanation.
We never really learned anything about X in relation to the Syndicate. We know he was carrying on Deep Throat's work and we also knew he met with the Smoking Man on occasion. However we never knew if he reported to him or if the two were on equal footing. This section is meant to try and illuminate what we knew about him. Calling him 'Leroy' is an in-joke: that was Steven Williams's secret name for the character he played.
Everything that refers to X in this section is from the episode he appeared in, particularly 'One Breath', 'End Game' and his death in Herrenvolk. Mulder summoned him the way described in the story and the implication was that X had surveillance on his apartment. How he knew this would work is a story the show never answered.
The show acknowledged Bill Mulder's role in the conspiracy as early as Season 2 but it never truly defined it. For that reason I believe it's possible that the reason many of Mulder's informant's came to him was through their relationship. Deep Throat is connected to him in the way of described (according to canon) X knew of 'his predecessor' and Marita Covarrubias was connected to the Smoking Man. So since everything has some link to Mulder's father it's going to be critical in the next several parts of the story.
Mulder never really dealt with or accepted the connection of the man he thought was his father to the Syndicate (according to canon). Since in this series of stories Bill Mulder is Fox's real father its obvious he hasn't wanted to find out the extent of the connection until recently. He's going to have to face it now and he's not looking forward to it.
Thanks for being patient. Read and Review!