Chapter 12
NEW MEXICO DESERT
1:31 pm
"You sure this is going to play out the way you want?"
"The last meeting went well enough. I don't know why you're still antsy about it." Cat Grant said. "At least this time O'Malley agreed to meet on our terms."
Felicity couldn't help but sigh. "I know, but we're giving up a lot."
"You sure? Based on what we know, we might actually be able to get something Mulder himself couldn't."
Having spent the last several days putting several smaller plans in play there was a consensus that they had to try and follow up on Cat Grant's original strategy: which meant following up with Tad O'Malley. This time, however, there was an insistence that someone accompany Grant into the mouth of danger.
Grant had been amenable to this but had argued that it had to be someone was neither superhero or vigilante adjacent. She figured that it had to be someone who was either a scientist or connected to technology, figuring they would be the only terms O'Malley would agree to. That had narrowed the field and Felicity had volunteered.
"What the hell? By this point I've been kidnapped so many times I might qualify for frequent flyer miles," she admitted.
Grant figured given the amount of information that O'Malley had been willing to give on their first meeting they had to respond in good faith. That meant giving him something that he might have some knowledge of but not details on involving the alien conspiracy. Kara had an idea which appealed to all of them, particularly given that when they'd checked the coordinates it was less than ten miles from their original meeting.
"You think there's any chance O'Malley knows about what happened here?" James had asked.
"I won't rule it out, but at best he's only going to have the broad strokes. We can give him a full picture," Cat acknowledged. "And the best part is, he can verify some of the details with his own independent resources."
Felicity noticed it first. "Was that the same kind of vehicle as last time?"
Cat Grant waited before shaking her head. "It's him, though. Given what we both know he takes security very seriously. Never uses the same vehicle twice."
It took another two minutes for the blue van to arrive at their location.
There was a pause. Then O'Malley and his assistant got out.
"You know, usually when people like us go on second dates they tend to go to more upscale locations," O'Malley said.
"Trust me, Tad, if I were to date you, you'd be the one punching up," Cat Grant said with a smile.
"Is that why you brought a buffer?"
"If this relationship is going to work, we have to trust each other," Cat Grant said. "You were remarkably forthcoming with someone you had every reason to despite in our first meeting. At the very least I figured it would be rude of me not to give something resembling reciprocity."
"I don't believe we've met," O'Malley said.
"We both know you're not that ill-informed," Felicity said.
"Not formally. Though I guess I shouldn't be surprised that she'd bring another CEO as her plus one on this next meeting," O'Malley said.
"I'm not nearly at Cat Grant's level at that regard," Felicity said coolly. "And I'd like to think I got my job on merit more than…other means."
This was a challenge to the frequent misogynistic tone of O'Malley's podcast. "Honestly, I think you could do better than your current choice of paramours but that's just me."
"Was that a compliment?" Felicity asked.
"Considering who said it, would you consider as such?" O'Malley returned.
"Darn it. Now I do like you," Felicity said.
"It helps not to know me," O'Malley turned his attention back to their surroundings. "All right. I know why I chose a location like this for our first meeting? Is there a reason you chose a similar one?"
Cat and Felicity exchanged a glance. "When we first spoke you said you weren't sure whether all of the talk about an alien conspiracy wasn't a cover story for the military industrial complex," Cat began. "What if the two of them were connected?"
O'Malley considered this. "I've heard stranger stories. I've told stranger ones."
"What if I could give you evidence? Information that you could independently verify using your own methods?" Cat Grant asked.
"More information then you've publicly revealed on your network the last several months?" O'Malley asked.
"At the time I was playing catch-up myself," Cat Grant said. "My associates have been doing a lot of work in the meantime. Not easy given their already packed schedules."
O'Malley looked at Felicity. "And you have access to this information."
"I have access to a lot of information," Felicity said. "The problem is, much of its decades out of date and there's very little in the way of independent support. A lot of the individuals who were primary sources have been dead for decades."
O'Malley clucked, sympathetically. "That's the problem I've had with my own work. Half the time I'm chasing ghosts and ghosts don't leave digital footprints."
"The trouble is people knew about this at least thirty years ago," Cat Grant said. "The difference was no one was willing to listen. Certainly not people like me. And as a result time, which has never been anybody's friends, is even less on our side than usual."
"And this story you have, could it help us now?" O'Malley asked.
"If the right people hear it and take note," Felicity said.
O'Malley considered this. "So I take it you've brought us to this attractive setting to tell me one of those stories."
The two women looked at each other. "You're the journalist," Felicity said to Grant. "I'll provide color commentary when you need it."
Cat Grant nodded. "I take it you're familiar with the so-called MJ Files," she said to O'Malley.
"They were considered by some to be the Holy Grail of UFO lore," O'Malley said. "Supposedly they were a complete list of everything the Department of Defense had catalogued about UFOs since the 1940s."
"In May of 1995, a hacker named Kenneth J. Soona broke into the government files and accessed them. He transcribed them to a digital tape and then arranged to set up a meeting with an agent in the FBI where he would hand the tape off to them. He knew he'd alerted the government by his actions and he was certain that his life was in danger," Cat Grant said.
"Spoiler alert: it was." Felicity said. "Within little more than a week, he was found dead of an apparent suicide."
O'Malley said. "I take it his FBI source was able to crack the files."
"Actually when he opened them, he found them completely illegible, and was inclined to dismiss it as gibberish," Cat Grant said. "It took him a while to realize that the files were encrypted and that the people who did so had gone to great lengths to make sure almost no one could crack the code."
"What kind of encryption software did they have in 1995?"
"They didn't have to encrypt it. It was encrypted when they put it in," Cat Grant said. "They had used one of the most unbreakable codes in history, one that had served them well in World War II. "
Now O'Malley looked interested. "They used Navajo code-talkers?"
"The Bureau of Indian Affairs confirmed it," Felicity said. "Most of it was jargon, but she recognized one word: merchandise. Shed put the FBI in touch with one of the few people alive who could translate it. In part because he'd help come up with the code in the first place."
"Now the FBI agent who'd been given the files had been pursuing cases like this for several years. What he didn't know was that the government was aware of the danger he posed and was engaged in their most dangerous attempt to discredit him yet."
"You don't have to talk in circles. I've watched your broadcasts." O'Malley said. "And it's not like I wasn't familiar with Fox Mulder before this."
"I didn't want to influence you with the names," Cat Grant said.
"And in a way, it may have helped if you didn't know them because in your research you will find out just what lengths they went to during this particular 'op'." Felicity said. "During a period of weeks, the apartment complex Mulder lived it had been having its entire water supply dosed with hallucinogens. Not long before Mulder received the MJ Files, one of his neighbor shot her husband of forty years. This was not an exercise in subtlety."
O'Malley shook his head resignedly. "You hear what they do to the truth-seekers, you rarely hear about the collateral damage."
"Well, they were being more direct than that," Cat Grant said. "Not long after he received the files Fox Mulder would visit his father William, a former employee of the State Department. That night his father was shot in the head and his son – who had been acting erratically for days before – was the chief suspect. Only due to the somewhat drastic actions of his partner Dana Scully did Mulder manage to escape being permanently framed for the killing."
"How?"
The two women exchanged glances. "That's not our story to tell," Felicity said. "What we can tell you is that Scully drove her partner from DC to New Mexico over the course of nearly two days. Once the effects of the hallucinogen were out of his system, she introduced him to a man named Albert Hosteen, who was in fact with the code-talkers in question. And who told them that they knew the two of them were coming here."
"I'm not sure I either believe in the mysticism part of this or am qualified to talk about the rituals of indigenous people," O'Malley said.
"Would it help you if you knew it was based on hard evidence?" Cat Grant said. "For starters Hosteen had made a partial translation of the documents for Mulder and Scully. While much of it was, in fact, jargon it referred to a series of tests on human subjects going back to the 1940s."
"And here is the kicker," Felicity said. "Scully couldn't refute it because one of the names in the files was hers."
That did stop O'Malley in his tracks. "She was taken."
"There's still some debate as to what parties did so," Cat Grant said. "But it's a matter of public record that on August 9th 1994 Dana Scully was taken from her home in Georgetown by a man claiming to be a former alien abductee named Duane Barry."
"I'm familiar with that case." O'Malley said. "It's been difficult to get coherent data about it considering Barry's history own history with the Bureau. Many in my field believe his subsequent death in government custody was an attempt to stop him from revealing many of the Bureau's dirtiest secrets, paranormal or not."
"They're probably not that far off," Felicity acknowledged. "Barry was already an embarrassment to the Bureau and to this day, no one can explain how he managed to break out of the hospital and find his way to Scully. Even Mulder doesn't know if aliens were directing him or if was the people within the government who were using Barry as a pawn. What we do know is that Barry's name was in the most recent entries along with Scully's."
"Were either of them either to make a translation as to what purpose?"
"No." Grant paused. "But we're about a hundred feet away from a pretty good guess."
"We're in the middle of the desert," O'Malley said. "That's always been a good place to bury bodies."
"You're gonna want her to trail us. We don't want to get lost," Cat Grant said.
O'Malley nodded to his assistant, who got in the car.
LXLXLX
"A few days before all of this was playing out across the country Albert's grandson Eric was traveling in the desert," Felicity said as they walked. "While he was there he came across a strange skeleton. He'd seen his share of them over the years – the desert has never been exactly kind – but never one like this."
"It didn't look normal," O'Malley said.
"According to Eric his grandfather had a discussion with Mulder about old tribal lore," Felicity said. "We'll leave that aside because that goes back further then we'd want. When it ended Eric took him to where he found the body the first time. Right here."
She stamped on the ground. There was something resembling a clunk.
"I'm the one here most used to getting her hands dirty. Metaphorically, if not physically." Felicity said as she knelt down and brushed back the dust to reveal the rusted top of a boxcar.
O'Malley knelt down and looked at it. "All right, this is a new one even for me. What's inside?"
"Nothing that would count for proof anymore," Cat Grant told them. "You're welcome to look if you want but Felicity and I have already been there verifying Mulder's version of events. "
"I've sent the material back to Star Labs to see if there's anything we can get back from microchemical analysis," Felicity said. "It's still a long shot but as Hosteen himself told Mulder, nothing vanishes without a trace."
"All right, what was inside here?" O'Malley asked.
"This is second-hand evidence and there's no way any reputable journalist can go on the record with it," Cat Grant said. "We have eyewitness testimony for what happened before and after, but this part you won't be able to broadcast without risking the whole thing being irreversibly tainted."
"You're assuming I'll broadcast this at all," O'Malley said without blinking.
"CatCo's planning to go on the record with this some point down the road," Cat Grant said. "I was just hoping when it happens we could work together on it."
"Like the Times did with Assange?" O'Malley said doubtfully.
"I'm not his biggest fan as to who he was and how he did it, but I'm still think he was an inspiration," Felicity spoke up.
O'Malley's face remained neutral. "Answer my original question."
"That's part of the reason we're waiting for analysis," Felicity said. "Because while what Mulder saw was horrible it is subject to interpretation as to what he saw."
"And what was it?"
"Bodies. Stacked floor to ceiling," Cat Grant said bluntly. "Based on his observations – which again you can interpret whatever your world view is – he believed them to be extraterrestrial in origin. Scully can't testify to that never having seen them. What she can testify to is that in those files was prove of government experimentation on human beings going back decades."
"And considering that she later found proof she was one of those test subjects, there's an excellent chance that's what was going on her," Felicity said. "It's a matter of public record that she disappeared after Barry abducted her in August of 1994 and mysteriously reappeared hanging near death three months later in a Georgetown hospital, the victim of horrendous genetic experiments."
"Scully signed a release form allowing us access to the relevant information from her medical file," Cat Grant said grimly. "I'll give you the details later: trust me, it isn't pretty."
"Hang on, I'm still trying to deal with the significance of a train car filled with dead bodies in the desert," O'Malley said in a tone of voice that seemed strangely detached. "Particularly considering the dates those files were likely first translated."
O'Malley had made the obvious connection. Good for him.
"Did Mulder have any clear idea how they had been killed?" O'Malley asked.
"He was appalled by what he saw," Cat Grant admitted. "He also noticed that the bodies had what appeared to be smallpox vaccination scars on them. But he never got a chance to say anything else for quite a few days."
O'Malley steadied. "They found him."
"According to him he got a phone call from an individual who he considered the person who had done the most to thwart his work in the past," Felicity said. "Roughly half an hour later he heard a helicopter fly over ahead. Eric Hosteen saw and covered the boxcar. A man in a suit and a group of men in military garb came out of it. They grabbed him and demanded to know where Agent Mulder was. They went inside the boxcar and Eric was stunned when they said they couldn't find him. The man in the suit ordered them to burn it and they grabbed Eric. Eric naturally assumed that they would kill him."
"He had more pressing things to worry about soon," Cat Grant said. "They flew back to his village and ransacked the place. The man in charge came to his grandfather's house, saying he wanted Mulder and those files. Albert stood up to him and they beat him up, along with several of his friends before they left."
O'Malley looked at the boxcar. "So I'm guessing any evidence of the bodies was…"
"…burnt to ash," Felicity said. "Just as when the government didn't bother to destroy the original MJ files because they never thought they could ever fit on a computer disk fifty years in the future, they couldn't believe that the kind of technology could exist to retrieve genetic information from the cremated remains today. These men were trying to control the future but they were still stuck very much in the past."
"And Agent Mulder managed to escape to safety," O'Malley assumed.
Now was not the time to bring up the afterlife and spiritual journeys. Still they had to play by what was in the record. "At the time Scully presumed that her partner was dead," Cat Grant said. "As it was she had her own problems to deal with. She had covered for Mulder and as a result she missed a critical meeting. When she returned to DC she was suspended, pending dismissal with no chance of reinstatement."
"She didn't know how much worse things were going to get," Felicity said grimly. "At the time, the forces who had been trying to discredit Mulder assumed that he was dead and that the digital recording with the MJ Files was gone. That meant they needed to clean up all the remaining loose ends."
O'Malley more than understood the euphemism. "Was she going to be the victim of an attempted break-in or a mugging on the street?"
He was right about the Syndicate's plan to kill her in one of two ways.
"Two men were waiting in Scully's apartment for her," Felicity said. "Alex Krycek and Luis Cardenal. They waited for someone to enter her apartment and they shot her. It wasn't until they turned on the light that they realized they'd shot the wrong woman. Her older sister, Melissa."
O'Malley was suitably disturbed. "I know our government can't find its ass with its elbow on a good day but this is the worst example. Four innocent people dead on this 'operation' alone, and they didn't come close to hitting either of the people they were trying to take out."
"I have no doubt it was justified for 'the greater good'," Cat Grant said grimly. "The worst part is that neither of them even had time to mourn their losses. Dana learned about what happened to her sister secondhand and she couldn't even go to the hospital because she knew that her life would be in danger if she did."
"I'm guessing her sister didn't survive," O'Malley assumed. "How did they end up back in the Bureau?"
"That part we can verify because there's a firsthand witness," Felicity said. "We won't reveal his identity here but given your own research into the government you'll be able to figure it out by process of elimination."
"That individual managed to obtain the digital tape," Cat Grant said. "He knew it was the only leverage Mulder and Scully would have in order to guarantee their safety. He was willing to make an exchange: he would hand over the tape to the Syndicate in exchange for Mulder and Scully's return to the Bureau."
"And he assumed the shadow government would honor that agreement?" O'Malley said doubtfully.
"He had a back-up plan in play because he assumed it wouldn't," Felicity said. "That assumption proved to be well-founded. He went to the hospital to check on Melissa Scully's condition and while he was there, he was set upon by three assailants. One of whom he knew was Krycek and the second he would later recognize as Cardenal. They assaulted him for the purpose of obtaining the tape."
"I take it the conspiracy then removed the assassins from the picture," O'Malley said.
"If they did, it was a half-assed job," Felicity said. "Mulder and Scully are thin on the details but apparently the Syndicate wanted to remove Krycek from the picture first. They failed and he managed to disappear with the digital tape. He would be a headache for them for a long time afterwards but for the purpose of this story he was irrelevant. Mainly because it wasn't until months later that they realized his larger role and they had far more immediate concerns."
"So they no longer had the tape as leverage. How did they manage to get out alive?" O'Malley asked.
"That leads us to the final piece of the puzzle. One which we ourselves have only recently become privy to," Cat Grant said. "I assume you're interested."
"I won't lie: this is a good story," O'Malley told them. "And because it sounds only slightly unbelievable I'm inclined to almost take it as the truth."
"And if we could give you confirmation?" Cat Grant asked.
"That is the magic word," O'Malley said. "Problem is you've already told me most of your sources are dead and after nearly a quarter of a century the trail is going to be hard to pick up."
"We thought so too," Felicity said. "But as Mulder told us himself, not everything dies. We have a meeting scheduled with someone who had can confirm what happened and give us information that not even Mulder was able to utilize at the time."
"How far would we have to go?"
FARMINGTON, NEW MEXICO
3:00 PM
"As you might expect a lot of Mulder and Scully's investigations into the conspiracy were all around New Mexico," Felicity said. "Not Roswell – somehow the two of them never investigated a single case in that city – but they were always in this part of the desert."
"You have access to their casework," O'Malley said.
"Much of what the most critical work on the conspiracy never made it to an FBI database," Cat Grant said. "With good reason. On more than one occasion the powers that be made an effort to destroy the work they'd done, either by official or far more direct methods."
"But as you might expect when half the time you're investigating alien conspiracies and the other half you're finding out every single urban legend ever told was non-fiction, the memories are etched in their heads even after more than twenty years," Felicity said. "And considering how much of it affected them personally, it's even more carved in stone."
"I'm guessing what you've already told me happened to them is just the tip of a very dark, deep iceberg," O'Malley said.
"You knew who Fox Mulder and Dana Scully were before I confirmed they were my sources," Cat Grant pointed out. "You can't plead ignorance to knowing what their lives have been like."
"I know what's in the public record can't be a fraction of the truth. I also know that after more than fifteen years out of the government, the FBI has done an incredible job disappearing them from it," O'Malley said. "I might as well be trying to prove Keyser Soze's real than find any record of the two of them in the federal government while they were working on it."
That was hardly surprising, given Cat Grant's own efforts before she'd put Kara Danvers on the case and she knew where to look.
"What little I have is mostly based on a few scattered obituaries of family members over the years, which tells me scraps of scraps but nothing resembling the whole," O'Malley said. "Whatever I've learned about them and the so-called X-Files have always been through stories that either mention them basically in footnotes or are so public the government has clearly been using them to cast them as the villains."
"I'm guessing this story wasn't one of them," Felicity said.
"I knew about the deaths of William Mulder and Melissa Scully and I assumed that it had some relation to their investigations. I just assumed that they were being sent as warning messages to the agents: back off or people you love will die." O'Malley said. "I assumed that what happened merely put steel in both of their spines which only makes me admire them more."
Again without knowing more than the bare bones O'Malley was close to reality. He was remarkably neutral about the devastating losses to the two of them, of course, but that was to be expected: he didn't yet know them the way Felicity and Cat Grant did.
"Since you've made it clear they're now part of the record, perhaps you can give some clarity about the one time I know that they were publicly disgraced," O'Malley said. "Before the two of them were scapegoated and made federal fugitives, of course."
Grant wasn't surprised O'Malley knew that part of the story – it had after all been on cable news quite a bit in the summer of 2002. "I'll see what I can clarify," she said.
"In the spring of 1998 a Russian chess prodigy was assassinated at a match in Vancouver," O'Malley said. "At some point Mulder and Scully were called in to investigate and at a certain point the Attorney General was called in to offer blanket immunity to the assassin for information he had that, in theory, explained who the man was working for."
Both Felicity and Cat Grant knew this story. They wanted to hear the truth as O'Malley knew it.
"Not long after this, the assassin was killed while in government custody. The key witness to this event – the Russian's opponent, a ten year old named Gibson Praise – was abducted while in government custody after his bodyguard's were shot. No one has seen Praise since; he's presumed dead."
O'Malley had no idea of the significance of Praise to the project or that he was still alive. Felicity had every intention of keeping that secret.
"Mulder and Scully were fitted for goat horns and the X-Files were shut down." O'Malley said. "They then resurface at a government facility in Dallas which was the target of a bombing. Somehow despite the fact that they played a critical role in the evacuation of the building with only minimal casualties, the two agents were yet again, blamed for what happened."
"Now under any other circumstances those two strikes that close to each other should have at the very least, led the two of them being shitcanned. And yet somehow the two agents kept their jobs, the X-Files got reopened and the two of them lived to fight the forces of darkness without any further involvement for the next two years."
Admittedly this was a very glib synopsis of what had been one of the darkest periods in the lives of both agents. It was also, from the outside, accurate and more inexplicable than many of the conspiracies the two had devoted their lives to solving.
"That's an interesting story," Felicity said. "But I'm not sure I heard a question in there."
"I would think given everything your association with Oliver Queen the previous four years the subtext would be obvious," O'Malley said. "However, let me make it clearer. Despite what the two of them have spent their careers investigating to this day, Fox Mulder and Dana Scully are very much flesh and blood and the Syndicate clearly knew that the easiest way to solve their problems was to eliminate them. You've made me aware of one such effort; I have little doubt there are dozens more at a minimum."
"That's just what they told us," Cat Grant agreed.
"Clearly the shadow government has clearly hired the worst help possible if they just couldn't eliminate these two mere federal agents in their first stint of working for them," This was a bit sanguine but hard to dispute. "Having repeatedly failed at that, the next obvious step would have been to get them out of the Bureau entirely and remove whatever access their badges allowed them to use – which, if I'm being honest, probably wasn't much to begin with."
"There were more than a few efforts to do something close to it," Felicity felt safe in answering that. "On at least two occasions the X-Files were shut down and both agents were reassigned to other departments. They were in Dallas for that very reason."
O'Malley considered this. "So they were hoping that if they kept them away from the X-Files and gave them the kind of soul-crushing bureaucratic work that most of us have to deal with, the two of them would just quit of their own accord." He thought about this. "Get them so bored that they turn in their badges to escape a fate worse than conspiracy. That's actually genius, considering how often it works in so many other government fields over the years."
"It works pretty well in the private sector, too," Grant pointed out. "There's also the fact that, for a while at least, Mulder had allies in Congress that made it impossible for them to outright dismiss him without repercussions."
"And now they have some in the private sector that can match it," O'Malley said.
"There's one more possibility. One that is the end of the story we started in the desert," Felicity said. "And that's the other reason we're here."
Just then the door to the house they'd been standing outside opened. "I apologize for taking so long," a Navajo man in his early forties said.
"Perfectly understandable, given the nature of our call," Felicity said. "And what we were asking of you."
"The old ways have always been best," the young man said. "But sometimes the new ways can make them known."
"Are they all in there?" Felicity said.
"It wasn't easy to get them here but our people they know something about owing a debt."
"We'll be there in a moment."
"You want to share with the uninitiated?" O'Malley asked curiously.
"When he was prepared to hand over the digital tape Walter Skinner knew that they would need a back-up plan. He attempted to make a copy of it but given the material that was on it, any attempt to duplicate would cause it to be erased," Cat Grant said. "Nevertheless he knew that there were other ways."
"When Mulder was in the desert he was rescued by Albert and his friends," Felicity said. "They had no reason to trust the government but they'd seen what they'd done to Mulder so they knew he was an ally. When Albert was translating the tape he remembered what he saw and did his part to commit to memory what he'd seen."
"Hosteen would appear in DC not long after Melissa Scully was shot," Cat Grant said. "Skinner asked him if he would help and he said he had. When the powers that be regained the tape they made it clear there would be no deal. Skinner, however, had one more ace. And it was Albert."
"Forgive my bluntness but Hosteen had to be in his seventies at the time. And it's not like the Shadow government couldn't have gotten to him too."
"Hosteen knew that. Skinner told them that Hosteen had followed the oral tradition of his people and told twenty members of his tribe what was on the tape. Unless they were prepared to kill every Navajo in four states, they needed to hold off." Felicity said. "Skinner was bluffing. He didn't think Hosteen had the time to do that but he was focused on guaranteeing Mulder and Scully's safety. It worked at least for a while."
"Did they get to him, eventually?" O'Malley asked.
"Albert died of cancer in October of 1999 so the short answer is no," Cat Grant said. "Of course before that the man who knew about this secret had moved on to other things and we have no idea whether he passed it up or down the food chain. By that time the memory of what was on that tape had been forgotten even by Mulder and Scully themselves."
"But they didn't know that Albert had given them one last gift," Felicity knocked on the door.
"The man I talked to was Eric Hosteen, Albert's grandson," Felicity said. "And he had some secrets of his own that he never shared with Mulder and Scully. When they reached out to Albert and he was handed the files he'd translated half a century earlier, he knew how valuable they were. He also knew that the government would stop at nothing to take back what they had stolen in the first place. He'd seen it before."
"So before he translated the files he divided them into three separate groups and told me to give them to three of my friends," Eric said. "Each of them was go to as fast as they could to Santa Fe and go to a separate relic of a bygone era."
"A shopping mall with a copy center," Cat Grant said with a small smile.
"Once they had each made a copy they were to go meet me there and give me the original. Then they were to go to the nearest reservations at a ten mile distance north, east or south of the city and hand off the copies they made to the elder."
"The military never tried to follow up on it," O'Malley said.
"In a way they were blinded by their own narrow thinking," Eric said. "They thought that a white man from the FBI who had the code was more dangerous than the Navajo who could translate it. It's not the first time their vision has blinded them but it's one of the rare times where it actually worked to our advantage."
"They were sure the only people they had to worry about were in the FBI," Felicity said. "So the shadow government turned all their focus on them and their allies from that point forward. But because they were so focused on being able to change the future they never thought that the distant past could work against them."
"After the chaos died down my grandfather reached out to the elders. He kept his word to the forces of darkness but he did it after they stopped looking." Eric said. "Several years later when he became sick he passed on the information to me. I've spent much of the last twenty years keeping the promise I made both to Mulder and my grandfather."
They went inside.
"Last year before Mulder and Scully agreed to your interview, the two of them reached out to me," Eric said. "I knew the time was right to honor my word and that the methods to have evidence gathered were finally available. I reached out to my friends and the elders from all those years past. Since then we've been making a physical and electronic record of everything that Mulder and Scully brought us."
For the first time Tad O'Malley looked genuinely impressed.
"Of course everything on them is at the very least nearly a quarter of a century out of date," Cat Grant said. "So in a very narrow sense, it doesn't matter whether it gets out or not. But as anyone who has even a passing knowledge of our history knows, it's rarely the crime that gets you caught."
"It's the cover-up," O'Malley agreed.
"And as Mulder and Scully found out the government was just as determined to make sure neither was public knowledge," Felicity said. "The government did an effective job of making sure that they were silenced and that all the information vanished without a trace. But that's the thing about the wonderful world of high technology."
Eric Hosteen smiled. "Nothing vanishes without a trace."
AUTHOR'S NOTE
Little interlude before we return to the main action. As you will see I chose the location of this chapter deliberately.
Essentially what I have described is pretty much a recount of what happened in Anasazi the second season finale of The X-Files and much of the action in The Blessing Way and Paper Clip. I have left out the spiritual sections involving Hosteen as well as his narrative about the Anasazi not so much about cultural appropriation but because it isn't relevant to the narrative.
As anyone who watched the revival knows O'Malley was well aware of Mulder and Scully when he reached out to them so it stands to reason he knew of the official version of their record even if he considered it a lie. Therefore his knowledge of what caused the X-Files to be shut down at the end of Season 5 and the trouble Mulder and Scully were involved in at the start of Fight to the Future is everything in the official record. He knows it's a lie but he also doesn't know enough to discuss more than rumor.
To answer the next question, I have no immediate plans to reintroduce Gibson Praise in the immediate future. It probably makes sense for the story I'm telling but even the most devoted fan of the series knows that at the end of the day Gibson was no more special then so many 'holy grails' we were promised at the end of every season. Honestly Chris Carter had a short attention span when it came to those, which was one of the biggest problems of the mythology. I want to do better.
The scene where Skinner used Hosteen to outwit the Smoking Man was one of the great moments in the series even though logistically it made no sense: how could one man memorize the entire contents of the files much less tell it to twenty other people in less than a month? (Especially since he spent a lot of that time bringing Mulder back from the dead.) This narrative is more mundane and therefore is closer to what made so much of the mythology brilliant during Season 3: it is a fantastical story covering up something far simpler. It also has the advantage of being more practical.
And I like the idea of the technology that the conspiracy could never have thought of it when they were getting started being able to help bring them down in the present - a story full of metahumans and good aliens being able to bring down the conspiracy through science rather than anything else. It won't be the only factor but it will be a factor.
We're in the final stretch now people – three chapters more and most and an epilogue and this part of the saga is done. Read & review!