Title: A Little Knowledge
Author: Patti Murphy
Written: September 1995
Disclaimer: Mulder and Scully are lovingly borrowed from Chris Carter and Ten Thirteen Productions and no copyright infringement is intended. So there.

Summary: Mulder and Scully investigate a virus from a file given to them by "X", placing them closer to the truth, and closer to danger.

In the chronology of events in the X-Files Universe, this story takes place after "Our Town" but before "Anasazi" and is intended as a "fix" for those of us struggling through this long, cruel summer.

Thanks to: Gerri, who was kind enough to post this for me; Tricia, Celtic goddess and editor extraordinaire; Amy, who cheered me on; and John, story consultant and provider of mocaccinos.

Please direct all comments (and I *do* want to hear them!) to me, the author


Had she known what it contained and where it would lead, Scully would have been even more annoyed with Mulder when he dropped the computer disk on her desk at quarter to five that Friday afternoon.

"What's this?" she asked, picking up the little blue diskette.

"Some light reading for the weekend," Mulder said.

She frowned at him. "Mulder," she said.

"Gotta run, Scully. There's a guy at the Smithsonian giving a talk on repressed memory syndrome and alien abductees," he said, as he threw on his suit jacket.

"But we have to finish the field report on the Chaco murders in Arkansas," she protested. "Skinner is asking for it."

"Can't it wait until Monday?" Mulder asked. He had turned off his desk lamp and was edging towards the door.

"Mulder," she said, with increasing menace in her voice.

"We can whip them off first thing Monday morning, O.K.?" He had his trench coat in his hands now and she knew she wasn't going to be able to stop him. "Have a good weekend, Scully, and take a look at what's on that disk."

"Mulder!"

The door slammed and he was gone.

She tossed her pen down on the pile of paperwork in front of her and sighed in frustration. The disk sat on the edge of her desk blotter, taunting her. She looked at her watch and sighed again. She needed a weekend off or she was going to lose it completely. She fumed silently for a few minutes, then decided that she was going home. To hell with it.

She got up abruptly, stuffed several files into her briefcase, got her coat and was at the door when she remembered the disk. She went back to her desk, grabbed it and dropped it in the outside pocket of her briefcase. She would look at it later. Much later.

Scully tilted her face to the sun and took a deep breath, soaking up the musky smell of damp earth. She closed her eyes and pushed all thoughts of Mulder and work from her mind. Nothing but this park and this bench and this intoxicating sunshine. It was a spring sort of sunshine, warm and bright, but still a little tentative, almost as if the sun knew that it might have to depart suddenly, should the lurking shadows of winter decide to return.

Her mountain bike leaned against the bench where she sat. It was the dark green of an MG, the closest she'd ever get to owning a British sports car on a Department of Justice salary.

So far, it had been the perfect weekend. She'd slept late and then read the paper on the couch with a second cup of coffee. She'd met a friend for lunch, then had browsed through bookstores, returning home in time for a bike ride. Another day of this and she might start to feel like herself again.

Her legs felt heavy and tired from the cycling. She hadn't been exercising very much lately and she could feel the lack of it. Working out was always the first thing to go when things got busy, and she knew she couldn't afford to let that happen. She had to stay in shape, if for no other reason than to keep up with Mulder. He was a foot taller than she was, and there were days when Scully was certain that every inch of that foot was in his legs, because she constantly caught herself running to keep up with his long stride. That had happened a lot this week. They had been so snowed under with work, and Mulder had been restless and more disorganized than usual, flitting from one case to another, throwing out ridiculous and far-fetched theories, expecting her to race along behind him, holding everything together, keeping Skinner at bay with her field reports.

She realized she was clenching her jaw. She took a deep breath, let it out slowly. She wasn't going to think about work.

A man in spandex bicycle shorts lurched by on roller blades. He started to teeter dangerously right in front of the bench where she sat, and Scully reflexively stuck out an arm to catch him. At the last moment, in defiance of several laws of physics, he regained his balance and righted himself. Their eyes met and the man blushed a deep crimson. He was tall and lanky, but not in a gangly sort of way, and Scully guessed that he was about her age. His eyes were the gentle blue of the ocean on a calm day. He was smiling at her now, with that look that people get when they see something that they like. Scully couldn't remember the last time she'd seen that look in someone's eyes.

"Good thing I bought the helmet, too," he said, still blushing. "I think I'm going to need it."

Scully smiled at him, wondering if the dark tint of her sunglasses would disguise the movement of her eyes enough for her to check out his legs. Probably not. "That was a nice recovery," she said aloud.

He laughed a bit, looked down at his roller blades. When he looked up, his eyes moved up her body in a shy little glance. When they reached her face, his smile was even wider, the admiration evident now. "You ever try these?" he asked.

She shook her head. "I don't like stitches much," she said.

His laugh was genuine and lit up his face. For a few moments, he stood there, smiling and looking at her. Finally, he whipped off a glove and stuck out his hand. "I'm Peter," he said.

Scully took his hand. Firm grip, not too firm, warm soft skin. He had a lot of freckles. "Dana," she said.

"Dana," he repeated, and he looked at her as if he was memorizing her face. He released her hand, straightened up, and looked around the park, searching for the next right thing to say. His eyes stopped on her bicycle. "Your bike looks new. Are you just breaking it in?"

"I've had it for a while, actually," she heard herself say. "I don't ride it very often." Ask him something, she thought, anything. Just keep him talking.

He looked toward the playground, and she could see that he was scrambling to think of something to say, too. A little pause, his gaze lingering on the parents pushing children on the swings and then he was putting his glove back on.

"Well, it was nice meeting you, Dana," he said. "Maybe we'll run into each other again."

She nodded. "Yeah, maybe we will."

He gave her a last smile then turned and rolled off down the asphalt bike path. Scully watched him skate away, until he was out of sight, then sighed and shook her head.

"I've got to get a life," she said out loud as she wearily got to her feet.

The lunch hour racket in the deli was louder than usual. Or maybe it was just her damn headache. It was the third headache of the week -- actually it was the third day of the headache that had started on Monday morning -- and she didn't need to be a doctor to figure out what the cause was. The cause was standing at the counter ordering their sandwiches, his usual mild expression in place.

Scully massaged her temples, trying to loosen the half- nelson of pain around her head. Mulder must have sensed how close she was to throttling him this morning because he had stopped in the middle of a very technical explanation of genital excision in cattle mutilations and had said: "Hey, Scully, how about lunch? My treat." This was remarkable because when he was on a case, Mulder often lost sight of such trivial matters as meals. But it was all the more remarkable because as far as Scully knew, Mulder never had any money with him. There was only one explanation for such unusual behavior -- she must look as lousy as she felt, bad enough for him to notice and be worried. Great. Now he'd start to hover.

She reached for her briefcase, started fishing through it for the bottle of Advil that she always kept there. She groped around, headache thudding against her forehead with each heartbeat, and tried to calculate how many of those little brown pills she'd taken since Monday. She was up to fourteen before she located the bottle. Her medical training kicked in and she remembered all the harmful effects of such a high dose of ibuprofen. She quickly concluded that none of the side effects could be as bad as this headache, and besides, she had too much work to do. She popped two pills into her mouth and swallowed.

As usual, they had ended up at Mulder's favorite lunch place, a cramped, noisy little deli with rickety tables and faded photos of D.C.'s various sports teams in frames that were bolted to the walls. Scully always felt like she should wipe off the chair before she sat down, but Mulder had strong-armed her into going there, and she had capitulated without much of a fight. Her head hurt too much to argue and after all, he was paying.

She checked to see where Mulder was in line -- maybe food would help. He was at the counter now, standing there with his hands in his pockets, staring off into space, no doubt thinking up some outrageous theory to torment her with. Deep down, she knew that he didn't do it on purpose. It was just the way he was. But it got so frustrating sometimes, chasing after him, reigning him in, trying to reason with him while he made ridiculous leaps of logic, like an acrobat taking a sharp turn off the high wire. She smiled a bit at the image of Mulder in free fall. That's what she was...Mulder's net. And lately, something about that rankled.

She rubbed her forehead wearily. Better not to think about it right now. It was going to be a long enough day without adding psychoanalysis to the agenda. She pulled a file from her briefcase, flipped it open and tried to concentrate around her headache. She had struggled through the same paragraph twice when suddenly Mulder was at the table, hands full of paper- wrapped sandwiches and drinks.

"Turkey on whole wheat, mayo on the side, and grapefruit juice," he said, putting the appropriate items in front of her. "You didn't specify so I had them toss on some sprouty things, too." He ripped open a bag of potato chips with his teeth as he seated himself at the tiny table.

Scully slid the papers back into the folder and returned them to her briefcase. By the time she had unwrapped her sandwich, Mulder had cracked open his soda and was washing down a mouthful of pastrami on rye. She glanced at his lunch and fought the urge to roll her eyes.

"Didn't they ever teach you about the food groups, Mulder?" she asked.

"I must have been sick that day." He popped another chip in his mouth, watched her fuss with her sandwich. "Do you want your pickle?"

Scully shook her head as she chewed and motioned for him to take it. They ate in silence for a few moments.

"Did you have a chance to look at the files on that disk I gave you Friday?" he asked. Scully noticed how much attention he was paying to rebuilding his sandwich which had collapsed in his hands after the last bite. She also heard the studied casualness in his voice and wondered what exactly she was being set up for.

"There were over five hundred," she replied. "I read about fifty of them."

"And?" he asked.

"And..." She dragged the syllable out. "I don't know what I was supposed to be looking for. They looked like a random sample of medical files of people who had died around 1970."

"You didn't find anything suspicious?"

She shook her head, sipped her juice. "Was I supposed to?"

Mulder chewed thoughtfully for a moment. "I couldn't find anything unusual, either," he said, after he'd swallowed.

"Wait a minute. I don't get it," Scully said. "If there's nothing unusual in these files, why do we have them?"

"That's what we need to find out." He was concentrating too hard on his sandwich. Scully suddenly saw the missing piece. An eyebrow lifted.

"Mulder, where did you get those files?"

Mulder took a swig of soda, then methodically wiped his hands with a paper napkin. "My anonymous contact gave them to me."

She put her sandwich down and sat back in her chair, arms crossed. "Your new Deep Throat contact?" she asked. Mulder nodded, nibbling tentatively at his sandwich, watching the storm clouds gather in his partner's face. "The same man who knew what kind of danger you were in, but refused to help me find you when you were alone and injured on a polar ice cap?" Mulder noticed again how her eyes cooled to a pale gray when she was angry. He considered mentioning it, then decided it was probably not the best time. He gulped down some more soda and continued eating. When he didn't respond, she said, "You could have died, Mulder and he was going to let you." There were sharp edges to every word.

"He wouldn't have given me these files if they weren't important," Mulder said.

She leaned forward, pale eyes ablaze. "Do you remember the last time a contact of yours handed you a tip like this, with nothing to go on? Do you remember Purity Control, Mulder?"

He met her gaze, then lowered his eyes, nodding imperceptibly. When he looked up again, his expression was stony, unreadable. "My contact died for giving us Purity Control," he said.

"And nearly took you with him," she said, "and lied to you at least once before, that we know of."

"He was in a very delicate position, Scully."

"Delicate position? The man admits that he manipulated you, nearly gets you killed and you're worried about his delicate position?" Mulder started to speak, then quickly shut his mouth. They sat in charged silence for a few moments. "O.K., O.K," she said tersely, raising a hand to signal a truce. She sighed heavily and ran her hand across her forehead and through her hair. If only her head would explode and get it over with. She regarded Mulder for a few seconds. "Did it ever occur to you," she said, "that this Mr. X, whoever he is, might really be playing for the other side?"

A suggestion of a smile rested on Mulder's lips. "And you call me paranoid?"

"Dammit Mulder, I'm serious," she said, slamming her hand on the table. Her bottle of juice jumped.

"He's an anonymous informant, Scully. He risks exposing himself every time he passes something on to me. It's not like I can ask him for letters of reference."

She closed her eyes and leaned forward, letting her head rest on the palms of her hands. The noise in the deli closed in around her, made her feel dizzy.

"I can't just walk away every time things might get dangerous," he said.

"You know that's not what I'm saying," she said.

"Then what are you saying, Scully? What do you want me to do?" Impatience and anger mingled in his voice.

She lifted her head, slowly, opened her eyes and gave him an icy look. "I want you to be careful, Mulder, because one of these days, I'm not going to be there to catch you," she said. She reached for her briefcase and got to her feet. "I have things to do. I'll see you later." She strode off before he could reply, making her way through the crowded tables, toward the door. She knew that by the time she reached the sidewalk, she would feel like an idiot for behaving this way, but she didn't care. At that precise moment, all that mattered was a deep breath of fresh air and getting away from Mulder.

She had a hand on the door and was pushing it open when she heard her name being called over the noise. A strange voice, not Mulder. She turned instinctively and looked up into a hopeful smile.

"I'm not sure if you remember me..." Soft blue eyes. The park. Roller blade guy. She remembered. "We met at the park the other day," he continued, "uh,...on the weekend? I'm..."

"Peter." She spoke it before she could stop herself.

He exhaled audibly, looking relieved as he nodded. She shifted her briefcase to shake hands with him.

"I didn't know if you'd recognize me without the helmet," he said.

Scully felt herself smile, despite the flush of anger that still colored her cheeks. She took a deep breath to steady herself.

"Is everything all right?" he asked. "You look a little upset."

"Oh, I'm fine, really," she said. There was something about his eyes, a gentleness that drew her in, made her want to stand there and just look at him. She took in his dark suit, tasteful tie, mentally trying to change gears. "Do you work around here?" she asked.

"I'm a reporter, for the Post," he replied. "I'm on the hill today, doing some research for a story. How about you?"

"I'm with the Bureau," she said, waving her hand in the general direction of Pennsylvania and Ninth.

"Wow. I'll bet that's a lot more interesting than reading bills about lobster quotas, which is what I spent the morning doing," he said.

"Oh, it's interesting," she said. She thought about Mulder sitting back at the table. "Some days it's a little too interesting, actually."

"I suppose you're on your way back to work," he said. "Lots of bad guys to catch?"

She smiled. "And never enough time. You know how it is."

He stood there, smiling down at her, clearly enjoying what he was seeing. Scully suddenly wondered what it would feel like to have his arms around her. She drifted on that thought for a moment, until she realized that he was saying something.

"I guess I should be getting back, too. You never know when there might be important lobster news breaking, and if I wasn't there to cover it, I could miss out on my shot at the Pulitzer."

"It was nice running into you again," Scully said. "Look, if you're not able to, I understand," he said, "but,...I'm going to kick myself later if I don't ask...Do you think we could have lunch together sometime?" He looked more than a little nervous.

"I'd like that," she said.

He brightened. "How about tomorrow?"

"Sounds good."

They made arrangements to meet and exchanged cards out on the sidewalk. His card declared him to be Peter O'Hara, reporter for the Washington Post.

"Well, you'd better get back to those bad guys," he said, with a grin.

"And you'd better get back to those lobsters."

His grin blossomed into a smile. "I'm glad we bumped into each other again."

"Me, too. I'll see you tomorrow."

"Bye."

Scully had walked two blocks before she realized that her headache was beginning to feel better.


Patti Murphy She avoided their office for the balance of the day. Instead, she staked out a table in a remote corner of the library and turned her attention to a list of jobs she'd been putting off, including a consultation on the autopsy of the remains of a seven-year-old girl. She had been sexually assaulted and then murdered, no doubt to silence her, and her body dumped in a lake. Scully thought of her niece, just turned seven last month, in her First Communion dress, and hoped that there was a special place in hell for people who did such things to children. As a teenager, rebelling against her Catholic upbringing, she had been quite certain that there was no such thing as hell. Since she'd come to work for the Bureau though, she had started to hope that she had been wrong.

By five o'clock, she had cleared up her overdue paperwork, completed expense accounts from last month and read two articles in the most recent issue of the Journal of Forensic Medicine. I should ditch Mulder more often, she thought as she stuffed file folders and paper back into her briefcase, I'd get a lot more work done. Feeling only slightly guilty at slipping out at such a sinfully early hour, she closed her briefcase, grabbed her suit jacket from the back of her chair and headed for home.

When she arrived at her apartment, shortly after six, she was just beginning to feel sheepish for having walked out on Mulder at lunch. Her cooling off period was usually shorter than this, but she suspected that there was more at work here than her fiery Irish genes. Except she didn't know what. And wasn't sure if she wanted to think about it.

She kicked off her pumps and threw herself down into an easy chair. She looked at the phone on the table beside her. She should call him and apologize. Not for what she'd said -- she was still annoyed with him -- but for leaving in a huff. He would probably be sarcastic, she would have to bite her tongue to keep from snapping at him and then, in that disarming way he had, he would say something sensitive and ask if she was all right.

And then what would she say?

She felt the tiniest flutter in her stomach -- or was it her heart? -- and she tensed slightly. She was not all right and her body had been trying to tell her that for the past two weeks. Something had been hovering in the back of her mind, something too intangible to confront, yet solid enough to cast a constant shadow over her thoughts. She wondered if it wasn't time to figure out what it was.

She really should call him. Her gaze fell on the stack of mail beside the phone. She'd just read her mail first.

Amidst bills and flyers she found a large pink parchment envelope. Please, not another wedding, she thought. She reluctantly tore it open. "Bill and Julia invite you to share in the celebration of their love..." She sighed and tossed it onto the stack of unopened bills. The next piece of mail was a card with a pastel stork saying: "Guess who's having a baby shower..." Scully opened the card instead of guessing, then tossed it on the pile, too. She shook her head. "All that's missing for a perfect day is something from the IRS," she said out loud. She sighed and looked at the phone again. Maybe she'd go for a run first.

She stood on the front steps of her apartment building, one leg propped on the wrought iron railing, coaxing her calf muscles, which were as taut as bowstrings, to stretch. She really didn't like running, but she liked the way she felt after she'd run, so she forced herself to do it every so often. She wasn't fast, even when she really pushed herself, but she was stubborn and steady and she could keep putting one foot in front of the other until she reached her destination. Or, as was the case tonight, until she figured out the solution to whatever problem was on her mind. She had a feeling that she would make it to Baltimore before she came up with any brilliant insights on this one.

She finished her stretches, trotted down the steps and hit the asphalt. She was so focused on finding her stride that she didn't notice the navy blue Taurus quietly leaving its parking space across the street, making a lazy U-turn and head off in the same direction.

When she reached the running path at the park, fifteen minutes later, the complaints from her legs had subsided enough for her to be able to concentrate on something besides her aching muscles. She jogged along, arms and shoulders loose, her sneakers lightly crunching on the cinders.

It had always been her experience that the best way to solve a problem was to approach it as if it were a scientific puzzle. This method, and in fact her very nature, required her to gather all available information about the problem, formulate a reasonable hypothesis based on the data at hand, and then test possible solutions against it. Failing that, however, she could always eat a bag of chocolate chip cookies, go to bed early and hope that things looked different in the morning. Somehow, she didn't think that approach would help this time.

All right, she told herself, be clinical. What are the symptoms? Irritability, impatience, general lack of enthusiasm for things she usually enjoyed, feelings of ...what? Anger? Frustration? No, actually, they were closer to sadness. Loss. Emptiness.

She frowned. That last word had hit a nerve. She pushed it aside and trudged on. It might just be burn out. She'd been working pretty hard lately. She loved her job, but she was aware that there was a high cost that went along with it. Long hours, dangerous situations, cases that taxed you emotionally and physically. All of this took its toll every day.

Except this didn't feel like burn out. She'd seen plenty of burn out during her medical training and in her time with the Bureau and this wasn't it. She was doing the job that she wanted to be doing, the assignments were challenging, and despite the occasional urge to choke him, she liked and trusted her partner.

The feeling washed over her like crashing surf, made her stagger slightly and lose her breath. She slowed to a walk.

Something was missing. She felt it like a physical ache in her chest all of a sudden. Something was missing, something that she wanted but didn't have. Something she needed.

She stopped walking and bent over, hands on her knees to catch her breath. She cursed at herself. This was ridiculous. She was tired and stressed and she was overreacting because of it. A good sleep, maybe some time to herself on the weekend and she would be fine.

She straightened up and stood there, hands on her hips.

Then why did she still feel like she wanted to cry? And why hadn't the knot in her chest loosened? She took a deep breath and blew it out, sharply. What was it that she felt the lack of so sharply?

She flashed back to the deli and Peter's gentle eyes, remembering the feeling of him holding her with such clarity that she wondered for a second if it had actually happened outside of her imagination.

That's what was missing. Comfort. Tenderness.

There certainly hadn't been an abundance of those things in her life lately. She tucked some loose hair back into her ponytail, walked a few steps and kicked at the cinders with the toe of her running shoe. She wrestled with the feeling for a moment and then sighed.

The sun was getting low in the sky, and it cast a warm golden light across the park as it sank to the horizon. She turned and headed for home.

At the edge of the park, the driver of the Taurus started the car's engine.

She had known, somehow, that he would be there waiting for her, and so she was not surprised to find Mulder sitting on the steps, as she trotted up the sidewalk to her building. He still wore his suit, but he had taken the jacket off and slung it over the railing. His tie was loosened and his shirt sleeves were rolled up. He looked rumpled and tired.

Scully stopped at the bottom of the stairs. "Hi," she said, and looked at her feet.

"So you are talking to me," Mulder said. "I wasn't sure."

She suddenly didn't know where to put her hands. "Actually, I was just going to call you," she said.

Mulder looked up and down the street slowly and then his eyes finally settled back on her. "Have a good run?" he asked.

"Yeah. Yeah, I did." She stood there, wondering where to begin.

"Look, before you say anything, Scully, I just want to tell you that I've thought it over and I think you're right."

She blinked. "I'm right?"

He nodded. "We each have to draw the line for ourselves. If you want to walk away from this, I understand. I can't expect you to chase after me every time I go off..." He searched for the right words.

"Every time you go off fighting windmills?" she offered with a hint of a smirk.

Mulder's expression softened. "Fox Quixote...that has a nice ring to it." They both smiled sheepishly, feeling at once self-conscious and relieved.

Scully came and sat beside him on the step, and wrapped her arms around her knees. They sat quietly for a few moments, listening to the songs of birds and the hum of distant traffic.

"Mulder, what I said about being there to catch you,...I..." She hesitated and looked away. When she looked back Mulder noticed that her eyes were their usual warm blue again. He suddenly wanted to smile. "It was unfair of me to say that," she continued. "You've saved my skin at least as many times."

"I didn't realize you were keeping count," he said.

She didn't smile at his teasing, instead fixed a steady gaze on his face. "I trust your instincts, Mulder, as much as I trust my own. If you think there's something here, then we'll look. Let's just be careful, O.K.?"

A flicker of a smile lighted on his face. "Always," he said, and he touched her arm. Then he was on his feet, grabbing his jacket.

"Wait, where are you going?" she asked.

"Back to the office. Danny's got some more information on the people in those files for me. Social security numbers, service records, stuff like that. There's a connection here somewhere and we need to find it."

"You know, there was something odd about the files I read," she said suddenly. "I looked at about fifty of them last night and in each case, the person was diabetic."

Mulder looked down at the pavement and thought for a minute. "What are the odds of that happening in the general population, Dr. Scully?"

She shook her head. "It's possible, but...it's unlikely."

"Unlikely?" he asked. "As in `It's unlikely Elvis is still alive' or as in `It's unlikely the Cubs will win the Pennant this year'?

"My father always cheered for the Cubbies," she said. "Every year he used to think that this would be the year that they went all the way."

"Did he have any opinions about Elvis?"

"Let's just say that finding a high number of diabetics in such a small sample would be unusual but not statistically impossible."

"Maybe not, but it is damn curious." He started down the steps.

"Couldn't it wait until morning?" Scully called after him. "Why don't you stay and have dinner?"

He was already walking down the sidewalk towards his car. "Thanks, but I'm not hungry. I had two sandwiches for lunch." Scully watched him unlock the car and toss his jacket inside. "Besides, there's way too much I want to do."

She shook her head and chuckled. "Anybody ever tell you that you should get a life, Mulder?"

"This is all the life I can handle." He flashed her a quick grin. "See you in the morning." He got in the car, slammed the door and drove away. Scully watched until the car turned the corner at the end of the street and was gone. She debated whether or not she should join him, then decided she needed the downtime. She got up slowly, stretching her stiffening muscles, and went inside.

Down the street, the man in the Taurus picked up his cellular phone and punched in a number. "He just left. She's home again," he said, then hung up. He put the phone in the pocket of his coat and settled back in the seat.


The alarm crashed into her dreams at five o'clock the next morning. She jerked awake, turned off the droning alarm and then lay back, cocooned under the warm blankets. In a few seconds, she could feel her resolve to be at her desk by six starting to slip away and then she was letting herself slide back into sleep. She forced her eyes open again. She had to get moving. There was a lot to do today.

She was in the shower, massaging shampoo into her hair, when she remembered that she was meeting Peter for lunch today. Her stomach did a little flip. It's just lunch, she reminded herself. Probably an hour of small talk, "Can I call you sometime?" and then she'd be back in the bowels of the J. Edgar Hoover Building, with paperwork to do and an in-basket full of problems to solve. She rinsed the shampoo out of her hair then leaned against the tiled wall for a moment and let the hot spray run down her back. She thought about how he'd looked at her the other day in the park. Another little flip.

She got out of the shower, towelled herself off and combed out her tangled, wet hair. She did the usual morning rituals of moisturizer, styling lotion, blow dryer and toothpaste. As she put her toothbrush back in its holder, she realized that she was humming. A tuneless, happy kind of hum. She stood there, looking at her reflection in the mirror and chuckled. "It's only lunch," she said to the woman in the mirror.

She chose the light green suit from her closet and dressed, then returned to the bathroom mirror and put on her make up, taking a little longer than usual. When she finished, she stepped back a bit and checked her reflection again.

She ran a hand through her hair and sighed. There really hadn't been much gentleness in her life lately. She'd gotten this far though, hadn't she? She had proven, without a doubt, that she didn't need to have someone in her life. But that didn't mean that it wouldn't be nice.

She turned off the bathroom light, found her gun and holster, and left for work.

She had filled the better part of a yellow legal pad with notes when Mulder stumbled through the door of their subterranean office at eight thirty.

"Coffee's on," she said and then glanced up from the computer screen. "Mulder, you look like hell."

"Thanks," he mumbled. He searched around on his desk for his mug.

"It's over in the lab, by the coffeemaker," Scully said. "Did you get any sleep at all?"

"A little bit, I think. I was going through the information Danny got me until around four thirty, then I went home and crashed," he said, as he wandered past her desk toward the lab.

"Crashed is a good word, by the look of you," she said. She got up, grabbed her own mug and followed him. "Did you come up with anything?"

"A stiff neck, sore eyes and an unexplainable craving for Vietnamese food around three." He poured coffee into his mug, spilled an equal amount on the counter, then turned toward Scully to pour hers.

"Uh, thanks, but I just had this suit cleaned," she said as she took the pot from him. "So you didn't find anything to explain why Mr X. gave you these files?"

"Nothing. Nada. Maybe he is just jerking me around this time. There's nothing there, that I can see. All these people living boring lives, in boring cities, driving boring station wagons," he said. He took a long drink from his mug. "Who was it that said most men lead lives of quiet desperation?"

"Thoreau, I think."

"Well, he was talking about these people. The only bright spot that I can see in all of this is that they all died before disco made it big." He leaned against the cupboard, rubbed his eyes. "How about you? Find anything?"

"So far there's no discernible pattern in terms of age, location or occupation, but... I've looked at over 300 cases now Mulder, and every single one of them was diabetic. That and they died within ten months of each other, from November 1969 to August 1970. Now, I'm no actuary, but it seems to me that the odds of that happening are even more remote than the Cubs winning a Pennant."

"I'd say they're about as remote as Elvis winning a Pennant." He started to look a little more awake. "We need to track down these people's doctors, see if they can give us some information."

She shook her head as he spoke. "Patient confidentiality. No one is going to tell us anything unless we have all the paperwork. You know that."

He frowned, ran a hand through his hair. "O.K., how about if we start contacting their families, try to get someone to authorize the release of information?"

"And tell them what? That the FBI is investigating the unremarkable death of their loved one? We have no suspects, no motives and no idea what we're even looking for yet, Mulder."

Mulder shrugged. "It's worth a shot. At this point, it's all we've got."

"Actually, we've got one other angle to think about," she said.

Mulder raised an eyebrow. "Are you holding out on me, Scully?"

"I've got somebody in research compiling a list of all the major pharmaceutical companies in the continental U.S. that were producing and selling insulin in the late 60's. The majority of the people in these files appear to have been Type I diabetics, and those kinds of diabetics just about always require insulin."

"There are different kinds of diabetes?"

She nodded. "Juvenile, or Type I diabetes is generally a little more severe and requires insulin, and it usually shows up before age thirty. People with Type II or mature-onset diabetes can sometimes get by without insulin by watching their diets carefully."

Mulder pondered this a moment. "Can insulin be taken orally?"

"No, it's a protein. It would be digested."

"So it has to be injected directly into the bloodstream?"

"Not exactly. It's injected interstitially, into the thigh or abdomen or arm, but it's not supposed to go directly into the bloodstream. It's supposed to be absorbed slowly."

"You think there might have been something wrong with the insulin these people took?" Mulder asked.

Scully shrugged. "I don't know. But it's a place to start. Maybe we'll know more when we find out who was producing insulin then." She glanced at her watch. "I'll go see if they've got a list yet."

Mulder watched her head for the door, her fiery hair bobbing with each stride. "Hey, Scully," he said. She turned, a questioning look on her face. "You're awfully bright-eyed and bushy-tailed this morning. What's your secret?"

She allowed a slight smile. "Clean living," she said, and then was gone.

Mulder smiled. Her eyes were blue again this morning.

Scully put the phone back down in its cradle and stroked another name off the list. She looked across at Mulder who held the receiver to his ear with his shoulder. He was flipping through pages of computer printouts with one hand and scribbling down notes with the other. He was getting that look that he got whenever a case was taking hold of him. Describing it to others she would have said that he was focussed, but she knew that his behavior really landed somewhere between manic and obsessed.

She took out a morning copy of the Post that she had carefully tucked into her briefcase and snapped it open. She scanned the pages, stopping only to read headlines and bylines. She found what she was looking for on page four. Tucked in amidst the recent breakdown of peace talks in Bosnia and an apocalyptic story on the state of Chesapeake Bay, was a short piece entitled: "Congress Set to Drown Lobster Bill". The byline attributed the article to Peter J. O'Hara, Staff. She was two paragraphs into it when she heard Mulder hang up his phone.

"Any luck?" she asked. She folded the paper and stuffed it back into her briefcase.

Mulder was on his feet, jamming his arms into his jacket. "I followed up thirty six deaths within a three hour radius of Washington. Of those thirty six, fifteen of the surviving relatives are still at the same address. Nine are willing to talk to us."

"What exactly did you tell them we were investigating?"

"I said that it wasn't an official investigation yet, that we were really just making some enquiries."

"Concerning...?"

"I was a little vague," he said. She arched an eyebrow slightly at him. He missed it, in his zeal to cram all the papers on his desk back into their file folders. "The first stop is Baltimore. If we leave now, we can be there by two. I know this place near Camden Yards that makes a chili dog you won't believe." He was almost at the door when he realized she wasn't with him. He turned and looked at her. She had an expression on her face that he couldn't read. "Are you coming?" he asked.

"Yeah, it's just that..."

"What?"

"Well, I'm meeting someone for lunch." She wondered why she sounded so apologetic all of a sudden.

"Can you cancel?"

Scully studied her desktop. Haven't we already had this conversation once before, she thought. In Atlantic City? "Mulder, this case has waited for twenty five years," she said out loud. "I don't think another hour will make that much difference."

He glanced down at the file folders under his arm and tried not to look crestfallen.

"Sure," he said. "No problem. It can wait an hour." He went back to his desk and put the folders down. He watched Scully take her purse from her desk drawer and get to her feet.

She felt his gaze. "What?" she asked.

"Nothing," he replied. He took off his jacket and hung it on the back of his chair then looked at her again. "I was just wondering if you were going someplace with fast service. Or a drive through window."

She summoned up the last of her patience. "No Mulder, I'm going someplace nice, with tablecloths and cutlery and everything."

He nodded, mentally retreating. "Take your time," he said. "Really. Enjoy yourself."

"Thank you," she said, forcing a softer tone into her voice. "Why don't you see about getting a car? We can leave as soon as I get back."

He nodded and reached for the phone. She left, shutting the door behind her. After he'd arranged for the car and hung up, he sat looking at the door for a long time.

The restaurant that Peter had suggested was a converted house in Georgetown, trendy enough to attract tables of power- suited lawyers and lobbyists, but with food good enough to keep them coming back. The walls were stark white with splashes of art, and there were tall windows that overlooked a tiny courtyard with a fountain. Peter was already there, seated at a table in a secluded corner. When he spotted the Maitre d' escorting Scully towards him, he got to his feet, looking very much like a man who could not believe his good fortune. The Maitre d' held Scully's chair while she seated herself.

"I hope you haven't been waiting long," she said.

"No, no, I just got here a few minutes ago," Peter replied, as he sat down. His gaze lingered on her face. "You look great," he said.

She couldn't stop the smile. "Thanks," she managed to say, but she felt slightly flustered, certain that there was a hint of blush rising to her cheeks. Damn. It had been a while since she'd done this; she was out of practice. She reached for a menu and Peter followed suit. "So, what's good here?" she asked.

"They have the most amazing salads," he said. "There's one with pine nuts and chevre that's really good."

Suddenly, everything came together like a snapshot in Scully's mind: the brilliant spring sunshine pouring in the windows, the muted tinkle of ice cubes ringing against crystal goblets, this handsome man who was clearly attracted to her and who was somehow starting to make her feel like she was just waking up from a long hibernation. She looked over the top of her menu at Peter, who was scanning the list of entrees.

She smiled. This was nice. This was definitely nice.

By the time coffee arrived, they had explored all the safe subjects from movies to food, discovering a common love of Katherine Hepburn films, and had begun to cover the required topics of education and work.

"Physics? And medicine?" Peter asked. "Then how did you ever end up with the FBI?"

A flicker of a memory touched the edge of her mind. Old tapes started to play: trying to explain her decision to her parents, arguing with her father, finally even questioning her own instincts. She shrugged. "It was what I wanted. I had already done my residency in forensics and the Bureau offered a lot of challenges. A chance to prove myself, I guess."

Peter watched her intently, listening closely. "Has it been what you hoped it would be?"

"Yes." Why had she hesitated before she answered?

"I sense a 'but' there," he said.

She smiled a bit, and averted her eyes. "I haven't talked about this for a while. I was just remembering my parents' reaction to my decision to join the Bureau."

Peter nodded in understanding. "I take it they were less than thrilled."

"You could say that. Especially my Dad."

"Have the two of you worked it out?" he asked.

She looked down at her coffee cup and fiddled with her spoon. "He died about a year and a half ago," she said.

Peter reached over and covered her hand with his. "Dana, I'm sorry," he said. "That's really tough."

His hand was soft and warm. She lifted her eyes to his face and was surprised by the gentleness she saw there. Gentleness and something else. Sorrow. She tried to find her voice. "I'm thankful for the time we did have," she said.

Peter withdrew his hand and sat back in his chair. "My Dad died when I was a kid. It really tore the family apart," he said. "All of a sudden, there was never enough money for anything and at eleven years old, I was expected to be the man of the house." He shook his head. "It makes you grow up pretty quickly."

"I'll bet."

"But then, so does having three sisters," he said, a smile returning to his face.

"Three sisters?" Scully repeated. "And I thought having two brothers was rough."

"Were you a tomboy?"

"Does it show?" she asked.

His eyes twinkled. "I just get the feeling that you could probably still climb a tree if you had to."

"I suppose I could, if I had to," she said. They both sat there basking in the glow of shared attraction for a few moments. Scully realized that she didn't want this lunch to end yet. "What about you? Did you grow up always wanting to be a journalist?" she asked.

"No, actually I went to law school first. My Dad was a house painter all his life and he always thought that being a lawyer was the most respectable thing that someone could be. So, after he died, I guess I sort of adopted his dream out of some kind of loyalty or something. Trying to live up to his expectations. I was pretty driven." He took a sip of coffee, then shook his head at the memory. "I worked like a mad man, trying to get scholarships and holding down three part time jobs to pay my tuition. I finished my first year of law school and that summer I got a job working for the Trib in Chicago, as a sort of gopher for this big shot investigative reporter. That's when I figured out why I hated law school."

"Why?"

"Because the law isn't interested in finding out the truth. The law is all technicalities and plea bargaining and precedents. It's not about finding out what really happened and that's what I wanted to do. I wanted to wake people up and make them see what was going on all around them. So, I quit law school, went to work for the Trib full time and got a degree in journalism at night." He smiled suddenly. "And now I spend my time researching bills about off-shore fishing rights and lobster quotas. Talk about the American dream."

Scully laughed.

Peter studied her for a moment, trying to decide whether or not to say something. She urged him on with a tilt of her head.

"I don't know what your experience has been, but in general, I've always found first dates to be...well, a lot of work." He fingered his napkin and grinned. "This one has been different. I've really enjoyed myself."

She nodded her agreement. "Me, too. You're... very easy to talk to."

"I'm thinking that if the first date went so well, maybe we should risk a second one." His smile was at once teasing and slightly nervous.

Scully felt herself smile, something that she seemed to be doing a lot today. "I think I'm willing to take that risk," she said.


They were halfway to Baltimore, on the I-95, when Mulder finally asked. He passed a transport and settled back into the right lane before he spoke.

"So... did your lunch date go well?" he asked.

Scully didn't look up from the file she was reading. "Yes. Very well."

Mulder glanced over at her. "Where did you go?"

"A bistro in Georgetown," she said, continuing to skim the file in her lap. "Not your kind of place, Mulder. I didn't see chili dogs on the menu."

Mulder tried hard not to smile. He fished a sunflower seed out of his pocket, cracked the shell and nibbled at the seed. He kept his eyes on the road.

"Anybody I know?"

"No."

He glanced over at her again, trying to determine if she really was reading. He looked back at the road, let a few seconds pass.

"Is it the same guy you were talking to in the deli yesterday?" he asked.

Her head snapped up. Three pointer, nothing but net.

He watched her wrestle with her better judgment, saw her shoulders sag a bit as she let out her held breath.

"You know, there's a reason why they call it a `personal' life," she said. The expression on his face was maddeningly neutral. She said, "I'm a big girl, Mulder. I think I can screen my own dates," and immediately wished she hadn't sounded so sharp. She studied his profile, waiting for some response. Instead, he concentrated on the road ahead as if it held vital answers. He was silent for so long that Scully turned her attention to the files again.

When he spoke, his voice was subdued. "I just wouldn't want to see you get hurt."

The words startled her. It took a little effort to keep the casual tone in her voice. "For heaven's sake Mulder, it was only lunch."

He said nothing, only stared straight ahead and drove. She wondered if he'd even heard her. She watched him for a long time, wishing that he would look at her so that she could try to read what was in his eyes. After a while, she gave up and looked out the window at the passing landscape, a strange tightness in her throat.

The street looked just like all the others in the neighborhood. Small, one-storey houses wrapped in aluminum siding, with neatly trimmed lawns and trees that had grown there for at least a generation. The only thing that distinguished one house from the next was the color.

Mulder got out of the car and looked up and down the street at the spectrum of pastel shades. "Somewhere in the world, there is an aluminum siding salesman who retired a very rich man," he said.

Mulder followed Scully up the walk to a canary yellow house. They rang the bell and waited. A few moments later, the door was opened by a woman in her mid-fifties. She was slightly plump, with a round face and kind eyes. She pushed open the screen door and smiled.

"You must be Agent Mulder," she said.

Mulder nodded and gestured to Scully. "This is Agent Scully." They tried to show her their identification but she waved her hand at them.

"Don't be silly," she said. "I knew the minute I saw you. Please, come in." Once inside, she took their coats and ushered them into the kitchen. The tiny room looked as though she was expecting a photographer from Good Housekeeping at any minute: every surface gleamed, the floor was freshly waxed and there were flowers on the table.

Two minutes later, they were all seated around the table with cups of coffee and slices of freshly baked cranberry loaf before them.

"It's good of you to see us on such short notice, Mrs. Lucas," Scully said.

"It's no trouble at all," she said, "and please, call me Peggy. Would you prefer milk with your coffee Agent Scully?"

"No, thank you. Cream is fine."

"Peggy, we need to ask you some questions about your late husband," Mulder said. "He died in February, 1970, is that right?"

The woman nodded solemnly. "I'm happy to help, of course, but I'm afraid that I don't really understand why you're interested in Ed. What exactly is it that you're investigating? Or can you say?" She looked from Mulder to Scully and back again.

Mulder hesitated.

"We're interested in knowing if there was anything unusual about your husband's death," Scully said.

"Well, the whole illness was so unexpected. Ed was never sick, you know. Until the appendicitis."

"Appendicitis? When was that?" Scully asked.

"Oh, about six months before he died. He came down with it quite suddenly and they had to rush him to the hospital from work. He was a chemical engineer and he was working for Procon Textiles."

"Do you know what he was working on at the time?" Mulder asked.

"He was designing polyesters and other synthetics." She smiled. "Ed would always say `Polyesters are the fabric of the future, Peggy. No more ironing!' But I've always preferred natural fibres, haven't you?" She looked intently at Mulder.

"Oh, yes," Mulder agreed. "I swear by them." He could see Scully fighting to suppress a smile.

"Did your husband have an appendectomy, Peggy?" Scully asked.

She nodded. "The surgeon said that he was very lucky. If they'd waited another hour to get him to the hospital, they would have lost him."

"Was there anything unusual about the surgery? Any complications?"

"No, everything went well. But, you know, looking back, I realize that he was never quite himself again."

"How do you mean?" Mulder asked.

"Well, Ed was always so very active. He was always doing something around the house or playing with the kids. But after the surgery, he was tired all the time, and he'd sleep for hours and hours. He even stopped running. He played football in college --that's where we met-- and he always ran to stay in shape. He said it cleared his mind, helped him to think. He tried to run, after the stitches had healed, but it was too much for him. And then of course, at the end, he just got so sick so fast."

"Were they able to determine exactly what the cause of death was?" Scully asked.

"They said it was pneumonia."

Scully's eyebrows went up. "They weren't able to treat it with antibiotics?"

Peggy shook her head. "The doctors tried all sorts of drugs, but none of them seemed to help. He just kept slipping and then he was gone."

"Did they happen to mention what kind of pneumonia it was?"

"If they did, I can't remember the name." She thought a moment. "They did say that it wasn't a common kind. That Ed's immune system mustn't have been very strong."

"Was your husband taking any medications?" Scully asked.

"No, nothing. Ed didn't even like to take an aspirin. He said it always threw his blood sugar off, so he didn't take anything. Except his insulin, of course." She looked over at Mulder's empty plate. "Agent Mulder, how about another slice of cranberry loaf?"

Before Mulder could answer, she was up and slicing thick wedges off the loaf. She placed two more slices on his plate and refilled all their cups before she sat down again.

"How long had Ed been diabetic?" Scully asked.

"Since he was a little boy -- about ten, I think," Peggy answered. "That's the same age Jennifer was when she started with it, too. Jennifer is my oldest. Would you like to see a picture of her?"

Scully nodded. Peggy scurried off to the living room. Scully watched Mulder finish off the first slice of loaf and start on the second. "Hollow leg?" she asked.

Mulder washed down a mouthful with coffee before he answered. "I missed lunch," he said.

A moment later, Peggy was back with an armload of frames. "That's Jennifer. She's thirty-one now and she's a lawyer. She and her husband live in Boston," Peggy said, showing Scully a photo of a young woman with short dark hair and a self-conscious smile. Scully passed the picture to Mulder. "And this is Valerie. She's a lieutenant in the Navy. This is her graduation picture from Annapolis." Peggy studied the picture of her daughter in dress uniform and beamed. "She looks so much like her father. She's got his eyes."

"Did Ed ever have any problems regulating his diabetes?" Scully asked, once they'd looked at all the photos.

"Not really. He would have the odd reaction, now and then, but he'd just drink some juice or soda and then he'd be fine again," Peggy said.

"Do you remember where he got his insulin?" Mulder asked.

"I usually bought it at the pharmacy on Kennedy St. I think they've built a mall there now." Peggy looked expectantly at Scully, then Mulder. "Is it all right if I ask a question?" she asked timidly.

"Of course," Mulder said.

"Are you thinking that there was something unusual about Ed's illness?" she asked. "Do you suspect something was not right?" She wrung her hands in her lap. "It's just that, all these years...thinking that he just got sick..." There was a pleading look on her face. "It was just pneumonia, wasn't it?"

Mulder met Scully's eyes and read her expression: You field this one. He pushed his plate away, his second slice of cranberry loaf partially eaten. "We're not sure, Peggy. Right now, we don't know what to suspect. It may be nothing."

Peggy nodded numbly. Her gaze fell on the vase of flowers on the table. "He was a good man, Agent Mulder. A good husband, and a loving father." She smiled sadly. "He used to bring me flowers every Friday. Do you know that we were married for nine years and he never missed a single Friday." She looked over at Scully, tears beginning to well in her eyes.

Scully smiled sympathetically.

Mulder had steered them towards the booth by the window, and now he sat waiting for his dinner and watching eighteen wheelers rumble along the slick asphalt of the interstate. The rain that had started around eight o'clock continued to fall steadily. Little rivulets of water ran down the window and every so often the beams of car headlights washed over his face.

The day had been a complete waste of time and he felt tired just thinking about it. Three more interviews and eight butt- numbing hours in the car later, they had nothing to show. They still didn't even know what questions to ask. He tried to plod his way through the facts again, tried to shuffle the pieces to maybe catch a glimpse of a pattern, but instead he kept finding himself thinking about how nice it would be to be on his couch with a beer and a Knicks game for company.

Scully returned from the bathroom and slid into the seat across from him. "You look tired," she said.

He shrugged. "I'm O.K.." He continued to watch the rain pelt against the glass.

"I can drive the next shift, if you want."

"Sure."

He knew she was trying to measure whether he was just tired or annoyed with her. When she found no answers on his face, she leaned back, rested her head against the red-vinyl bench and closed her eyes.

Mulder glanced at her, then surveyed the restaurant, hoping to catch a glimpse of the waitress bringing his hamburger. The place he had chosen had the standard roadside decor, with the usual late night sprinkling of travellers. How many meals had he eaten in places like this, he wondered. They all looked the same after a while. The same fluorescent pink soap in the bathroom dispensers, the same smells of grease and vinegar and stale coffee at every one. And always, Scully sitting across from him. The constant in his life. He looked out at the rain again.

"Mulder, can I ask you something?"

He pulled his attention away from the window. "What?"

"Do you ever wonder what it would be like to have a normal life?" she asked.

He regarded her for a moment, arms crossed. "Define normal."

The look on her face told him that she wished she hadn't brought it up. "You know, normal," she said. "A regular job and everything."

"We have regular jobs," he said.

She chuckled. "I hate to burst your bubble, Mulder, but hunting for six foot human fluke worms in the sewers of New Jersey is not a regular job."

"Well, what do you mean by normal?" he asked. "Because if you're saying that normal is a mortgage and orthodontist bills, then..." His voice trailed off when it hit him. "Scully," he said, a grin creeping across his face, "is that the unmistakable sound of ticking that I hear?"

"Forget I ever asked," she said. She was braced for the next jab, but he only smiled a bit more, then looked out the window again. They sat in silence until their food arrived.

"So what's our next move?" Scully asked, after the waitress had deposited their plates. "More interviews?"

Mulder slammed his palm against the bottom of the ketchup bottle. "It's a waste of time until we have more of an idea what we're looking for," he said. He hit the bottle three more times, but no ketchup came out. "It's been nearly a week but we still don't know anything."

Scully took the ketchup bottle out of his hands and gently tapped the neck. "Well, we know that all of those people were diabetic and we also know that they're all dead. And I'm willing to bet that there's a causal relationship there." Two more taps and ketchup began to flow onto her fries. She put the bottle on the table and smiled. "Physics," she said.

Mulder swallowed his annoyance and picked up the ketchup. "Did you find out anything about the companies that manufactured insulin?" he asked. He hit the bottom of the bottle with his palm, hard.

"There were four major companies, but they pretty much carved up the map in terms of Distribution," Scully said. She reached over and pulled a handful of napkins from the dispenser and handed them to Mulder, who was wiping ketchup off his tie. "If there had been something wrong with one company's insulin, we wouldn't be seeing such a random pattern of deaths."

"It occurred to me today that even if we could figure out where the insulin came from, there's still the matter of tracing specific lot numbers to drug stores and then to individuals." He dabbed at the last of the stain on his tie, inspected the dark spot and tossed the crumpled napkin on the table. "I think it's a dead end."

"I wonder what Mr. X's interest is in all this," Scully asked. "I mean, it would be a terrible tragedy if a tainted batch of insulin got out, but why all this cloak and dagger stuff twenty-five years later?"

Mulder listened as he lifted his burger to his mouth. A half a pound of beef, still pink inside, just the way he liked it. Finally, something was going right.

Scully nibbled absently on a french fry. "You know the other thing that bothers me? In all the cases we looked into today, the cause of death was something unusual."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, two instances of rare pneumonias, one case of septicemia and one extremely rare parasitic infection. This is not run of the mill stuff." She moved her cole slaw around pensively. "Oh, my God," she said softly. She put down her fork. "Mulder, I just thought of something."

"What?" he managed to mumble around his mouthful of food.

"Insulin used to be made exclusively from the pancreases of slaughtered cows and pigs," she said.

He quickly swallowed, then put his burger down. "Oh, to have the stomach of a pathologist," he said, as he wiped the juices off his hands.

Scully was looking distastefully at her own supper. "What if there was something wrong with the livestock?"

Mulder frowned. "But it still comes down to the same thing doesn't it? It's still more a matter for the FDA than for us."

Scully raised her eyes from her plate. "The Church of the Red Museum, Mulder. Wisconsin."

She saw his expression change as it hit him. "Are you saying that the animals they used to make insulin, were being used in a similar experiment?" he asked.

Neither of them spoke for a moment.

"We've got to figure out how to track down livestock that was raised twenty-five years ago to make insulin," Mulder said.

"That's not going to be easy."

The waitress whisked past the booth and stopped abruptly when she saw their plates.

"Is there something wrong with your burgers?" she asked.

Mulder and Scully exchanged looks. "Could you wrap these up please?" Mulder asked. "I think we're going to take them with us."


It was after five when Scully glanced at her watch. She was on hold, again. She'd been on the phone all day with various branches of the FDA, four different pharmaceutical companies, a handful of slaughterhouses and more mid-level, faceless bureaucrats than she cared to count. She realized that she was hungry, and tried unsuccessfully to remember what she'd had for lunch.

Mulder's phone was still glued to his ear, too, and she noticed that the wastebasket by his desk had overflowed in a cascade of crumpled paper balls.

They were getting nowhere. Fast.

The annoying muzak in her ear stopped and a weary voice told her that Mr. Greeley had left for the day, but that he would get her message first thing Monday morning. Scully thanked the woman and hung up. Even if Mr. Greeley did return her call, she doubted that he held the key to the puzzle that Mr. X had dropped on them. Scully was starting to wish that she could meet with Mr. X one more time -- just long enough to inform him that he was welcome to take his top-secret, highly-classified, pain-in-the- ass business somewhere else.

She got up and wandered around the office, massaging her neck with one hand, while she waited for Mulder to get off the phone. She was in the lab, staring at some X-rays and thinking about a hot bath, when she heard Mulder hang up. "Anything?" she called to him.

He walked into the lab, rubbing his face. "Not a thing. I wasn't able to trace a single bovine organ back to its home. You?"

"I spoke to three people at each drug company who told me that the FDA must keep those records, and five people at the FDA who told me that it was the responsibility of the drug companies." She sighed and leaned against the counter. "I can't help but think that this is turning into a huge waste of tax payer's dollars, Mulder."

"No bigger waste than say, Newt Gingrich," Mulder said.

She smiled a bit. "Seriously, this trail isn't leading us anywhere. I think it's time to regroup."

Mulder leaned against the opposite counter. "We know it's the insulin. We just have to find out what and how."

"Hang on," Scully said, raising a hand. "We think it's the insulin. It's just a theory. That might not be it at all."

Mulder stared off into space for a moment. "We need more to go on. I'm going to try to contact my contact."

Scully pursed her lips. "I don't know, Mulder."

"What else can we do?" he asked. "If there's something here, we're sure not finding it."

She shook her head. "I just have a bad feeling about him."

A grin spread across Mulder's lips. "A bad feeling? Careful, Scully. You're starting to sound a little spooky."

His teasing didn't elicit a smile from her. "Call it an educated guess then," she said. "I don't trust him." She walked back to her desk and started packing her briefcase. "Besides, why should he help us, anyway?"

Mulder went back to his chair, sat down and propped his feet on his desk. "He said once that he does it because he feels a certain loyalty to Deep Throat."

Scully stopped sifting through her papers long enough to nail him with a look. "The night that I met him, he sure wasn't feeling much loyalty to you, Mulder."

"I have that effect on people," he said. "Frankly, I'm surprised that you've stuck around this long."

"Keep it up and I may jump ship, yet," she said. She slid on her pumps and snapped off her desk light. "Look, let's sleep on it for the weekend and start again on Monday. Maybe we'll be able to see some angle that isn't obvious to us, now."

Mulder nodded. "I'll see what I can find out. For all I know, he may not even work weekends."

She raised an eyebrow in disapproval and stopped herself from telling him to be careful. Instead, she picked up her briefcase and headed for the door. "Have a good weekend, Mulder," she said.

"Yeah, you too, Scully," he replied. "Have you got another date with the deli guy?"

She stopped at the door and turned, bracing herself before she answered. "As a matter of fact, I do," she said.

"Well, have a good time."

She studied him for any signs of sarcasm, but found none. "Thanks," she said. "I will."

"See you Monday."

"Yeah. Bye."

She left, looking a little confused, and Mulder listened to the click of her heels recede down the hall. He crumpled up some more paper, threw it at the wastebasket and missed. He leaned back in his chair and sighed. He wished he had told her to be careful.

The living room was bathed in flickering blue light from the television set and the Knicks were behind by six points. Mulder got up and wandered into the kitchen in search of another cold beer. He popped it open while he stood at the fridge, took a long drink, and then returned to the living room and his losing team. He glanced at the masking tape X on the window pane as he passed by.

The bastard had better contact him this time.

He took another slice of pizza from the open box on the coffee table and folded it in half with one hand. He was in the process of jamming most of it into his mouth when the phone rang. It took three rings for him to swallow and answer.

"Mulder," he said.

"Tomorrow night, nine p.m., in the parking garage of the Watergate Hotel. I'll find you. And don't be late, Mr. Mulder, because I have better things to do with my time."

The line went dead.

Mulder put the receiver back in its cradle.

The crowd on t.v. roared and Mulder looked towards the noise. The tide had turned. His team was winning.


Scully spent most of Saturday doing laundry, cleaning her apartment and trying to convince herself that an attractive, intelligent and sensitive man really was going to take her to dinner that night. She had a date, the first one in a long time. Lunch had been nice, but somehow having lunch with someone, even someone as charming as Peter, didn't count as a date. It was more like an interview. A chance to get together on neutral ground and check each other out, with the comfortable knowledge that if this midday meeting turned out to be a disaster, you could always plead a hectic day and escape back to work. Except she hadn't wanted to escape back to work. In fact, she could have sat in that sunny restaurant all afternoon and into the evening, talking and listening, getting to know each other.

It wasn't until she was folding the last load of laundry, still warm from the dryer, that she realized she was nervous. Nothing like dating to make you feel like a gawky fifteen year old again, she thought. Fortunately there were a few important differences between her teenage dating experiences and her current situation. For one thing, she wouldn't need her mother to rescue her poor suitor from her father's inevitable interrogation at the front door when he called for her. She smiled recalling how her mom would literally push her and her date out the door, ending her husband's "Stern Sea Captain Routine", with a cheerful "Really, Bill!" And of course, there would be no one to flick the porch light off and on when a midnight goodbye on the front steps threatened to stretch past what her father considered an acceptable time limit.

Not that there had been teenage boys lining up to ask her out. Her sister, yes, but not the youngest of the Scully women. She remembered lamenting this fact once to her mother, while they did the dishes.

"Boys don't ask me out because I'm not pretty," she had said, not daring to look away from the plate she was drying. She had been afraid to say the words out loud before now, afraid that somehow speaking them would make them true.

Her mother had been startled. "Sweetheart, you don't really believe that, do you?"

She shrugged. "It's all right, I guess. I don't mind that much."

Margaret Scully shook the dishwater off her hands then quickly dried them on her apron. She took her daughter's face in her hands and looked into her eyes. "You listen to me, Dana. You have a very special kind of beauty."

She had fidgeted and rolled her eyes. "I know, I know, I have inner beauty. But nobody asks you on a date because your insides are beautiful, Mom."

"It's not just your insides that are beautiful, darling." A fierce love shone in her mother's face. "If I could have one wish for you, it's that you could see yourself the way I see you. Beautiful and intelligent, strong and compassionate." She saw tears welling in her mother's blazing eyes and suddenly felt embarrassed. Her mother smiled through her tears, then quickly kissed her on the forehead. "Come on," she said, turning back to the sink. "We have dishes to finish."

Scully smiled at the memory, recognizing how long ago that had been but how little things had changed. She still felt gawky and uncertain at times, only now she was better at masking it with a practised clinical detachment and a cool exterior. And usually, it worked.

So why was she so nervous? She wasn't a fifteen-year-old girl anymore, shocked to suddenly find herself inhabiting the body of a woman and not at all sure how to act. She was an intelligent, accomplished professional, respected by her colleagues, if not for her assignment, then at least for her talent and her abilities. She had proven that she could hold her own in the boys' club on any case.

But this wasn't a case, this was a date. A date with a man she found very attractive. A man who made her feel beautiful when he looked at her. Not for the first time this week, she started to imagine the feel of his hands on her body, then caught herself and felt a sharp rush of embarrassment. This had to stop. Next, she was going to be listening to her old Air Supply albums.

She had finished folding the towels and was putting them away in the bathroom when it came to her. She was nervous because it had been a long time since she'd slept with a man. She sat down on the edge of the big, claw-footed bathtub and tried to remember precisely how long. At least a year and a half, she decided. Not since Mulder and her assignment to the X-Files.

Mulder, again. How had he managed to invade her life so effectively that he popped into her head even as she was contemplating sleeping with another man? She got up brusquely and strode back to the living room to finish folding the laundry. By the time she was dressing for her date, she had managed to convince herself that she was worrying for nothing. It was just dinner and a movie -- nothing to be apprehensive about there. As for what might come afterwards, she would play it by ear. Surely she was too pragmatic to let herself be swept off her feet by her hormones.

At two minutes to five, the door bell rang. She opened the door to find Peter standing there with a dozen white roses.

"Hi," he said. Then, with a shy smile, "These are for you." He held out the flowers. The intoxicating scent of roses washed over her. They locked eyes and Scully felt every ounce of her pragmatic resolve draining away.

She couldn't help but smile.

Peter waited in the living room while she put the flowers in water, then went to locate her jacket and purse. She slipped her cell phone and her gun into her bag and for just a moment, she let herself wonder what Mulder was doing tonight.


The car radio muttered softly. Mulder had searched for something to listen to while he waited, but had only been able to find an AM phone-in talk show. The current caller was drawing a parallel between replacement players in major league baseball and welfare recipients, the precise logic of which escaped Mulder. He was reaching to turn it off when the passenger door flew open. He jumped involuntarily and grabbed for his weapon. The man was in the car before Mulder could lay his hand on his gun.

"Feeling a little nervous this evening, Mr. Mulder?" the black man asked.

Mulder let out his held breath and sank back into the seat. "You shouldn't sneak up on people like that," he said.

The man's face showed no emotion. "And you should try not to be such an easy target. This is a dangerous business we're in, you know."

Mulder returned his steely gaze and realized again how much he disliked this man. The man drew a manila envelope from inside his overcoat and tossed it into Mulder's lap.

"Happy Birthday and Merry Christmas, Mr. Mulder. This is the biggest gift you'll get all year. I'm sorry I didn't have time to have it wrapped."

Mulder picked up the envelope. "What is it?"

"All the scientific data of a top-secret government project, the point of which seems to be evading you and your partner, as well as the obituaries of three scientists, all of whom have coincidentally died within the last six weeks." He scanned the parking garage as he talked, and Mulder realized he was experiencing a growing urge to do the same. "One of the scientists who worked on this project is still alive. I suggest you find her, as quickly as possible, before she decides to take up bungee jumping or some equally dangerous hobby."

"Do you have any idea where she is?" Mulder asked.

The man stopped sweeping the area with his eyes long enough to glare at Mulder. "Shall I write the report for you as well?"

The feeling of knuckles hitting bone with a satisfying thud flashed through Mulder's mind. Except he knew that this man would shoot him through the heart before he could land the punch.

The man's hand was already on the door handle. "One last thing, Mr. Mulder. I would advise you and your partner to move very quickly on this one. There is a clean up operation of the highest efficiency in motion and in a few days, there won't be anything left to investigate." He started to get out of the car.

"Wait a minute!" Mulder said, and grabbed the man's arm. He stopped and looked at Mulder's hand, then turned his blistering gaze on Mulder. Mulder waited the length of two heartbeats before he let go of his arm. "What's your interest in this? Why are you helping us on this one?"

The slightest trace of a smile crossed the man's lips, but never made it to his eyes. "Sometimes, when you want things done right, you have to do them yourself." He slipped out of the car and strode quickly towards the shadows.

The evening air was cool with the memory of winter but Scully was still warm from the glow of the wine they'd shared at dinner. The meal had been long and candlelit and they had decided to skip the movie, in the end, in favor of a walk around the Tidal Basin. The cherry trees were in blossom and the air was thick and syrupy with their fragrance. They held hands and walked the slow walk of two people who were enjoying the night and each other.

She couldn't remember the last time she had felt so relaxed. And she knew it wasn't just the wine, even though she had surpassed her usual one glass limit. It was everything: the breeze that caressed her face and stirred the petals in the trees, the lights reflecting and dancing on the water, and this man, whose fingers were gently intertwined with her own. She searched for the familiar hollow spot, listened for the echo of her own shouts, but heard only contented silence.

Peter squeezed her hand and peered down at her in the half light. "You're awfully quiet," he said. "Are you O.K.?"

She smiled, her self-consciousness dissipating like mist. "I'm fine," she replied.

He turned to face her, then stood there, looking at her. "Let's go back to your place," he ventured.

Scully studied his eyes, saw the promise of comfort and healing there. She nodded.


She had just slipped the cork out of the bottle when he came up behind her, in the kitchen. He kissed her neck tentatively and she felt a sigh escape her. She leaned back against him and he kissed her again, more insistently, his arms encircling her and pulling her to him. She closed her eyes and let the dizzy feeling wash over her. His lips brushed across her ear and sent a shiver through her. She felt her heart quicken and she turned in his arms, to face him.

The phone rang. She stiffened.

"Have you got an answering machine?" he murmured, but her mind was already racing through the possibilities. It was too late for her mother, unless something was wrong. Mulder? What the hell could he want on a Saturday night? Peter's kisses drew her thoughts back from the telephone and a few moments later, the ringing stopped. He cupped her face in his hands and kissed her mouth, gently at first, then more urgently. She felt her body responding, felt the heat building.

A muffled chirping came from the living room.

Scully stopped and listened. The sound was repeated.

"It's my cellular," she said, pulling away from Peter.

He let out a frustrated sigh. "How many phones do you have?" he asked.

Cursing silently, she followed the sound to the couch, where she had left her purse when they'd returned. It was either a family emergency or it was Mulder, and for his sake, she hoped it was really important because if it wasn't, there was a good chance that she would kill him.

"Scully," she snapped into the phone.

"Scully, it's me," Mulder said. "Listen, I think I've got something big here, and I need you to look at it. Where are you?"

"I'm at home," she said.

"O.K., stay there. I'm on my way over."

"Now?" she asked. She could hear the trace of hysteria that had crept into her voice and she fought to control it.

"Is that a problem?" Mulder asked.

Peter emerged from the kitchen and leaned in the doorway. She looked at him standing there, and felt a sharp ache.

"Scully? Are you still there?"

"Yeah, I'm here," she said. She pushed her bangs off her face and sighed. "How long will it take you to get here?"

"I'm not far. Maybe twenty minutes."

"All right. I'll see you then."

"Scully, is everything O.K.? You sound kind of funny."

She glanced over at Peter and thought about what she was giving up. She sighed again. "Everything's fine, Mulder. I'll see you shortly." She turned off the phone and tossed it onto the couch.

Peter watched her with an amused look. "Something's come up," he said.

She nodded. "It's this case we've been working on..." She let her arms fall to her sides. "I'm sorry," she said.

He smiled and straightened up. "Don't worry about it," he said. "I know what it's like. I don't have a nine to five job, either." She walked him to the door and waited while he put his jacket on. He caught her eye and smiled as if he had read her thoughts. "Really, I understand. I'll take a raincheck, O.K.?"

She nodded. "O.K."

"I had a good time," he said. He reached out and touched her cheek.

"Me, too."

"I'll call you," he said. He kissed her just long enough to remind her of what she was missing, and then was gone. She shut the door and locked it, then leaned against it and sighed. Right now, there was work to be done and she had to clear her head, but she promised herself that later, she was going to take the time to feel very, very disappointed. She headed to the kitchen, to put away the wine.

She heard the coffeemaker wheezing and rattling, announcing that the coffee was ready. She left her computer long enough to pour herself a cup, then returned to the terminal. She had started to read through the medical files again, while she waited for Mulder, going over what she had read already, looking through some new ones for something that might explain why Mr. X had given them this disk, when she spotted a diagnosis that made her stop. The deceased was Elizabeth MacIntyre, a thirty two year old woman who had died as a result of a rare infection, called cryptococcosis.

Scully's forehead wrinkled as she put down her mug. That was odd. Few people had ever heard of cryptococcosis before the eighties, when it started showing up in people dying of AIDS. She went to her bookcase and scanned her medical references, pulled out a volume on infections and returned to her seat at the computer. She thumbed through the book until she found what she was looking for.

"CRYPTOCOCCOSIS: a rare infection caused by inhaling the fungus CRYPTOCOCCOSIS NEOFORMANS, which is particularly found in soil that has been contaminated by pigeon droppings." She scrolled through the information on the screen. A very eager medical resident must have been the one to catch the infection, but no course of treatment had been successful. The patient had died as a result of an inflammation of the meninges which covered the brain and spinal cord. She had left a husband and a six-month-old baby.

Scully sat back and thought for a moment. All of these people had died from the same sorts of opportunistic infections that killed people whose immune systems were destroyed by HIV. Something had been decimating the immune systems of the people in these files, something that acted much more quickly than HIV. She leaned closer to the screen, skimmed through the information again. She reached the end of the file and started the next one.

Her concentration was suddenly shattered by angry shouts right outside her window. She drew back a bit, startled, then scrambled to find her gun. She returned to the window and pressed herself against the wall, listening, every muscle tensed. There was a second of hesitation where she willed herself to open the blind and look out, but couldn't move. Then, Mulder's voice reached her ears. Reflexively, she flipped up a wooden slat and peered outside. She glimpsed Mulder, wrestling with another man on the front steps, only a few feet away. An instant later, she was flying out the door of her apartment.

She could see them through the front door as she stormed down the hall. Mulder's back was to her, and he was fighting to pin the man's arms behind him. She threw open the heavy door, weapon leveled and shouted, "Federal Agent! I'm armed!"

The man suddenly stopped struggling. Mulder seized him by the jacket and pushed him roughly up against the iron railing at the edge of the steps. He shoved the man's upper body forward, bending him over the railing then finished snapping on the handcuffs.

"All right, what the hell were you doing in the bushes?" Mulder yelled. He grabbed a fistful of the man's jacket and forced him into the railing.

Scully suddenly felt the bottom fall out of her stomach when she recognized the jacket. Numb arms lowered the gun. "Mulder," she said.

Mulder was still breathing hard. He kept one hand firmly on the man's back while he quickly frisked him for weapons. "What were you doing? Huh? Looking for a way in? Or just keeping tabs on her?"

"Mulder, stop it!" Scully said, more loudly.

"Dana, what the hell is this? Who is this guy?" Peter demanded.

Mulder looked back and forth at Scully and the man in handcuffs, trying to piece it together.

"Dana!" Peter's voice was ragged with exertion and anger.

"Do you know this guy?" Mulder asked.

Scully had to force herself look him in the eye. She nodded. "His name is Peter O'Hara." Mulder stared at her, incredulous. God, did she have to spell it out? "He was my date tonight, Mulder," she said, finally.

Mulder didn't move for a moment. He turned his gaze back on Peter and his eyes narrowed. "That still doesn't explain what the hell he was doing under your window." Peter made a move to straighten up, but Mulder held him there.

"I am asking you to take your hands off me," Peter said, in a measured tone. He tried to stand up again, and Mulder resisted him once more.

"Mulder!" Scully glared at him. "Let him go."

Mulder hesitated, then reluctantly stepped back. Peter straightened up. The two men stood a few feet apart, eying each other. Peter shot a glance at Scully. "Who is this guy?" he asked.

Scully was flushed with equal parts of embarrassment and anger. "Peter, this is my partner, Fox Mulder."

They continued to stare each other down, the animosity growing until it was almost palpable.

"You still haven't explained what you were doing sneaking around under her window," Mulder said.

Peter spoke to Scully, as if she had asked the question. "I was getting into my car and I thought I saw someone trying to look into your front window. I came around the building from the other side, to try to catch him in the act. The next thing I know, your partner here, jumped me."

Mulder bristled. "Why didn't you call the police? Or just go back inside and tell Scully?"

Peter's expression hardened. "Why am I the one being interrogated here? I was just looking out for Dana."

"Very noble of you," Mulder spat back.

"Who the hell are you to jump all over me like that? I was just trying to help."

"Oh, I'm sorry, I must have missed your white hat."

"Stop! Just stop it! Both of you!" Scully's voice was sharp and her words echoed in the cool night air. The two men stood before her, like chastised children, refusing to meet each other's eyes. Scully took a slow breath and tried to infuse her voice with something that sounded like calm. "All right. Whoever was skulking in my bushes appears to be gone, probably scared off by all the noise you two were making." She leveled her gaze at Peter, her eyes pale. "Peter, I appreciate your concern, but I think I can take care of myself." Peter looked as if he was about to say something, then thought better of it. "Mulder, would you please take those cuffs off him?"

Neither man spoke, just resumed glaring at each other. Finally, when he could find no reason not to comply with her directive, Mulder pulled out his keys and unlocked the handcuffs.

"Are you all right?" Scully asked Peter.

He nodded tersely and rubbed his wrists. "I'm fine." Then in a softer tone, he added, "Look, Dana, I'm really sorry. I was just worried for you." Scully nodded, but said nothing. Peter shifted from foot to foot, suddenly very conscious of the gun she held at her side. "Well, I'll go then, if you're O.K.." He tried to smile. "I'll call you tomorrow," he said. He cast one more icy glance at Mulder, then left.

Mulder kept his eyes on Peter's back until he got in his car and drove off, then he turned and looked at his partner, as if he'd never seen her before. "You believe him, don't you?" he said.

Scully's eyes were still a cool gray and Mulder got the impression that she was looking through him. "Whether I believe him or not is irrelevant, Mulder. It's over and we have work to do. Come on."

Mulder stopped himself from shaking his head in disbelief, knowing it would only fan the flames of her fury. He settled for rolling his eyes as he followed her inside and wondering what the hell she was thinking.

Scully had to tell him twice to stop pacing before he went and sat on the sofa, leaving her to read in peace. He'd read the obituaries over another dozen times, but they only talked about loved ones and memorial services. Eventually, he had felt himself drifting into sleep and had decided to give in. When his cellular rang, he found himself sprawled on the sofa, his head at an uncomfortable angle against the arm. He glanced at his watch. It was after three.

"Mulder," he said.

"Don't you ever sleep?" a woman's voice asked.

"Not if I can help it," he replied. "What have you got, Claire? Any luck tracking down those dead guys?" She spoke for several minutes while Mulder scribbled down notes. When she had finished, he said, "Thanks. I owe you one."

"You mean you owe me another one, Mulder," she said. "And I'm keeping track." She hung up.

Scully was at the kitchen table, head bent over the document that she was reading, occasionally writing something down. She glanced up as Mulder approached, and he noticed how tired and pale she looked.

She took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes. "Did you find out anything about those obituaries?" she asked.

"Plenty." He looked at his notes. "Three weeks ago, Dr. Richard Steele, 77, died after falling down a flight of stairs in his home in St. Petersburg, Florida. He was a specialist in genetic engineering, a graduate of Harvard and apparently a brilliant researcher, given that he was shortlisted twice for the Nobel prize. Next was Dr. Joseph Costanza, 73, of Phoenix, Arizona, who allegedly lost control of his car and hit a rock face."

"Allegedly?"

"No one saw the accident, and the car exploded and caught fire, so there wasn't a whole lot of Dr. Costanza left to autopsy. It's still being investigated by local authorities. That was almost two weeks ago. He was a molecular biologist and had recently retired from teaching at Arizona State University." Mulder flipped a page. "Last, and most recently, there's Dr. William Inglis, aged 70, of Roanoke, Virginia. A pioneer in virology. He attended Yale and was a prominent cancer researcher for most of his career."

"How did he die?" Scully asked.

"Of an apparent allergic reaction to a bee sting. His wife found him in their garden." Mulder lifted his eyes from his notes. "You know those needles that people with severe allergies carry?"

Scully nodded. "Yeah, they're loaded with epinephrine."

"His was still in his pocket."

Scully raised an eyebrow.

"All in all, a rather sudden attack of careless behavior, don't you think?" Mulder said.

"What about the other doctor?" Scully asked.

"This is the best part." Mulder consulted his notes. "Dr. Leslie Hamilton, aged 70, a specialist in immunology, and a Yale graduate, she taught and did research at Rice University until 1990, when she and her husband, Vince retired to Corpus Christi, Texas. Her husband died a few months ago. Then six weeks ago, without saying a word to any of her friends, Dr. Hamilton sold her house and car and left Corpus Christi. No one has heard from her since, and a missing persons report has been filed."

"That was before any of those scientists died," Scully said. "She must have known something."

"We've got an immunologist, a molecular biologist, a genetic engineer, and a specialist in viruses," Mulder said, counting them off on his fingers. "What were they doing?"

She bit her lip and cast a glance across the papers spread over the table top. "It's hard to say," she replied.

Mulder sat down in the chair opposite her. "Come on, Scully. Just give me your best guess."

"It's not that simple, Mulder." She sighed and leaned back in her chair. "There is some very complex biochemistry and virology here, stuff that I've never even heard of before. Now, I'm guessing, but given the line-up of scientists and what I can understand of this data, I think they were designing a retrovirus."

"What is that, exactly?"

"It's a special kind of virus that carries RNA instead of DNA. They tend to be associated with tumours, at least in humans," she said, "but Mulder, HIV is only the third retrovirus that has been positively identified in humans."

"What are you saying?"

"If the dates on these documents are correct and this research was carried out in the sixties..." She took a deep breath and then plunged on. "Mulder, in 1970, there were only a handful of scientists in the world who even believed that human retroviruses existed. The first one wasn't discovered until about 1980."

"And yet, these scientists were designing one," Mulder said.

She held up a hand. "We don't know that for sure."

Mulder was already on his feet, pacing around the kitchen. "They were experimenting on all those people, using them as guinea pigs."

"Hold it," Scully said, and crossed her arms. "Even if these people had designed a human retrovirus, and I'm not saying that they did, but if they had and they were using insulin to deliver it, how on earth would they collect the data? You said yourself that it was impossible to trace bottles of insulin bought at pharmacies to the individuals who bought them. What good is it to infect people with the virus, but never know who you infected? It doesn't make sense."

Mulder acted as if he hadn't heard her. "It's perfect, Scully. Insulin would be the ideal way to unknowingly infect a population. They take the same does every day. And insulin probably has to be protected from extreme temperatures, and that would ensure that the retrovirus wasn't destroyed, right?" He looked to Scully for agreement.

She nodded reluctantly.

Mulder stopped pacing and faced her. "That's what was in the insulin Scully. Some kind of prototype of a biological weapon that the military was testing."

Scully hung her head and groaned. "Mulder, don't you think that it's a little premature to be jumping to such drastic conclusions? I mean, there's still so much that we don't know."

"Like what?"

"Like how they traced the insulin. And exactly what this is," she said, waving her hand over the paper that was strewn across the table.

"O.K.. So, how do we find that out?"

Scully saw the familiar intensity in Mulder's eyes, knew that he was already leaping off the high wire. She sighed. There was nothing to do but follow along, and prepare to catch him.

"I have a friend who works in virology over at Georgetown University," she said. "Maybe she can tell us more."

A grin flashed across his face, then was gone. "The next thing is to find Dr. Hamilton," he said. "She's the only one left who can piece this all together for us."

"It sounds to me like she doesn't want to be found," Scully said. "She may not even be in the country any more."

Mulder resumed his silent walk back and forth across the kitchen. Scully was just about to tell him again to quit pacing and sit down when he suddenly stopped. "Wait a minute," he mumbled, as he grabbed his notes and rifled through them. "Here. Look. Both Dr. Hamilton and Dr. Inglis went to Yale and they're about the same age. They might have been classmates."

"Yeah. So?"

"If she knew that they were all in danger, maybe she tried to contact him."

Scully considered this. "It's possible," she admitted.

"He lived in Roanoke. That's just a few hours from here. I think we should go and talk to his wife. She may know if he had heard from Dr. Hamilton."

"It's as good a place as any to start, I suppose," Scully said.

"We can drop all this off to your friend on the way," Mulder said, "and be in Roanoke in about three hours." He looked all around for his jacket but was stopped cold by Scully's expression. "What?"

"Mulder, it's three o'clock in the morning. In three hours, the sun will just be coming up," she said. "Go home. Get some sleep. Let me get some sleep."

"O.K," he said, and glanced at his watch. "I'll pick you up at six."

She glared at him. "Seven."

He hesitated. "Six thirty?"

She sighed. "Fine. Six thirty." She wearily got to her feet, and rubbed her eyes. "Just go home and let me go to bed. Unlike you, Mulder, I need to sleep."

He smiled at her and nodded, then made his way to the door, jacket in hand. He paused, one hand on the door knob and turned to face her again, searched for the right words. "Scully, I just wanted to say that I'm sorry about your date. I mean, about how things turned out," he said.

Her expression was unreadable. "Yeah. So am I."

He scrambled to think of what else he could say that might melt the chill he still heard in her voice, but decided to leave it alone for tonight. "All right. I guess I'll see you in the morning," he said.

She opened the door for him. "It already is morning, Mulder."

He studied her face for some hint of what she was feeling, but found none. He smiled, in what he hoped was an apologetic way, then left.

Scully locked the door, turned out all the lights and then let herself collapse onto her bed, not bothering to take off her clothes. She awoke with a start a little while later, her heart pounding. She had been dreaming about someone watching her, through her bedroom window. Light from the street seeped through the cracks in the blind and cast sharp shadows across the bed. She took a deep breath to calm herself, then rolled over and pulled the quilt up to her chin.


Scully struggled to keep her eyes open for most of the drive, despite the fact that Mulder had brought her a large steaming cup of coffee when he arrived to pick her up at six twenty-five. She dozed fitfully, jerking awake occasionally with the motion of the car. Mulder watched her for a while, then reached into the back seat for his trench coat.

"Here," he said, as he handed it to her, "use this, so you won't get a sore neck."

She mumbled her thanks, stuck the coat between her head and the door, and promptly went back to sleep. He kept an eye on her as he drove, wondered if she was still angry with him. She had been quiet since he'd picked her up, but then, she was pretty tired. She still looked pale and Mulder noticed that she was frowning slightly in her sleep. He smiled to himself. She must be dreaming about him.

Later, when he pulled up in front of the Inglis residence, a big, tudor style home with manicured hedges, he had to gently shake her shoulder to rouse her. She yawned and sat up, then ran her hand through her hair, trying to repair the damage.

Mulder got out, stretched and surveyed the house while he waited for her. A moment later, she joined him on the sidewalk and handed him his trench coat.

"It's a little wrinkled," she said. "Sorry."

Mulder examined the coat. It was deeply creased, like a piece of paper that had been crumpled and then unfolded.

"It's too warm for it, anyway," he said and tossed it in the back seat.

"I knew he was dead the moment I saw him," the tiny woman said. She sat opposite Mulder and Scully, in a wingback chair, which threatened to swallow up her frail form. Her hands lay lifelessly in her lap and her shoulders slumped slightly, as if some great weight was pushing down on them. Nearby, a grandfather clock kept vigil, steadily counting off the passing seconds. "When the paramedics arrived, they said there was nothing they could do, but I'd known that from the moment I stepped into the garden and saw him lying on the grass."

Her eyes drifted away from Mulder and Scully to gaze sightlessly into space, but her expression told them that she was reliving the scene. Scully waited for a few seconds and when she spoke, her voice was soft and soothing. "Mrs. Inglis, what sort of reaction did your husband usually have to bee stings?"

"He would have difficulty breathing and then his throat would become swollen, but once he took his needle, he'd be fine in a few minutes."

"So he'd been stung before?" Mulder asked.

"Oh, heavens, yes!" the woman said. "Bill loved to garden and he was particularly fond of roses, so the back garden is full of them. Most days if you stood still out there, you could hear the buzz from the back door." She smiled wistfully and one hand fluttered up from her lap to touch the lace doily on the arm of her chair. "He was always getting stung, but he didn't seem to mind. He'd just take his needle and rest for a little while, then he'd be right back at it." The smile on her face slowly faded and tears began to seep into her pale eyes. She fought to compose herself. Mulder noticed that this woman bore a passing resemblance to his own mother and silently wished himself out of this living room.

No one spoke for a few moments while she drew herself back together and blinked the bothersome tears away. "I'm sorry," she said. "It's still difficult." She smoothed her skirt, then folded her hands on her lap again. "Now, you said something on the phone about Leslie."

"Yes," Mulder said. "I don't know if you are aware that a missing person report has been filed on Dr. Hamilton."

The woman looked stricken. "Leslie? Dear God, what happened to her?"

"There's no reason to believe that anything has happened to Dr. Hamilton," Scully cut in, with a cursory glance at Mulder. "Some friends of hers in Texas are concerned because she hasn't been in contact with them. At the moment, no one seems to know where she is, and so it's routine to file a report."

"I see," Mrs. Inglis said. She pondered this information and the color slowly returned to her face. "Well, I'm afraid we haven't heard from her since, oh, it must be last summer."

"Your husband and Dr. Hamilton have known each other since medical school, is that right, Mrs. Inglis?" Mulder asked.

She nodded. "Yes, they were classmates at Yale. In fact, she and her husband Vince were married two weeks after Bill and I, right after graduation. It was a lovely wedding." She paused, the wistful smile returning briefly.

"Did they ever work on any projects together?" Mulder asked.

"Oh yes. When we were in New Mexico. But that was a long time ago."

Mulder sat up a little straighter. "Do you remember exactly when that was?"

She sighed. "Let's see...Bob, my youngest, was in junior high then, I remember because we had an awful time finding a school that would take him mid-semester. So, it must have been the winter of '67 that we moved there."

"What sort of project were they working on?"

"Oh, heavens. I'm afraid I don't really know. It had to do with viruses, of course, since that's Bill's field, you know, and it was a government grant of some sort, but beyond that I can't help you. I was busy raising the boys and Bill didn't like to discuss his work much."

"And Dr. Hamilton was working on the same project?" Mulder asked.

"Yes, but as I say, they never really talked much about it."

"You said you'd heard from Dr. Hamilton last summer," Scully said. "I assume you've kept in touch over the years."

"Mostly Christmas cards and the occasional letter. She and Bill conferred with each other for work I know, because he would mention from time to time that he'd gotten a call from her." She shook her head. "Poor Leslie. I hope nothing has happened to her."

Mulder leaned forward, elbows on his knees. "Mrs. Inglis, do you have any idea where Dr. Hamilton might go if she wanted to get away for a while? Does she have relatives that you know of? Anybody she spoke about?"

The tiny woman frowned. "I don't think I ever heard her speak of relatives, and of course, she and Vince never had children." She thought for a moment. "I do remember them stopping by once, oh, it must be twenty years ago, while they were on vacation. It sticks in my mind because we so rarely saw them. As I recall, they were going to spend a month at this little cabin that Vince had inherited somewhere in the Allegheny mountains. It was quite remote and they were beginning to make enquiries about the possibility of getting electricity."

"Do you have any idea where it might be?" Mulder asked. He was leaned so far forward that Scully thought he might tumble out of his chair at any moment.

"I'm just trying to remember," the woman said. "There was an animal in it somewhere..." She tapped a dainty finger on her lips and frowned as she thought. "It wasn't bears...what was it? It was something Crossing. No, something Junction. That's it. Some animal Junction." She pursed her lips and frowned. "It was so long ago, you know. I'm not sure that I..." She stopped speaking suddenly and her face brightened. "Wolf Junction," she said. "The closest little village was Wolf Junction, West Virginia. I think it's just across the state line, actually."

Scully saw Mulder's body relax, as if he'd just started breathing again.

The woman beamed a little at her accomplishment, then smoothed a few more invisible wrinkles out of her skirt. "That's the only time she ever mentioned it. She may not even own it anymore. As I say, it was a long time ago."

"Well, it's worth looking into," Scully said.

"Mrs. Inglis, is there any way we could look through some of your husband's correspondence?" Mulder asked. "There's a possibility that Dr. Hamilton may have mentioned something that could help us to locate her."

She hesitated and cast a furtive glance towards the staircase in the hall. "I suppose that would be all right," she said. "The last couple of years, he worked mostly at home, in his study. I ..." She choked on her words, one slender, pale hand flying to her mouth, in an effort to hold back a sob. Mulder and Scully waited, eyes downcast, while she struggled to find her voice.

"I wonder if you would mind if I didn't help you?" she asked, at last. Her hands darted about in tiny birdlike movements, fingering the buttons on her sweater, touching the fabric of the chair. "I haven't been able to bring myself to go in that room, yet. It's silly, I know, but..." She let the sentence trail off unfinished and regarded Mulder and Scully with a beseeching look.

Scully glanced over at Mulder in time to see his expression soften into a tender smile. "It's not silly at all, Mrs. Inglis. I understand perfectly," he said. He got to his feet. "Why don't you just tell us which room it is and we'll look on our own."

They found William Inglis's study on the second floor. It was a small room, made all the more cramped by the number of books, journals and files that were piled on every flat surface. A sturdy desk and chair were pushed up against the wall by the window. Two wooden filing cabinets stood beside it, and there was a worn, sagging arm chair in the corner.

"I'll start with the filing cabinets," Mulder said.

Scully looked around the room, took in the clutter on the desk and decided to begin there. She sat down in the desk chair and surveyed the files, scraps of paper and stacks of bills and correspondence. She methodically worked her way from one side of the desk to the other, discovering along the way scribbled references to scientific articles, phone numbers, a few issues of the journal of virology, a grocery list and a heap of seed catalogues. The slightest sense of guilt dogged her as she sorted through the paper and books. There was something disturbingly intimate about sitting at someone else's desk, going through their things, as if their entire life and all its secrets were tucked away in the drawers. She wondered, as she sifted through a handful of receipts, who had cleaned out her desk in their basement office when she had been missing last year. Probably Mulder. Had he felt guilty, intrusive, as she did now? Or was he grateful for the chance to sit in her chair and maybe somehow be near her in the process? She honestly didn't know, and she certainly wasn't going to ask him.

Her gaze fell on the Macintosh computer that occupied a quadrant of the desk. She studied it, thinking for a few seconds, then reached around the back of the computer and ran her hand across the ports, switches and cables. At the far right edge, her fingers touched a phone line.

Mulder looked up from the filing cabinet when he heard the computer hum to life with a perky chirp. Scully was tapping keys and peering at the screen.

"What are you doing?" he asked.

"Following a hunch," she said.

Mulder entertained several witty replies, then remembered the look on her face when he had left her apartment early this morning. He decided to keep them to himself, and returned to the filing cabinet.

Scully scrolled through directories looking for something that wasn't password protected. She was about to give up and start searching the desk for anything that looked like a password, when she came across the directories for an internet service provider. There was no security software on them. A few keystrokes and she found herself with a list of emails that William Inglis had sent, which had been automatically filed in the computer's memory. She started reading.

A few minutes later, she said, "Mulder, I think I've got something."

Mulder came to the desk and looked at the screen. "What?"

Scully clicked the mouse a few times, and the text of a letter appeared on the screen. He leaned closer to read it.

Leslie,

I heard about Richard today, but I think you're over-
reacting. The stupid old fool fell down the stairs is all.
I never liked him, as you know, but I can't help but feel
sorry.

Listen -- about your recent feedback:. I don't know what
to tell you. I have no idea if you've done the right thing
or not, but what's done is done. It will probably all blow
over in a few days. You're getting paranoid in your old
age, Leslie. It was 25 years ago. No one cares anymore.

Regards, Bill.

Mulder looked at Scully. "She blew the whistle on the project," he said, "and when they started coming after them, she tried to warn Inglis."

Scully leaned back in the chair and it squeaked loudly. "O.K., but why now? And what proof does she have?"

"If we can find her, we can ask her ourselves," Mulder said. "Is there an address?"

"Yeah, but it's just an address through a commercial service provider. It's going to take a lot of paperwork and a couple of days to get a proper address," Scully said. "But we do know that wherever she is, she has access to a computer."

"And a phone line."

They regarded each other for a moment.

"Hey, Scully, how many new phone lines do you think have been installed around Wolf's Butt, West Virginia in the last month?"

Scully allowed a hint of a smile. "Hopefully not too many."

Mulder looked into his rear view mirror and watched Scully's reflection stride across the rental car lot. He knew it made sense for her to head back to Washington to meet her virologist friend at Georgetown while he continued westward to Wolf Junction, but for some reason he couldn't fully articulate, even to himself, it made him uneasy. He'd held back while they'd discussed the plan of action, not able to come up with a good reason why they should stick together, and in the end, he'd driven her to the nearest AVIS office to rent a car for the return trip to D.C., with a promise to call one another as soon as anything turned up. But he didn't like it.

He signaled, then eased the car onto the highway, glancing back over his shoulder at the lot before he accelerated. She was nowhere to be seen. He pulled his cellular out of his pocket then punched in the familiar number.

"Danny?" he asked. "I've got an urgent one for you, and I don't care who you have to pull off the golf course for it. I need information about new phone lines installed in a place in West Virginia in the last five or six weeks."

Scully consulted the directory in the lobby of the deserted biological sciences building, running a finger down the list of names of professors and researchers until she found Dr. E. Przednowek, Rm. 612. She went off in search of the elevators, her heels clicking loudly against the floor tiles and echoing in the empty halls.

The door of room 612 was decorated with stickers from Greenpeace and a half-dozen other whale and tree saving organizations. Scully smiled as she knocked. Beth would never change.

The door was opened by a tall, lithe woman in a t-shirt, jeans and Birkenstocks. Her long, blonde hair was pulled back in a ponytail and she had wide, chestnut colored eyes. She didn't return Scully's smile.

"Jesus Christ, Dana! Where did you get this?" the woman said, when she spotted Scully.

Scully, who had been about to step through the door, stopped dead. "Why?"

"Do you realize what you have here?" she asked, waving a handful of pages in the air.

Scully looked quickly up and down the hall. "Can we discuss this in there?" she asked, pointing into the office.

Beth's expression softened and she nodded. "Sure, sure. I'm sorry! Come on in." She stepped aside and let Scully enter the tiny, windowless room. She pushed some text books and computer printouts off the only chair and motioned for Scully to sit down. She sat on the edge of her desk. "I'm sorry, it's just that I've been reading this stuff you dropped off for the past two hours and it's really freaking me out."

"What did you find?" Scully asked.

"Well, you were right, it's a retrovirus, but this data..." She shook her head. "This is bioengineering on a level I've never seen before."

"Really?"

Beth nodded and her pony tail bobbed in rhythm. "And that's not the best part. This data records elaborate manipulations of a retrovirus that, as far as I know, doesn't exist."

"Do you mean that it's one that hasn't been identified?"

"Well, it's either that or somebody created this thing to play around with."

"How, exactly?"

Beth flipped through the pages. "It's not entirely clear and there's a lot here that's over my head. But from some of these experiments, I'd say they were trying to make it more virulent. They were damn successful, too. They managed to speed up the cell death on some of these trials by 40%." She lowered the pages and stared at Scully. "And you're not answering my question, Dana. Where did you get this?"

"We're not entirely sure yet," Scully replied.

Beth cocked her head and studied Scully's expression. "Agent Scully, are you being straight with me? Or is that Bureau talk for `keep 'em in the dark'?"

Scully sighed. "Look, Beth, there's a lot we don't know about this yet."

"All right, all right," Beth said, "it's not that I don't believe you. It's just that there is some pretty revolutionary stuff in here. Not to mention a Nobel prize or two."

"Can you tell me how it works?" Scully asked.

"It's hard to say, but there are some structural similarities to HIV, so I'd guess that it targets the immune system."

"Which means that the host would die from opportunistic infections like pneumonias, and fungal infections, right?" Scully said.

Beth nodded. "It's possible."

"How infectious is it?"

"From what I read, not very. You'd need fairly direct contact with body fluids."

Scully sank back in the chair, her mind racing. Beth watched her for a few seconds, then said, "Is this some new sort of Ebola thing that lives in African bat shit or something? I mean, should I unpack my biocontainment suit?"

Scully met her gaze and chuckled. "Washington isn't about to become the next Zaire, if that's what you're asking," she said.

"Maybe not," Beth said. "But you've just shown me research that is so far beyond cutting edge that I can't make heads or tails out of some of it." She looked directly at Scully, her dark eyes intense. "Somebody, somewhere has this technology and they're not sharing. Doesn't that scare you?"

Scully looked at her friend for a long time, then nodded.


By 4:30, Mulder had driven down so many gravel roads that he thought his teeth were going to shake right out of his head. The addresses that Danny had been able to find for the three new phone lines installed that month in Wolf County were deep in what a real estate agent might have called a charming wooded setting. His patience failing with the afternoon light, Mulder was more inclined to think of it as the middle of nowhere. He'd stopped at a small general store hours ago, in search of sunflower seeds and directions, but had gotten neither, and now he was hungry as well as lost.

He tapped the steering wheel impatiently and scanned the road ahead for any sign of civilization, but the forest met the gravel in an unbroken line. The trees, still translucent green with their spring leaves, managed nevertheless to block out the late day sun, imposing a tinted twilight on the road. Mulder realized that when the sun finally did set, it was going to be very dark. If he didn't find this last place before then, he was going to have one hell of a time finding his way out of here.

The driveway was so narrow and overgrown that he nearly passed it. At the last second, it registered. He slammed on the brakes, then threw the car in reverse and backed up, the tires spitting gravel all around. There was no mailbox or sign, just a path that led off into the thick woods. Mulder pulled the car off the main road, easing the wheels into the ruts in the path, and hoped that whatever mud he encountered wasn't deep.

A few hundred yards later, the car emerged into a rough clearing. There was a small cabin, built mostly of logs, with a clapboard covered addition on the back. A Nissan Pathfinder was parked a short distance from the cabin and Mulder pulled up behind it. The clearing was bathed in shadows and when Mulder got out of the car, he spotted a light on in the cabin. The smell of wood smoke hung in the air.

Good, he thought, as he made his way across to the cabin, somebody's home.

He was still several yards from the cabin when the door opened and a woman looked out. He saw the color drain from her face.

"Dr. Hamilton?" he asked, as he reached into his pocket for his i.d.. "Dr. Leslie Hamilton?"

The woman, who looked like she might cry, nodded.

Mulder stopped a safe distance away and held out his credentials for her to inspect. "I'm Special Agent Fox Mulder, with the F.B.I.. I'm here to help you."

She looked at him for a long moment, cast a glance at his identification, and then her shoulders sagged. "It doesn't matter anyway," she said. "I'm tired of hiding. If you're here to kill me, you might as well come in and get it over with." As Mulder watched, she turned and walked wearily back into the cabin.

Scully checked her answering machine as soon as she got back to her apartment. There were two messages, one from her mother, just to say hi, and one from Peter, saying he was sorry that he'd missed her and that he would try to reach her again later. She stepped out of her pumps and stripped off her suit jacket as she listened to his voice, made tinny by the machine. She debated whether or not she wanted to be home for his next call as she padded down the hall to her bedroom. By the time she'd unclipped her holster and exchanged her skirt and blouse for black leggings and a t-shirt, she was still undecided and beginning to wish it would all just go away.

She sighed as she sat on the edge of the bed to lace up her sneakers. There just wasn't time to think about Peter right now. Her mind was racing, trying to sort through all the pieces that had been dropped in her lap these past few days. She needed to put them in some sort of order so that she could find the holes and figure out what pieces were still missing. The apprehension that had been with her since Mulder had given her the disk still gnawed at her insides, had in fact grown noticeably since her conversation with Beth this afternoon. They had something big here and it was important to do it right.

She pulled on a gray sweatshirt and grabbed her keys, carefully locking the door behind her. She stretched quickly on the front steps, anxious to start running, to hopefully clear her mind. Once she had her thoughts in order, she would call Mulder and tell him what she knew about the retrovirus that Dr. Hamilton and the others had engineered. She trotted off down the sidewalk, heading towards the running paths at the park.

A few moments later, a silver Oldsmobile Ciera pulled out of its parking spot and drove down the street. It reached the end of the block, signaled and turned in the direction of the park. The driver didn't notice the gray Taurus that fell in behind it in the next block.

The interior of the cabin was lit by two tired lamps and was sparsely furnished. A couple of armchairs that had seen better days were pulled up by the fieldstone fireplace and an upended orange crate with a lantern and a stack of books on it stood between them. The kitchen consisted of a hotplate with two burners, some whitewashed cupboards, a tiny table with two chairs and a sink. At the far end of the room, there was a wooden partition that blocked off what Mulder supposed was a bedroom.

The woman was pouring water from a plastic jug into a kettle. "Well, since you've come all this way to protect me, Mr... uh..." She turned and looked at him. "What did you say your name was again?"

"Mulder," he replied. "Fox Mulder."

She snorted and turned back to the kettle. "Well, Mr. Fox Mulder, since you've driven all this way to save my antique ass, the least I can do is offer you a cup of tea." She put the kettle on the burner and turned a dial. "You might as well sit down. You look like you've got a lot of questions to ask."

Mulder tossed his trench coat over the back of an armchair and sat down at the kitchen table.

"How did you find me?" she asked, as she rummaged through the cupboards.

"The email that you sent Dr. Inglis," Mulder said. "We realized that you had a phone line and Mrs. Inglis remembered you mentioning this cabin."

She brought a plate of cookies to the table, shaking her head. "I knew I was leaving myself wide open on that one, but, I felt I owed Bill at least a warning about what I had unleashed." She put the cookies down in front of Mulder. "Here, you look like you haven't eaten in days." She went back to the cupboards, started rooting for tea bags and cups. He ate a cookie and watched her preparing the tea. She moved slowly, and Mulder detected a hint of stiffness in her walk, but she looked much younger than her seventy years. She wore faded jeans and a man's red flannel shirt with a turtleneck underneath. Her hair was silver and very neatly pulled up into a bun. When she finished at the cupboards, she came and sat opposite him at the table, leaning forward on her elbows. "So, how much do you know, Mr. Mulder?"

"I know that twenty five years ago you were involved in some sort of top-secret government project to design a virus and that you probably tested that virus on an unsuspecting population," he said. "I know that this information isn't quite as secret as it used to be, due to some action on your part. I also know that of the four scientists who worked on the project, you're the only one who hasn't met a sudden and suspicious death."

Her eyes were a frosty blue and there was no emotion in them as she studied Mulder. "You're not here to kill me, are you?" she said.

Mulder shook his head. "How could I after you've gone to all the trouble of making me tea?"

A trace of amusement in the icy eyes, as if he was a child who had just recited his lesson well. Mulder helped himself to another cookie.

"What do you want to know?" she asked.

"Who were you working for? Who authorized the development of the virus?"

"Ultimately some covert group in the government that everyone would swear doesn't exist, but most of our contact was with military types. They probably took their orders from somebody higher up."

"Was it a biological weapon you were developing?" Mulder asked.

She smiled grimly. "We preferred not to call it that, particularly after Nixon signed that treaty in '68 which outlawed biological agents."

"But that's what it was, wasn't it?"

The emotion was gone again and her eyes were the color of frozen smoke. "It was the atomic bomb of biological agents, Mr. Mulder," she said. "This wasn't some rinky-dink little bug that the army would set loose on a battlefield to take down a few thousand troops. This was an agent that was designed to neutralize the entire population of the Soviet Union."

Mulder stared at her. She nodded. "Yes," she said, "it was that big."

The kettle whistled and she got up slowly and went to turn off the burner. "Many of my colleagues believed that it was much safer than nuclear warheads. None of that annoying radiation to worry about afterwards." She poured the boiling water into the teapot, and clouds of steam rose from it. "You must remember that this was the 1960's, and we believed that not only were the Russians developing even more deadly strains of viruses, they were months, if not years ahead of us."

She turned to look at Mulder, to read his expression, then turned her attention to the teapot again. "How old were you during the Bay of Pigs fiasco, Mr. Mulder? Two, maybe three years old?"

"About that," Mulder said.

"Well then let me tell you that while you were still in diapers, this whole country experienced fear on a scale it had never known before. The enemy was in our very back yards, pounding on the door," she said. She brought the teapot over to the table, set it down then returned for the cups. "Everything we had held sacred suddenly crumbled before our eyes. For months, people walked around expecting it to rain missiles on them. We were all terrified."

She put a china cup down in front of Mulder and one at her place and then sat again. "We thought what we were doing was the right thing. We thought that by having something equally lethal to wave under their noses, we could force the Russians to behave."

"So you went ahead and tested a deadly virus on five hundred innocent people?" Mulder asked.

"Acceptable losses, Mr. Mulder, or at least that's what the military called them," she said, her eyes on her cup. "Every good general knows that in any battle, men will die. And make no mistake, we were at war. The loss of life seemed minuscule compared to the greater risk of leaving ourselves open to foreign attack. We even managed to convince ourselves that those five hundred or so people who died were martyrs to a great cause."

Mulder shifted in his seat. Her eyes flicked up as he moved.

"I'm not asking for your pardon, Mr. Mulder. In fact, I don't expect you to understand. I'm just telling you what it was like." She ran her finger along the rim of her cup, and Mulder noticed that it trembled slightly. "It all seemed so very black and white then," she said.

"How did you collect the data?" Mulder asked.

"Operatives in hospitals, in major cities, posing as nurses, mostly. They had access to all the patient's records, and of course to their insulin. The operative would identify suitable candidates who were admitted to the hospital for some reason. They would incorporate the virus into their insulin and then they would wait. Within three to eight months, once their immune systems had failed, the subjects would usually be readmitted to the hospital, suffering from some illness which eventually killed them."

She leaned forward, lifted the lid on the teapot and peered inside. Satisfied that it was properly steeped, she poured steaming tea into their cups, then looked at Mulder again.

"When did it end?" he asked.

"In a sense, it didn't," she said. She wrapped her hands around her cup, to warm them. "The research was going incredibly well, we had a 98% fatality rate and what we'd learned in a few short months about RNA viruses, as we called them then, it took the rest of the world a decade to figure out."

"So what happened?"

"I'm not sure," she said. "The project was very suddenly shut down. Maybe they lost interest or maybe there was a shift in the power structure. I don't know. For whatever reason, our services were no longer required and we were dismissed, with the reminder that our lives and the lives of our families depended on our continued silence." She sipped her tea, and stared at the tabletop. "Bill Inglis told me that every so often, they would follow his kids home from school." She shook her head. "Subtlety was never their strong suit."

"So once your husband died, you realized that you had nothing to lose and decided to blow the whistle," Mulder said.

She smiled, but there was a sudden weariness in her features that hadn't been there before. "It's much more ironic than that, Mr. Mulder. You see, my husband died of AIDS, probably contracted through a blood transfusion he received while undergoing routine surgery. He unknowingly infected me and eventually, this horrid little virus will kill me too, and so twenty five years later, justice will be wrought."

She waited for Mulder's reaction, but he said nothing.

"It's really rather poetic, don't you think? Watching someone you love die slowly and painfully from a terrible illness and living every day with the knowledge that you doomed hundreds of innocent people to that same fate." She took another sip of tea, then carefully set her cup down. "I am not afraid to die, Mr. Mulder, because I am no longer afraid of hell. It can't be much worse than what I've endured these past few years."

Their eyes met and she held his gaze for a long time, challenging him to say something. Mulder kept his expression neutral and waited for her to go on.

"And so, suitably chastised, I decided to do my part to bring this dirty little secret to light," she said, picking up her cup again. "The first step was to get my hands on the information, the data, the medical records. My late husband, who designed security systems for computer networks was a brilliant man, and although it took about a year and a half, he hacked his way into the necessary places and got me what I needed. Then, of course, the question was how to make this information public."

The fire had died down to glowing coals and she got to her feet and moved stiffly to the fireplace. She poked at the ash with a long stick, then tossed on another chunk of wood.

"At first I considered contacting all the families of the subjects," she said, "but in the midst of researching the whereabouts of the surviving relatives, I came across that young reporter and decided that he was the most logical choice." She pushed at the log with the stick, trying to position it on the hottest embers. "His father had been a victim of our little creation and so I thought he would be highly motivated to get to the bottom of this."

"Wait a minute," Mulder said. "You gave this information to a reporter?"

She straightened up and nodded. "Yes. The young man at the Washington Post." She looked at Mulder quizzically. "That's why you're here, aren't you? Because he contacted you?"

A knot began to form in Mulder's gut.

"I was tipped off by an anonymous source," he said. "What is the reporter's name?"

"Peter O'Hara," she replied.

The knot tightened. "Oh, shit," he said.


Threatening gray clouds had followed Scully on her run, blotting out the sunset and eventually forcing her to turn back, but the rain held out until she was home, the first fat raindrops starting to dot the pavement as she trotted up her front steps. She stood, hands on her hips, and watched the rain fall, while she caught her breath. It had been a good run, even though it had been cut short, and her muscles felt warm and loose. She couldn't wait to step into the shower.

She propped one leg on the iron railing, grabbed her ankle and eased her body forward until her forehead touched her knee. Not bad for an old woman, she thought. She held the position for a while, then switched legs.

She studied the bushes under her front window as she stretched and noticed that they were badly trampled. She was reminded of the scene that had taken place on these steps last night and she sighed. She had just decided that she was going to have to call the building super to come and repair the damage to the bushes, when she spotted something shiny in the dirt. She leaned over the railing and squinted in the half-light, trying to make out what it was. Unable to identify it, she descended the steps and waded in, pushing branches out of the way, searching the ground.

She located the object and bent over to retrieve it. It was a bracelet, with a heavy silver chain and an oval plate in the middle. She held it up to the light. On one side was a caduceus -- two snakes intertwined around a winged rod -- and the words MEDIC-ALERT. She turned it over. One word was engraved there: DIABETIC.

The rain came down harder, but Scully stood there, clutching the bracelet, her thoughts churning in her head.

"Oh, my God," she said. "Peter."

A moment later, she slammed the door to her apartment and flipped on the living room lights. She strode across the room to her computer, not bothering to take off her sneakers. There was an antique crystal vase on the table beside the computer, which held the roses that Peter had brought her yesterday. She glanced at them as she turned the monitor on.

She stopped abruptly, one hand on the computer, and a tingle of fear ran through her.

The monitor was warm.

She felt it with her other hand to make sure. It was definitely warm.

She sensed, rather than heard someone come up behind her. It was at that moment that she realized she had left her gun and holster on her bedside table.

Leslie Hamilton stood by the fireplace, giving Mulder an odd look. "Mr. Mulder, you're very pale all of a sudden," she said. Mulder got up and grabbed his trench coat, felt in the pockets for his cellular phone, swearing at himself when he realized that he'd left it in the car.

"Is something wrong?" she asked, as he headed for the door.

Mulder opened the door and took a couple of steps towards his car before he saw the headlights, way off in the woods. As he watched, they were extinguished. The vehicle moved so slowly that Mulder could scarcely hear it. He bounded back into the cabin, shutting the door behind him.

"Is there another way out of here?" he asked.

The woman hesitated.

"I think the people who want you dead are in your driveway and we have to move quickly. Is there another way out of here?" he said.

"There's a window in the bedroom," she said.

Mulder took her by the arm, and rushed her across the cabin to the tiny space that served as a bedroom. There was a cot and a small chest of drawers. Mulder looked around, then guided the woman to the corner furthest from the door.

"Stay down," he said. "And don't make a sound."

She nodded, her eyes wide with silent fear, and she crouched in the corner.

He tried to open the window but it wouldn't budge. He pushed against the frame in a few places, and heard a cracking noise where it had been painted shut. He tried again to open it, struggled for a moment and then felt it give. It moved a few inches and stopped. Another heave and it slid open. With a glance back at Dr. Hamilton, he hoisted himself through the window, landing quietly on the ground. He drew his gun and instinctively crouched, making his way to the corner of the cabin. When his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he spotted a figure emerging from behind his car. Mulder waited until the man was out of his line of vision, then he rounded the corner and pressed himself against the wall. He moved soundlessly, his pistol grip loose, his heart thudding in his chest. At the next corner, he paused and listened. There was no sound. Mulder fell into a crouch, his back against the cabin, straining to hear some hint of the man's movements.

The faintest squeak of old hinges reached Mulder's ears. He waited, holding his breath. A few seconds later, he peered around the corner. The man was inside the cabin.

Mulder bounded around the corner and into the doorway, his weapon pointed ahead of him. The man was twenty feet away, standing by the table where Mulder and Dr. Hamilton had been drinking tea.

"Don't move!" Mulder shouted.

The man started to spin around and Mulder saw the flash before he heard the shot. Mulder managed to fire twice as he threw himself to the ground. He rolled away from the door and hurriedly got to his feet, breathing hard. There was no movement inside the cabin.

Mulder moved cautiously back into the doorway, keeping his gun trained on the body on the floor. He got close enough to determine that the man was dead, then scooped up his gun and sprinted out of the cabin towards the path to the road. The man's car was a few hundred feet away from the clearing and Mulder circled it once at a distance before he approached. There was no one in the car. He found the keys in the ignition, but the trunk and glove box were both empty.

He ran back to the clearing and his car, stopping to grab his cellular phone. Ten minutes and three phone calls later, Mulder had both the county sheriff and the U.S. Marshall on their way to the cabin, with promises to arrive within the hour. He tried Scully's number next, then her cellular, but didn't get an answer at either. The knot in his stomach tightened another notch.

He returned to the cabin and called to Dr. Hamilton. "I think it's safe to come out now," he said.

She appeared in the door, her eyes wide, and looked at the body laying on the kitchen floor.

"I shot him," Mulder said.

She nodded. "I can see that."

"Someone from the U.S. Marshall's office is going to be here within the hour to place you in protective custody. Your whereabouts are no longer a secret and I think it's the best way to keep you safe."

"You mean alive."

Mulder nodded imperceptibly. "I have to contact my partner and get back to Washington. I want you to take this gun and wait for the Marshall to arrive. They told me that they would be here soon." He crossed the room to give her the gun. She took it with trembling hands. "Just stay inside and you'll be safe."

Mulder had grabbed his trench coat and was at the door when she spoke.

"Mr. Mulder," she said.

He turned.

"I am in your debt," she said.

Mulder nodded and hurried out the door.

She sat down at the kitchen table, for a while, clutching the gun, then moved to an arm chair. She fidgeted around the cabin, stoking the fire a half-dozen times. She managed to stay busy for a few more minutes then decided to wash the tea cups they had used. She had just finished drying them and putting them away when she heard the van pull into the clearing. Surprised by the rush of relief that she felt, she hurried to the door and peered out into the darkness.

A man got out of the van and started walking towards the cabin.

She wondered for a moment why he wasn't wearing a uniform. And then she tried to remember where she had put the gun Mulder gave her.

He fired once. The bullet pierced her skull and she crumpled to the floor. The man stepped over her as he entered the cabin, paused long enough to glance at the other body that lay on the floor. He placed a small canister in the center of the room and then left.

A few moments later he climbed back into the van and nodded to the driver. He pulled out his cellular phone and dialed.

In the depths of a building in Washington, D.C., a phone rang. The man who answered it had just lit another cigarette and a haze of blue smoke hung in the air. He picked up the receiver and held it to his ear, but said nothing.

"The target has been neutralized," the man in the van said.

A puff of smoke. "Did Mulder get away?"

"Yes, sir. It went exactly as we expected."

"Very good." He hung up.

The van had reached the main road and was accelerating when the two men heard the explosion back in the woods.


Scully fought to keep her terror at bay. She steeled herself with a deep breath and slowly turned around. Peter stood in the living room, only a few feet away from her. Her fear was suddenly washed away in a wave of anger.

"What the hell are you doing in my apartment?" she demanded. "How did you get in here?"

"I can explain," he said, and backed away a few steps. "It's not what you think. I came here to ask for your help."

"It looks to me like you came here to break into my computer."

He raised his hands to signal a truce. "Look, I know you're angry."

"You're goddamn right I'm angry," she said. She held up the medic-alert bracelet, her eyes blazing. "When exactly did you intend to tell me about this?"

He faltered for a second, then smiled. "All right, you caught me. I'm a diabetic."

"Oh just cut the crap, Peter!" she said. "Your father was a diabetic, too, wasn't he? And if I look, I bet I'll find his name in the documents that were leaked to us. What I want to know is how you found out we were investigating this?"

Before he could answer, the phone rang. They both froze, eyes locked. It rang a second time and Scully started to move.

"Stay where you are," Peter said. He pulled a gun from his jacket pocket.

Scully stared at him in disbelief and she felt her heart start to beat a little faster. Two more rings and the answering machine picked up. Scully heard her own voice say "I can't take your call right now. Please leave a message." A loud electronic beep punctuated the sentence and then there was a static filled pause.

"Scully?" The machine amplified Mulder's voice across the living room. "If you're screening, pick up! It's important!"

Scully heard him sigh in frustration.

"O.K., look. I've found Dr. Hamilton," Mulder said, "and somebody just tried to kill her. She told me that she gave all the information to that guy you were out with the other night. His father was one of the people that they were experimenting on and I don't think that it's a coincidence that he's hanging around. Call me as soon as you get this message, all right? I'm on my way."

There was a burst of static and he hung up. Silence settled over the room.

"Is that what this is about?" Scully asked. "Your father?"

Peter smirked. "No, but I must admit, it will give the story a nice human interest angle."

"The story?"

"Don't you see? Dana, this makes Watergate look like a church picnic," he said. "The U.S. government was experimenting on its own citizens with a deadly biological weapon, for Christ's sake. Do you realize how big that is? Do you know how much print I can get with this?"

Scully looked at him standing there and realized that it wasn't the gun that frightened her. It was the expression on his face. She pushed the fear out of her mind, tried to focus.

"How did you know I was on this case?" she asked.

He chuckled. "I'm leading something of a charmed life these days. First, the story of a lifetime is dropped in my lap by this nice doctor lady who is trying to atone for killing my father, and then a week later, just as it's becoming clear that I can't do the story without her corroboration, some anonymous person phones me to say that you and your partner have all the pieces I need to put this together."

"Nobody knew we had this," Scully said, but the next moment, she realized that someone did know. She dragged her attention back to Peter. "So why are you here? You know as much as we do."

"Apparently not, if your partner just spoke to Dr. Hamilton," Peter replied. "This whole thing is not much more than hearsay without her." There was a look in his eyes now that made Scully want to take a step backwards. "I need to find her and talk to her or else there is no story here at all. So just tell me where I can find her and I'll be on my way."

Scully's expression didn't change. "I don't know where she is."

"Come on, Dana!" Peter said. "Your partner just finished talking to her. Where is she?"

"I'm telling you the truth. I don't know where she is," she said. "Mulder has been working on his own today and I have no idea where he found her." A flicker of fear crossed Peter's face and it fortified Scully. "You're welcome to wait and ask him when he gets here," she said.

Scully saw him hesitate and she knew he was off balance, that he was trying to figure out his next move. She mentally measured the distance between them and realized that she couldn't cross it fast enough to take him down.

"All right," Peter said. "I need to see what you've got on your computer. You must have information that I don't have and I couldn't get past your password, before." He was starting to sweat. "Boot up your computer and call up those files."

Scully didn't move.

"Do it!" he said, more loudly.

She forced as much calm as she could muster into her voice. "No," she said.

Peter's fingers tightened reflexively on the gun. "I like you, Dana. I don't want to hurt you. Start the computer."

Scully held his gaze for as long as she dared, then said, "You're not going to hurt me, Peter." She took a tentative step closer to him and held out her hand. "Give me the gun."

"Don't underestimate what this means to me," he said, but he was backing away from her, and his hand was trembling.

Scully wished he would move his finger off the trigger. She kept her voice soft and reasonable. "What are you going to do, Peter? Shoot me? That won't solve anything." She took another step as she spoke. "Put the gun down and we'll talk about this."

She could see the hesitation and confusion in his eyes. He was going to snap. One more step and she would be close enough.

Across the room, the front door burst open, yielding to a well-placed and violent kick. The door frame cracked and split in a shower of splinters and the door smashed against the wall, as two men swept into the room, weapons leveled. The smaller of the two keyed on the gun that Peter held and before Peter could turn to look at them, he'd been hit by a bullet. Peter fell to the floor, without a sound.

Scully wheeled around.

"Freeze, Agent Scully!" the larger man shouted. "Put your hands where I can see them, please!"

Scully numbly lifted her hands to shoulder height. The larger man, who was closest to her, held a gun on her while the other man walked around to where Peter lay on the floor, unmoving.

"We're with the NSA and we are here to place you under arrest," the first one said.

Scully gaped at him. "For what?"

"We understand that you are in possession of stolen government documents," he said. He nodded to his partner, who still hovered over Peter, and then holstered his gun. He pulled a set of handcuffs and a roll of silver duct tape out of his jacket pocket.

Scully saw the duct tape and suddenly lost her breath.

"Hold it," she said, backing away. "I want to see your identification."

The man's expression hardened and he moved in on her. "Don't make this harder than it has to be, Agent Scully," he said.

A brilliant red dot suddenly appeared on the man's temple. Scully barely had time to notice it before a bullet smashed through the front window and burrowed into his head, precisely where the dot had been. Scully gasped, one hand flying to her mouth. The man slumped over. The shock paralysed her for a fraction of a second and then instinct took over and she bolted for the door.

The man who stood by Peter raised his weapon and Scully threw herself into a headlong dive through the door. He fired. She heard the bullet whistle past her head and blast into the door frame. Scully scrambled frantically to her feet and ran. She flew down the hall and whipped open the heavy front door, looking over her shoulder at the last second. The hallway was empty.

One more stride and something smashed full force into the right side of her face. The night exploded into a burst of white light and her knees buckled. She forced her limbs to keep moving, willed herself to stay upright, but instead felt her body tumbling down the concrete steps.

She lay there, the pouring rain dragging her back to her senses. The sidewalk was spinning and she felt her stomach start to heave. There was a voice and the sound of rain splattering against the pavement. She tasted sharp, thick blood in her mouth. She made herself open her eyes, saw someone standing over her. She struggled to lift her head, saw the man who had shot Peter slumped in the doorway to her building, blood running from a wound in his head.

Someone said, "We'll clean up these two. Get her in the car."

The nausea rolled over her again and she felt herself descending into suffocating blackness. There were footsteps, hands lifting her up and then merciful unconsciousness.

Mulder was traveling eastward, cruising along well over the speed limit in an attempt to make up the time he'd lost on the gravel roads. Scully still hadn't returned his call and she wasn't answering her cellular. All his internal alarms were ringing now.

He grabbed his cell phone from the passenger seat and punched in a number.

"Lone Gunman," a distorted voice said.

"Frohike, is that you?" he asked.

There was a click and then Frohike spoke. "Mulder! What's up?"

"I need to ask a favor," Mulder said.

"Ask away."

"I need you to go over to Scully's apartment right away and see if everything is O.K." There was a pause during which Mulder was certain that Frohike was running his hand through his thinning hair.

"Will the lovely Agent Scully be expecting me?" Frohike asked.

Mulder smiled in spite of himself. "She may not even be there. It may be nothing. I just want you to check it out and make sure."

"No problem, Mulder. I'm on my way."

"And listen, phone me on my cellular as soon as you know something, O.K.?"

"Will do."

Mulder pressed the end button on his phone and tossed it back on the seat. He drove for a few minutes, then glanced at the phone. A moment later, he picked it up and dialed Scully's cellular number one more time.

The pain was the first thing that came back to her. It wandered through the peaceful fogginess of her mind, searching for her, seeking her out, trying to drag her back to the present. Memories and images came after the pain but they were fragmented and jumbled and she wanted to slide backwards, away from them, and slip back into the soothing blankness.

The pain pushed harder and she moaned. Her awareness flooded back then, and she realized that she was lying on her back. She pushed her eyes open and impossibly bright lights assaulted her, made her wince.

She knew, without a doubt, that she was going to throw up.

She struggled to sit up, setting off waves of piercing pain in her head. She found herself on the edge of a vinyl couch. She sat there, her shoulders slumped, her head pounding in time to her heartbeat, and tried not to move.

The nausea started to pass after a while. The right side of her face was throbbing and it felt swollen and distorted. She touched her cheek and temple gingerly, ran her fingers lightly across the bumps and scrapes. She wondered how long she'd been unconscious.

The room she was in was small and had no windows. There was a gray door at the other end of the room and a conference table with eight metal folding chairs placed around it. The floor was cement, the walls, unpainted concrete blocks. Fluorescent lights hummed overhead and cast a cold light on the room.

As the nausea in her gut subsided, the fear rose. She got unsteadily to her feet and started walking around the room, making herself breathe slowly, trying to stay calm. She tried the door as she passed, and found it, not surprisingly, locked.

She had to think. There had to be something she could do. She paced slowly around the long table, keeping one hand on the wall for support, and forced herself to concentrate.

She had a sudden flash of that man's face as he approached her with the duct tape, then the bullet entering his head. She remembered Peter's body dropping to the floor, not making a sound. The hammering in her head reached a crescendo and she had to stop walking and lean against the wall. She closed her eyes and took long, slow breaths until it ebbed. When she opened her eyes again, it was a few seconds before her vision cleared. She decided that she probably had a concussion and somehow that comforted her. At least that was something that she could focus on, something that she knew how to deal with.

Three laps of the room and she was too exhausted to stand anymore. She returned to the couch and lay down, curling herself into a fetal position.

She realized that there was a good chance that they were going to kill her. They'd already shot those two NSA guys and Peter. One more wasn't going to weigh heavily on their conscience, whoever they were. But she felt strangely calm about the prospect of her own death. She knew that she was probably in shock from her injuries, but somehow none of it seemed to matter. She was even a little resigned to it. Her eyes were heavy and they were closing. She knew she wasn't supposed to sleep because she had a concussion, but couldn't seem to keep them open.

She drifted in that state, half awake, and thought about her family, wished she'd taken time to call her mother this weekend, like she'd planned. Mulder pushed his way into her thoughts and she realized that she felt sad. She'd seen what her abduction had done to him last year, had heard from people how he had reacted. Her death would send him right over the edge.

She roused herself a little, forced her eyes open. She had to stay awake. She tried to focus her thoughts on her predicament, but they kept coming back to Mulder. Mulder and that part of him that was so closed off from the world. That place where he had locked up all his pain and fear. Scully wondered if anyone had ever been able to scale the walls that he'd built. She couldn't imagine it. And yet, sometimes, when she let herself feel the depth of Mulder's trust in her, she realized that he was opening a door for her, inviting her in. And it scared her a little.

There was a rattle of keys outside the room and she sat up abruptly, her heart leaping to her throat. The door opened and a man stepped in.

"Agent Scully, would you come with me, please?" he asked.

Fear and relief mingled in her chest and she didn't move. "What is this place? Where am I?" she asked, struggling to keep her voice from quavering. "Who are you?"

The man was unreadable. "Please come with me," he said again.

She tried frantically to think. Despite the fog that lingered along the edges of her mind, it didn't take long for her to conclude that she had very few options. She stood up, pulled herself up to her full height and, with her mouth set in a straight line of resolve, she walked across the room, trying not to sway as she moved. The man stepped out of the way to let her precede him into the hall.

"This way," he said, and he gently took her elbow and steered her to the left. Scully pulled her arm away and glared at him, then continued in the direction he had indicated. The man did not respond, only continued walking along beside her.

The halls were the same gray concrete block construction as the room where she'd been. They passed other colorless metal doors and Scully wondered who else was being detained behind them.

They reached the end of the hall and turned right. The man stopped and opened a door, then ushered Scully inside. As she crossed the threshold, the smell of stale cigarette smoke reached her nostrils and caused her to stiffen.

She knew who was in the room before she saw him.

Mulder slammed the gearshift into park and leaped out of the car and into the pouring rain. He sprinted down the sidewalk to Scully's building, took the stairs in two strides and ran down the hallway. He came to a dead stop at the entrance to her apartment, and stood there, dripping from the rain and breathing hard. The frame around the door was splintered and the door was wide open. He stepped inside, stopped again and looked around.

Frohike had described the scene in his panicked phone call, but Mulder hadn't been able to prepare himself for the blood stains on the carpet, one by the front windows and one across the room by the couch. He stared at them, fear gripping his insides. A single thought screamed through his brain: he couldn't lose her again.

Frohike stood in the door to the kitchen, wringing his hands and wordlessly watching Mulder's expression. Mulder made himself look away from the bloodstains and commanded his mind's eye to stop imagining how they'd gotten there. He walked around the room, touching nothing, just observing and thinking. The whole apartment had been tossed, drawers emptied onto the floor, and cupboards rifled. Whoever had done it had been thorough. He noted the bullet hole in the front window as he passed and desperately hoped that it had been made by a bullet from Scully's gun. He bent down and examined the carpet, found tiny shards of glass and his heart sank. The bullet had come from outside.

He got up and continued his tour of the apartment. He made his way to her bedroom and was struck by how much the room smelled like Scully: a clean, soapy smell, with a hint of a delicate perfume. He spotted her gun, in its holster, on the table beside her bed. He just stood there for a while, breathing in the familiar and comforting scent and thinking about the fact that wherever Scully was, she didn't even have her gun.

He returned to the living room, and surveyed the scene again. Frohike watched him and for just a second, he looked like he might cry, but then he cleared his throat and said, "O.K. We have to move quickly."

Please direct all comments to the Author: at:


The Smoking Man nodded to her. "Agent Scully," he said. "Please come in and have a seat." There was an ashtray beside him on the table and an empty chair across from him.

Scully sat down, never taking her eyes off his face, and she heard the door behind her close. The man lit a cigarette. There was a languidness about his movements, a deliberate slowing down of his actions and Scully felt herself tensing as she watched him.

"I thought it was important that we talk," he said once he'd taken a long drag from his cigarette. "There's something that you and Agent Mulder need to know." He took another puff and then put the cigarette in the ashtray. "The man who has been acting as Agent Mulder's anonymous informant is trying to have you both killed."

Scully held herself back, tried not to let her expression change. "I don't know who you're talking about," she said.

"You're a poor liar, Agent Scully," he said, "so let's not waste time. Three hours ago, someone tried to kill Agent Mulder."

She flinched. "Why should I believe what you're saying?" she said.

He picked up his cigarette. "You have no reason to trust me," he said, "but your life and your partner's life are in danger, so I suggest that you listen to what I have to say."

Scully studied his face, which remained flawlessly neutral. "Is Agent Mulder all right?" she asked.

He nodded. "For now."

Scully knew that this was a chess game he was playing with her, and decided to move a few pieces of her own. "Agent Mulder's informant has provided us with valuable information, in the past," she said.

"He has helped you only insofar as it furthered his interests, but now too many people can connect him with you and Agent Mulder." He blew smoke into the air, watched it swirl. "His position has been compromised." He looked squarely at Scully. "Very simply, Agent Scully, you know too much. And a little knowledge can be a very dangerous thing."

Scully's eyes were burning from the smoke and the pain in her head hammered at her, made her feel weak, but she kept her gaze on his face. "Who were those men who came to my apartment tonight?" she asked.

"Does it really matter? They were there to kill you and we stopped them."

"Were they working for him?"

"No, but he has been using this situation as an opportunity to have you killed without getting your blood on his hands," he said.

"How?"

"Let's just say that he's in a position to know a great deal. He knew that there would be a clean up crew dispatched with the task of reclaiming the information and eliminating anyone who had found out too much."

"Are you saying that he gave us that information so that some hit squad would come after us?" Scully asked.

He picked up his cigarette and leaned back in his chair, crossing his legs. "It was in his best interest that you and Agent Mulder get to the bottom of this case as quickly as possible. Why do you think he made it so easy for you?"

She pondered this a moment. "How do you know all of this?" she asked.

The faintest suggestion of a smile crossed his face. "It is my business to know such things, Agent Scully." He puffed on his cigarette. "We've been watching him ever since he first contacted Agent Mulder."

Scully's face reflected her scepticism. "I don't believe you," she said.

There was at trace of disdain in his look. "Don't be stupid, Agent Scully. If I wanted to know out what your mother had for breakfast this morning, I could find out in an hour." He flicked the ash off the end of his cigarette. "All that matters now is that the evidence that was in your possession has been destroyed. With no proof to support your claims, you and Agent Mulder are no longer a threat to those people who would have been embarrassed by your continuing investigation."

"You realize that whoever is responsible for the deaths of all those innocent people is going to get away with it," Scully said, angrily. "They're just going to walk away from this. Doesn't that bother you?"

He looked at her through the haze of blue smoke between them and said nothing for the longest time. Then, he took a last drag on his cigarette and extinguished it in the ashtray. He got up, walked to the door and opened it. "You'll be escorted home, now, Agent Scully. I'm glad we had the chance to talk."

"Why did you tell me all this?" Scully asked. "What do you get out of this?"

"I have my reasons. And besides, I've come to have a certain respect for you and Agent Mulder."

A wave of pain and exhaustion swept over her and Scully let herself sink back into her chair. The Smoking Man started to leave, but her words stopped him.

"Who are you?" she asked.

He turned and looked at her. He smiled and the expression seemed out of place on his face. "Think of me as your guardian angel," he said, and he left.

Mulder was on the steps of Scully's building, watching federal agents and technicians flow past him, into Scully's apartment. Bright yellow crime scene tape had been erected, fencing off the entire building from the street and despite the rain, which continued to pour down, a crowd of curious neighbors had gathered on the sidewalk, talking quietly and staring at the building. The lights from several police cars strobed silently, bathing the onlookers, the lawn and the whole block with intermittent flashes of stark light.

Mulder ran his hand through his hair, and fought the urge to scream at somebody. He desperately wanted to be doing something, anything, but there was nothing to be done, except wait for the experts to do their jobs, document the scene and hopefully turn up some clue which might help them locate Scully.

He walked to the edge of the steps and looked up at the clouds. The sky was gray and bleak, and there were no stars. He rubbed his chin, and wondered if she was still alive. Bile rose in his stomach and he had to take a deep breath to steady himself. He couldn't start thinking like that. He had to concentrate on finding her.

A movement across the street caught his eye -- there was something familiar in it. He peered through the rain and the darkness, shielding his eyes against the flickering police lights. The figure was limping and moving unsteadily, but he recognized the stride and the defiant tilt of the chin.

He flew down the steps, pushed past the uniformed officers and ran across the street, stripping off his trench coat as he went. He descended on her, quickly wrapping his coat around her, and then holding her at arm's length to look at her face.

She was drenched and shivering. There were dark bloodstains on her sweatshirt and her hair was plastered to her head. The right side of her face was scraped and swollen and a bruise was ripening around her eye, which was half-shut. She looked disoriented and she swayed a little on her feet.

"Scully?" Mulder said to her, as he steadied her. "Scully, are you all right?"

Her eyes searched out his face and she grabbed his arm. "Mulder, they're destroying all the evidence," she said. "We've got to take Dr. Hamilton into custody. She's the only one who can prove any of this now."

"They already got to her," he said. "They burned the cabin, Scully. She's dead."

He felt her sag. She looked around, rain pouring down her face and then her eyes met Mulder's again. "We've got nothing," she said. "We can't prove a thing."

Mulder pushed wet bangs back from her eyes and gently cupped her face in his hands. He looked at her face, as if he was memorizing it, then said, "It doesn't matter, Scully."

She tried to summon up a protest, fought to find the strength to object, but instead found herself teetering on the brink of tears. Her shoulders slumped.

Mulder pulled the coat around her more tightly. "Come on. We need to get you to the hospital," he said.

She nodded, numbly.

He wanted to scoop her up in his arms and carry her to his car, but knew that she wouldn't allow it. He settled for wrapping his arm around her and leading her across the street, towards her building. She leaned against him as they walked, until he was supporting her. Mulder thought about what he'd just told her, and realized, to his surprise, that at that moment, nothing else did matter.


Epilogue

FIELD REPORT submitted to Assistant Director Walter S. Skinner
Special Agent Dana Scully April 4, 1995

"...Both Agent Mulder's apartment and my own were searched, ostensibly to locate and remove any evidence pertaining to our investigation of the retrovirus project. The hard drives on our computers were destroyed, and the computer of Dr. Elizabeth Przednowek, a virologist at Georgetown University, was stolen from her office...

"...Two bodies were recovered from the site where Agent Mulder met with Dr. Leslie Hamilton. Dental records were used to positively identify one body as that of Dr. Hamilton, but the other body, a male, 30-35 years of age, is as yet, unidentified. Autopsies of the bodies revealed little, owing to the fact that the human remains had been mostly destroyed by the fire...

"...The investigation into the death of Dr. Joseph Costanza, of Phoenix, Arizona, also believed to have been involved in the retrovirus project, is now closed, and his death has been ruled an accident...

"...The body of Peter O'Hara, a journalist with the Washington Post was found on the morning of March 27, in an alley. He had been shot three times at close range. An autopsy showed elevated amounts of cocaine and alcohol in his blood. A known drug trafficker pleaded guilty to his murder and several other unrelated charges, and is currently involved in negotiations for a plea bargain with the District Attorney..."

Scully sat, staring blankly at the computer screen, the cursor blinking impatiently, waiting for her to finish. She didn't hear Mulder open the door to their office, didn't notice him standing in the doorway, watching her.

Blue light from the computer screen washed over her face, but didn't disguise what remained of her black eye, or the puffiness around her cheekbone. Mulder wanted to wince whenever he looked at her, and he still felt some unexplainable guilt every time she rubbed her hand over the pain in her forehead. The headaches seemed better this week though and he was relieved. He wondered what she wasn't telling him.

"You look like you could use a break," he said, as he walked across the office to her desk.

She looked at him as if he had just materialized in front of her. "I'm sorry, what did you say?" she asked.

"You've been working at that all morning," he said. He pushed some files aside and perched on the edge of her desk. "Maybe it's time for a break."

She slipped off her glasses and rubbed her eyes, then let her head rest against the back of the chair.

"Having a hard time with the report?" he asked.

She stared at the ceiling for a while before she answered. "I'm having a hard time believing just how big this is." She lifted her head to look at him. "Mulder, they managed to make everything disappear. Everything. Evidence, medical files, bodies. Just gone. And there's nothing we can do." She frowned and fiddled with the arms on her glasses.

"What?" Mulder prompted.

"I'm just wondering what they'll do next time we get too close," she said.

Mulder's eyes were clear and intense, but his voice was soft. "I don't know what they'll do," he said, "but I know what we'll be doing."

She raised an eyebrow. "What?"

"Watching each other's backs," he said.

She looked at him for a moment and then her expression softened. She nodded.

"So," Mulder said, as he slid off her desk, "got any plans for lunch?"

"No. Why?"

"I was thinking we could go out. Someplace nice, you know, with tablecloths and real cutlery and everything."

He'd been hovering over her like this since he'd met her on the sidewalk in the rain, over a week ago. But somehow, this time, she didn't mind as much as she usually did.

"So, what do you say, Scully?" he asked. He was already holding the door open for her.

She smiled. "You buying?"

"Why not?"

She saved the file she was working on and turned off her computer. The report could wait until after lunch. She grabbed her suit jacket off the back of her chair. As she passed him in the doorway, Mulder noticed that her eyes were sea-blue again. He smiled.


I hope this helps to fill the void until September 22nd and the season premiere. I would really love to hear people's comments

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