Consequential Loss

BOOK 1

Part 1

So which was it to be: an alien bounty hunter or Alex Krycek? The throbbing glow of an extraterrestrial spaceship or the dim outline of a delivery truck?

He turned, looking for the third option: Walter Skinner and sanity. Saw nothing except a pulsating curtain of light and that single narrow strand of darkness, a slender blindspot in the ship's beam. In the shadows, the gray outline of a man, one arm raised above his head, a ghostly silhouette against the blackness behind.

Shifting through three-sixty degrees, Mulder looked for the miracle that wasn't there. Now or never. Panic too close to the surface to consider the consequences, he sought out the breach in the shimmering wall and found it again. Story of his life, running from the light into the dark. The shadows had never looked so inviting.

EARLIER THAT DAY - Washington DC

Scully's mother seldom called during what she referred to as "working hours" and knew better than to call Scully at the office. Which meant that when Maggie called Scully on her mobile at 11:45, Scully was obliged to take it seriously. She nodded an excuse to the Lone Gunmen and headed into an empty corridor.

"I'm fine, mom."

"You didn't sound fine last night."

Scully, frowned at her mother's insight, thought back to the previous night. She tried to recall the words she'd used, wondering if she could wiggle out of them now. Mulder had flown to Oregon, but she hadn't felt well enough to join him. How the hell had she made a slip like that? She never admitted to being ill. No wonder her mother was concerned enough to call again today. No reply at Scully's apartment. Of course she'd try the cell phone. "Really, it's nothing to worry about. Must have been one of those 24-hour flu things."

"You told me here's no such thing."

Scully closed her eyes, wondering why she'd even said it. "OK - you got me. Probably food poisoning."

"You were thirteen when you told me that."

Scully could hear the proud smile in her mother's voice and couldn't help but smile as she replied. "Clostridium perfringes, maybe."

"I'll bring you some food over."

"Mom."

"Or are you flying out to Oregon now?"

"No," said Scully, fighting to keep at least a semblance of a smile in her voice. "Mulder will probably be back before I could even get there."

She closed the call and returned to the office, chin up, shoulders straight, walking proud and tall, defying anyone to see weakness in her stance. She was dismayed by the expression of concern on Byer's face.

She'd shrugged the Gunmen's questions off the day before. They'd been surprises that Mulder was traveling to Oregon with Skinner. "I've work to do here," she told them. Frohike had insisted on driving her home that night, reminding her that dizzy spells and city traffic didn't mix.

When they resumed work again today they did so only after asking oblique questions about tiredness and food. They'd insisted on supplying fruit juice and pastries, despite Scully's insistence that she wanted neither.

"Time for lunch," said Byers, before Scully even had chance to return to her chair.

Langly looked up at him, obviously ready to tell his colleague that he had to be insane before catching the look in Byer's eyes and turning to stare at Scully's pale face instead. "Yeah, time for a break," said the blond, stretching his arms behind his head as he rose.

Frohike had already taken up position at the door and was holding it open, making it clear to everyone that the decision had been taken; they were going to take a real break and not just call out for sandwiches or a pizza.

Byers moved towards Scully, cornering her for a moment. "He'd never forgive us if anything happened to you. We'd never forgive ourselves."

Easy for them to say. She needed to be ready; Mulder was going to need help and he was going to need it soon and, though she couldn't pin down exactly what it was that she was afraid of, she acknowledged the fear to herself. To Byers she admitted only a bare minimum about tiredness and stress, knowing that he would be reassured by a show of honesty, however incomplete.

Lunch was lunch. Eaten fast and tasting of dust and cardboard. While the others indulged in tall cups of caffeine rich java, she stuck to water. Even that was hard to swallow. She hustled them back to work as quickly as she could and they agreed that she'd compromised, but insisted that the next meal break would be a longer one in which they all got to sit down.

Stress? She'd thought working with Mulder was stressful, but not working with him was far worse.

He was out there looking for that UFO and she was stuck in DC. Mulder's orders. Since when had she listened to an order from Mulder? Smiling a little, despite the queasy feeling in her stomach, her thoughts drifted back to their first case and a night in an Oregon forest. Special Agent Dana Scully, the rookie kid drawing her gun on the town's sheriff. Mulder, acting as the voice of maturity, shaking his head and ordering her to stand down. God - she'd been so young, so naive, so excited to be in the field. A partner, not just another agent.

If she hadn't been feeling so damned sick, she'd have ignored his little speech about not wanting to risk losing her. Rejected that idea as well, as the dizziness returned full force. She'd have ignored his words? Not possible. How could she, not when they were practically a declaration of love, or as close to one as you could reasonably expect while standing outside a meeting room in the middle of the Hoover Building. Thank God for Skinner, at least she knew Mulder had backup he could trust.

Didn't stop her feeling sick to the pit of her stomach though.

She threw herself back into her work and was grateful that the Gunmen seemed equally absorbed in theirs, huddling around computer screens looking for anomalies on satellite feeds.

Hours later, she was rifling through the files, still searching for a pattern, knowing that something in there was calling to her, perhaps trying to tell her something that she didn't want to hear. The call was getting louder, more insistent. She read the list of names again and this time the mists cleared. "This just can't be."

Frohike reacted first. "What are you looking at?"

"Medical records. Billy Miles and other known abductees in Bellefleur, Oregon. They all experienced anomalous brain activity."

Byers continued the thread. "Electro-encephalitic trauma."

"Which is exactly what Mulder experienced a few months ago."

"I don't understand," said Langly.

And Scully didn't want to understand either, but suddenly the pattern and its implications were only too obvious. "There was something out there in that field. It knocked me back because it didn't want me. Mulder thinks that it's me that's in danger of being taken."

Mercifully, Frohike drew his own conclusion. "When it's Mulder who's in danger."

The dizziness was back, the sick feeling in her stomach rose; the awful pounding in her ears reached a crescendo. Knees buckling, she gave in to the gray.

Mulder's first attempt to open his eyes nearly made him throw up. One hell of a hangover: dry mouth, fuzzy vision and a definite dose of seasickness. Make that carsickness, he corrected, getting some kind of lock on his surroundings.

Krycek and the hole in the wall of light.

Maybe if he curled up on his side he could avoid actually vomiting. That proved to be easier said than done. Reopening his eyes he saw what he already knew; his hands were cuffed to the vehicle's walls.

Spread-eagled, flat on his back on the cold metal floor. Experimenting, he realized that his feet were free. A squirm later, he found the outline of his backup gun still strapped to his ankle. Which information might help later, but it sure as hell didn't help him now unless he could pull off some kind of contortionist trick and wriggle the gun out of its holster, hold it between his feet, draw it up into his manacled hand, and do it all without shooting himself.

Even sliding out of his shoes proved to be a tough job. His attempt to focus on breathing just made him more aware of the taser burns on his chest. Trying to bend his knees made him groan.

"They say that waking up is hard to do." Krycek was singing. The bastard was actually singing. A Neil Sedaka impersonation of all stupid things. "Now I know; I know that it's true."

"Breaking up is hard to do, asshole," snapped Mulder.

"Whatever you say, Mulder. How you doing back there?"

"Unfasten these cuffs and I'll draw you a picture."

"You're fine."

As the ship rose into the night sky Skinner's first rational thoughts had been of inevitability. Mulder's mission had drawn him to this place and to this fate. Angry, he cursed his brain for feeding him platitudes. Mulder had been here because no one else had the guts or the insight to do the work. Skinner was here as his lone backup because even an Assistant Director couldn't brave the ridicule that would follow a decision to send a team of agents to investigate a clearing in a forest. Actually, even if he'd wanted to, he wouldn't have trusted other people with the task.

It had been easier to do the job himself. Except of course if he'd done his job then how could he have lost Mulder? Scully never had. She'd never looked the wrong way at the vital moment. She'd never let go of the rope when Mulder had been playing on the cliff's edge.

The deputies Skinner called to the scene showed up fast but short-handed. Ray Hoese was missing; Billy Miles and his father couldn't be reached. The locals feared the worst. So did Skinner, but he wasn't ready to admit that yet. If nothing else he would get evidence of the abduction. Mulder deserved that much. If there were to be any meaning to this, then it would come from revealing the truth.

A couple of hours later and a team from the Bureau and a cluster of state troopers had been added to the mix. The infrared cameras on the helicopters patrolling overhead found nothing to record. A slight discrepancy regarding the ground temperature in the clearing. Very slight. "Fungi," suggested one of the pilots; "An underground spring," suggested another. The search teams went into action with flashlights, performing a first sweep of the woods, but found no sign of a missing man, or of anything else.

Requests to military and civilian air traffic controllers for information on abnormal radar activity drew a blank.

When dawn broke, the ground search began in earnest. Tracker dogs and men on foot walking in well-drilled lines. The Bureau forensics team pressed on in puzzled silence, diligent but perplexed. Some of them raised eyebrows at Mulder's array of laser monitors. Some of them were foolish enough to let their amusement show. Skinner's glare demanded silence and respect.

Despite their efforts, the bottom line was that so far they had no evidence of strange activity, and they had no clue as to how a federal agent could disappear without a trace from under his boss's nose.

The clearing itself was unmarked except for the heavy and obvious traffic of the search teams, police vehicles and helicopters. No scorch marks to mar the tree line. No giant pad prints where the ground had sunk away under a space ship's weight. Nothing to see except the evidence of their own investigation. The locals had opened a couple of gates to give them better access to the site but had found neither molten metal locks nor charred and splintered wood.

"A lot of vehicles have crossed the area, sir. We can try a few tire casts but it'll be a needle in a haystack."

Skinner stared at the forensics specialist who was busily trying to state the obvious. It took him a moment to catch on. These people thought Mulder had driven away from the scene, or maybe been kidnapped at gunpoint by some heavy with a SUV? Skinner almost laughed. How the hell did Mulder and Scully put up with this? "Just make sure we don't miss anything. Document the area. I want everything, photos, measurements, chemical residue analysis. Anything out of place. Something took off from this site. It flew out of here. I need to know what it was."

The agent stepped back, looking mystified, then nodded and walked away.

From Krycek's perspective it was a time for celebration; a moment to applaud a rescue mission conducted in haste but flawless in execution. He'd driven deep into enemy territory, risked injury and death, and he'd brought his target out alive and intact. In another time and place he'd be a hero. Unfortunately in this one, he'd assaulted a federal agent and was now transporting him in chains across state lines.

However, in his favor was the fact that he'd planned this journey, or one very like it, so well. The capture itself might have been fortuitous, miraculous even, given that Mulder was only seconds from disappearing into the belly of an alien ship, but most of what had happened since had been planned for weeks. Get Mulder at a moment when his defenses were down. Force him to listen to uncomfortable truths. Show him the files that would explain to him why danger was no longer simply a fact of life, but an immediate threat that required emergency intervention.

Years of Mulder-watching had given Krycek the knowledge to map out a strategy. On the one hand, Mulder wouldn't want to listen; he'd need to be made to. On the other hand, a helpless Mulder was a dangerous and unpredictable risk to himself and others, likely to gamble everything on a single throw of the dice just as he had in Tunguska. Mulder needed to be confined but he had to feel as if the situation was not completely out of his control. A balancing act certainly, but Krycek was confident he'd found the right approach.

A taser had persuaded Mulder to get into the van. Chloroform had bought Krycek enough time to chain the agent securely to its well-prepared walls, and enough access to inject the agent with the nanite army that could mean the difference between success and failure in this mission.

Since Mulder regained consciousness, Krycek had maintained a continuous thread of carefully rehearsed explanation. He'd successfully closed his ears to Mulder's anger and insults.

Carefully focused, he stuck to the necessities and chose not to respond to Mulder's pointed and mostly legitimate accusations by answering with lies or near lies, or even with speeches in self-defense.

The only real weapon he had in this game was that he was right. One hundred percent certainty that Mulder needed to listen; complete confidence that if the agent actually heard what was being said then he would act on it.

"Resist or serve," Krycek insisted again. "Another few years and that'll be the only choice anyone gets. Only difference is you have to make that choice now."

Krycek knew that Mulder was starting to weaken when, after hours of argument and angry rebuttal, the tenor of his responses had changed from a, "Why?" to a, "Why, right now?"

"Same reason that ship nearly took you. Anomalous electrical activity in the brain. You're changing, Mulder. Changing fast. What the aliens didn't realize is how much further you can go. They would never have let you escape tonight if they'd known. They would never have let you go once they got you on that ship."

"Changing?" grumbled Mulder, his tone suggesting that he considered the idea to be a joke, though not a very amusing one.

"Your genes were modified before birth, afterwards there were chemicals and surgery. You're becoming what you were designed to be."

Mulder's voice wavered, bouncing along somewhere between exasperated and lost. "They didn't have the technology for genetic manipulation back then."

Krycek smiled, knowing that he was winning. No denial that something was happening inside Mulder's head, merely a feigned skeptical stance on its origins and meaning. "The Consortium has been borrowing alien technology for a long time."

The reply was studiously bland, delivered by Mulder as if it was all somebody else's problem. "So what was I 'designed' to be?"

"A secret weapon. So secret that Bill Mulder never told his Consortium buddies about you."

That seemed to break Mulder's trance, the response was snapped back. "He didn't tell me either."

Krycek flinched and wondered if he could change the subject. Unfortunately he wasn't quick enough.

"Perhaps he would have, if you hadn't killed him." Mulder suggested, his voice dropping into a venomous hiss.

Krycek could only be grateful that while Mulder still had a gun he couldn't actually reach it. It was too soon for this discussion. Keep moving, he reminded himself. Keep on track. Stick to the plan. "You asked me why it has to be right now. Because as of a week ago Strughold's back in town and he's seen your latest hospital reports. He wants you."

"Strughold?"

"Klaus Strughold, an old 'friend' of your father. The Consortium's a shambles. El Rico Air Force base, old age, faction fights - most of the old leadership are dead, the rest are useless. They're like a ship without a rudder, thrashing about but going nowhere. Strughold's stayed out of the squabbles for years. Now he's come back to take charge."

"And he's got time to read my hospital records?" said Mulder, sounding mockingly amused.

"He's got time to offer a reward for your capture."

Krycek had it in black and white, albeit couched in terms that would make no sense to anyone outside the elite group of operatives who got their orders direct from the top. Money and a new life for the man who brought Mulder in alive. A death sentence for anyone who killed Mulder or left him mentally incapacitated. A blanket approval to kill anyone who got in the way of the operation.

Mulder response sounded more resigned than angry. "You kidnapped me for the reward money?"

Krycek was the one who suddenly sounded annoyed. "I'm keeping you out of his hands, same as I kept you off that ship. I'm giving you a choice."

Mulder was silent, which was a victory of sorts for Krycek, even though the angry outburst had been unplanned. He checked the clock again and thought about the route they were taking. With any luck, by the time they stopped at the motel, Mulder would have too much on his mind to even consider running away.

Pregnant?

The ER Doctor's first response was a, "Well, duh," look of bewilderment that a seemingly intelligent woman, another doctor in fact and one who was clearly of childbearing age was so easily struck dumb. "Recent sexual activity?" he said, obviously not quite sure what he was going to say next.

"Well - "

"Did you practice safe sex?"

"No, but - "

The doctor shrugged.

"I had IVF treatment. Three courses. And nothing. I didn't think. I don't understand."

The doctor, whose expression had been growing increasingly concerned, suddenly smiled as he realized that the news was presumably unexpected rather than actually unwelcome. "Congratulations."

They wanted to keep her in overnight. "Just for observation. You're obviously dehydrated. We fix that and the dizziness should go. But I'd like to run a few tests to be on the safe side. You should see your OB-GYN doctor as soon as possible - make sure there are no complications, hormone imbalances, no special precautions you should be taking given your difficulties conceiving."

Dazed as well as dizzy now, she lost track of his words and didn't even debate the point. Whatever it took. Whatever they thought best. Pregnant? A baby? She allowed her index finger to brush lightly over the imaginary bump in her belly, trying to visualize the soft skin of her child's head. Mulder, she thought, "You have to come home now. You have to see this."

She swallowed down the dread she'd been feeling, decided to blame the butterflies on unruly hormones. Of course it didn't help that she couldn't reach Mulder's phone. "Out of service area," said the voice at the other end. Skinner's phone was just as unobtainable, which was oddly reassuring. Brooding over phone reception in an Oregon forest? She chided herself for indulging in ridiculous fears.

When Frohike came in, she nearly fainted again. It was written all over his face, screamed out in the slump in his shoulders. He shook his head. "It's Mulder. He's missing. Skinner's organizing the search."

Seven years to get here. Mulder had to come home.

Part 2

According to Krycek, they were just outside Boise. Also according to Krycek, "It doesn't matter where we are. We won't be here tomorrow."

Mulder disagreed; disagreement was mandatory. According to Krycek they were stopping so he could get a few hours rest and so Mulder could get a first look at the files. Mulder, still manacled to the walls of his metal prison and with no real view of the world outside, could only guess that meant they were now in a motel parking lot.

Krycek leaned across the back of the seat to release Mulder's left hand. "I can't drag you to the room, Mulder - too many witnesses. You're just going to have to walk quietly in there with me and then I'll show you the files. I know you don't want to make it easy for me, so I'm going to make it easy for you. You try and run; you raise an alarm; you struggle with me in any way and I'll shoot anyone who sees. Understood?"

"Fuck you." The voice of grim compliance.

"Save it for when we're alone. You don't need a pile of dead bodies to prove that you didn't choose to come with me."

A bluff? Had to be, didn't it? Krycek wouldn't just shoot a bunch of innocents in cold blood, would he? Mulder thought not, but then he'd misread Krycek before. In any case, after hours of being strapped down, he probably wasn't in any shape to take on Krycek and win. The tingling numbness in the fingers of his left hand seemed to confirm it. In any case, the main thing was he still had his backup weapon and there would be other opportunities, provided he didn't spoil his chances by acting too soon and losing the element of surprise.

Krycek handed him the key to the other manacle. "Touch that ankle holster and I'll blow your foot off," he said.

Krycek knew about the second gun and hadn't taken it? Too confused to focus on being angry, Mulder struggled to free his right hand. Finally loose, he tried to stretch his fingers, had to clench them again as the blood ran in and the pins and needles took hold. One more reason to wait for a better moment.

"Nothing stupid, nothing brave," said Krycek. "I'm going to open the door and you're going to step out as if you've been asleep back there and you're happy to be heading to a real bed. Ready?"

Mulder scowled.

Krycek nodded. The van door opened and Mulder kept his eye on Krycek's gun hand as the man showed him the mouth of a pistol nuzzling out from behind his leather jacket.

Krycek passed Mulder the cardkey using his prosthetic hand. "Room 17. Don't test me, Mulder. I'm too tired to play games."

"You never do anything else."

A twenty-yard walk to the room. "Open the door."

Mulder did as he was told, not sure why he was being quite so obliging, but certain that he didn't have a choice. His fingers still didn't feel quite right, but they were at least functional again.

Krycek nudged him towards the center of the room, cold metal against the back of Mulder's head. A solid clunk as the door closed behind them, Mulder could only assume that Krycek had used his foot.

Mulder turned to face him, ready to go ballistic.

Krycek's right hand was holding Mulder's Sig Sauer by its muzzle. Lying in the outstretched plastic palm of his left hand was the weapon's clip. Krycek pushed the gun's grip towards Mulder. "Take it."

"What?" mumbled Mulder, temporarily lost. The indecision was over and done with in an instant. He reached forward, grabbing the weapon and its ammo. A brief visual check found both items satisfactory. The balance, the feel, confirmed the verdict - his gun, his bullets. All present and correct - so far as he could tell.

Krycek was digging around in a bag filled with paperwork. Mulder slid the clip back into place and pointed the gun directly at Krycek's chest.

Krycek ignored him, carried on searching through the documents, emerging with a manila file as non-descript as all the others in the stack. "You should start with this one."

What the hell? Mulder's anger flipped from ice to fire. He should kill the bastard. His finger twitched towards the trigger; the realignment of muscles so familiar that for an instant his mind felt the briefest flicker of déjà vu. The sensation caught him unawares, reminding him of who he was and what he was, and for all Krycek's preaching in the car about him becoming what he was designed to be, he was still Fox Mulder and he was an officer of the law.

Fed or not, he was furious, and there was no avoiding that. He lowered the gun, pouncing forward, sending Krycek tumbling into the wall and the bag of papers flying across the floor.

"Asshole," complained Krycek, and Mulder silenced him with an arm against his throat.

"What is this, Krycek? You drag me here in chains to read a file!"

Krycek glared, and Mulder, recognizing that it wasn't realistic to expect a choking man to reply, gradually eased the pressure on his neck. Realized that he'd eased the pressure too far when Krycek's foot crunched into his shin leaving him off-balance and easy prey for an elbow to the ribs that sent him crashing into the wall.

To Mulder's surprise, Krycek didn't follow up with an arm to the throat or even a knee to the groin. A brief stand-off as some of the fire in Krycek's eyes faded, and then Krycek took a step back, shaking his head, looking down at his left arm. "You could have trashed the elbow joint. You know how long it takes to get new parts made for these things?"

What? Mulder stood up straight, looked at the prosthetic and then back up into Krycek's face. The man looked genuinely hurt, insulted, offended even. He surely couldn't be expecting an apology?

Krycek finally shook his head and turned away. "Read the file, Mulder. Read that file and then decide if you need to read the others. You're pissed; I know that. Let's just take that as a given and get on with the job."

Sighing, Mulder let his head fall back against the wall, pushed away again with his foot to move towards the small desk and wondered why he was still listening to this. He could just walk out of here. Hand to hand they were a pretty even match. Krycek would have to shoot him to stop him and, though he couldn't explain why, Mulder was confident that he wouldn't do it. If only because Mulder was now carrying two loaded weapons and might forget all that stuff about being the good guy if he was wounded or threatened.

Mulder picked up the phone.

"Don't," said Krycek. Mild, like a reminder, not harsh like an order. "If you call her, they'll know you aren't on that ship, and nothing will stop them from hunting you down."

Mulder frowned, irritated that Krycek had guessed who he was calling. "She needs to know." They'd already had this conversation on the road. According to Krycek the Consortium was so eager to capture Mulder that they wouldn't care how many alarm bells they rang or FBI agents they brought into the fight.

"She's safe as long as you're on that ship. Soon as they hear you're on the run, they'll take her." Krycek paused, looking carefully at Mulder. "Read the file." He waved vaguely towards Mulder's cellphone, wallet and ID where they rested on the bedside table. "You have time to think. Give yourself an hour, then decide."

Two hours later and, with a couple of cups of coffee and a plateful of steak sandwiches that Krycek had brought back from a neighboring restaurant inside him, Mulder was still reading. Still digesting files and images and trying to make sense of terms like merchandise, enhancements and failure rates. His own file, this one dating back only as far as the incident with the rubbings from the alien ship, and the strange brain activity that had seemingly ended abruptly under a surgeon's knife at Cancerman's direction was a sickening mix of clinical precision and euphemistic spin.

The enhancements were going to make the merchandise fail catastrophically. Untreated, the flaws would inevitably lead to early termination. The report held out one faint hope - with the right drug regimen and suitably sophisticated life support systems, maybe only the body would die.

His head hurt. He hurt. The file was wrong. Yet it didn't feel wrong. The file sounded like it knew exactly what he'd been going through over the past few months of hospital visits and doctor's appointments. In fact it sounded like it knew rather more than he did about both the underlying cause and the prognosis. None of the possible outcomes mentioned in the file held any appeal. Which left him one option, and that was to disagree.

Not that disagreement helped, he'd disagreed with everything so far on this journey with Krycek and yet he was still here, sitting in a non-descript motel room, having been kidnapped and transported in chains across the state line into Idaho. If he didn't have anything solid to charge Krycek with before, then he certainly had it now. He glanced at his wrists, noted the way the bruises were darkening. It struck him that they could have been worse; at least Krycek had adjusted the cuffs to fit correctly.

"Your choice," said Krycek, playing with the TV remote, not actually moving off CNN, and not even looking at Mulder.

Choice? Like there was any kind of choice. Stay invisible, play dead, and maybe do something that, according to Krycek, might be useful and possibly even critical to the future of mankind, or make a phone call to Skinner or Scully and look forward to spending the next few years as the Consortium's chief lab rat. Assuming of course that such intervention by Strughold and his associates didn't arouse the curiosity of the aliens as well. "Why the hell should I believe you?"

"What have you got to lose? Stick around and you may learn something. Or walk out - now, next week, next month. Only difference is if you walk out now, then by this time next week you'll be wishing you were dead."

Mulder snorted at that. If he stayed with Krycek, then maybe by this time next week he would be dead. Just walk out, walk away now. Pick up the phone and call Scully. If he was in trouble then it was Scully he needed. For once his gut agreed with his brain - just call her, they said.

If he was in trouble then her phone would be tapped and that would lead them straight to him. Which was OK because he'd planned for this kind of eventuality. More accurately, they'd planned for it, even if Scully had tried to act as if she was humoring him in a hypothetical discussion not preparing for an eventual life or death struggle. Run, hide, switch to one of the fake identities the Gunmen had helped him to arrange and then get a message to Scully. Easy.

So why was he still listening to Krycek weave tales of Consortium infighting and genetic engineering?

Commonsense was screaming loud and clear, so why was it so hard to walk away? His fully loaded Sig Sauer and turned-off, but otherwise fully functional, cell phone were reassuringly close to his right hand, resting on the bedside table in the Extended Stay hotel alongside his credit cards and FBI credentials. How long had Krycek been using this room? Did he have a whole string of places like this, permanently on call, just in case he needed to transport a federal agent cross country?

The guns were the biggest problem, their implications profound, and currently well beyond his ability to analyze. The loaded Beretta had never left his ankle holster. Krycek had handed the Sig Sauer back to him as soon as they'd entered the motel room.

Ice cold and furious, Mulder had pointed it directly at his captor. Infuriatingly, Krycek had chosen to ignore it. Even when Mulder followed up by slamming Krycek into a wall, Krycek had done no more than reciprocate the move. Mulder could already feel the bruise forming on his elbow. Just another one to add to the collection.

The guns, according to Krycek, were a gesture of good faith, which didn't help Mulder resolve the confusion. Krycek and fucked up were probably synonyms.

Good faith or not, Mulder still remembered the rest of the story. Tasered into submission in the back of the panel truck. Flopping into oblivion as Krycek held the chloroform-soaked rag over his nose. Chained down and unconscious. Waking up nauseated, disoriented and restrained.

Now he was half-lying, half-sitting on a bed in a room with an assassin for hire and the knowledge that if anyone was looking for him then they would certainly be looking in the wrong place. Another look at the gun, another glance at his bruised wrists as his hands clenched into fists. His breaths coming closer together as the thoughts chased through his brain.

Krycek picked up on his discomfort. "If I hadn't knocked you out, you wouldn't have any choice."

Mulder shook his head, amused disbelief as his lips pulled wider in a grimace of a smile.

Krycek turned to face him. "You'd have run straight back to Skinner and the Consortium would have picked you up at the motel in Bellefleur." He looked back at the TV screen. "Or you could have gone on that ship. I'm giving you a choice - live on your feet, or die in a cage."

"Why? Why are you doing this, Krycek?"

"Why does anyone do anything?"

Great, just great. Now Krycek was playing shrink games with him.

Krycek was watching him, far too cool, far too controlled for Mulder's liking; his voice too sure in its delivery. "You're the profiler. You work it out. Everything you need's in those files."

By the time Skinner found himself stammering through his carefully prepared speech in Scully's hospital room Mulder had been missing for more than 36 hours. What exactly do you say to someone whose other half had been stolen from right in front of your eyes? "I lost him. I don't know what else I can say. I lost him. I'll be asked... what I saw. And what I saw, I can't deny. I won't."

Even as he spoke, the words sounded pale. What had he seen? A UFO? A military experiment? A bright white light? All he knew for sure was that Mulder was gone and that he had no idea how to bring him back.

After more than a day spent hunting for evidence in an Oregon forest, he knew that exposing the truth was an easy commitment to make in the privacy of his own thoughts, but that without compelling evidence it would be a much harder thing to deliver in front of the Bureau brass. Too easy to lose the truth in a sea of rationalization and ambiguity. Skinner didn't care. He was ready and willing to nail his flag to a UFO that only he had seen. It was the least he could do for Mulder and for Scully. Wasn't it?

Would it do any good to tell the truth? Would it do anything more than get him transferred or sidelined and wouldn't that leave Scully isolated and alone? What did he really know? The burning determination to deliver the truth at any price was already fading and he hated himself for it. He replayed his own words and felt their inadequacy. Even here, in the calm of Scully's hospital room, faced with the only audience that might believe him, he couldn't say it out loud. Couldn't tell her that an alien space ship had stolen her partner.

He needed to get out of this room. Scully needed his support; she didn't need to see her boss collapse under the weight of knowledge that she'd struggled with for years.

She was talking to him and all he could think about was running away. He didn't run. A Marine doesn't run. Aching at the stiffness he saw in her posture, the agony in her face, he stood his ground, and forced himself to listen as Scully struggled to tell him something in return. Cancer, he thought, when she took too long to explain why she was in a hospital bed. What if Mulder came back only to find Scully dead or dying? He locked his muscles and made himself wait it out.

What she said was nothing that he'd been preparing himself for.

"I'm having a hard time explaining it. Or believing it. But - I'm pregnant."

AN SUV IN UTAH

"He killed my father," said Krycek, sounding resolute but matter of fact.

Mulder snorted at that, amazed. He'd been ready for another pointless argument; he hadn't been ready for this. When he'd demanded an explanation for his father's death, he'd anticipated excuses and evasion. A rhetorical question delivered somewhere between statement and accusation. Even to Mulder, the words he'd spoken seemed to lack the passion and gravity they deserved, driven more by ritual than necessity. He wondered vaguely if he was still drugged. But it was too late to retreat now. He'd asked the damned question and now he had to face Krycek's reply. Voice shaky with disbelief. "You're saying you killed my father as revenge?"

"I killed him because I was ordered to."

"Then why are you telling me - "

"Because he was a player. He was up to his neck in it," barked Krycek, coming in loud and clear, and then suddenly letting the volume fall again. "And you know it."

Yes, but. Yes, but, what? Head throbbing, the logical aftermath of hours of drugged sleep and a bumpy ride strapped down in the back of a van. Even after an edgy few hours rest in an anonymous motel he was still exhausted. When had Krycek slept? Why did he care? Why was he even listening to this? And yet there was something here; Mulder could feel it. Some truth was standing there, just out of reach, and he had to chase it, because that was who he was. "Why was your father killed?"

Krycek took a moment to respond, seemingly left off-balance by the question. He frowned, fingers dancing over the steering wheel, then swallowed, eyes still locked on the road ahead. "To protect you."

The investigation into Mulder's disappearance was by the book. What it lacked in inspiration it made up for in numbers. Three days after Mulder's disappearance Skinner got a polite advisory visit from Deputy Director Jana Cassidy. "Step away, Walter. You're too close."

Not close enough. One look at Scully as she stood on the edge of the task force briefing, looking exhausted and angry, made it clear that when it mattered he'd been too far away.

Kersh on the other hand looked pleased to be here. Skinner reconsidered it. Not pleased, Kersh wasn't gloating, not exactly. Perhaps it would be fairer to say the man looked like he was in his element then? Yes, that was it. Kersh was relishing the chase, a tangible X-File to battle against.

"He ran or he was taken," said Kersh, politely arrogant, a newly promoted Deputy Director talking to a passed-over Assistant Director with more years on the clock and more enemies in the shadows. "We all know the drill. Mid-life crisis? Mental breakdown?" Kersh licked his lips and shrugged. "Some perp with a grudge? Some of the Bureau's finest are working on this. Go home, Assistant Director - get some rest - Agent Scully, too." Kersh stared at Skinner for a moment, the polite facade shifting to something more like a challenge. "Unless you've remembered something more?"

"I told you what I saw." In fact Skinner had told the whole task force about a light that hid rather than illuminated and an object that surged up into the night sky but didn't appear on radar and didn't leave any trace on the ground. Mumbled comments had followed from agents who should have known better, quickly stifled when Kersh raised his head and grunted a wordless warning.

The luxury of ignorance, thought Skinner, trying not to care and failing. How the hell did Scully stand it? He glanced in her direction and realized that she couldn't. Emotions masked but too close to boiling over to keep entirely bottled up, pain seeping into her eyes. Maybe he should take Kersh's advice, just for tonight. Drive Scully home perhaps? She needed to keep her strength up, but he thought that was probably the last thing that she'd want to hear.

"I'll be back in the morning," said Skinner, ignoring the tight-lipped grimace on Kersh's face. "First thing. If there are any developments overnight, I'd like your team leader to keep me informed."

Not waiting for Kersh's reply, Skinner started towards Scully, pausing briefly en route to speak to the agent running the manhunt. "Agent Doggett - keep me apprised, any time, day or night." Skinner handed him a card that included his home and cell phone numbers as well as the official ones.

He kept it together as he spoke to Scully. "Nothing's going to happen tonight. Why don't you come back fresh in the morning?" A question delivered as an order.

To his relief, Scully nodded, squaring her shoulders before carefully gathering up the files from the table in front of her. He recognized the body language: exhaustion, emotional and physical, was dampening her movements, forcing her into awkward robot steps. He doubted that she'd risk a sleeping pill, so he doubted that she'd sleep. But she could have a little solitude; put her feet up; close her eyes; cry it all away. Whatever she needed to do to recharge her batteries and recover at least a little of her strength.

It sounded like a plan. He helped her slide her arms into her jacket and pretended not to notice that the tears so carefully withheld all day were now dancing on her eyelashes waiting for their chance to fall.

"Let's go," he said.

She nodded, turning her back on him and moving swiftly towards the door.

Part 3

Days of hard driving had taken them down through Utah across Arizona and into New Mexico, continually crisscrossing and doubling back on themselves, covering hundreds of extra miles in order to follow Krycek's preferred roads.

"Less surveillance, fewer cameras," Krycek had said, looking at Mulder as if he was uncertain whether the agent was being difficult or merely dumb for actually daring to question the route. A hard smile as he'd added, "Or you could go and lie down in the back and I'll put on my ski mask if you think that'll make us less conspicuous."

Snaking their way past volcano country, they stopped again, this time for groceries, and Mulder knew that meant that they were almost "there" even though Krycek had been describing "there" as "soon" for several hours now.

Krycek glanced briefly at Mulder as they entered the store. "Whatever you want," he said.

Mulder shrugged, mind blanking on what or how he was supposed to respond to that. He was going shopping with Krycek? In what universe?

A single wistful look at the payphones by the door and Mulder followed Krycek deeper in. Seeing well-stocked shelves but unable to focus on their contents, he turned his attention back to Krycek. The man moved steadily from shelf to shelf, loading up the cart without a moment's hesitation or doubt, seemingly working to some kind of mental checklist. A month's worth of supplies maybe?

Krycek threw two different brands of toothpaste into the cart and that was just plain disturbing. He acknowledged Mulder's surprise. "It's the kind you always buy," he said, and Mulder's brain jumped briefly between admiration at the man's preparedness and anger at the intrusion, before sliding into profiler mode and storing the information away for later analysis.

Another couple of hours on the road and they were finally stopping, somewhere close to nowhere, not far from the Oklahoma state line, in what looked like an abandoned quarry. Krycek parked the recently acquired pickup truck under the shady entrance to the main building.

No fanfare. No announcement of home, sweet, home. Just, "I'll start the generator. We need to get unloaded."

The generator shuddered obediently to life. Mulder, freezer bags in hand, followed Krycek up the stairs, surprised to find curiosity temporarily overruling his anger and discomfort, and even his desire to pick another fight.

The heat made the three flights of stairs more of a challenge than Mulder was ready for, reminded him of sleepless nights and migraine-addled days on the drive down here and even from the ones that had come before.

The site manager's accommodation, actually the top floor of the main office and storage building, was airless and agonizingly hot. Looking disturbingly familiar with the place, Krycek moved swiftly to open windows and turn on air-conditioning units. Mulder could only hope that the generator was up to it. By the time they completed their third trip from truck to apartment, the air was a little more breathable.

Krycek had taken the food into the kitchen and Mulder wasn't surprised, when he looked into the room, to see that the fresh and frozen food had already been put safely away.

It was hard to discount the feeling that Krycek was working to a script while he was flying blind. How often did Krycek do this kind of thing? How long had he been preparing for this particular scenario?

The place smelled stale and disused despite Krycek's obvious familiarity with it. The blend of avocado green fittings in the kitchen and orange drapes in the living room betrayed its age. Yet it was still in remarkably good shape, fully-furnished and everything intact.

The cushions on the couch were plump; their corduroy covers still crisply ridged not patchily smooth. The kitchen was stocked with a full complement of pots and pans. The appliances were clean and seemingly in good condition, despite the yellowing of the plastics and the dullness of the metal surfaces. Nothing was old and battered, but none of it was new.

They could have been walking around inside the set for some 1970s retro movie. Except for the boxes of groceries, the new cell phones bought en route for cash, and of course the TV, microwave, DVD player and all the other electronic goodies that Krycek had brought along for the ride. They'd switched vehicles twice more after the first stop in Idaho, unpacking and repacking items, and adding to the collection of objects as they did. Finally switching to the beat-up pickup truck with its New Mexico plates just before their final food and refueling stop.

Mulder considered the signs of previous occupation. At a guess, based on the tarnished metal of the door handles and the labels on the older cans in the cupboards, the operation had been abandoned twenty, maybe even thirty years ago. A sick feeling in his gut. "They left in a hurry."

"You could say that," agreed Krycek, talking from one of the bedrooms as he unpacked a suitcase only to immediately pack an overnight bag. "I'll be gone for a couple of days. There's food, water, fuel for the generator. Don't contact anyone." He lifted his right arm to point at the case that housed the satellite phone. "For emergencies. Real emergencies."

"I know," grumbled Mulder, parroting words that he didn't quite believe and yet couldn't actually bring himself to discount. "If they know I'm alive and free, the Consortium will come after me. If they think I went on that ship they'll just have to wait and hope that I'll be returned."

Krycek looked at him, paused from packing until he was sure he had Mulder's attention. "This time they mean it. They thought... It doesn't matter what they thought. You're their only chance - they'll do anything to get you."

Tired of the repetition, exhausted by going round the same tight little loop of conversation, Mulder completed Krycek's speech for him. "Unless they think I'm beyond reach."

"You touch that phone - you sign Scully's death warrant. If they know you're alive, they'll take her as bait to draw you out."

As if Krycek hadn't repeated the statement a dozen times in the past two days, and every time he made the speech that was always the sucker punch. Mulder groaned at being caught by it again. He really should be used to it by now. His words came out fighting, coolly sarcastic. "So I should just sit here while you - do - what?"

"Something I should have done a long time ago." Krycek pointed to another small case that Mulder assumed contained a laptop. "Password's vengeance. If you need it, the car keys are behind the visor." Made sure that Mulder heard the word need.

Fine. What did it matter anyway? Krycek was going to run off to do God knows what to God knows whom and Mulder was going to stay home and play house.

Just give it a few days, Krycek had said. Give yourself time to read the files and think it through, Krycek had insisted. Stand up and fight smart and maybe one day you'll return home a hero, or make the wrong call and die a lab rat's death.

Mulder glanced at the satellite phone. The perfect opportunity to make the wrong call. If using it could kill Scully then he might as well blast the damned thing to bits now. Plenty of bullets left for whatever else he might need to do.

"Where the hell are you going, Krycek?"

"Why? Worried about the ghosts of miners past?"

There was more truth to Krycek's jibe than Mulder dared hear. He suddenly realized that he didn't want to be alone. Shouldn't he be glad to see the back of the treacherous bastard? If what he needed was a brief pause to collect his thoughts and analyze the files that Krycek had supplied, then wasn't solitude an advantage? Three days on the road with a killer for hire wasn't a relationship, not even a pragmatically made business alliance. It wasn't even the beginning of one.

Of course he didn't trust Krycek; how could he? "Not planning on committing any felonies are you?"

Krycek paused from his packing, offered a slight smile, his eyebrows high in mocking salute. "Nothing of interest to the Bureau."

"How the hell do I know that this isn't just a trap, that you won't call your Consortium buddies as soon as you leave here?"

"Why would I wait until we got here to do that?" Krycek's mocking smile faded. "Stay or go. I'm not your jailer."

But he was, and Mulder knew it. It stung Mulder that Krycek knew it too. All he'd had to do was push the right buttons - Scully, tests, invasion, truth, resistance - and the agent had fastened the manacles on himself. Mulder turned away, feigned sudden interest in the contents of the kitchen cabinets and didn't look round until he heard Krycek close the apartment's door.

The sound of the pick-up's engine drew Mulder to the window. A swoosh of dust and Krycek was gone.

Alone and wired so tight he was ready to start bouncing off the walls, Mulder decided to test the boundaries of his alleged freedom. The car hidden behind the big doors still worked. It started first time. It even had fuel and water, at least if the gauges were to be believed.

Mulder's own weapons were loaded and, based on the damage they did to an old Coke can foolish enough to come into range, he concluded they were fully functional.

He tapped his jacket pocket where it hung by the apartment door and felt the reassurance of spare clips.

Even the shotgun in the closet near the top of the stairwell with its supply of what Krycek described as magnetite cartridges looked like the real thing. Krycek's explanation of those had fallen somewhere between vague and infuriating. "If you weren't sure if you were shooting a werewolf or a wolf, you'd still want the silver bullets - wouldn't you? It's all on the computer."

The apartment made as little sense as the rest of it. It was too comfortable, too well appointed. Not merely out of time with its seventies color schemes but out of place as well. Too expensively furnished, too city in its design to be out here in the heart of an abandoned quarry.

Clearly it was a trap. Yet if it was a trap, then it was a good one. All the comforts of home and enough rope to hang himself.

SCULLY'S APARTMENT

The apartment looked wrong, as if everything had moved three inches sideways perhaps. It even smelled wrong, though logically not enough time could have possibly elapsed for that to be true. Scully pressed on into her living room, knowing that it wasn't really the apartment that was off.

Skinner had driven her home. It surprised her that she'd allowed him to do that. She'd excused the lapse as being for his benefit rather than hers and hadn't invited him in for coffee. Forcing a brisk goodnight, she'd insisted on carrying in her own laptop and briefcase, and hadn't allowed the mask to slip further.

It was the first time she'd been completely alone since Mulder disappeared. It had taken every ounce of her resolve and her OB-GYN's blandishments to keep her in that hospital bed while the FBI looked for Mulder in Oregon.

The Lone Gunmen had enlisted her mother to play guard dog. When she heard that Skinner was coming back to DC, she knew what had happened. There was no way that Skinner would have left the scene unless Mulder was truly gone.

Why was she making coffee? She didn't want coffee.

A brief shiver of nausea and Scully could recall the look of anger and concern on her mother's face as she left her house that morning.

"I have to go back to work, mom. It's my only chance to find him."

"You said that there's nowhere to look."

What Mulder had never really accepted was that the truth sucked. What her mom had to accept was that, "I have to try."

"You don't just have Fox to think about."

As if she didn't know that. As if that thought hadn't been replaying on a tight little loop since the moment the doctor told her that she was pregnant. Of course, that thought had had to time-share with another that asked how the hell could she be pregnant and a third that demanded that she find Mulder.

Mulder wasn't findable, was he? But what if Mulder was in one of those mysterious boxcars that had carried her away? What if the same men who made the chip that was wedged in the back of her neck were experimenting on him in some railroad siding?

So what if he was? They still wouldn't find him. Seven damned years and all they had to show for it were cabinets full of files and bodies full of scars. Must do better, Agent Scully. Had to.

Pregnant? How on earth could she be pregnant? What about that trip with the Smoking Man? Surely he couldn't have done something to her? Just because the man was offering miracle cures didn't mean that she'd been a recipient of one herself. She would have known, wouldn't she? Just because she'd woken up from drugged slumber to find herself in a strange bed wearing only her nightclothes didn't mean that - don't go there.

Maybe all those hormones she'd taken during the IVF treatment had more effect than her doctors believed. Maybe it had triggered her body to function again, found a lone undamaged ova and worked its magic, despite the odds against. Maybe science got lucky for once?

Perhaps it was Jenn; maybe it was Mulder's genie who sent this to them as a parting gift?

Maybe God had heard her prayers?

Did it matter? She was pregnant. She had someone else to think of apart from herself. Someone to care about other than Mulder.

The shower sluiced away the day's grime, but neither refreshed her body nor touched her mood. She headed for the bedroom, forcing herself to go through the motions of life knowing that if sleep came tonight, it would be from exhaustion not relaxation.

The screen was annoyingly small. The lack of Internet access frustrating at best, agonizing at worst.

Apart from breaks to fix a few sandwiches and make the occasional pot of coffee, Mulder had spent most of the past two days submerged in a mire of files. The deceptively small laptop was carrying at least 50,000 pages of data. Some of it as text. Some in complex relational databases that he hadn't really begun to get a handle on. Some of it as image copies of old documents, faxes and handwritten notes.

He guessed he'd at best skimmed the barest surface of maybe a tenth of the material. Some files documented thousands of different test subjects being put through hundreds of tests. Others discussed project personnel: their deployment, management and funding. Then there were the equipment lists, site plans, project timetables, proposals for new tests, step-by-step instructions for old tests, briefings on the care and handling of human guinea pigs so as to cause the minimum ripple in the wider world. Mountains of it.

Some of it seemed to date back to the fifties. Some of the memos might have been older still. The most recent material appeared to be around a year old.

To make matters worse he had no decent tools to search the files. If the Gunmen were here - but no, he'd come this far and, though the temptation to jump into the car, drive to the airport, board a plane and make copies of the hard drive before dropping off the machine at the offices of the New York Times was almost overwhelming, he wasn't quite ready to succumb. What he would do though was drive into town tomorrow. Wherever town was.

He looked at the map. None of the names rang many bells, though the idea of a Texline or a Wheeless held a certain appeal.

The siren call of a library and public access terminals caught him again. "Anonymous and untraceable aren't the same thing," said a memory of John Byers sounding awfully like his conscience. They'd debated this kind of thing before, looking for the perfect solution for a hypothetical life on the run. "You can set up a fresh Hotmail account every day, but if Scully gets an email from it on a site where she can be seen, then with the right access somebody can trace the source IP address and they've got a location for the sender. You need to control the line to disguise it."

In any case, even if he used a suitably roundabout route to contact her, a birthday greeting in one of the dailies, a question on a non-related newsgroup using keywords that only Scully would spot or one of the other methods they'd discussed, he still couldn't do it. Still must not do it.

What was he going to say? "I'm alive and well. See you later." Would a message like that from Scully have stopped him from worrying if their situations were reversed? Would a rider instructing her to act as if she'd never seen the message lest she trigger some worse tragedy for them both reassure her? Or would it just make her more determined than ever to track him down?

It wasn't that long since Scully went off on that joy-ride with Cancerman. All the "fines" in the world wouldn't have stopped him from worrying or from searching.

Best if she thought he was on that UFO. Nothing she could do about it if that was his location. No foolish risk she might suddenly feel driven to take to try and bring him back. In any case, once he had a better handle on the data and understood Krycek's claims that he'd been "designed" as a secret weapon then he would find his way back to her and they could talk about this face to face again.

There were other reasons to go to town though, even if finding the right kind of town was easier said than done. He tried to guess how far he'd have to travel to buy an external hard drive to create a disk image, and a DAT drive for easy duplication. Which gave him another dilemma: he knew the jargon but, without the Gunmen, the reality was that he'd be buying blind.

What if he bought the wrong thing and screwed it all up, destroying data rather than copying it? Could he risk taking the machine into a store to get advice? Maybe he needed a city? Sure, but if he went to Albuquerque or Amarillo why not just get on the next flight home?

Because Krycek said that he mustn't and Mulder had almost bought into Krycek's request for a voluntary delay before resurfacing. A time for reflection and research. Just a few days to think it through and understand all the implications. But that never-quite-agreed-to deal had been made before Mulder had seen the contents of the laptop. The Gunmen needed to copy this. Scully needed to see it. The world needed to know.

It was all or nothing. Stay silent, as Krycek advised, and bide his time until the right opportunity arose or scream it from the rooftops now and hope that full exposure could offer a different kind of security?

He looked back at the screen again. Of course the idea of thousands of test subjects in a database wasn't actually incriminating at all. You could chose to believe that the columns reflected voluntary answers to an opinion survey on the lovability or otherwise of some brand of coffee rather than the voltage level at which the victims passed out during testing, or the brightness of light to which they could be exposed before permanent retinal scarring occurred.

Volume of data wasn't enough, not when the keys to the databases and report cards looked like scruffy memos or back of an envelope doodles rather than highly confidential, critically important documents on which billions of dollars and maybe even billions of lives might depend. The absence of anything that even approached an abstract or a management summary in the files he'd examined just made it worse.

The files were mostly raw data; the sheer quantity acting as a kind of bizarre security, the lack of indices providing another layer.

It occurred to him that perhaps the explanation might be just that simple. These might be working copies of the files. Databases left open on some scientist's machine. Photocopied notes from someone's desk. Incomplete snapshots of encrypted files captured by some PC keylogging virus. The kind of thing a trusted second string like Marita Covarrubias or even a treacherous son of a bitch like Alex Krycek might get access to.

Despite years on the X-Files he really knew very little about the Consortium, its organization or its intentions. Adding what he'd now read in Krycek's files to those little hints he'd been offered by people like Bill Mulder and Deep Throat in the past, he could only conclude that in the early years the leaders were honestly enthusiastic about their task.

Enthusiastic enough that, according to the laptop, they'd offered themselves as the first human guinea pigs. Throwing the net wider, they turned their attention to the military. When that resource proved inadequate, they looked further afield, and the nation became their laboratory.

At the same time they improved their techniques for managing the memories of victims until all that could be seen was the occasional error in which somebody would talk about aliens and airmen but the world would hear only hysteria and hallucination.

The leadership's faith in their project was seemingly strong enough that they continued to include themselves in the tests. At any rate they included their wives and children, and even the occasional husband, in the trials.

So far as Mulder could tell, the first of the genetically modified offspring to survive gestation was born in 1958. The majority of that year's crop died within days. By 61, survival rates were better, mostly because they'd scaled down their ambitions - brains or brawn, telepathy or radiation resistance, and so on.

Had Bill Mulder looked down a list of features and chosen which ones his son was to possess, knowing the more boxes he ticked, the less chance of the kid surviving? Perhaps it was a lucky dip, a random choice by an anonymous technician, though that hardly seemed likely. Not if dad had the kind of power that Krycek suggested.

Which bits of him were real then? What came courtesy of mom and dad and what had been manufactured in a test tube? He'd accused his mom of having an affair with Cancerman. If he was reading this right then daddy could have been a mix and match of a dozen men and some things that weren't even men at all.

His mind flashed to thoughts of flounder genes implanted into strawberries to act as antifreeze and he wondered if surviving trips to the Arctic and Antarctic said more about him than he wanted to know. Maybe it explained the swimming thing. Shit. He almost laughed, thoughts racing past the possible via the improbable into the bizarre. Too much information and too little knowledge.

He'd found his file or at least what was probably his file if the folder he'd found in the vaults of the Strughold Mine years ago was right. 61/292544 documented changes made before, during and after fertilization, but the combination of technical complexity and the lack of searchable cross-references made it hard to see what it meant beyond the bare fact that "something" had been done.

So far, all he really knew was how big this thing was, how little of it he understood, and how badly he needed help.

Stretching back in the chair, angry muscles complained and tired eyes took the opportunity to blink closed. He was still low on sleep, lower still on energy.

Sleep, he thought, offering himself the only escape route he was allowed. He didn't want sleep; he wanted Scully. Permitted the words to escape from the cage in his head and bounce around in his conscious thoughts, relishing the moment of freedom even as he braced himself against the pain of memory.

Unforgivable. The word spun and he closed his eyes a little tighter as if that could block the images from closing in. He thought back to their last night together, to a tired motel room on the edge of an Oregon forest. "So much more you can do with your life." A moment of truth hiding the lie within.

God, he'd wanted her that night. Wanted to lose himself in her. It hadn't even been her body he'd craved; he'd wanted her soul. At least he'd had the guts not to follow through. At least he'd been able to stop at comforting her. He'd kept the promise he'd made to himself the day the neurologist in a Philadelphia hospital finally stopped using phrases like, "there's a danger of," and started talking about a, "need to prepare yourself," instead.

They'd had one week together before the doctor's verdict was pronounced. They'd made love three times in that extraordinary week. Three times. He'd had longer one-night stands.

"Your timing sucks," he muttered, snorting in a lungful of air and wishing for something he was scared to admit to wanting, even in his head.

Ashamed, he remembered his relief as Scully let him off the hook after he got the new prognosis. First of all she'd agreed, without so much as a questioning look, to his declaration that he needed a couple of weekends alone to sort out things related to his mother's estate. Then, after a week in a hospital bed suffering from the after-effects of an assault by tobacco larvae, she'd accepted his claims of tiredness and a need to sleep it all away.

"Should have told her," he said, wondering momentarily if Krycek or someone had the place bugged and was going to use talking to himself as evidence of something later, then laughed at the thought of just how insignificant that particular symptom would seem compared to the rest.

Couldn't tell her. Hadn't come up with a way to tell her. Telling her would have made it real. Telling her would have been dangerous - what if she'd said they should make the best of the time they had left together?

Better to back away. Better to retreat. Better not to die in her arms. Not slowly, not with her eyes betraying love and pity and concern as deterioration set in and the drugs became impossible to avoid.

"Sorry," he said at last. Not sure whom he was talking to, thinking that maybe it was himself. He'd tell her; next time he saw her, he'd tell the truth. Explain about the brain disease, the headaches, the warnings in the doctors' words.

And now he'd also have to tell her about the things he'd read in these Consortium files that said he was a freak and that it might be necessary to keep the freak alive, whether he wanted to stay alive or not.

A shuddering deep breath and he opened his eyes, forcing himself to come back to the here and now.

The cell phone that he wasn't supposed to use, despite there being no paper trail linking it to him, blinked "No Service" which was hardly a surprise. He turned it off again, not wanting to see the words.

The satellite phone was the worst possible solution. If someone was waiting for him to resurface then that would simply give them an early warning.

If he got this lot back to DC then he could get it out in front of the public. The Bureau had people who specialized in unraveling paper chains, tracking money movements, and identifying falsified and anomalous employment histories. They were good at it, and with this kind of documentation as a starting point they could achieve a lot more than he'd ever done.

If he was going to make a break back to DC, then the faster and more directly he did it the better. If they thought he was on that UFO, then they wouldn't be actively looking for him. Which meant if he moved fast enough now then he could fly home and, with some electronic magic and a little luck, he'd have passed on everything that Krycek had given him before anyone realized he was back in town.

Everything that Krycek had given him? He sighed, throwing back his head, closing his eyes for a moment. Krycek's computer. Krycek's files.

Didn't matter. Those files should be out there and one way or another he was going to make sure that's where they went. Besides which, there was no way they were Krycek's files in any sense other than that he'd stolen them from his employers or maybe been handed them by someone like Marita. Fine. Mulder would leave him a receipt from the FBI to indicate the removal of property. If Krycek dared, maybe he could get the Bureau to reimburse the cost of replacing the machine.

Mulder was going home.

Another yawn, more rubbing at tired eyes and aching temples. He thought about the drive to the airport. Hours of driving on empty roads. It would be a long night. A sudden flash on a conversation in a car. "The U.S. Department of Transportation estimates that over 190,000 fatal car crashes every year are linked to sleepiness." Special Agent Alex Krycek told him that - a lifetime ago.

Despite the source of the information, he accepted the glimmer of truth. He might need to be on top of his game to get home safely. A few hours sleep were a necessity. What mattered was that the decision had been taken. Tomorrow he would be going home.

Part 4

The Lone Gunmen had a lot of information but from Skinner's perspective none of it was useful.

The evidence, such as it was, fell somewhere in the range circumstantial, incomprehensible and inadmissible. Magnetic anomalies, lights in the sky, reports on MUFON bulletin boards. Plenty of coincidences, suspicions and observations, but nothing that Skinner could offer to Kersh as proof of an alien presence and of a quasi-governmental conspiracy to hide it.

The Gunmen were arguing over the interpretation of satellite thermal images in densely forested regions. His eyes slid towards Scully again, trying not to make it too obvious that he was watching her. He realized that he had nothing to be concerned about on that score; she didn't seem to know that there was anyone else in the room. Eyes wide open, mouth pulled into a flat line, Scully sat, slumping a little in the chair, staring at her lightly interlaced fingers, as they rested in her lap.

She was tired, that much he knew. She was lost in thought, that much he understood. He ought to respect her privacy and pretend that he'd noticed nothing but he couldn't do it. He'd always prided himself on protecting his people and he'd failed to protect Mulder. He wasn't going to fail her.

"Scully." When she didn't stir, he tried again. "Dana. Come on. Let me take you home."

"I'm not tired," she said, her tone equal parts exhaustion and stubbornness.

Skinner nodded. "I know. And you won't be tired tomorrow."

To his relief, after a moment's thought her fingers drifted to touch her stomach and she smiled. The expression lost in an instant; the new tension in her jaw threatening to pull tears from her eyes. She rose, nodding once towards the Gunmen before heading for the door.

Something about cars changed the rules. Maybe the borrowed security of metal walls or the artificial privacy of enclosure. Whatever it was, it gave him permission to speak. "When you were missing, he never stopped looking. Even when he was working other cases, he didn't stop."

Her face was turned away from him, eyes fixed resolutely on the view from the passenger window, but the stiff set of her shoulders told him that he had her full attention. "It blinded him. He nearly killed Duane Barry. It nearly got him killed. He went after the Smoker. He wanted revenge. He gave me his resignation."

That last piece of information actually provoked a, "Why?" from Scully and he could only guess that she'd never heard that story before.

"He was scared of losing himself - to vengeance, to anger, to a foolish mistake. He wanted to be there when you came back. You've got to do the same for him. He'll need you when he gets back."

The night had been too short or possibly too long. Not enough sleep, too many dreams. Instead of waking up rested, he'd jumped directly to agitated. Thousands of ants scrambling across his flesh. Millions of thoughts chasing in angry procession through his brain.

Genetically engineered by Bill Mulder to fight a war to save the world. Really? Not unique in that respect, there were thousands of files on that computer. So what was supposed to be so different about him, what made him so damned special? Of course, he only had Krycek's word that he was in any way different to the thousands of other failed experiments. Gibson Praise was "special"; they'd seen the brain scans to prove it. It hadn't helped Gibson or anyone else.

Being "special" had hospitalized Mulder last year, a set of drawings sending his brain into a toxic overload that hadn't ended until Cancerman's butchers chopped out the offending parts. At least, that's what he'd thought they'd done, what the brain scans Scully had insisted on afterwards seemed to suggest. How could he possibly matter to them now, if he hadn't mattered to them then? According to Scully, when she found him in the bowels of the DoD it looked like they'd decided to let him die.

"Changing," that was how Krycek phrased it. Mulder didn't know whether to feel impressed or insulted by the careful neutrality of the word. Changing for the better or the worse? He already knew about some of the changes. Changing from Regular Tylenol to Extra Strength. Changing from screaming nightmares when he was asleep to terrifying hallucinations when he was awake. Changing from thinking that Scully loved him to knowing it.

Not the kind of secret weapon that Bill Mulder could have had in mind. Not much of a weapon at all. He tired more easily these days; minor illnesses were hitting him harder. He was taking longer to recover from the aches and pains of everyday life, and the cuts and bruises of everything else. He'd blamed most of it on age and the rest on whatever was destroying his brain.

The neurologist had been telling him for weeks how close he was to a relapse that could hospitalize him. Same problem as before, a brain running so fast it couldn't even be bothered with minor details like muscle coordination or speech. The doctor had offered no solutions, simply suggested a cocktail of drugs that might temporarily suppress the storm. Drugs that if he took them would render him unfit for duty.

He hadn't even needed to think about it. The sickness was the result of an X-File and he'd never just given up working an X-File because it was dangerous or because his chances of success were low.

He hadn't told the doctor about the telepathy that had accompanied the previous incident, not wanting to add a diagnosis of psychosis to the file. It wasn't as if he was hiding anything, there had been no glimpses into other people's thoughts this time, just pain in his head and a frightening weakness in his movements as the agony took hold.

When the doctor pronounced the death sentence it hadn't even been a surprise. Not that he'd resigned himself to death, never that. Just that he'd always understood the dangers of his job and he'd always accepted them, if not with grace then with resolve.

Faced with one last chance to capture a UFO, how could he resist? So he'd gone to Oregon. Twice. Alien miracle denied, he'd jumped at Krycek's offer of another kind of revelation. He could admit that now - now that he'd been hit by far more information than he'd bargained for.

The only thing the Consortium's documents didn't explain was why they suddenly wanted him. If it was true that they wanted him, and he only had Krycek's word to go on there, despite the passionately worded memos demanding his capture in the files. Anybody could have written those.

If Krycek had been playing him then he'd played his cards well. The thought of keeping the brain alive as the body died was more frightening than death itself. Wasn't it? Which brought him back to Krycek and this place and what the hell he'd been doing for the past week. Nothing in the files suggested that Krycek had a miracle cure for the brain disease. So what did Krycek have planned? Did he also have a scheme to keep the brain alive?

Enough!

Shuddering, he quickly cleaned the breakfast plates, partly from habit, partly because it seemed like an admission of inadequacy to let Krycek clear up the mess. Better remember to empty the trash as well, he thought, amused by his brain's drift from the global to the trivial in the space of a few heart beats.

The car was too hot; he opened all the doors and loaded the paper files that Krycek had given him into the trunk along with the warm jacket he'd worn up in Oregon a week ago. The thought of returning to DC made him smile. He hadn't checked the weather forecast, had scarcely looked at the TV at all, just knew it would be beautiful there.

The first scream made him go for his gun. He spun, weapon at the ready, but saw nothing. The second scream was painful, gut-wrenching in its intensity. He ran out of the building, but found no explanation for the sound. No vehicles, no swirls of dust anywhere nearby to indicate movement. He turned slowly, looking into the blank landscape and saw no one, walked quickly around the building and saw no place to hide.

Another scream, the woman couldn't be more than twenty feet away.

What the hell? It had to be something to do with the shape of the quarry. He'd only done the most cursory of examinations of the site in the past three days, content to declare it flat and saucer-shaped with a single rocky ridge along one edge. Some kind of echo affect, focused by weird geography and odd atmospheric conditions?

What he knew for sure though was that he was miles from anywhere. If he could hear a scream then that meant he was probably the only person who could help. Another agonized howl rang out - female, fearful, soul-destroying. Somebody was killing her. Where was she?

He ran further from the building, hoping that by relocating himself he might get more sense of the direction the screams were coming from. Angry shouts instead, a procession of insults and abuse, sharp words from somebody standing right behind his back. A litany of, "Bitch. Whore. Die. Slut. Lying. Fucking." Building to a crescendo of furious contempt.

Mulder spun, gun solid in his right hand, left hand steadying his grip, ready for action. He screamed out a litany of his own. "Federal Agent. I'm armed. Come out where I can see you." He wasn't surprised that no one replied. The woman screamed again, more painful than before, but fainter. Mulder knew what that meant - she didn't have long left.

With nowhere else to go, he started to run towards the only place he could imagine anyone being able to hide. Ran past cannibalized cutters, abandoned crushers and the skeletons of heavy conveyors, ignored burned out cranes and trucks, dodged rusty backhoe buckets and ducked under the remains of excavator arms. Still shouting out FBI mandated orders to, "Stop," and, "Identify yourself," as if he was expecting them to be obeyed.

The screams stopped and so did Mulder, tumbling to the ground, face and hands hitting the dust simultaneously. His body curled up on contact with the earth and he closed his eyes, felt the shudders of pain fold his limbs a little tighter.

Ants crawling across his flesh, an unscratchable itch that started in his fingers, creeping across his eyeballs, pooling in his ears, scuttling through his thoughts, burrowing its way into his brain.

The man was still there, still screaming out words of abuse and hate, swirling in frenetic overlap with cries of horror and dismay. "She's dead. Oh, God. She's dead." Mulder heard the man's words, loud and clear, heard the mix of disbelief and panic in them and was quite sure that the words had never been spoken out loud.

He'd been through this before, or close enough to this. Collapsing in the hallway of a university, losing touch with reality in an FBI elevator, trembling and out of control in the padded cell of a DC hospital.

Voices mingling and merging, screaming and crying, demanding that he help, begging him to hear. He heard, of course he heard. Didn't want to hear, but didn't have a choice.

Was this how it felt to be special? Electric shocks of pain catwalking along his spine. He wrapped his hands over his ears, but it made no difference to the noise. A cacophony of terror and sorrow.

Hiding from them, he turned in on himself. Mind fluttering back to decades before and the sound of Samantha's cries, agonizing shivers of shame as he heard Scully scream his name on the night that Duane Barry stole her away, his mom sobbing out her goodbyes to an empty phone. So many screams. Perhaps he'd always heard them; maybe he'd just been able to ignore them until now.

Scully hadn't wanted to take the day off, but she was grateful now that Skinner, bristling with concern despite addressing her in full AD mode, had insisted that she at least stay away from the office today.

Last night had been the roughest yet, perhaps simply because the sheer accumulation of sleepless nights had all caught up with her at once. She needed sleep; she could admit that to herself even if she couldn't admit it to anyone else. Pills were out of the question. She considered milder alternatives but even the smell of chamomile tea made her feel queasy.

Actually, everything made her feel queasy. She sipped at a glass of watered down orange juice and tried to ride it out. Lying in bed just increased her awareness of being awake. And alone. The TV made a poor companion but it didn't nag, it didn't ask her how she was feeling; it didn't pity her at all.

The vivid horror of the dreams was no surprise. Men in white coats poring over test tubes and Petri dishes, working in stark white rooms where centrifuges spun and autoclaves sterilized. Inevitable that she should dream of experiments and genetics when her body was responding to a whole new chemistry of its own.

She didn't like all that nightmare talk about breeding programs, nucleotide sequences and mutagenic reactions but in the circumstances it was no surprise that her sub-conscious chose to label her fears with terms drawn from X-Files and medical science. While other women feared the "abnormal" or the "damaged" in general terms; her brain had no shortage of specifics.

Her head was pounding and the Tylenol box was looking more attractive all the time. She was loathe to use anything, but her doctor had reminded her that putting up with too much pain could be more dangerous to the child than the drug she was trying to avoid. Particularly as there was no chance of being able to eat until the worst of it had passed.

How much of this was stress, she wondered. Maybe she should talk to someone? Not Skinner, he looked as lost as she did, even if he had plucked up the courage to order her to stay home.

Mulder had been missing for a week. It could be months before they brought him back. Months in which she had to be strong and if being strong meant admitting that her body could sometimes be weak then she could learn to do that as well. She'd learned to handle a lot of things in the past few years. She just missed having Mulder's faith to lean on while she did.

Ten days after Krycek stopped Mulder from walking into a rendezvous with hell on board an alien spaceship, he couldn't avoid the feeling that he was another rescue mission.

He checked the pickup's clock even though he'd read it five minutes before. Stubbornly, it confirmed that five minutes had passed.

He'd planned on being away for two or three days, and would have felt comfortable even if it had taken four, but he'd been gone for six days, fourteen hours and a lot of minutes and he was still miles from the quarry. Shouldn't have left Mulder alone. Not for this long. Not at all in fact.

He'd planned how to handle Mulder's captivity with care and precision, mapped out alternate routes to the quarry starting from any of half a dozen prearranged stopovers like the hotel they'd used the first night in Boise. A logistical nightmare to set up, even using money ripped off from a consortium slush fund, but it had been flawless in execution. Even the shopping trips on the journey down had gone smoothly.

Mulder's response to being allowed to keep his guns had been particularly gratifying. Krycek had manage to bypass years of distrust and even the hours of discomfort the agent had experienced after his capture in that one grand gesture.

Everything was perfect - except for the timing, which had gone hopelessly awry. Should have killed Spender before the trip to Oregon. Should have killed him a month ago, a year ago, a decade ago. As it was, he'd been forced to kill him at a highly inconvenient time simply to stop him from going into hiding and escaping his fate again. No choice. Had Spender lived there was always a danger that some macabre residual connection brought about by that transplant of brain tissue from Mulder to him could have led the Consortium directly to their hiding place.

He wondered if Mulder knew about that link, if it had ever run both ways, if he'd realized just how much of his private life and thoughts Spender had seen in the past few months. Probably not, Krycek decided. Probably better off not knowing.

So he'd killed Cancerman. So what? What was the big deal? Nobody cared whether the old bastard lived or died, not even his one-time friends and colleagues. What Krycek had omitted from the equation, perhaps intentionally he now realized, was the fear factor. The other Consortium bosses were scared. It just was not kosher for one of the hired help to kill his chief and then to get away scot-free.

Even though he had done them all a favor.

No good deed goes unpunished, he noted, lips shifting into an uncomfortable smile before tightening again.

The trip up to DC had gone smoothly enough. A helicopter ride from Albuquerque with a pilot who owed him a favor and knew nothing about the Consortium. Another hop using an alias that had never been linked to him. And finally a very public flight, using a Consortium supplied credit card, from Portland to Washington, suggesting that he'd flown home having monitored the FBI's failed hunt for Mulder.

After killing Spender, he'd actually driven halfway to Dulles airport before he'd admitted that he couldn't take the same route back. Shouldn't have left a witness alive. When he killed the Smoker, he should have killed the nurse as well. It was Marita who said that another killing was unnecessary, that it would be enough to drug the nurse, buying them a few hours head start.

A head start was all they needed, she said, and Krycek agreed that the Consortium's bosses would guess who'd made the hit even without the nurse's account. Which had given him a problem: it would have aroused Covarrubias' suspicion if he'd killed the nurse. Driving to Dulles, he'd suddenly realized that by the time he reached the west coast he'd be on the Consortium's wanted list; so he'd taken the next exit and driven south.

He'd run, run so far and so fast that he'd nearly led them directly to Mulder's door. Recognized the tail almost too late and been forced to double back on himself, eventually leaving a couple more dead bodies in his wake. Mercenaries, not much to feel bad about there. Cancerman's old cronies had put a price on Krycek's head: a million dollars to the man who took him out.

Maybe he should feel flattered? Not quite as good a deal as the one being offered on Mulder, but if kids could die for a few bucks or a pair of running shoes then who was he to say that a reward like that should be ignored? Hell, in other circumstances he'd be interested in the job himself. He shook his head, amused and horrified to be feeling quite so hyper. "Sixteen hours straight driving does that to you," he said, hoping that hearing a voice, even his own, would help to keep him awake.

Things weren't running according to plan, but he'd lived with an axe over his head before and he could live with it now. The artificial hand smacked into the steering wheel and he regretted the empty gesture instantly as he reminded himself just how easily it could have done real damage, how tough it would be to get precision prosthetic repairs done in the middle of nowhere and just how fast the Consortium would find him if he had that kind of work done in a city hospital.

The fact was he was too damned easy to track and when Marita said, "Canada first," he should have jumped in her car and gone with it. She hadn't believed him when he'd replied with, "Mexico," but then disbelief was to be expected.

"Just so long as it isn't Tunisia," she'd said, and he'd nodded. They would meet again; they always did. Getting out of the country would have been the smart thing to do. He just hoped she'd made it off the continent before the goons started monitoring all flights.

The trouble was, with a price on his head, he was hardly a suitable bodyguard for Mulder. Not the point, he reminded himself. He didn't have an option in the matter. He'd kept Mulder away from that spaceship and brought him down here for good reasons and those wouldn't be served by leaving the man to his own devices in the wilds of New Mexico.

He checked the clock again, another five minutes, another four miles, still a couple of hours to go. Couldn't take any risks on unfamiliar roads. He needed to get back there. He just hoped to God that Mulder would be alive when he did.

The FBI's manhunt was winding down.

The agents were divided. Half of them looked on Scully with pity in their eyes; their sympathies honestly given to the grieving widow of a soldier officially classified as missing in action but most likely dead. The others managed to combine the pity with a little contempt. She'd seen that look before too, on the faces of cops dealing with abused wives, in the eyes of agents interviewing women who seemingly knew nothing of their monstrous partner's misdeeds.

She wasn't quite sure which reaction she preferred. What the hell did they know about her? What did they know about Mulder? They thought they knew him, but all they really knew were the tabloid headlines of his life - the ups and downs of his FBI career, the outrageous expense claims, the designer suits and the smart-ass remarks. They knew nothing.

"It seems to me that you're holding something back, Agent Scully," said Doggett. Business-like but polite, and with maybe a little less of the damned pity and a little more determination.

"Such as?"

"Why you're so certain that he didn't just walk away."

Because he wouldn't - didn't really have quite the right ring to it. She squared her shoulders, and looked Doggett coolly in the eye. "Because I know him," she said. She knew him and they didn't. She knew what they were getting at with their pitying glances and guarded words. They thought the basement pariah had taken one look at the auditor's report and the doctor's warnings, realized that his working life would soon be over, seen professional failure and death as his only prospects and he'd run away to hide.

Of course not. If he were convinced that the Bureau had become a hindrance not a help then Mulder might turn his back on them. But to turn his back on her? Not possible.

What about those brain scans that Doggett had showed her? Mulder had lied to her about those, hadn't he? What about those mysterious weekend trips? What about the freshly carved gravestone?

But no, there were logical explanations for those anomalies: fabricated records from some unknown source, maybe even a false trail left by Mulder himself to mask whatever he was really doing on those missing days. Whatever the explanation, the fact remained if Mulder had a choice then he would certainly be at her side. If he had only a glimmer of a choice then he would have found a way to tell her that he was alive.

Doggett frowned. "Sometimes it's the people closest to us we hide from the most."

Part 5

Another stop for gas and a detour around an emergency bridge repair had helped push Krycek's "away" time to something like six days and twenty-two hours. Call it a week, he told himself, surprised by his attempt at evasion. Couldn't be helped. Anyway, by now Mulder was either OK or not and whichever it was then a clear head and a cocksure demeanor would be useful.

The truck he'd switched back to the night before kicked up dust and stones in a cloud behind him as he swung onto the quarry's track. He slowed a little, not that it improved things much. Why the hell did it have to be in the middle of a damned wasteland?

The trouble with remote places is that every movement's visible, and every change logged by a satellite's high-resolution cameras is obvious. Krycek had to assume the place was still checked from time to time. Just so long as it was only from "time to time" then there was nothing to worry about. Only the desperately unlucky or the cavalierly foolish would get caught by a routine trawl.

The aliens had no reason to look at the place at all. When they destroyed the men working the site back in 76 they'd also delivered a warning shot to the Consortium's chiefs. They'd left behind sensors to look for trucks of magnetite leaving the quarry, but provided those weren't tripped then the place was not somewhere they would want to linger.

It wasn't a place that anyone would want to linger. Swallowing hard, Krycek pulled up in front of the office building, tucking the vehicle carefully under the shade of the unloading bay and away from a satellite's prying eyes.

He checked the storage area first. The car's doors were wide open, the trunk half filled with old file folders and Mulder's clothes. By the look of the spider working to set up home in there, the elderly Ford had been like that for a while. He checked the gauges, it had been moved at some point during the week but it hadn't gone far. Just enough to check that the thing was working, perhaps.

"Mulder," he shouted.

No reply. Not that he expected one. The man would surely have heard the pickup coming. He would have wanted to see whoever got out and Krycek would have spotted the surveillance in return.

Krycek ran up the stairs, two at a time, hoping that Mulder wasn't watching him right now. He wouldn't want the agent to mistake urgency for concern. Pushing the apartment's door open, he did a quick tour. No Mulder. No surprise there. The kitchen counter told him what he needed to know. The evidence: a glass that had once contained water and an open box of Tylenol.

Krycek grumbled his complaints to keep the instinctive desire to rush outside and start shouting Mulder's name from overriding his judgment. "Got a headache, Mulder? Feeling a little rough? Why don't you go and lie down? Course not. That'd be too easy."

When then? How long had Mulder been gone? The computer that Krycek had turned on as soon as he walked into the living room had finally come up. A few swift keystrokes and it was telling him more things that he didn't want to know. Hundreds of files opened, some quickly closed again, others obviously brooded over for hours. All happening within three days of their arrival here. Which meant that Mulder hadn't touched the machine for the past four days.

The map on the table told him that Mulder was preparing to run away, back to an airport, back to DC presumably. Annoying perhaps, but understandable. Yet he hadn't taken the car even though from the looks of things he'd been preparing to. Surely Mulder hadn't invited someone to come here?

A quick test said that the satellite phone hadn't been touched. The cell phones were way outside their service area.

If someone had come for Mulder then it had been unsolicited and therefore almost certainly unwelcome. Yet there were no signs of a struggle. The shotgun was standing unused in its home close by the door. The knife on the kitchen table had no bloodstains on its blade. From the look of the eggshells, breadcrumbs and milky cereal debris in the trash, Mulder's last meal had been breakfast. A big breakfast. Bacon fat in the pan. Plates and cup left to dry on the rack.

Mulder was up and awake and preparing for the long day ahead. The long journey ahead? Even the towel on the edge of the tub confirmed it. Mulder was a slob, but a tidy one. He might have left the towel in a heap after drying himself, but he'd have hung it up the next time he went in the room.

Mulder had taken a change of clothes, bought in an anonymous Walmart on the journey down here, and placed them in an overnight bag by the table. Maps, sunglasses, weapons, ammo, notepads. The bottled water had been cold when Mulder put it there, the dribble of condensation obvious from the puckering of the paper that he'd stood it on. The paper was bone dry now of course. Which thought made Krycek shudder a little. Mulder had left this room days ago and even if he'd taken water with him then it was unlikely he'd taken enough.

Mulder's service weapon was missing, but the spare clips were still on the table. So was his ankle holster with the compact automatic tucked safely inside. Just the laptop to slide back into its case and a few more things to throw in the bag and Mulder would have been ready to leave.

Which begged the question: he was ready to leave, so why hadn't he gone? Why was the car still here?

A surprise attack catching him off guard just as he was preparing to go? It seemed unlikely. Mulder, who sometimes seemed to lack the instinct to survive, nonetheless had proven himself to have all the required skills. In the area immediately surrounding the building there were no indications of a struggle and no signs of vehicles other than their own.

Krycek looked at the guns again. Anyone taking Mulder would have wanted the weapons as well or else they'd have taken the opposite stance and left Mulder's Sig Sauer on the table along with the others. They'd certainly have wanted the laptop. Everything pointed to Mulder having walked out of the building of his own free will and without any particular emergency action in mind.

Unless it had started, unless his brain had forced him into action? Three days - might that have been long enough? But where the hell would he go without the car? Unless he'd been too ill too drive?

A taxi? It would have been a cool move on Mulder's part except for the impossibility of calling one on an out of area cell phone, and of course then he would have taken his stuff, not just left it here. Had he gone on foot to a callbox somewhere and become disoriented? Somewhere being the appropriate word. So far as Krycek knew they were at least twenty miles away from anything that might offer such a thing. A private house then? Another quarry maybe? Something, miles away.

He shifted his gun temporarily into the prosthetic hand as he scratched behind his ear. OK. He'd seen all there was to see up here. Mulder had been out there somewhere for days so a five-minute pause for reflection was a necessity not a luxury, but the time for contemplation was up. Krycek knew he'd taken too damned long to get back.

He hadn't seen any vultures circling on the way in but then why would they need to circle if dinner had already been served? If Mulder was still alive then Krycek was going to kick his ass.

Water, thermal blanket, knife, flashlight, duct tape, drugs; he looked for anything else that might be useful. A moment of sudden recall and he was struck by the irony. "As you do to Mulder and to me - you do to all of mankind." The smoking bastard's final words: equating himself with Mulder, equating himself with humanity in general! Krycek threw his dirty laundry out of the backpack he'd taken to DC and replaced it with a rescue kit of emergency supplies.

Start at the office building and work outwards. He'd have to go on-foot, at least this first time, though he would probably need the truck to bring Mulder back. If Mulder could make a noise then Krycek needed to hear it. Maybe if he made the signal to Mulder loud enough? "I don't care what you call me, Mulder. Just call me."

Stopping at the rusty control panel by the outside door he studied the terrain, reminding himself of the lay of the land before delivering a short hoot then a long one, on the quarry's blast warning siren. He paused for an instant, then gave a long, short, long blast more. If Mulder had gone out and couldn't make it back where would he have holed up?

He surveyed the horizon to get his bearings. Caves to the east. Abandoned heavy machinery to the north. Nightmares where east met north. Thirty men dead in less than fifteen seconds in a radiation blast that had left machinery intact but had destroyed life in an instant. The consortium's clean up crew had used explosives to destroy anything that might tempt looters and burned or buried anything incriminating, then left the site as fast as possible afterwards. Krycek had read the report years ago but hadn't realized how significant the place was until this last few months.

Nodded to himself. Northeast then.

Almost resigned to walking, he listened for a moment more and was rewarded with a soft woof of sound. A single shot from some distance? A pistol. Mulder's? In the city, he wouldn't have heard the sound at all. Out here the problem was the echo. Both the distance and the direction it had come from were difficult to gauge, but it sounded like it came from the northeast, which was exactly as he'd anticipated.

None of which mattered much compared to the big picture - Mulder was alive and conscious, and not so very far away.

How much ammo did Mulder have left to signal with?

"Show some sense," Krycek mumbled, willing Mulder to read his thoughts. If Mulder was in one of those caves then he was probably going to need a few bullets to guide Krycek in. Certainly, relying on Mulder to shout loud enough was a long shot at best. Krycek was just relieved the man had been up to the job of squeezing the trigger.

He decided to take the risk and use the truck. The shotgun and pistols were loaded and ready to go; he patted his pocket to confirm the spare rounds were in there.

Taking it slow, he headed out across the rutted surface of the quarry, mindful that years of storms had rearranged the dust, hiding potential hazards like jagged rocks and discarded tools. After a moment he stopped and turned off the engine, shouted a, "Now," and fired a single shot.

Another gun replied. OK. Right direction but still some distance to go. He corrected his course and kept moving.

When he repeated the routine for the third time, the reply was loud enough that he could hear the zing as the bullet hit metal. "Good man," Krycek admitted. He was not only getting close, he now had the added advantage of knowing that Mulder had some heavy machinery parked in his firing line.

If he'd known Mulder was in good enough shape to speak only when spoken to and not to waste bullets or vocal chords on moments when no one was listening, then it'd have saved him a lot of worry. Allowed himself a glimmer of relief at that.

Another drive. This time he knew exactly where he was heading.

Not in such good shape, Krycek realized as he approached the cave's entrance. Good shape and Mulder would have started walking towards him. At the very least, Mulder would be sitting outside ready to make himself known. Krycek shouted again and caught a brief glimpse of Mulder coming to the mouth of one of the caves and then ducking back inside again.

"Poor bastard," he murmured, an accidental response swiftly tamped down. Still it had to be bad if Mulder couldn't even venture outside. How the hell was he going to get Mulder back to the main building?

Krycek drove right up to the cave's entrance. Just inside, he found his target sitting on the ground. Arms clinging to bent knees, head resting on his chest. A ragged bundle of a man, panting as if that last sortie into the cave's mouth only a few feet away had exhausted him. Krycek spotted the drum of water that Mulder had presumably been relying on and tried not to guess at the kinds of hazards that might have been stewing up in there, then wondered if maybe the gamma rays had sterilized everything they hadn't killed. One thing at a time, at least Mulder was still alive.

"What? You aren't going to hold a gun on me?" asked Krycek, desperate to see Mulder react. He moved to sit at the agent's side, pinned the water bottle he'd brought with him in place between plastic hand and jean-clad knee to open the top before pushing it towards Mulder.

A faint shrug of acknowledgement but no words. No action either.

"Drink the water." This time Krycek lifted the bottle to Mulder's lips. "Come on, tip your head back." Krycek cursed the prosthetic arm; accurate enough to use to hold a weapon steady as he loaded a fresh clip, good as a club in a fight, but not even up to the job of maneuvering a dead weight federal agent into a suitable position to drip water down his throat. Sudden flicker of memory at a parched journey on a rusty ship. Maybe he should just throw the water at him?

Fortunately Mulder seemed to get the message, lifting his head and sharing the task of positioning the bottle.

Krycek, remembering the warnings he'd heard in too many encounters with EMTs, suddenly felt compelled to say something. "Not too fast."

Mulder obviously felt a similar compulsion to reply. "Fuck you, Krycek."

Krycek had supplied Mulder with water, chocolate and a couple of Valium, and even then it had taken three attempts and a lot of pushing and shoving to get him moving.

Mulder had scrambled, crawled and finally clawed his way into the truck's passenger seat, babbling in pain, tears misting over his eyes, clutching his head as all the evils in the world paraded across his thoughts in sickening panoramic technicolor, surround-sound and feely-vision.

Well, perhaps not all the evils of the world. Maybe it was just those in a fifty-mile radius or so.

Since undergoing a little butchery at the hands of the Cancerman's quacks he'd felt the pain lingering in his head. Throbbing from quiet to loud, sometimes fading to a whisper, but ever present, an angry tingle that had sometimes turned into a roar of hurt. The brain scans taken since the surgery had shown only the damage and hadn't offered any possibility of a cure.

Yet, even during the worst of the pain and disorientation of the past few weeks the telepathy had never risen above a murmur, easily ignored as empathy or insight. But now there was no denying it; the quarry had brought it back to full strength. The peculiar caves had offered some protection from its affects. This apartment for whatever reason seemed like sanctuary.

Krycek was keeping out of his way and had been doing so ever since the brief incident when he'd attempted to manhandle Mulder into the shower. The reasoning behind the move, Mulder now admitted, had been benign and well-intentioned. Days of grime and sweat to scrub away and a fever to bring down.

Krycek's black eye, though satisfying, had been pure dumb luck; an ill coordinated lunge that took Krycek by surprise with its wild inaccuracy. A comic flailing of arms that had ended with the man stumbling backwards as he tried to keep Mulder from falling out of the bathtub.

The showerhead had delivered the knockout punch. The recollection as he glanced over at Krycek's slowly darkening bruise made Mulder smile. Scowling, Krycek handed him a bowl of soup and walked away. Mulder didn't say thanks.

Drowsy, a handful of Valium tended to have that effect noted Mulder, uncomfortable with the self-diagnosis. Fresher though, the shower had helped, mentally and physically. The food and drink was letting him feel a little more human.

Feeling better because Krycek was here? The irony bothered him. Little bubbles of laughter rose in his chest at the thought of how low you had to get before Krycek's presence constituted an improvement. "Got any more chocolate?"

Mulder could see Krycek weighing up his options; could see the moment of indecision as the muscles in Krycek's shoulders tensed. An explosion was imminent - laughter or violence? "Shit," Krycek grumbled, turning smoothly to face Mulder, a sour expression on his face.

Mulder laughed and Krycek looked horrified which made the agent laugh even more. Mulder shook his head, blinking hard, trying to chase the snorts of amusement away. Hysteria - just what he needed. Krycek vanished back into the kitchen and Mulder let his head drop low, struggling to combine breathing with laughter and failing miserably.

When Krycek returned he was carrying a glass of milk, which he placed on the table at Mulder's side. "Valium doesn't really work very well on you, does it?"

"Didn't I warn you about that?" said Mulder, hiccupping through the snorts.

"Drink the milk." Just a glimmer of a smile on Krycek's face now. "So what next - Thorazine, Haldol, Prozac - chloroform?"

Bastard. Mulder scowled; Krycek was taking his life in his hands with that little reminder of their trip down here. He glared up at Krycek and saw that the flickers of a smile had been replaced by a full-fledged flame. Anger fought briefly with amusement and Mulder raised a single finger in ironic acknowledgement. "They make it worse. Suppress my ability to control it."

Krycek nodded. "I saw you at the hospital when they took you in last time - you were pacing."

"I'd have run if I could."

"Is that what happened here?"

"I heard screams. They sounded so close. I thought - "

"You thought they weren't just in your head."

"I was outside, checking the car. Getting ready to go."

"Stealing my computer?"

"You're surprised?"

"Going back to DC?"

"I left it too late. I got out there and heard the voices - screaming. I ran towards them and it got worse. But I'd gone too far, couldn't get back, had to take shelter in the cave." Mulder paused, not ready for the conversation but aware that this might be as ready as he would ever be. "Krycek - I know what you've done to me."

"Me? I just did a few repairs."

Mulder's eyes slid shut. He didn't know what Krycek had done, not really. Just knew that Krycek had brought him here for a reason and that whatever "changes" had been happening before were nothing compared to what was happening to him now. Knew that running back to DC was no longer an option, at least not without heavy sedation and a nursemaid at his side. "How?" he finally hissed.

There was a rapid-fire urgency in Krycek's delivery that belied his too even tone. Rehearsed words. "This place amplifies the signals, gets the neurons in your brain excited - just like they did when you saw those drawings of the markings on that ship. The nanites I injected should slow things down enough that your brain can reroute the information flow - so you don't end up gibbering in a psych ward again."

"A spin-off of your father's work?"

"Your father's too."

"I should kill you for this," said Mulder, conversationally casual.

"Yeah, you should. But you won't. You found your files?" asked Krycek, tipping his head to point at the computer and getting a brief nod in reply. "The most interesting file is in the 73 series of course, that's when you really start to see the end results. Telepathy, ESP, the usual stuff."

Of course. The thought more sobering than any drug. "Was Samantha taken instead of me?"

"Bill Mulder thought if he hid you, it would be enough. They'd take one look at her new test scores and assume she'd lost it."

He'd seen this at the Strughold Mine, his file overwritten with hers. Had they done the same in the computer records too, deliberately transposed results to hide him? Had Samantha died because she wasn't what her tester's had anticipated, because she wasn't him? "But the merchandise was fragile and it broke," said Mulder, recalling the jargon they liked to use in their reports.

"They blamed it on hormone changes - pumped her full of drugs to try to stop it."

Mulder shook his head, not wanting to believe.

"Why not? Half the world's top gymnasts were getting the same treatment."

Fucker. He should kill the rat bastard, just to wipe the smile off his face. But the fact was Krycek's smile wasn't there anymore and it was the truth that hurt, not just Krycek's rendition of it.

Krycek's voice was quiet, good psychiatrist trying to coax the overwrought patient down from the ledge. "How does it feel?"

Mulder studied Krycek for a moment, saw an expression that on another man he might have mistaken for concern and responded to it, despite it being Krycek. "Like hundreds of radio stations all playing full blast, all wanting something. But I can ignore them, if I focus. Can't focus when I'm high on drugs."

"And now?"

"Just whispers. All I can hear is you."

Krycek flinched, turned away, kept it brisk and business like. "The building's coated in a special paint. Same thing the shotgun cartridges are filled with."

"Kryptonite?" asked Mulder, not quite laughing.

"Magnetite."

"Which does what?"

"Best I can tell you is it acts like the control rods in a nuclear reactor - regulating the effect. It can even stop it temporarily. Too much and it acts as a shield trapping the signals within itself. The right amount and it directs it, creates a kind of positive feedback, amplifying it. It affects some kinds of cell activity so drastically that it's toxic to certain lifeforms."

"So all I need is a hat made out of foil, painted with this stuff?"

Krycek shrugged.

Mulder moved in for the kill. "Or maybe that's what you need. To keep me out."

"You don't want to know what's in my head."

Perhaps not, but he needed to know. Don't profile your friends; it had been a self-preservation mantra since Quantico. But Krycek had never been a friend. He could feel Krycek's discomfort, but got no sense of the man beyond that. Later maybe. Once the drugs had worn off completely.

Today was another milestone. This was the first slideshow Scully had watched down here in the X-Files office since Mulder disappeared.

Too many memories demanding her attention, competing with whatever Doggett needed to say. Pictures of puncture wounds on a young victim's body in Bellefleur, years ago. Vampire activity in Texas. Photos of crop circles in an English field - she briefly regretted that scene; she could have joined him on the trip, used the opportunity to see a little more of Mulder's life. But no, it would be wrong to regret such a choice, she'd had a journey of her own to make right then.

She looked across at Skinner and wondered if he could guess what she was feeling. He shifted in his seat, looking uncomfortable, and she realized that he could probably understand it too well.

Not now, she told herself. She could deal with the memories and the emotions tonight, when she was alone. Right now, she needed to focus. Doggett had told her that he had new evidence and offered to provide her with a sneak preview before he presented the information to the team meeting. Scully had suggested they invite Skinner, partly as an ally, but also because he was the last person to see Mulder and therefore probably the one who had the most to offer in terms of interpretation.

She forced herself to sit up straight and looked expectantly at Doggett. He responded by pushing the button to bring up the next slide. Tire track 7A, Sequence 3, read the caption. "Vehicle 7 crosses the tracks of Vehicle 1 right here, showing it reached the site after Agent Mulder and Assistant Director Skinner."

"And there were no other vehicles on site with that tire pattern?" said Scully.

"It's the spacing between wheels that's the giveaway. That's why the forensics tech noticed it."

Scully nodded, not sure if she was hopeful or horrified. "They're sure?"

"They checked them all, police and Bureau, pool cars, rentals - they interviewed everyone on site in case one of them used their own vehicle without logging it. No one brought it and no one saw it. We're looking at a Dodge Ram Wagon, on that site for no good reason. We believe," said Doggett, bringing up another slide, "that it exited through this gate. No one can recall unbolting it that night, yet it was open. We're checking for prints."

Skinner rubbed his hand across his mouth. "I think - I'm sure - we would have seen it. If we were followed onto the site. I don't..."

Doggett was carefully soothing but professionally firm. He sounded as if he was talking to the victim's family not two FBI colleagues. "You said it yourself. A bright white light. You couldn't see Agent Mulder. If it had lights mounted on its roof..." He shrugged, leaving Scully and Skinner to fill in the blanks.

"That's not what I saw," said Skinner. "I know what a floodlight bar looks like."

Doggett nodded. "OK. That's all we have for now. We're checking with hotels, motels, gas stations, parking lots, airports, anything in a two hundred mile radius where they might have logged details of a vehicle passing through that night."

Scully frowned. "You're thinking what? That someone kidnapped him?"

"You tell me. I think he got in that Dodge, whether that was willingly or unwillingly I can't say."

Part 6

There were things that Scully couldn't believe and things she didn't want to believe. Tonight, lying on Mulder's bed, surrounded by the sights, smells and sounds of his apartment, with a stack of images from a brain scanner and the contents of an FBI file folder spread out across the linen she could almost imagine that he was in the bathroom, maybe brushing his teeth, or perhaps resting on the coach in the living room watching some late night TV.

She didn't want to believe that he was gone and she couldn't believe that he'd left her. Not by choice, never by choice. If she lay very still, curling herself around his pillow, allowing the comforter to sit high on her shoulders and drift down to rest on her ears, then she could almost imagine him; almost imagine them, as they'd been that last night in Bellefleur.

"There's so much more you need to do with your life. There's so much more than this."

Remembering his voice, the comfort and strength she'd drawn from it. The warmth of knowing that she wasn't alone any more. "Touched by others but never held." She'd once believed that of herself, imagined that was her destiny. But he'd touched her and he'd held her and yet those words about something more, that had meant so much as he said them, were starting to sound different now.

"There's so much more you need to do with your life."

Your life? He couldn't have done that to her. Couldn't have bound her soul to his and then said goodbye. It wasn't possible.

She sat up, pulling the images from his last brain scan towards her again, dissecting them, as if by staring for long enough she might be able to see what he'd been thinking as they were taken. She'd tried the obvious things, compared them to the scans made during the episodes with the alien rubbings a year before. Contrasted them with the images produced following his recovery from Cancerman's exercise in brain butchery. Not quite a match for either. All of them were Mulder's and, so far as the Bureau's imaging labs and the Lone Gunmen's edge analysis software could tell, none of them had been faked.

Perhaps they'd been taken by Cancerman's DoD cronies a year ago and now they'd been given to Doggett to spread doubt and confusion? Perhaps, she admitted, and perhaps the datestamps were correct. Perhaps Mulder had spent three months lying to her about his movements and his health, hiding in plain sight, without her even noticing.

Could she really have been duped like that? She knew he was tired, run down, a little ready with excuses to be apart on days they could have spent together. She'd thought perhaps the after-effects of the tobacco beetle larva had been a little harder than he'd admitted.

She knew that they were both intensely private people, who sometimes needed space no matter how close they felt. She knew that he was still grieving, for his mother, for Samantha. He might have declared himself "free," but moving on, however welcome, was never an easy thing.

It had suited them both; he hadn't pushed and she'd been grateful. She'd assumed that he was just trying not to monopolize her nights in the way that he already dominated her days, and that he was patient enough to give their new relationship time to settle before demanding more.

Now she felt ashamed that she'd been so happy to go along with it. How could she not have known? How could she be so focused on failed fertility treatment and disappointment that she hadn't seen what he was going through?

Yet, despite brain scans, gravestones, tire tracks and that damnable "your life", she still couldn't believe that he'd left her. But as the tears started to flow faster all she could hear was the mockery of a voice that said that maybe she simply didn't want to believe.

The bruises on Krycek's face had developed into multi-color contour maps and Mulder still hadn't quite worked out whether to laugh or apologize.

"What now?" demanded Krycek, sounding like his patience with his role as care-giver was already wearing thin.

Mulder had eaten, consumed enough liquid to feel a little more alive, taken a shower, caught a few hours sleep and was mostly running drug free again. Let the interrogation begin. "What kind of work did your father do?"

Krycek scowled. "What did yours do?"

"No idea. Maybe you can fill me in?"

That seemed to help ease them past the deadlock. Krycek pulled in a lungful of air. Head tilted back as far as it would go, he closed his eyes, snorting as he reopened them again. "My father worked for yours."

"And?"

"He was a doctor. Neuro-surgeon."

"Did he do something to me?"

Krycek heard the accusation and snapped at it. "Sure, Mulder. You're the God damned center of the universe. Of course he did something to you." A heavy gasp of an exhale. "He hid you from the fuckers who'd have sliced your brain up and spread it out on slides."

"I don't understand."

"You don't want to understand. Read the damned file. 95% plus on telepathy, with a rider that says it was probably a dash of attention deficit disorder that held you back and recommending a few drugs to correct it." Krycek shook his head, his voice softening just a little when he spoke again. "Bill Mulder was terrified. There were hundreds who'd had the same kind of genetic modifications, but there was still a big spread of abilities. He knew what was happening to kids who got scores like yours. If they made it past the first month of tests they were veterans. If they made it past two, they were vegetables."

"They died?"

"What do you think? Remember that rubbing from the alien ship? Imagine being exposed to the real thing, day in, day out."

"Why were they doing it?"

"They wanted to communicate - thought maybe the aliens would rate them above animals if they could pull it off. If nothing else it would confirm their position as go-betweens. Bill Mulder was smarter, I'll give him that; he wanted spies."

"But he didn't want to sacrifice me?"

Krycek snorted, gave Mulder a look of pure disbelief. "He wanted a secret weapon. He was going to wait until they perfected their training techniques before launching you into the attack!"

Mulder didn't respond to Krycek's tone, kept his reply flat calm and businesslike. "And your father?"

"Did a little slice and dice. Didn't touch the structures, just blocked the communication pathways. He switched a couple of names around on the file folders so they wouldn't get suspicious. Your sister scored 50%, very good but not the kind of thing that was going to get the rest of them salivating - good enough that when they retested her they wouldn't think the results were faked but they would think the talent had faded."

"Your father helped to hide me?"

"And Bill Mulder had him killed to make sure you stayed hidden."

"How did you find out?"

"My mother. Don't look so surprised. Even the hired help have mothers."

"Did Cancerman know?"

Krycek flinched, but his voice gave nothing away. "He knew Bill Mulder had my father killed. He didn't see any harm in mixing business with revenge."

"Why should I believe any of this?"

"Well, gee, I dunno' Mulder. Maybe your success chasing serial killers, mutants and aliens was just a lucky streak you've been running rather than a genetically engineered advantage. Maybe all the voices you heard when you were out in that quarry yesterday were figments of your imagination and you've finally gone nuts."

Scully was already in full flow, busily reorganizing the X-Files office, when Doggett arrived. He paused politely in the doorway for a moment, before finally giving up waiting for the invitation that wasn't going to come. "Agent Scully. I thought you were going to be working at Quantico for a while."

A reply wasn't strictly necessary so she didn't offer one, got straight to business. "I'd like an update on the search for Agent Mulder."

Doggett nodded, correctly assessing that further pleasantries were neither expected nor welcome. He took the visitor's chair next to Scully's desk, meeting her eye to eye across the diagonal. "All roads lead to that Dodge. We're widening the search net but we've got to accept the possibility that if he switched transport in a private garage then we may never find it. I can tell you that we haven't found one abandoned vehicle of that type within two hundred miles of Bellefleur. We've asked for details of all vehicles stolen that night in case something's still parked in the vicinity, but so far - "

" - nothing," she finished, taking the problem out of Doggett's hands. "What about motels, gas stations?"

"Thousands of possibilities but no clear sightings. You can ask people to review security tapes but - "

"Has anyone found Alex Krycek?"

Doggett sat back in his chair, puzzled. "The guy who was helping you and Agent Mulder?"

"The ex-FBI agent and traitor who was involved in the death of my sister and Agent Mulder's father."

"That's not how you described him to me in our first interview. That's not how the Assistant Director described him."

"I gave you his name. His record's on file."

"I'd appreciate a little less attitude and a lot more information."

"I'd appreciate you doing your job."

Doggett made a show of thumbing his way to the right place in the rather heavy file in his hand before starting to reel off the facts. "Mr. Krycek flew home from DC to New York at 18:40 on the night of Agent Mulder's disappearance. The passenger manifest confirms it. He visited the field office the next day following a request from my team." He paused, eyes blazing. "Want to tell me how to do my job, Agent Scully?"

"Why didn't you just say that when I asked you?"

"Because until you asked the question I was treating him as a witness not a suspect. Was I wrong? Is he a suspect?"

A sharp intake of breath. She was running on fumes and she knew it and though adrenaline and righteous indignation could drive her through a battle, they couldn't help her handle the aftermath. Hormones, she thought, swiping angrily at her eyes.

Doggett tried again, his voice a little milder this time. "Is Alex Krycek a suspect, Agent Scully?"

The slight nod was almost involuntary.

With Mulder missing for almost two weeks, Doggett and the remains of the task force were now spending most of their time sifting information arriving from field offices, car dealers, motel chains and other sources. The work was painstaking rather than glamorous and the trail was getting colder by the day. It was only a matter of time before Kersh allowed it to fade away to nothing.

Skinner came down to the basement at 5:30 precisely, ready to take her home. Scully knew she ought to be irritated by the presumption, but couldn't summon up the energy. In any case she needed to talk to Skinner and getting angry wouldn't help.

Fortunately she was on her own when Skinner arrived, Doggett having left to see Kersh in order to, "map out the next phase of the operation."

This time when they pulled up outside her apartment she did invite Skinner inside.

"How are you doing?" he asked, and Scully wondered if there was an answer to that which would be neither a lie nor an invitation to ask another question.

She settled for, "I've been busy."

"Krycek?"

She nodded.

Skinner followed up. "Doggett came to see me, said he'd spoken to you. I don't know what you said to him."

"Doggett asked if he should be treating Krycek as a suspect."

"You said yes?"

Why did that question sound like an accusation? "If Doggett's going to work on the X-Files he needs to know about Krycek."

"He practically accused me of helping Krycek kidnap Mulder."

"He thinks we're withholding information."

"He thinks I stage managed thirty abductions to cover up Mulder's disappearance?"

"He's just being thorough."

"You think I..." his voice trailed off. "I saw it. I saw the lights. I saw it."

"But you didn't see where Mulder went. The lights blinded you. You said it yourself."

"All those years. All those reports - yours and Mulder's - and you still can't believe."

Believing would be easy. Believing would mean that there was nothing she could do to bring him back. Believing would be giving in to whatever fate threw her way.

Skinner was staring at her now, waiting for a reply. The flesh above his eyebrow creased into angry folds. She watched as the skin of his Adam's apple tensed and flexed.

Suddenly he moved forward, just one step, bringing them within touching distance and simultaneously making it harder for her to see his face. He lifted his hand, approaching the dampness on her cheek without quite making contact, eased it back down to his side again. She could hear him breathe, see the fast tick of the pulse in his throat. One step forward and she could hide, hide from herself, hide from the slow procession of nightmares in her head.

She made no move.

He swallowed, a slow hiss of a breath before he spoke. "You think you can find him, don't you? You think if Krycek or someone took him then you can get him back."

"I think I can try."

It was three in the morning and, even for Krycek, channel-surfing, despite the mobile satellite system that he'd hooked up, had lost its appeal a while ago. He just didn't seem to be able to stop himself from doing it.

Mulder suddenly snapped. "Stop screwing with the remote." He rose to his feet and started to pace, completing a couple of circuits of the room before freezing for an instant directly in front of Krycek, and barking out a question. "Who did you kill?"

"Not your problem."

"You told me to get some sleep. How the hell am I supposed to sleep with you screaming?"

Screaming? Was that what it sounded like? Krycek stopped pushing the remote's buttons but didn't put it down. Maybe he should sleep in the truck tonight? And the night after, and the night after that?

What the hell had he been thinking, bringing Mulder here, imagining he could simultaneously act as his babysitter, bodyguard, doctor and telepathy coach? Maybe he should have let the UFO take Mulder, at least then he'd be somebody else's problem. Something else's problem.

It wasn't too late. Krycek could let his old bosses have him, let them strap him to some hospital gurney where they could wire up the bits they wanted and discard the rest. Perhaps he could make a trade: he could give them Mulder and they could cancel the hit. Maybe they'd even send that reward money his way. They wouldn't balk at such an offer; principles weren't what those men were about.

Mulder kept on pacing and Krycek wondered if there would be track marks on the carpet before they left. He caught the expression on Mulder's face and thought perhaps it was dangerous, the way the vein in his temple was sticking out like that. Mulder had tried going outside the building a few times that night, saying that he needed air, but he'd always returned within a couple of minutes, pain sweat marking his forehead. The sheen of it was there again now.

Oh shit. Maybe he should just tell him and get it over with? What was the worst thing that could happen? Krycek almost smiled as he realized that the answer to that might be a dead heat between self-righteous mock-filial indignation that Krycek had killed another father figure and holier-than-thou Fibbie who was honor bound to get his man. Either way it involved a gun to his head and another bunch of bruises.

Mulder stopped pacing, apparently losing even basic motor skills as another shockwave of pain struck him. Hands over his ears and pressing hard.

Krycek stared as Mulder's body sagged against the wall, limbs losing their tension as the agent crumpled slowly to the floor.

Ah, what the hell. "Cancerman," he announced, and waited for Mulder to open his eyes again. "Spender. The murdering old bastard. Whatever you want to call him. I killed him." He took a deep breath and played the rest of his hand in one hopeful sweep. "And the only thing I regret is not doing it sooner."

"It's not," said Mulder, still looking pained, but a little more in control despite not having even tried to move from the floor. "It is not the only thing you regret."

"No, it's the only thing I regret. If I'd done it sooner, then I wouldn't have an assassination crew chasing me now."

Mulder didn't move, didn't even say a word and Krycek wondered if he was going to be dumping the man outside the nearest hospital ER unit. He hoped not, Mulder was heavy and would need a lot of help to get down the stairs and into the car. Unless of course he just pushed him down.

Mulder shook his head, and Krycek recognized the sharp slice of hysteria in Mulder's sudden gulp of laughter. They couldn't even blame it on the drugs this time. Mulder's response, when it finally came, was precisely targeted. "That's great, Krycek." More sick painful-sounding laughter, highlighting the acid expression in his eyes. "I can't phone Scully in case it gets a manhunt started. You can tour the country on a killing spree and bring home a posse."

Not a spree, and Mulder could go fuck himself if he was expecting to hear an apology or even a speech in self-defense. Krycek pulled on his shoes and decided that now would be a good time for a run.

Proximity was making this hard. Planning the action, he'd never actually thought about how he was going to handle living with the man, seeing the changes, providing the painkillers to stop him from giving in.

In his imagination he'd shown Mulder the truth. Game over.

Mulder having been forced to listen would become the weapon of his father's dreams, plan his campaign and, when the big day came, Krycek would smile politely as Mulder explained the critical role that Alex had played in mobilizing the resistance.

Sickening. How the hell did he come up with these fantasies? Mulder, when not actively hating him, merely despised him. Moreover, the latest criticism of his performance was fair. No one was hunting seriously for Mulder, despite optimistic noises from the FBI's media relations department. The only people who stood any realistic chance of tracking Mulder down weren't looking for him at all.

Unfortunately they were now looking for Krycek. He did indeed have a posse on his trail and if he'd accidentally led them here then they were both going to pay the price. In Krycek's case, death would at least come quickly.

It only took a few miles and a couple of near misses involving partially buried rocks and his ankles before Krycek was ready to admit that he had two choices: go back to the apartment and face Mulder, or hit the road and try to make it out of the country before the Consortium's mercenaries caught his trail again.

The theory had looked good. Since Mulder's run in with Cancerman's neurosurgeon, Krycek had been studying both the reports on his condition and the Consortium's discussions on how such a talent might be reactivated and used. With the help of his father's files on Mulder, the speculative discussions of the Consortium's doctors, and the latest briefings on nanite technology he'd come into this operation well prepared.

The problem was that it looked like it was succeeding. The pathways in Mulder's brain were opening. Mulder could already hear strong emotions, and even though the process was painful it hadn't left him unconscious or incoherent. If the progress continued then empathy would soon be replaced by telepathy and intuition by ESP.

And then what?

Then all they had to do was build a new incorruptible secret organization, more powerful and effective than the Consortium had ever been, use a little Mulder magic to expose the aliens' most carefully guarded secrets and through that knowledge fashion a weapon that could destroy them.

Easy. After all, they already had a two-man army comprised of a one-armed killer and a brain-damaged, runaway Fed who loathed him. The aliens might as well surrender now.

He trudged tiredly up the stairs hoping that Mulder, spared his screaming presence, had had the good sense to go to sleep.

No such luck. Mulder had simply taken over remote control duty. He didn't even turn round when Krycek walked in, but he did acknowledge his presence with the statement, "There's lasagna in the oven."

What the fuck! No fresh barrage of insults about scum-sucking assassins? No shove against the wall followed up with a gun against his chest? No bags packed and ready to leave?

Something on the edge of Krycek's thought processes was jumping up and down demanding attention, and as he staggered towards the kitchen preparing to eat a plateful of pasta at 5 a.m. he finally identified what it was. Mulder didn't care that Cancerman was dead. Nor was he bothered that Kycek had killed him. He'd chastised him for poor judgment over the timing and the added risks inherent in them both being in the Consortium's sights. But the murder itself had gone not merely unadmonished but even unremarked.

"You wanted him dead, too," whispered Krycek. "You wanted him dead so badly you didn't even pretend to care."

Part 7

Having baked and eaten his late-night-going-on-early-morning snack of lasagna, Mulder had returned to the living room to sit for hours, eyes directed at the TV but utterly clueless about what he was watching. He'd paused from staring at the screen only for long enough to glare at Krycek when the man offered him a cup of hot chocolate.

Inside this building with its special paint he could almost forget that he was a freak, though the very fact that he was here with Krycek rather than home with Scully seemed to disprove that theory. The files were equally clear on the matter.

If his test scores really were those filed under 73/378671 rather than 73/292544 then the lie was at least consistent - he'd seen those record numbers on the files in the Strughold Mine in Virginia years before. Not that he doubted that these people could assemble a set of consistent lies, just that the lie seemed to span too many years and information sources to have been manufactured for this particular occasion.

Found himself grimly amused by that idea. What the hell did he know? Kritschgau once told him that his whole life had been fabricated, including most of his experiences on the X-Files. But if he couldn't trust what he'd seen, heard and felt, then what could he trust?

Scully. He wanted Scully. Not just to read the files with him and tell him that they made no sense or to point out what mattered and what did not. Not just to give him a couple of pills and order him to get some sleep. He needed her. Just her.

"I'm going home," he said, trying to keep both his tone and his expression bland as he spoke to Krycek.

"They won't let you."

Exhaustion segued into anger. Wasn't he supposed to be some kind of mind-reader? Surely that was going to give him all the edge he needed. "So you keep saying. Well fuck you, Krycek. Who's this 'they' you keep talking about and why the hell would they suddenly want me now? They've had thirty-nine years to come and get me."

Krycek scanned him slowly, a head to toe sweep as if looking for something that ought to be there but wasn't. "Jesus, you're an asshole," Krycek said at last. "Remember that brain surgery that Cancerman arranged for you? It didn't do him a lot of good, but he did get to see inside your head. Nice thought, eh? He told one of the doctors what he'd seen, course he was drugged up to the eyeballs at the time so no one took him too seriously. But they did decide to run a few trials. You know if your landlord offers to decorate your apartment you really should analyze the paint first."

Mulder started to respond but the words froze on his lips. He slumped deeper into the cushions on the couch. Not another magnetite cocktail? "Oh shit."

"You know it's true."

"The hospital I went to when I started hearing the noises again?"

"Yeah," Krycek shook his head, smirking slightly. "Where'd you find your specialist, Mulder?"

Mulder could feel it all now, closing in around him, making it hard to breathe. He drew on his energy reserves, needing to get through this in one hit. "I read about him on the Internet. Specialist subject - electro encephalitic analysis. Neurosurgeon. He'd investigated the link between epileptic seizures and alien abduction experiences. Recently moved from Chicago to Philadelphia."

Krycek laughed, a single beat of horrified amusement. "Sounds like a marriage made in heaven."

"Shit." Mulder rocked his head back to relieve the tension in his neck. "I checked his career history."

"You checked his history, you didn't check that you were meeting the man who'd lived it."

"So if I'm supposed to be a mind reader how come I couldn't read his?"

"Right now - you're tuned to humans. And not even very well tuned to them. You can thank my father for that."

The implications of that were rather more than Mulder wanted to think about. "This place, the quarry, it's like an echo chamber. It's full of noise."

"The brain's adaptable, damage part of it and with any luck, providing the damage isn't too great, another part will take over its duties. With the right encouragement of course. Your brain's repairing itself, making new pathways, bypassing the damage. With a little help from our nanite friends."

How much would he give to have Scully at his side right now. "If I go outside into the quarry all I hear are people screaming."

"Loudest signals. You'll learn to tune in to a single voice and filter out the rest."

It was Mulder's turn to snort at that. "You're going to teach me!"

"I'm going to give you Gibson Praise's file."

Arriving a couple of minutes early in the meeting room, Skinner hovered in the no man's land at the back, nodding towards colleagues but signaling with his expression that he wouldn't welcome conversation. Doggett's team was much reduced from those heady first days after Mulder's disappearance when everyone was trying to look hopeful.

Yet today, even though Mulder had been missing for more than two weeks, there was a buzz of anticipation and when Skinner saw the other door swing open he understood why.

Scully walked towards the whiteboard ready to assume the driving seat; Doggett hovered a couple of paces behind.

"This is Alex Krycek," she announced, silencing the room without so much as a hello and pressing the button to bring up an image on the screen. "And this is the photograph of Alex Krycek currently in the FBI's computerized files." The image of another man, similar in generalities like eye color and age, but different in specifics, appeared on the screen. "We have reason to believe that the records have been deliberately altered and we are trying to reconstruct the file from the original source material. Meanwhile, we've put together the best information and pictures we've got. Copies are being distributed now."

"Alex Krycek," said Doggett, stepping forward to take over the task of leading the meeting, "was here to speak with Agents Mulder and Scully the day before Mulder's disappearance. He was offering information. When he left here, he went to great lengths to cover his tracks. His name appears on an airline manifest and a man claiming to be him visited our New York office. I've spoken with the agents there. The man they saw was not Alex Krycek." Doggett waved towards the screen, which was now showing another image, this time of a leather-jacketed Krycek.

"We need to find the man who went to the field office, and who really boarded that flight, and we need to know where the real Alex Krycek is now."

"You're saying this Krycek guy might have Mulder?" asked one of the older agents, sitting somewhere near the front.

"There was at least one vehicle unaccounted for in the forest that night. Alex Krycek may have been its driver."

"I thought thirty other people went missing at the same time."

"The sheriff's office and state police are handling that investigation and we're cooperating in every way, but our focus is on Agent Mulder's disappearance."

Skinner sat in silence. He'd come to the meeting resigned to a role of ghostly conscience rather than active participant. Now he was witnessing the start of an investigation that could cost him his job and maybe even his liberty. Three things had been changed in Krycek's file - the photo, the fingerprints and some of the details in the medical profile.

When the formal meeting broke up, the agents clustered around Doggett to receive their assignments. The photo in Krycek's fake file was not of the man who appeared on the airport and Bureau security footage as Krycek's substitute. Which meant that they had at least two people to find, and that at least one of them was a witting accomplice who might have information on the real Krycek's movements or at least on his finances.

Stunned by the implications, Skinner rocked back in his chair. Krycek's personnel file hadn't seemed terribly important last month, so unimportant compared to a UFO in an Oregon forest and everything that had happened since Mulder's disappearance that Skinner had allowed himself to ignore its significance.

Analyzing the odds, Skinner came to the swift conclusion that he really didn't have any choice. Doggett wasn't stupid and Scully probably already knew what had happened. Skinner's only hope was that Scully might also want to know why.

"Agent Scully," said Skinner unnecessarily, her eyes had been locked on his since the moment he'd started to walk towards her. "I'd like to talk with you - in private."

"Agent Doggett's just finishing up. Should we come to your office?"

Damn it. The icy look in her eyes matched her coolly polite tone. He tried again, added a little managerial edge to his voice, more in hope than anticipation. "I'd appreciate a private word. Now, Agent Scully."

"Of course, sir."

Skinner felt like he'd just taken a punch to the gut. A deserved blow, he admitted, wondering how the hell he was going to get through the next half hour.

They left together, Scully having paused to exchange a nod of confirmation with Doggett.

Bugs, he remembered, surveillance in his office and in hers. "I think it might be better if we had this conversation away from the building."

"I don't think that would be a good idea, sir."

Another gut punch, this one catching him a little low and making it very hard to breathe. He nodded, horrified. She didn't trust him and though it shook him, it was hard to blame her. She'd trusted him to watch over Mulder and look what had happened there. Neutral territory then, they agreed to use the cafeteria for the discussion.

"I think you know what I'm going to say."

"I'd prefer to hear you say it."

It crossed his mind that she might be wearing a wire. Not that it mattered, not really. The formal investigation was one thing; he just wanted to her to understand. "I knew Krycek's file had been changed."

"Why didn't you report it?"

"There were no outstanding warrants against him. We had nothing that we could take to trial. If ever we get anything on him, then it won't be affected by the picture on his Bureau jacket." He knew that he was babbling now, rushing the words and ashamed both of the cover-up and his attempt at self-justification. "Anyway, you don't need to go back to the original source materials - I've got a copy of his file."

"As have I and I'm sure, if I were to search Agent Mulder's files, I could find another copy."

"Scully," her eyebrow rose, and Skinner flinched. "Agent Scully," he corrected. "I - if I had thought for one moment that Krycek had something planned, then I'd never have let him get anywhere near you, either of you."

"Looks like you thought wrong."

Mulder's head was reeling, spinning from too many hours staring at that damned stupid small screen and trying to make the pieces fit. Desperate to discuss what he was seeing and experiencing with the people he could trust, he was flailing, drowning on dry land. He needed to talk this through with the right people, the right person, the woman whose voice could simultaneously soothe him and drive him on.

The mundanity of the noise from the kitchen, the sounds of food being chopped and pans being moved just made it worse. The smell of something life-sustaining and even edible should have been pleasant, instead it just made him angry.

"I want Thai," he grumbled. Even a pizza would do, just so long as it was something that got delivered by some bored kid in a stupid uniform rather than prepared in a room that looked like it had escaped from an episode of That 70s Show.

"Oh, shit." OK, so he wasn't being fair. What did fair have to do with anything? Stir crazy, he admitted, amused by the predictable idiocy of his reactions. Fifteen hundred miles from home, a million miles from being able to talk to the people he loved, studying files that forecast the subjugation of mankind and maybe even its annihilation within a matter of years, trapped with an assassin who'd killed his father and who'd taken a little timeout at the start of this trip to kill someone else.

Complaining about Krycek's culinary skills? At best it showed a lack of perspective. At worst it spoke of dysfunction and a dangerous dance with cabin fever and violent overreaction. Ah, to hell with it, he decided, at least it was one up on depression. His brain slithered unwillingly into self-diagnosis and offered Seasonal Affective Disorder as an alternative, which was kind of ironic, given that they were heading into summer, and the heat some days was already climbing towards the stifling.

Still, the fact was, since those miserable days spent cowering in the caves he'd scarcely been outdoors, and this apartment though surprisingly comfortable was definitely not built with thoughts of natural light in mind. Moreover, he wasn't even able to exercise the way he liked - no running, no swimming, no games of pick-up in the local gym.

"Mulder?" Mulder looked up at the sound of Krycek's worried voice and was presented with the bizarre image of a one armed assassin for hire, dressed entirely in gray apart from a striped towel thrown over his shoulder. He was leaning against the kitchen doorframe, armed only with a wooden spoon. Mulder resisted the sudden urge to throw something.

"I want Thai," said Mulder.

Krycek looked briefly amused, sobered up fast to offer more words of concern. "I was talking to you; you didn't hear me. I thought you'd found something in the files. Something else."

Mulder had found plenty, but he was sure there was plenty more to be found. "I've got to go out."

"Mulder."

"Just for an hour or so. I need to move."

Krycek nodded but didn't agree. "I don't think you're ready. Gibson Praise - "

"Forget the lecture." He started to fasten his running shoes.

"Give me a minute," said Krycek, sliding back into the kitchen, presumably to turn things off, as Mulder headed for the door.

Mulder was already cowering against the metalwork of the pickup truck when Krycek appeared at the foot of the stairs, looking worried and sounding like he cared. "Mulder, get back inside."

"Fuck you."

"Mulder," he said again, arriving at Mulder's side, his hand resting on the agent's shoulder. "Come on, back inside."

Mulder turned and swung. Krycek, responding late, could only deflect the blow so it bounced off the edge of his ear. "Bastard," he complained, and brought his knee up in a fast motion that Mulder only dodged by letting himself fall backwards before the full weight of it struck home.

Krycek was on him in an instant, pinning Mulder down with a hand forced up under his jaw, momentarily catching the agent off-guard and leaving him winded. Resting his weight on Mulder's chest, Krycek paused for a moment, breathing hard.

Mulder started to buck and Krycek awkwardly raised his left arm as if preparing to take a swing, before suddenly pushing himself up again, jumping back to his feet and retreating to stand a couple of yards further away. "Forget it, Mulder," he said, lifting his hands briefly in a gesture of surrender before digging in his pocket to pull out a bunch of keys, including one to the truck. He threw them to the ground at the agent's side. "Lie there gibbering. Come inside. Go home. I don't give a fuck."

Krycek had almost succeeded in making the dramatic gesture complete by storming back into the building when Mulder started to laugh. "That was great," he howled, feeling suddenly wide awake, practically rocking with amusement on the ground, startled back into the present after days of reading about the past.

After the initial buzz faded Mulder was gratified to see that Krycek still lingered in the doorway, stiff shouldered and breathing hard. "I needed that, so did you. Come on; don't deny it. This goes on any longer we're going to kill each other."

"This?" demanded Krycek, turning slowly.

"This - being polite, acting like we're roomies in the first week at school. It's only a matter of time. You're going to hand me a slice of meatloaf and I'm going to stick a fork through your eye."

"This a long-standing fantasy of yours?"

"I've got to do something. Go for a run or something."

"You shouldn't go too far from the building."

"Yes, mom." The basketball hoop caught Mulder's eye and he remembered the ball he'd seen on top of one of the storage lockers. That would be good. Mindless focus, he could get himself drunk on the movement and forget all the screams. He looked across at Krycek, wondering if maybe - he caught sight of the hairless unnatural look of his left hand and swallowed, looking away again. Maybe he could just do a few dozen laps of the building?

"Bastard," said Krycek, appearing as if my magic only a couple of feet in front of him. "You could at least try to hide it."

Mulder shook his head, not wanting to understand.

"The pity! I might not be a mind-reader but even you normally do better than that."

Mulder didn't try to reply, just stood there as the wave of Krycek's pain and anger washed over him, turned his head as a baby screamed in the distance. Hands rubbing against his eyes as hundreds of voices started to shout in his ears asking him for something he couldn't understand and certainly couldn't give.

Fingers on his shoulder again and Krycek was suddenly pushing a ball into Mulder's hands and demanding to know if he was just scared, "of getting whupped by a one-armed man."

A plastic hand tapped him impatiently on the back, pushing him towards the hoop. "Got game?" asked Krycek, momentarily drowning out the sea of noise.

They played like demons, or perhaps just fools; they played till it hurt to laugh and it was laughable how much it hurt. By the time they got back inside it was almost dark and the only thing left to do was shower and eat and maybe knock back a couple of beers and watch TV.

It didn't do to get too comfortable though. "What?" demanded Mulder when he noticed that Krycek was staring at him again.

"How did you cope out there?"

"You could at least try to hide it - the pity."

"How? You're the mind-reader."

Mulder saluted him with the beer can. Shook his head. "I'm not, not really. I can do those ESP, 'is it a cat or a house,' card games with you, provided we both concentrate. I can hear emotions. I can tell when you're lying." Mulder paused for just long off enough to allow Krycek to focus on him. "Yeah, you've got your mouth open and there are words coming out."

Krycek snorted at that, almost choking on the swig of beer he'd just taken.

Tension relieved, Mulder decided to keep talking. "The rawer the emotion, the better I can hear it. There was a baby."

"Mulder," said Krycek, almost soothing.

"I thought someone was hurting it. But it had no beginning, no ending, no sense of who or what it was. And then I realized, it was a new-born, just coming into the world. I heard the shock of it. The cold, the brightness, the noise."

"Shit."

"Ah, you old romantic, you. Anyway. The more primitive the emotion, the louder it sounds."

"Can you hear me?"

"Yeah, you just asked if I can hear you."

That earned Mulder another mumbled, "bastard," and a single raised digit in reply.

"No, I can't hear you. Not now. Not like this. You aren't very primitive at all."

Krycek nodded, a softly amused look in his eyes. "I think that might be the nicest thing you've ever said to me."

Part 8

Skinner's admission that he'd known about the modifications to Krycek's file had caused uproar; his immediate suspension had been the minimum that the organization could do to protect itself.

The Bureau rumor mill was working overtime. Even those who normally would have moved to suppress speculation and innuendo found themselves swept up in it. After all, most of them were first and foremost detectives; hand them some clues and they'd try to make them add up. For many of them it was the most intriguing case they'd seen in years.

Every myth, every rumor, every piece of idle gossip from Mulder's years on the X-Files was being dredged up, dissected, embellished and passed around to be thrown into a melting pot in which fact met fantasy and emerged, transformed into something uglier and louder.

Psychosis was diagnosed by those who took Mulder's interest in little green men, rolled it up with a man who'd always been a little too good at hunting psychopaths, and added in the spice of a couple of stays on psych wards. "Probably Skinner who got him out of trouble then as well," suggested some of them, anxious to add a structure to the seemingly impossible scenario of an Assistant Director deliberately sabotaging an investigation into an agent's disappearance.

A coward, suggested those who thought Mulder had run from financial irregularities, a debilitating illness and a ball-breaking partner who'd started demanding something that His Spookiness couldn't deliver.

A victim said some of them. An honest if eccentric agent captured and killed by one of those people who he'd striven to put away.

Doggett tried to shield Scully from the worst of it. Scully pretended that she couldn't hear.

Kersh summoned Doggett and Scully to his office and presented them with photographs of a body found in a DC meat locker. "Broken neck - consistent with a fall down stairs, according to the ME," announced the Deputy Director.

"Cancerman," said Scully, not quite believing her eyes.

"What?" asked Doggett. "Who's he?"

Kersh responded with bureaucratic precision. "C.G.B. Spender was a senior officer with the DoD. That's all you need to know."

"A spook? So what does this have to do with Mulder's disappearance?"

"His colleagues are aware of a history of animosity between Agent Mulder and this man. They've also confirmed that Alex Krycek worked for him at one point. For the rest - I suggest you ask Agent Scully and Assistant Director Skinner."

Scully had her bearings again now. "I'd like to examine the body, sir."

Kersh looked at her for a moment, as if considering it, before closing down the shutters. "You may view the body from an appropriate distance in the presence of the pathologist who conducted the post-mortem. You will not approach the body or the evidence associated with it."

"May I ask why not?"

"Cross contamination, Agent Scully. They're looking for trace evidence - you were in contact with Mulder and Krycek. I can't allow the evidence to be compromised or challenged in any way."

From two weeks ago! She knew what he was saying, if they found a rogue hair amongst the contents of the evidence bags then it wouldn't have been placed there by her. Too astute to accuse her outright of dishonesty, he'd offered a face-saving formula. Arrogant prick.

"Then I'd like to look at the trace evidence, sir," said Doggett.

Kersh nodded his approval.

Later, after reading the stack of witness statements already gathered and following a fruitless journey to Quantico in which all Scully learned was that she felt no pleasure in seeing Spender dead, Doggett tried to tell her what he'd learned.

"It's too much of a coincidence, that man dying, Mulder and Krycek missing."

To Scully, that was only part of the picture. "The surprise is we found the body, not typical in that community; they usually like to handle this kind of thing themselves. Somebody wanted the FBI to know he was dead and wanted his time of death to be uncertain. The very fact that his 'colleagues' are even talking to us is suspicious."

Doggett looked like he was trying not to groan, but managed to formulate a reply. "Maybe it's time you told me a little more about your connection to him."

"We were investigating him. Not enough evidence to bring charges. He had a lot of protection, including Kersh."

"Investigating? According to one of those witness statements you spent the weekend with him, not very long ago."

"He offered information; I went to see it."

"And the outcome?"

"Nothing, a dead end."

"I didn't see a report from you in the files."

"It was a dead end."

His eyes softened, worried lines of sympathy formed around his mouth. "Did that man do something to you?"

Scully stared at him, horrified, felt her stomach try to leave her body, yet stood her ground.

"That weekend you were missing," continued Doggett. "Did something happen? Did Mulder find out about it?"

Did it? Had that monster made this pregnancy possible? Had he made this pregnancy? Not now, she reminded herself. Not here. Not in front of this man who Kersh had placed at her side and who was really still a stranger to her. "No," she said crisply, as if it were the most stupid question she'd heard in years.

Doggett looked angry and Scully couldn't really blame him. She was angry too, but it was Doggett whose words came quicker and deadlier than anything she'd prepared. "Mulder filed a report, I've checked the dates - it said you were missing. A.D. Skinner rejected his request to investigate. Seems like you two didn't always keep one another informed about your plans."

Scully tried to pretend it didn't hurt and Doggett shook his head. "Kersh asked me if you should be working this case. Don't make me regret saying yes."

She jumped at the opening, tried to spin the challenge straight back at him. "Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer? Do you think I'm your enemy, Agent Doggett?"

"I thought you were a good agent, and that you deserved the chance to find Mulder. I thought when you dropped Skinner you proved that you were serious about this investigation."

Dropped Skinner? That was a hell of a way to phrase it, but she didn't want to argue the point. Not right now. "I want to find Mulder. Whatever it takes." She was back on terra firma now. She challenged him to deny it. When he didn't, she carried on talking. "You want to know if Krycek could have killed Spender? Sure, he had means, motive and opportunity."

"And Agent Mulder - could he have killed Spender?"

"Not in cold blood."

"And if it had been self-defence, to protect someone, an accident?"

"He'd have called it in."

She hoped the words sounded confident. She hoped he wasn't going to push for more. Mulder had killed before without filing a report, shot a man spying on his apartment, dragged the body down into his living room, destroyed his face and left him to be found.

But that was different, wasn't it, and Doggett didn't need to know about any of that.

Mercifully, Doggett just nodded and let it go. Despite the silence, they both knew the score. The words were out there and though she denied that Mulder was a suspect in Spender's death she knew that her new partner hadn't discarded the possibility. It was OK. She could live with his suspicion so long as it didn't interfere with her mission to find Mulder.

The truth was the Office of Professional Responsibility had already found Skinner guilty despite the fact the formal meeting hadn't even begun. His office had been sealed. Permission to search his car and home had been effectively demanded rather than requested and he'd given it rather than have it taken.

The assumption of guilt already sat heavily on his shoulders without handing them more ammunition. His bank accounts, phone records and credit card dealings were open for inspection.

Cooperating fully with the enquiry meant offering up every detail of his life to scrutiny. For the first time in years he was able to admit that he was glad that he lived alone, that there was no one at home to share the pain or the shame.

Domestically, solitude was a relief and an escape, but professionally it was terrifying, and he hadn't really been prepared for that. He'd been threatened with death or disgrace before because of his association with the X-Files but on those occasions Mulder had always been willing to listen. Scully's trust had been precious to him, but had never been an automatic thing. She needed to weigh up the evidence for herself and this time it looked as if she too had found him if not yet guilty on all charges, then at least not innocent.

With the OPR verdict unofficially already in, the formal investigation was able to jump straight past the details of how and when Krycek changed his file and straight into looking for an explanation of why he'd allowed Skinner to know about it.

"To discredit me," said Skinner, trying not to sound as if he'd given up.

"Or to implicate you in Agent Mulder's disappearance?" demanded Jana Cassidy, the head of the panel.

"Possibly."

"Thus forcing you to fabricate an explanation for Agent Mulder's disappearance?"

"No. Absolutely not. Need I remind you that Agent Mulder was not the only person to go missing?"

"I'm sure we're all aware of the seriousness of what took place. Why didn't you report that Mr. Krycek's file had been changed?"

"I'd hoped to turn him. Use him as a confidential informer. I would have taken action to change the file myself had it been necessary."

"I'm sure you know the Bureau procedures for handling the introduction of a confidential informant."

"It was an emergency. Krycek's position was precarious; he'd already endangered himself by meeting us here. I had security concerns about going through normal channels."

"Is it true that Agent Mulder assaulted him?"

Skinner winced. Where in hell was Cassidy going with this? Scully must have told them what she knew about Mulder's reactions to Krycek and he couldn't fault her for that: it was part of the continuing story of animosity between the men. "It was nothing - a temporary loss of control - nothing happened. Mulder had reason to be suspicious of Krycek's motives."

"He reacted badly, just to the sight of the man. And did you report that to anyone?"

"No."

"No order for counseling? Not even a notation in Agent Mulder's file?"

"It wasn't important."

Cassidy sat up a little straighter. Her colleagues followed suit. Skinner braced himself as she moved in for the kill. "Did Fox Mulder kill Alex Krycek? Did you help him to cover his tracks by creating a fake trail that suggested Mr. Krycek had gone to New York?"

Stunned by the direction the interview was taking, Skinner could only say, "No."

"Do you recognize this man?" Cassidy pointed towards a photograph of a man who he'd once seen a file identify as C.G.B.Spender, but who seldom seemed to need a name.

"Yes."

"Are you aware that, according to Mr. Spender's colleagues, Agent Mulder threatened him on more than one occasion? That he'd held him at gunpoint in his own home, attacked him in a hospital corridor?"

Skinner shook his head but couldn't actually come up with a no.

"He was found dead, twelve days after Agent Mulder's disappearance. Exact time of death is uncertain. We do know that he was alive a month earlier; we have hospital records to prove it."

"Am I accused of something?"

"Hospital records indicate that Mulder was suffering from headaches, nausea, some kind of dissonance effect and that his medical team had no effective treatment for him. Were you aware that Agent Mulder was seriously ill?"

Skinner frowned, shaking his head, stunned at the way the meeting was going. Not only had he been found guilty of misconduct, but any moment now Mulder was going to be accused of two counts of murder and he was going to be labeled as his accomplice.

"Do you think that it's just coincidence that two men who Agent Mulder considered to be enemies, not just of him but of the American people, one of whom according to Agent Scully may have been responsible for Mulder's brain injury, are now dead or missing?"

Skinner chose to answer the real question. "Do I think Mulder's capable of killing Krycek and Spender in cold blood and going on the run? No. I do not."

"Thank you for your statement, Assistant Director. Please keep us apprised of any insights or new information that you might come across. I trust that you'll continue to cooperate fully with the criminal enquiries into the disappearances of Fox Mulder and Alex Krycek and the death of Mr. Spender. If you decide to leave town for any reason please ensure that Agent Doggett knows how to reach you."

Just when Mulder thought that his life couldn't get any more out of control, life had to come along and prove him wrong. Already hoarse, he'd awakened to the sound of his own screams with Alex Krycek holding a glass of water to his lips. Instinct had sent glass and water flying across the room and left Krycek cradling his fingers under the remains of his left arm.

"Fuck," mumbled Mulder, crashing down into the pillows. He cast a wary eye over Krycek, saw somebody contemplating murder and realized that there was more than one reason why Krycek was keeping his hand under control. "Sorry," he said, hoping that the word would reach Krycek's brain before Krycek's emotions got out of their cage.

Krycek blinked, obviously surprised by Mulder's apology and by the absence of any speech of self-justification backing it up. "It's OK. You weren't awake. Want to tell me what this one was about?"

The nightly ritual of nightmare and recovery, silent recrimination and self-reproach had been derailed. Krycek had broken the rules, first by entering Mulder's room and now by inviting an explanation. Mulder, stunned, realized that he wanted to answer.

"Blood."

"Blood?"

"There's a lot of blood. People I've drawn into this. People who died, because I lived. Samantha, my father, yours. A lot of people."

"That was the dream?"

"So much blood."

"You were moaning when I came in, but you went quiet almost immediately, that's why I thought you were awake. When I touched you - "

"I started screaming again."

"What did you see?"

"Myself." Hesitating, Mulder looked for the escape hatch, saw how easy it would be to lie, and decided that he couldn't. Turned his head to face Krycek. "I saw me. Drinking their blood. Rolling in it."

Krycek frowned, swallowed hard, and moved to walk away.

And Mulder had to ask, just in case he'd misunderstood, hoping that he'd misunderstood. "That was you, wasn't it? Not my dream at all. That was how you see me?"

Krycek froze, fixed him with a steely glare. Nodded. "You owe them, Mulder. You owe us all."

Scully hadn't slept much for the past few days and the flight down to St Louis was not going to help her to sleep tonight. Doggett kept looking at her, then quickly looking away. Her thoughts drifted back to a lifetime ago and her first case with Mulder. A white-knuckle flight. A challenging case. A soaking in a graveyard. A bathrobe dropped in her male colleague's motel room.

She smiled, despite the morning sickness that didn't seem to know that it wasn't even morning any more. Doggett looked back at her suspiciously, as if she'd done something strange, or perhaps even a little frightening. "You OK, Agent Scully?"

"Fine," she said. Was it really such a surprise to him that she sometimes smiled? In truth, despite the tiredness and the nausea, she felt better than she'd done since Mulder flew out to Oregon more than three weeks ago. She knew that he had gone back there; at least that much of Skinner's story had panned out. Security footage showed Mulder and Skinner picking up their car at the airport. The motel clerk remembered the men checking in.

"You know, Agent Scully, if you decided not to pursue this, no one would think less of you."

"I would," she said, trying hard to reward Doggett for his patience without actually giving anything more away.

"I'm just saying. You shouldn't go looking for something you don't want to find."

"I want to find the truth."

"Even if that means finding out that Mulder murdered those men?"

"Even if it means finding out they murdered him."

Doggett nodded, jaw tightening as if he wanted to say more but was determined not to.

The motel room was like a hundred others that she'd stayed in. Except for one thing: Mulder wasn't in the next room or even in the next corridor.

She unpacked carefully, shaking out her clothes and hanging them up. Preparing herself to stay for a week even though it was probable they'd be checking out tomorrow. If she didn't unpack properly tonight then she knew that she'd never find the time and in a couple of days clean and dirty would be mingling in an unholy alliance in her suitcase and on the backs of chairs. It was a ritual she'd learned early in her career.

A quick shower and a few careful movements to style her hair and she was ready for anything. What was the etiquette here? Convention said that the timetable was hers to set. Eat in or eat out? His room or hers, or should they eat alone? Out together was probably the politically correct thing to do. Professional without the personal. She'd almost forgotten how to do this.

The phone rang and Scully wasn't surprised when Doggett asked if she wanted to stroll across the parking lot to that grill they'd passed on the way in.

What had drawn them to this place was little more than a hunch. Her hunch.

A nationwide search managed by Scully looking for John Does and other out-of-town homicide victims had yielded plenty of replies from police departments across the country. She'd read every one looking for that certain "something" that would set her senses tingling. She might not have Mulder's nose for the paranormal but she had no difficulty distinguishing between the typical and the out of place.

None of the other files had been quite so intriguing as the one sent in by St Louis PD. It described the two male bodies found dumped close to a quiet road just outside town. Odd in terms of the basic facts, it had grown stranger when she read the details.

Both men were over six-foot tall and in good physical shape, better than good in fact. Two men in peak condition with no fingerprints on their acid bathed fingers and no identification in their pockets. Tidy kills.

Based on the positioning of the tire tracks, blood and bodies at the scene the local PD suggested that the men had been ambushed as they got out of their car. The headshots that killed them would have been impressive even against a single target, but to take out two men that way in rapid succession was exceptional.

Scully's fingers slid carefully over the handle of her Sig, trying to imagine the feel of it. Bang one. Turn, reposition. Bang two.

One of the victims was standing when shot, the bullet coming in from ahead of him and just off to one side. The trajectory of the second bullet suggested that the other victim was crouching.

Speculate, said a voice in Scully's head that sounded more like Mulder's then her own. So she did, allowed her thoughts free rein, as she tried to visualize the scene. In the end, she agreed with the police team and then added some extra speculation of her own.

A hidden shooter waited for the men to leave the car and close its doors. Standing ahead of them and on the passenger side of the car he'd shot the driver first.

The second man had dropped to the ground in an instinctive gesture of self-defense, presumably hoping to locate the shooter and return fire or else to use the car as a shield. The shooter's speed cut out the first option, his positioning removed the second.

One shooter or two? The forensics were inconclusive. Based on type and caliber, the bullet that had killed the standing man could have come from Mulder's Sig, but it hadn't; the markings proved it.

The second bullet hadn't been found, leading to suggestions that it had buried itself in the victims' car and then been driven away from the scene. However, there was still evidence to analyze even without the bullet itself. The diameter of the entry wound and the composition of some of the fragments left embedded in the skull suggested the bullet was of the same type as the one that killed the first man.

Maybe just one very good marksman?

Krycek? Perhaps. His Quantico scores were good, but not that good. However those numbers were years old, and he'd had plenty of time to practice since. In any case he might have chosen to hide talent as well as treachery back when he was pretending to be a Fed. Or maybe, having lost an arm, he'd worked extra hard to compensate?

Mulder? Good enough to do it on a firing range. But faced with two targets and a need to move fast wouldn't instinct and FBI training have taken over? Body shots, not the riskier shot to the head. The head shots suggested an assumption that the men would be wearing body armor, which, as it turned out, only one of them was.

The use of an as yet unidentified gun and the apparent context of an ambush suggested extreme preparedness. Preparedness meant premeditation and the idea that Mulder might have chosen such a path was unacceptable. Nor did she want to imagine him clearing away the evidence of the men's identities quite so ruthlessly, though he'd done something like it before and left the evidence of that deed on his apartment floor.

Deliberately, she acted out the move again, trying to be the one who pulled the trigger and trying to imagine the dead men with guns in their hands. Bang, she said, lining up and taking the first shot because she had to, because it was kill or be killed. Bang, she said again, but this time her aim was a little off, not a matter of accuracy, just a combination of recoil and hesitation, a tiny discrepancy, almost insignificant, but not good enough to make the hit.

The first kill placed a drag on her movements. Adrenaline? She sighed - chemistry could bridge the gap. OK, she could act it out as often as she wanted, but it still meant nothing.

When they arrived in the restaurant, Doggett jumped straight in with the Daily Special and the decaf coffee. Scully, feeling as if she had something to prove on the decisiveness front, instantly responded with an order for soup and a chicken salad. The waitress who hadn't even got as far as handing them the menus, simply nodded and turned away.

"This Krycek character," announced Doggett, sitting back in his chair and keeping his eyes on Scully. "Tell me about him."

"You've seen his file."

"It's what's not in the file. Agent Mulder's relationship with him."

"There wasn't one. They worked a couple of cases together as agents. Krycek betrayed him."

"Yet later you captured an arms shipment using information supplied by him."

"And your point is?"

"They traveled to Russia together."

"Krycek sometimes found it in his interests to offer Mulder information."

"Mulder trusted him?"

"No."

"OK, so Mulder acted as if he trusted him - on more than one occasion. Could it have happened again? Could they be working together?"

"No."

"If we get close - I want to know how many guns we'll be going up against."

She thought about the dead bodies they'd come out here to investigate. "Krycek's a dangerous man."

Part 9

Today's training session wasn't going well. Mulder was restless and Krycek's frustration wasn't helping. "You ready to give up?" asked Mulder.

"You ready to die?"

Mulder almost responded in kind, but stopped himself just in time, suddenly realizing where Krycek was coming from. "Just for today. I can't concentrate. All that's happening is I'm making my headache worse."

Krycek looked at him as if he'd grown a second head, clearlly stunned that Mulder had even bothered to offer an explanation. Mulder shrugged. Up until now, Krycek had been an outrageously patient teacher, taking every insult and complaint in his stride, coaxing him to study harder, reassuring him when things got tough.

He'd led Mulder through test cards of ball, cup, tree, cat until mistakes had become not merely rare they'd become impossible. They'd stopped that approach when Mulder told Krycek not just the card he was looking at but went on to supply a list of the next ten cards in the pack.

Concepts were proving a little harder. Sending Mulder whole phrases like, "The ball is burnt sienna," had just led to fights about, "What the hell does the color matter?" culminating in an explosive but vaguely comic, "I'm fucking color blind, you idiot."

Sometimes now they could go outside into the quarry and just walk or run together. Provided Krycek kept talking, Mulder could ignore the screams for minutes at a time even when he was simply sitting down out there.

Today's outdoor session had been a disaster. They'd been experimenting with saying one thing while thinking another and the screams had taken over, forcing Mulder to cower in the mouth of one of the magnetite rich caves until Krycek recovered enough control to synchronize both benign thoughts and quiet words again, directing them at Mulder until he'd calmed enough to be led home.

The continuation of the experiment inside the protective walls of the apartment had tripped their most recent flare-up. Krycek had been talking about his imaginary family while thinking about his real one. Not hard to see why that was a mistake. Mulder wondered why they'd even tried. It was hard to tell which of them had had the more painful job. No wonder Krycek snapped.

They'd have to come up with a better subject to practice on. Easier said than done. Lying about food preferences hadn't worked - seemingly not enough desire to make the lie convincing. Conspiracy related matters had introduced anger into the equation and Mulder wasn't ready to handle that.

"I have to know how she is," said Mulder. Admitting to himself that thoughts of family, anybody's family, kept sending him back to Scully.

"If you contact her -"

Mulder raised his hand in a stop gesture. "I know I can't talk to her. I just want to see how she is."

"You can't leave here, not until you can control it."

"Tell me something I don't know," said Mulder. An idea that he'd come up with and rejected on previous occasions suddenly sounded like the perfect solution, because something was at least better than nothing. "You can find out what she's doing."

"What?"

"FBI records, what cases she's assigned to, travel arrangements, contact phone numbers, expense claims." If she was working then that would mean that she was OK. Perhaps not good, but OK.

"What? I'm supposed to walk into the town library, logon at a PC and hack into the FBI mainframe? You've watched too many movies."

"Take the laptop, find an open wireless connection and jump on that."

"Do you have any idea how long that'll take? Disguising the connection, finding the holes in the FBI firewall, getting onto the databases?"

"Not if you go in through the cat flap." Mulder looked at Krycek, whose expression was shifting slowly from angry to curious. "Her Calendar entries," he announced, scribbling FTP details and passwords onto the pad. "We set it up a while ago, just in case we needed to find each other in a hurry."

"Fucking hell shit," groaned Krycek. "Don't you people know anything about security?"

"Just get me the file."

"Mulder."

It was Mulder's turn to start getting angry now. "Wear a beard. Wear a wig. Wear a damned dress for all I care. Drive to Dallas if you have to. Just do it." His voice cracked on the final word. He swallowed hard and tried again. "I can't not know."

Skinner and Langly were engaged in a stand-off, glaring at one another across the table. Byers emerged from the kitchen bringing extra supplies of coffee and a bowl of nuts.

"What if they're right?" said Langly, eyes fixed on Skinner but talking only to his colleagues. "What if HE helped Krycek get Mulder?"

Frohike looked at Langly, then at Skinner. "You did bring Krycek to that meeting."

"Precisely," barked Skinner. "You think if I was conspiring with Krycek, I'd have shown him to everyone?"

Byers nodded, acknowledging Skinner's defense. "Fair point. But we still don't really know you."

"Jesus," mumbled Skinner. "Just how dumb did Mulder say I am? What makes you think I'm stupid enough to let you see Krycek, if I'm working with him?"

"Mulder said you're a good man, who can't always do what needs to be done."

"We're way past that now - I've got nothing to lose. I'm probably going to get fired. Unless I can bring Mulder home I might be charged as an accessory to his abduction. Unless I find Krycek I might be an accessory to murder. I guarantee you: I'll do whatever it takes."

Byers glanced towards Frohike, who rose immediately, tapping Langly on his arm to get his attention. The trio vanished into the kitchen and Skinner downed his coffee in one hit. "Mulder," he complained, not quite audibly. "You'd better be dead or a prisoner, or so help me, I'll tear you apart myself."

The bodies in the St Louis morgue looked more Marine Corps than Mafia. Scully sighed, faintly ashamed of her lapse into stereotypes but didn't change her opinion. Their clothing was functional rather than designer, the shoes $100 good rather than Bruno Magli sharp. Their hair was styled with memories of military dress codes in mind.

"You're going to tell me that these were some kind of secret government crew," said Doggett, obviously dubious.

"Maybe not even secret," said Scully, looking at the hands again, brooding over things she'd read in forensics magazines and wondering if there was anything she could do to pull up a print. The flesh looked too damaged. No matter, she drew out the saw and prepared the hands for shipment to Quantico.

It would take weeks for any kind of search results on the DNA tests to come through. In any case, at best, all that was likely to give her were their names, their military records and maybe the name of whoever was currently paying their wages. What it wouldn't tell her was the reason why they'd been shot.

"The PD didn't find any record of them checking into a hotel."

Two men, two drivers, taking shifts. "They were following someone," she said.

"Sounds likely."

"The car?"

"Still not been found."

Another amazing, disappearing motor vehicle. Short of getting court orders to enter every private garage and storage unit in the area the chances were that it would stay that way. Without the car they wouldn't get much further on the men. Not quickly anyway.

That fact said a lot about the killer. Professional, but a risk-taker. He hadn't bothered to hide the bodies, too time-consuming and too much danger of discovery. But he'd hidden or destroyed everything that might make them easy to trace. "Either very confident or very arrogant," she said.

"Someone with a grasp of police procedures," countered Doggett.

She looked at the corpses again, wondering if there was some other avenue they could use to identify them and better still to find out the who, how and why of whatever had led them here.

Doggett was only a couple of feet away from her when he spoke, startling her out of her musing. "OK, Agent Scully. Why are we here? You pull two bodies out of thin air and we're on the next flight out. I've gone along with you so far. Now it's time for you to do some explaining."

What was she supposed to say? They'd been chased by guys like this before? In her nightmares, she'd seen men who looked like that emerge from sleek black cars, push her and Mulder to the ground - gun against the back of the head. They always killed Mulder first; she always woke up before they fired again.

Maybe she was wrong, perhaps she wouldn't have hesitated or tensed as she swung into the second shot. And if Mulder had managed to achieve the feat himself then she could hardly blame him.

"Agent Scully? Why do you think this is related?"

"Women's intuition."

Mulder had spent the past two hours trying not to pace, a task that he now ranked right up there with not thinking about breathing. As soon as the thought had wormed its way into his head, it had infected everything he did. Challenging him not to count his respiration rate and not to even try and justify why it had taken three trips to the kitchen to get one cup of coffee. "I forgot the damned sugar, and the spoon, all right?"

It had only taken Krycek half an hour to get ready to leave after their little discussion the night before. It wouldn't have taken him that long if Mulder hadn't made him wait until he'd created a full strength shopping list covering everything from newspapers, through hot dogs, to a second laptop computer. Krycek had practically flown from the building once it was done.

Without the laptop and in the absence of his odd couple roommate and telepathy coach, Mulder was lost. He'd done sleep; he'd done food; he'd done TV. He'd reread some of the paper files and now he was stuck. Going outside was OK, provided he had a plan in mind and didn't attempt to walk too far from the building. He'd learned that lesson following a long crawl back to the entrance; it had taken him nearly half an hour to cover a hundred yards.

The screams were exhausting. No wonder noise had its own entry in the torture handbooks. Knowing that every one of those screams was coming from someone in pain or in danger had almost sapped his will to fight.

He closed his eyes. No way was he going to be sitting, shaking in a cave when Krycek came back this time. If he came back. Christ, Krycek had warned him that there were people on his tail, people who would shoot first and dismember him later.

Then there was the man himself, a man who'd returned from a killing spree that had left Cancerman and at least two others dead but who'd felt bad only about the possibility of being caught. Look who your friends are now, Agent Mulder. He was supposed to cuff him and read him his rights, not cook the asshole lasagna and make conciliatory noises about not going along with his tactics but...

But what? But thank God the son of a bitch is dead? Well done, Alex. Here, don't feel bad about attracting the unwelcome attention of your assassin friends, it was worth it.

It occurred to Mulder that Krycek might have followed his throwaway advice and driven to Dallas. In which case, assuming that he only stopped to get a few hours sleep, Krycek should be arriving in town about now and couldn't possibly be back until tomorrow.

The satellite phone still sat on the shelf, silent, tantalizingly close to irresistible, and Mulder added it to the list of things he should try not to think about, or even to not think about thinking about. He kept coming up with wildly indirect routes to send information back to Scully. Everything from a delivery of her favorite Chinese food including the dishes that she would never order for herself but which she would always steal from him, through to some subtle hidden message delivered in a bunch of flowers.

Except for one thing - how would he disguise his voice? Too much to hope that a satellite call to DC, even to a takeout, wouldn't be monitored by the supercomputers at the NSA and that was way too risky if his voice pattern was on the watch list.

Not that any of it mattered - he couldn't contact her. The end. If she heard anything from him it would send her into full pursuit, alert the Consortium's hounds that a chase was on, and that could kill them both. No, he couldn't talk to her, nor even send a message. At least not until he was ready to go back, and if the headaches told him nothing else, they told him he wasn't ready for that.

Despairing of finding a safe distraction within the line of sight of the phone he picked up the Sig and the Beretta and some extra rounds and headed outside for a little target practice.

Combing through the evidence they'd gathered, she tried to read the message in the blanks. Scully knew another row of dots was forming, just itching to be connected.

Leaning back against the wall, Doggett was pawing the ground and looking restless. "Any more hunches, Agent Scully?"

"Maybe," she said, wondering if this was how Mulder felt, seeing patterns in places where no else would bother looking. Cancerman dead. Two mystery men dead a thousand miles away. In her heart there was a connection, gut instinct speaking in Mulder's voice telling her that, "There's no such thing as coincidence."

She looked at Doggett. He was studying her, waiting patiently for her reply. She decided to plow on, borrowing adrenaline from memories of Mulder responding to the same kind of skeptical looks. "I think whoever killed Spender, killed these men too."

"O-K," he said slowly, drawing it out. "Spender - an old man, in a wheelchair - pushed down stairs, then dumped in a meat locker. Two heavies - shot, identities removed, bodies left uncovered, a few yards off the road. Now, I'm no expert but I heard the same lectures as everybody else at Quantico and I don't see you've anything to connect them. No match on MO, no common signature."

"Professional assassin. Spender was the target. The killer didn't get away clean. Those men tracked him. The shootings may even have been in self-defense."

"That's a hell of a leap, Agent Scully."

"You wanted to find Alex Krycek. This is how we find him."

Doggett was almost smiling now. Head tilted slightly, curious to hear more. "I was kind of hoping for fingerprints, credit card transactions, something like that."

"Then you won't find Krycek."

He nodded. "Well, we don't have another place to be, so I guess we just keep chasing your hunches. If we aren't already too late. You're thinking he went to Mexico, right?"

She wasn't, but she was going to have a hard time explaining why not. She gave it the most plausible sounding spin she could. "If he just wanted to leave the country, he'd have skipped into Canada and caught a plane right at the start. There may be some reason why he couldn't."

Doggett, to his credit, was still listening. Perplexed, but not actually dismissive. "Some reason like Agent Mulder?" he asked.

"Maybe."

Krycek hadn't quite forgiven Mulder for this fiasco. The Internet connection had been easy. He'd had his pick of half a dozen open wireless networks without even trying. He'd even had the luxury of being able to pick one whose corporate network might help disguise his exact point of entry. A three-hundred mile round trip to pick up a 2k file and some search software that Mulder insisted he needed.

Shook his head in disbelief at the precautions he'd taken to come down here and then damned Mulder again for putting such a dumb idea into his head. At least he hadn't been dumb enough to go to Dallas. Even so, it was a hell of a long drive to pick up a couple of takeouts and some fresh fruit.

He hadn't actually looked at Scully's file yet. It needed another password to open it. Not that it would have been hard to hack into, just that the delay would have added another unnecessary risk on a day filled with them.

Walking out as soon as the idea came up was the kind of gesture that still got Mulder's attention. It might even have reminded him that being alone was not much of proposition right now. The only problem was that Amarillo at one in the morning was not well suited to successful shopping. ,

Not that it mattered; the night in the no-tell motel had gone smoothly enough. Scarcely necessary to wear the wig and beard given the fact that the kid on the desk hadn't even looked up from his Playstation when he checked in. Probably the best night's sleep he'd had in the past month.

Actually, he admitted, the whole trip was probably a good idea. Another computer. Fresh food supplies. Extras clothes. Luxuries that didn't matter but did make life easier. In fact, without the price on his head, he'd have probably done a similar supply run every week.

He felt a brief glimmer of sympathy for Mulder but suppressed it quickly. The "secret weapon" was one big liability at the moment. Like a Cruise missile with a defective guidance system. As dangerous to its masters as its enemies.

He tried to stifle the laugh but failed, rode it instead. Just as well that fleeting thought hadn't come up with Mulder in the room. "Yeah, Mulder, I did just describe myself as your master!" A fork through the eye wouldn't even come close.

The idea sobered him up. Mulder was learning fast. At this rate he'd soon be a match for Gibson Praise but with an adult's understanding, a psychologist's training and a soldier's willingness to fight. Bad enough yesterday when they'd been trying to play games of truth and lies, what about when it wasn't a game anymore?

It was almost enough to make him take the next left turn and head for Mexico. Almost.

He'd been born into the game. His father: researcher, surgeon, and probably from Mulder's perspective butcher. His mother: the loyal company wife until the day they'd killed her husband and she'd taken her son and run back to her family in Russia. Mulder might consider him a traitor and a killer, but he'd been his parents' child and he'd never betrayed his own family and he'd never betrayed the human race, and how many of the other players could make that claim?

And Mulder would just have to learn to live with it.

Part 10

Byers was leaning over Langly's shoulder. "You're sure?"

Langly just cast him a withering look.

"He could have just walked in and used somebody's desk while they were away."

"Risky. He'd have had to copy the files to CD or something. A lot less conspicuous done from a laptop."

Frohike agreed. "The corporate subnet rules out the obvious ways of tracking but if you include the delays then it's probable."

"What's probable?" said Skinner. "In English please."

"We can tell you whose network he used. We can't be sure which location. The addresses are dynamically assigned centrally and the server only shows current connections not past ones. He got a fast link. Chances are it's a big office but probably not the HQ or the computer center because they'll have the wireless security set correctly."

"Meaning?"

Byers took over. "Someone logged on and accessed Scully's calendar entries. Almost certainly in Texas - it could be Dallas, or Austin, it could be a couple of dozen other places. We can't be sure."

"Someone downloaded her calendar?"

"Mulder arranged it so they were automatically uploaded, in case they were separated or if we needed to find them."

"Nothing confidential," said Frohike. "It's practically public domain really - you could get most of it under Freedom of Information."

"Eventually," added Langly.

Fish out of water, Skinner could only feel grateful for any kind of lead.

"Where?" she said as Frohike ran through the same explanation that he'd given Skinner an hour before. "OK, give me the possibles. What do we do - drive past their perimeters and see if we can pick up a signal?"

Doggett was pacing, his patience already wearing thin as they argued in his motel room about the difference between evidence, guesswork and supposition.

When she finally stopped writing down addresses and the occasional password on the pad in front of her and hung up the phone, he jumped straight in. "Who was that?"

"An informant."

"And what did this informant have to say?"

"Somebody's been accessing my computer files."

Doggett nodded, demanding more.

"They probably used a computer somewhere in Texas.

Doggett frowned, a brief flicker of dismay. "Probably just the quarter million square miles to check out then?"

"They were able to narrow it down a little," she said, pushing the pad across the table towards Doggett.

"But not by much."

The map on the table drew her back again. "New Mexico," she said, almost to herself.

Doggett followed the track of her finger. A sweeping arc of a line starting with a dead body in a freezer in DC moving on via a couple of corpses in St Louis, skirting Texas and down into New Mexico. "Albuquerque. Santa Fe. Roswell," he mumbled, looking for familiar names.

She head him stifle a groan at the Roswell and appreciated the effort. She wondered if she'd been quite so good at disguising her reactions when she'd talked with Mulder. A sudden twinge in her back, that seemed to reverberate straight through her belly, made her gasp. She straightened up and hoped that Doggett hadn't noticed. "We've had a number of cases in New Mexico."

"An X-File hotspot, huh?"

An alien hotspot maybe? Certainly, according to Mulder, a hotspot for research. Farmington, she wondered, idly tracing another line on the map. No, not Farmington, that wouldn't fit in with a trip to use a computer in Texas.

The computer. The real implications of the Gunmen's phone call suddenly striking home. Mulder. Only Mulder and the Gunmen knew about the calendar she kept on the computer. Only Mulder would be looking for it. What had been fantasy and wishful thinking - the idea that Mulder wasn't on an alien spaceship, that he was down here and he was findable - suddenly sounded like it might not be fantasy after all.

Not fantasy and not yet reality either. Morning sickness in the middle of the night, a sour taste in her throat. If Mulder was alive then why hadn't he called her? Why hadn't he found some way to tell her that he was alive?

Unless this was his way of telling her he was alive. The only safe way he'd found.

"Agent Scully? Agent Scully?" Doggett's voice became increasingly insistent as he took her arm and led her to the bed, giving orders for her to rest up a moment, and demanding to know if she needed a doctor.

Mulder was sitting outside the building when Krycek arrived and Krycek wasn't quite sure if that was good news or bad. Certainly the lack of movement and the fact that he hadn't yet opened his eyes was worrying. At least he'd had the sense to stay close to the building.

"Thanks for the vote of confidence," said Mulder.

Krycek's lips twitched into a sheepish smile; he turned his head as he left the truck to make sure that Mulder couldn't see his expression. Maybe he could keep the question, of how good or otherwise Mulder was feeling, indirect. "Can you help me unload?"

Looking as awkward as a newborn foal, Mulder rose unsteadily to his feet. Having taken a couple of deep breaths, he finally opened his eyes. "Talk to me," he said.

Startled by the honesty of Mulder admitting that he needed help, Krycek was momentarily unsure what he was supposed to say.

"Any crap will do," added Mulder. "What's the weather like out there? Do they still have McDonalds? Have they found a cure for cancer?"

"You haven't been here that long," said Krycek, though he could see why Mulder might be feeling that way. "I went shopping. Did you know not all food comes in cans?"

"There's packets as well," agreed Mulder, and offered a near smile when Krycek tossed him a bag of sunflower seeds.

Once Mulder had at least some of his balance back, the car unpacking went relatively smoothly, the chatter continuous but idle and deliberately uncontroversial. Krycek waited until they'd taken everything up into the apartment before shifting gears. "So, how long have you been outside?"

Mulder looked at his watch. "An hour or two. I've been going out for a few minutes each hour to see what I could handle. What I could hear."

Oh, shit. Krycek could guess what was coming next. Mulder was heading way past Gibson Praise territory. Then again, Gibson hadn't spent a month in this quarry surrounded by magnetite, invisibly encouraging anomalous brain patterns to build ever more powerful circuits. Nor did he have a nanite army protecting his brain from damaging itself in the process. "What did you hear?"

"You stopped for gas."

About sixty miles away, important to have the tank full, never knew when they might need to be ready for action. "What else?"

"No way am I going to admit to following you into the john."

"That's good to hear."

"I didn't expect to be able to do it."

Krycek nodded, thinking of the exercises they'd been doing. Mulder had obviously locked onto his frequency somewhere along the line. Unable to think of anything to say that Mulder didn't already know he headed into the kitchen, trying to pretend it was situation normal, wondering what the hell they were going to do now. Just one thing. "Why did you stay outside?"

"To see if I could."

Yes. That would be right.

Mulder began undoing the packaging on the new laptop while the old one was starting up. His headache was bordering on the intolerable but the desire to examine Scully's calendar was calling loud and clear and much more important than aspirin or pain.

He hadn't needed to ask Krycek about the success or otherwise of his mission. It had been there right in the front of Krycek's thoughts as he'd driven up to the building and Mulder hadn't been able to avoid looking.

"Like reading somebody else's diary, only worse," he realized. A lot worse he admitted, ashamed of the stolen knowledge and wondering whether private and personal was ever going to mean quite the same thing again.

The laptop had finally woken up and Mulder sent it off to do a search for today's files. "DieBugDie" opened Scully's calendar. He'd suggested a password of "Bambi" in honor of the cockroach case that had marked the start of their nefarious calendar sharing activities. Scully had countered with the name of her favorite brand of bug killer.

Nothing especially personal or confidential appeared on the screen. Travel approvals for a case on which the agent of record was somebody called John Doggett, contact numbers for the local office and the PD, flight times and car rental bookings. "St Louis?" Why there?

Why not there? She was working and that was a good sign, wasn't it? That was all he'd asked for; just enough to reassure himself that Scully wasn't ill or grieving. Not that he'd actually proven anything of the kind. She worked through her father's death; she worked through Mulder's apparent death in a boxcar in New Mexico; she worked through her sister's death; she worked through cancer; she worked through the death of her child. Working was what she did - in sickness and in health, mourning or not.

Krycek's arrival in the living room was poorly timed. Krycek had seen Scully's sister die. If she was grieving now then Krycek had a hand in that as well. The reheated Thai takeout that the man had brought in with him just looked like a bribe. The hesitant smile Krycek was wearing vanished in an instant as he spotted Mulder's expression. "Now what?"

"Scully's working."

"I thought that was what -"

"She's in St Louis. Why do you suppose that is?"

It didn't take a mind reader to see that Krycek could guess exactly why Scully was in St Louis. Mulder's headache was slipping fast beyond the tolerable. Knowing what was coming next, he slid to the floor; he even had enough time to put his hand down to stop his head from hitting the ground first.

Washington DC

"What am I looking at?" demanded Strughold, turning his gaze from the screen to review the aging faces that formed the remains of the high command. Only the most naive had died in the machinations and scheming of the past ten years. Only the cowards had died at El Rico Airbase.

It had been the era of the phony war, of men jockeying for position, of experiments that had plenty of results but no conclusions. A time for men who acted as if they had all the time in the world. Perhaps because they simply didn't expect to be alive when the aliens came and it had allowed them to forget the future.

Incompetence and infighting had left them weak, damaging their ability to operate in the shadows. Links to the military were less secure these days. They'd lost the network of personal contacts that oiled the wheels of instant response with no questions asked. Official channels were slow and insecure. Unofficial channels had become rusty and unreliable.

Everything they did was taking longer and costing more than it should. Where once a whisper in the ear had been enough it now took a kick in the ass and cash in the bank to work the same miracle.

Strughold admitted that he carried his own share of blame. Bored with political wrangling in New York and Washington he'd moved into cheerful semi-retirement, managing the trials of genetically modified crops, emerging only for the occasional consultation session or strategy debate. It had been the wrong move and the world was in danger of paying the price for it.

The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity. Strughold had never considered himself to be one of the best but he was starting to wonder about it now. Scarcely any time left to make amends. Strughold looked back at the image on the projector screen again; the scan of a brain running far too hot, showing activity where no activity should be.

"Fox Mulder," said Daryl Nelson, the one man in the room who was still below the standard corporate retirement age.

No one retired in this business. At least, not willingly. Change was overdue and would be all the more painful for that reason. Change had to begin somewhere and it had to begin soon. Pulling himself back to the immediate problem, Strughold responded to Nelson's words. "Mulder's beyond our reach. It may be months before they return him, if they return him intact."

"That's what we thought."

"Thought?"

"His friends seem to think differently. Agent Scully has persuaded the FBI to search for Alex Krycek as a link to Mulder's disappearance. Assistant Director Skinner seems to be conducting his own investigation with the assistance of some computer hackers who've worked with Mulder in the past."

"Is there any rationale for their action?"

"Krycek," said Nelson, his voice brightening as if he'd suddenly realized that he was actually being listened to. "He created an elaborate alibi for the night of Mulder's disappearance. That it unraveled was sheer bad luck."

"Or good detective work?"

"Yes, sir."

"We have a bounty on his head, do we not?"

"He killed a couple of the people who went after him. Here," said the speaker, directing his laser pointer at the wall map and picking out St Louis. "Which is where Dana Scully is at the moment."

"And Walter Skinner?"

" - is traveling to Dallas, this evening."

"Why?"

"That's unclear. It seems to be related to some kind of computer access issue, possibly an attempt to hack into files belonging to Agent Scully. She's been in contact with the Bureau IT group and with local offices in Albuquerque and El Paso."

Not exactly localized then. "Doesn't sound as if they know very much."

"More than we do." The mumbled "sir" from the man with his hands on the computer mouse was an after thought and Strughold found that strangely reassuring. At least there was some life in the old dog of an organization.

Maybe his next act should be to remove the price tag from Krycek's head? Perhaps it was time to reward initiative rather than strangle it. But first there was this other matter. "We need tails on Skinner and Scully. Whoever they're hunting - we need to get there first. See to it."

"Sir."

"Make sure they know: Mulder's the priority - alive."

"And Krycek?"

"The reward for Krycek's death has been rescinded - effective now." If the FBI found him and could find something to charge him with then that was their prerogative. Strughold looked back at the map, gratified to see an unexpected bonus from a gamble he'd taken the week before. "Giving Mr. Spender's body to the FBI seems to have added a little extra spice to the chase."

"Yes, sir. Kersh understands that we're looking for a swift resolution to the manhunt."

"Then let's hope Agent Scully and Doggett are as good as they're supposed to be."

"Sir. You said Mulder's the priority. If there's a problem with the FBI agents?"

"I want Mulder. Alive. Miss Scully is a useful bargaining chip, nothing more. Whatever it takes."

Scully had built the walls high and Doggett was either cautious enough not to try to scale them or smart enough not to want to. Either way Scully was grateful. Moreover, he didn't mind following her hunches. "In the absence of any other leads," as he often reminded her, in case she imagined that he wasn't the skeptic he was claiming to be.

Discussions of her wellbeing were kept to the strict minimum. She admitted that she might have skipped one too many meals and that sleep had sometimes been in short supply. He promised to keep half an eye on the clock and help them both get into some kind of routine that involved regular meal breaks and a little realism about checking into motels before whoever was driving the car actually became a hazard to other road users.

Talking about Alex Krycek's history had felt like a welcome break at first. Nothing exotic. Nothing alien. Nothing paranormal about Krycek. A killer for hire and no reason for Doggett to look at her in pitying disbelief.

Except for that one big problem - everything about Krycek was personal. To Mulder or to her and that forced Doggett into a different kind of disbelief.

"But he took him to Russia," he reminded her, his voice mild and unchallenging, despite the poisonous undertone in the words.

"As a translator, guide."

"A guide? The man that Mulder thought killed his father?"

"The X-Files sometimes requires strange alliances."

Doggett nodded, and Scully felt like slapping him. She read the look in his eyes and understood. It angered her. His expression, so tolerant and patient, and so very wrong. Questioning her in silence, asking her if she was listening to her own words.

Mulder had worked with Krycek in the past, but that had been years before. It meant nothing, less than nothing. She'd gone on a fruitless journey with Spender only a few weeks ago, convinced that the risk was worth the possible gain. A trip that meant nothing about trust or relationships. She'd been gone only a couple of days; she'd tried to keep Mulder informed; he'd known that she was alive.

There was just no comparison between those kinds of actions and what was happening here.

For Mulder to be absent now, willingly holed up for some nefarious purpose with Krycek, was impossible. He wouldn't do that to her; couldn't do it. Not now. Not when she needed him. Not when she had another life to think about. Not when he did, too.

Part 11

The clock said 8, but the light from the small windows, always inadequate and never giving much sense of the sun's passage, was not entirely conclusive. Mulder suspected it was closer to breakfast-time than dinner. In which case he'd just slept for fourteen hours straight.

He moved slowly, awkwardly aware of the residual pain in his head. The situation not helped by the fact that his shoulders and neck were aching, suggesting he really had spent the night on the floor. The blanket and pillow seemed to confirm it. Krycek had attempted to make him comfortable, which from Mulder's point of view was more embarrassing than reassuring.

Krycek. Where the hell was Krycek? The TV was off and so was the laptop. There was no noise coming from the kitchen or the bathroom and whichever kind of eight o'clock it was, it was unlikely that Krycek was in bed.

Ashamed of the rising panic, he rolled up onto his feet before immediately sitting down on the couch again. This was bad, very bad. No voices in his head, no angry soundtrack of distant screams, just pain and something that felt horribly like fear. This was going to take more than a couple of aspirins to suppress. Morphine maybe. Chloroform was starting to feel like a valid option.

Asleep for fourteen hours, he reminded himself. CNN on the freshly awakened TV confirming the fact. Unconsciousness was clearly not the cure.

The staircase was tough to navigate. The steps were frustrating, moving sideways, up and down, growing and shrinking, seemingly at random. Seasick on dry land. Yes, he'd made a lot of progress since Krycek brought him here. Any more improvement and a straitjacket, padded cell and heavy sedation might be an attractive option.

What had Krycek said the Consortium was offering? A cage with a bed and 5-point restraints? It was starting to sound like a vacation.

Krycek had obviously heard him coming, hardly a surprise given the number of collisions with the wall it had taken to bring him halfway down the stairs. "Stay there. I'll come to you," said Krycek, bouncing up to meet him, two steps at a time.

The instinctive desire to tell the man exactly what he could do with his concern almost won. Maybe even would have won if the idea of standing still hadn't been quite so appealing and if Krycek hadn't arrived at his side before the agent had even managed to form the words.

"Let's go back upstairs," said Krycek.

"No, out."

"Mulder."

"Don't even try that 'for your own good' voice with me, Krycek." Scully was the only one who could pull it off. It didn't even always work for her.

Krycek nodded. "OK. Lean on me, I can't patch you up if you fall and break your neck." They navigated the stairs slowly but successfully, stopping to rest only once before Mulder was safely seated on the bench outside. "Now what?" demanded Krycek.

"Why were you outside?"

"You're the mind reader."

Not a good moment for a reminder. Mulder was having enough trouble focusing on his own thoughts without worrying about other people's. "Answer the damned question."

"Fine," Krycek had started walking, covering a tight little loop between the car, the truck and the bench, which made an interesting turn around thought Mulder, wondering if pacing was contagious. "You collapsed on the floor. I copied the computer files to the new machine and I was half way to El Paso before I turned back."

"You were leaving?"

"I was going to send Scully your position - latitude and longitude."

"Why didn't you?"

Krycek took a deep breath, looked Mulder directly in the eye. "If Scully's chasing me. Who's chasing her?"

"So why did you come back?"

Krycek's smile was humorless, the look in his eyes more than a little feral. "Guess. Come on. You know why; I bet you stole it straight out of my head. You just don't believe it."

Krycek was right; Mulder didn't believe it. Couldn't afford to believe it. "So why not just say it then?"

"And what? You'll believe me?"

"Try me."

"Fuck you, Mulder." Krycek was trying so hard to smirk, keep the sarcastic shell intact, trying to make it sound as if he didn't care, as if it was all a joke. Sing song voice. "I want to save the world."

And Mulder wanted to laugh, would have loved to laugh, but he knew that Krycek was expecting that and he didn't want to be too predictable. "Worried that I'll tell your assassin friends and blow your street cred?"

Krycek scowled, but it was pro-forma. His voice when he finally replied was apologetic. "We're going to have to leave here. Split up."

"I'll talk to Scully. Stop the search."

"Like hell. 'Yeah, Scully - I'm on the run with Alex - how about you just pretend I'm still on that UFO and go back to DC.' What do you think she'd do?"

"If people are trailing her then she's in danger, too. She needs to know."

"I'll go south, give them something to chase. I'll warn her that she's probably being followed."

"You tried that once. You came back."

"You don't remember last night, do you?" Krycek paused, took Mulder's silence as assent. "You collapsed. You had a temperature of 103. You were sweating, shaking. I couldn't wake you up. I couldn't even move you onto a pillow without setting you off screaming. By the time I was far enough away to call Scully, I knew I couldn't call her. When I got back, you seemed OK. Out like a light, but no fever. No sign that there was anything wrong. You're probably safe here for a while. So long as I'm not here."

"Where will you go?"

"Damned if I know."

Nowhere to go, thought Mulder, unintentionally tumbling into Krycek's thoughts. Hating that for a moment they'd sounded like his own.

The Bureau offices in New Mexico and Texas were initially more curious than helpful. Though the Texans did at least have the advantage of something tangible to get their teeth into.

"An unsecured wireless access point?" said the ASAC.

Scully repeated the name of the corporation whose network had been breached and why they couldn't be more precise about the location.

"I have no idea what you're talking about. But this is about a missing agent, right?"

To Scully's surprise, it had been the loss of one of their own rather than the possible glory of catching a professional assassin that had captured their attention. It shouldn't have been a surprise really, but it was a comfort to know that somebody cared. Like getting a Christmas card from an old friend. "Yes," she said, more hopeful that she'd felt in weeks.

"I'll get one of the computer people to contact you. He can brief a search team, get a few people out driving past the offices with antennae on their knees. See what we find, right?"

"Thank you."

Wonderful news. What could have taken her days or even weeks, could be done in a matter of a few hours. She turned to Doggett. "We should have an improved shortlist of locations tonight."

"And then?"

"We go to work."

Daryl Nelson had never been part of the high command, nor had he even been singled out as the best of the rising stars. He had however worked hard and learned well and he'd kept his head down when the bullets and recriminations flew. He believed in the work, if not always in the capability or the methods of the men in charge.

Like Mulder, he'd been born into conspiracy. Like Krycek, his father had died to keep Fox Mulder alive. Daryl wasn't the type to hold a grudge. Dad had turned traitor, made an inappropriate tactical choice to offer information to Mulder and ultimately to personally supervise an exchange of classified material in return for Mulder's life. The agents had called him Deep Throat, which seemed fair, either a whistleblower or a traitor depending on where you stood.

Unlike Mulder, he'd never doubted the wisdom of the Consortium's hunt for a vaccine to block the aliens from using human bodies as hosts. Even if that did mean using the unwitting and the unwilling as test subjects and playing for time by collaborating with the enemy. Unlike Krycek, he'd never learned to look somebody in the eye and pull the trigger. Which meant, in fact, he was different from Mulder and Scully in that respect too.

They were playing for the highest of high stakes and morality was such a subjective thing.

Strughold wanted Mulder and no wonder - what a catch! A telepath gifted with ESP and precognitive powers, albeit as yet untrained, and a man already bound by a thousand threads to his destiny. Some of the old Consortium leaders, Spender for one, had thought it was a fate that Mulder might one day embrace.

As on many other matters, Nelson had kept his head down and said nothing, even though his psychology doctorate made him a more qualified source than any of the men who did feel entitled to comment.

To outsiders, Nelson might have looked more like a secretary than a soldier. From his own perspective, they couldn't be more wrong. He was twenty-first century warrior, fighting with his brains not his body. Dana Scully really shouldn't use unsecured phone lines to talk to local Bureau offices. Walter Skinner really oughtn't expect a free run if he was going to use his own credit cards when he traveled.

A few phone calls and a couple of bribes, and he was already hours ahead of the FBI. Whereas the Lone Gunmen had produced a shortlist of twenty-three offices, which the FBI had so far reduced to twenty with twenty more sites to visit, there were only three possible sites on his list now.

It was time to replace the teams trailing Skinner and Scully, stealth required variety. He should be able to launch three additional duos into the mix as well. Fast, silent response through military channels was problematic these days. Fortunately civilian channels were getting better all the time and could be just as helpful given the right incentives.

Strughold acknowledged the effort and approved his actions with only the occasional pause for clarification. Strughold finally asked the unavoidable question. "Your best guess?"

It really wasn't a matter of guesswork. There were after all, only three sites where the computer connection could realistically have been made and only one of those was within a couple of hundred miles of an abandoned Consortium project. "White Heart," he said.

"The quarry? The magnetite." Strughold nodded, impressed. "Do we have satellite images?"

"Only routine sweeps. Nothing on those. But Krycek's not a fool. We'd need continuous monitoring to know for sure. I've asked for that but it'll be a matter of luck if we catch anything. We need more people on the ground."

Another brief nod from the man who was once again the Consortium's most feared and respected leader, followed immediately by an order. "Send your strongest team."

"Yes, sir."

Skinner had called in a few favors: Bureau, Marine Corps, people he'd met along the way.

Dallas had been a mistake. But that was OK. It was supposed to be a step in the right direction not a leap to a conclusion. Armed with a laptop computer, a gadget from the Lone Gunmen and a GPS handset he'd done well.

He'd started out with Byer's theories about which locations were the most promising. Not too big - one of the IT techies would have squealed, or it would have shown up in some hacker's guide to hotspots. Not too small, not easy enough to park up close and pause for a while without attracting attention.

He'd studied aerial photographs to identify the places where a strange car would be effectively invisible yet simultaneously might have good wireless access to an unprotected network.

He'd thrown Scully's trip to St Louis into the mix and drawn arcs on maps that directed him to look north. After a couple of days hunting, he'd deleted a lot of locations from the Lone Gunmen's list, but the choice of where to head next and what to do when he arrived was driven more by gut instinct than hard logic.

Amarillo was close enough to the New Mexico border to meet all of Scully's gut feelings. Big enough for someone to go hunting for an open wireless connection to the Internet. Large enough for a stranger to be invisible. Popular enough to offer shops, motels and all the other necessary accompaniments to life on the run. Small enough that when she heard from the Lone Gunmen that Walter Skinner was heading to the same town it wasn't hard for her to locate his hotel.

The only question from Doggett was about how much backup they were going to need.

It was a question that Scully couldn't afford to think about. For every possible answer there were at least a dozen more questions. "I'd like to talk to Skinner first."

"That could be a bad move. If he's planning to meet someone then we don't want to spook him."

"No one told him to come here. He started with the same information that we did. He didn't just fly straight to Amarillo."

"I didn't say he was stupid."

"I don't believe that he would help Krycek."

"But he could be helping Mulder?"

There was no answer to that. No answer for Doggett. No answer for herself. Mulder wouldn't do it, not to her. Focusing on her breathing, she sought out the quiet place inside, did the best she could with what she found. "What do you propose, Agent Doggett?"

"Surveillance. Local agents, people he won't recognize."

"And we do what?"

"Investigate. See what the people who own this network have to say for themselves. If we're in the right town, then we know where whoever accessed those files was between 9:57 and 10:01 on Friday morning. We follow it up with the PD. Maybe we get lucky and find him on a traffic camera. Maybe he used an ATM and we can get him on video security."

"And we stay away from Skinner?"

"We keep in contact with the tailing agents so we'll get some warning. But it's not that big a place. If we see him, we should be ready."

"Meaning?"

Doggett looked at her, his expression too gentle to be strictly professional. She knew what was coming next; he was going to offer her another chance to back away. "Are you ready, for whatever he throws at us?"

The light was hurting her eyes, she blinked away the acid. No, she wasn't ready, but she'd buried a sister and a child and she hadn't been ready for that. At least she could prepare herself for this.

Mulder was having trouble breathing again, struggling to stay afloat above the panic.

"I'll stay tonight," said Krycek, trying to hold a glass of water to Mulder's lips to help him swallow down the Tylenol.

Mulder's head hurt and just kept on hurting. Indoors was better than outdoors, but that was a relative term and better in this case simply meant that the external screams had stopped slamming through his skull and been replaced by some vaguer internal fear. The fact that the dread intensified at the thought of Krycek leaving made it even harder to take. What the hell was he going to do if Krycek did leave tomorrow?

Making matters worse was the idea that Krycek's assessment of the situation was at least partially correct. They had to separate. Which meant that tomorrow Mulder was going to need to be in good enough shape to drive or at least to stay here alone. Picking up the satellite phone and inviting Scully to come to the quarry was definitely too risky now. If someone else got here first then he was as good as dead. No way could he defend himself.

A more subtle approach was required. Call Scully from a public phone in the next big town; warn her that she might be followed; pass on a meeting place via the Gunmen. Get her to break off all contact with home, family and friends and go on the run with him.

What an offer.

Maybe he should forget running, just bite the bullet and focus on publicizing his case. Get this whole thing out in front of the people, which was where it belonged. Yeah. He could see it now. Just how long would it take before he was back in a psych unit somewhere? Necessarily so if he couldn't stop the voices screaming in his ears or the terror growing in his head. Had to have it under control before he reemerged. Bad enough that everything he had to say would sound like paranoid delusion, far worse if it looked like that was all it was.

Including himself in the equation kept messing the whole thing up. All he had to do was talk to Scully, tell her what was going on and find some way to get the files to her. She could get the information out there into the big wide world while he kept his head down and tried to survive. Easy.

So easy he wondered if he was going to die.

A new sensation caught him unawares. Something loud in his ears. "Mulder, for fuck's sake breathe," demanded Krycek.

And he tried, but couldn't quite get his head above the water.

Krycek was worried. Suspecting that he'd made the wrong call but not at all sure what the right one would have been. Since pushing, prodding and generally persuading Mulder first to walk and, when that method failed, to crawl back up the stairs into the apartment, things had gone downhill fast.

Sitting on the couch, Mulder hadn't stopped shaking. It started out breathless and angry. He was feverish again. Pulse rate through the roof. Sweating. If not actually unaware then certainly not operating fully in the here and now. Krycek tried what had in the past week or so become his standard tactic; smoothing his thoughts, talking quietly, then a little louder, then finally squeezing Mulder's shoulder and shouting in his ear.

But Mulder's shaking changed somewhere along the line to something stiffer and tighter. Something uncontrolled.

A seizure?

Krycek rocked back on his heels, fought against his own instincts to capture Mulder's shoulders and pin him down. He forced himself to wait it out, checked his watch so he'd know how long it took. If he had to kidnap Scully and bring her here to deal with this, then that was the kind of thing she'd want to know.

Skinner spotted the tail before he even left the hotel's parking lot: a shiny new Bureau car in midnight blue. It could have angered him to know that the Bureau was watching him, but instead it made him proud that his people were doing their jobs so well.

"Scully," he thought, glad that he wasn't the only one down here chasing Krycek or Mulder, or whatever it was he was doing.

It hurt a little to know that she hadn't trusted him enough to arrange a meeting to swap information and maybe share the problem of where to go next, but she was a straight arrow as well as smart. Sharp enough to work as Mulder's partner, yet still capable of going by the book in the way an agent like John Doggett might demand.

Knowing he was being tailed gave him a certain luxury: he didn't need to worry about backup. The idea pleased him. He couldn't help but think that it was exactly the kind of silver lining that Mulder would bet his own life on.

Skinner's FBI tails on the other hand were rather less comfortable about the situation. When they called in their position to Doggett, they were quick to inform him that they'd already spoken to their boss.

Sitting in the parking lot of the shopping mall with the highest density of ATM machines, Doggett motioned Scully forward to listen in on the call.

"OK," said Doggett, talking into the phone, "I want you to tell Agent Scully what you just told me."

"There's a black van following the Assistant Director. It's a rental."

"Do we have the driver details?"

"We're waiting for that information."

"Be very careful. Whoever's in that vehicle could be extremely dangerous. Do not approach them unless you have to and not without getting additional backup."

"And A.D. Skinner?"

"Just keep your guard up."

Doggett pushed the button to close the call. "Looks like things are warming up."

Scully frowned, wondering if she was ready for that and reminding herself that she had to be. She glanced up into the car's mirror again. "There's a green SUV, parked about four rows back. I think it was outside the hotel this morning."

Doggett checked the side mirror but couldn't quite get the angle to see what she was referring to. "I'll go for a little stroll, call in its plate."

"Don't use the cell phone," said Scully. "We need to warn the surveillance team as well - get the office to tell them to assume their calls are being monitored."

"You're thinking what? That this is some kind of Black Ops group sent out by the same people running those men in St. Louis? And they're using us to do the leg work for them?"

"Maybe."

Scully and Doggett maintained the show of visiting the banks and the electronics stores on the mall, one of them talking to the manager, the other keeping an eye on the cars outside.

According to the computer searches, both the van trailing Skinner and the SUV following Doggett and Scully were rentals. It took a little longer to identify the full details of their collection and to obtain copies of the drivers' papers.

The agents following Skinner had reported to their boss that, though the van had darkened windows and its occupants were cautious, the vehicle contained two men. "Could be cops," suggested one of the Feds talking over a landline to his FBI boss.

"Not police," said Scully, talking to herself more than to Doggett.

The SUV suddenly started its engine and drove away.

"Do we follow them?" asked Doggett.

"No, they'll make us straight away."

"Then what?"

"We wait. I don't think we'll have to wait for long."

They didn't wait for long. A white van containing two men suddenly pulled into a neighboring parking space. "How many vehicles have these people got?" complained Doggett.

"I need to warn Skinner that he's being trailed."

Doggett considered it for a moment. "Let's take this to Amarillo PD. Get everybody in one place. Away from civilians. Find out exactly who we're dealing with."

"I don't think they'll be looking for a fire fight - not with us."

"More reason to tackle them now. If we find something, we don't need vultures on our backs."

Easy for Scully to agree with that, given that the "something" in Doggett's statement might very well be Mulder. Doggett had asked her, more than once, if she really wanted to handle this investigation herself and the answer had always been simple: she didn't have a choice. But what if her search led someone else to Mulder? Could she ever forgive herself for that?

One thing at a time. For now, she would go along with Doggett. Maybe they could identify the men tailing them, perhaps even get enough circumstantial evidence to identify who was footing the bill for this mission. She thought of two dead men in St Louis; maybe these people could tell her the unidentified victims' names as well.

Setting the trap took a while and the personal intervention of Deputy Director Kersh plus a little encouragement from the local Bureau office. "Favor for a favor," said Doggett when one of the PD's commanders confirmed their enthusiasm might be improved if he received a little more information on a sting operation that he suspected the DEA was running on his turf. Deals done, they quickly got a plan in place.

"They want us to go to a baseball stadium?" asked Scully.

"Easy to find for out-of-towners. Plenty of room for them to set up a SWAT team and not too many people around."

Scully was a little annoyed by the suggestion. Strangers with something to hide might choose a place like that. Amateurs with something to hide, she thought, vaguely annoyed at the idea. She forced the anger down. It was a good location for them. Not so quiet as to be suspicious, not so busy as to endanger lots of innocent lives. Moreover, it was a place the local police felt secure, probably even a place where the SWAT team conducted the occasional training exercise. OK. It would do.

The method of springing the trap was easy. With the timings agreed in advance with the PD, Scully picked up her cell phone and called her old boss.

"Skinner."

"Walter, hi," said Scully.

A pause at the other end of the line made her nerves jangle. Come on, Skinner, she urged, wondering how many seconds she'd really been waiting for a reply and preparing herself to try again and to make herself even more obvious next time. Maybe two words hadn't been enough for him to recognize her voice or her intentions.

Skinner's voice finally returned, softer than usual, deeper even, and without its usual gruff undertone. "Dana - good to hear from you. Are you in town?"

"We need to swap notes. Meet me?"

"Sure."

Thirty minutes they gave themselves. Eighteen hundred seconds.

It had been a long time since Scully had prepared for a firefight without Mulder at her side. She'd put a bulletproof vest on under her jacket that morning, it chafed and sweated against her skin but at least she was dressed for the occasion. She thought of two men with bullets through the head and had to breathe slowly to stop the shudder that escaped her brain and ran along her spine.

"You ready for this, Agent Scully?" asked Doggett, looking worried.

"Are you?"

Doggett's worried look didn't disappear, but his voice added an extra dose of frustration now. "We don't know who's in those cars. We don't know which side Skinner's on."

"I'm ready."

She was grateful that Doggett didn't ask for more.

Part 12

Skinner had spotted the Bureau tail the day before and had carried on as if it wasn't there. After all, he had nothing to hide. Moreover, he'd been confident that if it reached the stage where he might have something to protect, then he could handle that as well.

Scully's phone call had changed everything. First the shock of the call. Even seeing her name in the Caller ID window was a surprise. Calling him Walter made him wonder immediately if she was in trouble. His instincts had been a little rusty but he'd soon caught up again. Since then he'd been preparing himself to be mentally and physically ready to act.

His weapon was close to hand and ready to use. He felt a little awkward about that. He'd turned in his Bureau issue gun at the start of the investigation into his conduct, but he'd brought his personal weapon along for the ride. Despite his suspension meaning that the paperwork for the flight was not quite everything it ought to be.

With his guard up after Scully's call, he'd spotted another vehicle, a green SUV this time that seemed to have shown up in his peripheral vision maybe once too often.

The parking lot of the sports ground had plenty of cars but not many people. "She's arranged this," he thought, but had no real idea what the "this" might be. An ambush? For him? For whoever was in the SUV?

He didn't have long to wait. A call to his cell phone from a number he didn't recognize and Scully's voice telling him to, "Stay down."

Waiting was hard. Waiting, slumped low in a car, while somebody else did something, was practically impossible. When the phone rang again overtaxed nerves made it slippery in his hand before he pushed the button. "OK, sir. Leave your weapon on the passenger seat. Get out of the car - slowly, hands empty and where we can see them."

They'd lost one of the vehicles: the black van that had originally been tailing Skinner had vanished.

The two heavyweight goons in the green SUV looked irritated rather than surprised to be on the wrong side of the SWAT team's guns. The men in the white van who'd been following Scully since they left the shopping mall seemed to have no problem accepting the order to come quietly but looked faintly rattled by the speed and efficiency of the search of their clothing and the vehicle's contents.

"Yeah, yeah. Tell it to the ACLU," suggested the SWAT team leader as he read them their rights. "We'll start with illegal monitoring of cellular communications and go from there."

But actually it was the cell phones of the men they were arresting that were of the most interest to Scully. "I want details of every call they've made on these phones in the past two days - in and out. Same with the phones at their motel," she said, waving the men's room receipt proudly in the air. Thank God for bureaucracy, she thought, wondering what kind of expense forms mercenaries were expected to use.

They announced themselves as corporate security specialists, and told the agents that they'd been employed to look into an abuse of a client's Internet connection and computer network. Hence the reason why they were equipped with the best hacking and scanning equipment that money could buy.

Of course they had no idea they were spying on a bunch of federal agents.

The chances were they'd be flying home before the night was over. The attorneys would come in fighting and the men would be walking straight back out again within hours. Scully had no doubt about that. Naturally the group had no insight, opinion or information on the identities of the dead bodies in St Louis, nor on the location of a man named Krycek, nor of an FBI agent named Mulder.

Doggett looked pissed and Scully couldn't help but wonder what he'd been expecting to find. She could guess what he'd been hoping to find: Fox Mulder, with or without Alex Krycek. X-Files had never been quite that easy to solve.

The question of how to deal with Skinner was still open and Skinner wasn't helping. He didn't do the easy thing and offer to return to Washington but nor did he press to see the phone records that the FBI area office had been gathering together at Scully's request.

"I think it's clear that I didn't have any special knowledge or any kind of rendezvous arranged," said Skinner. "I'm looking for Mulder, the same way you are."

Doggett shook his head. "Actually, sir, it's not the same way at all. You're suspended from duty and if I wanted to I could add a charge of obstructing a federal investigation to your sheet."

"If that's what you think happened, then you'd better make it official."

"That could finish your career."

"Unless I find Mulder, my career is finished."

"You endangered yourself and other people. You exposed a confidential investigation."

"Are we done, Agent Doggett?"

"I don't know, sir. Are we?"

Too much testosterone decided Scully, preparing to take the problem out of their hands. "I suggest you show us what you've got."

Skinner exhaled sharply. "I don't think we've got much time."

Scully felt that telltale grumbling in her head that warned of tiredness, knew that as the adrenaline surge faded another sleepless night was going to make her pay. "What would Mulder do?" she asked herself. Too easy. He'd go with gut instinct and gamble that if he shot for the sun, then even if he missed, he might at least hit the moon. But Scully wasn't Mulder - not by instinct nor by temperament. Her medical training had reinforced her own core beliefs: first, she must do no harm.

She couldn't bet it all on a hunch. Not when Doggett was watching her every move, waiting for a slip. Doggett? Since when had Doggett figured into her decisions? A compromise then, she would give Skinner something, a chance to redeem himself perhaps, or maybe just a chance to reveal himself as being on the wrong side.

"Ten men traveled on the 6:15 flight out of JFK yesterday morning. The stewardess remembers them - she thought it a was a football team at first but couldn't see enough players - one of the men told her they were going to a reunion of their squadron. On arrival in Amarillo, they picked up three pre-booked rental vehicles. Two of the vehicles are now in the police pound and four of the men are waiting for their lawyers. We have six men and at least one vehicle unaccounted for."

Doggett attempted to break into Scully's speech, but she waved him down. "I've more invested in this investigation than anyone. I need to find Mulder," she said, staring hard at Skinner.

"And I want to help in any way I can," said the AD.

Scully remained silent and Doggett nodded at her, looking relieved that she hadn't placed all their cards on the table. The cell phone network records seemed to indicate that at least some of the chasing team had gone west, heading towards New Mexico before they'd either turned off their phones or gone out of the service area. It amused Scully to note that, as she'd anticipated, despite presumably having access to covert networks of their own, even Consortium operatives were not immune to the charms of the mobile phone.

Skinner took a few seconds to recognize that he'd been placed center stage. It took him a few seconds more to accept the role, but when he spoke again he sounded like an Assistant Director of the FBI, albeit one who'd learned that going by the book didn't always offer the best chance of a solution.

"I'm assuming you've already checked the other rental agencies for cars booked out after that flight. So I'm guessing four of the men left by chopper. Which suggests they had a definite destination in mind. We need to look at flight plans, air traffic control records. Call in a few favors - see if anything's happening on satellite images, military communication channels, that kind of thing."

"Satellite images?" asked Doggett.

"The use of a helicopter implies they wanted to go somewhere specific, they may have rescheduled a camera to do reconnaissance of the location."

It wouldn't be the first time she'd hunted for Mulder by using satellite images. In this instance they didn't even need the pictures, just some indication that a satellite's eye had lingered in one place for a little longer than usual.

Scully nodded. Time to see if any of them had any favors left.

Scully had wanted to leave as soon as they had anything that even came close to a lead. To her annoyance Skinner had supported Doggett. In the end, she'd gone along with them, but only because the chopper with its two hour delay was still going to be faster than traveling by car.

"We can't use a civilian pilot and we can't risk a pilot we don't know. It's got to be Bureau," said Skinner. Scully was stuck with the logic of the argument even though she hated every word of it.

They arrived at White Heart Quarry not long after dawn. Tactics had been discussed. Risks had been assessed. A sixteen-person team with a tactical unit from Albuquerque providing the firepower. Scared of spooking Krycek into an angry response that might leave Mulder dead, they landed the choppers more than ten miles away and transferred to the SUVs that the rental company in the next town had agreed to deliver to a recently closed gas station on payment of an exorbitant fee.

Full body armor, flak jackets and helmets with breathing gear to go looking for two men, only one of whom was to be considered hostile. And even if the two men had been there the day before then there was a good chance that they wouldn't be there today.

Scully kept her breathing slow and fought to ignore the incessant pounding in her head. The delays had not given her the chance to sleep, rather they'd forced her to remain sleepless for another night. Fortunately one of the things she'd learned from years of working with Mulder was how to survive on catnaps, snack food and pure adrenaline. She was ready for anything. She just wasn't sure if she was ready for nothing.

"Start with the building," said the plan, not unreasonably, given that it was a choice between that and thousands of acres of nothing very much at all.

An old pickup truck was parked under the porch. It hadn't been there long, otherwise the dust that swirled up and covered everything else and destroyed any possibility of footprints or tracks would have coated the vehicle, too. The hood, however, was cool to the touch, so it wasn't that recent an arrival. The car parked deeper under cover looked like it hadn't moved for a couple of weeks.

The advance team headed quietly up the stairs until there were men and battering rams on every level. On a sweep of a hand from the man in charge of the assault, the office, storeroom and apartment doors clattered open. Hissing cans of gas following directly behind.

The shouts of, "Clear," came in one after another until finally there was a lone voice raised in dissent. "There's one here," and a, "Don't move," followed by a, "Let's see your hands."

Scully started to run upstairs but Skinner grabbed her arm, shaking his head fiercely. "Not without breathing gear."

Yes, they'd agreed that, hadn't they? She wouldn't go in at all unless a doctor was needed and even then she'd enter only once the smoke had cleared.

Then came the shout of, "Area secured and cleared. Open all doors and windows."

Not able to stand it any longer, she ran up the stairs.

"Wait a minute, Agent Scully," said the assault commander, his voice muffled through the breathing gear and helmet.

"Here, wear this," said Doggett, pushing a mask into her hands. Accepting the concern, she allowed herself a second or so to fasten it in place before walking into the room.

Smoke in her eyes already and damn it she was going to be useless now if there was a medical emergency because she wasn't even going to be able to see.

The body on the floor was long and lean. Only his voice gave him away. "Scully?"

Alex fucking Krycek. He'd heard the phrase shrieked, mumbled, growled and left as an unspoken epithet at the end of a sentence so often in the past hour that he almost wanted to point out that his name wasn't even Krycek. Not that it mattered much.

"Did you see them?" Scully asked for what had to be the fifteenth time that day. "The people who took Mulder."

"I heard them, at least three, could have been more. I couldn't see much. They were dressed for it - body armor, breathing gear, the works - I was practically unconscious when they came in."

"Did they hurt him?"

"He was unconscious," he reminded her, wondering if she was expecting him to change his answer or just scared that he might. "They had no reason to." Which didn't mean that they wouldn't have hurt Mulder, of course. It was a safe bet that they were hurting him now.

"Why didn't they kill you?"

"I was no threat. Especially not after this." He waved his battered looking hand. The attackers had even shot the satellite phone, cutting off his only means of calling for help. If the Fibbies hadn't shown up he'd have had to spend at least another week holed up in the quarry just to get into good enough shape to drive. Assuming he could have found a way to handle the cans of food and bottles of water.

Grudgingly, he admitted to himself that he was impressed that the FBI had found the place at all. Fine detective work by Scully to spot his activities in St Louis and solid investigative performances all round to track down that Internet connection so quickly. He really shouldn't have let Mulder talk him into that little adventure. It had been an indulgence. It had already cost Mulder his freedom and might now cost all of them their lives.

In retrospect, it had been inevitable; the only surprise was that it had taken so long. Mulder had coped without Scully, but when coping wasn't enough, his thoughts had turned to her. Intellectually he'd gone along with the big picture that Krycek painted. Call it martyrdom or masochism, Mulder could be talked into self-sacrifice, particularly if it placed him at the center of his own universe. But once Mulder had the idea in his head that Scully might not be out there, coping in adversity, carrying on regardless, it was impossible to distract him from it.

"You're telling me," growled Scully, "that Mulder could have left here at any time but he didn't even try?"

Krycek rocked back in his chair, mildly surprised that the Alex fucking Krycek label was absent from Scully's latest speech and even from her expression. He looked at Skinner and Doggett, then back at Scully, and had to bite down the desire to make the kind of reply that could do real damage to her connection to Mulder. "I didn't say he could leave. I just said that he was free to leave. He wasn't my prisoner."

"Enough riddles. Why should we believe you?"

"I told you. Get the laptop out of the truck and look at the files. 73/378671 and 292544 were particularly interesting to Mulder. You may find 94/1708976 informative."

Scully looked at him, bright blue eyes and open mouth. He suspected that she'd caught onto his suggestion straight away. "94?" she asked.

"Yeah, now what do you suppose happened in 94?"

"My abduction?" said Scully, her face losing its porcelain stillness as she stammered out the words.

A couple of seconds later, both Krycek and the chair he was manacled to were lying on the floor. He blinked hard, trying to clear his vision and failing. Damn that hurt. The pain in his ribs from Skinner's fist made him wonder briefly if he was actually more seriously injured than he'd thought. Gassed twice. Head ready to explode. And then suddenly it was all about his injured hand and the agony of bruised and broken fingers and he forgot the rest.

Scully at least had the grace to look embarrassed when the ER doctor asked for an explanation of Krycek's wounds. Across the indignant cries of, "That's confidential," from Doggett and Skinner, Krycek supplied all the details that he considered medically useful.

"Last night. I was unconscious when it happened. Gassed, probably an opiate. I washed the boot mark off my hand later, I assume it was stamped on, lots of swelling and bruising, but nothing that broke the skin - I just tried to wrap it up and keep it still. The rest of the bruises, the lacerations to the head, the CS gas poisoning, and the broken bones in my hand, that was all today, during my, er," Krycek turned to smile at Skinner, "rescue by the FBI."

With his hand splinted and dressed, his skull declared fracture-free and a prescription for antibiotics and painkillers issued, Krycek was pronounced fit to travel.

He didn't have to try very hard to get Scully to agree that a police lock-up was no place to leave the only witness to Mulder's abduction. Despite the necessity, three Feds and a killer for hire in one two-bedroomed hotel suite was not a cozy arrangement. Apparently Scully had a room of her own elsewhere in the building but she seemed very reluctant to go to there and none of the men seemed to have the nerve to suggest it.

Needing to have everything done for him, from the simplest visit to the bathroom to dealing with the slice of pizza, almost pushed Krycek's to his limits and he pushed their limits in return.

Eventually, with enough food and drink in his belly and a little less adrenaline in his body, Krycek's anger was starting to dissipate and he was beginning to see things a little more clearly. He fixed his eyes on Scully. "You have to hide."

"What?"

"They'll come for you."

"They told you that?"

"Didn't have to. They want to control Mulder. The key to controlling him is controlling you."

"I've never - "

And Krycek laughed, cutting Scully short with a shake of the head. No, she'd never controlled him, never really even tried - it was part of why they worked so well together. But that wasn't actually the point. "Alive isn't enough. They need him working."

"He'd never work for them."

"Not willingly. Don't you get it? How many bones would they have to crack, how many limbs would they need to remove to make him do whatever they ask?" He watched as she started to shake her head and then he moved in for the kill. "I'm not talking about his bones - I'm talking about yours. He wouldn't be able to handle it. That's why the good guys lose."

Doggett walked across the room to stand protectively at Scully's side. "How do you know?"

"Because it's what I'd do."

Scully, who'd scarcely even blinked up until then, suddenly closed her eyes and Krycek felt the thunder of deja vu when the expression on Scully's face somehow reminded him of Mulder.

He moved forward to kneel in front of her, almost falling over because of how off-balance the hand injury had left him. Surprise on his side, he got there so fast that even Skinner and Doggett weren't able to stop him. "Scully," he said, leaning in towards her ear, even though he could sense the male agents' hands twitching towards their guns. "It isn't over until we say it is."

And she nodded, shivering as she slumped forward, her head suddenly too heavy for her body, elbows on her knees, face resting between her hands. Not over, not yet.

Thanks to everyone who's mailed me or said encouraging things on the mailing lists and the boards. It's much appreciated.

I've got so many questions that I'd love to ask about what you think is going to happen in Book 2, but I'll resist. I'll be happy to hear your theories though!