From: m_aulfrey@hotmail.com
Date: Sat, 12 Feb 2000 09:24:21 GMT
Subject: NEW: The Missionary (01/30) by Michael Aulfrey



THE MISSIONARY
by Michael Aulfrey

AUTHOR'S NOTES:

I should say at the start of this story that, owing to its length and
the time it took to complete, that it isn't based in the current X-
Files continuity.  It is set between "Demons" and "Gethsemane", but I
hope addresses some of the issues which changed over that time.  Like,
for example, how Mulder was able to coldly execute a government agent.
This story, I hope at least tangentially, addresses how that might have
come about.

Copyright disclaimer is included at end of entire story, along with
more extensive notes.  This is so it doesn't spoil the story.

This story is R-rated.  There is a sex scene.  There is blood and
violence.  There is torture, in one sequence.  I hope it isn't
gratuitous, but please consider yourself warned if you decide to
continue reading.

Archivists, this one is a crossover...please consult the story's end to
see what with.  All archives are permitted, but I would appreciate it
if you could let me know first. ;)

All comments on the story, good or bad, are greatly appreciated and
should be sent to m_aulfrey@hotmail.com ... I spent two years on this
one, guys, gimme a break ... :) :)

Other than that, enjoy, everyone! :)

PROLOGUE:

Death walked with him.

It was the catfooted spirit coiled in his faintest shadow, the only
companion worthy or able to follow in his train.  And at death's
shoulder, darkness, where blood and the Void made savage love and
spawned the Way, the keys to revenge, will, power.  The conviction was
more than second nature to him.

The girl emerged at five thirty-four, as she had for three weeks since
her return.  Her form was dwarfed by the northern and eastern wings of
the manor.  The mass of the house gathered the pre-dawn darkness like a
chained black hole, shadows pooling on the carefully-kept lawns.  Rose
beds and trees shrouded the house in a two-hundred metre diameter of
foliage.  A flagstone path wound out from the mansion in a silver
umbilicus to the driveway and out into the gardens.

She stooped to tie her sneakers.  As she had for the past three weeks.
For a moment there was a certain elegance to the ritual, but he
dismissed the thought immediately.  Not ritual.  Only habit, drummed in
by her boarding school masters.  The Swiss were obsessed with time:
rising time; breakfast time; lunch time; the evening meal time; study
time; sleep.  The back of his throat tasted of something unpleasant at
the thought, though he had taken careful note of it, as he had every
other aspect which might provide a further tool.

Her full name was Jessica Ann Shelley.  Age sixteen years.  All-Vermont
track and field team, straight-B student.  The first qualification
precluded excellence in the second, required maintenance.  She managed
by running two miles every morning while she was at home.  She stopped
after the first mile and did forty sit-ups before running back.  He had
timed her.  Her place on the team was justified.  She had a horse on
the other side of the estate she called Phantom, and loved the animal.
She rode it almost as frequently as she ran.

Jessica pulled the tongues of the sneakers up, bounced once or twice in
them to settle herself in them, and set off at a jog down the long,
wide driveway towards the estate's main gate.

He moved.

The wall was no match for him; the motion detectors had been the first
real line of defence, overcome six days ago.  The security cameras were
more difficult, their copper ley lines brimming with energy inside the
house, out of his reach; but human vision was no more a bar to him than
the perimeter wall's whitewashed stone.  In the six days he had prowled
the estate slowly and carefully, mapping out the range and blind spots
of each camera, seen only out of the corners of eyes, as a jumping at
shadows.  The second line had been breached a hundred times, and its
watchkeepers looked straight through the invader.  He knew the location
of every shrub better than the gardeners themselves.  The probability
was low that he would need such intimacy with his surroundings, but Sun
Tzu required him to Know the Ground.

Beyond the security cameras, the third line of defence, which he had
not dealt with yet, but the counter to which he had the means to
initiate himself.

He moved with writhing shadows of branches in the breeze, his path
curving in the arc of a scorpion's tail from his point of concealment.
Low boots touched on dead leaves and left them quiescent in the
darkness.  His body was movement liquefied: efficient, soundless, until
it reached the precise spot he sought.  There he halted with a
suddenness equal in elegance to his previous motion.  He watched the
figure in sneakers, track pants, and shirt as it jogged towards the
gate.

It was about to begin.

He had a surge of anticipation at the thought.  He extinguished it, but
there remained the concern at the lapse.  He had thought himself
prepared, spirit burrowed into calm.  He ran through the list implanted
in his mind, to smooth over the rush.  Then he picked up the girl's
footsteps, some twenty feet away.  His body tensed, though no muscle
flexed.  He felt his spirit shift from rest to the crouch of a
panther.  Waiting.  Waiting.  Patiently counting the seconds down.

It came.

His hands reached out, dark-gloved, and pulled her into the trees with
less than a whisper of sound.  Total elapsed time less than three
seconds.  His first hand snapped over her mouth.  The second tightened
around her abdomen, cutting the air off.  She struggled until he leaned
over her shoulder and she met his eyes, the only feature of his face
not covered by the hooded mask, and then only a strip, the surrounding
skin coloured with lampblack mixed with charcoal.  She stopped
struggling.  He stared down into blue eyes the colour of the ocean,
burning with fear and surprise and sudden tears.  No resignation, no
acceptance, only panic at domination by another.  His contempt surged.

The hand over her face flickered downwards for an instant.  A blade
appeared in the glove as though birthing there, a small knife no longer
than palm to slender fingertip.  Her mouth was barely opening to shout,
mutely, too late, when the gloved fist slammed the blade and her jaw
upwards, the silver metal piercing below the chin, hungry metal sliding
through flesh and then brain in a single, fluid motion.  At the same
time, his other hand blurred from the abdomen, set between her
shoulderblades, and pushed, sharply, suddenly.  The crack of her neck
carried only to his ears, less sound than that made when he twisted the
blade ninety degrees clockwise and withdrew it.  She sagged.

For a long minute, he held her there, upright, listening, staring at
the sea becalmed in her eyes.  Satisfied, he set the corpse down amid
the underbrush of the nearest shrub.  The hands momentarily traced the
wire curve of his shoulder's muscles like the gentlest of lovers.  He
collected the items he needed, and set off towards the house.  Part of
him was counting time down, but he did not hurry.  It was not the Way.

It took him less than a minute to reach the door, set into a panel with
yellow bubble glass surrounding it.  Ornate acorn-patterns had been
carved into the wood.  The door had no lock or handle.  Instead, a
small plate, white, incongruent like conscience among the ornaments.

He removed the girl's right hand from a pouch and pressed the thumb
against the plate.  A hiss of muted hydraulics, and the door shrank
back from his touch, exposing the near-darkness of the entrance hall
beyond.  He stepped inside, dropping a small wedge to stop the door
from closing, and tossed the pouch and its contents indifferently to
the floor.  Took a second to get his bearings.  Then raced down the
entrance hall, gliding on soundless feet.

The house was elegantly decorated.  Monet and Picasso glared at each
other across one junction of corridors.  He slowed when he saw a print
of the Forty-Seven Ronin, but was moving again in an instant; he knew
of its presence, looked at it only to confirm his location.  One
corridor after another.  He had memorised the layout; had already been
here, in other ways, had studied the plans.  To his vision, the
electrical wiring, air conditioning and heating ducts were all alive,
beckoning him should the need arise.  He turned two corners, reaching
the northern wing's end before he found the plain white door.  Again,
he slowed, the sudden shift from motion to stillness defying Newton.
Slipped the door open.

The security guard was dozing in a chair behind the console, hands
folded on his stomach.  Behind him, a stylised diagram of the estate's
grounds glowed green with motion detectors dreaming safe, secure
visions.  The man in black's hands blurred again.  The short blade did
not whistle as it passed through the air, and made only the slightest
of noises as it caught the guard in the left eye.  The guard's other
eye sprang open, and his mouth gaped, but nothing but the hiss of a
dying balloon came from it.

The guard's hand fluttered at the silent alarm which the man in black
had cut three days before.  The chair was on rollers.  It moved with
the guard's trembling, the spasming body drifting back until it bumped
against the wall behind it, where it stopped.  He retrieved his blade,
watched the guard's unbroken eye for long moments, and then turned to
the console.  Methodically switched off the cameras marking out his
route of evacuation.

He proceeded back up the corridors, unhurried once more, until he
arrived in the far eastern end of the mansion.  This portion of the
mansion was even more sumptuous.  He passed through dining halls and
lounge rooms with Chippendale furniture.  Thousands of dollars of
artworks flanked his path.  His eyes did not waver from the corridor
ahead, until a set of white double doors confronted him.  He opened
them with a flick of his hands, stepped inside.

It was a bedroom, occupied.  Bookshelves on the far side, though there
was no fiction there.  A small clock ticked quietly, counting out time
in a dry age. Pictures on the night table, one of the corpse he'd left
behind, the other a faded black and white portrait of a stately-looking
woman.  He took these in with a single, long gaze across the room
ending on the bed.  Dark, varnish gleaming like steel in the dimness.
Oaken.  Massive, though it had only one occupant.

The old man looked too frail to live.  His hair had perhaps been curly
once, but had long since straightened with the snow in it.  The eyes
were closed, the mouth barely opened, the wheeze of old breath the only
sound aside from the tick of the clock.  The man in black stared at the
figure for a long moment, then shook himself.  Drew out another short
blade and set it against the man's withered neck.  Woke the old man
with a slap across the face.

The man came awake with a strangled cry of surprise.  Immediately felt
the knife, and relaxed.  The man in black could see the eyes try to
recognise, and then retreat into craftiness for a moment.  And finally
to resignation.
"You are James Shelley," said the man in black.  His voice was clipped
but perfect English.  Again, his preparation.
The old man said nothing.  The man in black edged the knife an inch
further.  Heard the indrawn breath, then the old lungs, producing the
shattered, gravel-washed voice.  "Yes."
"You will tell me what you know of the Daedalus Project."
Silence.  The man in black moved the knife another inch.  Another
indrawn breath, this time through teeth pressed together behind dry
lips.  But still, silence.  The man in black considered.
"You will tell me what you know of the Daedalus Project, or your
daughter will die."
A moment's silence from Shelley.  Then a grim smile, unexpected.  "I
imagine my daughter is already dead."
The man in black stared at Shelley for a long time.  Withdrew the knife.

The screams, when they began, did not carry further than the manor's
door until the very end.

THE MISSIONARY

Special Agent Dana Scully decided that she liked the couch.  Part of it
was the location: they had set it perpendicular to the bay window,
where the morning streamed in, casting gentle bands of sunlight across
her face, warming her inside the cream blouse and dark slacks.  The
gardens outside were well-tended.  The morning traffic of joggers and
dog-walkers could be seen, but faintly, in the distance, across green
lawns, where she did not have to think about them.

More than the location, though, it was an old couch, sagging
pleasurably in the centre, and its cushions had the smell of well-loved
foam to them.  She leaned back, letting her full weight push into it.
The backrest gave way gently, filling around her in an embrace that
made her think of fireplaces and woodsmoke.  For a second, the last
week's late hours overwhelmed her, and she closed her eyes.

Bliss.

And, she realised, a feeling of being At Rest.  Motionless.  Physics
defined it as a natural condition of matter which continued unless the
object was acted on by an outside source.  She liked that definition
better than the others she knew; lying down was not necessarily
resting.  Her eyes opened.  No, not lying down.  And neither did an
embrace automatically mean warmth.  Especially when it came from a
skull-white machine; when she was slotted into it, face up, helpless
like an infant, cold plastic mask over her eyes and nose, hydraulics
keening, body chambered like a bullet-No.  Enough.  She took a deep
breath and released it, feeling her nose tickle with the strange
perfume of the foam.  It remained the best hospital waiting room she
had been in, and the best couch.

She did not see the double doors further up the hall open, but the
hospital, like the couch, was old and the heavy creaking could not be
mistaken.  She stood up, smoothing out the creases in her slacks
without thinking, and turned to the open doorway of the waiting room as
the two men came around the corner of the door.

The first one was taller than the second, dressed in a black T-shirt,
jeans, and generic white sneakers, a long gym bag thrown over one
shoulder.  She expected the bristles framing his cheeks, but where his
eyes had been hazel, there was for a second a different colour, like a
marsh green, of things decaying.  Then the corner of his mouth pulled
up in the half-smile she was familiar with, the impression flickered
out, and it was the same Fox Mulder she knew.

The man following was shorter than Mulder, but what he lacked in height
he made up in girth.  He had the look of someone who read his nameplate
- P. WALKER - to remember who he was.  Black pants.  Blue shortsleeved
shirt, the collar of which strained to keep two of his chins in place.
A holstered forty-five and nightstick made jolly companions to the
silver spray of keys hanging at his belt.  Ginger hair and frogmouth
bass eyes completed the image.  He stood just outside the doorway,
staring at the two of them.

"Thank you," she said in the direction of the guard.
P. WALKER didn't move.  "There's papers to sign at the front desk."
She glanced at Mulder with a smothered sigh.  He might have given the
slightest of shrugs.  She nodded and walked over to the door, squeezing
his arm in passing.

She followed the guard to the reception desk, where a gum-chewing
secretary, hair frizzled like steel wool, handed her a thin sheaf of
documents once she'd produced her ID.  Scully skimmed the material.
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the secretary flick a glance over
her, and then raise her eyebrows in P. WALKER's direction.
"So that was the FBI guy?"
"Yep."
"Nice ass."  The secretary wandered over to one of the filing cabinets,
selected a Manila folder.  The anger rose, but she had seen the
secretary's once-over of her for what it was and decided not to rise to
the bait.

"Was there any reason for an armed escort?" she asked without looking
up.
"Doctor's orders."
She looked at the guard.  "Agent Mulder isn't violent, either here or
in the outside world.  His psych evaluation should show that."
"We don't take risks here, ma'am."  But even as the guard said it, she
could see him shifting uncomfortably on his feet.  Something inside her
sighed and shook its head.  Raines.  The psychiatrist had taken
personal dislike to the point of crusade.
"Nor do we," she said, and signed a final page with a heavier stroke
than was strictly necessary.  "Which is why we want him back."  She
shoved the papers across the benchtop to the guard, and turned for the
waiting room.

She found Mulder on the couch, head leaning against the wall behind it,
arms stretched along the top rim of cushions.  He opened his eyes as
she stepped into the room and picked up the bag he'd left just in the
doorway.
"Hey, Scully."
"How are you feeling?"
He shrugged as he stood up.  "Okay, I guess."  She heard slowness in
his voice; his eyes blinked heavily.  Her gaze flicked to the inside of
his forearm, where a bud of cotton wool had been taped, then back to
his face.
"Did you sleep okay last night?"
He smiled slightly.  "Yeah.  Eight hours.  About the longest unbroken
sleep I've had since high school."
"What did they give you?"
"10ccs of Amitryptyline, I think.  It's completely screwed my sleep
pattern."
She nodded, cursing Raines quietly to herself.
"Thanks for coming to get me," he said.  He pushed the main doors of
St. Martin's open and stood aside for her to walk through.
"I took the day off."  Mulder glanced at her, eyebrows raised.  She
shrugged.  "Skinner wants both of us to report to him once you're back
at work, just to get the paperwork taken care of.  Most of the active
cases are still waiting on responses from police departments, county
medical examiners - besides, I didn't know whether you'd be capable of
driving yourself."
He nodded.  Peered around, then set off in the direction of her car as
she walked next to him.  She thought about the other reasons for the
layover.  Silence except for the crunching of the bitumen under their
feet.
"How did they treat you?" she asked, finally.

He stopped at the door of her car for a moment, seeming to collect
himself.  Then glanced at her.  "About as well as can be expected.  It
wasn't so bad.  They had Ritchie Valens."
"Music therapy?"  She had heard about the technique in some Alzheimers'
treatment programs.
"Well, there was music, and there was therapy.  All in one convenient
package.  Elmer Fitzsimons, thirty-four, to be exact.  Native of Boise,
Idaho, now convinced he grew up on an orange plantation in southern
California with his brothers Miguel and Rico.  He was good.  No,
Scully, I'm serious.  Even a capella, the guy was a hit.  He practiced
six hours every day that I was in there."
She felt the smile building in her.  "Six hours?"
"Six hours.  Can we stop at a music store on the way back? I've got
this intense need to buy and smash a flamenco guitar."
She shook her head and opened the car door, the smile breaking
through.  "Come on, Mulder.  Let's get you home."

"How did you get me out so early?" he asked, when they were about a
quarter of an hour out from his apartment.
"There was no reason for them to keep you in a mental hospital for the
full eight weeks, Mulder.  Especially just for observation.  You, me,
and everybody else at the OPR hearing knew that.  They were looking for
a scapegoat."
"Baa."
She rewarded the attempt with a smile.  "So things got a little behind
at the office.  I was too busy rounding up people to testify that your
condition was pathological, as opposed to psychological."
"Anyone I know?"
"I wouldn't think so.  A couple of friends of mine from Georgetown
drafted some medical reports on the results of your blood tests for
me."  She hadn't thought that the contacts from her residency would
come in useful.
"You must have had someone testify from the psychiatric side, though."
"Tom Maguire at Columbus Medical Centre.  Also Joseph Gemmell over at
Johns Hopkins."
Mulder looked impressed.  "Not bad, Scully."
She shrugged.  "I can't really take the credit.  Maguire knew your
book.  He was more than happy to help out.  Gemmell was introduced to
me by someone from Georgetown, but he seemed to know you by reputation
anyway."
He nodded, but his brow furrowed.  "Did you talk to them personally
before they arrived?"
She nodded.  His gaze was careful.  "You flew halfway across the
country to get Maguire?"
"He was the best I could find."  His expression, a curious blend of
self-consciousness and guilt, fanned a flame of annoyance inside her.
"Stop looking like that."
"Like what?"
"Like you weren't worth it."
He pretended innocence.  "I wasn't-"
"I didn't do anything less than what you've done for me in the past."
Or, she added to herself, what you'd do for me in the future.  "If you
can't take reciprocation, that's too bad."
There was an uncomfortable silence in the car for a few seconds.  Then
he grinned.  "I guess the fact they wouldn't let you talk to me
wouldn't have helped much."
"Well, no."  She glanced in the rear view mirror, changed lanes.
"Having Raines swearing on Bibles about your mental incompetence didn't
make it any easier, either."
He was silent for long moments.  Scully looked at him.  He was staring
out of the window, hand rubbing slowly across the stubble on his chin.
"Did he give you a bad time while you were in there?" she asked softly.

Silence.  For a few seconds.  "I think it got worse after he figured
out I knew the tests backwards."
"I don't understand."
"Well, I went for the same answers each time on the DSM, and all they
could get out of me on the Rorschach was that they were showing me
inkblots.  Maybe Raines didn't like normal results.  I got bored."
She heard the hint of the guilty schoolboy in his voice, and glanced at
him.  "You didn't."
"Well, I-"
"You did."
He gave her a weak smile.  "Did you see any reports turn up about a sex-
crazed transvestite with an Oedpial complex and alternate personalities
named Ethan, Jimbo, and Denise?"
She closed her eyes for a second in exasperation, but somehow a smile
slipped around it.  "No.  If I had, I might have been tempted to let
you do the whole term.  What did Raines do?"
"Well, he scotched the results of that test, from what you're telling
me, and decided to start with the petty things, like turning the lights
on and off every four hours through the night."
Her amusement died.  "Jesus."  Scully turned onto Hegal Place.  "You
should file charges.  Treatment like that--"
He shook his head.  "No.  I think getting me out early was the best
payback you could have given to the good doctor.  Prison included,
which wouldn't make much difference to his social life anyway."
She chewed her lip for a moment.  "Well, he certainly didn't think much
of you.  I could see that at the review hearing."  Forty-eight hours
ago.  A lifetime.  She saw Mulder begin to shrug, but then his closer
look at her expression and slow nod in acknowledgment.  Half of her was
remembering the doctor, with a tic under his left ear, in the hotseat
before the OPR board.  She'd done a fair job of asking him the right
questions.  But the slow burn remained there on Raines' face all
throughout.

Not a pleasant recollection.

She slowed to a halt outside 2630 and turned the car's ignition off.
The street was quiet.  Two business-suited men got out of their car on
the opposite side of the road.  One of them took a second glance as a
young woman jogged past.  She saw Mulder's hand hesitate on the handle
of the car door before he looked across at her.
"You did feed my fish, didn't you?"
She stared flatly at him.
"Okay, bad question.  Come on up.  I think we could both use some
coffee."
The suits were walking across the road, towards her car.  She noticed
they were both wearing sunglasses.  She nodded at them.
"Mulder?"
He looked at them as they drew up alongside.  She noticed his hand
slide unobtrusively to the glove compartment, where he knew she kept
the pistol, though his face remained calm.  One of the suits tapped on
the passenger side window, and he rolled it down.
"Something we can help you with?"
The man in sunglasses slowly put his hand into his suit jacket.  She
tensed.  His fingers lightly touched the button release of the glove
compartment's door.  The man withdrew a wallet, flipped it open.  She
recognised it.  She and Mulder carried the same.
"Special Agent Jefferson, FBI."
Mulder was silent for a second.  She couldn't see his expression.  He
leaned closer to the window.  "Paul?"
The sunglasses came off slowly, after the wallet was back in its
pocket.  The eyes were invisible from this angle.  The voice was a deep
baritone.  "Agent Mulder, step out of the car, please."
"What's going on, Paul?"
"Better get out of the car first."  This delivered with weariness.
Mulder turned to her with a shrug.  She turned to her door to find a
young, sunglass-hidden face regarding her, though it stepped back as
she opened the door and got out.

The agent was maybe ten years older than Mulder, white hair forming at
his temples.  The first question that struck her was why he was still
working the street.  She was more accustomed to men of his age at the
FBI behind desks that had long nameplates with Supervisory Special
Agent at the end. He had a face well-worn in by time and the elements.
Then she noticed his eyes.  Sad, sad eyes, dark like water under
caverns.  He was about as tall as Mulder, give or take an inch.  Maybe
a little more heavyset, but athletic nonetheless even in his age.

Mulder extended a hand.  After a moment of looking at it, Jefferson
took it.
"It's been a while," said Mulder.
Jefferson nodded silently as he let Mulder's hand go.  Drew a breath,
seemingly as much to pick himself up as to gather air to speak, and
fidgeted with his sunglasses as he spoke.  "I have a warrant for your
arrest, Mulder."
"What?" The word exploded from her.

END OF PART 01/30

The Missionary (02/30)
by Michael Aulfrey


Jefferson glanced at her for a second, then back at Mulder
inquiringly.  She felt a twinge of annoyance.
"My partner, agent Scully. What's going on, Paul? Why the arrest
warrant?"
Jefferson gave Scully a brief, apologetic nod before facing Mulder
again.  "I have to bring you in.  Suspicion of murder.  There's some
bodies in Vermont."
"Vermont?  Agent Jefferson, Mulder's been under observation in a
Washington hospital for the past three weeks!"
Jefferson held up a hand.  "It's not my call, agent Scully.  The ASAC
on this case was planning to send a black-and-white around to bring
your partner in by force; I talked him into letting me do it this way."

"What have they got, Paul?"  Mulder's voice was abruptly, glacially
calm.  No shock on his face, only an analytical gaze.  Jefferson
glanced at the agent behind Scully.  A moment of silence, a nod from
Jefferson, and she heard footsteps receding.  Jefferson looked back at
Mulder.
"Something.  The ASAC's playing cards close to his chest, but I hear
he's a happy man.  VCU executed a search warrant on your apartment late
last night."  Jefferson's face was grave.  "The arrest order didn't
come until they finished."
"Who's the ASAC?" she asked.
"Young kid.  Don't think you'd know him.  Tom Colton."

A sinking feeling caressed her stomach.  She heard Mulder, speaking
next to her. "I thought he was in South Dakota."
Jefferson probably didn't pick up the undertone of annoyance there.  A
voice in the back of her head disagreed, and she finally locked onto
what it was: a kind of shared moment between the two men, something
that bespoke an older history.  Something, the voice noted uneasily,
that she was not part of.
Jefferson's gaze narrowed.  "You know him?"
"You could say that."
"Come on, Mulder.  It's me."
"It had to do with an X-File.  It was a while ago."
Which was describing World War Two as an after-dinner debate, but then,
neither of them really wanted to remember that particular case.

Jefferson sighed.  "He got transferred back to Washington about twelve
months ago.  Made something of a name for himself at his field office,
so I hear."
Mulder grinned acidly.  "He must have worked hard to get to be Mother."
The older agent snorted.  "No shit.  The little pinprick's been jamming
the ass of every supervisory agent he can find to get this
assignment-"  Jefferson seemed to realise what he was saying and shook
his head.  The moment of shared experience between them vanished.
"Anyway, it doesn't matter.  You're going to have to come with me,
Mulder."

Mulder didn't move.  They stood like that for a second.  Her skin
prickled.  She noted, detached, Jefferson's subtle shifting of his
weight to the back foot; his hand casually but lightly resting on the
lapel of his suit jacket.  Shoulder holster; or one on his hip.  There
was no way to tell, from where his fingers touched the material.  Mark
of a veteran.
"We can do it hard or easy, Mulder."
She looked at Mulder, alarmed.  His expression had hardened.  She felt
a tingling at the base of her neck, an awareness that her back
presented a wide target.  Suddenly, she wanted very much to know where
the other agent was.  The sharpness of her partner's manner stood firm
for a second.  Then he glanced at her, eyes flickering from hard
resolve to indecision, then back at Jefferson.  Seemed to come to some
sort of decision.
"Give me a minute, okay?"

Jefferson was silent for a second before he stood back, hand slipping
away from his lapel.  "Make it fast."  He moved across the street to
lean against the busteed he had arrived in, staring off towards the
highway.  The agent he'd come with walked across, seeming to be asking
Jefferson some kind of question, was dismissed with a shake of the head.
"Guess I'll take a raincheck on the coffee."
She turned back to him.  "Who is he, Mulder?"
Mulder glanced across the road, eyes resting on the older agent for a
long moment.  "Paul Jefferson.  He's a twenty-year agent out of Violent
Crimes.  We worked together - on a few cases.  Before I found the X-
Files."
The sense of unease she had shifted up several notches.  Usually,
Mulder was a lot better at concealing things he didn't want her to
know.  "You never mentioned him before."
"It was - a difficult time."  He hadn't taken his eyes off Jefferson.
But when his next words came, they were fainter.  "It could be true."
She didn't understand for a second, but then caught the tension behind
his words.  Her gaze snapped around to his.  "Mulder--"
He was looking at her again.  "Scully, I can't remember.  There's a
hole in my memory two days wide.  I can't think how or why I'd do it,
but with all that we've-"
"No, Mulder."  She shook her head, and felt again the amazement at how
he thought of himself: as some kind of mobile cannon, thinking he could
be or believed himself capable of unjustified killing.
"Scully, I don't think-"
"No.  The - procedure - you were under causes hallucinations and
violent behaviour, that's true.  But there is no conclusive proof that
you pulled the trigger on those two people.  And until I see proof
otherwise, I don't believe you've been responsible for a third."
He looked at the ground, biting his lip, before he raised his gaze to
meet her own, and this time he had the weakest of smiles on his face.
"Always so sceptical, agent Scully."
She thought she should have been irritated, but wasn't.  She looked at
Jefferson, who was peering at his watch.  She took a deep breath.
"Look, we can't do anything about it now.  When you get downtown, sit
tight, okay?  I'll be there as soon as I know something."

He nodded mutely.  There was acceptance and resignation, she could see
that; but more, still, the verge of something akin to fear.  It
overcame her.  Sometimes, it was so easy to forget how perfect his
implacable mask could be.  She reached out, rubbed a hand on his arm.
The smile that answered her, weak though it was, calmed some of her own
fear as well as his.
"You'd better go," she breathed.
He slowly pulled the duffel bag out of the car, looked at her for a
long moment, and walked slowly over to Jefferson's car.  Jefferson got
into the driver's seat, while the other got in next to Mulder in the
rear seat.  The movements were sudden, swift, and over in a moment or
two, but she stared at the spot where the car had turned the corner for
a long time after that.

*			*			*

New York; the darkest night he could remember, yet filled with a
strange clarity.  He climbed from the wreckage of the car, the driver
dead, windscreen shattered.  Iss-hogai was in his hand, the metal of
the sword's edge shining with the fearful shades of steel he had so
often admired.  He brought the dai-katana to the ready position,
letting his awareness flicker over the surroundings, analysing.

Across the opening of the small plaza, buildings looming overhead like
gods in judgement, a dark shape beckoned at both the visual and the
prescient levels.  Saigo, garbed all in black, his own katana drawn and
glinting with a light of its own.  They regarded one another for a long
moment.  Then, with such speed Nicholas Linnear could not determine
which of them had moved first, they were rushing at each other, the
kiai building in each of them like a storm of energy.

Saigo's blade was arcing, flashing like a wing of steel, and he brought
his own up to defend in the Fire and Stones Cut.  Nothing but superb
Japanese-forged steel could survive the impact.  The weapons collided.

Iss-hogai snapped.

Saigo's blade continued its swing downwards, a minuscule second later
arcing into Nicholas' flesh, bone, his heart-

Nicholas woke up, half tensed for the scream.  The coldness vanished,
replaced only by that of his own sweat and the sheets over him.  His
heart thundered.  For a moment, he stayed stock-still, muscles
tightened, awaiting.  Nothing came.  He let the breath out he had drawn
in.  Nothing.  No nightmare sprang at him.  Not Saigo, his cousin,
katana flashing in the New York night.  Saigo was two years dead.  Iss-
hogai had not snapped then; indeed, the blade had served its master
well, sufficiently that he was still here in New York today.

He took another breath, letting the pooled adrenalin wash from his
system, and got out of the bed.  He could hear the West Bay Bridge
traffic humming, off in the distance.  Padded quietly out of the
bedroom, into the kitchen, to the refrigerator.  Pulled out the jug of
cold water and poured himself a glass.

And thought of Justine again.

It had been eight months already, part of him noted quietly.  The same
part also reminded him that she was not coming back.  There had been a
certain focus to the night in Tokyo, he realised in hindsight, a
certain sharpening of the experience that should have warned him, but
did not.  Instead, she had left, crying, suitcase bumping against the
delicate shoji walls, and had not returned.  He had not thought about
it at the time, and perhaps that was what had kept her away.

Time.  He had come back to the States soon after that, reassuming
control of operations on the East Coast with relative simplicity.
Originally, he had returned with the intention of seeking her out, as
he knew she would have come back here, like a satellite in a decaying
orbit.  But the days became weeks, and weeks, months, and the company
demanded more and more of his time, until eventually, at a point he
could not pinpoint with any accuracy, he had stopped looking, and
devoted himself to Sato-Tomkin fully.

It was ironic that now he should have no blood link to the family which
had made him one of the most influential figures of cutting-edge
computer technology.  Tomkin Industries had been Raphael Tomkin's
child, to the point where he had neglected his other, flesh and blood
offspring: Gelda, and Justine.  Then Nicholas had met Justine, and
shortly after that, before his death, Raphael had bequeathed the
company to Nicholas, in the midst of one of its greatest crises.  A
crisis which Nicholas had overcome, with the melding of Tomkin
Industries with Sato International, a Japanese company.

Now, even Justine was gone.

He hadn't advanced the company at the price of family; Justine had left
him for other reasons, a complex mix of inadequacy, distance, and a
feeling of loneliness in Japan which he could understand but not
relieve.  These were but the first layer.  There were others.  Their
daughter.  He thought of it, but remembered her, tiny, beautiful, in
the humidicrib, fighting with the spirit of a samurai to retain the
wisp of life within her, and the concept shattered in his mind, the
aching welling up inside him.  Justine had taken it very badly.  He
suspected that the mourning process in her had never really finished.
Not that he expected it to.  His own - ability to deal with it had also
contributed to Justine's flight back to the bosom of the United States.

There lay the central reason for why she had left.  It had not been a
flight solely of her own volition, but also a primal repelling by
something within him, something he had no control over.  Karma, he
thought.  Then dismissed the notion: it was baser than that.  The
repelling had come from what he was.  And what he had in his possession
now.  It was inherited: his mother had borne one son; his grandfather,
none.  Circumstances, perhaps - but more probably, something in the
contained, raging power of the emeralds resting in his care.

He set the glass back on the counter and moved from the kitchen into
the living room.  His hands swept over a portion of wall, found the
panel which was not visible to the eye.  He gained impossible purchase
on the wall and pried the square of wood panelling aside.

Something was wrong.

He threw the panelling aside, began turning the tumblers of the lock by
instinct, but he knew it was wrong.  Horribly.  There should have been
a tightening of the atmosphere around this safe.  As though the
universe were drawing a shawl around its shoulders.  He got the last
combination and threw open the safe.  Inside was an elegantly decorated
copper box, a sparkling green and red dragon intertwined with a roaring
tiger elegantly carved onto the lid.  He half-wrenched the box open.

The dragon and the tiger no longer guarded anything.  Only sixteen
indentations in the green felt of the box's lining.  The emeralds.
Gone.

And on their absence, the coming of darkness.

Nicholas stood there, staring at the sixteen indentations.  While his
mind screamed.

*			*			*

He had a briefcase open on his desk, browsing through a folder in one
hand, an intelligent frown creasing his forehead.  She could see that
through the glass wall, ignoring the secretary's call for her to stop,
as she strode through the door and slammed it behind her.

He looked up, and she spotted at least half a dozen emotions flicker
across his face in the space of a few seconds.  The last of them was
calm. Tom Colton bore more than a passing resemblance to a young Randy
Quaid, but the face he had settled into was beyond personality, beyond
time: the face of bureaucracy.  She hated that face.  Worse still that
it now met her on someone who had basically fucked his way up here to
the seventh floor of the Hoover Building.

The secretary burst into the room, looking apologetically at Colton.
"Sir, I'm sorry-"
Colton shook his head, held up a hand.  "It's all right, Andrea.  Agent
Scully, won't you please come in?"
The secretary looked confused, but retreated, closing the door a little
more quietly behind her as she moved out of sight, down the hall.
Colton put the file he was holding into the briefcase and clicked it
shut.
"Dana, it's good to see you, but I really don't have the time.  I have
to catch a flight to Vermont."
"Why did you haul him in, Colton?"
He seemed suddenly absorbed in picking up pens and sticking them into
his pockets.  She walked across the room and tossed the folder she was
carrying onto the desk, where it made a satisfyingly loud slap as
leaves of paper slid from it.  He hesitated with the sound, looking
down at the documents, then at her.  "What're these?"
"Medical reports on Mulder's condition while he was interned at Saint
Martin's Psychiatric Hospital.  Where he's been locked up for the past
three weeks."
Colton pulled open one of the top drawers of his desk, fished a pen
out, and picked up the briefcase.  "I'll take a look at them when I get
back.  You can leave them with my secretary."
"Tom, you may not like Mulder-"
"My personal like or dislike of agent Mulder doesn't enter into this."
He started around the edge of the table.  She stepped in front of him.
He halted, stared at the ceiling with a long exhalation through his
nose that came out as a muted hiss.
She waited until he was looking at her again.  "Mulder hasn't left
Washington for over thirty days.  Whatever it is that happened up
there, you can't commit a physical crime from two hundred miles away."
"What are you, his lawyer?"
She felt the frustration rising and forced it down.  "I just don't
think it's solid investigative technique to haul in and charge one of
our own just on suspicion."
"The Bureau was called in just because he's one of ours.  And until
you've got solid evidence to show me he's not the UnSub, he stays in
the slammer.  Unless he makes bail."
Inwardly, she gaped at him.  As it was, some of the amazement crept
into her voice.  "You're serious? You think you've got enough for a
prosecution?"

Colton put up a display of deep thought.  "Well, let me think about it
for a second.  At the crime scene, we find Mulder's FBI identification
dropped under a bed.  We find what could be the murder weapon with
bloodstains on it in his apartment.  Gosh, agent Scully, that sounds
like a preliminary hearing at least, doesn't it?"  He slid past her.
She took a second to digest it.  It only reinforced the only possible
scenario.  She turned, overtook him just as he swung the door open. Put
an arm across the doorway, the heel of her palm connecting with wood of
the jamb, sending a satisfying jolt up her arm.  Colton jerked back,
stared at her.
"He's being set up."
"Jesus, I don't believe this."  He raised a arm halfway to heaven in
supplication.
"He needs to be on the team, Colton.  You know his work.  If your UnSub
is obsessed enough to frame Mulder, it stands to reason that Mulder's
your best chance of finding that person."

Colton's bureaucracy-face broke through to anger, was quickly hidden as
he glanced back towards his desk, and she realised the mistake she'd
made.  "I haven't got time for this."
She felt the anger rise, raging.  She tried to fight it down, but the
words spilled out anyway.  "It wasn't his fault you got transferred,
Tom."
His bureaucracy-face slipped completely.  "Oh, really?"  His voice had
dropped to a low growl.
The dam burst.  "You disregarded his advice and his profile.  You
pulled two agents off surveillance of Tooms' house.  It was your call,
not his."
"You know, this doesn't make any difference to me.  I spent two years
in South Dakota on white-collar crime, so what? The fact is-"
"The fact is that you're pursuing a vendetta against Mulder because he
turned out to be right!"
Colton took  what he no doubt thought was a patient breath.  "The fact
is, he's the accused in a murder investigation.  And I've heard a lot
more about him.  Whatever nous he had as a profiler, it's gone.  He's
been chasing his little green men around for so long it's fried his
brain.  And now it's cost someone their life."  He tapped his finger to
his temple for emphasis.  Some of the venom came out of his
expression.  "Most of the bureau knows it, too; Assistant Chief Blevins
has been saying it for months now.  And you're going right down the
tubes with him.  You should think about that."
"You're making a mistake, Colton." Anger burned inside her, but this
time she was more successful in forcing it down.  She settled her
voice.  "Pound for pound, he's the best criminal profiler you've got
access to."
The softening in his tone slammed shut.  "Yeah.  Mulder the one-inch
punch.  Figures you'd be leading his cheer squad.  I've heard about how
experienced he is."

It hit her in the face, robbed her of her intention, robbed her of
words, for a second.
"Just what are you implying?"
His anger came down and was replaced by the slightest of sneers.  "Oh,
come on, Dana.  Everyone knows what goes on down in the basement.  Or
perhaps I should say what goes down in the basement."

Her stomach tightened.  She felt it land, and cut.  Deep.  So.  That
Cassandric voice that whispered to her sometimes had been proved right
after all.  But then there was a deeper, stronger voice inside her, a
voice suspiciously like a navy drill instructor's, pulling her spine
straight.  Not in front of this man.  "If that's the best investigative
assessment you can make, Colton, you're way off base.  And you don't
deserve to be in charge of the operation."

He snorted and pushed past her, storming down the brightly-lit hall,
the windows affording a magnificent view of the Washington skyline.
She listened carefully until he had slammed the closest door, then
leaned against the doorjamb, first her shoulder, then her temple,
staring out at the unchanging Washington skyline, and let her will
unclench.  The thoughts whirled in her mind.

She had heard the rumour before.  Well, maybe not in so many words;
rather, she had intuited it watching some of the secretaries while they
were watching Mulder; seeing the heads move close and speak in hushed
tones, quickly splitting apart when they saw her, the movement
simultaneous preening and looking down their noses at her.  That
particular behaviour, she remembered, had started about the time they'd
brought Modell down.  She winced inwardly.  Not a good idea to do the
things she and Mulder had done in front of a twenty-strong SWAT team,
half of whom were based at the Hoover building.

There was nothing to it, of course.

But there was lingering doubt.  The intensity of emotion was real.  So,
too, the devotion on both sides of the equation.  It just had a
different character to it.  More than friendship, certainly.  Not
beyond the sexual, or equivalent to it - just - different, somehow.
She sighed in frustration.  She didn't have a word for it.  Just that
it wasn't what the looks said it was.

Yet - No.  She was his partner in the professional sense, and his
friend, but nothing more.  A shadowed place and candlelight on skin
flickered.  It held there in her mind's eye, taut, taunting, for a
moment.  No.  Not Mulder.  Not - that way.  The vision faded.

Shame struck her, at letting the impression get out that caused the
rumour in the first place, and she was suddenly angry at herself for
the emotion.  She-they-had done nothing wrong.  Worse than that was the
impression that she was only staying in her position because of her
alleged bedmate.  Above everything else, she had always prided herself
on standing on her own two feet.  The Academy, first; then teaching
there.  Taking the job with Mulder as much on interest as on orders.
Now, this.  The anger surged up, both at herself for the shame and
Colton for putting such a rumour out.  She held onto it, preventing its
release.  No sense in that.  Leave it until later, when you can discuss
it with

[take it out on]

Mulder.  The thought stopped her, not simply for the truth of it, but
with the sudden surprise that she would automatically want to tell
him.  The idea revolted her, somehow like bringing up her sex life with
her father.  Never mind that even if she did, he would either choose to
delicately ignore it out of some implied duty he believed he owed to
her, which would make it bad, or he would dismiss it with a long-
suffering shake of the head and some dry rejoinder, which would make it
worse.  No.  Stop it.  Let it go.

"Agent Scully?"
A voice like gravel on silk.  Her surprise mixed with resignation; even
when she was officially on vacation time, he seemed to know where she
was.  She pushed away the anger and turned to face Skinner as he padded
quietly up the hall, light sparking from the rim of his glasses.
"I didn't expect you to find me so quickly, sir."
"A friend of mine in VC called me at home this morning.  I figured
you'd be wanting answers, so I had Security page me when you got in."
The anger returned.  "You could have called one of us before this
started."
"There's a procedure to be followed here, agent Scully.  Giving a
murder suspect a headstart is not part of that program."
She closed her eyes with his words, knowing the truth of it, but
shaking her head.  "Mulder didn't do it."
Skinner flickered a glance past her without moving his head.  "That's
not a popular opinion around here right now."
"Sir, unless he set a bomb just before he was put into the hospital and
set the timer for three weeks, he couldn't have done whatever they're
saying he did."
"And you're positive?"
She considered for long seconds.  Never mind the factual difficulties.
Could he have dropped over the edge somewhere, picked up another shadow
lying in wait behind those eyes: Billy Joel's Stranger? Mulder - and so
many like him - had skated close.  Will Graham dodged the abyss by
cracking; his nervous breakdown was as much ripcord as affliction, she
had heard.  But God knew he had reason enough, after Lecter half-killed
him, before they brought the bastard in.  Mulder - maybe because he was
younger - he'd walked the tightrope more successfully.  And Patterson-

No.  Dammit, she knew him.  Even on that night, in the house on
Quonochontaug, when she'd felt an imaginary crosshairs centred on her
heart, she hadn't really feared Mulder was out of control.  Her heart
had known it as soon as she met his eyes.  Even hallucinating, she
could still see the struggle for control going on: a struggle directed
inward - not a conflict directed at, or including, her.  Had she seen
him lost under the weight of the induced memories then, she would have
her doubts now.  But she had remembered no loosening of her muscles, no
adrenalin surge of relief, as he arced the weapon over his head,
pivoting on his knees, to put a series of rounds into the wall.  She
had known.

Could he have killed three innocent people?

No.  "Yes."  She looked up into Skinner's face.  "If I knew what he was
being accused of, I could be absolutely certain.  But I don't."

Skinner was staring at her, his eyes thinned.  She held up against that
gaze.  There had been a time when she hadn't been able to.  He
scratched the back of his head and glanced out one of the windows
before answering.
"Agent Mulder's being charged with the murder of an industrialist named
James Shelley and his family.  They were found in Barre, Vermont, at
Shelley's residence.  Forced entry, I don't know all the details.  The
murder weapon was apparently a blade of some kind."  Skinner was
staring at her again.  "When Barre PD found an FBI wallet and badge at
the crime scene, they called us.  The badge number and the ID both
match agent Mulder's identification.  From that point, the Bureau got
in on the case."
"We can take care of our own," she said, almost to herself, her lip
curling.  Something was buzzing at the back of her head, like a shape
seen out of the corner of her eye.
If Skinner heard the bitterness in her voice, he didn't respond to it.
"Mulder's apartment was raided at four this morning.  They found a
broad-bladed knife with bloodstains on it.  Forensics is still
analysing for a DNA match, but they do know the blood type on the
weapon was AB, the one shown on Shelley's driver's licence."
She shook herself from dismay at the words.  There was still that
feeling that she was missing something.  "What was the time of death?"
"They only just got the investigation started in Vermont.  Agent
Colton's on his way to take up the case on scene.  The DNA matching on
the blood type is the only forensic test that's been ordered so far."
"But he brought Mulder in anyway," she said.
"Someone wants answers for why this man died, agent Scully.  Agent
Colton was in the right place at the right time."

She caught the intensity behind his last words, and didn't like it.  At
all.  "Sir, what are you saying?"

Now he did glance around, saw no one in the immediate vicinity.  His
voice lowered.  "What I'm saying is that whoever put agent Colton on
the case wants a quick solution to this man's murder.  Whatever else
Colton may be, his reputation is that he's good at quick solutions.  So
I suggest that if you don't want to see agent Mulder arguing his
theories to a judge, you get him out of jail and onto this case, and
fast."

The image set off other, worse ones in her mind, and they ruled for a
few moments.  Did Vermont have the death penalty? She needed to get
onto the scene.  Get Mulder onto the scene.

[everyone knows what goes down in the basement]

Dimly, she heard Skinner call her name.
"Sorry," she said, looking up at him again.  He was silent for a few
moments, seemingly assessing her.
"Agent Scully -"  The shift in his voice was abrupt.  The sound
reminded her of a time lost to her, back when she was sixteen, coming
home from a particularly bad date.  The same subtle catch had been in
her mother's voice.  She struggled to control the expression on her
face that must have alerted him.  "Is something wrong?"
"No, sir."
Silence.
"Do you know any judges?" she asked, to fill it.
Skinner seemed to shrug, and mentioned some names.

END OF PART 02/30


The Missionary (03/30)
by Michael Aulfrey

Calm, first and foremost.  Assess each situation dispassionately.

There was some useful weaponry in emotion, of course.  Fear, in
particular: command through fear of force rather than force itself.
Aggression, anger - these, too, had their uses.  Revenge as well.  But
all of these tools were nothing without the handle of calm to wield
them, since the first mistake the fearful, or the angry, person made
was to equate calm with control.

And control was, after all, his job.

So.  Calm.  Dismiss the rumblings among his informants in the lower
ranks, and get out of the car without a hesitation or fumbling that
might give his consternation away.  Stand tall.  Draw the cigarette box
from the pocket, and then one from the pack, with the ritual and
elegance of a ballet.  As he lit it, slowly, he flicked a gaze from his
momentarily bowed head at the places where he knew the small, gleaming
black eyes watched him in this bare, concrete garage.  He wondered what
they would be thinking, up on the other end of the fibreoptic cables.
Some of them would be thinking what an arrogant bastard he was; others
afraid of him, which was as it should be.

And perhaps, back in the shadows of even the main conference room, one
or two silently urging a sniper to take their shot now, now, now, while
he was exposed.  The thought sent a thrill of excitement through him, a
peak against the weariness.  He gently overrode it, restoring his
calm.  Still, there was some amusement in the feeling.  Life, valued
and experienced only on the edge of death.  It called to mind the day
he had tasted the power, the sudden knowledge that he was, in every
sense of the word, untouchable.  Amusement, this time with a tinge of
nostalgia.  The seventies.  Glory days.  Star Wars at the end of the
decade, and the work in West Virginia at its beginning.  He could still
taste iron-haired Ronald Croner's elation that-

He took another drag on the cigarette, killing the memories.

Dispassionate assessment.  A meeting had been called, but the Curtain
was still in a collective pout over the Tunguska affair.  Far East had
declined to attend.  Africa hadn't even been brought into the picture.
Which left the Angel Isle, his own constituency, western Europe, and
the mad Australians.  He didn't like the presence of the last on any
occasion.  Unfortunately, their chancy possession of a good third of
the Antarctic continent made them players whether anybody liked it or
not.

Therefore: it was not the announcement of the Date. Relief sighed in
one part of his mind, which he stilled quickly.  He would know if they
were here for that.  They would all be here for that, pale and
trembling in their two-thousand dollar suits.

So it was internal, a problem in his jurisdiction.  Mulder? No.  One of
his underlings would have said long before now.  Something else, then.
He dropped the cigarette, again with the same graceful movement, ground
it out with a single, measured twist of his heel.  Slowly pushed his
hands into the pockets of his overcoat and walked to the iron door,
where the two security guards stood waiting, a pair of unblinking
sphinxes.  He briefly looked them up and down while he waited for the
elevator to arrive, visualising not for the first time smashing the
Adam's apple of the first and driving fingers through the eyes of the
second.  It wouldn't have been hard: amateurs, both of them.  He had
only provided the building, not the security.

There was no control panel in the elevator, no choice of floors.  Only
one, single button, which he pressed.  He barely felt the movement
upwards.  At least this part of the project was running on time and on
schedule.  They bickered amongst themselves, had done so since before
they rose to their ranks.  This time would be no exception.  Even faced
with the enormity of the Project's implications, they could not come to
a consensus.  He shook his head ever so slightly.  The Viscount
probably had a quote for the occasion.  Consensus had led them all into
this situation, and now the lack of it was going to-

The door slid open on silent tracks.  He took no heed of two more of
the tame apes who tensed as he strode out of the elevator, a little too
quickly for their liking.  He lit another cigarette, and frowned, even
in spite of the cameras that followed his movements from the centre
light of the hallway, where he had installed them.

What situation could warrant his presence?

He glanced at a copy of da Vinci's sketch of a flying machine, hung
just to the right of the elevator doors.  The print was on yellowed
paper, though there was no glass over it.  A single spotlight dripped
illumination over pencil strokes, smudges: mistakes made, corrections
done, the vision unaltered.  They had picked it up in Italy a few years
ago.  It had been the Viscount's idea to put it here, of course; the
officious old fucker loved his ironies.  Cost had not been a factor,
though the print was perhaps the only one of its kind.

He blew smoke on the picture, and walked down the hall to the polished
oak wood of the morning room's double doors.  For a second, he was
tempted to throw both of the doors open and try and scare them.  Then
remembered the necessity of the calm.  He quietly opened one of the
doors and stepped inside, closing it just as silently behind him.

They turned, as one, to face him.  Consensus.  He stifled a snicker.
The light was flowing into the room from the bay window, gold lettering
on bookcases afire, varnish of redwood tables glowing.  He had the
sudden impression of a dream: some of them closer, more visible,
silhouetted against the light from the window; others, near the
bookshelves, indistinct through that same light, like angels in the
architecture.  He glanced around, found the clear ashtray on the
sidetable, unconcerned by the gazes that had locked onto him.  Stubbed
the cigarette out.  Grace, precision of movements.  Counterfeiting
nonchalance.

One of the faded forms near the window seemed to lift and float
unsteadily towards him, in a walk too slow to be a waddle but too
quickly to be a crawl.  No seraphic litheness of movement here.  If he
had to choose a mythical creature, he might have picked Leviathan.  The
features sharpened when he'd traversed the light slanting from the
window and was back into the half-shadows lurking around the door.
Corpulent.  Dark eyes, half-burning.  Full lips, which hid the
shattered, broken lower teeth from a knife-fight in the back streets of
the Vatican over forty years ago.  He was unsurprised that Pandeone
never had them fixed.  Despite his razor's edge of a mind, despite his
wealth and the circles they moved in, Pandeone remained a hood.  There
was a stink to Mafia that never left a man, even with the passage of
thirty years.

Pandeone stood there for a beat, staring at him.  The gaze did not move
over his face, or his clothes.  Merely looked into his own.  The
examination was akin to being regarded by a snake.  Then, a long
sucking in of breath from the Italian, and then the wheeze of the
voice, barely able to get past the fat-encrusted lungs.
"You will explain yourself to us."
He let his face shift to just the right note of dramatic surprise.
"There is something to explain?"
Pandeone's eyes blazed.  "You come before us and claim ignorance?"
He regarded Pandeone with tired amusement.  "The last I heard, I hadn't
been appointed a deity."
Pandeone was silent.  Perhaps trying to translate his words into
Neanderthal.  Sucked breath in.  "You will explain to us the reasons
for the termination in Vermont."
He ran through the catalogue, past and present, in his head.  Nothing
sparked.  "There are many deaths in any American state on any given
day.  Do you assume that I had something to do with one out of
thousands?"
"We've precious little time for your fencing," said the clipped,
accented English voice from across the room, and the Viscount, Lindley,
was marching forward, materialising from shadows and the silhouettes
which hung in the background like wallpaper.  His elegant, clean hands
were balled into fists.  "I only hope you have the best of reasons."

He let the smooth exterior drop away; Pandeone he might fuck with, but
Lindley usually didn't make a fuss unless it was something serious.
"What's happened?"
Pandeone's face wrinkled in disgust, and the Italian glanced at Lindley
for a long moment, enough for the silent question to cross the room.
He saw the Englishman's face ripple with momentary irritation, and the
subtle hand movement: stay.  Pandeone looked back at him, eyes still
burning with that concealed fury.  Lindley's face had creased in
confusion.  But smoothed in comprehension just as quickly, and then to
grim objectivity.  "Shelley has been killed."
Bad.  He stepped past Pandeone.  "Alone?"
"Along with his daughter, and their guard."
"It's confirmed?"
"Our source reported to us after making final identification less than
three hours ago," said Pandeone.  His expression was similar to a man
who had once tried to kill him.

All right.  Think.  First: shift blame.
"We had nothing to do with this," he said.
There were assorted curses from around the room like an aging choir.
"After what you've told us before, you expect us to believe that?"
Pandeone's face was half a sneer.
"Believe what you want.  I knew nothing of this until two minutes ago."
"Then if not you," said Lindley, moving closer, "who?"
Second: provide a suspect.  "An outside element."  That raised a
distinctly unpleasant thought, not one he preferred to bring up.  "Or a
dissenter."  And an even more unpleasant one, but he had to face them
with all the possibilities.  "Or perhaps - a beginning."

He could see them thinking about it.  The blood was running out of
their faces.  A little taste of the way it would be when the Date was
announced.  But then Lindley shook his head, flicking away the fears.
"From what we have heard, the method used was terrestrial."
"Terrestrial?" he echoed.  "Shelley was under protection.  You're aware
of the pains to which both myself, my group, and even this -"-He could
not resist the wry grin-" - august assembly has gone to in order to
validate that protection."
"You find the death humorous?"
"Only in so far as you believed me responsible."
Lindley stared at him.
He drew another cigarette from the pack.  "As I said, Shelley was
protected.  Even without the luxury of conducting my own investigation,
I can tell you that whoever did this was a professional."
"Or knew something about us."

The voice came from across the room.  He turned towards it.  Purcell
was moving towards them, blue eyes bright, hands thrust into his
pockets.  His shock of blond hair, unique among the others, was almost
white in the sunlight.
"What do you mean?" said Lindley.
Purcell rubbed at his chin.  "Isn't it possible Special Agent Mulder
could have done this?"
Unbelievable.  He tapped the cigarette against the outside of the pack
to hide his sudden frustration.  If all of the young ones were like
this - a line from Yeats came back to him; the centre does not hold.
"Mulder is under control."
"He is aware of our existence.  He's been a problem before."
"Special Agent Mulder doesn't have the will to do what he knows is
necessary."
"Frankly, considering the day's events, I'm not reassured.  How do you
know that Mulder was not responsible for this?"
He took a couple of steps closer to Purcell.  Lit his cigarette.
"Mulder is a mystic.  Not a killer."  He took a long drag.  "But the
man who did this is."

Purcell took a step back, but managed to keep from fidgeting with his
tie.  He approved.
"Shelley's murderer must be found," Lindley was saying.  "The work he
was doing-"
"I'm aware of that," he said without turning.  Still watching Purcell.
"Then find him.  And quickly."
He noted the omission, decided to play it out.  "And do what?"
Lindley's eyes narrowed.  "What must be done."
"That wasn't so difficult, was it?"
"You have your assignment."  Pandeone's eyes were hooded.  "We expect
that you will carry it out."
"As always."
He turned and left the room.

*			*			*

"I expected you earlier."
Nicholas Linnear inclined his head in apology.  Fukashigi set the
teacup down before him soundlessly, rested his hands on his thighs, and
looked at Nicholas, epicanthic eyes unreadable.
"I had to exhaust all the other avenues first, sensei."
"Prudence may be the road to destruction in this instance.  What did
you find?"
"Nothing."  He felt the fear rise up, bubbling in his stomach.  He took
refuge in the ritual, slowly picking up the teacup, and putting it to
his lips.  The bitter taste of herbs soothed the back of his throat.
"I looked, over the entire house.  There were no signs of intrusion,
nothing I could detect."

Fukashigi seemed to consider the words, picked up the teacup again,
sipped slowly, set it down.  The faintly bitter smell was as
unobtrusive as the coolness of the tatami mats beneath them.  "Your
birthright, the emeralds your grandfather passed down to you, stolen."
He looked at Nicholas for long moments, before speaking.  "I felt it
begin."
"I did not."
Silence.
"You know what it was?" asked Nicholas.

Fukashigi set the teacup down, set his hands on his thighs folded
beneath him.  The wrought, wrinkled hands were a stark contrast to the
grey kimono they rested on.  "We must apply logic in this instance,
Nicholas.  The emeralds were in the safe, as you described.  They were
not upon your wakening.  Yet this much is true: no burglar could have
escaped your notice.  No common burglar, in any event."
"Forgive me, but where does this lead us?"
Fukashigi shook his head, the light glinting off the silver threaded
through his black hair, as if he found youth's impatience amusing.  "I
will ask you one question, Nicholas: did you dream?"

Nicholas thought back.  He had dreamed of Saigo, but-
"Yes."
"Then there is only one explanation: your conscious mind had been
suborned.  Your subconscious was attempting to warn you of the
emeralds' theft."
"Sensei, a dream-"
"-Is more than a musing of the mind.  At least for you, as we both
know.  Review, then: what could have been the source of your mind being
overcome?"
Nicholas considered, letting the impossibility of it settle back out of
the way.  "The Kobudera -- dark sorcery.  But Saigo is-"
"Saigo is not the only one who knew of the Kobudera."
He did not have to mention Akiko.  "I was guarded against most forms of
the Kobudera.  You made that happen - the night before I met Saigo,
here, in New York.  Are there some forms of Kobudera which you did not
guard me against?"
"There is one."  Fukashigi's face was grim.  "There is always one."
"Then what?"
"It is called the Ebony Cloak.  A wilted, dry branch of the Kobudera.
One taught so long ago that even the jaho have forgotten its use."
"How, then, is it possible that you know of its existence?"
"I know of it from legends.  Stories.  Of itself, the Ebony Cloak is of
little power.  But it circumvents your skills.  And with the emeralds,
it - becomes more potent."
Nicholas left aside the implications of the last sentence for a
moment.  "Are you saying that the burglar was jaho - a magician?"
"No.  He is - outside.  One who has learned things no man should know."
"The Kobudera as a whole is a forbidden art."
"Sometimes, Nicholas, it is not so much the art itself which is as
deplorable as its sensei."
"Then who was this man's sensei?"
Fukashigi was silent again, but this time Nicholas' mind reached out,
across the years, back to the stories his mother had told him.
"It cannot be."
Fukashigi just stared at him.
"You suggest something that is no more than myth."
"Review, Nicholas: myth, superstition, legend - these are all names the
arrogant give to their own ignorance.  Your heritage is part of that
myth."
The fear returned to Nicholas' stomach.  He shook his head.  "I refuse
to believe that.  This thief - he is a man."
Fukashigi seemed to deflate.  "And you must find him.  I am in no
position any more to demand you take a particular course.  Not when
your kenjutsu, the one thing in which I might have instructed you, is
equal to my own.  I merely offer this as counsel to you, and warning.
You may have no choice.  One thing is certain: you must recover the
emeralds.  Without them, all is lost."

Nicholas nodded slowly, letting the disbelief drain away.  Fukashigi
bowed, got up, and left the room.

Nicholas' cell phone rang.  He drew it out, and answered it.  It was
Joe Senncraft in Washington.  Who had news.



END OF PART 03/30


 The Missionary (04/30)
By Michael Aulfrey

The corridor was well-lit, though he couldn't see a source for the
illumination.  His concern was the colour: not familiar white or gold,
but a pale lime like chlorophyll.  The corridor curved away to the
left, around an unseen corner, like a rib.  A sound like a mechanical
groan, rising through the lower octaves and then falling again, rippled
through his body.  He stopped.  Nothing, but the rising and falling
groan again.  And again, after an interval of several seconds.  Not a
groan; more a heartbeat, somewhere deep below him.  Or breath.

In the distance, there was a skittering sound.  He thought of arachnid
legs.  His eyes tracked the source, further ahead in the corridor, but
saw nothing.  His hands moved independently, without his gaze to guide
them.  They lifted the pistol from its holster, the metal clearing
leather with the gentlest of sounds, like silk over skin.  Beneath his
bare feet, the ground was an unpleasant temperature somewhere between
lukewarm and cold-

[behindyou!]

He spun.  His finger half-tightened on the trigger.  Nothing.  Turned
again, the weapon snapping round.  Nothing.  An empty corridor.  He
took another sharp breath, held it.  Tried to tell his heart to slow.
Blood pounded in his ears.  He stood motionless.  Eventually, the
thumping slowed.  Another low rumble rippled through him.  He took a
slow, careful breath before moving on down the corridor.

His nostrils flared as the faint smell of sulphur touched them.  Felt
his pulse quicken again.  He was sure, now.  Down here.  What he
searched for was down here, somewhere.  He couldn't remember how far he
had come, but it didn't matter.  He increased his pace down the
corridor, moving on the balls of his feet.  The pulse-wave of the
heartbeat came again.  He moved into a slow trot, letting his breath
out slowly.

[carefulcareful don'tletthemhearyou]

He slowed.  The wall had been a long, homogenous stretch of material:
not plastic, not steel.  Now there was a break in that stretch: a high,
narrow rectangle on the wall, curving upwards and over him, its base on
the floor.  The smell of sulphur was suddenly back, buzzing at his
mind.  He glanced up the corridor, back the way he had come.

There was a sudden blackening of the air there, despite the light
glowing and despite the lack of any change in the colour of the
atmosphere.  A curling of the universe on itself.  Something.  Large.
He heard nothing.  Saw nothing.  Smelled nothing but the sulphur.  The
unseen heartbeat rolled through his body.  His mind screamed.

[itscoming]

He lifted the pistol in the direction he'd come.  Reached out with
eyes, ears, every sense, desperately probing for some idea of what his
most primitive cells knew was on its way.  Nothing.  Only the recurring
impression of arachnid legs, wandering through his mind.

[dontbehere!]

His hand snapped out, almost of its own volition, to thump soundlessly
against the unyielding rectangle.  Where he had touched it, where it
had been impregnable, harder than tungsten, a crack appeared, sliding
back from his touch as though wounded, shrinking away from him.  The
material withdrew to the edges of the rectangle, where it stopped.
Beyond was black, unbroken darkness.  He stared at it, trying to get
some sense of distance, perspective.  He found none.  His spine crawled.

[itsalmosthere!]

His body jerked with the thought.  His heart pounded in sudden
agreement.  He took a last, quick glance back the way he had come and
threw himself through the doorway, into the darkness.  Behind him, the
material of the wall slid forward and over the rectangle, eager.  It
slammed shut behind him, leaving him in the dark.  For a long,
panicking second.  Then, light, without source, intensifying over a
matter of moments, until the room was almost as bright as the
passageway he had left.  He breathed out, suddenly, reflexively, a
small cough coming loose.  He'd been holding his breath.  He turned.

It was shaped like an upturned scallop shell, ripple marks on its outer
surface.  The edges flared outwards in what immediately brought petals
to mind.  Petals, flaring out and then upwards and backwards upon
themselves, drooping over the heart of the depression in the surface.
Resinous, white matter, barely translucent.  A faint glow cycled
within, and somewhere below him, the heartbeat pulsed.

There was a splash of colour at the centre.  Flesh.  Naked.  About five
feet tall.  His gaze caught on a solemn, sleeping expression and red
hair framing her head like a garland.  His heart thundered.  Before he
moved, the ends of the petals stretched, impossibly, solid matter
unable to do what they were, lengthening, into thin stems.  Branch-
thin.  Hair-thin.  Understanding smashed into his mind.  He tried to
move, but was too late.

The stems snapped out, the ends diving into flesh, puncturing.  Blood
sprayed as one pierced the temple.  Others writhed over her.  One into
her arm.  Another to the hip.  Her eyes flew open.  Sudden pain was
there.

She screamed.

He tried to move.  Was unable to.  The pistol hung useless by his
side.  She screamed again.  A stem withdrew, red-pointed.  Drew back,
then surged forward.  Dived into her inner thigh, close to the juncture
of leg and torso.  This time she shrieked.  Stems glowed as blood
trailed along their lengths.  The smell of sulphur burned in his
nostrils.  He tried to cry out.  Beg.  Rage.  His biceps surged at his
sides.  No movement resulted.  The madness was coming.  He watched.  He
had no choice.

Her screaming changed.  Pulsed.  Took syllables.  Words.  One word,
shrieked.  Over, and over, like a mantra.  Or a prayer, which he could
not grant.
"Mulder!"
Another stem hovered over her eye, seemed to regard it.  He tried with
every ounce of strength he had to cry out and failed.
"Mulder!"
A stem tore loose from her chest, just above the collarbone.  Blood
fountained in a thin stream.  Things moved under the skin of her
stomach, rippling it.
"Mulder!"
The universe began to collapse.  The room shook, walls trembling.
Still the Thing at the centre of the flower plunged on.  Red stains
flicked across its surface from the arteries.  The stems dived.  Again
and again, a frenzy of sliding motion.  Her calls degenerated back into
a single, mindless shriek.  The world exploded, and he felt the justice
of oblivion come, that he'd failed, that he hadn't kept her from the
dark things, and at the end of it he seemed to hear her voice again,
calling, like a final curse-

"Mulder!"
The voice was deeper, but he woke half-clenched, torso snapping erect.
His head cracked against the steel beam of the upper bunk.  Pain
erupted in his head, and he fell back to the pillow, hand clapping to
the sudden heat there.  There was a snort from the same voice, across
the room.
"Wakey-wakey, agent Mulder."  A deep, resonant voice.  He tried to
blink away the supernovas bursting behind his eyes and turned in its
direction.  Winced.  Bright colours flickered as he slid around on the
bed and slowly sat up.  The cop was in Washington blues, light from the
fluorescent lamps overhead gleaming off the vinyl of his jacket,
quartered by the bars on the cell door.  The cop's grin was twisted
like a wire coathanger.  "Let's go."

Mulder glanced at his watch.  Remembered they'd confiscated it.  But it
was late.  Very late.  "Where?"  He squeezed his eyes shut, rubbed with
two fingers at them.  Sudden noise in the darkness under his own lids:
the click of keys in the lock, the roll of tumblers, and the screech as
the door swung open.
"You got some pull, buddy.  Your bail came through."
He thought about that for a long second.  With the pain, the concept
took a while longer to get all the way through his mind.  Before he
could ask who, there was a clicking of heels from further up the
corridor, and a glance of the guard in that direction, followed by him
stepping aside.

His head was hurting badly.  His eyes took an age to process the figure
and assemble it from its component parts into a single, recognisable
image.  A dark coat, calf-length.  A smaller figure, more slender: not
male.  Then he saw the white hair, and his tired brain locked it
together in a Gestalten rush.
"Hello, Fox."
No softness of tone there; only an acknowledgment of his existence, if
anything.  For a moment, the memories rushed back, and he stared at the
floor, sighing heavily, before looking up, a surge of pain in his
stomach.  His mother held his gaze for a moment or two, her blue eyes
icy, before she turned and started back down the hall, without looking
at him.  He stood up and shuffled out of the cell, leaning against the
bars as he did.  She was closing a frosted glass door behind her.  He
followed her, strength returning with each step, ignoring the guard who
was looking at him with a quizzical expression.

The steel doorknob was cold on his hand.  Nervousness boiled in his
stomach.  It brought with it all the usual suspects: guilt.  Shame,
somehow.  Submissiveness.  All the things that he had once associated
with his father.  They'd all been there, at other times, but diluted
down.  They'd come back especially badly the last time.  Strange how,
despite flying across oceans, to Oxford, he'd never really left home in
some ways.  He drew a long, steady breath in, calming himself, and
turned the knob.

The room was even more stark than his cell.  The walls were a dull
grey, the linoleum below an unimaginative pattern of black and blue
squares.  A tattered poster about drink driving hung on one wall.  The
table and chairs beside it were made of steel.  She was sitting on the
other side of the table, hands folded in her lap where he could not see
them, looking down at the table.  He stood there a moment, looking at
her.

She'd gotten so old.

"Thanks," he said, and closed the door.
"You needn't thank me," she said.  Her face was bleak.  "Your father's
money might as well be put to some use."
He stared at the poster, thinking back.  There were a number of
possibilities, from his memory of the will.  He'd left a diverse
portfolio on trust, as well as a couple of managed funds for any
children Fox or Samantha might have.  He and his mother had been
surprised.  The lawyer hadn't been.  The will had been executed in
1970; was never amended.  People changed situations, but infrequently
their wills.

Even so, few of the assets could have been converted to cash so
quickly.  "The McDonnell Douglas shares?"
She nodded, in the corner of his eye.  Still did not look at him.  The
silence stretched out, the pain rising with every moment.
"How did you know I was here?" he asked, finally, though he could guess.
"Your partner called me."
"Is she here?"
"She said she had to take care of some paperwork.  She's outside."

Silence again.  She was suddenly interested in her hands.  He didn't
need to look to know that her left thumb would be rubbing over the edge
of her curled index finger, the rest of the hand partly clenched.
Back, and forth.  Clockwise, counterclockwise.  Always moving.  She'd
done so at the reading of the will.
"I'm sorry."
Now she did look at him.  "Your apology is not accepted."
The words wrenched at him, and in spite of his pride screaming against
it, he looked at her.  His voice came out cracked.  "Mom-"
"It's always the past with you, Fox."  Her voice was trembling, as
well.  Her hands had not moved from her lap.
"Mom, did Scully tell y-"
"She told me.  Do you think that makes it all right? Do you think that
just because you were hallucinating, or whatever it was - do you think
that means that I didn't hurt when you accused me of -?"
"I don't, Mom.  I don't.  Really."
"Don't lie to me, Fox!"  Her voice snapped out at him with whipcrack-
force.  His body flinched.  No reason, no training, could have stopped
that reaction.  It was not he who responded; it was a twelve-year-old
boy.  "You thought it enough to accuse me of it.  Don't try and tell me
that you didn't think it happened."

Something awoke inside him; a part of him that was suddenly tired of
it.  He brought it to the surface with an internal heave, through the
layers of anxiety springing from openly opposing her.  "I had it on
good authority."
Her face stiffened to a death mask.  He fought recoiling from the
rigidity of that expression.  He expected the next words.  "Whose
authority?"
"You know."
Silence.  He trembled.  She was staring at him, a hand pressed to her
lip.  Then breathed slowly, and lowered her hand.  "What did he tell
you?"
"That he knew you since before I was born."  The words were hard coming
to his mind, as though he had to put each letter together one at a time
to make the sounds serve him.  "Is it true?"

She looked away.  He slowly walked over, pulled out a chair, and sat
down facing her, forearms on the table.  "Is it true, Mom?"
"Yes."  Her voice was little more than breath.  "Yes, I knew him."  Her
voice took on flint again.  "I never betrayed your father."
"Who was he?"  He was startled to hear the softness of his own voice.
She looked at her hands for long seconds, as though considering the
interpretation to take of his question.  Finally, she looked at him
again.  "Fox, there's almost nothing that's left of that time in my
memory now.  Your - your father kept those memories, not me.  All
that's left are emotions, feelings."

The sudden familiarity of it stopped him in his tracks.  He'd often
wondered where his own ability to block out the night of Samantha's
abduction had come from.  Not from his father, as he'd thought.  "What
kind of emotions?"
She shook her head.  "Please.  It doesn't matter any more.  It's all so
far in the past now it's dust."
"Mom, it's so much a part of my present that someone keeps trying to
kill me over it."
"What are you talking about?"
"Samantha.  I told you, once before.  She wasn't just kidnapped.  She
was abducted."
"Fox-"
"I'm sure of it.  More sure now than I ever was.  I've seen a place.
I've seen - things - that tell me there's more.  Every time I get
closer to what happened to her, someone, or something keeps blocking
me."
"Don't, Fox.  It was bad enough losing her-"
"Whatever that is, Mom, it's bigger than just Sam.  Big enough to kill
for."
"Enough!"  The command voice snapped out, and he fell back into his
chair.  She looked at him sadly.  "Don't do this to both of us.
Samantha's gone.  I've tried to put her to rest."
She stood up, pushing the chair back, wiping at her eyes.  "I'm going
home.  I don't expect repayment for the bail.  Goodbye, Fox."
"She's alive, Mom," he called after her as she opened the other door.
"And he knows where she is."
He saw her hesitate at the last, but then quickly straighten and walk
out of the room, slamming the door behind her.

His stomach loosened.  There was an ache just above it.  He rubbed
absently at the bristles he hadn't been given a chance to dispense
with.  Vaguely, he heard the door behind him open quietly and close.
Heeled shoes, behind him, then to his right, a chair pulled out with a
whisper of metal across the floor. Scully's eyes were inquiring as she
sat down.
"Mulder?"
At least five or six questions in that word, most of which probably
related to the heavy mass at his soul.  He had a sudden surge of
exasperation, but suppressed it.  "It's not important."
Silence.  She was watching him, a look in her eyes reminding him of
pity.  He shook his head, feeling the annoyance rise, but pushing it
down relentlessly.  "It doesn't matter, Scully.  What did you find out
about what I've been charged with?"
She held his gaze for a moment or two longer, then sighed and set
papers on the table.  "There were three murder victims, although they
think it was an assassination centred on the owner of the house they
were found in.  An industrialist named James Shelley."
"Who were the others?"
He was suddenly aware of her gaze, very keen on him.  "Final ID is
still pending on one of them, but one of them they think was Shelley's
daughter, the other his security guard."
He closed his eyes.  "So why was I arrested?" he asked after a moment.
He heard her lean forward, putting her elbows onto the table.  "Your
badge and identification were found underneath a bed at the crime
scene.  The murder weapon was a blade of some description, and they
found blood matching Shelley's blood group on a knife at your apartment
when they searched it."

He opened his eyes, recognising the caution behind her voice.  "It's a
setup, Scully-"
"I know, Mulder.  And not a very good one.  To start with, you were in
a hospital here.  There's another reason, though.  It was bothering me
for hours.  The fact is, there's only one possible scenario for when
someone could have obtained your identification."
He felt a chill at the base of his spine as he worked it out.  "My
missing time."
She nodded.  "I didn't notice it when I met you on Rhode Island.  It
only occurred to me a long time after that.  I was more worried about
the clip from your issue being short two rounds.  But you didn't have
your ID when you woke up.  Somewhere in those forty-eight hours, it was
taken from you, maybe while you were whacked out, I don't know.  Then
they locked you away in your cell."
"My God," he heard himself whisper.  "He must have been watching me."
There was a pause from her; he was staring inwardly, didn't see her
expression.  Too busy trying to warm the chill creeping from his spine
to his heart.  "Who?"
"Shelley's killer.  He knows what happened in those forty-eight hours.
Where I was.  Maybe even what happened to the two-"
Deep inside his mind, at the edge of consciousness, a spark went off.
Dimly, he heard her speaking, her tone clear and cutting, in that voice
that she always used to try and lay down the law to him.  "There's no
hard evidence to support that, Mulder.  For all we know, your ID could
have been sold on the black market and then left at the crime scene by
whoever it was who killed these people."
"And then a potential murder weapon is found at my apartment?"
"Your address is a matter of public record.  You know that."
"With a matching blood type?"

She was silent in the wake of that.  He had a creeping feeling,
growing, from the spark in his mind.  His dark intuition.  An itching
of knowledge that refused to surface, gliding below the waterline of
his conscious mind like a black-hooded manta.
"Did you say the murder weapon was a blade of some kind?"
She nodded.  "They haven't done all the testing yet, but they're
calling it a short-handled blade.  Razor sharp."
It couldn't be.  But still the manta cruised, silent, unceasing,
pursuing its course.  "James Shelley was murdered in his bed?"

Her look of surprise brought the dagger of ice to rest against his
stomach.  "How did you know?"
His mind fell back.  Only base impulses and concepts flashed to his
body.  Act.  Quickly.  No time.  He stood up.  Realised he should say
something.  "We have to get up there right now."
"Mulder?"
But he hardly heard it, striding around the table, pushing through the
door his mother had departed through minutes earlier.  He caught a
brief glimpse of her face, suddenly confused, hurt blossoming-

Murdered in his bed.  Short-handled blade.  It couldn't be.  It
couldn't.

END OF PART 04/30



--
Michael Aulfrey                   X-Phile, Anti-Gump
Barrister & Solicitor              X-Fanfiction


Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
Before you buy.


From m_aulfrey@hotmail.com Fri Feb 25 16:47:30 2000
Date: Sat, 12 Feb 2000 10:08:41 GMT
From: m_aulfrey@hotmail.com
Newsgroups: alt.tv.x-files.creative
Subject: NEW: The Missionary (04/30) by Michael Aulfrey



The Missionary (04/30)
By Michael Aulfrey

The corridor was well-lit, though he couldn't see a source for the
illumination.  His concern was the colour: not familiar white or gold,
but a pale lime like chlorophyll.  The corridor curved away to the
left, around an unseen corner, like a rib.  A sound like a mechanical
groan, rising through the lower octaves and then falling again, rippled
through his body.  He stopped.  Nothing, but the rising and falling
groan again.  And again, after an interval of several seconds.  Not a
groan; more a heartbeat, somewhere deep below him.  Or breath.

In the distance, there was a skittering sound.  He thought of arachnid
legs.  His eyes tracked the source, further ahead in the corridor, but
saw nothing.  His hands moved independently, without his gaze to guide
them.  They lifted the pistol from its holster, the metal clearing
leather with the gentlest of sounds, like silk over skin.  Beneath his
bare feet, the ground was an unpleasant temperature somewhere between
lukewarm and cold-

[behindyou!]

He spun.  His finger half-tightened on the trigger.  Nothing.  Turned
again, the weapon snapping round.  Nothing.  An empty corridor.  He
took another sharp breath, held it.  Tried to tell his heart to slow.
Blood pounded in his ears.  He stood motionless.  Eventually, the
thumping slowed.  Another low rumble rippled through him.  He took a
slow, careful breath before moving on down the corridor.

His nostrils flared as the faint smell of sulphur touched them.  Felt
his pulse quicken again.  He was sure, now.  Down here.  What he
searched for was down here, somewhere.  He couldn't remember how far he
had come, but it didn't matter.  He increased his pace down the
corridor, moving on the balls of his feet.  The pulse-wave of the
heartbeat came again.  He moved into a slow trot, letting his breath
out slowly.

[carefulcareful don'tletthemhearyou]

He slowed.  The wall had been a long, homogenous stretch of material:
not plastic, not steel.  Now there was a break in that stretch: a high,
narrow rectangle on the wall, curving upwards and over him, its base on
the floor.  The smell of sulphur was suddenly back, buzzing at his
mind.  He glanced up the corridor, back the way he had come.

There was a sudden blackening of the air there, despite the light
glowing and despite the lack of any change in the colour of the
atmosphere.  A curling of the universe on itself.  Something.  Large.
He heard nothing.  Saw nothing.  Smelled nothing but the sulphur.  The
unseen heartbeat rolled through his body.  His mind screamed.

[itscoming]

He lifted the pistol in the direction he'd come.  Reached out with
eyes, ears, every sense, desperately probing for some idea of what his
most primitive cells knew was on its way.  Nothing.  Only the recurring
impression of arachnid legs, wandering through his mind.

[dontbehere!]

His hand snapped out, almost of its own volition, to thump soundlessly
against the unyielding rectangle.  Where he had touched it, where it
had been impregnable, harder than tungsten, a crack appeared, sliding
back from his touch as though wounded, shrinking away from him.  The
material withdrew to the edges of the rectangle, where it stopped.
Beyond was black, unbroken darkness.  He stared at it, trying to get
some sense of distance, perspective.  He found none.  His spine crawled.

[itsalmosthere!]

His body jerked with the thought.  His heart pounded in sudden
agreement.  He took a last, quick glance back the way he had come and
threw himself through the doorway, into the darkness.  Behind him, the
material of the wall slid forward and over the rectangle, eager.  It
slammed shut behind him, leaving him in the dark.  For a long,
panicking second.  Then, light, without source, intensifying over a
matter of moments, until the room was almost as bright as the
passageway he had left.  He breathed out, suddenly, reflexively, a
small cough coming loose.  He'd been holding his breath.  He turned.

It was shaped like an upturned scallop shell, ripple marks on its outer
surface.  The edges flared outwards in what immediately brought petals
to mind.  Petals, flaring out and then upwards and backwards upon
themselves, drooping over the heart of the depression in the surface.
Resinous, white matter, barely translucent.  A faint glow cycled
within, and somewhere below him, the heartbeat pulsed.

There was a splash of colour at the centre.  Flesh.  Naked.  About five
feet tall.  His gaze caught on a solemn, sleeping expression and red
hair framing her head like a garland.  His heart thundered.  Before he
moved, the ends of the petals stretched, impossibly, solid matter
unable to do what they were, lengthening, into thin stems.  Branch-
thin.  Hair-thin.  Understanding smashed into his mind.  He tried to
move, but was too late.

The stems snapped out, the ends diving into flesh, puncturing.  Blood
sprayed as one pierced the temple.  Others writhed over her.  One into
her arm.  Another to the hip.  Her eyes flew open.  Sudden pain was
there.

She screamed.

He tried to move.  Was unable to.  The pistol hung useless by his
side.  She screamed again.  A stem withdrew, red-pointed.  Drew back,
then surged forward.  Dived into her inner thigh, close to the juncture
of leg and torso.  This time she shrieked.  Stems glowed as blood
trailed along their lengths.  The smell of sulphur burned in his
nostrils.  He tried to cry out.  Beg.  Rage.  His biceps surged at his
sides.  No movement resulted.  The madness was coming.  He watched.  He
had no choice.

Her screaming changed.  Pulsed.  Took syllables.  Words.  One word,
shrieked.  Over, and over, like a mantra.  Or a prayer, which he could
not grant.
"Mulder!"
Another stem hovered over her eye, seemed to regard it.  He tried with
every ounce of strength he had to cry out and failed.
"Mulder!"
A stem tore loose from her chest, just above the collarbone.  Blood
fountained in a thin stream.  Things moved under the skin of her
stomach, rippling it.
"Mulder!"
The universe began to collapse.  The room shook, walls trembling.
Still the Thing at the centre of the flower plunged on.  Red stains
flicked across its surface from the arteries.  The stems dived.  Again
and again, a frenzy of sliding motion.  Her calls degenerated back into
a single, mindless shriek.  The world exploded, and he felt the justice
of oblivion come, that he'd failed, that he hadn't kept her from the
dark things, and at the end of it he seemed to hear her voice again,
calling, like a final curse-

"Mulder!"
The voice was deeper, but he woke half-clenched, torso snapping erect.
His head cracked against the steel beam of the upper bunk.  Pain
erupted in his head, and he fell back to the pillow, hand clapping to
the sudden heat there.  There was a snort from the same voice, across
the room.
"Wakey-wakey, agent Mulder."  A deep, resonant voice.  He tried to
blink away the supernovas bursting behind his eyes and turned in its
direction.  Winced.  Bright colours flickered as he slid around on the
bed and slowly sat up.  The cop was in Washington blues, light from the
fluorescent lamps overhead gleaming off the vinyl of his jacket,
quartered by the bars on the cell door.  The cop's grin was twisted
like a wire coathanger.  "Let's go."

Mulder glanced at his watch.  Remembered they'd confiscated it.  But it
was late.  Very late.  "Where?"  He squeezed his eyes shut, rubbed with
two fingers at them.  Sudden noise in the darkness under his own lids:
the click of keys in the lock, the roll of tumblers, and the screech as
the door swung open.
"You got some pull, buddy.  Your bail came through."
He thought about that for a long second.  With the pain, the concept
took a while longer to get all the way through his mind.  Before he
could ask who, there was a clicking of heels from further up the
corridor, and a glance of the guard in that direction, followed by him
stepping aside.

His head was hurting badly.  His eyes took an age to process the figure
and assemble it from its component parts into a single, recognisable
image.  A dark coat, calf-length.  A smaller figure, more slender: not
male.  Then he saw the white hair, and his tired brain locked it
together in a Gestalten rush.
"Hello, Fox."
No softness of tone there; only an acknowledgment of his existence, if
anything.  For a moment, the memories rushed back, and he stared at the
floor, sighing heavily, before looking up, a surge of pain in his
stomach.  His mother held his gaze for a moment or two, her blue eyes
icy, before she turned and started back down the hall, without looking
at him.  He stood up and shuffled out of the cell, leaning against the
bars as he did.  She was closing a frosted glass door behind her.  He
followed her, strength returning with each step, ignoring the guard who
was looking at him with a quizzical expression.

The steel doorknob was cold on his hand.  Nervousness boiled in his
stomach.  It brought with it all the usual suspects: guilt.  Shame,
somehow.  Submissiveness.  All the things that he had once associated
with his father.  They'd all been there, at other times, but diluted
down.  They'd come back especially badly the last time.  Strange how,
despite flying across oceans, to Oxford, he'd never really left home in
some ways.  He drew a long, steady breath in, calming himself, and
turned the knob.

The room was even more stark than his cell.  The walls were a dull
grey, the linoleum below an unimaginative pattern of black and blue
squares.  A tattered poster about drink driving hung on one wall.  The
table and chairs beside it were made of steel.  She was sitting on the
other side of the table, hands folded in her lap where he could not see
them, looking down at the table.  He stood there a moment, looking at
her.

She'd gotten so old.

"Thanks," he said, and closed the door.
"You needn't thank me," she said.  Her face was bleak.  "Your father's
money might as well be put to some use."
He stared at the poster, thinking back.  There were a number of
possibilities, from his memory of the will.  He'd left a diverse
portfolio on trust, as well as a couple of managed funds for any
children Fox or Samantha might have.  He and his mother had been
surprised.  The lawyer hadn't been.  The will had been executed in
1970; was never amended.  People changed situations, but infrequently
their wills.

Even so, few of the assets could have been converted to cash so
quickly.  "The McDonnell Douglas shares?"
She nodded, in the corner of his eye.  Still did not look at him.  The
silence stretched out, the pain rising with every moment.
"How did you know I was here?" he asked, finally, though he could guess.
"Your partner called me."
"Is she here?"
"She said she had to take care of some paperwork.  She's outside."

Silence again.  She was suddenly interested in her hands.  He didn't
need to look to know that her left thumb would be rubbing over the edge
of her curled index finger, the rest of the hand partly clenched.
Back, and forth.  Clockwise, counterclockwise.  Always moving.  She'd
done so at the reading of the will.
"I'm sorry."
Now she did look at him.  "Your apology is not accepted."
The words wrenched at him, and in spite of his pride screaming against
it, he looked at her.  His voice came out cracked.  "Mom-"
"It's always the past with you, Fox."  Her voice was trembling, as
well.  Her hands had not moved from her lap.
"Mom, did Scully tell y-"
"She told me.  Do you think that makes it all right? Do you think that
just because you were hallucinating, or whatever it was - do you think
that means that I didn't hurt when you accused me of -?"
"I don't, Mom.  I don't.  Really."
"Don't lie to me, Fox!"  Her voice snapped out at him with whipcrack-
force.  His body flinched.  No reason, no training, could have stopped
that reaction.  It was not he who responded; it was a twelve-year-old
boy.  "You thought it enough to accuse me of it.  Don't try and tell me
that you didn't think it happened."

Something awoke inside him; a part of him that was suddenly tired of
it.  He brought it to the surface with an internal heave, through the
layers of anxiety springing from openly opposing her.  "I had it on
good authority."
Her face stiffened to a death mask.  He fought recoiling from the
rigidity of that expression.  He expected the next words.  "Whose
authority?"
"You know."
Silence.  He trembled.  She was staring at him, a hand pressed to her
lip.  Then breathed slowly, and lowered her hand.  "What did he tell
you?"
"That he knew you since before I was born."  The words were hard coming
to his mind, as though he had to put each letter together one at a time
to make the sounds serve him.  "Is it true?"

She looked away.  He slowly walked over, pulled out a chair, and sat
down facing her, forearms on the table.  "Is it true, Mom?"
"Yes."  Her voice was little more than breath.  "Yes, I knew him."  Her
voice took on flint again.  "I never betrayed your father."
"Who was he?"  He was startled to hear the softness of his own voice.
She looked at her hands for long seconds, as though considering the
interpretation to take of his question.  Finally, she looked at him
again.  "Fox, there's almost nothing that's left of that time in my
memory now.  Your - your father kept those memories, not me.  All
that's left are emotions, feelings."

The sudden familiarity of it stopped him in his tracks.  He'd often
wondered where his own ability to block out the night of Samantha's
abduction had come from.  Not from his father, as he'd thought.  "What
kind of emotions?"
She shook her head.  "Please.  It doesn't matter any more.  It's all so
far in the past now it's dust."
"Mom, it's so much a part of my present that someone keeps trying to
kill me over it."
"What are you talking about?"
"Samantha.  I told you, once before.  She wasn't just kidnapped.  She
was abducted."
"Fox-"
"I'm sure of it.  More sure now than I ever was.  I've seen a place.
I've seen - things - that tell me there's more.  Every time I get
closer to what happened to her, someone, or something keeps blocking
me."
"Don't, Fox.  It was bad enough losing her-"
"Whatever that is, Mom, it's bigger than just Sam.  Big enough to kill
for."
"Enough!"  The command voice snapped out, and he fell back into his
chair.  She looked at him sadly.  "Don't do this to both of us.
Samantha's gone.  I've tried to put her to rest."
She stood up, pushing the chair back, wiping at her eyes.  "I'm going
home.  I don't expect repayment for the bail.  Goodbye, Fox."
"She's alive, Mom," he called after her as she opened the other door.
"And he knows where she is."
He saw her hesitate at the last, but then quickly straighten and walk
out of the room, slamming the door behind her.

His stomach loosened.  There was an ache just above it.  He rubbed
absently at the bristles he hadn't been given a chance to dispense
with.  Vaguely, he heard the door behind him open quietly and close.
Heeled shoes, behind him, then to his right, a chair pulled out with a
whisper of metal across the floor. Scully's eyes were inquiring as she
sat down.
"Mulder?"
At least five or six questions in that word, most of which probably
related to the heavy mass at his soul.  He had a sudden surge of
exasperation, but suppressed it.  "It's not important."
Silence.  She was watching him, a look in her eyes reminding him of
pity.  He shook his head, feeling the annoyance rise, but pushing it
down relentlessly.  "It doesn't matter, Scully.  What did you find out
about what I've been charged with?"
She held his gaze for a moment or two longer, then sighed and set
papers on the table.  "There were three murder victims, although they
think it was an assassination centred on the owner of the house they
were found in.  An industrialist named James Shelley."
"Who were the others?"
He was suddenly aware of her gaze, very keen on him.  "Final ID is
still pending on one of them, but one of them they think was Shelley's
daughter, the other his security guard."
He closed his eyes.  "So why was I arrested?" he asked after a moment.
He heard her lean forward, putting her elbows onto the table.  "Your
badge and identification were found underneath a bed at the crime
scene.  The murder weapon was a blade of some description, and they
found blood matching Shelley's blood group on a knife at your apartment
when they searched it."

He opened his eyes, recognising the caution behind her voice.  "It's a
setup, Scully-"
"I know, Mulder.  And not a very good one.  To start with, you were in
a hospital here.  There's another reason, though.  It was bothering me
for hours.  The fact is, there's only one possible scenario for when
someone could have obtained your identification."
He felt a chill at the base of his spine as he worked it out.  "My
missing time."
She nodded.  "I didn't notice it when I met you on Rhode Island.  It
only occurred to me a long time after that.  I was more worried about
the clip from your issue being short two rounds.  But you didn't have
your ID when you woke up.  Somewhere in those forty-eight hours, it was
taken from you, maybe while you were whacked out, I don't know.  Then
they locked you away in your cell."
"My God," he heard himself whisper.  "He must have been watching me."
There was a pause from her; he was staring inwardly, didn't see her
expression.  Too busy trying to warm the chill creeping from his spine
to his heart.  "Who?"
"Shelley's killer.  He knows what happened in those forty-eight hours.
Where I was.  Maybe even what happened to the two-"
Deep inside his mind, at the edge of consciousness, a spark went off.
Dimly, he heard her speaking, her tone clear and cutting, in that voice
that she always used to try and lay down the law to him.  "There's no
hard evidence to support that, Mulder.  For all we know, your ID could
have been sold on the black market and then left at the crime scene by
whoever it was who killed these people."
"And then a potential murder weapon is found at my apartment?"
"Your address is a matter of public record.  You know that."
"With a matching blood type?"

She was silent in the wake of that.  He had a creeping feeling,
growing, from the spark in his mind.  His dark intuition.  An itching
of knowledge that refused to surface, gliding below the waterline of
his conscious mind like a black-hooded manta.
"Did you say the murder weapon was a blade of some kind?"
She nodded.  "They haven't done all the testing yet, but they're
calling it a short-handled blade.  Razor sharp."
It couldn't be.  But still the manta cruised, silent, unceasing,
pursuing its course.  "James Shelley was murdered in his bed?"

Her look of surprise brought the dagger of ice to rest against his
stomach.  "How did you know?"
His mind fell back.  Only base impulses and concepts flashed to his
body.  Act.  Quickly.  No time.  He stood up.  Realised he should say
something.  "We have to get up there right now."
"Mulder?"
But he hardly heard it, striding around the table, pushing through the
door his mother had departed through minutes earlier.  He caught a
brief glimpse of her face, suddenly confused, hurt blossoming-

Murdered in his bed.  Short-handled blade.  It couldn't be.  It
couldn't.

END OF PART 04/30





The Missionary (Part 05/30)
By Michael Aulfrey

Joseph Senncraft was a short, round man, with thick-rimmed glasses
shoved back against the bridge of his nose, as though clinging to the
precipice of his large nose.  His stride was small, jerky, and
irregular when he became excited.  He'd been working on it; Nicholas
could see the overcompensation even from this distance, some thirty
metres from the door of the Lear, at the top of the portable
stairwell.  Then Senncraft spotted Nicholas, and his concentration
disappeared; he came across the tarmac not so much scurrying as somehow
burrowing across the top of the concrete, catching Nicholas as he
stepped onto the ground again.
"Nick.  Come on, there's no time to wait around here."  Senncraft
marched off without waiting for him.  Nicholas smiled for a moment.
Senncraft's directness was one of the reasons he'd hired him.  Then the
thought of the missing emeralds struck him again, forcefully, and he
sobered.
"What's so important that you had to get me all the way down to
Washington, Joe?"
Senncraft was still walking briskly away, without looking at Nicholas.
A uniformed driver outside a limousine parked about sixty feet away
moved to the back door, opened it.  "Remember James Shelley, Nicholas?"
"Yes."  Another good choice.  The man was remarkably gifted, from both
a business and a manufacturing angle.
"He was killed earlier today."
Shock struck.  He stopped in his tracks.  "My God."
Senncraft turned to look at him.  "His home was broken into, in
Vermont, from what I hear."
A sickness went through Nicholas.  "How's his daughter holding up?"

Senncraft held his gaze for a moment, then turned for the limousine
again.  Nicholas' heart sank.  He forced words past his throat.
"Jessica?"
The word turned his chief of operations around again, slowly.
Senncraft stuffed his hands into the pockets of his suit, refused to
meet Nicholas' eyes.  "Afraid so."
Nicholas' hand on the handle of his briefcase was clammy.  He switched
hands and wiped it on the trousers of his suit.  He glanced back at the
Lear.  It suddenly looked very inviting.  "Do the police have any idea
who did it?"
"I haven't heard anything.  There's more important things to worry
about."
"Jesus, Joe-"
"The integration designs on the Sphynx T-PRAM have gone."

A chill went down Nicholas' spine.  "What do you mean, gone?"
"Exactly what I said.  Gone.  One of our development teams tried to
access the files earlier this morning, and found nothing.  Zip.  All
the research, all the blueprints, everything including the kitchen
sink.  Gone."
"The system crashed-?"
"Nope.  What do you think I've been doing since eight this morning?
I've already run all the scenarios, vetted for every virus known to
man, even tried a few of my own concoctions out.  The computer system
has a constitution something like a sperm whale."
Nicholas' mind struggled to think back to the various staff meetings.
"But everything on the T-PRAM is gone?"
"No, just the cutting edge material.  The research we were doing on the
T-PRAM's applications to the Net, plus a few other goodies.  So far as
I can tell, the original design blueprints for the Total-Programmable
Random Access Memory chip are still intact, as is the gallium-arsenide
chip we were working on. "
"But only Shelley had the full access to-"
He stared at Joe, who turned and got into the limousine.

Nicholas turned to Joe in the limousine.  "Are you saying Shelley was
working for someone else?"
Senncraft shrugged as he slammed the door.  "Who knows? The fact is,
it's gone, well and truly.  Shelley couldn't have fucked us up the ass
better if he'd used an icepick."
"How far does this set us back?"
Senncraft considered.  "I can't tell you offhand.  As you know, the T-
PRAM chip was designed as, and still is, a major leap ahead in
technology.  We can outpace our competitors for the time being.  But
the parallel processing technology we were researching? That's been
completely lost.  And without that, the T-PRAM's just a faster chip
than your average Pentium.  Its real power just isn't accessible."

Nicholas sank back into the soft, comfortable feel of the seats.
Suddenly gravity seemed much stronger.  Sato International had unique
ideas on the future direction of computer technology over the next
fifty years, but it was small, without a strong market base as yet.
Without the T-PRAM at its head, the company was easy meat for the
larger competitors in the market.  It was Nicholas' life.

"There's something else."
Nicholas turned to him.
"Somebody is very pissed off about whatever it was Shelley was doing.
There's talk of a CIA investigation."
"Of us?"
Joe nodded.  "Like I said, I needed you here.  We're walking into a
regular shower of shit."
Nicholas nodded, the whirling thoughts in his mind settling onto a
course of action.  He needed to return to New York and continue his
search for the missing emeralds; even Sato-Tomkin had to yield to
that.  However, he also had a responsibility to the people he
employed.  "All right.  Get me to a hotel, and then call for me
tomorrow afternoon."
"What are you doing tomorrow morning?"
"There's someone I have to see."

*			*			*

She had to admit that she was impressed.

There had been the fair share of rich kids among her class at
Georgetown; kids who had more family money than brains, whose fathers
had car doors opened for them; who were usually addressed with the
honorific "sir", despite the lack of title or anything faintly
resembling a knight's code of honour.  She had never been part of that
group.  Not a chance, once it came out that she was a Navy man's
daughter, on part scholarship, and lucky even to get that.  She winced
sometimes when Mom joked back then how she was moving in higher circles.

Of course, there had been others as well - Corey, Jennifer - who had
made it bearable, even worthwhile.  Corey was second generation Army
brat, on full scholarship; last she heard, he had made Chief Surgeon at
Fort Stewart in Georgia and was loving it.  The greens ran blood-deep
in that family.  They'd been good friends; the shared patriarchal
figures common to their families called to each other.

Jennifer's family had money to burn, but she was a little different to
the rest of the Porsche-and-cigars set.  She seemed able to look
through the careful, closed face that Dana showed to the world, and
befriend the person who was within.  She also made an effort to try and
at least get Dana around to the fashionable houses.  There had been a
party at a senator's place, one time, just before she had graduated.
She remembered the opulence, and thinking that if wealthy needed a
definition, it found it at that house.

James Shelley's residence was, at least externally, beyond that.  It
was a two-storey mansion, the brickwork in muted, earth tones looking
not so much like a house as a fortress.  The gardens around it were
extensive.  A pale yellow driveway from the gates of the estate
stretched languidly to the house, curling in a lazy arc in front of the
doors and then pooling off down by the garage, where she caught a
glimpse of polished steel and chrome.
"Not your average country hideaway," she said.
"Just his way of getting back to nature, I guess," said Mulder.  She
glanced over at him, but his eyes were unreadable, fixed on the
driveway ahead, a hand loosely on the steering wheel.

She was tempted to try and draw him out, make him explain.  He was
trying to hide it; still making his usual wisecracks every once so
often, staying with that implacable face of his.  But she had caught
him out on the way back from the ladies' on the plane to Barre: staring
out at the darkness beyond the window, upper jaw cradled in the web of
skin between his thumb and forefinger.  She couldn't see his face, but
didn't have to.  His anxiety had nothing to do with the charges laid
against him.  She almost gave in to the temptation, as she had then.
But the memory of him quietly looking the other way when she had to
wipe her nose from the red telltale there restrained her.

He seemed to be doing better in daylight.  They'd booked into a motel
for what was left of the night.  What conversation there had been was
contrived, even forced.  Skinner had called earlier that morning.
There would be repercussions with OPR, but for the moment they were
still ahead of the FBI bureaucracy.  The AD had even managed to get
them assigned to the case without Colton's knowledge.  He would be
getting the news any time now.  She couldn't help but repress a smile.

Mulder stopped the car outside the front door.  He had to fight for
space.  Several other fleet sedans were already parked outside, as well
as the usual group of black and whites.  They were dwarfed by the size
of the place.  Scully glanced at the mansion again as they stepped out
of the car.  It seemed even larger now they seemed to be directly under
it.  A cop walked over to her from the doorway; she flashed her
identification, and he wandered away again.
"Pretty big for such a small family, wouldn't you say?"  Mulder had his
back to the house; was staring across the rosebushes and flowerbeds.
"It's not exactly without precedent, Mulder.  On the west coast, I
think you'd find a lot of places with a low population density like
this."  She moved around to join him on the other side of the car.

He tried to hide his hesitation by feigning inattention, and she felt
the old curiosity steal over her.  He'd never told her about the Los
Angeles case; she'd gone quietly, one Saturday night while the Knicks
were in town, to the closed section and looked into that one.  He had
worked a few other files, while she was

[abducted]

gone, but none of them had mentioned the City of Angels.  She only
picked it up when she glanced over one of the ubiquitous expense
summaries for the time period she'd been gone.  A reference to a date,
a time, and a flight number, destination California, had set her to
wondering.  Even then, he had covered his tracks well: the LAPD file
he'd actually worked over there he had buried without a number in
storage, and even the X-File had been closed and placed in the queue
for destruction, as some of their more ancient, closed cases were.
She'd used up a good number of favours with Danny to find that one.

What she found was a confused story of bite marks, blood, a death in
custody - some kind of heatstroke in a jail cell - and all it ended
with was an inconclusive arson report, four bodies reduced to bones,
and FILE CLOSED scrawled across the front of the folder in a familiar,
disorganised longhand.

She had wanted to ask him about it there and then.  Before they'd gone
to Mount Avalon on the Firewalker case, the question had been on her
lips.  But then her gold cross had shifted against her skin, under her
suit.  And something had told her not to ask.  Something like smoke or
mirror images: insubstantial.  Like, she thought suddenly, whatever it
was that brought words from her: `I had the strength of your beliefs'.

But the curiosity remained.  Pandora's legacy, she noted wryly to
herself.  She sighed, and shook it away once again.  Maybe one day he'd
tell her.

Probably on the day you tell him what you really remember of Duane
Barry.

"So explain Melrose Place to me."  He crouched on the ground, absently
scraping at sand on the driveway, then stood again, taking a few steps
away from the car, back the way they had come.
"Where are you going?"
He turned back to her.  "I just want to take a look at something.  Go
on ahead, I'll catch up."

He turned again, hands shoved into his pockets, walking slowly down the
driveway, and she wondered whether she'd ever understand him.  He was a
mobile howitzer intellectually, far ahead of the pack.  So far that it
often looked like he was running behind rather than on the verge of
lapping his contemporaries.

"Agent Scully?"
The deep baritone came from the door of the building, which had been
jammed open.  She turned, seeing the tall man with white at his
temples.  Jefferson's coat was off, the sleeves of the shirt rolled up
the forearms, the skin tanned.  There was a familiarity in his stance
that she couldn't place.
"Yes.  Dana Scully.  We met earlier.  Paul Jefferson, wasn't it?"
He nodded as he walked towards her, putting a hand out which she took.
A firm grip.  Felt a lot like Bill Junior's.  "Washington told us you
were coming up.  We must've missed you at the airport."
"We didn't take a flight at regular hours.  We came as quickly as we
could."
He nodded.  "Sorry about the thing in Washington.  We were under
orders."
A part of her sardonically remembered Nuremberg, but she slapped
herself mentally on the wrist.  "Well, I'd just as soon get up to speed
about what's going on here."
"Sure.  Come on inside.  I'll show you around the party."  He turned
for the house.
"Did you want agent Mulder to come along?"
Jefferson glanced at the retreating figure further down the driveway.
"I imagine he'll be here in his own time."

He walked through the front door.  There was no doorknob, only a small
white plate which was smudged with talcum powder.
"Access to the house was by fingerprint identification?" she guessed.
"Computer recognition," said Jefferson.  "I can't say I've ever seen it
before on residential premises.  Mr. Shelley obviously liked his
security, not that it did him much good."
"What do you mean?"
"They found three victims: James Shelley, his daughter Jessica, and a
private guard from Bracewell Security named Max Harris.  We only found
Harris and Shelley in the house.  Jessica's body was outside, down by
the main gate.  She was dressed to go running.  We think the UnSub was
waiting for her just outside the gate.  He cut off her right hand and
used it to gain access through the front door."
A chill went through her.  It quickly disappeared.  Miracles of
darkness were as possible as those of light, in the human mind.  She'd
seen too many.  "Where was the security guard?"
"That's what we haven't worked out yet.  We found his body in the
camera and monitors booth up at the other end of the house."
"Cameras?"
"About twenty all up, covering most of the estate.  There were also
motion sensors on the walls.  This house has the surveillance
capability of a small federal penitentiary."
"Did they have tape from the cameras?"
"Bracewell already gave us most of what they have, and transcripts of
all callouts they've had to this address for the past four days or so."
"And?"
Jefferson turned back to the hall with an abrupt snap of motion.  "I'll
show you where we found Shelley."

She trailed after him.  Again, that eerily familiar sensation
originating from the way he'd dodged the question.  "Jefferson, was
there anything on the security tape?"
He slowed and stopped in front of a Monet print, light thrown onto it
from an overhead lamp.  "So far, nothing."
"What do you mean, nothing?"
"The most human movement recorded on the cameras around the estimated
time of the murders is Jessica Shelley jogging down the driveway.  They
haven't checked every tape yet, but the ones they have come from the
night of the murder or shortly before then."
She rocked back on her heels for a moment, considering.  "The motion
sensors-"
"Never tripped once."  There was a faint note of something unsettled in
Jefferson's voice.  "The transcript from Bracewell's records shows no
alarm for ninety-six hours before the estimated time of death.  The
only thing they had before then was a cat running along the top of one
of the walls."
"So you're saying that whoever did this walked through the exterior
wall, killed three people, and then walked out again without showing on
a security camera?"
"Technically.  We did find several of the cameras switched off when we
got here, so there's no certain way to tell.  The company noticed the
malfunction and sent a car around to check, which was when they found
the bodies."

Jefferson pushed through an open door ahead of them ,and Scully found
herself standing in what appeared to be the master bedroom of the
estate.  A few faces were moving slowly around the room: suited men,
both photographers and fingerprint dusters.  She saw the looks of
recognition and curiosity from some of them as they prowled around the
room, semi-opaque gloves stretching and touching, plastic tasting the
air of the murder scene.  Bureau.  There was a large red stain across
the sheets of the bed.  The activity in the room was a dance of
movement centred around it like a bad Vaudeville finale.  She shook
herself as he spoke again.

"We only just got started in here, really.  Barre PD did some
preliminaries, but there's been no substantial work before our arrival."
She noticed that the nighttable had been roped off as the working
table, moved slowly over to it.  "Except for picking up agent Mulder's
identification."
Jefferson nodded.  "As soon as he heard, the ASAC suspended operations
here until he could bring Mulder in."
She glanced sharply at Jefferson.  She had hoped to see there a further
note of disgust at the breach of standard practice, but Jefferson's sad
eyes were mysteriously inscrutable as well.  She probed the dark brown
eyes for a moment longer before breaking eye contact.  The night table
had a few small items on it.  There was a black-and-white picture on
it, a portrait of a woman smiling faintly at the camera.  Haughty.
Regal.  Scully nodded at the picture.  "Who's she?"
"We think it's Shelley's wife,"  Jefferson moved over to stand next to
her.  "From all accounts, he was a widower."
"Whose accounts?"
Jefferson pointed at a Time magazine next to the picture.  "His rough
bio.  He was a big businessman.  Apparently working for some computer
corporation down in Washington.  Profitable, from what I hear."
"It would have to be, considering the size of this place.  Do you have
any potential suspects yet - other than Mulder, that is?"
"No."  Abruptly, Jefferson smiled.  It was weak, but warm.  "But we
have senators busting our phones trying to speed the investigation up.
I'm not going to be very popular at home this weekend."
She felt a grin creep across her face.  "How many children do you have,
agent Jefferson?"
"Unfortunately, none.  It's just Carol and me.  She knows, she
understands I get these types of rush jobs now and then, but - well, it
doesn't mean she has to like it.  I don't blame her, either.
Especially not this time; we still have to run hair and fibre through
the whole place.  There's about thirty rooms.  It's going to be a
killer of a job."
"It'll be a waste of time."

Scully turned towards Mulder's voice.  He was leaning on the doorjamb;
his hands were dirty with dust as he glanced around the room, his face
bleak.  She felt Jefferson in her wake as she walked over.  "What do
you mean, Mulder?"
"Hair and fibre will only turn something up if there's something here
to be found.  The man who did this is too experienced for that."
"So what's your theory on what happened here?"
She was surprised to hear the words coming from Jefferson.  Even more
surprised to hear the evenness of tone behind the question, rather than
the ridicule or weariness she'd expected.

Mulder looked past her, at Jefferson, for a long, long moment before
speaking.  "Colton's working sequence of events goes like this, doesn't
it: the killer waits outside the gates of the estate.  The girl,
Jessica, has to disarm the motion sensors to open the gate to go for
her morning run, which she does.  As soon as she leaves the grounds,
the killer attacks, pulls her back inside before the sensors rearm,
kills her, cuts her hand, and gets up to the house.  He disarms the
electronic lock and kills the security guard and Shelley."
 "Sounds pretty reasonable to me."   Jefferson didn't sound taken aback.
Mulder was nodding, slowly.  She had the sense again of something
clicking between the two men.  A kind of silent communication.  Her
partner was - at bay, somehow.  As though in the presence of a
superior; yet his tone did not carry subservience.
"What if I said the killer was already inside the estate when she came
out for her morning run?"
Jefferson was silent.  She glanced back at him.  The inscrutable
expression had returned to his face, but his eyes had a gleam of
calculation in them.  For a moment.  "You'd need solid evidence."
Mulder started back down the corridor.  "Come on."

He led them back outside, into the sunlight, down the driveway.  He
stopped just inside the white wall of the estate, at a point which had
been marked off with yellow tape, moving carefully past a rosebush.
"This is where they found her body?" she asked.
Jefferson nodded.  "Facedown.  No trace evidence has come up yet."

Mulder moved past the tape, further back, into the gardens.  His head
was down, trailing a path she couldn't see, a small powerhouse of
energy.  They followed him.
"He hasn't changed," breathed Jefferson.  She looked back at him, not
sure if she'd been the intended audience to the words.  He had a wry
grin on his face.  Not mocking; somehow, she knew his face was
incapable of forming that expression.  Then he noticed her looking at
him and the smile slowly faded.  She glanced ahead.  Mulder was about
ten paces ahead, still moving through the shrubbery.
"Mulder mentioned he knew you from VCU."
Jefferson seemed to focus on her again.  "He was my partner for a
while."
"I thought he was working with Jerry Lamana back then."
"He did.  I came in later.  Number two of three."
"Two of three what? Partners?"
"Yes."

"Here."
Mulder was crouched down on the ground ahead of them, gazing down at
something beneath the shadow of a weeping willow, where no grass had
grown.  She walked up behind him, looked over his shoulder.  It was a
depression in the ground, crudely dug out, half-filled with dead
leaves, about six feet in length, maybe a foot deep.  Mulder looked
back up at the two of them.
"My guess is the killer penetrated the security of the estate a good
twelve hours before he killed Jessica Shelley.  He found a camera blind
spot here, and hid himself to wait."

She stared at the hole in the ground, running through the possibility.
"Mulder, it makes more logical sense for the killer to come through the
front gate as Colton seems to think.  Why would the killer take the
risk of discovery just for the chance to wait twelve hours to kill
somebody?"
"I believe that to this man there was no risk of discovery in doing so."
"Are you saying the killer was invisible?"
He was silent for a second, and she did not miss the flickering glance
over her shoulder to Jefferson.  "To this man, the killing itself isn't
the challenge.  The way it's done is far more important."  Mulder
pointed across the estate.  She looked in the direction of his
outstretched finger.  "The killer had an unobstructed view of the
estate's doorway.  He could see Jessica Shelley leave in the morning.
He could see when the security guard arrived."
The doorway was some distance away, through trees and shrubs.  She saw
figures moving around as another car pulled up.  "Mulder, from this
distance you could hardly see anything.  You wouldn't be able to make
out anyone's features."
"Unaided."
"I'd have to agree with agent Scully."  Jefferson was looking in the
direction of the house as well.  "Occam's Razor, Mulder.  Right now,
all I'm looking at is a hole in the ground.  There's a simpler
explanation in the killer waiting outside the gate."
Mulder nodded, turned back to the hole.  He drew a pencil out of his
pocket, crouched, and stirred dead leaves in the hole.  Pushed a little
further.  Then raised the pencil, drawing with it a thin vinyl lead.

The strap pulled with it a small pair of binoculars.

He looked back at Jefferson as he set them on the rim of the
depression, his eyes bleak.  "How are you fixed for blades?"
There was no amused note in his voice.
Jefferson regarded the binoculars silently as Mulder stood and turned
to her.  "I'm heading back to DC."
A ball out of left field.  "Why?"
"There's a couple of cases that are similar to this one on file back
there."
"Similar? You mean X-?"

But he was already dialling on his cell phone.  "Danny? Yeah, it's me.
Look, I need you to pull some files, have `em ready for me when I get
to the office.  About four hours."  A pause.  "There's Knicks tickets
in it for you."  Another pause, followed by Mulder's grin.  "Better
seats than the ones I got you last time.  Yeah.  All right.  Got a pen?
Okay, the first one's eighty-nine colon one two five four slash zero
nine.  Then one two five five, and all the files in sequence up to one
two six zero.  Same prefix and suffix for each.  Okay.  I'll be in
touch."  He hung up.
She was sure at that point.  His recitation of the numbers from memory
had convinced her.  "Mulder, what's going on here?"
He glanced again at Jefferson, who was crouched by the hole, touching a
couple of the leaves.  Mulder turned and started back through the
garden again.  She hurried alongside him, lowering her voice.
"Those weren't X-Files you asked Danny to pull.  Were they Violent
Crimes?"
He pulled up next to a shrub of white roses, looked at her.  "Yes, they
were."
She held his gaze.  "What aren't you telling me, Mulder?"

And for a second she could see the words behind his eyes.  But then a
flicker of pain crossed over his expression, and was gone, along with
the words.  "I can't be sure.  Not until I've checked."
She felt the annoyance rising quickly, and took a deep breath, but he
forestalled her.  "Bear with me on this one, Scully.  Please."
She sighed deeply, letting the anger drain away.  "I suppose you want
me to perform an autopsy?"

He nodded.  "If you can.  They may have already started without us, but
there's a chance they'll miss something in the cause of death.  It may
show on all three murder victims, or it may show just on Shelley."
"Can you at least tell me what I'm looking for?"  But he was shaking
his head before she finished speaking.
"No, I don't want to prejudice your findings.  I trust your technique
enough to find what I think will be there.  Look, we need to get moving
on this.  Stick with Jefferson; he's seen enough of these cases to know
what you'll need to get your job done.  I'll see you back in DC."
He moved away, through the roses, head down, in thought, leaving her
alone.

END OF PART 05/30




The Missionary (06/30)
By Michael Aulfrey

He picked up the public telephone at exactly eleven thirty, as the
first trill sounded.  Said nothing.
"48th Street and Columbus Avenue.  Thirty minutes."  The woman's voice
was sharp and correct.  The phone rang off in his hand.

Messy.

He preferred to ensure security prior to making the call, rather than
try and throw off the scent afterwards.  On the other hand, he was
adaptable.  That was, after all, the reason he had been chosen.  He
made it from the booth at Times Square in twenty-five minutes.  He
could have moved faster, even on foot.  However, doing so would have
appeared out of character with the middle-aged, overweight Japanese
businessman he was dressed as.  A disguise was more than a collection
of makeup and padding; it required a total image, crafted down to the
speed of his own motion and the length of his stride.  His was designed
to avoid notice, make him invisible.

The telephone booth on the southeastern corner of the junction of 48th
and Columbus was a battered, vandalised thing, and for a moment he
hesitated, weighing up the potential breach to his disguise in calling
from such a telephone.  He eventually decided the harm was minimal.

The telephone rang, and he picked it up.
"Status," said the voice on the other end.  Male this time.  He often
wondered what position the woman held.  The woman spoke English with
the faintest trace of an accent, but he was not quite well-travelled
enough to discern the nationality.  The male was American.
"The alpha has been dealt with."
"The item?"
"Proceeding."
There was a pause from the other end.  "We've been instructed that
there is some concern over the method used."
He was unsurprised.  "Terminal discretion was given to me in this
matter."
"So far as the principal players were concerned.  Our mutual
associates, however, did not give the same level of clearance in
relation to interlopers."
"If my methods are to be questioned, our associates should not have
engaged my services."
"No, no."  The voice was conciliatory.  "There is no presumption here
of telling you how to perform your tasks.  Only an underlining, if you
will.  They wish minimal attention."
"I will continue to act as I see fit in relation to this work."
"Of course."
"You will inform our associates of this."
"Of course."
"I am proceeding with the beta."  He hung up the phone.

*			*			*

Senator Richard Matheson's morning had not been pleasant, and with the
telephone call at 11:00 p.m. the previous evening, it would get no
better.  The Defence Oversight Committee had met, and despite all his
objections, most of them had voted in favour the Army's proposal.
Pitching the laser-blinding weapon to them as a means of saving the
lives of joes in the field was a masterstroke.  The Committee members
were, to a man, accountants at heart.  The Colonel putting the weapon's
effectiveness to them as a pair of columns of - projected casualties
with, projected casualties without, cost of ammunition, cost of
production - was handing a lion pride a juicy antelope.

The M-349.  A small, two-handed device, though it could be wielded with
one.  Very small.  Basically a grip, a battery pack, and a squat mouth
at the business end.  No ammunition for this little treat: it was the
original laser gun.  One that projected a broad-width frequency of
light at an intensity guaranteed to cause permanent retinal burn to
anyone who happened to glance in its direction.  Total, and utter,
blindness, instantaneously.  In terms of leaps forward in maiming
weapons, the International Committee of the Red Cross rated it up there
with grapeshot, which had been outlawed nearly a hundred years before.

Far easier for the pride to look at those dead, static columns of
numbers than at pictures of men with bandages around their eyes and
white canes.  And far easier to have their little factories of death
churn them out quietly, "just for a contingency."  He wondered whether
Oppenheimer ever considered himself as preparing for a contingency.
Matheson's course in life was set the moment he learned that the
scientist's first words after the first bomb's test detonation were
`Now I am become death'.  Matheson, then only a young turk in
Congress's lower levels, had been a believer up until that point.  He
did not believe in much now.  But he was constricted by the power, as
much of it as he had.  He had to rely on others to do those things he
could not.

He had come back to the office, made excuses to his secretarial staff,
and walked out along Pennsylvania Avenue, taking in the people
strolling happily, the besuited lawyers on their short lunch breaks.
Visions of blind men flittered in his eyes. He closed his eyes.
Momentarily.  There were other things he needed to attend to.  He
flagged a cab down and had the driver take him to the Washington
Monument.

The sun was shining brightly; the bitter smog blanket had rolled back
for once, and the sky was blue as if in a dream.  If he strained, he
could see the gleam of whitewashed stone off Capitol Hill, even light
reflecting from 1600 Pennsylvania's walls.  All is well in the heart of
the nation.  Where the dwarves delve too deep and forge weapons in
subterranean chambers.  He turned back to the monument: a simple,
unblemished stone obelisk.  Huge, insurmountable.  It made for more
pleasant viewing.

He had been standing there for perhaps three or four minutes when there
were steps behind him.
"Senator?"
He turned slowly, still hoping that the owner of the voice would not be
there, but it was.  He glanced around slowly, then back at the man.
"Nicholas.  It's been a long five years."
They shook hands.  Nicholas Linnear's grip was still firm as ever.  He
shoved his hands back into the pockets of the suit he was wearing.
"Thank you for seeing me on such short notice.  Though I take it from
the location that this is not an official appointment."
Matheson felt the guilt flow.  He reminded himself of the consequences
of his actions.  "The chicanery is as much for your own protection as
mine, Nicholas.  The Secret Service performed their routine
counterintelligence sweep of my offices two days ago.  A listening
device was found there.  We don't know yet whose.  So you can imagine
that this is something of a trying time for me."  Matheson glanced back
at him.  "Why have you come to me?"
Nicholas gazed down the Mall.  "There's a CIA-NSA investigation that's
been launched against Sato-Tomkin.  As of early this morning, a court
order came into effect suspending the activities of the company on the
eastern seaboard."
Matheson shook his head.  "There's nothing I can do to stop it."
"All I want to know is what they're trying to flush out.  Sato-Tomkin,
so far as I know, has nothing to hide.  You've taken an interest in
Sato-Tomkin's work, Senator.  In confidentiality, we've kept you
updated on the T-PRAM development process for five years.  It's a right
which we've denied foreign governments.  Because I believe you can be
trusted.  But I also believe you owe us for that."

Matheson clasped his hands behind his back, the dark overcoat gaping
open.  "The investigation into Sato-Tomkin was commenced because they
suspect espionage from one or a number of its officers."
"Espionage for whom?"
"They aren't certain."  Matheson glanced around again, and led Nicholas
a little way from the rest of the tourists.  "A memorandum came across
my desk late last week about an NSA stakeout of a certain embassy
belonging to a former Soviet state here in Washington."
"I thought the NSA wasn't chartered for domestic surveillance."
"You know your constitutional law.  And you're absolutely correct."

They both stood there, for a moment.
"What did the stakeout turn up?" asked Nicholas.
"A member of Sato-Tomkin was seen entering the embassy carrying a
briefcase.  When that person emerged, the briefcase was missing.  The
United States government, as you know--"
"Required prior to allowing the merger that none of the technology we
were developing would be passed to interests outside the US or Japan,"
Nicholas finished.  Matheson knew Nicholas had never liked that
particular condition, but neither of them had seen a way around it
then.  "Do they have any idea what was inside the briefcase?"
"No.  Although considering your company's current research focus, the
answer is not particularly difficult."  Matheson stared intently at
Nicholas.  "I've heard rumours suggesting that the traffic between Sato-
Tomkin and these foreign interests has been going on for some time."
"How long?"
"Long enough.  Nicholas, your company has been used as a cut-out for
whoever has been transporting these materials off US soil, a front for
a dedicated espionage operation.  Companies have died for less."
"Sato-Tomkin as a whole was never involved.  If it was involved at all."
"That probably won't stop the CIA.  The Director is quite a meticulous
man.  They'll bag your entire operation so fast it'll make your head
spin.  I've seen it happen."
"That's absurd."
"There are those in Congress who would not be unhappy to see it happen,
either."
He could see Nicholas thinking about it.  "Who?"
"Familiar faces to you.  Stockburn.  Myers.  Mostly those who opposed
the original merger.  Have you made any other enemies recently?"
Nicholas ignored the question.  "What about you? What's your interest
in this?"
Matheson smiled.  "Let's say that I prefer the idea of independent
computer chip companies, as opposed to ones with financial strings
attached to our defence program."

He could see Linnear churning the information over in his mind,
analysing.
"You must have some potential suspects in mind," said Nicholas.
Matheson considered it carefully.  Decided against it.  Too close to
him.  "If the CIA did, they'd have already arrested the man involved."
"The CIA isn't psychic."  Nicholas's face was impassive.  "And there
are other companies which deserve to be dismantled more than Sato-
Tomkin.  Take McKenzie Industrial Trading, for example."

Matheson nearly had a heart attack.  He stared at Nicholas.  The man's
face hadn't shifted in expression.  The same impassive calm.  How was
that possible?
"How do you know about that?"
"I do my research before investing.  I think some conscientious
operatives of the Agency might do so as well.  Even more if they were
to find out the company's main business is funding black market arms
sales.  I don't think I need to add to whom."
He doesn't even need to mention the names of the entire board, Matheson
thought.  Those of the Joint Chiefs who were on it would be enough.
The others' names alone would implicate the intelligence community.  He
tried to restore his poker face, but failed.  Linnear had him.  He
breathed in deeply.
"We have one suspect."
"I need a name."
Matheson hesitated.  McKenzie Industrial flickered through his mind,
and he sighed.  "James Shelley."

Only the briefest of pauses from Linnear in response.  "You have to
stop the investigation."
"I already told you I can't.  Direct interference with CIA-NSA
activities is outside my sphere of influence."
"Sato-Tomkin had nothing to do with whatever Shelley was involved in.
He was murdered early yesterday morning."
"If Shelley is dead, you'll have no way of proving that Sato-Tomkin as
a whole wasn't involved.  Unless you can come up with definite proof
that it was only Shelley who was dealing in your materials."
"I'm aware of that."  Nicholas' voice had a note of annoyance to it.
It had disappeared by the time he had sighed, straightened, and turned
to leave.  "Thank you, Senator.  I'll be on my way."
"What will you do?"
Nicholas' voice floated back to Matheson.  "I have my own avenues of
investigation."

He left Matheson there alone, in the shadow of the Monument.

			*			*

FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION
LABORATORY DIVISION

PRELIMINARY LABORATORY REPORT
May 16, 1996

TO:     Special Agent Dana Scully, MD

Your case #32     FS LAB #674-N-034
Victim(s): Shelley, James Christopher
Examiner: Michael Freeman, PhD
Laboratory: Quantico Academy

Age: 63
Race: W  Sex: M
Date Received: May 16, 1996
Suspect(s): None
Evidence submitted by: Special Agent Dana Scully (MD)
One bottle of blood and one bottle of urine for alcohol and drug screen.

RESULTS OF EXAMINATION:
BLOOD:  0.06% ethanol weight/volume
URINE:   0.08% ethanol weight/volume

BLOOD AND URINE:
Negative for significant quantities of cyanide and fluoride; negative
for barbituRates, carbamates, hydantoins, glutarimides, and other
sedative-hypnotic drugs.
Negative for amphetamines, antihistamines, phencyclidines,
benzodiazepines.
Negative for natural and synthetic narcotics and analgesics.
Negative for tricyclic antidepressants and carbon monoxide.
Negative for heavy metals.
Positive finding: Unidentified agent (protein?).

Michael Freeman, PhD
Toxicologist

END OF PART 06/30