From: Mrsblome <mrsblome@aol.com>
Date: 14 Feb 2001 04:13:57 GMT
Subject: NEW: America's Games, by Sarah Segretti, 1/7, PG, XA

Title: America's Games
Author: Sarah Segretti
Category: XA
Keywords: Post-episode
Rating: PG with a few R-rated words
Spoilers: Through Talitha Cumi/Herrenvolk (S3/4)
Website: http://members.aol.com/mrsblome
Feedback: mrsblome@aol.com
Archive: Ephemeral and Gossamer okay, everyone else ask first.
Disclaimer: If you neither read it in the papers nor saw it on TV, then, dear
reader, it belongs to me. No actual bioterrorism experts were harmed in the
making of this story. Minor liberties taken with time, locations and events.
Summary: Assigned to the bioterrorism squad at the 1996 Summer Olympics, Scully
tries to make sense of confusing evidence, her baffling partner and her
uncertain place in a world where the X-Files don't matter.
Author's notes: I have set the events of Talitha Cumi/Herrenvolk in early July,
1996. This story takes place during the final scenes of Herrenvolk. Although
the episode date stamps place those scenes a month after the rest of the
episode, I've compacted the timeframe. More at the end.

America's Games
By Sarah Segretti
February 2001

Scully's apartment
July 17, 1996
8:39 p.m.

CNN Headline News cycled through its fourth consecutive half-hour segment,
still unwatched and muted. Scully scowled at the television over her laptop,
only subliminally registering the festive nature of the anchor's shimmery
blouse and unruly hair. Protein sequences scrolled past her vision like the
day's stock market report. Proteins, and amino acids, and vaccinia virus ...

And 70 gigabytes of data.

Hope was having a place to start. That's what she'd told Mulder at his mother's
bedside. But she'd been far more optimistic then. So close, they'd thought:
Mulder with his implausible eyewitness account of multiple cloned Samanthas,
she with her list of tagged smallpox vaccinations. Scully scratched absently at
the scar on her arm, still a little itchy around the healed spot where she'd
had the biopsy taken. At the time, she'd believed everything she'd said to
Mulder. They could crack this conspiracy, they could find answers.

After all, no matter what unbelievable impossibility Mulder had said he'd seen,
she'd uncovered 70 gigs of data. Hard evidence, right?

Yeah, right. Jeremiah Smith's data had caused her nothing but grief from the
start. When Skinner and Pendrell had told her about the vast amounts of data
the FBI had recovered from Smith's office hard drive, she'd wanted to kick
herself. It was an ugly, shocking reminder of how far she'd drifted from solid
investigative techniques. Of course you check the hard drive of a man who
inputs data for a living. She'd been angry at herself for not considering it
because she'd been lost  in Mulder's troubles. And then she'd gotten angry at
the FBI. Her job was to back up Mulder's theories with science, and when she
did, at the Bureau's request, it still dismissed her initial findings as if she
were an uneducated crackpot.

Feeling bitter, she poked at the page up button, watching the strings of
letters that spelled out the amino acid sequences scroll into a blur on her
screen. At this rate, it would take forever to analyze. Her laptop held barely
a quarter gig at a time. She had no access to any computer that could hold all
of Jeremiah Smith's data. The mainframe boys at work weren't convinced her
project was high enough priority for them to drop a million other assignments,
and they were the only ones in the Hoover Building equipped to handle the
amount of data she wanted analyzed.

Jeremiah Smith had disappeared. Mulder was making his way through the UN phone
directory, trying to reach any of the special representatives who could
elaborate on the peculiar bee farms he'd seen in Canada. And here she sat,
alone at her coffee table on a fine summer night, staring at a portion of a
near-meaningless list of records that so far defied her rudimentary attempts at
data-mining.

It was a catalog, she knew that much. An inventory of everyone who'd had a
smallpox vaccination in the last 50 years. But why keep such a record? What was
Jeremiah Smith trying to track? And for whom?

The fact that the data took the form of amino acid sequences made sense; they
were probably the product of the genetic marker she'd found in her biopsy and
in Pendrell's. But the other sequences, the numeric ones, refused to yield
their secret. If she could only decode them, link her tag to its corresponding
sequence, maybe she could understand what this data meant and why it was
important.

Merchandise comes in catalogs, she thought, and swallowed down her unease.

Out of desperation, she'd turned to the Gunmen for help, slipping them a
purloined copy of the Smith data. Their little eyes had lit up, whether at the
promise of the data or at the fact that she'd stolen something, she didn't want
to know. She was anxious to see what they'd come up with, if anything. 

Once this year, just once, she wanted an investigation to pan out. She was so
tired of leads that fizzled to nothing, of cases stalled by clandestine
maneuvering or official stonewalling. She was tired of being used, of being a
pawn, of never knowing why. An answer, God, was that so hard? She hated feeling
so unsettled, not knowing where to focus.

The guys must know something by now, Scully thought. It was time to pay them a
visit. She shut down her computer, switched off the TV, and stood up, ready to
get answers.

Her phone rang. Damn it. "Scully," she barked.

"A.D. Skinner here, Agent Scully."

She froze. Mulder had been gone all day. He'd called once or twice from
wherever he was, leaving cryptic messages. She hadn't worried until she heard
the tone of Skinner's voice.

"It'll be on CNN in a minute if it isn't already, but we've got a jetliner down
near New York," Skinner said. Scully scooped up her remote and turned the TV
back on. A 747, over open water. 

Her heart began to pound. Where was Mulder, anyhow? "Sir, is there anything I
need to know?"

"Suspicious circumstances, Agent. The Bureau is getting involved."

She closed her eyes briefly. Skinner would know if Mulder had been on the
plane. "How soon do you need us to be there, sir?"

There was a brief, almost surprised silence. "No, Agent Scully. New York is
calling for help, but you're not assigned ... and I'm going to do everything I
can to keep you from being drawn in. I sense a good ratfuck coming, and you've
got better things to do."

Scully blinked at the unexpected encouragement she thought she was being given.
"Thank you, sir."

"More important, Agent, this incident smells very strange, and I want you to do
everything you can to keep Agent Mulder away from the scene."

She flared with irritation. Sometimes Skinner treated her more like Mulder's
babysitter than his partner. She suspected he thought they were sleeping
together, and that assumption bothered her far out of proportion to its
importance.

I am not my partner's keeper. Tell him yourself.

"Yes, sir," she said instead.


FBI Headquarters
July 18, 1996
1:32 p.m.

What she didn't tell her boss was that she had no idea where her partner was.
Hadn't, since he'd left the office on the evening of the 16th. Despite efforts
to find him, she still didn't know.

The entire Hoover Building hummed with agents and other workers comparing
conspiracy theories and looking for dark, anti-government agendas. The break
room buzzed with talk about bombs and missiles and Oklahoma City. The strained
atmosphere only added to Scully's nervous mood. That's our job, she thought
irrationally, listening to the chat in the elevators as she returned from
lunch. They're on our turf.

She ignored the fact that even with Skinner's assurances, she'd spent the first
few hours after the crash praying that they wouldn't be detailed to New York.
Others had been. She'd come in this morning to find Pendrell gone, sent to help
with the delicate and horrible job of identifying remains through DNA. And
she'd heard that part of the new Weapons of Mass Destruction team had been
pulled from Atlanta, even though the Olympics began the next day. She knew that
was ramping up the paranoia. A plane falling out of the sky in clear weather
was bad enough. The possibility that it was a terrorist attack on an American
jet so close to the start of an Olympics on American soil was far worse.

Scully shook her head as she walked down the hall to the X-Files office,
failing to clear her mind. She much preferred that the rest of the Bureau drift
along on a low tide of paranoia, while she and Mulder rode the rougher
emotional waters. It made her feel better, in a way, to think that there was a
normal world out there. But when everyone was as nuts as an average day on the
X-Files...

She stopped short inside the door of the office. Mulder was slumped over his
desk, head down on his arms and turned to one side. Their rarely-used TV
burbled the latest news from the crash site in Long Island. He seemed to be
watching, but she couldn't see his face.

"Mechanical failure, Scully." His voice was hoarse, as if he had a cold. "I'd
lay money on it."

She lifted an eyebrow, surprised that he'd take the less bizarre theory, and
momentarily forgot her worry. "I don't know, Mulder. A bomb sounds awfully
plausible to me."

"More plausible than that hand-held missile theory that's going around." He
lifted his head to look at her, and it took an effort not to react to his
appearance -- haggard, and tired, and older than a 34-year-old man had any
right to look. He may not have slept in that suit, but that had to be
yesterday's shirt.

"Nobody shot down that plane, Mulder. I don't care what the eyewitnesses said."

"Then again," Mulder continued, "the plane did go down less  than 10 miles from
the Montauk radar station. Do you know about Montauk, Scully?"

"It's a defunct Air Force base linked by conspiracy theorists to government
mind control tests, electromagnetic experimentation, the Philadelphia
Experiment and Lord knows what else." She took a breath and stared hard at him.
"Where were you yesterday, Mulder?"

The brief spark that had flared in his exhausted eyes as he'd prepared to give
her the Montauk spiel vanished, replaced by a guilty look she knew all too
well. "New York."

"Mulder!"

He put up his hands as if to ward her off, sitting up straight at the same
time. "It's not what you think, Scully. I'm not interested in interagency
bullshit right now. I flew up yesterday morning, before --" He gestured at the
television. "I went to see someone at the UN I thought could tell me more about
the farms in Alberta."

She sighed. "Did you learn anything?"

He shrugged, but she caught the involuntary glance he gave an unmarked file
folder on the desk. "And I, uh, went up to Providence to see my mother. Flew
back this morning. Let me tell you, JFK is no fun right now."

Scully sat down heavily, the televised images of relatives on the Long Island
beach mixing with memories of Mulder sobbing in her arms. Too much grief in the
air. "I would have  gone to New York," she said. "Why didn't you tell me you
were going?"

Their eyes met, and held for a second. Mulder looked away first. "Skinner
called right before you walked in," he said. "He wants to see you in his
office."

She blinked. Why didn't he tell her? What didn't he want her to know? She'd
assumed they were working together on this case, although on separate tracks.
Now she suddenly wasn't so sure.

"Did Skinner say what he wanted?" she asked.

"No." A tiny smile crept across his lips. "He did say we needed to start
keeping better track of one another, though."



Skinner's office
2:06 p.m.

Scully stared at her A.D., not sure she'd heard him correctly. "Atlanta?"

"The WMD team lost its forensic pathologist to New York," Skinner said grimly.
"They need someone down there ASAP. The Olympics start in just over 24 hours."

"I don't have weapons of mass destruction experience, sir." But she knew, even
as she offered her mild protest, that there was no contesting this assignment,
that Skinner wouldn't brook arguments based on unfinished investigations into
vanished Canadian farms or mysterious genetic tags in vaccination scars. All
hands on deck, and she was a good sailor when she needed to be.

Skinner stood and handed her a file. "The basics. Our team is part of a
multi-agency anti-terrorism task force. It's been in the works since the nerve
gas attack on the Tokyo subway last year. Surveillance, intelligence,
prevention. You get the idea. They'll brief you on the details when you get
there. Your flight leaves at 4:35."

"What about Agent Mulder, sir?"

The AD twitched, a sign he was displeased about something. "Atlanta needs the
skills that you have, Agent. Your partner will be staying here."

The thought of Mulder, alone in that basement dwelling on thoughts of his lost
sister and his dying mother, was not one she cared for. There was no telling
what he'd do in that state of mind if she was 600 miles away.

"Yes, sir," she said quietly.

When she got back to the basement to tell Mulder about her new assignment, he
was gone. The television was off. The file she'd seen him glance at before was
missing. This was not a quick trip to the men's room. Dammit, she thought, and
sank into his chair. As she reached for the phone, she saw  the note taped to
the TV screen:

S --
Docs want me back in RI.  Call you later.
--M

Oh, no. Her heart sinking, she grabbed the phone and dialed his cell number. He
answered, breathless. "They wouldn't say, Scully, except to say I shouldn't
worry." She could hear the sounds of the airport, of a flight being called. "I
gotta go, Scully, that's my flight. I'll call you."

He hung up.

Gotta go, too, Mulder, she thought, frustrated and worried. How long are the
Olympics, anyway?


Hartsfield International Airport
Atlanta
6:32 p.m.

Scully slipped out of the stream of disembarking passengers and leaned her
laptop bag against the ticket agents' station, taking a second to absorb her
chaotic surroundings. She could hardly see the gate across the way for all the
forest green "Atlanta 1996" banners hanging from the ceiling. Signs everywhere
welcomed her to the Home of the 26th Olympiad. Even the frozen yogurt stand was
festooned with white bunting bearing the colorful Olympic rings. The crowds
were unbelievable, even by the standards of the busiest airport in America. But
most of the faces wore smiles instead of the usual traveler's frown. An amazing
number of people were speaking -- what the hell? English, she realized, the
Australian version.

The shock passed; excitement began to set in. She remembered watching Nadia
Comaneci as a girl, but the Olympics had never held much interest for her. That
could change, she thought. Maybe this assignment won't be so bad after all.

A more wistful thought crossed her mind: Mulder would love this.

A little of the thrill drained away, and she could feel her shoulders sag.
Before she could decide whether she was just worried about him, or if the
thought that she couldn't see anything without filtering it through his eyes
depressed her, she heard someone calling her name. She looked around to see a
sullen-faced woman, a few inches taller than herself, squinting at her from
under a mop of unruly dark blonde hair. The woman held an unfolded piece of
paper in one hand. In her dark blue tank top, khaki shorts and fanny pack, she
looked just like one of the hundreds of tourists milling around, except for the
veritable deck of plastic identification cards dangling from a thin silver
chain around her neck. Scully had no idea who she was, and stared blankly at
her.

"You are Agent Dana Scully, right?" The woman took a few steps closer and
displayed the piece of paper so that Scully could see it. It was a bad fax of a
worse picture of herself. She cringed.

"Mine's not much better." The woman lifted her necklace of IDs off her neck,
shuffled through them, and presented the stack to Scully. "Dr. Toni Garrett,
National Center for Infectious Diseases. Medical epidemiologist. Chauffeur."

There was no trace of humor in the woman's flat delivery.  Briefly, Scully
wondered if Skinner had shielded her from the interagency mess that New York
was already becoming only to drop her into a similar situation in Atlanta. "I
was expecting someone from the Bureau," she said cautiously.

"God forbid they should interrupt a staff meeting," Garrett said.

Sometimes I hate being right, Scully thought. At least the face on the CDC ID
badge -- Garrett worked for a division of that sprawling agency -- matched the
actual face in front of her, with fewer years on it. Scully spread out the
cards, curious about the number of IDs. Garrett also bore a huge white Olympic
pass, a city of Atlanta badge, and even one from the Department of Defense.
Garrett tapped the Olympics badge.

"Can't go anywhere without it."

Scully looked at her, waiting for the punchline.

"I'm not kidding," Garrett said. "The IOC has more power here right now than
the federal government. First thing we do after we pick up your bags is get you
to processing."

Processing. Scully nodded. It wouldn't be a government operation without the
paperwork.

"What about transportation?" she asked, following Garrett as she snaked through
the crowds towards baggage claim.

"I drove your rental car here. Drive me back to campus and it's all yours. Oh,
and here are your hotel keys." She handed two battered Comfort Inn keys to
Scully. "Your co-workers evacuated pretty quickly. You get their motel room."

They were on an escalator now, moving up, Garrett a step ahead of Scully.
Garrett turned around to look down at her. "Is that all you brought to wear?"

The question was not asked in the friendliest tone. Scully glanced down at her
clothes. She was wearing the same navy blue suit she'd worn to work that
morning. Her bag was filled with similar outfits. "This is what I always wear."

"No," Garrett said bluntly. "Not here. The only formal wear permitted at
Sci-Tech is blue suits and fatigues, and that's only if the shit has hit the
fan."

Biohazard suits for CDC workers and military gear for the DOD. Of course. It
made a certain amount of sense -- but even Mulder, on his most exasperating
days, offered more lucid explanations. "What are you talking about?"

"Staff is not permitted in my heat stroke surveillance statistics. It skews the
curve." Garrett stepped off the escalator and juked left into the baggage claim
area. Scully had a terrible feeling that the woman wasn't joking.

And after processing was over a couple of hours later, she found out that she'd
guessed right. The first assignment given to Special Agent Dana Scully, M.D.,
attached to the FBI's bioterrorism response team at the 1996 Centennial Olympic
Games in Atlanta, was a shopping trip at the nearest Gap.

end 1 of 7

Part 2 of 7; disclaimers in part 1

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
Sci-Tech Campus, Chamblee, Ga.
July 19
7:25 a.m.

Uncomfortable in her new casual wear, Scully clutched a cooling cup of coffee
and made her way through the cluttered  warehouse that served as Base Ops. Just
about every federal agency possible was represented here, as far as she could
tell from the badges around everyone's necks. The young blonde guy wrestling
with a shipping crate was EPA; the woman plugging in a computer was the U.S.
Department of Agriculture, of all things. Garrett had been right about the
dress code. The DOD personnel wore fatigues, but everyone else was in shorts,
T-shirts, polo shirts or discreet tank tops. There was a frightening amount of
federal skin on display. Even if it was more appropriate for the assignment --
no one wanted to scare the tourists by salting the crowds with men and women in
government-issue  suits -- Scully still felt unprofessional in her
short-sleeved blouse and khaki shorts.

She stopped for a minute to get her bearings and to search the teeming
warehouse for her SAC. Amid the crates of supplies, the makeshift computer
workstations, and the hastily arranged lab space were a dozen televisions,
perched on file cabinets or sitting on rickety tables. Half were tuned to NBC
-- Scully preferred National Public Radio, but she knew what Katie Couric
looked like -- and most of the rest were showing CNN. From somewhere in the
room came the unmistakable burr and crackle of police scanners. Overworked air
conditioners rumbled and strained to keep the big room cool; it wasn't quite
working.

"Agent Scully!"

The unfamiliar voice belonged to a compactly-built man in his early 40s, sandy
hair poking out from under an FBI baseball cap. He wore a white polo shirt with
an "Atlanta 1996" logo where the breast pocket would be, and somehow had
received permission to wear slacks. Lightweight and tan, but slacks. Scully
glanced jealously at his covered legs.

"SAC Randy Costello," he said by way of introduction, sticking out a hand.
Scully shook it. "AD Skinner spoke highly of you. Sorry we couldn't pick you up
at the airport ourselves -- the Director had us all on a conference call for a
pep talk. Follow me and I'll show you the bullpen."

The "bullpen" turned out to be the corner of the room where the police scanners
were located, along with two computers set up on cafeteria tables. One of the
televisions in this corner was tuned to CNN; the other, oddly, featured Barney.
"We'll have you here first, monitoring radio traffic. Later, we'll rotate you
out into the field, placing you at a venue or two," Costello said. "Hopefully,
this will be the most boring assignment you ever had."

Scully smiled, and it caught her by surprise. In the tense, awful place the
world was becoming, where terrorists felt free to gas commuters and bomb
daycare centers, where planes fell from the sky for no reason, a boring
assignment sounded good. Exciting, in this context, was unthinkable. "Yes,
sir."

Costello lowered his voice. "And if we get a chance, I'd be interested in
hearing more about that smallpox data you uncovered."

The police scanners fell unexpectedly silent, and the word "smallpox" carried
beyond the bullpen. Scully tried not to flinch. It was bad enough that her
presentation had clearly leaked out beyond the few participants at that
meeting. She glanced around and noticed three or four people staring at them
with interest. One of them, she realized, was Garrett, poking her head out from
behind a computer terminal.

Well, at least now I know who else is CDC, she mused.

"What smallpox data, Randy?" The big, dark-haired man who appeared next to them
wore a forest green Olympics T-shirt that stretched over the beginnings of a
gut. Scully noticed that he stood too close to Costello; the man wielded his
height and bulk like a weapon.

"Agent Scully, Dr. Todd Bitterman, chief of the CDC bioterrorism medical strike
team," Costello said.

Bitterman nodded briefly at Scully, then turned back to Costello with a stern
look. "Randy, don't hold out on me." His voice resonated through the open
space. "You know that smallpox is a threat agent."

Oh, great, Scully thought. "Sir, he's not ... holding out on you. The data are
part of an ongoing investigation my partner and I are conducting unrelated to
this project. I'm not at liberty to discuss it."

Even as she said it, it felt wrong. She was standing just a few miles from one
of the only surviving stocks of smallpox virus, surrounded by epidemiologists
and infectious disease experts. The CDC was the best place in the world to find
people who could help her understand her data, especially if Mulder was
beginning to hide information from her again. But she didn't know this man,
knew none of them, had no idea who she could trust.  She barely knew Costello,
except that she'd heard he'd survived five years in bank fraud before being
promoted to a position where he could actually use that Ph.D. in microbiology.

In a place where there should be allies, she felt she had none.

"The case isn't terrorism-related, is it?" Bitterman boomed at her.

"No, sir," she said confidently, and added to herself, not the kind you're
worried about.

"Well." Bitterman stood down. Costello blinked in a way that made Scully
realize he'd been nervous. "If you ever want to talk smallpox, Agent Scully,
we're your guys."

A motion caught Scully's eye: Garrett, behind her computer, suddenly staring at
a wall, her face tight. "Absolutely, sir."

"We're still working out who's first among equals," Costello said calmly once
Bitterman left. "Come on, let's get you set up."


Listening to a city wake up proved to be more interesting than Scully had
expected. She had access to scanners monitoring traffic from the police and
fire departments, private EMT services, traffic helicopters, even transmissions
from media outlets that still used walkie-talkies to communicate with their
reporters on the scene. She learned several fascinating euphemisms for strong
Anglo-Saxon words from a WXIA cameraman familiar with his FCC regulations.

"Anything exciting to report?" a female voice asked.

Garrett. Scully shook her head. "The MARTA police are starting to sound a
little stressed over the crowds on the subway platforms, but nothing serious, I
think."

"We'll see." Garrett pulled over a chair and sat down. "Do you mind?"

"Go ahead." The woman's face was still as unreadable as ever, but Scully had a
sense that this counted as a friendly overture. To her surprise, Garrett
reached into a shirt pocket and pulled out a pack of cigarettes, tapped one out
and stuck it in her mouth. Scully knew very few scientists who smoked.

"I really should quit," Garrett said, the unlit cigarette flapping a little as
she spoke. "Do you smoke?"

Scully hesitated, wondering if Garrett was going to ask for a light. "I smoked
in college. But I quit."

"Bet you didn't have any trouble quitting. You look the type."

This was said completely matter of factly, but it still felt like a shot.
Scully couldn't decide if it really was, or if this was just Garrett's way. She
took a deep breath and decided to ignore the comment. "So how about you?
Anything exciting to report?"
For the first time, Scully saw a light in the other woman's eyes. "Not yet. The
morning data dump has run, and there's a small spike in minor injury reports,
but it's nothing. More people in town to step on each other's toes. Wait until
the Games really start."

"Are you sure it's nothing?" Scully wondered.

"You G-men are all alike." Garrett pointed at her with her unlit cigarette.
"Costello said the same thing a couple of days ago, when heat stress cases
increased a little. The temperature topped 100, and the fireworks crew wasn't
drinking enough water. If there's one thing I can do, it's pick out an abnormal
spike from a reasonable one."

She looked closely at Scully. Scully just stared back politely. Garrett had
come over for the smallpox data. "It's just vaccination records," she said.
"It's nothing."

"Sure," Garrett said. "Whatever you say."

A sharp burst of chatter erupted from the MARTA scanner. A train had stalled at
the East Point station. Garrett snorted. "This is my prediction. Half the city
has already evacuated. The other half swears it's avoiding the Games. But once
that flame is lit tonight, they'll all be downtown like a shot, bursting with
civic pride. And the trains implode with the load. You watch." She stood up,
twiddling her cigarette between two fingers. "Some scientists believe that it's
hot enough today to light a cigarette spontaneously with the rays of the sun.
I'm going to test that hypothesis."

Well. Scully watched Garrett wend her way through the warehouse, and considered
an idea. She fished her cell phone from her belt, saw no new messages, and
dialed a number.

"Frohike," she said quietly, looking around to make sure no one was within
earshot. "Yes, I know what time it is. Do me a favor ... no, I have no access
to Russian gymnasts." She rolled her eyes. "How about a T-shirt instead? Okay.
I need a background check on the following people. Todd Bitterman. Toni
Garrett, Toni with an I ..."


8:46 p.m.

Of course, boring assignments and long stakeouts were always the most
exhausting. Scully hid a yawn and wished she'd brought her laptop, even if it
was unprofessional to be doing something unrelated while on assignment.

The other federal employees were gathering around the TVs. The Opening Ceremony
was just a few minutes away. Costello had gone to the tactical command post
near Olympic Stadium to join the rest of the FBI contingent, which Scully knew
had been working together in Atlanta for weeks. As far as she could tell, she
was one of the few law enforcement agents left behind at the CDC. She wondered
if the agent she'd replaced would be sitting in this warehouse, had he not gone
to New York.

This isn't punishment, she reminded herself as her cell phone rang.

"Scully."

"Agent Scully, Byers here."

She felt a little stab of worry, and tried to force it down. Mulder said
everything was fine, she reminded herself. It means nothing that he hasn't
called. "What have you got, Byers?"

"Nothing terribly interesting," he admitted. "The entire CDC team seems to
share a resume. Highly respected epidemiologists and infectious disease
specialists. They've all been to the big outbreaks, or they've done work in
Africa on AIDS. A few of them have been to the Hill -- Bitterman has testified
before Congress three times in the last six months alone."

Bitterman would make an imposing presence at a witness table, Scully thought.
"About what?"

"Funding requests, generally. He testified once before the Senate Select
Committee on Intelligence. Looks like planning for the project you're on."
Byers paused, and she could hear the clicking of his computer keyboard. "He's
well-connected politically, but not in any way that raises an alarm for us."

"Probably raises good money for his agency, though." Scully thought about it
for a moment. Too perfect. She no longer believed an entire federal agency
could be free of the conspiracy.

"One thing," Byers added. "Dr. Toni Garrett."

Scully sat up straight.

"She's the only one who hasn't been to all the big outbreaks. She was in
Milwaukee for the cryptosporidosis outbreak in 1993, but she missed hantavirus
later that year, the plague epidemic in India in '94 and Ebola in '95."

Scully's gaze wandered over to the group at the nearest TV set, which was
blaring out a countdown. Garrett perched on the edge of a desk, at the
perimeter of the bunch. "And yet, she's here on what is presumably a hot
assignment," Scully said in a low voice.

"Without the same experience as the rest of the team," Byers continued for her.

A small cheer erupted from the scientists and other team members as the picture
on the TV screen burst into billions of shards of light. Let the games begin,
Scully thought, an unexpected thrill coursing through her. "See what else you
can find out about her, Byers. The Atlanta SAC let slip that we have the ...
that data I've been studying, and the entire CDC is breathing down my neck for
it."

"Gotcha." Byers paused and listened to voices in the background. Scully could
hear the music from the nearby television echoed in the Gunmen's lair. "Frohike
wants to know --"

"Tell him I'll bring him a T-shirt and that's all." Scully hung up, eyeing
Garrett. I don't have WMD experience and I'm here, she thought, but then, I'm
an emergency replacement. She crossed her arms and watched the scientists watch
the Opening Ceremony. One was pointing and gesturing as if he were giving
directions.

"...prevailing wind from the south and you could take care of Olympic Stadium
and Centennial Olympic Park with one flyover," he was saying.

Another shook her head. "Infiltrate the system that operates the fountain.
Tamper with the chlorination system. Add in some crypto or giardella. A flyover
wouldn't work. I heard that the military had orders to shoot down anything that
wasn't the Goodyear Blimp."

"Really?" the first scientist said. "Who has the authority to issue that kind
of order?"

"NBC," a third federal worker said, and the entire group laughed.

Scully recognized this conversation for what it was -- bored, over-educated
professionals killing time waiting for something that pray God would never
happen -- but it still gave her a sudden case of the chills. A face on the
screen caught her eye: the president's teenaged daughter, no older than a good
percentage of the athletes straggling onto the field right now. She'd found
while investigating the smallpox vaccination data that most experts believed
the immunity had long since worn off. No American born after 1972, the last
year shots were given to U.S. civilians on a regular basis, had ever been
immune.

The two-way radio on the desk went off at the same time as her cell phone.
"Scully, please hold," she barked into her cell, and acknowledged the radio.
"Base One, over."

"Base One, Command." Costello's voice crackled through the radio. "Report,
over."

"All clear, sir," Scully said. "Ceremonies look good on TV, over."

"That they do, Base. Remember fireworks begin at 11, over."

She remembered, although she wasn't sure they'd be able to hear the explosions
this far from downtown. "Acknowledged, sir. Base out." She picked the phone out
of her lap. "Scully."

"Ooh, it makes me hot when you talk that military talk, Scully," Mulder said.

"Mulder," Scully breathed, relief at hearing his voice outweighing the
annoyance that it had taken so long for him to call. "Where are you?"

"Greenwich," he said. "My mother -- " And his voice broke.

Scully gripped the edge of her desk.

"She came out of her coma. She's fine. She just needs some physical rehab to
get back on her feet, but she's fine. I brought her home."

The joy in his voice was like nothing she'd heard before from him. She let her
hand slip away from the desk. "Mulder, that's wonderful. How ... ?"

"They don't know." She could almost picture him looking at the ceiling and
blinking back tears. "I don't care. Maybe ... maybe Jeremiah Smith got to her
after all."

Scully closed her eyes and forced down a sudden stab of irritation. It was just
as possible that the medications she knew Mrs. Mulder had been given had done
their job. Not everything had to be an X-file. 

Don't spoil this for him, she warned herself. "I'm glad she's well, Mulder."

"Yeah." His smile was audible. "The doctors said they'd never seen anything
like it."

"I'll bet," she said, and then shook her head. Unbelievable. She was feeding
into his Jeremiah Smith fantasy -- one that had nearly gotten her killed. He'd
been so focused on getting Smith to his mother that he'd left Scully alone with
that stiletto-wielding goon ... 

Stop it, she repeated. Let him have this moment.

"So, Scully," Mulder said into her silence, "did you know that some people
believe that Margaret Mitchell herself is responsible for the arsons at her
home? Seems her ghost read a copy of that 'Gone with the Wind' sequel."

"The real mystery down here is how people figure out where they're going when
every third street is named Peachtree," Scully replied. "I take it you got my
voice mail."

Mulder said nothing for a second, and she jumped in. "It's okay, Mulder," she
said out of habit. "You've had a lot on your mind."

When he spoke again, he sounded relieved. "Hey, Scully?"

"What?"

"Tell me you're bored out of your mind on that assignment."

She smiled, and told him a truth she knew he wouldn't believe. "I'm bored out
of my mind."

He sighed, envy coming through loud and clear. Her instinct that he would have
enjoyed the spectacle had been correct. "McDonald's is an Olympic sponsor,
right?" he said suddenly.

"I assume," she said, puzzled.

"Look at the torch, Scully. Super-sized!"

She stared at the TV. The unlit cauldron, huge and red -- oh,  Lord, he was
right. It did look like an order of fries. "Thank you for the image, Mulder."

"No, thank you for coming to the Olympics." he said in a perfect minimum-wage
drone, then paused.  "Two weeks?"

Something needy and unfamiliar in his voice set off an inner alarm. "Seventeen
days," she said. "Please behave while I'm gone."

"I always behave, Scully," he said abruptly.

She sighed as they hung up. She hadn't meant to speak to him as if he were a
child, but she had. By all rights, she should be glad for him -- his mother had
survived, he was safe -- but nearly every word out of his mouth had irritated
her. Forget it, she told herself. The last thing she wanted to do was sit here,
on assignment, in a room full of strangers, and try to dissect why Mulder was
pissing her off. That was best done at home, over a bowl of ice cream, in front
of a mindless television show.

Or better yet, not at all.

A familiar voice wafted out of the television as the president declared the
games of the 26th Olympiad open. Scully noticed that his accent had thickened
so close to home. The scientists offered up a few mild catcalls -- "Authorize
more biomedical spending!" "Non-essential this!" -- and the familiar federal
jargon snapped her back into her surroundings.

She still had a job to do here, even if that job was just to wait. Focus on
that, she told herself.

But she still wished she had her laptop with her.

end 2 of 7

Part 3 of 7; disclaimers in part 1

CDC, Sci-Tech Campus
July 20
12:35 p.m.

After the second morning staff meeting, Scully began to feel more at home. She
and a few other agents sat in on the team's conference call with the Director,
she briefed Costello on the details of her night, she checked in with Skinner
as a courtesy.

And then, like everyone else on her team, she waited. Later, she'd have more
specific duties -- helping to sift through intelligence, going out to the
venues to help keep a watchful eye -- but for now, she was in a lull. Armed
with a sandwich from the CDC's lunch truck, she snagged a New York Times from a
nearby pile of newspapers. Its plain black-and-white pages were a relief amid
the gaudy colors of the other local and national newspapers.

The Times' front page was evenly split between the Olympics and TWA 800, as
were the television sets surrounding her in the makeshift bullpen. She found
the repeated whistle and splash of the live swimming heats on NBC a
disconcerting soundtrack to the muted recovery efforts visible on CNN. Scully
watched the TVs for a second over the folded down corner of her Times, her
attention caught for some reason by the image of the pool rather than that of
Long Island Sound.

Her phone rang, and she put the newspaper down. "Scully," she said absently,
one eye on the TV. An American seemed to be pulling from behind in the last 50
meters.

"Scully, it's me," Mulder said.

"Mulder! Where are you?" A weird sense of deja vu swept over her as the words
left her mouth. She always seemed to be asking him that.

"Still in Greenwich," he said. "I think I'll be able to go home tonight,
though. Mom's okay, settled in. I found a nurse ..."

She listened to him talk about home health care and Medicare and occupational
therapy, topics scarier than any X-file. Her mother wasn't much younger than
Mulder's. Her gaze remained on the television. The American won his heat, and
boosted himself out of the pool, water rushing down his broad trapezoids. She
blinked, and tuned back in to Mulder.

"It sounds like you're taking good care of her, Mulder," she told him.

There was a pause. "Thanks," he finally said, sounding slightly surprised. He
paused again, and the silence edged into awkwardness. "So, Scully, busted up
that terrorist plot yet?"

"Don't even joke, Mulder. I've been in meetings all morning. It's just like
being back in DC, minus the slide shows of exsanguinated cows."

He actually laughed. "So who won the heat?"

"The American -- Mulder!" she exclaimed, caught.

"Working hard, I see." His teasing smile was audible.

"Believe it or not, I am." Her retort came out a bit more sharply than she'd
intended, and Mulder fell silent. Damn. She sucked in her upper lip and
wondered why she'd overreacted. "I am, Mulder," she said again, softly. "Not
the kind of work we're used to, but it's still important."

"I know, Scully." She heard the apology-accepted in his voice. "Listen. I think
I will be back in DC tonight. I can't do anything on those farms while I'm
here. Mom -- "

He stopped, and she understood. There was no way he could do anything
concerning his strange reports of a girl who looked so much like his sister,
not around his mother. She opened her mouth to update him on the little
progress she'd made with her vaccination data, when he cut her off. "Listen,
Scully, Mom's physical therapist wants to talk to me."

Gone. The first chance in days that she'd had to talk to him about her end of
the investigation, and she didn't get the chance.  Scully fumed at the phone
for a second, then stabbed it off and glanced at her watch. One o'clock. She
was due to stand watch with Garrett over the morning data dump, reports of
every medical event at every venue, the first aid stats and local EMS and
emergency room reports. That was to keep track of biological attacks. Everyone
assumed, given the experience in the Tokyo subway, that a chemical attack would
be instantly obvious.

And every federal employee in America knew what a bomb blast looked like.

At that moment, she happened to look at CNN. The salvage crews in New York were
hauling the first recognizable piece of airplane out of the water, a twisted
slab of fuselage with a few windows still intact and the bright red TWA stripe
still visible underneath them. With a shudder, she picked up the remains of her
lunch and headed for Garrett's workstation.

The data were already scrolling across the other woman's computer screen when
Scully sat down next to her. "Welcome to my world," Garrett said, arms crossed
over her chest, feet up on her desk. Her gaze never left the screen. "Do you
know what we're looking for?"

"I have an idea," Scully said, resisting the temptation to list her own
scientific credentials. "A spike of some sort. An anomaly."

Garrett nodded. "This is raw data, here." She poked her chin at the computer
screen. "It'll take a few minutes to load, and then we'll plug it into the
program that will sort it. We can cut the data any way we want -- age, gender,
location, events attended, you name it."

She sounded proud, and before Scully could ask why, her phone rang. "Excuse
me."

"Agent Scully," the familiar voice on the other end said.

"Frohike. What's going on?"

"Well, we just tried to reach Mulder and he's not answering his phone. Have you
heard from him?"

"He's in an appointment with his mother's physical therapist." She let her
irritation at the question come out in her voice. "Nothing's wrong. Call him
again in an hour."

She hung up, in no mood at that moment to know what Mulder and the boys were
working on. Garrett gave her a sidelong look. "Trouble at home?" she asked.

"No," Scully said abruptly. "So you were saying that you can cut the data any
way you want."

Garrett stared at her, then shrugged and picked up the thread of the original
discussion. "Yeah. Wrote the program myself." The note of pride was back in her
voice. "A single morning's worth may not be enough to show evidence of an
outbreak, but it's valuable to be able to see the data points."

"Just how much data do you need?" Scully asked. Maybe she didn't need to
analyze every single bit of hers after all.

She got that same sidelong look again. "Depends on the kind of data you're
talking about. For an outbreak, well, there are some diseases where a single
data point is all you need. Plague in the Northeast U.S., for example. That's a
western disease. Or inhalation anthrax anywhere. Which will be tough to spot,
by the way. Its initial symptoms resemble the flu."

Scully made an interested face, even though she'd read all about anthrax
symptoms in the briefing papers on the plane.

"Now if you were talking about something different, say, unusual information
about smallpox vaccinations ... " Garrett let her voice trail off. Scully gazed
implacably back at her, tamping down every instinct she had to hand over the
data.

"God, I hate feds," Garrett finally said, her voice even.

"Technically, you're also a fed," Scully pointed out.

"True enough. Okay, let's see what we've got here." The data had stopped
scrolling across the screen, and Garrett typed in a few commands. "Just as I
expected. Headaches, upset stomachs, some dehydration -- hey, what's that?" She
leaned forward and jabbed a finger against the screen.

Scully leaned in to see, easily decoding the medical abbreviations. "Fever,
chills, body aches --"

"Flu symptoms. And it's not flu season." Garrett stood up and cupped her hands
around her mouth. "Hey, Todd!" she yelled. "C'mere!"

As Bitterman trotted over from the other side of the warehouse, Scully felt
herself clicking into action mode, even as she prayed the scientists were
wrong. "Call Mario," Garrett said as he approached. "He needs to see this."

"What have you got?" Bitterman asked, and blinked as he saw it. "Where did this
come from?"

Garrett squinted at the screen. "Grady Memorial."

"Two cases." Bitterman was already dialing his cell phone. "Agent Scully,
where's Agent Costello?"

"At the field office." Scully reached for her own phone. "I can call him -- "

"Not yet. This may be nothing. Mario!" Bitterman boomed into his phone. "Toni's
station. Got some interesting data."

"Sir, if we do have a situation, the FBI should be notified -- " Scully began.

Bitterman stared her down. "Let us do our jobs, and we'll let you know if you
need to do yours."

As Scully glared, a third person joined them. She guessed it was the
single-named Mario, a slight, dark-skinned man who had taken the phone from
Garrett and was shooting rapid-fire questions into it.

"This morning. Uh huh. Well, what did the rapid assay -- Okay. You're sure.
Mediastinum normal. Positive? Okay. Right. Keep in touch." He hung up and
turned to his waiting colleagues. "It really is flu. Two Australian tourists.
Just got here yesterday. Did not attend the Opening Ceremony. Rapid assay
showed presence of H3N2. Anthrax preliminarily ruled out, but Grady's keeping
them until final tests come back."

"We still should have gotten a call," Garrett said. "That shouldn't have waited
for the data dump."

"O'Connor's going to hear about this," Bitterman said darkly.

"I'm going downtown to see the labs myself," Mario said.

"I'm coming with you," Scully interjected.

All three CDC workers turned to look at her. "Who are you?" Mario demanded.

"Special Agent Dana Scully, FBI, M.D.," she said, emphasizing the M.D. "Right
now, I'm the FBI's eyes on this situation, and we should be at the hospital in
case the interpretation of the lab work is wrong. Your name is -- ?"
"Dr. Mario Ruffelli, Special Pathogens Branch." He rolled his eyes and glanced
at Bitterman.

"Take her along," Bitterman said, resigned. This was nothing new as far as
Scully was concerned. Nobody ever wanted the FBI around, but they were sure
glad enough when the Bureau showed up in an emergency. 

She and Mario didn't return to campus until after dinner. The initial diagnosis
had been correct -- influenza, Type A Johannesburg, in two people traveling
from a part of the world where it was flu season. The pair were being given
amantadine to ease their symptoms, and sent back to their Motel 6.

"It's just difficult sometimes," Mario had said by way of apology on the ride
back. "The law enforcement agencies and the military still want to react to a
bioterrorism threat as if it was a hazmat event -- rope everything off, haul
out the blue suits, hose everybody down -- and it won't work like that. In the
beginning, it will look more like an outbreak, slow and steady, like flu
season, and we're having trouble convincing them ... you ... of that."

She'd let him vent for a while, allowing him to get comfortable with her. "But
you won't see a pattern if you don't have enough data," she began.

"Hey!" Mario said. "You're the one with the smallpox data, aren't you? We've
all been talking about you!"

Scully kept quiet after that.

They made nosy colleagues, but the CDC workers also turned out to be good
hosts. Someone had arranged for a catered meal for the night shift -- fried
chicken, baked beans, coleslaw, biscuits and pie -- and Scully decided to take
a plateful outside. The day's heat was beginning to dissipate, and she'd had
enough air conditioning for one day. She'd noticed a nice clump of trees with a
battered bench nearby.

Someone, though, to judge from the red tip of a cigarette she saw glowing in
the dusk, had beaten her there. As her eyes began to adjust to the dim light,
she saw that it was Garrett.

"I was just leaving," the scientist said, grinding her cigarette butt into the
sand-topped garbage can nearby.

"No, you were here first. You stay." Scully had hoped to have some quiet time
to think. Oh, well. She sat down and balanced her plate on her knees.

Garrett's wry smile was just visible in the fading light. "I ate at my desk.
More stable."

"It was time to get some fresh air," Scully said. "How did the rest of the
afternoon go?"

Garrett shrugged and pulled another cigarette out of her pack. "Uneventful.
Heat stress is on the rise, but not as quickly as we'd expected. I think the
water stations are helping, and it's not as hot as it usually gets this time of
year, believe it or not. Couple of interesting gastrointestinal disturbances.
We'll see how that plays out. Mind?" She gestured with the cigarette. Normally,
Scully would, but Garrett seemed to want to talk, and she wanted to listen. She
shook her head, and the scientist lit up. "Bitterman's annoyed that I tipped
him to the flu cases in front of you, but he'll get over it."

"Why?" Scully set an uneaten sporkful of beans back on her plate and answered
her own question. "Turf."

"Exactly." Garrett flicked ash off the end of her cigarette a little more
violently than seemed necessary. The outdoor lights were beginning to flicker
on, but the trees still shaded the bench.

"It sounds like you've worked together a long time," Scully said.

"Forever." Garrett waved a hand, the cigarette tracing red lines in the air.
"The three of us have been running outbreaks for at least five years, before
emerging infections were cool. Todd handles the locals. Mario works the labs. I
crunch the numbers."

"So you've been to all the big outbreaks, then." She had to be careful here.
She knew that Garrett wouldn't take kindly to finding out that Scully had
checked up on her.

Garrett sighed, and the sound carried an unexpected note of sorrow. "No. I
stopped traveling after Milwaukee for a while."

"Can I ask why?" Scully asked gently.

The other woman took a long drag on her cigarette before answering. "My brother
... was diagnosed with lymphoma in early 1993. He lives -- " She stopped.
"Lived here."

That wasn't what Scully had expected at all. She said nothing. There was
nothing to say.

"I thought it was more important to be near him. I didn't want to be stuck in
some hellhole full of panicky people under near-quarantine halfway around the
world and not be able to get back in time." Garrett's voice was raw. Scully was
grateful for the dim light.

"When --"

"January."

Barely six months ago. At that point for her, Scully remembered, Melissa's
death had still been an open wound. "I'm sorry."

Her voice caught, and Garrett looked up at her in surprise. Scully looked at
the ground. "What about you?" Garrett asked, not unkindly.

"My sister," Scully admitted, feeling the still-fresh anger rise. "Murdered."

"Jesus," Garrett whispered.

"A year ago April," Scully said.

"Wow," Garrett said quietly. "Close?"

Scully nodded. "You?"

"I missed the first Ebola outbreak in humans in 20 years for him," Garrett
said, and Scully understood completely.

They sat in silence for a while, Scully's dinner cooling in her lap. She didn't
feel like eating any more; she never did when the grief paid an unexpected
visit. She watched other federal workers stroll by in groups and pairs, heard
the distant sounds of basketball, no doubt from the omnipresent television
sets. And even with Garrett beside her, she felt alone.

"Reheat that before you eat it," Garrett finally said.

Scully blinked.

"I don't like staff in my foodborne illness statistics, either."

Scully smiled a little. "I didn't mean to upset you."

"It happens." Garrett shrugged, but it was the same kind of studiously casual
gesture Mulder also used to cover great pain. "Let's talk about something
else," she said suddenly. "Team handball, or dressage ... or smallpox
vaccination records."

Scully sighed, exasperated. She didn't need this, not in the mood she was in.
"I told you, it's part of an ongoing ... "

"...investigation, yadda yadda yadda, I know." Garrett stood up and cracked her
back. "If you ever decide you need help analyzing it, you know where to come.
My uncle worked on the Smallpox Eradication Project. I know a little
something."

Scully stared after her as she walked away, trying to curb the    sudden desire
to enlist Garrett's help immediately.


Comfort Inn, Chamblee, Ga.
10:15 p.m.

Done for the night, Scully pulled into a space near the front door of her
motel, itching for the quiet time she hadn't gotten at dinner. And she needed
to call the Gunmen, to see if they'd turned up anything on Garrett's uncle, and
-- 

There was sound coming from inside her room.

Scully stopped cold, key frozen in midair before she could plug it into the
lock. The laptop, she thought, I left the laptop in there. She pulled out her
gun, stared at the door for a second to figure out how to open it without
alerting anyone inside, and then slammed it open.

"Freeze! FBI!" she shouted, and pointed her gun at the first person she saw.

Mulder, lying on the spare bed, recoiled and flung his hands in the air.
"Scully, it's me!"

"Mulder!" She lowered her gun, heart pounding. Whistle. Crack. Splash. Swimming
on her TV. "What are you doing here? How did you get in?"

He crept to a sitting position. Scully noticed a couple of beer bottles on the
bed table, and she realized she could smell Chinese food, too. An open suitcase
poked out of the closet, and Mulder was wearing jeans and a T-shirt. Oh, he'd
clearly made himself at home.

"I told the people at the front desk that I was your partner. Guess the
previous occupants had been partners as well, because they let me right in."

And if the front desk staff let Mulder in, they'd probably open her door for
anyone with an official-looking ID. She nodded. The laptop was definitely
coming onto campus with her tomorrow. "Why are you here?" she asked again.

Mulder glanced away. Something indefinable in his expression made her nervous.
"I thought I'd just come here and we could kick around some ideas about the
investigation."

"The farms in Canada," Scully said flatly.

"Right." Mulder looked at her again, but didn't meet her eyes. "I can make some
calls from here -- I don't need to be in New York or DC for that -- run some
computer searches, you know ... "

His voice trailed oddly away. He's drunk, she realized with a start. Wonder if
that happened before or after he got on the plane.

"I'll hang out here," he said. "I'll be okay."

She bristled. "You realize I'm on assignment here. And that has to come first."

"I know, Scully." He frowned at her. "I was going to stay somewhere else, but
there aren't any other available rooms. I checked around."

Of course there weren't. So much for getting time alone to think. "Look, I'm
just tired, and you scared me. And I was planning to do some work on the
investigation myself tonight."
 
He stared at her blankly, as if he'd forgotten that she was a part of this, and
she could feel her blood pressure rise. "Or maybe I'll just take a shower," she
said, and walked abruptly into the bathroom.

Where she found a wet towel on the floor and Mulder's work clothes hung on the
hook on the back of the door. She snatched the towel off the floor and jammed
it into the rack, furious. You're not mad about towels, a little voice told
her, but she refused to listen.


end 3 of 7

Part 4 of 7; disclaimers in part 1

MARTA stop, Chamblee, Ga.
July 21
10:05 a.m.

She hated sleeping with Mulder.

It had worked when they were on the run, on the way to New Mexico, but then
he'd been too sick to do more than pass out cold. In West Virginia, they'd both
been so frightened that sleep was impossible. On the very few other occasions
they'd had to share a room on a case, it hadn't worked. He couldn't sleep
without the TV on, and she couldn't sleep for the feeling that he was watching
her all night.

They'd reached a compromise on the TV issue soon after NBC's Olympics late
night show ended. It consisted of her hiding the remote under her pillow. There
was nothing she could do about the other problem.

So Scully entered the crowded MARTA system on little sleep and with nerves more
jangled than usual. She had never been a big fan of any public transit that
didn't float, and she rarely rode the Metro at home. Georgetown, famously, had
no subway stop. Trains made her nervous, anyhow.

Pushing aside thoughts of merchandise and Japanese doctors, she eased into the
crowded car and wriggled her way to a pole to hang on. She was sure that the
train would only get more crowded as they got closer to town.

Today she was detailed to the medical trailer at Centennial Olympic Park, with
a side trip to Grady Memorial later in the afternoon. As she'd done before, she
was to monitor data, report back if a suspicious trend developed, and wait
around for disaster to strike.

Costello claimed this was a plum assignment. She'd get to go downtown, see the
sights, soak up some Olympic flavor. Jostling against tourists as the train
moved on, she had her doubts about the alleged upside. Costello had also told
her that she'd have to take MARTA, since most downtown roads were closed to all
but emergency vehicles, so she'd been forced to leave the laptop and the car
with Mulder.

Mulder, who'd settled right in and fired up the computer as if he belonged
there. 

Just don't screw up my spreadsheets, she thought darkly.

"Five Points," the conductor announced, and Scully squirted out the door onto
the platform with nearly the entire population of the car. The human morass
oozed its way through the turnstiles and up the escalator. The street outside
the stop was disturbingly transitional -- dollar stores, a battered McDonald's,
businesses with gates on their windows -- and then she turned a corner and
found herself in the First World version of a Third World country.

Replace the T-shirts and commemorative pins with rugs, brass trinkets and
incense and the bazaar she was walking past would be perfectly at home in
Algiers. As it was, the booths hid the storefronts and office lobbies she knew
must be behind them. She didn't even realize she was walking past the
headquarters of the local newspaper until she noticed that the booth just in
front of it was selling the paper along with the commemorative mugs and
baseball caps. Pins, she thought, a little dazed, maybe I can get Frohike a
pin.

The spectacle only got bigger and more commercial as she neared what she
thought was Centennial Olympic Park. Overhead, a giant silver car rotated
slowly around a metal planet, a strange tribute to the automotive industry. Bud
World -- wow, that gave her flashbacks to bad college parties. Somewhere a
raucous band was playing bar band rock at 10 o'clock in the morning.

Blinking with overstimulation, she nearly walked past the white medical
trailer. Inside was welcome familiarity: a waiting area, exam areas set off
with white curtained screens, a data area with computers. Scully sank
gratefully into the chair offered her by the nurse-practitioner on duty, a
short, solid woman whose neckwear included a badge for the Fulton County Health
Department.

"First time downtown," the woman said. It was not a question. Scully nodded and
accepted the cup of coffee she offered. She could still hear the band, albeit
muffled.

"There's a look all the first-timers have," the woman continued. "Would it be a
help to see where you're supposed to be?"

"Yes," Scully said.

"Don't understand why they need the feds here," the woman said. "But our
coffee's good and we're friendly."

Scully ended up hanging out in the discharge area, where patients filled out
forms detailing restaurants they'd eaten at, events they'd attended, their
hometowns. All of it was epidemiological data that would go into Garrett's data
dumps. No one was suffering from anything out of parameters. There was a mild
sunburn, some dehydration, a stomachache or two, the odd skinned knee or
twisted ankle. Except for the thud of the band leaking through the walls and
the hum of the overloaded air conditioning units, it was quiet. Too quiet. She
was having trouble staying awake.

The soft burr of her cell phone nearly sent her through the ceiling.

"Scully, it's me."

"Mulder." She felt her shoulders tense. "Where are you?"

"Marietta and Spring." He paused. "There wasn't anyplace good to have lunch
near the motel, so I thought I'd come downtown."

Lunch. Scully looked at her watch. Nearly 12:30. "I have to be at Grady in an
hour, Mulder, I don't think I'll have time -- "

"Oh, come on, Scully." He was getting closer; she could hear the music from the
General Motors Century of Motion exhibit through the phone. "Anthrax has an
incubation period of one to five days. Plague takes three. You have time to eat
before the outbreak begins."

She rolled her eyes -- and her gaze landed on a young woman handing her
paperwork to the clerk at the discharge desk. Nothing unusual about her,
really. Medium height, slim, sleeveless T-shirt and shorts that exposed legs up
to there, brown hair brushing against her shoulders. But something told Scully
to watch her closely.

"So what do you say, Scully?" Mulder asked.

The woman pulled a barrette from her fanny pack and clipped her hair into a
ponytail. The action revealed a small, angry scar on the young woman's neck.
Scully stood up. "I have to go, Mulder," she said, and hung up on him. She
noticed distantly that her hands were trembling. The woman left the trailer.
Scully darted up to the desk. "I need to see her file," she told the baffled
clerk.

Scully stepped out of the trailer a moment later and searched the crowd for the
ponytailed woman. Wendy Christiansen, age 21. Hometown ... Allentown,
Pennsylvania. The word "Allentown" echoed in Scully's mind as she wove through
the throngs, following a path based more on instinct than actual sightings. It
was important to find her.

"Wendy Christiansen," she called out in desperation, and miraculously the crowd
parted to reveal a startled woman turning in her direction. A look of
recognition crossed her face, and Scully froze, remembering the placid stares
of Betsy Hagopian's MUFON group.

"God! All I wanted was a bandage for a scraped knee!" the woman exclaimed. "How
much more paperwork do you want me to do?"

From the trailer. She saw me in the trailer, Scully thought, relieved. "No, no,
nothing like that." She pulled her FBI badge out of her back pocket. "I just
want to ask you a few questions."

Wendy went pale, and edged away. "I haven't done anything  wrong."

"No," Scully agreed, wanting to take the woman somewhere quiet but knowing that
such a place didn't exist within miles. "I think you can help me, though."

The woman's hand flew to the back of her neck. "I told the police everything,"
she said defensively. "There's nothing else to say."

Her pain and fear were palpable. It must have happened recently, Scully
thought. Part of her wanted to hold the woman's hand and say, I know, I
understand. A much larger part was feeding on Wendy's strong emotions, dredging
up her own buried ones. Just as she had in Allentown, she felt tears sparkle in
her eyes.

Wendy frowned at her. "Are you okay?"

"Yes," Scully said firmly. Someone tapped her on the shoulder then, and she
spun around with a gasp.

Mulder. He grabbed her arms to help her keep her balance in the crowd. "What's
going on?" he asked.

His hands were still on her arms, and she shrugged quickly out of his grasp,
turning to look for Wendy. Gone. Damn it. There was no way to find her in this
crowd. "Nothing."

He stared at her for a minute. "Whatever you say, Scully."

"Fine," she replied. And they were at an impasse again. This time, Mulder
looked away first.

"Well, I'm still going to get lunch," he said, and the vague note of loneliness
in his voice sent guilt washing over her.

"Okay. I could use some food," she said. "But let's eat near the hospital. I
don't want to be late."

Mulder didn't smile, but his face relaxed. He followed her lead as she dove
into the crowds again. "Listen, Scully, I made some calls this morning," he
began, projecting his voice over the noise of the band.

She only half-listened, concentrating on making her way out of the park,
thinking about why she'd reacted so strongly to Wendy's scar besides the
obvious emotional reasons.

"Scully, are you listening?" Mulder called from behind her.

"Always, Mulder," she lied.


CDC, Sci-Tech campus
July 22
3:37 p.m.

She was growing comfortable on the CDC campus, watching over Garrett's shoulder
as the afternoon data dump scrolled by, watching the sunstroke and the
indigestion and the twisted ankles ebb and flow. Data. Sometimes it fell into
little patterns -- elderly tourists who didn't drink their water, revelers
stumbling into traffic along a street that should have been closed. Sometimes
it didn't.

Sometimes it just didn't.

"Ginseng is a protected crop in some regions," Mulder was murmuring through the
cell phone into her ear. Apparently his UN source had told him that the apiary
was really a ginseng farm. Whatever. "Did you know that some farms have to
employ security guards to keep away poachers? The Canadian government requires
that farms register, so it can keep track of supplies and control prices --"

There was no shaking him from this.

Garrett pointed wordlessly to the screen. Fever. Scully nodded, took a mental
note.

"You have checked with the other ginseng farms in Canada, then, haven't you?"
she asked Mulder. "Because if this was an unregulated farm, you can bet the
legitimate operations knew about it, or knew that something was affecting their
prices."

"Of course I've checked with them, Scully."

She could tell from his voice he'd done no such thing. "Well, good, then.
You're making progress." She glanced at her laptop, retrieved from the trunk of
the car where Mulder had left it yesterday, waiting for her to return to her
hapless attempts at data mining.

"I thought you were still interested in this case, Scully."

She narrowed her eyes at the dig. "Of course I am."

"Okay, then. Tell me your theory."

Finally. "The vaccination data is clearly --"

"No," Mulder jumped in. "I meant the farms."

"I have no theory on the farms, Mulder," she said, her voice tight.

He sighed. "Let me know when you come up with one."

Scully tossed her phone onto Garrett's desk and sighed as well. If it wasn't
for the fact that she was positive she could get meaning out of those files,
she'd drop the whole thing right now and move on to another case. 

"The vaccination data is clearly -- ?" Garrett asked.

"Nice try," Scully said. "What's the fever?"

"Mario's checking the details. Eighteen month old, sudden fever, no other
symptoms." She shrugged even as Scully's stomach tightened. "Kids make the
worst data. For some diseases, they're the perfect little canaries, but mostly
they're just terrible false positives. We tried to track an outbreak once in a
daycare center. You would not believe the variety of virus antibodies we
identified."

"No, I guess I wouldn't," Scully said, preferring not to think of children
acting as sentinels of plague, as pieces of inventory to be cataloged.

Garrett narrowed her eyes. "I thought you were a doctor."

"I am," Scully said, and surprised herself by adding, "But there's a reason I'm
not a pediatrician."

"Yeah. I can understand that." Garrett nodded.

"You wanted to be a pediatrician?" Scully had a hard time picturing this
brusque, unsmiling woman treating children.

Garrett shook her head. "A virologist. My uncle's stories about going out into
the field during the smallpox outbreaks were fascinating."

"So why didn't you -- ?" Scully began.

The expression that crossed Garrett's face held just a hint of humiliation. "I
get claustrophobic in the blue suits. And all the hot research, pardon the pun,
is at Biohazard Level 3 or 4. At least, that's what Uncle Fred always claimed.
So now I look for trends and outbreaks, and I help save lives that way."
Garrett tapped out a cigarette and pointed it at Scully's computer. "And what
are you looking for?"

"The truth," Scully replied automatically.

"No, seriously. What do you hope this data will show you?"

Scully began to speak, stopped. She was looking for the reasons why this evil
catalog existed, mostly. The people who put it together. Wendy Christiansen's
face flashed into her mind, and her stomach clenched again. "Answers," she
said, refusing to go further.

"Please." Garrett rolled her eyes. "I thought you were also a scientist. Be
specific."

Anger boiled over, made her incautious. "All right then. I have 70 gigs of data
encoded in random 20-letter strings, each attached to a 15-digit string which
appears to be encrypted. We've sorted it by the 20-letter strings. And now
we're stuck. The encryption is NSA level. I'm looking for a way to figure out
what the hell I'm looking at."

Garrett put her feet up on her desk. "Twenty-letter strings. Amino acids."
Scully said nothing. "Yeah, I know, ongoing investigation," Garrett sighed.
"The 15-digit strings --"

The phone rang, and she snatched it up. "CDC, Garrett. Yup. Okay. Great." She
hung up. "Mario. Roseola. The kid had the classic viral exanthem when he got
there."

"Good!" Scully exclaimed.

"Well, not if you're his parents or his daycare provider," Garrett added.
"Fifteen-digit strings. Social Security numbers -- "

"Which are nine digits long," Scully cut in. "We thought of that."

"Social Security numbers," Garrett continued, as if Scully hadn't spoken, "with
date of birth attached. Or ... " Her gaze went far away, then snapped back into
focus. "The date of smallpox vaccination."

Shit. Scully prayed her expression hadn't changed. Shit shit shit. So obvious.
Why didn't I -- ? Shit.

"Got it, didn't I?" Garrett spun the cigarette triumphantly between her
fingers. "That is why I get the big Public Health Service bucks."

Yeah, well, I carry a gun, Scully thought irrationally. "I'll let you know if
that works," she said as calmly as she could, itching to call the Gunmen.

"Yeah, well, let me know when you know what you're looking for." Garrett
hunched back over her own computer. "Because until then, you're not going to
uncover squat."


7:05 p.m.

The silence on the other end of the phone was almost gratifying.

"It kills me to think that there may be another woman in the world smarter than
the lovely Agent Scully," Frohike said. 

"It's not a competition," Scully leaned back on the park bench. This time, she
was alone. "How long will it take to crack it?"

"Depends. Birthdays are easy enough to match to Social Security numbers.
Finding the dates of smallpox vaccinations, though ... " His voice trailed off.

One word flashed into Scully's mind: Files.

"I could dig up the date of my vaccination -- " Frohike was saying.

Lots and lots of files.

"You can start with my family," Scully said, her eyes closed. "I'll get ours
from my mother."

"We'll work on it from our end, too" Frohike said. "There must be a database
somewhere. Give us a few days."

Hanging up, Scully put the phone down on the bench. 

What did she hope to find? Garrett's question still burned, hours later. She'd
thought she'd known, but now she wasn't so  sure.

Jeremiah Smith kept track of people by Social Security number (she hoped). He
keyed the SSN to an individual tag given to people when they received a
smallpox vaccination -- the only one, if memory served, that every single
person in America could have received during the time that Smith was collecting
his data. Smallpox vaccine predated even the polio vaccine. It predated
everything. It was the first vaccine.

Okay. So you tag people. You catalog them. And you need to do this why? To find
them later. But for what?

Scully stared at the sky. She wondered if her tag matched Penny Northern's, or
Betsy Hagopian's. Maybe she could biopsy their scars to see for sure. Not all
the tags were the same. Pendrell's hadn't matched hers. But if they matched,
then  maybe they had been selected as children, yes, as pieces of merchandise
to be inventoried and sold.

Nauseated, she tried to push the idea away and failed.

But then, if that were the case, what was Jeremiah Smith doing? Smallpox
vaccinations ended 24 years ago, so Wendy Christiansen wouldn't have been
vaccinated. Yet he continued to catalog. Who did he work for? What was his
role?

Maybe the numeric strings do include birthdates after all, Scully thought.
She bent over, elbows to knees, her head in her hands. None of this hung
together. The holes she had to fill in her scenario were bigger than a Russian
weightlifter.

The smell of cigarette smoke wafted past her nose, and she looked up. "Time for
the evening data dump," Garrett called as she walked towards Scully. "Let's go
count tummyaches."

Scully looked up, her shoulders sagging. Oh, what the hell. "The database is
current," she said. "The man maintaining it was inputting data as recently as a
month ago."

"So you think I'm wrong about the vaccination dates, then," Garrett said, her
voice frosty.

"No," Scully said. "These files are definitely linked to the vaccinations. But
what do you do after 1972? Birthdates seem too obvious."

"With that level of encryption, you're probably right." Garrett  stared past
Scully and took a long drag on her cigarette. "Maybe it's keyed to time of
entry. We're doing that with our surveillance data, since it's coming in from
dozens of sources. Time of entry, plus an operator ID to guard against double
entry. You could come up with some fancy coding that way." She focused on
Scully. "But this is all out of your pay grade, no doubt."

Scully smiled, not minding the needle this time. "It is. But that's all right."

It wasn't out of the Gunmen's expertise, not at all. At last, a path to follow.
Hope was having a place to restart, too.


end 4 of 7

Part 5 of 7; disclaimers in part 1

Comfort Inn, Chamblee, Ga.
July 23
8:26 p.m.

On her first night off since her arrival, Scully opted for the cool glow of her
computer screen over the hot lights of downtown. Costello had clearly thought
she was crazy, and maybe she was. But Langly had whipped up a quick program
that would search for the sort of algorithm Garrett had outlined, and they'd
decided to test it on her slice of the data. She watched the progress bar on
her screen fill slowly with bright blue squares, and chewed gently on her lip
as she got closer to useful information. 

"Hey, Scully."

She'd almost forgotten that Mulder was there. He was lounging on his bed,
forking takeout Italian into his mouth, eyes on the TV, which featured the
inevitable swimmers -- this time, women. At some point, he'd bought himself a
not-unflattering Olympic T-shirt. That peculiar bluish green actually looked
okay on him, unlike the dozen other federal employees she'd seen wearing it. 

"What, Mulder?"

"Whatcha doin'?"

"Workin' the case." She really wanted to focus on this project. "Whatcha think
I'm doin'?"

"I thought maybe you'd want to watch the Olympics." He patted the bed.

This time she did roll her eyes. "I watch them all day."

"Oh, right. Was it brucellosis we were worried about today, or Q fever?"

"You've been doing your homework, Mulder." Oddly, this pleased her. "But right
now, I'm thinking about smallpox."

"Oh." And that was all he said.

At that, she glanced up from the screen and stared sharply at him. His face was
unreadable, hidden behind another forkful of baked ziti. He was watching TV
again. Had he gotten her hint? Did he think she was making a bioterrorism joke?
Was he just not interested? She couldn't tell. These days, he was even more of
a mystery to her than usual.

"Mulder, what are you doing here?"

His eyes met hers, liquid and hurt. Boy, that had come out wrong.

"No, I mean, you should be out seeing the sights, trading pins, sneaking in to
watch the Dream Team." Getting out of my hair, she added silently.

He set the container down on the nightstand and swapped it for a beer. "It's no
fun watching Charles Barkley stomp the forward for the Little Sisters of the
Angolan Poor," he said with a small pout. "And I ran out of FBI pins."

Scully bent down and scrabbled in her laptop case for a second. "Here." She
tossed him a blue and gold CDC pin, which he caught one-handed. "I'm told that
that and an Izzy pin are worth at least one from the Lithuanian basketball
team."

Mulder clutched it to his chest in mock rapture. "Tomorrow. Tonight, I watch
gymnastics."

"Gymnastics? Mulder! The American girls won the team competition. You know
that. We heard it on the radio at the  restaurant."

"Ah, but we don't know how they won, do we?" He lifted an eyebrow in a fair
imitation of her own expression. "Sometimes understanding the process is more
valuable than just knowing the facts."

She hoped he intended this as innocent banter, because she wasn't in the mood
for a metaphorical argument over their investigative techniques and
philosophies of life. "Well, let me know when we win the gold, okay?"

She also hoped that sounded friendly. When he nodded and saluted her with his
bottle, she relaxed.

"I'll bet you were good at gymnastics, Scully."

She stared at the screen. No progress yet. "That's like assuming a tall black
man is good at basketball, Mulder."

"I thought every girl your age wanted to be Olga Korbut. Samantha did."

She looked up at the sudden catch in his voice. He seemed surprised, as if he'd
not meant to bring her up so naturally. And then he blinked, and the emotion
was gone. On television, a group of short, muscular girls in white leotards
bounced in place. The Americans were preparing to move to the next apparatus.
She saw Mulder's gaze drift back to the TV. The fact that they were no longer
looking at one another gave her the emotional space to make a decision.

"Missy liked gymnastics," she offered, watching her computer screen. "And
figure skating. All the girly sports."

"She would have." There was a smile in Mulder's voice, and Scully couldn't help
but smile herself. "What about you?"

"Horseback riding. Sailing. But they never show those events on TV."

"Scully, it doesn't get any girlier than horses." Mulder made a noise of mock
disgust and rolled onto his stomach, facing the TV. For a split second, Scully
saw the big brother inside the man. She had to stare hard at her computer
screen to keep the unexpected tears from spilling over.

"I could get behind gymnastics, though," Mulder added, and she was relieved to
hear the familiar leer back in his voice. She glanced up. A slim, stunning
Russian straddled the balance beam, touching the back of her head with her
pointed toes. Back on familiar ground.

"You realize, of course, that that woman is now prone to arthritis, joint
deterioration and chronic pain," Scully pointed out. "She probably hasn't
entered puberty properly, even if she is a teenager, and I'll bet she hasn't
had a period in, oh, three years, if she's ever had one."

Mulder cringed. "Jesus, Scully, you're no fun," he complained. 

"Just quoting the New England Journal of Medicine, Mulder," Scully informed
him. "Gymnastics is really a dreadful -- Wow!"

The Russian had just exploded off the balance beam, twisting and flipping
through the air, spearing her landing.

"You were saying?" Mulder grinned.

Suddenly uncomfortable, Scully scrambled back to her official position of
disinterest. "Like I said, let me know when we win the gold."

He left her alone to work after that, the ebb and flow of NBC commentary a
now-familiar backdrop to her search. The graybar swished back and forth,
mesmerizing her a little. Langley's program looked buggy; it didn't seem to be
getting anywhere. She rubbed her thumb over the mouse button, making the cursor
skitter back and forth across the screen. All this information, teasing her
with answers. The truth, if only -- 

"Holy shit!" Mulder exclaimed.

Irritated, Scully looked up to see an American sprawled on her tiny little ass
on the mat. "I thought they won," she said in surprise.

"They did!" Mulder crawled to the edge of the bed and sat with his nose
practically to the television.

"But... " Scully stopped, watched the stunned girl shake it off, walk back to
the lane, run like hell to the vault -- and fall again. ''...how?" she
finished.

Consternation on the television, discussion of scores. Everything hinged on the
last American, who was now stepping up to the vault. If the last girl didn't
score well, the Americans lost the gold. The last girl stood at the end of the
lane, bouncing and twitching. Caught up in the moment, Scully slipped out from
behind her computer and sat on the bed next to Mulder. She felt him glance at
her briefly as the girl ran, jumped, twisted -- 

-- and fell.

They gasped along with the crowd in the Georgia Dome. "Oh, God, she's hurt,"
Scully breathed. The girl was hopping on one foot, having trouble putting her
weight on the other.

"How the hell do they win this thing?" Mulder wondered.

Together they watched as the girl limped back to the beginning of the lane. Her
coach shouted at her. The commentators were incoherent. The girl shook and
wiggled her hands. "She's going to do it," Mulder said in disbelief.

Without thinking, Scully grabbed Mulder's arm, the way she used to grab
Melissa's.

The girl began to run.

Scully dug her fingers into Mulder's bicep. He was chanting "Gogogogo" under
his breath and barely seemed to notice. The girl punched off the springboard,
lifted, twisted ... and landed.

The scene on the television exploded into chaos as the girl wavered on her good
leg, holding the landing. Mulder jumped to his feet, punching the air. Scully
put both hands over her mouth, wanting to scream with joy. The girl crumpled to
the mat and crawled towards the vault, her face contorted. She's hurt she's
hurt but oh my God she did it, Scully thought.

Mulder whirled in mid-victory dance and she caught his outstretched hand for a
high five -- and they didn't let go. For a second, she didn't recognize the man
she was seeing. She couldn't remember the last time she'd seen pure elation on
his face, if she'd ever seen it at all. Her breath was coming a little faster
than usual, and she thought he looked a little flushed.

It's the Olympic moment, she thought, but she couldn't let go of his hand.

They stared at each other for a few seconds, the din from the  television
seeming to recede. All Scully could hear was her heart.

"Let's get out of here," Mulder said hoarsely.

A million objections leaped automatically to mind -- it's close to midnight, I
have to work tomorrow, I want to work on my data -- but she could see something
dangerous in his eyes, felt it in her own rapid breathing.

"Let's get out of here," she agreed.


Centennial Olympic Park
July 24
12:45 a.m.

They rode downtown in a charged silence. More than once, Scully caught Mulder
stealing glances at her, but only because she was doing the same to him. This
car is too small, she thought, and later, this is crazy. No, not crazy. Crazy
is what might have happened if we'd stayed.

Mulder maneuvered through downtown Atlanta with enough expertise to make her
wonder what he'd really been doing during the day. "Where are we going,
Mulder?" she asked as he pulled into a parking space on the perimeter of the
pedestrian zone that could have been considered a miracle.

He turned off the car and palmed the keys. "To see the fountain."

"I've seen the fountain," she objected.

Mulder shook his head. "You glanced at it as we walked past it on the way to
lunch. We're going to see the fountain."

Scully got out of the car and tugged at the hem of her polo shirt. Play along,
she told herself. This might be nice.

Even at this hour, downtown was still jumping. The thump of music from the
distant bandstand provided a beat for the slightly thinned crowded milling
about them. The T-shirt booths twinkled with small lights that reflected off
the collectible pins. The skyscrapers towered above, every window and corporate
logo illuminated like stationary fireworks. It really was beautiful, in a
glitzy and commercial sort of way, like being in the mall at Christmas except
for the still-warm temperature.

She gasped when Mulder grabbed her wrist. "Come on, Scully, you've got to see
this."

He pulled her through a small stand of skinny urban trees and into a water
wonderland. Dozens of people stood around the sunken plaza that was home to the
famous fountain, hundreds of jets of water shooting through the pavement as
loud classical music blared over the distant rock band.

"Watch." Mulder smiled, and pointed, as he led her to a seat on the low
concrete wall surrounding the plaza.

The 1812 Overture. What a cliche, she thought. Then she realized the water was
moving in time to the music. The crowd squealed as a dozen jets of water
firehosed high into the air at the first cannon burst, squealed again as the
breeze caught the water and sprayed those standing too near.

"The technology behind this, Mulder," she breathed, amazed at the precision
with which that much water could be moved.

"You're such a romantic, Scully."

She glanced at him. Did he really mean that? The lights from the display
rippled and washed across his face, obscuring his expression. "It's not nice to
tease, Mulder," she scolded lightly.

"I'm no tease, Scully."

The meaning she heard in his voice made her heart skip a beat. She held her
breath, waited to see what he'd do.

He did nothing.

They sat in silence for a few more minutes, watching the fountain dance and
jump. Scully began to notice the individual people in the crowd -- teenagers
edging towards the fountain boundary as if they wanted to jump in, families
videotaping their children, couples arm in arm.

An older woman with her arms wrapped around the shoulders of a young girl
caught her eye, glanced at Mulder, and smiled. Scully twitched her mouth at the
woman in an approximation of a smile and turned away. It's not like that, she
protested mentally. And then Mulder shifted position. His thigh brushed ever so
slightly against hers, and didn't move away.

Scully swallowed hard, tried to slow her racing heart. What have I started
here? she wondered, nerves threatening to override all other emotions. Don't,
Mulder, don't, it isn't right ... 

As if he'd heard her, he fidgeted again. The contact ended, but he was still
sitting closer than he had been before. There'd been a time, a million years
ago, when she'd had such a crush on him, when she'd been the one searching for
accidental ways to touch him. But they'd both changed since then. Things had
grown more complicated. For him to try and change now whatever they had (her
mind refused to label it) was terrifying. 

"If this were ancient times, this fountain would probably be one of the Seven
Wonders," Mulder said over the din of music, an odd wistfulness in his voice.
"Remember the Seven Wonders?"

"The Great Pyramid, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Temple of Artemis..."
Scully began.

"...the Statue of Zeus, the Lighthouse of Alexandria, the Colossus, the
Mausoleum at Halicarnassus." Mulder sighed. "Only one left standing. The rest
of them almost forgotten."

"That's a cheery thought."

"I'm a cheery guy." Mulder watched the fountain.

"I wouldn't say they were completely forgotten, Mulder. We remember them."

He glanced at her without moving his head. "So how did you learn about the
Seven Wonders, Scully?"

"A View-Master slide."

Even though this weird train of thought he was on disturbed her, she was still
pleased to see him smile. "I think I read about them in a Scholastic book," he
said.

"There, see?" She felt compelled to comfort him. She always did. "Someone
remembered, and passed it down to us, and we remember."

"Yes, but the civilizations that built them are still gone."  Now he did turn
to look at her, his eyes dark. "Who remembers us, if our civilization meets the
same fate? How do you prevent that?"

"It won't happen, Mulder," Scully said. "We won't let it." Without thinking,
she put a hand on Mulder's knee. Immediately his eyes changed, focused
completely on her. She caught her breath, felt herself lean forward, lean into
him --  No. No, no, no. And she drew back. She understood him now, understood
why he'd come to Atlanta, why they were here tonight, but it was wrong. The
motive was wrong, the timing was wrong.

"So we need to keep our focus," she continued, gently removing her hand. "We're
so close, Mulder, I can feel it. We can't let anything get in our way, not
now."

They stared at each other for a second. Understand, please understand, she
begged him. Please. Mulder finally took a deep breath and stared back into the
fountain. The music had stopped. People were edging carefully in, finding their
way through the jets of water without getting soaked.

"You should try it," Mulder said flatly, exhaustion coloring the edges of his
voice.

Scully flashed on the half-dozen or so possible interpretations of that
sentence, trying not to panic at his defeated tone of voice. The fountain, she
finally realized. "But --"

"It's safe," Mulder said. "You'll like it."

She decided to take that at face value. "All right, then." She hopped off the
low concrete wall. "Coming?"

"In a minute." He gestured with his chin towards the fountain. "You go. I'll be
there."

The water switched off, turning the fountain area into a rainslick plaza.
Scully turned her back on Mulder and darted into the fountain, making sure she
planted herself in an area relatively far from the water spouts. But when the
fountain switched back on, she got a surprise -- instead of the powerful blasts
of water she'd been expecting, she found herself surrounded by a cool mist so
thick her hair began to curl in the humidity. She couldn't see anything more
than a few feet away.

She couldn't see Mulder at all.

She lifted her hands into the mist, tilted her face to the bright night sky.
The mist obscured everything. All she could hear was the sound of people
laughing and shrieking around her. Thin jets of water punched into the air, and
squeals erupted as the spray hit those standing in the wrong place. The sound
of the water changed and turned harsh like machine gun fire. She nearly reached
for the gun she'd left at the motel until she saw the source. Next to her, two
teenaged boys were balancing an upside down beer cup over one of the jets. The
plastic cup bounced and bobbed on top of the water.

Bill and Charlie, Scully thought, even though the two dark-skinned boys bore no
physical resemblance to her brothers, and she smiled. She reached out to one
nearby jet, encircled it with thumb and fingers, snatched her hand away when
the stream widened. This will last, she thought, this moment. These people,
this society. We'll protect them. We can do it.

The mist began to clear as the fountain started up a new program, and she
finally saw Mulder, searching for her in the crowd. She stepped behind one of
the large jets of water, hoping for one more second of peace.

A cold blast of water to her back jolted her out of that hope. She yelped and
spun around; the water caught her in the stomach. She looked around, batting
her hands against the water. There he was. Mulder stood with one palm flattened
over top of a stream of water, forcing it perpendicular to the ground and
straight at her.

"Mulder!" she shouted, halfway between anger and amusement.

He smirked and took his hand out of the water, but she noticed that his eyes
remained hooded and dark. Okay, if that's how you want to play this, she
thought. A socially acceptable way to work out your frustrations. I can do
that, too.

She slammed her hand against the nearest jet of water and angled it down,
punching Mulder right in the chest. His shout of surprise was the most
satisfying thing she'd heard from him in days.

end part 5 of 7

Part 6 of 7; disclaimers in part 1

Comfort Inn, Chamblee, Ga.
July 24
7:05 a.m.

The hot water of the shower burned Scully awake. The steam almost took care of
the feeling that someone had scraped her frontal lobe raw. Stupid, to stay out
that late, stupid, stupid, stupid ... She leaned her head against the white
fiberglass of the stall, wishing for more water pressure. Barely three and a
half hours of sleep when she had a long, inert day ahead of her. Downtown
again, on the most unstimulating assignment possible, on too little sleep and
too much thought.

"Night, Scully," Mulder had said, somewhere around 2:30 a.m., then stripped
down to his boxer shorts in front of her as if it were a challenge and slipped
into his bed.

Maybe I should have taken him up on it, she thought. I might have slept better.

Stupid, she reminded herself.

To distract herself last night, she'd begun to think about the new direction
she was investigating. That had kept her awake for another hour, as she
listened to Mulder snuffling gently in his sleep.

She shut off the shower. Steam covered the mirror and that was just as well.
She knew what she looked like after a long night. Shrugging into her robe, she
tied it loosely around her waist, wrapped a towel around her wet hair, and
pushed the bathroom door open quietly, hoping not to wake Mulder.

Except that he was already awake, wearing nothing but  jeans, slouched behind
her laptop with his hair still tousled from sleep. The faint clack of keys
sounded in the room. For once, the television wasn't on.

Damn him. She'd been hoping to slide out quietly, put some distance between
them for a couple of hours.

He looked up as she stepped into the room, and while his expression didn't
change, she felt the need to pull her robe more tightly around her.

"About time." He pushed abruptly away from the computer and headed past her for
the bathroom. "My eyes were starting to turn yellow."

Thanks for sharing, she thought as the door snicked shut behind him. Do I get
teambuilding points for this? She took his place at her computer, intending to
start Langly's program again; it had crashed while she and Mulder were out.
What she saw on the screen instead dismayed her.

His face lit up when he came out of the bathroom and saw her at the computer.
Before she could say anything, he was at her side, kneeling beside her. Much
too close. She held still, remembering last night.

"Look at this, Scully." He braced one bare arm against the back of her chair to
balance himself. "A complete list of every ginseng farm in Alberta, operational
and not. Look, here are a couple of new ones in neighboring provinces. What do
you think?"

It was hard to think when he was so close. If he was doing  this on purpose,
she was going to be furious. "I think," she said carefully, "that when I'm free
of this assignment, we should go back to West Virginia."

Mulder rocked back on his heels. "West Virginia? Why?"

"Files, Mulder. Lots and lots of files."

He frowned, and she plunged in to prevent his objection. "They contained
medical records, remember? Tissue samples. Smallpox vaccination certificates."

"Scully --"

Putting a hand on the edge of the laptop's screen, she ignored him. "I was
thinking about this before I fell asleep. The older information in those files
probably matches up with the data Jeremiah Smith was collecting at the Social
Security office. I was talking to Dr. Garrett, and she believes --"

"You told the CDC about this?" Mulder exclaimed.

Now it was Scully's turn to frown. "No, SAC Costello did."

"How did he --?"

Heaven forbid I get a little help, she thought. "The grapevine, Mulder, but
honestly, that is not the issue. Dr. Garrett believes that a good portion of
the data could be Social Security numbers combined with smallpox vaccination
dates, and those dates are in the West Virginia files. It could help us decode
this information, prove a link -- "

Mulder snorted, and popped to his feet. "And how do you propose that we get all
of those files out of there? Or do we just look in all the drawers until we
find another DAT tape full of gibberish?"

"Navajo," she corrected him, her frown deepening. The level of his hostility to
this idea was unexpected. "We take a sample of files, enough to get a
statistically significant sample of dates, or files we're interested in -- "

"If they're even there."

She almost winced, but stuck to her guns. "How are we going to know unless we
look?"

Mulder began to pace. The towel slipped off Scully's hair as she watched him;
she caught it and draped it over her chair.

"You realize that smallpox vaccination ended in the United States in 1972," he
began.

Her eyes widened. He had been looking into the files after all. But his next
words stunned her.

"So the files, the data, they're missing an entire generation.  They're
useless," he said.

She felt like shouting. "We don't know that yet, Mulder. The Gunmen and I are
working on an angle. And maybe the files cover younger subjects, too. We won't
know until we look."

"They let us see the files, Scully. What better proof -- " he emphasized the
word -- "do you need that they're unimportant?"

"The tissue sample cases are modern. Those files are being maintained!"

"Okay," he said, his face dangerously blank. "Then if those files are so
critical, why didn't we re-examine them a year ago?"

"Because it was dangerous? Because I'd been suspended and you were officially
dead? Because my sister was dying and I wanted to go home? You ought to know
what that feels like."  

His flinch made her feel gratified, and then mean, but she was too angry to
care. He recovered and whirled on her.

"So what makes it less dangerous now?" His voice headed lower as hers went
higher.

"We have something to link them to now," she exclaimed. "Facts, Mulder."

"What matters is here." He struck his chest. "The truth, Scully. Facts don't
always add up to the truth. The fact is that our scientists lack the will to
clone humans, but I've seen clones. The fact is that human experimentation
without consent is unethical and illegal, but it goes on. It happened to you."

She willed herself to keep looking at him. She wanted to kill him. She wanted
to cry.

"Go ahead, play with your data, look at your files, but it won't uncover the
truth," he continued. "The people who cloned those girls know about my sister.
I'm going to find her. That's what matters. Not this."

And he slammed her laptop closed.

She stared at his hand, her gaze burning on his long fingers while she tried to
get her heartbeat under control. She understood his need to find his sister, to
recreate the family he'd nearly completely lost. But to dismiss her in the
process ... A strand of damp hair fell into her face, and the motion of tucking
it back into place helped her center her thoughts.

"Mulder." Her knees were shaking. At least her voice didn't betray her rage. "I
have to get ready for work. I would like you to leave the room while I do that.
After that, the rest of the day is your call. Excuse me."

He stared at her for a second, fury shimmering off him like  heat from a hot
Georgia highway. Then he pulled on the nearest T-shirt, jammed his feet into
shoes and left. Scully wanted to fall into a chair, but didn't. If she did,
she'd never get up again.


CDC, Sci-Tech Campus
9:15 a.m.

Garrett  jumped when Scully slammed the computer disk onto her desk. "I thought
you were downtown today," the scientist said.

"On my way," Scully snapped. "This is for you. Analyze away."

The other woman picked up the disk and examined it with interest. "Is this the
-- ?"

"The smallpox vaccination data." Scully stared at Garrett, daring her to make a
crack. Garrett just raised her eyebrows.  "This one is the slice I've been
working with. I can get you the rest. Want to know what I hope to find?"

"It would help."

Scully ignored the sarcasm. "I believe that all of us are being tagged,
cataloged and recorded as part of some ongoing experiment, the details of which
I do not yet know. There was a genetic marker encoded in the smallpox vaccine.
Different people may have different tags, depending upon their role in the
experiment. If I can link the information on this disk to other classified
information I am working to obtain, then I might be able to figure out who's
behind the experiments, exactly what they are, and why they're being
conducted."

Garrett put the disk back on the desk. "Unauthorized human experimentation,"
she said doubtfully.

"Begun in the 1940s with the American effort to rehabilitate German scientists.
It continues today."

There was a long, long silence. Garrett stared at the disk, then pushed it ever
so slightly away from her. "You've got to be kidding me," she finally said.

Only then did it dawn on Scully that Garrett was dressed differently today: in
crisp, military whites with a gold oak leaf on her black epaulettes and a small
row of medals just below her plastic nametag. She was a lieutenant commander.

"You never said you were military," Scully breathed.

"No. Public Health Service. Commissioned Corps. Only pseudo-military. Wednesday
is Uniform Day, even at the Olympics." Garrett stared at her. Scully thought
she looked a little pale. "So, you are kidding, right?"

So you are establishment, Scully thought. Goddamn it. I thought I had an ally.
"Yeah. I'm kidding."

Her throat was tight with the lie, with her anger at Mulder. The sense of
betrayal all around overwhelmed her. She scooped up the disk and bolted out.

When she got back to the motel, close to 11 that night, Mulder was gone.

Dammit, Mulder, Scully thought, looking at the empty spot where his suitcase
had been. Dammit, dammit, dammit.

She dropped onto the edge of his bed, fell onto her back and covered her eyes
with one hand. She lay there in silence, resisting the temptation to pick up
the phone.


end part 6 of 7

Part 7 of 7; disclaimers in part 1

Sci-Tech Campus
July 26
6:27 p.m.

Scully couldn't tell whether Garrett had said anything to anyone about her
theories. All she knew for sure was that the atmosphere in the warehouse had
subtly shifted, and she felt out of place once again. Garrett remained her
usual unreadable self. No one said a word to Scully about smallpox. That made
her think that Garrett had said something, if only that the dataset was
bullshit. The CDC people had been too interested before to be suddenly
uninterested now. Hard to say how much of what she was feeling was simple
paranoia, and how much was real.

The scanners crackled, alerting them to a disturbance outside a MARTA station.
Adrenaline pumping, Scully leaned in to listen. After a few seconds of
listening to panting police officers puffing reports into their shoulder mikes,
the situation became clear: Pickpockets. Nothing for her to worry about.

Garrett's voice startled her out of her focus. "Heads up."

Scully looked up to see Costello headed her way -- and behind him, Mulder, in
dress shirt with the sleeves rolled back and his tie loosened, a file folder in
one hand, loping along as if he belonged here. His visitor's pass twisted and
swung crazily on its chain against his chest as he walked. This was trouble.

"Who's the other guy?" Garrett asked.

"My partner."

Before Garrett could say anything else, Costello and Mulder were at Scully's
station. Mulder stared at a point just past Scully's left ear, not meeting her
eyes. A muscle twitched in his jaw. Come to think of it, Costello looked fairly
grim, too. Her stomach clenched.

"Agent Scully," Costello began, and sighed. "You've been a terrific help to us,
and we appreciate all the work you've done here on such short notice."

Her heart was racing. "But."

"But your AD says it's time to go home. He's arranged for the agent you
replaced to come back from New York, and as of the end of your shift tonight,
your assignment here has ended."

Scully stood up. "Mulder?" she began, not sure whether to be angry or upset or
glad.

He jerked his head towards an empty corner of the warehouse, and she followed
him over. "What the hell is going on here?" she hissed at him, pitching her
voice so that no one else would hear.

Mulder began to fiddle with the manila folder. "I went back to DC," he said,
still not quite looking at her. "Did some thinking. Talked to Skinner. Assuming
I described it correctly, he liked your theory."

Scully was speechless.

"We have a flight back in a couple of hours, and then we can head off to the
mines." Mulder looked up and finally met her eyes. "Assuming you still want to
pursue that line of investigation."

"Of course I do."

"Okay, then." He reached into the folder and pulled out a photograph. "But I
have to show you this first."

She could hardly believe what she was seeing: another goddamned ginseng farm,
being tended to by half a dozen identical blond boys ... and half a dozen
identical eight-year-old Samanthas.

"Mulder," she breathed. "This is impossible."

"It's not," he said flatly. "This is what I saw."

"But this photo could be doctored."

He shook his head. "I had the guys check it out. It's real. Plus, Scully --
this is what I saw."

"But how --" She stopped, the questions piling up in her mind like cars on an
icy highway. "Where --?"

"I don't know, Scully. I don't know anything, except ... not everything dies."
Something in his voice chilled her. Those words were not his own. "The mines,
then this. Okay?"

She stared at the photo for a moment, the impossible Samanthas looking more
probable every minute. There was a  tissue sample case in her own file, too,
she remembered, and shuddered.

"Okay," she said.


Alberta, Canada
July 30
9:27 a.m.

The rolling fields Scully could see through the passenger window of their
rental car were as endless and as empty as the caves they'd left behind in West
Virginia. Even though she'd expected it, she'd still been angry at the sight of
the gaping manmade recesses where the vanished file cabinets had been.

Mulder, to his credit, had said only, "You're lucky you've been able to keep
that smallpox data as long as you have."

She shifted in her seat and wondered, as she spotted a snow-tipped mountain on
the horizon, if he felt that lucky now. The three farms they'd visited
yesterday had been perfectly legitimate. No sign of bees, boys or Samanthas.

The radio was broadcasting the latest news from Atlanta in counterpoint to her
thoughts. They'd missed the bomb at Centennial Olympic Park by just hours. If
Mulder had shown up at the CDC later, or their flight had been delayed, both of
them no doubt would have been drafted into the manhunt. She could have done
something useful for the Atlanta team, been of real help to someone.

"They're barking up the wrong bubba, Scully."

Scully glanced over at Mulder, behind the wheel as usual. His fingers tapped
out a rhythm on the steering wheel to a song she couldn't hear. He'd rolled
back his sleeves again, and his jacket was discarded in the back seat. She
curled her hands up inside her own jacket sleeves. After a few days of Atlanta
heat, a Canadian summer felt like winter.

"Most UNSUBs want attention," he continued. "But I'm not sure an interview with
Katie Couric is what -- "

"Mulder, I agree with you, okay?" The long drive was getting to her. She had
the makings of a tension headache, right between the eyes, and she rubbed the
bridge of her nose.

"You okay, Scully?"

"I'm fine." To forestall any more questions, she pulled out the road map. Only
a few more miles to go to the next farm. "How many more stops on your list?"

"Four, including this next one."

"You don't see a trend developing here?"

Mulder raked a hand through his hair. "I'll feel better seeing for myself."

"Fine." She couldn't fault him for that. She'd demanded the same when it came
to the West Virginia files. "You realize we have to be back in DC by Friday.
Skinner has another 302 -- "

Her phone rang, and she glanced in surprise at Mulder. He shrugged. Instead of
a hello, she heard cursing and crashing and men shouting. The voices were hard
to pick out. "Hello?" she said.

"Agent Scully!" Byers, breathless. "We have a problem."

In the background, she heard Frohike shouting, "Shut it down! Pull the plug!"
and the unmistakable sound of a telephone being dropped.

"Byers?" she said, worried.

"What's going on?" Mulder wondered. She ignored him.

"Agent Scully," Langly said, his nasal voice pinched with tension. "Your data
-- we cracked the code."

"But?" The crashing and shouting had died down; the cursing had not.

"It contained an executable that launched when we broke in outside normal
access channels. The data cannibalized itself, and started in on our hard
drive. I don't know how much damage it caused to us, but your data is gone."

Son of a bitch. She stared at the ceiling of the car. "I still have my copy,
and systems has a copy at work. If we had a proper password, or something --"

"If we came in as friendlies," Langly agreed. "Maybe. But in the meantime,
we've got a lot of diagnostics to do before we can help you again."

"Keep me posted," she said. "And thanks." She hung up. Even solid evidence
wasn't solid. Shit.

"So what was all that?" Mulder asked.

"A little computer problem," Scully said tightly. She crossed her arms and
glared at the road. "Nothing the guys can't handle."

She saw Mulder glance at her, knew that he knew she was lying, was relieved
that he let it drop.

"Here we are," her partner mumbled to himself. He pulled into a long, winding
driveway that ended in nothing. All Scully could see was a flat expanse of
recently tilled land, a clear space where a house or a barn might have stood, a
few small trees, the earth at their bases fresh.

Speechless, Mulder stared out the window. "This was it, Scully. I know it was."

She almost reached out to put a comforting hand on his arm, but stopped,
remembering his reaction at the fountain. An instinctive act, and she couldn't
even let herself do that. Mulder got out of the car and rambled around the
site. She watched him crumble the dirt between his fingers, looking for
evidence. She stepped out of the car herself. The cool breeze ruffled her hair.
Evidence. Right. He wasn't going to find anything. Just as she hadn't.

So close, in the last few weeks, to so many things. To proof, to validation, to
help, to new comrades, although Garrett so far hadn't answered the brief
goodbye email Scully had sent her.

And then the X-Files intruded again, as they always did, as they had when her
father died, when her sister was dying, when she had entree into a normal life,
working with normal people ... or at least as normal as people who spent their
days watching anthrax and Ebola for a living could be.

No, she realized. I let them intrude. I made them intrude. I'm the one allowing
myself to stay in this limbo, where proof doesn't matter and truth takes
precedence over facts and I use Mulder's instincts instead of my own.

She stood under a glorious blue sky, mountains visible in the distance, the
gentle rolling prairies around her easy on the eye. And she was watching her
partner roam around an abandoned farm that meant nothing any more. Her head
still ached, and she rubbed the space between her eyebrows again. Science had
provided them a place to start, but there was nowhere to finish.

She was so tired of being in this position.

She was so tired.

Never again, she swore.

"Mulder," she called.

He stood up and looked at her, a smear of dirt on his cheek and a matching
smudge on one knee.

"We're done," she said. "Let's go home."

-30-


Author's notes, redux:

Where to begin? This story has been nearly two years in the making, and it
wouldn't have been finished without a lot of poking and prodding from a lot of
people.

First, Triton-X, who provided me with information on the Australian equivalent
of the FBI and who has probably forgotten all about it, and Shannono, who
actually drove around Chamblee more than a year ago so that I could have some
idea of what the place looked like.

Next, the members of scullyfic, who have been listening to me whine and moan
and complain about this story for several months when I wasn't busy
commandeering topics for my personal use, and who kindly stalked me in return.

And the Beta Band: Barbara D., EPurSeMouve, Fialka,  haphazard method and
shannono for helping me make the original story make some sense. I will never
load more than a quarter gig of data onto a virtual laptop again.

My son also played a critical but unwitting role in this story's completion: he
began tae kwon do lessons last fall, and opened up another two hours per week
in my schedule for writing, since I had to wait for him while he took his
class. To him, a yellow belt and a bag of sparring gear.

This story is based loosely on the real multi-agency teams that performed this
very job in Atlanta and Sydney. I've heard the actual people involved in
Atlanta and Sydney discuss their work, but I made a lot of it up, too.

This story is also based on real-life events, some of which resulted in the
deaths of many real people. I mean no disrespect by using these events in a
fictional way; I hope none is taken.

mrsblome@aol.com

-30-