Chapter Text
Dana kicked her shoes off as soon as she got in the door. What a god awful waste of time the last three weeks had been. Cell reception had been awful in some of the towns they passed through, and a week in she’d lost her phone in a scuffle with a woman they suspected had been harbouring Barry, which she hadn’t been, but she had been harbouring a fair-sized marijuana farm out the back of her house and fought like hell to keep it. They spent three weeks following up pointless leads, travelling up and down the East coast as Dana grew steadily more frustrated. Alex, on the other hand, seemed perfectly happy with the situation and had never been so present at work. Finally, Skinner had admitted that all their leads were bs and recalled them to DC, leaving her to come home on Sunday afternoon to her car covered in bird shit and a mailbox overflowing with junk mail.
Her answering machine light was flashing; she pressed play as she unbuttoned her shirt.
“Dana, it’s your mother. Please give me a ring when you get this. Your friend Fox called me this afternoon, he was worried about where you were and I’m getting worried too. Love you.”
She stopped the tape. Mulder had called her mom? He must have been trying her cell for the last three weeks and getting nothing back. She’d have to call him, let him know everything was okay. That date had been… maybe something special, and she’d thought about him a lot, perhaps more than she realised. And she should have told her mom she’d lost her phone, at least.
First, however, she needed a bath. She finished undressing in the bathroom and threw everything into the laundry basket – she had so much washing to do that she was going to have to start living in the laundry room. The water pressure in her building was blessedly high, unlike the string of miserable motels she’d been staying at, and the tub filled up quickly. She got in with a sigh and leaned back.
The tub was at least sixty percent of the reason she’d taken the place. It was original to the building, a solid, deep claw foot bathtub from the 1920s, where most of the other apartments had been renovated to oblivion over the decades. There was no standing shower, just a faucet attachment that meant she had to sit down to wash her hair, but it was a small inconvenience for such luxury.
She spent maybe an hour soaking, before she sat forward again and washed her hair, scrubbing at her scalp with her expensive shampoo, then smoothing her equally expensive, frizz-taming conditioner through it. She’d missed this too, while she was away.
She was almost done when she heard the knock at the door. Probably Mulder, she thought, and felt a little burst of excitement over the thought of it. She gave her hair one last blast with the shower and stepped out, then wrapped herself in a towel. The knock came again and she yelled that she was coming. She twisted her hair into second towel and let the first one drop, replacing it with a robe.
The knocking had progressed to pounding; she appreciated the eagerness, but not so much the aggression. She peered through the peephole and saw not Mulder, but a woman with curly dark hair and a face that looked somehow familiar. She opened the door.
“Yes?” she said, as coldly and authoritatively as anyone could with a pink towel wrapped around their head.
“Are you Dana?” the woman asked.
“Yes. And you are?”
“I’m Samantha Mulder,” she said, and the familiarity suddenly made sense. There was something similar around the eyes, and her hair, the texture of it. Dana pushed away the thought of her hands in Mulder’s thick hair when she’d had him laid out beneath her on the couch.
“Oh, well, hello.”
“Hello?” Samantha echoed back, lifted her chin. She was a good few inches taller than Dana, and it would just be like Mulder, to come from a family of tall people, she thought, quite irrationally. “You drove my brother crazy with worry for three weeks, and all you’ve got to say is ‘hello’?”
Dana blinked in surprise. She hadn’t expected anyone to be crazy with worry for her, not least a man she’d only known for a few weeks. Then again, he had laid his soul at least partially bare about his intensity in relationships, and he had tracked down her mother’s number and called her. Perhaps this was to be expected. “That wasn’t my intention. Is he okay?”
“I wish I knew!” Samantha said, and barged right past her and into her apartment. “He’s missing.”
Dana turned on her heel, following Samantha’s path, and closed the door. “He’s missing? For how long?”
“Two days,” she said firmly.
“Only two days? Are you sure he’s actually missing?”
“Of course I’m sure. He’s not answering my calls, his phone is just ringing out, and he hasn’t been home.”
“Okay,” Scully said, crossing her arms over her chest. “Look, I might not know Mulder that well, but… he doesn’t seem like he’s the most reliable person in the world, are you sure he hasn’t just taken off for a while?” It kind of hurt to even say it, that maybe he’d just left, that whatever had been going on with them hadn’t been that important to him. Maybe he was pissed off by her extended absence and had cut his losses.
If looks could kill. “He wouldn’t do that to me, he always answers my calls, and there’s no reason he wouldn’t – he doesn’t have a job. He might have moved around a lot, but he’s never just skipped out without telling me. And he wouldn’t just skip out on you.”
Dana willed herself not to blush. Clearly Mulder shared a lot with his sister. “Okay, well… have you called the police?”
“Yes, and they said the same as you, that it’s only been two days and that he’s an adult. But I’m telling you, something’s wrong. I always know when something’s wrong with him.”
“Okay,” she repeated. “I-- I had a message from my mom, she said Mulder called her. Maybe she has some idea where he is.”
“Call her,” Samantha said.
“I am,” she muttered, picking up the phone.
Her call was answered after only three rings. “Hey Mom, it’s me,” Dana said.
“Dana! Where have you been? You haven’t been answering your telephone, I’ve been worried.”
“I’m sorry, it was work, and I lost my cell, but I should have let you know what was going on.” Samantha glared at her impatiently. “Look, I need to ask you something. You said in your message that Fox called you?”
“Yes, he sounded very upset.”
“Did he say anything? If he was going somewhere?”
“He said he was going to your work, to find out where you were. He said he’d call me back, but he never did.”
“When was this?” Dana asked, a feeling of dread pooling in her stomach. Samantha was right, something had happened.
“Friday afternoon,” her mom said.
Two days ago. She glanced at Samantha, then back to the phone handset. “I have to go, Mom, I’m sorry. I’ll call you again soon, we’ll talk properly.”
“Is everything okay?”
“I’m… not sure. Ring me if you hear from him.”
Her mother agreed that she would and they ended the call. Dana pulled the towel from her head and shook her hair out. “I’ll get dressed, we’re going to the FBI.”
Twenty five minutes later, they were in the lobby of the Hoover Building. It was late in the day, nearly five, and there weren’t many people around. Ernie, her favourite guard, was behind his desk and smiled when he saw her.
“They making you come through the front now, Agent Scully?” he said.
“Not exactly,” she replied, approaching the desk with Samantha hot on her heels. “I’m trying to find out some information, about a friend of mine who might have been looking for me on Friday. He’s about six foot, brown hair.”
Ernie hummed. “Yeah, I remember him. He was trying to get in to see AD Skinner. He mentioned you as well.”
Skinner? She thought back on their date – she had complained about Skinner, how he didn’t seem to trust her, how he’d lumbered her with a useless partner. Mulder must have remembered his name.
“Did he get in?”
“No, he didn’t have a pass and he was behaving suspiciously. I asked him to leave and he did.”
She nodded; trying to sneak into the FBI to see a high ranking member was certainly going to raise a few eyebrows. “Do you know what time he was here?”
“I can find out on the camera,” Ernie said, and turned to his computer terminal. After a few minutes, he found Mulder, entering at 4.18pm and leaving at 4.31pm. He printed out the clearest shot of him leaving the lobby and Dana got onto the tech lab about pulling CCTV footage from the street to see where he went, but didn’t get the warmest reception, given that it was late afternoon on a Sunday and it wasn’t part of an active investigation.
“It’ll be a while before they pull any footage, probably a day or so,” she told Samantha. “I can try to send it up the chain, but I don’t see it making a lot of difference.”
Samantha closed her eyes and drew in a deep breath, then opened them again. “I might know someone who can help,” she said, sounding not a little pained by that fact. “Give me ten minutes.”
She waited in the car while Samantha went to a payphone on the corner to call her mystery contact. She hadn’t divulged anything who this person was and was generally behaving very cloak and dagger about it all. Was Dana getting herself drawn into something that shouldn’t concern her? Were the Mulder siblings both just crazy? He’d certainly implied that his family wasn’t the most stable; perhaps him and his sister were co-dependent fantasists from years of parental neglect and she was going to get herself drawn into murky family politics. Maybe he had just taken off after all, despite making all that effort to find her over the last couple of weeks.
Maybe she was self-sabotaging again.
Samantha opened the passenger side door and got in. “I’ve got an address in Chinatown.”
That was just around the corner, barely a five minute drive. She started the car. “How do you know this guy?”
Samantha leant her head back against the headrest. “He used to work for the FCC, I met him at a tech convention. He had a promising career but he started believing in all these conspiracies and then he quit his job to write a newsletter, The Magic Bullet.
“The Magic Bullet?” Dana repeated. She’d heard of the publication; it was a joke in the office, conspiracy theorist garbage. “They’re a bunch of cranks.”
“Maybe,” Samantha said.
“You really think he’ll be able to help?”
“I think he has a lot of connections.”
“And you think he’ll agree to help us?”
She nodded, and looked out the window. “I think so.”
There was more to that story, Dana thought, but it wasn’t for her to ask. A few minutes later, Samantha directed her to the building, a two-storey red brick on the corner lot, with a plaque on the wall that read ‘THE LONE GUNMEN: PUBLISHERS OF “THE MAGIC BULLET” NEWSLETTER’.
“Don’t mention the FBI,” Samantha said, “they’re probably fairly paranoid.”
She rang the doorbell, then gestured for Dana to step back, which she did, though not without feeling a little chagrined at the gesture. They waited for several long moments in silence, long enough that she started to wonder if they were even there, until finally she heard a series of locks and bolts being opened on the other side. The heavy metal door eased open slowly, and a man with a neat beard looked back at them.
“John,” Samantha said.
He stepped aside to let them pass. “Come in. You mentioned something about your brother?”
The room they’d stepped into was cluttered and dark, all the shades drawn, and every surface covered in papers, computers, and wires. It looked like an unholy hybrid of office, printing press, and computer forensics lab. “He’s missing and I need your help,” Samantha said.
There was a wolf whistle from further in the room, and two men stepped out of an adjoining doorway, one tall, one short. “Who are the babes?” the shorter man said.
Dana pulled out her badge. “Special Agent Dana Scully, FBI.”
The way the lascivious look melted off the little man’s face was gratifying, as her words sent the three of them into chaos, yelled accusations about bringing feds to the door and backstabbing bouncing around the room. Samantha mouthed ‘what the fuck’ at her and shook her head.
“I knew you were still a government man deep down!” the little man hurled at John, who shouted back about paranoia and further devolved the conversation.
“Enough!” Dana yelled over the din, and slapped her hand on the nearest table, knocking a cascade of paper to the ground.
“We’re just here for my brother, nothing else,” Samantha added, shooting a withering glare at Dana.
“And who do you work for? The CIA?” the blond guy asked.
“FTC,” she said, and the little guy threw up his hands and turned away. “I’m an attorney.”
“Langley, Frohike, calm down!” John said, “she’s a friend and she needs our help.”
“So she’s your little piece,” the man Dana determined to be Frohike said. Everyone ignored him.
“We need to trace Samantha’s brother’s movements over the last two days,” Dana said. “Apparently you can help with that. His name is Fox Mulder.”
John took a seat at one of the various terminals and started typing. It was deeply alarming how quickly he pulled up a photo of Mulder and a list of past jobs and addresses.
Frohike’s question of ‘and why can’t the FBI deal with this?’ was drowned out by Langley’s ‘oh shit!’ and the hurried, whispered conversation between the three of them, of which all Dana heard was ‘Eurisko’.
She thought back to Mulder’s initial questioning. The man he’d seen, he said, had long blond hair and glasses. He’d seen him again in a Walmart parking lot, he’d insisted, but she hadn’t really believed him.
“You’re the hacker,” she said. “You’re the man who hacked into Eurisko’s servers and the blame got pinned on Mulder.”
The trio broke apart and Langley threw up his hands in contrition. “Look, man, I wasn’t trying to frame anyone, but there’s something going on at Eurisko. A fed got killed there last year and it all got covered up. They’re developing something dangerous in there. It’s our duty to investigate, that’s what we do.”
Dana opened her mouth – this Garth-from-Wayne’s-World lookalike had just validated every strange feeling she’d had about the case, everything that got shut down and Alex ‘helpfully’ cleared away for her. This was the first real lead she’d had into Eurisko and maybe the only opportunity she’d have to speak to these guys, since they’d probably pack up and move as soon as she left, but there wasn’t time. She had to focus on Mulder. “We need the CCTV footage from outside the Hoover Building from around four thirty on Friday.”
“Step aside,” Frohike said, and waved John away to take over at the computer. He started typing, navigating his way through various computer programs, and Dana averted her eyes, as though only seeing it in her periphery would absolve her of her legal duty to arrest them for hacking into government networks. Before long he’d located the footage, Mulder leaving the building at 4.32pm on Friday afternoon and getting into his car. Frohike hopped from camera to camera, following Mulder’s journey along E Street, then turning off onto 9th Street.
“The cameras are densely packed around the Hoover Building,” John said, “it’ll get harder to track him once he gets further away.”
Mulder started making a turn at an intersection on screen, when a man darted out into the road. Mulder’s car jerked to a stop, a hair;s breadth from hitting him, and the man quickly swung around to the side of the car, thrusting his arm through the driver’s side window.
“Oh my God,” Samantha half gasped. The man, who appeared to be unseasonably dressed in a thick coat, pulled the back door open and got in, and haltingly Mulder began to drive again. “He got carjacked.”
John put his hand on her arm.
“We need a shot of his face,” Dana demanded, her heart in her throat.
Frohike shook his head. “There’s no good angle on the guy, but maybe… there’s a jewellery store on the corner there. High end. They should have good cameras.”
Dana gave up on any pretence of not condoning criminal acts, even to herself, and all four of them leant in around Frohike as he hacked his way through the store’s security and got into their camera, though she couldn’t imagine how he’d been able to do it. He inched his way through the carjacking frame by frame, until he got the clearest shot of the man stepping out into the street and raising his head. He isolated the image and shrunk it down until the pixels coalesced. Dana recoiled from the group, nearly tripping on one of the wires littering the ground.
“What? What is it?” Samantha said.
“That’s Duane Barry,” she said, fumbling for her phone.
“Who?”
“He held four people hostage in a travel agents a couple months ago and got taken out by a SWAT team,” Langley replied. “Thought the guy was dead.”
“He escaped a few weeks ago,” Dana said, waiting for the phone to ring through to the task force emergency number. As soon as the line was picked up, she spoke, “this is Special Agent Dana Scully, badge number JTT0331613. I need you to put out on APB on the following plate-” She broke off to gesture for Frohike to zoom in on it, but he already had it up on screen. “-BC658, Rhode Island. The vehicle is registered to Fox William Mulder and I have reason to believe that Duane Barry has taken him hostage.”
She hung up as soon as she got confirmation and tuned back into the conversation taking place, the three men expressing surprise at Barry’s flight from the secure unit of Jefferson Memorial Hospital – so they weren’t privy to everything that was going on. The media blackout had been unusually tight on this one.
“The guy’s a multiple abductee,” John said seriously.
“And criminally insane,” Frohike added.
“Why wasn’t it in the news?” Samantha asked, a hard edge to her voice. “Why weren’t people being warned about this guy?”
“There was a media blackout, it wasn’t my choice,” she said, though of course that was going to be little consolation to Samantha. It was strange, that they’d hidden it from the public, it served no purpose other than to create a situation like this one. But she couldn’t think about that now, she needed to decide her next steps, so she ignored Samantha as her face grew steadily redder and John held her arm again when it looked like she might scream or cry, or both. Was it better to go back to the FBI or stay here? This strange trio of men seemed to have a lot of technology at their fingertips, and a considerable edge on the lab.
“You have a police scanner,” she said, not a question, and there was a general murmur from the men. “Turn it on, and keep tracking the car.”