UMBRA 2:ELLIPSIS CHAPTER 5 By Dawson E. Rambo Disclaimer : Fox Mulder, Dana Scully, Walter Skinner and any other tangentially mentioned characters created by Chris Carter remain his copyrighted property, the property of 1013 Productions, and the property of Fox Television, a unit of 20th Century Fox, Inc. The author believes that the use of copyrighted characters in the forum known as "Fan Fiction" is protected under the "Fair Use" statutes of US Copyright law. No infringement of any copyright is intended. Characters created by the author remain his property. Archive Title : ELLIPSIS 5/? Posting Date : 27 July 1998 Classification : SRA/MSR[m] Overall STORY Rating : NC-17 (explicit sexuality, violence) CHAPTER Rating : R Keywords : UMBRA, Mulder/Scully, Thriller Summary : Withheld at author's request. Spoilers : NOTE: This chapter goes back and forth on the timeline, folks, so please note the section headers. NOTE 2: Once again, I owe a debt of gratitude to my team of editors, Tamara Kauffman, Hank Lee and Scott Carr. Their deft touches and amazing skill has once again reduced the amount of mental gymnastics the rest of you have to go through to make sense of my sometimes...erratic writing. ENJOY! +=+=+= Aboard VC-20 Tail Number N913998 Enroute to Billings, Montana April, 2003 Dana Scully leaned back in the comfortable leather seat and sighed. This, she decided, was *much* better than flying commercial. The sleek executive jet was assigned to the Air Force Special Missions Wing at Andrews Air Force Base, detailed to shuttling high-ranking military and civilian officials around the country. Glancing across the aisle, she saw that Mulder was deep inside his briefcase, moving piles of paper around the small work desk in front of him, frowning at some of the papers, shrugging at others, and chewing his lip at still a third pile. "What are you working on?" she asked. "Same thing as always," he mumbled, taking his glasses off and rubbing the bridge of his nose. "Trying to find a pattern in the madness." Scully stood and crossed the cabin, leaning down to look over his shoulder. He was going over VICAP teletypes. Each of them reported a violent criminal act somewhere within the jurisdiction of the FBI. Picking one at random, Scully lifted it from the desk and read it quickly. A self-described teen militia consisting of twelve members of a high school football team in Jacksonville, Florida had assassinated a math teacher who had refused to give them all passing grades. The teacher had received death threats by telephone and through the mail, but had dismissed them all as the rantings of unbalanced athletes riding the emotional waves of chronic steroid abuse. That mistake had cost the man his life. Answering a knock at his door late one Friday night, he came face- to-face with a 12-guage shotgun wielded by the captain of the football team. The teenager had pulled the trigger, blowing a "stop" sign-sized hole in the teacher's chest. The VICAP report indicated that the teenager had been, until that moment, a straight-A student who was hoping for a football scholarship to a Big 10 school. "Any evidence to suggest...?" Scully asked. Mulder, lost in another VICAP report from Ohio, shook his head. "No, the fact that the kid's parents are still alive leads me to believe that it's not exactly what we're looking for. I'm not a hundred-percent sure, though." Scully dropped the first report and selected another. Plano, Texas: One teenage girl had gunned down another in the parking lot outside their senior prom. The stressor event had been the discovery that the victim was carrying the suspect's boyfriend's child. Continuing to hold that one, Scully chose another. Kentucky: a sixteen-year-old boy had reportedly shot a homeless man in the back of the head and then riddled his chest with more gunshots in a fight over a cigarette. "This one?" Scully asked, holding the Kentucky report up. "No. The homeless man was a nobody, I'm sad to say. Veteran, in and out of VA hospitals. He had no...tactical importance." "Practice?" Scully offered, shuddering at the thought. Mulder sat back, his eyes defocusing as he gave the idea some thought. "Let me see that," he requested, holding his hand out. Handing him the report, Scully watched as Mulder quickly read it, and then read it again, slowly, more carefully. "Possible," he said, moving it to the second pile, "but not probable. The level of violence is worth a second look, though. He shot the guy sixteen times in the chest. Had to reload twice." Mulder picked up the report he'd been reading and finished it, sighing as he did. "Listen to this," he said softly. "A nine-year-3old boy in Chicago. Killed by gang members." Scully frowned. That didn't fit the profile that Mulder had created. "Wait," he said, noticing her expression. "Listen to the rest of it. According to the CPD, he was, at nine, already an accomplished dealer. He had a network of older boys working street corners for him. Police estimate his crew was taking in somewhere in the neighborhood of ten thousand dollars." "A week?" Scully asked, visibly surprised. "Ten thousand a *day*," Mulder corrected. "He also had sidelines in carjacking, armed robbery, and the occasional arson for hire." "The victim? Or his...cronies?" "The kid, in most cases. He got into a shootout with police two weeks before his death, managing to blow a cop's head off in the process." Sitting back, Mulder laced his hands behind his head. "The kid vanished right after that, disappearing into a network of safehouses he'd created himself. The CPD, as you can imagine, didn't sit still for that, and went into a full-court-press against the gang. Instead of giving him up, they executed him." "A nine-year-old boy?" Scully asked, horrified. "A nine-year-old with six felony arrests and one conviction, Scully. A cub scout this kid is not." "Still," Scully said softly. After a minute, she asked, "Does that fit your profile?" "No, but it's interesting for other reasons." Scully waited for Mulder to elaborate, and when he didn't, she reached out and touched his elbow to get his attention. "Not yet, Scully," he said gently. "I'm still thinking about it." Scully nodded, moving back to her seat. Buckling in, she leaned back, closing her eyes, thinking back to when Mulder had first started to notice the pattern, when he first spotted the fact that the youngsters of the country had descended into a vortex of bloodlust... +=+= Sterling, VA September, 1999 Mulder hung up the phone and glanced at his wife, his eyes distant and hazy. "What?" she asked. "That was Timothy Gates, over at ISU. He works in the VICAP development center. He's emailing me something he wants me to take a look at." Scully waited, knowing Mulder would eventually tell her what was going on. "Yesterday, a fourteen-year-old in Ohio burned a house to the ground in Dayton to cover up a burglary. A mother and her six-day-old daughter were inside. The local Field Office interviewed the kid as part of the VICAP update, and the kid admitted that he knew the mother and daughter were in the house." Scully closed the book she was reading and turned to face Mulder. "That's horrible." "Yeah, but that's not all," Mulder said, moving from the couch to the desk. Flipping the switch on the computer, Mulder sat and faced his wife while waiting for the machine to boot. "San Diego, two days ago. A star track runner, 17, took a contract for six hundred bucks and wasted the abusive father of his best friend's girlfriend. Shot him eleven times in the head, reloaded, and put ten more into his crotch. And, six days ago, Portland, Oregon. A fifteen-year-old girl got her father's shotgun from a cabinet in his den, loaded it, and killed her parents, her younger brother, and then herself." Mulder paused. "They were eating dinner at the time of the murders." Turning back to the computer, Mulder launched his email client and dialed out to the FBI POP node in Alexandria. "Tim thinks that there's something wiggy with the numbers and wants me to take a look." "Wiggy how?" Scully asked, interested. "Well, VICAP was set up to track one killer through multiple jurisdictions, via the MO and signature. No one ever thought to look at the data the other way. Looking at crime trends." "That's what the UCR is for," Scully pointed out. The Uniformed Crime Report, a yearly compilation of all major crimes, was completed by every single municipal police agency in the United States that requested access to the NCIC computer system. Mulder glanced over his shoulder. "The UCR doesn't report juvenile crimes, Scully." With a start, Scully realized Mulder was right. "Here it is," Mulder said, mumbling. His eyes scanned the report, taking note of dates and places and ages. "Holy shit," he whispered. "What?" "Tim's right. There's a definite statistical upwards trend starting in 1996." Mulder stood, leaving the email on the screen and went in search of his briefcase. When he came back, Scully was seated at the computer. She had launched Excel and was busily graphing the data Tim had emailed. "Look at this, Mulder!" Scully said, pointing at a 3D multicolored pie chart on the screen. "Felony crimes committed by juveniles between the ages of 10 and 15," the legend read. "Murder, 39 percent, arson, 12 percent, armed robbery, nineteen percent, rape, twenty percent, carjacking, eight percent and miscellaneous, two percent." "That's just for 1998," Mulder said, pointing at the Excel sheet. "Do a murder trend from 1995 until now." Scully gasped. "Look at that. Almost 700 murders committed by juveniles last year. And...God, what is it, September? It's almost past last year's total!" Mulder grunted. "What the hell is going on?" +=+= April, 2003 Scully's eyes drifted open. Glancing to her left again, she saw that Mulder was still engrossed in his work. He'd dived into the problem almost four years ago, unaware at the time that it was a precursor to the mission they now found themselves on. At first, no one at the Bureau had wanted to believe. They claimed that the number of murders committed by kids was holding steady, it was just the reporting that was getting better. Mulder had used the Lexus/Nexus computer network to prove them wrong, scouring the country's newspapers and magazines for reports on any violent juvenile activity. He proved that less than ten percent of violent juvenile crime was going unreported, and most of that was in remote, rural areas served by police departments that didn't have access to the NCIC system and thus didn't have any access to VICAP as well. As the numbers had continued to climb, Mulder had taken it on as his pet project. He knew it wasn't, strictly speaking, an X-File. It was professional curiosity more than anything else. Two months after that, he'd asked Scully to autopsy the body of a Washington, DC kid who had gone on a shooting rampage in a mall, killing sixteen people with an AK47 before being cut down by the police. Scully had gone along, not expecting to find anything out of the ordinary. Only she had. Something unexpected. Something utterly, completely... Alien. But not like before. There were DNA tags, proteins never seen before on Earth. But they weren't in the killer's cells, not exactly. There were traces of them left behind, traces in the connective tissues of the brain, traces in the saliva and the blood. But in the blood plasma, not the blood cells themselves. Traces were found in the cerebrospinal fluid, not in the actual brain tissue itself. Scully had likened it to an infection because that was the closest word that seemed to match. And she had to admit that it looked...familiar. It looked like Purity Control. But different. Evolved. Mutated. And the chase had begun. Shortly after that, the Smoker had approached them. Scully would never forget that day as long as she lived. +=+= November, 1999 Washington, DC Mulder was in the office, logged onto the computer, using his lunch hour to scour the NCIC databases for what he called "underreported" crimes -- those cases in which the reporting authority was trying hard not to "ruin" a kid's life by doing such things as listing a rape as an aggravated assault or a car jacking as "unauthorized vehicle use." A soft, polite knock came at the door. "Come in," Scully had called, her attention focused on a paperback novel. It was probably Skinner, and since it was the lunch hour, he probably wouldn't mind the fact that she was reading at her desk. But it wasn't Skinner. It was him. The Smoker. Scully dropped the paperback and reached for her pistol, leveling it at the man. "Mulder," she said softly. The warning tone in her voice caught his attention, and Mulder looked up into eyes of the man he hated above all others. "Doing your dirty work in person?" Mulder asked sarcastically. The Smoker grinned slightly. He has a gentle smile, Scully mused, and then immediately banished the traitorous thought. "I'm more concerned with how you got into the building," Scully said. The Smoker shrugged. "May I come in?" "Since you asked so nicely," Scully said, stepping away from her desk, keeping her pistol trained on the man's chest, "Please. Be my guest." He entered, careful not to startle either one of them. "I was wondering if I might have a word with the both of you," he said slowly, softly. "About a matter that concerns all three of us." Mulder and Scully exchanged a glance. It had been weeks since they'd brushed up against the Consortium in any of their cases. And there was nothing pending that seemed even remotely connected. "About what?" Mulder asked. "If I might be allowed to explain," the Smoker said. "I'm sure I can make myself clear." Glancing at Scully, he said, "And I can assure you, Agent Scully, that you won't need that." Scully lowered the pistol but didn't holster it. The Smoker took the seat in front of Mulder's desk and reached inside his jacket. Scully's pistol was up in an instant, pointing at the back of the Smoker's head. "Don't," she said. The Smoker's hand reappeared with a pack of cigarettes. "No smoking," Mulder said, pointing at the sign on his desk. It had been a gag gift from Scully for his last birthday. The Smoker considered lighting up anyway, but he'd read Scully's FBI personnel file. She was known for pulling the trigger at the slightest *hint* of danger to her partner. "Very well," he said, replacing the cigarettes inside his jacket. Scully waited until his hand reappeared empty before lowering her pistol. "So, what can we do for you?" Mulder asked, a sneer on his face. "Come to burn the files again?" The Smoker chose to ignore Mulder's taunt and instead clasped his hands on one knee. "I'm actually here about two things," he started. "The Graves affair and some of the things you're currently working on. There is a connection I'm sure you're not aware of." "A connection between a megalomaniac terrorist and a spree of juvenile murders?" Mulder scoffed. "That's a stretch, even for *you*." "And why would you care if we even *made* the connection?" Scully asked. The Smoker twisted in his seat, speaking to Scully. "Because, believe it or not, I am here to help you, Agent Scully. Just as I have always tried to help you." Scully's jaw tightened at the man's audacity. "Do I *look* like an idiot to you?" she asked, visibly angry. "No, nothing of the sort, I assure you," The Smoker grinned. "But, if you'll allow me to say my piece, perhaps we can call get past this disdain you seem to have for me." Mulder stood, hands on hips. "Do you *blame* me? You had my sister kidnapped, raised by a family that was not her own. You've tried to have me killed a half-dozen times. You've participated in the single most important cover-up in the history of--" Scully held up her hand, silencing her husband in midstream. "Let him talk, Mulder. The sooner he says his piece, the sooner he leaves." Mulder nodded and retook his seat. "Go ahead," he said. "I want you to think back to the Graves case," The Smoker said. "To the time just after Commander Stone had been killed. When you and your wife and Graves left the White House on the chopper." He paused. "Where did you go?" "Zeus Storage," Mulder said immediately. "A place I am *intimately* familiar with. As you well know." The Smoker nodded. "Did you ever wonder why he took you there?" "To kill us," Scully interjected. "But I got the drop on him." The Smoker nodded. "Sure...but why did he take you to that specific place, Agent Scully? Why Zeus Storage?" Mulder opened his mouth to reply and then shut it. "Obviously," Scully said, "since Graves had the access he did, he'd read our files and knew that location held special meaning for us. He was obviously hoping that we'd be so distracted by our surroundings that our reactions would be slowed, giving him an advantage in any confrontation." The Smoker grinned. "A viable assumption, Agent Scully. Wrong, but viable." "So why don't you tell us why he took us there?" Mulder asked. "Do you remember how you entered the room?" The Smoker asked. Mulder closed his eyes, remembering. "The chopper landed in the street next to the warehouse. Graves had a key. He unlocked the door, then locked us in. He led the way to the storage room, unlocked it, and..." He trailed off, opening his eyes. "I went in first. Scully behind me, and Graves behind her." "Right," the Smoker said. "So...what happened next?" "Mulder was carrying the CBX device," Scully interjected. "Graves kicked Mulder in the knee, and the device started falling. Graves grabbed it and triggered it. As the gas started filling the room, I shot him." The Smoker grunted. "Not really, Agent Scully." "We were *there*," Scully pointed out. "Who performed the autopsy?" the Smoker asked. Scully shrugged. "I have no idea. I was disqualified. I killed him." "Agent Mulder, why don't you pull up the file?" Mulder set his jaw, considering. "Fine," he said. "But it doesn't matter. You could have had the file changed. That much I know." Mulder turned to his computer and began typing. Almost a full minute later he was reading the file. "Doctor Abrahms," he said. "Paul Abrahms." "I know him," Scully said. "He was a professor of mine in medical school." "Do you trust him?" the Smoker asked. Scully nodded. "To a point." "Remember that. It will become important in a moment. Mulder, please read the report in detail." Mulder shrugged and turned back to the computer, reading. "Killed by a single gunshot to the head at close range, a contact wound, caliber .380..." Mulder stopped, frowning. "That can't be right," Scully said. "I had a USP .45 in a shoulder holster and my duty SIG in a thigh holster." "And which did you shoot him with?" the Smoker asked. "I..." Scully started, and then stopped. "I can't remember," she said softly. "I have something I think you should see," the Smoker said softly. "It's a weapon. I'm going to reach inside my jacket, using two fingers, and bring it out." Scully's pistol came up again and she nodded at Mulder who nodded at the Smoker to continue. The Smoker reached back under his coat and slowly came out with a Walther PPK held between two fingers. Scully watched him closely, her hand loosening and tightening on the grip of her pistol. "This," the Smoker said, laying the pistol on Mulder's desk, "is the weapon that killed Danny Graves." The Smoker stood, placing a business card on the corner of Mulder's desk. "Call Abrahms. Check it out. There's the weapon. Match it against the bullet." "You could have switched-" Mulder started. "Abrahms has had the bullet in his personal possession since the autopsy," the Smoker explained. "He keeps it in a safe in his den. He considers it a collectible." "If you know that," Scully pointed out, "you could have switched it." "I understand your reluctance to believe me, but the evidence does speak for itself. Skinner himself signed the autopsy report, and he has a copy of it in his personal safe." "How do you know that?" Mulder asked. "Because he told me," the Smoker replied. "Does he know you're here now talking to us?" Scully asked. "Yes," the Smoker said simply. "Yes he does." And with that, he turned and left. Scully and Mulder had begun the investigation almost immediately. Skinner had provided his copy of the autopsy report, and Scully had spoken with Dr. Abrahms. He confirmed that it had been a .380 that had killed Graves, and not a .45 or Scully's SIG. Microscopic examination of the slug had matched the PPK that the Smoker had left on Mulder's desk. "Proves nothing," Mulder had insisted. "This man is a master at manipulating evidence, Scully. This could all be a setup for something else, something bigger, something we aren't seeing." "But it's worth following up, Mulder," she had insisted. "You think he's being altruistic?" Mulder had asked, astonished. "I don't know what his motivations are," she'd replied. "It's just worth following up. Even just to see what he wants from us." Mulder hadn't been convinced, but he'd gone along. And now, four years later... +=+= April, 2003 Scully opened her eyes again and glanced out the window. "We're almost there," she said to herself. Glancing over at her husband again, Scully was relieved to see that he'd chosen to take a short nap. His work light was off and the seat was reclined. Scully's thoughts turned to the mission ahead. I've come so far, she thought. Almost twelve years as an FBI agent, married for close to seven. From a green, wet-behind-the-ears agent to... What? Scully smiled as she remembered her twentieth high school reunion. Well, she mentally amended, the reunion of her senior class; moving around as often as she had, that was the only one she'd been invited to. Held only a year ago, she'd talked Mulder into going, if for nothing more than a brief respite from the grueling UMBRA training. He'd acquiesced, and they'd both ended up having a much better time than they had originally planned. The most-often posed question, (right after "So, is *this* your husband?") had been, "So what do you do?" Scully remembered the thoughts that had flown through her head. I'm a medical doctor. A forensic criminal pathologist. A federal agent. I hold a reserve commission in the US Navy as a Captain, like my father. I am the executive officer of an elite counterterrorist unit charged with saving the world, a world that may come to an end in the next three years if I don't do my job. I'm a sister and a daughter. I'm a wife. Married to a abnormal criminal psychologist. A certified National Violent Criminal Profiler. Also a federal agent. A man who holds a commission in the US Army as a Colonel. A man named as a Counselor to the President. For the last nine years I've chased mutants, monsters, aliens, and tried my hardest to uncover a conspiracy I discovered only recently was nothing but a grand plan to prepare myself and my husband for the defense of this planet against an invading alien colonizing force. She'd smiled and told everyone that she was a pediatrician. They'd believed her. +=+= Norfolk, VA The Plumber considered his options. Ever since the package had arrived, he'd been unable to think of anything else. He'd known it would come to something like this. He'd tried. He'd warned her. Again and again. And each time, she had stubbornly refused to listen. Headstrong. Insistent. Just like her father, the Plumber thought. He'd long ago stopped thinking of Captain Bill Scully as his *own* father. To do otherwise would render him unable to complete the tasks assigned to him. Such as this one. Two months to complete the assignment, and the Plumber knew he would need every day, every hour available to him. So, he thought, drumming his fingers on his desk, how to do it? Part of him wanted her to know, wanted the look of recognition on her face when he pulled the trigger. That meant, of course, that Mulder would have to go first. That would be a pleasure. Imagining the kick of the gun against his hand as he killed Mulder, the Plumber smiled, savoring the bloodlust that thrummed through his nerves. An *exquisite* pleasure. Since the wedding, they had hardly spent a moment apart. He'd never known a married couple so comfortable with each other, a couple who could spend literally months together for 24 hours a day, seven days a week and not go stark raving mad. So, he would have to kill him in front of her. Sad, but unavoidable. If he insisted on her knowing it was him. Otherwise, it could be done a thousand different ways. Poison. Bomb. Long-range shot from a powerful rifle. He had the clearances to get onto any military installation in the country, so getting *to* them wouldn't be a problem. Getting away, in such a scenario, would be a problem. A big problem. So, the house in Sterling. A bomb in the basement, under the hood of a car, poison in the food. Or, the simple, old-fashioned way. Creep in while they were asleep, slit his throat, wake her up, show her his handiwork, and then...her. The Plumber decided that this mission, his last mission, his most delicious mission, required a bit more thought. It had to be perfect. It was the last time he was going to kill, and he wanted to remember it for the rest of his life. He wanted to savor the ultimate victory. He knew that he would do it face-to-face. He wanted her to know. He wanted to tell her, to make her understand. She had a right, he thought, a right to know that if she'd just listened to him, if she had just taken his advice so many years ago she wouldn't be in this position today. She could have lead a normal life. With a husband and a family. Now...now she would never know those things. Oh, sure, she had a husband. *Mulder*. The thought of the man's name drew a sneer across the Plumber's features. God, how I hate him. *He* took her from me. From her mother. From her family, her friends. It's his fault. The anger the Plumber felt towards Mulder grew and grew. He inhaled deeply, holding the breath deep in his gut, and let it out slowly, through his nose, controlling his emotions, centering himself. She will watch him die, the Plumber decided. Punishment. For not obeying. +=+=+=+=+=+=+= END CHAPTER 5 End Note: The cases of juvenile violence that I mention herein are taken from actual case histories from the years 1990-1998. Some details have been changed for the purposes of narrative tension, but one fact was left unchanged in all cases: The age of the perpetrator.