01 - Goblins (15 page)

Friday night in the middle of nowhere.

His stomach complained of all the caffeine he had drunk, and he popped an
antacid tablet into his mouth, chewed it absently, and wondered what the hell he
was going to do now. Of course, there was still that “date” with Babs Radnor to
keep. If he wanted to. And right about now, it looked as if it was the only game
in town.

Another antacid, another scan of the street, and he dropped a few bills onto
the table and went outside.

He scowled at the overcast. He hated this kind of day. If it was going to
rain, he wished it would do it and be done with it; otherwise, why the hell
didn’t those clouds just blow away?

He headed for the corner; his car was still parked in front of the police
station.

Along the way he passed an old woman dressed in black from a heavy topcoat to
a long scarf wrapped around her head. She held a large purse close to her chest,
and an idle glance there made him stop and turn slowly.

What he had seen was the orange top of a spray paint can, and it didn’t take a genius to figure out who she was.

He hurried after her, came abreast and said, “Miss Lang?”

She stopped and glared up at him. “
Ms.
Lang, if you don’t mind. Who
are you?”

“I’m a reporter,” he explained, best smile, best voice. “I’m looking into the
…” He lowered his voice, slipping her into his confidence. “Into the goblin
affair.”

He waited patiently, watching her debate both the truth and the sincerity of
what he had said.

A bus coughed past them.

Three young airmen on the corner broke into song.

Elly Lang eyed him suspiciously. “You think I’m a nut?”

“He killed a friend of mine. That’s not crazy at all.” When she didn’t walk
away, he touched her arm lightly. “I’d be pleased if you’d join me for dinner.”

“And pump me, right?” she snapped.

The smile turned up a notch. “That, and for the company.”

She shook her head. “You’re full of it, mister, but I’m not going to pass up
a free meal.” She took his arm and led him up the street. “You going to be
cheap, or are we going someplace good?”

He didn’t laugh, but he wanted to; instead, he promised her the best meal
this town could provide, which seemed, for the moment, to satisfy her. And as
long as he didn’t run into Mulder or Scully, he had a feeling this was going to be a most informative, and
lucrative, night.

Tonero wasn’t in his office, wasn’t anywhere on post that she could tell, but
Rosemary ordered herself not to panic. There was still time to make corrections.
There was still time to salvage something of the years she had put in.

She returned to the hospital, nodding silently to the receptionist and making
her way down a corridor to an elevator stenciled authorized personnel only. From
her pocket she took a small key ring and inserted a silver key into a vertical
slot where, ordinarily, a summons button would be. When the door slid aside, she
checked the hall and stepped in.

The key took her down.

She didn’t bother to watch the floor indicator; the elevator only stopped at
three levels—the second floor, where the major’s office was, the main floor, and
a subbasement.

The car stuttered to a halt and the door opened; she stared uneasily down the
length of the dimly lighted corridor.

It seemed a lot longer tonight, and her heels a lot louder on the concrete
floor.

The faint thrum of distant machinery was the only other sound.

As if performing for an invisible audience, she made a show of smoothing her
smock over her chest, of caressing a palm over her hair as she walked. Confidence, outside and in, was the key. As long as she kept to her
plan, as long as she didn’t lose her head, everything would be fine.

She tested Tymons’ office door; it was locked.

She opened the Project Center door and nearly screamed when she saw him
bending over one of the computers.

“Jesus, Leonard,” she said, stepping in. “I didn’t know you’d be here. What
are you—”

He turned to face her, and in his right hand was a rectangular block of black
metal about six inches long. In his left hand was a gun. “Just stay where you
are, Rosemary, all right? Just… stay where you are.”

“Leonard, what the hell are you doing?”

He smiled wanly. “Correcting a few things, that’s all.”

She looked around the room, not seeing anything out of place until her gaze
reached the first computer screen. Though the machine was on, the screen was
blank. So was the second one.

He waved his right hand. “It was so easy, I don’t know why I didn’t think of
it before.” He held up the block. “Why go through the whole mess when all you
need is a magnet.”

“My God, Leonard!”

“One pass, and poof!” He dropped the magnet on the shelf. “Poof. All gone.”

Outrage prevented her from speaking, and fear of what Joseph would do when he
found out.

“The thing is,” Tymons said calmly, and put a bullet through the nearest
computer.

She jumped, but the gun kept her from fleeing.

“The thing is, you see, nobody’s ever really going to know, are they? I mean,
there’s no sense going to the papers or the TV stations, because no one would
ever believe it.”

He shot another one, showering the floor with splintered plastic and shards
of glass.

She took a step back.

He glanced at her sideways, his expression rueful. “I’m still going to try,
though. Despite the odds, I’m really going to try.”

“You can’t,” she said hoarsely, her throat lined with sand. She cleared it
and tried again. “You can’t.” Her left hand fluttered helplessly from her chest
to her throat and back again. “All those years, Leonard, all the work we’ve
done. All the time. For God’s sake, think of all the time!”

“All the failures,” he said flatly. “All that time, and all those failures.”
He spat dryly. “Buried, Rosemary. We had to bury our failures.”

He’s insane, she thought; my God, he’s insane.

“Listen, Leonard, if that’s what… if you don’t care about the work…think about—” She jerked a thumb at the ceiling. “You can’t.”

“Why? You mean those stupid oaths we signed?” He fired at the third and last
monitor and hunched a shoulder to protect himself against flying shards.
“Meaningless, Rosemary. By the time I’m through, they won’t mean a thing.”

“I’ll deny it,” she threatened. “I’ll tell anyone you tell that I don’t know
a thing.”

He straightened. “My dear doctor, I’m sorry, but you won’t live long enough
to have the chance.”

She backed up hastily until the wall stopped her, the open door to her right.
She couldn’t think, could barely breathe, and a small fire in the workings of
one of the destroyed computers had begun to lift feathers of smoke into the
room.

“They’ll come after you, Leonard,” she warned, swallowing hard, fighting the
nausea that roiled in her stomach. “Even if you can get off post, you won’t be
able to hide for long. A week, maybe a month.” Sweat stung her eyes, but she
didn’t dare move her hands to wipe it away. “You’ve just signed your own death
warrant.”

He shrugged. “Like I care, Rosemary? Like I really give a damn?”

Without warning he emptied his clip into the shelves, the explosions
deafening, damage almost total. She couldn’t help but scream then, more in rage
than fear, hands up to protect her face from the spinning, flaming debris.
Before she could move, he had replaced the clip with a fresh one from his
pocket.

And pointed the gun at her head.

Her eyes fluttered closed.

All she could think was
This is crazy, this is wrong.

“Go away.”

She didn’t move, didn’t understand.

“Rosemary, go away.”

When she looked, the gun was at his side, but the defeat in his voice wasn’t
reflected in his face.

“Maybe,” he said, “you’ll last longer than I.”

Disgust twisted her features, but she refused to say a word for fear he would
change his mind. Although she wanted desperately to rail against the destruction
of all their work, she wanted more desperately to get out of this alive.

“Go away,” he whispered, and shook the gun at her.

Without further urging, she bolted clumsily into the corridor, and hadn’t
taken two steps toward the elevator when she kicked herself in the ankle and
fell hard into the wall. She cried out, more in surprise than pain, and cried
out again when she heard a gunshot.

Another.

At that she ran, keeping her stinging arm braced against her side, fumbling
with her free hand for the keys.

At the elevator door the key slid off the control plate twice before she was
able to insert it properly. “Come on, damnit,” she whispered urgently, willing
her nerves to settle down. “Come on, come on!”

The door opened and she virtually threw herself into the car, spun around
and inserted the key a second time.

It wasn’t until the door had hissed closed that she realized she wasn’t
alone.

No, she thought; not after all this, no.

“You know,” said a rasping voice behind her, “I’m getting pretty good at
this, don’t you think?”

Andrews wasn’t in the room when Dana returned, and she decided to take some
of her own advice and scrub some of the afternoon away. Maybe some time alone
would help her figure out the purpose of today’s attack. So little of it made
any real sense. If it had been meant as intimidation, as a warning to stay away
and drop the investigation—for whatever reason—it certainly wouldn’t work, and
surely whoever was behind it knew that as well; if it had been meant to stop
them permanently, that had failed, too, and she couldn’t convince herself that
the shooter hadn’t been arming to kill.

“Unless,” she thought aloud, “he wasn’t an expert.”

She pushed a hand back through her hair, and rubbed the back of her neck.
There had been a lot of wind, lots of leaves and things blowing around. Branches
moving, targets moving. Plus, they had been shooting back.

So maybe, she thought, just maybe, they had gotten a little lucky.

That particular idea unnerved her more than anything. Especially when she
realized that the shooter really could have killed her and Webber at practically
any time before they had ducked into the trees.

They had been in the open far longer than Mulder.

But he hadn’t.

The more she thought about it, the more she believed he had only been trying,
and succeeding, to pin them down. To take them out of the game as much as he
could.

What he had actually been trying to do was put a bullet in Mulder.

The man at the Jefferson Memorial:

you have no protection, Mr. Mulder, you still have no protection.

“Oh, brother,” she whispered. “Oh, brother.”

Think. She needed a clear head to think this through, or she’d end up just as
paranoid as her partner.

Once stripped and in the shower, however, it wasn’t the shooter she
concentrated on—for some reason, she couldn’t stop thinking about Mulder’s other assailant. The explanations she had given him were more than likely
correct, or at the very least, parameters. Which did not, under any
circumstances, include anything like a goblin.

And yet…

She made a noise much like a growl.

And yet there had been times past when she had been forced to the unwelcome
conclusion that explanations could very well be only rationalizations in
disguise.

She growled again and turned away from the shower head, letting the hot water
slam against her back and splash over her shoulders. Her eyes half-closed. Her
breathing steadied as she willed the memory of gunfire to a safer distance.

Steam rose gently around her, condensing on the narrow pebble-glass window in
the white-tiled wall, running down the translucent sliding door.

She felt nothing but the water.

She heard nothing but the water.

The perfect time, she thought suddenly, for good old Norman Bates to slip
into the bathroom, knife held high and at the ready. Effectively deaf and vision
blurred, lulled by the comfort of steam and heat, she wouldn’t know it was over
until the end had begun; she wouldn’t know, because all she could see was a
smeared shadow on the door.

Standing there.

Watching.

Biding its time.

The shadow, of course, was the drape of bath towels over their rack by the
door.

She knew that.

No; she assumed that.

Her eyes closed briefly as she damned Mulder for sparking her imagination;
nevertheless, she couldn’t stop herself from holding her breath to brace
herself, and opening the shower door, just a little.

Just to be sure.

“Mulder, I swear I’m going to strangle you,” she whispered in relief and mild
anger when she saw the towels, and the rack, and not a single place in the tiny
room for anyone to hide.

The steam flowed over and around her, twisting in slow spectral ribbons,
creating the momentary illusion she had stepped into a light fog.

She shivered.

The room was chilly.

And the steam that should have filled it flowed and twisted, because the
bathroom door was open.

He didn’t want to sleep.

There was too much to do.

But the pain had finally ebbed, weariness taking its place, and he couldn’t
keep his thoughts in an orderly line. They drifted, fading and dancing.

mulder, watch your back.

Patches of skin like snapshots, flashing too rapidly for him to focus on, barklike skin without the roughness of bark,
without the texture, although he couldn’t really be sure because contact had
been so brief.

Mulder

The voice was muffled by sleep and time, yet it sounded maddeningly familiar
despite the fact that it belonged to no one he knew; a roughness here, too, and
forced, as if the speaker, the goblin, was either suffering low-level pain or
hadn’t yet gotten used to the voice that it had.