Title: Rongbuk
Author: Ravenscion
E-mail: ravenscion@hotmail.com
Rating: R (language, violence, sex)
Category: XR
Keywords: Mulder/Scully romance, some angst
Spoilers: possible for seasons 1-5 and the movie.
Date of First Posting: 29 August 1998
Author's website: http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Dunes/6767/
Archiving: Please archive at Gossamer.  Others, please email for
permission.

Summary and notes: see chapter 1.

Disclaimer: Fox Mulder and Dana Scully, and all of the other characters
and situations related to the X-Files, belong to Chris Carter, 1013
Productions, and the FOX network.  I am using them without permission
but intend no copyright infringement.

[begin part 2 of 11]
************************************************************************

FBI Headquarters, Washington, D.C.
Monday, 14 September, 8:30 a.m.

Scully watched the tension pour out of her partner.  His shoulders
slumped momentarily as relief took its place, and then he was before
her, reaching over her shoulder to shut the door and crushing her in an
embrace that told of the unquiet hours he had passed since last seeing
her.

"Mmmmm, Mulder," she smiled into his chest.  Scully tightened her arms
around him, enjoying his presence and his scent, allowing herself a
brief violation of the discipline they had set for themselves at the
office.  She had not seen him since early Sunday morning, after all, and
no one was likely to intrude upon them at this early hour.

"I was worried about you," he said into her hair.

She eased back in his embrace and looked up at him, seeing the doubts
etched in his features.  "I'm fine," she said, "really."

He held her gaze for a moment, then nodded.  "Good," he said, pulling
her close again and kissing her lightly atop her head.

He released her after a few seconds, giving her space to remove her
coat and hang it with his on the ancient coat tree by the door.  As
Mulder stepped back to his desk, she recovered her soft leather
briefcase, dropped in the midst of their embrace, and set it by her
chair, then stepped over to the coffee maker.  She poured herself a cup,
pleased that he had remembered to start it brewing, and unconsciously
cleaned up the debris from a minor, Mulder-triggered explosion of non-
dairy creamer.  Behind her, she heard the staccato of his fingers on his
keyboard.

Scully returned to her desk then, leaning against it and sipping from
her cup, secretly enjoying the vaguely professorial look that Mulder's
glasses lent him.  Fatigue showed around his eyes, and he had forgotten
to shave, but her news seemed to have re-energized him.  "So," she
offered, gesturing at the file in front of him, "what have you got
there?"

Mulder lifted the file, shrugged, and passed it to her.  "Nothing," he
said.  "I've been through it half a dozen times already, and I even
managed to pay attention once, but I don't see anything significant.
The case is closed -- they just routed it to us FYI, because it had
occult overtones, but I'm not sure why they bothered."

Scully took the folder but did not open it.  If the file had contained
anything even remotely related to the X-Files, Mulder would have already
switched on the slide projector by now.  Most likely it had been sent by
an over-zealous or overly careful clerk in the records division.  She
set the file down.  "Any messages?"

"Not much so far.  Byers called about something.  I told him we'd come
by this evening.  Otherwise, I've just got an inbox full of routines and
a few crank emails -- say, want to go search for dire wolves in Alaska?"
He turned back to his computer.

Alaska...that actually sounded kind of nice, Scully thought, though she
honestly couldn't imagine a trip with Mulder that wouldn't end with them
on a glacier somewhere, him enthusiastically chipping what might or
might not be alien artifacts from the ice while her feet froze.  After
their recent misadventures in Antarctica, she could imagine that all too
clearly.  She sat down, not really disappointed that, for once, Monday
did not signify the start of a new chase.

She relaxed for a moment, waiting for the coffee to take effect,
indulging in a bit of Mulder-watching.

Despite the frustrating end to their investigation of the Blackwood
virus, Mulder had settled into a sort of equilibrium, seeming to abandon
dueling with himself over the fundamental validity of his quest, content
for the time being to focus his energy on her and let the Truth take
care of itself.  Their love affair remained an unknown territory, for
both of them, and she and Mulder together had begun to cautiously
explore this new stage in their lives, spending most nights either at
her place or his, while maintaining the outward appearance of separate
residence.

Scully was not sure how long their charade could be maintained.  She
smiled inwardly, thinking that, if nothing else, the passion they shared
must be written all over her.  Some mornings found her positively giddy
with the afterglow.

It was a welcome change from waking in an empty bed, in an empty
apartment, with only a few family pictures on dressers and tables, and
a faded snapshot of the daughter she had known so briefly tucked in the
drawer of her bedside table.  She slept soundly in Mulder's comforting
embrace, not having to keep watch on the ramparts of her emotions.  The
ghosts remained, but she had shelter from the worst of their haunting.
For the first time in years of suffering and loss, interrupted only by a
brief respite in the wake of her remission, she found her outlook
guardedly optimistic.

And so she relished her new closeness with Mulder, reveling in their
time together.  The hours they had spent apart, since early on Sunday,
seemed inordinately long.

She resisted the urge to touch him.  "Dire wolves?" she asked instead.

He called up the message again.  "Big, dumb, and presumably extinct, but
not so, according to one..." his voice took on an incredulous tone
"...Melrose Platz -- and I thought I had a stupid name -- of Fairbanks,
who claims he saw a pair while on a camping trip."  He affected a
serious look.  "This is a job for...the Park Service!"

Scully gave him her best quizzical look.

He shrugged.  "Still, you never know.  Extinct species have turned up
deep in the wilderness before."  He turned back to his computer, re-
reading the message.

You'd love it if it were true, she thought, hiding a smile behind her
coffee cup.

I missed you, yesterday.

They had been separate because Mulder had left Sunday and Sunday night
to her, for Mass, for family, or just for solitude.  He gave her
that much space, unwilling to over-burden her with himself, sensitive to
her need to maintain a small part of the life alone that she had lived
before they had brought their lives together.

She loved him for that too, along with everything else that he was,
though she was beginning to consider the Sunday night aspect overdoing
it.  His absence had affected her sleep, and from the look of him,
Mulder had been similarly restless.

It had been years since Scully had enjoyed the wholly contented
slumber that nights in Mulder's arms brought her.

She sipped her coffee again, steam from the hot liquid bathing her face,
relaxing and bringing her into focus simultaneously.

The peace that she and Mulder had would not last.  Scully knew that
beyond any doubt.  In love with her or not, and she now knew how truly
he was, he would eventually pour his energy into rebuilding the X-Files.
The project remained his life's work, and no matter how hopeless it
became, he would never give it up.  And she would not have wanted him
to, not for anything.  It had become her quest as well.

So it was only a matter of time until the wheel turned and a new and
most likely difficult stage began.  Scully had already prepared herself
for it, as best she could, and she believed that she and Mulder would
weather it together, but she certainly felt no urgency for it to begin.

All in its own time, she thought.  I'll enjoy what respite we have.  Her
cancer, and the unlikely and uncertain stay of execution under which she
lived, had taught her to do that.

And to have faith.

She removed her gaze from her partner, turning to the clutter on her
desk.  "Well, Mulder, it's not as though we aren't faced with weeks of
paper-work."  Scully reached for a stack of forms, contemplating the
monumental task of putting their recent investigation into some sort of
order, then looked back at her partner when he failed to respond.

"Mulder?"

"That's odd," he said.

She waited.

"Scully, does the name 'John Leslie' mean anything to you?"

Something in his voice warned her.  Spoke too soon, she thought.  "No,
not really," she said, keeping her voice neutral.

Mulder turned, beckoning her to him.  "Look at this," he said.

Scully rose, making her way to his desk, leaning over his shoulder to
read his computer screen.  The email displayed there, addressed to
Mulder's work account, was short and cryptic:

'John Leslie has returned from Rongbuk.  Thought you would want to
know.'

There was no signature, but attached to the message was the scanned
image of a newspaper article, detailing the mysterious arrival in Lhasa
of a man rumored to be a missing explorer.

Scully placed one hand lightly on her partner's shoulder.  "There's not
really all that much there, Mulder.  What does it mean?"

He looked up at her.  "I'm not sure, but I think I'd better get back in
touch with Byers."

************************************************************************

North of Rongbuk Monastery, Tibet
14 September, 7:30 p.m.

The light had begun to fade, and though most nomads of the Tibetan
plateau were settling down for an evening's supper of stew and butter
tea, or perhaps even a cup of beer, Kunga had no prospect of doing
either for some time.  He had a stray yak to round up, and in the vast
emptiness of stone, sky, and ocher moss north of the monastery, that
would likely take a while.

Kunga was not a happy man.

For one thing, there were a thousand things he would rather be doing
than searching alone for a lost animal, but more important, there were
a thousand places he would rather be doing it.

He had ranged far beyond the limit that most Tibetans would travel.  The
unknown place, the place of demons, lay somewhere beyond the low hills
and escarpments on the northern horizon.  He did not have more than the
vaguest of notions as to its location, but like all his kindred, he knew
and avoided the general area.

The place was creepy enough in the best of times, but lately, with the
intermittent lightnings that were seen for miles around, lightnings that
the people of his generation had never seen before, though they had oft
heard their grandparents speak of them, it had become positively
terrifying.  If the yak had not been so valuable an animal, Kunga would
never have ventured within miles of where he now stood.

He would have to find the yak soon, or it would have to wait for
morning.  Already, the afternoon sun had sunk beneath the mountain range
to the southwest, and the shadows had deepened.

Something caught his eye.

He turned, looking to his right, down into a small gully in which a
stream flowed back toward Rongbuk Monastery.  Something was there, in
the grey sand of the stream bed -- tracks.

He scrambled down the slope, for a better look.  Perhaps his yak had
stopped here for a drink.  Nearing the marks, he leaned down for a
closer look, and then recoiled in horror at what he saw.

The tracks were large, vaguely man-like, but with heavy, clawed toes.

Yeti.

Kunga felt sick with fear.  He glanced about, the yak forgotten,
searching the nearby slopes for some sign of the monster.  He had never
actually seen one, but he had heard all of the stories, and his uncle
and brother had both seen such tracks before, and heard the yeti's eerie
ululations as they sat huddled near their campfire.

And of course everyone had heard the stories of what happened to those
who were unfortunate enough to actually get close enough to see a yeti.
The torn and broken bodies of such people had been a mainstay of nomad
storytelling for generations.

Kunga had no interest in that sort of notoriety.

Slowly, as though noise would summon the creature from nowhere, Kunga
climbed back up the slope.  Under his breath, he murmured "om mani peme
hum" over and over, the mantra of the Bodhisattva of Compassion that
Tibetans recited to keep the demons of their land at bay.  His eyes
flitted from one shadow to another, and every boulder suddenly seemed
animate, when viewed at the edge of his vision.  He cleared the edge
of the slope and began a rapid walk southward, back the way he had come.

As he left the site of the tracks further in his wake, his pace
quickened until his frightened, fast walk had become a trot.  He felt
a bit better, now that he had turned back in the direction of his
family's camp, but he was nonetheless very anxious to get home.

Around the warm campfire, the yeti would be scary but amusing.  Out
here, as the darkness grew and the chill wind rose, the terror was all
too real.

************************************************************************

Arlington, Virginia
14 September, 5:22 p.m.

It was considerably earlier than 8:00 p.m when Mulder drove across the
Roosevelt Bridge from the District of Columbia into Northern Virginia,
heading for a run-down section of Arlington that was home to the
offices of "The Lone Gunman."  Rain pelted the outside of the car,
driven by a warm, gusting wind that had strengthened since the morning.
From the passenger seat, Scully watched her partner drive, waiting for
him to fill her in on just what it had been about the singularly
uninformative, and unsigned, email he had received that struck him as
significant.

Back in the office, shortly after he had received the unsigned message,
he had told her about Byers' excited phone call, and then hastily called
the guys at 'The Lone Gunman' to arrange an earlier meeting time.  But
then he had fallen silent, brooding, his fingers steepled below his chin
as he leaned back in his chair.  Scully had let him be, returning to
their paperwork while she waited for him to explain his mind to her.

She knew he would get around to it in his own time.  In their more than
five years of companionship, she had learned to be patient with Mulder's
idiosyncracies, of which his occasional tendency to be mysterious about
leads was one of the least.  She left him to his thoughts, knowing that
his mind, insulated by quiet, would be flowing freely, without any fixed
direction, allowing the fragments and indications within it to seek
their own patterns and connections.  In time, when the kaleidoscope
array of ideas and images fell into some sort of order, he would turn to
her to test the integrity of his thinking.

Then their ongoing intellectual dance would begin anew, his dark and
fluid intuition paired with her clarity, each blending into the other,
not without friction but flowing, with time, into a complex harmony.

Mulder had spent most of the day in silence, eventually taking on his
share of the paperwork, but with an air of distraction.  At last, just
after 5:00, he had abruptly tucked away his glasses and turned off his
computer, barely giving her time to get her own desk in order before he
seized his trenchcoat and headed for the exit.  She had not tried to
keep up with his pace on the way to the car they were sharing, instead
letting him walk ahead, burning off nervous energy with long strides.
When she reached the garage, he had already started the car's engine and
air conditioner.  Scully had been grateful to slip into the comfort of
the vehicle's cooling interior.

They had completed just over half of the trip when the Washington rush
hour, made worse by the weather, brought them to a complete halt.
Scully scanned the traffic ahead and concluded that they would have time
to kill before reaching their destination.  She reached out with her
left hand, setting it delicately on Mulder's thigh.

"Hey," she said.

His right hand drifted from the steering wheel and took hers, giving it
a brief squeeze.  "Hmmm?" was his wordless response.  He looked over at
her, questioningly.

Scully loosened her seatbelt and settled against the car door, facing
her partner.  "Do you want to tell me about John Leslie?"

Mulder looked ahead, where a bit of space had formed, and inched the car
forward.  "Leslie was an American surveyor who disappeared in Tibet
under mysterious circumstances.  He and his partner, Randolph Sales --
that's the guy that Byers called about earlier -- anyway, they had
been sent out to investigate various UFO-like phenomena and..."

Here we go, Scully thought. "Wait a minute, Mulder, back up.  Leslie and
Sales were sent by whom?"

"The government of Tibet, I suppose.  That's who they worked for."  He
shrugged.

"Why was the government of Tibet interested in UFOs?"  If she failed to
insist that he explain the matter systematically, she would be left
behind from the outset.  "And when did all this happen?"

"Sorry," said Mulder, smiling.  "I'm getting ahead of myself."  He
paused a moment, then continued.  "UFO sightings are commonly understood
to have begun with the Roswell incident in 1947, right?"

Scully nodded, waited for him to go on.

"But in fact, there have been a lot of reports of UFO-like phenomena
all around the world, for decades, even centuries before then.  It's
just that people didn't refer to these incidents as UFO encounters in
those times."

"And Tibet?" prompted Scully.

"Well, it would be an ideal place to conceal a -- hold it..."  Mulder
broke off, spying an opportunity in the traffic ahead, and made a quick
shift into a moving lane, gaining several car lengths in the process.
Scully re-tightened her seatbelt.

"Almost there," Mulder said.  "Just have to get past that light and
we're rolling."

Scully ignored the traffic and instead wondered at the sheer volume of
paranormal lore that was stored in Mulder's head.  Even taking his
eidetic memory into account, the amount of trivia he could keep track of
never ceased to amaze her, despite the amount of time she had spent with
him.

"Tibet, Mulder?"

"Oh, right.  Over the years of foreign exploration into Tibet -- the
Tibetans kept the country sealed against outsiders for decades --
explorers reported all sorts of strange happenings in their accounts of
their travels.  Nain Singh, Nikolai Prejevalski, William Rockhill, Sven
Hedin -- they all wrote about mysterious lights, strange noises, even
the sort of disorientation that could be attributed to lost time."

Or oxygen deprivation, Scully thought.  But in light of what she had
seen after Mulder had pulled her from the grotesque mausoleum in Wilkes
Land, she was not inclined to fence with him over this point.

He continued, warming to the story.

"There evidently was one area in particular, in west-central Tibet, in
which these phenomena seemed to occur more often than anywhere else, at
least as far as can be told from the journals of the outsiders who
witnessed them."  Mulder gave her a significant look: "Near Rongbuk
Monastery."

Ah ha, Scully thought.  "Alright, that's one connection.  And Leslie?"

"Leslie.  Well, as I said, he was an American surveyor who got a job
with the Tibetan government in the 1930s...."  Mulder paused, reading
the skepticism in Scully's countenance.

"Mulder..."

He anticipated her.  "I know, I know, he'd be pretty old by now."

"Very old, Mulder.  In his eighties, at least."

"Right.  But hear me out, okay?"

Scully narrowed her eyes.  "Mulder, this isn't just an elaborate scheme
to justify a trip in search of the Abominable Snowman, is it?"

That earned her a wry grin.  "Don't you want to see a yeti, Scully?"

She fished unsuccessfully for a clever rejoinder, but a shift in the
traffic bailed her out.  Mulder cleared the light, with a restrained
'yes!', and accelerated down one of Arlington's less congested streets,
entering a somewhat run-down section of the county.  "Not much further,"
he said.

"So, why was Leslie working for the Tibetans?"  Back to business --
Scully wanted to get as much of the story out of Mulder as possible
before the foolishness that inevitably accompanied a visit to his
paranoid buddies began.

Mulder shrugged.  "I have no idea why he went to Tibet to get a job, if
that's what you mean.  But at any rate, his survey work proceeded
uneventfully until he and a partner were sent to..."

"Let me guess: Rongbuk," Scully finished for him.

"Full marks, Red."  Mulder grinned at her.  "It gets better."

"How is it that you know all this, Mulder?"  Scully changed course for a
minute.  She knew how he remembered it -- he remembered almost
everything -- but Tibetan history seemed sufficiently obscure that even
the Bureau's basement-dwelling Master of Trivia had no obvious reason to
have made a study of it.

"No special reason, really."  Mulder shrugged again.  "When I started
work on the X-Files, I read everything on UFO studies I could get my
hands on.  I hadn't thought about this in years, though.  There hasn't
been much serious research into the accounts of foreign explorers in
Tibet, or the Leslie affair, but they're in the literature."

Scully was reminded of a day, long ago, when she had first learned of
Mulder's own notoriety in 'the literature,' when they had caught a
genial, slightly scruffy intruder in Mulder's motel room in Wisconsin.
She felt a twinge of regret -- Max Fennig had been one more innocent who
had died for an agenda he had never even known, much less supported.

So many dead, now, she thought.

"So, what gets better?"

"Leslie never came back from Rongbuk."

"That's better?"

"More interesting," Mulder corrected himself.  "His partner -- Sales --
did come back, but he left his post shortly thereafter and returned to
the United States."

"What happened to him?"

"That's what Byers is so eager to tell us," said Mulder.  "He returned
to his hometown, and was later institutionalized.  As far as I know, he
never wrote about his experiences.  His story died with him."

Scully felt a chill creep up her spine.  There had been far too many
coincidences this day.  "But Byers has found something," she said.

"He says he has Sales' journals, written after he left Tibet."

"And?"

"And Byers thinks that they could be the key to locating an actual alien
ground site in Tibet."

"And you believe all this?"

Mulder frowned.  "I want to know the truth of it."  He paused.  "You
don't believe it?"

Scully could see that he was close to hooked.  "Mulder, after what we've
seen, we can't discount the possibilities.  But doesn't all this seem a
little too...."

"Convenient?  Contrived?"

"Yes, and yes."

"Yes."  He parked the car in front of the dilapidated building that
housed the offices of 'The Lone Gunman,' unfastening his seatbelt and
turning to face her.

"But consider this, Scully."  Mulder leaned in close, intensity etched
on his features.  "For years, all I knew was that extraterrestrials were
real, and that the government had been hiding that fact for decades."

Scully held his gaze, but did not speak.

"Then I found out that it had all been a hoax, and that I had been a
tool of my enemies all along."  His voice caught, then he continued.
"Everything I did, every move I made, had just served the purposes of
the conspiracy I sought to expose.  And brought suffering to the people
I care the most about...."

Scully was silent.  She knew the hurt behind that statement, and ached
for him.  Once, overwhelmed by despair and bitterness, she herself had
laid the blame for her cancer at his feet, as if his own tendency toward
self-loathing were not enough.  She knew he had forgiven her that, if
ever he had held it against her, but she had never forgiven herself.

'They gave me this disease to make you believe.'  God, Dana, what were
you thinking?

But she knew what she had been thinking.  The cancer had metastasized,
tainting her once-healthy body with deadly growth, killing her last hope
of repairing the life of grief she had fallen into.  And Mulder, fleeing
into his crusade to shelter from his own guilt had, unwittingly, left
her to shoulder the oppressive burden of his obsessions.  She had worked
on, despite the costs, saving him from himself, her life trickling away
into bits of tissue paper and restroom sinks.

Finally, in exasperation and despair, she had lashed out at him.  Give
it up, Mulder.  Give it up and find a real life somewhere.  Leave me.
Let me alone to swallow the last bitter drafts of love too long
unrequited and then, when you don't need me any more, I can die.

She had sunk low indeed.

Somehow, he had redeemed them both.  As she had lain in the hospital,
waiting for the darkness, the purity of the love he bled for her had
given her something, some kernel of will and hope that brought her back
from the edge, that returned to her the desire for life and gave her
strength to ask God to let her live a while longer.

Mulder would scoff at the idea, but she believed now that he been the
instrument of her redemption just as he had been an aspect of the trial.
He had brought her back from the brink of a dark well, despite the wound
she had dealt him.  Though they had never discussed it, she knew
intuitively that his phony suicide could easily have been real, that he
himself had stood on the edge of the Abyss, contemplating the
anaesthetic offered by the handgun.

Scully banished the scene from her mind, unwilling to taste again the
rust of despair, the flavor of her own blood on her lips and in her
mouth.

She started to speak.  "Mulder..."

He took her hand, pressed it between his.  "John Leslie went to Rongbuk
to investigate something that no one could explain.  I don't know what
that was, but there are, or were, at least two people who do."

"Sales, and Leslie himself," said Scully.

Mulder nodded.  "I know this could be a hoax, a set-up.  But if it's
not, and if there is any way to find out what it was that Leslie and
Sales found in Tibet, it could provide a starting point..."

"Mulder," Scully began again.

"Scully, Leslie's journey to Rongbuk predates Roswell by 13 years."  His
voice had become urgent.  "Some of the accounts I mentioned are 19th
century.  They pre-date the conspiracy..."

"I understand," she said, keeping her tone even, noncommittal.  Scully
understood his passion.  Part of her, as always, longed to just drop her
careful habits of thought and abandon herself to Mulder's wild dance.
But she also knew that, consciously or not, he relied on her not to do
so.  "I agree that it's intriguing.  I just think we should be careful."

"We have to investigate this.  If there really is something here, it
could be that the conspiracy is not aware of it yet.  They can't cover
up something they don't know about."  His grip on her hand tightened.
"I have to know," he said, "and I think you do too."

"Mulder, I'm as committed to this as you are.  You know that."  Scully
watched Mulder carefully, trying to read his expression, needing to know
she was reaching him.  "But you know we've been set up before.  More
than once."  Don't get drawn in so easily, she did not say.

He returned her gaze a moment longer, then nodded.  "Alright.  Let's go
see what Byers has for us."

Together, they climbed out of the car and hurried through the downpour,
up the metal staircase to the overhang, where they pressed the buzzer at
the door and stood dripping, wet despite the umbrella they had shared.

* * *

Some distance away, from the third-floor window of an old apartment
building noteworthy only for peeling paint and the fact that it stood
within line of sight of the doorway at which Mulder and Scully waited, a
figure trained a pair of binoculars on the scene.  He watched as, after
a delay, a tall man and his diminutive, red-headed companion were shown
in by a youngish fellow with long, blonde hair and absurdly thick-framed
glasses.  The watcher stood well back from the window through which he
looked, his caution not to expose himself instinctive, and when the
doorway to the office closed, he set his lenses aside and remotely
activated a device that would transmit the conversation within the
closed room to a remote recorder.

The transmitter had been extraordinarily difficult to place.  He had
thought that once he had gained admittance to the inner sanctum of 'The
Lone Gunman,' placing the bug would have been relatively easy.  But
despite their evident affability the night before, Byers, Langly, and --
what was his name? Frohike -- had proved watchful and alert.  It had
taken all of his skill, the most subtle sleight of hand, to place the
device.

He would soon learn whether it had been detected since then.

Radu Florescu adjusted the speaker volume and noted with satisfaction
that the instrument had begun recording.

Later, he would listen to the tapes carefully, taking detailed notes and
replaying sections where necessary, before he made his report.  For now,
he simply relaxed and listened to the conversation, his skill in English
not sufficient to catch everything, but good enough to get the overall
thrust of the discussion.

He had doubts as to whether this ruse would work.  Krycek had felt
confident about it, but he wondered.  Although the documents that he had
given to Byers seemed genuine -- if they were forgeries, they were well
done -- the story he had been instructed to give seemed fairly flimsy.
What was more, he had been forced to throw the entire operation together
far too quickly, having had mere days to get to the United States and
set up a base of operations.  It had been nothing more than good fortune
that a suitable apartment had been available on short notice, and had
the target been in a better section of town, he would likely have not
even had a place from which to observe it.

Florescu did not care to operate by the seat of his pants, and he wasn't
entirely sure what Krycek ultimately hoped to gain from all of these
machinations, though he had a few theories.

Still, he had his orders: pass the documents, place the bug, watch, and
report.  And that he would do.  In time, he would be given further
instructions.  He could afford to be patient until then.

* * *

As Langly opened the door, almost tripping himself in his haste to let
them in out of the wet, Mulder placed his palm over the small of
Scully's back and guided her across the threshold, indulging in a long-
standing intimacy, but one he never tired of.  He watched with amusement
as a range of emotion flitted briefly across her face in response to the
sight of the room they had entered.  The trio at 'The Lone Gunman' never
failed to have some new high-tech device, often partially disassembled,
prominently displayed in the midst of the office's perennial clutter,
and today was no exception.  Something that appeared to be a cross
between an oil derrick and an Erector Set loomed in the center of the
room, gleaming metal bars tangled with wires and dangling circuit
boards.  A slight arch in Scully's brows revealed surprise, quickly
replaced by a mix of amusement and mild chagrin.

A Cheshire cat grin spread across Langly's face.  "Pretty cool, huh?"
Then another thought struck him.  "Say, Agent Scully, I hear you saw the
inside of a UFO."

Scully's expression became serious.  "More of it than I wanted to, to be
honest."

"Yeah, but still...."  Langly could not wipe the enthusiasm off his
face.

Scully glanced over at Mulder, indicated the tower in the center of the
room.  "Do you think we should even ask?"

He shook his head.  "No need..."  He would have said more, but Langly
had already shifted gears again, plunging into an enthusiastic monologue
about the merits of what would, in due course, become the definitive
advancement in anti-surveillance technology.  Listening to Langly's
slightly nasal accent, Mulder had a brief vision of him, clad in a
bathing suit and his glasses, riding some sort of high-tech, laser-
guided surf board toward a southern California beach.  The image was
both ludicrous and, somehow, utterly convincing.

Scully, better equipped than he to follow Langly's oration, was asking
a question.

Langly looked slightly uncomfortable.  "Well, I actually haven't worked
that out yet," he said.

"No?"  The merest hint of teasing colored her tone.

"Well, not exactly."

Scully kept a straight face.  "So it's not actually working yet?"

"Er, no."

"It's just sitting there, taking up space?"

Langly squirmed a bit, then recovered.  "Yes, but we'll have it going
soon, for sure.  I'd better get the guys."  He turned and escaped across
the room, leaning through a doorway to summon his partners.

Mulder cast a wondering look at Scully.  She returned just the ghost of
a smile, raising one hand to prod a nearby tangle of wiring and other...
hardware...that hung from Langly's contraption.  Weighted at one end, it
swung, pendulum-like, in response to her touch.

Mulder stared at the device.  Rising nearly to the ceiling, whatever
else it may have been, it was hardly a triumph in miniaturization.

He chuckled.  "Scully, did I ever tell you that I'm not related to these
guys?"

She did not have a chance to respond, as Byers chose that moment to
hurry into the room.  "There you two are.  Glad you could make it."  He
led them to a desk in a corner.  "Have a look at these."

Mulder leaned forward, Scully close to him.  On the desk, illuminated by
an antique lamp that seemed strangely out of place amid the room's
electronic decor, lay three leather-bound journals, pages yellowed with
age and stained from hard use.  The text was in a neat, confident hand,
obviously written with care, though in places smeared due to exposure to
moisture.

Scully spoke first.  "Well, they look old.  Are they authentic?"

"You bet," said Frohike, behind them.  They turned to face him.  Langly
was there too.

"We've already run several tests on them," he continued.  "They're real,
all right."

Mulder picked up one of the volumes, thumbed through it.  The pages felt
crisp and coarse under his fingers.  The cover gave off an antique,
musty odor.  These books are real, he thought, no fakery here.  He
struggled to contain his excitement.  If the books themselves were
genuine....  "Okay," he said, affecting a nonchalant air.  "What about
these has all your drawers in knots, anyway?"

Byers laughed at that.  "Come sit down, and I'll tell you all about it."

Mulder set the book back on the desk and looked around the room, found
chairs for himself and Scully.  Byers and Frohike sat as well, while
Langly perched, buzzard-like, atop a desk, his back to a large, reel-to-
reel tape recorder.

Byers spoke again.  "This all started on Saturday night.  Frohike and I
were here," he indicated Langly, "he was out."

"All-night gaming," Langly interjected, pantomiming an axe-blow.

"I'm glad you're getting out and around, these days," said Mulder.

"Anyway," said Byers, "we got a call from someone named 'Radu Florescu.'
He said he was a subscriber to 'The Gunman.'"

"Is he?" asked Scully.

"Yes," said Frohike.  "Our only subscriber in Romania, as it turns out.
He lives in Bucharest."

"He brought you the books?" Mulder broke in.

"Yes," said Byers.  He looked at Scully.  "Has Mulder told you about
Sales and Leslie?"

She nodded.

Byers went on.  "Evidently, when Leslie and Sales went to Rongbuk, they
were attempting to locate and investigate a particular area north of the
monastery -- a locus of UFO-like phenomena."

"What sort of phenomena, precisely?" asked Scully.

"The usual," said Byers.  "Mysterious lights, lost time, abductions --
things that the local people attributed to the activities of malevolent
spirits."

"It could be nothing more than that.  I mean, it sounds like a story
superstitious people would tell around campfires to scare children."

Byers nodded.  "It does, but the descriptions detail events that also
fit the profile of UFO activity.  Both Tibetan government records and
the journals of explorers describe them."

Frohike broke in: "But not as UFOs, of course.  The acronym hadn't even
been invented at that time."

"So, all that Leslie and Sales knew was that they had been sent to
Rongbuk to investigate something unexplained," said Mulder.  "What
happened next?"

"According to Sales' journal," said Byers, "their trip was uneventful
until they actually reached the monastery.  They spent some time there,
observing various atmospheric phenomena visible to the north, and then
they journeyed on in search of a source of those phenomena."

Langly shifted on his desk.  "Sales wrote about 'orbs of light aloft in
the northern sky.'  Pretty weird stuff."

Mulder glanced at Scully, who clearly wanted to say something, but she
held her peace and let Byers finish.

"At this point, Sales' journal becomes confused.  He mentions a cave
through which he and Leslie penetrated a low cliff that blocked their
route, but his account is sketchy on the geographic details."

"So you don't know where the cave is," said Scully.

Byers shook his head.  "Unfortunately, no, though it must be somewhere
north of Rongbuk.  Anyway, beyond the cave he writes about some sort of
fortress -- a metallic fortress -- that produced 'lightnings and divers
strange sounds.'"

"He actually wrote that?" asked Mulder, somewhat astonished.

"A little over-the-top, eh?"  Byers shrugged, continued.  "According to
the book, Leslie went into the structure and never came out.  Sales, it
seems, experienced hallucinations from which he never fully recovered."

Scully gave Byers a look, the one that silently demanded further
explanation.  Mulder smiled inwardly, amused at Byers' look of
discomfort, despite a basic sympathy with the story he was telling.

"Well, his writing becomes rather confused at this point."

Scully turned to Mulder, waiting for him to speak.

"Fair enough," he said, looking back at Byers.  "What do you guys have
on your source, this Florescu fellow?"

Byers, Langly, and Frohike exchanged glances, mentally conferring, and
then Langly spoke up.  "The truth is, Mulder, we don't know much about
him at all.  He's been a subscriber since the Wall came down, but there
isn't much in the way of hackable databases in Eastern Europe."

"Did he leave an address?"

"No, he said he would contact us again if he could," said Frohike.

"A-mazing," said Scully, looking more annoyed than amazed.  "Here I am,
sitting with what I thought were the four most paranoid men in the free
world, and...."

"Wait a minute," interrupted Langly.  "We didn't say we trusted this
dude."

"You have to understand," added Byers, "in this business, most of our
sources don't want to be located.  This guy may have taken some chances
to get us this material."

Scully was unimpressed.  "He just walks in here and hands you a bunch of
old-looking books, and you just jump at the contents."

"We tested the books," Frohike reminded her.  "They're the real deal."

"This is obviously a set-up.  Mulder, tell them about the email you
got this morning."

Mulder briefly related the contents of the message to his friends.  What
Scully was saying made sense, of course.  The whole scenario stank of a
deception scheme.  But for some reason, Mulder didn't think that it was,
at least, not entirely.  He seldom could explain how he knew to play a
hunch, but he had one now, and he trusted his instincts.  "She's right,"
he said to Byers, "there have been too many coincidences for this to be
taken at face value, but that said, I think it's more than just a set-
up."

Scully's face shifted from brief, surprised satisfaction back to
impatience.  "Mulder...," she began.

"Hear me out, Scully.  Who would set us up in this way, and why?"

"I don't know," Scully said deliberately.  Where do I begin? asked the
look on her face.

Mulder made a placating gesture.  "Alright, I guess that was a dumb
question.  Put it another way: if we're being set up, there has to be a
reason.  Someone wants something from us."  He searched his partner's
expression.

She's beautiful when she's irked, an impish part of him mused.

"Most likely," she said.

"So someone wants us to investigate this.  Someone wants to use us to
get to something that he cannot."

"Or someone wants to discredit us once and for all," she shot back.

"I think there's more to it than that," said Mulder.  "I think we're on
to something important, and if it's a deception, there may be a core of
truth in the middle of it."

Scully did not speak, just gave him her 'you-have-no-evidence-to-
warrant-that-conclusion' look.  He knew it well.

He held her gaze.  Trust me Scully, I have a feeling about this one.

She accepted his silent communication, agreeing to a temporary truce.
Thank you, Mulder thought.  He turned back to Byers, knowing that he and
Scully would revisit the discussion again, soon.

"How did Florescu come to be in possession of Sales' journals?" he
asked.

Byers sent a wary glance in Scully's direction, but her expression
remained neutral.  "Sales traveled home from Tibet overland.  In
Kazakhstan, he was forced to leave some of his possessions in the hands
of Soviet officials.  But now, the Russians have opened up a whole lot
of old archives.  Sales' journals are just one more thing that's turned
up."

"So Florescu has been rummaging around archives in Moscow," said Mulder.

"He said St. Petersburg," Frohike put in.

Mulder turned to Scully again.  "We know the Russians have been studying
UFOs for some time.  Remember the Tunguska business."  The thought
chilled him.  His time in the gulag had been short but extremely
unpleasant.

"That may be true," she said, "but the evidence in this affair is beyond
tenuous.  Look at what we have: a Romanian 'Lone Gunman' subscriber
about whom almost nothing is known walks in unannounced and hands over
Randolph Sales' journals, which themselves were not known to exist until
he did so."

"Authentic journals," repeated Frohike.

"Even so, on practically the same day, we receive email to the effect
that Sales' partner has returned after being missing for 64 years.  And
we know that Leslie and Sales were investigating *something,* but that
something could easily have been some sort of natural atmospheric
phenomenon.  We don't have any conclusive evidence that their mission
had anything to do with extraterrestrials."

Langly stood up from where he was seated.  "Actually, guys, she has a
point.  This Florescu could be an agent provocateur."  That earned him
a 'where-did-you-learn-that-expression?' look from Byers and Frohike,
but he seemed unfazed.

"If that were true, why would he have brought Sales' actual journals?"
Byers frowned, doubtful, but unable to deny the validity of Scully's
argument.  "Why not just forge something to catch our interest?"

"That's why I think that something underlies all of this," said Mulder.
"The journals are a smoke-screen -- they whet our appetites, but if
Sales was too screwed up to leave a coherent account, his writings don't
really give us any hard information."

"So you think Leslie is the key to this," said Scully.

"Maybe.  If he has returned from Rongbuk, where is he now?"

"Mulder, if he did go missing in Rongbuk, and if he did somehow spend 64
years living in the Tibetan countryside, why would he come back now?"
Her eyes locked with his, at once persistent and distracting.

Not now, Mulder, he thought.

"I don't know.  I'd like to find out."

A brief silence fell over the room, then Mulder spoke again.  "Any
chance we could borrow these journals?"

Frohike produced a folder stuffed with papers.  "I thought you'd want to
read over them, so I photocopied the interesting parts."

"How about finding out where the email on Leslie came from?"

"Child's play," said Frohicke, handing over the folder.  "We'll get on
it tonight."

Mulder took the package from him, then turned to Scully.  "Ready to go?"

She nodded.

He turned back to Byers.  "Give us time to go over this, and I'll get
back to you."

Byers led them to the door.  "Thanks.  Let's discuss it soon."

"By the way, Mulder," Frohike called from behind them, "thanks for
the...you know."

From the corner of his eye, Mulder saw Scully's eyebrow arch, as she
realized what he was referring to, and then the merest hint of a smile.
He nodded at Frohike.  "You bet," he said.

Outside, the sky had darkened into night, but the rain had slowed to a
warm drizzle.  Mulder and Scully accomplished the walk to the car in
silence.

************************************************************************

Arlington, Virginia
Tuesday, 15 September, 8:00 a.m.

Radu Florescu's laptop chirped, indicating that a message had come down.
He opened it, scanning its contents, and then began composing a
response.  He chose his words with care, keeping them as non-specific as
possible.  Even with a strong encryption program protecting their
communications, Krycek prefered not to take any risks.

After a few minutes of typing, Florescu sat back and reread his message,
checking for typos:


Subject: Current project

Have successfully set-up equipment and am monitoring the situation.

Secondary target group has contacted primary and passed on documents.
primary1 has identified the traveler as critical element, but primary2
has expressed serious suspicions.

It is unclear whether primary will investigate.  No information on
location of traveler available at this time.


He sent the message.  Krycek would likely not have further instructions
for him right away, given that he had so little to report.  But as long
as the listening device went undetected, the operation still could
succeed.

A reply came sooner than expected, less than an hour later:


Subject: Current project

Continue monitoring.  Pay particular attention to primary2.  Report any
developments.


Florescu nodded to himself.  He had expected these orders.  He settled
in for a long wait.  It would probably be some time before he could
report on the "traveler's" whereabouts.

He sighed.  He had never liked stakeouts.

************************************************************************
[end part 2 of 11]