4/12

Pam Wyeth's residence 11:19 AM

"It's just like military housing," Scully announced tonelessly as we stopped in front of Pam Wyeth's house -- brown brick with a white door and a rough square of ailing green lawn that was identical to every other house I could see. She unfastened her seatbelt. "You ever live in military housing, Mulder?"

"Briefly." I got out of the car and tried to walk like my butt wasn't asleep. "Dad got his State Department job when I was four or five, and we could afford to turn down the housing offer after that. I don't remember it." I glanced across the street and automatically lost my bearings. "Obviously not very memorable."

"None of it is, believe me." She stretched. "I spent my entire childhood in neighborhoods that looked just like this one."

I shielded my eyes with my hand as she looked off into space. "You ever get lost?"

"I honed a good sense of direction."

"I'm glad *one* of us has."

She smiled. "It was a matter of counting when I was little. I had to know which house from what direction. Third house from the left. In the winter it was impossible to know, but in the summer, ours was the only yard with the tacky lime green lawn chairs and the sprinkler that stayed on all day long. Our yard was this huge mudpit." She rolled her shoulders to loosen them, recalling. "Once, Mom and Dad did their second honeymoon thing and left Bill in charge. But one night, after Bill went to sleep, Melissa took it upon herself to paint the shutters and the door facing...bright blue. It looked terrible and Dad was livid but I could always find our house after that. Everyone could."

I thought about being a kid out on the Vineyard, no neighbors for miles, my arms flung out like I was on fire. Her happy, hyper childhood for my financially comfortable, private-schooled, cold New England life. Quite the pair. I guess we all had that short end of the stick poking us right in the side.

"Did you see this, Mulder?"

Her moment of nostalgia had puttered out before mine. "See what?"

She had the file open in her hand. "Madeline Roark's address --" She looked up and pointed at the road that cut through Pam Wyeth's. "She lives right over there, about...five houses down. That would explain how she could corroborate the story. If Krycek was parked on the street, she'd have a view of it from her front window."

I nodded. "Why don't I go talk to Pam and you talk to Madeline Roark? We could meet back at the car."

"Sounds like a plan," she said.

I started up Pam Wyeth's walkway.

"Mulder?"

I turned. "Yeah?"

Closing the distance, she lowered her voice, leaning forward. "Six weeks ago, Pam Wyeth attacked a man who worked with the local utility company after he accidentally read her meter two weeks in a row. Hit him in the head with a shovel. Sixteen stitches altogether. She compensated the man generously and he dropped the charges, but the paperwork was still in that file."

I laughed. "C'mon, Scully...I don't think she's making this one up."

"I don't either," she replied dryly. "I'm just telling you to watch your head."

Oh. Scully began her walk towards Madeline Roark's house, and when Jonson passed me to discreetly follow her, I realized I'd forgotten they were even there. Jonson was Mr. Stealth, and I forgot about him half the time since I was no longer had to know what she was having for lunch, or if she made a particularly good target that day. McGrath, who had called me from his set once to ask if I'd bring him lunch, could stand to take a lesson or two. I waved him on from their rented Jeep Cherokee and he opened the door and began to follow.

What was the best possible course of action? My arms raised in a gesture of peace, badge prominently displayed? Too much coffee, I thought to myself. The jet lag was nowhere near subsiding, and my inner clock was spinning like a compass in Area 51. All it would take was a well-aimed shovel lunge and I'd be out of commission for the rest of our time here.

The door opened before I even got there. A single bloodshot blue eye peered at me, unblinking, over the deadbolt chain.

"Fox Mulder. I'm with the FBI. Are you Pam Wyeth?"

She looked hard at my credentials. In a crackling whisper that I could barely hear, she asked, "Can I see that?"

"Are you Pam Wyeth?" I asked.

"Yes."

I extended it. "Then you can see it."

Her pale arm came through the opening and nailbitten fingers pulled it out of my hand. She didn't pull it in, but held it just under the chain. "You can download these, you know. Right off the Internet. Paste your own picture in."

I doubted that. "You can also steal them from FBI agents who come to your door and hand them to you without thinking about it first."

She handed it back. "Why are you here?"

"I have a few questions about your stalker."

The blue eye moved from side to side. She was shaking her head. "They closed that case yesterday."

"We re-opened it this morning."

"Why?"

"We believe you," I said.

"Who's we?"

"My partner and I." I felt stupid standing there. "How many more of these questions before I can come in and talk to you?"

I swore she hadn't blinked once since she opened the door. "Alright."

The door closed, the chain rattled from within and she opened it.

I tried not to be taken aback at the site of her. She was pale, waxy white, uncomfortably close to my age if not exceeding it. Her black hair was pulled into a severe ponytail that seemed to tug at her entire face. Small red capillary veins tore and split across both eyes, leaving pink where the whites had been. Only her eyes seemed to contain any life at all, and the scar across her throat, hairline at one end and thick and crooked across the other, shone against her skin. Her gaze followed mine and she impotently pulled her collar up, moving aside.

Never letting me leave her sight, she stowed a Louisville Slugger back in the fake ficus next to the door from where it had probably come. She'd been standing there, waiting for me to pitch her a reason, any reason, to smack me in the head with it. Don't put me in, Coach, ain't ready to play.

There was something distinctly unsettling about the inside of the house, and I couldn't place it. Normal furniture, I noted. Everything was clean. Too clean. There were lights everwhere. It seemed there were extra sources of it overhead and a lamp on every available flat surface, and to my right -- I stopped.

A four-way photo-still of me standing on her doorstep was serving as a sort of screen saver. A shot of me from the back, from the left, from the right, and one close-up from the front. No ordinary peephole I'd been staring into then.

She went to the keyboard and made the image turn into a more generic pattern of flying toasters. "The entire house is surveilled." It would've sounded like a threat even without her fraying voice announcing it.

"Which of these chairs will catch my best side?"

"Sit down anywhere." She took a seat herself across from where I was standing, one hand behind her. Obviously there was another weapon planted in the couch cushions. I wondered if there was one stuffed down in the chair I sat in. I could fence with her.

"The red-headed woman outside...your partner?"

The entire house is surveilled, she'd said. I believed her, because with every twitch, I thought I heard those cameras tagging the motion. There were at least thirty possible places where they could be. That's how the room was set up. They could be anywhere, everywhere. I've never physically hated a house before. Fear, dread, dislike, sure. But this was hate, pure and uncut. Pam Wyeth drifted hollow-eyed on my unease with her low, monotonous voice. "Who was the man following her?"

I matched her stare. "It's not really crucial that you know."

She sat back now, mildly surprised. "Okay. Then who is the man following me? Do you have his name, and if so, can I know it?"

"His name is Alex Krycek."

She made a sideways gesture with her wrist. Write it down.

I scrawled it on a piece of paper and handed it to her. She folded it up tiny without looking at it. "It's a tactic of surprise," she said quietly. "The attacker, if he doesn't know that his attacker knows who he is, can be thrown off guard -- just by saying his name. Maybe only for a second, but off guard is off guard."

Off guard was me right then. Get a grip, I told myself. That's a direct order from the body. I shook it all off, leaning forward and locking my hands together. "The only problem that's presented by him being your stalker is that his previous lists of charges...doesn't really fit the profile. Some domestic terrorism here, some international espionage there. What we believe are some ...contract killings."

"In other words, not a stalker." She motioned to the ID tag on my lapel, still there from the meeting with Bartusiak. "In other words, you're here for something else entirely."

"It's not that. I'm just saying that, if this person is stalking you, it's not for the reasons you suspect. I don't think he's after *you* specifically. I think he's more interested in accessing something you know."

"Something I know?"

"I'm talking about where you work. NeuroMast. This man doesn't deal in one-on- one crimes. He deals in blanket victimization. If there's a database that he knows you can get to and something he needs off of it, then he'll use you for that."

She laughed, a dry papery sound. "You make it sound like I'm doing something top-secret. There are lab technicians that have a higher security clearance than I do, just because they're working with more important doctors, and I swear all they're doing is fetching things." She settled back into the cushions. Was there another bat behind her? "Hope you have some more theories."

"I do." I clenched my teeth. "Though I haven't worked them out yet. What about the specific project you're on? You would have top clearance for that project, wouldn't you?"

She said nothing.

"I know you can't confirm or deny. I'm just asking you to give me something to work with. I'm looking at all of this surveillance equipment and thinking Montag Eyenets. Right?"

She didn't say I was right. She didn't have to. Her face said it all.

"I heard there's three different sub-projects under the umbrella of that one. One of them can tests fluids, see who they belong to using DNA and biological evidence. The second one just deals basically with the rooms that can understand a voice and decide to let them in or leave them outside. And the third one, the main one, that's busy converting human DNA in such a way that we wouldn't need keys anymore to get in our own house, right? Just touch a sensor on the door. No cash to carry, no identification required. You're born, you get a bank, and that's all you need to do, huh?"

Pam Wyeth was shaking. "Who told you that? Who gave you that information?"

"I don't think it's crucial that you know that, either. The point is, Pam, what's more important? Catching your stalker? Or protecting whatever covert sci-fi it is you do at work?"

"It's not...'covert' makes it sound like we're doing something dark and suspicious. It's not like that. It's a matter of patents." She composed herself. "We're the government. We have to be the best. Or at least the first...some independant research facility beats us to the punch, we all look bad."

It was my turn to say nothing.

"Okay," she said, all in a breathless gust. "You believe me. It's a start. I work with the third sub-project you discussed. Programming DNA for use with computer systems. But there are people involved with it with a lot more access, a lot more knowledge than me. So I don't understand what you're saying."

I opened my wallet and took one of my Bureau cards out, writing my cell number on the back. "Keep your cameras rolling, Pam. If something shows up on one of them, or you see Alex Krycek, call me and one or both of us will be over here. Okay?" I held the card out. "I want this guy to suffer as much as you do."

A shrill alarming drove my hands to my ears and McGrath stood pictured on the computer monitor, looking pleasantly oblivious from four different angles on the front lawn.

"He's with us." I shouted over the noise. "Can you turn that off?"

She went back to the computer and pushed some more buttons, and my ears rung at the silence. "You and your partner both each have a man with a sniper case following you, and you tell me not to be afraid? Not to be paranoid?"

"Did I say that?" I waited. "No. I didn't."

The card twitch between two of her fingers, flipping back and forth like a bug's wing. She was almost curled up there. Almost in tears.

"I'm sorry." I stood up. "But we're going to do what we can."

She walked me to the door without another word, and I wondered if I was waiting for goodbye, or thank you, or It's been real, g-man, or something. Once the air outside hit me in the face, I realized what a stifling influence everything in that house had been, and gulped it in. Scully sat in the car, looking down at something, hair falling forward.

I punched McGrath half-heartedly in the arm.

"Ow," he said, rubbing at the spot. "That wasn't cool."

"You looked too damn happy, guy."

McGrath chuckled, preoccupied. "Scully, uh...she doesn't look like she needs a punch in the arm at all."

She'd picked her head up now. Bad news? She looked frightened more than anything. Pale and scared.

"See you guys at the hotel, later," I mumbled, finding my car keys and letting myself in. I sunk down behind the wheel, brushing my hand against hers. She had it splayed on the arm rest, rolling her head to look at me. "There's a woman more paranoid than me in there, Scully. Maybe we'll get some free surveillance equipment out of this. I don't know what she's not telling me, but I suspect it's the reason he's after her. We'll just have to -- are you going to tell me what's wrong?"

"Whatever you -- " Her voice cracked on the first word. "Whatever conclusion you came to in there, you need to talk to Madeline Roark first. Right now. You need to see her."

I put the keys in the ignition, shrugging. "Then let's go."

"Then let's walk."

I started to object and pocketed the keys instead. "Then we'll walk."

It's when we got out of the car that I knew something was wrong, because she grabbed for my hand. That was about as characteristic as a sing-along. But I let her, and she was in the lead, halfway pulling me behind her. She was my compass, she knew that. It was all the same house to me, with mirrors repeating them over and over.

"I'm sick of it, Mulder." She said fiercely. Her nails dug into my palms painfully. "I'm sick of all of it."

"Sick of what?"

She pulled me up the walkway. I wanted my hand back now. I wanted to run back to the car, but she was knocking on the door like it had hit her first. Footsteps were coming and she knocked some more. Her knuckles would be bruised and her shoulders would hurt the next day. The voice that announced indignantly that it was coming was...familiar, and that moment of knowing it on my face was a hot knife to Scully.

She wouldn't stop knocking.

Madeline Roark opened the door. She flung it open. "I said I was -- "

It was my turn to feel punched and winded now. "Samantha?"

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