Skin : the X-files (15 page)

Skin

ment that had killed the two prisoners. And Mulder was right, they needed to track down Emile Paladin.

Maybe he could tell them how a skin transplant could ravage a man’s brain from the inside—and what any of this had to do with the encephalitis lethargica that had felled the two med students.

Maybe Emile Paladin had some idea what had really happened to Perry Stanton.

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X The huge crimson atrium spilled out in front of the electronic revolving door like blood from a gunshot wound. Mulder paused to catch his breath as he and Scully stepped from inside the moving triangle of smoked glass. Twenty yards ahead stood an enormous black-glass desk, staffed by three men in similar dark blue suits. Behind the desk, the walls curved upward in magnificent swells of stone to the paneled black ceiling lined with more than a dozen miniature spotlights, a synthetic night sky gazing down upon a mock vermilion desert carved out of imported marble.

The interior of the Fibrol complex was nothing like the nondescript, blank-walled three-storied boxes he and Scully had seen from the highway. Even when they had passed through the twin security checkpoints on 146

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the way into the parking lot, Mulder had not realized the extent of the building’s architectural deception.

From the outside, Fibrol’s main offices seemed no different from the hundreds of other corporate headquarters lodged in the grassy foothills that surrounded New York City. But the interior decor told a story more in line with the S&P reports the agents had scoured after leaving New York Hospital. Fibrol had grown wealthy during the biotech boom of the late eighties, burgeoning into one of the nation’s largest suppliers of burn-transplantation materials. Along with their most recent product—the antibacterial Dust—Fibrol held over three hundred patents on products in use at major hospitals and research centers. The company operated a half dozen burn clinics in the Northeast, and satellite offices in Los Angeles, Seattle, London, Tokyo, Paris, and Rome.

Mulder’s shoes clicked against the polished marble as he and Scully bisected the huge atrium. He noticed a long glass case running along the wall to his right, containing strange-looking metal and plastic tools; each tool had a plaque explaining its use and date of development, and by the third scalpel-like object, Mulder realized the case was a visual history of the transplantation art. He looked more closely as he reached the last section of the case. He passed what appeared to be microscalpels and needles, lying next to a specialized microscope. To the right of the microscope, he recognized a laser device similar to the machine Dr. Bernstein had used to remove the tattoo.

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Then he came to the red powder, spread out in three equal piles above a metallic plaque.

He paused, tapping Scully’s arm. The plaque was dated thirteen months ago, and contained a single cap-tion in gilded script:

Antibacterial Compound 1279

effective in reducing consequential septicity after radical transplantation

Mulder was about to ask for a medical definition of

“consequential septicity” when a high voice impaled his right ear. “Agents Mulder and Scully? I trust you had no problem following my directions?” Mulder looked up from the glass case. One of the blue-suited men had risen from behind the black desk.

Just a kid, really—he looked no older than twenty-three, with short blond hair and an acne-covered face. His thin limbs were swimming in his suit. Scully nodded in his direction. “Are you the man we spoke to on the phone?” The kid smiled, coming around the edge of the desk.

“Dick Baxter. I set up your appointment with Dr. Kyle, our director of research. He’s waiting in his office. I’ll take you right to him.”

Mulder and Scully shook Baxter’s hand. Enthusiasm leaked out of the kid’s every pore.

“Dr. Kyle?” Mulder asked. He remembered seeing Julian Kyle’s name in the S&P files. Kyle was responsible for a number of Fibrol’s patents, spanning back to 148

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the company’s inception. Still, Mulder had hoped their FBI status would get them access to someone higher up than a director of research.

Then again, Mulder didn’t yet know enough about Fibrol’s leadership to complain. He and Scully had been hoping to find Emile Paladin still at the helm of the company—but to their surprise, they had discovered that Fibrol’s founder and CEO had died in an accident overseas shortly after the experiment involving the Rikers Island prisoners. Since then, the company had gone through two acting CEOs, and at present no CEO

was in place. Perhaps Julian Kyle was as close to the company’s true leadership as Mulder and Scully were going to get.

“You asked to speak to the person in charge of our East Coast operations, didn’t you?” Baxter continued.

“Julian Kyle heads up all new projects at Fibrol. His finger is on the pulse of everything that goes on around here.”

Mulder and Scully followed the young man as he strolled past the desk to an opaque glass door embedded in the marble wall. Baxter paused, pressing his hand against a plastic circular plate next to the door. There was a short metallic whir, and the door slid open, revealing a long corridor with matching crimson walls.

“Pretty high-tech,” Scully commented.

“Infrared imaging,” Baxter said, smiling proudly. “It’s a lot more comfortable than a retinal scanner, and certainly more accurate than a thumb pad. Of course, it’s 149

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much more expensive than either technology.” Mulder glanced back toward the spectacular front atrium. “Doesn’t look like Fibrol is too concerned with expense.”

Baxter laughed. “Not lately. We’ve got a number of major new developments coming down the pipeline.

Already, our foreign division has tripled in revenues—

just in the past two years. The new board of directors has decided to update our look, to reflect this new level of success. They’ve redesigned much of the complex; you should see the new labs in the basement—we’re talking major high-tech.”

Mulder raised his eyebrows, glancing at Scully as they followed the young man through the security door and into the long corridor. “You seem pretty excited about the changes. Is that why they have you working the door?” Baxter laughed, pulling at the lapels of his blue suit.

“Actually, I’m a Ph.D. student at NYU. I’m working here through the summer—but I hope to be hired full-time after I graduate. Maybe start as a junior scientist and claw my way up in the research department. Beats the hell out of academia, and you get to really see your work transformed into something useful.” Mulder kept his eyes moving as they sliced through the inner corridors of the complex. The place was built like a maze, and Mulder was reminded of the interior floor plan of the Pentagon. They passed many unmarked offices, each with opaque glass security doors. None of the doors had knobs. Instead, each was fitted with the 150

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same plastic handplate. A very efficient security system, probably routed through a computer center somewhere in the complex. Mulder also noticed closed-circuit television cameras at ten-foot intervals along the hallway ceiling. The cameras were painted the same crimson as the walls. He touched Scully’s arm, pointing. “Fibrol seems to take its security fairly seriously. Cameras, infrared access panels, and the twin security checks on the way into the fenced parking lot.”

Baxter overheard his comment and nodded vigorously. “Oh, yes. We’re very concerned with keeping our work private. You’d be surprised at the sort of thing that goes on in the biotech industry. Theft, sabotage, corporate spying, Internet hacking—just last month we had an incident with the janitorial staff. A cleaning lady on the third floor was caught stealing the shredded paper from a central wastebasket.”

“Shredded paper?” Scully asked.

Baxter had a serious look on his face. “A hacker employed by a rival biotech company could have extracted password information from the stolen garbage.

Once inside our computer banks, there’s no telling what sort of damage they could have done.” Mulder stifled a smile. It seemed he did not have a monopoly on paranoia. Then again, perhaps Baxter was right. Mulder knew that the biotech industry relied on its secrets to survive. Patents could only protect inventions that were already complete—every step along the way was a fierce race. And judging from the lavish front 151

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atrium with its expensive marble walls, the payoff could be impressive.

Baxter stopped in front of another glass door, again placing his palm against an infrared panel. After two clicks the door slid open, and Baxter gestured for the two agents to step inside. “Dr. Kyle will answer all your questions from here on out. I hope you enjoy your visit.”

Mulder could see the sincerity in Baxter’s eyes. The kid was nearly floating on the balls of his feet, not an ounce of cynicism in his slender body. As long as he kept his attitude, he’d probably go far in the corporate-industrial world.
Great brochure material.

Mulder and Scully thanked him, and together they stepped into Julian Kyle’s office.

“Damn it! Just stay where you are. I’ll get them back on in a second.”

Mulder stood frozen next to Scully in complete darkness, his skin tingling as his pupils tried to dilate. The lights had gone off the second the door had slid shut behind them. He had caught a brief glance of a stocky man in a white lab coat moving toward them across a large, well-appointed office—then everything had gone black. A second later, there had been a loud crash, followed by the sound of breaking glass.

“It’s this new environmentally sensitive system,” the frustrated voice continued from a corner of the room.

“It’s all Bill Gates’s fault. He had to go and build that 152

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intelligent house, and suddenly every new designer wants to copy his technology. The system is supposed to shut off the lights when you
leave
the room—not when someone else enters. Hold on, here we go.” There was a metallic cough, and suddenly a panel of fluorescent lights flickered to life. The office was about thirty feet across, square, with two wide picture windows overlooking the parking lot and the same crimson walls that lined the building’s corridors. There was a glass desk at one end of the airy room, covered with fancy computer equipment and neat little stacks of CD-ROMs. In front of the desk crouched a black leather love seat with high armrests. Directly to the left of the love seat, a display case’s chrome frame lay surrounded by a pile of broken glass. Half-buried in the glass was a shiny plastic rectangle painted in colors running from pink to beige.

“Shit. If it’s broken, I’m going to charge it to the board.

This whole reconstruction was their idea. I thought we were doing fine with white walls, doorknobs, and light switches.”

Julian Kyle swept out of the far corner of the room, his white coat flapping behind him. He was built like a fire hydrant, with solid shoulders, stumpy legs, and a cube-shaped head. His silver hair was cropped close to the planes of his skull, and his face was remarkably chiseled and unwrinkled for a man of his age. Sixty-five, Mulder guessed, but it was difficult to be sure. There was a vigorous spring in the doctor’s step as he rushed to the 153

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destroyed display case and carefully reached for the large plastic object.

“Can we help?” Scully asked, as both agents moved forward. Kyle shook his head, carefully lifting the object and shaking away the broken glass. Mulder saw that it was some sort of model, made up of different-colored horizontal layers, each a few inches in height.

“An award from the International Burn Victim’s Society,” Kyle explained, reverently checking the model for scratches. “It’s a three-dimensional cross section of an undamaged segment of human skin. See, it’s even got the melanocyte layer—done in bronze leaf.” Mulder looked more closely at the model as Kyle placed it gently on an empty corner of his glass desk. The cross section was divided into three parts, showing the epidermis at the top, then the thick, beige dermis, and finally the white layer of subcutaneous fat. Tiny blood vessels and twisting branches of nerves curled through the middle section, winding delicately around tubular sweat glands and dark, towering follicles of hair. Mulder was struck by the intricacy of the skin’s structure. He knew skin was an organ—the body’s largest—but he had never considered what that meant. To Mulder, skin was just
there
. It could be rough or soft, porcelain like Scully’s or stained and creased like the Cancer Man’s.

Kyle noticed Mulder’s focus as he moved to the other side of his desk. “Most people suffer from a misconcep-tion when it comes to skin. They assume it’s something static; like a leather coat wrapped around your body to 154

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keep your skeleton warm. But nothing could be further from the truth. The skin is an amazing organ. It’s in a constant state of motion; basal cells migrating upward to replace the dying epidermal cells, nerves reacting to inputs from the outside, blood vessels feeding muscles and fat, sweat glands struggling to regulate the body’s temperature as the cells twist and stretch to accommo-date movement. Not to mention the constant healing and recovery process, or the battle to stay moist and elastic.” Mulder lowered himself next to Scully onto the leather two-seater as Kyle took a seat behind the desk, holding his hands out in front of him, palms inward. He wriggled his fingers as if typing on an invisible keyboard. “We never notice our skin until there’s something wrong with it. A cut, a rash—or a burn. Then we realize how important it really is. How much we’d be willing to pay to get it back to normal.”

Mulder nodded, thinking of the building’s front atrium. “Enough to import most of the marble in Italy.” Kyle laughed. Then his smile turned down at the corners, as he waved his hands at the walls on either side.

“And have this entire complex dyed crimson. It had to be the worst decision this new board’s ever made. Yes, we specialize in burn-transplant materials—but do we need the constant, fiery reminder on every wall in this damn complex? Still, they tell me that it impresses our foreign visitors, the corporate honchos from Tokyo, Seoul, and now Beijing.”