Read Skin : the X-files Online
Authors: Ben Mezrich
Skin : the X-files (31 page)
Skin
fying, abrupt, and obvious as their appearance.
Mulder shivered, then slowly turned away. Scully remained behind, staring uneasily at the pair of crisscrossing, razor-sharp tusks.
319
X Scully leaned back against the chain-link fence and shut her eyes. Even through her eyelids, she could see the lights: a caravan of flashing red and blue, a Christmas tree on its side stretching more than fifty yards beyond the edge of the cordoned-off runway. Although the sirens had been silenced because of the late hour and the proximity to Dulles International’s main terminal, sound filled the night air: the rumble of diesel emergency vehicles, the shouts of medical personnel, the shrill squeal of steel stretcher wheels against pavement.
“It’s like watching some sort of macabre carnival,” Mulder commented from a few feet away. He was also leaning against the fence, his bandaged right arm resting in a sling against his chest. The razor wound on his cheek 320
Skin
was covered by two strips of gauze, there was an Ace bandage around his left forearm, and heavy bags under his eyes. His stooped shoulders showed the effects of twenty hours in a plane and another ten in debriefing at FBI headquarters. “From here, it seems like a lot more than twenty-five ambulances.”
Scully opened her eyes, watching the colored lights play across her partner’s battered cheeks. She wondered if she looked as worn as Mulder. Her jaw still ached from Tien’s backhand blow, and her eyesight had begun to blur from exhaustion. She had napped briefly on the plane, and had showered and changed at her apartment; but she knew it would take at least another week to recover fully from the rigorous case. It didn’t help that there were still so many questions left unanswered. Sadly, lack of closure was not unfamiliar territory.
She rubbed the back of her hand across her eyes, clearing her vision. A hundred yards down the runway, beyond the ambulances, she could just make out the Boeing 727. A dozen high-intensity spotlights surrounded the curved fuselage of the plane, illuminating the military markings on the tail and wings. Both the front and back hatches of the plane were open, and bright orange mechanical hoists squatted beneath the openings, surrounded by medical technicians in light blue military uniforms. Scully watched as one of the hoists smoothly lowered a pair of stretchers from the front hatchway. Once the hoist had reached the 321
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ground, the medics spirited the stretchers to one of the waiting ambulances. Then the hoist rose back to the hatchway, ready for another pair.
Skinner had estimated that it would take only two hours to remove the patients from the specially outfitted plane. The expense of transporting the twenty-five burn victims—and for the years of medical care that would come next—fell squarely on the taxpayers. A VA hospital in Maryland had already been outfitted with the necessary life-support machinery, and a staff of full-time con-valescent nurses had been hired. Frankly, Scully had been pleasantly surprised by the military’s swift response to the situation. The first recon teams had arrived in Alkut only hours after she and Mulder had contacted Washington; led by Timothy Van Epps, three squadrons of Marines had quickly prepared the scene for transport. Meanwhile, Skinner had worked through the red tape in Washington, using Mulder and Scully’s case report as a guideline for the upcoming analysis and management of the situation. Six hours later, the two agents were in an ambulance on their way to Bangkok. Scully had insisted that one of the burn victims be transported with her—perhaps in response to Mulder’s growing paranoia at the military’s swift presence.
The long journey to Bangkok had given Scully the opportunity to evaluate the patient firsthand. On closer inspection, the longevity of the napalm-burn victims seemed less miraculous than tragic. As she had suspected, the patient was in a vegetative state, in complete 322
Skin
organ failure, kept alive by mechanical intrusion. Despite what Mulder had hypothesized, from a medical perspec-tive there was no chance the patient would ever recover.
Still, Scully
had
discovered evidence that the patient’s cellular structure had been infused with an unknown chemical—a strange, carbon-based molecule Scully had never seen before. The unknown chemical displayed two amazing characteristics: the ability to strengthen cell walls and to stave off fibroblast deterioration. Scully could only assume that the chemical was another synthetic breakthrough, like the red antibiotic dust.
According to Mulder’s theory, the chemical had “prepared” the patients for Paladin’s radical transplant procedure. It would take years of further analysis to determine fully if that was true.
In the meantime, the military was considering her and Mulder’s request for a regional search for the rest of the two thousand Vietnam casualties. Scully was pes-simistic about the likelihood of a major operation ever taking place—after all, there wasn’t any real evidence that the burn victims were still alive, nor was there much hope of tracking them down after so many years. Still, she could envision quiet diplomatic inquiries being circulated throughout Southeast Asia, and perhaps even a more wide-scale search of the mountains around Alkut.
She was more optimistic about the current efforts being made to match the twenty-five recovered patients to the list of casualties. Without teeth and distinguishing features, it would be difficult—but not impossible. DNA 323
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samples would be matched to blood taken from the casualties’ surviving family members, and identities would be confirmed. The only obstacles were time and money, and the U.S. military had plenty of both.
“Isn’t that Skinner?” Mulder interrupted, gesturing with his good arm. Scully saw a tall man separate from a group of uniformed officers fifty yards away, just beyond the rear ambulance. She easily identified the assistant director’s broad shoulders and distinctive gait. Skinner was moving down the runway toward them, a heavy clipboard in his hands; Scully recognized the case file she and Mulder had prepared on the flight back to Washington.
“Maybe there’s been some progress in the search for Julian Kyle,” she said, hopefully. She and Mulder had sent out an international APB on the fugitive scientist, and had transferred his stats to Interpol and the Southeast Asian division of the CIA. Still, despite her hopes, she doubted Kyle would be apprehended anytime soon. Kyle was ex-military, and assuredly had the resources to hide in Asia indefinitely.
“I wouldn’t hold my breath,” Mulder commented, putting voice to Scully’s thoughts. “From what the search teams reported after hitting Fibrol, I’d say Kyle planned for this contingency a long time ago.” Scully sighed, straightening her slacks as she pushed off the fence. Mulder ’s sentiments were accurate; there was little hope of finding Kyle or, for that matter, any evidence of a connection between Paladin’s work and Fibrol International.
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Three FBI search teams had descended on Fibrol’s main complex just hours after Scully and Mulder had reported their findings to Skinner. Every office and laboratory had been thoroughly searched, every file cabinet and computer processor scoured for evidence. No links to Paladin or his experiments were found. Nothing to indict either Fibrol or Julian Kyle, and no indication that anyone at the company had previous knowledge of Emile Paladin’s faked death or continued existence.
Fibrol’s board of directors had stood up to twelve hours of direct questioning—and not one member of the exec-utive staff had shown evidence of the slightest deception, or any knowledge of Kyle’s possible whereabouts.
Paladin and Kyle had obviously been working alone.
If, as Mulder maintained, they had been funded by sources within the Defense Department, the paper trail had long since vanished.
Still, the raid on Fibrol had not been a total waste of time. While going through Julian Kyle’s office, the search team had found an unlabeled phone number in a locked drawer in his desk. The number had been traced to a studio apartment in Chelsea. The apartment had been deserted for at least a week, but the forensic specialists had found a number of hair and skin samples in the sink and shower drains matching similar samples taken from the cave at the base of See Dum Kao.
According to preliminary DNA matches, the apartment had belonged to Quo Tien, Emile Paladin’s son.
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Twenty minutes after the search team began to scour the apartment, they made a chilling discovery. Beneath a hinged tile in the apartment’s bathroom, they had found a small vial of clear liquid and two specially manufac-tured, spring-loaded miniature syringes. Scully had recognized the description of the syringes from a
New Eng-land Journal of Medicine
article on microsurgery; they had been designed for intercapillary intrusions during microscopic surgical procedures. That in mind, she was not surprised when the clear liquid in the vial was identified as a rare viral sample suspended in a supercooled chemical base. The search team had solved the mystery of the encephalitis lethargica outbreak.
“Kyle’s long gone,” Mulder continued, as he and Scully started toward the runway, intending to meet Skinner halfway. “And he took Paladin’s skin with him.
We’re left with twenty-five unknown soldiers, a trail of brutal murders, a medically exonerated Perry Stanton—
and, of course, a pair of tusks. In retrospect, I guess it’s a pretty good ending to a three-hundred-year-old myth.” Scully avoided looking at her partner. They had been over the subject a dozen times. The tusks had been transported to the FBI headquarters along with Scully and Mulder’s case file. Preliminary molecular dating had placed the age of the objects at approximately three hundred years—a fact that, on its own, was inconclusive.
Elephants and wild boar were indigenous to the region, now as well as three hundred years ago. Although DNA analysis had not yet found a species match, there was a 326
Skin
good chance the tusks belonged to a strain of elephant or boar that had since gone extinct.
“Maybe that’s what Skinner wants to talk about,” Scully finally responded, her voice low. They were now only a dozen yards from the assistant director, closing fast. “Maybe he wants to donate the tusks to a museum.
Or better yet, sell them to pay for our little excursion.”
“I’d rather mount them on the wall of my office,” Mulder said. “A memento of our romantic journey to Southeast Asia. What do you say, Scully? We could split the pair.”
“Thanks,” Scully responded, her face stiffening as they met Skinner at the edge of the runway, “but I think they’re more your style.”
327
BEN MEZRICH
has published nine books, including the
New York Times
bestseller
Bringing Down the House
(set to be a Sony picture in March 2008 starring Kevin Spacey). He is a columnist for
Stuff
magazine and
Boston
Common
and a contributor for
Flush
magazine (U.K.).
His most recent book is
Rigged
, and he lives in Boston, Massachusetts.
Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.
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This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
THE X-FILESTM: SKIN. Copyright © 1999, 2008 by Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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