TITLE: BLUE BOYS, 3/5
AUTHOR: kateswan
EMAIL: kateswan@triton.net
RATING: PG-13, minor language
DISCLAIMER: Carter, Gilligan, Shiban, Spotnitz ... did you love them as
much as we do? So long, and thanks for all the characters.
AUTHOR’S NOTES: I don’t believe in delayed gratification. I want it, I
want it now ... Dedicated to all the Gunfen, you know who you are; and
to the programming poohbahs at Fox Broadcasting, this is for you and the
horses you rode in on. My take on what happens after the TO BE CONTINUED
whopper flashed across the screen following the final minutes of The
Lone Gunmen: All About Yves.
“Okay. We’ll start the tale with us belly down on the ground,” Frohike
said, sitting on the bottom corner of the bed farthest from Fletcher,
“watching Mr. Morris Fletcher and his bunch of stormtroopers riding off
into the sunset. He’d dropped his clue, that expression of disbelief
bordering on fear when we mentioned the name Romeo 61. He figured it
would be enough to encourage further investigation. He was right.”
“When we found Romeo 61, and the list of dates with the word
‘successful’ listed after each one, for a few moments we wondered -- as
Langly phrased it -- if we really had found the Holy Grail of
Conspiracies. The Lockerbie crash, the Olympics bombing, the bombing of
the Marine barracks in Lebanon, and others listed ... many of the
incidents could be traced directly to known terrorists. Three Mile
Island and the Exxon Valdez just plain made no sense at all. But we’d
had one of our buttons pushed, as Fletcher had planned. The idea that a
single group of government sanctioned terrorists was responsible for the
assassination of JFK sent our collective sense of paranoid reality right
out the window.”
Mulder was sitting on the edge of the bed, hanging on his every word.
The others, except for Fletcher, who was rolling his eyes and grimacing,
seemed just as interested. Frohike nodded at Byers. “Take it.”
Byers cleared his throat. “The thing is, we have a pretty good idea who
the actual trigger man was in the assassination, and it wasn’t Lee
Harvey Oswald. It took us a long time to put a man to our profile, but
eventually we arrived at a 98 percent certainty that a figure who’d been
lurking around the corners of Mulder’s life ... and ours, to a certain
degree ... could very well have been responsible.”
“Who was it?” Jimmy asked in a hushed voice. “And why’d you get so
excited if you’d already figured it out?”
“We called him Cancer Man for years,” Byers said, looking at Mulder.
“Also known as C.G.B. Spender. He’s dead now, I believe.”
“And if there’s a God, burning in hell,” Mulder said. “You think he shot
JFK, and you never told me?”
“Lots of shit been hitting the fan, dude,” Langly said, polishing his
glasses on a piece of the bedspread. “The thing was, we’ve always hoped
for hard proof, documents, and this was a new place to start looking. If
a group like Romeo 61 did exist, Cancer Man would have been Grand Poobah
of the order.”
“Back up a bit,” Frohike said. “We found the nice site Fletcher made for
us, got all excited and decided to go question him about it. Jimmy was
doing some heavy foot-dragging, and when I asked if he wanted to come
along he said no, he had something to do.”
Jimmy looked at Yves, shyly. “I never believed it. Not for a minute.”
“I know.” Yves smiled sadly. “But you thought they did.”
“Hell yes.” Jimmy frowned at Frohike.
“Well I give you credit for awakening the worm of doubt, Jimmy. We
calmed down after you left, and Langly wondered aloud why a group that
dished out assorted death and destruction would bother e-mailing us
about a shadow government poobah dealing in alien technology. Wouldn’t
they: a - take the technology if they wanted it, or b - swat Fletcher
like the annoying stinging insect that he is.” Frohike smiled at
Fletcher. “No offense, Morris.”
“Then Byers made the observation that we’d had two too-good-to-be-true
leads in less than 24 hours, what were the odds of that,” Langly said.
“The odds are pretty high. Frohike made us go through each of the listed
dates and run a couple of sims with all the information we could find on
each event. Turns out there’s no possible way they could all be the work
of one group. Turns out a couple of the dates couldn’t even be exactly
matched to an obvious event ... like the terrorist killing of the
Israeli athletes in Munich, September 5, 1972. Romeo 61 had it listed as
9-6-72.”
“It was good bait, but it wouldn’t stay threaded on the hook,” Frohike
buffed his fingernails against his vest. “You’ve got an ego problem,
Morris. The earliest dated incident, the last on the list ... you just
had to slip in something to show what a clever bastard you are.”
“That and the name of the ‘terrorist; group,” Byers said. “Langly hit on
that right away. He wanted to know what kind of terrorists would call
themselves something that sounded like a chat room Lothario.”
Langly peered up over the edge of the bed and grinned at Fletcher. “I
hit the romance and sex chat rooms, claiming to be a 23-year-old blonde
pregnant with the love-child of Romeo61, a Caucasian, 6 foot male with
sandy blond hair, about 55 years old.”
“I’m not that old,” Fletcher protested.
“... did anyone know his real identity, and where I could find him. It
didn’t take long.” Langly shook his finger at Fletcher. “Lola32,
Debbi362436 and Desiree27 were very helpful. Especially Desiree.” Langly
made a fanning motion with his hand. “She sounds so hot, Morris.
Remember her? Little redhead, Las Vegas, you told her your real name was
Tommy L. Jones? Imagine our surprise when we realized you were at the
DefCon in Vegas when ...”
“Langly.” Frohike shook his head.
“You mentioned something about a date,” Mulder prodded.
“Yeah. July 28, 1952 in Buenos Aires. Odd, we couldn’t find any
significant occurrence on this day that would fit into the Romeo 61
scenario. Fortunately, we have Wonder Byers.” Frohike smiled around the
room. “He’s a walking encyclopedia. Try two days earlier, the death of
Eva Peron. Two days later, on the 28th, an entire country was in mourning.”
“Don’t cry, Argentina,” Jimmy said, “Evita.”
“It didn’t jell at the time,” Frohike nodded. “But it was an oddity, and
although there were plenty of people who might have wanted her dead,
there’s absolutely no doubt that Eva’s death was natural.”
“So why did Fletcher include it?” Skinner asked, entering the
conversation for the first time.
“We’ll come back to it.” Frohike took a second to bask in the knowledge
that he was telling a good story, and his audience was appreciative of
the fact. “It was at this moment that Byers asked another crucial
question. How had Fletcher, shot up to the gills with pentothal, managed
to come around, get himself out of our alien stage-o-rama, mobilize the
death star and throw up a road block? The whole thing was as staged as
our rubber suit and vibrating probe.”
“Frohike.” Mulder looked startled. “You’re the one who took my things?”
“Payback, Mulder. You’ve got half my video collection under your couch.”
Frohike continued rapidly. “Our next move was to pay Fletcher a call at
his hotel. We wanted to hear what explanation he’d offer for Romeo 61,
and why he’d been brought to our attention in the first place. We’d had
a chance to evaluate what he’d told us about the Maheren Project, and it
was looking thin.”
“Bogus,” Langly contributed. “Science of the fictional variety. Photonic
aggregate my butt cheeks.”
“The scary thing was, he knew who we were,” Byers said. “He stood there
and laughed at us, insulted us, compared us to the staff of Mad Magazine ...”
“As if that wasn’t an honor,” Langly interrupted.
“Then he launches into this whole Maheren Project disc stolen, I’m a
dead man, can’t find the woman who ripped him off -- who just happens to
look like Yves and uses an anagram for Lee Harvey Oswald as her alias --
and who Fletcher claims is a member of Romeo 61, this apolitical group
of terrorists who kill, torture and steal for profit, or to create
chaos,” Frohike continued. “Fletcher’s sitting there describing Ferengi
and asking us to seriously believe Yves has enlarged ear lobes.”
“We stepped out in the hallway after Fletcher dropped his big clue,”
Byers said. He began walking back and forth between the foot of the bed
and the doorway, looking from Fletcher to Smarm’s unconscious body on
the floor. “The whole story wasn’t working for me. We’d agreed before
going in not to let Fletcher know we suspected him.”
“Langly and I were on the same page with Byers,” Frohike broke in. “Why
would Yves rip Fletcher off, then e-mail us? It just didn’t make sense.
If she’d wanted to expose him, she could have brought the disc straight
to us, no tantalizing mention of Romeo 61 involved. Hard proof equals
hard copy in our profession. I told the guys it wouldn’t hurt to play it
out, maybe try to find Yves and, once and for all, solve two mysteries
for the price and effort of one.”
“We took Fletcher back to the office with us, and dropped red herrings
about her phone account. Jimmy gave us the perfect chance to play our
parts. He got all defensive, demanding to know if we’d ever seen Yves
kill anybody,” Langly said. “He blurts out that we’re wrong about her.”
“Thank you, Jimmy.” Yves had been listening with a brooding, unhappy
look in her dark eyes. It made Frohike hope Jimmy would get around to
giving her a comforting hug sooner or later. She looked like she could
use a hug and shoulder to cry on.
“It was perfect. It was the reason we decided to keep you out of the
loop, Jimmy. Your acting skills aren’t as polished as ours,” Frohike
said apologetically.
“I’ve heard stories *I* don’t believe about his acting skills,” Skinner
said. “*The bodies are piling up,* Jimmy?”
Jimmy had the grace to look embarrassed. “Sorry about that. I thought
you were a murderer, sir.”
“You gave us credibility. You contributed something important,” Frohike
added. “Byers nearly caved in the apartment when you stormed out.”
“It was such a relief, though,” Byers said. “I felt terrible deceiving
you, Jimmy.”
“What apartment?” Mulder asked. “Keep the story in a straight line, guys.”
“Fletcher wanted to find Yves, and he suggested we start in his hotel
lobby and try to track her car by hacking into security cameras. We were
willing to do it his way. Langly stayed ready to lose the connection at
any point along the route if it looked like we were going to be
successful in the trace.”
“What’s that mean?” Fletcher wriggled on the bed. “You knew where she
lived all the time? I don’t believe it.”
“Believe it, man. Frohike made me track her phone numbers a month ago.
One was billed to Martha Stewart, the other to Rupert Murdoch. We had a
look for any kind of rental in the area that was being billed to either
of them. We found ... something. Some place,” Langly said carefully.
“Imagine our surprise when the cameras led us to an apartment at Bishop
Place.” Frohike stopped when he heard Smarm groan. “You should tape that
guy, Skinner. He’s coming round.”
“Glad to. Keep talking, you give good story, Frohike.” Skinner rolled
Smarm over with his foot and began wrapping duct tape around the man’s
hands.
“If we had any doubts about Fletcher before we got to the apartment,
they evaporated once we were inside.” Frohike looked at Langly’s still
mostly blue face and grinned. “The dye job on Langly. Yves would never
have set that up; she’d have seamless electronic surveillance in her
place.” He nodded in her direction. “You did, too. A nice job. It took
me a while to find everything.”
“You broke into my ... place? When?” Yves’ face had lost the sorrow. She
was getting pissed.
That was more healthy, Frohike thought. “Not until tonight. We needed to
use your stuff. And very cool stuff it is.”
“Back to the apartment.” Doggett growled. “Your ego seems a match for
Fletcher’s, Frohike. Finish the damn story so I can get back to real
life sometime soon.”
“The dye was wrong, the bra was wrong, the clothes were wrong, and the
receipt from Lucerne Financial recording the multimillion dollar payment
from Fenix Atlantic Corporation was way wrong.” Frohike grinned and
began smoothing the leather on his gloves. “We’d just watched Jimmy
storm out after his big speech about dealing with a man who lies for a
living, then Langly conveniently finds this document that shouts even
louder at us that Fletcher thinks he’s playing us like violins, and he’s
getting his rocks off on the whole scam.”
“I hate all of you,” Fletcher said, turning his head to star at the
wall. “You’ll all be sorry.”
“What about the bra?” Mulder asked. “Don’t tease me, Frohike.”
“Sorry. It was a nice bra, but it was a size 36D. I’m betting you picked
out the clothes for the setup in the apartment, Fletcher. Your eyes are
bigger than your ...” Frohike coughed, rolled his eyes and continued.
“Unless I’m getting senile, Yves wears a 34C. And none of those clothes
looked like anything I’ve ever seen her wear.”
“You can tell her bra size by looking at her?” Jimmy didn’t want to ask,
but couldn’t help himself. “Yves?”
Her skin was turning rose under the smooth coffee color of her cheeks.
“34C,” she said. “You’re a dirty old man, Frohike.”
“I prefer the term experienced, my dear.” Frohike realized he was
enjoying the Fletcher torment a tad too much, but couldn’t make himself
quit poking at the big weasel. “We didn’t find leather, either. I’m not
sure what that says about him.”
“I said you weren’t smart,” Jimmy’s voice was contrite. “I didn’t trust you.”
“You did good, kid. You trusted your gut, and stood by your conviction.
You’ve got nothing to apologize for, Jimmy.” Frohike walked to the foot
of the bed and stared down at Fletcher’s mulish face. “Did you really
think Fenix Atlantic wouldn’t jump up and kick us between the eyes?”
Mulder started to laugh. “Oh my god. What a condescending asshole.”
“Explain it to me in words of one to two syllables,” Skinner said. “Now.”
“It’s an anagram,” Yves said slowly. “Spell it with one extra ‘t’, and
you’ve got *an X-File antic.*”
“Son of a bitch.” Doggett threw his hands up. “Does everything in the
universe come back to the damn X-Files?”
“Yup.” Mulder reached over and patted Fletcher’s cheek. “You really
screwed yourself. Don’t mess with my boys, ever again.”
“Good advice,” Frohike said. “We told Fletcher we needed to get our gear
together, and we’d be back for him around 8. We dropped him at his hotel
and went to work. Swiss banks aren’t the easiest hack in the world, but
Langly was able to verify that the account had been opened in the name
of ... Fenix Atlantic Corporation. Not Yves Adele Harlow or Romeo 61. He
also found out that Fenix is a shell, with a fictional board of
directors who all live in Nevada.”
“What a surprise,” Skinner said.
“Yeah. We tried to get hold of you, Mulder, but you weren’t answering.”
“Another dead cell phone.” Mulder shrugged. “I got your message on the
machine when I returned from meeting Jimmy.”
“You met Jimmy?” Frohike looked between them.
“Short story, but later,” Mulder said.