The Coin of Betrayal

by Phetsy Calderon <phetsy@earthlink.net>

Copyright (c) 1997 Phetsy Calderon. All rights reserved, except that the characters Dana Scully and Sen. Richard Matheson are the property of Chris Carter and 1013 Productions. No copyright infringement is intended, and all rights to the characters remain with the copyright owner.

Special thanks: to Dawson Rambo for technical accuracy.

A man lay bent across the wall of a circular fieldstone fireplace, set into a beach house's redwood deck. Flames jittered across the bed of oak coals, oozing yellow light across the Big Sur night sky.

The fire under his head burned him and the pistol muzzle at his neck froze him.

The face of the woman holding the gun turned his guts to water.

<But she's the sensible one. We sent her to keep him in line, to keep him functioning. She's the sensible one.> He wanted to believe that. He kept reciting the words to himself. He tried very hard to convince himself.

But there was nothing sensible in the blue eyes like case-hardened steel that bored into him.

"I assume you are interested in continuing to live?"

Her tone was soft, almost silken. It terrified him. He had heard that tone before: Army Rangers. Green Berets. Navy SEALS. Killing machines wound too taut, adrenaline pumping too hard, to control anything beyond the softest of whispers.

He made a tiny motion with his head, telling her yes.

She pushed the muzzle of the 9mm more lovingly against his throat, bending him a little farther back over the stone edge of the fire pit. The flames cackled below him, a litany of mad laughter, mocking his helplessness at the hands of a woman slighter than his shadow. The heat clasped his neck, his ears. The world was hard stones at his back, the smooth weatherbeaten redwood of the deck below his feet, the deep black sky and the eyes weighing his death above hi m.

"Then call off your hounds. Let my doctors know they are under no further threat. Tell my insurance company to honor the terms of my treatment policy."

The waves boomed under her words, weighting them.

"You have a touching faith in the influence of my position, Agent Scully."

Her eyes scraped over him. The pistol muzzle never wavered.

"Do you have any idea how easy it is to read a bang path, Senator?" Soft words. Polite. Rage carefully channeled. "You must not. It wasn't hard to find out the origin of the little innuendoes about the safety of children, wives and lovers of certain oncologists. To say nothing of the threats to their medical licenses.

"And do you know, most system administrators leave their virtual back doors unlocked?" The silky voice murmured, as she drug the pistol muzzle slowly across his throat in a deadly caress. "It's really not hard to log in as root, on most machines. That means it's possible to find out exactly where funds are moving from. You can find out, for instance, who's hacking into an insurance company's records and altering the terms of one policy. One particular policy that benefits me."

The muzzle came to rest under his left ear. She leant over him, a wing of red hair turned to burning blood by the firelight shifting against her cheek. The black clothes she had worn to gain access to the remote beach house merged with the black, moonless sky behind her. She was an effigy of dark and blood, with cold blue oceans of eyes.

<She's the sensible one. She's the sensible one.> He wanted to believe it. He cursed the impulse that had led him to borrow the house for a quiet weekend away from his responsibilities. He had lured himself into the perfect trap: a solitary, hidden house, cantilevered 200 feet above the heavy Pacific breakers. Thickets of Coast cypress hid the house from the infrequent cars traveling the Cabrillo Highway inland from it. The road ran 20 lonely miles in either direction before it hit so much as a roadhouse.

His allies, his sources of power, and his physical security personnel were all 3000 miles away. Here isolation and her SIG Sauer were all the allies the woman needed to hold him at a complete disadvantage. She was indeed the sensible one, he thought in bitter irony. She had obviously watched and waited until he had given her the perfect time and place to deal.

"So I'm sure you can understand why I have so much faith in the 'influence of your position,' as you put it.

"I'm sure you will also understand why I'm making another request of you.

"Bring Mulder in."

The words fell heavy as the break of the booming waves on the cliffs below.

When they finally stopped, he felt as though all his blood had been thinned, and half the oxygen stripped from the air.

"What do you mean? Agent Scully, no amount of influence will bring a man back from the dead."

"Maybe not, Senator. But I am willing to bet my immortal soul and what remains of my life that there's a way to bring back a man who's been sold out and forced underground."

He opened his mouth to speak, but the words never left him. For the first time, her effort to control herself was visible. He felt a tiny tremor in the pistol. He saw the absolute certainty in her eyes, and a promise he did not want to understand.

"What are you saying, Agent Scully?" Maybe she didn't know everything. Maybe there was some small chance. . .

"I'm saying that my contacts didn't just find out who was sending unkind eMail to my doctors. I'm saying that we know who was really behind the effort to take down Mulder. We know what the hoax really is, and it wasn't anything Mulder found.

"He was too close, wasn't he, Senator? He was almost touching the crownstone, and the whole bridge of secrets was about to tumble at the public's feet.

"And so you betrayed him. You took away his work, you mocked his integrity and his ability, and you took his life--"

"No!"

"I thought you said he was a dead man, Senator?" The voice was lazy and soft again. Like a hunting cat.

"I mean--Fox's death was at his own hands."

"You took his life: his dedication, his meaning, his search. You may not have pulled a trigger, Senator, but you destroyed Fox Mulder's life. And then you threw him out in the cold, as a bone for the Consortium to chew on."

He tried one more time. "Agent Scully, this has been a terrible shock for you. You want so desperately to believe that you've created an illusion that Mulder is not dead."

"I talked to him."

She went on. "Three nights ago. At the Lincoln Memorial. And believe me, if I were going to suffer a delusion of him returning from the dead, it would not include that particular bitter conversation."

His face gave away so little that it gave away everything.

"Yes, Senator. We do know who was really behind the effort to take down Mulder. And we know why. It wasn't because he was wrong, it was because he was right, wasn't it, Senator?"

Matheson stared back at her. She saw the thoughts collecting themselves in his head. And then she saw him, without really thinking, decide to fall back on the habits of power.

"Oh, yes, he was right, and he was going to give away everything to the Consortium."

Senator Richard Matheson had forgotten, for a brief unfortunate moment, his opponent's state of mind. He was reminded by a rocketing left cross .

"Mulder wouldn't give anything to the Consortium except a ticket to hell," she snarled an inch from his face. "And you should be careful what you say to a delusional woman with a gun. She might suffer from the delusion that the bullets can't hurt you."

Richard Matheson was not unkind, but he was not feeling particularly generous.

"Oh, but he was about to give everything away, Agent Scully. He was about to let them know how poorly they held their secrets, how much we knew about them. He was about to drive them so far underground we could never find them, never know what they were doing.

"Mulder had to be taken out: he was about to wave a warning flag that even those arrogant bastards in the Consortium couldn't ignore. "

"So that's your payment of choice, for your loyal allies? The coin of betrayal, the tender of humiliation?"
Suddenly she hauled him to his feet with a fist knotted in his shirt. Standing, he was most of a foot taller, but there was no question as to who held the upper hand.

He felt the cool evening air of the ocean drifting and cooling his skin where he had been so close to the fire. He faced the slight woman with the heavy gun, and felt a greater heat compounded of anger and determination.

"Matheson. Listen to me. Bring Mulder in. Bring his work back. Or I will find everyone and everything that knows that truth.

"I'm not playing by the rules anymore, Senator, and I will find every person who knows the truth and is hiding it. Protocol and chains of evidence and even law don't matter anymore. The courts have failed us, so everything I learn will go right to the media.

"And I promise you, I will find every record. I will find every facility that studies that technology and science that can't exist except as an alien gift. I will know every name, and means of funding, and all the secrets. And I will place those facts before the public. I will set them out like dishes at a banquet."

Some combination of admiration and pity settled on his face.

A small, bitter smile crossed her face as she understood what he was thinking.

"And don't think that because I'm dying the game won't be played out. If you don't bring Mulder back, I will set loose a cascade of revelations. It won't just be from me, and it won't just be from fringe sources you can easily discredit. Mulder wasn't the only one who had influential contacts--a captain's daughter has a chance to make many friends, Senator. I've been reluctant to drag them into my fight before this, but no more. There will be a wildfire of revelations that will consume your network of secrets like a fire consumes a tree, from root to branch.

They stared at each other for a moment. Scully released his shirt, safed her pistol.

"I'm leaving now, Senator. I suggest that you forget I was here tonight--but don't forget what I know, or what I will do. "

She holstered her gun. Stepped back out of the circle of firelight and turned to go. Her voice drifted over her shoulder.

"I will be contacting you, Senator, and I will be hoping that I don't have to ignite that tree of fire.

"Because if I do, you will be nothing but a leaf of flame on that tree, Senator."

Then she was gone in the night, and there was the sound of waves on the rocks below, and wind over the cypresses.

And the fire crackling behind him.
 

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