Chapter 8: Everything Shines

Frohike stood up on his toes to peer out the spy hole of the door, and grinned at the sight of one of John Doggett’s bright blue eyes peering back at him.

He barely had time to get the last lock undone before Doggett was pushing his way through the door.

“Whoa, Johnny, where’s the fire?”

Doggett didn’t answer, just brushed past the little man and moved between shelves groaning with hardware towards the space the Lone Gunmen referred to as their office.

Frohike grumbled darkly to himself as he relocked the door and then marched after the other man.

When he got to the desk that Langly had most of his computers set up on, Doggett was already there, staring intently at the screen directly in front of the youngest of the Gunmen; Langly’s hands were flying over the keyboard in front of him while windows flashed on the screen in every colour of the spectrum. Doggett leaned forward expectantly, muttering, “this better be good.”

“Just sit back and watch the magic, G-Man,” Langly snarled.

Byers came up behind them, and Frohike noticed how the quiet man’s attention wavered between the information Langly was manipulating on the screen, and Langly himself. He thought it was an interesting observation, but opted to file it away for perusal at a later date. Right now it was more important that they were helping Agent Doggett, who in turn would use their assistance to help Mulder, Walt, and, of course—

“Have you talked to Scully today?” Frohike asked. Doggett nodded a reply, still fixated on the computer screen.

“Is she okay?” Frohike pushed.

Another nod.

“Did she say anything about—uh—“ Frohike didn’t know what he was actually asking about. It might have been Skinner’s state of health, Mulder’s state of mind, or Scully’s state of arousal.

“She says Skinner’s fine, Mulder’s a mess, and they have a lead.”

“Well,” Byers said, over brightly, “That’s something.”

“I’ve got it!” Langly exclaimed.  More screens flashed, a snipped of the Star Wars theme blared from tiny Bos speakers next to the computer, and the printer spit out a bit of paper.

“Take that, DOD!  You’re no match for the power of the Dark Side!” Langly gave Doggett a huge, smug smile.

Doggett played it cool.

“That didn’t look so hard,” he scoffed.

“Not hard? Are you wacked, dude? That took mad skills!”

Frohike stepped between them.

“Save the anger ball for Middle Earth, hippie!” Then, to Doggett: “If you actually had any idea what he just did there, you wouldn’t have needed him to do it, now would you, G-Man?”

Doggett and Langly glared at each other over the top of Frohike’s head.

“Hey, Langly,” Byers called from the photocopier, “This looks great!”

Langly forgot all about Doggett and visibly preened under the praise.

Frohike noticed this in the same way he’d seen Byers attention to Langly earlier, and he thought he might do well to consider taking a trip on his own some weekend in the future, maybe let his partners have a little alone time, a little space.

Doggett snatched the printout out of Byers hands.

“Pretty good,” he agreed, sounding more reluctant about it than he really was.

“So, what’s the sitch here anyway,” Frohike asked as Byers took back the new Department of Defense identification card that Langly had just created. “What are Black Ops up to these days that you’re just dying to check out, Johnny?”

“Don’t call me Johnny,” said Doggett.

“All right, Agent Doggett,” he emphasized the consonants in the man’s name sarcastically. “What’s goin’ down at the DOD that you need to be sneakin’ in?”

“Sneaking in?” Langly yelped, “I don’t think so. That I.D. is so good you could tap dance right through the front door with it. I found a back door right into personnel. After that, it was easy enough to find some poor slob who’d taken his vacation pay.”

“Sheldon Seeney,” Byers said, cropping Langly’s work with a paper cutter on another desk.

“Oh, the name was nothing,” continued Langly, “Cake and pie. It’s the bar code that was the challenge…well, a challenge for anyone else, maybe.” He cracked his knuckles with authority, and then his slender fingers were moving over the keyboard again like a three year old in search of a security blanket.

“At the risk of repeating myself,” said Frohike, “Which by the way happens *way* too often around here, I’ll ask again: why are we forging some narc’s ID?”

Byers was just pulling the freshly forged and now freshly laminated ID card out of the laminator. Doggett whisked the card out of his hands and held it up to his face.

“Hi, I’m Sheldon,” he declared in a nasal whine. “I’m a Pisces who enjoys black ops and long walks in the park, and I’m just looking for a woman who understands me.”

Langly snorted a giggle through his nose, and Byers smiled at him. Langly didn’t notice, already focused back on his computer, building firewalls and covering his tracks.

“Funny, G-Man, really funny. Tell me this: Is this just a lark of your own, or are you trying to help our people here?”

Doggett didn’t miss the grim tone, and he held up a hand in a placating manner. “Easy Melvin, relax. Of course I’m doing this for Dana.” He and Frohike exchanged a look full of protection for Dana Scully, peppered with just a hint of jealousy and a sprinkle of mistrust.

Doggett backed down first, and addressed all three men.

“We know that whatever’s wrong with Skinner, it has somethin’ to do with that time he was sick back a few years.”

“Nanotechnology,” confirmed Byers.

“Bad mojo,” agreed Langly.

“Well, according to Skinner,” continued Doggett, “He was being blackmailed at the time by Alex Krycek.”

“Rat,” said Byers.

“Bastard,” said Frohike.

“Dead rat bastard,” said Langly.

“And Krycek had some sort of gadget that was making Skinner sick.”

“The mighty Palm Pilot of Doom,” said Langly. He finished his defensive programming and hit another key, bringing up a map of Middle Earth. “Whatever happened to that thing anyway?” he asked as he resumed his ongoing battle for Helm’s Deep.

“That’s just it—no one knows. Dana says that according to Skinner, Krycek didn’t have it with him when he was killed—uh—when he died.” Doggett liked the Gunmen, trusted them nearly as much as Mulder did, but he didn’t know how much they had been told about that night in the parking garage, and he didn’t think he should be the one to fill in any blanks.  “Anyway, then Mulder told her about this fourth floor caper that he went on a few years ago at the DOD, looking for—“

“The cure for Scully’s cancer—the chip!” exclaimed Byers, remembering.

“Well, yeah. So then he figured if there was anything left hangin’ over him or Walt that you guys mighta missed, it might be there.”

He ignored Frohike’s bristling at the suggestion that they had been anything less than thorough in erasing their friends from any unwelcome inquisitors, and simply headed for the door with a wave.

“You’re welcome!” snapped Langly as virtual Elven archers nearly took off his head.

“I owe ya one!” Doggett called back over his shoulder. And then he was gone and Frohike was muttering over his locks again.

“Do you think there’s really anything there?” Byers worried aloud.

“If there is, that ID will get him there,” Langly replied. “My kung fu is the best.”

“Keep tellin’ yourself that, ‘Manhammer’,” Frohike told him. Then more quietly he added, “I sure hope he makes it.”

*   *   *

Doggett could barely smother a grin as yet another door opened with a wave of Langly’s bogus card. Part of him marveled at what kind of guy this Sheldon Seeney was to have such access, while another side of him was a little disgusted with the ease with which he was able to move through the DOD offices. Either security was way too lax, or he looked too much like a narc—neither answer thrilled him, but he hoped it was more the former than the latter.

He stopped thinking about any of it as he entered the room. While his jaw didn’t actually drop at the sight, the football field sized room with its apparently endless rows of shelves and drawers did take his breath away for a moment…

…a small green light flashed on a screen deep in the heart of the building and a security guard looked up from his magazine…

…Doggett looked at the shelf nearest the door and saw that a sticker was attached haphazardly to it: Aa—Be

“S-K,” he muttered and headed down the aisle at a quick pace.

…the security guard pulled a close up of the ID card used to scan through the restricted doorway and keyed in a code that began comparing the ID to all known identifications in the database…

“R..R…S…Sa…Christ, this place is friggin’ huge!” Doggett moved faster now, scanning shelves for the letters he needed and muttering them aloud as he passed: “Sk-Sk-Skar-Skil-Skin—“

…The two identification cards on the screen had the same bar code, the same name, the same signature, the same basic information, and the same clearance…
…the same picture.

When Doggett had first contacted Langly about the possibility of getting an ID card for the Department of Defense, he hadn’t thought about the photo part of it much.

Langly had.

Instead of replicating the DOD agent’s picture on the new ID, where it would have been suspect if anyone had looked at the man wearing the tag too closely, Langly had gone the opposite way.  Since he was already in the system, and manipulating information, it was nothing to simply slip Doggett’s picture into Sheldon Seeney’s file and onto the identification—the old one and the new one.

Once Doggett was clear, he could then go back in and switch them back, and no one would ever know.

As the DOD data base did its job badly, and Doggett leapt on a plastic box labeled SKINNER, WALTER S., Richard “Ringo” Langly smugly traversed a virtual Middle Earth to be crowned King.

Now that Doggett had actual evidence—of what he couldn’t be sure, but still it was something he could see, touch, take—now he felt nervous.  He glanced around the room, expecting a dozen armed guards to come barreling in any second now, guns blazing.

The box reminded Doggett of the old Tupperware containers that his ex-wife used to freeze baking in. He wondered if he should just go through it here, and then he decided he’d pressed his luck quite enough for one day.

“Hell, one lifetime,” he muttered to himself as he tucked the container under one arm and headed back to the exit.

At the door he paused, sorely tempted to see if there was anything under DOG-, but again, he knew he was pushing it. He suddenly grinned nastily and intoned in his best Governor-of-California voice: “I’ll be back.”

And then he was out the door and running for the stairs.

* * *

“Honey, I’m home!” Doggett called out, and a moment or two later, Byers was opening the door for him.

“What took ya so long?” Frohike cracked from deeper inside the room, where he was sitting in a large ergonomically designed office chair and fiddling with a camera.

“Stopped to chat up the security guards—thought I might ask one out,” Doggett replied dryly.

“I think Scully might have a thing or two to say about that,” Frohike replied.

“Have your gab session later, ladies,” Langly interrupted gruffly. “Didja get the swag, or what?”

“What’s with the hostility, Blondie?” Doggett asked, setting the container he’d stolen from the Defense Department onto the wooden table next to Langly’s computer. Then he pulled the identification badge from his jacket and handed it to Byers, who removed the metal clip from it, set it on a chipped china saucer, and put it in what looked like a microwave oven set up on still another counter.

“The “Lord of the Geeks” here is just bitter ‘cos he got buggered by a dwarf or something,” Frohike told him. Langly just glared at his computer screen.

“Oh, for a moment there I thought it might be something serious.” Doggett turned his attention to the container. “Let’s see what we’ve got here.”

Frohike joined him at the table, and after removing the colorful melted slag that the ID had become from the oven and tossing it in the trash, so did Byers. Langly closed his video game program and started up the original hacking program he’d designed for getting into the government files, so that he could now go back and erase John Doggett from existence.

Doggett opened the plastic container gingerly, but apparently the DOD felt that locking their doors at night was enough, and it wasn’t booby-trapped in any way. He removed a plain file folder from the top of the pile and flipped it open.

“Whoa, check out Don King!” he exclaimed, and Frohike laughed. Byers and even Langly turned to see what Doggett had in his hands.

The picture of Skinner had to be at least twenty years old, maybe more, and revealed a man just as serious as the man they all knew now, with the exception of a bush of dark curly hair that seemed more out of place than the seriously dated suit he was wearing.

Following the picture was a dossier describing a slow but steady rise through the FBI ranks, including a stint in the legal department that Doggett figured not even Mulder knew about. Doggett knew that Skinner had come to his position honorably, but he didn’t realize just how clever the man really was.

“All the more reason to protect him,” he muttered.

“What else we got here?” Frohike grew quickly bored with the paperwork. He reached into the container and pulled out a small vial containing, of all things, a dead bee.

“Wow, what’s this? Wednesday Addams’ hope chest?” asked Langly, pulling out another vial, this one containing some brackish amber fluid. Langly hoped it wasn’t an aged urine sample.

Byers took both vials from him, muttering something about analysis.

“Okay, I’m seeing things here, and not getting the connection—how does a queen of spades signify anything about Skinner?” Frohike held up a playing card. Doggett took it from him, flipped it over, and thought the skull on the back of it looked familiar, but he wasn’t sure from where.

“Okay, I think I’m getting this,” he said. “I think this is all stuff from old cases—ones that Skinner had a particular hand in, or was part of, or maybe ran—I dunno—but I think this is stuff that could have maybe opened up more answers…or even just protected him…”

“So you think someone was holding this stuff to keep him quiet?” Byers asked.

“Yeah, or under their thumb or something.”

“Never mind the trip down FBI memory lane—is the whatsit that Krycek was using in here?” Langly pushed aside a jar with a dead worm in it, a couple of pens and a desk sign that read “Thank you for not smoking”. Doggett knocked his hands away as he spotted a lumpy object wrapped in felt.

“Hey, what’s this?” He unwrapped the package to reveal a silver cased, hand held device of some kind, with a wide screen and several buttons on it.

“All right! Jackpot!” exclaimed Frohike. He grabbed the device from Doggett, and then promptly lost it to Byers, who fumbled, and it was back in Doggett’s hands a moment later.

“I think we have a winner, folks!” Doggett said, grinning. He turned the device over in his hands once, twice, then a third time. “Now how do we turn the sucker off and save the day?”

Langly had been watching Doggett silently during the tussle over the device, and now he stood up, plucked the thing right out of Doggett’s hands, and flipped a switch on the side.

“Unless your bad guys are Pikachu and the Mario Brothers, Agent Dogbird, you are shit outta luck.” Tinny electronic music began emanating from the device.

“It’s a Gameboy,” he declared flatly. “Advance.”
 

8/19