Disclaimers in part 1
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"They that know nothing fear nothing."

~~Frances E. Willard -- A Wheel Within a Wheel~~
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SATURDAY, APRIL 3, 2000
LONE GUNMEN HQ
8:00 AM

LANGLY:

Oh, man, that was a long night. Mulder wanted to know *all* the hits Black Widow's made, and where and when. Piece of cake for guys like us, right? Not even -- it's hard, boring work. We did more scouting for Mulder and found more stuff. We can date it, but the problem is where it came from, and we still can't tell where he is. We tried to nail him again while we were online, but he started backtracking us again, and things got freaky. Byers made it to about 1 a.m., but he was really fried by then. He would have tried to stay up longer, but Frohike made him go to bed. I was tired and not having a real good time, and I wished the little troll had made me go to bed too. I mean, Deb was zonked; it wasn't like we could do anything, but the idea of climbing in bed next to her, feeling her next to me, I was so hungry for it. Fro and me finally gave up around 5 a.m. I crawled in next to my girl, and it was so awesome.

"Ringo?" she whispers in my ear. At first I think I'm dreaming, but it's such a glorious dream. When I finally wake up, I'm so beat, but there she is, right next to me, and it's better than any dream. It may be the only time in my life I've really felt like waking up.

"What time's it?" I'm still pretty muzzy.

"Around eight."

I just groan. I doubt this is a good time to tell her I never get up before the crack of noon on Saturdays, and that's only if I haven't been drinking too much. She leans over and kisses me, real gentle. I think I've died and gone to heaven. This is good, because if we're getting up right now, I'm gonna be dead on my feet the rest of the day. "What time did you get to bed, babe?" She's stroking my hair,  and god it's so nice.

"I think... it was like five or something." Well, that's what Frohike told me. He could've been lying. Sometimes he does, if it suits his purposes.

She runs her hand over my chest, down to my stomach... You go any lower, girl, and you better mean it. "Well, if you get three hours, you're usually okay. If I can't get three hours, I just stay awake. Better that way."

Well, she's a lot more macho than I am, what can I say? Younger, too. "You slept a long time," I run my hands through her soft hair. She feels delicious.

"Don't worry, I'll be able to use a nap later. I've got lots of sleep to catch up on. Thanks for letting me get some."

"No problem." I lean over and kiss her neck, and she purrs like Cardinal Richelieu.

"Ringo, I have something to tell you, but I didn't want to say it on the phone or on line." Oh shit. Those words are usually lethal. If she has a boyfriend or a husband or she prefers girls, please, just kill me now and get it over with. She must see the look on my face; she laughs. "It's a good thing, Ringo!"

"Shoot."

She sits up and leans on the headboard. "Back before I even met you, I applied for a trauma surgery fellowship. I was notified a few days ago that I'd received one."

"Oh wow, that's great." It is, but if it means I'll see even less of her, it's also gonna suck.

"Guess where?" I've got blurry vision, but you could be blind and still see her smiling.

"Where?"

"George Washington U, right here in town, and I start in June. I am so excited! I was excited to get the fellowship, but when I got it at GWU, I was just thrilled... Ringo, what's wrong?" Her face falls and she looks all disappointed.

This wasn't the kind of news I was expecting, and I'm running on empty right now. "Nothing, babe. Nothing's wrong."

"I thought you'd be happy." She's upset; maybe I didn't show the proper enthusiasm.

"Look, babe, I'm real glad that you got the fellowship, and of course I want us to be together."

"So... what's the problem?"

Time for some major damage control. She's not happy, and if I don't do something quick, she's gonna grab her stuff and bail at lightspeed. What am I gonna say to her? Byers says I have to tell her the truth. Oh yeah, easy for him to say... Okay, maybe it's not so easy. Not like he's got a great history either. He was right about the sheets, though; maybe he's right about this, too.

"Ringo?" Time to get my story together here. I take a deep breath.

"Deb, like, you know what we do, right?"

"I know that you're a computer consultant, and publish an underground newspaper. It's kind of interesting, though I have to say that I can't believe you'd buy that alien shit."

Well, I have proof, but we won't go there. I have more important stuff to discuss right now than editorial content. "It's a little more... involved than that."

"In what way? You're not going to tell me you're some kind of spy, are you?" She sort of laughs.

"Actually, in a way, we are." She stops laughing. "You've only seen a couple sample issues, and it's been pretty slow the last couple months, but things are starting to heat up."

"What kind of things?" She sounds like she doesn't believe me.

"You ever heard of Pinck Pharmaceuticals?"

That gets a good laugh. "Ringo, I'm a doctor, we use their shit all the time. It's everywhere. They're a major supplier."

"Well, what do you really know about them?"

She stares at me like I'm some kind of moron. " I know that when their detail people show up, we all run and hide. But we do love the samples." Hmm, samples. I didn't think of that. I'll have to ask her if she gets anything good.

"But what do you know about the company itself?"

"Ringo, babe, I'm a doctor, not a pharmacist. It's their job to know that."

"Well, I'm not sure any of the pharmacists at your hospital would know the kind of stuff that's really going on there. Actually, we're not even entirely sure, which is why we're looking into it."

"What, are they spiking their Viagra analogue with saltpeter?" I really need to get her to listen.

"Hey, if it was just that, Frohike'd be the only one suffering. No. We got this friend. Well, she's Byers' bud, but she's me and Fro's bud too; her name's Sari Thomas, and she works at the Sierra Club, which is where we're consulting right now."

"Hey, that's great." Okay, now she's gonna take me seriously. I forgot; she's not a dropout like me. Credibility counts with this chick. So be credible, you idiot.

"Actually, the reason we're there is because a few weeks ago, Sari was preparing a white paper to present to a Senate subcommittee on some of the really ugly shit Pinck's been doing. Seems that our pals at Pinck have been engaging in some covert genetic experiments."

"Ringo, go to any medical school, there are a hundred genetic experiments going on, and 'covert' is in the eye of the beholder. They refer to it as 'proprietary,'  and they keep a lid on it so they can patent processes, drugs, and organisms."

"How many of these experiments get funded by pharmaceutical companies?"

"Lots. Which admittedly doesn't always make for good research, but I'm not all that interested in research unless it's patient-based. I'm a clinician. I like being in the trenches, and I only do as much research as I have to."

"How many projects does Penn have funded by Pinck?"

"That's easy to find out, we just check the research database. I have a password." Cool, that saves some time. "But why are you so interested in Pinck?"

"Because some of the stuff Pinck's done has been a hell of a lot less than kosher, and I don't think they've changed their evil ways."

"Why does this surprise you about pharmaceutical companies? To physicians, they're a necessary evil, but it's not as if they're out to destroy us."

"Yeah, well, they're out to destroy anyone who doesn't think too highly of their research."

"Sniping at each other in journal articles is just the way things get done, Ringo."

"If that was all they'd done, we wouldn't be working at Sierra."

"So what did they do?"

"Took out the entire computer system. SCI got slashed, poisoned and burned big time." I'm sitting up now.

"Pinck did that?" She doesn't quite believe it.

" Pinck doesn't want to do their own dirty work. They hired somebody. A hacker. And he's a mean one. Remember Byers' friend Sari? He started small, hit her home system first. He figured if he hit hard enough, the Club wouldn't have time to pull it together for the hearing, and she'd be ruined too. But she went ahead and made the presentation, and you know what? She got 'em with their pants down, and now she's getting Congressional support, even from a few of the most free-market conservatives there. So Pinck got mad and got even, and fried some bigger fish to do it, namely, SCI's computers."

"How bad was it?"

"Bad enough that we're in the catbird seat for the next few months. It was ugly and they're paying some serious bucks for us to de-uglify it. The guy didn't just hit the main office, he took out a bunch of regionals in the Midwest, too, near some critical Pinck test fields; ground zero for a sudden spike in human and animal birth defects."

"Do you know who did it?"

"Only by his nym. We been trying to get this guy for years. So's the FBI, but we're way ahead of 'em; we always are. The problem is, he's tricky. He's got damn good kung fu." And it's pissing me off, too. I know I'm a sore loser, but I won't be a loser long. We are so gonna nail his ass.

"Are you saying that you...you're a hacker?" I've got my glasses on now and I can watch her face. She looks kinda confused.

Time for the moment of truth. "Yeah, we are, and it's not very safe."

"How so?"

"Well, okay. You remember I told you about Timmy Landau, the guy that messed me all up?"

"Seeing as that's how we met, I could hardly forget."

"Well, it's a real long and complicated story about how it all came down. He's part of it. I'll tell you all about it later, but Pinck's the issue right now."

" All right, so Pinck, you theorize, is hiring someone to trash the opposition's computers."

"I don't think, I know. And he's tracking us while we're trying to track him, and that could get nasty. If Pinck's bankrolling him, well, it's not our first run-in with them. We know what they can do. We damn near bought it last time we got close to them."

She just shakes her head. "This is incredible. You say you have proof?" I nod. "Would you be willing to show it to me?"

"I will, but I just gotta warn you, if you stick around with a loser like me, this is the kind of stuff that happens. The reason I got so weird when you said you were gonna be local, it's not 'cause I don't want you around me; I want that more than anything. I just don't want you getting hurt 'cause of what I do. That's what scares me."

"So you do want to be with me."

"Jesus, Deb, all I been doing is counting the minutes until you got here, 'til I could hold you for real. I just... I don't want anything to happen to you."

"Ringo, babe. Look at me." I'd do that anytime, request or no. "I'm an emergency medicine physician, and I'm going to do trauma surgery. You don't do that kind of work if you're a wimp."

"You're not a wimp, babe." Hell, that's the last thing I think about her. "But like, what if they discover you're my girlfriend and they decide to get to me by doing something to you?"

"I don't think that would happen, Ringo. I tend to be in very protected environments."

She's a smart girl, but way too trusting. I gotta break her of some of that. " Lemme show you some of the shit this guy's already pulled, and then we'll visit the Penn research database, okay?"

Now I get a smile. "Only if we eat first." Hmm, a woman after my own heart. Food as a priority.

I can't cook for shit, and neither of the guys are up, so after I let her get the first shower, I take a fast one and we head out to Gogie's. Gogie's is cheap and good and best of all, the tables are real private. They might be hideous orange and purple -- Gogie's doesn't know the fifties ended a while back -- but they do block a lot of sound. This is frustrating if you're trying to listen in on a Congresscritter's conversation, but great if you wanna talk about stuff with your girl.

She's been real quiet on the way over, but she did let me drive her car. I think she took one look at the van and Frohike's boat, and decided we should take her car. It's got a nice CD player. We put on the Plimsouls on the way over. It's cool she likes the Plimsouls. "You okay?" I ask her after we put in our orders and start in on the gallon of coffee the waitress left for us. She didn't even ask; I think she took one look at us and decided we needed a jumpstart.

"I'm fine."

"So what's on your mind?"

She looks up at me. "It's taken me so long to find someone I feel comfortable talking to, who doesn't get weirded out because of my strange schedule, and doesn't get all bummed because I can't keep my eyes open sometimes. I'm not going to give that up just because you think your line of work is dangerous."

"Deb, babe, I know it is. That's what I'm tryin' to tell ya. You think that's the first time I was in an ER?"

"Obviously not," she sounds kind of dry. "You've got quite a few old injuries."

"Yeah, well, okay, some of 'em I got skiing, but these days we're getting messed up an awful lot. I don't want it happening to you. It scares me half to death."

"Ringo, I think you're being too paranoid."

"'No matter how paranoid you are, you aren't paranoid enough.'"

She laughs. "Oh, that's a cute one. Did you make that up yourself?"

"No. Old acquaintance of ours. Well, I said I'd tell you about it. It started in '89, in Baltimore." By the time I've told her how it all began, the breakfast crowd's gone and the lunch crowd's moved in.

"You sure you're not making any of this up?"

"Okay, yeah, it sounds incredible, but that's really how it happened." I still don't think she quite gets it. I don't blame her. Sometimes I have trouble believing how it all went down, too. "You can ask the guys. They'll tell you."

She takes my hand in hers. "I do believe you. It's just... it's just so strange."

"Yeah, well, it gets stranger. What time's it?"

"Almost noon."

"Oh, shit. I forgot to tell you: Sari Thomas, she's doing a poetry reading this afternoon. She invited all of us, you included. You wanna go?"

She gives me a big smile. "You keep surprising me, Ringo. A poetry reading? I'd love to." I thought she might. She studied Latin poetry as a classics major. I love it when she talks Latin to me; I get really hot. She says I keep surprising her. Well, I just hope these are the worst surprises she gets. Me, I hate surprises.

We hop into her car and head for the Soylent Bean.

End part 11