Skin

by Ben Mezrich

  Mulder realized with a start that he recognized the patient’s face. Andrew Paladin. He had found the recluse brother. He shifted his gaze back to the masked surgeon. The blue-eyed man moved slowly to one of the video cameras behind him, and hit a switch. The cameras stopped whirring. “You’ve disturbed a delicate procedure. This man could die because of you.”

  The voice was soft, almost melodic, tinged with confidence. He did not seem fazed by Mulder’s presence.

  “This man should have died a long time ago,” Mulder responded, slowly moving around the operating table, his eyes flickering toward the scalpel. He could feel the warm blood still trickling down his jaw to his neck, staining the front of his camouflage. His wounded left arm hung uselessly at his side. “There are twenty-five just like him imprisoned in the next room. And there are close to two thousand more hidden somewhere, suffering the same horrid fate. Tortured souls, separated from their families for more than twenty-five years.”

  The blue-eyed man took a step back from the operating table, the scalpel poised expertly in his gloved hand. “Those men are alive because of me. My skin will give them a second chance—a way out from the torture.”

  Mulder shook his head, anger filling him. “You mean turn them into slaves—drones?”

  The blue-eyed man backed between the two oxygen tanks as Mulder skirted the bottom corner of the operating table.

  “No,” Mulder continued, his anger turning his voice sharp. “That was just the first stage. Incapable of individual thought—willing, unthinking servants, following your orders. But the next stage—it’s something much more advanced, isn’t it? Much more valuable.”

  “This is beyond you,” the blue-eyed man said, his voice indifferent, even clinical. “You can’t possibly begin to understand.”

  Mulder felt his anger multiply. “I know that you’ve kept these men alive for the past twenty-five years. Medically, that seems impossible. So it must be the skin itself—or perhaps chemicals within the skin, that has made this longevity possible. You’ve used the skin to alter these men—to prepare them. For this demonstration.”

  Mulder paused, looking at the patient on the stretcher. Then he glanced at the cameras, then at the receiver by the wall. He assumed it was connected by a fiber-optic link to a satellite dish somewhere high in the mountains. “Soldiers—intelligent, invulnerable soldiers. That’s what you’re trying to create, isn’t it? And you intend to sell them—to the military? To another government? Who’s on the other end of the cameras?”

  The blue-eyed man’s face tensed as his left hand suddenly slipped into his coat pocket. When it reappeared, he was holding a small-caliber handgun. Mulder’s chest constricted, and he took a step back. The cold glint in the man’s eyes scared him almost as much as the gun.

  “That’s enough,” he said, quietly.

  It was more than a statement—it was a command. Looking at the man’s face, at the intensity of his gaze, Mulder was struck by a sudden thought: This man was nothing like Julian Kyle. He might have worn a green uniform—but he had never been hard-line military. He was arrogant, egotistical, controlling; certainly, he was not a man who followed orders. His motivation came from within, from his own obsessions, his own unquenchable ego. Mulder glanced back at the cameras, at the operating table—and he realized it didn’t make sense.

  “It’s not about money at all,” he finally said. “The men who are funding you might think that’s what you’re after—but that’s not it. You’re chasing something else. Something much more powerful than money.”

  He thought about the twenty-five burn victims in the vast chamber, kept alive for twenty-five years. Then he thought about the first-stage drones—men who should have died during the Vietnam War, men who still appeared as young as they had the day they were injured. He realized that he and Scully had missed the point from the very beginning.

  “Immortality,” he whispered, his eyes widening. “Invulnerable soldiers are just the beginning. The skin is ageless. Timeless. Immortal—like the Skin Eater itself. That’s what you’re after, isn’t it? Immortality—”

  Mulder ducked to the left just as the gun went off. He felt something slam into his right shoulder, and he was whirled off his feet. He hit the floor, rolling as fast as his wounded body could manage. A second shot exploded against the floor by his feet, sending up a plume of shattered stone. Mulder scrambled the other way, his mind churning as he partially concealed himself beneath the raised operating table. He couldn’t tell how badly he’d been shot, but a dull ache was moving through his shoulder, mingling with the pain from his slashed left arm. He could hear the blue-eyed man circling the operating table toward him, and he crawled in the opposite direction, struggling against the growing sense of panic. He had grossly misjudged the situation. He had let his adrenaline drive him carelessly forward. He had not counted on the hubris of a man who had turned a myth into a miracle. A man who had spent his adult life searching for a way to beat death.

  “Two thousand regenerating sources of immortality,” Mulder said, his voice low. “Including your own brother.”

  There was an audible cough, and Mulder’s shoulders trembled. He had been correct all along. Emile Paladin was the man behind the surgical mask. Mulder leaned back against the operating table, the pain from his gunshot wound sapping his energy. Paladin’s hubris was numbing—his accomplishments, overwhelming. Two thousand invulnerable soldiers, each to become a regenerating source of the transforming skin. A demonstration—and presumably, a sale of the product—to unknown forces within the Defense Department, men who had funded Paladin up until this point. Tinkering with the human species, an experiment that meddled with evolution itself—it was abominable. But there was nothing Mulder could do. He felt his head falling forward—when he noticed a rounded pedal just a few inches from his right foot. He followed the pedal to its cylindrical root, and realized he was lying a few feet from the base of the laser scalpel.

  His heart slammed in his chest, the adrenaline rocking his body awake. He heard Paladin circling around the head of the operating table. He closed his eyes, imagining the man’s position. He pictured the articulated arm with the attached laser, the way it pointed at a slightly upward angle. He set his jaw, tensing his aching muscles, forcing his body to coil inward. He counted the seconds, listening as the footsteps moved closer and closer and closer…

  Suddenly, Mulder leapt out from under the operating table and rose to his full height. Paladin reared back, stunned, the gun sweeping upward. Before Paladin could pull the trigger, Mulder slapped at the steel arm with his open right hand. The mechanical arm sprang forward on its hinged springs, spinning wildly away from the cylinder. At the same moment, Mulder’s foot came down hard on the control pedal and there was a loud, electric snap, like a leather belt pulled tight. The red guiding light flickered out toward a spot a few inches past the blue-eyed man’s shoulder. Mulder’s eyes went wide as he watched the light land directly on the rubber gasket at the top of one of the oversized oxygen tanks by the head of the operating table. Christ, he thought to himself. Another miscalculation. There was a moment of frozen time—followed by a blinding flash of white light.

  Mulder was thrown backward as the oxygen tank exploded. A searing heat licked his face as a sphere of flame billowed out from the eruption point, instantly consuming Paladin from behind. The fiery sphere continued to expand, enveloping the operating table, licking at the canisters of anesthetic gas. Mulder crashed back into the wall, covering his head with his hands as a second explosion rocked the operating room. Metal shrapnel tore through the air, chunks of stone and steel pummeling the walls and floor. Something hit Mulder in the stomach, driving the air out of him. He doubled forward, gasping, the heat singeing the hairs on the back of his neck.

  And just as suddenly, the heat evaporated as the oxygen burned out. Mulder staggered to his feet, staring at the devastated room. Medical machinery lay strewn against the walls, most of the devices charred beyond recognition. The vide
o cameras lay mangled in the corners, lenses melted into crystal pools against the floor. The operating table itself had split down the middle—and Andrew Paladin was nothing more than a curled, blackened shape. The anesthetic gas inside his lungs had obviously ignited, engulfing him from the inside.

  Mulder stumbled forward, his eyes searching for the man who had started it all. He stepped over the smoking remains of the cardiac monitor, wincing as the motion exacerbated the pain in his right shoulder. Still moving forward, he pulled open the buttons of his shirt and slid the material gently away from the wound. Relief filled him as he surveyed the slash of blood; the bullet had only nicked him, cutting through his skin but missing the muscle and bone beneath. His gaze moved back to the floor—and he stopped dead, his heart pounding in his chest.

  “Mulder?” he heard from the entrance to the devastated operating room. “My God. What the hell happened in here?”

  Mulder stared down at the blackened, mangled thing on the floor by his feet. “Emile Paladin. Though you’ll have to take my word for it. There’s even less of him to autopsy, this time around.”

  Mulder looked up. Scully was gingerly touching a burned corner of the operating table. There was dried blood on her lower lip, and her red hair was matted with sweat.

  “What about Julian Kyle? And the cooler of skin?”

  Scully shook her head. “Kyle got away. The tunnels go on for miles into the base of the mountain. It could take days to search them all. We need to get back to Alkut and call Washington, then bring in Van Epps and the military.”

  “The military,” Mulder repeated. He glanced at the ruined video cameras. Despite the horror he had just witnessed, an ironic smile inadvertently touched his lips. “The military may be less than helpful.”

  Scully shrugged. It was not the first time Mulder had made such a statement. Mulder sighed, frustration and fatigue tugging at his insides. The case was over—but they had little more evidence than when they had started. He knew it would be next to impossible to match the twenty-five soldiers with any of the names on the list. And by the time the military got involved, he doubted there would be any evidence of the 130 first-stage drones, or any trace of the rest of the two thousand burn victims. Without Kyle and the drones there was no remaining evidence of Emile Paladin’s miracle skin—and no definitive proof of its source.

  Scully seemed to have come to the same conclusion. She moved carefully into the room, her eyes focused on Mulder’s shoulder wound. In many ways, she was a doctor first, a federal agent second. “We may never know the truth behind Paladin’s synthetic skin. But we’ve put an end to his experiments.”

  Mulder wondered if it was true. Kyle had escaped with the synthetic skin. And the rest of the two thousand guinea pigs were still out there, somewhere. It was possible he could start again. Still, Julian Kyle wasn’t Emile Paladin. It wasn’t his experiment—and it wasn’t his obsession.

  Mulder sighed, letting Scully’s expert fingers probe his bared shoulder. “Another case without closure, Scully. Without any hard evidence to take back with us.”

  Scully finished with his shoulder and stepped away, watching him rebutton his shirt. “Actually, on my way back to the chamber, I did find something. But I’m not sure what it means.”

  Mulder looked at her eyes. There was something there, deep beneath the blue. Something was bothering her. Mulder felt the fatigue disappear from his body.

  “Show me.”

  Twenty minutes later, Mulder stood next to Scully in a small alcove near the center of the network of tunnels, staring up at two objects embedded in the stone wall. Mulder could feel his heart pounding in his chest.

  Finally, Scully broke the silence. “I can think of a number of plausible explanations.”

  Mulder didn’t respond. To him, no explanations were needed. Scully could break the objects down to their molecular level, stare at them under an electron microscope, bathe them in an acid bath or weigh them on an atomic scale. She could subject them to every possible abuse in her scientific arsenal, and it wouldn’t make any difference. To Mulder, the objects were an explanation in themselves. Their meaning was as terrifying, 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.

  29

  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 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 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 convalescent 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 organ failure, kept alive by mechanical intrusion. Despite what Mulder had hypothesized, from a medical perspective there was no chance the patient would ever recover.

  Still, Scull
y 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 pessimistic 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 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.