Fight the Future Read Free

eyes with his hand, he walked slowly to the edge of the roof, leaning against the barrier there. He said nothing, but the line of his mouth grew even tighter as he stared to where a solitary fig' ure emerged from a door on the neighboring roof. Even from this distance, he could see the resolve with which the slender form moved beneath its FBI windbreaker, and the glint of sunlight on her shoulder-length auburn hair. Michaud's hands clenched at the edge of the wall.
    On the other rooftop, Special Agent Dana Scully winced as the door slammed shut behind her. Her finger jabbed at her cell phone as she stepped carefully down the stairs and onto the roof, looking around warily.
    "Mulder?" she said urgently, the cell phone cool against her cheek as she paused. "It's me."
    Mulder's voice echoed tinnily in her ear. "Where are you, Scully?"
    "I'm on the roof."
    "Did you find anything?"
    She brushed a drop of sweat from her nose. "No. I haven't ."
    "What's wrong, Scully?"
    Scully drew herself up and shook her head impatiently, as though Mulder stood in front of her and not somewhere on the other end of a cell phone. "I've just climbed twelve floors, I'm hot and thirsty and I'm wondering, to be hon-est, what I'm doing here."
    "You're looking for a bomb," Mulder's un-flappable voice replied.
    Scully sighed. "I know that. But the threat was called in for the federal building across the street."
    "I think they have that covered."
    Scully grimaced even more impatiently. She took a deep breath and began, "Mulder, when a terrorist bomb threat is called in, the logical pur-pose of providing this information is to allow us to find the bomb
    . The rational object of terrorism is to provide terror. If you'd study the statistics, you'd find a model behavioral pattern in virtu-ally every case where a threat has turned up an explosive device—"
    She paused, and drew the cell phone closer, choosing her words as carefully as though she were explaining something to a rather slow, stolid child. "If we don't act in accordance with that data, Mulder—if you ignore it as we have done—the chances are great that if there actu-ally is a bomb, we might not find it. Lives could be lost—"
    She paused again for breath, and suddenly realized she'd been the only one talking for the last few minutes. Her voice rose slightly as she said, "Mulder… ?"
    "What happened to playing a hunch?"
    Scully almost jumped out of her skin: the voice came not from her cell phone but from two feet away.
    There, in the shadow of the AC unit, stood Fox Mulder. He raised an eyebrow almost imperceptibly as he cracked a sunflower seed between his teeth, tossing the spent husks to the ground as he clicked off his cell phone and stepped toward her.
    "Jesus, Mulder!" Scully moaned, shaking her head.
    "There's an element of surprise, Scully," said Mulder evenly. "Random acts of unpre-dictability."
    He popped another sunflower seed into his mouth as he went on, "If we fail to anticipate the unforeseen or expect the unexpected in a universe of unforeseen possibilities, we find ourselves at the mercy of anyone or anything that cannot be programmed, categorized, or easily referenced…"
    As he spoke he walked toward the edge of the building. At the wall he leaned over, sail-ing his sunflower seeds off into the air and then dusting his hands off. For a moment he paused, staring thoughtfully, almost wistfully, into the nether distance, then turned to Scully and said, "What are we doing up here? It's hotter than hell."
    And before Scully could make an exasper-ated reply he was off again, striding gracefully toward the stairs where Scully had emerged a few minutes before. She stood and watched him, then stuffed her cell phone into a pocket. Hiding a grin, she followed him, grabbing his arm and steering him up the steps.
    "I know you're bored in this assignment," she said. Any faint vestige of humor leaked from her face.
    "But unconventional thinking is only going to get you into trouble