Ground Zero (The X-Files) Read Online Free PDF Page B

charred desktop.
    “Hey, Scully, look at this,” he said. When she came over, he pointed to the pale rectangular patches. “I think there must have been documents here, reports left on top of his desk—but somebody’s removed the evidence.”
    “Why would anyone do that?” Scully said. “The reports themselves probably still have significant residual radioactivity—”
    Mulder met her gaze through the thin faceplates on their hoods. “I think somebody’s trying to do us a 28
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    favor. They’ve ‘sanitized’ the murder scene to protect us from classified information that maybe we shouldn’t be seeing. For our own good, of course.”
    “Mulder, how can we possibly expect to solve this if the crime scene has been tampered with? We don’t have the complete picture here.”
    “My feeling exactly,” he said.
    He knelt to look at Dr. Gregory’s two-shelved metal credenza. It was filled with physics textbooks, computer-code user’s manuals, a copy of Lagrangian-Eulerian Hydrocode Dynamics , and straightforward geography and physics texts. The bindings were burned and blackened, but the rest of the books remained intact.
    He looked at the burn marks on the shelves themselves. As he had expected, several books had been removed as well.
    “Somebody wants a quick answer to this, Scully,” he said.
    “A simple answer. One that doesn’t require us to have all the information.”
    He looked toward the closed lab door. “I think we should inspect each of these other offices down the corridor, too. If they’re the offices of Dr. Gregory’s project team, somebody might have forgotten to yank out the information that was carefully deleted from this scene.”
    He went back to the bulletin board and touched another piece of the crumbling paper. The ash flaked off, but he was able to distinguish two words before it disintegrated. Bright Anvil .
    29
    FOUR
    Veteran’s Memorial Hospital,
    Oakland, California
    Tuesday, 3:27 P.M.
    The safety technicians and radiation specialists at the Teller Nuclear Research Facility had assured Scully that any residual radiation in Dr. Emil Gregory’s corpse remained low enough to pose no significant safety hazards. Scully found it faintly amusing that none of the other doctors in the hospital wanted to be with her in the special autopsy room they had prepared. She was a medical doctor and had performed many autopsies, but she preferred working alone—especially in a case as disturbing as this one.
    She had dissected corpses in front of her students at the Quantico FBI Training Facility many times, but the condition of Dr. Gregory’s body, the specter of a radioactive disaster, bothered her enough on a gut level that she was glad she could think her own thoughts and not be distracted by questions or perhaps even rude jokes from the new students. 30
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    Rather than providing general autopsy facilities, the Veterans Memorial Hospital had placed her in a little-used room especially reserved for severely virulent diseases, such as strange tropical plagues or unexpected mutations of the flu. But the room had what she needed. Scully stood in front of Gregory’s body. She tried to swallow, but her throat was dry. She should get to work.
    She had performed more autopsies than she could remember, on bodies in far worse condition than this burned husk of an old man. But the thought of how Dr. Gregory had died brought back the nightmares she had suffered while in her first year of college at Berkeley: grim and depressing imaginings of the world’s dark nuclear future. She had awakened to thoughts of these horrors in the middle of the night in her dorm room. By day she had read the propaganda slogans, the overblown antinuclear brochures designed to foster fear of the atom.
    Before this autopsy, she had reviewed medical texts, concise and analytical treatments that avoided the imflammatory descriptions of radiation burns. She was ready. Scully drew a long, deep breath through