Ruins Read Online Free PDF

Langly answered, sauntering across the room with a lazy shuffle that, with a little work, could have been turned into a dance step. Tall and scrawny, inelegantly dressed, he was the type who could easily have fit in with any crowd of computer nerds or roadies for a rock band. "It's for his own protection," he added, adjusting his black-rimmed glasses.
    Langly had stringy blond hair that looked as if he washed it in a blender.
    Mulder had never seen him wear anything other than a ratty T-shirt, usually advertising some fringe rock group.
    "I think he just likes our company," Frohike mum-bled, working with several pieces of extremely expen-sive camera equipment on one of the metal shelves at the rear of the office. In the background, Langly switched on the big reel-to-reel tape recorders, getting their entire conversation down on tape.
    "Yeah, you three are just my kind of guys," Mulder said with a disarming smile.
    Byers always wore a suit and a tie. He was soft-spoken and intelligent, the kind of son any mother would have been proud to have—if not for his vociferous oppo-sition to various government organizations and his obsession with UFO
    conspiracies.
    Frohike, with glasses, close-cropped hair, and rugged features, didn't look as if he would fit in with any social group. He had a long-standing crush on Dana Scully, but basically it was all talk. Mulder sus-pected Frohike would turn into a jittering mass of nerves if Scully ever consented to go out with him.
    Nevertheless, Mulder had been deeply touched when the short-statured man had brought flowers to Scully's bedside while she lay in a coma after returning from her abduction.
    No identifying sign marked the door to the offices of the Lone Gunmen, and they were not listed in any phone book. The three kept their operation very low-profile. They tape-recorded every incoming phone call and took care to cover their own movements in and around Washington, D.C.
    Nondescript, utilitarian shelves held surveillance equipment and computer monitors. Wires snaking out of the wall provided hard links to any number of network servers and databases. Mulder suspected the Lone Gunmen had never been granted official access to many of the systems, but that did not prevent the three from hacking into libraries of information closely held by gov-ernment organizations and industrial groups.
    Most of the chairs in the office were filled with boxes of stuffed manila envelopes, preprinted address labels facedown. Mulder knew the envelopes carried no return addresses.
    "Your timing is good, Agent Mulder," Frohike said. "We're about to mail out our new issue. We could use some help dispersing them through a couple dozen mail-box drop points."
    "Do I get a sneak preview of the contents?" he said.

    Langly popped an old reel-to-reel magnetic tape from one of the recorders, labeled the flat metal canister, and installed a new backup system. "This one's a special issue of TLG. Our 'All Elvis' number."
    "Elvis?" Mulder said in surprise. "I thought you guys were above all that."
    "No conspiracy is beneath us," Byers said proudly.
    "I can see that," Mulder answered.
    Langly took off his glasses and rubbed them on the tail of his T-shirt, which advertised a concert tour by the Soup Dragons. He blinked small eyes at Mulder, then put the black-rimmed glasses back on. "You won't believe what we've uncovered, Mulder. You'll have a whole new take on it after reading our historical retrospective. I did most of the research and writing myself on this one.
    "We think that Elvis is being positioned as a messiah figure—by powerful persons unknown to us. You can find similar instances all through history. The lost king who reappears after his supposed death to lead his peo-ple again.
    Could be a strong basis for forming an insidi-ous new religion."
    "You mean like legends of King Arthur promising to come back from Avalon?"
    Mulder said. "Or Frederick Barbarossa sleeping in a mountain cave until his beard grows all