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“Lone Gunmen.”
“Frohike! Thank God you’re there. I need… I need your help. You’re the only ones I can trust.”
Frohike straightens in his chair. Truth be told, more than a few of his fantasies starring one Dana Katherine Scully begin with her saying something very similar to this.
But in none of them does she ever sound this scared.
“What’s going on, Scully? Are you hurt? Is Mulder… Did something happen?”
“It’s William,” she says, her voice cracking. “A man tried to kill him yesterday, and now--”
“Wait, what?”
“Look, I’ll explain it all later but right now I need to get him somewhere safe. You guys helped Mulder hide, and now I need you to do the same for William. Just for a little while. Just until I can figure out why they want to hurt him.”
Frohike has about a thousand more questions, but he closes his mouth around them and nods. “We can be there in twenty minutes.”
“Not here,” Scully says quickly. “I’ll meet you, um… you know the pizza place on the waterfront?”
It’s a code, established shortly after Mulder went off the grid. They set up a number of pre-arranged drop sites just in case Mulder needed fresh fake identification documents or something like that. Each location is coded as a different type of restaurant, and the “pizza place” happens to actually be a dry cleaner in Adams Morgan.
“Yeah, I know the one,” he says.
“I’ll meet you in the alley behind the restaurant.”
“We’ll be there.”
Byers and Langly have both stopped what they were doing and are looking at him with worried expressions when he hangs up the phone.
“I don’t have a lot of details,” he says, pushing back his chair and standing, “but Scully needs us to take William somewhere safe. I don’t know for how long, but we’d better plan for at least a few days.”
“Wait, William? As in baby William?” Langly asks, his eyes wide.
“No, her jackass brother Bill,” Frohike deadpans. “Of course baby William. Someone’s after him. She said a man tried to kill him yesterday. That’s all I know,” he adds, holding up a hand to forestall the shocked outbursts he knows are about to come from the other two, “but I say that’s all we need to know, right? So let’s move! Grab half a dozen burners and the go bags. I’ll throw some food and water into the cooler and meet you out at the van.”
