a.s.suming," he said sarcastically, "you're right" He yanked the cruiser so hard off the interstate, Mulder nearly fell over. "For G.o.d's sake, gimme a break."

Unfortunately, Mulder couldn't see any other answer. What he could see, however, was a cou-ple of names who might be interested in such control. The question was, why would they feel the need to kill?

"I mean," the sheriff continued, working him-self into a self-righteous rage, "how can a couple of intelligent people like you believe in such c.r.a.p? Bunch of old Indians sitting around a campfire, shooting cosmic something-or-other at each other? You been nibbling at some peyote or what?" He slapped the steering wheel hard.

"Scully, you're a doctor, for G.o.d's sake. You gonna tell me you actually go along with this s.h.i.t?"

Mulder held his breath.

"Sheriff" she answered in her most official, neutral voice, "I have never known Mulder to be so far off-base that I would dismiss everything he says out of hand."

"Ah ... c.r.a.p."

Thank you, Scully, Mulder thought with a brief smile, I'd rather have a resounding "absolutely and how dare you," but that'll do in a pinch.

On the other hand, the day that "absolutely and how dare you" actually came, it would probably kill him with amazement.

They pa.s.sed the Double-H, and he wondered if any of this had touched Annie. He wondered what she had heard on the wind. Whatever it was, he didn't believe for a second she was in any way involved.

Suddenly the sheriff braked hard, and Mulder shot his hand out to brace himself against the seatback.

In the road ahead, a pickup had been parked across the lane. Nick Lanaya lounged against the bed, arms folded across his chest.

"Stupid b.a.s.t.a.r.d," the sheriff muttered. "Has everyone gone nuts on me today?"

They climbed out slowly, Mulder moving around the car to join Scully. As he did, he looked up the boulder-strewn slope on his right and saw a figure sitting near the top, featureless and black against the sky.

"Dugan Velador," Lanaya said, pushing away from the truck. "He's like a priest. One of the six." A tolerant chuckle and a gesture to the hill. "He likes it up there. He says it helps him think."

"But it's so hot," Scully said, astonished. "How does he survive?""He's Konochine, Agent Scully. He can pretty much survive anything." He cleared his throat. "So what's up? I got Chuck's message. What can I do for you?"

The sheriff hitched his belt. "Nick, you ain't gonna-"

"We need to see the reservation, Mr. Lanaya," Mulder said, further cutting the sheriff off by standing half in front of him. "There are some questions we have to ask of the people in charge."

"The Council?"

"Are they the priests?" Scully asked.

Lanaya shrugged. "Mostly, yes. But I don't think they'll talk to you."

Mulder smiled. "That's why you're here. To convince them that cooperation in a murder investigation would be the right thing to do. Maybe save some lives."

Lanaya scuffed the ground with the toe of a boot. "Well, to be honest, Agent Mulder, I'm kind of beat today." A sour look at the sheriff. "I spent most of the morning with a police accoun- tant, going over Donna's ledgers and bank account. It seems she was cheating me more than just a little."

"So I gathered."

"Luckily, most of the money is recoverable, so I won't lose much. But it's the shock, you know what I mean? A lot of years I trusted her, and now I'll never know why she did it."

"Your people trusted her, too" Scully said.

"No." He squinted at the hillside. "No, they trusted me. Like I said, I've got a h.e.l.l of a lot of damage control ahead of me here. And you com-ing in like this . . . it's only going to make things worse."

Mulder walked over to the truck. "You have air conditioning, right?"

Puzzled, Lanaya nodded.

"Good." He opened the pa.s.senger door and beckoned to Scully. "Let's go." Expressionless, Scully climbed in first. "We have a job to do. Right, sheriff?"

All Sparrow could do was nod curtly, and Lanaya shrugged an it's your funeral before getting in behind the wheel. But his face was hard, and Mulder saw his fingers tremble as they turned the key to fire the engine. Anger, or nerves.

''Ground rules," Lanaya told them as he maneuvered the pickup around. "You don't get out unless I say it's all right. You don't speak to anyone unless I say it's all right, or they speak to you first. And you sure don't go in any building unless I say it's all right. Okay?"

"Drive, Mr. Lanaya," he said. "Neither one of us has all day."

They drove through the gap, the road curving gently to the right. When the hill was finally behind them, Mulder almost asked him to stop. He wasn't quite sure what he had expected, but it wasn't anything like this.

Off the road to the left were small fields filled with crops. Scattered gunmetal pumps resem-bling steel dinosaurs worked ceaselessly, pump-ing well water into an effective series of irrigation ditches. He didn't recognize any of the crops except, in the center and by far the largest field, corn.

It was a stark, surreal contrast to the desert land that surrounded it.

On the right, however, was Sangre Viento Mesa.

Lanaya slowed. "The Place, Agent Mulder. You'll see other mesas, but never one like that."

It rose two hundred vertical feet from the desert floor, its sides ridged and furrowed, and stark. Where sunlight washed it, faint red hinted at iron among the dark tans and browns. There was no green at all.

There was no plant life that he could see from this distance. On the flat top were outlines of low buildings.

Several large birds circled over it. Its shadow seemed everywhere.

At the north base was the pueblo, and again his vague expectations didn't match the reality.

"Your people weren't cliff dwellers" Scully said softly.

"No. No one has ever lived on the Mesa itself." Lanaya looked at her with a faint smile. "Every so often, maybe once a decade, I'm able to bring in an archaeologist or two and some professors who don't believe it. They insist there have to be cave homes there on several levels, with ladders and all the rest.Like at Fuye and Mesa Verde. There aren't."

What there were were neat rows of small adobe houses, a single story each. One, apparently, for each family. All the doors and windows Mulder could see were outlined in pale green. As the road curved closer, he saw laundry hanging from lines on poles, orderly streets in a grid, and at the east end, two larger structures which, Lanaya explained, were a storage building for crops and a tribal center.

Incongruously, to Mulder, some of the homes sported television and FM antennas; only a few had vehicles parked beside them, and most of them were pickups. He also spotted a cor-ral where several horses munched on hay and swatted flies with their tails, a trio of black and white dogs trotting along a street, and a low pen populated by chickens whose plumage was almost garish.

It didn't occur to him to think it odd that he couldn't see any litter.

"Where do they work?" Scully asked, leaning as close to the windshield as she could.

"In the fields, in workshops in the center or in their homes. A few go outside, but not many. The Konochine have no unemployment if that's what you're wondering. You work to eat. You don't work, you don't eat," Lanaya laughed, but not cheerfully. "I don't know of anyone who has ever chosen to starve."

"And your house?" she asked.

Flatly: "You can't see it from here."

Mulder watched a group of white-clothed chil-dren playing in front of a building near the pueblo's middle; another group chased each other through the streets, carrying hoops and switches. "What about Leon Ciola?"

Lanaya forced the truck into a tight U-turn and took a short dirt road that led them to the front of the warehouse and the tribal center. No one looked up as he pa.s.sed except one small boy, whose eyes grew so wide Mulder had to smile.

When the engine stopped, metal creaking, Lanaya opened his door. "Ciola lives where he wants. I don't follow him around, Agent Mulder. He's . . . he's having a difficult time fitting back into the life."

Three steps led to double doors in the center.

Lanaya pushed one open and gestured the others in. "You'll have to ask your questions here."

They were in a large meeting hall with exposed thick beams in the low ceiling. Two doors in the side walls and one in back were closed, their frames painted a pale green. The walls were white. The floor was uncovered. The only decora-tion was on the back wall over the door, a huge woven tapestry with a depiction of the Mesa in the center. Lightning in the sky. Symbols of sun and moon, of birds and animals.

No people at all. Nothing he recognized as a language.

"No one knows how old it is," Lanaya said, his voice low. "My grandfather once told me that his grandfather knew an old woman who knew an old woman who helped with the design" He shrugged. "It doesn't matter."

Against the left wall was a long table of Spanish oak, with equally bulky chairs arranged around it. He led them over and bade them sit, Mulder with his back to the wall, Scully opposite him. "You'll want to talk to one of the Council," he said. "Dugan would be the best."

"The man on the hill?" Mulder said.

"Yes. Ifs time he came in out of the sun any-way. He's going to get heatstroke one of these days. Wait here. Please. It won't take me long."

The echo of his boots on the floor lingered after he had gone. And once gone, there was no other sound. The outside might as well not have existed.

Scully placed her shoulder bag on the table and folded her hands on it. "He's a strange man, Mulder.

One minute you think he hates this place, and then he goes all reverent on you."

"He's been outside. How can you not have a conflict?"

She looked doubtful, but she didn't pursue it. Instead, as he expected, she launched into a per-fectly reasonable explanation of why, with his belief in the Sangre Viento, he was pushing the limits of her tolerance. While she grudgingly granted him the possibility of undirected psy-chic energy-a phrase she nearly choked on- she was not about to grant him deliberate control.

"Do you know what that means?""Murder," he answered simply.

"Do you want to try to prove that in court? Do you think Skinner will buy it?"

"Right now, I don't care about Skinner. What I care about is who's doing this." He leaned for-ward on his arms folded on the table. "Scully, four people are dead, there's one agent missing, every connection points here, or to someone here, and unless we catch him, there's going to be more."

She stared at him for a long time.

He held the stare as long as he could, then sighed and looked down at his blurred reflection in the dark polished wood.

"Ciola," she said then.

He looked up without raising his head.

"Leon Ciola." She slipped a sheet of paper from her bag and slid it over. "You were so busy driv-ing Sheriff Sparrow away with your story that I didn't have a chance to tell you." She tapped the paper with a finger. "Preliminary police report on Donna Falkner's house. A lot of prints were lifted. Hers, of course, and Lanaya's, no surprise, he was her partner. And Leon Ciola's." She c.o.c.ked an eyebrow. "Some of them in the bed-room."

He glanced over the form and resisted the urge to shout.

"It's hard with only that one conversation," she continued, "but I don't get the feeling that she ran that embezzlement scheme on her own. Ciola could have talked her into it. It's been going on for four years.

Two of those years were his last two in prison." Another tap on the paper. "She visited him there, Mulder. Often. Evidently she was the reason he lost his temper in the bar."

Mulder rested his chin on his arm. "She gets greedy. He finds out. His infamous temper."

No answer.

He looked up into a disquieting frown.

"We'll a.s.sume again, all right? For the sake of argument?"

He nodded.

"Why Paulie Deven? Why the Constellas?"

He had already thought about that; he already had an answer that disturbed him.

"Practice," he said, lowering his gaze to the table. "All they were to him was practice,"

She didn't react, didn't speak. She pulled the paper back, turned it around, and skimmed it. Then she put it back into her bag and let her head rest against the chair's high back. Her lips pursed; her eyes followed an unseen trail on the ceiling.

"He's not one of the Council, Mulder. Ciola-"

"Well, welt well, chica," Ciola said from the entrance. "Every time 1 see you, you can't help but speak my name."

Beyond the cornfield, beyond the last of the water pumps, in the desert, the sand began to stir.With an exaggerated swagger Ciola crossed the hall, swinging his arms, deliberately cracking his heels against the floor for the gunshot sound. His head was bare, his shirt and jeans looked stiff enough to be new, and his hair had been freed from his ponytail to sway against his back as he moved.

"You like it in here?" he asked, spreading his arms.

Neither Mulder nor Scully answered.

He made a face. "This, you know, is the place where they meet every month. They try to think of a way to banish me, you see?" He laughed and stamped a foot. "I am an embarra.s.sment to them, FBI. I spent a lot of time in the penitentiary, and I think they think this shames them."

He reached the head of the table and dragged the chair back, dropped into it and hooked a leg over the arm.

Scully shifted in her chair to face him, her right arm resting on the table. She said nothing; she only looked.

Ciola gestured toward the entrance. "You're all the talk out there today, Agent Scully, did you know that? It's the red in your hair, I think. I fig-ured you were here to talk to me, is that right? So here I am.

So talk."

Scully gave him a little nod. "Where were you yesterday afternoon, Mr. Ciola?"

He shook his head sadly. "You'll have to do bet-ter than that. I was telling my parole officer how wonderful it is to be outside again."

"Then how did you know about Donna Falkner? You were there."