[Quantico, 20 years ago]

Another long, boring day in a series of long, boring days. Special Agent Timothy Moyer stood off to the side, supervising the latest class of trainees on the firing range. He watched with a critical eye born of years of experience in the field. All of them were good. Not all of them were good enough. It was only the first week of training and already he could tell who was going to make it and who wasn’t. Or, to his way of thinking, who he’d want covering his backside out in the field and who he wouldn’t.

That was where he’d rather be. Out in the field. Doing something. He sighed. The transfer to the training division hadn’t been his idea. Hadn’t really been the bureau’s idea either, when it came right down to it. It had been his doctor’s idea. Beat the hell out of a desk job, though.

He was drawn out of his reverie by something on the periphery of his vision. "Dammit, Holliman," he shouted at the young man at the end of the range. "Ever heard of a simple little concept called aiming."

"I’ll do better, sir," Holliman called.

"Damn well better." Moyer turned away impatiently. There was always the slim chance that Holliman would improve, but it was unlikely. There were better prospects in the class, and he wanted to turn his attention to them.

It didn’t work out that way. Moyer never saw the flash of light. If his class did, none of them remembered it later. In fact, none of them reported anything out of the ordinary, except perhaps that the morning seemed to have passed unusually quickly, and that one moment their instructor had been right behind them, and the next he was gone. Vanished without a trace.

*****

[MD1, Quantico, 9:15AM]

It was Josh’s second day on the job at Quantico. Yesterday had been about settling in to the new office. Today was the ‘official tour’ of the facility, led by his predecessor. Agent William Scott was a stone-faced man, not one for small talk and seemingly without a sense of humor. From the whispers Josh had heard in the hallways, Scott himself was the only person not pleased about his retirement. Not one to judge anyone too quickly, Josh hadn’t formed an opinion on the matter, but he could see Agent Scott might be difficult to work with.

"Firing range," Scott said unnecessarily as they entered the facility.

"The range was rebuilt a few years ago, wasn’t it?" Josh asked. He knew it had been, but he felt that he should be saying something about it.

Scott just nodded.

Josh look around for a few moments, admiring the new equipment housed there. "State of the art," he observed. "The…"

Scott cut him off with a snort. "State of the art today is obsolete tomorrow," he said with a grin. It was the first expression Josh had seen on his face besides mild disdain. "That’s the one part of this job I won’t miss. Three, four times a week, you’re gonna get calls from some company or another trying to sell you something that will enhance training, bring the FBI into the twenty-first century, yada yada. If you ask me, nothing’ll ever beat a good old paper target and a clothes line."

It seemed that Scott had a great deal more to say on the subject, but he stopped suddenly when a commotion began somewhere in the back of the building. The two men ran toward the sound of a scuffle.

*****

[Josh’s office, 9:30]

"I have no idea how he got in there," Rick Washington said. He was the man in charge of the range. He was indignant that an unauthorized person had gotten in on his watch, and a little afraid that he might be blamed for the breach in security.

"That’s what we’re trying to find out," Josh said. "Any idea who he is? Have you ever seen him before?"

"No, sir. And all the doors were locked except the one you and Agent Scott came through."

Josh nodded. He’d checked that fact out for himself. "Could he have been hiding out there?"

"No. Absolutely not. I checked everything out this morning and I know everyone who came in and out since then."

There was a knock at the door and Agent Scott came in without waiting to be invited. "Identifies himself as Agent Timothy Moyer," Scott said. He grinned again. "Seems to think it’s 1979," he went on, oozing sarcasm. "Says he was abducted by aliens."

"Can we confirm his identity," Josh asked.

"Running fingerprints now. And I asked your secretary to check the computer files, see if the name comes up anywhere."

Josh nodded, reaching for the phone. He had a feeling he could come up with the same information as fast as the computer could, and perhaps some that wouldn’t be in the computer files. He dialed Kate’s number.

"It’s me," he said when she answered. "Think back to 1979."

[Okay,] Kate said, sounding curious.

"Does the name Moyer mean anything to you?"

[Can you be a little more specific. ’79 was a long time ago. I was still in high school.]

"Okay. The bureau, Quantico. Maybe your grandfather mentioned the name."

There was a brief pause on the line while Kate searched her memory. [Maybe. Yeah, I think he did talk about him. Why?]

"Just tell me what you remember." Josh looked up as Scott’s cell phone rang and the man stepped out of the office to take his call.

[He was an instructor at Quantico. He disappeared without a trace. Just walked off the job, or so people said. Although getting out of Quantico without being seen is almost as hard as getting in.]

"I don’t suppose you’d have anything on him among those reports you’re not supposed to have?"

[I don’t know. I could check. Why?]

Scot returned and nodded. "Fingerprints say it’s him," he said.

"Because," Josh said into the phone, "he just reappeared."

*****

[Kate’s house, 10:30AM]

An hour of digging around in the attic where all of her grandfather’s papers were stored turned up one thin file on the Timothy Moyer case. It contained a few statements from Moyer’s students regarding his disappearance, a copy of the missing persons report that had been filed and a black and white photograph, unlabeled but which was undoubtedly Moyer himself.

Kate took the file back downstairs and sat down with a cup of coffee to study it and wait for Josh to call back as he had promised. She was intrigued by what he had said during their earlier conversation.

Moyer had appeared on the firing range, which was where he had disappeared from twenty years ago. *Exactly* twenty years, Kate noted from the file. The date matched. She made a mental note to ask Josh the exact time Moyer turned up, but she already suspected it would be right around 9:15, or about fifteen minutes before he called. Moyer had been rambling incoherently since he was found, and they were about to have him taken to a hospital in Arlington.

Josh had remarked casually that the case would most likely be turned over to the X-Files division. Kate knew perfectly well why he’d told her that. Delta was the only team available to take it at the moment. She was going to have to make her decision fast. Not that there was really any question left in her mind. Her main worry in going back to work was leaving Dillon on his own. Since this case was close to home, she could put off that concern for a while.

She grabbed the phone before the first ring finished sounding. "Josh?" she asked.

[Yeah. It’s yours if you want it,] he told her.

Kate tried not to sound too enthused, but something about this case fascinated her. "You really think I’d pass it up?" she asked.

Josh laughed. [No, actually I was fairly certain you’d jump at the opportunity. He’s at the University Hospital in Arlington, room 642. There’s a guard on the door, but I told him to be expecting you.]

Kate sighed. "Am I really that predictable?"

Josh declined to comment on that.

*****

[University Hospital, 11:10AM]

Kate made it in to Arlington in record time. She considered continuing on to the office so she could brief the rest of the team before interviewing Moyer, but decided against it. Best to make sure there was actually a case before getting their hopes up.

She went directly to the sixth floor and inquired at the nurse’s station there for the location of room 642. Last room at the end of the hall, she was told. Turning in that direction, she first noted that there was no guard at the door as there should have been. She started down the hall at a fast walk, every instinct telling her that something was very wrong.

Before she was a quarter of the way there, a man emerged from the room. He was extremely tall - he had to duck through the doorway - dressed in a dark suit. He turned for the stairwell at the end of the corridor and disappeared through it. Kate hesitated for a fraction of a second before breaking into a run to catch up with him. She hit the door before it finished swinging shut and burst through, then stopped to listen. No sound of foot falls on the stairs. She peered over the railing, looking up to the next floor and down to the one below and saw nothing. No way to tell where he went.

She turned back and went into Moyer’s room. She recognized him instantly from the photo in the file. Strange, she thought, it seemed he hadn’t aged a day in twenty years.

"Agent Moyer," she began. But she suddenly realized that the man wasn’t breathing. She checked for a pulse, and, finding none, left to locate a doctor.

*****

Half an hour later, Kate was leaving the hospital. Moyer had been pronounced dead, and security had failed to locate either the guard or the tall man in the dark suit. Kate was thinking only about getting into the office and getting things rolling. As she was about to walk out the doors, a nurse caught up with her.

"Excuse me," the nurse said. "You’re the agent who was here checking on Agent Moyer, right?"

Kate nodded.

The nurse pulled a thick sheaf of papers out of her pocket. "He had these when he was checked in," she said. "He asked me.. Well, he said that if anything happened to him, to make sure someone in the FBI got them."

*****

[Delta office, noon]

After relaying the events of the morning to the rest of the team, Kate pulled the papers out of her briefcase. She passed them to Newt, who was seated closest to her. She’d read through them in the car before pulling out of the hospital lot and now wanted the others to have the same opportunity before she commented on them.

It was a rambling, although not terribly lengthy, treatise on his time spent with the ‘grays’, written in sprawling longhand. They were not, he maintained, aliens. They were the future of humanity, time travelers who had come back from some far distant and unimaginable future to warn us. Of what, he never got around to saying. He had, he said, spent the last twenty years living in their future world.

After Newt, September and Leanna had each had a chance to read through the papers, Kate looked at each of them in turn. "Any comments," she asked. She smiled. All things considered, it was good to be back at work.


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