SPOILERS: None.

CONTENT: See notes below.

RATING: PG

CLASSIFICATION: T

SUMMARY: A clerical worker at the FBI accidentally gets involved in internal corruption in the VCS, and turns to Mulder for help.

DISCLAIMER: I don't own anything to do with The X-Files. The X-Files belongs to 20th Century Fox and Chris Carter. I'm not making any money out of this story, which was written for my own amusement and hopefully for that of anyone else who reads it. Any characters you recognise probably belong to CC and 20th Century Fox, while any you don't know are almost certainly mine. The title of this story has no connection to the British TV show of the same name.

NOTES: This isn't really an X-Files story, but occurs perhaps a month before Scully is assigned to work with Mulder. The details about office procedures I've taken from my own experience in British local government - I really have no idea how the FBI manages it's filing systems, but it seems reasonable to assume that they can't be *that* different - and as for the cranky elevator, that came from my experience with a really old lift in a building I used to work in, which was probably around the same age as the Hoover Building. I don't like lifts at the best of times, but that one was a terror - every office block has one like that, doesn't it? <g>

Feedback would be very nice, and I will respond to all.

Part 1/2

The day started like any other, up to and including the occasional annoyances of everyday life; the alarm clock not going off, oversleeping, missing the bus, and consequently being half an hour late for work.

Elizabeth Tarvi shot through the revolving doors in the lobby of the J. Edgar Hoover building like a stone from a catapult, her short hair standing on end and her coat flapping over her arm. It didn't really matter that she was usually punctual to a fault, and had a few minutes owing her here and there; she hated being late.

On top of everything else, she'd misplaced her electronic key-card, and had to enter through the front doors, which meant all the fuss of stepping through the scanners and metal detectors under the watchful eye of Security.

Fortunately, the guard of the day was Larry, an old friend, and he only grinned at her tempestuous entrance and wild appearance. Lizzy flung her bag, coat and lunchbox down on the side table and walked through the scanner arch, then turned to pick up her belongings - only to feel Larry touch her shoulder and nod to the flashing lights.

Something had set off the damned alarm.

Letting out a huff of breath and thinking evil thoughts, Lizzy stood patiently while he ran the hand-held wand over her. After several patient moments, they determined that it was probably the little metal catch on her bra. Which amused Larry, but did nothing for her temper.

Finally, she was able to escape into the elevator and ascend to her office on the third floor. Lizzy was a mere Records Officer - a fancy name for a filing clerk - but worked in the huge Records Office adjoining the Violent Crimes Section, a job that unlike some of her colleagues she enjoyed. It made her feel useful to the Bureau, an organisation she had had ambitions to join since childhood.

Of course, in those days no one had liked to disillusion the little girl and tell her that she could never be an agent. She was bright and intelligent, but once she reached her teens she had known she could never be accepted to Quantico Academy.

Lizzy Tarvi was profoundly deaf.

By the time she had finished college, she had accepted this fact, and had looked for other ways to work at the Bureau, which had led to her joining them as a clerical worker. In actual fact the work was more varied and interesting than it sounded; she had an interest in computers and a naturally orderly mind which lent itself to maintaining the huge floor-to-ceiling shelves of hard-copy filing, plus a natural ability to find the apparently unfindable.

And being 'hearing impaired' had its own advantages, working around the agents in Violent Crimes. The turnover of Records staff in the VCS was usually rather high; but after a successful - and rather boring - six month stint in Personnel, Lizzy had found her niche. The aggressive, stressed-out, short-tempered and overwhelmingly male-dominated bullpen had no effect on her. Foul language and machismo went straight over her head.

The fact that she was generally treated as an automaton went over her head too. Lizzy was a loner by nature, happier in her cubicle in the corner, surrounded by stacks of files, than with the chattering groups of other female clerical workers. She watched the world go by in pantomime, and was left alone. Most people couldn't talk to her properly anyway. How many people in the general populace knew sign language? She could lip-read, and better than most people guessed, but they still insisted on shouting or talking as though she were mentally impaired. Honesty compelled her to admit that her determination not to speak probably had something to do with this, but after an incident early in life (where it had been forcibly brought home to her that her painfully acquired voice sounded "funny" to the non-hearing-impaired) she had resolved to stick with ASL or the written word. And as she had grown older, the occasionally negative attitude of others ceased to bother her.

She had come to see it as funny.

XXXX

Despite its unfortunate beginning, the day proceeded more calmly once she had dumped her bag and coat and had a coffee. On her desk was the usual stack of messages and a forest of little yellow Post-It notes decorated the face of her computer monitor. Patiently sorting them out, Lizzy set to work.

Most of the work in Violent Crimes involved finding things, and putting other things right. It was probably just as well that this section was big enough never to fear being subjected to the dreaded "O & M" exercise which every other team in the Bureau had every once in a while. O & M (or Operations and Management to give it its full title) was a process which ranked only slightly lower than an Internal Investigation on the list of Things To Be Feared and Avoided. It involved a specialist team of personnel officers subjecting everyone to a time and motion study, and it usually happened after something vital had gone missing.

A kind of divine retribution administered from the Fifth Floor.

Lizzy wondered sometimes exactly how Section Chief Blevins had managed to prevent the O & M team invading his sacrosanct bullpen. The ideal procedure with regards to files meant that an agent had to come to the filing team, request a file, wait while it was brought to him, then sign it out. When he returned it, it was signed back in and returned to the records officer, who filed it correctly. It meant that files never went missing, and if something went missing from the file, you could trace who had last had it.

That was the ideal procedure.

In practice, the agents went in and out of the records office at will, taking whatever files they wanted and rarely signing the book, because they were in too much of a hurry to go through the formalities. There simply weren't enough records staff to keep up with the demands. Files would then come back to the system in a variety of ways; brought back by the agent and dumped on whatever desk they came to first, handed to a passing records officer if they remembered, or - which was more likely - collected by the records officer during an evening search after the majority of agents had gone home.

The latter job was very often Lizzy's, because she had no objection to working late and had a talent for sniffing out which files could be taken back and which should be left on desks as 'active'. It was generally acknowledged by the Senior Records Officer that it was Lizzy's abilities to find the unfindable which prevented more material going missing in Violent Crimes than actually did.

So this morning, most of the Post-It notes were from other records staff asking her if she could find files that had disappeared. Lizzy sorted them out, mentally noting at least four whose whereabouts she already knew, and set off to find a trolley and get started.

XXXX

The only gripe Lizzy might have had about working in her section was that she worked with three other records officers. Lizzy had a passion for neat filing racks, and working with three other people, most of whom didn't have her eye for precision, and a set of agents who had no respect for files at all, drove her nearly crazy sometimes. But she liked working in the big, rather dark, musty room which stored the main racks of 'closed' paper files, so by dint of silent disapproval she had managed to drive most of her co-workers into leaving the paper side of things to her. They all preferred computer records anyway.

Generally she tried to avoid any contact with the agents, which wasn't hard in the main filing store. If one came in - and she could tell, either by the smell of aftershave, sweat or, occasionally, perfume - she hid herself until they were gone. She would sometimes follow them on silent feet, always out of sight, putting right the mess they left behind them, but she preferred to stay out of their way.

What she didn't know, because no one had ever bothered to mention it in her presence, was that the general lack of records staff in the main store, and the strange tidying that went on around them, had led to the agents of Violent Crimes making up half-joking stories about ghosts.

It was a story that was about to have very strange consequences.

XXXX

Lizzy's troubles started innocuously enough.

First of all, the 'record room ghost' story reached the ears of Chief Blevins. It was mentioned in a meeting and rather jokily put forward by one of the junior agents, Cresley, as a possible explanation for Agent Kausigan never having the right papers with him. Since Kausigan's forgetfulness was well known, it was perceived as a joke by everyone except Chief Blevins, who was in a foul mood. Cresley and Kausigan both got their heads snapped off for their pains.

At another meeting later that day, having given one particular agent a particularly savage reprimand, Blevins rather nastily suggested that since the agent in question had a particular interest in such things, he could damn well investigate the so-called ghost.

The agent in question let it go, not deeming the comment worth taking affront to. He was used to such things. But he had a very good memory, and the matter was filed away as a curious note for examination another time.

XXXX

The second thing that happened was that Agents Lammerdale and Harvey, who had been trailing a notorious rapist for six months, had a stroke of luck and caught their man. They had evidence connecting him to eight rapes and one murder when they pulled him, and the entire Section was high on their success.

There was just one problem. The perp happened to know one or two things about Agents Lammerdale and Harvey too, and he also had evidence.

Which was when the files and evidence on a selection of criminals went missing.

XXXX

When a file goes missing, the first person to be blamed is the filing clerk. It is, after all, their responsibility to ensure that it *doesn't* go missing. And in a typical human response, each of the filing clerks tried to disclaim responsibility. A massive search was launched to find the missing material.

But oddly enough, no one thought to ask Lizzy Tarvi what her thoughts on the matter were. Not that Lizzy was usually asked the kind of questions which required deep and meaningful answers, but had they thought to question her, she might have been able to tell them that Agents Lammerdale and Harvey had been spending more than their fair share of time in the storage racks lately, and usually during periods when they might reasonably expect not to be encountered there by other agents.

Lizzy chose not to tell anyone. She hadn't *seen* either of them after all, but she knew the peculiar combination of expensive cologne and gun oil she associated with Harvey and no one else; he was a champion shot, and spent a great deal of time at the ranges.

Why he should have been in the filing stores she didn't know; all the files he was using were out on his desk, and the current evidence boxes and other material wouldn't be in the big storeroom anyway. But it did occur to Lizzy that it would be very easy for one file to go missing among other files. Lots of them.

Lots and lots of them ....

Lizzy joined in the frenetic search, bearing that thought in mind.

XXXX

"Maybe it's this ghost everyone keeps talking about," Agent Llewellyn suggested jokingly, as he made his selection from the lunch trolley that was making its rounds of the bullpen and outer offices on the second floor. He glanced around as he spoke, and noticed one solitary agent stood at the water cooler, fighting the faulty spigot. He raised his voice. "Hey, Spooky, what d'ya say? You're the expert. You think our resident poltergeist lifted the files?"

The tall, lanky agent turned to look at the shorter man, and suppressed a sigh, dumping his plastic cup unused. "It's a possibility," he acknowledged, a wry smile crossing his lips.

There were a few sniggers from the other agents, and Agent Rawson, a new recruit to the VCS, stared at him incredulously. He'd heard the rumours about Fox "Spooky" Mulder, but still had that over-seriousness associated with someone who has yet to prove themselves but wants to desperately. Consequently, he missed the humour entirely.

"You can't be serious!" he blurted out.

Mulder couldn't resist pulling his leg a bit more. "Sure I can," he replied, raising a mocking brow. "I can be serious as much as I like."

Rawson flushed, but couldn't think of what to say in response to that. Llewellyn had no such difficulty.

"C'mon, Mulder - level with us," he said, waving his jam doughnut for emphasis. "Do ya think there really *is* a ghost in the filing stacks?"

Mulder gave him a strange look for a moment. Then he grinned. "Llewellyn, I have no idea. But I think that, like the culprit who took the files, whatever haunts the filing stores is probably human. In fact, I know it is." He dug his hands into his pockets and walked away.

"What did he mean by that?" Rawson demanded.

Llewellyn shrugged. "That the 'ghost' is human, I guess. C'mon, Mick, you don't really buy into that ghost stuff, do ya? Whoever it is in the filing racks has gotta be human."

"So maybe they *have* got the files," Rawson pointed out.

"Maybe. Who cares? That's the Records Chief's problem, not ours."

XXXX

Lizzy was working at her desk, her head buried in a pile of brand new file folders and sticky labels, when a hand appeared in front of her face. She raised her head, and saw the Senior Records Officer, John Carey, standing in front of her desk. His expression was grave, and when she glanced around, puzzled, her other colleagues were avoiding her gaze. She blinked, and turned back to her superior.

Unlike most, he didn't exaggerate his words when he spoke directly to her, so it didn't take her two attempts to understand what he was saying.

"Will you come with me, please, Ms. Tarvi?"

The new files she was working on were an urgent job. Lizzy pointed at them, but he shook his head and gestured that she should leave them. When she stood up, he also pointed to her jacket hanging on the back of her chair. She put it on, suddenly realising that this must be serious; she would only need her jacket if they were going to see someone higher up the chain of command.

It was only when they took the lift to the fourth floor and went to the new Assistant Director's office that she realised just how serious it was. They went straight in, and Lizzy's throat went dry when she realised that not only was the AD, Skinner, there but also Chief Blevins and Agents Harvey and Lammerdale.

Her superior shut the door behind them and gestured for her to take a seat at the table. Lizzy sat down, feeling everyone's eyes on her, and began to get a very bad feeling about the forthcoming interview.

XXXX

Special Agent Fox Mulder, former golden boy of both the Violent Crimes Section and Behavioural Sciences Unit, had been permitted to take up residence in an old photocopier room in the disused basement offices of the Hoover building when he took charge of the so-called 'X' files. Ironically, at one time these offices had actually been the official home of the Behavioural Sciences Unit, back in the less enlightened days when they had led a shamefaced existence as one of the Bureau's crankier projects.

Perhaps it was appropriate.

Mulder certainly had no objection to being down here. For one thing, it was quieter than up in the bullpen. Nobody lounged around the desks, drinking coffee and annoying busier agents; there was only the one telephone, which meant he didn't have to answer someone else's when they weren't around; there was none of the noise associated with twenty or thirty other people all working in a cramped space; and he didn't have to queue for the men's room at lunchtime. Of course, he was several floors away from the main filing stores and support staff, but the majority of the files he needed were right here with him and he thought he could probably manage without the assistance of the secretarial team. And out of sight meant out of mind, a definite plus where people like Blevins were concerned. Mulder wasn't too sure about AD Skinner; he'd only met the man once, but he had a notion that *this* man kept those out-of-sight things especially in mind, which wasn't a comfortable thought.

One other minor inconvenience was that down in the basement he didn't hear as much of the rumour mill as he would have liked. Sometimes that was the only way to keep up with events in the Bureau. If he managed to catch the clerical worker who distributed the mail, he could sometimes engage them in talk long enough to find out what was going on, but many of the clerical staff seemed to deliberately go out of their way to visit the basement when he wasn't around. In the end, Mulder was driven to chatting up a girl on the switchboard called Holly, just so that he had an excuse to call in once or twice a week and find out what was happening.

Mulder rather hoped that he could sort out a better solution sometime soon; Holly was a nice girl, but he really didn't want to go further than chatting over the phone with her. And these things had a habit of getting out of hand where women were concerned.

In his experience, anyway.

Since Holly was enjoying a week's vacation time at the beach, it took a couple of days for the news to filter down to Mulder. He was rummaging in a pile of files in the little storage room adjacent to his office when he heard footsteps and a set of squeaky wheels walking quickly down the passage outside and into the office.

Mulder peered around the edge of the racks and saw the rather sturdy legs of Marge, a middle-aged woman who was one of the more approachable clerical workers in the mailroom.

She jumped when he appeared behind her, then let out a spurt of jolly laughter. "Agent Mulder! What a fright you gave me!"

He grinned at her. "Sorry, Marge. What have you got for me today?"

She rummaged in her little trolley. "Couple of parcels, a few letters and some of those magazines."

He gave her a quizzical look. "*Those* magazines?"

She laughed again, and pretended to slap at his arm. "Those magazines about UFOs you have sent here."

He pretended to wipe his brow. "Phew! I thought for a minute you meant some of my *other* magazines ...."

"Get away with you, Agent Mulder!"

"I wouldn't want to make you blush, Marge, gorgeous as it would make you look - "

"Flatterer!" Marge tidied her stack of mail, sorted out who she had to go to next, and expertly manoeuvred the trolley around so that it was facing the door - no mean feat, given that it had the obstinate wheels of a shopping cart and listed slightly to the left. "Son, I'll have to trouble you to help me get this old mule back up the stairs."

"No problem. Is the lift out again?"

"It is," she sighed. "It held out 'til I got down here, then the doors snapped shut and nearly caught me in them. And when I tried the buttons, they wouldn't open again for love nor money."

Mulder frowned, considering, although the problem was not a new one. The lift was old, one of the originals in the Hoover building, and although it served all floors, it was hardly ever used because it was in an out of the way corner at the rear of the building. It probably got less maintenance than the others did and as Mulder had discovered twice to his detriment, it broke down quite frequently. But there were other associated little quirks, some of which occasionally caused problems.

"Did someone else call it?" he asked, as he helped Marge get the trolley through the door and around one of the more awkward bends in the corridor.

"I didn't hear it move," she replied. "The car seems to be just sitting there."

Mulder grunted, resigning himself to a fight with the maintenance team about getting the lift fixed again. There had been an outside chance that someone else had called it, or that the inner sliding cage doors weren't quite shut - that sometimes caused problems - but he had bigger things on his mind. A particularly interesting file had turned up on his desk this morning, and he was eager to get back to it. He grabbed the two sides of the wire trolley frame and began to haul it up the stairs, its owner puffing a little behind him.

"Besides," Marge said, interrupting his thoughts, "the only person besides you and me who uses that old lift is Lizzy Tarvi, and she won't be using it to get to the stacks anytime soon, poor girl, if what I hear's true."

Mulder's head jerked up. "Lizzy Tarvi? The deaf girl up in VCS Records? What's happened to her?"

Marge clucked sympathetically. "Rumour says she's been suspended - they think she may have misplaced those case files of Agent Harvey's."

Mulder's eyebrows nearly hit his hairline. "Lizzy? You've got to be kidding me - nothing Lizzy puts her hand on *ever* goes missing. She's like Radar from "M*A*S*H"."

"That's what they're saying, Agent Mulder. And since everyone knows that Lizzy never loses anything ...." She let her voice trail off and gave the agent a meaningful look. "AD Skinner's taken this one into his own hands, but it doesn't look good. If you ask me - those files don't turn up, she's finished with the Bureau."

XXXX

Lizzy Tarvi stood in the doorway of the main filing store and stared down the long rows of floor-to-ceiling shelves. Impossible as it seemed to her, the very place, which had been her best friend and favourite refuge for the last couple of years, had suddenly turned on her. She looked at the neat rows, which had been her particular charge and passion, and felt a terrible rage come over her.

She hadn't taken the files, nor had she misplaced them. Therefore, that left two options; that the files were genuinely lost, misplaced by someone else, or ....

The second option was unspeakable, but Lizzy Tarvi knew which one was the more unlikely of the two. She had been blamed for the disappearance because she was the only records clerk to have had the handling of the files other than the two agents. If she hadn't 'mislaid' them, Lammerdale or Harvey must have.

Lizzy recalled smelling Agent Harvey's cologne in the filing store, where he had no reason to be. She also recalled that hiding a white sheep is always easier in a field full of other white sheep.

Despite the lateness of the hour - her colleagues had all left half an hour previously - she went back to her desk and re-booted her computer. It would be interesting to see what other files Agents Harvey and Lammerdale had used over the past couple of weeks.

The file menu appeared, and Lizzy tried to open the electronic version of the logging-out book.

*ACCESS DENIED. THIS FILE IS IN USE.*

Lizzy blinked. That file was only really used by the records team, and got updated at the end of each day. She peered around the dim records office, but there was no one else there. Just to be certain, she checked to make sure no one had left their computer on by accident.

All the screens were dark. She went back to her desk and requested further details from the blinking message box. The computer obediently brought up details of the user.

* JTT047101111, MULDER, FOX, SPECIAL AGENT.*

XXXX

In his basement office, Agent Mulder was just preparing to come out of the filing log when a neat little gadget provided by some friends of his notified him - with a soft *ting* - that someone else had tried to open the file and was questioning why they couldn't.

Now that was interesting .... He typed in his own query, and the little gadget traced the source of the query. Normally Mulder used the device to trace any attempts to hack into his computer, but it was definitely proving its varied usefulness tonight.

A message box flipped up, detailing file pathways and various computerised codes. Then it disgorged the information Mulder was looking for.

*TARVI, ELIZABETH, FBI ADMIN - VCS.*

Mulder's brows rose and a small smile crossed his lips. Now that was *really* interesting. He carefully extricated himself from the filing log, flipped up his screen-saver, and headed out of the office.

End Part 1/2