"My god..."
Scully tucked a strand of titian hair behind her ear, her eyes wide with shock. In all her years with the FBI, and with the X-Files, she had never seen this kind of brutality.
She re-read the autopsy record, sickened by the report. The victim had been raped and mutilated, tortured beyond words. The killer apparently had an intimate knowledge of human anatomy, and had employed it to the worst of ends. Blisters marred what little skin was still intact, burns that were calculated for pain. In other places the flesh had been stripped from the bone, skin from muscle, fingernails and toenails peeled away from their respective nail beds.
More frightening still was the fact that this level of brutality was on the upswing, spreading outward from New York City and into the heartland.
The killer taunted law enforcement, sending email manifestos from public kiosks around the country, mostly from libraries. Interviews with visitors and library personnel yielded nothing. No one could recall seeing anyone using the computers at the moment time-stamped by the server, and the email, registered to ‘Attila’, was set up in the dummy town of Nowhere, USA.
Experts in the FBI’s Internet Crimes division were stymied; backtracking did them no good and their alarm system did nothing except alert them hours after the email was sent. It seemed that ‘Attila’ was equally deft with electronics. He or she was using workarounds to access email without triggering alerts, and sending emails on a time-delay basis. Experts suspected that Attila was a hacker who was merely breaking into the libraries and other public venues, but to date, they still had been unable to establish any connections.
The case had come to encompass the X-Files when Attila’s last manifesto arrived. In it, the killer claimed to BE Attila the Hun, reincarnated in the flesh of modern-day man. He or she also claimed to have recovered the Sword of Mars, the weapon that the original Mongol King carried with claims it gave him power.
It was a claim that might have been chalked up as the incoherent ravings of a lunatic except for two things.
Historians had already determined that, according to the best available records, the murders were committed in the style of the ancient warrior. And three days ago, a letter had arrived at Trinity University, addressed to a Professor Sydney Fox, with an attached photo of a 5th century sword. In its hilt was etched the Roman symbol for the God of War. It was a computer generated letter signed by Attila, and it promised to raise the army of the Huns again in the Western World.
Go to Part Three.