MULDER: Robbing a jewelry store is a federal crime.

SCULLY: Thank you.

MULDER: ... what do you think?

HENDERSON: Okay, first impressions... the ink is fresh, the note was written in the last forty-eight hours. Ballpoint, but you knew that. A right-hander. Let's see... written by someone sitting down, but now I'm just showing off.

REGGIE PURDUE: You know, all this talk about you, about "Spooky" Mulder, I never used to pay it much mind. I figured it was just talk about how paranoid you were and all.

MULDER: And now?

REGGIE PURDUE: Remember the day you walked into my office wet from Quantico? You pissed me off just looking at you but then I saw how your mind worked. How you were always three jumps ahead. It was scary, Mulder. Everybody said so.

SCULLY: What are you going to do?

MULDER: I know what I'm not going to do. I'm not going to hang around and wait for Barnett to send me another valentine.

SCULLY: You mean the ghost of John Barnett.

MULDER: I didn't know you believed in ghosts, Scully.

MULDER: No, listen, Reggie, there's just one thing that doesn't make sense to me.

REGGIE PURDUE: Yeah, what's that?

MULDER: That Agent Henderson said that that note that was left at the jewelry store was written by a right-hander.

REGGIE PURDUE: Yeah, so?

MULDER: Well, this inmate at the prison swears he saw Barnett's right hand amputated.

N.I.H. DOCTOR: The patient you see is an eight-year-old girl suffering from the advanced stages of progeria.

MULDER: She looks about ninety.

N.I.H. DOCTOR: Only about a hundred cases have ever been reported so the disease is rare.

SCULLY: But fatal.

N.I.H. DOCTOR: Some progeria patients make it to early adulthood but others become terminal at age seven or eight.

MULDER: What's the cause of death?

N.I.H. DOCTOR: Clinically, it's cardiac or cerebral vascular disease but actually, these poor kids die of old age.

SCULLY: You just don't reverse aging.

MULDER: Ridley's found a way.

SCULLY: Listen to what you're saying.

MULDER: He wanted human research subjects, right? Prisoners. Prisoners like John Barnett.

SCULLY: Mulder, it's science fiction.

MULDER: Well, what would you have said twenty years ago about gene splicing, DNA fingerprinting, cloning, artificial intelligence? Maybe we're not looking for a man in his late forties after all. Maybe John Barnett has found the perfect disguise... youth.

JOSEPH RIDLEY: I varied Barnett's treatment. Once I isolated the progeria receptors, I stumbled onto something quite unexpected... these same genes related to the production of myelin.

SCULLY: The material that insulates neurons in the body.

JOSEPH RIDLEY: Yes. You see, myelin is not present in the very young and by reversing the effects of aging, I found, with Barnett, I was able to regulate the production of myelin. Myelin being the material that prohibits you or I from, say, regenerating a new hand if we were to have ours cut off.

MULDER: You were able to grow John Barnett a new hand?

JOSEPH RIDLEY: Not exactly. Not a human hand, anyway. I could never get the cells to divide or behave properly.

SCULLY: I, I'm afraid to ask. What kind of hand did you grow?

JOSEPH RIDLEY: There had been some successful work done in London. By taking samples of what we call cell morphegins from an amputated salamander arm and applying them to the back of the creature, they were able to grow a new limb on a completely different part of the body.

SCULLY: Because you knew that if your theories panned out...

JOSEPH RIDLEY: The man who owns the fountain of youth controls the world. When the A.M.A. censured me, certain sponsors came out of the woodwork. One of them is the U.S. government.

MULDER: They financed your research?

JOSEPH RIDLEY: You might be more surprised to learn just how high up the ladder this dirty little secret goes.

DEEP THROAT: ... our government is bargaining with Barnett to buy it from him.

MULDER: What does he want?

DEEP THROAT: A lot of money, immunity, safe haven.

MULDER: Will he get it?

DEEP THROAT: He holds all the cards.

MULDER: You're aware that this... freak of science you're negotiating with is a murderer?

DEEP THROAT: The information he has... could change the course of mankind. Consider the options.

MULDER: You're not that smart.

JOHN BARNETT: Tell me, you're not going to make me prove it to you again, are you?

MULDER: We know that if he shows, he'll be keying on Scully. So wherever she is, she should not leave your sight. We've got two hours before the performance. Know this place inside and out. We don't want any shots fired if we can help it. We want to take Barnett alive, okay? How are you feeling?

SCULLY: It's the first time I've ever played the target.

MULDER: Let's make sure it's not the last time.

SCULLY: Mulder, I know what you did wasn't by the book.

MULDER: Tells you a lot about the book, doesn't it?

MULDER: Who knows? If Barnett didn't destroy it, he could have stashed it anywhere. Which would have a cruel irony, wouldn't it? Scientific knowledge that could change the course of mankind buried out in a field somewhere or in some safe deposit box. Getting old, just like the rest of us.

SCULLY: If it didn't destroy it, chances are that somehow, someday, somebody will find it.

MULDER: And when they do... maybe he can get his revenge from beyond the grave but somehow, I feel like we haven't heard the last from John Barnett.