“You could absolve yourself?” Reyar’s tone indicated that he did not think so.
Esad hesitated. “Something like that,” he said. It was true that Kalisi Reyar had tried to betray Astraea’s location, but Esad himself was partially responsible for dragging Kalisi into the matter in the first place—for it was he who had brought her to the facility at Valo VI, the first time Abor had questioned her. For his role in it, Esad had always felt unsettled, that there was still a loose end that he could never hope to reweave.
There was a silence. Seeing the anger that was now replacing the other man’s sorrow, Esad thought he’d perhaps do best to leave. But before he stood, he added one more thing. “You may recall that Dost Abor was stationed at Valo VI for many years,” he said. “But that is no longer the case.”
“No?” Reyar said, looking expectantly to Esad for the rest.
Esad wasn’t sure if this was the right thing to do at all—in fact, he suspected it was not. But something within him insisted that he do it, whether to shift the blame away from himself, or whether he still had too much of the vengeful agent in him, he did not know. “You see…I put in a recommendation for Abor…that he be moved from Valo VI, and my praise has finally come to fruition for him. He is stationed right here, on Cardassia Prime,” Esad said. “In fact, he lives in the Coranum sector.”
“Here?” Yannik whispered. “The man who murdered my daughter is a stone’s throw from my own home?”
“Yes,” Esad said, keeping his own voice low. “He has assumed a new identity for his current post, per the orders of the new Obsidian Order head.”
“A fool,” mumbled Reyar, and Esad silently agreed with him. Not everyone could be the genius Enabran Tain had been. Tain was not a good man, that was absolutely certain, but he was a brilliant man.
“Dost Abor now calls himself Ran Lotor,” Esad went on. “He is posing as an educator.”
“Ran Lotor,” Esad repeated. “I don’t know him.”
“Well,” Esad said, standing up, “he will not be difficult to find, especially not for a man with military resources at his disposal. Perhaps you would like to go and…introduce yourself?”
Reyar stood as well. “I think it is a fine idea,” he said.
Esad did not linger, not only because he wanted to leave the man in peace, but because he was still not entirely comfortable with what he had set in motion today. As an Oralian, he was committed to a certain set of beliefs, but as a Cardassian, sometimes his personal feelings overwhelmingly overrode them. Esad was no stranger to this conflict, for his entire profession put his faith in constant compromise. As the servant let him out, he had to be satisfied with remembering that he was a complicated man, as all men were, and that his own personal feelings regarding a matter might sometimes take precedence over what he knew was right—and that sometimes the things he knew to be right could directly contradict each other. Today, he had chosen to act as a Cardassian.
20
Odo was making his regular rounds on the Bajoran side of the Promenade when another man fell in step with him, somewhat more conspicuously than Odo might have liked. He told himself there was nothing suspicious about having a friendly chat with some random acquaintance, Bajoran or Cardassian—though he was sure Dukat would have preferred that he keep his friends in the latter category.
The man spoke under his breath, which Odo felt made their interaction all the more noticeable. “Kira tells me you have agreed to speak to me.”
“Yes,” Odo said shortly, trying to remember this man’s name. He thought it was Gran. “Let’s do this quickly. I have other matters to attend to this evening.”
“At the start of his shift tomorrow,” the man said, “The chief of engineering is going to be implicated in some black-market dealings with a Bajoran here on the Promenade.”
“Dalin Kedat?”
“Yes.” Gran was impatient, though he struggled to maintain detached politeness. He seemed far from comfortable with this arrangement. “You’ll arrest him and somehow make the charges stick. Kedat is one of three people on the station, including yourself, who have access to the surveillance feeds from the computer core, and we need him out of the way. After you arrest him, Terok Nor is going to start feeling very cold to the Cardassians.”
“You’re sabotaging the environmental control system,” Odo surmised.
“For starters,” Gran said. “It’s going to look like a malfunction. We laid the groundwork for that aspect of the plan yesterday.”
“How?”
“That doesn’t matter—”
“It matters to me,” Odo growled.
“Fine!” the Bajoran hissed. “We used the environmental control interface for the Ferengi’s holodecks—bribed him to look the other way for ten minutes. Satisfied?”
Odo scoffed at the revelation of Quark’s involvement in the scheme, but very likely the Ferengi didn’t even know what the Bajorans were up to; the better to profit while maintaining plausible deniability, as he had done with Kira. “Go on.”
“The cold won’t do any real damage, but it’ll keep most of the Cardassians uncomfortable and busy trying to fix the problem. No one will question it if you move security personnel away from the computer core in order to guard the work crews.”
“What about Dukat?” Odo asked. He was the third man with access to the core’s surveillance feeds.
“Once the temperature drops, you’ll need to figure out a way to get Dukat out of his office and keep him occupied long enough for my man to enter the core and take out the detection grid. Twenty minutes is all he’ll need.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
“Then it’s not going to work,” Odo said. “Dukat won’t allow me to keep Kedat in custody during a mechanical failure—not on black market charges.”
“We’ll kill Kedat, then.”
“No, you won’t,” Odo said sternly. There would be no more innocent blood on his hands. This resistance member might not understand that, but fortunately there was another reason simply assassinating Kedat wouldn’t help them: “You murder a senior officer, and Terok Nor immediately goes on heightened alert.”
“You have a better idea?”
“Actually I do, but it means you’ll need to delay the environmental malfunction.”
“How long?”
“Four hours following his arrest.”
Gran swallowed. Clearly the idea of waiting so long to implement the next phase of the plan made him nervous. “All right,” he said finally. “We’ll do it your way, Constable.” The man started to move away.
“Wait,” Odo said, sudden doubt overtaking him. “What if something goes wrong? Do you have a signal, some way to let me know if you intend to abort?”
Gran snorted. “Dozens of things could go wrong, Mr. Odo. We just have to take the risk, and hope that everything will fall into place. There are no fail-safes.”
“But—” Odo found himself very uncomfortable with this level of uncertainty. “If we are caught, several people will be executed, and you may not get another chance to disable the grid. Dukat will take pains to ensure that no more attempts can be carried out.”
The Bajoran shrugged. “True,” he said wryly. “But some things are worth taking risks for.”
Odo remembered someone else saying something quite similar once—it was Sito Jaxa, the little girl who had boldly wandered into the forest with the belief that she could deliver information to the resistance all on her own. She had taken a terrible risk, and almost paid dearly for it. Odo was not much of a risk-taker himself. He wondered if he should back out, even as he was agreeing to the reckless terms of the plan.
He left the Bajoran man alone on the Promenade and continued on his rounds, knowing now that if he failed to keep up his end of the agreement, several Bajorans would be guaranteed a death sentence, and it would essentially be his own fault. On the other hand, if he adhered to the rule of law, he should turn in the man and all who were involved. He didn’t especially want that on his conscience, though it wouldn’t be the first time he’d assisted in putting a stop to Bajoran conspiracies. He felt as though something very new and very frightening had transpired within himself these past few days—but he took some comfort in knowing that it wasn’t too late to change his mind. It wouldn’t be too late until fourteen hundred hours tomorrow.