Section 31 - Disavowed Page 5

  It took all his willpower to remain calm and keep his heart rate and breathing slow. If Section 31 was spying on him and Sarina—and he was sure they were—then they would be monitoring his vital signs for any sign of deceit or duplicity. He couldn’t afford to give them a single reason to doubt him or Sarina. That meant he needed to remain aware of every aspect of his feigned physical and mental states. He needed to lie so persuasively that even he believed his own falsehoods. He needed to own this charade so deeply that it became his new truth.

  But, for now, he had to appear calm. He sipped his chamomile tea and set the cup on its saucer. Then he called out over his shoulder, “How was your day?”

  Sarina drifted into the room, well submerged into her role as a woman struggling under the burden of a terrible secret. She subtly wrung her hands as she sat beside him on the sofa. Her averted eyes and taut posture made her a portrait of guilt and apprehension.

  He regarded her with tender concern. “Is something wrong?”

  She took her time mustering her faux courage. “There’s something I need to tell you.”

  “All right. I’m listening.”

  She stalled with a sharp draw of breath. “It won’t be easy for you to hear.”

  That was his cue to turn his affectionate worry into the first inkling of dread. “What is it?” He touched her shoulder, as if he thought he needed physical contact to draw her out. “No matter what it is, you can trust me.”

  “That’s the problem, Julian. What I’m saying is . . . you can’t trust me. Or you shouldn’t have. I—” Her voice caught, and tears shimmered in her eyes. “I’ve been lying to you.”

  He pulled back his hand. “About what?” As he leaned forward to reestablish eye contact with her, she turned away. “What’s this about?” Bashir darkened his countenance with jealous anger. “Is there someone else? . . . There is, isn’t there? Who is it?”

  She shook her head. “No, no. It’s not— I mean, you—” She hid her face in her hands, slowed her breathing, and looked up at him with sorrow-reddened eyes. “It’s not that.”

  Impatience put an edge on his voice. “What is it, then?”

  Sarina stood and paced away from the sofa. She stopped to gaze out the broad picture window. The apparition of her reflection looked back at him from its surface, while beyond it the low urban nightscape of Sherlas glittered in the distance beneath an indigo sky.

  “I’m not who you think I am, Julian.”

  He did his best to sound confused. “What are you talking about?”

  “Last year . . . when I accessed the Meta-Genome data for you. I didn’t get it through my contacts in Starfleet Intelligence.”

  Now it was Bashir’s turn to stand. He took a hesitant step toward her. “What are you saying? Where did it come from? How did you get it?”

  “I used my real contacts—inside Section Thirty-one.”

  He froze and concentrated on making his mind draw a blank and his face go pale. A hard swallow left his jaw tight enough for him to mutter with convincing horror, “You did what?”

  She squeezed her eyes shut for a moment. Then she opened them and turned to face him. “I’m one of them, Julian. I’m part of the organization.”

  Bashir let her “confession” take a few seconds to sink in. His outward expression shifted from shock to dismay, and then from fury to despair, all in less than half a minute. He turned away from her and stumbled back to the sofa. As his knees met its edge, he pivoted and collapsed onto it, sprawled like a beached invertebrate. “How? Why?”

  “It was the only logical choice, Julian. Do you remember when Starfleet asked me and the others to help analyze their war-game scenarios against the Dominion?”

  He didn’t react, though he did recall the first time he had met her, many years earlier, during the war. Back then Sarina had been practically catatonic, a victim of a genetic resequencing gone wrong. Her neural pathways had been accelerated almost beyond the ability of science to measure, but her sensory inputs hadn’t been upgraded to match. Consequently, all her mental processes had fallen out of sync, leaving her trapped in her own mind, her thoughts racing ahead of her perceptions, her body lagging behind her will to action.

  However, he had found her locked-in syndrome almost endearing when compared to the behavior of her fellow patients: Jack’s violent mania, Lauren’s predatory sexual advances, and Patrick’s childlike naïveté. They all were products of genetic augmentation gone wrong. There was little that Bashir or modern medicine could do for most of them, but Bashir had been able to correct Sarina’s synaptic asynchronization. Since then, she had in many ways become his equal in her intellectual development—and, in some ways, she had far exceeded even his impressive abilities. In the process, she had become the woman he had waited his entire life to find: one who could not only keep up with him but also challenge him to better himself.

  Now he had to convince whoever was watching and listening to them that she had crushed all his dreams for their future together. He stayed quiet and let Sarina take the spotlight.

  She kneeled beside him. “Remember when we analyzed the threats facing the Federation? It looked hopeless. And if the facts we’d been given were true, it would have been hopeless. But we didn’t know the Federation had another line of defense, one that its enemies rarely see: Thirty-one.” He rolled away from her, but she grabbed his shoulder and pulled him back, forced him to look her in the eye. “We live in a hostile universe, Julian. There are powers we can scarcely imagine that would like nothing better than to see us erased from creation. The organization exists to keep that wolf from the Federation’s door.”

  He shook his head. “No. You can’t tell me you believe their lies.”

  “Lies, truth. You act like those are absolutes, but they’re not. One person’s truth is another’s lie. The only absolutes in the cosmos are life and death. Existence and oblivion.”

  “No, there has to be more than that. Or else nothing we do matters.”

  She pressed her palm to his cheek. “You mean morals, Julian? Can you still be that innocent, after all the horrors you’ve seen? After all the blood you’ve shed?”

  He got up and retreated from her, tripping over furniture and his own feet as he backpedaled toward the kitchen. “I don’t even know who you are. You betrayed me.”

  She wore a disappointed frown. “No, I’m trying to save you. I’m still the same person I was yesterday. The same person you thought I was. Nothing is different between us.”

  “How can you say that? It’s all different! This changes everything!”

  “Like what? It doesn’t change the fact that I love you. And I think that if you look into your heart, and if you’re honest with yourself . . . you’ll see that you still love me.”

  He trembled with unchained fury. Tears brimmed in his eyes. “If you loved me, you wouldn’t have lied to me.” He slammed the side of his fist against the counter. “All this time!” He pointed an accusatory finger at her. “Wait! How long? When did this start?” His bark became a roar. “When did you join them?”

  “They recruited me a month before I joined Starfleet Intelligence. In fact, I applied to SI because the organization asked me to. They wanted someone like me on the inside.” Somehow, she made her cheeks flush on cue. “And they told me to seduce you into the organization.”

  Losing himself in the role, he let her words knock him back half a step, as if he’d been gut-punched. His voice trembled. “So that’s all this has been, since the beginning. Just a sham, all of it. You . . . me . . . the mission to Salavat . . . everything since then. Just one big lie.”

  “Not everything. When I first joined, they didn’t even want you. They’d given up on you. They thought you’d never see reason, that you’d never understand why the Federation needs them. But I convinced them you could still be an asset. That you could learn to see clearly.”

  He recoiled with ersatz offense. “Learn to see clearly? Are you mad?”

  “Julian, you
’re not just smart—you’re a goddamned genius. You know as well as I do that for all its noble talk, the Federation would be little more than the galaxy’s punching bag if it didn’t have someone to do the dirty work. Someone willing to make the hard decisions.”

  “That’s why it has an elected council and a president, and why they appoint intelligence services to protect the interests of the Federation. Thirty-one has no charter, no oversight—”

  “And a near-perfect track record of safeguarding the Federation from all threats, foreign and domestic, for nearly two hundred and thirty years.” She moved into the kitchen and cornered him. “It doesn’t exist to run the government, Julian. It doesn’t dictate how people live their lives. Most of the time, it stays hands-off, out of the picture. It’s only when someone or something comes along that threatens the safety of the Federation that it takes action.” She gently grasped his arms and stared at him until he looked into her eyes. “I know you, Julian. And Cole was right—you won’t be happy living on the sidelines. You joined Starfleet so you could be on the frontier, exploring and making a difference. You’ll never be satisfied with your life unless you know you’re being of service.” Her hands traveled up his arms, over his shoulders and neck, to the sides of his face. “We all need to serve something greater than ourselves, Julian. Even when that something turns its back on us.” Her face inched closer to his. “The organization is offering you a chance to go on serving the Federation. To live a life worthy of your potential. You should take it . . . Join me, Julian.”

  He bowed his forehead against hers. “You’re asking me to serve something I hate.”

  “No, I’m asking you to go on serving the Federation. The organization is just a tool.” She embraced him and whispered into his ear. “If we become part of it, we can change it. We can try to guide it. You say the organization has no conscience. We can become its conscience. We both need to be part of something that matters, and the organization needs us to steer it in the right direction. I can’t do it alone, Julian. I need you. Come with me.”

  He kissed her, doing his best to believe she was still acting and not in fact trying to pull him down into the ethical morass of Section 31. Their lips parted, and tears fell from his eyes. “I won’t do it for the Federation. And I don’t give a damn about saving Thirty-one’s soul.” He kissed her again, then gently lifted her chin so she could meet his gaze. “But I’ll do it for you.”

  * * *

  The trio stood bathed in the blue flicker of the holovid. L’Haan appeared impassive as she watched the recording of Bashir and Douglas’s dramatic confrontation, which Cole had recorded less than an hour earlier. Their peer, Vasily Zeitsev, cocked one eyebrow with critical disdain as he watched the playback. He looked many years older than either L’Haan or Cole, though the Vulcan woman was at least a few decades Zeitsev’s senior. But where she still enjoyed the trappings of youth, he had given himself over to the gray shades of antiquity.

  Suspended in the air before them, Douglas’s confession sounded to Cole like a moment out of a bad daily serial: “I’m one of them, Julian. I’m part of the organization.”

  He shook his head. “She’s the worst actor I’ve ever seen. It’s a wonder she isn’t dead.”

  L’Haan, who bore direct responsibility for managing Douglas as an asset, remained cool as she absorbed the indirect criticism. “Not Miss Douglas’s best performance, to be certain.”

  The recorded scene continued, and Zeitsev crossed his arms. “She’s wooden, and he’s overselling it. Can anyone tell me why we wanted to recruit them in the first place?”

  His derogatory query drew a shrug from Cole. “They did all right on Salavat.”

  “Salavat was sloppy.” Zeitsev turned a scathing eye toward Cole. “They completed the mission, but they were identified by the Breen Intelligence Directorate, and she got captured.”

  Cole was unwilling to let his superior’s hypocrisy go unchallenged. “So did Sloan.”

  “Different situation.” Zeitsev held up a hand. “Hang on, I like this part.”

  They stopped talking and watched the next few seconds of Bashir and Douglas’s face-off. In the hologram, Douglas put on her most earnest expression. “We live in a hostile universe, Julian. There are powers we can scarcely imagine that would like nothing better than to see us erased from creation. The organization exists to keep that wolf from the Federation’s door.”

  Bashir protested, but his words were drowned out by Zeitsev’s derisive laughter. “She tries so hard. It’s sad, really. I want to believe her. There’s nothing I’d like more than to think such a brilliantly engineered creature was one of our true believers . . . What a shame.”

  A dull pall of boredom settled on L’Haan’s elegant features. “We’ve known she was a double agent from the beginning. I fail to grasp why we have let her come as far as she has.”

  “Keep your friends close,” Cole said, knowing his compatriots would by reflex fill in the second half of the ancient aphorism: and keep your enemies closer.

  Zeitsev nodded. “True.” He squinted at the holovid. “What I wouldn’t give to send these two to some acting workshops. What’s she doing there? Is that some method-acting bullshit?”

  L’Haan mimicked Zeitsev’s expression. “Perhaps. Though her style seems rooted more in the techniques of Strasberg than Stanislavsky. With some elements of Deltan realism mixed in.”

  “You’re both full of shit,” Cole said. “She’s just hamming it up.”

  The Vulcan wore her disappointment openly. “I should have made her spend more time studying improvisation.”

  The supervisor waved off L’Haan’s lament with a callused hand. “It’s not your fault. She was never meant to be a long-term asset. There was no point teaching her all our secrets. She’d only have used them against us.” His eyes narrowed as he turned his focus toward Cole. “She might still be dangerous. Are you sure you know what you’re doing?”

  “Positive.” He scrutinized the subliminal details of Bashir’s and Douglas’s performances, the microexpressions and hidden verbal tics that betrayed their words as hollow lies. “In fact, if they’re to be of any use to us at all, we need to let them embed themselves even more deeply than they already have. After all, if we try to freeze them out, they might realize we’re on to them.” He chuckled softly at their ham-fisted attempt at deception. “The key from this point forward is to keep them both on short leashes. We need to compartmentalize all intel they receive and make sure all their perceptions are filtered through our lenses.”

  With a motion of her hand, L’Haan paused the playback of the holovid as Bashir and Douglas leaned their foreheads together. “I renew my objection. I think we will have more success manipulating them separately than together.”

  “I disagree,” Cole said. “When I tried to run Bashir on Sindorin nine years ago, he nearly went off the reservation. If Salavat showed us anything, it’s that both of them are easier to control when they think the other is in danger. Keeping them together serves our purposes.”

  Zeitsev nodded in assent. “I agree.” He staved off L’Haan’s protest with a raised hand. “I understand your concern. Having two double agents on one op is a risk. But Cole’s right. We can use them to keep each other in line. And in case you’ve forgotten, L’Haan, the success of our mission in the alternate universe entirely depends upon Bashir’s participation.”

  “I have not forgotten.”

  Cole harrumphed. “Good, because it’s too late to rewrite the mission profile.”

  The older man mirrored L’Haan’s disapproving countenance. “You’d best be certain about this, Cole. I’m putting you in charge of the next phase of the operation. It’s up to you to make sure Bashir and Douglas play their parts—and end their turns on the stage, as planned.”

  “I assure you, sir. One way or another . . . this mission will be their curtain call.”

  Seven

  The Alternate Universe

  There was no room for err
or. All the officers on the bridge of the Enterprise understood the need for precision. Every word, every action would be scrutinized, and a single mistake would carry dire consequences for the lives of billions. No one on the bridge was more aware than its commanding officer of the stakes confronting the ship and its crew. Captain Picard felt his responsibilities weigh upon his shoulders like a lead apron. Its burden made him reluctant to stand from his command chair as the ship’s chronometer counted down to the fateful moment.

  On his right, his first officer looked up at him, her mien both apprehensive and meant to encourage. K’Ehleyr shared his anxiety about the Dominion, but her training as a field operative for Memory Omega, coupled with her years as his executive officer on the Enterprise, gave her a measure of calm and poise in the face of what might prove to be a calamitous turning point in history’s long arc.

  Standing above and behind Picard’s left shoulder, manning the tactical console, was his other trusted adviser. Deanna Troi had been Picard’s traveling companion for many years; they had entrusted their lives to each other long before they had sworn to serve as soldiers and explorers—and also, apparently, diplomats—for the Galactic Commonwealth. There was no one else whose counsel carried as much weight with Picard. He glanced in her direction, and her calm smile reassured him that everything would be all right, that all he needed to do was stand and soldier on, and Fate would take care of itself.

  The chronometer beneath the main viewscreen reached 0900. It was time.

  Picard stood tall and smoothed the front of his black uniform tunic. “Commander Troi, hail them. Commander K’Ehleyr, relay my command screen to the main viewer, left one-third.”