Garak’s eyes narrowed. “Oh yes?”
Quickly, Mhevet brought him up to speed on Antok’s find. Children, thought Garak; it always had to be children.
“Poor Natima,” said Garak, when Mhevet finished, and said nothing more.
“Is that all?”
“What do you want me to say?”
Mhevet rubbed an eye ridge. “I’m not sure. I thought you might have some idea whether or not it was true—”
“How would I know either way?”
“Weren’t there . . . well, wasn’t there a file on her?”
An Order file, she meant. “I should imagine there were numerous files on her,” Garak said calmly. He knew this for a fact. He’d devoured Lang’s files voraciously, almost as voraciously as he’d consumed her collected works. “She was not,” he lied, “a special area of study.”
Mhevet was studying him thoughtfully. From the corner of his eye, Garak saw a dash of scarlet petal, like a wound opening beside him. He collected himself. “Arati, I’m not sure what you need me to say. I’m not responsible for Natima Lang’s actions before the war. If she made some hard decisions and compromised some dear-held principles, then I am sympathetic, but we are none of us without fault, and we lived in difficult times.” He shifted in his seat. Some had contributed more than others to making the times difficult. He checked the time on the chrono. The press conference really was very soon . . . “What’s worrying you?”
“It’s convenient, isn’t it, that this has come up now, just as Therok is retiring and Lang’s in the running for the job?”
“I see what you’re suggesting. That it’s less convenience than contrivance.”
“Well, yes—”
“If the accusations are baseless, then an investigation will find that.”
“But perhaps not in time to save her reputation.”
“You’ll be amazed,” said Garak, “at how far you can get with a bad reputation.”
Mhevet pondered him thoughtfully. “Antok was threatened.”
“That must be deeply unpleasant,” said Garak. “I understand she has young children. Have you offered her protection?”
“Yes, but—”
Garak took a deep breath. “Arati, I have a press conference starting very soon.”
“I know, boss. But—”
“But what?”
“Castellan, I have to ask—do you know anything about this?”
Garak stared at her. After a moment or two, she flinched, but she didn’t look away. “I’m not going to dignify that with an answer.”
Anger, hot and red, flashed in her eyes. “That is below you, and unjust to me—”
“Let me be clear what you’re asking,” he said. “Are you asking whether I have planted files implicating Natima Lang in experiments on children for some reason—perhaps to prevent her becoming chief academician? Or are you asking whether I have had someone knock on the door of a prominent young intellectual in the middle of the night in order to give her the fright of her life? Neither would reflect terribly well on me, would they?”
“It wasn’t a knock on the door in the middle of the night—”
“There we are then. I really do have no idea. If I did have anything to do with this, by the way, and had decided to conceal that from you, do you think I would tell you the truth?”
Mhevet, he saw, was furious, and just about reining it back. “I hope you’d feel you did not have to conceal anything from me.”
“I would suggest that you continue in that hope.”
“That,” she said, “is a master class in equivocation.”
The door opened. Akret poked her head around, and, with a fierce expression on her face, jabbed her finger at the chrono on the wall. “I have to go,” Garak said. He took another deep breath and controlled his breathing and his rising anger. “Look, Arati, I’m sorry if you think I’m equivocating. I’ll tell you one thing, though—the last thing I want is for this whole business to blow up in my face. I trust you to do what you think is best.”
She still didn’t look happy. She would have to come to terms with that. “Okay, boss,” she said, and cut the comm.
Garak gathered his wits and picked up his padd, a helpful prop that gave him something to do with his hands rather than gnaw his nails. On a whim, he grabbed the perek petal and tucked it into his pocket. Outside his office, a few of his advisors were flapping about, but his expression, which he imagined to be thunderous, was enough to suppress them. One could tell the truth as much as one liked, he thought, but if nobody believed you anyway, you might as well go back to lying.
He strode down the corridor and out into the glare of the press room. As he walked up to the podium, there was a huge buzz of chatter and a rising whirl of noise as holo-recorders kicked into action. He took a moment to quell his rising anxiety—and his nausea—and he placed his padd on the podium and gripped its sides. He waited until the walls no longer seemed to be looming. He could control that. Sometimes he thought he could control anything, if he put his mind to it. If he did his chores. He cleared his throat and abandoned the speech his advisors had so carefully prepared for him. He did this a lot. They hated it, and most of all they hated that he invariably gave a much better speech. He knew he was shaving years off their lives. But Garak wasn’t getting any younger, and he still had a great deal that he wanted to do, and there were more and more days when he just didn’t have the time or the inclination to do anything other than speak his mind.
“You’ve all read the report,” he said to the waiting journalists. “Assemblyperson Carnis and her team have done exceptional work. I commend their professionalism, their meticulousness, and their steadfastness in the face of what must at times have been deeply distressing material. They never lost sight of their goal, which was justice for those who have suffered. I will tell you now that I accept the contents of this report, and I accept their recommendations to the full—”
The room went crazy with questions and noise. Garak lifted his hand for silence. He looked straight down into the holo-recorders, and he imagined he was speaking to all the shades who haunted his days and his nights: the ones who were guilty, the ones who were innocent, and the ones who were somewhere in between. “Nobody will be immune from prosecution,” said the castellan of the Cardassian Union, a man whose hands were drenched in blood. “Nobody.”
* * *
“Elima Antok, huh?” Pulaski wrinkled her brow, trying to place the name. She was sure she’d seen this young woman somewhere before. She snapped her fingers when she remembered: a documentary she’d watched on her first day, on one of Cardassia’s eight separate dedicated history channels. “I know! The expert on Bajor!”
Antok looked rather pleased. Typical academic, Pulaski thought with a smile. Not even kidnapping could spoil the pleasure of recognition. “Cardassian-Bajoran relations, more specifically,” Antok said, “with an emphasis on social history.”
“Huh?” said Pulaski.
“Interspecies relationships. That kind of thing.”
“Oh, I see. Touchy subjects.”
Antok sighed deeply and looked around. “Apparently so.”
Pulaski cocked her head. “You think your research is the reason that you’re here?”
“It must be,” said Antok. “It has to be . . .”
“So what’s going on? Is someone trying to make you pull back from your findings? Someone trying to avoid being prosecuted?”
Antok shook her head. “No, I think it’s something else. Earlier in the week I found some files dating back to before the war. Dating back to the Occupation. They were from a university committee—”
Pulaski was startled. Never in her wildest dreams could she imagine university committee minutes being so explosive that someone would kidnap over them. “Really?”
“No, really,” Antok insisted. “Fr
om the medical school.”
“Ah,” said Pulaski. “Let me guess. Children.”
Antok shuddered. “How did you guess?”
“Oh, it’s always children,” said Pulaski. Not for the first time she wondered why people bothered having kids. They always led to trouble. “Children and the medical school. And you’re an expert on Cardassian-Bajoran relations. Let me guess—these were Bajoran kids. What the hell were they doing to them?”
“They were children born on Bajor, to Bajoran mothers and Cardassian fathers,” Antok explained. “They were forcibly relocated to Cardassia and subjected to gene therapy to remove their Bajoran nucleotides.”
“Jeez,” said Pulaski, pulling back in revulsion. “Do no harm, folks,” she muttered. “Do no goddamn harm. How many lived?”
Antok didn’t reply. She put her head in her hands. Pulaski put her arm around the young woman’s shoulder. “Horrible thing to find,” she said. “Are you okay, Elima? Shall I get you some water?”
“I’m okay,” Antok said quietly. “But I should explain—I’m quarter Bajoran.”
“No wonder this has hit so hard. Dammit! Why do people do these things?”
They sat for a while until Antok was back under control. She glanced at Pulaski and gave an embarrassed laugh. “I’ve never told that to anyone. Well, my mate knows, of course, but not anyone else. I don’t generally go around broadcasting it. None of my friends know; none of my colleagues.”
“It’s because I’m Federation,” said Pulaski. “Nobody gives a hoot whether you’re half one thing and half another and half something else. Infinite diversity. Where I come from, it all just adds to the general gaiety of life.”
“I miss the Federation,” said Antok wistfully. “I loved having you here. All your people—they were so young, so friendly. They laughed a lot, like there was something to laugh about, like they could see that the future was going to be okay. After a while it sort of rubbed off on you. You started to believe them when they said everything would be okay. And one day it was.”
“Yeah, well, we’ve gotten ourselves into plenty of our own messes, you know,” Pulaski said. “So you found these files, and the next thing you knew you were here. Why do you think that was? Is the castellan involved or something?”
It was a cheap shot, but Antok, to her amazement, took it seriously. “Oh, no! Not the castellan! It’s worse than that—no, really. The files were about funding. Approval was given by a committee—almost all dead now. One survivor.” Antok rubbed her brow. “Natima Lang.”
Pulaski nearly fell off the bed. “Well, shit!”
“Yes,” said Antok. “That’s what I thought.”
Pulaski stood up and walked across the room. The window here gave a better view over the city than hers had, but she just stood and stared and tried to think of something to say that would encapsulate her shock and dismay. After some considerable thought, she came up with, “Shit!”
“Quite,” said Antok.
“I met Lang the other day,” Pulaski said. “She was impressive. It seems damned unlucky that these files turn up just as she’s in the running for a prestigious post.”
“I agree it’s not consistent with Lang’s past,” Antok said. She sighed and came to join Pulaski by the window. “But that’s what things were like before the war, wasn’t it? I know we joke that everyone was guilty of something, like we were all living in some kind of enigma tale, but in reality there were plenty of innocent people. Those kids were half Cardassian, and they never hurt anyone. But the other side of that is that sometimes people had to make some hard choices. Maybe signing off on this project saved lives that we know nothing about. Lang ran an underground railroad that saved many of her students, got them out of Cardassian space before the Order could get hold of them. Maybe letting someone get on with this research meant they turned a blind eye to someone escaping the Order.” Antok shuddered. “Still, I could never have put my name to that. I could never have given that authorization.”
“What I mean,” said Pulaski, “is that it could be faked.”
Antok frowned. “Faked?”
“Think about it,” said Pulaski. “You can’t believe Lang could do such a thing. I can’t believe Lang could do such a thing. So let’s take Occam’s razor to the whole business and assume that she didn’t do such a thing. Perhaps someone wants to ruin her reputation. By someone here,” she added, “I mean the castellan.”
Antok looked at her in astonishment. “The castellan?”
“He doesn’t want her to take over after Therok, you know.”
“He’s wrong,” said Antok. “Lang is the obvious person—the best person.” Her face went sad. “She was the best person.”
“Not according to Garak.” Pulaski wondered dimly whether the ambassador had meant her to be discreet with the information. She decided not to worry about that.
“But to destroy her reputation to remove her from the running?” Antok shook her head. “That’s completely over-the-top.”
Pulaski sucked her teeth. “How much do you know about your head of state? I mean, really know? Do you know what kind of man he is?”
Antok looked out of the window. “Everyone knows about the castellan.”
“Well, knows what?” Pulaski pressed.
“We know that he was a voice for the Cardassian people within the Federation during Dukat’s reign. We know that he and Damar led the resistance against the Dominion. We know that he was a vital voice at that time for our interests within Starfleet. We know that before that he fought with the Federation against the Dominion, and that after the war he stopped the military seizing power. We know he was our ambassador to the Federation at a time when our reputation was nothing in the quadrant. We know he’s one of the chief architects of our regeneration—not just the buildings, but something else, something just as important. He’s taught us self-respect, the ability to look at each other and not feel dread or shame, but to feel proud again, because we’ve worked so hard after losing so much—”
“Yeah, yeah,” said Pulaski. “And the weather’s better too since he came to power, and everyone’s favorite hound always wins. You know that isn’t the whole story.”
“Garak,” said Antok stubbornly, “has done remarkable things.”
Pulaski lost her patience. “For pity’s sake, he was in the Obsidian Order!”
“Well, I know that!” said Antok. “We all know that!”
Pulaski was incredulous. “Don’t you care?”
“Care? Of course I care! The Order blighted people’s lives! They were completely out of control!”
“Then how on earth,” Pulaski said in exasperation, “do you all accept this man as your head of state? He was right in the middle of it all!”
“It’s complicated,” said Antok.
“You bet!”
“Look,” said Antok, “it’s quite obvious the castellan isn’t the man he once was. People change.”
“They don’t change that much.”
“Enough has changed—his view of the world, maybe; the way he operates, certainly. Do you think we’re stupid, Doctor? Do you think that we’re ever going to let a swaggering bully like Dukat near power again? You tell me that you can’t believe that Natima Lang would have anything to do with a project like Enigma. And I tell you that I can’t believe that Castellan Garak would destroy an innocent woman for no real purpose. Once upon a time, perhaps.” She gave Pulaski a steely look. “Remember that my specialism is the prewar period. I probably know more about Cardassian behavior on Bajor than anyone else in the Union. I have no illusions. But the castellan would not do that.”
Pulaski snorted. “Well, you’re more trusting than I am.”
“Not Castellan Garak. He might campaign for his preferred choice, but if Lang got the post, he’d accept that.”
Pulaski shook her head but left it alo
ne. Garak was a serious player, she could see, and he liked to get his own way. He’d surely done a lot worse in his time than smear an innocent woman. “Hey,” she said. “I don’t want to quarrel with you. You’re my best friend right now.”
Antok smiled. “I guess you’re my best friend right now too.”
“Bad luck,” said Pulaski with a grin. “So, what are we going to do next? Will anyone be looking for you?”
“Mikor is expecting me to join him and the boys in the country. He’ll start to get worried soon. And I saw a friend of mine just before I got knocked out. I said that I was worried that something might happen to me, and I asked her to get help if I, well, disappeared . . .”
“Commendable paranoia,” said Pulaski. “But it won’t do us any harm to try to get away under own steam, will it? Cause some trouble for our common enemy? Confound his politics, frustrate his knavish tricks.” She looked out of the window. “Do you have any idea where we are?”
Antok looked around. “It’s hard to guess, I can’t see much. But these buildings look like one of the new developments out on the western edge of Paldar.”
Pulaski tried to remember the map of the city she’d looked at. “Not so central, huh?”
“Not really.”
“So how would we get back to the center of the city?”
Antok didn’t get a chance to speak. The door behind them opened.
Pulaski swung around to see a Cardassian male standing in the doorway. Antok shrunk back, and Pulaski put herself between her and their captor. “Are you the bastard that’s brought us here?”
“Doctor Pulaski,” he said.
“That’s me. What do you want?”
He stared at her. “Why are you here, Doctor?”
“Huh?” she said. “You’re the one who brought me here—”
He took a step or two forward, out of the shadows, and she recognized him right away as the Cardassian who had spoken to her at the reception, the one who had asked her to direct him to Alden. She also saw that he was carrying a phaser. “Sonny,” she said, “if you wanted to go out for a drink after the party, all you had to do was ask.”
Enigma Tales Page 11