Oblivion - Michael Jan Friedman [22]
But unlike Macbeth, McAteer intended to have the last laugh. When the dust cleared and the play was over, it would be Picard’s head on the pole, and the admiral marching around with it like a kid with a new toy.
“That’s right,” he said out loud, savoring the image. “Like a kid with the best toy of all.”
And for the first time that night, Arlen McAteer smiled.
The Cardassian the others respectfully called “glinn” drew in a deep, calming breath. I will not show my anger, he promised himself. Not to mere underlings.
They stood in front of him in their rented suite of rooms, a dozen of his fellow Cardassians with their eyes wide in their ridged, scaly orbits, waiting to see their leader’s reaction to the news. But the glinn wouldn’t give them the pleasure of hearing him curse.
He hadn’t risen through the ranks by giving rein to his emotions. He had been careful to submerge his feelings and consider his actions with cold detachment, leading his superiors to believe that he was older than his years.
And he wasn’t about to diverge from that policy now by letting his anger fly unrestrained.
Instead, he turned back to his second-in-command and said, in a voice of tempered iron, “Repeat that, Merant. But this time, speak a bit more slowly.”
Merant, who was taller and broader than the glinn but not half as shrewd, did as he was told. “The Starfleet captain has escaped from the Second Quadrant Detention Center. Our informant in the security force says the escape was carried out with the assistance of a confederate.”
The glinn nodded. “A female, I believe you said. A human-looking female.”
“Yes, Glinn,” came Merant’s response.
The glinn wasn’t pleased. He wasn’t pleased at all.
After all, he had known about the human’s rendezvous for some time. The army of spies the Cardassians maintained on the Zartani homeworld had seen to that.
In fact, they had been keeping tabs on Demmix ever since his family was killed by the Ubarrak, in the hope that the combination of the Zartani’s wealth and his despair would spur him to do something interesting.
And eventually, it had.
It had spurred him to steal Ubarrak tactical data. And it had spurred him to give that information to the Federation, on the condition that he be granted asylum.
The Cardassians knew all that, and a lot more. They knew that Demmix was to meet his old acquaintance, Jean-Luc Picard, and that their meeting was to take place in the traders’ maze known as Oblivion.
They even knew what Picard looked like. The Cardassian government had had the foresight to maintain a rather extensive file on Starfleet’s commanding officers—including the likeness of every one whose image had ever appeared on the viewscreen of a Cardassian vessel.
The only thing they didn’t know was that Demmix would have his appearance altered. It was the glinn who finally came to that conclusion, after several Zartani had arrived in Oblivion in the weeks prior to the rendezvous and none of them had matched Demmix’s description.
Unfortunately, the glinn hadn’t had the luxury of waiting until the rendezvous took place and then seizing both Picard and Demmix. If he had tried that, the two of them might have given him the slip somehow, or invoked the aid of the city’s security force. And then the Cardassians would have come away empty-handed.
So he had taken a more proactive approach to the matter—by secreting a bomb in the plaza, and putting a simple plan into motion. When his operatives saw Picard and a Zartani approaching each other at the agreed-upon place and time, they were supposed to detonate the explosive.
If all went well, Picard would perish in the blast. The glinn’s operatives would seize Demmix—and his secrets—in the confusion that was sure to follow.
The glinn had even had a backup plan in place. It involved a hired Yridian “witness,” who would accuse the human of detonating the bomb in case he survived the blast.
It had all seemed so clean,