“The ‘extraordinary measures’ supposedly authorized by Article Fourteen, Section Thirty-one of the charter,” T’Pol interpreted.
“As a matter of fact, I don’t remember Harris ever mentioning that clause at the time. I suppose he saw his formal Starfleet authority as enough of a justification—at least until he ran up against its limits. Harris’s superiors began asking too many questions, so he made himself scarce and went freelance. He vanished from the official record in December 2149, and over the next year, several other current or former members of his division began to disappear, retire, or be listed as dead, along with various personnel in SI and the Earth Security Agency. I can’t prove their connections to Thirty-one, but these are my top suspects.”
Tucker studied the list of personnel Reed had brought up. “I can confirm most of these from my own data.” The two men worked to correlate their data sets, with Tucker’s information firming up the web of connections between Harris and most of his other suspects—and eliminating a few suspects as red herrings or even victims of the cabal. Several more remained inconclusive, such as Harris’s former Starfleet Intelligence liaison, Admiral Parvati Rao. Some of her ex-subordinates were among the suspected founding members, suggesting her possible involvement or support, but proof was elusive. The data trails surrounding her activities had been expertly erased, and she had spent the two years since her retirement in deep, virtually unreachable seclusion on Mars.
“Okay,” Tucker said as he looked over the revised timeline. “For most of 2150, Harris is quiet, and just a couple of his top Security people show signs of suspicious activity. He must’ve spent those months building his infrastructure and gathering resources, paving the way for the rest of his core team and trusted allies to follow once he was ready. The whole thing seems to reach critical mass in October or November. People from his and Rao’s inner circles, a couple from ESA, and a few others start dropping off the grid in various ways, and by the end of the year, we’re already starting to see signs of Section activity.”
T’Pol’s eyes roved over the various data insets on the situation table’s screen. “Although neither of your data sets appears to contain any specific evidence of that formative process. It will be challenging to make a case against Harris without it—and Harris is the nexus of the case against the entire Section. Unless he can be implicated, none of this can be proven.”
“That’s our main problem,” Trip conceded. “However he covered his tracks, he did it flawlessly.”
“In any case, the timeline makes sense,” said Reed. “Early in 2151, Harris contacted me and invited me to participate in a ‘new project’ of his—something that was continuing the ‘good work’ we’d done together, but with fewer restrictions. He believed that having an asset embedded aboard Enterprise would be of use. I said no, of course—though we know how that turned out. And judging from how rapidly the Section came together, he didn’t waste time recruiting other assets.”
Tucker shook his head and whistled. “So the Section was only, what, a little over four years old when I joined up? Everyone acted like it was older, like it had been around since before the ink dried on the Starfleet Charter.”
“The pretense of age is often used to convey a sense of authority and tradition,” T’Pol observed.
“My first handler, Phuong, said he’d gone off the grid three years before. He must’ve been one of the earliest recruits.” Tucker smiled slightly. “And he called it ‘the bureau.’ Sure, officially it has no name, but its members hadn’t even settled on a nickname. Makes sense if the group was still young.”
“I appreciate the effort to let me off the hook,” Reed said. “But as far as I’m concerned, Thirty-one is a direct continuation of the rogue security operation that I was part of for years.”
“Nonetheless, this is encouraging,” T’Pol said. “If Section Thirty-one is only fifteen years old as an independent entity, its degree of entrenchment and influence must be limited. This makes it a more manageable opponent.”
“You may be right,” Reed conceded. He worked the display controls to assemble an organizational chart from the combined data. “As I expected, it appears that the core membership of Section Thirty-one is still fairly small even today. There are still a few gaps here, but I’d say there are no more than ten central decision-makers and perhaps two dozen full-time field agents, not counting collaborators and informants. As it would have to be in order to avoid detection, contrary to the clichés of so many spy movies.”
“Logical,” T’Pol said. “Any successful conspiracy relies on maintaining secrecy, and the probability that its secrecy will be compromised, either by accident, external discovery, or willful betrayal, increases linearly as more conspirators become involved. The larger the conspiracy, the sooner its exposure becomes inevitable. Extending the duration of secrecy would require the conspiracy becoming dormant and the number of individuals aware of the secret diminishing over time as they age and die off. This is, of course, a simplified best-case scenario for the conspirators; the likelihood may vary based on the loyalty and commitment of the conspirators, the efficacy of external investigators, and so forth.”
Reed frowned. “It’s the ‘dying off’ part that concerns me. The easiest way to keep conspirators from talking is to arrange for their deaths.”
“Except that the act of murder requires another conspiracy that must be kept secret, and thus it can actually increase the likelihood of discovery.”
“I wouldn’t put assassination past Harris if he thought it was necessary,” Tucker said. “After all, he didn’t have a problem condemning millions to death on Sauria or in the Partnership if he thought it helped the Federation.” They shared a solemn silence. “But I think he’d rather go for staying dormant. He likes to say that Section Thirty-one needs to keep its head down, to be a last resort when all else fails. ‘The first rule of not being seen is not to stand up.’ ”
“And yet,” T’Pol replied, “Harris has had you intervene in three major situations that I know of in as many years. First the Vertian affair, then Sauria, then the Ware. As we discussed following the fall of the Partnership, the Section has begun to move beyond taking extralegal action in defense of the Federation to using the defense of the Federation as an excuse to take extralegal action.”
“And Harris doesn’t see it happening,” Tucker added. “I tried to suggest that we were overreaching, and he just rationalized it away. He’s convinced he’s making the right decisions for the right reasons, and he’s too much of a true believer to see otherwise.” He lowered his gaze. “Maybe he couldn’t live with himself if he had to face the possibility that the mass deaths he’s caused weren’t absolutely necessary and justified.”
“So Harris is the weak spot,” Reed said. “We can use his increased recklessness to our advantage. We may not be able to implicate him in the Section’s founding, but if we can catch him in a mistake, tie him to actionable proof of a criminal act in the here and now, then we can turn over the rest of our evidence and expose the entire conspiracy.”
“The proof is the hard part, though,” the lanky agent replied. “The Section has an uncanny ability to manipulate digital information to cover its tracks. I’ve spent years trying to figure out how they do it, but it still eludes me.”
“I am a former science officer,” T’Pol pointed out. “I have skills of my own at unearthing information. If you can tie Harris overtly to a criminal or treasonous act, I can help you to ensure that the proof reaches Starfleet and Federation authorities.”
“So what we need is a smoking gun,” Tucker summarized. “All we have to do is figure out how to get Harris to fire it.”
January 9, 2166
San Francisco
“There’s something I think you should see,” Harris said.
Charles Tucker schooled himself to calm. This was his first face-to-face meeting with the spymaster since his decision to turn against the Section. He had years of training in concealing his true
plans and emotions—but much of that training had come from the silver-haired, pale-complexioned man before him. What if Harris could tell that he was hiding something?
But even thinking about that risked giving something away. So he cleared his mind and simply asked, “What’s that?”
Harris turned to activate his desk display, and for a moment, Tucker feared he would see surveillance video of his meeting with T’Pol and Reed—or perhaps even of his earlier visit to Centauri VII, where he had solicited assistance and information from the immortal Akharin, whose acquaintance he had made during the Ware affair. The 5,999-year-old man (his six-millennial birthday was sometime this year, by coincidence, though changing calendars had obscured the exact date) had many lifetimes of experience at faking his death and disappearing—a skill that Trip expected to draw upon in the near future—and he had sources of intelligence rivaling the Section’s. But what if Tucker had overestimated Akharin’s talents, or underestimated the Section’s? Some of Harris’s abilities to gather information, communicate without a data trail, and alter digital records seemed to border on the supernatural.
But instead, what came on the screen was an interview between Jonathan Archer and Gannet Brooks, the Sol System Information Network journalist. Brooks had been an outspoken critic of Starfleet during the Earth-Romulan War, a saber-rattler who had insisted that Starfleet’s defensive strategies were too timid. The journalist was taking a similar tack now as she grilled Archer on his noninterference campaign.
“Just look at how many civilizations Captain Reed’s task force liberated from the Ware. Would you really advocate just standing by and doing nothing to help people in such dire need? We have the power to do so much good. We have done good, in defeating the Romulans, in ending the Vertian raids, in combatting organized crime beyond our borders. Should we renounce all that and declare that, from now on, the only beneficiaries of Federation strength will be ourselves?”
The admiral gave a patient smile. “I’m not proposing isolationism, Gannet. Of course we should be a good neighbor, be there to help when we’re asked. But good neighbors don’t force their help on people who don’t want it, or assume they’re better qualified to make someone else’s decisions for them.”
“The victims of the Ware didn’t want to be liberated from it because they didn’t know it was a threat. We made them aware of that.”
“And once they were aware, it should’ve been up to them to decide what to do about it. That’s what the Partnership did. They’re being painted as victims of the Ware, but the fact is, they’d achieved a workable symbiosis with it. Maybe they could’ve helped others do the same, given time and the chance to decide their own fate.”
“That chance was taken away from them by the Klingons, not us.”
“But the Empire only got involved because the Partnership sold Ware to their enemies—and the Partnership only did that because they thought we were invading them. It all started with a misunderstanding we could’ve avoided. The risks of intervention without understanding are too great.”
“Let’s not forget, Admiral, that it was a Starfleet consultant, Philip Collier, who sold the Ware destruct signal to the Empire. While some credit his action with preventing a war between us and the Klingons, that is still an act of treason. Isn’t this campaign for nonintervention just a distraction from where our focus should be? What is Starfleet doing to find Philip Collier and bring him to justice? Or give him a medal, as the case may be?”
Harris paused the playback and smiled. “Justice or a medal. Which one would you prefer?”
Tucker withheld his anger. Harris knew full well that Tucker, under the Collier alias, had not been the one to provide the destruct protocol to the Klingons. Instead, Harris had suborned Olivia Akomo, a civilian engineer whom Tucker had recruited to the task force, by playing on her concern for her family in the path of the imminent Klingon invasion. Akomo had traded the destruct protocol to the Empire in exchange for peace, and now she had to live with the destruction of the Partnership on her conscience. She had done it, she had explained, so that Tucker would remain sufficiently untainted to continue serving as Section 31’s conscience. Despite that, it was largely on her behalf that Tucker had decided that the only action his conscience would allow was the destruction of Section 31.
Which meant that this meeting was edging close to dangerous terrain after all. “Is there a reason you wanted me to see this?” he asked.
“Just curious to hear your thoughts on this nonintervention push of the admiral’s.”
Tucker took his time answering. “I understand where he’s coming from. Back on Enterprise, T’Pol always advised against interfering in other cultures. We saw examples of the harm we could do if we weren’t careful. Not every world is ready for contact.”
“The admiral’s position seems to be that we aren’t ready to decide whom we should contact or intervene with.”
“That seems fair. He doesn’t want us to get arrogant—to assume our technology makes us smarter or better than other species.”
The older, black-suited human peered at him. “I seem to recall you wanting us to get more involved on Sauria a while back.”
“Only to mitigate the damage we did by getting involved in the first place.” He studied Harris. “Look, if you’re suggesting I should try to talk Archer out of it, or—”
The spymaster held up his hands in a mollifying gesture. “Not to worry, Mister Tucker. As a matter of fact, I think an official Starfleet policy of nonintervention would be an excellent idea.”
Tucker blinked. “You do? I mean . . . isn’t intervening basically our whole deal?”
Harris chuckled. “But we keep our interventions unseen. Meddling openly creates enemies. It invites retaliation. The more foreign affairs the Federation gets itself involved in, the more security risks it creates. So if Archer can convince the public and his superiors that we should stay out of matters where we aren’t invited, I say more power to him.” He went on with a sly smile. “It just gives us cover for whatever clandestine interventions do become necessary.”
“So . . . you actually want to help Archer succeed.”
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. We don’t know yet if our involvement will be required. Archer can be a persuasive fellow.”
“That he can,” Tucker agreed.
Still, Harris’s words had gotten him wondering. In order to entrap the spymaster into exposing himself, Tucker needed to know what Harris wanted. Traps needed bait, after all. If Harris wanted the nonintervention policy to succeed, was there a way to use that?
And if there was . . . could Tucker pull it off without jeopardizing Archer’s agenda—or Archer himself?
2
January 20, 2166
Archer residence, Sausalito
“YOU LOOK LIKE you had a rewarding day,” Danica Erickson said after welcoming Jonathan Archer back aboard his houseboat with a hug and kiss.
“I did,” he replied as he moved into the living area. But he spotted Porthos lying on the couch and headed over to greet him. Once, the little beagle would have been there to meet him at the door every evening, but Porthos rarely had the energy for that anymore, so now it was the mountain’s turn to come to Muhammad. Archer greeted the dog warmly, cradling his head and skritching his ears, before settling down on the couch to pet him.
After allowing Archer and his old friend a few moments for each other, Dani took the chair opposite and asked, “Did you finally make some progress on the noninterference front?”
He shook his head. “Still working on that, I’m afraid. Shran won’t budge, and he’s got Flar and Zenohr firmly on his side,” he went on, naming the Tellarite and Rigelian members of Starfleet’s joint chiefs of staff. “They both see too many benefits from trade with new civilizations to be comfortable with restrictions on first contacts. So far I’ve only got T’Viri solidly in my corner, though Osman’s wavering.”
“I thought Alexis understood your arguments.”
“She does, but the public back on Alpha Centauri? Not so much. Or here on Earth, for that matter. It’s hard getting the complexities of the Partnership situation across to them. They see the Ware as a threat, plain and simple. The idea that the Partnership could’ve been better off with it than without it, and that we should’ve been more careful to understand that before we took action, is a hard nuance to get across.”
“Especially without making it sound like you’re insulting the memory of Vol’Rala’s crew.”
“Exactly. I know this is for the best, but it’s hard to find a way to articulate why in a way the public will understand.”
“Then why do you look like you won a victory?”
“Because President al-Rashid and the Council have finally agreed to issue a resolution condemning Maltuvis’s sentient-rights violations on Sauria. Soval’s been given the go-ahead to bring all our diplomatic pressure to bear on Maltuvis to comply with interstellar ethical standards or risk facing sanctions.”
The bright smile on Dani’s dark bronze face was as beautiful as ever. “That’s a welcome surprise! What about the trade deal? The risk of losing Sauria’s dilithium and rare earths?”
“With the threat of war with the Klingons subsided, we don’t have as much need for those minerals.” He sighed. “Plus, admittedly, with new worlds not so eager to join us lately, it doesn’t look like we’ll need as many resources for growth. Not great news, but at least it reduces Maltuvis’s economic leverage over us.”
In the wake of the Partnership debacle and the resultant hit to the Federation’s reputation, a number of worlds that had been in negotiations for membership had quietly or not-so-quietly backed down over the past few weeks. The Tesnians, who had lost an entire colony to the Vertians several years ago, had been close to forgiving the Federation for negotiating peace with that mysterious culture, but now their mistrust of Federation motives had returned with a vengeance. The Xyrillians, whose exotic environmental needs and traditional isolationism had been a challenge for Commissioner Soval’s diplomatic teams, had now not only retreated from their tentative flirtation with membership, but had become formal signatories of the Vissians’ embargo on technology transfers to less advanced civilizations such as the Federation. Perhaps the biggest loss had been the Lorillians. They had been considered a cinch for membership due to their close relationship with the Rigelian trading community, but the fall of the Partnership had come just before a planetary election on Lorillia, bringing about the narrow victory of a xenophobic nationalist party whose opposition to Federation membership had been the heart of their campaign. At least the Ithenites had joined back in October, bringing the number of Federation member states just barely into double digits before the slowdown, for what little that was worth as a milestone.
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