Deep in thought, Odo made no reply.
"I'm going now. Always a pleasure having a chat with you . . ."
Odo glanced over as the booth's security curtain fell back into place. Through it, he could see the Ferengi heading at high speed back to the security of his bar.
Alone in the booth, Odo fed the disk into his data padd. The only thing on it was a video clip some fifteen seconds long. The concealed lens near the entrance to Quark's establishment had caught the individual in question; he had actually stopped, looked up, and smiled, as though he had known the camera was there.
Odo didn't recognize the man. A lean, vulpine face and a relatively tall, wide-shouldered physique clad in somber black; the partnership with the diminutive Quark must have been a study in contrasts.
He froze the image on the data padd's screen, then magnified it, drawing in upon the right eye.
There had been one item of identification in the Starfleet files on McHogue. "Computer," he said aloud. "Call up and compare retinal patterns, onscreen subject and name index McHogue, security office working file area."
The screen divided, showing a circle of distinctive markings on either side. Even before the computer spoke, he knew.
"Confirm match between patterns," came the measured voice. "Onscreen subject identified as McHogue."
"Possibility of error?"
"Below estimation threshold. Not statistically significant."
Odo blanked the screen. Another interesting datum: Quark, with his needle-like Ferengi gaze, had looked into this individual's mercenary soul . . . and hadn't recognized him. His old business partner.
There was a lot to gnaw on here. He nodded slowly to himself; as disturbed as he was by the threat to his DS9, a certain pleasurable tension came with such a tangled knot to pick apart. And even more satisfaction to come, when all the strands would be laid out neatly before him.
But that was still in the future. Right now there was another to take care of, a duty that he was ashamed that he had put off. Something that he should have already told Commander Sisko, no matter the pressure of time on both of them. He should have forced the commander to listen to him. . . .
All the while he had been digging information out of Quark,it had still been at the back of his mind. Before anything else could happen, before he could concentrate his full attention on the epidemic of murder, this needed to be laid to rest.
Odo picked up the data padd and drew aside the security curtain. It would be only a matter of minutes before he was at the Ops deck and in Sisko's private office.
Now he was alone.
His chief of security had departed, after having caught him as he'd left Ops and coming back with him to his private living quarters. Sisko sat leaning forward on the couch, his forearms against his knees, hands knotted together; the surrounding lights had been dimmed to a soft glow. He sat and thought about what Odo had told him.
"Is it really that urgent?" Sisko felt a pang of remorse for having asked that. "I really need to get some rest."
"I think it is," Odo had replied. He had insisted—rightly so—on getting away from the crowded Ops deck, where the other crew members might inadvertently listen in.
So it had been here, in this little world, as much of a home and refuge as was possible to create inside DS9, that Odo had informed him of what he had discovered during his investigation.
"It's about your son Jake." Odo had been forthright, even blunt, in telling him. There had been no other way. "I've extracted the list of frequent users of the altered holosuites. And Jake is one of them."
His thought processes had seemed to take a step back. operating at a safe remove from the world. "Are you sure?"
Odo had nodded. "I had O'Brien check out the device he constructed for me, that reads out the access codes. The device is working perfectly; the data I've obtained with it is reliable."
"I see." He remembered glancing over his shoulder, toward the corridor that led to his son's bedroom; Jake was already asleep there. Despite all his pledges to himself, he had again missed having dinner or spending any other time with him. "How bad is it?"
"Your son's usage of the altered holosuites appears to still be in a preliminary stage; the pattern we've seen, of increasingly frequent use, has only just started to accelerate in his case. There's time . . ."
Time, mused Sisko. The memory of Odo's words faded away. There was always time; there had always been time enough. If he had remembered what was important.
Odo had said something to him about being sorry, and had left him to his thoughts. And his being alone.
If Jake's mother were still alive . . .
Inside his head, he closed a door firmly against the empty rooms that those words led to. He had spent enough late-shift hours in there already, and would spend more, he knew. It was unavoidable; she had been the only woman he had loved. But now he had to think just of their son.
He looked over to the side of the room. The wooden crate that Kira had brought from Bajor had been moved there; it sat mute in the shadows, still unopened. That was another person gone from him, whose advice he could have used. It seemed, in moments like this, that the function of time itself was to carry away, one by one, all those closest to him. . . .
Perhaps that had already started to happen to Jake.
A current of anger rose inside him, enough to force his fists clenched. Seconds passed before he sat back and used his comm badge to reach the security chief.
"Constable—were all of those CI modules removed from the holosuites in question?"
"Actually, they weren't, Commander." Odo's reply was clipped and professional. "We left one module on-line with a security monitor attached, in case we needed to investigate its effects in situ, as it were. As long as the sector is sealed off, I felt the chance of any further harm being done was minimal."
"Thank you." He broke the connection.
For a moment, Sisko stood outside Jake's bedroom, listening in the dark to his son's breathing. Then he turned away and headed for the living quarters' door.
As commander of the station, he had no problem in entering the restricted sector—with a simple computer override. The small light on the access panel told him that the last holosuite along the corridor was the one that had been left functional. He peeled away Odo's security seal and dropped it on the floor beside him. With a press of his finger, the door slid open and he stepped inside—
To a sunlit world. The doorway closed behind him, completing the holosuite's illusion. A warm summer wind moved across a field of yellow grasses; the barely perceptible scent of cool running water came from beyond the dense stand of trees some apparent distance farther on. He had been here before, with Jake; he had set the holosuite's programming for what he knew was one of his son's favorites. The path's loose earth and broken stalks—or the perfectly contrived sensation of them—moved beneath his steps, the sun overhead hot enough to bring beads of sweat onto his brow.
In the woods' darkness, he found the first wrong thing. The whitening bones of a cat, the dry fragments spread obscenely apart by coarse twine looped around the nearest tree trunks. The blood had long ago soaked into the leaf-covered ground, but there was still a gut-tightening sense of pain and death in the shade's motionless air. The cat's skull bared its teeth in a silent howl.
What Dax and Bashir had stated in their preliminary report was true. This was how the CI modules worked, taking the normal, benign holosuite programming and warping it into something different. There had been no reason to doubt his officers, but he had to see it for himself. He could only wonder how far it went, what he might find on the other side of the perceived horizon.