Owen looked at him like he’d gone insane. Maybe I have,Kyle thought. Maybe insane is the only way to counter insanity.“Back to work? Are you sure? Then it’ll be no secret that you’re back here.”

“That’s right,” Kyle said. “If they’re going to come at me again, whoever they are, I want them to do it in the open. I want everyone to know I’m here. I want to flush them out. If my presence is a secret then any attacks on me will be a secret too. I want to force their hand, make them sweat a bit. They’ll play the cards I deal them this time, and not the other way around.”

Owen shot him a smile, the first Kyle had seen on him since he’d arrived at the wharf to see his long-since vanished friend. “Did you spend your time thinking, or playing cards?” he asked. He put a friendly hand on Kyle’s shoulder. “I don’t necessarily agree with your plan, but I’ll go along with it. You deal the hands; I’ll back your play as best I can. And I’ll make sure my friends in security do the same.”

“I appreciate that, Owen,” Kyle said. “That’s the best I can ask for.”

Lieutenant Commander Dugan glanced up from the computer screen, sleepy-eyed but alert. “There’s no record of any arrest warrant for Kyle Riker, Admiral,” he said. “Not two years ago in June, not ever.”

“I didn’t think so,” Owen Paris said. Kyle had left him at the wharf a couple of hours before, promising to get in touch when he’d found a place to stay in the city. His apartment had long since been occupied; his belongings put into storage. “But I had to check. What about the other thing?”

“That’s a strange one,” Dugan said. He’d been promoted a little more than a year ago, and Owen had absolute faith in his trustworthiness. “A security officer named Romesh McNally was on duty that night. He was approached, he said, by a fellow officer, Carson Cook, to help serve a warrant on Riker. McNally never saw the actual warrant, it turns out. Cook had it, he said, and McNally was just along as backup. They went to the infirmary to serve it. McNally says Cook was acting strangely—fixated on this one task, serving this warrant, and unable or uninterested in engaging in any conversation or activity that was not directly related to the job. It was, McNally says, like he was obsessed with it. McNally describes him as tense, too, as if he expected trouble.”

“Isn’t there always the possibility of trouble when a warrant is being served?” Owen asked him.

Dugan touched his silver hair, smoothing it down even though it wasn’t out of place. “Sure,” he said. “You never know what might happen, what the response might be. You’re tense, ready to go for your sidearm if necessary. But at the same time, in spite of that tension it’s kind of a routine thing. You joke around, you talk about sports, women, whatever. You don’t focus on it like it’s the only thing in the world. Cook was an experienced officer; he had been through it plenty of times. I knew him—not well, but a little. He was a good man.”

“Was?” Owen asked. “Clarify, Commander.”

“Yes, sir,” Dugan said, and Owen realized that he had slipped into admiral mode without even realizing it. “I had only a vague memory of this, but I checked the records. And McNally, of course, remembered it all fairly well, when I interviewed him about it. Both officers showed up for their next shift, after failing to serve the warrant, and McNally had asked Cook what had happened. He assumed that someone else had taken over the warrant, maybe serving Riker at his home or office the next day, or, failing that, if an investigation into Riker’s whereabouts had been launched. But Cook couldn’t remember what he was talking about. He claimed not to know who Kyle Riker was, didn’t recall the trip to the infirmary. It was like the whole event, the whole shift that night, was gone from his memory.”

“That must have been disturbing.”

“I’m sure it was. Nobody’s quite sure if that set off what happened next, or if it was just symptomatic. But Cook’s mind seemed to deteriorate rapidly. Not quite overnight, but according to the records, within weeks his memory was completely gone. Every known therapy was used to try to restore it. Counseling, hypnosis, holotherapy, data extraction. Nothing helped. His mind, again according to the records, had been wiped clean. He couldn’t remember how to pull on a pair of boots. He didn’t know his own name, or recognize his immediate family.”

“I remember the case,” Owen said. “I just didn’t realize it was the same person. Of course, I didn’t know about the ‘warrant’ then, or I might have made the connection.”

“Almost no one knew, except for McNally,” Dugan explained. “He talked about it with a few people, including his immediate superior. But soon enough, Cook’s deterioration overshadowed any puzzle about a nonexistent warrant for a guy no one could find anyway. The mystery of the warrant went into the databanks and was largely forgotten, until you brought it up again today.”

“And the one man who claimed there was a warrant isn’t available to ask about it.”

“You could ask him,” Dugan corrected. “He’s here, in a private care facility in San Francisco. The thing of it is, you just wouldn’t get an answer.”

Ensign Tanguy Messina looked in on his charge several times a day. The poor guy had been Starfleet, just like he was, and even though he could no longer serve, he was still entitled to the respect due the uniform he had once worn. Now he didn’t wear a uniform at all, unless a loose white robe counted. They made sure he was comfortable, at least as far as one could determine the comfort level of a person who couldn’t tell you how he felt. Carson Cook could have stood outside in a blizzard, naked, and except for involuntary responses like shivering and turning blue, he’d have seemed every bit as content as he was inside this temperature-controlled environment with his every physical need catered to. The room was light and airy, the furniture soft and comfortable, and soothing music played in the background. Calming holoimages, rotating at random intervals, were displayed on the walls.

“People asking about you today, Cars,” Ensign Messina said casually. “That doesn’t happen too often anymore, does it? But today, everybody wants to know how you’re doing. Funny, huh?” He watched Carson closely, but there was no evidence that the guy understood a single word he was saying. As usual. He talked to the guy sometimes just because it felt weird not to. He was completely mindless, as far as Messina could tell, but he was still a human being.

“How you doing today?” he continued. “Same as always?”

Carson’s gaze flitted across him as if he wasn’t even there. It was strange, he knew. Modern medical science could cure just about anything, it seemed. He knew that historically, mental health care had been largely hit-and-miss. Some people could be put right again, others suffered forever, their conditions sometimes mitigated by drugs, talk therapy, electroshock, or other treatments. Messina had made a study of the dysfunctions of the mind, and he volunteered at this care facility, which had only the occasional “hopeless” case, where in centuries past it had been full to overflowing, while he worked on his medical training as a graduate student at the Academy.

He had glanced away from Carson, but when he looked back, it seemed as if something had changed. Maybe a little tensing of the muscles, which was rare. Carson sat in a chair most of the time; though he was capable of almost full mobility, he just didn’t seem to have anywhere he wanted to go. He was in that chair now, but he seemed a little more wound up than he had been just a moment before, almost coiled. And his eye movements were different. Rather than drifting aimlessly about the room, they seemed to dart.

This was definitely a change, Messina realized. He had to alert the director. Something was going on with Carson Cook, and that had never happened. He started for the door.