“In the past twenty four hours, case counts have risen to one hundred and fourteen.”

One hundred and fourteen. A start, but not nearly enough. Not yet. The contagion had only just begun to spread. And spread it would, just as it was designed.

“Our staff are working tirelessly to render critical care to those in need.”

They might slow it, but they couldn’t stop it. In the end, the prognosis was fatal. It was all but guaranteed.

“The most effective measure remains social distancing, and we beg of you to continue to observe the stay-at-home orders to slow the spread.”

He could hear the exhaustion in the voice of the station’s medical director, Captain Anna Vale. That wasn’t a good sign for her. Not when this was only the beginning.

It was going to get worse. So much worse.

The station’s staff had only instituted the lockdown eighteen hours ago, and the virus had a three day incubation period. That meant there were two more days worth of cases that would flood the infirmary before their measures even began to have an effect.

And that meant two more days before his next move.

As the public health announcement drew to a close, he glanced at the monitors spread across his makeshift desk, each displaying a surveillance feed from a key area on the station. He could see the promenade, all but empty now, and the hallway outside his hotel room, just in case anyone came for him. So too could he see the command center, a lone commander standing watch, and the primary infirmary, bustling with activity as the medical staff fought the inevitable. But it was a different screen that drew his attention, one watching the corridor lined with the offices of the command staff.

“So predictable,” he muttered under his breath as he stared at Captain Kurayami Kioshi, the station’s aged intelligence chief, who walked down the otherwise empty corridor, drawing to a stop in front of the rear admiral’s office. “Finally getting around to telling Grayson, I guess.”

There wasn’t anything he could say that would change any of this. Still, he was curious. The intelligence chief might’ve thought an in-person visit would prevent eavesdropping, but so reliant and trusting was Starfleet of its systems that he didn’t even have to bug the room. Instead, he just used the tunnel he’d already established into the comms network to issue a ping with a malformed payload to Rear Admiral Grayson’s combadge. That payload broke through with a buffer overflow, allowing him to commandeer its internal controls. He activated the internal mic without an audible chime, and then he relayed the pickup back to his hideout.

“Five days ago, Frank Negrescu arrived on Archanis Station aboard a freighter out of Acamar, using forged papers and a fictitious name. And then yesterday, a deadly contagion with a three day incubation period appeared out of nowhere.”

Good. They’d begun to piece it together. Sort of, at least. This had been why he’d allowed Captain Kioshi to identify him here in the first place. That they already knew who he was would make it easier when at last he revealed himself to them.

“He doesn’t go anywhere or do anything without purpose. If he’s here, he’s here for a reason. It’d be quite a coincidence if, shortly after his arrival, people started dying and he wasn’t involved.”

That was also correct. Mostly. He wasn’t the sightseeing variety.

“I put my best team on tailing him, but he lost them like they were a gaggle of freshman cadets.”

That was Captain Kioshi’s best team? What an embarrassing admission. A gaggle of freshman cadets might have done a better job. Intelligence, as a discipline, had lost its edge, its officers too reliant on their tech and their toys. But that tech and those toys were easy to defeat, and then they had nothing.

“Negrescu is a ghost. We’re doing everything we can, but understand that this is someone we trained, and someone who would already be dead if he wasn’t so good at evading capture from people far more conniving than us. If he doesn’t want to be found, we may never find him.”

Yes, if he wasn’t good at what he did, he would have died on Cardassia or Betazed or Romulus. But he didn’t because he was good at what he did. 

Even if they mobilized the entire security staff and went level by level looking for him, they’d never find him. He had their communications channels, their surveillance feeds, and even their biosensors. He knew where every single officer on the station was and what they were doing, and he’d know immediately if someone so much as glanced in his direction.

And so, as the pair concluded their exchange and the link grew quiet again, Frank Negrescu leaned back in his chair and took another sip of his whisky. There was nothing to do for now but to wait and to watch as the contagion continued to spread.