Adán Zepeda

General manager at Shiawase, vendor side. Buys things his own company will not be shown buying.

General Manager, Supply Development, for Shiawase Energy's Southern California region. Early forties. He has a ground-floor office at the AES complex in El Segundo, a window onto the transformer yard, a company shrine shelf on the wall beside the door, and a calendar that a stranger can get onto in nine days.

Supply Development is the department that finds people to build things. Most of what it does is dull and legitimate: transformers, switchgear, the shipping. A small part of it is not on the same ledger.

Lux went and got the meeting. Nobody asked him to and nobody sent for him: he used his own name on a corporate switchboard until it reached somebody with a calendar, which is the one thing that name is reliably good for. Zepeda took the meeting on its merits and did not appear to have looked into him at all.

What the crew knows#

• The meeting is on the ground floor, badged in at the front, in daylight, with his assistant walking you around. You never see an elevator. Getting onto his calendar took nine days and one name.
• Somebody has asked him for explosive communications devices, built discreetly, and he says so in the first two minutes rather than circling it. Short runs, a working commlink with a charge inside it, and nothing about either half advertising the other.
• He will not say who the customer is. He is not coy about refusing, and he does not pretend the question is unreasonable.
• He built a prototype nobody asked him for. Two days between one meeting and the next, and he turned up wearing the thing. Whether that is eagerness, a demonstration, or a man who had most of it on a shelf already is not a question he volunteers an answer to.
• His price is 10,000¥ a device, forty per cent up front, and he will tell you to your face that it is a loss. A commlink with a charge in it that does not read as one cannot be sold at a profit to the people it has to reach.
• He is precise about terms, pays in stages, and has not misrepresented anything yet.

Contact#