The Director

A director of something in the UCAS nobody has named, reached only through Lux Vale. One call, and the bill arrives later.

You have never met him. What you have is three phone calls Lux Vale has made from this end, outdoors, at a distance, and a number none of you can dial.

He is a director in the UCAS's intelligence service. Which directorate is not written down anywhere the crew can reach. He is early forties, he has never been to Los Angeles, and he answers on the second ring at any hour, which tells you more about the arrangement than the rest of it put together.

The surname is Vale, and the crew did not get it from him. They got it from Lux, who works under his own name and has never pretended it is not his father's as well. No given name has come with it, and asking has produced the same courteous nothing every time. The title on this page came off the commlink: Fiche stood close enough on the second call to read what the unit said the call was from, and what it said was The Director. So that is what this page calls him.

What the crew knows#

• He answers, and he never asks what it is for. No conditions on the call, no questions about the job, no interest in who else is on the line. That is not trust. It is a man who has decided he would rather not know, and would rather you knew he had decided that.
• What he gives is a name in this city. His service runs its own picture of Los Angeles, because a foreign capital keeps track of a free city on its border, and that picture is full of people who already take a call from the north: a deputy in a district office, a compliance officer inside a corporation, a consular clerk, somebody's accountant. He tells you which one to approach, what they already owe, and the sentence that gets them to listen. He has never once produced a document, a payment or a person.
• He does not tell you why any of them are on his list, and the crew have learned not to ask. A name that arrives without its reason is a name you are using on somebody else's terms.
• The favors come back. Not a bill, not a price, and never in the same month: an instruction, phrased as a request, arriving through Lux Vale in the same courteous voice. Twice so far. Both were easy. Nobody in the crew believes the third one will be.
• This time the offer went the other way. In session 5 Lux put a proposition to him rather than asking for a name: a Shiawase-built commlink with a concealed charge in it, 10,000¥ a device at 40% up front, sold at a loss into offices across the UCAS. He answers that one favorably, in its own call, and then says nothing further about it.
• The third favor is the one that comes back, and it is not easy. Weeks later, in a different call and never in the same month, the instruction arrives through Lux in the usual courteous voice: the service would like simsense masters recorded inside the San Diego cordon. Not a report and not a debrief. The format that carries a print, from the one place nobody can enter. See run 05.

Contact#