“SHAKEN, NOT STIRRED.”
STARDATE 57647.98
APRIL 15, 2381
2300 HRS
[ Lt. Cmdr. Andrew Fisher | Ibai Besi Promenade | Aldea Prime ] Attn: @BipSpoon
As twilight splendor gradually began to settle in across the distant horizon, bathing one of the street side markets of Ibai Besi in an almost iridescent haze of deep oranges and crimson, the Chief Intelligence Officer of the most wanted starship in the Galaxy stood idly by, his arms crossed in front of his chest as he waited for his contact to arrive. In truth, Fisher was more than a little surprised at how quickly his newly developed Aldean assets had come through on the slightly unusual request that he had put in.
Yet just twenty-minutes earlier he had received a coded transmission confirming that his primary contact, a man named Joban, had with his fellows managed to track down nearly all of the items on a list that the veteran Starfleet spy had forwarded to them. That they were now ready and willing to make delivery of the items in question at a time and place of Fisher’s choosing. With the pragmatic awareness that there were no guarantees of a tomorrow in which he could set up something a bit more safe and secure, he had instead opted to meet as soon as possible down on the planet side so as to keep any other members of the crew out of the matter. Of course it had dawned on him that his contacts might not have actually fulfilled his requests but were instead planning on setting him up for some other nefarious or unsavory purposes, and it was that reason which had prompted his choice of the Promenade Markets as the location. Given the newly unleashed Guardian Angel which hovered overhead in low-orbit, Fisher wanted to ensure that as little collateral damage as possible would be inflicted if things went south, and the markets were decidedly sparse with random innocent civilians at this late hour in the evening.
Emerging from around a corner some fifty or so paces distance, a man wearing a tan smock with three followers in tow stopped as he spotted Fisher standing alone, propped up against a sandstone wall.
“Flash!” Fisher called out in a hushed shout.
“Thunder.” Came the appropriate response.
Lurching forward, Fisher left the wall he had been leant against and began striding rather deliberately toward the first man, who in turn began moving to meet him halfway. “Joban.” Reaching out with a leather-gloved hand to greet his lead contact, appraised him with sage-green eyes for a scant moment before examining the other three which lingered back in their original position. He hadn’t explicitly stated for Joban to come alone, but he also hadn’t felt it necessary to do so. Such a meeting didn’t seem to warrant a security detail in his mind, which meant that Joban had an ulterior motive to the meeting, or that he had intended to re-discuss the agreed upon payment. “Your friends going to come over and say hello?” he teased the man with a wry grin, which was meant to express how unintimidated he was by their presence. This wasn’t the first time he had engaged in such an arrangement and knew all the tricks someone might have played in an attempt to squeeze a little more in the way of payment out of him. Still, Fisher needed to keep this little operation as clandestine as possible and had left a little wiggle room in his budget to allow for late term haggling.
“We need to discuss--” Joban began to speak, only to be interrupted.
“--the agreed upon price, yeah I kind of got that.” Fisher completed Joban’s statement for him, knowing where this was all headed. “If you really have managed to recover ninety-percent of the items on the list, in as short a time frame as you have, then I think we can come to a new agreement with an added bonus reflective of your speed and thoroughness.” Retrieving an Orion hand-computer from his pocket, Fisher flicked it on and brought up the active datalink to Theurgy that he’d programmed into it. Well, he hadn’t, one of his encryption specialists had, but all the same; he knew not to bring standard Starfleet equipment with him so as to prevent it falling into the wrong hands if he was indeed apprehended. Punching up the agreed upon contract, which had dictated a sum of fifty-bars of Gold Pressed Latinum to be paid to Joban upon delivery, Fisher doubled the payment to one-hundred-bars. No small fee by any measure but given the wealth that the spy had accrued during his time undercover, it represented little more than a drop in the bucket.
“One-hundred bars.” He said simply, finalizing the additional payment transfer from the Ferengi Banking Agent which had been handling his personal accounts over the past six years. “Better?”
Blinking a little, Joban seemed surprised to have had his payment doubled, and so he looked back over his shoulder at the three goons he’d hired, then back to Fisher and gave him an appreciative nod. “Uhh, yeah that’s... perfect.”
“Excellent.” It dawned on Fisher that he likely could have haggled to pay less than double, but under the circumstances it didn’t overly bother him. Again, he knew that the items contained within the packages that Joban had recovered for him were worth more than what he had just paid if you could find the right buyer for them anyway. What Fisher didn’t know, was that one of Joban’s men had in secret sent out a subspace communication of his own to someone else regarding the deal, and that the message hadn’t been properly encoded at all. That message could easily have been intercepted and read by anyone within range, including those back aboard Theurgy, whom Fisher was desperately hoping to keep out of the issue. That was likely now impossible, though he wasn’t exactly aware of who had intercepted such a transmission.
“So... coordinates of the goods?” he asked Joban, waiting to input them into the computer so that Theurgy could scan the items, then beam them back to one of the cargo bays, and he could complete his business with this matter as soon as possible.
Uncoded Communication which has been intercepted by Cam: “Meeting with the Starfleet Spy now. Ibai Besi Promenade Markets Exchange of illicit goods to take place there.”
Topic: Day 36 [2300 hrs.] - “Shaken, not stirred.” (Read 5439 times)
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