Rodrigo sat in an outdoor cafe, quietly sipping a latte and 'reading' a news flimsy, seemingly scrolling through articles from a local news aggregate on the smart paper. In reality, the veteran SAFE agent was covertly monitoring a particular corner market, waiting for a particular junior horticulturalist to pay the market a visit.
Rodrigo had arrived on Terra six weeks ago, following a lead gleaned from a number of partial intercepts of heavily-encrypted transmissions, and a partially-destroyed data core that the Draconis Combine had managed to capture in a rare early victory against the Clans, and that a SAFE operative in the FWL embassy on Luthien had quietly copied for their own analysis. After spending a couple weeks inserting himself into the local routine, Rodrigo had spent the last month quietly monitoring this particular horticulturalist, though he had been careful to do so from a significant distance. His concern was less that his target would detect him, however, and more that his counterparts on Terra would pick up on his target and remove his ability to complete any of his mission objectives.
While SAFE was not nearly as incompetent as it was commonly believed to be, its reputation was partly earned, as well as fostered. It wasn't that SAFE trained bad agents, it was just that many of those agents tended to rely overmuch on the technology that SAFE provided them. Thanks to Marik's technological edge, SAFE agents had a wide array of technical gadgetry and skills to assist them in their efforts, some bordering on things you would expect to see in a cheesy spy movie, and SAFE agents generally had a strong technological advantage over most of their counterparts.
Rodrigo had learned early in his career, however, that technology could not always be depended on, and there was much to be said for old-fashioned tricks and leg-work in his business. So he had masked his real target by pretending to observe a number of other, believable targets in Unity City, to throw off the ComStar ROM agents who inevitably picked up on his presence and quietly attempted to monitor him, much as he was monitoring a particular horticulturalist. Despite, or perhaps because of the great care to evade or misdirect ComStar's pervasive monitoring of communications, Rodrigo's superiors put too much trust in their encryption protocols and message coding, and too much trust in their technical skills in creating the detailed history of his alias, and it invariably complicated his life in every field operation.
For now, though, Rodrigo was confident that his efforts to misdirect the ROM agents had been successful, and that his true target remained obscured. He had managed to slip a bug into the apartment the ROM agents were operating out of, several in fact, most of which had been burned, and two of which had been discovered and were being used to try and feed false information to him, but they had all been covers, expendable devices meant to mask the real bug, which had gone undetected. The ROM agents had even failed to catch one of his expendable probes, an old-fashioned, low-tech device that Rodrigo had thrown in, in the hope that the ComStar agents would find it and think it the device all the others were meant to distract from. The ROM agents were convinced that Rodrigo was there on a long-term operation to fish for blackmail opportunities, and that he was currently attempting to throw them off his "real" objective.
The SAFE agent took another sip of his latte to hide a smile at how the bumbling SAFE agent had managed to spin a show that the supposedly omniscient ROM agents had bought hook, line and sinker, and flicked his drooping flimsy to straighten it as his horticultural target walked past. It was actually the first time that his observation had put him anywhere close to his target - his efforts to throw off his ROM followers had forced him to do most of his real observing from a distance, relying much more on technology than he generally preferred.
The flick of his smart paper flimsy, though an innocuous motion, was anything but. It designated the horticulturalist as the target for a micro tracker, a sophisticated tracking and listening device half the size of a gnat, which clung to the side of the railing that enclosed the cafe's outdoor seating area, two tables past Rodrigo. As the target passed, the bug dropped off the railing and flew up to gently alight on a fold of the target's clothing, between her shoulderblades. The gut-twistingly expensive device then shifted color to match the cloth it was attached to, looking like nothing more than a thread snagged slightly out of place.
Rodrigo took another sip of his latte, and smiled up at the waiter who was delivering the rest of his order, and set about enjoying his meal and reading the latest antics of Terra's pop culture icons.
Edited by Ilithi Dragon, 23 February 2015 - 06:30 PM.
3
Time Bandit, on 16 February 2015 - 06:01 PM, said:
