Letter to "Mouse"
23 Sep 2022Cycronos
Dear esteemed cmdr. Pseudowoodoo,I am delighted that you would consider my humble person useful in your current predicament, and I feel honored that would trust me with such a personal matter.
Upon the arrival of a tiny advance of 500M credits I shall speedily endeavour to bring your target to justice.
Until then I shall remain your trusted colleague
Cycronos
That is what you would have gotten for a reply, if you had made the mistake of adressing a proper Imperial by name and title alone. Always use some ego-massaging honorific if you don't wanna get the door slammed in your face with acidic politeness.
But, since I am no longer a proper Imperial and have a lot of respect for you and your work, I shall forgive this breach of etiquette this one time. Since furthermore I owe you my callsign, the only piece of my current identity that is of my own making, even if only indirectly so, I shall also help you for free this time.
Unfortunately I can't get involved personally, since the situation aboard the Argenti is still far from ideal and requires my constant oversight for the forseeable future.
That said, you've already done the hard part and located the target. The rest should be easy if you can find and pay for the right people. Given your work as a fuel rat I'm sure you have the necessary contacts to acquire such personnel.
Which means all that's left for me to do is come up with a precise extrapolation of your target's behaviour.
Given that your target has resurfaed only once before, and that he was able to get away clean from law enforcement (after murdering one of their own no less), we must assume he is quite adept at hiding. His resurfacing is probably a case of „maintenance“ of his hidden state, in the sense that his fake identities need to be changed or new funds need to be accquired.
All of this points to his current name being a burner identity, that he will ditch as soon as he is done with whatever he is currently after, and using another identity that is currently silent and waiting as his means of escape.
(Simply bribing the right people or hiding away in a cargo hold don't strike me as your target's MO. Too dangerous, unsophisticated and definitely useless when the law is out for blood.)
But, in order to pull that off, this getaway identity aleady has to be in the systems of the station or settlement that is his current place of residence. If it suddenly popped up out of nowhere, it would be traceable.
Have your people datamine the nav beacon. Sleeping idents are usually established one or two weeks prior to the beneficiary actually arriving. At least that's how we did it back in my day, when we wanted to get away from all the... well, enough said, I guess.
What you are looking for is an arrival without a departure. Something humble, unassuming and temporary. A trader, an entrepeneur or a tourist.
That should narrow your pool of suspects considerably.
After that it's just a case of finding and matching the remaining candidates to their real life counterparts. The one you can't match is your targets sleeper ident.
Since your target is no amateur, we can assume that his sleeper ident goes beyond a card and an entry in the nav beacon. That would be a bit too easy to filter out for anyone with half a brain. The sleeper should have quarters, commodities, deliveries etc. in its name.
Your people should take that into account when mixing and matching. There are probably more than a few sleeper idents going around.
Once that is done the fun part begins: spooking the target. All you have to do is force your target to actually use his means of escape, tail him till he stops running, and then grab him.
Here you can add a personal touch. In my experience few things are scarier than a blast from the past. The ghosts of bad deeds, long thought dead and buried can shake a man to the core in ways you wouldn't believe.
Make him suffer from, make him afraid of, make him pay with his inner demons.
Make him feel helpless. Accomplish that and catching him will be easy, you'll see him break right in front of you. That should bring you some comfort.
As always your friend and colleague
Cycronos
In answer to this:
https://inara.cz/elite/cmdr-logbook-entry/391753/72308/