The sound of clinking glasses and tipsy laughter filled the bar as a man wearing an elaborately decorative mask entered and picked his way through the crowd to an empty and secluded booth at the back of the establishment.
Sitting down, he motioned for a waitress and ordered an expensive bottle of imported Gallian wine. Sitting back and waiting for his order to arrive, he placed his feet on the table casually and began flipping through a dataslate with picture captures of a heated battle in a scap field, his eyes occasionally flicking to the entrance as if waiting for someone to come through...
John Brown entered the bar, it was a pleasant place, and his senses were delighted with the smell of delicious pastries, and the sound of a beautiful violin playing. John Brown looked around the establishment, as if looking for someone. He noticed a rather odd man, wearing a masquerade mask beckoning towards him.
"Mr. Pimpernel, I presume?"
Le Pimpernel rose from his seat and extended his hand to the off duty police officer.
"Ah monsieur Brown," he said enthusiastically, "my old friend!"
Sitting down and beckoning for the man to join him, he stashed the dataslate away as a waitress arrived with the wine and two glasses.
"I am indeed Le Pimpernel monsieur," he said, pouring the wine and taking a sip.
He took a moment to savour the taste before continuing.
"Now I do not know how... involved you wish to get in my business but perhaps I should explain some things just so we are clear mon ami," said Le Pimpernel.
"You know already that I am a Gallian in a foreign land," he began, "and you know from our convosation in space that I deal in information.
He swilled his wine in the glass and took another sip.
"What I am trying to do in Liberty is to restart my business as it were," he continued, "I will not go into details but my business became, how do you say... unviable... in Gallia."
Taking out a cigarette, he lit it and blew a small smoke ring before continuing.
"No doubt you can see how you, as a police officer, may be useful to my purposes," he said, "I will of course pay you well for any relevant information you can provide to me and any... less than legal aspects of my business you can turn a blind eye to."
He sat with the cigarette in his mouth waiting for the officer to reply...
John Brown leaned back a bit, taking his time and choosing his words carefully.
"As I said before. I dabble a bit. I'd have no problems being part of your... business contacts, as long as my participating is merely in Information, and turning a blind eye. Not anything direct."
He leaned forward.
"Frankly, I don't really care about what happened in Gallia, all I'm interested in now is having a little something on the side here in Liberty. The question is, just how much are you willing to..."
Brown paused for a moment.
"Contribute, to make this work smoothly?"
""That is good," said Le Pimpernel, "as I said before, the best criminals are those who never break the law."
He took a drag from his cigarette and tapped the ash into the ashtray on the table.
"In terms of what would be expected of you and how much I would pay you, it is quite simple really," he said, "when I require information you may be able to provide, I will come to you with an amount of credits in exchange for the information."
Sitting upright and taking out the datapad from earlier, he flipped to a slide with details of a bank account.
"In terms of the actual amounts of credits I can offer," he said, "depending on the nature of the information provided, anything from two to ten million credits. Perhaps with a bonus for particuarly juicy scraps."
He sipped his wine and took another drag on the cigarette.
"Is this agreeable?"
Brown smirked a bit.
"More than agreeable. You've got yourself a deal."
Brown slid a small device towards Pimpernel.
"This device has some encryption frequencies and channel data on it. Use it to get in contact with me, I guarantee the encryption is neigh unbreakable if you don't have the right key."