Multiple calls, actually. There’s no way the phone-drones in the Star bureaucracy are going to let a call from a street drek like me go straight through to the people I want to contact. And, for obvious masons, those same phone-drones can’t know that I’m an undercover op. In the old days, I’d probably have been given a single phone number that would connect me directly with some higher-up’s office, but today that kind of direct line is too much of a risk—a datapath for outside deckers to use to penetrate a corporate official’s private comm and computing system. No, these days all calls to and from Star officials have to go through switching systems with wetware components. And those wetware components—the phone-drones again—don’t know Rick Larson from any other hunk of guttermeat in the sprawl. Still, there are procedures in place.