Cristal is an agent with Department RE.
The proper name is "Department RE (for Research and Evaluation)", sometimes labeled just RE). It is a "section of the British Civil Service established sixteen years previously" and is a member of the larger British Intelligence community. It is said to be "not only clearly unorthodox but also highly important". We first learn of the organization through the eyes of two women working for its duo Directors, men named Sleightley (referred to as K) and Pond (known as C), and it is from them that we are told that none of the friends of these two ladies in the Service knew anything about the Department. This is noteworthy because they knew that you learned a lot more about your own organization "from outside the department than from daily contact with one's bosses inside" and to their amazement, they were learning that no one not in RE knew anything about it, at least not the highly covert intel side of it.
Officially the other side of the operations was tasked to "collect and assess information relating to commercial and theoretical trends and practices, which helped other Civil Service departments i their forward planning and purchasing" (whew!). This free range gave the organization extremely powerful abilities and cover to conduct the secret side of its unofficial mandate. Put another way, RE has "no responsibility to, and owed no loyalty to, either the British Government of the day or its acknowledged anti-subversion and counter-espionage arms, MI5 and MI6.
Another very telling piece of intel on RE is that Sleightley had sometime back successfully bugged the private phone of the Director of sister agency, MI6, and routinely monitored it and made notes.
Cristal Vengan, described in Pond's mind as "startlingly beautiful", is a fairly young woman aged 27 who had been with the agency for 4 years. Why she had chosen RE was something that still amazed her bosses who considers her "possibly the most accomplished and ruthless field agent they had ever recruited". Pond was especially curious why she did the sort of work for RE as she did; why she "had chosen to dedicate her beauty and her body and her brain to the most soulless and hazardous way of life (and death) that could ever have been offered to her". One other telling point is when she receives the first assignment after we meet her, she is surprised it is to be bodyguard for someone, thinking "how decidedly odd it was the a RE agent should be allotted the task of specifically keeping someone alive".
Vengan is described as "exactly six feet tall, and her hair was a shining waterfall of the sheerest jet; her eyebrows well defined, but not hick; her nose classically long and perfectly straight. She had eyes of a deep, dark, almost violet, blue. Her skin was clear but for tiny, impudent clusters of freckles at the sides of her nose. Her mouth was proportionately wide, with full, pink lips."
Also playing a major role in the first recorded adventure is fellow RE agent who would go on to have his own solo adventure later.
!!Good Lines:
- When instructed to get close to a potential target, "intimately, if you consider it necessary", "Cristal sniggered, 'That could be ... diverting'."