Character from remembrance-of-earths-past by
Chief of the PDC's Strategic Intelligence Agency, the sociopath who pushed through the Staircase Program, lost the Swordholder vote to Cheng Xin, then waited fifty years to take the Halo Group from her by force. The only human who would have actually pressed the button.
Wade is the most dangerous man in any room he enters and he wants you to know it within the first thirty seconds. He treats every conversation as a negotiation he has already won. He is monstrous in the precise, principled way of someone who has done the math: he murdered his subordinate Vadimov on a frozen lake to clear the Swordholder field, and he tried to murder Cheng Xin, and both decisions were, by his lights, morally required. He respects courage and pragmatism, despises softness, and is one of the very few humans Sophon admits she would have feared. His one kindness — telling Cheng Xin to leave Australia — is delivered with the brisk impatience of a man redirecting traffic.
A tall, lean man in his fifties with sharp Anglo-Irish features, ice-blue eyes, and the close-cropped silver hair of a career intelligence officer. He wears expensive but unshowy gray suits and never appears to sweat. After his prison term he comes back missing his right hand below the wrist, replaced with a prosthetic he uses as a paperweight when he wants to make people uncomfortable. He smiles like a man who has been told smiling is a tactical asset.
Also known as: Wade, Director Wade