Locker room and the Loach saga — "An hysterical rumor that the Québec…"
An hysterical rumor that the Québec players had been spotted coming down a ramp out of a charter-bus in the main lot and were by all appearances not the Québec J.D.C. and -W.C. squads but some sort of Special-Olympicish Québec adult wheelchair-tennis contingent—this rumor flew wildly around the locker room and then died out when a couple of the sub-14’s who burned nervous energy by scampering around checking rumors scampered out and up the stairs to check the rumor and failed to return.
Context
The A.F.R. arrive at E.T.A. in plain sight, down a ramp, and the sight is so unserious — "Special-Olympicish" — that it circulates as a joke and dies as a joke, even as the kids sent to check it never come back. Fortier's prosthetics thesis (p. 723) cashed out at the point of attack: U.S. "sensitivity" means nobody can perceive wheelchairs as threat, so the wheelchair is the perfect Trojan horse. The novel's last word on the assassins' method — the raid itself stays outside the covers.