voluminous, confident, and wrong
That far be it from her to tell the U.S. Office of Unspecified Services its business, but why not simply go to J.O.I.’s widow and verify directly the existence and location of the purported cartridge?
Context
The book's running joke about intelligence work: the interrogation extracts an enormous, fluent, self-assured monologue that is mostly secondhand supposition. Notkin "tell[s] everything she believed she knew" — and she believes she knows the film's cosmology, the two suicides, the widow's motives, the acid-flask trajectory — yet punctuates it by advising the operatives to go verify the one concrete fact directly with the widow, and by conceding pieces of it "didn't make too much sense to her either." The samizdat's contents, Joelle's deformity, and the family's history belong to other themes; what the espionage lens captures is the shape of the yield — pages of confident, unreliable product wrung out of a frightened source under a borrowed movie lamp.