watchers timed around the other service
it was almost as if the legless and pathologically shy punting-groupies were somehow afraid of Moment’s Junoesque Ms. Steeply—Orin had seen his last wheelchair the day before she came up, and now (he realized, driving) it was only hours after she’d left that they were now back, with their shy ruses
Context
The two operations orbiting Orin are deconflicting, and only he can't see it. The A.F.R.'s wheelchaired watchers disappear the day before Steeply arrives and reappear within hours of her leaving — the Québecois surveillance team clearing the field while the U.S.O.U.S. operative is in town and resuming the moment she is gone. Orin registers the pattern precisely ("his last wheelchair the day before she came up... only hours after she'd left") and files it as the shyness of groupies, missing that he has just described one intelligence service timing its visibility around another around the same target.