the pond-draining / the engineer snatched

The surveillance state's chief, positioned to see everything, watching the wrong thing. Rodney Tine, Chief of Unspecified Services, stands the whole morning at an eighth-floor window with panoramic "specular vision" over the concentric rings of the pond-draining spect-op, idly tracking Frisbees to the ridge and back — and the one operation that matters, the A.F.R.'s snatch of the WYYY engineer who can rebuild the Entertainment's master, unfolds on the far southwest hillside just below the ridgeline, in the exact fold his purview can't reach. The watcher-in-chief has a god's-eye view of a duck pond and a blind spot over the abduction being run against his own side. Surveillance rendered as the comedy of the blind spot: the more total the vision, the more precisely it misses.