four branches, no decision

Here the double ledger opens into a full four-way branch: stay and observe for the A.F.R.; bolt and phone Fortier; instead phone Steeply and defect to O.N.A.N.; or hold and time the betrayal for maximum advantage — "it may be far wiser of waiting until Québec had been evicted and the A.F.R. were fully engaged to reveal his quadrupling for O.N.A.N." Every option is live at once, weighed in a single interview, the loyalties genuinely unresolved rather than merely concealed. The word the text supplies for his condition — "quadrupling" — is the theme's limit case: an agent so nested in pretense that even he cannot yet say which side he is on.