Tine dispatched to metro Boston to run the samizdat manhunt — his one POV chapter

pivotal · Early Nov YDAU

• When: Early Nov YDAU (scene 107 dateline; POV: Rodney Tine)
• What: The Entertainment's lethality having reached Gentle only after it took out a Near Eastern medical attaché and a dozen incidentals in Boston "late last spring," Tine is dispatched to metro Boston "to coordinate substantiation" of the cartridge and its dissemination-point — the Canadian-involvement angle being U.S.O.U.S.'s "special province." His one POV chapter opens on "the only bona fide blackmailable thing about" him: the special metric ruler with which "Tine measures his penis every A.M., like clockwork; has since twelve; still does" (plus a telescoping travel model and a Franklin-Planner chart) — the human flaw under the intelligence chief. He has toured a ward of the pithed victims; his staff, after "dozens of entries," settle on the code-name "the samizdat"; test-subjects drawn from federal/military penal systems are being expended to describe the cartridge (the Leavenworth lance-corporal's report of the veiled woman in the revolving doors). Steeply, who reports up Tine's chain, tells Marathe that "Rod the God Tine's got Tom Flatto's I/O boys running tests around the clock" — the Marathe/Steeply desert operation feeds this manhunt. The samizdat's likely dissemination-point: the U.S. north border, with hubs in metro Boston/New Bedford and the desert Southwest.