The mountainside interface with Steeply; the attaché "razzle" and the A.F.R.'s denial

pivotal · 30 April – 1 May YDAU

• When: the night of 30 April into dawn 1 May YDAU, on an outcropping NW of Tucson AZ (the A.F.R.'s Southwest Ops-area); the attaché "razzle-dazzle" was ~1-2 April YDAU
• What: The A.F.R.'s standing intelligence channel with O.N.A.N. runs through Marathe: his "sixth or seventh" all-night interface with U.S.O.U.S. operative Hugh Steeply, near the A.F.R.'s four-Quonset Southwest base ("doorknobs hot to touch and hell-stench inside the empty rooms"). The precipitating incident: a cartridge of the Entertainment reached a Saudi medical attaché in Boston by ordinary physical mail, not InterLace pulse, routed through the desert Southwest where B.S.S. suspects the A.F.R.'s dissemination mechanism; the dead — attaché, family, embassy, neighbors, police — number "Upwards of twenty" (Steeply) / "twenty-three human beings lost for all time" (Marathe's own tally, as printed). B.S.S. wants to know whether the A.F.R. disseminated it or made the attaché an example; Marathe denies both — the cell has "neither digestive medicals nor diplomatic entourages on any lists for action" — and floats the attaché's possible prior link to the auteur's Québécoise widow. Steeply also raises the Rodney Tine / Luria Perec channel (Tine's O.N.A.N.-architect stenographer doubled as DuPlessis's), the mirror-case of an operative compromised by love.