The mirror-ambush plan: seize and replace the Québec junior team en route to E.T.A.

pivotal · 19 Nov YDAU

• When: 19 Nov YDAU (dateline); Balbalis's van drives north into the blizzard that night
• What: With all leads on the veiled performer back negative (Marathe, Ossowiecke, and Balbalis all report failure), Fortier and Marathe throw into effect the most drastic operation yet — "to acquire members of the immediate family of the auteur, perhaps in public." A direct assault on E.T.A. is impossible ("A.F.R.s fear nothing in this hemisphere except tall and steep hillsides"), so the plan is to intercept and replace the Québec provincial junior tennis squad en route to a gala exhibition at the Academy: Balbalis's modified van drives north to install a giant mirror across I-91's southbound lanes below the border checkpoint — "An old F.L.Q. trick," the planning scene calls it, though the record pins event 4's original campaign on the A.F.R. itself (see Dating notes) — so the chartered bus, deluded by its own headlights, swerves off the road; surviving children beyond the six the van can hold "would be allowed to die for leur rai pays." Marathe, left in charge of the operation's details (Fortier having departed to Phoenix, event 17), promises "an excellent ruse to explain the wheelchairs and adult beards of the false players," while Broullîme's Entertainment field-tests run on two newly acquired Subjects — a white-wigged, cookware-laden eccentric and a cross-dressed purse-carrier (the scene record's Randy Lenz / Poor Tony Krause identifications; the raw names neither), the former severing the latter's digits to spare his own. See Marathe's timeline (event 21).