The indirect route — hunting the performer and the auteur's circle

pivotal · ~9-19 Nov YDAU

• When: the two-route doctrine standing from the Antitoi occupation (?/9 Nov); the indirect phase opens in earnest with the Read-Only verdict (~14 Nov) and runs to the 19-Nov escalation
• What: The hunt's hinge. From the start "there were two ways of going": the direct route — locate and secure a Master copy on their own — and, "held abeyant" behind it, the indirect one. When the found copy proves Read-Only (event 14), Fortier commits the cell to "forfeiting hopes of securing a Master copy and instead striving to secure the original Master, the auteur's own cartridge" — i.e. "the more arduous and risky task of taking for technical interview known persons associated with the Entertainment." The apparatus deploys: the performer's radio station's technical engineer is "acquired in a public but low-risk operation" and divulges all he knows "under the mere descriptive threat of technical-interview procedures" (then becomes event 15's first Subject); Fortier, Marathe, Balbalis, and Ossowiecke — "all those with the better English" — make "the rounds of all Substance-Difficulty-Rehabilitation facilities in hospitals, psychiatric institutions, and demi-maisons within a 25-km. radius," Fortier scanning the Phoenix House common room and finding "no person among them wore a veil of facial concealment"; and in the Southwest the cell runs "the infiltration of that relative of the auteur felt most strongly (according to Marathe) to have knowledge or possession of a duplicable copy" — the athlete Orin, to whom "The Americans' field-operative, jutting with prostheses, had been clinging... like a bad odor." By 19 Nov the cell's own record has every canvasser "reported back negatively for all signs of this veiled performer" — while, unreported, Marathe has already found her at Ennet House (the AFR thread (event 14); as printed, the cell's record stays negative). See the AFR thread (event 10), events 13, 14; the Joelle timeline (the performer's whereabouts).