The Boston "razzle" — the medical attaché massacre; Tine dispatched to metro Boston

pivotal · ~April YDAU ("late last spring")

• When: "late last spring" YDAU (the attaché scene-cluster's own dateline is 1 April YDAU); treated as recent on the 30 April mountainside; Tine dispatched to Boston early November YDAU
• What: The samizdat arrives, unbidden, by ordinary mail at the Cambridge home of a diplomatically-immune medical attaché — and takes out the attaché, his Saudi-citizen wife, embassy staff, neighbors, and most of the responding police: "Upwards of twenty" out of commission, "twenty-three human beings lost for all time." The Saudi Ministry of Entertainment's stink and the diplomatic status escalate it to J. Gentle, who is apprised "only after" the Boston razzle. The victim is no simple civilian on the Office's background checks: Mideast/Saudi but "a compatriot of yours. Canadian citizenship. Born in Ottawa, to Arab émigrés," Montreal residence — and Boston follow-up reports "possible indications of the victim's prior possible involvement with the widow of the auteur we both know was responsible for the Entertainment in the first place" (she taught at Brandeis where he did his residency; "This wife herself a Québecer, Rémy, from L'Islet county—Chief Tine says three years spent on Ottawa's 'Personnes Qui On Doit' list"). O.U.S. suspects A.F.R. dissemination (postal codes route the package through the desert Southwest, where the cell's routing mechanism is proposed); Marathe denies it: "We have neither digestive medicals nor diplomatic entourages on any lists for action [...] Nor in particular Montreal civilians." Tine, his retinue, and his ruler are dispatched to coordinate substantiation in metro Boston. This is the beat that puts Steeply into the field against Marathe and the whole Office into Boston. See the AFR thread (event 7) (the A.F.R. side and its denial); medical-attache; the Avril timeline (the widow).