LOST Chapter 20: Mori Moves

Read chapter 20 of LOST by Simply No One on NovelPedia.

The monitoring team found him on day five. I had bought four to six days with the parameter adjustment. I got four, which was the lower end of my estimate and therefore not a surprise, and which still felt like a failure of a kind I had not fully anticipated, the specific failure of a plan that worked exactly as designed and still produced the wrong outcome. The parameter I had moved allowed the alert threshold for Sai's likely location to be set two degrees outside the protocol specification. This meant that contact patterns which should have triggered an alert did not trigger one until they had accumulated beyond the adjusted threshold. In practice this meant the monitoring team's automated systems missed the first four days of activity around the guesthouse on the harbor road, which was what I had intended. What I had not sufficiently accounted for was Mori running a parallel check. He did not tell me this directly. He told me the outcome, which was that they had located Sai, and I was left to reconstruct the method from what I knew of how Mori thought, which I had been doing for six years and which I could do with reasonable accuracy. The parallel check would have been manual, not automated, run by Mori himself or by one of the two senior Watchers he trusted with the kind of work he did not want in the system logs. It would have run alongside the automated monitoring as a redundancy, not because Mori suspected me but because Mori built redundancy into everything as a matter of disposition, the way someone who has seen a plan fail once builds in the assumption that the plan will fail again and accounts for it. Twenty-six years ago his plan failed once. Since then he has built redundancy into everything. I should have accounted for the parallel check. I had not. This was the failure, the specific place where my planning had been less complete than it needed to be, and I located it now with the precision I would bring to any error, not to dwell in it but to understand it well enough not to repeat it. The glass room. Morning. Mori across the table with the carafe and the two cups and the folder, which today was thicker than the monitoring protocol had been, which was information in itself. He said: we found him. I said: where. He said: a guesthouse on the harbor road. Registered to a woman who crossed from W-03 six years ago. She runs it as legitimate accommodation, which is good cover, and she has been a known Thresher contact in this world for four years. We've had a flag on the property since she arrived. I had not known about the flag on the property. This was the second thing I had not accounted for: not the finding of Sai but the mechanism of the finding, the existing infrastructure the org had already built around the Thresher network in W-02, the flags and the traces and the accumulated six years of monitoring that meant any new contact with a known Thresher was going to surface eventually regardless of what I did with the alert parameters. I had thought I was protecting Sai by pushing him toward the network. I was understanding now that I had been, at least in part, making him more visible. I kept my face in the position it needed to be in. I said: extraction timing. Mori looked at the folder. He opened it and looked at something inside it and then closed it again, which was a thing he did when he had already decided something and was considering how to present the decision rather than what the decision was. I had seen this particular motion a number of times and I had learned to read it as the pause before a surprise, the preparation before something that was not what you expected. He said: we're not extracting yet. I said: what's the timeline. He said: we want to see who he finds first. I looked at Mori. He said: he's been in W-02 for five days. In that time he has connected with the guesthouse owner, with at least one other Thresher we don't yet have a full profile on, and with a local minor who appears to have som