The IT contractor’s trace resolved on a Saturday morning, which was not when Marco had expected it and was therefore a Saturday morning that rearranged itself around the information rather than proceeding on its original schedule.
The proxied destination, followed through four layers of routing that had been designed to terminate in an unresolvable dead end, had an error at the third layer. Small, technical, the kind that a more sophisticated operator would not have made, which told Marco something about the sophistication of the person who had set up the channel rather than the sophistication of the person using it. Someone had built the routing for the informant. The informant had used it, reliably, for eighteen months, without understanding its limitations well enough to know when thos
