They operated through influence, through information, through the careful placement of value in positions that Takahashi's machine would eventually need or want. They didn't break laws. They used the same mechanisms that powerful people used. They had simply arranged to be holding the right cards in the right sequence before the hand was fully played. Daisuke Mori had taught her that.
She didn't say his name during the meeting. She rarely did in this context, but he was present in everything, in the structure of how this board operated, in the particular philosophy that shaped their choices, in the reason any of them were in this room at all. When the meeting had covered what it needed to cover, Harold looked at her again. "There's one more thing." He nodded to the woman at the far end of the table, a younger member early 40s named Cassandra Webb who handled communications and digital infrastructure for the network.
Cassandra turned her laptop toward the center of the table. On the screen was a photograph. It was a security camera image timestamped from earlier that evening taken from a camera positioned above the entrance of Aurelius. The image was clear enough. It showed Amara stepping out of the service entrance and it showed the black car at the curb and it showed the driver opening the door.
"This went up on a private financial news aggregator 45 minutes ago." Cassandra said. "Someone inside the restaurant shared it. The caption asks who the waitress is." Amara looked at the image.
"How wide?" "Small circulation, niche, the kind of thing Takahashi's intelligence team monitors." Cassandra paused. "They've already seen it." The room was quiet.
"So, his investigation started faster than we expected." Patricia said. "It started the moment she answered him." Harold replied. He didn't sound concerned.
He He sounded like a man watching a chess piece move exactly where he'd predicted it would. He looked at Amara. "This isn't a problem. It's an acceleration." Amara looked at the photograph on the screen for another moment, herself in uniform stepping toward an open door, caught between two versions of herself in a single frame.
"I know." She said. She looked up. "Let him dig. He won't find what he's looking for."
She paused. "But he'll find enough to keep looking and while he's looking, he won't be watching what we're actually doing." Nobody disagreed. The meeting closed at 12:40. The others gathered their things and filed out in ones and twos.