Chapter 28: Obi-Wan Names His Faith and Arthur Names His Fear

The operation had taken three weeks to build and forty minutes to fall apart.

Arthur learned the precise geometry of the failure from Bail Organa, who delivered it in the flat, careful voice of a man who had been awake for thirty-one hours and had moved past exhaustion into something colder and more functional. The financial network they had been mapping — nine shell corporations, four subsidiary accounts, two Senate communications contracts, and a procurement channel running through a mid-level budgetary committee — had been handed to the Republic's Judicial Department in a sealed package with full documentation, exactly as planned. The Judicial officer receiving it had been Bail's own recommendation. The documentation had been verified by two independent auditors whose names appeared on no Palpatine-affiliated list they possessed.

Within six hours, the file had been reclassified. Within twelve, the shell corporations had begun the particular kind of dissolution that left no legally recoverable trace. Within twenty, the procurement channel had been restructured under a new committee chair whose appointment paperwork was dated, impeccably, eleven days prior.