The lights in the Hokage's Office were still on.
Baishi closed the last draft concerning the restructuring of the Konoha Military Police Force. His fingertips lingered at the edge of the page, but he did not sign it.
It was late. Outside the window, only the wind could be heard.
A soft knock came at the office door: three long, two short. The General Staff Headquarters' contact signal.
"Come in."
The door opened, and Shikaku Nara walked in, carrying the chill of the night and a faint smell of tobacco. He had no folder with him, only a thin sheet of printed paper pinched between his fingers.
But he gripped that sheet tightly.
Shikaku set it on Baishi's desk and slid it forward. The paper glided across the smooth surface and stopped beside Baishi's hand.
"Lord Hokage." Shikaku's voice was a little hoarse. "The Grid-Based Monitoring System just flagged an anomalous movement report."
Baishi looked away from the unsigned draft and down at the paper.
The report was spare: a route map, a few lines of automatically generated code, and an orange risk marker. A blue line ran from the Ichiraku Ramen Shop to a disused archive room on the seventh underground floor of Konoha Hospital.
At the endpoint, the system had flagged an "unregistered" Chakra contact. The energy fluctuation was minuscule, but its nature had been classified as "encrypted information transfer."
"Based on the route overlap and behavior pattern, the system identified Lady Tsunade as the contact." Shikaku's voice held no emotion. He was merely stating a cold fact. "And the person most likely to contact her through such an old-fashioned method is Lord Jiraiya."
Baishi picked up the paper. Somehow, its weight seemed to settle into his fingertips.
The new surveillance system was like a freshly woven net.