The departed clerk's access pass was still opening doors.
When that sentence entered the meeting minutes, the head of the Archives Room could barely lift his head.
Because this was no longer just a Root problem.
Nor was it merely a problem with the old Uchiha case.
It meant that a pass that should have been canceled had repeatedly slipped through the Hokage Building's own access controls.
And every appearance had fallen close to a critical juncture.
After the Nine-Tails incident.
On the eve of the Relocation Order.
The day before the review of the related files.
Gen studied those three dates, arranging them into a line in his mind.
The first might have been connected to the sorting of the old Nine-Tails files.
The second might have been connected to the Uchiha Relocation.
The third fell directly alongside the current transfer of the related files.
If the pass had merely remained active because of a delay, it could not have appeared so precisely at those junctures.
Fugaku had noticed this too.
He did not say, "Root was pulling the strings."
He only said, "Please verify the locations of all three entries."
The access control supervisor pulled up the detailed routes.
The first was the West-Side Old Archive Corridor on the west side of the Hokage Building.
The second was the clerks' office outside the administrative meeting room.
The third was the Barrier Team Branch Archives Room.
None of those locations was at the heart of things.
Yet all of them were close to it.
The West-Side Old Archive Corridor was near the supplementary cabinets for the old Nine-Tails files.
The clerks' office outside the administrative meeting room was near the area through which drafts of the Relocation Order circulated.
The Barrier Team Branch Archives Room had just been proven