#I've been thinking about this for AGES esp since Tempest and Fault but I've been too distracted to write it up so lemme just finally...

[captainofthetidesbreath]

I've been thinking about why Ginsberg was asked to kidnap Milton Fleit Sr. specifically, and I think, to put it the way @utilitycaster put it to me back in February, that the plan is Fight Club.

If you're unfamiliar with Fight Club, the film adaptation: the third act revolves around a plan to wipe debt records by blowing up the headquarters of various credit card companies and of a credit reporting agency, setting everyone back to zero.

The Breach doesn't need as many explosives. The Trust keeps their records of every account in the one place (per 1.15): the Central Vault, the precise location of which within the geography of the Highest Light has been pointed out at every opportunity this season.

There isn't a whole lot that kidnapping Fleit offers to the Breach other than vacating his office temporarily (dubious, unless they want to replace him with their own person) or to get information about how the Bank of Valor works as an institution and how the Vault is laid out (also shaky, but potentially possible). Kozma claims (in 3.07): "The Breach isn't just out there. It's in here: inside the Trust, inside the Company, inside this city." The fact that the Company is mentioned* but not the Bank makes me wonder if they don't actually have a meaningfully significant enough foothold inside the Bank. Thus, they needed a way to get inside of it, understand it, or both.

* Tangent, since the Company is specifically mentioned, there must be someone we know there who is with the Breach. It's gotta be Gretel; we have only two named current members of the Company, and the other one is Spahr. It has to be Gretel just by process of elimination. This is not actually relevant to this point but—

That also leads me to wonder if this is why there's this sense of hovering over Phineas early on. (Hieronymous is in the Breach, Kozma already knew a lot about Phineas, so many seem to be keeping tabs on him, etc.) I wonder if it's like... after the Fleit plot failed, the Breach needed someone who had or could acquire security clearance to move freely through the Vault, a familiarity of off-limits areas, or both. As the new Prime Adsecla, and an apparently contentious pick for it (as suggested in appendices for 1.06), Phineas both holds a valuable position and is potentially ideologically vulnerable, making him a prime [ba dum tsh] candidate to target for a flip attempt. So, perhaps they've been working on Phineas since the Fleit plot failed. But, that's also a bit of a tangent.

Point is here: they seem to have needed Fleit for something. Kozma had ideas for what to do with Phineas, and whatever they needed Fleit for must be a gap in their logistics, but there is not a whole lot that Fleit and Phineas have in common, other than familiarity with various high-security spaces. So, I do wonder if the thing they needed was Vault access, because the specific plan is to blow up the TRW building Vault and zero out the entire debt record.