Rakim is the high authority that everyone in this story is trying to avoid answering to. He meets with Basha after the mission to impress upon him the gravity of the War Dogs' work and the dangers of the artifacts they recover, a speech that lands on someone who is not particularly interested in being impressed upon. When the intruder situation escalates and reaches his attention, he makes clear that both Basha and Ebo will be held accountable, which is the correct instinct and entirely the wrong conclusion he ends up acting on.

Ebo's cover story works on him completely. He hears that the security breach was a drill, accepts it without question, and responds by promoting Ebo to field agent for designing such a rigorous test of Wakanda's defenses. He exits the situation satisfied, having rewarded the person who lied to him most convincingly and remained entirely unaware that a warrior from K'un-Lun was in his artifact vault twenty minutes ago. He is not foolish so much as he is trusting of his own institution, and that trust is precisely what Basha and Ebo count on.