28. Ana
ANA
The Baltic Health Infrastructure Documentation Office sits between a pharmacy warehouse and a shipping yard. Most people walk past it without looking twice. It handles hospital freight schedules and storage records. The lobby lights stay on late.
Dominik parks a second car a block away. He doesn’t hide it. He leaves it in plain sight, angled between two delivery vans.
I walk the distance from the first car to the second. I time it. I do it again with a bag in my hand. The second run takes longer.
“We need the building layout,” I say.
Dominik types a message. He doesn’t explain who it goes to.
Five minutes pass. Enough to feel intentional. The engine ticks as it cools. Then his phone vibrates once. He reads the message and deletes it without replying.
“Igor cleared access,” he says. “Fourth floor. The archive is under a compliance review. Paperwork is already filed.”
He looks at the screen once more.
“He sent door access levels,” he adds. “Who can badge in. Which doors log entries. Which ones don’t.”
We stop long enough to write things down.
“I don’t think about archives,” I say. I draw a loose circle on the paper and mark the center. “I think about people. Who needs it buried. Who gets hurt if it comes out. And who’s staying quiet instead of pushing.”
“We'll confirm it,” Dominik says. “Once we touch the ledger, the reactions tell us the rest.”
That’s when I know where the risk really sits—not in getting in, but in what follows. Igor can open doors, but he can’t close them if the council pushes.
On paper, the archive runs mirrored scans.
Compliance reviews get logged as routine and pushed through systems no one studies closely.
If the ledger is digital, I can pull what we need without triggering extraction alerts.
I can strip the direct name links and leave the structure intact so nothing flags as missing.
“What if it’s tied into a live system?” Dominik asks, leaning back in his chair.
“I don’t need to take it,” I say. “I only need to copy certain parts.”
He doesn’t ask where I learned it. It’s been part of my survival for years, first as Markov’s wife, then as his widow.
“If something shifts,” I say, “we keep moving.” I don’t rely on plans. I rely on space around them.
Markov never trusted one layer of protection. He buried records inside legitimate systems, but he also kept paper. Paper doesn’t disappear when servers go down. It doesn’t vanish when someone wipes a drive.
If this matters, it exists in print somewhere. I tell Dominik that.
He listens. “We prepare for both,” he says.
I don’t carry a scanner. That would slow me down. What I bring fits in my palm and looks like a power bank. Matte black. No markings. If someone pulls it from my bag, it looks ordinary.
Inside is a microSD the size of my fingernail.
We walk the perimeter once more before we enter the building. We check sightlines, windows, cameras, and exits. Then we step in.
The entrance looks like any other government office. A short set of steps, worn smooth in the middle, leads to glass doors. Just inside is the guard desk. The guard isn’t armed, but he’s paying attention.
Fluorescent lights hum overhead. Dominik hands over the papers. I don’t look at them. I watch the guard instead. He checks the dates twice and the stamp once, then he waves us through without speaking.
Inside, the building opens into a long corridor that smells of paper, floor cleaner, and stale tea. Along the wall by the sink, mismatched mugs sit in a row, used every day.
We move down the corridor looking like just another married couple with routine business to settle, my hand looped through his arm, a plain shoulder bag resting against my hip.
The bag isn’t the point. My coat is tailored with an inner flap stitched between lining and seam, a narrow pocket meant for paper folded once and kept flat. That’s where the copy will go.
Offices line both sides of the corridor with doors half open, phones ringing and going unanswered. A muted argument carries from one room, and a woman walks past with a tray holding a kettle and chipped cups.
No one looks at us.
We take the elevator. It rattles once before moving, then climbs slowly. The numbers tick upward without urgency. I watch the mirror instead of the doors. Faces drift in and out. No one studies us.
When we step out on the fourth floor, the building feels different. The windows are gone and the doors are heavier, spaced closer together. A narrow sign lists departments in small black letters. Compliance. Legacy Review. Archival Processing.
Dominik keeps walking without slowing, and I stay just behind him. We turn once, then again, and the hallway tightens around us. The lights shift from white to a softer yellow. The walls are scuffed where carts have passed for years.
At the end of the corridor, a desk blocks the way.
A woman sits behind it with a ledger open in front of her and her glasses low on her nose.
A desktop monitor glows beside the book, the screen filled with rows of entries.
She checks the clipboard, glances at the screen, matches the name, then gestures down a short side hall.
“Second door on the left.”
We thank her and move on.
The door we stop at has no label. The lock is newer than the frame around it. Dominik pauses long enough to listen, then opens it.
The room is smaller than the hallway suggested. No windows. Shelves line three walls, boxes stacked and labeled by year and category in the same neat hand. A desk sits in the center with a terminal and a stack of folders waiting to be processed. The air is cool and dry.
I look up first, scanning corners and ceiling lines. I don’t see a camera. Dominik steps inside and closes the door carefully behind us.
We don’t speak. I take in the shelves again, slower this time. The boxes sit squarely and evenly. The labels aren’t new. Nothing looks disturbed.
“There,” Dominik says. It isn’t a name. It’s a gap.
One shelf stays uniform until it doesn’t. The newer boxes stand out from the rest. Their labels are printed instead of handwritten, and the dates cover a shorter range than the volume suggests. The category reads Legacy Consolidation.
I step closer and read the codes without touching the boxes. Medical Procurement. Regional Logistics. Deferred Audits.
Dominik comes up beside me.
“Yelena used to route files like this,” he says.
“Not anymore,” I say.
There’s no sign she worked here. No nameplate. No extra chair pulled slightly out. No mug left behind on the shelf.
“They moved her,” I add.
“Or reassigned her,” he answers. “Same result.”
I open one of the newer boxes and shift the front folders just enough to see behind them. The paper inside is thick and older stock. The edges are worn from being handled more than once.
“These weren’t meant to be scanned and filed away,” I say. “They were meant to stay in circulation.”
Dominik watches the stack.
“He wouldn’t have left this on a server,” he says.
“No,” I say. “Too many people can touch that.”
Something about the room holds my attention. Markov never relied on obvious locks. He kept important things inside normal systems, the kind people stopped questioning.
I move along the shelves slowly, reading labels and watching for small differences. Most of the boxes match what’s printed on them. Contracts. Shipping Reconciliations. Audit Responses.
Then I reach a section that’s too consistent. The categories match the rest, and the codes follow the same pattern, but the folders inside are sleeved. Not for age. For control.
“This one’s tracked,” I say.
Dominik steps closer. “Tracked how?”
“Signed in and out,” I say.
I slide one folder out just enough to see the inside cover. Plain brown board. No title. A stamped identifier sits near the bottom, and a faded red diagonal mark cuts across the corner.
Behind it sits a slim metal case fixed into the back of the shelf. It’s not large. It’s locked with a key and sealed with a strip that would tear if forced. A log sheet is clipped beside it in a clear sleeve.
Dates. Times. Initials.
The handwriting is the same on every line.
“One custodian,” Dominik says.
“Yes,” I say. “If something goes missing, there’s one name attached to it.”
The log is the control.
No one moves this without signing for it.
I check the seal first. It hasn’t been broken.
I photograph the log sheet, line by line. The initials repeat. The handwriting stays the same across every entry.
Dominik logs into the terminal under the compliance review window Igor opened. When he selects the shelf ID, it prompts for confirmation that the material falls under the active review.
He confirms. The system records the access.
A soft click sounds from inside the shelf. The lock releases.
I open the case.
The ledger sits inside, black cover worn at the corners. No title. No marking on the front.
I open it to the index and mark the sections we need. My device captures each page without sound or light. I set it to continuous and turn the pages at a steady pace.
Council names appear beside approval signatures.
Duplicate forms signed by two officials on the same day.
Emergency procurement waivers pushed through by judges who never recorded the cases.
A regional leader’s office routing funds before they circle back to a logistics firm tied to Sergei’s network.
Roman Kadeev’s name appears in a different column. Companies folded and reopened under transport subsidiaries that answer to his faction.
“Someone’s going to have to answer for the gaps,” I say, keeping my hands moving.
I don’t start at the front and I don’t move straight through. I go to the entries we marked first. The names tied to leverage. The transfers that don’t match the public filings. I capture those pages before anything else and check each image before turning to the next.
Some entries I pass over. Others I capture twice.
This isn’t removal. It’s duplication that looks like review. I pause once on a set of names, then continue, careful not to leave any pattern that stands out.
Dominik stays near the door, eyes on the hall. He doesn’t hurry me.
I’m halfway through the last section when the building shifts. The steady hum from the vents fades, then settles into a lower pitch. I don’t look up. I keep turning pages and capturing them at the same pace.
When I finish, I close the ledger the way it was. I slide it back into the case and lock it. The seal presses flat against the edge.
We step into the corridor.
The sound hits first. Or the lack of it. Phones aren’t ringing anymore. The low conversation from the offices has thinned out. Doors that were half open are closed.
At the end of the hall, the desk is empty. The chair is pushed in. The ledger that sat on top is gone.
We walk toward the elevator. Dominik presses the call button. Nothing lights up. The display above the doors is dark. We try the stairwell. The handle turns, but the door doesn’t open.
Dominik scans the hallway.
“This isn’t local,” he says.
The lights flicker once, then hold. Somewhere below us, a door shuts hard.
The building is still. Too still.
Dominik looks at me.
“They’re here,” he says.