28
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’tdisappear 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.
