The Copenhagen Protocol

You collect the key card and floor plan from the locker, but you do not go to Hellerup.

Instead, you call the burner number Marcus gave you — the one he said was Lindqvist's personal line — and you say four words: "I have the document."

Then you go home, pack a bag, and move to a hotel in Vesterbro under a name you have not used in four years. You take the key card with you.

Within three hours, two things happen.

First, your apartment is searched. You know because you left a strip of clear tape across the door frame at knee height, invisible unless you know to look. When you return to check, it is broken.

Second, your old phone — the one you left on the kitchen table — receives a text from an unknown number: "Name your price."

Not Lindqvist. The syntax is wrong for a frightened seventy-three-year-old Dane. This is someone who buys and sells information professionally.

You have flushed out a third party. Someone who is neither Marcus nor Lindqvist, and who wants the protocol document badly enough to respond within hours.

You text back one word: "Tomorrow."