Two men come through the door. Eastern European, professional, weapons holstered now that you are compliant. The man in the good overcoat stands.
"Sensible," he says.
They take your phone, your laptop bag, and the USB drive. They do not harm you. They sit you in a chair and the man talks at you for twenty minutes about pragmatism, history, and the pointlessness of individual conscience against the machinery of state interest.
Then they leave. All three of them, through the side door. You hear a car start.
You are alone in the warehouse with nothing. They have the drive.
But they do not have what is in your head. The sixteen pages you translated four years ago, still word-perfect in your memory. The location coordinates buried on page eleven.
And they do not know about Anna Voss.
The story pauses here…