The admission costs her. Doctors guard their doors. She turns the monitor back. "You understand the law."
"I understand vows," I say.
Outside, snow lies thick on the curb. A plow scrapes by and throws a ridge against a hydrant. On the corner, a florist strings lights in a window, paper angels on twine. I stand in the cold until my jaw stops its anger. Then I call Misha.
"Grey room. Now."
The grey room sits two floors below the chapel, past a steel door that weighs as much as a man who has worked the docks for thirty years. Ash walls hold a table that doesn't wobble, a row of phone lockers, a lead-glass cabinet, and two quiet racks of drives. In the high corner, a small icon faces the stone where the servers cannot see it. Here, lies run out of places to sit.
Misha stands over a printout with red strokes like sutures. Katya works at the far bench under a lamp bent low over tweezers and a tray. She is all edges and nerve, slim as a whip, sharp-faced in the cold light, combat boots planted like a verdict.
On the center table rests Monk, our Mobile Offline Non-networked Kit. A black case open on foam, an air-gapped laptop, a write-blocker with tamper seals, and a compact printer that gives us paper and nothing else. No cables to the building. No radios. No door for rumor. The drive from the bell tower sits inside a static sleeve that eats noise. Misha taps it once with a gloved knuckle, steady as a dock man testing a crate.
"Talk," I say.
"No calls left the stick after you sealed it," he answers, lifting a page that smells of toner, and on it he lists what lives inside—images, transcripts, access logs dressed to look like our house, the dressing neat and sly and almost perfect until it slips.
"Show me the seams."
He circles three lines in blue. Our routers stamp connections with a habit the way a man bars his seven, and herethe stamp is copied well and then forgotten for four entries, a forger who lost his rhythm.
Katya tips her chin, her red hair a small banner. "There is a little prayer in the file," she says, dry as salt. "A maker's mark. White wolf tucked in the margins. Some boys sign their sins." Her mouth curves, not kind. She respects a good tell.
"Sergei." I say. "Clinic?"
She clips the stick to the safe reader, hands steady and quick, a fox working a lock. "Image, verify, print on paper," I say, and she runs the Monk.
She mutters about my poetry for paper and keeps working. When the candle-blue screen settles, she leans back like a judge after a verdict and says, "It starts inside our house. Picture a thief with a borrowed sacristy key. The link went to the clinic, opened Valentina's file, made a copy, left one inside our system, then handed the rest off through a city relay. The time stamps line up. It is the same hand on every step."
"The flower—check it." My eyes are ice grey. "Gardenia shoved through our lock, white as a lie on Christmas Eve."
Katya brings the silver bud vase the maid found on Valentina's table. Her boots bite the concrete. She twists the base with a jeweler's wrench and splits the metal clean. Inside sits a resin pocket, a thin battery, and a tiny slot with a card. She lifts the SIM with tweezers and smiles like a scalpel. "Bugged bouquet," she says. "It is water resistant and has a week of life. One job only—listen and send."
"The SIM used data in ten short bursts," she reads. "Topped up at a kiosk for cash. No name. The strongest tower sitsover a pharmacy three blocks away. Each time this SIM wakes, a second phone lights that same tower. The second phone doesn't do anything else. It pings, waits, and goes dark. A lookout." Her voice is a dry match struck in a church.
Misha lifts a photograph. Street shot of a rental at the curb. The date is a small ghost. The plate reads clean through the slush.
"We have it," he says, his voice almost satisfied. "The rental sits under a short-term corporate account for a ‘consultancy’. That firm has three clients. All three are charities with the same people on their boards. The same boards sit on all three. We saw this path once before when we shut the pier. The wire leaves New Jersey, touches a shell we tied to Vetrov, then hops again. Two stops. Just to hide the hand."
I look at Katya. "The clinic log used a fake staff pass," I say. "Your guess?"
"Same pattern here." She taps a map with her pencil. "The touch that hit the clinic brushed our estate. Not one address. Many. Guest network. West Wing. Library. And a repeater that was not ours, alive in a service hall for fourteen minutes, then gone. Different rooms, same hand."
The stick is dressed like a carol book. The top folders sing simple. Under them sit nests of folders. One ‘random' name is a tilt cipher. You angle the letters and it spells VETROV. Sloppy pride. A skim of the chapel calendar sits beside it. Whoever built this wanted dates, not gossip, the hour a girl would stand where candles are.
I ask for Aleksandr. Misha lays out the loop—parish, florist, curb, driver in an electrician's coat. Same days. Same windows. The sum is not poetry. Sergei planned. Aleksandrdelivered. The clinic gave them the secret. The repeater gave them our halls. The stick gives us their signature.
Simple. Ugly. Traceable.
Katya shuts her eyes once, opens them, and says, "He wanted her alone."
"This is inside," I say, my teeth set like a bolt sliding home.
"Inside," Misha answers. "Here. A linen cart stuck in the lift while the steward signed for an unmarked box." He flips another page. "The box weighed nothing," he says, then grimaces at his own choice of words. "The box carried almost no mass."
Katya nods. "Inside was a palm-sized plug built to look like a nightlight. It seats in five seconds, no tools, no training. Anyone with access could place it, which is the point."
"The service cam hums," Misha adds, "and gives us one frame worth keeping."
