Joe didn't know anymore.
He just knew that somewhere ahead, in a town that barely existed, Bill Kinsman might be waiting.
24
The sublevel records room beneath the old Federal Reserve annex hadn't been designed for people.
It had been designed for retention.
Ivy signed in at the security desk and showed her badge—U.S. Department of the Treasury—and watched the guard glance at it, then at her, then back at the badge again. His eyes lingered on her face just long enough to make the comparison, then dropped back to the badge photo.
He made a call.
Someone upstairs approved it.
The guard handed her a temporary access card without comment, his expression carefully neutral in the way that suggested he'd learned not to ask questions about who went down and what they were looking for.
She clipped the card to her belt and walked to the elevator at the end of the hall.
The elevator was older than she was. The panel inside had been updated at some point with new buttons and labels but the cage itself was original, made of riveted steel and industrial paint worn smooth by decades of hands.
She pressed B5 and felt the mechanism engage with a heavy clunk that traveled up through the floor.
The descent was slow.
The elevator took her down past the floors marked on the panel. B2. B3. B4.
The air changed as she went deeper. Cooler. Drier. The kind of climate-controlled atmosphere that wasn't meant for comfort but for preservation. She could feel the pressure shift in her ears.
It stopped at B5, a level that no longer appeared on the building directory.
The doors opened with a pneumatic hiss.
The smell hit her first. Old paper. Dust. A faint chemical tang from decades of fire suppression systems and pest control treatments. The air tasted recycled, filtered through systems that had been running for decades.
The doors opened onto a low concrete corridor lined with steel doors, each stenciled with faded alphanumeric codes. The ceiling was barely seven feet high, crossed with conduit and ventilation ducts painted the same institutional gray as the walls.
Fluorescent lights ran the length of the corridor in wire cages, casting a flat, colorless illumination.
This wasn't a vault. It was something older. A Cold War solution to a Cold War problem: where to put records that were too sensitive to destroy and too awkward to declassify.
A woman in her sixties waited for her beside a rolling cart. She wore a cardigan over a blouse that had probably been pressed that morning but had since surrendered to the static and dryness of the air down here. Her ID badge hung from a lanyard, the photo so faded it was barely recognizable.
"You're Treasury?" she asked.
"Yes."
"Financial Crimes?"
"Counter-proliferation," Ivy said.
The archivist gave her a thin smile. "That explains why you're here."
She turned and started walking without waiting for a response. Ivy followed, her footsteps echoing off the concrete in a way that made the corridor feel even more confined than it was.
They walked together past rows of shelving packed with banker's boxes and green metal file drawers stamped DEFUNCT, MERGED, or REASSIGNED. The shelves stretched back into darkness beyond the reach of the overhead lights.
Ivy caught glimpses of letterhead that hadn't existed in thirty years—departments folded into others, agencies renamed to bury uncomfortable missions. Some of the boxes had water stains along the bottom edges. Others were pristine, untouched since the day they'd been filed.
