The archivist's cart squeaked as she pushed it. The sound carried in the dead air.
They passed a section marked MARITIME ADMINISTRATION, then another labeled EXPORT CONTROL—OBSOLETE. The organization down here felt archaeological. Layers of bureaucratic sediment compressed into rows.
They stopped at a steel table bolted to the floor. A single lamp clamped to the edge provided the only local light. The rest of the area faded into shadow.
"These came over from Commerce in '72," the archivist said. She rested one hand on a stack of boxes on the cart, her fingers drumming once against the cardboard. "Nobody wanted them. We inherited them by default."
"Okay."
"What you asked for: trade compliance reviews involving Soviet transit goods. Dual-use items. Mostly rail and maritime."
"Perfect, thank you.”
She left Ivy alone with the files.
Ivy stood for a moment in the silence, listening to the faint hum of the ventilation system and the distant sound of the archivist's cart squeaking away down another corridor. Then she removed her jacket and set her bag beneath the table.
She worked standing, the way she always did when she wanted to stay alert. Sitting made you comfortable and being comfortable sometimes made you careless.
She pulled the first box toward her and lifted the lid.
The smell of old paper intensified. The documents inside were brittle at the edges, yellowed in a way that suggested they'd been stored somewhere warmer before coming here. She handled them carefully, supporting each page as she turned it.
The first folders were familiar. Machine tools. Precision bearings. Vacuum pumps. The same components that appeared in every proliferation case from that era. Legal on paper. Suspicious in aggregate. She'd seen variations of these transactions hundreds of times.
She flipped pages quickly, skimming. Her eyes tracked across columns of figures and routing codes with the practiced efficiency of someone who'd spent years learning to read between the lines of bureaucratic documentation.
Then she slowed.
A routing sheet listed no commercial consignee. Instead, it referenced a custodial authority. The paper was thinner here, onionskin carbon copy, the text slightly offset where the typewriter keys had struck through multiple layers.
??????????? ????
Special cargo.
Ivy underlined it in pencil on her legal pad, her handwriting small and precise. She'd seen the phrase before—in gold shipments, in intelligence transfers—but here it appeared repeatedly, always paired with unusually strict handling notes.
Humidity limits. Shock tolerances. Personnel restrictions.
Not for machinery.
She turned the page. Clipped to the back was a personnel certification form, the names listed in tight rows under "Authorized Technical Personnel." Most were partially redacted, black bars obscuring ranks and facility assignments. But one name near the bottom was fully visible: Volkov. She photographed it, then moved on.
She set the page aside and dug deeper into the box.
A margin note caught her eye. The ink which was different from the typed text was ballpoint, blue, added by hand in Cyrillic script that was neat but hurried.
???–3
She frowned and copied it exactly as written onto her pad, taking care with each character.
The notation wasn't typed. It had been added later, by hand, as if someone wanted to clarify something without formally amending the document. Someone who knew what they were looking at and wanted to make sure anyone else who came after would know too.
She turned pages, hunting for context. The paper whispered against her fingers.
There it was again. And again.
Sometimes spelled out once, then reduced to initials. Sometimes paired with serial suffixes, probably sub-variants, not quantities. The pattern was consistent enough to be deliberate, scattered enough to avoid drawing attention.
