Ivy translated it slowly, deliberately, testing each word in her mind before committing it to paper.
Yadernyy fugasnyy zaryad.
Nuclear demolition charge.
She let that sit. Stood very still with her hands flat on the table, feeling the cold of the steel through her palms.
Not missile. Not warhead. Charge.
Something meant to be placed.
Her eyes tracked down the page to the oversight line, following the bureaucratic chain of custody that had been carefully documented in the same typewritten format as everything else.
12-? ??????? ??????????
The 12th Main Directorate.
Custody. Accounting.
If the 12th was involved, this wasn't theoretical. It was inventory. Real devices, tracked and managed by the people whose job was to know where every nuclear weapon in the Soviet arsenal was at any given moment.
She pulled another box closer and worked through it methodically, page by page.
Two folders in, Ivy found another reference. A transport manifest, this one with a typed signature block at the bottom: Technical Officer Volkov. The same name appeared on a routing sheet three documents later. She made a note of both dates and photographed the pages.
She found another designation on a later document, this one buried in a logistics annex that looked like it had been photocopied too many times. The text was degraded, some words barely legible, but the alphanumeric codes were still clear.
??-115
Ivy recognized the structure immediately. She'd spent enough time studying Soviet weapons nomenclature to know the pattern when she saw it.
This wasn't a route number or a facility code. It followed the internal logic of a weapons system designation—family, variant, revision.
This was the part that never showed up in public histories. Not the missiles. Not the tests. The quiet, obsessive tracking ofthings that were never supposed to exist in large numbers yet existed anyway. The careful documentation of devices that were meant to be deniable but still needed to be counted.
She opened her eyes and got back to work.
She used a small camera to photograph only what mattered: the designations, the oversight references, the routing patterns. No full documents. No obvious theft.
When she finished, she reassembled the folders exactly as she'd found them. Every page back in order. Every box lid replaced. She'd learned early in her career that the best way to avoid attention was to leave no trace that you'd been there at all.
As she slid the last one back into its box, she noticed a faint pencil note on the inside cover. The graphite had faded to almost nothing, barely visible against the brown cardboard.
A single word.
????
Accounting. Inventory.
She stood there for a moment, looking down at the boxes, thinking about the person who'd written that word. Someone who'd handled these same documents decades ago. Someone who'd understood what they meant.
Somebody had once cared deeply about knowing exactly how many of these charges existed.
And the problem with inventory wasn't building it.
It was keeping it current.
She put her jacket back on, picked up her bag, and walked back toward the elevator. The archivist was nowhere in sight. The corridor stretched empty in both directions, fluorescent lights humming in their cages.
