THE MEN

A boot struck the slope above her and sent wet grit into her hair and across her neck.

Twisting, Jana saw the man coming down with one hand on the wall and one spread for balance. Another shape filled the opening by the grate. From behind it, still inside the service way, a third voice carried. They had the height. She had mud to the knees, the folder on the ledge, the ring-bolt in her hand, and no time to climb carefully.

She pushed up hard. Her right foot slid, held, slipped again. She caught the folder first, drove it under her arm with the envelope, and turned sideways up the bank. The ring-bolt dragged at her hand, corrosion flaking into her palm. It was too heavy, too awkward. The first man lunged lower, aiming not for her shoulder but for the packet under her arm.

She yanked back and made the choice before she had finished thinking. She let the ring-bolt go.

It dropped from her hand, struck stone, and bounced once toward the wash. A strip of blackened material, wound or snagged around the shank under the mud, came with it and tore free from the bank with a wet jerk. Something small and flat, wrapped in slime and rotted cloth, slapped against the stones and stopped short of the water.

Seeing only her movement, the man nearest reached for the folder.

Jana drove her elbow into his face. He grunted and lost his footing for half a second. It was enough. She snatched at the mud-dark bundle with her free hand and came away with it. The outer cloth split. Under it lay a clear sleeve, scratched and brown at the edges but still sealed along one side.

“Take the papers,” the man behind him snapped.

Recovered, the first one caught at her coat. Jana tore free, fabric ripping at the seam, and scrambled up onto the narrow strip by the wall. Her shoulder hit brick. She turned and ran along the river wall, bent over the folder, the envelope, and the new thing slick in her hand.

Their steps pounded after her, then checked. One of them had reached the place where the ring-bolt had fallen. Another had the scattered cloth.

“What is that?” a voice said.

Jana gained three strides, four. Ahead, the wall angled inward around old stonework, forming a shallow recess. She reached it and flattened into it for one breath, hidden from the grate and partly from the bank below. Her chest jerked. Water dripped from her sleeves and trouser legs. She looked down at the sleeve in her hand.

Inside, folded once, she found a torn calendar page.

It had been ripped from a desk pad or wall block. The top edge was jagged. Mud had stained the lower corner, but the center remained legible beneath the plastic. One date square had been marked by hand. Beside it, in narrow dark writing, stood a name.

Behind her, on the slope, one of the men said, “She took something.”

“Forget the bolt,” another answered.

Jana heard paper being snatched up, the folder perhaps, the photographs. She slid the calendar page partly free of the sleeve with her thumb. The plastic clung to it. Her fingers were numb from cold and slick with mud. She wiped them on her coat and looked again.

The date was clear now, and so was the name beneath it.

Boots hammered the paving again, closing.

Coming around the angle of the wall at a run, one man saw her in the recess. His face changed at once, not at the folder under her arm, not at the envelope, but at the piece in her hand.

“That,” he shouted over his shoulder. “Take that. At any cost.”

The words cut through the noise of the river, the steps, and the scrape of shoes on grit. At any cost. Not the photographs. Not the papers they had been chasing through the corridor. This.

Jana understood in the same instant that Arendt had not led her here for the iron in the mud. The photographs had been a trail to the ring-bolt; the ring-bolt had marked the hiding place. He had hidden one thing inside another. He had assumed the obvious documents would be watched, seized, checked. He had left the real thing where no office inventory would mark it and no drawer search would find it.

Lunging into the recess, the man closed on her.

Jana shoved the page back into the sleeve, folded it once against her palm, and rammed it inside her blouse, under the damp fabric at her ribs. She thrust the envelope and folder toward him at the same moment. His hands went to what he could see. The folder burst open between them.

Spilled, fanned, dropped to the paving and the mud at their feet.

As she caught the cardboard edge, the man cursed when it tore in his hand. Glossy prints slid under his boots. Hard around the wall came a second man and nearly went down on them. He kicked one photograph into the shallow water by the stones, bent for another, then looked up straight at Jana.

She saw the dark band of riprap and the concrete lip in the print before his boot ground it into the water. The angle matched the embankment outside the archive wall, and the marker post at the edge fixed the place more tightly than Arendt’s notes had. The photos had not shown a random riverbank. They had shown this recess, this path, and men willing to tear her open for one page could only be trying to keep what was hidden here buried.

“Where is it?”

Driving her shoulder into the first man, she broke past him. From the recess, only one line led out: wall on one side, black water below the stones on the other, and ahead the narrow strip toward the service path where the tram light cut across the wet ground in pale bars. Three steps on, a hand caught the back of her coat and dragged her half sideways. The seam bit into her throat. Twisting, she felt cloth strain, then slip free from his wet grip.

“Hold her.”

“Get the page.”

Not the folder. Not the photographs. At once, the words fixed it.

Because running straight would only let them take her from behind, she turned on them. Again the first man reached, broad hand open, breath harsh in the cold. Jana snatched one of the fallen photographs from the ground and slapped it against his face. He flinched, more from surprise than pain. Shoving at his chest, she moved past him while he tore the wet print away.

With three or four sheets gathered to his arm, the second man dropped them when he saw her hand go to her blouse. His mouth opened before he spoke, and in that moment she saw fear plain on him.

“No.”

He came fast. Jana stepped back against the wall and pulled the plastic sleeve free from under her clothing. It stuck to the damp fabric and to her skin. The page inside had folded crookedly. She tried to work it loose with one hand. The plastic would not give. One edge had sealed to itself with water and pressure.

At once the first man seized her wrist.

Slamming the sleeve against the stone corner of the wall, she tore at it with her teeth. Plastic split along the seam. Her lip scraped. She tasted dirt and blood and river water. Swearing, the man caught at her forearm. She drove her knee upward, felt it strike his thigh, and wrenched the torn opening wider.

In a ragged jerk, the calendar page came free.

“Take it from her.”

A third voice answered from farther up the path, out of sight around the angle. “Leave the rest. Dorn must not lose the page.”

At the name, all the blocked corridors and withheld answers came up at once to Jana. She did not hesitate. Control.

At hearing it too, the first man changed his grip. He stopped fighting her body and went only for her hand.

Flattening the torn page to her palm, she looked down once. The pencil mark around the date had smudged but held. The handwriting beneath it was cramped, deliberate, familiar only in its certainty that it was meant to identify someone and be understood later.

Near enough now to snatch, the second man’s fingers brushed the page.

Drawing breath, Jana shouted the date into the recess.

Her voice struck the wall and went back at them. At once the first man jerked his head toward her mouth. Staring, the second man heard her shout the name.

Everything broke for a beat.

In front of her, the man stopped with his hand still raised. Recognition showed in the way his face emptied and then locked. Behind him, the one on the path said, “What?”

Too quickly, the second man answered. “I don’t know it.”

“You do,” Jana said, louder, forcing the sound down the channel toward the service path, toward the tram line, toward any passerby who might hear words if not sense. She shouted the name again. Then the date.

Then the first man struck for her, open-handed, not to take the page now but to stop her mouth. She ducked. His palm hit the wall with a crack. Jana slid under his arm and ran.

On grit and wet paper, her shoes slipped. One of the photographs folded under her heel. She heard them recover behind her, one cursing at the other, one saying, “Enough, enough, move.”

By degrees, the service path opened ahead out of the narrow line of wall. Tram light reached farther here. Overhead, wires hummed. She heard the river less and street noise more. A bell sounded somewhere beyond the warehouse edge.

“Don’t let her get up there.”

Keeping the page closed tight in her fist, Jana feared losing it, feared crushing it beyond use. Once, her other hand skimmed the wall, steadying her around a slick patch. She did not look back until she reached the start of the path.

When she did, two of them came into view under the tram wash, slowed by the open stretch and by the people moving beyond it. Near the stop, a woman with two shopping bags stepped off the curb. At the pole, an older man waited with a folded newspaper under his arm. The path widened into a strip of broken paving beside the road, and the men coming after Jana changed their pace at once. They no longer rushed at her full on. They spread a little, one nearer the wall, one nearer the curb.

A third man was already there.

Where the service path met the street, he stood with bare hands, coat buttoned high, hat brim dry under the shelter edge. He had not been running. He watched her come with a stillness that made the other two seem coarse beside him. When the tram light passed over his face, she knew him.

“Move,” Jana said, and did not slow.

Leander Voss stepped into her path and stopped there, not touching her. Behind him, one of the transport men bent with both hands on his thighs, breathing hard. The other drew up straighter, jaw set, eyes on Jana’s fist.

Voss studied her face first, then the hand holding the folded page.

“Miss Lore,” he said. “Give me the document.”

Jana stopped because he had chosen the one place where stopping looked voluntary. The tram bell rang again. A few people turned their heads, then turned back. Just near enough to hear tone, not words, the woman with the shopping bags stood by the stop.

“No,” Jana said.

“That paper does not belong to you.”

“Neither does Viktor Halden’s file.”

At the name, one of the men behind Voss shifted. Not much. A brief break in the set of his mouth, then control again. Jana saw it and raised her voice. “Viktor Halden. Transfer file. Missing annex.”

Voss’s eyes moved to her face and held there. He did not look back at his men.

“This is not the place.”

“It is now.”

She took one step sideways toward the road, opening the angle so anyone at the tram stop could see them all at once. Without hurry, Voss matched the step. Her chest still hurt from the run.

“The page.” His voice stayed even. “You have caused enough trouble for one evening.”

Jana let out a short breath through her nose. Metal coated the back of her throat. “Then answer one question.”

“I am not here to answer your questions.”

“You are here because one of your men knew the date when I said it.”

The transport man near the curb said, “I said nothing.”

“You didn’t need to.”

Voss kept his voice level. “Miss Lore, hand over the material.”

She looked at the two men behind him. Dirt streaked both sleeves. A wet dark mark crossed one knee on one of them from the path. They had come close enough to put hands on her in the dark. Here, they waited for Voss.

Jana shifted the folded page under her thumb and reached into her coat with the other hand.

At once, the man near the curb moved. “What’s that?”

She pulled out her phone. She lifted it chest-high, thumbed the side, and the screen lit white against the street.

Voss’s expression changed only in the eyes. A narrowing, then nothing again.

“I am recording,” Jana said. She raised her voice toward the stop, toward the old man with the newspaper and the woman with the bags, toward the tram shelter glass. “State your name.”

“Put that away,” one of the transport men said.

Jana did not look at him. “State your name.”

For one full second, Voss stood without moving. Then he replied, “Leander Voss.”

“Position.”

“That is not required.”

“Good,” Jana said. “Then I’ll ask what is required. In Viktor Halden’s transfer file, there is a missing annex. Is that annex under restricted handling?”

Low and urgent, one of the men behind him muttered, “Don’t.”

Voss answered over him. “The page you are referring to, and related material, fall under restricted administrative handling.”

The words landed cleanly. Jana’s pulse kicked once in her throat, but she kept the phone steady.

“Restricted by whom?”

“I am not discussing internal process on a public street.”

“You just discussed it on a public street.” Another small step carried Jana back so that Voss had to either come nearer her phone or let the space widen. He held where he was. “Is the annex kept outside ordinary sequence?”

“That terminology is yours.”

“Is it missing from the file a clerk would be shown?”

Voss’s jaw tightened once. “You are not entitled to any file.”

“That wasn’t the question.”

The tram drew in behind them.

The scrape of metal and the rush of air from its brakes. Heads turned along the curb. The doors had not opened yet, but people on the platform shifted forward in a loose line, bags lifted, shoulders angled toward the carriage.

Breathing through his nose, the man on Voss’s right went on. He had gone still after his earlier mutter. Past her phone, the other one looked, not at her face or the folded page in her hand, but at the screen. He had understood what she was doing. That did not stop him from staying where he was.

“That wasn’t the question,” Jana said again.

At his sides kept his hands Voss. His coat was buttoned wrong at the throat, one side pulled tighter than the other. He had come fast and had not corrected it. “You are trying to create an impression in front of strangers.”

“I’m asking about a document.”

“A file you should not have touched.”

With a hard chime, the tram doors opened. Light spilled across the wet strip of pavement at the curb. People began to step down first: two women, an older man with a cane, a boy with a rucksack hanging from one shoulder. Those waiting hesitated, then crowded in around them. Between the boarding line and the shelter, the small public corridor widened the space behind Jana and kept Voss from closing in.

She raised her voice only enough to carry. “Is the annex missing from the file a clerk would be shown?”

Too fast, one of the men said, “It was removed before clerks ever had—”

He stopped.

For a fraction, Voss turned his head. Not enough to make a scene, enough to cut him off.

At once taking the opening, Jana pressed. “Removed.”

No one around them fully stopped, but more than one person looked over while passing the doors. With one foot on the first step, a woman in a green coat slowed, then moved on inside.

Setting down each word separately, Voss answered, “The accessible sequence does not include every internal attachment.”

“That is not what I asked.” Jana kept the phone pointed at him. In her other hand, the folded page pressed damp against her palm. “Was there an annex.”

Voss looked first at the page, then at her face. “You know there was.”

“Was it taken out.”

His mouth flattened.

“Before clerk access,” Jana pressed.

Shifting his weight, the man who had spoken first tried, “Miss—”

This time, Voss did not look at him. “Stop.”

Jana heard that, and heard what sat under it. Not surprise. Containment.

A cluster of passengers came off the tram in a tight knot and broke around them, annoyed at having to edge past four people standing in the way of the stop. Somebody said, “Move it,” with no side chosen. Jana stepped back toward the shelter pole and gave them room. The movement put the line of waiting passengers partly between her and the two men. Voss remained in front of her, close enough to answer, not close enough to take the page without making everyone there see it.

She asked, “Why did your men ask for the page and not the rest of the papers.”

“The page concerns restricted matter.”

“And the attachment.”

“I am not here to discuss filing language.”

“That is what this is?” Jana asked. “Filing language.”

“It is an administrative distinction.”

The answer came quickly, too quickly to be careful.

Jana held still. “Nonessential?”

One beat passed. The tram chime sounded again. More people boarded. The driver, visible through the front pane, leaned to look down the platform.

Now Voss saw the listeners. Not one listener, not a crowd either, but enough faces turned in and away and back again to make blunt force expensive. His voice changed. It went flatter, office-flat, the tone of a correction entered into a record.

“The annex is administratively nonessential to the page.”

Jana did not move. Her thumb pressed once against the edge of her phone screen to mark the recording in her own mind, the exact moment, the exact phrasing.

“Nonessential,” she repeated.

“To the operative handling of that page,” Voss said. “Yes.”

At the pavement, the man behind him looked.

“Then why chase me for it?” Jana asked.

Recovering ground where he could, Voss answered at once this time, “Because you removed restricted material and are now standing in public with it in your hand.”

“The page,” she said. “Not the attachment.”

“The annex is not at issue here.”

“No,” Jana replied. “It is.”

He let that sit. He had already said enough. She saw him come to that conclusion while the last of the waiting passengers filed through the doors. A young father lifted a stroller wheel over the tram gap and glanced over his shoulder at them.

The stroller came through with a scrape and a bump. Inside, the father settled it, then turned his head once more toward the voices on the pavement before the tram swallowed him from view. The doors stayed open. Near the pole inside the entrance, a woman remained standing, one gloved hand on the rail, watching without pretending not to.

Jana held the folded calendar sheet at chest height, neither raised nor hidden. Her phone stayed in her coat pocket, screen inward, recording.

“You mentioned restricted material,” she said. “You said the annex was nonessential to the document. Those are two different claims.”

Voss kept his eyes on the paper. “Miss Lore.”

“One concerns access. One concerns content.”

“Give me the sheet.”

“No.”

The nearer of the two men shifted his weight. He had broad shoulders under a dark coat and a crease between his brows that had been there since Jana first spoke Halden’s name. The other man scanned the line toward the front of the tram, toward the driver, then back at Voss.

Unfolding the page another inch, Jana showed that she could. Ink marks crossed one date square. Beside it, a name in block letters.

Voss caught the movement and lost the stillness in his face for an instant. “Do not read from that.”

She met his eyes. “Why?”

“Because it is not yours to circulate.”

“Circulate,” she repeated. “That is new too.”

In the tram doorway, the woman adjusted her hand on the pole. Someone farther back asked whether they were leaving. The driver rang the chime again.

Lowering her eyes to the page, Jana read the date aloud.

The man on Voss’s left turned at once, enough to show it. His mouth tightened before he could stop it.

One looked at Voss. The other looked at the paper. It lasted less than a second. It was enough.

Voss snapped, low and hard, “Stop.”

“So they know it,” Jana replied. “Or they know where it belongs.”

“You are creating a scene.”

“We are standing at a tram station, and you intercepted me in public.”

His mouth hardened. “You have no idea what you are holding.”

“I have an idea. I had one before you came after me.” She folded the page once more, slowly, and kept it in her hand. “Original statement packet. Signed line disputed later. Initial present beside the line in the original and absent in other handling. Missing annex. Now this sheet, removed from ordinary access, chased down in the street.”

One of the men muttered, “Don’t.”

Voss did not look at him. “You are stitching together fragments you do not understand.”

“Then explain them.”

“That is not a discussion for here.”

“That is why it has to happen here.”

In the doorway, the woman kept watching. Two boys who had stepped off to smoke by the shelter had stopped talking. A man in a gray hat moved past them, slowed, and stayed.

Voss heard it all. Jana saw it in the way he chose his next words, placing each one too carefully.

“The document should never have left controlled review.”

“Review,” Jana echoed at once.

His mouth shut.

One step nearer, not enough to close distance, only enough to make him answer to her and to the people within earshot, and she pressed, “Say that again.”

He did not.

“You told me the annex was not at issue. You told me it was administratively nonessential to the document. You told me the record was restricted. Now you are saying review.” She did not raise her voice. She did not need to. “Review of what?”

The driver leaned out from his window and called down the platform, “Board now or wait for the next.”

No one answered him.

At last, he looked away from the paper and at Jana herself. His expression shifted from control to calculation, then narrowed further. “If you file this,” he told her, “it stops being internal.”

“So it is internal now.”

He knew the mistake when the words left him. Jana saw it cross his face as he stepped forward.

“Internal to whom?” she pressed.

One of the men moved with him. Jana did not give ground. The tram door remained open at her side.

“This is your last chance to hand that over quietly,” Voss warned.

“Quietly ended when you followed me.”

His voice dropped further. “That page belongs to Halden’s assessment packet.”

The words reached the doorway, and the woman there straightened. Jana did not blink.

She kept him speaking with silence.

Voss went on because he had already crossed the line.

“It remained under formal review,” he replied. “It was not supposed to leave restricted handling.”

The woman at the tram door turned fully toward them. A man on the bench near the timetable lowered the newspaper he had only been holding. Farther down the platform, a tram worker stopped with a tool bag in his hand and stayed where he was.

Jana kept her hand in her coat pocket around the phone. The hard edge pressed into her palm. Without looking down, she kept her eyes on Voss.

“Restricted by whom?” she asked.

“That is not your concern.”

“It is in my assessment.”

“You do not understand what you are carrying.”

“That page,” Jana countered, “belongs in Viktor Halden’s assessment packet. Those were your words.”

Voss’s jaw tightened. He glanced once toward the open tram door, once toward the faces that had turned toward them, and then back to her. The two men with him had halted. One of them glanced at the folded page in Jana’s hand and then away too quickly.

“The annex was separated,” Voss admitted. “The page remains identifiable without it.”

Jana caught the correction he had tried to make and the part he had failed to take back. “Separated by whom?”

“That is not the issue.”

“It is one issue,” she replied. “Another is that you have now stated in public that material from Halden’s packet left restricted handling.”

His voice sharpened. “Do not put words in my mouth.”

“I don’t need to.”

The driver leaned from his window again. “Final boarding.”

No one moved.

Voss took one step closer. He did not raise his voice, but the effort to keep it low showed in his face. “Listen carefully. If you submit anything built on this, the review board will ask where you obtained it, who gave it to you, and why you interfered with restricted material. You will not be outside that inquiry.”

Jana studied him for a moment. She traced the route he offered her, the one that ran back into offices, requests, permissions, delays, and revised descriptions of what had already been said aloud. She had spent enough time on that route. She knew where it led.

“You already told me where it belongs,” she reminded him. “You already told me it should not have left restricted handling. You already stated the annex was separated.”

“Administratively nonessential to the page.”

One of his own men closed his eyes for a brief second. Voss heard himself too late. The phrase hung in the cold air between the platform edge and the tram step.

Jana corrected him, very clearly. “Administratively irrelevant to the page.”

The woman at the tram door stepped back into the carriage to make room but kept her eyes on them. Jana could feel the attention along the platform now, not dramatic, not loud, simply fixed. Witnesses without names. Enough.

Voss reached out, stopping just short of her wrist because the tram driver was watching and because everyone else was. “Give me the page.”

“No.”

“You are making this worse for yourself.”

“For whom is it better,” Jana asked, “if Halden’s packet can be opened, pieces separated before ordinary clerical access, and then described as irrelevant?”

His face changed again. Not with surprise or anger alone, but with recognition. He understood then that she was no longer asking him for the missing sequence before she acted. He had anticipated pursuit. He had expected another demand, another attempt to force disclosure from the same system that had already closed around it. He saw that she was finished waiting for a full chain of custody before she wrote what was already plain.

One of the men beside him murmured, low and urgent, “Leander.”

It was too late for caution between them.

Jana stepped onto the tram. The driver pulled his head back inside, one hand already moving toward the controls. Voss put his foot to the threshold but stopped there. He could not follow without making a scene he could not explain.

“This does not protect you,” he warned.

Jana stood just inside the door. “It protects the record.”

The doors closed between them.

Voss remained on the platform, his mouth set, one hand half lifted and then lowered. Through the glass, Jana saw one of his companions turn on him with a look that vanished before anyone else could mark it. The tram moved, and the platform slid away.

She did not unfold the page during the ride. She kept it in her bag and took the phone from her pocket only after she had changed trams, then streets, and then gone through the side entrance of the State Forensic Assessment Unit.