The estate of Viktor Raud lay in a valley carved by a river that had changed course a century ago, leaving behind a floodplain of dark soil and dense forest. The mansion itself was visible only in fragments through the trees—a neoclassical facade of pale stone, its columns and pediments designed to evoke the architecture of a more confident age. Leo lay in the undergrowth at the edge of the state forest, the night-vision goggles pressed against his eyes, watching the patrols move through their predictable rhythms.
It was 2:17 a.m. The temperature had dropped below freezing, and his breath misted in front of his face despite the balaclava that covered his mouth. Gregor's voice was a low murmur in his earpiece, counting down the seconds until the next patrol passed the eastern perimeter.
"The guard is turning now. He will cross the south lawn in forty seconds. That gives you a ninety-second window to reach the service entrance. Move when I tell you."
Leo's muscles were coiled tight, his body protesting the hours of stillness in the cold. He had been in position since midnight, watching and waiting while Gregor tested the security system's backdoor codes from a laptop in the forest behind him. The codes had worked—most of them. Two of the cameras on the eastern perimeter had been successfully disabled, their feeds replaced with looped footage of empty grounds. The motion sensors had been more stubborn, but Gregor had found a workaround, creating a narrow corridor of blind space that led from the forest edge to the service entrance of the main house.
"Now," Gregor said.
Leo ran. His boots were silent on the frozen grass, the night-vision goggles turning the world into a landscape of green and black. The service entrance was a steel door set into the eastern wall of the mansion, its frame outlined by a faint glow from the security light above it. The door was supposed to be locked, but Gregor had accessed the maintenance override and released the electronic latch. Leo pushed it open and slipped inside.
The service corridor was dark and narrow, its walls lined with pipes and electrical conduits. The air was warm and smelled of cleaning chemicals and the faint, sweet odor of decay that old buildings carried in their bones. Leo pulled off the night-vision goggles and let his eyes adjust to the dim emergency lighting that ran along the baseboards.
"You are inside," Gregor said. "The kitchen is at the end of the corridor. The service stairwell is to the left of the cold storage door. The basement access is at the bottom of the stairs. You have four minutes before the next patrol passes the kitchen windows."
Leo moved quickly, his footsteps silent on the concrete floor. The kitchen was a cavern of stainless steel and industrial appliances, its surfaces gleaming dully under the emergency lights. The cold storage door was exactly where Gregor had said it would be—a heavy insulated panel with a steel handle. The service stairwell was to the left, a narrow flight of concrete steps descending into darkness.
He descended the stairs two at a time, counting the steps as he went. Fourteen steps. A landing. Fourteen more steps. The basement corridor stretched ahead of him, its walls lined with storage rooms and mechanical spaces. The vault was at the end, behind a door that looked like it belonged on a ship—heavy steel, riveted at the seams, with a wheel-lock mechanism that required two hands to turn.
"The vault door is mechanical," Leo whispered into the communicator. "There is no electronic lock."
"Raud never trusted electronics for the outer door. The biometric scanner is inside, on the inner vault. The outer door should be unlocked—Irena never seals it during the night shift because the maintenance staff need access to the mechanical rooms next to the vault."
Leo gripped the wheel-lock and turned. It moved smoothly, the mechanism well-oiled, and the door swung open with a low groan that echoed in the concrete corridor. He slipped through the gap and pulled the door shut behind him.
The space beyond was not the vault itself but an anteroom—a small chamber with a desk, a security monitor, and a second door, this one made of polished steel with a biometric scanner mounted beside it. The inner vault. The scanner's screen glowed faintly, waiting for input.
"The scanner requires a fingerprint and a twelve-digit code," Gregor said. "I cannot bypass it remotely. But the maintenance logs—check the desk."
Leo moved to the desk and opened the single drawer. Inside was a clipboard with a paper logbook, its pages filled with entries in neat handwriting. He flipped through the pages until he found the current day's date. The most recent entry, logged at 23:47, read: I. Ozolina—maintenance check—all systems nominal.
Beneath the logbook was a sticky note with a string of numbers written in the same neat handwriting. Twelve digits. The code.
"She wrote down the code," Leo whispered. "She left it in the desk drawer."
"I told you she cuts corners. The fingerprint will be more difficult. The scanner requires a live print—you cannot use a lifted print or a photograph."
Leo thought about the logbook entry. Irena Ozolina had been in this room less than three hours ago. She had touched the desk, the clipboard, the door handle. Her fingerprints would be everywhere.
He pulled a small roll of adhesive tape from his pocket—part of the kit Gregor had assembled in Stockholm. He pressed the tape against the metal handle of the desk drawer, lifting a smudge of oil and skin cells, then carefully applied the tape to the biometric scanner's sensor plate. The scanner beeped and flashed red.
"Not enough detail. Try the clipboard. The paper surface holds prints better."
Leo pressed the tape against the clipboard's metal clip, lifting another print, and applied it to the scanner. This time, the scanner beeped and flashed green. The screen prompted him for the code.
He entered the twelve digits from the sticky note. The scanner processed the input for a long moment, and then the inner vault door clicked open, its seals releasing with a hiss of equalizing pressure.
"You are in," Gregor said, his voice tight with tension. "You have approximately two hours before the next upload cycle. Find the recordings and get out."
The inner vault was a room of perhaps ten square meters, its walls lined with metal shelving units stacked with document boxes and data storage devices. A single camera was mounted in the corner, its red light blinking steadily. The camera was recording locally, Gregor had explained—the footage would not be uploaded to the security hub until 6:00 a.m. As long as Leo was gone before then, his presence would go unnoticed.
He began searching the shelves, his gloved hands moving methodically through the boxes. Financial records. Legal correspondence. Personnel files. Blackmail materials—photographs, letters, recordings of conversations that had been meant to be private. Raud had been collecting leverage on his allies for decades, building an insurance policy that would protect him if anyone ever tried to turn against him.
And then, on the bottom shelf in the far corner, he found them. A set of hard drives labeled with dates ranging from 2004 to 2016. Kronberg Institute—Auction Recordings—Original Masters. The labels were handwritten, the ink faded but legible. Leo pulled the first drive from the shelf and connected it to a portable reader Gregor had provided.
The directory loaded on the reader's small screen. Hundreds of video files, organized by date and lot number. Lot 1. Lot 23. Lot 47. Lot 712. The numbers stretched on, a catalogue of human lives reduced to inventory designations. Leo scrolled through the directory until he found a file dated March 12, 2006. Lot 23.
He opened the file. The video showed the same room he had seen in the Kronberg archive—the glass-walled enclosures, the industrial lighting, the cold clinical efficiency of the auction space. But this version was different. There was no digital mask over the auctioneer's face.
Viktor Raud stood at the center of the room, his face fully visible, his calm professional voice describing the unborn child being offered for sale. Elena Thorne sat in a chair beside him, her hands resting on her belly, her eyes fixed on a point above the camera. The buyers were visible too—men in suits, some in person, some on video screens mounted on the walls. The prices were spoken aloud. The transactions were documented in real time.
Leo stared at the screen, his heart pounding. This was the evidence they needed. Not just proof that the network existed—proof that Viktor Raud was its leader. Proof that the man who was now presenting himself as a victim had been the one setting the prices and counting the money.
He copied the file to a portable drive, then began copying more—dozens of files, hundreds, spanning the entire history of the Kronberg Institute's auction operations. The portable drive's capacity was large enough to hold them all, and the transfer speed was fast. But the minutes were ticking by, and the upload cycle was approaching.
"Gregor, I have the recordings. Raud is visible in the original footage. No mask, no blur. His face is clear."
There was a pause on the other end of the communicator. Then: "How many files?"
"Hundreds. I am copying as many as I can."
"Copy the most incriminating ones and leave. You do not need all of them. You need enough to prove Raud was in charge."
Leo selected the files that showed Raud most clearly—the ones where he was speaking, setting prices, negotiating with buyers. He copied them to the portable drive, then replaced the original hard drives on the shelf exactly as he had found them. If the security team did not notice the missing data until after the upload cycle, he would have a head start.
He was about to leave the vault when he noticed another box on the top shelf, this one labeled Silber Group—Internal Affairs. He pulled it down and opened it. Inside were personnel files—hundreds of them—documenting the careers of Silber Group operatives. And at the front of the box, a file labeled with a name he recognized: Katya Voss. Lot 712.
Leo opened the file. Inside was a photograph of a girl with dark hair and eyes like Anya's, taken when she was perhaps six years old. Below the photograph, a placement record: Transferred to private buyer, Riyadh, 15 August 2014. Transaction completed. No further contact. There was an address, a name, a phone number. The information Anya had spent ten years searching for.
Leo copied the file and returned the box to the shelf. Then he sealed the inner vault door, wiped down the surfaces he had touched, and slipped out of the anteroom into the basement corridor.
"The patrol is passing the kitchen now," Gregor said. "You cannot use the service stairwell. There is an alternate route—a maintenance ladder at the end of the corridor. It leads to the ground floor near the library. The library is empty at this hour."
Leo found the ladder and climbed, his arms burning with the effort. The library was a vast room of dark wood and leather-bound books, its windows looking out onto the south lawn. The patrol passed outside, their torch beams sweeping across the snow. Leo waited in the shadows until they moved on, then crossed the library to a side door that led to the garden.
The eastern perimeter was still unmonitored, the cameras still disabled. Leo slipped through the gap in the fence and disappeared into the state forest, the portable drive clutched in his hand. Behind him, the mansion stood silent and dark, its secrets still hidden, its master still unaware that his most incriminating evidence had just been stolen.
Gregor was waiting at the rendezvous point, the car's engine already running. Leo climbed into the passenger seat and pulled off the balaclava, his face slick with sweat despite the cold.
"I have the recordings," he said. "Raud's face is on them. The auctions, the prices, the buyers. All of it. And I found something else—Katya's placement record. Anya's daughter. I know where she was sent."
Gregor stared at him, his heavy face unreadable. Then he put the car in gear and pulled away from the forest edge, heading north toward the border.
"We need to get this evidence to Lindqvist before Raud realizes it is missing," Gregor said. "Once he knows what you have, he will do everything in his power to stop you. There will be no more negotiations, no more press conferences. He will send every operative he has."
"Let him. We have what we need. The truth is no longer just testimony and documents. It is video footage of Viktor Raud selling children. He cannot talk his way out of that."
The car sped through the darkness, the headlights cutting a narrow path through the forest. Behind them, the estate of Viktor Raud receded into the night, still silent, still unaware. But that would not last. The shift change was in two hours. The upload cycle was in three. And when the security team realized what had been taken, the hunt would begin.
Leo held the portable drive in his hand and thought about the faces he had seen on the recordings—the buyers, the sellers, the children. Lot after lot after lot. The evidence was damning, irreversible, the kind of proof that could not be dismissed or discredited. The end of the network was finally in sight.
But Viktor Raud was still out there, still protected by his allies and his resources and his decades of experience in surviving. And he would not go down without a fight.
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