They moved the body of Adrian van der Heijden to the janitor's closet. There was nowhere else to put it. Dr. Hugo de Vries insisted on a proper examination before they sealed the door, checking for signs they might have missed—a second wound, defensive marks, anything that might contradict what their eyes told them. He found nothing. The wound was clean, precise, the work of someone who had either medical training or extensive practical experience. He did not say which category he suspected. The scalpel had been removed from the scene and placed in a plastic evidence bag that Lena Kappel had improvised from a document sleeve she found in an abandoned filing cabinet. No one had touched the handle. They had all watched enough procedural dramas to know about fingerprints, though privately de Vries wondered whose prints would even be on file in a building that had been sealed for a decade.
The remaining five gathered in the center of the trading floor, equidistant from the exits they could not use and the monitors they could not trust. Irma Becker had resumed her knitting, the needles moving with mechanical regularity, though her eyes never settled on the yarn. She was watching the others with the patient attention of someone who had spent decades reading the silences between women's words.
"We need to talk about what we saw on the screens," de Vries said. He had positioned himself against a pillar again, his back protected. "Before Adrian died. The footage of each of us. Someone in this building has access to information that should not exist."
"Someone meaning the person who brought us here," Sofia Beltrame said. "That much is obvious."
"Obvious but incomplete." De Vries's voice had the clipped precision of a surgeon dictating notes. "The question is not who brought us here. The question is what they want. And the secondary question—the immediate question—is which of us killed van der Heijden."
Agnieszka Kowalski sat with her legs crossed beneath her, palms resting on her knees, her expression serene. She had arranged her face carefully, the way she had arranged the scalpel on van der Heijden's desk. The face she wore now was the face of someone who had been through something terrible and was simply trying to endure. It was a lie, but she had worn many lies in the past six years. One more made little difference.
"Dr. de Vries," Irma said, her needles still clicking, "your scalpel was used to kill the man. You claim it was stolen from your bag. Can you tell us when you last saw it?"
"Before the first video played. I checked my instruments when we woke up here. Everything was accounted for."
"So it was taken while we were watching the screens."
"Or shortly after," Sofia said. "When van der Heijden walked away, several of us moved around the room. Kappel was in the janitor's closet. Agnieszka followed van der Heijden. De Vries went to the far windows. I was watching the monitors. Irma never moved from her corner."
"Are you accusing someone?" de Vries asked.
"I'm establishing a timeline. It's what I was trained to do."
"And what exactly were you trained to do, Ms. Beltrame? The personnel file on the screen was quite thoroughly redacted."
Sofia met his gaze without blinking. "I worked for the National Security Directorate. The North Sea Republic's intelligence service. My specialization was—" she paused, selecting the word carefully—"sanitation. When the state had a problem that could not be solved through legal channels, they sent me. I was very good at my job."
"You were an assassin," Kappel said flatly.
"I was a solution provider. The terminology matters less than the function. I removed threats to national security. Sometimes those threats were people."
The confession settled over the room like dust. De Vries took an involuntary step backward. Irma's needles paused for half a beat before resuming their rhythm. Only Agnieszka remained perfectly still, her face betraying nothing. She had known about Sofia Beltrame for years. The woman who called herself "Helga" had been a ghost in the intelligence files that Agnieszka had purchased from a defector in Tallinn, a name that appeared in the margins of operations connected to the Vanderbijl Group's Eastern European subsidiaries. Sofia had not been the one who killed Elina, but she had cleaned up after the people who did.
"If you're an assassin," de Vries said, his voice tighter now, "then you're the most likely suspect."
"On the contrary. I'm the least likely suspect. Professional assassins do not use stolen surgical tools. They do not commit murder in locked rooms full of potential witnesses. And they do not leave behind the kind of forensic evidence that a first-year criminology student could identify." She looked at de Vries with something approaching pity. "Someone is trying to frame you, Doctor. Your scalpel, your professional skillset. The killer wants us to suspect you."
"Or the killer is you, and you're smart enough to make that argument," de Vries shot back.
The conversation spiraled. Kappel accused Irma of trafficking in human organs. Irma accused Kappel of designing the therapies that created the demand. De Vries accused Sofia of being a state-sponsored murderer. Sofia accused de Vries of performing unnecessary surgeries on vulnerable women. The accusations circled like birds over carrion, each one landing briefly before being driven off by the next.
Agnieszka listened to all of it. She had heard similar arguments before, in the shabby apartments of Riga and the back rooms of Tallinn bars, where ex-spies and former soldiers and disgraced scientists gathered to drink and blame each other for the wreckage of the post-Soviet world. Everyone was guilty. Everyone had a justification. The guilt was never the problem—the problem was that guilt was too evenly distributed, too diffuse to be actionable. You could not punish a system, so you had to punish individuals. You had to find the ones whose hands had actually touched the lever, even if a hundred other hands had designed the machine.
"Agnieszka."
She looked up. Irma Becker was speaking to her directly, the knitting needles finally still.
"You've been very quiet. You found the body. You followed him. What did you see?"
"Nothing." The lie came easily. "I spoke to him briefly. He was upset. He wanted to be alone. I left him in the office and came back here."
"And you saw no one else near the offices?"
"No one."
Irma's eyes narrowed. She had spent fifty years listening to women lie about pregnancies, about miscarriages, about the origins of bruises and the destinations of unwanted infants. She knew the texture of a lie, the slight pause before the denial, the careful arrangement of details that were too precise to be true. Agnieszka's statement had all these qualities. But Irma said nothing. There was no advantage in exposing the girl yet. Not when the dynamics of the room were still shifting.
The monitors flickered. Everyone tensed, expecting another round of damning footage. But this time, the screen showed only static—the visual equivalent of white noise, a blizzard of gray pixels that seemed to pulse with some hidden rhythm. Then a single line of text appeared, green on black, the font reminiscent of old computer terminals:
"The Vanderbijl Group would like to thank all participants for their attendance. The exit interview will begin shortly."
"Vanderbijl," Kappel whispered. "This whole building is Vanderbijl. The old stock exchange. They bought it after the crash, before the redevelopment plans fell through. All of this—the cameras, the traps, the footage—it's all their equipment."
"It's a name, not a person," de Vries said. "Carl Vanderbijl died two years ago. Pancreatic cancer. I read the obituary."
"His company didn't die with him," Sofia said. "The Group is still operational. Still cleaning up loose ends." She looked at the text on the screen with the expression of someone who recognized a professional signature. "This is a containment operation. We are loose ends."
The text on the screen changed:
"Participant 2: Hugo de Vries. Status: pending review. Case reference: Tallinn Surgical Institute, 2018-2022."
De Vries went pale. "That's not—I never worked at—"
But the screen was already displaying new information. Photographs of an operating theater. A patient intake form bearing de Vries's handwriting. A series of invoices linking the Tallinn Surgical Institute to Irma Becker's network of clinics. And beneath it all, a question rendered in the same green text:
"Who supplied the subjects for your skill maintenance program, Dr. de Vries?"
The surgeon's mouth opened and closed. He looked at Irma, who looked back at him with an expression that was almost gentle, almost understanding.
"She supplied the women," de Vries said finally. "Becker's network. They came to her clinics seeking help, and she sent them to me. Some of them were already pregnant. Some of them had conditions that required surgical intervention. They were desperate, undocumented, easily disappeared. I operated on them to maintain my skills. I removed organs that could be sold. I performed procedures that had no medical justification." He swallowed. "The Vanderbijl Group paid for everything. They needed biological materials for research. They needed surgeons who could perform delicate extractions without asking questions. I was one of six across the Baltic region."
The room was silent. Then Kappel began to laugh—a high, brittle sound that had nothing to do with humor.
"We're all working for the same people," she said. "Don't you see? I designed the therapies. Van der Heijden shorted the bonds. De Vries and Becker harvested the materials. Vos—the soldier who died first—his unit provided security for Vanderbijl's Eastern European facilities. He was implicated in the disappearance of a journalist who was investigating the Krimulda trial. And Sofia Beltrame cleaned up whatever messes the rest of us created. We're not strangers. We're colleagues. We've been colleagues for years and never knew it."
"And what about her?" de Vries pointed at Agnieszka. "What's her role in this corporate family?"
The screen flickered again. A new file appeared: Agnieszka Kowalski, born in Krimulda, Latvia. Sister of Elina Kowalski, deceased, patient number eleven in the Krimulda clinical trial. No criminal record. No corporate affiliations. No visible role in the Vanderbijl apparatus.
"Participant 7: Agnieszka Kowalski. Status: anomaly. Case reference: none. Note: not employed by or affiliated with Vanderbijl Group or its subsidiaries. Presence unexplained."
"She's not one of us," Irma said. "She's not part of the machine."
"Then why is she here?" de Vries demanded.
The screen provided no answer. Instead, the green text disappeared, replaced by a live feed from a camera mounted somewhere in the room. The five survivors stared at their own image, each of them looking up at the monitor with expressions of confusion, fear, and—in Agnieszka's case—something that might have been satisfaction.
Then the lights went out completely. Not the dim red emergency lighting, but true darkness, the kind that swallowed sound and distance and the distinction between self and other. Someone screamed—Kappel, probably. Someone else was moving in the dark, footsteps rapid and purposeful. Agnieszka stayed perfectly still, listening. She heard a scuffle, a grunt, the sound of a body hitting the floor. Then silence.
When the lights came back on, de Vries was dead.
He lay in the center of the trading floor, his body arranged with deliberate precision: arms at his sides, legs straight, eyes closed. A thin red line circled his throat, barely visible at first glance. Sofia knelt beside him and examined the wound with professional detachment.
"Piano wire," she said. "Or something similar. Garroted. The killer approached from behind while the lights were out. Knew exactly where de Vries was standing. Knew exactly how long the lights would be off."
"Someone here knew the building's systems," Kappel said. "Someone who worked for Vanderbijl."
"All of us worked for Vanderbijl," Irma said. "Except her." She looked at Agnieszka. "The anomaly. The one who doesn't belong."
Agnieszka met her gaze. "I didn't kill him."
"You killed van der Heijden. I knew it when you gave your statement. You killed him, and now you've killed de Vries."
"Prove it."
The challenge hung in the air. Irma opened her mouth to respond, but Sofia raised a hand, silencing her.
"Look at the bodies," Sofia said. "Look at the pattern. Vos died first—the soldier, the security enforcer. The outermost layer of the operation. Then van der Heijden—the financier, the money mover. Now de Vries—the surgeon, the direct harvester. The killings are moving inward. Someone is working their way up the chain."
"Or down the chain," Kappel said. "Depending on how you diagram the organization."
"Either way, there's an order. A logic. Someone has ranked us by proximity to the victims—the real victims, the children and women who died—and is executing us in sequence."
Agnieszka listened to this analysis with genuine interest. Sofia was half right. There was a logic to the sequence. But the logic was not the killer's alone. The building itself was enforcing the order. The monitors, the traps, the timed blackout—someone had designed this space as an instrument, a machine for producing death in a particular sequence. Agnieszka had simply used the machine. She had killed van der Heijden when the opportunity presented itself. The building had killed de Vries.
Unless someone else in the room had done it.
She looked at the three remaining women. Sofia Beltrame, the state assassin. Irma Becker, the organ trafficker. Lena Kappel, the scientist who had designed the therapy that killed her sister. Any of them could have garroted de Vries in the dark. Any of them had reasons that Agnieszka could not yet see.
The screen flickered once more. This time, the message was brief:
"Participant 6: Irma Becker. Status: awaiting review. Participant 4: Lena Kappel. Status: awaiting review. Participant 8: Sofia Beltrame. Status: awaiting review. Participant 7: Agnieszka Kowalski. Status: UNKNOWN. Recommendation: immediate isolation."
The building's voice was speaking directly to the group now. It was telling them that Agnieszka was the threat—or that it wanted them to believe she was the threat. Either way, the effect was the same. Kappel, Irma, and Sofia turned to face Agnieszka as a unit.
"You need to tell us the truth," Kappel said. "Why are you here?"
Agnieszka looked at the three women who had helped destroy her sister. The scientist who designed the drug. The trafficker who supplied the test subjects. The assassin who silenced the investigators. And somewhere above them, watching through cameras and screens, the building itself—the ghost of Carl Vanderbijl, the corporate machine that had turned death into a product and products into profit.
"I'm here," Agnieszka said quietly, "because someone sent me an invitation. The same as all of you. A card with a date and a Latin phrase. My date was January 17, 2023. The day I stopped being a victim and started being something else."
"What did you become?" Sofia asked.
Agnieszka smiled. It was not a pleasant smile. It was the smile of someone who had spent six years learning to be patient and had finally run out of patience.
"I became the person who was going to make sure that none of you ever hurt anyone again. But I only killed van der Heijden. The building killed Vos. And one of you—one of you in this room—killed de Vries. Which means there are two of us playing the same game."
She looked at each of them in turn.
"Which one of you is it? Which one of you sent the invitations?"
The monitors went dark. The yellow windows showed nothing but fog. And somewhere in the depths of the Van der Bijl Building, machinery that had been dormant for a decade began to hum.
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