The burn happened at 04.11 on a Tuesday and it took nine minutes.
It was not a hack. That is the thing everybody assumed for the first four days, and it is what the first three statements said, and it was wrong.
It was a man called Peter Oakes who was forty-six and who had worked in that building on a facilities contract since 2029, and who had been paid four hundred and eleven thousand euros over eleven months into an account in his sister's name, and who at eleven minutes past four in the morning on a Tuesday in March used a card that should not have worked on a door that should not have opened.
He was in that room for nine minutes.
He took four files.
They knew by six.
They knew what had gone by eleven, and that is the part of it that nobody outside that building has ever understood: it takes five hours to find out which four files, because the system does not log what a person looks at, it logs what a person exports, and Peter Oakes did not export anything.
He photographed a screen with a telephone.
So there is no list. There is nine minutes of corridor footage, and a man's shoulders, and the angle of a phone, and four people in a room on the second floor with the footage frozen at 04.14 working out what was on that screen from the reflection in a window.
By four in the afternoon they had three of the four.
Two of them were procedural and one of them was a cover arrangement in a country that has since made it entirely academic, and all three were bad and none of them were people.
The fourth was a file with a name on it that ran to thirty-one pages.
REIS, T.
Ines Duarte was in a room on the fourth floor at ten past four when somebody said that name out loud in a corridor.
She had been at that desk since eight in the morning and had spent the day doing what everybody in that department was doing, which is a damage matrix, and she had a spreadsheet open with four columns in it.
She heard it through a door.
And Ines Duarte, twenty-eight, who has been described in four annual reviews as exceptional at the desk, stood up so fast that she took her chair over backwards, and went out into that corridor without her lanyard, and said:
"Say that again."