One Comment on the Public Ledger Gave the Location

One comment on the public ledger gave the location.

After Gyeongmin's three cases went up last night, one of the sellers who had posted the same phrasing added a line under his own listing. The printed copy is in Warehouse Building 3, cabinet 5, scheduled for disposal next week.

It wasn't next week. When Dohyeon checked the disposal schedule, Building 3 was set for tomorrow morning.

Nineteen cabinets lined the inner wall of Warehouse Building 3. Dohyeon opened the fifth one.

The smell was damp paper. More ink than mold.

"This is it," he said.

The ledger was larger than A4. The cover carried a print date. Three years ago.

"This is a printout from before the auto correction," Dohyeon said. "The screen gets fixed when the server gets fixed. Paper doesn't get fixed."

"So this is the original," Mirae asked.

Dohyeon pulled out gloves before answering. If finger oil got on the paper, it would later blur who had touched it.

"No. It's a printout. The original is on the server, and the server's already been corrected." Dohyeon turned a page. "This is a copy that kept the form it had before the correction."

4:51 PM. Only one of the three warehouse lights was on. Dohyeon switched on his own headlamp and fixed the angle. If he held it in his hand, the shadow direction would shift between photos, and that would raise doubt about whether it was the same ledger.

Thirty seconds after he fixed it, the light cut out once. It came back two seconds later.

"The power's unstable," Dohyeon said. "If it cuts out, we reshoot. The shadows change."

Dohyeon stopped at page 231 of the ledger.

One page of return records held twelve lines. The total headcount column read 8. There were seven lines of names.

And the space where the eighth line should have been had been cut out with a blade.

"A clean removal," Dohyeon said. The comma disappeared from his voice.

"Was it torn," Mirae asked.

"Tearing leaves an irregular grain. This is a straight line. A knife or a paper cutter." Dohyeon pulled out a ruler.

Mirae raised her camera at the spot. Dohyeon blocked it with his hand.

"Wait. There's an order to this."

"What order," Mirae asked, lowering the camera.

"Later, this will be called forgery," Dohyeon said. "They'll say we cut it. So we need to photograph the state before we touched this page."

Dohyeon called out the sequence. Mirae shot in that order. The closed cabinet, the old seal sticker with no tear marks, the ledger's position inside the cabinet, the print date on the cover, all of page 231, a close shot of the cut edge, and the page numbers before and after. Seven shots.

"Pages 230 and 232 run in sequence," Dohyeon said. "If a sheet were pulled out of the ledger, two page numbers would go missing. Here, none are missing. It's not a sheet that was removed. Only a line was cut."

"Why does that matter," Mirae asked.

"To cut just a line, you'd have to do it with the ledger sitting right here. That means someone came into this warehouse."

Dohyeon set the ruler against the cut edge. The width of the cut was 6 millimeters. The height of one line.

"The line spacing is 6.1," he said. "Within the margin of error. Exactly one line was removed."

He looked at the cross section near the spine. There were three thin gaps.

"There are three more spots," he said.

He opened to the three spots. Page 88, page 402, page 655. All three were the same. The total headcount column stayed as it was, one line of a name was gone.

Dohyeon read the total headcount numbers on the four pages aloud. 8, 6, 11, 5. The name lines read 7, 5, 10, 4.

"Every one is off by exactly one," he said. "There's no case where two lines were cut."

"What does that mean."

"One at a time," Dohyeon said, folding the ruler. "There's no case where two people were erased at once. That could mean a person picked them out one by one by hand, or it could mean the rule only processes one at a time."

"Which is it."

"I don't know. Four cases aren't enough to decide," he said. "We need a bigger sample. But that sample is about to get loaded onto a truck."

Mirae checked the dates. The four return dates were scattered across three years. Different seasons, different floors.

"Any common ground."

"Right now I see one thing," Dohyeon said, pointing to the same column on all four pages. "The compensation payout column is empty in every one. They counted the headcount, but the compensation was never paid out."

"Is that confirmed."

"This is still an observation," he said. "With four cases, it could be empty by coincidence. We'd need more of a sample to call it confirmed."

"Four cases," Dohyeon said. "Four cases in a single three year old printout."

Mirae wrote it in her notebook. Four cases, one three year old printout. Her hand stopped after she wrote it.

"Dohyeon. We have to take this."

"We can't take it," Dohyeon said.

"Why," Mirae asked.

"It's an asset scheduled for disposal by the Agency. Taking it is theft." Dohyeon closed the ledger. "Evidence obtained through theft can't be used in court."

"Then if we leave it here, it's gone by tonight," Mirae said.

The probability of it disappearing, against the probability of killing the evidence through theft. Dohyeon set the two side by side.

Igyeol's voice came from the warehouse doorway.

"We leave it."

Igyeol walked up to the cabinet. She didn't touch the ledger.

"Instead, we do three things," she said. "Shoot in the order Dohyeon called out. Put one more of our own seals on the cabinet. It has no legal force, but if it's torn, whoever tore it leaves a trace. And we write up a seizure request right now."

"We write the seizure request ourselves," Dohyeon asked.

"Anyone can write one. Whether it gets accepted is another matter," Igyeol said. "If it's rejected, the reason will include this ledger's number. Then the ledger's existence stays on record as an Agency document."

Dohyeon counted the three steps one by one. No theft, forgery defense in place, a record left behind.

"We need one more thing," he said.

"Go ahead."

"A hash," Dohyeon said, looking at Mirae's device. "We need to calculate the hash of the photo files themselves right now and write it down by hand on paper. If someone later claims we altered the photos, we can check whether the handwritten number matches the file at that time."

"How many digits do I write," Mirae asked.

"The first sixteen digits are enough. That's a length you can write by hand, and the odds of a coincidental match are basically zero."

Mirae pulled the hashes for the seven photos. Dohyeon copied them down by hand. Sixteen digits each, seven lines.

Writing it took four minutes. His handwriting shook on the third line. He didn't erase it, just rewrote it next to the shaky line.

"If I erase it, later they'll ask why I erased it," he said.

The alarm went off as they were attaching the seal.

It wasn't the warehouse alarm. It was the perimeter entry alarm. Dohyeon counted the direction of the sound. Two of them, west and south.

"Two vehicles," he said.

The first person to come in wasn't in Agency uniform. It was a license examiner, one of the people who had sat at the observation post yesterday before dawn, and he had a document folder in hand.

"Surveyor Han Igyeol," he said. "There's an on site check related to the conditional maintenance supplementary documents. Would you explain your reason for being here."

"We're reviewing an asset scheduled for disposal," Igyeol said. "We don't have viewing authorization. I only just learned that."

The examiner looked at the cabinet. Two seals were attached. One old, one new.

"What's this seal," the examiner asked.

"I put it there," Dohyeon said. "Im Dohyeon. The time is 17:08. If you're going to tear it off, please write down the time you tore it off too."

The examiner lowered his hand. He asked without opening his folder.

"Why didn't you take it."

"Because that's theft," Igyeol said.

"That's correct," the examiner said.

He stepped back two paces from the cabinet. Then he wrote a line in his own folder.

"I'm recording the fact of the viewing. I'm also recording the asset number," he said. "This could be used against you."

"Please write it down," Igyeol said. "If the number stays on record, this ledger stays on record too."

The examiner's face showed he understood the meaning of that. He checked the number twice and wrote it down.

The people who got out of the second vehicle were from the disposal company. They were scheduled to load all nineteen cabinets onto the truck, and Building 3 was on today's schedule.

"When do you load it," Mirae asked.

"We load tomorrow morning," the company worker said. "Today we just mark them."

Twelve hours.

Dohyeon broke the twelve hours down. Filing the seizure request would take at least three hours, and night filings were processed the next morning. That put the request behind the truck.

"Surveyor," he said. "The request won't stop it."

"I know."

"Then why write it."

"To leave a record that we tried to stop it and couldn't," Igyeol said. "If this ledger disappears tomorrow morning, it stays on record that we tried yesterday and the process was too slow. The next person uses that."

Dohyeon wrote the sentence in the log. It was the third log entry today, and unlike the first two, it had no numbers in it.

Instead, he did one more thing that could be done with numbers. He put the photos on three storage media. Mirae's device, his own measuring instrument's card, and a physical card to hand off to Saebyeok.

"If one place gets erased, two remain," he said.

"All three are in our hands," Mirae said. "That's the same as one place."

Dohyeon stopped. The point was correct.

"Then we need a fourth," he said. "Outside our hands."

Mirae looked at her device. Jo Eunchae's number was on the list.

"Eunchae's in the middle of a license audit right now," he said. "If she takes on our material, that could add another audit."

"We still have to ask," Dohyeon said. "Whether she'll take it."

Mirae made the call. Dohyeon had her put it on speaker. If conditions came up, he needed to check the math himself.

Mirae laid out the situation and the risk in order, and Eunchae attached one condition.

"I won't take the files," Eunchae said. "I'll take the hashes only. Sixteen digits, seven lines."

"Then the photos stay in our hands."

"They should stay there. If I hold the photos, I become subject to seizure too," Eunchae said. "If I only hold the hashes, later I can prove whether your photos are genuine."

Dohyeon checked the math on that structure. It wasn't a way of splitting the material. It was a way of splitting verification authority.

"I didn't think of that," he said.

Mirae read the seven lines of hash aloud. Eunchae wrote them down and read them back. Both times, they matched.

After the call ended, Dohyeon folded the paper.

Outside the warehouse it was already dark. Two trucks were backed up in front of Building 3, and disposal tags had been stuck onto the cabinets. Nineteen out of nineteen.