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Your search has been far from fruitless – there are many things here which caught your eye, Gennady, and you will return for them later – but you also have not found any radio equipment. If radio equipment was here, you would expect it to be in a central room or the office of a senior official, but there is nothing of the sort to be found. Before you continue your search over at the police station, however, there is one small matter you’d like to address before leaving.
Thudding down four flights of stairs in army boots produces a racket that reverberates through the empty building then cleanly cuts off when you set foot on the painted basement floor. You make your way to the large black furnace and rest a hand on its painted surface – yes, still warm to the touch, just above the temperature of the room.
From your village childhood, you know that old iron furnaces – like this one – can hold onto residual heat for long periods of time. The larger, the better they retain heat. With one this size, designed to heat a whole building, you don’t know how long it could remain warm after use – a few days at least, maybe more. But for it to be as warm as it is, there must have quite a fire going and quite recently, which does not accord with the dry hot weather that has persisted all March across northern Republia. You lift the oversized lever locking the furnace door in place, tug open the door, and peer within. As soon as you begin, ash pours out onto the floor. The furnace is stuffed to the brim. Either it has not been cleaned in a long time or a large amount of material was burned all at once fairly recently.
Hot air from the furnace interior wafts out into the basement room, carrying with it small flecks of ash. Distinctly absent from that air are the expected smells of smokey wood or acrid and cloying coal. This all must be paper ash, then. Curious: not that someone would burn files in advance of an invading army, of course, but it raises the question of where the files came from, as your brief tour of the building testified to masses and heaps of papers and records remaining unburnt.
You stare into the remains of the great mass of paper before again closing the furnace door, locking the remaining heat inside, and continuing back up the stairs to the ground floor, where Matsukov waits.