Forty Eight Hours
The Ministry of Defense was a building designed to keep people out, which made it an interesting challenge for someone who had spent a decade learning how to get into places she was not supposed to be. Valeria spent the first twelve hours of her countdown doing what Medina had taught her: she mapped the building's security rotations, identified the gaps, and cultivated a contact — a junior archivist named Pardo who owed a gambling debt to people who did not accept late payments. She did not feel good about using Pardo. She did not feel good about any of this. But the document in Sub-basement 3 would give Restrepo the legal framework to dismantle a peace that had taken twelve years to build, and the crisis he needed to trigger the codicil's provisions was, she now understood, already in motion.
The news broke at 6 AM on the second day: a series of coordinated attacks on infrastructure targets across the eastern provinces. The attacks were small — a power substation, a water treatment plant, a communications relay — but they were precise, targeting the exact systems whose failure would meet the codicil's threshold for "systemic destabilization." The government would declare an emergency. Restrepo would invoke the codicil. The military would assume control. It would all be legal. That was the beauty of it, from Restrepo's perspective — not a coup but a constitutional mechanism,