"Three minutes!"
Jerome's voice was not just an alarm in their earpieces; it was the sound of a judge's gavel, delivering their final sentence. Three minutes. One hundred and eighty seconds. The time was short enough to make clear thought impossible, yet long enough for a cold, paralyzing fear to spread through every nerve.
They were trapped. A trap they had laid for themselves, and now they were the ones writhing in it. Before them was a rusted padlock, a seal of forgotten time. Behind them, two armed guards were steadily approaching. There was no way out.
"The lock… we have to break it," Sara said, her voice a trembling whisper. She was on the verge of panic. She kicked the old lock with her heel, a desperate act of frustration, but the centuries-old, thick iron did not even flinch. The only result was a muffled metallic thud that sounded deafeningly loud in the silence.
"Stop!" Mayra whispered sharply, grabbing her arm. "Do not make a sound!" Her mind, fueled by a surge of adrenaline, was working like a supercomputer, analyzing thousands of possibilities in a fraction of a second. Running was impossible. Fighting was suicidal. There was only one path left—forward.
She pulled a thin but incredibly strong metal pin from her hair. It was not just a hairpin; it was a tool, a lesson she had learned from her travels in places where the smallest things could mean the difference between life and death.
Sara stared at her in disbelief, her eyes wide even in the dim light. "What are you doing? This is not a movie, Mayra! Do you really think you can open this massive, ancient lock with a hairpin?"
"I have no choice but to try, Sara," Mayra whispered back, her focus absolute. She bent the end of the pin, giving it a slight hook. She inserted it into the small, tight keyhole of the padlock and closed her eyes, trying to see and feel the intricate mechanism inside the lock with the tips of her fingers.
"One minute!" Jerome's voice came through, now laced with clear panic. "They have reached the corner of the corridor! They have turned towards you!"
Mayra's hands were slick with sweat. She could feel the pins inside the lock—small, stubborn tumblers that had been frozen in place for centuries, as if they had sworn an oath to protect the Sultan's secrets. She gently twisted the pin.
A soft click.
It was a faint, almost inaudible sound. But to her, it was a symphony. One pin had moved.
"Fifty seconds!"
Mayra focused on the second pin. It was deeper, more resistant. She had to push her improvised tool further in.
Another soft click.
The second pin yielded. Her heart was pounding so hard she was afraid the guards would hear it.
"Thirty seconds! Mayra, forget it! Run! I will try to create a diversion! I will trigger an alarm!" Jerome was almost shouting now.
"No!" Mayra gritted her teeth. "An alarm would trap us forever." She could feel the last pin. It was the thickest and most stubborn of them all. She focused all her concentration on that single point.
Click. Click. Click.
She could feel it… it was moving… but it was not opening.
"Ten seconds! Oh my god, they are going to see you!"
And then, in a last, desperate attempt, Mayra did something different. She pulled the pin out slightly and pushed it back in from a different angle.
There was a deep, satisfying, and incredibly beautiful clunking sound.
The lock was open.
"It is open!" Mayra whispered. They removed the rusted padlock and pulled the iron grille, which made a painful, grating screech. Behind it was a square, coal-black hole, from which a suffocating smell of dampness, rot, and spiderwebs emerged.
At that exact moment, the shadows of the two guards appeared around the corner of the corridor, and the powerful beams of their flashlights danced across the wall.
"Inside!" Mayra practically shoved Sara into the narrow shaft.
They both jumped into the tight space. Mayra pulled the grille back into place from the outside, just as the guards' flashlight beams fell on the very spot where they had been standing a few seconds earlier.
They had made it. Just barely.
They were in a dark, dusty ventilation shaft. It was so narrow they had to crawl on their stomachs, and the air was so stale it was difficult to breathe.
"We… we are inside," Sara said, panting, her voice echoing in the confined space.
"Yes," Mayra replied, her own breathing heavy. "Now we just have to find the section where the 'Third Vizier's' documents are kept."
It was not easy. The shaft branched off in several directions, like an underground, dusty labyrinth. But Sara had done her homework well. She had memorized the old blueprints of the building like a book.
"This way," she said, pointing to a narrow passage that seemed slightly wider than the rest. "This path runs along the northern wall of the main records hall. If my calculations are correct, it should lead us directly above the vault."
After about twenty minutes of crawling through spiderwebs and dust, they saw another grille. But this one did not open to the outside, but downwards. They carefully peeked through it.
They were directly above the massive records hall, its high, domed ceilings lost in the darkness. Below, long, endless rows of metal shelves looked like tombstones in a cemetery. The hall was completely empty and silent, as if time itself had stopped here.
"Now we have to get down," Mayra said. The floor of the hall was about twenty feet below. They had no rope. But Mayra, as always, was prepared. In her bag, she had a lightweight but incredibly strong grappling hook and a thin kevlar cable. It was another lesson she had learned from working in dangerous places.
They securely fastened the hook to the grille and, one by one, descended silently, like commandos. They were now in the heart of the enemy's den.
"Third Vizier… Section forty two B," Sara whispered, as if chanting a sacred mantra. She led them through the shelves as if she were walking in her own home. Her memory was working like a GPS.
They reached Section forty two B. Here, there were hundreds, perhaps thousands, of thick, leather-bound boxes. Each box was inscribed with Ottoman Turkish, faded with time.
"Now what?" Mayra asked. "We cannot open all of them. It would take weeks."
Sara touched one of the boxes and then smiled. "We do not need to." She pointed to the end of the row of shelves, where a single, black iron safe was built into the wall, separate and stronger than the rest. "The official records were kept on the shelves. For the world to see. But the most sensitive, most dangerous secrets… they were always hidden."
The safe had a complex brass lock with no keyhole. Instead, it had several rotating dials with Arabic letters on them. It was a combination lock.
"Okay," Jerome's voice returned to their earpieces, now a bit calmer. "I cannot help you with this one. It is completely mechanical. You will have to find the combination yourselves."
"What could the combination be?" Mayra wondered.
Sara examined the safe closely. "Ottoman bureaucrats were very superstitious," she said. "They often used the name of their favorite Sultan or the numerical value of a verse from the Quran."
"But there are hundreds of Sultans and thousands of verses," Mayra said in frustration.
"Yes," Sara said. "But there was only one Sultan who 'trusted his shadows more than his subjects'."
Mayra remembered Attar's riddle. "Who?"
"Sultan Abdul Hamid the Second," Sara replied. "He was the last great and powerful Sultan of the nineteenth century." He was extremely clever, but just as paranoid and suspicious. He suspected everyone. He created a vast network of spies that spread throughout the empire. They were known as his 'shadows'."
Sara began to turn the dials. She set the name 'Abdul Hamid' on the dials. They held their breath. Sara turned the handle of the safe.
Nothing happened. It was still locked.
"Maybe it is not the name," Mayra said, disappointed.
"Wait," Sara said, a strange glint in her eyes. "Maybe it is not the name… but his greatest fear."
She turned the dials again. This time she was not writing a name, but a word. A word that symbolized the Sultan's greatest fear and the downfall of his entire empire. A word that was whispered in fear throughout the empire at that time.
"Betrayal." (Hıyanet in Turkish)
She turned the handle.
With a deep, satisfying clunk, the heavy door of the safe swung open by an inch.
They did not have much time. They opened the door. Inside, as they had hoped, there was only one thing. A thin, black leather-bound book. It was the personal report book of Sultan Abdul Hamid's chief spy, shared with no one but his Sultan.
Mayra opened it. They did not have the time to risk reading it there. They quickly began to take pictures of every page with their small, high-resolution camera.
Every page was a new bombshell.
One report clearly described how British agents were stealing "tablets with the language of the stars" from Iraq.
The next report revealed that the Ottoman Sultan was only pretending to help the British. Their real intention was to seize the ships for themselves, and they had a whole plan to betray the British.
And then, on a final page, was a note that seemed to have been added later. It was a report from eighteen ninety nine, sent from Berlin by the son or grandson of the same spy.
It read:
"Sir, the German archaeologist Robert Koldewey has begun excavating the temple of Marduk in Babylon. He was sold this information by a source from our own court. They are pretending to be looking for statues, but their real target is the same 'star tablets.' They believe that those tablets hold the secret to a technology that will make their empire invincible."
And then there was a line at the bottom that was blood-curdling.
"According to our intelligence, the new and ambitious Empire of Japan is also now keeping an eye on Berlin. They are following every move the Germans make."
It was a spider's web. A century-long, bloody web of deceit, in which the world's greatest empires were entangled. And they… they were now standing at the center of that web.
"We have to get out of here," Mayra whispered.
They finished taking the pictures, put the black leather book back in the safe, and were about to quietly make their retreat. They were about to celebrate their victory when…
Clack!
All the lights in the hall switched on at once.
For a moment, they were blinded. When their vision cleared, they saw a silhouette standing at the main door of the hall.
Was it a guard?
Had an alarm been triggered?
Or was it the encounter they had feared the most, and for which they were completely unprepared?