The four walls of the Berlin apartment no longer felt like a safe house, but like a cage. Outside, the normal life of the city continued—people went to work, trams chimed as they passed. But inside that apartment, for three people, the world had changed forever. They were now shadows, fugitives, with a ten million dollar bounty on each of their heads.
"We cannot stay here any longer," Jerome finally broke the tense silence. He was peeking through a small gap in the window curtains, watching the street below. "With every passing minute, the chances of the Syndicate finding us increase. And not just the Syndicate. Now, any greedy neighbor could make a phone call to the police."
He was right. Their faces would now be in every corner of the internet, on the phone of every mercenary, and in the database of every intelligence agency.
"But where do we go?" Sara asked. Her voice was filled with a deep weariness. "We cannot go to the airport, nor the train station. Our faces are now our greatest enemies."
Mayra was bent over the table, her eyes fixed on the scanned pages of Doctor Einstein's diary. "Maybe we do not need to go anywhere," she said softly.
Jerome and Sara looked at her in confusion.
Jerome's voice was edged with disbelief. "What are we going to do, Mayra? Sit in this apartment and wait for a Syndicate hitman to break down the door?"
"No," Mayra said. She pointed to a specific page in the diary. "We will find the answers. Right here, in this diary. Doctor Einstein called himself Prometheus. He stole the fire. But in every story, the one who steals the fire also hides it somewhere. We need to find out where he hid his research, his machines, and most importantly, his laboratory."
"But he died in nineteen oh two," Sara argued. "His laboratory must have been destroyed long ago."
"Perhaps," Mayra acknowledged. "But Doctor Einstein was a brilliant and paranoid man. He knew that what he was working on was dangerous. He would not have left it in any ordinary place. He would have hidden it in a place where no one would even think to look."
It was another gamble, another riddle. The next few hours were spent in intense mental exertion. They were detectives now, searching for a hidden message in every line, every word, every random mark of a century-old diary.
"There is a pattern in his handwriting," Sara said suddenly. She was arranging the scanned pages on the table in a specific order. "In most entries, he uses the same kind of ink for the date. But on a few specific dates… the ink is slightly different, a little darker."
Jerome immediately scanned those pages on his laptop. "Sara is right," he confirmed a few minutes later. "This ink is different. It has a higher concentration of iron gall, which was used in secret documents at the time. This ink becomes invisible over time and only reappears when exposed to heat."
"Heat," Mayra repeated. An idea sparked in her mind.
She took a candle and a pair of tongs from the apartment's small kitchen. It was a risky task. But they had no other choice.
They opened the image of the first page with the special date on the laptop screen. Mayra very carefully held the candle under the screen, moving it back and forth slowly.
For a moment, nothing happened.
But then, on the screen, between the letters of the old handwriting, new, faint letters began to emerge, like a ghost coming out of the shadows.
They were numbers. Geographic coordinates.
Sara almost shouted with joy. "We found it!"
They quickly repeated the process with the rest of the pages. Each page gave them a new set of numbers. When they plotted all the coordinates on a map, they were scattered around the city of Berlin.
"This does not make any sense," Jerome said. "These places are random."
"Maybe they are not random," Mayra said. She was staring at the dots, as if trying to understand a constellation. She picked up a ruler and began to connect the dots to each other.
When she connected the last dot, a precise geometric shape had been formed on the map.
A pentagon.
"That… that is the same symbol," Sara said in a trembling voice. "The one that was on the first Sumerian seal. The five pointed star."
It was a revelation that sent shivers down their spines. A symbol that had traveled through thousands of years and thousands of miles. It was a signature. The signature of the 'Builders.'
"But what does it mean?" Jerome asked. "It does not give us a single location."
Mayra was staring at the pentagon. Her gaze was fixed on the center of the shape. "Maybe it is not showing us five places," she said. "Maybe it is showing us just one place. The place that is at the exact center of this shape."
Jerome quickly made the calculations. He found the exact coordinates of the geometric center.
"Alright," he said. "The location is… wait a minute. This cannot be."
"What is it?" Mayra asked.
"This location… it is at Tempelhof Airport," Jerome said in disbelief.
"Tempelhof?" Sara repeated, a shiver running down her spine despite the room's warmth. "But that is closed now. It is a public park."
"Yes," Jerome said, his voice dropping to a low, grim tone. "But it is what is underneath that matters. During the Second World War, the Nazis built a massive network of underground bunkers and tunnels beneath it. A city under the city. A place where they conducted their darkest experiments. Most of the tunnels were sealed after the war, their maps officially destroyed."
Mayra looked at the map, at the single red dot marking the center of the pentagon. "So he did not just hide it," she whispered. "He hid it inside a monster's lair."
At that very moment, there was a soft knock on the apartment door.
All three of them froze, their hearts pounding. Had the Syndicate found them?
The knock came again, a little louder this time.
Jerome silently went to the door and looked through the peephole. A look of surprise and confusion came over his face.
"It is… a delivery girl," he whispered. "A pizza delivery girl."
"We did not order pizza," Sara said.
"Wait!" Mayra stopped him as he was about to open the door. "Think. Only the three of us know we are here. A delivery girl would not just knock on our door by chance. This is a message."
Mayra went to the door and asked in a low voice, "Who is it?"
"Pizza delivery!" a cheerful voice replied from outside. "For apartment three B. The order was placed by the gentleman who gave me double the money and said that if anyone asks, just say it is from the 'friend with the tea'."
The friend with the tea.
The words echoed in their minds like a codeword. It was a reference that only the four of them could understand.
Mayra opened the door. Outside stood a young woman with short hair and a delivery cap. She nervously handed a large pizza box to Mayra, turned quickly without saying another word, and ran down the stairs as if she were fleeing from a ghost.
Mayra brought the box inside and placed it on the table. They opened it.
There was no pizza inside.
Instead, there were three items in the box:
A very old, detailed map of Berlin's sewage and underground subway system.
Three old, worn out worker's identity cards, with their pictures on them, but with different names.
And inside the lid of the box, written in marker, was just one word:
"Rats."