Instead, they walked like weary gladiators, crossing an arena littered with the bodies of their slain enemies. They crossed to greet the emperor and to receive their reward. It seemed to Seth that they had finally come back to write the ending chapter to a war that had begun in another era and which had waited for them all along. The enemy still fought back at them over time, as if destiny were still waiting to be decided.

The first vault door had two combination dials that had to be turned simultaneously. Zoe read the numbers aloud as Seth on the right dial and Gunther on the left turned the mechanisms.

“Left dial to the left to twenty-seven,” she read from the documents, as Stratton held the light for her, “and right dial to the left to fifty-nine. Get ready. Go.” Seth and Gunther moved the dials in unison, then waited for their next instruction.

“That’s it,” Zoe said. “That’s all the numbers.”

Seth and Gunther looked at each other and then, as if a communication had passed between them, turned and gestured to Morgen.

“Father,” Gunther said. “Will you do the honor?”

Morgen walked reverently to the door with the hesitancy of a man approaching the fulfillment of his life’s work. He took the handle on the vault door and wrenched it clockwise. Somewhere inside the massive door the mechanism clacked solidly, moving its well-oiled parts for the first time in more than four decades. This sound, too, seemed to solidify this vault’s relationship with the one beneath the streets of Zurich, as if they had both been designed by the same man for the same act of destiny.

Morgen strained at the door. It wouldn’t move.

Alarmed that they had come so far for nothing, Seth placed his right hand beside the priest’s and heaved. Still nothing.

The joy and reverence had fallen into ruins on Morgen’s face.

“Seth?” Zoe asked. “What’s the matter?”

“Door won’t open,” Seth said. “The mechanism moved inside, but it won’t swing open.” He paused. “Let me see the instructions.”

She handed him the papers from which she had been reading. Ridgeway examined the papers with Gunther looking over his shoulder. After a pause he handed them to Gunther.

“We did everything right,” Ridgeway said. “It must be the hinges or something.”

Morgen’s face looked blank, as if his thoughts were focused in another era. “They had some sort of automatic mechanism, I believe.” Morgen said finally. “I remember the door almost opening by itself when the sergeant brought me here.”

“Perhaps something the camp commandant added?” Gunther suggested.

Ridgeway shrugged, his face dark with thought Then, a moment later, he said to Gunther, ‘Take off your rope. Tie one end to the handle of the vault door.”

Gunther complied, and when the knot was secure, Seth arranged them along the rope like members of a tug-of-war team. Seth gave himself the anchor position at the tail of the lineup.

“Pull!” he yelled. The rope lightened and swayed as they arranged themselves in a straight line. They took a step back as the nylon climbing rope stretched. But the door remained stationary.