“I promise,” I say, and mean it.

I slide on my shades as we pull to a stop and quickly get out, belting Claudia’s borrowed jacket around me. I can feel them pull away, leaving me strangely bereft and all too conscious of the fact that I am, for the first time in days, alone.

I turn the corner and walk past the Auersperg palace at a swift clip, pretend to answer a call, my hand cupped around the microphone, obscuring my mouth and cheek. The section that is Auerspergstrasse is only two blocks, but it’s part of a much longer thoroughfare regulated by cameras. The fact that Parliament is visible a block east from here just past a roundabout doesn’t help.

Der Tresorraum might as well be a bank or even a museum by the look of it, except for the modern glass front doors. Not what I would have expected for a vault. I carry on my fake conversation as I pass beneath the camera at the entrance.

The interior is sparse, at modern odds with the Baroque architecture out front. A receptionist sits behind a desk in an anteroom beside a large steel statue that looks vaguely like a spiral tunnel.

“Kann ich Ihnen helfen?” the man at the desk says as I pocket my phone.

“Do you speak English?” I say.

“Yes, of course. May I help you?” he says without smiling. I wonder if he can hear the pulse pounding in my ears.

“I’d like to access my box.”

He rises. “This way, please.”

He escorts me through a door, which he opens with a key card. Down the hall past several secure corridors, he admits me to a windowless chamber. It houses nothing more than a desk, the woman sitting behind it, and the unmistakable entrance to a giant vault set in the adjacent wall.

The woman gestures to a pad on her desk. “Bitte,” she says, and I assume by the outline on the screen that I’m supposed to lay my hand on it. I wonder if she sees that my fingers are trembling, the moist smear my palm leaves against the screen.

And then a lock clacks on the vault’s steel door, and she crosses the room to haul it open for me.

The “vault” is nothing but a large room housing two counters, each with a metal plate in the middle and a standing touch screen.

“There are two rooms in the back for your privacy,” she says, pointing like a flight attendant.