Open Sesame - The Beginning

A Story by WanderingMind

Book Lovers turned friends come together to claim a treasure. Is it worth it?

Cyber Pearl…..
A huge IT building which houses many world recognized IT and BPO organizations in its belly. The building has breath-taking garden views with two blocks of six floors each. The building also has many facilities for its organizations employee’s like the restaurant, a shopping mall, a gymnasium and a library.

You may be surprised to find a library in an “all-business” building but the property developers thought it as a way of stress buster and a chance for the employees of different organizations to meet new people.

The library was a very special place in the building, as it was the first structure to be finished in the entire building project. The Library housed many well-known works and it had regular staff to organize and maintain it.

Apart from the many walk-ins into library, three employees of different organizations named Adithya, Karan and Sanjana shared a similar habit of spending time with books unlike wasting it on social-networking sites. They used meet and greet each other daily as they spent their time in the library. As days passed by, they became close friends and used to hang out regularly.

One fine day, Sanjana was searching through the library shelves to find something interesting to read. Eventually she wandered into the dishevelled books section, which was basically the trash section of the library. She just threw a glance over a dirt pile of book and once particular book caught her attention. She picked the book and started to dust it. She took a seat and turned the first page to be surprised. The first page of the book was stamped as ‘Federal Bureau of Prisons, U.S. Department of Justice’. She was equally surprised and shocked with that stamp and her mind started to wander about how a US prison library book ended up in their building library.

With that thought running in her mind, she slowly started to turn the pages over. She found many of the pages were marked by a random set of numbers. She got confused about the dirty hand writing which was very hard to figure out. After spending most of her Friday evening, she gave in and sought the help of her two trusted book buddies, Adithya & Karan.

The three buddies meet at their favourite café and start to discuss about the book. They tried for hours and hours to make some sense out of that numbers and the writing, but found no success. After a long and tired decoding, Karan tried a different approach of matching the random numbers with the page and line numbers of the book. The first few words started to make some sense and he started to write down the letters which came up. The other two thought Karan lost his mind but eventually understood what he was up to. After a careful one full hour of writing, they finished the number combinations.

Sanjana started reading the whole thing together:

“Hello and congratulations on deciphering the world’s most confusing number combination and figuring this text out. My name is Thomas Aldine. I used to own an office space in this same building over a decade ago. My Company’s name was Amalgamate Ltd, which dealt with import and export of seeds, fertilizers and pesticides, which was just the face of the organization. Behind that mask, we used to export and import various drugs and narcotics. Most of you do not have the knowledge, but our company was shut by the Indian govt. for our illegal import and export business under fertilizer tags. As my company had many political bigwigs involved, the news never made it to the public. The drug operation obviously cost me my career, my freedom and money. We came to know through our internal network that the local law enforcement was planning a raid on our offices. I knew what the future held for me and I secretly started building a secret safe inside my office wall to stash my drug money. Eventually the raid happened and the police thought they made a full recovery of drugs and money.

But they were wrong. The money secretly hidden in my office wall was never recovered and is still lying there. After the preliminary court hearing, I was deported back to my country where I was arrested and sentenced to 25yrs in prison for unlawful business practices. I bought this book from my prison librarian and had it shipped to your building authority after encrypting it with my story. The library in the building was a very special place to me and I was sure that they would stack the book one day in the library shelves. By the time you read this, I might be dead already. Please dig out the money and I am sure you will use the money for a good cause. Good Luck and God Speed to you’.

The three friends were shocked after reading what they figured out from the book. Thoughts start to run wild in their minds and they were totally confused about what to do next. Karan said ‘Let’s dig it up guys. This is a chance from god himself’. Sanjana replied ‘Yeah, this kind of money can change people lives. I am thinking of setting up an orphanage and an old age home with the money’. Adithya was irritated and said ‘Sanju, stop talking like a wannabe miss universe. Think logically guys, this kind of money can change our lives but can also destroy it. What if we get caught digging up the treasure? What if someone else has already decoded the book? If everything goes right, how the hell do you plan to dig it out? There is a lot of thinking which needs to be done. First we have to figure out where the Amalgamate Company was floored in the building’

These words by Adithya stuck a thought in the three of them. They spent the next two days collecting all possible data about the Amalgamate Company and its office. They found out that the company was floored in the same space where Sanjana’s office is situated currently. Then the action plan started to chalk out.

Adithya said ‘I think I have a plan guys. Sanjana, by what time will all the employees of your office leave the premises? Sanjana replied ‘by 9:30 we will have all the office to ourselves. But the only concern is the security guard who stays up all night’ Karan said ‘Hmmm I will take care of the guy but how will we break and make the wall in one night?’ Adithya thought for some time and replied ‘My brother works for a construction company and he will surely have a solution for it. But the second challenge is, how will you get the machinery in and out of the building?’

Sanjana started to get nervous after hearing all this stuff. She said ‘what will we do if we get caught in the act???

***TO BE CONTINUED***