The morning light had barely touched the stained-glass windows of Langley University Library when Professor Miriam Blake discovered the manuscript missing.
It wasn’t just any manuscript. The Dagger Code, an 18th-century ciphered journal once owned by a British double agent, was believed to contain secrets about unsolved political assassinations. It had been under Blake’s study for nearly six months. Now, its glass case stood empty—no signs of a break-in, no camera footage, no alarms triggered.
Detective Nolan Hart was called in. Stoic and methodical, Hart wasn’t fond of academic crimes—until he realized the manuscript’s secrets weren’t just historical.
A cryptic note was left in its place:
“Truth buried thrives in silence. Let sleeping daggers lie.”
Within days, Blake’s assistant, Julia Carr, disappeared. Julia, a history postgraduate with a photographic memory, had been decrypting the final passages of the manuscript. Was it a coincidence?
Hart began digging.
Julia’s apartment was untouched—except for one thing: the mirror in her room had “DAGGER 27B” scrawled across it in red lipstick. Cross-checking it with the university archives, Hart found a forgotten storage wing labeled 27B, disused since a fire decades ago.
Inside, amid dust and decay, Julia was found—alive but drugged. In her pocket, a torn journal page with a cipher that, once cracked, led to coordinates pointing to an old war bunker outside town. There, the missing manuscript was hidden… but altered. Pages were gone.
Someone had tried to erase a name.
Hart traced the missing pages to Professor Blake herself. Facing exposure for falsifying parts of her research and manipulating university grants, she had tried to destroy what Julia decoded—the name of a living relative of the original spy, now a powerful figure in Parliament.
Professor Blake was arrested. Julia recovered. The manuscript, restored.
But the final line of the journal still lingers in Hart’s mind:
“One dagger hidden. One still to fall.”
