coordinates
Long night with the assistant.
Theory: if page 117 is an offset, the digits after it might be meaningful. I asked it to look for structure in pages 117 to 120, and it found something. Three groups of digits that, read as latitude/longitude fragments with "52." and "13." in front (Berlin's coordinates), land on three places in the city:
- A courtyard in Adlershof, near where the institute was.
- A street corner in Prenzlauer Berg, two blocks from Keller's shop.
- A Plattenbau in Lichtenberg.
The assistant found (I checked, it's on a Berlin history site) that a flat on the Prenzlauer Berg street was used by the Stasi as a konspirative Wohnung, a safe flat for meeting informants.
I told Jonas on a call. He was quiet for a while. Then: "Lukas. If you put '52.5' in front of any random digits, you get somewhere in Berlin. And Berlin had thousands of safe flats. Random digits map to everything."
He's right, of course. That's literally what random means.
I'm going to look at the third one anyway.