Relatively late in Vampire: The Masquerade – Swansong, Emem Louis has gone from unwitting vampire diplomat to unwilling infiltration specialist. In the offices of the joint task force dedicated to destroying Boston’s vampire population, she has the chance to find a crucial lead, but it’s going to take a little bit of work and finding the office 13 safe code.
While you don’t have to pull this off in order to finish the scene, cracking the safe in office 13 is worth a little extra experience for Emem. It’s worth taking the extra couple of minutes to figure out. Naturally, this involves mild spoilers for the back half of Swansong.
How to Find the Code to Office 13’s Safe
Once you’ve taken out the three guards in the SAD base’s offices and the engineer they were protecting, you have the run of the place. At this point, you can dig up some useful intel about SAD, their objectives, and their methods of operation.
However, there’s a locked safe in office 13, behind the intelligence director’s desk, that you can only open if you figure out the code. Thankfully, you can find it nearby; this isn’t a secret you had to have figured out several scenes beforehand.
The first clue is if you hang out in the vents long enough to hear a conversation between the engineer and her bodyguard about a guy named Charles Nussbaum. As a memo in the director’s office puts it, he was just dismissed for “serious professional misconduct.”
Subsequently, after you’ve taken out all four SAD agents, you can find Nussbaum’s desk in office 11, which has a box on top of it labeled with his home address.
If you’ve put two ranks in Emem’s Auspex Discipline to learn the Psychometry talent, you can use it on Nussbaum’s desk to see a flashback of him writing a memo, then going outside the office to hide it.
A third clue can be found on the body of the engineer, although it seems like it doesn’t show up regularly. It may only appear if you enter the stage without having enough ranks in Auspex to unlock Psychometry, which is weird because it’s arguably the most useful hint.
Whatever the circumstances might be, you may be able to inspect the engineer’s body and find a hidden note, signed “CN,” that says there’s something hidden above his desk.
All of the employees who worked out of this department are identified by name on the plaques next to each office’s door – somebody read their Evil Overlord’s Handbook – and Nussbaum is the only one here who has the initials CN.
Once you’ve found Nussbaum’s desk in office 11, you can return to the vents via the access panel in office 14, which is the only one that Emem leaves open after she uses it.
Inspect the grate that’s roughly above Nussbaum’s desk to find a note from him, addressed to the engineer you just killed. It also contains the code to the director’s safe: 050211.
Open the safe to find a Tremere concoction, a consumable item that removes 2 points of Hunger, and a three-page file that contains some data about the traitor in the Kindred’s midst.
And that’s how to find the code for the office 13 safe. For more guides on the puzzles of Vampire: The Masquerade – Swansong and more, keep an eye on our official tips hub for the game.
