Page 10 of The Secret of Secrets (Robert Langdon #6)
Savoring the warmth of the hotel shower’s body jets, Robert Langdon closed his eyes and breathed hot steam into his lungs. He had managed to extricate himself from his wet clothing, and yet he still had not managed to shed the shroud of confusion surrounding this morning’s events.
Langdon considered calling Katherine to interrupt her tour of Dr. Gessner’s lab and tell her what had happened, but he thought better of it.
This is a bizarre conversation we’ll need to have face-to-face when she returns.
Even now, as Langdon’s body gradually warmed and his thinking became clearer, he felt no closer to a logical explanation for the ghostly apparition he had seen on Charles Bridge. Or his reaction.
Normally Langdon reacted calmly under pressure, but this morning he had panicked, overcome by a strange, visceral fear. It had overwhelmed his rational mind…the sight of the woman, the smell of death, the spear, the eerie tolling of the bells. The haunting memory replayed endlessly in his head.
How could this happen?
He returned to the events of last night, barely five hours earlier, to Katherine screaming his name and jolting awake from a vivid nightmare. He had consoled her as she frantically conveyed her harrowing vision.
It was terrifying, Robert…There was a dark figure standing at the foot of our bed.
She was dressed in black…she had a spiked halo on her head…
and she was holding a silver spear. And she smelled putrid, like death.
I shouted for you, but you weren’t there!
The woman hissed at me, “Robert cannot save you. You are going to die.” Then there was a deafening noise and a flash, and the hotel exploded in a cloud of fire. I could feel myself burning…
At the time, despite the obvious horror of Katherine’s dream, the elements had made logical sense to Langdon.
The spiked halo or radiant crown had featured prominently in Katherine’s lecture that night.
The silver spear had been a topic of conversation over drinks after the event with Brigita Gessner.
The smell of sulfur could have lingered from their trip to the nearby hot springs of Karlovy Vary.
And the explosion at the hotel was no doubt the unfortunate result of seeing some grim news footage yesterday of a bombing in Southeast Asia.
Langdon had comforted Katherine, reminding her that absinthe was a potent hallucinogen—and also that she was likely on edge because her editor was about to read her manuscript. I know those nerves well, Langdon thought. No wonder you had a sleepless night.
Now, however, hours later, standing in the shower, Langdon was at a loss to find any logical explanation for what he had just seen…at least not in his current understanding of reality.
Einstein had famously declared: Coincidence is God’s way of staying anonymous.
What I saw was not a coincidence, Langdon’s gut insisted. It was a statistical impossibility.
Either Katherine’s nightmare had predicted the future…or the future had reacted to her dream. Whichever one was true, Langdon remained baffled.
More eerily still, Katherine’s lecture last night had addressed this exact phenomenon.
Precognition.
The ability to sense or foresee future events before they happen.
From the stage in Vladislav Hall, Katherine had recounted some of history’s most famous instances of precognition, including the clairvoyant dreams of Carl Jung, Mark Twain, and Joan of Arc.
She explained that Abraham Lincoln, three days before his assassination, had shared a dream with his bodyguard, Ward Hill Lamon, in which he saw a covered corpse guarded by a soldier who announced, “The president, he was killed by an assassin.”
Then Katherine went on to describe the strangest case of all—Morgan Robertson—an American author who published the 1898 novel Futility, which he based on a vivid nightmare he had about an unsinkable ocean liner— The Titan —striking an iceberg and sinking on one of its first voyages across the Atlantic Ocean.
Incredibly, the book was published fourteen years before the Titanic disaster.
It so specifically described the ship’s construction, navigational course, and sinking that the coincidences had never been explained.
“I know that there are skeptics in the audience,” Katherine had said, glancing playfully in Langdon’s direction, “and so I thought I’d share an experiment, which was first conceived and performed years ago by a colleague of mine at the Institute of Noetic Sciences.
Since then, it has been replicated and built upon by labs around the world. It goes like this…”
Katherine pointed her clicker at the screen behind her, and an image appeared—a test subject wearing a brain monitor and sitting in the dark in front of a small movie screen.
“While monitoring a subject’s brain waves with specialized equipment,” she began, “we show him a random stream of images. These images fall into three distinct categories—horrifying violence, tranquil calm, or explicit sexual content. Because each type of image triggers a different section of the brain, we are able to watch in real time as his conscious mind registers the image.”
She clicked again and displayed a graph of brain waves with intermittent spikes—each color-coded to indicate what type of image had been shown. “As expected, the appropriate sections of the brain light up with the appearance of each specific image. Follow me so far?”
Heads nodded eagerly.
“Great,” she said, now zooming in on the graph’s horizontal axis. “This timeline is an extremely accurate record to indicate the precise moment at which the computer flashed each image at random and the precise moment the brain spiked.”
Langdon wondered where this was going.
“If we zoom in farther,” she said, clicking to display increasingly shorter time increments, “we get down to the millisecond range…and we discover there is a big problem.”
She said nothing further, but within seconds there was a communal murmur of bewilderment around the large hall. Langdon shared in the confusion. According to these graphs, the subject’s brain spiked before the computer had shown the image.
“As you clearly see,” Katherine said, “this man is registering each image far too early. The appropriate part of his brain is lighting up a full four hundred milliseconds before the image is displayed. Somehow, his consciousness already knows what type of image he is about to see.” She smiled.
“And that’s not even the most startling part… ”
The hall fell silent.
“As it turns out,” Katherine said, “the brain reacts not only before the image is displayed …but before the computer’s random-number generator has even chosen which image to show! It’s as if the brain is not predicting reality…so much as creating it.”
Like everyone around him, Langdon was stunned. He also knew that this very idea—the notion that human thoughts create reality—existed at the core of most major spiritual teachings.
Buddha: With our thoughts, we create the world.
Jesus: Whatever you ask for in prayer, it will be yours.
Hinduism: You have the power of God.
The concept, Langdon knew, was echoed by modern progressive thinkers and artistic geniuses as well. Business guru Robin Sharma declared: Everything is created twice; first in the mind, and then in reality. Pablo Picasso’s most enduring quote proclaimed: Everything you can imagine is real.
A knock startled Langdon, and Vladislav Hall dissolved from his mind.
He was back in the shower and heard the bathroom door opening.
Through the translucent shower enclosure, Langdon saw the hazy outline of a person entering and he breathed a sigh of relief.
Thank goodness she’s back early. No doubt Katherine had heard about the hotel incident and quickly returned.
“Just finished,” Langdon called, turning off the hot water and forgoing his usual ice-cold rinse. I’ve had enough cold water for one morning. He grabbed the towel hanging inside the enclosed shower door, wrapped it around his waist, and stepped out into the bathroom. “Katherine—”
He stopped short.
Katherine was not there.
Langdon was standing face-to-face with an angular man in a leather suitcoat.
“Who the hell are you?!” Langdon demanded. How did you get in here?!
The intruder moved several inches closer, his expression humorless. “Mr. Robert Langdon?” he said with a heavy Czech accent. “Good morning. I am Captain Janá?ek of the ú?ad pro zahrani?ní styky a informace. I took the liberty of securing your passport from your bedroom. I trust you don’t mind.”
You took my passport? Langdon felt naked standing in only a towel before this strange man. “I’m sorry, who are you?”
The man flashed an identification badge, but in the steamy air Langdon could see very little except the organization’s bold emblem—a lion reared up on his hind legs.
The Lion Rampant? The symbol was quite common, and it also happened to be the logo of Langdon’s prep school alma mater, although he was fairly certain this guy was not from Phillips Exeter Academy.
“I’m with úZSI,” the man said gruffly. “Czech national intelligence service.”
You don’t look like an intelligence agent, Langdon thought. The man’s eyes were bloodshot and weepy, his thinning hair was uncombed, and his shirt was badly wrinkled beneath his leather jacket.
“I will say this once, Mr. Langdon.” The Czech official stepped toward him as if making a point of crossing some invisible line between them. “You just evacuated a five-star hotel. Either you give me a very good reason why, or I arrest you immediately.”
Langdon was at a loss for words. “I…I’m terribly sorry,” he stammered. “It’s difficult to explain, Captain. I made a mistake.”
“I agree,” the man fired back, his expression revealing nothing. “A substantial one. Why did you pull the alarm?”
Langdon saw little choice but to tell the truth. “I thought there was going to be an explosion.”
The officer’s only reaction was a faint twitch of his furry eyebrows. “Interesting. And what might cause this explosion?”
“I don’t know…perhaps a bomb.”
“I see. Perhaps a bomb. So, you feared there was a bomb in this hotel…and yet you ran back inside the building and upstairs to this suite?”
“To warn my…friend.”
The man pulled a notepad from his jacket and read it. “Your friend is Ms. Katherine Solomon?”
Langdon felt a chill to hear Katherine’s name on the lips of a Czech intelligence officer. The situation was feeling more serious by the moment. “That’s correct. But she was already gone.”
“I see, I see. So, knowing your friend was safe, rather than taking the stairs back out, you risked drowning in an icy river by jumping out the window?”
Langdon had to admit that the action surprised even himself. “I panicked. A church bell suddenly began tolling…It seemed ominous.”
“Ominous?” He looked offended. “It’s called Angelus, Professor. Church bells ring on the hour here as a call to morning prayer. I would have thought you knew that.”
“Yes, of course, but I wasn’t thinking clearly. The bells made it feel like I was…I don’t know…out of time. I had seen police in the lobby earlier—”
“Out of time? So…your bomb was a time bomb? Set for seven a.m.?”
It wasn’t my bomb! Langdon strained to retain his composure. “No, I was just very confused, and I reacted on instinct. Of course, I will pay for the—”
“No need to pay, sir,” the man said, his tone softening. “People get confused. That’s not a problem. I’m just trying to understand why you thought there would be an explosion. Where did you get your information?”
I can’t possibly tell him, Langdon knew. The truth was implausible—unlikely beyond belief—and an honest confession ran a serious risk of backfiring. He’ll never believe me. Langdon suddenly sensed he might need an attorney.
“Mr. Langdon?” the officer pressed.
Langdon shifted, holding his towel around his waist. “As I said, I was confused. I had bad information.”
The captain’s gaze narrowed as he took a step closer and lowered his voice. “Actually, Professor, that is not the problem. The problem is you had good information. Very good information.”
“I don’t understand.”
The officer glared, eyes probing. “No?”
Langdon shook his head.
“Professor,” the captain said icily. “Early this morning, in this very hotel, my team located and defused…a bomb. It was set to detonate at exactly seven a.m.”