Page 104 of The Secret of Secrets (Robert Langdon #6)

CIA Director Gregory Judd gunned his wife’s Jeep Grand Cherokee down Georgetown Pike toward CIA’s Langley headquarters.

His regular driver was not prepared at this early hour, and Judd did not have time to wait.

Despite his distaste for Finch’s methods, the director had a duty to country first…

and most Americans could not begin to comprehend the threats this country faced.

America and her allies are under attack…at all times.

In recent years, their enemies had needed only the most rudimentary social media tools to influence the minds and decisions of millions upon millions of people.

His agency had tracked measurable foreign influences over elections, consumer habits, economic decisions, and political trends.

But those attacks paled in comparison to the storm that was coming.

There’s a new battleground emerging, and it requires new kinds of weaponry.

The Russians, Chinese, and Americans were all racing to dominate this new arena, and winning that race had been Gregory Judd’s primary directive for his entire twenty-year tenure in the upper echelons of the agency. Threshold, and its astonishing technology, was about to give him an edge.

Now, as he raced toward Langley, he wondered what it was that Ambassador Nagel had sent to his secure server that she believed was explosive enough to hold the CIA hostage.

A bluff? Doubtful. An overplayed hand? Nagel was too smart for that.

All he could imagine was she had somehow discovered what they were doing inside Threshold. If that was true, Judd would need to do everything in his power to keep her quiet. If Nagel went public with that kind of sensitive information, the fallout would be explosive—and global.

Overnight, the psychic arms race would escalate uncontrollably.

Deep beneath Folimanka Park, The Golěm sat with his back against the heavy metal door, catching his breath.

I cannot risk another seizure.

I need to escape alive…I must release Sasha.

As his pulse slowed, he stood cautiously and gripped the thick wheel mounted to the door.

He paused for ten seconds to allow any lightheadedness to clear.

Then, with all his strength, he turned the wheel repeatedly until he heard the heavy latch disengage inside.

The Golěm pushed the steel portal inward.

From out of the blackness beyond, an icy wind whipped past him, lifting his cloak tails as he put his head down and stepped through the airtight opening.

The lights inside snapped on, and he heaved the door closed behind him.

Instantly, the wind subsided.

The fortified vault in which he was now standing was bitter cold, but he knew this was not air-conditioning.

This was Prague winter seeping in. The ceiling had a gaping circular hole in it, more than two meters in diameter.

The hole ascended through a vertical steel conduit that climbed several stories through the earth to an ingeniously disguised opening in the middle of Folimanka Park.

The Golěm had seen the opening many times.

Everyone had.

The conduit emerged from the ground, rising about three meters into the air, and was capped with a perforated concrete dome. For decades, to the passersby in the park, it resembled a giant concrete torpedo sticking out of the earth.

Guidebooks correctly identified it as the original ventilation shaft for the now-defunct Folimanka bomb shelter, and despite many petitions to remove the “torpedo tip” as an unsightly reminder of Cold War times, anonymous street artists had come up with a very different idea.

Prague was a city of avant-garde art, and years earlier the concrete vent had been mysteriously transformed.

The odd-shaped canvas now paid tribute to one of Hollywood’s most beloved movie stars—a robot who was conveniently shaped exactly like the tip of a torpedo—the droid R2-D2 from Star Wars.

R2-D2 had become a popular feature in Folimanka Park, towering over all who posed for photos beside its iconic silver, blue, and white body.

The city government agreed it was historically appropriate to leave the anonymous art in place, as it actually had been a Czech writer—Karel ?apek—who had coined the term “robot” for the very first time in a play he wrote in 1920.

Of course, from the outside no one would have any idea that this defunct ventilation shaft had been entirely repurposed. It was no longer used to pull air in. Rather, it was now an emergency fail-safe—engineered to let something else out.

The monotonous patter of rain on Faukman’s windows seemed an apt soundtrack for his latest dead end. Having researched all of In-Q-Tel’s fractal-based investments, he had found nothing that seemed like it could be compromised by Katherine’s writings.

Fractal telescopes? Fractal cooling components? Fractal stealth geometry?

Faukman shook his head in frustration as the exhaustion of the night settled deeper into his bones. He couldn’t know for certain, but he suspected that whatever in Katherine’s manuscript had provoked this attack…was far more significant than fractals.