Page 114 of The Secret of Secrets (Robert Langdon #6)

Langdon surveyed the small room into which he and Katherine had just escaped.

Whatever this place is…I’ve just locked us in.

The space felt decidedly softer than the sterile corridor outside; it had carpeting, a number of realistic artificial trees, and even a series of abstract paintings on the wall.

There was an arched opening ahead of them, and he eyed it with trepidation.

Beyond, a wide concrete tunnel curved to the left and out of sight.

Three things about the passage felt instantly ominous to Langdon.

First, the tunnel lights were already on—pale blue on the gray walls—suggesting that someone else might already be inside.

Second, the floor of the tunnel was inclined downward, and Langdon hesitated to venture deeper into the earth.

And finally, it seemed clear from the RFID cards required to enter and exit this area that the tunnel likely led to the most secure area of Threshold—rather than to an exit.

For a fleeting moment, Langdon wondered if the safest move would be to surrender, but he had a growing suspicion that the older, well-dressed man pursuing them might actually be Mr. Finch himself—a man who, according to the ambassador, took no prisoners and would stop at nothing to protect Threshold.

We need somewhere to hide…now.

Langdon caught up with Katherine partway down the tunnel, which they followed to another arched portico. This entrance was framed in elegant black stone, with a wide swinging door of frosted glass. The translucent surface was etched with a familiar image:

Langdon and Katherine exchanged a silent look. It seemed that whatever they had seen so far—robotic surgeons, VR labs, artificial neurons, and computer chips—was only the preamble to whatever lay beyond this doorway.

With a surge of adrenaline, Langdon moved to the door and pushed it open just far enough to peer inside. To his surprise, he felt his gaze shift immediately in the one direction he had not anticipated this deep underground.

Up.

Langdon found himself looking skyward into a high domed ceiling—a concave canopy that was gently illuminated from below.

The circular dome reminded him of a planetarium, and yet Langdon knew what it once had been.

The dome is the strongest architectural form.

This was Folimanka Bunker’s “blast shelter”—the safe room where people congregated during an attack—its deepest, most secure space.

Langdon had once seen another secret underground dome—also owned by the U.S.

government—concealed beneath the golf course of the Greenbrier Resort in West Virginia.

For over three decades, the U.S. Congress’s private nuclear fallout shelter, Greenbrier Bunker, had been one of America’s best-kept secrets until the Washington Post published an exposé in 1992.

Langdon lowered his gaze and looked around the room itself. This is definitely not a planetarium. The chamber was vast and perfectly round, and it looked like nothing Langdon had seen in his entire life.

What is this place?

Bewildered, Katherine stepped into the domed chamber with Langdon. At first glance, it seemed like a depiction of a futuristic spacecraft’s command bridge.

The center of the room was dominated by a raised circular platform on which at least twenty sleek workstations sat in a ring, all facing outward. Each command post consisted of an elaborate cockpit—similar to a flight simulator.

As Katherine lowered her gaze to the main floor, she found herself unable to make sense of what she was seeing there.

Precisely arranged on the plush carpeted floor surrounding the command bridge, a starburst array of sleek, low-slung metallic pods radiated outward like the spokes of a wheel.

Each glistening pod resembled a piece of modern art—a minimalist, torpedolike shell of sleek black metal, three meters long and aligned with its own command post up on the bridge.

Puzzled, she moved toward the closest pod, now seeing that the top of each was actually a convex panel of tinted glass, so perfectly tailored that it had no seams. She peered down through the glass but saw only darkness within.

“What are these things?” Katherine whispered as Langdon arrived beside her.

He studied the pod a moment and then reached down and touched a button discreetly recessed in its side.

There was a hiss of air, like the release of a vacuum, and the glass lid of the pod hinged upward like a gullwing door.

Soft lights illuminated inside, revealing a padded interior that resembled a futuristic sleeping pod.

Or a coffin.

“It looks like an advanced version,” Langdon said, “of the pod we saw in Gessner’s lab.”

Katherine nodded, peering in at the Velcro restraints and the IV connector. This machine was clearly the offspring of the rudimentary prototype in which they had seen Gessner’s body…the suspended-animation machine capable of holding a critically injured patient on the threshold of death for hours.

In addition to being larger and sleeker than its forefather, this version contained a specialized head cradle with plush leather padding and a skull-sized opening.

The opening looked a lot like a magnetoencephalograph’s “sensing cavity”—the area equipped with magnetic sensors to detect neuronal activity—although Katherine assumed that if brain chips were involved, the opening probably contained some kind of near-field or ultra-wideband technology commonly used to interface with brain implants.

Wireless communication directly through the skull, she thought, feeling a chill. If a subject is implanted with a fully integrated H2M brain chip…and that chip is capable of real-time monitoring…

Katherine felt dizzy as it began to dawn on her precisely what this room was designed to do.

Incredibly, she and Robert had been discussing the topic all afternoon…

altered states of consciousness, out-of-body experiences, psychedelic drug trips, epileptic postictal bliss.

A collage of concepts now flooded her mind: brain filters, universal connection, humankind’s untapped ability to glimpse a vastly wider spectrum of reality.

These gleaming sarcophagi, she now realized, were the final piece of a research project that, less than an hour ago, she would have declared utterly impossible.

Is this really happening?

Beside her, Langdon raised his eyes from the pod and gazed out over the entire dome. “But I don’t understand…what happens in this room?”

The answer to his question, Katherine knew, was as simple as it was mind-bending. This place was engineered to unveil life’s most enigmatic secret…the mind’s ultimate altered state…the single most elusive of human experiences.

As the weight of the moment settled over her, Katherine reached out and quietly took his hand.

“Robert,” she whispered. “They’ve built a death lab.”