Page 23 of The Secret of Secrets (Robert Langdon #6)
Langdon’s eardrums were still ringing from the gunshots as he stepped through the shattered doorway into Crucifix Bastion. His loafers crunched on the glass shards covering the pink marble floor as he joined Janá?ek and Lieutenant Pavel in the elegant entryway.
A hallway led to their right, but Janá?ek seemed more focused on the imposing steel door directly in front of them. Stenciled with the word Lab , the portal had a tiny reinforced window and a biometric panel.
“Stairwell down to the lab,” Janá?ek said, peering through the window and trying the locked door.
Langdon glanced around for an elevator, curious how Gessner transported heavy scientific gear down to her facility, but he saw nothing else in the foyer except this stairwell and the hallway that led off to their right.
Langdon had yet to see any sign of a keypad for the “clever passcode” that Dr. Gessner had bragged about the night before.
Janá?ek was studying the dislodged frame of shattered safety glass on the floor.
After a moment, he crouched down, hoisted the frame, dragged it over to the lab entrance, and leaned it precariously against the lab door.
“Makeshift alarm,” he announced. “In case your friend thinks she can slip out while we’re not watching. ”
Langdon could not believe Janá?ek thought Katherine would run, but his resourcefulness was impressive.
Lieutenant Pavel was already moving cautiously down the hall, his gun raised as if he could be ambushed at any moment. Put your goddamned gun away! Langdon wanted to shout. They’re unarmed scientists!
As Janá?ek and Langdon followed, Lieutenant Pavel peered into a small restroom, apparently found it empty, and continued to the end of the hall.
Here the corridor turned left, and he inched warily around the corner, gun at the ready.
After a moment, he holstered his weapon and turned back to his captain with a shrug. “Nikde nikdo.”
Langdon followed Janá?ek around the corner into a dazzling space bathed in natural light.
Furnished like the atrium of some boutique hotel, the room had stark white couches, pounded copper tables, and a sophisticated coffee station.
The floor-to-ceiling windows offered a majestic view out across the bastion’s long courtyard to Prague’s skyline, Pet?ín Tower, and Vy?ehrad Fortress.
As Langdon surveyed the space, his gaze fell on a massive piece of art on the rear wall—a Brutalist wall sculpture whose unique style he recognized at once.
My God, is that an original Paul Evans piece?
The eight-foot-square rust-colored metal was divided into a grid of rectangular recesses, each holding a smaller individual sculpture.
An improvisation on a “cabinet of curiosities,” Langdon had to guess the Paul Evans was easily worth a quarter of a million dollars.
Gessner had bragged last night about her lucrative medical patents, but Langdon had clearly underestimated just how lucrative those patents must be.
Janá?ek was moving toward the far end of the room, where an oversized wooden door stood open into what appeared to be Dr. Gessner’s office.
“Dr. Gessner?” Janá?ek called, walking into the office.
Langdon followed in the hope of seeing Katherine, but the office was empty.
The neuroscientist’s office was adorned with a collection of vibrant abstract prints—each one an amorphous spheroid blob with regions of different colors—which Langdon immediately recognized as MRIs of the human brain.
Science as art.
Langdon wondered if Gessner was so self-involved as to hang images of her own brain.
Bio self-portraits had become popular lately with the advent of imaging companies like DNA11, which generated artwork based entirely on a customer’s unique DNA microscopy.
Genetic art, they advertised, means no two people ever own the same piece.
Janá?ek walked over to Gessner’s desk and examined what appeared to be an intercom and microphone. He selected a button and held it down.
“Dr. Gessner?” he declared into the mic. “I am úZSI Captain Old?ich Janá?ek. As I suspect you are aware, I am with Professor Robert Langdon. It is imperative that you and Ms. Solomon come upstairs immediately to speak with me. I repeat— immediately. Please confirm.”
Janá?ek released the button and waited, glaring up into a fish-eye camera on the ceiling.
With each passing moment of silence, Langdon felt increasingly uneasy. Why isn’t Katherine responding? Did something happen down there? Has there been an accident?
“Professor?” Janá?ek sauntered slowly over to Langdon. “Do you have any idea why Ms. Solomon would be ignoring me? They are obviously here. Dr. Gessner’s office is unlocked, and there are fresh footprints outside.”
Langdon was not sure how “fresh” the muted prints were, but considering their scheduled meeting here, it seemed logical that Katherine was indeed downstairs with Gessner. “I have no idea,” he replied truthfully.
Janá?ek guided Langdon back to the waiting room and pointed to one of the white couches. “You sit.”
Langdon obeyed, taking a seat on the long couch by the side wall. Janá?ek placed a phone call, speaking in rapid-fire Czech.
While Langdon waited, his gaze moved again to the colorful images decorating Gessner’s office. Just three pounds of flesh, he thought, scrutinizing the mysterious contours and interconnected folds in each image. And science still has no clue how it works.
In her lecture last night, Katherine had projected a markedly less attractive image of a human brain—a stark laboratory photograph of a grayish, furrowed glob of tissue sitting in a stainless-steel tray.
“This blob is your brain,” she had told the crowd.
“I realize it looks more like a mound of very old hamburger, but I can assure you, this organ is nothing short of miraculous. It contains approximately eighty-six billion neurons. Together they form over a hundred trillion synaptic connections, which can process complex information almost instantly. Moreover, these synaptic connections can reorganize themselves over time as needed. This phenomenon, known as neuroplasticity, enables the brain to adapt, learn, and recover from injuries.”
Katherine displayed another photo—a single DVD sitting on a table.
“This is a standard DVD—it can hold an impressive four-point-seven gigabytes of information,” she continued, “which equates to approximately two thousand high-definition photos. But do you know how many DVDs it would take to store the estimated memory of the average human brain? I’ll give you a hint…
If you stacked the required DVDs on top of each other”—she gestured at the soaring ceiling of Vladislav Hall—“they would reach well beyond the peak of this building. In fact…the stack would be so tall…it would reach the International Space Station.”
Katherine tapped her skull. “We each store millions of gigabytes of data in here—images, memories, lifetimes of education, skill sets, languages…all sorted and organized neatly in this tiny space. Modern technology still requires a data warehouse to match it.”
She turned off the PowerPoint and walked to the front of the stage. “Materialist scientists remain baffled as to how an organ so small could possibly hold such vast quantities of information. And I have to agree, it seems a physical impossibility…which is why I’m not a materialist. ”
There was a slight flurry in the audience. Poking the hornet’s nest again, I see. Langdon had learned that Katherine had no qualms about striking a nerve when it came to the two opposing philosophies into which the study of human consciousness was divided.
Materialism versus Noetics.
The materialists believed that all phenomena, including consciousness, could be explained solely in terms of physical matter and its interactions.
According to materialists, consciousness was a by-product of physical processes—the activity of neural networks along with other chemical processes within the brain.
For noeticists, however, the picture was infinitely less confined. Noeticists believed that consciousness was not created by brain processes, but rather was a fundamental aspect of the universe—akin to space, time, or energy—and was not even located inside the body.
Langdon had been stunned to learn that the human brain represented only 2 percent of a person’s body weight, and yet it consumed an incredible 20 percent of the body’s energy and oxygen.
The blatant mismatch, Katherine believed, was proof that the brain was doing something so incomprehensible that traditional biology had not yet been able to grasp it.
Her manuscript will likely unravel that mystery, Langdon thought, wondering if Jonas Faukman had begun reading yet. Knowing Jonas, he’s been wide awake all night and is halfway through the book already.
Janá?ek had just placed a second call, and his increasingly urgent tone was not helping Langdon’s frayed nerves. He glanced at his watch and hoped for the hasty arrival of Harris and the ambassador.
As Langdon waited on the couch, he found himself again scrutinizing the huge Paul Evans wall sculpture on the other end of the room. The expensive piece had frustrated Langdon the moment he first saw it.
He felt irritated by wealthy art enthusiasts who purchased world-class masterpieces, removed them from the safety of museums, and then displayed them privately in poor lighting or in unsafe conditions.
And on top of that, Gessner hung it improperly.
No doubt Paul Evans had intended this sculpture to be displayed like a painting—centered and mounted on the wall—but Gessner had lazily set the piece directly on the floor, propped vertically with only a stabilizing bar across the top to keep it from falling into the room.
That wall is solid stone, Langdon thought. It could easily have handled the weight.
As he studied the heavy horizontal bar, however, an unexpected thought struck him.
Unless…
He scrutinized the complete piece of art a moment longer. Then he stood up and began walking briskly toward it.
Without warning, Pavel leaped in front of him, pulling his weapon and aiming it directly at Langdon’s chest. “Nechte toho!”
Langdon’s arms shot skyward. For God’s sake!
Janá?ek ended his call and nodded calmly at his lieutenant, saying something to him in Czech.
Pavel lowered the gun and holstered it.
“What the hell is he doing?!” Langdon shouted at Janá?ek.
“His job,” the captain replied. “Are you trying to leave us?”
“Leave?!” he replied angrily. “No, I was…”
“You were what ?”
Langdon hesitated a moment, reconsidering his words. “I was just going to the restroom,” he lied, returning to his seat. “On second thought, it can wait.”
The Golěm donned his sunglasses as he strode across the cobbles of Old Town Square toward the taxi stand. Despite his lack of sleep, he felt energized, his thoughts firmly focused on what would be required to carry out his liberating act of vengeance.
Last night, Gessner had confessed a dark truth, revealing that her colleagues had secretly constructed a sprawling, cavernous facility deep beneath the city of Prague.
They call it Threshold . The scope of the project was astounding, and yet it was the facility’s precise location that had most amazed The Golěm.
Right in the heart of the city.
Hundreds of people walk over it every day…with no idea it’s there.
When The Golěm demanded Gessner tell him how to get inside, she tried to resist but, overwhelmed with pain, quickly revealed the answer: Threshold could be accessed only by someone who knew where the entrance was hidden…and also possessed a highly specialized RFID key card.
It took The Golěm only a few minutes of brutality to extract both. When he left Gessner to die, he possessed the information he required…and also her personal RFID key card.
Unfortunately, he later discovered that the neuroscientist had managed to withhold one critical piece of information from him: the key card alone was not sufficient to gain access.
Defeated and exhausted, The Golěm had trudged homeward through the darkness, the useless key card in his pocket. Partway home, however, he realized there might be a solution to his problem. The more he considered it, the more confident he became. By dawn, he was fully certain.
I require a second item.
Fortunately, The Golěm knew precisely where this item was located at this very moment—in Gessner’s private lab, high on the ridgeline overlooking the city.
“Bastion u Bo?ích muk,” he said as he climbed into a cab. “Take me to Crucifix Bastion.”