Page 28 of The Secret of Secrets (Robert Langdon #6)
Images of Katherine Solomon played in The Golěm’s mind as his taxi climbed the ridge toward Crucifix Bastion. He could still see her onstage at Prague Castle…delivering her remarkable lecture. The Golěm had attended, sitting quietly in back, dressed unremarkably, as he was now.
The Golěm felt drawn to Katherine’s ideas, sensing at times that she had been speaking directly to him.
I am living proof, Katherine, that you are correct.
For over an hour, Katherine had held the crowd in Vladislav Hall in rapt attention, alive with the thrill of new possibility…
a fresh outlook on the workings of human consciousness.
One moment, in particular, had spoken to him.
“There exists an extraordinary phenomenon,” Katherine had said, “that proves beyond any shadow of a doubt that our traditional views of consciousness are entirely wrong. It’s called sudden savant syndrome, and the clinical definition is as follows: ‘The abrupt manifestation in a human mind of a unique skill or knowledge that previously was nonexistent.’?” She smiled.
“In other words, you get conked on the head and you wake up a virtuoso violinist, or fluent in Portuguese, or a genius at math—where you previously possessed none of these skills.”
Katherine quickly ran through a series of slides and video clips of individuals who had experienced sudden savant syndrome.
Reuben Nsemoh —a sixteen-year-old American who was kicked in the head during a soccer game, fell into a coma, and woke up speaking perfect Spanish.
Derek Amato —a middle-aged man who dove into a pool, hit his head, and woke up a musical genius and virtuoso pianist.
Orlando L. Serrell —a ten-year-old boy struck by a baseball who found he suddenly had the ability to do astonishingly complicated calendrical calculations.
“The obvious question,” Katherine said, “is, how is this possible? How could a kick to the head magically impart into a brain the entirety of the Spanish language? Or a lifetime’s practice on the violin?
Or the ability to pinpoint precise dates that are centuries in the past or future?
The answer is—in our current model of the brain—all of these events are, quite literally, impossible. ”
She motioned to a young man eyeing his phone. “Sir, imagine you hurled that phone against the wall, and when you picked it up, your photo gallery contained brand-new photos…of places you’d never been.”
“Impossible,” the man agreed.
The Golěm understood, of course, how this could happen. He understood why cosmic signals got crossed. And clearly so did Katherine Solomon.
“Then, of course, there’s the astonishing tale of Michael Thomas Boatwright.”
Katherine went on to tell the story of a U.S. Navy vet who was found unconscious in a hotel room and awoke speaking fluent Swedish; he had no recollection of his own life, instead recalling his life as a Swede named Johan Ek.
Driving her point home, she relayed the well-known story of James Leininger—a two-year-old boy haunted by nightmares of being trapped in the cockpit of a burning fighter jet.
In his waking hours, young James drew pictures of a burning jet and talked through complicated preflight routines, using technical vocabulary that his parents, and most certainly the young child, had never heard.
When his frightened parents asked him where he got this information, the boy declared his name was not James Leininger but rather James Huston, and he was a fighter pilot who flew off “a Natoma” with his friend Jack.
To the parents’ astonishment, a search of World War II records revealed a fighter pilot named James Huston had flown off the Natoma Bay aircraft carrier with fellow pilot Jack Larsen.
Huston had crashed and died, trapped in his burning cockpit.
The story only got stranger from there, and it was now the subject of numerous documentaries as well as endless online speculation.
“These phenomena are inexplicable, but they are real, ” she continued.
“They are true anomalies…and they so fundamentally undermine the current model of consciousness that we now find ourselves at a crossroads of human understanding, a juncture where an ever-widening circle of brilliant minds—neuroscientists, physicists, biologists, and philosophers—are seeing no choice but to accept the same shocking truth…quite simply, that our established scientific views of how the human mind works are no longer adequate. It’s time for a new model.
It’s time to admit we don’t know the answer to a very simple question: Where do our thoughts, talents, and ideas come from?
And that, my friends, is the topic of tonight’s talk. ”
The Golěm’s taxi rounded the final corner toward Crucifix Bastion, and the lab came into sight in the distance. But when he saw what was before him, he immediately pounded on the Plexiglas divider. “ Zastavte! Zastavte! ”
The driver lurched to an abrupt stop.
The Golěm thought he would be alone here, but to his surprise, an úZSI sedan was parked in front of the building. Nobody should be here at this hour!
He sent the taxi away and approached the bastion slowly on foot, moving discreetly through the woods that surrounded the facility. As he drew closer, he saw that the entry door to the building was shattered. The foyer was gaping open, its floor scattered with glass.
Did úZSI break into Gessner’s lab?
If so, The Golěm suddenly feared he might have difficulty retrieving what he had come for. Without it, I won’t be able to gain access to Threshold.
The Golěm saw nobody moving inside the shattered foyer, but he did notice movement at the far end of the courtyard. Seventy-five yards away, a lanky man in a suit gazed out over the low enclosure wall and spoke on the phone.
An úZSI officer?
One of Gessner’s contacts?
Either way, his presence here was a problem…and needed to be rectified.