Page 32 of The Secret of Secrets (Robert Langdon #6)

Langdon felt momentarily paralyzed as he stared into the pod at the human figure inside.

My God…Katherine.

He dropped to his knees and pounded on the glass, pressing his face to the surface, trying to see inside.

I have to get her out of there!

Beneath the lid, a motionless hand was pressed against the inside of the pod, its slender fingers pale and rigid, laced with frost. It looked as if her wrists were bound in place by heavy straps.

Langdon groped at the glass pod, trying to find a way to open it. He clutched the smooth surface, which was ice-cold, but he found no seam or handle or release button of any kind. The earsplitting alarm continued to wail.

Open, goddammit!

Only inches from Langdon’s face, the body’s hazy outline appeared and disappeared within a cloud of the swirling fog.

Suddenly, there was a sound behind him—footsteps rapidly approaching on the hard tile floor. Langdon twisted to see a tall woman with shoulder-length blond hair. She was running toward him wielding a stainless-steel fire extinguisher, threatening to crash it down into his face.

“Co to sakra dělá??!” she screamed over the noise.

Langdon held his hands up in defense. “Wait!”

“How did you get in here!” the woman demanded in a thick Russian accent as she raised the heavy metal extinguisher over his head.

“Please we need to open—”

“How did you get in here?!”

“The elevator passcode!” Langdon exclaimed. “Dr. Gessner gave it to me! My friend Katherine Solomon and I—”

The woman immediately lowered the fire extinguisher, looking genuinely startled. “Professor Langdon? I’m so sorry…I’m Sasha Vesna, Brigita’s lab assistant—”

“Katherine is inside this!” Langdon interrupted, pointing at the pod. “She needs help!”

Sasha suddenly seemed to register the beeping sound, and her expression turned from confusion to horror. She dropped the fire extinguisher with a loud clang and ran to the attached machine, where she yanked out a rackmount drawer, flipped open a laptop, and began typing feverishly.

“Oh no…No!”

Langdon had no idea what was happening, but the woman’s panic only reinforced his own. “Just open the damn thing!”

“It’s too dangerous!” Sasha shouted. “You have to reverse the process first.”

What process? “Please just get her out!”

The assistant looked lost, glancing fearfully into the pod. “I don’t understand—why would Dr. Solomon ever get in there?”

Langdon was half tempted to pick up the fire extinguisher and smash the pod open. This can’t be happening…

Gessner’s assistant tapped again at the keyboard, and the alarm noise finally halted.

Moments later, the fans went quiet, and the tubes connecting the pod to the larger device began gurgling.

Langdon didn’t know what he expected to see coming through the clear tubes, but it most certainly was not the crimson liquid that began to flow toward the body.

“Is that…blood?!” Langdon asked, feeling suddenly ill. “What is this thing?”

“EPR!” Sasha said with panic in her voice, still typing as the liquid flowed back into the pod. “Emergency preservation and resuscitation machine. This is Brigita’s prototype! It’s not ready for use!”

As the cold mist swirled around the body, Langdon now realized Gessner had actually mentioned her EPR machine last night.

This lifesaving technology had been first proposed hypothetically by a surgeon named Samuel Tisherman at University of Maryland School of Medicine, but Brigita Gessner had been the one who seized upon the rudimentary concept, designed a highly modified prototype, and now held the patent—a patent she boasted was worth a fortune.

“Prolonged hypoxia causes brain damage,” Gessner had informed them, “but my EPR can protect the brain from oxygen deprivation by putting its cellular activity on pause—a kind of suspended animation. My machine is essentially a modified ECMO bypass—an extracorporeal membrane oxygenation unit that swaps blood for supercooled saline at a rate of two liters per minute. It rapidly cools the brain and body down to ten degrees Celsius, giving a surgical team hours to treat a critically injured patient who would normally be brain-dead within minutes.”

Standing over Gessner’s prototype EPR pod, Langdon was on the verge of being sick.

Suddenly, a muted pop echoed inside the pod, and blood began spattering all across the interior of the glass. Langdon jumped back. She’s bleeding!

“Блядь,” Sasha cursed, abandoning whatever she was doing on the laptop and dashing to an emergency panel on the rear wall.

She broke a plastic seal and, without hesitation, pressed a bright red button beneath.

The pod instantly hissed and released suction on the lid, which began to hinge open, swinging upward like a gull-wing door.

As the fog cleared, Langdon leaned over the container.

My God…

When he saw her, Langdon knew she was gone. Her eyes were blank and lifeless, and her face was frozen in an expression of pure terror. Langdon had never imagined that seeing a dead body could bring such an overwhelming sense of both despair and relief—but that was exactly what he now felt.

The corpse lying before them was not Katherine Solomon.

It was Brigita Gessner.