“That should do it!” the woman said, reaching out for her phone. “Let me check them!”

  Langdon returned her device, noticing the sea of red notification badges on all her social media apps. The world’s new popularity metric. Digital applause.

  She swiped through photos, nodding. “They look perfect!” she gushed. “Thank you!”

  Langdon managed a smile. “Congratulations.”

  The newlyweds headed back to the elevator, having been up here only long enough to photograph themselves before moving on, most likely to the next photo opportunity. Langdon sometimes sensed the only reason to do anything anymore was to post it for the world to see.

  As the elevator doors rumbled open, Langdon was struck by a thought. “Excuse me,” he called to the couple. “Could I ask a small favor?”

  They paused in the doorway, holding the door open and looking back at him.

  “I was supposed to meet someone here,” Langdon said. “But she never arrived. I lost my phone this morning, and I was wondering if I might use yours to give her a quick call?”

  The woman looked as if Langdon had asked to hold her newborn, but after a nudge from her husband, she reluctantly handed over her phone.

  With the young couple watching him closely, Langdon quickly dialed the number he had seen repeatedly on the Four Seasons registration desk, and the familiar voice of the hotel manager answered on the first ring.

  “Thank you for calling the Four—”

  “Good morning, sir,” Langdon interrupted. “This is Robert Langdon. I need to speak to Katherine Solomon immediately. It’s important.”

  “Oh, hello, Professor.” The manager’s enthusiasm cooled abruptly. “I don’t believe Dr. Solomon is here. She left the hotel this morning while you were…swimming.”

  “She never came back?”

  “I haven’t seen her, sir. I’ll try your room.”

  As the line to their suite began ringing with no answer, Langdon had to accept the frightening reality that Katherine might not have returned to the hotel this morning. So where did she go?! As he tried to imagine where she could be, an odd thought struck him.

  I can’t believe I didn’t think of it earlier…

  The line was still ringing, and the Indian couple looked increasingly impatient as they held open the elevator door and waited to descend.

  “Sweetie!” Langdon blurted suddenly, pretending someone had answered. “Where are you?! I’m at Petřín Tower and—” He fell silent, as if listening, and then gasped dramatically. “Wait, what?! Slow down. Just talk to me…”

  Langdon indicated he needed a moment of privacy, and without waiting for consent, he turned his back on the couple and walked around the platform, out of sight behind the shaft, immediately launching a web browser.

  Katherine may have tried to reach me this morning…

  He had been so caught up in the chaos of the morning that he had not been thinking clearly, but the red notification badges on the woman’s apps were now reminding him of those same notifications on his own laptop. Email. For years before this trip, Katherine and Langdon had always communicated that way. Katherine called it old-school, but Langdon despised the implied urgency of texting, so they defaulted to email.

  If Katherine had tried to reach him this morning by phone or text with no reply, he realized, she would likely have sent him an email that he could read on his laptop.

  I never checked mine this morning!

  Langdon quickly navigated to gmail.com and signed into his account. His inbox started to load, displaying very slowly. Come on!

  The elevator door was buzzing, apparently protesting being held open for so long.

  Finally, the screen refreshed, and Langdon’s inbox appeared.

  YOU HAVE 31 UNREAD MESSAGES.

  He cursed his overflowing inbox and rapidly scanned the list of incoming messages from colleagues, friends, and assorted spam. As he neared the bottom of the list, he was losing hope.

  Then he saw it. Yes!

  FROM: KATHERINE SOLOMON

  The time stamp was 7:42 a.m. this morning—after Katherine had left the hotel but before her meeting with Gessner.

  Strangely, the subject line was blank.

  Heart racing, Langdon tapped to open the message, but when it displayed, it was also blank. There’s nothing here? An instant later, he noticed the icon indicating there was a graphic attached to the message. She sent a photo? He stabbed at the icon, and the cursor began spinning again as the image loaded. The phone showed only one bar of service.

  “Sir?” a voice demanded nearby.

  Langdon looked up and saw the young man coming around the elevator shaft.

  “What are you doing?!” the man demanded. “You said you had to make a call! Are you looking through her—”

  “No!” Langdon said. “I need to check an incoming message. I’m sorry. It’s very important.” He held up the blank screen. “It’s just loading. I’ll give it back in a second.”

  “I’d like it back now, sir,” the man said, walking toward him.

  The elevator continued buzzing.

  Load, goddammit!

  The wind whipped harder, and the woman began calling for her husband.

  “Sir!” The man held out his hand for the phone.

  “Please…one second,” Langdon said as the cursor spun. “I really need to see—”

  “Now!” the young man demanded. “You have no righ—”

  “Here it is!” Langdon shouted as the image finally materialized before him.

  Whether the wind had just moved the tower or his knees had gone weak, Langdon wasn’t sure, but he felt suddenly off-balance. The image on the screen was as unexpected as anything he could ever imagine Katherine sending him.

  Langdon stared for a long moment at the bizarre “message,” letting his eidetic memory take a mental snapshot of it. Then he quit the browser and handed the phone back to the young man, who grabbed it and stalked angrily off.

  A few seconds later, Langdon heard the elevator begin its descent.

  CHAPTER 48

  Michael Harris arrived outside Sasha Vesna’s apartment door wondering how many times he had stood right here, ashamed, telling himself that this would be his last visit.

  Steeling himself, he knocked loudly. No answer. He tried the door and found it unlocked.

  Not surprising. She is expecting me.

  “Sasha?” he called, entering the apartment. “I’m here!”

  The only signs of life were Harry and Sally padding toward him down the hallway. Harris stepped inside and closed the door so the cats could not get out.

  “Sasha? Professor Langdon?”

  Silence.

  Puzzled, Harris headed down the hall and into the kitchen. He saw three cups laid out for tea, steam rising from the kettle.

  Strange. Have they left?

  As he began to turn back toward the hallway, a floorboard creaked behind him, and a sudden blaze of electricity tore through the center of his back. Instantly paralyzed, Harris dropped to his knees and pitched forward, crashing into the floor.

  For several seconds, his mind went blank, ears ringing, muscles locked. As he slowly regained his mental bearings, all Harris could imagine was that someone had just stepped out of the small kitchen closet and used a Taser on him.

  What’s happened to Sasha and Langdon?!

  “Sa…sha!” Harris tried to call to her, barely audible.

  “Sasha cannot hear you,” a deep, hollow voice said above him. “Not where she is now.”

  No. Before Harris was able to roll over and see his attacker, he felt the prongs of the stun gun pressing sharply into the base of his skull.

  There was a scalding blast…and his world went entirely black.

  The Golěm stood over the paralyzed body of Michael Harris, who lay facedown on the wooden floor. The Vipertek stun gun blast had knocked him unconscious. Straddling the powerful man, The Golěm crouched down, took out a heavy plastic bag he had found in the closet, and pulled it over Harris’s head. Twisting it tightly around his neck, The Golěm cut off the man’s oxygen supply.

  Three minutes later, The Golěm released his grip.

  He suffered very little.

  Sasha would appreciate that. The Golěm had locked Sasha away and intended to keep her there until he was prepared for his final step.

  Now, as he stood up, The Golěm could feel the Ether gathering, as it often did in moments of exertion. He quickly took out the metal wand he carried at all times.

  “Ne seychas,” he whispered, rubbing the wand on top of his head. Not now.

  The Ether would have to wait. There was work yet to complete in this realm. Abandoning the corpse on the floor, The Golěm disposed of the plastic bag in the kitchen trash and walked to a small desk in the hallway, where he sat down to write.

  The only paper he could locate was a sheet of Sasha’s stationery, which was decorated with kittens. Nonetheless, he composed a short letter and sealed it in a matching envelope.

  He addressed the envelope in bold letters to Michael Harris’s superior.

  U.S. AMBASSADOR HEIDE NAGEL.

  Before exiting, The Golěm dropped the envelope onto the attaché’s lifeless body. Then, leaving Sasha’s door unlocked, he headed home.

  CHAPTER 49

  Alone now atop Petřín Tower, Langdon steadied himself against the observation rail as the wind whipped across the platform. While his eyes were directed out over the snow-dusted city, the image in his mind’s eye was not Prague at all; it was a snapshot of what Katherine had emailed him earlier this morning.

  For Langdon, the effect of “eidetic” recollection was indistinguishable from seeing the object live. His eidetic memory provided precise, total recall of a visual input and derived its name from the Greek eidos, meaning “visible form.”

  Langdon pondered the image she had sent, which seemed to be a screenshot of her own phone. On her display was a glowing string of seven characters.

  Langdon recognized the ancient language at once, but he could not begin to imagine what it was doing on Katherine’s phone.

  She sent me something in…Enochian?

  Often called the “Angelic Tongue,” Enochian was a language “discovered” here in Prague in 1583 by the two self-proclaimed English mystics, John Dee and his partner Edward Kelley. It was allegedly the language by which the mediums could speak to spirits and obtain “wisdom from the other realm.”

  The only reason Katherine knew Enochian existed was because Langdon had told her about it just yesterday. While walking the streets, they had seen a poster advertising an exhibit called Making Gold and Swapping Wives, which, in addition to the catchy text, was adorned with Enochian symbols. Katherine asked Langdon what the symbols were, and he relayed the sordid tale of Dee and Kelley’s historical passion for alchemy, wife-swapping, and talking to angels in their own special language—Enochian—the mystical language of the spirit world.

  “They were almost certainly a pair of charlatan opportunists,” Langdon told her, “but they were in high demand in their day, even hired by Emperor Rudolf II to ask the angels to help him make wise political decisions.”

  “Have our current politicians tried that?” she asked with a smile.

  “It’s not hard to do,” Langdon replied. “There’s even an Enochian app for your phone.”

  “A Renaissance app for talking to spirits?!” Katherine exclaimed, laughing out loud.

  Langdon took her phone and quickly downloaded the free app. “There, now you, too, can communicate with another dimension.”

  “That’s thoroughly ridiculous.”

  “Ridiculous?” Langdon asked, smirking. “Did we finally find a mystical idea that you don’t believe in?”

  “Very funny, Professor.”

  Langdon kissed her on the cheek. “You’re cute when you’re cynical.”

  Now, shivering atop Petřín Tower, Langdon surmised that Katherine must have used the Enochian translation app to create a message, then emailed a screenshot to him.

  But why? Was she being playful?

  Langdon found nothing playful about reading the language of spirits while standing atop a ghost-infested hilltop looking for a woman who had disappeared. It was conceivable that Katherine was not being playful at all, but rather had encoded her message for secrecy. The problem was that anyone with an Enochian dictionary or app could easily decipher it.

  Langdon held the image in his mind.

  The translation of Enochian to English was actually an absurdly simple substitution scheme. Langdon had always found it suspiciously convenient that the mystical language discovered by a British clairvoyant turned out to be a letter-by-letter transliteration into English.

  Langdon had long ago memorized the Enochian “key,” and he needed only a few seconds to make the transliteration, converting the symbols in Katherine’s message to English letters.

  The decryption that emerged, however, appeared meaningless.

  LXXEDOC

  Langdon puzzled over the jumbled string of letters, which looked vaguely like a Roman numeral, except that the letters E and O did not exist in that numbering system, and the other letters were not in proper sequence.

  Whatever Katherine wanted to tell me…this isn’t it.

  Unfortunately, if she’d made a mistake while translating, she would never have suspected her message wasn’t right because all she would have seen were the symbols she had sent him.

  Frustrated, Langdon stared out at the wooded landscape and tried to figure out his next move. As he did, a huge flock of birds took off from the trees, rising en masse, all turning at the same precise instant, flocking as one.

  The universe is mocking me, Langdon decided as he watched the amorphous cloud of birds undulating across the sky. Katherine had researched the synchronized murmurations of starlings and declared the phenomenon to be scientific proof of an invisible connection between living things.

  “Separation is an illusion,” she had told Jonas at their lunch last year and pulled up a mesmerizing video of starlings all moving as one. “This phenomenon is called behavioral synchronization, and it occurs all throughout nature.”

  She scrolled through several video clips—a mile-long school of bluefish all turning left and right in perfect synch; an endless herd of migrating gazelles, all bounding and leaping in unison; a swarm of fireflies, all illuminating and blinking in unison; a nest of hundreds of sea turtle eggs, all hatching within seconds of one another.

  “Incredible,” Faukman said.

  “It never ceases to amaze me,” Katherine said. “Some traditional scientists claim behavioral synchronization is actually just an illusion…that these organisms are simply reacting to one another so rapidly that the delay is imperceptible.” Katherine shrugged. “Unfortunately, a pair of high-speed video cameras linked to atomic clocks at the front and back of a school of fish has shown that their alleged reaction time is faster than the speed of light.”

  “Oops,” Langdon said.

  “Exactly,” Katherine said with a smile. “That’s a no-no in our current model of physics and reality. Instead, I would argue that there exists a point of view from which these synchronizations are not miraculous at all. If you view a murmuration of starlings not as many individual birds—but rather as one complete organism—then the synchronization is to be expected. The starlings are moving as one because they are one…an interconnected system. No separation. Much like the individual cells in your body, which form the integrated whole that is you.”

  Faukman looked fascinated.

  “I believe the same holds true for each of us as human beings,” Katherine said, sounding excited now. “We mistakenly picture ourselves as isolated individuals when in fact we are part of a much larger organism. The loneliness we feel is because we can’t see the truth—we are, in fact, integrated into the complete whole. Separation is our shared delusion.”

  She touched the tablet. “Don’t take it from me, though. Here is one of the most brilliant minds in history.” A new screen appeared—a quote from Albert Einstein.

  A human being is a part of the whole called by us “universe”…

  He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings

  as something separated from the rest,

  a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness.

  This delusion is a kind of prison for us.

  “Even the greatest scientist who ever lived,” Katherine said, “declared that our conscious minds delude us and trick us into seeing disconnectedness where there is only unity.”

  Leonardo da Vinci had said the same thing, Langdon recalled. Realize that everything connects to everything else.

  “And similar proclamations have been made by spiritual prophets throughout time,” Katherine continued, “but today, a growing number of quantum physicists are echoing a belief in the interconnectivity of all things…and all people.” Katherine smiled at Faukman. “I admit it’s hard to visualize our connection to a world we cannot see, but believe me, future generations will understand. One day we’ll see that our perception of being alone in the world was once humankind’s greatest shared delusion.”

  “And your experiments?” Faukman pressed. “The ones you’re not telling us about? They echo this interconnectivity?”

  Katherine smiled, eyes sparkling with excitement. “Gentlemen, the results of these experiments will not only remind us we are all connected. They will light the way toward an entirely new understanding of our reality and human potential.”

  Just then, a piercing squeal brought Langdon back to the cold wind at the top of Petřín Tower. For a moment, he thought it was a sound from the elevator, but instead he looked down and saw that a car had just skidded loudly to a stop at the base of the tower. The black sedan looked forebodingly familiar. The emblems on the doors confirmed it.

  ÚZSI.

  Langdon could not make out the face of the uniformed man who jumped from the driver’s seat far below and was now sprinting across the parking lot toward the tower. But there was no mistaking his muscle-bound build.