Langdon waited for this to soak in, but his punch line fell flat.

  “Folks!” he prompted. “A book of this size, length, and complexity would have taken an estimated forty years to complete.”

  “Well,” someone said, “that makes more sense than doing it in one night.”

  “I agree,” Langdon said, “but there’s a major problem with the logic. In the thirteenth century, life expectancy was approximately thirty years—and it would have taken at least half of those years to master the artistic skill exhibited in this calligraphy and illustration. Stranger still, the specialists confirm that the penmanship is astonishingly consistent across the entire book. There is no degradation of the lettering from beginning to end…no signs of fatigue, loss of eyesight, decreasing mobility, aging, senility. No change in style whatsoever. You put all those factors together, and it’s a puzzle that is technically impossible.”

  Silence.

  “So, Professor…what do you think happened?” someone finally asked.

  Langdon thought a long moment. “I have no idea,” he said honestly. “History contains many inexplicable anomalies, and this is one of them.”

  “That’s why I’m a physics major,” chimed in a quiet student in the front row.

  “Sorry to burst your bubble,” Langdon said with a chuckle, “but science doesn’t do much better on anomalies. Perhaps you could explain for us the double-slit experiment? Or the horizon problem? Or Schrödinger’s—”

  “I retract!” the kid surrendered good-naturedly.

  “Signs of intelligent life, after all,” Langdon said to laughter. “In any case, in 2007, when the stolen codex was loaned to Prague, the Swedes feared the Czech government might not return it, but indeed the artifact was returned as promised, and the good-faith gesture now means the Devil’s Bible visits Prague for six months once every ten years, provided it is never removed from its sealed display case.”

  With a small jolt, the funicular came to a halt at the bottom of Petřín Hill. Langdon glanced up, still considering the codex and Katherine’s message. She was clearly urging him to return to the Devil’s Bible, and yet Langdon saw no logical reason for her to make that request.

  No reason…except one.

  Is Katherine there…waiting for me?

  CHAPTER 56

  The George Washington Bridge is the busiest motor bridge in the world. Connecting the steep cliffs of New Jersey with the shores of New York, its fourteen traffic lanes provide safe passage to more than a hundred million vehicles per year.

  Today, however, in the predawn darkness, Jonas Faukman was nearly alone on the bridge as he rocketed toward Manhattan in the stolen SUV. His eyes flicked repeatedly to the rearview mirror, looking for any signs that he was being followed. He hoped he could reach the relative safety of Random House Tower before someone reported this vehicle missing.

  Alex, the PRH tech, had just communicated horrifying news out of Prague. All Faukman could do was pray there was some mistake in what the IT tech had found.

  Is the discovery in Katherine’s book really worth killing for? He thought back to the theory of consciousness that Katherine had pitched to him over lunch in New York. It was certainly a bold departure from the current paradigm, but it hardly seemed dangerous.

  “The theory,” Katherine had said, “is called nonlocal consciousness. And it’s based on the premise that consciousness is not localized to your brain…but rather it is everywhere. That is to say, consciousness permeates the universe. Consciousness is, in fact, one of the fundamental building blocks of our world.”

  “Okay,” Faukman said, already struggling to keep up.

  “In the nonlocal model,” she continued, “your brain does not create consciousness, but rather your brain experiences what already exists around it.” She glanced from Faukman to Langdon and back. “In simple English, our brains interact with an existing matrix of awareness.”

  “That was simple English?” Faukman looked bemused.

  “Count your blessings,” Langdon said. “She could ruin lunch by trying to explain the triadic dimensional vortical paradigm.”

  “Seriously, Robert?” she chided. “A man of your intellectual capacity should be able to grasp a nine-dimensional quantized, volumetric reality embedded in an infinite continuity.”

  Langdon rolled his eyes. “See what I mean?”

  “Kids.” Faukman held up his hands. “Don’t make me stop the car.”

  Langdon refilled their wineglasses as Katherine continued.

  “Here’s the easiest way to think of it,” she said. “Look at that speaker.” She pointed to a nearby shelf on which a miniaturized wireless speaker was playing classical music. “Let’s say Mozart traveled ahead in time and joined us right now at this table for lunch—he would be amazed to hear music coming out of that tiny box. In his world, there were no recordings. When he heard music, there was always an orchestra present. Seeing this speaker, he might mistakenly conclude there is an orchestra hidden behind the wall—or even a miniature orchestra inside the speaker itself. There would be no other options within his intellectual grasp. He would never conclude that the music was in fact hovering silently all around us in the form of radio waves and was somehow being received by this speaker.”

  Faukman looked around the room and imagined it full of invisible radio waves.

  “We could try to explain our reality to Mozart,” she continued, “but he would have no frame of reference to comprehend it. Even the first primitive recording technique wouldn’t be invented for another hundred years after his death. My point is, here we are sitting at this table in modern Manhattan, and yet explaining nonlocal consciousness to you is a bit like attempting to describe radio waves to Mozart. In his reality, music comes solely from live musicians playing instruments in real time, and no other possibilities exist.”

  A silence hung over the table as the ideas sank in.

  “But in our reality…things are different.” Katherine leaned in toward them. “In the world of nonlocal consciousness…the music exists everywhere around us. Our brains simply ‘tune in’ to hear it.”

  Faukman thought for a long moment. “You’re saying consciousness is like a streaming service to which our brains subscribe?”

  “Very close…more like an immeasurably large radio dial. Think of consciousness as an infinite cloud of radio waves in this room. Your brain is a receiver…tuned to its own unique station. In your case, it’s tuned to the Jonas Faukman station.”

  The editor frowned. “Not to sound like Mozart, but it sounds…impossible.”

  “I don’t disagree,” Langdon said to Faukman. “But in fairness, many scientific discoveries were initially deemed absurd or impossible—heliocentricity, the spherical earth, radioactivity, the expanding universe, germ theory, epigenetics, and countless others. Historically speaking, important truths often begin their lives as total impossibilities. And just because we can’t imagine how something could possibly be true, doesn’t mean we can’t observe it to be true. The ancient Greeks proclaimed the earth was round nearly two millennia before Newton explained exactly how the oceans stayed in place thanks to gravity.”

  “Touché.” Faukman smiled. “I should know better than to debate a Harvard professor.”

  “I think what Robert is trying to say,” Katherine offered, “is that while we are still learning exactly how nonlocal consciousness works…we have certainly shown that the theory offers clear answers to a host of phenomena that seem incomprehensible in the current model.”

  “Okay…”

  “Moreover,” Katherine said, “unlike Mozart, you have the advantage of living in a world where you interact daily with a very similar model.”

  “Similar to nonlocal consciousness?” Faukman saw no parallel in his world.

  “What if I told you,” Katherine said, “that I could fit all the information in the world into a container the size of a deck of playing cards? True or false?”

  “Impossible. False.”

  Katherine held up her cell phone. “It’s all in here. What do you want to know?”

  “Clever…” Faukman said, smiling. “But that information is not contained inside the phone. The phone is accessing data contained in countless data banks worldwide.”

  “Exactly,” she said, although he sensed she was leading him…somewhere. “You make an excellent point. Now, what if I told you I could store millions of gigabytes of data inside a blob of human tissue about the size of…well, say…a human brain?”

  Faukman frowned. That was fast. Checkmate in three moves.

  “It’s the identical concept,” she declared. “The inconceivable storage capacity of the human brain is a physical impossibility. It’s akin to trying to cram every song in the world into your phone. It makes no sense. Unless…”

  “Unless,” Faukman conceded, “the brain is accessing data…from elsewhere.”

  “Nonlocally,” Langdon added, looking impressed.

  “Exactly.” Katherine smiled. “Your brain is just a receiver—an unimaginably complex, superbly advanced receiver—that chooses which specific signals it wants to receive from the existing cloud of global consciousness. Just like a Wi-Fi signal, global consciousness is always hovering there, fully intact, whether or not you access it.”

  “The ancients certainly felt that way,” Langdon chimed in, now seeing myriad parallels in history. “Almost all of the world’s spiritual traditions have long echoed a belief in a universal consciousness—the Akashic Field, the Universal Mind, Cosmic Consciousness, and the Kingdom of God, just to name a few.”

  “Indeed!” Katherine said. “This ‘new’ theory actually runs parallel to some of our most ancient religious beliefs.”

  She went on to describe how nonlocal consciousness was increasingly supported by discoveries in diverse fields like plasma physics, nonlinear mathematics, and consciousness anthropology. New concepts like superposition and entanglement were unveiling a universe in which all things existed at all times in all locations. In other words, the nature of our universe was unified, or, as the title of a recent Oscar-winning film had so aptly described it—Everything Everywhere All at Once.

  “What is really turning heads,” Katherine continued, “is that this new model provides logical explanations for all the ‘paranormal anomalies’ that have plagued the traditional model for so long—ESP, sudden savant syndrome, precognition, blindsight, out-of-body experiences…the list goes on and on.”

  “But how could any model,” Faukman challenged, “explain an average kid getting hit on the head with a baseball and waking up a virtuoso violinist?”

  “Well, it does happen. Sudden savant syndrome has been medically documented numerous times.”

  “Yes, I’ve read about it,” he said, chuckling, “and I choose to ignore it!”

  “Precisely…” Katherine said. “That’s how we humans have always dealt with phenomena that don’t fit our reality. We ignore the occasional oddity rather than admit our entire model is wrong.”

  “And you believe nonlocal consciousness explains all this? Getting into an accident and suddenly being able to speak fluent Mandarin?”

  Katherine nodded. “I do. If your brain is a receiver, think of it like a classic car radio with a physical dial. It’s tuned to your normal classic rock station—a clear signal of familiar content. One day, you hit a pothole and there’s a jolt to the radio. Suddenly, the tuner jumps slightly on the dial, and in addition to hearing classic rock, you’re now also hearing a Spanish newscaster from an entirely different station mixed in with it.”

  Faukman looked uncertain.

  “Let’s look at it this way,” Katherine said. “What does it take to become a virtuoso violinist?”

  “Practice,” Faukman replied.

  “And to become a great golfer?”

  “Practice.”

  “And why does practice make you a better golfer?”

  “It helps you develop muscle memory. Grooves your swing.”

  “Wrong,” Katherine said. “There’s no such thing as muscle memory. It’s an oxymoron. Muscles don’t have memory. In reality, when you practice, you’re fine-tuning your brain…gradually rewiring it to receive information more clearly and consistently from the universal consciousness so it can command your muscles to contract in a perfect pattern to perform a task in a certain way.”

  Faukman scowled. “You’re saying there’s a golf channel in the universal consciousness?”

  “I’m saying everything already exists out there…and practice helps clarify the signal your brain is receiving. This is how we become more skilled—we slowly acquire a new specific signal. Some brains are born prewired to receive a certain signal, which is why we have star athletes, virtuosos, and geniuses.”

  “Okay…”

  “And the same holds true for many people with Asperger’s or autism,” she added. “They can have highly specialized receivers that provide them access to remarkable skills and insights, and yet simultaneously make it difficult to perform routine tasks. It’s a bit like wearing binoculars instead of eyeglasses; you could see much farther than most…and yet your immediate surroundings would be blurry.”

  A unique perspective, he mused. “And you claim this model also explains ESP?”

  “Completely,” Katherine said. “The ‘extra sense’ we attribute to ESP is really nothing more than a brain tuning in to information that is normally filtered out. According to this new theory, when you have an intuition or a hunch, it’s exactly like the car radio picking up the brief wisp of a different station it doesn’t normally receive. And in some instances, if the brain picks up multiple stations too clearly, the experience can be profoundly confusing, even debilitating—schizophrenia, dissociative identity disorder, voices in your head, multiple personalities—all of these can be explained in this model.”

  “Fascinating,” Langdon interjected. “And an experience like precognition?”

  “Sometimes radio broadcasts bounce around in the atmosphere,” she replied, “creating echoes and time delays. In this model, those manifest in our minds as déjà vu or, in reverse, as precognition.”

  Faukman sat a long moment, glancing back and forth between Langdon and Katherine. “My friends,” he finally said, smiling, “I daresay this calls for another bottle of wine.”

  Now, one year later, Jonas Faukman’s consciousness—however it worked—returned to the highway before him. As he sped along the upper deck of the George Washington Bridge, Faukman wasn’t sure what channel he was tuned in to tonight, but it certainly was a strange one.

  He approached the middle of the bridge, and he lowered his window to perform the task the PRH tech had urged him to complete. “Get rid of your phone,” Alex had said. “There’s a high probability it’s being traced.”

  Reluctantly, Faukman hurled the phone out into the night. It sailed over the guardrails and began a 212-foot plummet toward the Hudson River.

  As the phone fell, Faukman recalled the final words the tech had spoken.

  “Try to get back here as fast as you can…I figured out who hacked us.”

  CHAPTER 57

  The funicular doors opened at the bottom of Petřín Hill, and Langdon stepped off and found himself at Újezd Station, an unexpectedly bustling interchange for taxis, buses, and trolleys. Eager to put as much distance as possible between himself and Lieutenant Pavel, Langdon surveyed his options.

  His last two taxi rides had ended badly, and he decided it was safest to take a tram and lose himself in the crowd. Tram #22 was the only one with a line of people waiting to board, and according to the placard over its windshield, it went toward Prague Center.

  Toward the Klementinum…

  Langdon wanted very much to believe that Katherine’s message was an encoded plea to meet her at the Devil’s Bible, and yet he had realized there was a small problem; she had sent her email more than two hours ago—long before the museum opened. The standard opening time for Prague museums was 10 a.m., which was still a few minutes from now.

  Could she have been waiting outside all this time?

  Despite being plagued by uncertainty, Langdon boarded tram #22 and headed for the museum that housed the Devil’s Bible. As he crossed the river, he hoped to find what he was looking for—as he had done many times in his life—with the help of an ancient book.

  By the time Lieutenant Pavel made it back up to his sedan at the base of Petřín Tower, his head was throbbing so deeply that his vision was blurring. He slid in behind the wheel, closed his eyes, and pondered his next course of action. He sensed he needed a hospital, but his pursuit of Langdon was urgent, and he was unwilling to give up on it—or on his captain.

  Despite the professor’s reputation as a mild-mannered academic, he was turning out to be a dangerous and highly resourceful criminal. Even so, there was a limit to how far he could run. The American was out in the wild, and tips from Pavel’s Blue Alert would keep flowing directly to the captain’s phone in his pocket.

  Unfortunately, it would not take long for others—ÚZSI, the U.S. embassy, the local police—to discover Langdon was a wanted man. They would all soon be involved, and those organizations would treat Langdon more gently than he deserved.

  Pavel knew his window for retribution was closing quickly…and there was only one way he could fully honor his captain’s memory.

  Find Langdon before anyone gets to him first.

  The conductor of Prague tram #22 had witnessed many oddities in her career. Normally she would not have glanced twice at a foolhardy tourist wearing only loafers and a sweater in midwinter. This man, however, had just exited the tram and crossed directly in front of her window. She noticed his handsome face, and there was no doubt in her mind. This was the same face that had been broadcast to her phone as a “Blue Alert” less than an hour ago.