Our last moments of life…become our first moments of truth.

  CHAPTER 86

  Ambassador Nagel was carefully navigating the hairpin turn on Chotkova when her personal cell phone chirped on the charger beside her. For a moment, she imagined the unfamiliar sound must be some kind of alert to inform her the phone was no longer completely dead.

  But the phone kept chirping. Nagel glanced down, startled to see an incoming call—her first ever on this phone, whose ringtone was apparently set to “cricket.”

  Nobody knows this line even exists…

  Nonetheless, her caller ID showed a familiar name—SERGEANT SCOTT KERBLE—the lead officer on her Marine security guard detail. Nagel trusted Kerble with her life, but she was surprised that he had this number. Seeing no option but to answer, she took the call.

  “Scott?”

  “Madam Ambassador!” the guard exclaimed, sounding relieved. “I apologize for using your private line. I tried all your other numbers, but—”

  “It’s fine—I just wasn’t aware anyone knew about this phone. Is there a problem?”

  “Your residence informs me,” the Marine said, “that you’re coming to the embassy for some medication. What’s your ETA?”

  Nagel slumped over the wheel. Dammit. “Actually, Scott, it’s not a convenient time. Is something wrong?” She could see the entrance to Mánesův Bridge fast approaching ahead of them.

  “I’m waiting for you at the embassy, ma’am, with an item that I believe you need—”

  “Wait, I thought you were with Dana overseeing the recovery of Mr. Harris!”

  “I was, ma’am, but I left Dana in charge so I could return to the embassy and give you…” Kerble hesitated, sounding uncharacteristically hesitant. “Ma’am, when I entered the flat, there was a sealed envelope lying on Mr. Harris’s body.”

  Nagel was caught off guard. “I’m sorry? An envelope?”

  “Yes, ma’am. By all appearances, it was left there by the person who killed Mr. Harris.”

  For God’s sake. “What’s inside?”

  “I haven’t opened it. I decided to remove it discreetly and bring it to you at once.” Kerble paused again, lowering his voice. “The envelope is addressed specifically…to you.”

  “Me?!” Nagel let the phone drop in her lap, grabbed the wheel with two hands, and spun it left, veering off the road only moments before she would have entered the bridge. The SUV lurched to a stop on the shoulder of Klárov just beyond the Winged Lion Memorial.

  Nagel picked up the phone again. “Scott, give me a second here.”

  Langdon and Katherine looked understandably alarmed, and Nagel signaled to them that she needed a moment. She killed the engine, exited the vehicle, and walked toward the riverbank with the phone pressed to her ear.

  “Tell me,” Nagel snapped, more angrily than intended, “why the hell would Michael Harris’s killer leave an envelope addressed to me?!”

  “I don’t know, but it was clearly meant to be found and delivered. The envelope is marked ‘Private and Personal.’ ”

  A gust of wind coming off the Vltava sent a chill to Nagel’s core as she struggled to understand the worsening situation.

  “Ma’am?” Kerble pressed. “I am fully aware you left the residence unaccompanied. In light of this letter, I’m going to have to ask you to come in immediately.”

  Nagel was half tempted to tell the Marine to open the letter and tell her what it said, but she knew he would decline. Rightly so. She was on a cell phone, and God only knew the contents of the letter. She could hear the concern in Sergeant Kerble’s voice and had no doubt that if she didn’t come in immediately, he would be forced to direct the entire Marine security detail to try to locate her.

  Nagel glanced back at the SUV. Langdon and Katherine had both climbed out and were watching her with concern. Kerble’s voice was in her ear again.

  “Ma’am?” the Marine pressed. “I can hear you’re outside. Did you slip out to do some errands?”

  Sergeant Kerble’s question about “errands” was an indication that—as the kids liked to say—“shit just got serious.” The reference was a rehearsed distress call in case she was in trouble. All she had to do was say, “Yes, I’m out doing errands,” and all hell would break loose.

  “Scott,” she said. “You know I don’t do errands. Bring the letter to my office. I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

  “Thank you, ma’am.” The Marine sounded relieved.

  Nagel hung up and headed back toward the SUV. Letenská Street was nearby, an eight-minute walk to the embassy. She obviously couldn’t take Langdon and Katherine anywhere near there.

  “What just happened?” Langdon asked as she arrived.

  “When it rains, it pours,” Nagel said, telling them about the envelope. “I have no idea what it says, but if I’m not back in the embassy in ten minutes, my entire security detail will be scouring Prague—and they don’t play games.” She handed Langdon her car keys. “You’ll be safer without me.”

  “Any news on Sasha?”

  “No, he would have mentioned it. I’ll ask my tech officer to run a facial recognition sweep of city surveillance.”

  “And the phone?” Katherine said, motioning to the old Samsung in her hand. “For photos?”

  Nagel sighed. “Clearly, it’s compromised. I don’t know if it’s trackable, but you shouldn’t risk it. It occurs to me anyway that if you take photos, the CIA will simply claim they’re AI fakes. You’ll be much better off finding documents and hard evidence if you can.”

  “Okay,” Langdon said. “There’s one other problem. I promised Jonas Faukman I’d phone him after getting away from your residence. If he doesn’t hear from me, he’ll be contacting Prague authorities shortly. I was waiting to call him until your phone was charged, but now that we know it’s compromised…”

  “What’s your editor’s direct number?” Nagel asked, reaching into the SUV for a pen and scrap of paper. “I’ll call him from the embassy’s secure line. Or I can email a—”

  “He won’t believe you,” Langdon said. “He knows you’re CIA. He’ll want to hear from me directly.”

  Damn, she thought. He’s right.

  “Actually…” Langdon’s brow furrowed as he schemed a moment. “Give me that.” He took the pen and paper and began writing. “Here’s Faukman’s email address.” The professor paused, closing his eyes for a long moment, as if composing a message in his mind. “Okay, send him this.” Langdon quickly wrote out a strange-looking message and handed it to her.

  Nagel eyed the nonsensical text. “What is this?”

  “Just send it,” Langdon replied. “He’ll understand.”

  CHAPTER 87

  “Stick shifts should be outlawed,” Langdon grumbled, struggling with the SUV’s manual transmission as the vehicle jerked gracelessly southward toward Folimanka Park.

  “Or perhaps just the men who pretend to drive them?” Katherine offered.

  Langdon had to smile, grateful for her levity amid all the tension. His mind had been elsewhere, thinking about the ambassador’s abrupt departure. Nagel had put herself at enormous professional risk for them, which Langdon appreciated. But his primary concern was for their safety…and figuring out why Katherine’s book was in the crosshairs of the CIA.

  Those answers lie inside Threshold.

  With luck, his optimistic gut feeling about gaining access to the hidden facility would not turn out to be delusional overconfidence.

  We’ll know in a matter of minutes.

  Katherine’s suspicions that Stargate had something to do with their predicament, meanwhile, seemed unlikely to Langdon. He didn’t know too much about the discredited program, but he did know that even Hollywood had enjoyed a laugh at the CIA’s expense, releasing a George Clooney picture sardonically titled The Men Who Stare at Goats. It was based on an alleged Stargate experiment in which subjects tried to kill goats by staring at them.

  Despite Langdon’s skepticism about remote viewing, the basic concept was more than seven thousand years old. The ancient Sumerians had written about mystical “star journeys”—out-of-body experiences in which their minds traveled to the stars to view distant worlds.

  Of course, there was a lot of opium involved, Langdon knew, wondering if maybe Threshold might be exploring drug-induced altered states…perhaps even relating them to nonlocal consciousness.

  Katherine had mentioned earlier a new class of drugs known as dissociatives, which apparently were accompanied by a sense of being disconnected from one’s body. And certainly the CIA had a long history of running secret drug experiments.

  Including on the Harvard campus…

  One of the most notorious CIA projects ever to reach the public eye had been code-named MKULTRA, which secretly administered LSD to unsuspecting college students to study the effect of the drug on young minds. Eerily, one of the test subjects had been Harvard undergrad Ted Kaczynski—who later became known as the Unabomber—and while the CIA testified that Kaczynski had never been given drugs, they did admit subjecting him to “experimental interrogation techniques,” which quite possibly could have destabilized his mind.

  The Harvard drug lore did not stop there. Concurrently with MKULTRA, faculty psychologist Timothy Leary launched the infamous Harvard Psilocybin Project, which encouraged students to explore the mind-expanding benefits of hallucinogens: Turn on; tune in; drop out. Many now suspected that Leary might have been working undercover with the CIA.

  “I’m curious,” Langdon said, turning to Katherine, who was staring out the window. “In your book…did you write about chemically induced altered states?”

  “Of course,” she said, “as I mentioned earlier, certain hallucinogens will decrease GABA levels in the brain, thereby lowering the brain’s filtering mechanism. This implies, in my opinion, that the out-of-body sensations associated with hallucinogens are a reflection of unfiltered reality, rather than hallucination.”

  It made sense, and there was certainly historical precedent for drugs as a road to enlightenment. From the ancient texts of The Rigveda and Eleusinian Mysteries to Huxley’s 1954 classic The Doors of Perception, great writers had long been suggesting psychedelic substances were a way to expand human consciousness and perceive “reality unfiltered.”

  “I’ve never asked you, Katherine,” Langdon ventured casually, “does your consciousness research involve doing drugs yourself?”

  She turned and stared at him, looking amused he would even ask the question. “Robert, really?! The brain is an incredibly delicate mechanism, and trying to alter it with hallucinogens is like trying to adjust a priceless Rolex wristwatch with a sledgehammer! Drugs induce altered states by creating a jarring chain reaction of neurological disruptions that can have permanent effects. As enlightening as you may find that brief experience, you risk undermining long-term synaptic integrity and neurotransmitter equilibrium. For most hallucinogens, the primary mechanism through which they exert their effects is the dysregulation of serotonin—a very bad idea—as it can easily lead to cognitive deficits, emotional instability, and even enduring psychotic states.”

  Langdon nodded with a smile. “I’ll take that as a no.”

  “Sorry,” she said sheepishly. “I have colleagues who experiment responsibly with various psychedelics, and there’s certainly a place for that. I just get nervous when young people assume it’s all safe. It’s not.”

  Langdon downshifted as smoothly as possible to avoid colliding with a tram.

  “I assume you were asking,” Katherine said, “because you think drugs might have something to do with Threshold?”

  “It seems like a possibility,” Langdon said. “You mentioned in your talk last night a host of new drugs that seem to increase psychic ability. If you consider the countless documented cases of crimes being solved by psychics, it’s not a big leap to imagine the CIA trying to develop drugs to enhance psychic ability. The applications would be endless.”

  “I suppose…” she said. “But it’s not exactly a cutting-edge idea.”

  True, the CIA would be a bit late to that party. The Oracle of Delphi had regularly seen visions of the future while breathing gases escaping through a fissure in Mount Parnassus; the Aztecs spoke to future spirits while tripping on peyote; and the Egyptians saw tomorrow’s events while consuming mandrake and blue lotus. Our modern “pioneers”—names like Castaneda, Burroughs, McKenna, Huxley, Leary—were actually following centuries of souls who had attempted to expand their minds with chemicals.

  “I really don’t think Threshold is related to drugs,” Katherine said. “There’s very little about them in my manuscript.”

  “So what’s your best guess?” Langdon asked, guiding the SUV southward along the river toward Folimanka Park.

  Katherine leaned her head back against the headrest. “I’d say their concern lies with my experiments in precognition.”

  Langdon recalled Katherine’s precognition tests—a subject’s brain reacting to an image before actually visually “seeing” it. The randomly selected image, as if by magic, appeared in the subject’s consciousness before the computer had even selected which image to show.

  “To be honest,” he said, “I’m not sure I even understand your precognition experiment. If the brain registers the image before the computer has even chosen the image…then it’s as if your brain is making the choice…and then telling the computer which image to choose.”

  “Consciousnesses creating reality. That is one possibility, yes.”

  “Is that what you believe?”

  “Not exactly. In my model, your brain is not making the choice…but rather receiving the choice.”

  Langdon glanced over. “Receiving the choice…from where?”

  “From the field of consciousness that surrounds you. Even though you feel like you’re actively making choices yourself, in fact, those choices have been made already and are streaming into your brain.”

  “That’s where you lose me…If I’m only imagining I’m making my choices, then there’s no free will!”

  “True. But maybe free will is overrated.”

  “How can you possibly—”

  Katherine leaned over toward the driver’s seat and kissed him on the lips. Then she sat back and smiled. “I have no idea where that decision came from…but does it really matter? Isn’t the illusion of free will enough?”

  Langdon considered it a moment and placed a hand on her thigh. “I believe more research is required.”

  She laughed. “Craving an out-of-body experience, Professor?”

  “Actually, I think I’d prefer to stay in my body for that particular activity.”

  “Don’t be so sure,” she said. “As it turns out, sex is very closely related to the noetic view of out-of-body experiences.”

  Langdon groaned. “Does everything with you relate to work?”

  “In this case, it does. As you know, during sexual climax, the mind experiences a blissful moment of oblivion in which the entire corporeal world evaporates. Climax is considered in every culture to be the most intensely pleasurable experience a person could have, a blank-slate detachment from oneself, a momentary abandonment of all concern, pain, and fear. Do you know what the French call it?”

  “Oui,” he said. “La petite mort.”

  “Yes—the little death. That’s because the self-detachment felt at orgasm is precisely the same feeling described by people who have had near-death experiences.”

  “That’s morbidly fascinating.”

  “It’s brain science, Robert. Of course, the problem with sexual climax is that it’s frustratingly fleeting. Within seconds of being ecstatically released from all things, your mind rushes back into your body, reconnecting with the physical realm and all its attendant pains, stresses, and guilts.” She smiled. “Which is another reason we want to do it over and over. The experience of climax overloads the nervous system…and releases the mind. Much like an epileptic seizure.”

  Langdon had never associated orgasms with death or seizures, and he suspected the connection would forevermore resurface in his mind at the most inappropriate moments. Thanks a million.

  “Actually…” Katherine said, cocking her head. “I just had a strange thought.”

  You seem to have a lot of those…

  “Gessner’s lab assistant,” she said, glancing over. “You said this young woman is an epileptic? And she spent time in an institution?”

  “She did.”

  Katherine’s brow furrowed. “Don’t you find it odd that the CIA would permit Gessner to hire an unskilled Russian mental patient? I mean I know Sasha only works in Crucifix Bastion in a menial capacity, but it seems like a security risk to have a Russian with brain problems so close to Gessner’s work…which I gather is critical somehow to Threshold.”

  “I don’t see a risk,” Langdon countered. “Sasha seemed quite stable, and she’s certainly no fan of her home country. I think Gessner probably hired her out of compassion.”

  Katherine laughed out loud. “Robert, you’re adorable. Naive but adorable. Brigita Gessner—no disrespect for the dead—was a self-serving egomaniac and a ruthless businesswoman. If she hired an uneducated Russian mental patient for her inner circle, it’s because Sasha has something Gessner needs.”

  “Well, then I have no idea what that is.”

  “I might,” Katherine said, sounding suddenly more energized. Her eyes were alight. “It just occurred to me, and it’s something I wrote about in my manuscript.”

  “What is it?”

  “I know you’re deeply skeptical about remote viewing,” she said, turning fully toward him now, “but if Threshold has anything at all to do with remote viewing…then Sasha’s epilepsy makes her valuable.”

  “How?”

  “Think about it! The fundamental skill possessed by a remote viewer is the ability to conjure an out-of-body-experience. The challenge is that organic OBEs are exceedingly rare, and very few people can actually have them.”