Impossible.

  Beyond explanation.

  For an instant, Langdon wondered if he was still asleep, trapped in a vivid nightmare like the one Katherine had experienced last night. No. The biting cold and frantic beat of his heart assured him he was awake. As anyone who had plunged through pond ice could attest, the onset of acute hypothermia brought with it a unique succession of mental states—shock, panic, reflection, and finally, acceptance.

  Use the panic, he told himself. Swim harder.

  Angling across the current, Langdon stroked awkwardly in the direction of the dock, trying to ignore his intensifying pain. With each effort it grew worse, although the blare of the hotel alarm seemed to be growing louder. Closer. His eyes stung in the freezing water, and his vision was beginning to fade.

  The dock was close now, a dark mass in the glare of the security lighting, and Langdon urged himself toward it, making a final push. When his hand groped something solid, his numb fingers were barely able to feel the rough wood, much less take hold. He pulled himself hand over hand down the dock to the small metal ladder mounted there. Using every last bit of strength, he pulled himself up, flopping like a deadweight onto the landing, his soaking-wet clothes shedding water all around him.

  Langdon lay immobile, shivering and spent, knowing he was still very much in danger.

  I’ll freeze quickly out here. I need to get warm.

  He crawled to his knees and looked up at the hotel. The terrace was already jammed with guests, many wearing bathrobes, standing in the snow. He turned and looked back toward Charles Bridge, which looked like a postcard, its gas lanterns glowing warmly in the falling snow.

  I saw what I saw.

  Langdon heard the rapid approach of footfalls on the dock.

  “Mr. Langdon!” the hotel manager shouted, arriving wild-eyed. He slipped to a stop on the snow-covered surface. “Are you all right, sir?! What happened here?!”

  Langdon nodded. “I…thought…there was…”

  “A fire?!”

  Convulsing with cold, Langdon shook his head. “No…”

  “Then why did you pull the alarm?!” The man’s normally gracious tone was frayed and angry.

  “I thought…there was danger.”

  “From what?!”

  Langdon struggled to prop himself into a sitting position. His head pounded, and he could feel hypothermia setting in.

  A hotel security guard sprinted down the dock and joined them. The muscular man reached down and roughly pulled Langdon to his feet, lifting him with a firm grasp beneath his armpits. Langdon was uncertain whether the guard was helping him up or restraining him.

  “Why did you pull the alarm, sir?” the manager repeated, staring intently at him.

  “I’m sorry…” Langdon replied, his teeth starting to chatter. “I was…confused.”

  “Because of the police in the lobby? I told you that was nothing!” The manager seemed barely able to contain himself. “I need to know—is it safe to go back inside?”

  Langdon could see guests still flowing from the rear emergency exit, and he could only imagine the chaos at the hotel’s main entrance. I can’t explain this to them. They’ll think I’m mad.

  “Professor Langdon,” the manager said, his frustrated tone now turning angrier, “I need an answer! I have four hundred guests standing outside in the snow. Is the building safe? Yes or no! Can our guests return inside?”

  Langdon again saw the image of the woman wearing the black radiant crown…the silver spear…and the putrid smell of death. There must be another explanation. The world does not work this way! Get a grip, Robert.

  Langdon finally nodded. “Yes…I believe it’s safe. I’m terribly sorry. As I said…I was confus—”

  “Vypněte alarm!” the manager said to the guard, who released Langdon abruptly. As Langdon teetered on trembling legs, the guard pulled out a radio and barked orders while the hotel manager placed a call on his mobile.

  Within seconds, the alarms fell silent, replaced by the distant wail of approaching emergency vehicles. The manager closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and exhaled slowly through pursed lips. Then he reopened his eyes and calmly brushed the snowflakes from his dark suit.

  “Professor Langdon,” he whispered through clenched teeth, “I need to receive the authorities. My security guard will help you to your room. Do not go anywhere. The authorities will need to speak to you.”

  Langdon nodded his understanding.

  As the manager rushed off, the guard led Langdon through a smaller service entrance to a back staircase. Langdon’s sneakers squished with every step as the two men made their way up to the Royal Suite. The door was open, and the lights were on, exactly as Langdon had left it.

  “Zůstaňte tady,” the guard commanded, pointing into the room.

  Langdon didn’t speak Czech, but the guard’s body language was crystal clear. Enter and do not come out. Langdon nodded and entered the suite alone, closing the door behind him.

  The bay window from which he had jumped was still open wide, the flower arrangement on the sill already wilting from the icy cold. The red, white, and blue tulips had been a gift from the U.S. ambassador to Katherine in honor of her anticipated lecture, the colors being those of both the American and Czech flags.

  Langdon closed the window, morbidly recalling that the practice of defenestration—throwing a victim from a high window—had sparked both the Hussite Wars and the Thirty Years’ War. Fortunately, Langdon’s hotel window was significantly lower than Prague Castle Tower, and despite the trouble he’d caused this morning, Langdon doubted he’d started any wars.

  I need to talk to Katherine…and tell her what I saw.

  The encounter on Charles Bridge had been as disorienting as anything Langdon could ever remember, and despite Katherine’s open-mindedness to all things “paranormal,” Langdon doubted even she would have an explanation.

  Hoping she might have texted to say she had safely exited the hotel, Langdon reached into the pockets of his dripping sweatpants to dig out his phone, but it was no longer there—most likely at the bottom of the Vltava River.

  A fresh wave of cold shuddered through him as he hurried to the bedroom to use the hotel phone to call her. As he reached for the handset, though, he saw a handwritten note on the bedside table.

  In his panic earlier, he had not noticed it.

  R—

  Decided to walk to my meeting at Dr. Gessner’s lab.

  You can’t be the only one to get exercise today!

  Back by 10 a.m. Save me a smoothie!

  —K

  Langdon exhaled.

  Katherine is safe. That’s all I need to know.

  Relieved, he went straight to a shower, turned it on, and climbed in fully clothed.

  CHAPTER 6

  The Ether had passed, and The Golěm lay naked on the hemp mat.

  His journey had climaxed, as it always did, with waves of euphoria and an overwhelming sense of spiritual connection to all things. To receive the Ether was a nonsexual orgasm—a cresting wave of mystical bliss that unlocked a gateway through which to glimpse Reality as it really was.

  Mystical journeys like these were often disparaged as delusional fantasy, but those who saw the Truth had no need for small minds. The Golěm knew from experience that the universe was far more complex and beautiful than most could comprehend. The Moderns still could not accept the Truth that the Ancients understood intuitively…The human body was nothing but a temporary vessel in which to experience this earthly realm.

  He removed the perforated ball gag from his mouth and stood up, alone in the darkness of his svatyně. In the absence of light, he moved to the far wall and knelt on the cushion before the shrine he had created there.

  Groping in blackness, he found the box of matches and struck one, lighting the three votive candles he had arranged on the table in a bed of dried flowers.

  As the flickering candlelight grew, the photo on the wall before him came into view.

  He smiled lovingly up at her face.

  You don’t know me, but I am here to deliver you from evil.

  The forces of darkness that threatened her were potent and had exceptional reach. She was more vulnerable now than ever before, especially because she was distracted.

  She has found love.

  Or so she believes…

  The Golěm felt sickened to know she was giving her body to someone so unworthy.

  He does not understand you as I do.

  Nobody does.

  Sometimes, when she lay in bed, intertwined with her new lover here in Prague, The Golěm permitted himself to watch…a visitor in her mind, looking on in silence, wanting desperately to shout into her ear: “He is not who he seems!”

  But The Golěm remained silent…a thought in the shadows.

  She must never know I am here.

  CHAPTER 7

  The world’s largest book publisher, Penguin Random House, publishes nearly twenty thousand books a year and generates over five billion dollars in annual gross revenues. Its American headquarters is located on Broadway in Midtown Manhattan and occupies twenty-four floors of a glittering gray-glass skyscraper known as Random House Tower.

  Tonight, the offices were quiet. It was after midnight in the city, and even the cleaning crews had finished their rounds. Nonetheless, on the twenty-third floor, a single light burned in a corner office.

  Editor Jonas Faukman was a night owl. At a youthful fifty-five, he still kept the hours of a teenager, ran daily in Central Park, and wore black jeans and sneakers to work. His wavy black hair fortunately was still thick, but his beard was definitely showing signs of gray—reminiscent of Joseph Conrad, he liked to think.

  Faukman loved the undisturbed silence of these late hours, savoring his solitude as he wrestled with complex storylines and knotted prose, writing detailed pages of notes for his authors. Tonight, he had cleared his desk to spend the night doing what he enjoyed most in the world…reading a freshly delivered manuscript from a brand-new author.

  Potential yet unknown.

  Most published books came and went without a trace, but a select few captured the minds of readers and became bestsellers. Faukman had high hopes for the one he was about to read. He had been anticipating its delivery for months. The book was a bold exploration of the mysteries of human consciousness, penned by prominent noetic scientist Katherine Solomon.

  A little over a year ago, Faukman’s close friend Robert Langdon had brought Katherine to New York to pitch her book idea over lunch. The scientist’s presentation had been nothing short of mind-blowing—the most enthralling pitch for a nonfiction book Faukman could remember. Within days, he had taken it off the market by offering Katherine a lucrative publishing contract.

  She had toiled for the past year writing in complete secrecy, and just this afternoon, she had called from Prague to report that she had finished polishing the manuscript and was ready for Faukman to read it. He suspected that Langdon might have had a hand in encouraging Katherine to stop tweaking and to seek her editor’s perspective. No matter the catalyst, Faukman knew one thing for certain: if Katherine Solomon’s manuscript turned out to be half as riveting as her pitch had been, this book would be one of the most important projects of his career.

  Illuminating…startling…universally relevant.

  The quest to understand human consciousness was quickly becoming the new Holy Grail of science, and Faukman sensed Katherine Solomon was poised to become a trailblazing voice in the field. If her theory proved correct, then the human mind was not at all as had been imagined; the truth would bring about a profound shift in our views of humanity, life, and even death.

  Faukman wondered if he was about to edit a work that might one day stand alongside other paradigm-altering publications like On the Origin of Species and A Brief History of Time.

  Slow down, Jonas…he reminded himself. You haven’t even read it yet.

  A sharp knock at Faukman’s door snapped him back in the moment, and he wheeled around, startled to have a visitor in the dead of night.

  “Mr. Faukman?” The young man standing in his doorway was a stranger.

  “Yes? Who are you?”

  “Sorry to frighten you, sir,” the young man said, holding up his laminated company badge. “I’m Alex Conan—in data security. I work mainly at nights while system traffic is low.”

  The kid’s mop of blond hair and Pizzeria Papagayo T-shirt made him look more like a surfer than a technician. “How can I help you, Alex?”

  “Oh, it’s probably a false alarm,” the tech replied, “but our system just threw a flag on some data that was accessed.”

  Data that were accessed, Faukman thought, wondering when the world would finally accept that the word “data” was plural.

  “I’m sure it’s nothing,” the kid said. “I was worried because ‘unverified user’ is a rare alert for us, but now that I see that you are actually here in the building and logged in, I feel better. It’s probably just a glitch on your account.”

  “But I’m not logged in,” Faukman said, motioning to his monitor. “My computer hasn’t been on all night.”

  The kid’s eyes widened ever so slightly. “Oh…”

  Faukman felt a trace of alarm. “Is someone logged into my account?”

  “No, no,” the tech said. “Well, not anymore. Whoever it was, they’re gone.”

  “Whoever it was? What does that mean?!”

  The tech looked concerned now. “It just means that someone penetrated your personal partition, sir, without a password or authorized credentials. Whoever it was must have legit skills, because we’ve got a military-grade firewall protec—”

  “Hold on, what exactly was accessed?” Faukman swiveled to his desk and powered up his computer. My entire professional life is on that goddamned server!

  “Someone hacked one of your SVWs,” the kid said.

  Faukman froze. That is not the answer I wanted.

  SVWs—secure virtual workspaces—were a fairly new implementation at PRH. Due to a rise in book piracy of stolen manuscripts, some PRH editors had begun encouraging top-selling authors to work exclusively on the Penguin Random House servers for an extra layer of security. Many of PRH’s most valuable manuscripts were written, edited, and saved in a single secure location—the confines of the company’s encrypted, firewalled system in Random House Tower…along with its redundant backup in Maryland.

  I asked Katherine Solomon to use an SVW, Faukman thought uneasily.

  Having sensed blockbuster potential in her proposal, Faukman had encouraged Katherine to adhere to strict security protocols while writing the manuscript. She had happily agreed, saying she loved the thought of logging in remotely from anywhere in the world to work on her manuscript, knowing all her materials were in one place, secure and automatically backed up.

  Most authors felt the same way, albeit with one concern. Privacy. No author wanted an impatient editor monitoring the progress of a manuscript before they were ready to show it. For this reason, every author using an SVW protected his or her virtual workspace with a password—an access code known only to the author—until the manuscript was ready to be delivered.

  For Katherine, that day was today, Faukman thought.

  When she had called earlier from Prague, she had nervously given Faukman her access code so he could start reading and editing. Faukman immediately cleared his desk of other work so he could dive into her manuscript tonight and read it from start to finish over the weekend. Now, however, his long-awaited night of reading had been interrupted by a T-shirted security tech with unsettling news.

  “Which SVW was accessed?” Faukman demanded, his throat feeling dry. “Which book?”

  The kid pulled a scrap of paper from his pocket and began unfolding it. “I think it’s some kind of mathematical book?”

  Faukman perked up, feeling a glimmer of hope.

  “Here it is,” Alex said, reading the note. “The title is…SUM.”

  The editor felt an immediate jolt of panic.

  Breathe, Jonas. Breathe.

  SUM was no math book. It was an acronym.

  It stood for “Solomon—Untitled Manuscript.”

  CHAPTER 8

  Savoring the warmth of the hotel shower’s body jets, Robert Langdon closed his eyes and breathed hot steam into his lungs. He had managed to extricate himself from his wet clothing, and yet he still had not managed to shed the shroud of confusion surrounding this morning’s events.

  Langdon considered calling Katherine to interrupt her tour of Dr. Gessner’s lab and tell her what had happened, but he thought better of it. This is a bizarre conversation we’ll need to have face-to-face when she returns. Even now, as Langdon’s body gradually warmed and his thinking became clearer, he felt no closer to a logical explanation for the ghostly apparition he had seen on Charles Bridge. Or his reaction.

  Normally Langdon reacted calmly under pressure, but this morning he had panicked, overcome by a strange, visceral fear. It had overwhelmed his rational mind…the sight of the woman, the smell of death, the spear, the eerie tolling of the bells. The haunting memory replayed endlessly in his head.

  How could this happen?

  He returned to the events of last night, barely five hours earlier, to Katherine screaming his name and jolting awake from a vivid nightmare. He had consoled her as she frantically conveyed her harrowing vision.

  It was terrifying, Robert…There was a dark figure standing at the foot of our bed. She was dressed in black…she had a spiked halo on her head…and she was holding a silver spear. And she smelled putrid, like death. I shouted for you, but you weren’t there! The woman hissed at me, “Robert cannot save you. You are going to die.” Then there was a deafening noise and a flash, and the hotel exploded in a cloud of fire. I could feel myself burning…

  At the time, despite the obvious horror of Katherine’s dream, the elements had made logical sense to Langdon. The spiked halo or radiant crown had featured prominently in Katherine’s lecture that night. The silver spear had been a topic of conversation over drinks after the event with Brigita Gessner. The smell of sulfur could have lingered from their trip to the nearby hot springs of Karlovy Vary. And the explosion at the hotel was no doubt the unfortunate result of seeing some grim news footage yesterday of a bombing in Southeast Asia.