Langdon and Katherine exchanged a silent look. It seemed that whatever they had seen so far—robotic surgeons, VR labs, artificial neurons, and computer chips—was only the preamble to whatever lay beyond this doorway.

  With a surge of adrenaline, Langdon moved to the door and pushed it open just far enough to peer inside. To his surprise, he felt his gaze shift immediately in the one direction he had not anticipated this deep underground.

  Up.

  Langdon found himself looking skyward into a high domed ceiling—a concave canopy that was gently illuminated from below. The circular dome reminded him of a planetarium, and yet Langdon knew what it once had been. The dome is the strongest architectural form. This was Folimanka Bunker’s “blast shelter”—the safe room where people congregated during an attack—its deepest, most secure space.

  Langdon had once seen another secret underground dome—also owned by the U.S. government—concealed beneath the golf course of the Greenbrier Resort in West Virginia. For over three decades, the U.S. Congress’s private nuclear fallout shelter, Greenbrier Bunker, had been one of America’s best-kept secrets until the Washington Post published an exposé in 1992.

  Langdon lowered his gaze and looked around the room itself. This is definitely not a planetarium. The chamber was vast and perfectly round, and it looked like nothing Langdon had seen in his entire life.

  What is this place?

  Bewildered, Katherine stepped into the domed chamber with Langdon. At first glance, it seemed like a depiction of a futuristic spacecraft’s command bridge.

  The center of the room was dominated by a raised circular platform on which at least twenty sleek workstations sat in a ring, all facing outward. Each command post consisted of an elaborate cockpit—similar to a flight simulator.

  As Katherine lowered her gaze to the main floor, she found herself unable to make sense of what she was seeing there. Precisely arranged on the plush carpeted floor surrounding the command bridge, a starburst array of sleek, low-slung metallic pods radiated outward like the spokes of a wheel. Each glistening pod resembled a piece of modern art—a minimalist, torpedolike shell of sleek black metal, three meters long and aligned with its own command post up on the bridge.

  Puzzled, she moved toward the closest pod, now seeing that the top of each was actually a convex panel of tinted glass, so perfectly tailored that it had no seams. She peered down through the glass but saw only darkness within.

  “What are these things?” Katherine whispered as Langdon arrived beside her.

  He studied the pod a moment and then reached down and touched a button discreetly recessed in its side. There was a hiss of air, like the release of a vacuum, and the glass lid of the pod hinged upward like a gullwing door. Soft lights illuminated inside, revealing a padded interior that resembled a futuristic sleeping pod.

  Or a coffin.

  “It looks like an advanced version,” Langdon said, “of the pod we saw in Gessner’s lab.”

  Katherine nodded, peering in at the Velcro restraints and the IV connector. This machine was clearly the offspring of the rudimentary prototype in which they had seen Gessner’s body…the suspended-animation machine capable of holding a critically injured patient on the threshold of death for hours.

  In addition to being larger and sleeker than its forefather, this version contained a specialized head cradle with plush leather padding and a skull-sized opening. The opening looked a lot like a magnetoencephalograph’s “sensing cavity”—the area equipped with magnetic sensors to detect neuronal activity—although Katherine assumed that if brain chips were involved, the opening probably contained some kind of near-field or ultra-wideband technology commonly used to interface with brain implants.

  Wireless communication directly through the skull, she thought, feeling a chill. If a subject is implanted with a fully integrated H2M brain chip…and that chip is capable of real-time monitoring…

  Katherine felt dizzy as it began to dawn on her precisely what this room was designed to do. Incredibly, she and Robert had been discussing the topic all afternoon…altered states of consciousness, out-of-body experiences, psychedelic drug trips, epileptic postictal bliss. A collage of concepts now flooded her mind: brain filters, universal connection, humankind’s untapped ability to glimpse a vastly wider spectrum of reality.

  These gleaming sarcophagi, she now realized, were the final piece of a research project that, less than an hour ago, she would have declared utterly impossible.

  Is this really happening?

  Beside her, Langdon raised his eyes from the pod and gazed out over the entire dome. “But I don’t understand…what happens in this room?”

  The answer to his question, Katherine knew, was as simple as it was mind-bending. This place was engineered to unveil life’s most enigmatic secret…the mind’s ultimate altered state…the single most elusive of human experiences.

  As the weight of the moment settled over her, Katherine reached out and quietly took his hand.

  “Robert,” she whispered. “They’ve built a death lab.”

  CHAPTER 111

  A death lab.

  As Langdon began to grasp the implications of Katherine’s startling revelation, he felt a rush of new questions. Why would the CIA be studying death? What are they hoping to find?

  As intellectually exciting as Langdon found the prospect of understanding death, he feared this room served a far darker purpose than simply studying human consciousness or death. The horror of subjecting someone to the “death state” for any reason other than life support seemed unconscionable. Even if the patient is drugged or cannot recall the experience…

  “I need to know everything about this research,” Katherine said, moving deeper into the array of pods.

  “We need to keep moving,” Langdon urged, firing a nervous glance back toward the entryway.

  He quickly joined her and motioned to the far side of the dome, where a sign read SYSTEMS / UTILITIES. He doubted a utilities room would have an exit, but at least it might offer somewhere better to hide, and Langdon saw no better option. No way out.

  They hurried through the maze of pods, and halfway across the dome, Langdon could see that the utility area was accessed not through a door…but rather through a large rectangular opening in the floor.

  Farther underground?

  Whether the opening had stairs, a ladder, or some kind of lift, the idea of descending any deeper into the earth was one Langdon did not relish.

  As it turned out, descending was not an option anyway.

  An ear-piercing gunshot rang out behind them. The roar of the weapon reverberated in the dome overhead. Langdon and Katherine both wheeled around, frozen in their tracks, as the silver-haired man in the dark suit approached with his weapon leveled at them both.

  “Dr. Solomon and Professor Langdon, I presume?” he said calmly. His voice was familiar—the same Southern drawl Langdon had heard on the speakerphone with the ambassador.

  Finch.

  “You’re playing a dangerous game,” he said, approaching. “And I’m afraid it’s not going to end well for you.”

  Finch knew there was nothing as arresting as the sound of gunfire in an enclosed space. In movies, it made people flee, but in real life it had a paralyzing effect. He took pleasure seeing Langdon and Solomon rooted in place, arms raised, showing their palms—the universal sign of surrender. His targets were now in reaction mode, and Finch held all the cards.

  “Set down your bag, Dr. Solomon,” he commanded in case she had a weapon in it.

  Solomon obeyed, laying her shoulder bag on the floor. As she did, Finch saw the bag contained a thick black binder…no doubt one of the classified documents they’d collected along the way.

  You’re making this easy for me.

  By all accounts, these two intruders had just broken into a secret government project and stolen top secret material. If Finch shot them dead, there would be no investigation, especially since they had made it this far into the restricted facility. Ironically, death was precisely what this room was designed for.

  Nonetheless, Finch would need to interrogate them first…and find out who else was involved in this, and how. Ambassador Nagel was clearly guilty, having not only crossed Finch but also threatened the agency. Extremely bad idea. Director Judd had no doubt detained the ambassador by now and would deal with her appropriately.

  The wild card is Sasha Vesna, he thought, remembering the epilepsy wand he had found upstairs. He was still struggling to accept that Sasha had murdered two people. Questions for later, he told himself. Right now, manage the issue at hand…my two captives.

  Strategically, it made no sense for Finch to march Langdon and Solomon out of the building at gunpoint. Despite being an extremely fit seventy, Finch’s diminutive stature would prove no match for the six-foot Langdon should anything go wrong, and the trek back to the bastion offered far too many chances for a surprise attack. Threshold’s secondary access point was closer, but it was currently being used for construction, and it was manned by U.S. soldiers. Finch exiting with two Americans at gunpoint would raise too many questions.

  And so we wait, he decided, having immediately called for backup upon finding Housemore’s body. Help is on the way.

  The interrogation would take place in Threshold, Finch had proudly decided. His facility offered superb secrecy and efficacy. The EPR pods could be used extremely persuasively, and the Threshold pharmacy burgeoned with interrogational aids, including memory impairment drugs should it become necessary that “none of this ever happened.”

  As Finch moved slowly toward his captives, he felt confident the situation was entirely under his control. His lone oversight—a minor one—had been failure to check the rounds in Housemore’s gun, but having seen no signs of a gunfight upstairs, he was nearly certain her SIG Sauer P226 had a nearly full magazine.

  Finch preferred not to use the weapon—at least not yet—but he knew he would have no choice if Langdon and Solomon decided to rush him. I have to keep them calm. The most effective manipulation to control captives was to distract them with other thoughts. Conveniently, Langdon and Solomon were still apparently thunderstruck by what they had found down here, and the more Finch explained about Threshold, the clearer it would become to the agency that Langdon and Solomon knew far too much to go free. Ever.

  “There’s no need to shoot,” Langdon declared as Finch arrived before them, gun leveled at their chests. “We’ll sign your NDAs. Just tell us what you need.”

  “Oh, that moment has passed,” Finch replied coolly. “You’ve broken into a top secret facility, and you’ve seen entirely too much.”

  “True,” Solomon declared, her tone indignant. “I saw you stole my patent.”

  Her apparent lack of fear told Finch that she had yet to grasp the true peril of her situation. “We stole nothing, Dr. Solomon,” he said calmly. “You held no patent. As you may recall, it was denied.”

  “But why all the tactical maneuvers?!” Langdon demanded. “Why not simply contact Katherine or her publisher and explain—”

  “Because we’re not suicidal,” Finch shot back. “Ask Dr. Solomon how she feels about sharing research with the U.S. military. She gave a damning podcast interview about it once. I could not risk her going public and sharing the agency’s concerns. Besides, Mr. Langdon, we had no time. This all came to a head last night very quickly—”

  “What experiments are you running here?!” Katherine interrupted, surveying the EPR pods with undisguised amazement. “Are you studying death?”

  “How much would you like to know?” Finch asked, nodding ominously toward the pod closest to them. “Get in and I’ll show you.”

  “That won’t be necessary,” Langdon said. “Take your classified binder back. We’ll sign NDAs. We’ve seen some of your facility, but we understood almost nothing.”

  Finch chuckled. “Bright people playing dumb? That’s never very convincing, Professor. Allow me to enlighten you.”

  “Please don’t,” Langdon said. “I think we’d prefer not to know what you’re doing down here.”

  “Well, that hardly seems fair,” Finch said with a smile. “Considering Dr. Solomon helped build it.”

  The Golěm had stepped onto the pneumatic lift to ascend back to the domed chamber when the gunshot rang out. Alarmed, he immediately stepped off, waiting in silence beneath the opening.

  The conversation above was perfectly audible.

  An armed man had just taken two hostages in the dome, and he had addressed them as Dr. Solomon and Robert Langdon. Why the two Americans were down here, The Golěm had no idea, but neither one of them deserved to die.

  The man with the gun, however, most certainly did. The Golěm had quickly realized that this was Everett Finch, who, according to Gessner, was the mastermind behind Threshold.

  The head of the snake. Here in the flesh.

  The universe had just offered The Golěm an unexpected gift—the opportunity to eliminate Sasha’s ultimate betrayer…the man who had created this house of horrors.

  As alluring a prospect as it was to kill Finch, the task seemed nearly impossible. The Golěm had only a stun gun with a single discharge remaining—no match for a firearm—and if he ascended on the pneumatic platform, he would rise out of the floor in plain view at the back of the domed chamber, totally exposed.

  The clock is ticking, he reminded himself, estimating he had only fifteen minutes or so before this room detonated and became a catastrophic pressure bomb.

  Waiting here too long was certain death, and he wondered if he should run back through the long utilities passageway to the SMES vault and try to abort the blast. The airtight portal’s turn wheel had required substantial effort to seal on his way out, and he feared that the energy required to open it again might prove too much for him.

  A dangerous gamble without my wand, he thought.

  The Golěm felt ready to trade his life for Mr. Finch’s, but he knew he could not make that decision for Sasha. If he didn’t escape and release her, she would never again see the light of day.

  CHAPTER 112

  In the spectral glow of the dome, surrounded by suspended-animation pods, Robert Langdon stood beside Katherine and studied their captor. Having positioned himself a safe five yards away, Everett Finch was leaning comfortably against a pod, his gun leveled.

  Considering the tense circumstances, Finch’s demeanor seemed unsettlingly serene. There was an icy detachment about this man that suggested he was capable of doing whatever was necessary.

  “The future will be controlled by those who develop the first true human-to-machine interface,” Finch began. “Effortless communication between people and technology. No typing, dictating, viewing…just thinking. The financial ramifications alone are enough to create a new world superpower, but the practical applications, particularly in the field of intelligence work…are unimaginable.”

  Langdon suspected a viable H2M technology, in the wrong hands, could make the worst Orwellian nightmare look like an amusing daydream.

  “For this reason,” Finch continued, “the CIA had been working tirelessly to keep pace with the biotech behemoths—Neuralink, Kernal, Synchron, and the rest—all of whom have bottomless war chests and the same quest to be the first brain implant capable of true high-speed, human-to-machine communication. Fortunately for us, they’ve all faced the same hurdle.”

  “The interface,” Katherine said. “How to create artificial neurons.”

  Finch nodded. “Neuralink has had moderate success, but nothing on the scale of what’s necessary. The missing piece turns out to be a design that the CIA has been fortunate enough to be developing for two decades now.”

  “Taken from Katherine’s patent,” Langdon said.

  “To repeat, Dr. Solomon holds no patent. And if she had, we would have taken it over in the name of national security. The challenge with exercising eminent domain is that the process can be contentious and public, often revealing precisely what the agency is interested in keeping secret.”

  “What are you doing with my design?” Katherine demanded. “What is Threshold?”

  Finch removed his glasses with his free hand and slowly rolled out his neck. “Dr. Solomon, perhaps you recall when Caltech built an implant that tapped into the brain’s visual cortex and could effectively ‘see’ whatever the host was seeing through his or her eyes.”

  “Certainly I remember,” Katherine said. “The implant captured optical signals passing through the optic nerve, translated them, and broadcasted them out as live video.”

  Langdon was not familiar with the technology, but it sounded essentially like an internal GoPro camera—a way to look through someone else’s eyes. Is Threshold monitoring what subjects are seeing? If so, it was an entirely new kind of surveillance. Langdon looked up at the video screens encircling the dome and imagined point-of-view broadcasts from people moving about their daily lives. But then why the pods?

  “The agency has been working on something similar,” Finch said, “a far superior version of that implant—one that can monitor what is being experienced not by the eyes…but rather by the mind’s eye.”

  For Langdon, the phrase “mind’s eye” conjured images of the colorful bindi dot worn between the eyebrows to represent the gateway to spiritual wisdom, also called the Third Eye.

  “Your mind’s eye, Professor,” Finch said, apparently sensing Langdon’s uncertainty, “is the mechanism by which your brain sees without your eyes. When you close your eyes and picture your childhood home, a vivid image appears. That is your mind’s eye. Your brain does not require visual input to conjure detailed images. Your brain continuously views memories, fantasies, daydreams, imaginations. Even when you sleep, your brain conjures images in the forms of dreams and nightmares.”

  “You can’t really have built…” Katherine trailed off, looking for the right words.

  “We did,” Finch replied with a hint of pride. “Threshold has created an implant that can view the content of the mind’s eye. We can now monitor the full spectrum of images a brain conjures…seeing it unfold in real time, in full detail.”