Above the main entrance, an elegant bronze panel announced: THE GESSNER INSTITUTE. The bastion’s door was a broad, stylish pane of reinforced frosted glass in a steel frame. Janáček pulled on the handle, but the door did not budge. He rapped loudly on the thick glass.

  No reply.

  Janáček now turned to the call box beside the door—a biometric finger scanner, a speaker, and a call button. No keypad for a passcode? Langdon wondered, puzzled because last night Gessner had boasted gratuitously that her lab was secured with “an ingeniously clever passcode.”

  She must have been referring to an interior door.

  Janáček impatiently pressed the call button, and the speaker buzzed, an intercom now ringing inside. They waited, and after five rings, the buzzer stopped.

  Janáček stepped back and raised his hooded eyes to the security camera positioned discreetly overhead, as if he were staring it down. He held his ÚZSI identification card aloft in front of the camera and pressed the call button again.

  It rang an additional five times with no answer.

  Langdon glanced at the security camera, wondering if maybe Katherine was looking back at him. Why isn’t Gessner answering the door? Or buzzing us in? Clearly, the two women could see that Janáček was here, and Langdon found it unlikely that Gessner’s desire for secrecy was so intense that she would rebuff an ÚZSI officer.

  “Give me Katherine Solomon’s cell number,” Janáček said, pulling out his phone.

  Langdon recited it from memory, and Janáček typed it into his phone, which he placed on speaker mode. The call went instantly to Katherine’s voicemail.

  No service inside those thick stone walls? Langdon wondered, although it seemed odd that a tech giant like Gessner had not installed cellular boosters in her lab.

  Janáček grumbled something under his breath and turned, shouting in the direction of his car. “Pavel!”

  The thick-necked driver leaped from behind the wheel and hurried toward Janáček like a dog to its master. “Ano, pane kapitáne?!”

  Janáček pointed to the glass door. “Prostřílej dveře.”

  Lieutenant Pavel nodded, pulled out a handgun, and crouched in a firing position aimed at the door.

  Jesus! Langdon leaped backward just as the lieutenant’s gun roared.

  Six rapid-fire shots rang out—the bullets piercing the center of the pane in an almost perfect circular grouping. The reinforced glass did not shatter, its gooey inner layer keeping it intact. Lieutenant Pavel wasted no time spinning and kicking his leg up and back, his heavy boot striking the glass in the circle of bullet holes. A spiderweb of cracks radiated outward. He kicked again, and the entire panel crashed inward, breaking free from the frame and skidding across the floor in a shower of safety-glass shards that looked like glistening sugar cubes.

  Langdon watched in disbelief, wondering if Janáček had even considered that there might have been someone on the other side of the frosted-glass door when his lieutenant fired.

  Pavel reloaded his gun and stepped through the demolished opening, his boots crunching on the broken glass. He looked left and right, and then he motioned all clear for Janáček to enter.

  “After you, Professor,” Janáček said. “Unless you’d prefer to wait in the car?”

  Langdon had no desire to leave Katherine alone with Janáček and his trigger-happy madman. Heart pounding, Langdon stepped toward the shattered opening, wondering how many other times in history this medieval fortress had been breached.

  CHAPTER 20

  The United States embassy in Prague is located in the Schönborn Palace. It comprises more than a hundred rooms, many with the original stucco walls and thirty-foot ceilings. Built in 1656 by a one-legged count—Rudolf von Colloredo-Waldsee—the opulent palace includes several ramps that enabled Count Rudolf to ride his horse up into the building. Now, having become the official U.S. embassy, the palace housed twenty-three on-site personnel tasked with working on behalf of U.S. interests in the region.

  This morning, the embassy’s media liaison—Dana Daněk—was alone in her office, organizing the daily agenda. She was a thirty-four-year-old Praguer who had perfected her English while modeling in London in her twenties. After returning to Prague and earning a computer degree, she’d applied for a post at the U.S. embassy and landed in the public relations department.

  Dana’s office felt colder than usual on this snowy morning, and she walked over to the classic steam radiator, bending over to turn it on for some extra heat.

  “Pěkný výhled,” a deep voice said behind her. Nice view.

  She turned and swooned a bit as she always did when she saw the striking legal attaché, Michael Harris. He treated her politely inside the office; of course, it was how he treated her outside the office and in his bedroom that she found most appealing. Beyond his physical talents, Harris had a lightness about him that always lifted her mood.

  “You’re on the wrong floor,” Dana said playfully, having heard that Harris had requested an emergency meeting with the ambassador. “She’s upstairs in her office, waiting for you.”

  “Could you do something for me?” Harris replied, sounding surprisingly serious. “It’s important.”

  She nodded. Anything your heart desires, Michael Harris.

  Harris quickly described his request.

  Dana stared at him, trying to gauge if he might be joking. “I’m sorry…a woman wearing a spiked tiara?”

  Harris nodded. “She was on Charles Bridge just before seven o’clock this morning. I only need to know where she came from and where she went afterward.”

  The request was unusual. Dana’s access to the camera system was technically restricted to assessing specific incidents that impacted public relations—public rallies, demonstrations, protests, and so forth. This felt like something…else.

  “Don’t worry,” he pressed. “I’ve got your back.”

  I certainly hope so, she thought. The two of them shared a perilous secret—an illicit office romance—which was strictly forbidden among embassy employees.

  “I’ll see what I can find,” she said.

  He gave her shoulder a little squeeze. “Thanks. I’ll stop back after my meeting.”

  Dana watched him go. You want me to track a woman wearing a spiked tiara…Why?

  In recent weeks, Michael had been uncharacteristically secretive, especially about his evening activities. He was increasingly unavailable to meet Dana after work and had become evasive when asked what he was doing instead. Dana was starting to suspect there was another woman.

  Feeling a sudden wave of jealousy, Dana wondered if maybe his request to track this woman might be a personal matter. Her suspicion was absurd, of course; the embassy’s legal attaché, of all people, would know never to use official resources for a personal matter, and Dana would be the last person Harris would ask to research another woman.

  Still, he’s using me, she knew.

  Nonetheless, Dana settled in behind her desk and logged into the embassy’s surveillance interface. “All right, Michael, let’s see what we can find.”

  After the Czech Republic had joined NATO in 1999, more than eleven hundred surveillance cameras had been positioned in Prague as part of a U.S.-funded classified surveillance partnership known as Echelon. Despite strict Czech laws governing access to the cameras, the U.S. had built the network and had given its embassies, with a few exceptions, full access…a point of sharp contention for Czech authorities.

  Dana Daněk was not entirely comfortable with the surveillance either, and yet citizens of Central Europe had little choice but to accept Echelon’s watchful eyes monitoring their daily lives—including, in Dana’s case, her occasionally sneaking in and out of Michael Harris’s flat at all hours of the night.

  Nobody is monitoring my activity, she assured herself. There is simply too much data.

  Even so, civilian privacy campaigns like @ReclaimYourFace regularly held anti-American protests against Prague’s ubiquitous security cameras. The embassy’s counterargument was both simple and true: Most citizens prefer to be monitored…than to be blown up by terrorists.

  With that thought in mind, Dana moved her cursor across a detailed map of Prague, navigated to Charles Bridge, and called up its recently archived security footage.

  CHAPTER 21

  Langdon’s eardrums were still ringing from the gunshots as he stepped through the shattered doorway into Crucifix Bastion. His loafers crunched on the glass shards covering the pink marble floor as he joined Janáček and Lieutenant Pavel in the elegant entryway.

  A hallway led to their right, but Janáček seemed more focused on the imposing steel door directly in front of them. Stenciled with the word LAB, the portal had a tiny reinforced window and a biometric panel.

  “Stairwell down to the lab,” Janáček said, peering through the window and trying the locked door.

  Langdon glanced around for an elevator, curious how Gessner transported heavy scientific gear down to her facility, but he saw nothing else in the foyer except this stairwell and the hallway that led off to their right. Langdon had yet to see any sign of a keypad for the “clever passcode” that Dr. Gessner had bragged about the night before.

  Janáček was studying the dislodged frame of shattered safety glass on the floor. After a moment, he crouched down, hoisted the frame, dragged it over to the lab entrance, and leaned it precariously against the lab door. “Makeshift alarm,” he announced. “In case your friend thinks she can slip out while we’re not watching.”

  Langdon could not believe Janáček thought Katherine would run, but his resourcefulness was impressive.

  Lieutenant Pavel was already moving cautiously down the hall, his gun raised as if he could be ambushed at any moment. Put your goddamned gun away! Langdon wanted to shout. They’re unarmed scientists!

  As Janáček and Langdon followed, Lieutenant Pavel peered into a small restroom, apparently found it empty, and continued to the end of the hall. Here the corridor turned left, and he inched warily around the corner, gun at the ready. After a moment, he holstered his weapon and turned back to his captain with a shrug. “Nikde nikdo.”

  Langdon followed Janáček around the corner into a dazzling space bathed in natural light. Furnished like the atrium of some boutique hotel, the room had stark white couches, pounded copper tables, and a sophisticated coffee station. The floor-to-ceiling windows offered a majestic view out across the bastion’s long courtyard to Prague’s skyline, Petřín Tower, and Vyšehrad Fortress.

  As Langdon surveyed the space, his gaze fell on a massive piece of art on the rear wall—a Brutalist wall sculpture whose unique style he recognized at once.

  My God, is that an original Paul Evans piece?

  The eight-foot-square rust-colored metal was divided into a grid of rectangular recesses, each holding a smaller individual sculpture. An improvisation on a “cabinet of curiosities,” Langdon had to guess the Paul Evans was easily worth a quarter of a million dollars. Gessner had bragged last night about her lucrative medical patents, but Langdon had clearly underestimated just how lucrative those patents must be.

  Janáček was moving toward the far end of the room, where an oversized wooden door stood open into what appeared to be Dr. Gessner’s office.

  “Dr. Gessner?” Janáček called, walking into the office.

  Langdon followed in the hope of seeing Katherine, but the office was empty.

  The neuroscientist’s office was adorned with a collection of vibrant abstract prints—each one an amorphous spheroid blob with regions of different colors—which Langdon immediately recognized as MRIs of the human brain.

  Science as art.

  Langdon wondered if Gessner was so self-involved as to hang images of her own brain. Bio self-portraits had become popular lately with the advent of imaging companies like DNA11, which generated artwork based entirely on a customer’s unique DNA microscopy. Genetic art, they advertised, means no two people ever own the same piece.

  Janáček walked over to Gessner’s desk and examined what appeared to be an intercom and microphone. He selected a button and held it down.

  “Dr. Gessner?” he declared into the mic. “I am ÚZSI Captain Oldřich Janáček. As I suspect you are aware, I am with Professor Robert Langdon. It is imperative that you and Ms. Solomon come upstairs immediately to speak with me. I repeat—immediately. Please confirm.”

  Janáček released the button and waited, glaring up into a fish-eye camera on the ceiling.

  With each passing moment of silence, Langdon felt increasingly uneasy. Why isn’t Katherine responding? Did something happen down there? Has there been an accident?

  “Professor?” Janáček sauntered slowly over to Langdon. “Do you have any idea why Ms. Solomon would be ignoring me? They are obviously here. Dr. Gessner’s office is unlocked, and there are fresh footprints outside.”

  Langdon was not sure how “fresh” the muted prints were, but considering their scheduled meeting here, it seemed logical that Katherine was indeed downstairs with Gessner. “I have no idea,” he replied truthfully.

  Janáček guided Langdon back to the waiting room and pointed to one of the white couches. “You sit.”

  Langdon obeyed, taking a seat on the long couch by the side wall. Janáček placed a phone call, speaking in rapid-fire Czech.

  While Langdon waited, his gaze moved again to the colorful images decorating Gessner’s office. Just three pounds of flesh, he thought, scrutinizing the mysterious contours and interconnected folds in each image. And science still has no clue how it works.

  In her lecture last night, Katherine had projected a markedly less attractive image of a human brain—a stark laboratory photograph of a grayish, furrowed glob of tissue sitting in a stainless-steel tray.

  “This blob is your brain,” she had told the crowd. “I realize it looks more like a mound of very old hamburger, but I can assure you, this organ is nothing short of miraculous. It contains approximately eighty-six billion neurons. Together they form over a hundred trillion synaptic connections, which can process complex information almost instantly. Moreover, these synaptic connections can reorganize themselves over time as needed. This phenomenon, known as neuroplasticity, enables the brain to adapt, learn, and recover from injuries.”

  Katherine displayed another photo—a single DVD sitting on a table. “This is a standard DVD—it can hold an impressive four-point-seven gigabytes of information,” she continued, “which equates to approximately two thousand high-definition photos. But do you know how many DVDs it would take to store the estimated memory of the average human brain? I’ll give you a hint…If you stacked the required DVDs on top of each other”—she gestured at the soaring ceiling of Vladislav Hall—“they would reach well beyond the peak of this building. In fact…the stack would be so tall…it would reach the International Space Station.”

  Katherine tapped her skull. “We each store millions of gigabytes of data in here—images, memories, lifetimes of education, skill sets, languages…all sorted and organized neatly in this tiny space. Modern technology still requires a data warehouse to match it.”

  She turned off the PowerPoint and walked to the front of the stage. “Materialist scientists remain baffled as to how an organ so small could possibly hold such vast quantities of information. And I have to agree, it seems a physical impossibility…which is why I’m not a materialist.”

  There was a slight flurry in the audience. Poking the hornet’s nest again, I see. Langdon had learned that Katherine had no qualms about striking a nerve when it came to the two opposing philosophies into which the study of human consciousness was divided.

  Materialism versus Noetics.

  The materialists believed that all phenomena, including consciousness, could be explained solely in terms of physical matter and its interactions. According to materialists, consciousness was a by-product of physical processes—the activity of neural networks along with other chemical processes within the brain.

  For noeticists, however, the picture was infinitely less confined. Noeticists believed that consciousness was not created by brain processes, but rather was a fundamental aspect of the universe—akin to space, time, or energy—and was not even located inside the body.

  Langdon had been stunned to learn that the human brain represented only 2 percent of a person’s body weight, and yet it consumed an incredible 20 percent of the body’s energy and oxygen. The blatant mismatch, Katherine believed, was proof that the brain was doing something so incomprehensible that traditional biology had not yet been able to grasp it.

  Her manuscript will likely unravel that mystery, Langdon thought, wondering if Jonas Faukman had begun reading yet. Knowing Jonas, he’s been wide awake all night and is halfway through the book already.

  Janáček had just placed a second call, and his increasingly urgent tone was not helping Langdon’s frayed nerves. He glanced at his watch and hoped for the hasty arrival of Harris and the ambassador.

  As Langdon waited on the couch, he found himself again scrutinizing the huge Paul Evans wall sculpture on the other end of the room. The expensive piece had frustrated Langdon the moment he first saw it.

  He felt irritated by wealthy art enthusiasts who purchased world-class masterpieces, removed them from the safety of museums, and then displayed them privately in poor lighting or in unsafe conditions.

  And on top of that, Gessner hung it improperly.

  No doubt Paul Evans had intended this sculpture to be displayed like a painting—centered and mounted on the wall—but Gessner had lazily set the piece directly on the floor, propped vertically with only a stabilizing bar across the top to keep it from falling into the room.

  That wall is solid stone, Langdon thought. It could easily have handled the weight.

  As he studied the heavy horizontal bar, however, an unexpected thought struck him.

  Unless…

  He scrutinized the complete piece of art a moment longer. Then he stood up and began walking briskly toward it.

  Without warning, Pavel leaped in front of him, pulling his weapon and aiming it directly at Langdon’s chest. “Nechte toho!”