Page 107 of The Secret of Secrets

Unfortunately, the ultrathin material would burn for only a moment—not nearly enough to ignite a laminated brochure or even a sheet of the thin manuscript paper. If Langdon was to have any chance of starting this fire, he would need something flammable.

Highly flammable.

At the bottom of the stairs, Katherine felt increasingly anxious as she waited in silence for further instructions from Langdon. Stay right here…I’ll tell you what to do in a minute, he had told her. He had been moving around on the stairs and finally positioned himself halfway up on the grated landing where they had been standing earlier.

In addition to the sounds of Langdon overhead, Katherine had been hearing noises from the library—a series of repetitive, loud, staccato screeches—which Langdon said were from the display case being relocated. That noise has now stopped, Katherine realized, sensing they were nearly out of time.

With rising fear, she looked up again toward the metal grate on which Langdon was working. To her surprise, the light now filtering through the grid looked different suddenly. It was no longer solely the pale rays from the trapdoor above them…it was a flickering glow.

Fire?

He did it?!

Stunned, she held her breath, waiting…

Within seconds, the glow began growing brighter, and Katherine finally exhaled with a rush of hope. She had no idea what Boy Scout magic Langdon had invoked to start this fire, but as the flames swelled, she could see that the porous metal grid on which he’d set the fire was providing perfect ventilation from beneath.

Her amazement, however, quickly turned to concern.

That’s a lot of fire…

The flames were quickly expanding and now seemed to be covering a larger portion of the landing. In the growing firelight, she could see that Langdon had moved off the platform and was now kneeling a couple of steps below, feeding the fire from the side. As the flames spread, Katherine started to feel air drafting in under the bookcase door, rising up the stairwell like a chimney, feeding the fire further.

Katherine knew her first concern should have been: Is this safe? But it was not. Her first concern was something else entirely. What is he burning?! These flames had grown far too intense to be a museum brochure, a pack of Kleenex, or whatever else he had found in her bag. What is he using for fuel?!

Her answer appeared a moment later when a partially charred scrap of paper drifted down from above, landing on the stairs directly in front of her. The scorched shred of white paper was printed with black text, some still legible. Katherine needed only an instant to recognize the words.

Robert, no!

She launched herself up the stairs, calling for him to stop. As she spiraled up toward Langdon, she suddenly suspected he had told her to stay below because he knew she’d never agree to his plan. He’s burning my manuscript!

She could feel the heat as she arrived beneath the landing. Above her, through the metal grid, she saw the underside of a stack of manuscript pages that Langdon was feeding into the fire. The pages were burning fast and bright.

“Stop!” she gasped. “That’s our only copy! We can’t lose it!”

Langdon glanced down, his eyes intense in the firelight. “We’ve already lost it, Katherine—I’m so sorry. This hard copy will be confiscated the second we step outside this alcove. And then it’s over for us. We might as well use it to save our lives.”

“But there’s no other—”

“Please listen,” he said, still feeding pages into the fire. “There are things I haven’t told you yet, but people have been killed today on account of this book. As long as we’re holding this manuscript, we are targets. The first bullet barely missed us. The next one won’t.”

“My God, people were killed?!” she repeated. “Because of my manuscript?!”

“Katherine, professionals deleted your manuscript from a secure corporate server! The ÚZSI captain who interrogated me this morning accused us of orchestrating a terrorist publicity stunt for this book. Brigita Gessner asked for an advance copy, and she was tortured and killed last night. Jonas seems to have gone missing. ÚZSI has been hunting me sinc—”

“Brigita Gessner is dead?!”

Langdon gave a grim nod. “I don’t claim to know what’s going on, but nothing is worth our lives. And each other. This is the right move. I need you to trust me.”

A little late for trust, she thought, seeing the meager stack of remaining pages. You’ve already burned most of it.

Lieutenant Pavel’s skull pounded from exertion.

He had finished manhandling the large display case across the library floor, finally succeeding in positioning it beneath the balcony. The transparent cube had been considerably heavier than it looked, much of its weight no doubt coming from the mammoth object inside.

Pavel had taken a minute to catch his breath, staring through the thick Plexiglas at the absurdly large book inside the cube. It was famous enough to draw a crowd, but the book was open to a page depicting a half-naked devil, squatting in a loincloth.

People pay money to see this?