Page 217 of The Secret of Secrets

After waiting a few more minutes with no sign of Langdon, she finally exited back into the main sanctuary to rest her legs in a nearby pew. It felt good to be off her feet, but her concern about Langdon was increasing. Did something go wrong?

Forcing her mind elsewhere, she raised her eyes to the main altar—a towering framework of gold lattice spires against a backdrop of stained glass. There was no denying this building was an astonishing human achievement, a majestic work of art.

Even the pulpit is a masterpiece, she thought, admiring the intricately carved podium mounted on the column beside her. Accessed by an elegant spiral staircase, the lofty hexagonal pulpit was crowned with a canopy of gilded cherubs. The sacred perch had clearly been designed to imbue the speaker with almost deific authority.

“There you are!” a deep voice called across the church.

She turned to see Langdon exiting Wenceslas Chapel and rushing toward her, still bundled up in his Patagonia puffer. “I didn’t see you in there and was afraid you gave up on me,” he said, arriving breathless. “Did you find the door with the seven locks?”

“I did,” she said. “Shockingly, it was locked.”

Langdon smiled, looking more relaxed now. “Well, if you want me to open it, I’ll need to make seven phone calls—the president, the prime minister, the archbishop, the administrator, the dean, the mayor, and the chamber chairperson.”

“I won’t even ask why you know that, Robert. Did you sort out your paperwork?”

“I did,” he said. “We’re all set.”

Katherine felt relieved. “Are you going to tell me what it was all about?”

“I will…” he said, seeming distracted by the nearby pulpit. “Hold on…” He glanced around the deserted cathedral and then back at Katherine. “Sit right here—I want to show you something.” He headed for the pulpit stairs and deftly stepped over a velvet swag that blocked them.

“Robert, what are—”

He bounded up the curling staircase. When he reached the top, only his head was visible as he peered down over an immense Bible that lay open on the lectern. “Katherine, I’d like to read a few passages to you,” he said, his tone earnest. “Just open your heart and listen.”

Bible passages? “I don’t underst—”

“Just listen,” he urged. “I believe these words will comfort your soul.”

Katherine gazed up in bewilderment as Robert got himself situated, removing his puffy coat, dropping it on the floor, and fumbling with the Bible. He seemed to be flipping pages as if searching for a specific passage.

Once settled, Langdon cleared his throat and made eye contact with her again before turning his eyes to the lectern. When he spoke, his familiar baritone was clear and resonant. “It has now been proven,” he orated dramatically, “that infants are capable of conscious experiences from birth…thereby undermining our current model that consciousness develops over time.”

I’m sorry? Katherine’s thoughts scrambled. What did he just say?!

Langdon flipped several pages and began reading again. “Most remarkably,” he continued, “we have now detected irrefutable evidence of intense gamma wave activity in the brain as it dies.”

Katherine leaped to her feet, now recognizing precisely what he was reading from. That’s impossible! She dashed toward the pulpit as Langdon began to read another section.

“GABA levels,” he intoned, “fell precipitously in the moments before death, and with it, the brain’s ability to filter out the broadest spectrums of human experience that are normally unknown.”

Katherine scrambled up the curved stairs, heart racing. “Robert!” she exclaimed, reaching the pulpit, coming to an abrupt stop, and staring in disbelief at the familiar stack of laser-printed pages sitting atop the massive bible. “Is that my manuscript?!”

“Apparently so,” he said with a shrug and the lopsided grin she had come to love.

Katherine now realized he must have been carrying the manuscript beneath his coat. “But…” She fumbled for words. “I thought…you burned it!”

“Only your bibliography, my darling…” he said with a smile. “The rest of the manuscript I hid behind some ancient books on the library’s balcony shelves.”

Stunned, Katherine pictured the blaze Langdon had started on the metal stairs and the charred scraps of paper drifting down to the floor below. “But…the fire seemed so big.”

“It was,” Langdon said. “Leave it to you to cite forty-two double-spaced pages of sources. You do know your publisher lays that out for you at the end, right? Anyhow, I mixed in a handful of blank vellum pages from one of the old ledgers up there. Animal fat creates a lot of black smoke.”

Katherine fought back a torrent of emotions rushing through her. Relief, gratitude, disbelief, and also frustration. My manuscript was never lost?! “Why didn’t you tell me?!” she demanded. “I was devastated!!”

Langdon’s expression was sincerely remorseful. “Believe me, Katherine, I desperately wanted to. It was agonizing to see you suffer, but we were surrounded by chaos and were on the verge of being arrested and interrogated. I didn’t want you to have to lie. It was far safer for you not to know the manuscript existed until this was all sorted out—the last thing I wanted was to have it confiscated again by ÚZSI or worse.”

Katherine was a lousy liar, and they both knew it…She realized he was probably right. Disinformation by deception, as Nagel had called it. Langdon had not even told Jonas on the phone.