Page 47 of The Secret of Secrets

Sasha Vesna let out a wail of anguish and collapsed to her knees beside the corpse in the pod. “Brigita! No!” She covered her face and began to sob uncontrollably.

All Langdon could do was watch, his heart aching for her. Clearly, this woman’s grief at seeing Dr. Gessner was as overwhelming as Langdon’s relief that it was not Katherine.

After several seconds of tormented tears, however, Sasha glanced up, and her face took on an expression of alarm. She began patting her pockets as if she’d lost something. As she did, she began hyperventilating. “No…” she whispered, her jaw tightening into a rigid grimace. “Please…not now!”

Langdon hurried to her. “What’s happening?!”

Sasha tried to clamber to her feet and make a move toward the door, but as she did, she faltered, dropping back to her knees. She seemed to be about to suffer a seizure of some sort, and Langdon did his best to steady her.

“What can I do?!” he offered.

Sasha made a throaty groan and pointed to the handbag she had dropped onto the floor nearby.

Medication? he guessed, then leaped into action, running over to the purse and rummaging frantically through its contents as he carried it back to her.

Dr. Gessner had mentioned last night that her lab assistant suffered from TLE—temporal lobe epilepsy—although the statement seemed less one of compassion than a way for Gessner to brag about how many TLE patients she had cured. “Seizures are nothing but electrical storms in the brain,” Gessner had explained. “I invented a way to interrupt those storms. It’s essentially a perfect cure.”

Perfect? Ms. Vesna did not seem very “cured” at the moment.

Maddeningly, Langdon found only keys, gloves, glasses, tissues, and assorted other items. No pill bottles, no syringes, no inhalers, nothing at all that looked helpful in this situation. “What do you need?!” he asked, arriving beside her with the purse.

But he could see it was too late. Sasha was now on her side, shaking violently, her eyes glazed over and her head knocking against the tile floor.

Too late for medicine, Langdon thought as he hurriedly dropped to the floor, bracing her head in his palms and holding it safely away from the hard tile. As a teacher, Langdon had been trained how to help in the event of a student’s seizure.

First, do no harm. He knew better than to roll a person onto her stomach, as television paramedics often did to prevent a victim from “swallowing her own tongue”—a bizarre old wives’ tale that was actually a physical impossibility. It was also advised never to shove a belt into the victim’s mouth, as some believed was prudent. That’s how you suffocate someone—or get your finger bitten off. The only FDA-approved mouth protection for seizures was called a PATI mouth guard, and Langdon didn’t see one in Sasha’s purse. Just help her ride it out.

“It’s okay,” Langdon whispered. “I’ve got you.”

As Langdon cradled the woman’s head in his palms, he could see that her nose had been previously broken and poorly set and that she had a crimson scar under her chin, almost certainly injuries from previous seizures. He saw the traces of other scars peeking out from beneath her thick blond hair, probably from other similar accidents.

Langdon felt an upwelling of sympathy for her.

Epileptic seizures took a brutal toll on one’s physical body. About that there was no debate. Paradoxically, however, the effect on one’s mental state was documented throughout history to be quite different. Precisely the opposite, in fact.

Katherine had mentioned epilepsy in her talk last night as one of the human mind’s naturally occurring “altered states” of consciousness. Apparently, when viewed in an MRI machine, seizures displayed a stunning electrical signature that was similar to certain hallucinogens, near-death experiences, and even orgasm.

Remarkably, some of humankind’s most creative minds had been epileptic—Vincent van Gogh, Agatha Christie, Socrates, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky. The Russian novelist had once proclaimed his epileptic seizures to be “a happiness and harmony unthinkable in the normal state.” Others described their seizures as “opening a gateway to the divine”…“blissfully freeing the mind from the confines of its physical shell”…and “providing otherworldly bursts of profound creativity.”

Epilepsy appeared with notable frequency in Christian artwork, which was not surprising considering so many scriptural accounts of mystical experiences—visions, ecstasies, divine encounters, transcendent revelations—all seemed to describe, with uncanny specificity and accuracy, the experience of an epileptic seizure, including Ezekiel, St. Paul, Joan of Arc, and St. Birgitta. Raphael Sanzio’s famed The Transfiguration depicted an epileptic boy in the throes of a seizure, which he and others commonly used as a visual metaphor for Christ’s ascent to heaven.

In Langdon’s arms, Sasha finally stopped trembling. Her breathing slowed to a normal cadence. The whole event had lasted about a minute, and she was now completely limp, most likely unconscious. Langdon knew just to be patient…and allow her time to return.

As he gazed down at the unconscious Russian, he felt disoriented by the disturbing detour his morning had taken. Just hours ago, Langdon had been quietly swimming laps. Now he was sitting on the floor of a private lab with two women he had never met before yesterday—one unconscious in his arms, the other dead in an EPR pod.

And most troubling of all…there was no sign of Katherine.

Lieutenant Pavel stood anxiously in the bastion’s shattered entryway, scanning the courtyard for any signs of his ÚZSI captain. He had seen Janáček only minutes ago on the edge of the ridge making a phone call. Now he was gone. Pavel had called him twice. No answer.

Janáček also disappeared?!

Fortunately, the mystery of Langdon’s disappearance had now been solved. Moments earlier, Pavel had located a hidden elevator behind a sliding wall in the waiting area. The elevator required an authorization code, but that was easily remedied; someone downstairs must have been watching Langdon on the security cameras and come up in the elevator to retrieve him.

Langdon’s disappearance confirmed that Solomon and Gessner were indeed downstairs and had disobeyed a direct order from ÚZSI Captain Janáček. Pavel wondered if the Americans had any idea how serious their trouble was about to become.

Pavel had been examining the hidden alcove when he heard a loud crash in the foyer. Immediately he knew it was the shattered doorframe that the captain had ingeniously leaned against the lab stairwell’s entrance as a rudimentary alarm.

Solomon, Langdon, and Gessner are escaping the lab!