Page 58 of The Secret of Secrets

The claim made no sense. “You’re sure it was Dr. Solomon?”

“I saw her in the mirror…tall…blond…”

Definitely not Katherine Solomon. Harris knew there was only one tall blonde with access to this lab—Gessner’s assistant, Sasha Vesna—and he found it hard to imagine Sasha was capable of violence. “Where is Robert Langdon?”

“He ran…with her.”

The story sounded delusional, and yet Harris now noticed a series of footprints departing the front walkway…as if headed for the woods. Langdon fled?!

“Did you see anyone else inside?” Dr. Gessner?

“No…I came straight up to report this to my captain.” The lieutenant motioned to the far end of the courtyard. “He’s out there.”

Harris looked out toward the ridge, but Janáček was nowhere to be seen. “I don’t see him.”

“He went out there to make a phone call…”

Harris was not surprised. He was probably doing damage control after he spoke to the ambassador. “You should really sit down, Lieutenant.”

The man was already moving toward the ridgeline, and Harris scooped up a handful of snow, hurrying to catch up. “Here. Hold this on your head.”

The man took the ball of snow and pressed it to the back of his skull as he walked. “He was out here on the phone…but he never came back in.”

Harris saw a tangle of footprints on the ridgeline, as if Janáček had been pacing or perhaps had been joined by someone else, but the area was now deserted. As the two men neared the edge, the lieutenant stopped and retrieved a metallic object from the ground. He dusted it off, his eyes wide with concern. “This is his phone!” he exclaimed.

Why would Janáček have left his phone?

Tentatively, they moved the final few yards to the edge of the ravine and peered over the ridge. The scene below was grisly. At the bottom of the chasm, grotesquely sprawled and broken on the rocks, lay a body in a dark suit. The man’s head was encircled with red snow that radiated several feet in all directions. Even from this height, Harris had no doubt he was dead…and no doubt who he was.

My God…Janáček jumped?

Beside Harris, the lieutenant turned away and bellowed like a wounded animal. His voice echoed with the pain of true loss…and uncontrollable rage.

Chapter 36

Langdon lowered his head against the wind as he and Sasha Vesna descended the wooded slope away from the bastion. The dense tree cover provided enough dry ground that Langdon was able to descend more gracefully than anticipated, sliding several times on the slick snow but maintaining a steady pace.

By the time they emerged from the woods into Folimanka Park, Langdon’s loafers were caked with snow and his feet were frozen. A scattering of pedestrians dotted the pathways, heads down, making their way to work.

Without speaking, Sasha led them quickly across the park, heading due south. As they passed Folimanka Fountain, Sasha spoke under her breath. “I’m convinced Katherine never entered the bastion this morning…the display on the EPR pod showed Brigita had been in that pod since late last night, which is far longer than anyone could survive.”

Langdon hoped this meant Katherine had arrived at the lab, received no answer at the buzzer, and simply returned to the hotel. She and I might have crossed paths, he told himself, trying to ignore the nagging sensation that something with Katherine was indeed very wrong. He felt terrified by the prospect of losing her.

For the past three days, he and Katherine hadn’t spent a moment apart, and it amazed Langdon that after nearly thirty-five years, their casual friendship had ignited into such a natural, passionate romance, catching them both off guard.

Langdon had savored the days together. He took Katherine to see the bizarrely fetishistic Infant Jesus of Prague statue, which was ritualistically undressed and dressed in different outfits like some kind of sacred Barbie Doll. He showed her the mysterious 165-pound Devil’s Bible, the largest book in the world, whose terrifying legend involved an adulterous monk, the skins of 160 donkeys, and death by “immurement”…and even dared Katherine to taste the local tlačenka—“meat jelly”—which she agreed was surprisingly delicious despite being made of pig’s heads.

Katherine had also been on an adrenaline ride these last few days, having just finished her manuscript. With a mixture of enthusiasm and coy reserve, she had told Langdon about it in general, playfully rebuffing his attempts to learn more about the details of the book in order not to ruin the surprises for him. But mainly, Langdon recalled, she had fretted about whether readers and book reviewers would be open to new ideas.

“Let’s face it—the human mind hates change,” she had said yesterday while sipping espresso at the stylish La Boheme Café. “And the mind despises abandoning existing beliefs.”

Langdon smiled. That’s why religions endure for millennia despite mountains of evidence contradicting their beliefs.

“Thirty years ago,” Katherine complained, “physicists proved that communication between two entangled particles is instantaneous…and yet we’re still teaching Einstein’s mantra that ‘nothing travels faster than the speed of light’!”

The original experiment, as Langdon recalled, involved using a magnet to reverse the polarity of one entangled particle, resulting in the polarity of its “twin” particle reversing instantly—whether it was in the same room or miles away. Upping the ante, Chinese scientists had later performed the same experiment using satellites to demonstrate that two entangled particles remained “instantaneously connected” over a distance of twelve hundred kilometers. Science Magazine ran the cover story “China Shatters ‘Spooky Action at a Distance’ Record,” referring to the phrase coined by Albert Einstein in the mid-1930s to describe the phenomenon.

“And it’s been decades,” Katherine continued, “since we’ve proven repeatedly that human thought, when focused, can quite literally alter one’s body chemistry. And yet…the notion of remote healing is skeptically debunked by medical experts as voodoo.”