Page 79 of The Secret of Secrets

Before exiting, The Golěm dropped the envelope onto the attaché’s lifeless body. Then, leaving Sasha’s door unlocked, he headed home.

Chapter 49

Alone now atop Petřín Tower, Langdon steadied himself against the observation rail as the wind whipped across the platform. While his eyes were directed out over the snow-dusted city, the image in his mind’s eye was not Prague at all; it was a snapshot of what Katherine had emailed him earlier this morning.

For Langdon, the effect of “eidetic” recollection was indistinguishable from seeing the object live. His eidetic memory provided precise, total recall of a visual input and derived its name from the Greek eidos, meaning “visible form.”

Langdon pondered the image she had sent, which seemed to be a screenshot of her own phone. On her display was a glowing string of seven characters.

Langdon recognized the ancient language at once, but he could not begin to imagine what it was doing on Katherine’s phone.

She sent me something in…Enochian?

Often called the “Angelic Tongue,” Enochian was a language “discovered” here in Prague in 1583 by the two self-proclaimed English mystics, John Dee and his partner Edward Kelley. It was allegedly the language by which the mediums could speak to spirits and obtain “wisdom from the other realm.”

The only reason Katherine knew Enochian existed was because Langdon had told her about it just yesterday. While walking the streets, they had seen a poster advertising an exhibit called Making Gold and Swapping Wives, which, in addition to the catchy text, was adorned with Enochian symbols. Katherine asked Langdon what the symbols were, and he relayed the sordid tale of Dee and Kelley’s historical passion for alchemy, wife-swapping, and talking to angels in their own special language—Enochian—the mystical language of the spirit world.

“They were almost certainly a pair of charlatan opportunists,” Langdon told her, “but they were in high demand in their day, even hired by Emperor Rudolf II to ask the angels to help him make wise political decisions.”

“Have our current politicians tried that?” she asked with a smile.

“It’s not hard to do,” Langdon replied. “There’s even an Enochian app for your phone.”

“A Renaissance app for talking to spirits?!” Katherine exclaimed, laughing out loud.

Langdon took her phone and quickly downloaded the free app. “There, now you, too, can communicate with another dimension.”

“That’s thoroughly ridiculous.”

“Ridiculous?” Langdon asked, smirking. “Did we finally find a mystical idea that you don’t believe in?”

“Very funny, Professor.”

Langdon kissed her on the cheek. “You’re cute when you’re cynical.”

Now, shivering atop Petřín Tower, Langdon surmised that Katherine must have used the Enochian translation app to create a message, then emailed a screenshot to him.

But why? Was she being playful?

Langdon found nothing playful about reading the language of spirits while standing atop a ghost-infested hilltop looking for a woman who had disappeared. It was conceivable that Katherine was not being playful at all, but rather had encoded her message for secrecy. The problem was that anyone with an Enochian dictionary or app could easily decipher it.

Langdon held the image in his mind.

The translation of Enochian to English was actually an absurdly simple substitution scheme. Langdon had always found it suspiciously convenient that the mystical language discovered by a British clairvoyant turned out to be a letter-by-letter transliteration into English.

Langdon had long ago memorized the Enochian “key,” and he needed only a few seconds to make the transliteration, converting the symbols in Katherine’s message to English letters.

The decryption that emerged, however, appeared meaningless.

LXXEDOC

Langdon puzzled over the jumbled string of letters, which looked vaguely like a Roman numeral, except that the letters E and O did not exist in that numbering system, and the other letters were not in proper sequence.

Whatever Katherine wanted to tell me…this isn’t it.

Unfortunately, if she’d made a mistake while translating, she would never have suspected her message wasn’t right because all she would have seen were the symbols she had sent him.

Frustrated, Langdon stared out at the wooded landscape and tried to figure out his next move. As he did, a huge flock of birds took off from the trees, rising en masse, all turning at the same precise instant, flocking as one.