Page 90 of The Secret of Secrets

Katherine nodded. “I do. If your brain is a receiver, think of it like a classic car radio with a physical dial. It’s tuned to your normal classic rock station—a clear signal of familiar content. One day, you hit a pothole and there’s a jolt to the radio. Suddenly, the tuner jumps slightly on the dial, and in addition to hearing classic rock, you’re now also hearing a Spanish newscaster from an entirely different station mixed in with it.”

Faukman looked uncertain.

“Let’s look at it this way,” Katherine said. “What does it take to become a virtuoso violinist?”

“Practice,” Faukman replied.

“And to become a great golfer?”

“Practice.”

“And why does practice make you a better golfer?”

“It helps you develop muscle memory. Grooves your swing.”

“Wrong,” Katherine said. “There’s no such thing as muscle memory. It’s an oxymoron. Muscles don’t have memory. In reality, when you practice, you’re fine-tuning your brain…gradually rewiring it to receive information more clearly and consistently from the universal consciousness so it can command your muscles to contract in a perfect pattern to perform a task in a certain way.”

Faukman scowled. “You’re saying there’s a golf channel in the universal consciousness?”

“I’m saying everything already exists out there…and practice helps clarify the signal your brain is receiving. This is how we become more skilled—we slowly acquire a new specific signal. Some brains are born prewired to receive a certain signal, which is why we have star athletes, virtuosos, and geniuses.”

“Okay…”

“And the same holds true for many people with Asperger’s or autism,” she added. “They can have highly specialized receivers that provide them access to remarkable skills and insights, and yet simultaneously make it difficult to perform routine tasks. It’s a bit like wearing binoculars instead of eyeglasses; you could see much farther than most…and yet your immediate surroundings would be blurry.”

A unique perspective, he mused. “And you claim this model also explains ESP?”

“Completely,” Katherine said. “The ‘extra sense’ we attribute to ESP is really nothing more than a brain tuning in to information that is normally filtered out. According to this new theory, when you have an intuition or a hunch, it’s exactly like the car radio picking up the brief wisp of a different station it doesn’t normally receive. And in some instances, if the brain picks up multiple stations too clearly, the experience can be profoundly confusing, even debilitating—schizophrenia, dissociative identity disorder, voices in your head, multiple personalities—all of these can be explained in this model.”

“Fascinating,” Langdon interjected. “And an experience like precognition?”

“Sometimes radio broadcasts bounce around in the atmosphere,” she replied, “creating echoes and time delays. In this model, those manifest in our minds as déjà vu or, in reverse, as precognition.”

Faukman sat a long moment, glancing back and forth between Langdon and Katherine. “My friends,” he finally said, smiling, “I daresay this calls for another bottle of wine.”

Now, one year later, Jonas Faukman’s consciousness—however it worked—returned to the highway before him. As he sped along the upper deck of the George Washington Bridge, Faukman wasn’t sure what channel he was tuned in to tonight, but it certainly was a strange one.

He approached the middle of the bridge, and he lowered his window to perform the task the PRH tech had urged him to complete. “Get rid of your phone,” Alex had said. “There’s a high probability it’s being traced.”

Reluctantly, Faukman hurled the phone out into the night. It sailed over the guardrails and began a 212-foot plummet toward the Hudson River.

As the phone fell, Faukman recalled the final words the tech had spoken.

“Try to get back here as fast as you can…I figured out who hacked us.”

Chapter 57

The funicular doors opened at the bottom of Petřín Hill, and Langdon stepped off and found himself at Újezd Station, an unexpectedly bustling interchange for taxis, buses, and trolleys. Eager to put as much distance as possible between himself and Lieutenant Pavel, Langdon surveyed his options.

His last two taxi rides had ended badly, and he decided it was safest to take a tram and lose himself in the crowd. Tram #22 was the only one with a line of people waiting to board, and according to the placard over its windshield, it went toward Prague Center.

Toward the Klementinum…

Langdon wanted very much to believe that Katherine’s message was an encoded plea to meet her at the Devil’s Bible, and yet he had realized there was a small problem; she had sent her email more than two hours ago—long before the museum opened. The standard opening time for Prague museums was 10 a.m., which was still a few minutes from now.

Could she have been waiting outside all this time?

Despite being plagued by uncertainty, Langdon boarded tram #22 and headed for the museum that housed the Devil’s Bible. As he crossed the river, he hoped to find what he was looking for—as he had done many times in his life—with the help of an ancient book.