Page 137 of The Secret of Secrets

Nagel eyed the nonsensical text. “What is this?”

“Just send it,” Langdon replied. “He’ll understand.”

Chapter 87

“Stick shifts should be outlawed,” Langdon grumbled, struggling with the SUV’s manual transmission as the vehicle jerked gracelessly southward toward Folimanka Park.

“Or perhaps just the men who pretend to drive them?” Katherine offered.

Langdon had to smile, grateful for her levity amid all the tension. His mind had been elsewhere, thinking about the ambassador’s abrupt departure. Nagel had put herself at enormous professional risk for them, which Langdon appreciated. But his primary concern was for their safety…and figuring out why Katherine’s book was in the crosshairs of the CIA.

Those answers lie inside Threshold.

With luck, his optimistic gut feeling about gaining access to the hidden facility would not turn out to be delusional overconfidence.

We’ll know in a matter of minutes.

Katherine’s suspicions that Stargate had something to do with their predicament, meanwhile, seemed unlikely to Langdon. He didn’t know too much about the discredited program, but he did know that even Hollywood had enjoyed a laugh at the CIA’s expense, releasing a George Clooney picture sardonically titled The Men Who Stare at Goats. It was based on an alleged Stargate experiment in which subjects tried to kill goats by staring at them.

Despite Langdon’s skepticism about remote viewing, the basic concept was more than seven thousand years old. The ancient Sumerians had written about mystical “star journeys”—out-of-body experiences in which their minds traveled to the stars to view distant worlds.

Of course, there was a lot of opium involved, Langdon knew, wondering if maybe Threshold might be exploring drug-induced altered states…perhaps even relating them to nonlocal consciousness.

Katherine had mentioned earlier a new class of drugs known as dissociatives, which apparently were accompanied by a sense of being disconnected from one’s body. And certainly the CIA had a long history of running secret drug experiments.

Including on the Harvard campus…

One of the most notorious CIA projects ever to reach the public eye had been code-named MKULTRA, which secretly administered LSD to unsuspecting college students to study the effect of the drug on young minds. Eerily, one of the test subjects had been Harvard undergrad Ted Kaczynski—who later became known as the Unabomber—and while the CIA testified that Kaczynski had never been given drugs, they did admit subjecting him to “experimental interrogation techniques,” which quite possibly could have destabilized his mind.

The Harvard drug lore did not stop there. Concurrently with MKULTRA, faculty psychologist Timothy Leary launched the infamous Harvard Psilocybin Project, which encouraged students to explore the mind-expanding benefits of hallucinogens: Turn on; tune in; drop out. Many now suspected that Leary might have been working undercover with the CIA.

“I’m curious,” Langdon said, turning to Katherine, who was staring out the window. “In your book…did you write about chemically induced altered states?”

“Of course,” she said, “as I mentioned earlier, certain hallucinogens will decrease GABA levels in the brain, thereby lowering the brain’s filtering mechanism. This implies, in my opinion, that the out-of-body sensations associated with hallucinogens are a reflection of unfiltered reality, rather than hallucination.”

It made sense, and there was certainly historical precedent for drugs as a road to enlightenment. From the ancient texts of The Rigveda and Eleusinian Mysteries to Huxley’s 1954 classic The Doors of Perception, great writers had long been suggesting psychedelic substances were a way to expand human consciousness and perceive “reality unfiltered.”

“I’ve never asked you, Katherine,” Langdon ventured casually, “does your consciousness research involve doing drugs yourself?”

She turned and stared at him, looking amused he would even ask the question. “Robert, really?! The brain is an incredibly delicate mechanism, and trying to alter it with hallucinogens is like trying to adjust a priceless Rolex wristwatch with a sledgehammer! Drugs induce altered states by creating a jarring chain reaction of neurological disruptions that can have permanent effects. As enlightening as you may find that brief experience, you risk undermining long-term synaptic integrity and neurotransmitter equilibrium. For most hallucinogens, the primary mechanism through which they exert their effects is the dysregulation of serotonin—a very bad idea—as it can easily lead to cognitive deficits, emotional instability, and even enduring psychotic states.”

Langdon nodded with a smile. “I’ll take that as a no.”

“Sorry,” she said sheepishly. “I have colleagues who experiment responsibly with various psychedelics, and there’s certainly a place for that. I just get nervous when young people assume it’s all safe. It’s not.”

Langdon downshifted as smoothly as possible to avoid colliding with a tram.

“I assume you were asking,” Katherine said, “because you think drugs might have something to do with Threshold?”

“It seems like a possibility,” Langdon said. “You mentioned in your talk last night a host of new drugs that seem to increase psychic ability. If you consider the countless documented cases of crimes being solved by psychics, it’s not a big leap to imagine the CIA trying to develop drugs to enhance psychic ability. The applications would be endless.”

“I suppose…” she said. “But it’s not exactly a cutting-edge idea.”

True, the CIA would be a bit late to that party. The Oracle of Delphi had regularly seen visions of the future while breathing gases escaping through a fissure in Mount Parnassus; the Aztecs spoke to future spirits while tripping on peyote; and the Egyptians saw tomorrow’s events while consuming mandrake and blue lotus. Our modern “pioneers”—names like Castaneda, Burroughs, McKenna, Huxley, Leary—were actually following centuries of souls who had attempted to expand their minds with chemicals.

“I really don’t think Threshold is related to drugs,” Katherine said. “There’s very little about them in my manuscript.”

“So what’s your best guess?” Langdon asked, guiding the SUV southward along the river toward Folimanka Park.