Page 146 of The Secret of Secrets

When The Golěm regained his senses, he was unsure how much time had passed. He needed several minutes to get his bearings.

Finally mustering his strength, he stood to his full height and again took in the astonishing space around him. To engineer something like this in total secrecy seemed an almost impossible feat, and yet he now understood who was behind it all.

They possess nearly unlimited influence—and resources.

Reassimilating, The Golěm shook off his postictal haze and returned to the spot where he had emptied his cloak pockets in search of the wand. Crouching on all fours, he collected the items one by one, returning them to his pocket—the Vipertek stun gun and a plastic box he had taken from a nearby work surface, which had once contained nuts and bolts, but now contained Brigita Gessner’s black RFID key card…and her severed thumb.

My access to Threshold.

As anticipated, Brigita’s thumbprint had immediately authorized the card whenever he pressed them together.

And led me to this inner sanctum.

Gessner had admitted the existence of this room, and now that The Golěm had seen it for himself, he felt invigorated by the need to destroy it. More determined now, he moved to the deepest reaches of the chamber, passed through a glass door, and found what he was looking for—a niche cordoned off by a safety gate.

Beyond the gate, the floor was a metal platform, stenciled with the words:

Systems / Utilities

The Golěm stepped onto the platform and, using the toe of his boot, depressed an oversized red button on the floor. A soft hiss of air escaped somewhere beneath him, and the platform began to drop, lowering him through the floor.

The descent was short—maybe twelve feet.

As the platform came to a stop, fluorescent lights flickered on to reveal a low-ceilinged passageway that extended back the way he had come, beneath the heart of the facility.

As The Golěm moved along the cramped concrete tunnel, he passed mechanical vaults of generators, pumps, air handlers, and control panels, plus miles of copper tubing, ductwork, and heavily insulated wiring. It was all connected like a gurgling, breathing, blinking ecosystem.

Despite the absence of employees at Threshold, the heartbeat of this facility was very much alive.

For only a short while longer, The Golěm told himself, pressing toward his final destination.

Chapter 94

Katherine stood over the EPR pod and stared down at the bloody nub of bone where Brigita’s right thumb had been snipped off just beneath the joint. For a moment, all thoughts of entering Threshold dissolved…overwritten by the horror of the scene before her.

Oh, Brigita…I’m so sorry.

The grisliness of the severed thumb barely registered against the macabre backdrop of the surrounding scene. Inside the pod, the neuroscientist’s face was contorted in agony, her eyes staring into nothingness, her lips pulled back in a grimace. Her skin was drained of all color. Gessner’s wrists and ankles were chafed from struggling against the Velcro straps, and both forearms had been penetrated crudely with IV catheters. One catheter had erupted from the flesh, covering her forearm with congealed blood, which had already turned a dark crimson.

A peripheral IV? Katherine thought. No wonder the IV failed.

Gessner had described this prototype EPR device as a “modified bypass machine,” which she used to swap out supercooled saline for blood in order to slow the dying process. That kind of bypass would require, at the very least, a pair of femoral IVs.

This is definitely not how you connect an ECMO.

Surveying the setup, Katherine concluded that whoever had done this to Brigita either had been wholly incompetent, or, possibly, had known this process would kill her and had opted for a slow application of cold saline to inflict pain. Katherine shuddered imagining the agony Gessner must have endured if she had not been previously sedated. Moreover, this machine looked like a crude, jerry-rigged prototype…definitely not ready for human testing.

When Langdon arrived beside her, Katherine was startled to see a smartphone in his hand. “Is that Brigita’s?” she asked.

He nodded. “It’s still on, but almost dead. Her elevator passcode didn’t unlock it, but…” He crouched down beside the pod, looking grim as he held the phone out over Brigita’s face. “I wonder if facial recognition can distinguish between living and—”

The phone chimed.

Langdon stood up and began swiping through the phone.

“Wait, what are you doing?!” Katherine asked.

“The ambassador needs to know we failed,” he said quietly. “My plan to enter Threshold hinged on that card being—”