Coming soon from Doubleday, an imprint of Penguin Random House.

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Dan Brown is the author of eight #1 bestselling novels, including The Da Vinci Code, which has become one of the bestselling books of all time, as well as Origin, Inferno, The Lost Symbol, and Angels & Demons. His thrillers have captivated readers worldwide and been the subject of intellectual debate and speculation. He is also the author of the bestselling children’s book Wild Symphony. Brown’s novels are published in 56 languages internationally, with over 250 million copies in print.

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INSTANT #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The world’s most celebrated thriller writer and author of The Da Vinci Code returns with his most stunning novel yet—a propulsive, twisty, thought-provoking masterpiece that will entertain readers as only Dan Brown can do.

Robert Langdon, esteemed professor of symbology, travels to Prague to attend a groundbreaking lecture by Katherine Solomon—a prominent noetic scientist with whom he has recently begun a relationship. Katherine is on the verge of publishing an explosive book that contains startling discoveries about the nature of human consciousness and threatens to disrupt centuries of established belief. But a brutal murder catapults the trip into chaos, and Katherine suddenly disappears along with her manuscript. Langdon finds himself targeted by a powerful organization and hunted by a chilling assailant sprung from Prague’s most ancient mythology. As the plot expands into London and New York, Langdon desperately searches for Katherine . . . and for answers. In a thrilling race through the dual worlds of futuristic science and mystical lore, he uncovers a shocking truth about a secret project that will forever change the way we think about the human mind.

Leseprobe
Prologue

I must have died, the woman thought.

She was drifting high above the spires of the old city. Beneath her, the illuminated towers of St. Vitus Cathedral glowed on a sea of twinkling lights. With her eyes, if she still had eyes, she traced the gentle slope of Castle Hill down into the heart of the Bohemian capital, following the labyrinth of winding streets that lay shrouded in a fresh blanket of snow.

Prague.

Disoriented, she strained to make sense of her predicament.

I am a neuroscientist, she reassured herself. I am of sound mind.

That second statement, she decided, was questionable.

The only thing Dr. Brigita Gessner knew for certain at the moment was that she was suspended over her home city of Prague. Her body was not with her. She was without mass and without form. And yet the rest of her, the real her—her essence, her consciousness seemed to be quite intact and alert, floating slowly through the air in the direction of the Vitava River.

Gessner could recall nothing from her recent past except a faint memory of physical pain, but her body now seemed to consist only of the atmosphere through which she was floating.
The sensation was unlike anything she had ever experienced. Against her every intellectual instinct, Gessner could find only one explanation.

I have died. This is the afterlife.

Even as the notion materialized, she rejected it as absurd.

The afterlife is a shared delusion... created to make our actual life bearable.

As a physician, Gessner was intimately familiar with death, and also with its finality. In medical school, while dissecting human brains, Gessner came to understand that all those personal attributes that made us who we are-our hopes, fears, dreams, memories-were nothing but chemical compounds held in suspension by electrical charges in our brains. When a person died, the brain's power source was severed, and all of those chemicals simply dissolved into a meaningless puddle of liquid, erasing every last trace of who that person had once been.

When you die, you die.

Full stop.

Now, however, as she drifted over the symmetrical gardens of Wallenstein Palace, she felt very much alive. She watched the snow falling around her—or through her?—-and oddly, she sensed no cold at all. It was as if her mind were simply hovering in space, with all reason and logic intact.

I have brain function, she told herself. So I must be alive.

All Gessner could conclude was that she was now in the throes of what medical literature termed an OBE-out-of-body experience, a hallucination that occurred when critically injured patients were resuscitated after clinically dying.

OBEs almost always presented in the same manner-—the perception that one's mind had been temporarily separated from its physical body, floating upward and hovering without form.
Despite feeling like real experiences, OBEs were nothing but imagined journeys, usually triggered by the effects of extreme stress and hypoxia on the brain, sometimes in conjunction with emergency room anesthetics like ketamine.

I am hallucinating these images, Gessner assured herself, gazing down at the dark curve of the Vltava River snaking through the city. But if this is an OBE... then I must be in the process of dying.

Surprised by her own calm, Gessner tried to remember what had happened to her.

I am a healthy forty-nine-year-old woman... Why would I be dying?

In a blinding flash, a frightening memory materialized in Gessner's consciousness. She now realized where her physical body was lying at this very instant... and, even more terrifying, what was being done to her.

She was on her back, tightly strapped into a machine she herself had created. A monster stood over her. The creature looked like some kind of primordial man who had crawled out of the earth. His face and hairless skull were coated with a thick layer of filthy clay, cracked and fractured like the surface of the moon. Only his hate-filled eyes were visible behind his earthen mask. Crudely etched across his forehead were three letters in an ancient language.

"Why are you doing this?!" Gessner had screamed in panic. "Who are you?!" What are you?!

"I am her protector," the monster replied. His voice was hollow, his accent vaguely Slavic. "She trusted you... and you betrayed her."

"Who?!" Gessner demanded.

The monster spoke a woman's name, and Gessner felt a stab of panic. How can he possibly know what I have done?!

An icy weight materialized in her arms, and Gessner realized the monster had started the process. An instant later, an unbearable pinpoint of pain blossomed in her left arm, spreading along her median cubital vein, clawing its way sharply toward her shoulder. "Please, stop," she gasped.

"Tell me everything," he demanded as the excruciating sensation reached her armpit.

"I will!" Gessner frantically agreed, and the monster paused the machine, halting the pain at her shoulder, though the intense burning remained.

Racked with terror, Gessner spoke as quickly as she could through clenched teeth, frantically revealing the secrets she had vowed to keep. She answered his questions, divulging the disturbing truth about what she and her partners had created deep beneath the city of Prague.

The monster stared down at her from behind his thick clay mask, his cold eyes flashing with comprehension ... and hatred.

"You've built an underground house of horrors," he whispered. "You all deserve to die." Without hesitation, he turned the machine back on and headed for the door.

"No...!" she shrieked as the agony seized her anew, surging through her shoulder and into her chest. "Please don't leave … This will kill me!"

"Yes," he said over his shoulder. "But death is not the end. I have died many times."

With that, the monster evaporated, and Gessner was suddenly hovering again. She tried to shout an appeal for mercy, but he…