The Secret of Secrets (Robert Langdon, #6)

by Dan Brown

Mr. Langdon was easy. I noticed he had an iCloud email address and also that he had chosen the same exact password for multiple credentials on the PRH server. I have to say, I’m surprised such a smart guy would use a single password, especially one as weak as ‘Dolphin123.’ ”

Langdon’s password is Dolphin123? Faukman hung his head. Why do we even have security protocols? Langdon’s nickname at Harvard was “The Dolphin” because he could still outswim half of the varsity water polo team. Unfortunately, Langdon was also a self-proclaimed Luddite—a classicist whose expertise in the ancient past made for a reluctant relationship with the future. He still has a Rolodex and wears a Mickey Mouse watch, for God’s sake.

Langdon found himself staring into the tear-filled eyes of Katherine Solomon.

she might have lost the man with whom she was falling in love. To be without him would have been the cruelest of twists;

Really Dan, you had to make Katherine out like this?

“That’s actually pretty damn clever, Katherine Solomon.”

Yes it is clever Robert, shes a genius. God, Dan why did you have to go and be sexist?

That fateful night, as he studied the cycle of souls, he was struck by the realization that he, like the original golem, had materialized with clarity and without preamble into this realm, a blank soul awaking inside a physical form that felt so foreign to him as to be repulsive.

He believes himself to have aquired the soul of the original golem. Also, if Katherine's theories are true he may have simply "tuned-in" the frequency.

He recalled that first moment inside the dank mental institution when, inspired by an act of unspeakable cruelty, The Golěm had suddenly perceived himself and felt purpose…rising up out of nothingness…seeing a helpless woman being beaten senseless by a night nurse. He had launched himself forward and struck the nurse to the ground, strangling her unrelentingly until the life left her.

Not until that night in Prague, reading the words of Rabbi Loew, had it finally dawned on The Golěm why the Jewish legend felt so familiar…and the real reason why he had been brought to Prague. I am The Golěm.

Never mind, he believes that he is a reincarnation of the original golem.

Today brought a vastly different challenge. He had killed her mentor and also her lover—two monsters who had abused her trust—but it was critical that Sasha not discover his actions on her behalf. She would never forgive me…never understand.

“Your bosses are clueless, Mark. I hope you’re smarter…smart enough never to mention we were here.” Dole stared into the man’s steely eyes. “By the way,” the thug added, “your kids are cute. I see you live in Sunset Park. Brooklyn’s not a bad commute, and your place on Forty-Sixth looks close to the park for the kids. You’ve got a peaceful life.”

the ambassador insisted on no outside contact until Katherine and Langdon had been brought to safety and fully briefed…for their own protection.

I think they were after Dr. Gressner's group all along; they must poss significant harm.

The U.S. embassy seal on the limousine door had triggered one of Langdon’s memories from this morning—a note card emblazoned with the same embassy seal, which accompanied the large arrangement of red, white, and blue tulips that had been sent to their hotel by the U.S. embassy.

“Wait…” Katherine stammered. “You think our flowers were bugged?!” Langdon nodded. “You and I were sitting right near the bouquet when we talked about your nightmare last night. It’s the only explanation. If someone heard you describe—”

“We’re not going to the embassy,” Katherine said. “I heard Dana tell the driver to take us to the ambassador’s residence.” Langdon looked surprised. “Why?” Katherine shrugged. “Maybe she thought it would be more welcoming?”

Oh no.

Incredibly, there were over one hundred thousand bodies buried in this three-acre plot of land. Jews in fifteenth-century Prague were relegated to the peripheries of societal acceptance and cordoned off into their own ghetto. When they needed to bury their dead, as was Jewish custom, those in power allotted them only a very small piece of land to do so.

In his field of religious history, published claims were brutally debunked as part of the battle between believers and nonbelievers. Fraud was commonplace. The Shroud of Turin—the alleged burial cloth of Christ—had now been radiocarbon-dated to 1,200 years after Christ. The famous “James Ossuary Inscription” of 2002 had been revealed as counterfeit. The influential imperial decree known as the Donation of Constantine had been revealed as a clever forgery manufactured by the Church to consolidate power.

“I read that one too,” Langdon admitted, recalling the intriguing subtitle: “Experimental Evidence for Anomalous Retroactive Influences on Cognition and Affect.”

What if they attempt to use Robert's affinity for memory recall to bring back Katherine's book using non-local consciousness.

Troubled, he had taken the Bem results to a colleague in the physics department—a bow-tied Oxford grad named Townley Chisholm—who seemed surprisingly unfazed by the data. Chisholm assured Langdon that “retrocausality” was indeed real and had been observed in numerous experiments, including one called “the delayed-choice quantum eraser.”

If an athlete has an amazing Olympic result and sets a world record—something that has never occurred before, and which nobody else can replicate—we don’t decide the television cameras played a trick, or the audience was hallucinating. We see it simply as a remarkable result. Just because you can’t perform the same thing twice, that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.”

“Selective attention is a prime example of filtering by the brain,” Katherine said. “It’s called the ‘cocktail party effect.’ Picture yourself at a crowded party with your brain focused solely on the words coming from the person who is speaking to you—and then you get bored, and your focus switches effortlessly to a more interesting conversation halfway across the room. It’s what enables you to filter out background noise and not be overwhelmed by every voice within earshot.”

“Repeated sensory input is blocked by your brain so effectively that you literally cannot hear the incessant hum of the air conditioner or feel the pair of glasses sitting on your nose.

That filter is so powerful that we can search the house for glasses that are literally right before our eyes, or a phone clutched in our hand.”

The amount of times that this has happened to me.

“GABA is a remarkable compound—a chemical messenger in your brain that plays a critical role in regulating brain activity. But probably not in the way you’d think. Specifically, GABA is an inhibitory agent.”

This is why this is controversial to the other scientists.

the brain of a newborn baby has incredibly high levels of GABA, filtering out everything except what is directly in front of its face.

The filters work like a set of training wheels, protecting the baby’s mind from too much stimulation as it develops.

epilepsy is a condition often related to dangerously low levels of GABA, which is the brain’s braking mechanism.

With too little of it, your brain goes into overdrive, has runaway neuronal firing, and ultimately—”

epileptic seizures are often followed by a pleasurable refractory period known as postictal bliss—a peaceful, expanded state of consciousness, accompanied by bursts of connectedness, creativity, spiritual enlightenment, and out-of-body experiences.”

“You’re suggesting there’s a reality around us…that we can’t perceive?”

Hallucinogens don’t excite your neurons, as you guessed—they do the opposite. Those drugs, through a series of complex interactions in the brain’s default mode network, drastically decrease your GABA levels.

they lower your filters and allow a wider spectrum of reality to flow in. That means you are not hallucinating, you’re actually seeing more of reality. Those sensations of connectedness, love and enlightenment…are real.”

I need to look into this to see if Dan Brown got this from actual science.

Are we entering a sanctuary…or a lion’s den?

After Hitler declared his intention to turn Prague into a “museum of an extinct race,”

Not quite that simple, Langdon knew, having read former ambassador Norm Eisen’s book The Last Palace, a detailed historical portrait of this astonishing home. In fact, the U.S. had spent an astronomical sum to purchase and restore the villa to its original glory after the war, having maintained it now for almost a century at great expense. America’s way of helping preserve the heritage of Prague.

Langdon had met Eisen once and recalled him sharing an inspiring account of his mother, Frieda, an Auschwitz survivor, who often said, “The Nazis took us out of Czechoslovakia in cattle cars, and my son flew back on Air Force One.”

The woman on Charles Bridge was not a premonition, but rather some kind of bizarre performance in response to someone overhearing Katherine’s dream. But why?!

Langdon could not recall ever being reprimanded quite so succinctly. “Understood. Please…go on.”

I think he was very impressed.

What you need to understand is that there exist powerful entities who believe that this book, if published, will pose a substantial risk to national security.” “How?” Katherine demanded. “It’s a book about human consciousness!”

“That is not information I have been given. However, the man who does have that information is arriving in Prague shortly to speak to you both.” Langdon was taken aback. “Speak to us—or interrogate us?” “A bit of both, I imagine,” Nagel replied,

She was no stranger to In-Q-Tel—or “Q,” as agency spooks called it—the secretive investment arm of the CIA.

Is Dan Brown relating this to Q-Anon?

The old-boy network had placed a female pawn in a position of power where they needed her, and Nagel had been trapped ever since. She eventually learned what should have been obvious from the start—that Finch had engineered her dismissal from the CIA, planting the documents in her home.

Nagel threatened to call CIA Director Judd, but Mr. Finch only encouraged it, telling her that both Judd and the president were briefed on the plan, and that a call to them would only confirm that she was playing in the big leagues with no allies.

For more than two years, Nagel had been looking for any way out of her prison, but Finch had never provided even the slightest opening. Until now.

Hopefully this means she will help Robert and Katherine?

In the 1950s, one of Europe’s largest Soviet-era bomb shelters had been built in Prague. The massive network of dank subterranean chambers was said to contain space for some 1,500 people along with its own power station, air-filtration system, showers, toilets, gathering hall, and even its own morgue. The bunker was long since abandoned, although a portion of it was still open today as a tourist attraction.

Over the decades, its vast network of tunnels and chambers had flooded, fallen into disrepair, and were sealed off and forgotten.

Or so they want you to think.

For obvious reasons, the ambassador had always despised Finch,

She’s a smart woman…smart enough to know her place in this operation.

Ooooo, he underestimates her.

Finch reminded himself that this entire complicated operation boiled down to one simple fact that had myriad ramifications and justified his actions. The human mind is the world’s next battlefield.

The wars of tomorrow would be fought differently, and Finch had been tapped to lead the charge.

For years, the talented noetic scientist had been on the CIA’s watch list. Among other things, the nature of her work overlapped with projects being explored by the agency.