On approach to Václav Havel Airport, Everett Finch feels the Prague operation has stabilized: Ambassador Heide Nagel has been brought to heel, Langdon and Katherine Solomon have been located and secured, NDAs are signed, the manuscript is contained, and the New York team has been ordered to withdraw into radio silence. Finch frames the whole mission around a single imperative: the human mind is the next battlefield, and the CIA’s subterranean program “Threshold” must be protected at any cost.

Finch recalls why Solomon became a threat long before Prague. Her public refusal to let noetic research be weaponized put her permanently out of reach for recruitment, so Finch chose surveillance and containment instead. When he learned her manuscript was being written only on Penguin Random House’s private server under unusually tight security, he initiated a backup plan: send Brigita Gessner to lure Solomon to Prague, probe her about the book, solicit an advance copy, and push a tour-and-NDA that included quiet provisions giving Finch control if needed.

The plan collapses when Gessner texts that Solomon refused the blurb, refused an advance copy, refused the NDA, and lied—then Gessner disappears. Soon after, Finch’s surveillance team reports Solomon screaming in her hotel suite. Listening through Finch’s planted microphone, Finch hears Langdon calm Solomon after a nightmare and reference the symbol on Gessner’s Threshold access card, implying Gessner exposed a tightly guarded credential. Unable to reach Gessner, Finch concludes either she has been compromised or Solomon already knows more than she should.

The decisive trigger comes when Finch hears Solomon tell Langdon she has given her editor, Jonas, permission to begin editing that day, which would scatter copies across the publishing house and make containment impossible. Finch orders his team to hack PRH and steal the full manuscript, then searches it for “CIA” and “Threshold,” finding nothing. He then runs a targeted search string for a specific detail and gets a hit near the end—confirming to Finch that the book creates a major crisis.

As Finch weighs responses, he receives an alert that Solomon is accessing the PRH server from the Four Seasons Business Center and printing the manuscript, suggesting she suspects a breach and is moving to protect her work. With Gessner still missing and the situation escalating in both Prague and New York, Finch activates prepared countermeasures by sending a single command to his operatives: EXECUTE.