Alone in her office, U.S. Ambassador Heide Nagel studies a handwritten, unsigned note left on Michael Harris’s body. Expecting a threat, Nagel is instead unsettled by its restrained message: “Please help Sasha,” followed by a YouTube link.

Nagel decides a public link is safer than an unknown file and plays the video on an embassy computer. The footage shows Dr. Brigita Gessner strapped into a long transport-like container, alive and struggling, contradicting what Nagel believed after hearing Langdon’s report.

A hooded interrogator enters frame with a clay-smeared face marked by three Hebrew letters, deliberately styled as the Golem of Prague. Nagel watches, horrified, as the attacker uses IV lines and an unfamiliar medical procedure to inflict pain and extract a detailed confession from Gessner.

When the video ends, Nagel realizes the classified program she helped facilitate is now at risk of being exposed publicly, with catastrophic consequences. Sickened by what she has learned, Nagel reaches for her phone, deciding it is time to make a dangerous call she believes she should have made years earlier.

Elsewhere, Sasha Vesna drifts in an endless black void, dimly perceiving distant light for the first time in her dissociated state. Unable to remember how she arrived and feeling pinned as if restrained or paralyzed, Sasha panics, weakens, and is pulled back under into complete darkness.