Michael Harris speeds away from Crucifix Bastion after receiving a frantic phone call from Sasha Vesna: she is with Robert Langdon and needs Harris’s help. Harris heads north toward Sasha’s apartment, a place he knows well and associates with growing guilt.

Harris recalls meeting Sasha two months earlier at a coffee shop when he greeted her in Russian, then bonded with her over Casablanca. Sasha confided her traumatic childhood, epilepsy, and how Dr. Brigita Gessner cured her with an implant activated by a magnetic wand when she senses a pre-seizure “fog.” When Harris suggests seeing each other again, Sasha resists out of fear she will disappoint him, but eventually agrees.

As their relationship deepened, Harris became increasingly uneasy because he was seeing Sasha for a hidden purpose. He remembers confronting Ambassador Heide Nagel to quit an “off-book project,” arguing Sasha is harmless and that continuing to lie to her is morally wrong.

Nagel reveals she knows Harris is also involved with the embassy PR liaison, Ms. Daněk (Dana), and uses the embassy’s zero-tolerance relationship policy to pressure him into continuing the assignment. Nagel explains her superiors want updates on whatever “secrets” Sasha shares with trusted people, offers to double Harris’s pay, and promises to pull him out if it becomes dangerous. Feeling trapped and believing someone else might treat Sasha worse, Harris agrees.

Back in the present, Harris reflects that the operation’s scope is far larger than he understood, and he decides he is in over his head. As he approaches Old Town to meet Sasha and Langdon, Harris vows that regardless of consequences, this will be his last visit with Sasha.