The Golěm, exhausted after a struggle, drags a newly killed woman’s body across pink marble and hides her behind a couch. He considers taking her handgun but rejects it because he cannot use it and prefers the simplicity and silence of a stun gun.

He slides a wall sculpture aside to reveal a concealed elevator and enters Gessner’s seven-character passcode, which he learned during her interrogation. As the elevator descends, he recalls forcing Gessner into her own EPR pod without anesthesia, using the device’s cold-saline procedure as a deliberate method of pain and coercion.

The elevator opens into Gessner’s lab, where the Golěm moves through the dim “bastion” alone, confident he will not be interrupted. He intends to quickly retrieve what he came for and then proceed to the secret facility known as Threshold.

Elsewhere, Jonas Faukman remains shaken by recent events and worries that Robert Langdon and Katherine Solomon have walked into another trap. In his office, he watches tech specialist Alex Conan compile a partial list of In-Q-Tel’s private investment holdings, which appears largely focused on cybersecurity, analytics, imaging, and computing.

When PRH’s security director Allison summons Alex for questioning, Alex hastily sends Faukman the investment list and urges him to analyze it for crossover with Solomon’s book, suggesting PRH’s data tools or an online AI like ChatGPT or Bard. Alone, Faukman—who has publicly opposed AI—decides to use it anyway, concluding that ethics can wait because he is now at war.