Katherine Solomon rides in the back of Ambassador Heide Nagel’s SUV after hiding in the Klementinum’s Baroque Library, anxious about how Robert Langdon intends to get them into the heavily secured Threshold facility without getting them killed. Nagel pulls over and demands Langdon explain his entry plan before they proceed.

Langdon outlines a surprisingly simple, logical approach, and both Nagel and Katherine are shocked that it might actually work. Nagel, newly hopeful, resumes driving south toward the river, and the car falls into tense silence as they commit to the attempt.

As they drive, Katherine’s mind shifts to why her manuscript could threaten a CIA black project. She connects the generic codename Threshold to Cold War psychotronics—Russian research into paranormal and mind-related phenomena—and Nagel confirms the history, describing how CIA programs followed in response.

Nagel brings up Project Stargate and explains its public humiliation after attempts at remote viewing—a would-be surveillance method based on projecting consciousness to observe distant locations—were mocked as pseudoscience. Katherine argues that Stargate was, at minimum, an early effort to test nonlocal consciousness, while Langdon remains skeptical about its scientific plausibility.

Katherine pushes back by framing nonlocal consciousness as a serious modern inquiry supported by noetic science and quantum-adjacent research, and she notes that Langdon has written about similar ideas historically as astral projection and the Egyptian concept of the Ka as a vehicle for consciousness. She reflects on lucid dreaming as an empirically validated bridge between mind and subjective reality, then broadens to the idea that out-of-body experience may be universal at death, ending on the unsettling thought that the truth of death is promised to everyone, but only at the end.