In the taxi’s warmth after crossing Folimanka Park, Robert Langdon tries to thaw out, kicking off snow-caked shoes and rubbing his frozen toes. Sasha sits beside him in silence with her eyes closed as Langdon’s mind returns to the uncanny woman he encountered on Charles Bridge.

Langdon replays the details that made the meeting feel unreal—her blank stare, deathlike odor, and apparent inability to hear him—while also reminding himself that Prague’s famous ghost lore is only folklore. He focuses on the physical evidence that makes a supernatural explanation impossible: the woman left footprints in the snow.

Langdon forces his thinking into three possible explanations for the woman’s appearance, given how closely it matched Katherine’s earlier dream. He dismisses a precognitive vision as near-impossible and rejects coincidence as statistically absurd.

With the other options eliminated, Langdon concludes the likeliest explanation is a deliberate setup: someone learned about Katherine’s dream and staged a real-world version of it. He suspects surveillance in the Four Seasons Royal Suite could explain how someone overheard Katherine describing the dream, and he wonders whether Jandek, ZSI, or someone else has been listening. The thought that his predictable routine helped enable the trap leaves him more frightened than any ghost story.