CIA Director Gregory Judd takes an early-morning workout in his basement when he receives an unexpected call from Ambassador Heide Nagel in Prague. Nagel confronts Judd about the classified-documents scandal that ended her career at Langley, demanding to know whether Judd knew that “Q” framed her and used her as a puppet in Prague. Judd admits he learned the truth after the fact and says Everett Finch acted with broad autonomy, leaving Judd furious but unwilling to unravel an arrangement that served national security interests.

Nagel presses further, listing covert favors she performed under Finch’s direction—bypassing police, eavesdropping, and coercing Michael Harris into surveilling Sasha Vesna without being told why. When Nagel references a classified facility about to open beneath Folimanka Park, Judd goes rigid and tries to shut down the conversation, but Nagel says she has already sent him a video link and will call back with demands after he watches it.

Nagel escalates to blackmail: if Judd refuses her demands, she will make the video public. She warns that the link is already public and could be discovered within hours, and she claims to have downloaded and distributed multiple copies. After Nagel erupts in rage about being collateral damage and warns that her disappearance will trigger the video’s release worldwide, she hangs up.

Shaken, Nagel pours a drink in her office, then safeguards the material by downloading the video twice (hiding one copy under an innocuous filename) and copying it to a USB drive. She seals the USB inside a diplomatic pouch addressed to herself, locking it under Vienna Convention protections, then decides her office is not safe if Judd targets her. Nagel hands the pouch to her Marine sentry, Scott Kerble, ordering absolute secrecy, and learns there is still no forensic update on Michael Harris’s death.

Nagel summons Dana Daněk back to the embassy despite Daněk’s distress over Harris’s body, reasoning that Prague’s surveillance network can locate Sasha Vesna if Daněk helps. Meanwhile, deep in Threshold, the Golěm reaches a sealed oval steel hatch marked “SMES AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY,” realizing it connects to a repurposed park structure used as ventilation. Without his wand and wary of another seizure, the Golěm braces himself and strains to turn the wheel, driving himself with thoughts of Sasha and other victims.