In his hotel shower, Robert Langdon tries to make sense of the morning’s chaos: the apparition on Charles Bridge and his own uncharacteristic panic that led him to pull the hotel alarm and jump into the Vltava. He considers calling Katherine Solomon at Dr. Brigita Gessner’s lab but decides the conversation must happen in person.

Langdon replays Katherine’s nightmare from only hours earlier, in which a black-clad woman with a spiked halo and a silver spear threatens Katherine’s death and the hotel’s fiery destruction. The details had seemed explainable as dream residue from their prior evening—Katherine’s lecture imagery, recent conversations, absinthe, and grim news—but Langdon now cannot rationalize how closely the nightmare mirrored what he believes he witnessed.

Thinking back to Katherine’s lecture on precognition, Langdon remembers her describing experiments in which subjects’ brains appear to react to random images before the images are chosen or displayed, implying consciousness might anticipate—or even help create—reality. The recollection intensifies Langdon’s fear that what happened was not coincidence.

A knock interrupts him. Expecting Katherine, Langdon exits the shower to find an intruder: Captain Janáček of the Czech national intelligence service (ÚZSI), who has entered the suite and taken Langdon’s passport. Janáček demands an explanation for the hotel evacuation and challenges the logic of Langdon’s actions, including returning upstairs and then jumping from the window.

Langdon admits he feared an explosion, possibly a bomb, but claims he was confused and had bad information. Janáček corners him with a chilling revelation: Langdon’s information was “very good,” because ÚZSI found and defused an actual bomb in the hotel, set to detonate at exactly seven a.m.