Airborne, En Route- New York – 10:10 a.m.
Langdon's eyes drifted to the horizon as the plane crossed over the Atlantic. The cryptic phrase still echoed in his mind:
"Where the living die to remember… beneath the silence of stone and sky." He had translated it instinctively. It pointed not just to a place of reverence—but to Columbia University's Chapel of St. Paul, where Katherine once conducted some of her earliest noetic field studies. The chapel's foundations, Langdon recalled, held rooms sealed off since the 1950s.
Beside him, Lenka scrolled through encrypted emails recovered from Lucius Solomon's old accounts—recently hacked, presumably by The Black Veil.
"We found three references to 'Corpus Mentis'," she said. "Two were academic… one wasn't." She showed him a redacted file with just one line:
Project: Corpus Mentis Location: Below Trinity Gate, Columbia Status: Pending activation upon convergence.
Langdon's pulse quickened.
"Convergence…" Lenka looked up. "What does it mean?" Langdon thought of Katherine's theories—the moment when collective human thought might align, even briefly, in resonance. A moment of global mental coherence.
And then it struck him.
"The lunar zenith," he whispered. "Tonight's full moon. Midnight. New York time." "That's what the telegram meant," Lenka said. "They're planning something tonight—something that needs to be stopped." Langdon looked out the window. The skyline of Manhattan loomed ahead, wrapped in fog.
Somewhere down there, Katherine was either hidden—or dead.
And the secret she carried could either heal the world… or destroy it.