“It was a guy named Taylor Barnes. He and his wife go to Iceland to celebrate their anniversary, or something like that. They go hiking on some cliffs. She’s been having an affair, doesn’t want to live with him anymore but doesn’t know how to say it, sees him peering over the edge of a cliff and decides pushing him off the cliff is easier than an awkward conversation. He goes over, falls something like two hundred feet and hits the rocks below—and then the next thing he knows he’s home, in Glendale, California, wondering what the hell just happened.”

“It’s a good question.”

“It’s a very good question. He knows his wife pushed him off the cliff, he knows he fell, he knows he died—and yet, there he is in his condo in southern California, not dead but very confused. He calls 911 and reports his own murder, in Iceland. Everyone else is very confused as well, including his wife.”

“Until it starts happening everywhere.”

“Right. The United States has something like forty or fifty murders a day, and all of those murder victims just…stop dying. Or they die, but show up at home, naked and bewildered. That bomb went off in Athens, killing eighty tourists at the Parthenon, and all but one of them ended up back in their country of origin. In Afghanistan, hundreds of fighters dying in that Kabul offensive, and showing up at home a couple of seconds later, naked as the day they were born. And finally someone figures out the pattern.”

“Someone has to kill you in order for you to come back.”

“That’s right.” I signaled the waiter to get more coffee. “If you die of natural causes, you’re dead. If you commit suicide, you’re dead. If you accidentally fall down an elevator shaft or drop a radio in your bathwater, you’re dead. But if someone pushes you down that elevator shaft or drops that radio into your tub? You come back. Nine hundred and ninety-nine times out of a thousand.”

“Okay,” Langdon said. “And this has to do with you being psychologically prepared to kill someone how?”