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Inferno

of how efficiently the plague ate through the population.”

Sienna glanced uneasily at the biohazard symbol on the tube.

Allusions to the plague seemed to be occurring with more frequency this morning than

Langdon cared to admit, and so it was with reluctance that he acknowledged a further

connection. “Saligia is representative of the collective sins of mankind … which, according

to medieval religious indoctrination—”

“Was the reason God punished the world with the Black Death,” Sienna said,

completing his thought.

“Yes.” Langdon paused, momentarily losing his train of thought. He had just noticed

something about the cylinder that struck him as odd. Normally, a person could peer

through a cylinder seal’s hollow center, as if through a section of empty pipe, but in this

case, the shaft was blocked. There’s something inserted inside this bone. The end caught

the light and shimmered.

“There’s something inside,” Langdon said. “And it looks like it’s made of glass.” He

flipped the cylinder upside down to check the other end, and as he did so, a tiny object

rattled inside, tumbling from one end of the bone to the other, like a ball bearing in a

tube.

Langdon froze, and he heard Sienna let out a soft gasp beside him.

What the hell was that?!

“Did you hear that sound?” Sienna whispered.

Langdon nodded and carefully peered into the end of the canister. “The opening

appears to be blocked by … something made of metal.” The cap of a test tube, maybe?

Sienna backed away. “Does it look … broken?”

“I don’t think so.” He carefully tipped the bone again to reexamine the glass end, and

the rattling sound recurred. An instant later, the glass in the cylinder did something

wholly unexpected.

It began to glow.

Sienna’s eyes opened wide. “Robert, stop! Don’t move!”

CHAPTER 14

LANGDON STOOD ABSOLUTELY still, his hand in midair, holding the bone cylinder steady.

Without a doubt, the glass at the end of the tube was emitting light … glowing as if the

contents had suddenly awoken.

Quickly, the light inside faded back to black.

Sienna moved closer, breathing quickly. She tilted her head and studied the visible

section of glass inside the bone.

“Tip it again,” she whispered. “Very slowly.”

Langdon gently turned the bone upside down. Again, a small object rattled the length

of the bone and stopped.

“Once more,” she said. “Gently.”

Langdon repeated the process, and again the tube rattled. This time, the interior glass

shimmered faintly, glowing again for an instant before it faded away.

“It’s got to be a test tube,” Sienna declared, “with an agitator ball.”

Langdon was familiar with the agitator balls used in spray-paint cans—submerged

pellets that helped stir the paint when the can was shaken.

“It probably contains some kind of phosphorescent chemical compound,” Sienna said,

“or a bioluminescent organism that glows when it’s stimulated.”

Langdon was having other ideas. While he had seen chemical glow sticks and even

bioluminescent plankton that glowed when a boat churned up its habitat, he was nearly

certain the cylinder in his hand contained neither of these things. He gently tipped the

tube several more times, until it glowed, and then held the luminescent end over his

palm. As expected, a faint reddish light appeared, projected onto his skin.

Nice to know a 208 IQ can be wrong sometimes.

“Watch this,” Langdon said, and began shaking the tube violently. The object inside

rattled back and forth, faster and faster.

Sienna jumped back. “What are you doing!?”

Still shaking the tube, Langdon walked over to the light switch and flipped it off,

plunging the kitchen into relative darkness. “It’s not a test tube inside,” he said, still

shaking as hard as he could. “It’s a Faraday pointer.”

Langdon had once been given a similar device by one of his students—a laser pointer

for lecturers who disliked wasting endless AAA batteries and didn’t mind the effort of

shaking their pointer for a few seconds in order to transform their own kinetic energy into

electricity on demand. When the device was agitated, a metal ball inside sailed back and

forth across a series of paddles and powered a tiny generator. Apparently someone had

decided to slide this particular pointer into a hollow, carved bone—an ancient skin to

sheathe a modern electronic toy.

The tip of the pointer in his hand was now glowing intensely, and Langdon gave Sienna

an uneasy grin. “Showtime.”

He aimed the bone-sheathed pointer at a bare space on the kitchen wall. When the

wall lit up, Sienna drew a startled breath. It was Langdon, however, who physically

recoiled in surprise.

The light that appeared on the wall was not a little red laser dot. It was a vivid, high-

definition photograph that emanated from the tube as if from an old-fashioned slide

projector.

My God! Langdon’s hand trembled slightly as he absorbed the macabre scene projected

on the wall before him. No wonder I’ve been seeing images of death.

At his side, Sienna covered her mouth and took a tentative step forward, clearly

entranced by what she was seeing.

The scene projected out of the carved bone was a grim oil painting of human suffering

—thousands of souls undergoing wretched tortures in various levels of hell. The

underworld was portrayed as a cutaway cross section of the earth into which plunged a

cavernous funnel-shaped pit of unfathomable depth. This pit of hell was divided into

descending terraces of increasing misery, each level populated by tormented sinners of

every kind.

Langdon recognized the image at once.

The masterpiece before him—La Mappa dell’Inferno—had been painted by one of the

true giants of the Italian Renaissance, Sandro Botticelli. An elaborate blueprint of the

underworld, The Map of Hell was one of the most frightening visions of the afterlife ever

created. Dark, grim, and terrifying, the painting stopped people in their tracks even

today. Unlike his vibrant and colorful Primavera or Birth of Venus, Botticelli had crafted

his Map of Hell with a depressing palate of reds, sepias, and browns.

Langdon’s crashing headache had suddenly returned, and yet for the first time since

waking up in a strange hospital, he felt a piece of the puzzle tumble into place. His grim

hallucinations obviously had been stirred by seeing this famous painting.

I must have been studying Botticelli’s Map of Hell, he thought, although he had no

recollection of why.

While the image itself was disturbing, it was the painting’s provenance that was now

causing Langdon an increasing disquiet. Langdon was well aware that the inspiration for

this foreboding masterpiece had originated not in the mind of Botticelli himself … but

rather in the mind of someone who had lived two hundred years before him.

One great work of art inspired by another.

Botticelli’s Map of Hell was in fact a tribute to a fourteenth-century work of literature

that had become one of history’s most celebrated writings … a notoriously macabre vision

of hell that resonated to this day.

Dante’s Inferno.

Across the street, Vayentha quietly climbed a service staircase and concealed herself on

the rooftop terrace of the sleepy little Pensione la Fiorentina. Langdon had provided a

nonexistent room number and a fake meeting place to his consulate contact—a “mirrored

meet,” as it was called in her business—a common tradecraft technique that would

enable him to assess the situation before revealing his own location. Invariably, the fake

or “mirrored” location was selected because it lay in perfect view of his actual location.

Vayentha found a concealed vantage point on the rooftop from which she had a bird’s-

eye view of the entire area. Slowly, she let her eyes climb the apartment building across

the street.

Your move, Mr. Langdon.

At that moment, on board The Mendacium, the provost stepped out onto the mahogany

deck and inhaled deeply, savoring the salty air of the Adriatic. This vessel had been his

home for years, and yet now, the series of events transpiring in Florence threatened to

destroy everything he had built.

His field agent Vayentha had put everything at risk, and while she would face an

inquiry when this mission was over, right now the provost still needed her.

She damned well better regain control of this mess.

Brisk footsteps approached behind him, and the provost turned to see one of his female

analysts arriving at a jog.

“Sir?” the analyst said, breathless. “We have new information.” Her voice cut the

morning air with a rare intensity. “It appears Robert Langdon just accessed his Harvard e-

mail account from an unmasked IP address.” She paused, locking eyes with the provost.

“Langdon’s precise location is now traceable.”

The provost was stunned that anyone could be so foolish. This changes everything. He

steepled his hands and stared out at the coastline, considering the implications. “Do we

know the status of the SRS team?”

“Yes, sir. Less than two miles away from Langdon’s position.”

The provost needed only a moment to make the decision.

CHAPTER 15

“L’INFERNO DI DANTE”, Sienna whispered, her expression rapt as she inched closer to the

stark image of the underworld now projected on her kitchen wall.

Dante’s vision of hell, Langdon thought, rendered here in living color.

Exalted as one of the preeminent works of world literature, the Inferno was the first of

three books that made up Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy—a 14,233-line epic poem

describing Dante’s brutal descent into the underworld, journey through purgatory, and

eventual arrival in paradise. Of the Comedy’s three sections—Inferno, Purgatorio, and

Paradiso—Inferno was by far the most widely read and memorable.

Composed by Dante Alighieri in the early 1300s, Inferno had quite literally redefined

medieval perceptions of damnation. Never before had the concept of hell captivated the

masses in such an entertaining way. Overnight, Dante’s work solidified the abstract

concept of hell into a clear and terrifying vision—visceral, palpable, and unforgettable.

Not surprisingly, following the poem’s release, the Catholic Church enjoyed an enormous

uptick in attendance from terrified sinners looking to avoid Dante’s updated version of the

underworld.

Depicted here by Botticelli, Dante’s horrific vision of hell was constructed as a

subterranean funnel of suffering—a wretched underground landscape of fire, brimstone,

sewage, monsters, and Satan himself waiting at its core. The pit was constructed in nine

distinct levels, the Nine Rings of Hell, into which sinners were cast in accordance with the

depth of their sin. Near the top, the lustful or “carnal malefactors” were blown about by

an eternal windstorm, a symbol of their inability to control their desire. Beneath them the

gluttons were forced to lie facedown in a vile slush of sewage, their mouths filled with the

product of their excess. Deeper still, the heretics were trapped in flaming coffins, damned

to eternal fire. And so it went … getting worse and worse the deeper one descended.

In the seven centuries since its publication, Dante’s enduring vision of hell had inspired

tributes, translations, and variations by some of history’s greatest creative minds.

Longfellow, Chaucer, Marx, Milton, Balzac, Borges, and even several popes had all written

pieces based on Dante’s Inferno. Monteverdi, Liszt, Wagner, Tchaikovsky, and Puccini

composed pieces based on Dante’s work, as had one of Langdon’s favorite living

recording artists—Loreena McKennitt. Even the modern world of video games and iPad

apps had no shortage of Dante-related offerings.

Langdon, eager to share with his students the vibrant symbolic richness of Dante’s

vision, sometimes taught a course on the recurring imagery found in both Dante and the

works he had inspired over the centuries.

“Robert,” Sienna said, shifting closer to the image on the wall. “Look at that!” She

pointed to an area near the bottom of the funnel-shaped hell.

The area she was pointing to was known as the Malebolge—meaning “evil ditches.” It

was the eighth and penultimate ring of hell and was divided into ten separate ditches,

each for a specific type of fraud.

Sienna pointed more excitedly now. “Look! Didn’t you say, in your vision, you saw

this?!”

Langdon squinted at where Sienna was pointing, but he saw nothing. The tiny projector

was losing power, and the image had begun to fade. He quickly shook the device again

until it was glowing brightly. Then he carefully set it farther back from the wall, on the

edge of the counter across the small kitchen, letting it cast an even larger image from

there. Langdon approached Sienna, stepping to the side to study the glowing map.

Again Sienna pointed down toward the eighth ring of hell. “Look. Didn’t you say your

hallucinations included a pair of legs sticking out of the earth upside down with the letter

R?” She touched a precise spot on the wall. “There they are!”

As Langdon had seen many times in this painting, the tenth ditch of the Malebolge was

packed with sinners half buried upside down, their legs sticking out of the earth. But

strangely, in this version, one pair of legs bore the letter R, written in mud, exactly as

Langdon had seen in his vision.

My God! Langdon peered more intently at the tiny detail. “That letter R … that is

definitely not in Botticelli’s original!”

“There’s another letter,” Sienna said, pointing.

Langdon followed her outstretched finger to another of the ten ditches in the

Malebolge, where the letter E was scrawled on a false prophet whose head had been put

on backward.

What in the world? This painting has been modified.

Other letters now appeared to him, scrawled on sinners throughout all ten ditches of

the Malebolge. He saw a C on a seducer being whipped by demons … another R on a

thief perpetually bitten by snakes … an A on a corrupt politician submerged in a boiling

lake of tar.

“These letters,” Langdon said with certainty, “are definitely not part of Botticelli’s

original. This image has been digitally edited.”

He returned his gaze to the uppermost ditch of the Malebolge and began reading the

letters downward, through each of the ten ditches, from top to bottom.

C … A … T … R … O … V … A … C … E … R

“Catrovacer?” Langdon said. “Is this Italian?”

Sienna shook her head. “Not Latin either. I don’t recognize it.”

“A … signature, maybe?”

“Catrovacer?” She looked doubtful. “Doesn’t sound like a name to me. But look over

there.” She pointed to one of the many characters in the third ditch of the Malebolge.

When Langdon’s eyes found the figure, he instantly felt a chill. Among the crowd of

sinners in the third ditch was an iconic image from the Middle Ages—a cloaked man in a

mask with a long, birdlike beak and dead eyes.

The plague mask.

“Is there a plague doctor in Botticelli’s original?” Sienna asked.

“Absolutely not. That figure has been added.”

“And did Botticelli sign his original?”

Langdon couldn’t recall, but as his eyes moved to the lower right-hand corner where a

signature normally would be, he realized why she had asked. There was no signature,

and yet barely visible along La Mappa’s dark brown border was a line of text in tiny block

letters: la verità è visibile solo attraverso gli occhi della morte.

Langdon knew enough Italian to understand the gist. “ ‘The truth can be glimpsed only

through the eyes of death.’ ”

Sienna nodded. “Bizarre.”

The two of them stood in silence as the morbid image before them slowly began to

fade. Dante’s Inferno, Langdon thought. Inspiring foreboding pieces of art since 1330.

Langdon’s course on Dante always included an entire section on the illustrious artwork

inspired by the Inferno. In addition to Botticelli’s celebrated Map of Hell, there was

Rodin’s timeless sculpture of The Three Shades from The Gates of Hell … Stradanus’s

illustration of Phlegyas paddling through submerged bodies on the river Styx … William

Blake’s lustful sinners swirling through an eternal tempest … Bouguereau’s strangely

erotic vision of Dante and Virgil watching two nude men locked in battle … Bayros’s

tortured souls huddling beneath a hail-like torrent of scalding pellets and droplets of fire

… Salvador Dalí’s eccentric series of watercolors and woodcuts … and Doré’s huge

collection of black-and-white etchings depicting everything from the tunneled entrance to

Hades … to winged Satan himself.

Now it seemed that Dante’s poetic vision of hell had not only influenced the most

revered artists throughout history. It had also, apparently, inspired yet another individual

—a twisted soul who had digitally altered Botticelli’s famous painting, adding ten letters,

a plague doctor, and then signing it with an ominous phrase about seeing the truth

through the eyes of death. This artist had then stored the image on a high-tech projector

sheathed in a freakishly carved bone.

Langdon couldn’t imagine who would have created such an artifact, and yet, at the

moment, this issue seemed secondary to a far more unnerving question.

Why the hell am I carrying it?

As Sienna stood with Langdon in the kitchen and pondered her next move, the

unexpected roar of a high-horsepower engine echoed up from the street below. It was

followed by a staccato burst of screeching tires and car doors slamming.

Puzzled, Sienna hurried to the window and peered outside.

A black, unmarked van had skidded to a stop in the street below. Out of the van flowed

a team of men, all dressed in black uniforms with circular green medallions on their left

shoulders. They gripped automatic rifles and moved with fierce, military efficiency.

Without hesitation, four soldiers dashed toward the entrance of the apartment building.

Sienna felt her blood go cold. “Robert!” she shouted. “I don’t know who they are, but

they found us!”

Down in the street, Agent Christoph Brüder shouted orders to his men as they rushed into

the building. He was a powerfully built man whose military background had imbued him

with an emotionless sense of duty and respect for the command chain. He knew his

mission, and he knew the stakes.

The organization for whom he worked contained many divisions, but Brüder’s division—

Surveillance and Response Support—was summoned only when a situation reached

“crisis” status.

As his men disappeared into the apartment building, Brüder stood watch at the front

door, pulling out his comm device and contacting the person in charge.

“It’s Brüder,” he said. “We’ve successfully tracked Langdon through his computer IP

address. My team is moving in. I’ll alert you when we have him.”

High above Brüder, on the rooftop terrace of Pensione la Fiorentina, Vayentha stared

down in horrified disbelief at the agents dashing into the apartment building.

What the hell are THEY doing here?!

She ran a hand through her spiked hair, suddenly grasping the dire consequences of

her botched assignment last night. With the single coo of a dove, everything had spiraled

wildly out of control. What had begun as a simple mission … had now turned into a living

nightmare.

If the SRS team is here, then it’s all over for me.

Vayentha desperately grabbed her Sectra Tiger XS communications device and called

the provost.

“Sir,” she stammered. “The SRS team is here! Brüder’s men are swarming the

apartment building across the street!”

She awaited a response, but when it came, she heard only sharp clicks on the line,

then an electronic voice, which calmly stated, “Disavowal protocol commencing.”

Vayentha lowered the phone and looked at the screen just in time to see the comm

device go dead.

As the blood drained from her face, Vayentha forced herself to accept what was

happening. The Consortium had just severed all ties with her.

No links. No association.

I’ve been disavowed.

The shock lasted only an instant.

Then the fear set in.

CHAPTER 16

“HURRY, ROBERT!” SIENNA urged. “Follow me!”

Langdon’s thoughts were still consumed by grim images of Dante’s underworld as he

charged out the door into the hall of the apartment building. Until this instant, Sienna

Brooks had managed the morning’s substantial stress with a kind of detached poise, but

now her calm demeanor had grown taut with an emotion Langdon had yet to see in her—

true fear.

In the hallway, Sienna ran ahead, rushing past the elevator, which was already

descending, no doubt summoned by the men now entering the lobby. She sprinted to the

end of the hall and, without looking back, disappeared into the stairwell.

Langdon followed close behind, skidding on the smooth soles of his borrowed loafers.

The tiny projector in the breast pocket of his Brioni suit bounced against his chest as he

ran. His mind flashed on the strange letters adorning the eighth ring of hell: CATROVACER.

He pictured the plague mask and the strange signature: The truth can be glimpsed only

through the eyes of death.

Langdon strained to connect these disparate elements, but at the moment nothing was

making sense. When he finally came to a stop on the staircase landing, Sienna was there,

listening intently. Langdon could hear footsteps pounding up the stairs from below.

“Is there another exit?” Langdon whispered.

“Follow me,” she said tersely.

Sienna had kept Langdon alive once already today, and so, with little choice but to

trust the woman, Langdon took a deep breath and bounded down the stairs after her.

They descended one floor, and the sounds of approaching boots grew very close now,

echoing only a floor or two below them.

Why is she running directly into them?

Before Langdon could protest, Sienna grabbed his hand and yanked him out of the

stairwell along a deserted hallway of apartments—a long corridor of locked doors.

There’s nowhere to hide!

Sienna flipped a light switch and a few bulbs went out, but the dim hallway did little to

hide them. Sienna and Langdon were clearly visible here. The thundering footsteps were

nearly upon them now, and Langdon knew their assailants would appear on the staircase

at any moment, with a direct view down this hall.

“I need your jacket,” Sienna whispered as she yanked Langdon’s suit jacket off him.

She then forced Langdon to crouch on his haunches behind her in a recessed doorframe.

“Don’t move.”

What is she doing? She’s in plain sight!

The soldiers appeared on the staircase, rushing upward but stopping short when they

saw Sienna in the darkened hallway.

“Per l’amore di Dio!” Sienna shouted at them, her tone scathing. “Cos’è questa

confusione?”

The two men squinted, clearly uncertain what they were looking at.

Sienna kept yelling at them. “Tanto chiasso a quest’ora!” So much noise at this hour!

Langdon now saw that Sienna had draped his black jacket over her head and shoulders

like an old woman’s shawl. She had hunched over, positioning herself to obstruct their

view of Langdon crouched in the shadows, and now, utterly transformed, she hobbled one

step toward them and screamed like a senile old woman.

One of the soldiers held up his hand, motioning for her to return to her apartment.

“Signora! Rientri subito in casa!”

Sienna took another rickety step, shaking her fist angrily. “Avete svegliato mio marito,

che è malato!”

Langdon listened in bewilderment. They woke up your ailing husband?

The other soldier now raised his machine gun and aimed directly at her. “Ferma o

sparo!”

Sienna stopped short, cursing them mercilessly as she hobbled backward, away from

them.

The men hurried on, disappearing up the stairs.

Not quite Shakespearean acting, Langdon thought, but impressive. Apparently a

background in drama could be a versatile weapon.

Sienna removed the jacket from her head and tossed it back to Langdon. “Okay, follow

me.”

This time Langdon followed without hesitation.

They descended to the landing above the lobby, where two more soldiers were just

entering the elevator to go upstairs. On the street outside, another soldier stood watch

beside the van, his black uniform stretched taut across his muscular body. In silence,

Sienna and Langdon hurried downstairs toward the basement.

The underground carport was dark and smelled of urine. Sienna jogged over to a corner

packed with scooters and motorcycles. She stopped at a silver Trike—a three-wheeled

moped contraption that looked like the ungainly offspring of an Italian Vespa and an adult

tricycle. She ran her slender hand beneath the Trike’s front fender and removed a small

magnetized case. Inside was a key, which she inserted, and revved the engine.

Seconds later, Langdon was seated behind her on the bike. Precariously perched on the

small seat, Langdon groped at his sides, looking for handgrips or something to steady

himself.

“Not the moment for modesty,” Sienna said, grabbing his hands and wrapping them

around her slender waist. “You’ll want to hold on.”

Langdon did exactly that as Sienna gunned the Trike up the exit ramp. The vehicle had

more power than he would have imagined, and they nearly left the ground as they

launched out of the garage, emerging into the early-morning light about fifty yards from

the main entrance. The brawny soldier in front of the building turned at once to see

Langdon and Sienna tearing away, their Trike letting out a high-pitched whine as she

opened the throttle.

Perched on the back, Langdon peered back over his shoulder toward the soldier, who

now raised his weapon and took careful aim. Langdon braced himself. A single shot rang

out, ricocheting off the Trike’s back fender, barely missing the base of Langdon’s spine.

Jesus!

Sienna made a hard left at an intersection, and Langdon felt himself sliding, fighting to

keep his balance.

“Lean toward me!” she shouted.

Langdon leaned forward, centering himself again as Sienna raced the Trike down a

larger thoroughfare. They had driven a full block before Langdon began breathing again.

Who the hell were those men?!

Sienna’s focus remained locked on the road ahead as she raced down the avenue,

weaving in and out of the light morning traffic. Several pedestrians did double takes as

they passed, apparently puzzled to see a six-foot man in a Brioni suit riding behind a

slender woman.

Langdon and Sienna had traveled three blocks and were approaching a major

intersection when horns blared up ahead. A sleek black van rounded the corner on two

wheels, fishtailing into the intersection, and then accelerating up the road directly toward

them. The van was identical to the soldiers’ van back at the apartment building.

Sienna immediately swerved hard to her right and slammed on the brakes. Langdon’s

chest pressed hard into her back as she skidded to a stop out of sight behind a parked

delivery truck. She nestled the Trike up to the rear bumper of the truck and killed the

engine.

Did they see us!?

She and Langdon huddled low and waited … breathless.

The van roared past without hesitation, apparently never having seen them. As the

vehicle sped by, however, Langdon caught a fleeting glimpse of someone inside.

In the backseat, an attractive older woman was wedged between two soldiers like a

captive. Her eyes sagged and her head bobbed as if she were delirious or maybe

drugged. She wore an amulet and had long silver hair that fell in ringlets.

For a moment Langdon’s throat clenched, and he thought he’d seen a ghost.

It was the woman from his visions.

CHAPTER 17

THE PROVOST STORMED out of the control room and marched along the long starboard deck of

The Mendacium, trying to gather his thoughts. What had just transpired at the Florence

apartment building was unthinkable.

He circled the entire ship twice before stalking into his office and taking out a bottle of

fifty-year-old Highland Park single malt. Without pouring a glass, he set down the bottle

and turned his back on it—a personal reminder that he was still very much in control.

His eyes moved instinctively to a heavy, weathered tome on his bookshelf—a gift from

a client … the client whom he now wished he’d never met.

A year ago … how could I have known?

The provost did not normally interview prospective clients personally, but this one had

come to him through a trusted source, and so he had made an exception.

It had been a dead calm day at sea when the client arrived aboard The Mendacium via

his own private helicopter. The visitor, a notable figure in his field, was forty-six, clean-

cut, and exceptionally tall, with piercing green eyes.

“As you know,” the man had begun, “your services were recommended to me by a

mutual friend.” The visitor stretched out his long legs and made himself at home in the

provost’s lushly appointed office. “So, let me tell you what I need.”

“Actually, no,” the provost interrupted, showing the man who was in charge. “My

protocol requires that you tell me nothing. I will explain the services I provide, and you

will decide which, if any, are of interest to you.”

The visitor looked taken aback but acquiesced and listened intently. In the end, what

the lanky newcomer desired had turned out to be very standard fare for the Consortium—

essentially a chance to become “invisible” for a while so he could pursue an endeavor far

from prying eyes.

Child’s play.

The Consortium would accomplish this by providing him a fake identity and a secure

location, entirely off the grid, where he could do his work in total secrecy—whatever his

work might be. The Consortium never inquired for what purpose a client required a

service, preferring to know as little as possible about those for whom they worked.

For a full year, at a staggering profit, the provost had provided safe haven to the

green-eyed man, who had turned out to be an ideal client. The provost had no contact

with him, and all of his bills were paid on time.

Then, two weeks ago, everything changed.

Unexpectedly, the client had made contact, demanding a personal meeting with the

provost. Considering the sum of money the client had paid, the provost obliged.

The disheveled man who arrived on the yacht was barely recognizable as the steady,

clean-cut person with whom the provost had done business the year before. He had a

wild look in his once-sharp green eyes. He looked almost … ill.

What happened to him? What has he been doing?

The provost had ushered the jittery man into his office.

“The silver-haired devil,” his client stammered. “She’s getting closer every day.”

The provost glanced down at his client’s file, eyeing the photo of the attractive silver-

haired woman. “Yes,” the provost said, “your silver-haired devil. We are well aware of

your enemies. And as powerful as she may be, for a full year we’ve kept her from you,

and we will continue to do so.”

The green-eyed man anxiously twisted strands of greasy hair around his fingertips.

“Don’t let her beauty fool you, she is a dangerous foe.”

True, the provost thought, still displeased that his client had drawn the attention of

someone so influential. The silver-haired woman had tremendous access and resources—

not the kind of adversary the provost appreciated having to deflect.

“If she or her demons locate me …” the client began.

“They won’t,” the provost had assured him. “Have we not thus far hidden you and

provided you everything you’ve requested?”

“Yes,” the man said. “And yet, I will sleep easier if …” He paused, regrouping. “I need

to know that if anything happens to me, you will carry out my final wishes.”

“Those wishes being?”

The man reached into a bag and pulled out a small, sealed envelope. “The contents of

this envelope provide access to a safe-deposit box in Florence. Inside the box, you will

find a small object. If anything happens to me, I need you to deliver the object for me. It

is a gift of sorts.”

“Very well.” The provost lifted his pen to make notes. “And to whom shall I deliver it?”

“To the silver-haired devil.”

The provost glanced up. “A gift for your tormentor?”

“More of a thorn in her side.” His eyes flashed wildly. “A clever little barb fashioned

from a bone. She will discover it is a map … her own personal Virgil … an escort to the

center of her own private hell.”

The provost studied him for a long moment. “As you wish. Consider it done.”

“The timing will be critical,” the man urged. “The gift should not be delivered too soon.

You must keep it hidden until …” He paused, suddenly lost in thought.

“Until when?” the provost prodded.

The man stood abruptly and walked over behind the provost’s desk, grabbing a red

marker and frantically circling a date on the provost’s personal desk calendar. “Until this

day.”

The provost set his jaw and exhaled, swallowing his displeasure at the man’s

brazenness. “Understood,” the provost said. “I will do nothing until the circled day, at

which time the object in the safe-deposit box, whatever it may be, will be delivered to

the silver-haired woman. You have my word.” He counted the days on his calendar until

the awkwardly circled date. “I will carry out your wishes in precisely fourteen days from

now.”

“And not one day before!” the client admonished feverishly.

“I understand,” the provost assured. “Not a day before.”

The provost took the envelope, slid it into the man’s file, and made the necessary

notations to ensure that his client’s wishes were followed precisely. While his client had

not described the exact nature of the object in the safe-deposit box, the provost preferred

it this way. Detachment was a cornerstone of the Consortium’s philosophy. Provide the

service. Ask no questions. Pass no judgment.

The client’s shoulders softened and he exhaled heavily. “Thank you.”

“Anything else?” the provost had asked, eager to rid himself of his transformed client.

“Yes, actually, there is.” He reached into his pocket and produced a small, crimson

memory stick. “This is a video file.” He laid the memory stick in front of the provost. “I

would like it uploaded to the world media.”

The provost studied the man curiously. The Consortium often mass-distributed

information for clients, and yet something about this man’s request felt disconcerting. “On

the same date?” the provost asked, motioning at the scrawled circle on his calendar.

“Same exact date,” the client replied. “Not one moment before.”

“Understood.” The provost tagged the red memory stick with the proper information.

“So that’s it, then?” He stood up, attempting to end the meeting.

His client remained seated. “No. There is one final thing.”

The provost sat back down.

The client’s green eyes were looking almost feral now. “Shortly after you deliver this

video, I will become a very famous man.”

You are already a famous man, the provost had thought, considering his client’s

impressive accomplishments.

“And you will deserve some of the credit,” the man said. “The service you have

provided has enabled me to create my masterpiece … an opus that is going to change the

world. You should be proud of your role.”

“Whatever your masterpiece is,” the provost said with growing impatience, “I’m

pleased you have had the privacy required to create it.”

“As a show of thanks, I’ve brought you a parting gift.” The unkempt man reached into

his bag. “A book.”

The provost wondered if perhaps this book was the secret opus the client had been

working on for all this time. “And did you write this book?”

“No.” The man heaved a massive tome up onto the table. “Quite to the contrary … this

book was written for me.”

Puzzled, the provost eyed the edition his client had produced. He thinks this was

written for him? The volume was a literary classic … written in the fourteenth century.

“Read it,” the client urged with an eerie smile. “It will help you understand all I have

done.”

With that, the unkempt visitor had stood up, said good-bye, and abruptly departed. The

provost watched through his office window as the man’s helicopter lifted off the deck and

headed back toward the coast of Italy.

Then the provost returned his attention to the large book before him. With uncertain

fingers, he lifted the leather cover and thumbed to the beginning. The opening stanza of

the work was written in large calligraphy, taking up the entire first page.

INFERNO

Midway upon the journey of our life

I found myself within a forest dark,

for the straightforward pathway had been lost.

On the opposing page, his client had signed the book with a handwritten message:

My dear friend, thank you for helping me find the path.

The world thanks you, too.

The provost had no idea what this meant, but he’d read enough. He closed the book

and placed it on his bookshelf. Thankfully, his professional relationship with this strange

individual would be over soon. Fourteen more days, the provost thought, turning his gaze

to the wildly scrawled red circle on his personal calendar.

In the days that followed, the provost felt uncharacteristically on edge about this client.

The man seemed to have come unhinged. Nonetheless, despite the provost’s intuition,

the time passed without incident.

Then, just before the circled date, there occurred a rapid series of calamitous events in

Florence. The provost tried to handle the crisis, but it quickly accelerated out of control.

The crisis climaxed with his client’s breathless ascent up the Badia tower.

He jumped off … to his death.

Despite his horror at losing a client, especially in this manner, the provost remained a

man of his word. He quickly began preparing to make good on his final promise to the

deceased—the delivery to the silver-haired woman of the contents of a safe-deposit box

in Florence—the timing of which, he had been admonished, was critical.

Not before the date circled in your calendar.

The provost gave the envelope containing the safe-deposit-box codes to Vayentha,

who had traveled to Florence to recover the object inside—this “clever little barb.” When

Vayentha called in, however, her news was both startling and deeply alarming. The

contents of the safe-deposit box had already been removed, and Vayentha had barely

escaped being detained. Somehow, the silver-haired woman had learned of the account

and had used her influence to gain access to the safe-deposit box and also to place an

arrest warrant on anyone else who showed up looking to open it.

That was three days ago.

The client had clearly intended the purloined object to be his final insult to the silver-

haired woman—a taunting voice from the grave.

And yet now it speaks too soon.

The Consortium had been in a desperate scramble ever since—using all its resources to

protect its client’s final wishes, as well as itself. In the process, the Consortium had

crossed a series of lines from which the provost knew it would be hard to return. Now,

with everything unraveling in Florence, the provost stared down at his desk and

wondered what the future held.

On his calendar, the client’s wildly scrawled circle stared up at him—a crazed ring of red

ink around an apparently special day.

Tomorrow.

Reluctantly, the provost eyed the bottle of Scotch on the table before him. Then, for

the first time in fourteen years, he poured a glass and drained it in a single gulp.

Belowdecks, facilitator Laurence Knowlton pulled the little red memory stick from his

computer and set it on the desk in front of him. The video was one of the strangest things

he had ever seen.

And it was precisely nine minutes long … to the second.

Feeling uncharacteristically alarmed, he stood and paced his tiny cubicle, wondering

again whether he should share the bizarre video with the provost.

Just do your job, Knowlton told himself. No questions. No judgment.

Forcing the video from his mind, he marked his planner with a confirmed task.

Tomorrow, as requested by the client, he would upload the video file to the media.

CHAPTER 18

VIALE NICCOLÒ MACHIAVELLI has been called the most graceful of all Florentine avenues. With

wide S-curves that serpentine through lushly wooded landscapes of hedges and

deciduous trees, the drive is a favorite among cyclists and Ferrari enthusiasts.

Sienna expertly maneuvered the Trike through each arching curve as they left behind

the dingy residential neighborhood and moved into the clean, cedar-laden air of the city’s

upscale west bank. They passed a chapel clock that was just chiming 8 A.M.

Langdon held on, his mind churning with mystifying images of Dante’s inferno … and

the mysterious face of a beautiful silver-haired woman he had just seen wedged in

between two huge soldiers in the backseat of the van.

Whoever she is, Langdon thought, they have her now.

“The woman in the van,” Sienna said over the noise of the Trike’s engine. “You’re sure

it was the same woman from your visions?”

“Absolutely.”

“Then you must have met her at some point in the past two days. The question is why

you keep seeing her … and why she keeps telling you to seek and find.”

Langdon agreed. “I don’t know … I have no recollection of meeting her, but every time

I see her face, I have an overwhelming sense that I need to help her.”

Very sorry. Very sorry.

Langdon suddenly wondered if maybe his strange apology had been directed to the

silver-haired woman. Did I fail her somehow? The thought left a knot in his gut.

For Langdon, it felt as if a vital weapon had been extracted from his arsenal. I have no

memory. Eidetic since childhood, Langdon’s memory was the intellectual asset he relied

on most. For a man accustomed to recalling every intricate detail of what he saw around

him, functioning without his memory felt like attempting to land a plane in the dark with

no radar.

“It seems like your only chance of finding answers is to decipher La Mappa,” Sienna

said. “Whatever secret it holds … it seems to be the reason you’re being hunted.”

Langdon nodded, thinking about the word catrovacer, set against the backdrop of

writhing bodies in Dante’s Inferno.

Suddenly a clear thought emerged in Langdon’s head.

I awoke in Florence …

No city on earth was more closely tied to Dante than Florence. Dante Alighieri had

been born in Florence, grew up in Florence, fell in love, according to legend, with Beatrice

in Florence, and was cruelly exiled from his home in Florence, destined to wander the

Italian countryside for years, longing soulfully for his home.

You shall leave everything you love most, Dante wrote of banishment. This is the arrow

that the bow of exile shoots first.

As Langdon recalled those words from the seventeenth canto of the Paradiso, he

looked to the right, gazing out across the Arno River toward the distant spires of old

Florence.

Langdon pictured the layout of the old city—a labyrinth of tourists, congestion, and

traffic bustling through narrow streets around Florence’s famed cathedral, museums,

chapels, and shopping districts. He suspected that if he and Sienna ditched the Trike,

they could evaporate into the throngs of people.

“The old city is where we need to go,” Langdon declared. “If there are answers, that’s

where they’ll probably be. Old Florence was Dante’s entire world.”

Sienna nodded her agreement and called over her shoulder, “It will be safer, too—

plenty of places to hide. I’ll head for Porta Romana, and from there, we can cross the

river.”

The river, Langdon thought with a touch of trepidation. Dante’s famous journey into

hell had begun by crossing a river as well.

Sienna opened up the throttle, and as the landscape blurred past, Langdon mentally

scanned through images of the inferno, the dead and dying, the ten ditches of the

Malebolge with the plague doctor and the strange word—CATROVACER. He pondered the

words scrawled beneath La Mappa—The truth can be glimpsed only through the eyes of

death—and wondered if the grim saying might be a quote from Dante.

I don’t recognize it.

Langdon was well versed in Dante’s work, and his prominence as an art historian who

specialized in iconography meant he was occasionally called upon to interpret the vast

array of symbols that populated Dante’s landscape. Coincidentally, or perhaps not so

coincidentally, he had given a lecture on Dante’s Inferno about two years earlier.

“Divine Dante: Symbols of Hell.”

Dante Alighieri had evolved into one of history’s true cult icons, sparking the creation of

Dante societies all around the world. The oldest American branch had been founded in

1881 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. New England’s

famous Fireside Poet was the first American to translate The Divine Comedy, his

translation remaining among the most respected and widely read to this day.

As a noted student of Dante’s work, Langdon had been asked to speak at a major

event hosted by one of the world’s oldest Dante societies—Società Dante Alighieri

Vienna. The event was slated to take place at the Viennese Academy of Sciences. The

event’s primary sponsor—a wealthy scientist and Dante Society member—had managed

to secure the academy’s two-thousand-seat lecture hall.

When Langdon arrived at the event, he was met by the conference director and

ushered inside. As they crossed the lobby, Langdon couldn’t help but notice the five words

painted in gargantuan letters across the back wall: WHAT IF GOD WAS WRONG?

“It’s a Lukas Troberg,” the director whispered. “Our newest art installation. What do

you think?”

Langdon eyed the massive text, uncertain how to respond. “Um … his brushstrokes are

lavish, but his command of the subjunctive seems sparse.”

The director gave him a confused look. Langdon hoped his rapport with the audience

would be better.

When he finally stepped onstage, Langdon received a rousing round of applause from a

crowd that was standing room only.

“Meine Damen und Herren,” Langdon began, his voice booming over the loudspeakers.

“Willkommen, bienvenue, welcome.”

The famous line from Cabaret drew appreciative laughter from the crowd.

“I’ve been informed that our audience tonight contains not only Dante Society

members, but also many visiting scientists and students who may be exploring Dante for

the first time. So, for those in the audience who have been too busy studying to read

medieval Italian epics, I thought I’d begin with a quick overview of Dante—his life, his

work, and why he is considered one of the most influential figures in all of history.”

More applause.

Using the tiny remote in his hand, Langdon called up a series of images of Dante, the

first being Andrea del Castagno’s full-length portrait of the poet standing in a doorway,

clutching a book of philosophy.

“Dante Alighieri,” Langdon began. “This Florentine writer and philosopher lived from

1265 to 1321. In this portrait, as in nearly all depictions, he wears on his head a red

cappuccio—a tight-fitting, plaited hood with earflaps—which, along with his crimson Lucca

robe, has become the most widely reproduced image of Dante.”

Langdon advanced slides to the Botticelli portrait of Dante from the Uffizi Gallery, which

stressed Dante’s most salient features, a heavy jaw and hooked nose. “Here, Dante’s

unique face is once again framed by his red cappuccio, but in this instance Botticelli has

added a laurel wreath to his cap as a symbol of expertise—in this case in the poetic arts

—a traditional symbol borrowed from ancient Greece and used even today in ceremonies

honoring poet laureates and Nobel laureates.”

Langdon quickly scrolled through several other images, all showing Dante in his red

cap, red tunic, laurel wreath, and prominent nose. “And to round out your image of

Dante, here is a statue from the Piazza di Santa Croce … and, of course, the famous

fresco attributed to Giotto in the chapel of the Bargello.”

Langdon left the slide of Giotto’s fresco on the screen and walked to the center of the

stage.

“As you are no doubt aware, Dante is best known for his monumental literary

masterpiece—The Divine Comedy—a brutally vivid account of the author’s descent into

hell, passage through purgatory, and eventual ascent into paradise to commune with

God. By modern standards, The Divine Comedy has nothing comedic about it. It’s called a

comedy for another reason entirely. In the fourteenth century, Italian literature was, by

requirement, divided into two categories: tragedy, representing high literature, was

written in formal Italian; comedy, representing low literature, was written in the

vernacular and geared toward the general population.”

Langdon advanced slides to the iconic fresco by Michelino, which showed Dante

standing outside the walls of Florence clutching a copy of The Divine Comedy. In the

background, the terraced mountain of purgatory rose high above the gates of hell. The

painting now hung in Florence’s Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore—better known as Il

Duomo.

“As you may have guessed from the title,” Langdon continued, “ The Divine Comedy

was written in the vernacular—the language of the people. Even so, it brilliantly fused

religion, history, politics, philosophy, and social commentary in a tapestry of fiction that,

while erudite, remained wholly accessible to the masses. The work became such a pillar

of Italian culture that Dante’s writing style has been credited with nothing less than the

codification of the modern Italian language.”

Langdon paused a moment for effect and then whispered, “My friends, it is impossible

to overstate the influence of Dante Alighieri’s work. Throughout all of history, with the

sole exception perhaps of Holy Scripture, no single work of writing, art, music, or

literature has inspired more tributes, imitations, variations, and annotations than The

Divine Comedy.”

After listing the vast array of famous composers, artists, and authors who had created

works based on Dante’s epic poem, Langdon scanned the crowd. “So tell me, do we have

any authors here tonight?”

Nearly one-third of the hands went up. Langdon stared out in shock. Wow, either this is

the most accomplished audience on earth, or this e-publishing thing is really taking off.

“Well, as all of you authors know, there is nothing a writer appreciates more than a

blurb—one of those single-line endorsements from a powerful individual, designed to

make others want to buy your work. And, in the Middle Ages, blurbs existed, too. And

Dante got quite a few of them.”

Langdon changed slides. “How would you like to have this on your book jacket?”

Ne’er walked the earth a greater man than he.

—Michelangelo

A murmur of surprise rustled through the crowd.

“Yes,” Langdon said, “that’s the same Michelangelo you all know from the Sistine

Chapel and the David. In addition to being a master painter and sculptor, Michelangelo

was a superb poet, publishing nearly three hundred poems—including one titled ‘Dante,’

dedicated to the man whose stark visions of hell were those that inspired Michelangelo’s

Last Judgment. And if you don’t believe me, read the third canto of Dante’s Inferno and

then visit the Sistine Chapel; just above the altar, you’ll see this familiar image.”

Langdon advanced slides to a frightening detail of a muscle-bound beast swinging a

giant paddle at cowering people. “This is Dante’s hellish ferryman, Charon, beating

straggling passengers with an oar.”

Langdon moved now to a new slide—a second detail of Michelangelo’s Last Judgment—

a man being crucified. “This is Haman the Agagite, who, according to Scripture, was

hanged to death. However, in Dante’s poem, he was crucified instead. As you can see

here in the Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo chose Dante’s version over that of the Bible.”

Langdon grinned and lowered his voice to a whisper. “Don’t tell the pope.”

The crowd laughed.

“Dante’s Inferno created a world of pain and suffering beyond all previous human

imagination, and his writing quite literally defined our modern visions of hell.” Langdon

paused. “And believe me, the Catholic Church has much to thank Dante for. His Inferno

terrified the faithful for centuries, and no doubt tripled church attendance among the

fearful.”

Langdon switched the slide. “And this leads us to the reason we are all here tonight.”

The screen now displayed the title of his lecture: DIVINE DANTE: SYMBOLS OF HELL.

“Dante’s Inferno is a landscape so rich in symbolism and iconography that I often

dedicate an entire semester course to it. And tonight, I thought there would be no better

way to unveil the symbols of Dante’s Inferno than to walk side by side with him …

through the gates of hell.”

Langdon paced out to the edge of the stage and surveyed the crowd. “Now, if we’re

planning on taking a stroll through hell, I strongly recommend we use a map. And there is

no map of Dante’s hell more complete and accurate than the one painted by Sandro

Botticelli.”

He touched his remote, and Botticelli’s forbidding Mappa dell’Inferno materialized

before the crowd. He could hear several groans as people absorbed the various horrors

taking place in the funnel-shaped subterranean cavern.

“Unlike some artists, Botticelli was extremely faithful in his interpretation of Dante’s

text. In fact, he spent so much time reading Dante that the great art historian Giorgio

Vasari said Botticelli’s obsession with Dante led to ‘serious disorders in his living.’

Botticelli created more than two dozen other works relating to Dante, but this map is his

most famous.”

Langdon turned now, pointing to the upper left-hand corner of the painting. “Our

journey will begin up there, aboveground, where you can see Dante in red, along with his

guide, Virgil, standing outside the gates of hell. From there we will travel downward,

through the nine rings of Dante’s inferno, and eventually come face-to-face with …”

Langdon quickly flashed to a new slide—a giant enlargement of Satan as depicted by

Botticelli in this very painting—a horrific, three-headed Lucifer consuming three different

people, one in each mouth.

The crowd gasped audibly.

“A glance at coming attractions,” Langdon announced. “This frightening character here

is where tonight’s journey will end. This is the ninth ring of hell, where Satan himself

resides. However …” Langdon paused. “Getting there is half the fun, so let’s rewind a bit

… back up to the gates of hell, where our journey begins.”

Langdon moved to the next slide—a Gustave Doré lithograph that depicted a dark,

tunneled entrance carved into the face of an austere cliff. The inscription above the door

read: ABANDON ALL HOPE, YE WHO ENTER HERE.

“So …” Langdon said with a smile. “Shall we enter?”

Somewhere tires screeched loudly, and the audience evaporated before Langdon’s

eyes. He felt himself lurch forward, and he collided with Sienna’s back as the Trike

skidded to a stop in the middle of the Viale Machiavelli.

Langdon reeled, still thinking about the gates of hell looming before him. As he

regained his bearings, he saw where he was.

“What’s going on?” he demanded.

Sienna pointed three hundred yards ahead to the Porta Romana—the ancient stone

gateway that served as the entrance to old Florence. “Robert, we’ve got a problem.”

CHAPTER 19

AGENT BRÜDER STOOD in the humble apartment and tried to make sense of what he was

seeing. Who the hell lives here? The decor was sparse and jumbled, like a college dorm

room furnished on a budget.

“Agent Brüder?” one of his men called from down the hall. “You’ll want to see this.”

As Brüder made his way down the hall, he wondered if the local police had detained

Langdon yet. Brüder would have preferred to solve this crisis “in-house,” but Langdon’s

escape had left little choice but to enlist local police support and set up roadblocks. An

agile motorbike on the labyrinthine streets of Florence would easily elude Brüder’s vans,

whose heavy polycarbonate windows and solid, puncture-proof tires made them

impenetrable but lumbering. The Italian police had a reputation for being uncooperative

with outsiders, but Brüder’s organization had significant influence—police, consulates,

embassies. When we make demands, nobody dares question.

Brüder entered the small office where his man stood over an open laptop and typed in

latex gloves. “This is the machine he used,” the man said. “Langdon used it to access his

e-mail and run some searches. The files are still cached.”

Brüder moved toward the desk.

“It doesn’t appear to be Langdon’s computer,” the tech said. “It’s registered to

someone initialed S.C.—I should have a full name shortly.”

As Brüder waited, his eyes were drawn to a stack of papers on the desk. He picked

them up, thumbing through the unusual array—an old playbill from the London Globe

Theatre and a series of newspaper articles. The more Brüder read, the wider his eyes

became.

Taking the documents, Brüder slipped back into the hall and placed a call to his boss.

“It’s Brüder,” he said. “I think I’ve got an ID on the person helping Langdon.”

“Who is it?” his boss replied.

Brüder exhaled slowly. “You’re not going to believe this.”

Two miles away, Vayentha hunkered low on her BMW as it fled the area. Police cars

raced past her in the opposite direction, sirens blaring.

I’ve been disavowed, she thought.

Normally, the soft vibration of the motorcycle’s four-stroke engine helped calm her

nerves. Not today.

Vayentha had worked for the Consortium for twelve years, climbing the ranks from

ground support, to strategy coordination, all the way to a high-ranked field agent. My

career is all I have. Field agents endured a life of secrecy, travel, and long missions, all of

which precluded any real outside life or relationships.

I’ve been on this same mission for a year, she thought, still unable to believe the

provost had pulled the trigger and disavowed her so abruptly.

For twelve months Vayentha had been overseeing support services for the same client

of the Consortium—an eccentric, green-eyed genius who wanted only to “disappear” for a

while so he could work unmolested by his rivals and enemies. He traveled very rarely,

and always invisibly, but mostly he worked. The nature of this man’s work was not known

to Vayentha, whose contract had simply been to keep the client hidden from the powerful

people trying to find him.

Vayentha had performed the service with consummate professionalism, and everything

had gone perfectly.

Perfectly, that was … until last night.

Vayentha’s emotional state and career had been in a downward spiral ever since.

I’m on the outside now.

The disavowal protocol, if invoked, required that the agent instantly abandon her

current mission and exit “the arena” at once. If the agent were captured, the Consortium

would disavow all knowledge of the agent. Agents knew better than to press their luck

with the organization, having witnessed firsthand its disturbing ability to manipulate

reality into whatever suited its needs.

Vayentha knew of only two agents who had been disavowed. Strangely, she had never

seen either of them again. She had always assumed they had been called in for their

formal review and fired, required never to make contact again with Consortium

employees.

Now, however, Vayentha was not so sure.

You’re overreacting, she tried to tell herself. The Consortium’s methods are far more

elegant than cold-blooded murder.

Even so, she felt a fresh chill sweep through her body.

It had been instinct that urged her to flee the hotel rooftop unseen the moment she

saw Brüder’s team arrive, and she wondered if that instinct had saved her.

Nobody knows where I am now.

As Vayentha sped northward on the sleek straightaway of the Viale del Poggio

Imperiale, she realized what a difference a few hours had made for her. Last night she

had been worried about protecting her job. Now she was worried about protecting her

life.

CHAPTER 20

FLORENCE WAS ONCE a walled city, its primary entrance the stone gateway of the Porta

Romana, built in 1326. While most of the city’s perimeter walls were destroyed centuries

ago, the Porta Romana still exists, and to this day, traffic enters the city by funneling

through deep arched tunnels in the colossal fortification.

The gateway itself is a fifty-foot-tall barrier of ancient brick and stone whose primary

passageway still retains its massive bolted wooden doors, which are propped open at all

times to let traffic pass through. Six major roads converge in front of these doors, filtering

into a rotary whose grassy median is dominated by a large Pistoletto statue depicting a

woman departing the city gates carrying an enormous bundle on her head.

Although nowadays it is more of a snarled traffic nightmare, Florence’s austere city

gate was once the site of the Fiera dei Contratti—the Contracts Fair—at which fathers

sold their daughters into a contracted marriage, often forcing them to dance

provocatively in an effort to secure higher dowries.

This morning, several hundred yards short of the gateway, Sienna had screeched to a

stop and was now pointing in alarm. On the back of the Trike, Langdon looked ahead and

immediately shared her apprehension. In front of them, a long line of cars idled at a full

stop. Traffic in the rotary had been halted by a police barricade, and more police cars

were now arriving. Armed officers were walking from car to car, asking questions.

That can’t be for us, Langdon thought. Can it?

A sweaty cyclist came pedaling toward them up the Viale Machiavelli away from the

traffic. He was on a recumbent bike, his bare legs pumping out in front of him.

Sienna shouted out to him. “Cos’ è successo?”

“E chi lo sa!” he shouted back, looking concerned. “Carabinieri.” He hurried past,

looking eager to clear the area.

Sienna turned to Langdon, her expression grim. “Roadblock. Military police.”

Sirens wailed in the distance behind them, and Sienna spun in her seat, staring back up

the Viale Machiavelli, her face now masked with fear.

We’re trapped in the middle, Langdon thought, scanning the area for any exit at all—an

intersecting road, a park, a driveway—but all he saw were private residences on their left

and a high stone wall to their right.

The sirens grew louder.

“Up there,” Langdon urged, pointing thirty yards ahead to a deserted construction site

where a portable cement mixer offered at least a little bit of cover.

Sienna gunned the bike up onto the sidewalk and raced into the work area. They

parked behind the cement mixer, quickly realizing that it offered barely enough

concealment for the Trike alone.

“Follow me,” Sienna said, rushing toward a small portable toolshed nestled in the

bushes against the stone wall.

That’s not a toolshed, Langdon realized, his nose crinkling as they got closer. That’s a

Porta-Potty.

As Langdon and Sienna arrived outside the construction workers’ chemical toilet, they

could hear police cars approaching from behind them. Sienna yanked the door handle, but

it didn’t budge. A heavy chain and padlock secured it. Langdon grabbed Sienna’s arm and

pulled her around behind the structure, forcing her into the narrow space between the

toilet and the stone wall. The two of them barely fit, and the air smelled putrid and

heavy.

Langdon slid in behind her just as a jet-black Subaru Forester came into view with the

word CARABINIERI emblazoned on its side. The vehicle rolled slowly past their location.

The Italian military police, Langdon thought, incredulous. He wondered if these officers

also had orders to shoot on sight.

“Someone is dead serious about finding us,” Sienna whispered. “And somehow they

did.”

“GPS?” Langdon wondered aloud. “Maybe the projector has a tracking device in it?”

Sienna shook her head. “Believe me, if that thing were traceable, the police would be

right on top of us.”

Langdon shifted his tall frame, trying to get comfortable in the cramped surroundings.

He found himself face-to-face with a collage of elegantly styled graffiti scrawled on the

back of the Porta-Potty.

Leave it to the Italians.

Most American Porta-Potties were covered with sophomoric cartoons that vaguely

resembled huge breasts or penises. The graffiti on this one, however, looked more like an

art student’s sketchbook—a human eye, a well-rendered hand, a man in profile, and a

fantastical dragon.

“Destruction of property doesn’t look like this everywhere in Italy,” Sienna said,

apparently reading his mind. “The Florence Art Institute is on the other side of this stone

wall.”

As if to confirm Sienna’s statement, a group of students appeared in the distance,

ambling toward them with art portfolios under their arms. They were chatting, lighting

cigarettes, and puzzling over the roadblock in front of them at the Porta Romana.

Langdon and Sienna crouched lower to stay out of sight of the students, and as they

did so, Langdon was struck, most unexpectedly, by a curious thought.

The half-buried sinners with their legs in the air.

Perhaps it was on account of the smell of human waste, or possibly the recumbent

bicyclist with bare legs flailing in front of him, but whatever the stimulus, Langdon had

flashed on the putrid world of the Malebolge and the naked legs protruding upside down

from the earth.

He turned suddenly to his companion. “Sienna, in our version of La Mappa, the upside-

down legs were in the tenth ditch, right? The lowest level of the Malebolge?”

Sienna gave him an odd look, as if this were hardly the time. “Yes, at the bottom.”

For a split second Langdon was back in Vienna giving his lecture. He was standing

onstage, only moments from his grand finale, having just shown the audience Doré’s

engraving of Geryon—the winged monster with a poisonous stinging tail that lived just

above the Malebolge.

“Before we meet Satan,” Langdon declared, his deep voice resonating over the

loudspeakers, “we must pass through the ten ditches of the Malebolge, in which are

punished the fraudulent—those guilty of deliberate evil.”

Langdon advanced slides to show a detail of the Malebolge and then took the audience

down through the ditches one by one. “From top to bottom we have: the seducers

whipped by demons … the flatterers adrift in human excrement … the clerical profiteers

half buried upside down with their legs in the air … the sorcerers with their heads twisted

backward … the corrupt politicians in boiling pitch … the hypocrites wearing heavy leaden

cloaks … the thieves bitten by snakes … the fraudulent counselors consumed by fire … the

sowers of discord hacked apart by demons … and finally, the liars, who are diseased

beyond recognition.” Langdon turned back to the audience. “Dante most likely reserved

this final ditch for the liars because a series of lies told about him led to his exile from his

beloved Florence.”

“Robert?” The voice was Sienna’s.

Langdon snapped back to the present.

Sienna was staring at him quizzically. “What is it?”

“Our version of La Mappa,” he said excitedly. “The art has been changed!” He fished

the projector out of his jacket pocket and shook it as best as he could in the close

quarters. The agitator ball rattled loudly, but all the sirens drowned it out. “Whoever

created this image reconfigured the order of the levels in the Malebolge!”

When the device began to glow, Langdon pointed it at the flat surface before them. La

Mappa dell’Inferno appeared, glowing brightly in the dim light.

Botticelli on a chemical toilet, Langdon thought, ashamed. This had to be the least

elegant place a Botticelli had ever been displayed. Langdon ran his eyes down through

the ten ditches and began nodding excitedly.

“Yes!” he exclaimed. “This is wrong! The last ditch of the Malebolge is supposed to be

full of diseased people, not people upside down. The tenth level is for the liars, not the

clerical profiteers!”

Sienna looked intrigued. “But … why would someone change that?”

“Catrovacer,” Langdon whispered, eyeing the little letters that had been added to each

level. “I don’t think that’s what this really says.”

Despite the injury that had erased Langdon’s recollections of the last two days, he

could now feel his memory working perfectly. He closed his eyes and held the two

versions of La Mappa in his mind’s eye to analyze their differences. The changes to the

Malebolge were fewer than Langdon had imagined … and yet he felt like a veil had

suddenly been lifted.

Suddenly it was crystal clear.

Seek and ye shall find!

“What is it?” Sienna demanded.

Langdon’s mouth felt dry. “I know why I’m here in Florence.”

“You do?!”

“Yes, and I know where I’m supposed to go.”

Sienna grabbed his arm. “Where?!”

Langdon felt as if his feet had just touched solid ground for the first time since he’d

awoken in the hospital. “These ten letters,” he whispered. “They actually point to a

precise location in the old city. That’s where the answers are.”

“Where in the old city?!” Sienna demanded. “What did you figure out?”

The sounds of laughing voices echoed on the other side of the Porta-Potty. Another

group of art students was passing by, joking and chatting in various languages. Langdon

peered cautiously around the cubicle, watching them go. Then he scanned for police.

“We’ve got to keep moving. I’ll explain on the way.”

“On the way?!” Sienna shook her head. “We’ll never get through the Porta Romana!”

“Stay here for thirty seconds,” he told her, “and then follow my lead.”

With that, Langdon slipped away, leaving his newfound friend bewildered and alone.

CHAPTER 21

“SCUSI!” ROBERT LANGDON chased after the group of students. “Scusate!”

They all turned, and Langdon made a show of glancing around like a lost tourist.

“Dov’è l’Istituto statale d’arte?” Langdon asked in broken Italian.

A tattooed kid puffed coolly on a cigarette and snidely replied, “Non parliamo italiano.”

His accent was French.

One of the girls admonished her tattooed friend and politely pointed down the long wall

toward the Porta Romana. “Più avanti, sempre dritto.”

Straight ahead, Langdon translated. “Grazie.”

On cue, Sienna emerged unseen from behind the Porta-Potty and walked over. The

willowy thirty-two-year-old approached the group and Langdon placed a welcoming hand

on her shoulder. “This is my sister, Sienna. She’s an art teacher.”

The tattooed kid muttered, “T-I-L-F,” and his male friends laughed.

Langdon ignored them. “We’re in Florence researching possible spots for a teaching

year abroad. Can we walk in with you?”

“Ma certo,” the Italian girl said with a smile.

As the group migrated toward the police at the Porta Romana, Sienna fell into

conversation with the students while Langdon merged to the middle of the group,

slouching low, trying to stay out of sight.

Seek and ye shall find, Langdon thought, his pulse racing with excitement as he

pictured the ten ditches of the Malebolge.

Catrovacer. These ten letters, Langdon had realized, stood at the core of one of the art

world’s most enigmatic mysteries, a centuries-old puzzle that had never been solved. In

1563, these ten letters had been used to spell a message high on a wall inside Florence’s

famed Palazzo Vecchio, painted some forty feet off the ground, barely visible without

binoculars. It had remained hidden there in plain sight for centuries until the 1970s, when

it was spotted by a now-famous art diagnostician, who had spent decades trying to

uncover its meaning. Despite numerous theories, the significance of the message remains

an enigma to this day.

For Langdon, the code felt like familiar ground—a safe harbor from this strange and

churning sea. After all, art history and ancient secrets were far more Langdon’s realm

than were biohazard tubes and gunfire.

Up ahead, additional police cars had begun streaming into the Porta Romana.

“Jesus,” the tattooed kid said. “Whoever they’re looking for must have done something

terrible.”

The group arrived at the Art Institute’s main gate on the right, where a crowd of

students had gathered to watch the action at the Porta Romana. The school’s minimum-

wage security guard was halfheartedly glancing at student IDs as kids streamed in, but

he was clearly more interested in what was happening with the police.

A loud screech of brakes echoed across the plaza as an all-too-familiar black van

skidded into the Porta Romana.

Langdon didn’t need a second look.

Without a word, he and Sienna seized the moment, slipping through the gate with their

new friends.

The entry road to the Istituto Statale d’Arte was startlingly beautiful, almost regal in

appearance. Massive oak trees arched gently in from either side, creating a canopy that

framed the distant building—a huge, faded yellow structure with a triple portico and an

expansive oval lawn.

This building, Langdon knew, had been commissioned, like so many in this city, by the

same illustrious dynasty that had dominated Florentine politics during the fifteenth,

sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries.

The Medici.

The name alone had become a symbol of Florence. During its three-century reign, the

royal house of Medici amassed unfathomable wealth and influence, producing four popes,

two queens of France, and the largest financial institution in all of Europe. To this day,

modern banks use the accounting method invented by the Medici—the dual-entry system

of credits and debits.

The Medici’s greatest legacy, however, was not in finance or politics, but rather in art.

Perhaps the most lavish patrons the art world has ever known, the Medici provided a

generous stream of commissions that fueled the Renaissance. The list of luminaries

receiving Medici patronage ranged from da Vinci to Galileo to Botticelli—the latter’s most

famous painting, Birth of Venus, the result of a commission from Lorenzo de’ Medici, who

requested a sexually provocative painting to hang over his cousin’s marital bed as a

wedding gift.

Lorenzo de’ Medici—known in his day as Lorenzo the Magnificent on account of his

benevolence—was an accomplished artist and poet in his own right and was said to have

a superb eye. In 1489 Lorenzo took a liking to the work of a young Florentine sculptor

and invited the boy to move into the Medici palace, where he could practice his craft

surrounded by fine art, great poetry, and high culture. Under Medici tutelage, the

adolescent boy flourished and eventually went on to carve two of the most celebrated

sculptures in all of history—the Pietà and the David. Today we know him as Michelangelo

—a creative giant who is sometimes called the Medici’s greatest gift to humankind.

Considering the Medici’s passion for art, Langdon imagined the family would be pleased

to know that the building before him—originally built as the Medici’s primary horse

stables—had been transformed into the vibrant Art Institute. This tranquil site that now

inspired young artists had been specifically chosen for the Medici’s stables because of its

proximity to one of the most beautiful riding areas in all of Florence.

The Boboli Gardens.

Langdon glanced to his left, where a forest of treetops could be seen over a high wall.

The massive expanse of the Boboli Gardens was now a popular tourist attraction.

Langdon had little doubt that if he and Sienna could gain entrance to the gardens, they

could make their way across it, bypassing the Porta Romana undetected. After all, the

gardens were vast and had no shortage of hiding places—forests, labyrinths, grottoes,

nymphaea. More important, traversing the Boboli Gardens would eventually lead them to

the Palazzo Pitti, the stone citadel that once housed the main seat of the Medici grand

duchy, and whose 140 rooms remained one of Florence’s most frequented tourist

attractions.

If we can reach the Palazzo Pitti, Langdon thought, the bridge to the old city is a

stone’s throw away.

Langdon motioned as calmly as possible to the high wall that enclosed the gardens.

“How do we get into the gardens?” he asked. “I’d love to show my sister before we tour

the institute.”

The tattooed kid shook his head. “You can’t get into the gardens from here. The

entrance is way over at Pitti Palace. You’d have to drive through Porta Romana and go

around.”

“Bullshit,” Sienna blurted.

Everyone turned and stared at her, including Langdon.

“Come on,” she said, smirking coyly at the students as she stroked her blond ponytail.

“You’re telling me you guys don’t sneak into the gardens to smoke weed and fool

around?”

The kids all exchanged looks and then burst out laughing.

The guy with the tattoos now looked utterly smitten. “Ma’am, you should totally teach

here.” He walked Sienna to the side of the building and pointed around the corner to a

rear parking lot. “See that shed on the left? There’s an old platform behind it. Climb up on

the roof, and you can jump down on the other side of the wall.”

Sienna was already on the move. She glanced back at Langdon with a patronizing

smile. “Come on, brother Bob. Unless you’re too old to jump a fence?”

CHAPTER 22

THE SILVER-HAIRED WOMAN in the van leaned her head against the bulletproof window and

closed her eyes. She felt like the world was spinning beneath her. The drugs they’d given

her made her feel ill.

I need medical attention, she thought.

Even so, the armed guard beside her had strict orders: her needs were to be ignored

until their task had been successfully completed. From the sounds of chaos around her, it

was clear that would be no time soon.

The dizziness was increasing now, and she was having trouble breathing. As she fought

off a new wave of nausea, she wondered how life had managed to deliver her to this

surreal crossroads. The answer was too complex to decipher in her current delirious state,

but she had no doubt where it had all begun.

New York.

Two years ago.

She had flown to Manhattan from Geneva, where she was serving as the director of the

World Health Organization, a highly coveted and prestigious post that she had held for

nearly a decade. A specialist in communicable disease and the epidemiology of

epidemics, she had been invited to the UN to deliver a lecture assessing the threat of

pandemic disease in third-world countries. Her talk had been upbeat and reassuring,

outlining several new early-detection systems and treatment plans devised by the World

Health Organization and others. She had received a standing ovation.

Following the lecture, while she was in the hall talking to some lingering academics, a

UN employee with a high-level diplomatic badge strode over and interrupted the

conversation.

“Dr. Sinskey, we have just been contacted by the Council on Foreign Relations. There is

someone there who would like to speak to you. A car is waiting outside.”

Puzzled and a bit unnerved, Dr. Elizabeth Sinskey excused herself and collected her

overnight bag. As her limo raced up First Avenue, she began to feel strangely nervous.

The Council on Foreign Relations?

Elizabeth Sinskey, like most, had heard the rumors.

Founded in the 1920s as a private think tank, the CFR had among its past membership

nearly every secretary of state, more than a half-dozen presidents, a majority of CIA

chiefs, senators, judges, as well as dynastic legends with names like Morgan, Rothschild,

and Rockefeller. The membership’s unparalleled collection of brainpower, political

influence, and wealth had earned the Council on Foreign Relations the reputation of being

“the most influential private club on earth.”

As director of the World Health Organization, Elizabeth was no stranger to rubbing

shoulders with the big boys. Her long tenure at WHO, combined with her outspoken

nature, had earned her a nod recently from a major newsmagazine that listed her among

its twenty most influential people in the world. The Face of World Health, they had

written beneath her photo, which Elizabeth found ironic considering she had been such a

sick child.

Suffering from severe asthma by age six, she had been treated with a high dose of a

promising new drug—the first of the world’s glucocorticoids, or steroid hormones—which

had cured her asthma symptoms in miraculous fashion. Sadly, the drug’s unanticipated

side effects had not emerged until years later when Sinskey passed through puberty …

and yet never developed a menstrual cycle. She would never forget the dark moment in

the doctor’s office, at nineteen, when she learned that the damage to her reproductive

system was permanent.

Elizabeth Sinskey could never have children.

Time will heal the emptiness, her doctor assured, but the sadness and anger only grew

inside her. Cruelly, the drugs that had robbed her of her ability to conceive a child had

failed to rob her of her animal instincts to do so. For decades, she had battled her

cravings to fulfill this impossible desire. Even now, at sixty-one years old, she still felt a

pang of hollowness every time she saw a mother and infant.

“It’s just ahead, Dr. Sinskey,” the limo driver announced.

Elizabeth ran a quick brush through her long silver ringlets and checked her face in the

mirror. Before she knew it, the car had stopped, and the driver was helping her out onto

the sidewalk in an affluent section of Manhattan.

“I’ll wait here for you,” the driver said. “We can go straight to the airport when you’re

ready.”

The New York headquarters of the Council on Foreign Relations was an unobtrusive

neoclassical building on the corner of Park and Sixty-eighth that had once been the home

of a Standard Oil tycoon. Its exterior blended seamlessly with the elegant landscape

surrounding it, offering no hint of its unique purpose.

“Dr. Sinskey,” a portly female receptionist greeted her. “This way, please. He’s

expecting you.”

Okay, but who is he? She followed the receptionist down a luxurious corridor to a

closed door, on which the woman gave a quick knock before opening it and motioning for

Elizabeth to enter.

She went in, and the door closed behind her.

The small, dark conference room was illuminated only by the glow of a video screen. In

front of the screen, a very tall and lanky silhouette faced her. Though she couldn’t make

out his face, she sensed power here.

“Dr. Sinskey,” the man’s sharp voice declared. “Thank you for joining me.” The man’s

tautly precise accent suggested Elizabeth’s homeland of Switzerland, or perhaps

Germany.

“Please sit,” he said, motioning to a chair near the front of the room.

No introductions? Elizabeth sat. The bizarre image being projected on the video screen

did nothing to calm her nerves. What in the world?

“I was at your presentation this morning,” declared the silhouette. “I came a long

distance to hear you speak. An impressive performance.”

“Thank you,” she replied.

“Might I also say you are much more beautiful than I imagined … despite your age and

your myopic view of world health.”

Elizabeth felt her jaw drop. The comment was offensive in all kinds of ways. “Excuse

me?” she demanded, peering into the darkness. “Who are you? And why have you called

me here?”

“Pardon my failed attempt at humor,” the lanky shadow replied. “The image on the

screen will explain why you’re here.”

Sinskey eyed the horrific visual—a painting depicting a vast sea of humanity, throngs of

sickly people, all climbing over one another in a dense tangle of naked bodies.

“The great artist Doré,” the man announced. “His spectacularly grim interpretation of

Dante Alighieri’s vision of hell. I hope it looks comfortable to you … because that’s where

we’re headed.” He paused, drifting slowly toward her. “And let me tell you why.”

He kept moving toward her, seeming to grow taller with every step. “If I were to take

this piece of paper and tear it in two …” He paused at a table, picked up a sheet of paper,

and ripped it loudly in half. “And then if I were to place the two halves on top of each

other …” He stacked the two halves. “And then if I were to repeat the process …” He

again tore the papers, stacking them. “I produce a stack of paper that is now four times

the thickness of the original, correct?” His eyes seemed to smolder in the darkness of the

room.

Elizabeth did not appreciate his condescending tone and aggressive posture. She said

nothing.

“Hypothetically speaking,” he continued, moving closer still, “if the original sheet of

paper is a mere one-tenth of a millimeter thick, and I were to repeat this process … say,

fifty times … do you know how tall this stack would be?”

Elizabeth bristled. “I do,” she replied with more hostility than she intended. “It would

be one-tenth of a millimeter times two to the fiftieth power. It’s called geometric

progression. Might I ask what I’m doing here?”

The man smirked and gave an impressed nod. “Yes, and can you guess what that

actual value might look like? One-tenth of a millimeter times two to the fiftieth power?

Do you know how tall our stack of paper has become?” He paused only an instant. “Our

stack of paper, after only fifty doublings, now reaches almost all the way … to the sun.”

Elizabeth was not surprised. The staggering power of geometric growth was something

she dealt with all the time in her work. Circles of contamination … replication of infected

cells … death-toll estimates. “I apologize if I seem naive,” she said, making no effort to

hide her annoyance. “But I’m missing your point.”

“My point?” He chuckled quietly. “My point is that the history of our human population

growth is even more dramatic. The earth’s population, like our stack of paper, had very

meager beginnings … but alarming potential.”

He was pacing again. “Consider this. It took the earth’s population thousands of years

—from the early dawn of man all the way to the early 1800s—to reach one billion people.

Then, astoundingly, it took only about a hundred years to double the population to two

billion in the 1920s. After that, it took a mere fifty years for the population to double

again to four billion in the 1970s. As you can imagine, we’re well on track to reach eight

billion very soon. Just today, the human race added another quarter-million people to

planet Earth. A quarter million. And this happens every day—rain or shine. Currently,

every year, we’re adding the equivalent of the entire country of Germany.”

The tall man stopped short, hovering over Elizabeth. “How old are you?”

Another offensive question, although as the head of the WHO, she was accustomed to

handling antagonism with diplomacy. “Sixty-one.”

“Did you know that if you live another nineteen years, until the age of eighty, you will

witness the population triple in your lifetime. One lifetime—a tripling. Think of the

implications. As you know, your World Health Organization has again increased its

forecasts, predicting there will be some nine billion people on earth before the midpoint

of this century. Animal species are going extinct at a precipitously accelerated rate. The

demand for dwindling natural resources is skyrocketing. Clean water is harder and harder

to come by. By any biological gauge, our species has exceeded our sustainable numbers.

And in the face of this disaster, the World Health Organization—the gatekeeper of the

planet’s health—is investing in things like curing diabetes, filling blood banks, battling

cancer.” He paused, staring directly at her. “And so I brought you here to ask you directly

why the hell the World Health Organization does not have the guts to deal with this issue

head-on?”

Elizabeth was seething now. “Whoever you are, you know damned well the WHO takes

overpopulation very seriously. Recently we spent millions of dollars sending doctors into

Africa to deliver free condoms and educate people about birth control.”

“Ah, yes!” the lanky man derided. “And an even bigger army of Catholic missionaries

marched in on your heels and told the Africans that if they used the condoms, they’d all

go to hell. Africa has a new environmental issue now—landfills overflowing with unused

condoms.”

Elizabeth strained to hold her tongue. He was correct on this point, and yet modern

Catholics were starting to fight back against the Vatican’s meddling in reproductive

issues. Most notably, Melinda Gates, a devout Catholic herself, had bravely risked the

wrath of her own church by pledging $560 million to help improve access to birth control

around the world. Elizabeth Sinskey had gone on record many times saying that Bill and

Melinda Gates deserved to be canonized for all they’d done through their foundation to

improve world health. Sadly, the only institution capable of conferring sainthood

somehow failed to see the Christian nature of their efforts.

“Dr. Sinskey,” the shadow continued. “What the World Health Organization fails to

recognize is that there is only one global health issue.” He pointed again to the grim

image on the screen—a sea of tangled, cloying humanity. “And this is it.” He paused. “I

realize you are a scientist, and therefore perhaps not a student of the classics or the fine

arts, so let me offer another image that may speak to you in a language you can better

understand.”

The room went dark for an instant, and the screen refreshed.

The new image was one Elizabeth had seen many times … and it always brought an

eerie sense of inevitability.

A heavy silence settled in the room.

“Yes,” the lanky man finally said. “Silent terror is an apt response to this graph. Seeing

it is a bit like staring into the headlight of an oncoming locomotive.” Slowly, the man

turned to Elizabeth and gave her a tight, condescending smile. “Any questions, Dr.

Sinskey?”

“Just one,” she fired back. “Did you bring me here to lecture me or insult me?”

“Neither.” His voice turned eerily cajoling. “I brought you here to work with you. I have

no doubt you understand that overpopulation is a health issue. But what I fear you don’t

understand is that it will affect the very soul of man. Under the stress of overpopulation,

those who have never considered stealing will become thieves to feed their families.

Those who have never considered killing will kill to provide for their young. All of Dante’s

deadly sins—greed, gluttony, treachery, murder, and the rest—will begin percolating …

rising up to the surface of humanity, amplified by our evaporating comforts. We are facing

a battle for the very soul of man.”

“I’m a biologist. I save lives … not souls.”

“Well, I can assure you that saving lives will become increasingly difficult in the coming

years. Overpopulation breeds far more than spiritual discontent. There is a passage in

Machiavelli—”

“Yes,” she interrupted, reciting her recollection of the famous quote. “ ‘When every

province of the world so teems with inhabitants that they can neither subsist where they

are nor remove themselves elsewhere … the world will purge itself.’ ” She stared up at

him. “All of us at the WHO are familiar with that quotation.”

“Good, then you know that Machiavelli went on to talk about plagues as the world’s

natural way of self-purging.”

“Yes, and as I mentioned in my talk, we are well aware of the direct correlation

between population density and the likelihood of wide-scale epidemics, but we are

constantly devising new detection and treatment methods. The WHO remains confident

that we can prevent future pandemics.”

“That’s a pity.”

Elizabeth stared in disbelief. “I beg your pardon?!”

“Dr. Sinskey,” the man said with a strange laugh, “you talk about controlling epidemics

as if it’s a good thing.”

She gaped up at the man in mute disbelief.

“There you have it,” the lanky man declared, sounding like an attorney resting his case.

“Here I stand with the head of the World Health Organization—the best the WHO has to

offer. A terrifying thought if you consider it. I have shown you this image of impending

misery.” He refreshed the screen, again displaying the image of the bodies. “I have

reminded you of the awesome power of unchecked population growth.” He pointed to his

small stack of paper. “I have enlightened you about the fact that we are on the brink of a

spiritual collapse.” He paused and turned directly toward her. “And your response? Free

condoms in Africa.” The man gave a derisive sneer. “This is like swinging a flyswatter at

an incoming asteroid. The time bomb is no longer ticking. It has already gone off, and

without drastic measures, exponential mathematics will become your new God … and ‘He’

is a vengeful God. He will bring to you Dante’s vision of hell right outside on Park Avenue

… huddled masses wallowing in their own excrement. A global culling orchestrated by

Nature herself.”

“Is that so?” Elizabeth snapped. “So tell me, in your vision of a sustainable future, what

is the ideal population of earth? What is the magic number at which humankind can hope

to sustain itself indefinitely … and in relative comfort?”

The tall man smiled, clearly appreciating the question. “Any environmental biologist or

statistician will tell you that humankind’s best chance of long-term survival occurs with a

global population of around four billion.”

“Four billion?” Elizabeth fired back. “We’re at seven billion now, so it’s a little late for

that.”

The tall man’s green eyes flashed fire. “Is it?”

CHAPTER 23

ROBERT LANGDON LANDED hard on the spongy earth just inside the retaining wall of the Boboli

Gardens’ heavily wooded southern edge. Sienna landed beside him and stood up,

brushing herself off and taking in their surroundings.

They were standing in a glade of moss and ferns on the edge of a small forest. From

here, the Palazzo Pitti was entirely obscured from view, and Langdon sensed they were

about as far from the palace as one could get in the gardens. At least there were no

workers or tourists out this far at this early hour.

Langdon gazed at a peastone pathway that wound gracefully downhill into the forest

before them. At the point where the path disappeared into the trees, a marble statue had

been perfectly situated to receive the eye. Langdon was not surprised. The Boboli

Gardens had enjoyed the exceptional design talents of Niccolò Tribolo, Giorgio Vasari,

and Bernardo Buontalenti—a brain trust of aesthetic talent that had created on this 111-

acre canvas a walkable masterpiece.

“If we head northeast, we’ll reach the palace,” Langdon said, pointing down the path.

“We can mix there with the tourists and exit unseen. I’m guessing it opens at nine.”

Langdon glanced down to check the time but saw only his bare wrist where his Mickey

Mouse watch had once been strapped. He wondered absently if it was still at the hospital

with the rest of his clothing and if he’d ever be able to retrieve it.

Sienna planted her feet defiantly. “Robert, before we take another step, I want to know

where we’re going. What did you figure out back there? The Malebolge? You said it was

out of sequence?”

Langdon motioned toward a wooded area just ahead. “Let’s get out of sight first.” He

led her down a pathway that curled into an enclosed hollow—a “room,” in the parlance of

landscape architecture—where there were some faux-bois benches and a small fountain.

The air beneath the trees was decidedly colder.

Langdon took the projector from his pocket and began shaking it. “Sienna, whoever

created this digital image not only added letters to the sinners in the Malebolge, but he

also changed the order of the sins.” He hopped up on the bench, towering over Sienna,

and aimed the projector down at his feet. Botticelli’s Mappa dell’Inferno materialized

faintly on the flat bench top beside Sienna.

Langdon motioned to the tiered area at the bottom of the funnel. “See the letters in

the ten ditches of the Malebolge?”

Sienna found them on the projection and read from top to bottom. “Catrovacer.”

“Right. Meaningless.”

“But then you realized the ten ditches had been shuffled around?”

“Easier than that, actually. If these levels were a deck of ten cards, the deck was not so

much shuffled as simply cut once. After the cut, the cards remain in the correct order, but

they start with the wrong card.” Langdon pointed down at the ten ditches of the

Malebolge. “According to Dante’s text, our top level should be the seducers whipped by

demons. And yet, in this version, the seducers appear … way down in the seventh ditch.”

Sienna studied the now-fading image beside her and nodded. “Okay, I see that. The

first ditch is now the seventh.”

Langdon pocketed the projector and jumped back down onto the pathway. He grabbed

a small stick and began scratching letters on a patch of dirt just off the path. “Here are

the letters as they appear in our modified version of hell.”

C

A

T

R

O

V

A

C

E

R

“Catrovacer,” Sienna read.

“Yes. And here is where the ‘deck’ was cut.” Langdon now drew a line beneath the

seventh letter and waited while Sienna studied his handiwork.

C

A

T

R

O

V

A

—

C

E

R

“Okay,” she said quickly. “Catrova. Cer.”

“Yes, and to put the cards back in order, we simply uncut the deck and place the

bottom on top. The two halves swap places.”

Sienna eyed the letters. “Cer. Catrova.” She shrugged, looking unimpressed. “Still

meaningless …”

“Cer catrova,” Langdon repeated. After a pause, he said the words again, eliding them

together. “Cercatrova.” Finally, he said them with a pause in the middle. “Cerca … trova.”

Sienna gasped audibly and her eyes shot up to meet Langdon’s.

“Yes,” Langdon said with a smile. “Cerca trova.”

The two Italian words cerca and trova literally meant “seek” and “find.” When

combined as a phrase—cerca trova—they were synonymous with the biblical aphorism

“Seek and ye shall find.”

“Your hallucinations!” Sienna exclaimed, breathless. “The woman with the veil! She

kept telling you to seek and find!” She jumped to her feet. “Robert, do you realize what

this means? It means the words cerca trova were already in your subconscious! Don’t you

see? You must have deciphered this phrase before you arrived at the hospital! You had

probably seen this projector’s image already … but had forgotten!”

She’s right, he realized, having been so fixated on the cipher itself that it never

occurred to him that he might have been through all of this already.

“Robert, you said earlier that La Mappa points to a specific location in the old city. But I

still don’t understand where.”

“Cerca trova doesn’t ring any bells for you?”

She shrugged.

Langdon smiled inwardly. Finally, something Sienna doesn’t know. “As it turns out, this

phrase points very specifically to a famous mural that hangs in the Palazzo Vecchio—

Giorgio Vasari’s Battaglia di Marciano in the Hall of the Five Hundred. Near the top of the

painting, barely visible, Vasari painted the words cerca trova in tiny letters. Plenty of

theories exist as to why he did this, but no conclusive proof has ever been discovered.”

The high-pitched whine of a small aircraft suddenly buzzed overhead, streaking in out

of nowhere and skimming the wooded canopy just above them. The sound was very

close, and Langdon and Sienna froze as the craft raced past.

As the aircraft departed, Langdon peered up at it through the trees. “Toy helicopter,”

he said, exhaling as he watched the three-foot-long, radio-controlled chopper banking in

the distance. It sounded like a giant, angry mosquito.

Sienna, however, still looked wary. “Stay down.”

Sure enough, the little chopper banked fully and was now coming back their way,

skimming the treetops, sailing past them again, this time off to their left above another

glade.

“That’s not a toy,” she whispered. “It’s a reconnaissance drone. Probably has a video

camera on board sending live images back to … somebody.”

Langdon’s jaw tightened as he watched the chopper streak off in the direction from

which it had appeared—the Porta Romana and the Art Institute.

“I don’t know what you did,” Sienna said, “but some powerful people are clearly very

eager to find you.”

The helicopter banked yet again and began a slow pass along the perimeter wall they

had just jumped.

“Someone at the Art Institute must have seen us and said something,” Sienna said,

heading down the path. “We’ve got to get out of here. Now.”

As the drone buzzed away toward the far end of the gardens, Langdon used his foot to

erase the letters he’d written on the pathway and then hurried after Sienna. His mind

swirled with thoughts of cerca trova, the Giorgio Vasari mural, as well as with Sienna’s

revelation that Langdon must have already deciphered the projector’s message. Seek and

ye shall find.

Suddenly, just as they entered a second glade, a startling thought hit Langdon. He

skidded to a stop on the wooded path, a bemused look on his face.

Sienna stopped, too. “Robert? What is it?!”

“I’m innocent,” he declared.

“What are you talking about?”

“The people chasing me … I assumed it was because I had done something terrible.”

“Yes, at the hospital you kept repeating ‘very sorry.’ ”

“I know. But I thought I was speaking English.”

Sienna looked at him with surprise. “You were speaking English!”

Langdon’s blue eyes were now filled with excitement. “Sienna, when I kept saying ‘very

sorry,’ I wasn’t apologizing. I was mumbling about the secret message in the mural at

Palazzo Vecchio!” He could still hear the recording of his own delirious voice. Ve … sorry.

Ve … sorry.

Sienna looked lost.

“Don’t you see?!” Langdon was grinning now. “I wasn’t saying ‘very sorry, very sorry.’ I

was saying the artist’s name—Va … sari, Vasari!”

CHAPTER 24

VAYENTHA HIT THE brakes hard.

Her motorcycle fishtailed, screeching loudly as it left a long skid mark on the Viale del

Poggio Imperiale, finally coming to an abrupt stop behind an unexpected line of traffic.

The Viale del Poggio was at a standstill.

I don’t have time for this!

Vayentha craned her neck over the cars, trying to see what was causing the holdup.

She had already been forced to drive in a wide circle to avoid the SRS team and all the

chaos at the apartment building, and now she needed to get into the old city to clear out

of the hotel room where she had been stationed for the last few days of this mission.

I’ve been disavowed—I need to get the hell out of town!

Her string of bad luck, however, seemed to be continuing. The route she had selected

into the old city appeared to be blocked. In no mood to wait, Vayentha revved the bike

off to one side of the traffic and sped along the narrow breakdown lane until she could

see the snarled intersection. Up ahead was a clogged rotary where six major

thoroughfares converged. This was the Porta Romana—one of Florence’s most trafficked

intersections—the gateway to the old city.

What the hell is going on here?!

Vayentha now saw that the entire area was swarming with police—a roadblock or

checkpoint of some sort. Moments later, she spotted something at the center of the

action that left her baffled—a familiar black van around which several black-clad agents

were calling out orders to the local authorities.

These men, without a doubt, were members of the SRS team, and yet Vayentha could

not imagine what they were doing here.

Unless …

Vayentha swallowed hard, scarcely daring to imagine the possibility. Has Langdon

eluded Brüder as well? It seemed unthinkable; the chances of escape had been near zero.

Then again, Langdon was not working alone, and Vayentha had experienced firsthand

how resourceful the blond woman could be.

Nearby, a police officer appeared, walking from car to car, showing a photo of a

handsome man with thick brown hair. Vayentha instantly recognized the photo as a press

shot of Robert Langdon. Her heart soared.

Brüder missed him …

Langdon is still in play!

An experienced strategist, Vayentha immediately began assessing how this

development changed her situation.

Option one—flee as required.

Vayentha had blown a critical job for the provost and had been disavowed because of

it. If she were lucky, she would face a formal inquiry and probable career termination. If,

however, she were unlucky and had underestimated the severity of her employer, she

might spend the rest of her life looking over her shoulder and wondering if the

Consortium was lurking just out of sight.

There is a second option now.

Complete your mission.

Staying on task was in direct opposition to her disavowal protocol, and yet with

Langdon still on the run, Vayentha now had the opportunity to continue with her original

directive.

If Brüder fails to catch Langdon, she thought, her pulse quickening. And if I succeed …

Vayentha knew it was a long shot, but if Langdon managed to elude Brüder entirely,

and if Vayentha could still step in and finish the job, she would single-handedly have

saved the day for the Consortium, and the provost would have no choice but to be

lenient.

I’ll keep my job, she thought. Probably even be promoted.

In a flash, Vayentha realized that her entire future now revolved around a single critical

undertaking. I must locate Langdon … before Brüder does.

It would not be easy. Brüder had at his disposal endless manpower as well as a vast

array of advanced surveillance technologies. Vayentha was working alone. She did,

however, possess one piece of information that Brüder, the provost, and the police did

not have.

I have a very good idea where Langdon will go.

Revving the throttle on her BMW, she spun it 180 degrees around and headed back the

way she came. Ponte alle Grazie, she thought, picturing the bridge to the north. There

existed more than one route into the old city.

CHAPTER 25

NOT AN APOLOGY, Langdon mused. An artist’s name.

“Vasari,” Sienna stammered, taking a full step backward on the path. “The artist who

hid the words cerca trova in his mural.”

Langdon couldn’t help but smile. Vasari. Vasari. In addition to shedding a ray of light on

his strange predicament, this revelation also meant Langdon was no longer wondering

what terrible thing he might have done … for which he had been profusely saying he was

very sorry.

“Robert, you clearly had seen this Botticelli image on the projector before you were

injured, and you knew it contained a code that pointed to Vasari’s mural. That’s why you

woke up and kept repeating Vasari’s name!”

Langdon tried to calculate what all of this meant. Giorgio Vasari—a sixteenth-century

artist, architect, and writer—was a man Langdon often referred to as “the world’s first art

historian.” Despite the hundreds of paintings Vasari created, and the dozens of buildings

he designed, his most enduring legacy was his seminal book, Lives of the Most Excellent

Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, a collection of biographies of Italian artists, which to

this day remains requisite reading for students of art history.

The words cerca trova had placed Vasari back in the mainstream consciousness about

thirty years ago when his “secret message” was discovered high on his sprawling mural in

the Palazzo Vecchio’s Hall of the Five Hundred. The tiny letters appeared on a green

battle flag, barely visible among the chaos of the war scene. While consensus had yet to

be reached as to why Vasari added this strange message to his mural, the leading theory

was that it was a clue to future generations of the existence of a lost Leonardo da Vinci

fresco hidden in a three-centimeter gap behind that wall.

Sienna was glancing nervously up through the trees. “There’s still one thing I don’t

understand. If you weren’t saying ‘very sorry, very sorry’ … then why are people trying to

kill you?”

Langdon had been wondering the same thing.

The distant buzz of the surveillance drone was getting louder again, and Langdon knew

the time had come for a decision. He failed to see how Vasari’s Battaglia di Marciano

could possibly relate to Dante’s Inferno, or the gunshot wound he had suffered the night

before, and yet he finally saw a tangible path before him.

Cerca trova.

Seek and find.

Again Langdon saw the silver-haired woman calling out to him from across the river.

Time is running out! If there were answers, Langdon sensed, they would be at the

Palazzo Vecchio.

He now flashed on an old adage from early Grecian free divers who hunted lobsters in

the coral caves of the Aegean Islands. When swimming into a dark tunnel, there arrives a

point of no return when you no longer have enough breath to double back. Your only

choice is to swim forward into the unknown … and pray for an exit.

Langdon wondered if they had reached that point.

He eyed the maze of garden pathways before them. If he and Sienna could reach the

Pitti Palace and exit the gardens, then the old city was just a short walk across the most

famous footbridge in the world—the Ponte Vecchio. It was always crowded and would

provide good cover. From there, the Palazzo Vecchio was only a few blocks away.

The drone hummed closer now, and Langdon felt momentarily overwhelmed by

exhaustion. The realization that he had not been saying “very sorry” left him feeling

conflicted about running from the police.

“Eventually, they’re going to catch me, Sienna,” Langdon said. “It might be better for

me to stop running.”

Sienna looked at him with alarm. “Robert, every time you stop, someone starts

shooting at you! You need to figure out what you’re involved in. You need to look at that

Vasari mural and hope it jars your memory. Maybe it will help you learn where this

projector came from and why you’re carrying it.”

Langdon pictured the spike-haired woman coldly killing Dr. Marconi … the soldiers firing

on them … the Italian military police gathering in the Porta Romana … and now a

surveillance drone tracking them through the Boboli Gardens. He fell silent, rubbing his

tired eyes as he considered his options.

“Robert?” Sienna’s voice rose. “There’s one other thing … something that didn’t seem

important, but now seems like it might be.”

Langdon raised his eyes, reacting to the gravity in her tone.

“I intended to tell you at the apartment,” she said, “but …”

“What is it?”

Sienna pursed her lips, looking uncomfortable. “When you arrived at the hospital, you

were delirious and trying to communicate.”

“Yes,” Langdon said, “mumbling ‘Vasari, Vasari.’ ”

“Yes, but before that … before we got out the recorder, in the first moments after you

arrived, you said one other thing I remember. You only said it once, but I’m positive I

understood.”

“What did I say?”

Sienna glanced up toward the drone and then back at Langdon. “You said, ‘I hold the

key to finding it … if I fail, then all is death.’ ”

Langdon could only stare.

Sienna continued. “I thought you were referring to the object in your jacket pocket, but

now I’m not so sure.”

If I fail, then all is death? The words hit Langdon hard. The haunting images of death

flickered before him … Dante’s inferno, the biohazard symbol, the plague doctor. Yet

again, the face of the beautiful silver-haired woman pleaded with him across the bloodred

river. Seek and find! Time is running out!

Sienna’s voice pulled him back. “Whatever this projector ultimately points to … or

whatever you’re trying to find, it must be something extremely dangerous. The fact that

people are trying to kill us …” Her voice cracked slightly, and she took a moment to

regroup. “Think about it. They just shot at you in broad daylight … shot at me—an

innocent bystander. Nobody seems to be looking to negotiate. Your own government

turned on you … you called them for help, and they sent someone to kill you.”

Langdon stared vacantly at the ground. Whether the U.S. Consulate had shared

Langdon’s location with the assassin, or whether the consulate itself had sent the

assassin, was irrelevant. The upshot was the same. My own government is not on my

side.

Langdon looked into Sienna’s brown eyes and saw bravery there. What have I gotten

her involved in? “I wish I knew what we were looking for. That would help put all of this

into perspective.”

Sienna nodded. “Whatever it is, I think we need to find it. At least it would give us

leverage.”

Her logic was hard to refute. Still Langdon felt something nagging at him. If I fail, then

all is death. All morning he’d been running up against macabre symbols of biohazards,

plagues, and Dante’s hell. Admittedly, he had no clear proof of what he was looking for,

but he would be naive not to consider at least the possibility that this situation involved a

deadly disease or large-scale biological threat. But if this were true, why would his own

government be trying to eliminate him?

Do they think I’m somehow involved in a potential attack?

It made no sense at all. There was something else going on here.

Langdon thought again of the silver-haired woman. “There’s also the woman from my

visions. I feel I need to find her.”

“Then trust your feelings,” Sienna said. “In your condition, the best compass you have

is your subconscious mind. It’s basic psychology—if your gut is telling you to trust that

woman, then I think you should do exactly what she keeps telling you to do.”

“Seek and find,” they said in unison.

Langdon exhaled, knowing his path was clear.

All I can do is keep swimming down this tunnel.

With hardening resolve, he turned and began taking in his surroundings, trying to get

his bearings. Which way out of the gardens?

They were standing beneath the trees at the edge of a wide-open plaza where several

paths intersected. In the distance to their left, Langdon spied an elliptical-shaped lagoon

with a small island adorned with lemon trees and statuary. The Isolotto, he thought,

recognizing the famous sculpture of Perseus on a half-submerged horse bounding through

the water.

“The Pitti Palace is that way,” Langdon said, pointing east, away from the Isolotto,

toward the garden’s main thoroughfare—the Viottolone, which ran east–west along the

entire length of the grounds. The Viottolone was as wide as a two-lane road and lined by

a row of slender, four-hundred-year-old cypress trees.

“There’s no cover,” Sienna said, eyeing the uncamouflaged avenue and motioning up at

the circling drone.

“You’re right,” Langdon said with a lopsided grin. “Which is why we’re taking the tunnel

beside it.”

He pointed again, this time to a dense hedgerow adjacent to the mouth of the

Viottolone. The wall of dense greenery had a small arched opening cut into it. Beyond the

opening, a slender footpath stretched out into the distance—a tunnel running parallel

with the Viottolone. It was enclosed on either side by a phalanx of pruned holm oaks,

which had been carefully trained since the 1600s to arch inward over the path,

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