Inferno: A Novel (14 page)

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.”

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.

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!”