Inferno: A Novel (33 page)

The unexpected vibration in the boards beneath Vayentha’s feet was just enough to cause her to turn slightly as she was firing. Even as her weapon discharged, she knew it was no longer pointed at Langdon.

Something was approaching behind her.

Approaching fast
.

Vayentha spun in place, swinging her weapon 180 degrees toward her attacker, and a flash of blond hair glinted in the darkness as someone collided with Vayentha at full speed. The gun hissed again, but the person had crouched below barrel level in order to apply a forceful upward body check.

Vayentha’s feet left the floor and her midsection crashed hard into the low railing of the viewing platform. As her torso was propelled out over
the railing, she flailed her arms, trying to grab onto anything to stop her fall, but it was too late. She went over the edge.

Vayentha fell through the darkness, bracing herself for the collision with the dusty floor that lay eight feet beneath the platform. Strangely, though, her landing was softer than she’d imagined … as if she had been caught by a cloth hammock, which now sagged beneath her weight.

Disoriented, Vayentha lay on her back and stared up at her attacker. Sienna Brooks was looking down at her over the railing. Stunned, Vayentha opened her mouth to speak, but suddenly, just beneath her, there was a loud ripping sound.

The cloth that was supporting her weight tore open.

Vayentha was falling again.

This time she fell for three very long seconds, during which she found herself staring upward at a ceiling that was covered with beautiful paintings. The painting directly above her—a massive circular canvas depicting Cosimo I encircled by cherubs on a heavenly cloud—now showed a jagged dark tear that cut through its center.

Then, with a sudden crash, Vayentha’s entire world vanished into blackness.

High above, frozen in disbelief, Robert Langdon peered through the torn
Apotheosis
into the cavernous space below. On the stone floor of the Hall of the Five Hundred, the spike-haired woman lay motionless, a dark pool of blood quickly spreading from her head. She still had the gun clutched in her hand.

Langdon raised his eyes to Sienna, who was also staring down, transfixed by the grim scene below. Sienna’s expression was one of utter shock. “I didn’t mean to …”

“You reacted on instinct,” Langdon whispered. “She was about to kill me.”

From down below, shouts of alarm filtered up through the torn canvas.

Gently, Langdon guided Sienna away from the railing. “We need to keep moving.”

In the secret study of Duchess Bianca Cappello, Agent Brüder had heard a sickening thud followed by a growing commotion in the Hall of the Five Hundred. He rushed to the grate in the wall and peered through it. The scene on the elegant stone floor below took him several seconds to process.

The pregnant museum administrator had arrived beside him at the grate, immediately covering her mouth in mute terror at the sight below—a crumpled figure surrounded by panicked tourists. As the woman’s gaze shifted slowly upward to the ceiling of the Hall of the Five Hundred, she let out a pained whimper. Brüder looked up, following her gaze to a circular ceiling panel—a painted canvas with a large tear across the center.

He turned to the woman. “How do we get up there!?”

At the other end of the building, Langdon and Sienna descended breathlessly from the attic and burst through a doorway. Within a matter of seconds, Langdon had found the small alcove, deftly hidden behind a crimson curtain. He had recalled it clearly from his secret passages tour.

The Duke of Athens Stairway
.

The sound of running footsteps and shouting seemed to be coming from all directions now, and Langdon knew their time was short. He pulled aside the curtain, and he and Sienna slipped through onto a small landing.

Without a word, they began to descend the stone staircase. The passage had been designed as a series of frighteningly narrow switchback stairs. The deeper they went, the tighter it seemed to get. Just as Langdon felt as if the walls were moving in to crush him, thankfully, they could go no farther.

Ground level
.

The space at the bottom of the stairs was a tiny stone chamber, and
although its exit had to be one of the smallest doors on earth, it was a welcome sight. Only about four feet high, the door was made of heavy wood with iron rivets and a heavy interior bolt to keep people out.

“I can hear street sounds beyond the door,” Sienna whispered, still looking shaken. “What’s on the other side?”

“The Via della Ninna,” Langdon replied, picturing the crowded pedestrian walkway. “But there may be police.”

“They won’t recognize us. They’ll be looking for a blond girl and a dark-haired man.”

Langdon eyed her strangely. “Which is precisely what we are …”

Sienna shook her head, a melancholy resolve crossing her face. “I didn’t want you to see me like this, Robert, but unfortunately it’s what I look like at the moment.” Abruptly, Sienna reached up and grabbed a handful of her blond hair. Then she yanked down, and all of her hair slid off in a single motion.

Langdon recoiled, startled both by the fact that Sienna wore a wig and by her altered appearance without it. Sienna Brooks was in fact totally bald, her bare scalp smooth and pale, like a cancer patient undergoing chemotherapy.
On top of it all, she’s ill?

“I know,” she said. “Long story. Now bend down.” She held up the wig, clearly intending to put it on Langdon’s head.

Is she serious?
Langdon halfheartedly bent over, and Sienna wedged the blond hair onto his head. The wig barely fit, but she arranged it as best as she could. Then she stepped back and assessed him. Not quite satisfied, she reached up, loosened his tie, and slipped the loop up onto his forehead, retightening it like a bandanna and securing the ill-fitting wig to his head.

Sienna now set to work on herself, rolling up her pant legs and pushing her socks down around her ankles. When she stood up, she had a sneer on her lips. The lovely Sienna Brooks was now a punk-rock skinhead. The former Shakespearean actress’s transformation was startling.

“Remember,” she said, “ninety percent of personal recognition is body language, so when you move, move like an aging rocker.”

Aging, I can do
, Langdon thought.
Rocker, I’m not so sure
.

Before Langdon could argue the point, Sienna had unbolted the tiny door and swung it open. She ducked low and exited onto the crowded cobblestone street. Langdon followed, nearly on all fours as he emerged into the daylight.

Aside from a few startled glances at the mismatched couple emerging from the tiny door in the foundation of Palazzo Vecchio, nobody gave
them a second look. Within seconds, Langdon and Sienna were moving east, swallowed up by the crowd.

The man in the Plume Paris eyeglasses picked at his bleeding skin as he snaked through the crowd, keeping a safe distance behind Robert Langdon and Sienna Brooks. Despite their clever disguises, he had spotted them emerging from the tiny door on the Via della Ninna and had immediately known who they were.

He had tailed them only a few blocks before he got winded, his chest aching acutely, forcing him to take shallow breaths. He felt like he’d been punched in the sternum.

Gritting his teeth against the pain, he forced his attention back to Langdon and Sienna as he continued to follow them through the streets of Florence.

The morning sun had fully risen now, casting long shadows down the narrow canyons that snaked between the buildings of old Florence. Shopkeepers had begun throwing open the metal grates that protected their shops and bars, and the air was heavy with the aromas of morning espresso and freshly baked cornetti.

Despite a gnawing hunger, Langdon kept moving.
I’ve got to find the mask … and see what’s hidden on the back
.

As Langdon led Sienna northward along the slender Via dei Leoni, he was having a hard time getting used to the sight of her bald head. Her radically altered appearance reminded him that he barely knew her. They were moving in the direction of Piazza del Duomo—the square where Ignazio Busoni had been found dead after placing his final phone call.

Robert
, Ignazio had managed to say, breathless.
What you seek is safely hidden. The gates are open to you, but you must hurry. Paradise Twenty-five. Godspeed
.

Paradise Twenty-five
, Langdon repeated to himself, still puzzled that Ignazio Busoni had recalled Dante’s text well enough to reference a specific canto off the top of his head. Something about that canto was apparently memorable to Busoni. Whatever it was, Langdon knew he would find out soon enough, as soon as he laid his hands on a copy of the text, which he could easily do at any number of locations up ahead.

His shoulder-length wig was beginning to itch now, and though he felt somewhat ridiculous in his disguise, he had to admit that Sienna’s impromptu styling had been an effective ruse. Nobody had given them a second look, not even the police reinforcements who had just rushed past them en route to the Palazzo Vecchio.

Sienna had been walking in total silence beside him for several minutes, and Langdon glanced over to make sure she was okay. She seemed miles away, probably trying to accept the fact that she had just killed the woman who had been chasing them.

“Lira for your thoughts,” he ventured lightly, hoping to pull her mind
from the image of the spike-haired woman lying dead on the palazzo floor.

Sienna emerged slowly from her contemplations. “I was thinking of Zobrist,” she said slowly. “Trying to recall anything else I might know about him.”

“And?”

She shrugged. “Most of what I know is from a controversial essay he wrote a few years ago. It really stayed with me. Among the medical community, it instantly went viral.” She winced. “Sorry, bad choice of words.”

Langdon gave a grim chuckle. “Go on.”

“His essay essentially declared that the human race was on the brink of extinction, and that unless we had a catastrophic event that precipitously decreased global population growth, our species would not survive another hundred years.”

Langdon turned and stared at her. “A single century?”

“It was a pretty stark thesis. The predicted time frame was substantially shorter than previous estimates, but it was supported by some very potent scientific data. He made a lot of enemies by declaring that all doctors should stop practicing medicine because extending the human life span was only exacerbating the population problem.”

Langdon now understood why the article spread wildly through the medical community.

“Not surprisingly,” Sienna continued, “Zobrist was immediately attacked from all sides—politicians, clergy, the World Health Organization—all of whom derided him as a doomsayer lunatic who was simply trying to cause panic. They took particular umbrage at his statement that today’s youth, if they chose to reproduce, would have offspring that literally would witness the end of the human race. Zobrist illustrated his point with a ‘Doomsday Clock,’ which showed that if the entire span of human life on earth were compressed into a single hour … we are now in its final seconds.”