Inferno

“Reestablish? I don’t—”

“Please, Professor, just listen. Everything will be made clear. I promise.”

Langdon settled back into the infirmary bed, his thoughts spinning as Dr. Sinskey continued.

“Agent Brüder and his men are an SRS team—Surveillance and Response Support. They work under the auspices of the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control.”

Langdon glanced over at the ECDC medallions on their uniforms. Disease Prevention and Control?

“His group,” she continued, “specializes in detecting and containing communicable-disease threats. Essentially, they are a SWAT team for the mitigation of acute, large-scale health risks. You were my main hope of locating the contagion Zobrist has created, and so when you vanished, I tasked the SRS team with locating you … I summoned them to Florence to support me.”

Langdon was stunned. “Those soldiers work for you?”

She nodded. “On loan from the ECDC. Last night, when you disappeared and stopped calling in, we thought something had happened to you. It was not until early this morning, when our tech support team saw that you had checked your Harvard e-mail account, that we knew you were alive. At that point our only explanation for your strange behavior was that you had switched sides … possibly having been offered large sums of money to locate the contagion for someone else.”

Langdon shook his head. “That’s preposterous!”

“Yes, it seemed an unlikely scenario, but it was the only logical explanation—and with the stakes being so high, we couldn’t take any chances. Of course, we never imagined you were suffering from amnesia. When our tech support saw your Harvard e-mail account suddenly activate, we tracked the computer IP address to the apartment in Florence and moved in. But you fled on a moped, with the woman, which increased our suspicions that you were now working for someone else.”

“We drove right past you!” Langdon choked. “I saw you in the back of a black van, surrounded by soldiers. I thought you were a captive. You seemed delirious, like they had drugged you.”

“You saw us?” Dr. Sinskey looked surprised. “Strangely, you’re right … they had medicated me.” She paused. “But only because I ordered them to.”

Langdon was now wholly confused. She told them to drug her?

“You may not remember this,” Sinskey said, “but as our C-130 landed in Florence, the pressure changed, and I suffered an episode of what is known as paroxysmal positional vertigo—a severely debilitating inner-ear condition that I’ve experienced in the past. It’s temporary and not serious, but it causes victims to become so dizzy and nauseated they can barely hold their heads up. Normally I’d go to bed and endure intense nausea, but we were facing the Zobrist crisis, and so I prescribed myself hourly injections of metoclopramide to keep me from vomiting. The drug has the serious side effect of causing intense drowsiness, but it enabled me at least to run operations by phone from the back of the van. The SRS team wanted to take me to a hospital, but I ordered them not to do so until we had completed our mission of reacquiring you. Fortunately, the vertigo finally passed during the flight up to Venice.”

Langdon slumped into the bed, unnerved. I’ve been running all day from the World Health Organization—the very people who recruited me in the first place.

“Now we have to focus, Professor,” Sinskey declared, her tone urgent. “Zobrist’s plague … do you have any idea where it is?” She gazed down at him with an expression of intense expectation. “We have very little time.”

It’s far away, Langdon wanted to say, but something stopped him. He glanced up at Brüder, a man who had fired a gun at him this morning and nearly strangled him a little while earlier. For Langdon, the ground had been shifting so quickly beneath him that he had no idea whom to believe anymore.

Sinskey leaned in, her expression still more intense. “We are under the impression that the contagion is here in Venice. Is that correct? Tell us where, and I’ll send a team ashore.”

Langdon hesitated.

“Sir!” Brüder barked impatiently. “You obviously know something … tell us where it is! Don’t you understand what’s about to happen?”

“Agent Brüder!” Sinskey spun angrily on the man. “That’s enough,” she commanded, then turned back to Langdon and spoke quietly. “Considering what you’ve been through, it’s entirely understandable that you’re disoriented, and uncertain whom to trust.” She paused, staring deep into his eyes. “But our time is short, and I’m asking you to trust me.”

“Can Langdon stand?” a new voice asked.

A small, well-tended man with a deep tan appeared in the doorway. He studied Langdon with a practiced calm, but Langdon saw danger in his eyes.

Sinskey motioned for Langdon to stand up. “Professor, this is a man with whom I’d prefer not to collaborate, but the situation is serious enough that we have no choice.”

Uncertain, Langdon swung his legs over the side of the bed and stood erect, taking a moment to get his balance back.

“Follow me,” the man said, moving toward the door. “There’s something you need to see.”

Langdon held his ground. “Who are you?”

The man paused and steepled his fingers. “Names are not important. You can call me the provost. I run an organization … which, I’m sorry to say, made the mistake of helping Bertrand Zobrist achieve his goals. Now I am trying to fix that mistake before it’s too late.”