Inferno (Page 127)

Is this how it all ends for me?

CHAPTER 83

I need air, Robert Langdon thought. A vista … anything.

The windowless fuselage felt as if it were closing in around him.

Of course, the strange tale of what had actually happened to him today was not helping at all. His brain throbbed with unanswered questions … most of them about Sienna.

Strangely, he missed her.

She was acting, he reminded himself. Using me.

Without a word, Langdon left the provost and walked toward the front of the plane. The cockpit door was open, and the natural light streaming through it pulled him like a beacon. Standing in the doorway, undetected by the pilots, Langdon let the sunlight warm his face. The wide-open space before him felt like manna from heaven. The clear blue sky looked so peaceful … so permanent.

Nothing is permanent, he reminded himself, still struggling to accept the potential catastrophe they were facing.

“Professor?” a quiet voice said behind him, and he turned.

Langdon took a startled step backward. Standing before him was Dr. Ferris. The last time Langdon had seen the man, he was writhing on the floor of St. Mark’s Basilica, unable to breathe. Now here he was in the aircraft leaning against the bulkhead, wearing a baseball cap, his face, covered in calamine lotion, a pasty pink. His chest and torso were heavily bandaged, and his breathing was shallow. If Ferris had the plague, nobody seemed too concerned that he was going to spread it.

“You’re … alive?” Langdon said, staring at the man.

Ferris gave a tired nod. “More or less.” The man’s demeanor had changed dramatically, seeming far more relaxed.

“But I thought—” Langdon stopped. “Actually … I’m not sure what to think anymore.”

Ferris gave him an empathetic smile. “You’ve heard a lot of lies today. I thought I’d take a moment to apologize. As you may have guessed, I don’t work for the WHO, and I didn’t go to recruit you in Cambridge.”

Langdon nodded, too tired to be surprised by anything at this point. “You work for the provost.”

“I do. He sent me in to offer emergency field support to you and Sienna … and help you escape the SRS team.”

“Then I guess you did your job perfectly,” Langdon said, recalling how Ferris had shown up at the baptistry, convinced Langdon he was a WHO employee, and then facilitated his and Sienna’s transportation out of Florence and away from Sinskey’s team. “Obviously you’re not a doctor.”

The man shook his head. “No, but I played that part today. My job was to help Sienna keep the illusion going so you could figure out where the projector was pointing. The provost was intent on finding Zobrist’s creation so he could protect it from Sinskey.”

“You had no idea it was a plague?” Langdon said, still curious about Ferris’s strange rash and internal bleeding.

“Of course not! When you mentioned the plague, I figured it was just a story Sienna had told you to keep you motivated. So I played along. I got us all onto the train to Venice … and then, everything changed.”

“How so?”

“The provost saw Zobrist’s bizarre video.”

That could do it. “He realized Zobrist was a madman.”

“Exactly. The provost suddenly comprehended what the Consortium had been involved in, and he was horrified. He immediately demanded to speak to the person who knew Zobrist best—FS-2080—to see if she knew what Zobrist had done.”

“FS-2080?”

“Sorry, Sienna Brooks. That was the code name she chose for this operation. It’s apparently a Transhumanist thing. And the provost had no way to reach Sienna except through me.”

“The phone call on the train,” Langdon said. “Your ‘ailing mother.’ ”

“Well, I obviously couldn’t take the provost’s call in front of you, so I stepped out. He told me about the video, and I was terrified. He was hoping Sienna had been duped as well, but when I told him you and Sienna had been talking about plagues and seemed to have no intention of breaking off the mission, he knew Sienna and Zobrist were in this together. Sienna instantly became an adversary. He told me to keep him abreast of our position in Venice … and that he was sending in a team to detain her. Agent Brüder’s team almost had her at St. Mark’s Basilica … but she managed to escape.”

Langdon stared blankly at the floor, still able to see Sienna’s pretty brown eyes gazing down at him before she fled.

I’m so sorry, Robert. For everything.

“She’s tough,” the man said. “You probably didn’t see her attack me at the basilica.”

“Attack you?”

“Yes, when the soldiers entered, I was about to shout out and reveal Sienna’s location, but she must have sensed it coming. She drove the heel of her hand straight into the center of my chest.”

“What?!”

“I didn’t know what hit me. Some kind of martial-arts move, I guess. Because I was already badly bruised there, the pain was excruciating. It took me five minutes to get my wind back. Sienna dragged you out onto the balcony before any witnesses could reveal what had happened.”

Stunned, Langdon thought back to the elderly Italian woman who had shouted at Sienna—“L’hai colpito al petto!”—and made a forceful motion of her fist on her own chest.

I can’t! Sienna had replied. CPR will kill him! Look at his chest!

As Langdon replayed the scene in his mind, he realized just how quickly Sienna Brooks thought on her feet. Sienna had cleverly mistranslated the old woman’s Italian. L’hai colpito al petto was not a suggestion that Sienna apply chest compressions … it was an angry accusation: You punched him in the chest!