Inferno (Page 70)

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.

CHAPTER 50

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.”