by Dan Brown
“Is that so?” Elizabeth snapped. “So tell me, in your vision of a sustainable future, what is the ideal population of earth? What is the magic number at which humankind can hope to sustain itself indefinitely … and in relative comfort?”
The tall man smiled, clearly appreciating the question. “Any environmental biologist or statistician will tell you that humankind’s best chance of long-term survival occurs with a global population of around four billion.”
“Four billion?” Elizabeth fired back. “We’re at seven billion now, so it’s a little late for that.”
The tall man’s green eyes flashed fire. “Is it?”
CHAPTER 23
Robert Langdon landed hard on the spongy earth just inside the retaining wall of the Boboli Gardens’ heavily wooded southern edge. Sienna landed beside him and stood up, brushing herself off and taking in their surroundings.
They were standing in a glade of moss and ferns on the edge of a small forest. From here, the Palazzo Pitti was entirely obscured from view, and Langdon sensed they were about as far from the palace as one could get in the gardens. At least there were no workers or tourists out this far at this early hour.
Langdon gazed at a peastone pathway that wound gracefully downhill into the forest before them. At the point where the path disappeared into the trees, a marble statue had been perfectly situated to receive the eye. Langdon was not surprised. The Boboli Gardens had enjoyed the exceptional design talents of Niccolò Tribolo, Giorgio Vasari, and Bernardo Buontalenti—a brain trust of aesthetic talent that had created on this 111-acre canvas a walkable masterpiece.
“If we head northeast, we’ll reach the palace,” Langdon said, pointing down the path. “We can mix there with the tourists and exit unseen. I’m guessing it opens at nine.”
Langdon glanced down to check the time but saw only his bare wrist where his Mickey Mouse watch had once been strapped. He wondered absently if it was still at the hospital with the rest of his clothing and if he’d ever be able to retrieve it.
Sienna planted her feet defiantly. “Robert, before we take another step, I want to know where we’re going. What did you figure out back there? The Malebolge? You said it was out of sequence?”
Langdon motioned toward a wooded area just ahead. “Let’s get out of sight first.” He led her down a pathway that curled into an enclosed hollow—a “room,” in the parlance of landscape architecture—where there were some faux-bois benches and a small fountain. The air beneath the trees was decidedly colder.
Langdon took the projector from his pocket and began shaking it. “Sienna, whoever created this digital image not only added letters to the sinners in the Malebolge, but he also changed the order of the sins.” He hopped up on the bench, towering over Sienna, and aimed the projector down at his feet. Botticelli’s Mappa dell’Inferno materialized faintly on the flat bench top beside Sienna.
Langdon motioned to the tiered area at the bottom of the funnel. “See the letters in the ten ditches of the Malebolge?”
Sienna found them on the projection and read from top to bottom. “Catrovacer.”
“Right. Meaningless.”
“But then you realized the ten ditches had been shuffled around?”
“Easier than that, actually. If these levels were a deck of ten cards, the deck was not so much shuffled as simply cut once. After the cut, the cards remain in the correct order, but they start with the wrong card.” Langdon pointed down at the ten ditches of the Malebolge. “According to Dante’s text, our top level should be the seducers whipped by demons. And yet, in this version, the seducers appear … way down in the seventh ditch.”
Sienna studied the now-fading image beside her and nodded. “Okay, I see that. The first ditch is now the seventh.”
Langdon pocketed the projector and jumped back down onto the pathway. He grabbed a small stick and began scratching letters on a patch of dirt just off the path. “Here are the letters as they appear in our modified version of hell.”
“Catrovacer,” Sienna read.
“Yes. And here is where the ‘deck’ was cut.” Langdon now drew a line beneath the seventh letter and waited while Sienna studied his handiwork.
“Okay,” she said quickly. “Catrova. Cer.”
“Yes, and to put the cards back in order, we simply uncut the deck and place the bottom on top. The two halves swap places.”
Sienna eyed the letters. “Cer. Catrova.” She shrugged, looking unimpressed. “Still meaningless …”
“Cer catrova,” Langdon repeated. After a pause, he said the words again, eliding them together. “Cercatrova.” Finally, he said them with a pause in the middle. “Cerca … trova.”
Sienna gasped audibly and her eyes shot up to meet Langdon’s.
“Yes,” Langdon said with a smile. “Cerca trova.”
The two Italian words cerca and trova literally meant “seek” and “find.” When combined as a phrase—cerca trova—they were synonymous with the biblical aphorism “Seek and ye shall find.”
“Your hallucinations!” Sienna exclaimed, breathless. “The woman with the veil! She kept telling you to seek and find!” She jumped to her feet. “Robert, do you realize what this means? It means the words cerca trova were already in your subconscious! Don’t you see? You must have deciphered this phrase before you arrived at the hospital! You had probably seen this projector’s image already … but had forgotten!”
She’s right, he realized, having been so fixated on the cipher itself that it never occurred to him that he might have been through all of this already.
“Robert, you said earlier that La Mappa points to a specific location in the old city. But I still don’t understand where.”
“Cerca trova doesn’t ring any bells for you?”
She shrugged.
Langdon smiled inwardly. Finally, something Sienna doesn’t know. “As it turns out, this phrase points very specifically to a famous mural that hangs in the Palazzo Vecchio—Giorgio Vasari’s Battaglia di Marciano in the Hall of the Five Hundred. Near the top of the painting, barely visible, Vasari painted the words cerca trova in tiny letters. Plenty of theories exist as to why he did this, but no conclusive proof has ever been discovered.”
The high-pitched whine of a small aircraft suddenly buzzed overhead, streaking in out of nowhere and skimming the wooded canopy just above them. The sound was very close, and Langdon and Sienna froze as the craft raced past.
As the aircraft departed, Langdon peered up at it through the trees. “Toy helicopter,” he said, exhaling as he watched the three-foot-long, radio-controlled chopper banking in the distance. It sounded like a giant, angry mosquito.
Sienna, however, still looked wary. “Stay down.”
Sure enough, the little chopper banked fully and was now coming back their way, skimming the treetops, sailing past them again, this time off to their left above another glade.
“That’s not a toy,” she whispered. “It’s a reconnaissance drone. Probably has a video camera on board sending live images back to … somebody.”
Langdon’s jaw tightened as he watched the chopper streak off in the direction from which it had appeared—the Porta Romana and the Art Institute.
“I don’t know what you did,” Sienna said, “but some powerful people are clearly very eager to find you.”
The helicopter banked yet again and began a slow pass along the perimeter wall they had just jumped.
“Someone at the Art Institute must have seen us and said something,” Sienna said, heading down the path. “We’ve got to get out of here. Now.”
As the drone buzzed away toward the far end of the gardens, Langdon used his foot to erase the letters he’d written on the pathway and then hurried after Sienna. His mind swirled with thoughts of cerca trova, the Giorgio Vasari mural, as well as with Sienna’s revelation that Langdon must have already deciphered the projector’s message. Seek and ye shall find.
Suddenly, just as they entered a second glade, a startling though
t hit Langdon. He skidded to a stop on the wooded path, a bemused look on his face.
Sienna stopped, too. “Robert? What is it?!”
“I’m innocent,” he declared.
“What are you talking about?”
“The people chasing me … I assumed it was because I had done something terrible.”
“Yes, at the hospital you kept repeating ‘very sorry.’ ”
“I know. But I thought I was speaking English.”
Sienna looked at him with surprise. “You were speaking English!”
Langdon’s blue eyes were now filled with excitement. “Sienna, when I kept saying ‘very sorry,’ I wasn’t apologizing. I was mumbling about the secret message in the mural at Palazzo Vecchio!” He could still hear the recording of his own delirious voice. Ve … sorry. Ve … sorry.
Sienna looked lost.
“Don’t you see?!” Langdon was grinning now. “I wasn’t saying ‘very sorry, very sorry.’ I was saying the artist’s name—Va … sari, Vasari!”
CHAPTER 24
Vayentha hit the brakes hard.
Her motorcycle fishtailed, screeching loudly as it left a long skid mark on the Viale del Poggio Imperiale, finally coming to an abrupt stop behind an unexpected line of traffic. The Viale del Poggio was at a standstill.
I don’t have time for this!
Vayentha craned her neck over the cars, trying to see what was causing the holdup. She had already been forced to drive in a wide circle to avoid the SRS team and all the chaos at the apartment building, and now she needed to get into the old city to clear out of the hotel room where she had been stationed for the last few days of this mission.
I’ve been disavowed—I need to get the hell out of town!
Her string of bad luck, however, seemed to be continuing. The route she had selected into the old city appeared to be blocked. In no mood to wait, Vayentha revved the bike off to one side of the traffic and sped along the narrow breakdown lane until she could see the snarled intersection. Up ahead was a clogged rotary where six major thoroughfares converged. This was the Porta Romana—one of Florence’s most trafficked intersections—the gateway to the old city.
What the hell is going on here?!
Vayentha now saw that the entire area was swarming with police—a roadblock or checkpoint of some sort. Moments later, she spotted something at the center of the action that left her baffled—a familiar black van around which several black-clad agents were calling out orders to the local authorities.
These men, without a doubt, were members of the SRS team, and yet Vayentha could not imagine what they were doing here.
Unless …
Vayentha swallowed hard, scarcely daring to imagine the possibility. Has Langdon eluded Brüder as well? It seemed unthinkable; the chances of escape had been near zero. Then again, Langdon was not working alone, and Vayentha had experienced firsthand how resourceful the blond woman could be.
Nearby, a police officer appeared, walking from car to car, showing a photo of a handsome man with thick brown hair. Vayentha instantly recognized the photo as a press shot of Robert Langdon. Her heart soared.
Brüder missed him …
Langdon is still in play!
An experienced strategist, Vayentha immediately began assessing how this development changed her situation.
Option one—flee as required.
Vayentha had blown a critical job for the provost and had been disavowed because of it. If she were lucky, she would face a formal inquiry and probable career termination. If, however, she were unlucky and had underestimated the severity of her employer, she might spend the rest of her life looking over her shoulder and wondering if the Consortium was lurking just out of sight.
There is a second option now.
Complete your mission.
Staying on task was in direct opposition to her disavowal protocol, and yet with Langdon still on the run, Vayentha now had the opportunity to continue with her original directive.
If Brüder fails to catch Langdon, she thought, her pulse quickening. And if I succeed …
Vayentha knew it was a long shot, but if Langdon managed to elude Brüder entirely, and if Vayentha could still step in and finish the job, she would single-handedly have saved the day for the Consortium, and the provost would have no choice but to be lenient.
I’ll keep my job, she thought. Probably even be promoted.
In a flash, Vayentha realized that her entire future now revolved around a single critical undertaking. I must locate Langdon … before Brüder does.
It would not be easy. Brüder had at his disposal endless manpower as well as a vast array of advanced surveillance technologies. Vayentha was working alone. She did, however, possess one piece of information that Brüder, the provost, and the police did not have.
I have a very good idea where Langdon will go.
Revving the throttle on her BMW, she spun it 180 degrees around and headed back the way she came. Ponte alle Grazie, she thought, picturing the bridge to the north. There existed more than one route into the old city.
CHAPTER 25
Not an apology, Langdon mused. An artist’s name.
“Vasari,” Sienna stammered, taking a full step backward on the path. “The artist who hid the words cerca trova in his mural.”
Langdon couldn’t help but smile. Vasari. Vasari. In addition to shedding a ray of light on his strange predicament, this revelation also meant Langdon was no longer wondering what terrible thing he might have done … for which he had been profusely saying he was very sorry.
“Robert, you clearly had seen this Botticelli image on the projector before you were injured, and you knew it contained a code that pointed to Vasari’s mural. That’s why you woke up and kept repeating Vasari’s name!”
Langdon tried to calculate what all of this meant. Giorgio Vasari—a sixteenth-century artist, architect, and writer—was a man Langdon often referred to as “the world’s first art historian.” Despite the hundreds of paintings Vasari created, and the dozens of buildings he designed, his most enduring legacy was his seminal book, Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, a collection of biographies of Italian artists, which to this day remains requisite reading for students of art history.
The words cerca trova had placed Vasari back in the mainstream consciousness about thirty years ago when his “secret message” was discovered high on his sprawling mural in the Palazzo Vecchio’s Hall of the Five Hundred. The tiny letters appeared on a green battle flag, barely visible among the chaos of the war scene. While consensus had yet to be reached as to why Vasari added this strange message to his mural, the leading theory was that it was a clue to future generations of the existence of a lost Leonardo da Vinci fresco hidden in a three-centimeter gap behind that wall.
Sienna was glancing nervously up through the trees. “There’s still one thing I don’t understand. If you weren’t saying ‘very sorry, very sorry’ … then why are people trying to kill you?”
Langdon had been wondering the same thing.
The distant buzz of the surveillance drone was getting louder again, and Langdon knew the time had come for a decision. He failed to see how Vasari’s Battaglia di Marciano could possibly relate to Dante’s Inferno, or the gunshot wound he had suffered the night before, and yet he finally saw a tangible path before him.
Cerca trova.
Seek and find.
Again Langdon saw the silver-haired woman calling out to him from across the river. Time is running out! If there were answers, Langdon sensed, they would be at the Palazzo Vecchio.
He now flashed on an old adage from early Grecian free divers who hunted lobsters in the coral caves of the Aegean Islands. When swimming into a dark tunnel, there arrives a point of no return when you no longer have enough breath to double back. Your only choice is to swim forward into the unknown … and pray for an exit.
Langdon wondered if they had reached that point.
He eyed the maze of g
arden pathways before them. If he and Sienna could reach the Pitti Palace and exit the gardens, then the old city was just a short walk across the most famous footbridge in the world—the Ponte Vecchio. It was always crowded and would provide good cover. From there, the Palazzo Vecchio was only a few blocks away.
The drone hummed closer now, and Langdon felt momentarily overwhelmed by exhaustion. The realization that he had not been saying “very sorry” left him feeling conflicted about running from the police.
“Eventually, they’re going to catch me, Sienna,” Langdon said. “It might be better for me to stop running.”
Sienna looked at him with alarm. “Robert, every time you stop, someone starts shooting at you! You need to figure out what you’re involved in. You need to look at that Vasari mural and hope it jars your memory. Maybe it will help you learn where this projector came from and why you’re carrying it.”
Langdon pictured the spike-haired woman coldly killing Dr. Marconi … the soldiers firing on them … the Italian military police gathering in the Porta Romana … and now a surveillance drone tracking them through the Boboli Gardens. He fell silent, rubbing his tired eyes as he considered his options.
“Robert?” Sienna’s voice rose. “There’s one other thing … something that didn’t seem important, but now seems like it might be.”
Langdon raised his eyes, reacting to the gravity in her tone.
“I intended to tell you at the apartment,” she said, “but …”
“What is it?”
Sienna pursed her lips, looking uncomfortable. “When you arrived at the hospital, you were delirious and trying to communicate.”
“Yes,” Langdon said, “mumbling ‘Vasari, Vasari.’ ”
“Yes, but before that … before we got out the recorder, in the first moments after you arrived, you said one other thing I remember. You only said it once, but I’m positive I understood.”