by Dan Brown
‘Do not argue morals with me. You crossed a line when you made that specimen, and you have put this entire facility at risk. I’m trying to protect not only the jobs of the three thousand scientists who work here, but also your father’s reputation. Think about him. A man like your father does not deserve to be remembered as the creator of a weapon of mass destruction.’
Vittoria felt his spear hit home. I am the one who convinced my father to create that specimen. This is my fault!
When the door opened, Kohler was still talking. Vittoria stepped out of the elevator, pulled out her phone, and tried again.
Still no dial tone. Damn! She headed for the door.
‘Vittoria, stop.’ The director sounded asthmatic now, as he accelerated after her. ‘Slow down. We need to talk.’
‘Basta di parlare!’
‘Think of your father,’ Kohler urged. ‘What would he do?’
She kept going.
‘Vittoria, I haven’t been totally honest with you.’
Vittoria felt her legs slow.
‘I don’t know what I was thinking,’ Kohler said. ‘I was just trying to protect you. Just tell me what you want. We need to work together here.’
Vittoria came to a full stop halfway across the lab, but she did not turn. ‘I want to find the antimatter. And I want to know who killed my father.’ She waited.
Kohler sighed. ‘Vittoria, we already know who killed your father. I’m sorry.’
Now Vittoria turned. ‘You what?’
‘I didn’t know how to tell you. It’s a difficult—’
‘You know who killed my father?’
‘We have a very good idea, yes. The killer left somewhat of a calling card. That’s the reason I called Mr Langdon. The group claiming responsibility is his specialty.’
‘The group? A terrorist group?’
‘Vittoria, they stole a quarter gram of antimatter.’
Vittoria looked at Robert Langdon standing there across the room. Everything began falling into place. That explains some of the secrecy. She was amazed it hadn’t occurred to her earlier. Kohler had called the authorities after all. The authorities. Now it seemed obvious. Robert Langdon was American, clean-cut, conservative, obviously very sharp. Who else could it be? Vittoria should have guessed from the start. She felt a newfound hope as she turned to him.
‘Mr Langdon, I want to know who killed my father. And I want to know if your agency can find the antimatter.’
Langdon looked flustered. ‘My agency?’
‘You’re with U.S. Intelligence, I assume.’
‘Actually . . . no.’
Kohler intervened. ‘Mr Langdon is a professor of art history at Harvard University.’
Vittoria felt like she had been doused with ice water. ‘An art teacher?’
‘He is a specialist in cult symbology.’ Kohler sighed. ‘Vittoria, we believe your father was killed by a satanic cult.’
Vittoria heard the words in her mind, but she was unable to process them. A satanic cult.
‘The group claiming responsibility calls themselves the Illuminati.’
Vittoria looked at Kohler and then at Langdon, wondering if this was some kind of perverse joke. ‘The Illuminati?’ she demanded. ‘As in the Bavarian Illuminati?’
Kohler looked stunned. ‘You’ve heard of them?’
Vittoria felt the tears of frustration welling right below the surface. ‘Bavarian Illuminati: New World Order. Steve Jackson computer games. Half the techies here play it on the Internet.’ Her voice cracked. ‘But I don’t understand . . .’
Kohler shot Langdon a confused look.
Langdon nodded. ‘Popular game. Ancient brotherhood takes over the world. Semihistorical. I didn’t know it was in Europe too.’
Vittoria was bewildered. ‘What are you talking about? The Illuminati? It’s a computer game!’
‘Vittoria,’ Kohler said, ‘the Illuminati is the group claiming responsibility for your father’s death.’
Vittoria mustered every bit of courage she could find to fight the tears. She forced herself to hold on and assess the situation logically. But the harder she focused, the less she understood. Her father had been murdered. CERN had suffered a major breach of security. There was a bomb counting down somewhere that she was responsible for. And the director had nominated an art teacher to help them find a mythical fraternity of Satanists.
Vittoria felt suddenly all alone. She turned to go, but Kohler cut her off. He reached for something in his pocket. He produced a crumpled piece of fax paper and handed it to her.
Vittoria swayed in horror as her eyes hit the image.
‘They branded him,’ Kohler said. ‘They branded his goddamn chest.’
28
Secretary Sylvie Baudeloque was now in a panic. She paced outside the director’s empty office. Where the hell is he? What do I do?
It had been a bizarre day. Of course, any day working for Maximilian Kohler had the potential to be strange, but Kohler had been in rare form today.
‘Find me Leonardo Vetra!’ he had demanded when Sylvie arrived this morning.
Dutifully, Sylvie paged, phoned, and E-mailed Leonardo Vetra.
Nothing.
So Kohler had left in a huff, apparently to go find Vetra himself. When he rolled back in a few hours later, Kohler looked decidedly not well . . . not that he ever actually looked well, but he looked worse than usual. He locked himself in his office, and she could hear him on his modem, his phone, faxing, talking. Then Kohler rolled out again. He hadn’t been back since.
Sylvie had decided to ignore the antics as yet another Kohlerian melodrama, but she began to get concerned when Kohler failed to return at the proper time for his daily injections; the director’s physical condition required regular treatment, and when he decided to push his luck, the results were never pretty – respiratory shock, coughing fits, and a mad dash by the infirmary personnel. Sometimes Sylvie thought Maximilian Kohler had a death wish.
She considered paging him to remind him, but she’d learned charity was something Kohler’s pride despised. Last week, he had become so enraged with a visiting scientist who had shown him undue pity that Kohler clambered to his feet and threw a clipboard at the man’s head. King Kohler could be surprisingly agile when he was pissé.
At the moment, however, Sylvie’s concern for the director’s health was taking a back burner . . . replaced by a much more pressing dilemma. The CERN switchboard had phoned five minutes ago in a frenzy to say they had an urgent call for the director.
‘He’s not available,’ Sylvie had said.
Then the CERN operator told her who was calling.
Sylvie half laughed aloud. ‘You’re kidding, right?’ She listened, and her face clouded with disbelief. ‘And your caller ID confirms—’ Sylvie was frowning. ‘I see. Okay. Can you ask what the—’ She sighed. ‘No. That’s fine. Tell him to hold. I’ll locate the director right away. Yes, I understand. I’ll hurry.’
But Sylvie had not been able to find the director. She had called his cell line three times and each time gotten the same message: ‘The mobile customer you are trying to reach is out of range.’ Out of range? How far could he go? So Sylvie had dialed Kohler’s beeper. Twice. No response. Most unlike him. She’d even E-mailed his mobile computer. Nothing. It was like the man had disappeared off the face of the earth.
So what do I do? she now wondered.
Short of searching CERN’s entire complex herself, Sylvie knew there was only one other way to get the director’s attention. He would not be pleased, but the man on the phone was not someone the director should keep waiting. Nor did it sound like the caller was in any mood to be told the director was unavailable.
Startled with her own boldness, Sylvie made her decision. She walked into Kohler’s office and went to the metal box on his wall behind his desk. She opened the cover, stared at the controls, and found the correct button.
Then she took a deep breath and grabbed the microphone.
Vittoria did not remember how they had gotten to the main elevator, but they were there. Ascending. Kohler was behind her, his breathing labored now. Langdon’s concerned gaze passed through her like a ghost. He had taken the fax from her hand and slipped it in his jacket pocket away from her sight, but the image was still burned into her memory.
As the elevator climbed, Vittoria’s world swirled into darkness. Papa! In her mind she reached for him. For just a moment, in the oasis of her memory, Vittoria was with him. She was nine years old, rolling down hills of edelweiss flowers, the Swiss sky spinning overhead.
Papà! Papà!
Leonardo Vetra was laughing beside her, beaming. ‘What is it, angel?’
‘Papà!’ she giggled, nuzzling close to him. ‘Ask me what’s the matter!’
‘But you look happy, sweetie. Why would I ask you what’s the matter?’
‘Just ask me.’
He shrugged. ‘What’s the matter?’
She immediately started laughing. ‘What’s the matter? Everything is the matter! Rocks! Trees! Atoms! Even anteaters! Everything is the matter!’
He laughed. ‘Did you make that up?’
‘Pretty smart, huh?’
‘My little Einstein.’
She frowned. ‘He has stupid hair. I saw his picture.’
‘He’s got a smart head, though. I told you what he proved, right?’
Her eyes widened with dread. ‘Dad! No! You promised!’
‘E=MC2!’ He tickled her playfully. ‘E=MC2!’
‘No math! I told you! I hate it!’
‘I’m glad you hate it. Because girls aren’t even allowed to do math.’
Vittoria stopped short. ‘They aren’t?’
‘Of course not. Everyone knows that. Girls play with dollies. Boys do math. No math for girls. I’m not even permitted to talk to little girls about math.’
‘What! But that’s not fair!’
‘Rules are rules. Absolutely no math for little girls.’
Vittoria looked horrified. ‘But dolls are boring!’
‘I’m sorry,’ her father said. ‘I could tell you about math, but if I got caught . . .’ He looked nervously around the deserted hills.
Vittoria followed his gaze. ‘Okay,’ she whispered, ‘just tell me quietly.’
The motion of the elevator startled her. Vittoria opened her eyes. He was gone.
Reality rushed in, wrapping a frosty grip around her. She looked to Langdon. The earnest concern in his gaze felt like the warmth of a guardian angel, especially in the aura of Kohler’s chill.
A single sentient thought began pounding at Vittoria with unrelenting force.
Where is the antimatter?
The horrifying answer was only a moment away.
30
‘Maximilian Kohler. Kindly call your office immediately.’
Blazing sunbeams flooded Langdon’s eyes as the elevator doors opened into the main atrium. Before the echo of the announcement on the intercom overhead faded, every electronic device on Kohler’s wheelchair started beeping and buzzing simultaneously. His pager. His phone. His E-mail. Kohler glanced down at the blinking lights in apparent bewilderment. The director had resurfaced, and he was back in range.
‘Director Kohler. Please call your office.’
The sound of his name on the PA seemed to startle Kohler.
He glanced up, looking angered and then almost immediately concerned. Langdon’s eyes met his, and Vittoria’s too. The three of them were motionless a moment, as if all the tension between them had been erased and replaced by a single, unifying foreboding.
Kohler took his cell phone from the armrest. He dialed an extension and fought off another coughing fit. Vittoria and Langdon waited.
‘This is . . . Director Kohler,’ he said, wheezing. ‘Yes? I was subterranean, out of range.’ He listened, his gray eyes widening. ‘Who? Yes, patch it through.’ There was a pause. ‘Hello? This is Maximilian Kohler. I am the director of CERN. With whom am I speaking?’
Vittoria and Langdon watched in silence as Kohler listened.
‘It would be unwise,’ Kohler finally said, ‘to speak of this by phone. I will be there immediately.’ He was coughing again. ‘Meet me . . . at Leonardo da Vinci Airport. Forty minutes.’ Kohler’s breath seemed to be failing him now. He descended into a fit of coughing and barely managed to choke out the words. ‘Locate the canister immediately . . . I am coming.’ Then he clicked off his phone.
Vittoria ran to Kohler’s side, but Kohler could no longer speak. Langdon watched as Vittoria pulled out her cell phone and paged CERN’s infirmary. Langdon felt like a ship on the periphery of a storm . . . tossed but detached.
Meet me at Leonardo da Vinci Airport. Kohler’s words echoed.
The uncertain shadows that had fogged Langdon’s mind all morning, in a single instant, solidified into a vivid image. As he stood there in the swirl of confusion, he felt a door inside him open . . . as if some mystic threshold had just been breached. The ambigram. The murdered priest/scientist. The antimatter. And now . . . the target. Leonardo da Vinci Airport could only mean one thing. In a moment of stark realization, Langdon knew he had just crossed over. He had become a believer.
Five kilotons. Let there be light.
Two paramedics materialized, racing across the atrium in white smocks. They knelt by Kohler, putting an oxygen mask on his face. Scientists in the hall stopped and stood back.
Kohler took two long pulls, pushed the mask aside, and still gasping for air, looked up at Vittoria and Langdon. ‘Rome.’
‘Rome?’ Vittoria demanded. ‘The antimatter is in Rome? Who called?’
Kohler’s face was twisted, his gray eyes watering. ‘The Swiss . . .’ He choked on the words, and the paramedics put the mask back over his face. As they prepared to take him away, Kohler reached up and grabbed Langdon’s arm.
Langdon nodded. He knew.
‘Go . . .’ Kohler wheezed beneath his mask. ‘Go . . . call me . . .’ Then the paramedics were rolling him away.
Vittoria stood riveted to the floor, watching him go. Then she turned to Langdon. ‘Rome? But . . . what was that about the Swiss?’
Langdon put a hand on her shoulder, barely whispering the words. ‘The Swiss Guard,’ he said. ‘The sworn sentinels of Vatican City.’
31
The X-33 space plane roared into the sky and arched south toward Rome. On board, Langdon sat in silence. The last fifteen minutes had been a blur. Now that he had finished briefing Vittoria on the Illuminati and their covenant against the Vatican, the scope of this situation was starting to sink in.
What the hell am I doing? Langdon wondered. I should have gone home when I had the chance! Deep down, though, he knew he’d never had the chance.
Langdon’s better judgment had screamed at him to return to Boston. Nonetheless, academic astonishment had somehow vetoed prudence. Everything he had ever believed about the demise of the Illuminati was suddenly looking like a brilliant sham. Part of him craved proof. Confirmation. There was also a question of conscience. With Kohler ailing and Vittoria on her own, Langdon knew that if his knowledge of the Illuminati could assist in any way, he had a moral obligation to be here.
There was more, though. Although Langdon was ashamed to admit it, his initial horror on hearing about the antimatter’s location was not only the danger to human life in Vatican City, but for something else as well.
Art.
The world’s largest art collection was now sitting on a time bomb. The Vatican Museum housed over 60,000 priceless pieces in 1,407 rooms – Michelangelo, da Vinci, Bernini, Botticelli. Langdon wondered if all of the art could possibly be evacuated if necessary. He knew it was impossible. Many of the pieces were sculptures weighing tons. Not to mention, the greatest treasures were architectural – the Sistine Chapel, St Peter’s Basilica, Bramante’s famed spiral staircase leading to the Museo Vaticano – priceless testaments to man’s creative genius. Langdon wondered how m
uch time was left on the canister.
‘Thanks for coming,’ Vittoria said, her voice quiet.
Langdon emerged from his daydream and looked up. Vittoria was sitting across the aisle. Even in the stark fluorescent light of the cabin, there was an aura of composure about her – an almost magnetic radiance of wholeness. Her breathing seemed deeper now, as if a spark of self-preservation had ignited within her . . . a craving for justice and retribution, fueled by a daughter’s love.
Vittoria had not had time to change from her shorts and sleeveless top, and her tawny legs were now goose-bumped in the cold of the plane. Instinctively Langdon removed his jacket and offered it to her.
‘American chivalry?’ She accepted, her eyes thanking him silently.
The plane jostled across some turbulence, and Langdon felt a surge of danger. The windowless cabin felt cramped again, and he tried to imagine himself in an open field. The notion, he realized, was ironic. He had been in an open field when it had happened. Crushing darkness. He pushed the memory from his mind. Ancient history.
Vittoria was watching him. ‘Do you believe in God, Mr Langdon?’
The question startled him. The earnestness in Vittoria’s voice was even more disarming than the inquiry. Do I believe in God? He had hoped for a lighter topic of conversation to pass the trip.
A spiritual conundrum, Langdon thought. That’s what my friends call me. Although he’d studied religion for years, Langdon was not a religious man. He respected the power of faith, the benevolence of churches, the strength religion gave so many people . . . and yet, for him, the intellectual suspension of disbelief that was imperative if one were truly going to ‘believe’ had always proved too big an obstacle for his academic mind. ‘I want to believe,’ he heard himself say.
Vittoria’s reply carried no judgment or challenge. ‘So why don’t you?’
He chuckled. ‘Well, it’s not that easy. Having faith requires leaps of faith, cerebral acceptance of miracles – immaculate conceptions and divine interventions. And then there are the codes of conduct. The Bible, the Koran, Buddhist scripture . . . they all carry similar requirements – and similar penalties. They claim that if I don’t live by a specific code I will go to hell. I can’t imagine a God who would rule that way.’