• CHAPTER  82

The massive C-130 transport plane was still ascending as it banked southeast, thundering out across the Adriatic. On board, Robert Langdon was feeling simultaneously cramped and adrift—oppressed by the absence of windows in the aircraft and bewildered by all of the unanswered questions swirling around in his brain.

Your medical condition, Sinskey had told him, is a bit more complicated than a simple head wound.

Langdon’s pulse quickened at the thought of what she might tell him, and yet at the moment she was busy discussing containment strategies with the SRS team. Bruder was on the phone nearby, speaking with government agencies about Sienna Brooks, following up on everyone’s attempts to locate her.

Sienna …

Langdon was still trying to make sense of the claim that she was intricately involved in all of this. As the plane leveled out from its ascent, the small man who called himself the provost walked across the cabin and sat down opposite Langdon. He steepled his fingers beneath his chin and pursed his lips. “Dr. Sinskey asked me to fill you in . make an attempt to bring clarity to your situation.”

Langdon wondered what this man could possibly say to make any of this confusion even remotely clear.

“As I began to say earlier,” the provost said, “much of this started after my agent Vayentha pulled you in prematurely. We had no idea how much progress you had made on Dr. Sinskey’s behalf, or how much you had shared with her. But we were afraid if she learned the location of the project our client had hired us to protect, she was going to confiscate or destroy it. We had to find it before she did, and so we needed you to work on our behalf . rather than on Sinskey’s.” The provost paused, tapping his fingertips together. “Unfortunately, we had already shown our cards . and you most certainly did not trust us.”

“So you shot me in the head?” Langdon replied angrily.

“We came up with a plan to make you trust us.”

Langdon felt lost. “How do you make someone trust you … after you’ve kidnapped and interrogated him?”

The man shifted uncomfortably now. “Professor, are you familiar with the family of chemicals known as benzodiazepines?”

Langdon shook his head.

“They are a breed of pharmaceutical that are used for, among other things, the treatment of post-traumatic stress. As you may know, when someone endures a horrific event like a car accident or a sexual assault, the long-term memories can be permanently debilitating. Through the use of benzodiazepines, neuroscientists are now able to treat post- traumatic stress, as it were, before it happens.”

Langdon listened in silence, unable to imagine where this conversation might be going.

“When new memories are formed,” the provost continued, “those events are stored in your short-term memory for about forty-eight hours before they migrate to your long-term memory. Using new blends of benzodiazepines, one can easily refresh the short-term memory . essentially deleting its content before those recent memories migrate, so to speak, into long-term memories. A victim of assault, for example, if administered a benzodiazepine within a few hours after the attack, can have those memories expunged forever, and the trauma never becomes part of her psyche. The only downside is that she loses all recollection of several days of her life.”

Langdon stared at the tiny man in disbelief. “You gave me amnesia!”

The provost let out an apologetic sigh. “I’m afraid so. Chemically induced. Very safe. But yes, a deletion of your short-term memory.” He paused. “While you were out, you mumbled something about a plague, which we assumed was on account of your viewing the projector images. We never imagined that Zobrist had created a real plague.” He paused. “You also kept mumbling a phrase that sounded to us like ‘Very sorry. Very sorry.’ ”

Vasari. It must have been all he had figured out about the projector at that point. Cerca trova. “But . I thought my amnesia was caused by my head wound. Somebody shot me.”

The provost shook his head. “Nobody shot you, Professor. There was no head wound.”

“What?!” Langdon’s fingers groped instinctively for the stitches and the swollen injury on the back of his head. “Then what the hell is this!” He raised his hair to reveal the shaved area.

“Part of the illusion. We made a small incision in your scalp and then immediately closed it up with stitches. You had to believe you had been attacked.”

This isn’t a bullet wound?!

“When you woke up,” the provost said, “we wanted you to believe that people were trying to kill you … that you were in peril. ”

“People were trying to kill me!” Langdon shouted, his outburst drawing gazes from elsewhere in the plane. “I saw the hospital’s doctor —Dr. Marconi—gunned down in cold blood!”

“That’s what you saw,” the provost said evenly, “but that’s not what happened. Vayentha worked for me. She had a superb skill set for this kind of work.”

“Killing people?” Langdon demanded.

“No,” the provost said calmly. “Pretending to kill people.”

Langdon stared at the man for a long moment, picturing the gray- bearded doctor with the bushy eyebrows who had collapsed on the floor, blood gushing from his chest.

“Vayentha’s gun was loaded with blanks,” the provost said. “It triggered a radio-controlled squib that detonated a blood pack on Dr. Marconi’s chest. He is fine, by the way.”

Langdon closed his eyes, dumbstruck by what he was hearing. “And the . hospital room?”

“A quickly improvised set,” the provost said. “Professor, I know this is all very difficult to absorb. We were working quickly, and you were groggy, so it didn’t need to be perfect. When you woke up, you saw what we wanted you to see—hospital props, a few actors, and a choreographed attack scene.”

Langdon was reeling.

“This is what my company does,” the provost said. “We’re very good

at creating illusions.”

“What about Sienna?” Langdon asked, rubbing his eyes.

“I needed to make a judgment call, and I chose to work with her. My priority was to protect my client’s project from Dr. Sinskey, and Sienna and I shared that desire. To gain your trust, Sienna saved you from the assassin and helped you escape into a rear alleyway. The waiting taxi was also ours, with another radio-controlled squib on the rear windshield to create the final effect as you fled. The taxi took you to an apartment that we had hastily put together.”

Sienna’s meager apartment, Langdon thought, now understanding why it looked like it had been furnished from a yard sale. And it also explained the convenient coincidence of Sienna’s “neighbor” having clothing that fit him perfectly.

The entire thing had been staged.

Even the desperate phone call from Sienna’s friend at the hospital had been phony. Sienna, eez Danikova!

“When you phoned the U.S. Consulate,” the provost said, “you phoned a number that Sienna looked up for you. It was a number that rang on The Mendacium.”

“I never reached the consulate …”

“No, you didn’t.”

Stay where you are, the fake consulate employee had urged him. I’ll send someone for you right away. Then, when Vayentha showed up, Sienna had conveniently spotted her across the street and connected the dots. Robert, your own government is trying to kill you! You can’t involve any authorities! Your only hope is to figure out what that projector means.

The provost and his mysterious organization—whatever the hell it was —had effectively retasked Langdon to stop working for Sinskey and start working for them. Their illusion was complete.

Sienna played me perfectly, he thought, feeling more sad than angry. He had grown fond of her in the short time they’d been together. Most troubling to Langdon was the distressing question of how a soul as bright and warm as Sienna’s could give itself over entirely to Zobrist’s maniacal solution for overpopulation.

I can tell you without a doubt, Sienna had said to him earlier, that without: some kind, of drastic change, the end of our species is coming … The mathematics is indisputable.

“And the articles about Sienna?” Langdon asked, recalling the Shakespeare playbill and the pieces about her staggeringly high IQ.

“Authentic,” the provost replied. “The best illusions involve as much of the real world as possible. We didn’t have much time to set up, and so Sienna’s computer and real-world personal files were almost all we had to work with. You were never really intended to see any of that unless you began doubting her authenticity.”

“Nor use her computer,” Langdon said.

“Yes, that was where we lost control. Sienna never expected Sinskey’s SRS team to find the apartment, so when the soldiers moved in, Sienna panicked and had to improvise. She fled on the moped with you, trying to keep the illusion alive. As the entire mission unraveled, I had no choice but to disavow Vayentha, although she broke protocol and pursued you.”

“She almost killed me,” Langdon said, recounting for the provost the showdown in the attic of the Palazzo Vecchio, when Vayentha raised her handgun and aimed point-blank at Langdon’s chest. This will only hurt for an instant . but it’s my only choice. Sienna had then darted out and pushed her over the railing, where Vayentha plunged to her death.

The provost sighed audibly, considering what Langdon had just said. “I doubt Vayentha was trying to kill you . her gun fires only blanks. Her only hope of redemption at that point was to take control of you. She probably thought if she shot you with a blank, she could make you understand she was not an assassin after all and that you were caught up in an illusion.”

The provost paused, thinking a bit, and then continued. “Whether Sienna actually meant to kill Vayentha or was only trying to interfere with the shot, I won’t venture to guess. I’m beginning to realize that I don’t know Sienna Brooks as well as I thought.”

Me neither, Langdon agreed, although as he recalled the look of shock and remorse on the young woman’s face, he sensed that what she had done to the spike-haired operative was very likely a mistake.

Langdon felt unmoored . and utterly alone. He turned toward the window, longing to gaze out at the world below, but all he could see was the wall of the fuselage.

I’ve got to get out of here.

“Are you okay?” the provost asked, eyeing Langdon with concern.

“No,” Langdon replied. “Not even close.”

He’ll survive, the provost thought. He’s merely trying to process his new reality.

The American professor looked as if he had just been snatched up off the ground by a tornado, spun around, and dumped in a foreign land, leaving him shell-shocked and disoriented.

Individuals targeted by the Consortium seldom realized the truth behind the staged events they had witnessed, and if they did, the provost certainly was never present to view the aftermath. Today, in addition to the guilt he felt at seeing firsthand Langdon’s bewilderment, the man was burdened by an overwhelming sense of responsibility for the current crisis.

I accepted the wrong client. Bertrand Zobrist.

I trusted the wrong person. Sienna Brooks.

Now the provost was flying toward the eye of the storm—the epicenter of what might well be a deadly plague that had the potential to wreak havoc across the entire world. If he emerged alive from all this, he suspected that his Consortium would never survive the fallout. There would be endless inquiries and accusations.

Is this how it all ends for me?