Langdon recoiled as Zobrist himself abruptly appeared, dressed as the plague doctor, and then tore off his mask. Langdon stared at the gaunt face and wild green eyes, realizing that he was finally seeing the face of the man who was at the center of this crisis. Zobrist began professing his love to someone he called his inspiration.

“I have left the future in your gentle hands. My work below is done. And now the hour has come for me to climb again to the world above … and rebehold the stars.”

As the video ended, Langdon recognized Zobrist’s final words as a near duplicate of Dante’s final words in the Inferno.

In the darkness of the conference room, Langdon realized that all the moments of fear he had experienced today had just crystallized into a single, terrifying reality.

Bertrand Zobrist now had a face … and a voice.

The conference room lights came up, and Langdon saw all eyes trained expectantly on him.

Elizabeth Sinskey’s expression seemed frozen as she stood up and nervously stroked her amulet. “Professor, obviously our time is very short. The only good news so far is that we’ve had no cases of pathogen detection, or reported illness, so we’re assuming the suspended Solublon bag is still intact. But we don’t know where to look. Our goal is to neutralize this threat by containing the bag before it ruptures. The only way we can do that, of course, is to find its location immediately.”

Agent Brüder stood up now, staring intently at Langdon. “We’re assuming you came to Venice because you learned that this is where Zobrist hid his plague.”

Langdon gazed out at the assembly before him, faces taut with fear, everyone hoping for a miracle, and he wished he had better news to offer them.

“We’re in the wrong country,” Langdon announced. “What you’re looking for is nearly a thousand miles from here.”

Langdon’s insides reverberated with the deep thrum of The Mendacium’s engines as the ship powered through its wide turn, banking back toward the Venice Airport. On board, all hell had broken loose. The provost had dashed off, shouting orders to his crew. Elizabeth Sinskey had grabbed her phone and called the pilots of the WHO’s C-130 transport plane, demanding they be prepped as soon as possible to fly out of the Venice Airport. And Agent Brüder had jumped on a laptop to see if he could coordinate some kind of international advance team at their final destination.

A world away.

The provost now returned to the conference room and urgently addressed Brüder. “Any further word from the Venetian authorities?”

Brüder shook his head. “No trace. They’re looking, but Sienna Brooks has vanished.”

Langdon did a double take. They’re looking for Sienna?

Sinskey finished her phone call and also joined the conversation. “No luck finding her?”

The provost shook his head. “If you’re agreeable, I think the WHO should authorize the use of force if necessary to bring her in.”

Langdon jumped to his feet. “Why?! Sienna Brooks is not involved in any of this!”

The provost’s dark eyes cut to Langdon. “Professor, there are some things I have to tell you about Ms. Brooks.”

CHAPTER 79

Pushing past the crush of tourists on the Rialto Bridge, Sienna Brooks began running again, sprinting west along the canal-front walkway of the Fondamenta Vin Castello.

They’ve got Robert.

She could still see his desperate eyes gazing up at her as the soldiers dragged him back down the light well into the crypt. She had little doubt that his captors would quickly persuade him, one way or another, to reveal everything he had figured out.

We’re in the wrong country.

Far more tragic, though, was her knowledge that his captors would waste no time revealing to Langdon the true nature of the situation.

I’m so sorry, Robert.

For everything.

Please know I had no choice.

Strangely, Sienna missed him already. Here, amid the masses of Venice, she felt a familiar loneliness settling in.

The feeling was nothing new.

Since childhood, Sienna Brooks had felt alone.

Growing up with an exceptional intellect, Sienna had spent her youth feeling like a stranger in a strange land … an alien trapped on a lonely world. She tried to make friends, but her peers immersed themselves in frivolities that held no interest to her. She tried to respect her elders, but most adults seemed like nothing more than aging children, lacking even the most basic understanding of the world around them, and, most troubling, lacking any curiosity or concern about it.

I felt I was a part of nothing.

And so Sienna Brooks learned how to be a ghost. Invisible. She learned how to be a chameleon, a performer, playing just another face in the crowd. Her childhood passion for stage acting, she had no doubt, stemmed from what would become her lifelong dream of becoming someone else.

Someone normal.

Her performance in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream helped her feel a part of something, and the adult actors were supportive without being condescending. Her joy, however, was short-lived, evaporating the moment she left the stage on opening night and faced throngs of wide-eyed media people while her costars quietly skulked out the back door unnoticed.

Now they hate me, too.

By the age of seven, Sienna had read enough to diagnose herself with deep depression. When she told her parents, they seemed dumbfounded, as they usually were by the strangeness of their own daughter. Nonetheless, they sent her to a psychiatrist. The doctor asked her a lot of questions, which Sienna had already asked herself, and then he prescribed a combination of amitriptyline and chlordiazepoxide.

Furious, Sienna jumped off his couch. “Amitriptyline?!” she challenged. “I want to be happier—not a zombie!”

The psychiatrist, to his great credit, remained very calm in the face of her outburst and offered a second suggestion. “Sienna, if you prefer not to take pharmaceuticals, we can try a more holistic approach.” He paused. “It sounds as if you are trapped in a cycle of thinking about yourself and how you don’t belong in the world.”

“That’s true,” Sienna replied. “I try to stop, but I can’t!”

He smiled calmly. “Of course you can’t stop. It is physically impossible for the human mind to think of nothing. The soul craves emotion, and it will continue to seek fuel for that emotion—good or bad. Your problem is that you’re giving it the wrong fuel.”

Sienna had never heard anyone talk about the mind in such mechanical terms, and she was instantly intrigued. “How do I give it a different fuel?”

“You need to shift your intellectual focus,” he said. “Currently, you think mainly about yourself. You wonder why you don’t fit … and what is wrong with you.”

“That’s true,” Sienna said again, “but I’m trying to solve the problem. I’m trying to fit in. I can’t solve the problem if I don’t think about it.”

He chuckled. “I believe that thinking about the problem … is your problem.” The doctor suggested that she try to shift her focus away from herself and her own problems … turning her attention instead to the world around her … and its problems.

That’s when everything changed.

She began pouring all of her energy not into feeling sorry for herself … but into feeling sorry for other people. She began a philanthropic initiative, ladled soup at homeless shelters, and read books to the blind. Incredibly, none of the people Sienna helped even seemed to notice that she was different. They were just grateful that somebody cared.

Sienna worked harder every week, barely able to sleep because of the realization that so many people needed her help.

“Sienna, slow down!” people would urge her. “You can’t save the world!”

What a terrible thing to say.

Through her acts of public service, Sienna came in contact with several members of a local humanitarian group. When they invited her to join them on a monthlong trip to the Philippines, she jumped at the chance.

Sienna imagined they were going to feed poor fishermen or farmers in the countryside, which she had read was a wonderland of geological beauty, with vibrant seabeds and dazzling plains. And so when the group settled in among the throngs in the city of Manila—the most densely populated city on earth—Sienna could only gape in horror. She had never seen poverty on this scale.

How can one person possibly make a difference?

For every one person Sienna fed, there were hundreds more who gazed at her with desolate eyes. Manila had six-hour traffic jams, suffocating pollution, and a horrifying sex trade, whose workers consisted primarily of young children, many of whom had been sold to pimps by parents who took solace in knowing that at least their children would be fed.

Amid this chaos of child prostitution, panhandlers, pickpockets, and worse, Sienna found herself suddenly paralyzed. All around her, she could see humanity overrun by its primal instinct for survival. When they face desperation … human beings become animals.

For Sienna, all the dark depression came flooding back. She had suddenly understood mankind for what it was—a species on the brink.

I was wrong, she thought. I can’t save the world.

Overwhelmed by a rush of frantic mania, Sienna broke into a sprint through the city streets, thrusting her way through the masses of people, knocking them over, pressing on, searching for open space.

I’m being suffocated by human flesh!

As she ran, she could feel the eyes upon her again. She no longer blended in. She was tall and fair-skinned with a blond ponytail waving behind her. Men stared at her as if she were naked.

When her legs finally gave out, she had no idea how far she had run or where she had gone. She cleared the tears and grime from her eyes and saw that she was standing in a kind of shantytown—a city made of pieces of corrugated metal and cardboard propped up and held together. All around her the wails of crying babies and the stench of human excrement hung in the air.

I’ve run through the gates of hell.

“Turista,” a deep voice sneered behind her. “Magkano?” How much?

Sienna spun to see three young men approaching, salivating like wolves. She instantly knew she was in danger and she tried to back away, but they corralled her, like predators hunting in a pack.

Sienna shouted for help, but nobody paid attention to her cries. Only fifteen feet away, she saw an old woman sitting on a tire, carving the rot off an old onion with a rusty knife. The woman did not even glance up when Sienna shouted.

When the men seized her and dragged her inside a little shack, Sienna had no illusions about what was going to happen, and the terror was all-consuming. She fought with everything she had, but they were strong, quickly pinning her down on an old, soiled mattress.

They tore open her shirt, clawing at her soft skin. When she screamed, they stuffed her torn shirt so deep into her mouth that she thought she would choke. Then they flipped her onto her stomach, forcing her face into the putrid bed.

Sienna Brooks had always felt pity for the ignorant souls who could believe in God amid a world of such suffering, and yet now she herself was praying … praying with all her heart.

Please, God, deliver me from evil.

Even as she prayed, she could hear the men laughing, taunting her as their filthy hands hauled her jeans down over her flailing legs. One of them climbed onto her back, sweaty and heavy, his perspiration dripping onto her skin.

I’m a virgin, Sienna thought. This is how it is going to happen for me.

Suddenly the man on her back leaped off her, and the taunting jeers turned to shouts of anger and fear. The warm sweat rolling onto Sienna’s back from above suddenly began gushing … spilling onto the mattress in splatters of red.

When Sienna rolled over to see what was happening, she saw the old woman with the half-peeled onion and the rusty knife standing over her attacker, who was now bleeding profusely from his back.

The old woman glared threateningly at the others, whipping her bloody knife through the air until the three men scampered off.

Without a word, the old woman helped Sienna gather her clothes and get dressed.

“Salamat,” Sienna whispered tearfully. “Thank you.”

The old woman tapped her ear, indicating she was deaf.

Sienna placed her palms together, closed her eyes, and bowed her head in a gesture of respect. When she opened her eyes, the woman was gone.

Sienna left the Philippines at once, without even saying good-bye to the other members of the group. She never once spoke of what had happened to her. She hoped that ignoring the incident would make it fade away, but it seemed only to make it worse. Months later, she was still haunted by night terrors, and she no longer felt safe anywhere. She took up martial arts, and despite quickly mastering the deadly skill of dim mak, she still felt at risk everywhere she went.

Her depression returned, surging tenfold, and eventually she stopped sleeping altogether. Every time she combed her hair, she noticed that huge clumps were falling out, more hair every day. To her horror, within weeks, she was half bald, having developed symptoms that she self-diagnosed as telegenic effluvium—a stress-related alopecia with no cure other than curing one’s stress. Every time she looked in the mirror, though, she saw her balding head and felt her heart race.

I look like an old woman!

Finally, she had no choice but to shave her head. At least she no longer looked old. She simply looked ill. Not wanting to look like a cancer victim, she purchased a wig, which she wore in a blond ponytail, and at least looked like herself again.

Inside, however, Sienna Brooks was changed.

I am damaged goods.

In a desperate attempt to leave her life behind, she traveled to America and attended medical school. She had always had an affinity for medicine, and she hoped that being a doctor would make her feel like she was being of service … as if she were doing something at least to ease the pain of this troubled world.

Despite the long hours, school had been easy for her, and while her classmates were studying, Sienna took a part-time acting job to earn some extra money. The gig definitely wasn’t Shakespeare, but her skills with language and memorization meant that instead of feeling like work, acting felt like a sanctuary where Sienna could forget who she was … and be someone else.