Inferno (11 page)

His field agent Vayentha had put everything at risk, and while she would face an inquiry when this mission was over, right now the provost still needed her.

She damned well better regain control of this mess
.

Brisk footsteps approached behind him, and the provost turned to see one of his female analysts arriving at a jog.

“Sir?” the analyst said, breathless. “We have new information.” Her voice cut the morning air with a rare intensity. “It appears Robert Langdon just accessed his Harvard e-mail account from an unmasked IP address.” She paused, locking eyes with the provost. “Langdon’s precise location is now traceable.”

The provost was stunned that anyone could be so foolish.
This changes everything
. He steepled his hands and stared out at the coastline, considering the implications. “Do we know the status of the SRS team?”

“Yes, sir. Less than two miles away from Langdon’s position.”

The provost needed only a moment to make the decision.

“L’inferno di Dante,”
Sienna whispered, her expression rapt as she inched closer to the stark image of the underworld now projected on her kitchen wall.

Dante’s vision of hell
, Langdon thought,
rendered here in living color
.

Exalted as one of the preeminent works of world literature, the
Inferno
was the first of three books that made up Dante Alighieri’s
Divine Comedy
—a 14,233-line epic poem describing Dante’s brutal descent into the underworld, journey through purgatory, and eventual arrival in paradise. Of the
Comedy
’s three sections—
Inferno
,
Purgatorio
, and
Paradiso—Inferno
was by far the most widely read and memorable.

Composed by Dante Alighieri in the early 1300s,
Inferno
had quite literally redefined medieval perceptions of damnation. Never before had the concept of hell captivated the masses in such an entertaining way. Overnight, Dante’s work solidified the abstract concept of hell into a clear and terrifying vision—visceral, palpable, and unforgettable. Not surprisingly, following the poem’s release, the Catholic Church enjoyed an enormous uptick in attendance from terrified sinners looking to avoid Dante’s updated version of the underworld.

Depicted here by Botticelli, Dante’s horrific vision of hell was constructed as a subterranean funnel of suffering—a wretched underground landscape of fire, brimstone, sewage, monsters, and Satan himself waiting at its core. The pit was constructed in nine distinct levels, the Nine Rings of Hell, into which sinners were cast in accordance with the depth of their sin. Near the top, the
lustful
or “carnal malefactors” were blown about by an eternal windstorm, a symbol of their inability to control their desire. Beneath them the
gluttons
were forced to lie facedown in a vile slush of sewage, their mouths filled with the product of their excess. Deeper still, the
heretics
were trapped in flaming coffins, damned to eternal fire. And so it went … getting worse and worse the deeper one descended.

In the seven centuries since its publication, Dante’s enduring vision of
hell had inspired tributes, translations, and variations by some of history’s greatest creative minds. Longfellow, Chaucer, Marx, Milton, Balzac, Borges, and even several popes had all written pieces based on Dante’s
Inferno
. Monteverdi, Liszt, Wagner, Tchaikovsky, and Puccini composed pieces based on Dante’s work, as had one of Langdon’s favorite living recording artists—Loreena McKennitt. Even the modern world of video games and iPad apps had no shortage of Dante-related offerings.

Langdon, eager to share with his students the vibrant symbolic richness of Dante’s vision, sometimes taught a course on the recurring imagery found in both Dante and the works he had inspired over the centuries.

“Robert,” Sienna said, shifting closer to the image on the wall. “Look at that!” She pointed to an area near the bottom of the funnel-shaped hell.

The area she was pointing to was known as the Malebolge—meaning “evil ditches.” It was the eighth and penultimate ring of hell and was divided into ten separate ditches, each for a specific type of fraud.

Sienna pointed more excitedly now. “Look! Didn’t you say, in your vision, you saw this?!”

Langdon squinted at where Sienna was pointing, but he saw nothing. The tiny projector was losing power, and the image had begun to fade. He quickly shook the device again until it was glowing brightly. Then he carefully set it farther back from the wall, on the edge of the counter across the small kitchen, letting it cast an even larger image from there. Langdon approached Sienna, stepping to the side to study the glowing map.

Again Sienna pointed down toward the eighth ring of hell. “Look. Didn’t you say your hallucinations included a pair of legs sticking out of the earth upside down with the letter
R
?” She touched a precise spot on the wall. “There they are!”

As Langdon had seen many times in this painting, the tenth ditch of the Malebolge was packed with sinners half buried upside down, their legs sticking out of the earth. But strangely, in
this
version, one pair of legs bore the letter
R
, written in mud, exactly as Langdon had seen in his vision.

My God!
Langdon peered more intently at the tiny detail. “That letter
R …
that is definitely
not
in Botticelli’s original!”

“There’s another letter,” Sienna said, pointing.

Langdon followed her outstretched finger to another of the ten ditches in the Malebolge, where the letter
E
was scrawled on a false prophet whose head had been put on backward.

What in the world? This painting has been modified
.

Other letters now appeared to him, scrawled on sinners throughout all ten ditches of the Malebolge. He saw a
C
on a seducer being whipped by demons … another
R
on a thief perpetually bitten by snakes … an
A
on a corrupt politician submerged in a boiling lake of tar.

“These letters,” Langdon said with certainty, “are definitely
not
part of Botticelli’s original. This image has been digitally edited.”

He returned his gaze to the uppermost ditch of the Malebolge and began reading the letters downward, through each of the ten ditches, from top to bottom.

C … A … T … R … O … V … A … C … E … R

“Catrovacer?”
Langdon said. “Is this Italian?”

Sienna shook her head. “Not Latin either. I don’t recognize it.”

“A … signature, maybe?”

“Catrovacer?” She looked doubtful. “Doesn’t sound like a name to me. But look over there.” She pointed to one of the many characters in the third ditch of the Malebolge.

When Langdon’s eyes found the figure, he instantly felt a chill. Among the crowd of sinners in the third ditch was an iconic image from the Middle Ages—a cloaked man in a mask with a long, birdlike beak and dead eyes.

The plague mask
.

“Is there a plague doctor in Botticelli’s original?” Sienna asked.

“Absolutely not. That figure has been added.”

“And did Botticelli
sign
his original?”

Langdon couldn’t recall, but as his eyes moved to the lower right-hand corner where a signature normally would be, he realized why she had asked. There was no signature, and yet barely visible along
La Mappa
’s dark brown border was a line of text in tiny block letters:
la verità è visibile solo attraverso gli occhi della morte
.

Langdon knew enough Italian to understand the gist. “ ‘The truth can be glimpsed only through the eyes of death.’ ”

Sienna nodded. “Bizarre.”

The two of them stood in silence as the morbid image before them slowly began to fade.
Dante’s Inferno
, Langdon thought.
Inspiring foreboding pieces of art since 1330
.

Langdon’s course on Dante always included an entire section on the illustrious artwork inspired by the
Inferno
. In addition to Botticelli’s celebrated
Map of Hell
, there was Rodin’s timeless sculpture of
The Three Shades
from
The Gates of Hell …
Stradanus’s illustration of Phlegyas
paddling through submerged bodies on the river Styx … William Blake’s lustful sinners swirling through an eternal tempest … Bouguereau’s strangely erotic vision of Dante and Virgil watching two nude men locked in battle … Bayros’s tortured souls huddling beneath a hail-like torrent of scalding pellets and droplets of fire … Salvador Dalí’s eccentric series of watercolors and woodcuts … and Doré’s huge collection of black-and-white etchings depicting everything from the tunneled entrance to Hades … to winged Satan himself.

Now it seemed that Dante’s poetic vision of hell had not only influenced the most revered artists throughout history. It had also, apparently, inspired yet another individual—a twisted soul who had digitally altered Botticelli’s famous painting, adding ten letters, a plague doctor, and then signing it with an ominous phrase about seeing the truth through the eyes of death. This artist had then stored the image on a high-tech projector sheathed in a freakishly carved bone.

Langdon couldn’t imagine who would have created such an artifact, and yet, at the moment, this issue seemed secondary to a far more unnerving question.

Why the hell am I carrying it?

As Sienna stood with Langdon in the kitchen and pondered her next move, the unexpected roar of a high-horsepower engine echoed up from the street below. It was followed by a staccato burst of screeching tires and car doors slamming.

Puzzled, Sienna hurried to the window and peered outside.

A black, unmarked van had skidded to a stop in the street below. Out of the van flowed a team of men, all dressed in black uniforms with circular green medallions on their left shoulders. They gripped automatic rifles and moved with fierce, military efficiency. Without hesitation, four soldiers dashed toward the entrance of the apartment building.

Sienna felt her blood go cold. “Robert!” she shouted. “I don’t know who they are, but they found us!”