awling ceiling hovered
overhead as though weightless-the 141-foot unsupported span larger even than the cupola at St. Peter's.
As always, Langdon felt a chill as he entered the cavernous room. It was a remarkable fusion of
engineering and art. Above them the famous circular hole in the roof glowed with a narrow shaft of
evening sun. The oculus, Langdon thought. The demon's hole.
They had arrived.
Langdon's eyes traced the arch of the ceiling sloping outward to the columned walls and finally down to
the polished marble floor beneath their feet. The faint echo of footfalls and tourist murmurs reverberated
around the dome. Langdon scanned the dozen or so tourists wandering aimlessly in the shadows. Are you
here?
"Looks pretty quiet," Vittoria said, still holding his hand.
Langdon nodded.
"Where's Raphael's tomb?"
Langdon thought for a moment, trying to get his bearings. He surveyed the circumference of the room.
Tombs. Altars. Pillars. Niches. He motioned to a particularly ornate funerary across the dome and to the
left. "I think that's Raphael's over there."
Vittoria scanned the rest of the room. "I don't see anyone who looks like an assassin about to kill a
cardinal. Shall we look around?"
Langdon nodded. "There's only one spot in here where anyone could be hiding. We better check the
rientranze."
"The recesses?"
"Yes." Langdon pointed. "The recesses in the wall."
Around the perimeter, interspersed with the tombs, a series of semicircular niches were hewn in the wall.
The niches, although not enormous, were big enough to hide someone in the shadows. Sadly, Langdon
knew they once contained statues of the Olympian gods, but the pagan sculptures had been destroyed
when the Vatican converted the Pantheon to a Christian church. He felt a pang of frustration to know he
was standing at the first altar of science, and the marker was gone. He wondered which statue it had been,
and where it had pointed. Langdon could imagine no greater thrill than finding an Illuminati marker-a
statue that surreptitiously pointed the way down the Path of Illumination. Again he wondered who the
anonymous Illuminati sculptor had been.
"I'll take the left arc," Vittoria said, indicating the left half of the circumference. "You go right. See you
in a hundred and eighty degrees."
Langdon smiled grimly.
As Vittoria moved off, Langdon felt the eerie horror of the situation seeping back into his mind. As he
turned and made his way to the right, the killer's voice seemed to whisper in the dead space around him.
Eight o'clock. Virgin sacrifices on the altars of science. A mathematical progression of death. Eight, nine,
ten, eleven . . . and at midnight. Langdon checked his watch: 7:52. Eight minutes.
As Langdon moved toward the first recess, he passed the tomb of one of Italy's Catholic kings. The
sarcophagus, like many in Rome, was askew with the wall, positioned awkwardly. A group of visitors
seemed confused by this. Langdon did not stop to explain. Formal Christian tombs were often misaligned
with the architecture so they could lie facing east. It was an ancient superstition that Langdon's
Symbology 212 class had discussed just last month.
"That's totally incongruous!" a female student in the front had blurted when Langdon explained the
reason for east-facing tombs. "Why would Christians want their tombs to face the rising sun? We're
talking about Christianity . . . not sun worship!"
Langdon smiled, pacing before the blackboard, chewing an apple. "Mr. Hitzrot!" he shouted.
A young man dozing in back sat up with a start. "What! Me?"
Langdon pointed to a Renaissance art poster on the wall. "Who is that man kneeling before God?"
"Um . . . some saint?"
"Brilliant. And how do you know he's a saint?"
"He's got a halo?"
"Excellent, and does that golden halo remind you of anything?"
Hitzrot broke into a smile. "Yeah! Those Egyptian things we studied last term. Those . . . um . . . sun
disks!"
"Thank you, Hitzrot. Go back to sleep." Langdon turned back to the class. "Halos, like much of Christian
symbology, were borrowed from the ancient Egyptian religion of sun worship. Christianity is filled with
examples of sun worship."
"Excuse me?" the girl in front said. "I go to church all the time, and I don't see much sun worshiping
going on!"
"Really? What do you celebrate on December twenty-fifth?"
"Christmas. The birth of Jesus Christ."
"And yet according to the Bible, Christ was born in March, so what are we doing celebrating in late
December?"
Silence.
Langdon smiled. "December twenty-fifth, my friends, is the ancient pagan holiday of sol
invictus-Unconquered Sun-coinciding with the winter solstice. It's that wonderful time of year when
the sun returns, and the days start getting longer."
Langdon took another bite of apple.
"Conquering religions," he continued, "often adopt existing holidays to make conversion less shocking.
It's called transmutation. It helps people acclimatize to the new faith. Worshipers keep the same holy
dates, pray in the same sacred locations, use a similar symbology . . . and they simply substitute a
different god."
Now the girl in front looked furious. "You're implying Christianity is just some kind of . . . repackaged
sun worship!"
"Not at all. Christianity did not borrow only from sun worship. The ritual of Christian canonization is
taken from the ancient 'god-making' rite of Euhemerus. The practice of 'god-eating'-that is, Holy
Communion-was borrowed from the Aztecs. Even the concept of Christ dying for our sins is arguably
not exclusively Christian; the self-sacrifice of a young man to absolve the sins of his people appears in the
earliest tradition of the Quetzalcoatl."
The girl glared. "So, is anything in Christianity original?"
"Very little in any organized faith is truly original. Religions are not born from scratch. They grow from
one another. Modern religion is a collage . . . an assimilated historical record of man's quest to understand
the divine."
"Um . . . hold on," Hitzrot ventured, sounding awake now. "I know something Christian that's original.
How about our image of God? Christian art never portrays God as the hawk sun god, or as an Aztec, or as
anything weird. It always shows God as an old man with a white beard. So our image of God is original,
right?"
Langdon smiled. "When the early Christian converts abandoned their former deities-pagan gods, Roman
gods, Greek, sun, Mithraic, whatever-they asked the church what their new Christian God looked like.
Wisely, the church chose the most feared, powerful . . . and familiar face in all of recorded history."
Hitzrot looked skeptical. "An old man with a white, flowing beard?"
Langdon pointed to a hierarchy of ancient gods on the wall. At the top sat an old man with a white,
flowing beard. "Does Zeus look familiar?"
The class ended right on cue.
"Good evening," a man's voice said.
Langdon jumped. He was back in the Pantheon. He turned to face an elderly man in a blue cape with a red
cross on the chest. The man gave him a gray-toothed smile.
"You're English, right?" The man's accent was thick Tuscan.
Langdon blinked, confused. "Actually, no. I'm American."
The man looked embarrassed. "Oh heavens, forgive me. You were so nicely dressed, I just figured . . . my
apologies."
"Can I help you?" Langdon asked, his heart beating wildly.
"Actually I thought perhaps I could help you. I am the cicerone here." The man pointed proudly to his cityissued
badge. "It is my job to make your visit to Rome more interesting."
More interesting? Langdon was certain this particular visit to Rome was plenty interesting.
"You look like a man of distinction," the guide fawned, "no doubt more interested in culture than most.
Perhaps I can give you some history on this fascinating building."
Langdon smiled politely. "Kind of you, but I'm actually an art historian myself, and-"
"Superb!" The man's eyes lit up like he'd hit the jackpot. "Then you will no doubt find this delightful!"
"I think I'd prefer to-"
"The Pantheon," the man declared, launching into his memorized spiel, "was built by Marcus Agrippa in
27 B.C."
"Yes," Langdon interjected, "and rebuilt by Hadrian in 119 A.D."
"It was the world's largest free-standing dome until 1960 when it was eclipsed by the Superdome in New
Orleans!"
Langdon groaned. The man was unstoppable.
"And a fifth-century theologian once called the Pantheon the House of the Devil, warning that the hole in
the roof was an entrance for demons!"
Langdon blocked him out. His eyes climbed skyward to the oculus, and the memory of Vittoria's
suggested plot flashed a bone-numbing image in his mind . . . a branded cardinal falling through the hole
and hitting the marble floor. Now that would be a media event. Langdon found himself scanning the
Pantheon for reporters. None. He inhaled deeply. It was an absurd idea. The logistics of pulling off a stunt
like that would be ridiculous.
As Langdon moved off to continue his inspection, the babbling docent followed like a love-starved
puppy. Remind me, Langdon thought to himself, there's nothing worse than a gung ho art historian.
Across the room, Vittoria was immersed in her own search. Standing all alone for the first time since she
had heard the news of her father, she felt the stark reality of the last eight hours closing in around her. Her
father had been murdered-cruelly and abruptly. Almost equally painful was that her father's creation had
been corrupted-now a tool of terrorists. Vittoria was plagued with guilt to think that it was her invention
that had enabled the antimatter to be transported . . . her canister that was now counting down inside the
Vatican. In an effort to serve her father's quest for the simplicity of truth . . . she had become a
conspirator of chaos.
Oddly, the only thing that felt right in her life at the moment was the presence of a total stranger. Robert
Langdon. She found a