 look. After a moment, she pulled
back. "You're right. He's standing up! Maybe he's alive and needs help!" She called into the hole.
"Hello?! Mi puó sentire?"
There was no echo off the mossy interior. Only silence.
Vittoria headed for the rickety ladder. "I'm going down."
Langdon caught her arm. "No. It's dangerous. I'll go."
This time Vittoria didn't argue.
66
C hinita Macri was mad. She sat in the passenger's seat of the BBC van as it idled at a corner on Via
Tomacelli. Gunther Glick was checking his map of Rome, apparently lost. As she had feared, his mystery
caller had phoned back, this time with information.
"Piazza del Popolo," Glick insisted. "That's what we're looking for. There's a church there. And inside is
proof."
"Proof." Chinita stopped polishing the lens in her hand and turned to him. "Proof that a cardinal has been
murdered?"
"That's what he said."
"You believe everything you hear?" Chinita wished, as she often did, that she was the one in charge.
Videographers, however, were at the whim of the crazy reporters for whom they shot footage. If Gunther
Glick wanted to follow a feeble phone tip, Macri was his dog on a leash.
She looked at him, sitting there in the driver's seat, his jaw set intently. The man's parents, she decided,
must have been frustrated comedians to have given him a name like Gunther Glick. No wonder the guy
felt like he had something to prove. Nonetheless, despite his unfortunate appellative and annoying
eagerness to make a mark, Glick was sweet . . . charming in a pasty, Briddish, unstrung sort of way. Like
Hugh Grant on lithium.
"Shouldn't we be back at St. Peter's?" Macri said as patiently as possible. "We can check this mystery
church out later. Conclave started an hour ago. What if the cardinals come to a decision while we're
gone?"
Glick did not seem to hear. "I think we go to the right, here." He tilted the map and studied it again. "Yes,
if I take a right . . . and then an immediate left." He began to pull out onto the narrow street before them.
"Look out!" Macri yelled. She was a video technician, and her eyes were sharp. Fortunately, Glick was
pretty fast too. He slammed on the brakes and avoided entering the intersection just as a line of four
Alpha Romeos appeared out of nowhere and tore by in a blur. Once past, the cars skidded, decelerating,
and cut sharply left one block ahead, taking the exact route Glick had intended to take.
"Maniacs!" Macri shouted.
Glick looked shaken. "Did you see that?"
"Yeah, I saw that! They almost killed us!"
"No, I mean the cars," Glick said, his voice suddenly excited. "They were all the same."
"So they were maniacs with no imagination."
"The cars were also full."
"So what?"
"Four identical cars, all with four passengers?"
"You ever heard of carpooling?"
"In Italy?" Glick checked the intersection. "They haven't even heard of unleaded gas." He hit the
accelerator and peeled out after the cars.
Macri was thrown back in her seat. "What the hell are you doing?"
Glick accelerated down the street and hung a left after the Alpha Romeos. "Something tells me you and I
are not the only ones going to church right now."
67
T he descent was slow.
Langdon dropped rung by rung down the creaking ladder . . . deeper and deeper beneath the floor of the
Chigi Chapel. Into the Demon's hole, he thought. He was facing the side wall, his back to the chamber,
and he wondered how many more dark, cramped spaces one day could provide. The ladder groaned with
every step, and the pungent smell of rotting flesh and dampness was almost asphyxiating. Langdon
wondered where the hell Olivetti was.
Vittoria's outline was still visible above, holding the blowtorch inside the hole, lighting Langdon's way.
As he lowered himself deeper into the darkness, the bluish glow from above got fainter. The only thing
that got stronger was the stench.
Twelve rungs down, it happened. Langdon's foot hit a spot that was slippery with decay, and he faltered.
Lunging forward, he caught the ladder with his forearms to avoid plummeting to the bottom. Cursing the
bruises now throbbing on his arms, he dragged his body back onto the ladder and began his descent again.
Three rungs deeper, he almost fell again, but this time it was not a rung that caused the mishap. It was a
bolt of fear. He had descended past a hollowed niche in the wall before him and suddenly found himself
face to face with a collection of skulls. As he caught his breath and looked around him, he realized the
wall at this level was honeycombed with shelflike openings-burial niches-all filled with skeletons. In
the phosphorescent light, it made for an eerie collage of empty sockets and decaying rib cages flickering
around him.
Skeletons by firelight, he grimaced wryly, realizing he had quite coincidentally endured a similar evening
just last month. An evening of bones and flames. The New York Museum of Archeology's candlelight
benefit dinner-salmon flambé in the shadow of a brontosaurus skeleton. He had attended at the
invitation of Rebecca Strauss-one-time fashion model now art critic from the Times, a whirlwind of
black velvet, cigarettes, and not-so-subtly enhanced breasts. She'd called him twice since. Langdon had
not returned her calls. Most ungentlemanly, he chided, wondering how long Rebecca Strauss would last in
a stink-pit like this.
Langdon was relieved to feel the final rung give way to the spongy earth at the bottom. The ground
beneath his shoes felt damp. Assuring himself the walls were not going to close in on him, he turned into
the crypt. It was circular, about twenty feet across. Breathing through his sleeve again, Langdon turned
his eyes to the body. In the gloom, the image was hazy. A white, fleshy outline. Facing the other
direction. Motionless. Silent.
Advancing through the murkiness of the crypt, Langdon tried to make sense of what he was looking at.
The man had his back to Langdon, and Langdon could not see his face, but he did indeed seem to be
standing.
"Hello?" Langdon choked through his sleeve. Nothing. As he drew nearer, he realized the man was very
short. Too short . . .
"What's happening?" Vittoria called from above, shifting the light.
Langdon did not answer. He was now close enough to see it all. With a tremor of repulsion, he
understood. The chamber seemed to contract around him. Emerging like a demon from the earthen floor
was an old man . . . or at least half of him. He was buried up to his waist in the earth. Standing upright
with half of him below ground. Stripped naked. His hands tied behind his back with a red cardinal's sash.
He was propped limply upward, spine arched backward like some sort of hideous punching bag. The
man's head lay backward, eyes toward the heavens as if pleading for help from God himself.
"Is he dead?" Vittoria called.
Langdon moved toward the body. I hope so, for his sake. As he drew to within a few feet, he looked down
at the upturned eyes. They bulged outward, blue and bloodshot. Langdon leaned down to listen for breath
but immediately recoiled. "For Christ's sake!"
"What!"
Langdon almost gagged. "He's dead all right. I just saw the cause of death." The sight was gruesome. The
man's mouth had been jammed open and packed solid with dirt. "Somebody stuffed a fistful of dirt down
his throat. He suffocated."
"Dirt?" Vittoria said. "As in . . . earth?"
Langdon did a double take. Earth. He had almost forgotten. The brands. Earth, Air, Fire, Water. The
killer had threatened to brand each victim with one of the ancient elements of science. The first element
was Earth. From Santi's earthly tomb. Dizzy from the fumes, Langdon circled to the front of the body. As
he did, the symbologist within him loudly reasserted the artistic challenge of creating the mythical
ambigram. Earth? How? And yet, an instant later, it was before him. Centuries of Illuminati legend
whirled in his mind. The marking on the cardinal's chest was charred and oozing. The flesh was seared
black. La lingua pura . . .
Langdon stared at the brand as the room began to spin.
"Earth," he whispered, tilting his head to see the symbol upside down. "Earth."
Then, in a wave of horror, he had one final cognition. There are three more.
68
D espite the soft glow of candlelight in the Sistine Chapel, Cardinal Mortati was on edge. Conclave had
officially begun. And it had begun in a most inauspicious fashion.
Half an hour ago, at the appointed hour, Camerlegno Carlo Ventresca had entered the chapel. He walked
to the front altar and gave opening prayer. Then, he unfolded his hands and spoke to them in a tone as
direct as anything Mortati had ever heard from the altar of the Sistine.
"You are well aware," the camerlegno said, "that our four preferiti are not present in conclave at this
moment. I ask, in the name of his late Holiness, that you proceed as you must . . . with faith and purpose.
May you have only God before your eyes." Then he turned to go.
"But," one cardinal blurted out, "where are they?"
The camerlegno paused. "That I cannot honestly say."
"When will they return?"
"That I cannot honestly say."
"Are they okay?"
"That I cannot honestly say."
"Will they return?"
There was a long pause.
"Have faith," the camerlegno said. Then he walked out of the room.
The doors to the Sistine Chapel had been sealed, as was the custom, with two heavy chains on the outside.
Four Swiss Guards stood watch in the hallway beyond. Mortati knew the only way the doors could be
opened now, prior to electing a Pope, was if someone inside fell deathly ill, or if the preferiti arrived.
Mortati prayed it would be the latter, although from the knot in his stomach he was not so sure.
Proceed as we must, Mortati decided, taking his lead from the resolve in the camerlegno's voice. So he
had called for a vote. What else could he do?
It had taken thirty minutes to complete the preparatory rituals leading up to t