Dan Brown - Inferno

Langdon no longer heard it either, and yet the fountain was quite loud.

“Must have needed to refuel,” Sienna said. “This is our chance. Which way?”

Langdon led her to the left, and they began descending a steep incline. As they emerged from the trees, the Pitti Palace came into view.

“Nice little house,” Sienna whispered.

“Typical Medici understatement,” he replied wryly.

Still almost a quarter mile away, the Pitti Palace’s stone facade dominated the landscape, stretching out to their left and right. Its exterior of bulging, rusticated stonework lent the building an air of unyielding authority that was further accentuated by a powerful repetition of shuttered windows and arch-topped apertures. Traditionally, formal palaces were situated on high ground so that anyone in the gardens had to look uphill at the building. The Pitti Palace, however, was situated in a low valley near the Arno River, meaning that people in the Boboli Gardens looked downhill at the palace.

This effect was only more dramatic. One architect had described the palace as appearing to have been built by nature herself … as if the massive stones in a landslide had tumbled down the long escarpment and landed in an elegant, barricade-like pile at the bottom. Despite its less defensible position in the low ground, the solid stone structure of the Pitti Palace was so imposing that Napoleon had once used it as a power base while in Florence.

“Look,” Sienna said, pointing to the nearest doors of the palace. “Good news.”

Langdon had seen it, too. On this strange morning, the most welcome sight was not the palace itself, but the tourists streaming out of the building into the lower gardens. The palace was open, which meant that Langdon and Sienna would have no trouble slipping inside and passing through the building to escape the gardens. Once outside the palace, Langdon knew they would see the Arno River to their right, and beyond that, the spires of the old city.

He and Sienna kept moving, half jogging now down the steep embankment. As they descended, they traversed the Boboli Amphitheater — the site of the very first opera performance in history — which lay nestled like a horseshoe on the side of a hill. Beyond that, they passed the obelisk of Ramses II and the unfortunate piece of “art” that was positioned at its base. The guidebooks referred to the piece as “a colossal stone basin from Rome’s Baths of Caracalla,” but Langdon always saw it for what it truly was — the world’s largest bathtub. They really need to put that thing somewhere else.

They finally reached the rear of the palace and slowed to a calm walk, mixing inconspicuously with the first tourists of the day. Moving against the tide, they descended a narrow tunnel into the cortile, an inner courtyard where visitors were seated enjoying a morning espresso in the palace’s makeshift café. The smell of fresh-ground coffee filled the air, and Langdon felt a sudden longing to sit down and enjoy a civilized breakfast. Today’s not the day , he thought as they pressed on, entering the wide stone passageway that led toward the palace’s main doors.

As they neared the doorway, Langdon and Sienna collided with a growing bottleneck of stalled tourists who seemed to be assembling in the portico to observe something outside. Langdon peered through the crowd to the area in front of the palace.

The Pitti’s grand entrance was as blunt and unwelcoming as he recalled it. Rather than a manicured lawn and landscaping, the front yard was a vast expanse of pavement that stretched across an entire hillside, flowing down to the Via dei Guicciardini like a massive paved ski slope.

At the bottom of the hill, Langdon now saw the reason for the crowd of onlookers.

Down in Piazza dei Pitti, a half-dozen police cars had streamed in from all directions. A small army of officers were advancing up the hill, unholstering their weapons and fanning out to secure the front of the palace.

As the police entered the Pitti Palace, Sienna and Langdon were already on the move, retracing their steps through the interior of the palace and away from the arriving police. They hurried through the cortile and past the café, where a buzz was spreading, tourists rubbernecking in an attempt to locate the source of the commotion.

Sienna was amazed the authorities had found them so quickly. The drone must have disappeared because it had already spotted us.

She and Langdon found the same narrow tunnel through which they had descended from the gardens and without hesitation plunged back into the passageway and bounded up the stairs. The end of the staircase banked left along a high retaining wall. As they dashed along the wall, it grew shorter beside them, until finally they could see over it into the vast expanse of the Boboli Gardens.

Langdon instantly grabbed Sienna’s arm and yanked her backward, ducking out of sight behind the retaining wall. Sienna had seen it, too.

Three hundred yards away, on the slope above the amphitheater, a phalanx of police descended, searching groves, interviewing tourists, coordinating with one another on handheld radios.

We’re trapped!

Sienna had never imagined, when she and Robert Langdon first met, that it would lead to this. This is more than I bargained for. When Sienna had left the hospital with Langdon, she thought they were fleeing a woman with spiked hair and a gun. Now they were running from an entire military team and the Italian authorities. Their chances of escape, she was now realizing, were almost zero.

“Is there any other way out?” Sienna demanded, short of breath.

“I don’t think so,” Langdon said. “This garden is a walled city, just like …” He paused suddenly, turning and looking east. “Just like … the Vatican.” A strange glint of hope flickered across his face.

Sienna had no idea what the Vatican had to do with their current predicament, but Langdon suddenly began nodding, gazing east along the back of the palace.

“It’s a long shot,” he said, hustling her along with him now. “But there might be a different way to get out of here.”

Two figures materialized suddenly before them, having rounded the corner of the retaining wall, nearly bumping into Sienna and Langdon. Both figures were wearing black, and for one frightening instant, Sienna thought they were the soldiers she had encountered at the apartment building. As they passed, though, she saw they were only tourists — Italian, she guessed, from all the stylish black leather.

Having an idea, Sienna caught one of the tourists’ arms and smiled up at him as warmly as possible. “Può dirci dov’è la Galleria del costume?” she asked in rapid Italian, requesting directions to the palace’s famed costume gallery. “Io e mio fratello siamo in ritardo per una visita privata.” My brother and I are late for a private tour.

“Certo!” The man grinned at them both, looking eager to help. “Proseguite dritto per il sentiero!” He turned and pointed west, along the retaining wall, directly away from whatever Langdon had been looking at.

“Molte grazie!” Sienna chirped with another smile as the two men headed off.

Langdon gave Sienna an impressed nod, apparently understanding her motives. If the police began questioning tourists, they might hear that Langdon and Sienna were headed for the costume gallery, which, according to the map on the wall before them, was at the far western end of the palace … as far as possible from the direction in which they were now headed.

“We need to get to that path over there,” Langdon said, motioning across an open plaza toward a walkway that ran down another hill, away from the palace. The peastone walkway was sheltered on the uphill side by massive hedges, providing plenty of cover from the authorities now descending the hill, only a hundred yards away.