Dan Brown - Inferno - A Novel

As they drew closer to the doorway, she felt a warm wind rushing up the stairs, billowing from deep inside the earth and escaping from the enclosed cavern. The wind brought to the surface not only the sound of violins, but the unmistakable scents of humidity and masses of people.

It also brought to Sinskey a deep sense of foreboding.

As a group of tourists emerged from the stairs, chatting happily as they exited the building, the doorman allowed the next group to descend.

Brüder immediately moved to enter, but the doorman stopped him with a pleasant wave. “One moment, sir. The cistern is at capacity. It should be less than a minute until another visitor exits. Thank you.”

Brüder looked ready to force his way in, but Sinskey placed a hand on his shoulder and pulled him off to one side.

“Wait,” she commanded. “Your team is on the way and you can’t search this place alone.” She motioned to the plaque on the wall beside the door. “The cistern is enormous.”

The informational plaque described a cathedral-size subterranean room—nearly two football fields in length—with a ceiling spanning more than a hundred thousand square feet and supported by a forest of 336 marble columns.

“Look at this,” Langdon said, standing a few yards away. “You’re not going to believe it.”

Sinskey turned. Langdon motioned to a concert poster on the wall.

Oh, dear God .

The WHO director had been correct in identifying the style of the music as Romantic, but the piece that was being performed had not been composed by Berlioz. It was by a different Romantic composer—Franz Liszt.

Tonight, deep within the earth, the Istanbul State Symphony Orchestra was performing one of Franz Liszt’s most famous works—the Dante Symphony—an entire composition inspired by Dante’s descent into and return from hell.

“It’s being performed here for a week,” Langdon said, scrutinizing the poster’s fine print. “A free concert. Underwritten by an anonymous donor.”

Sinskey suspected that she could guess the identity of the anonymous donor. Bertrand Zobrist’s flair for the dramatic, it seemed, was also a ruthless practical strategy. This week of free concerts would lure thousands more tourists than usual down into the cistern and place them in a congested area … where they would breathe the contaminated air, then travel back to their homes both here and abroad.

“Sir?” the doorman called to Brüder. “We have room for a couple more.”

Brüder turned to Sinskey. “Call the local authorities. Whatever we find down there, we’ll need support. When my team arrives, have them radio me for an update. I’ll go down and see if I can get a sense of where Zobrist might have tethered this thing.”

“Without a respirator?” Sinskey asked. “You don’t know for a fact the Solublon bag is intact.”

Brüder frowned, holding his hand up in the warm wind that was blowing out of the doorway. “I hate to say this, but if this contagion is out, I’m guessing everyone in this city is probably infected.”

Sinskey had been thinking the same thing but hadn’t wanted to say it in front of Langdon and Mirsat.

“Besides,” Brüder added, “I’ve seen what happens to crowds when my team marches in wearing hazmat suits. We’d have full-scale panic and a stampede.”

Sinskey decided to defer to Brüder; he was, after all, the specialist and had been in situations like this before.

“Our only realistic option,” Brüder told her, “is to assume it’s still safe down there, and make a play to contain this.”

“Okay,” Sinskey said. “Do it.”

“There’s another problem,” Langdon interjected. “What about Sienna?”

“What about her?” Brüder demanded.

“Whatever her intentions may be here in Istanbul, she’s very good with languages and possibly speaks some Turkish.”

“So?”

“Sienna knows the poem references the ‘sunken palace,’ ” Langdon said. “And in Turkish, ‘sunken palace’ literally points …” He motioned to the “Yerebatan Sarayi” sign over the doorway. “… here.”

“That’s true,” Sinskey agreed wearily. “She may have figured this out and bypassed Hagia Sophia altogether.”

Brüder glanced at the lone doorway and cursed under his breath. “Okay, if she’s down there and plans to break the Solublon bag before we can contain it, at least she hasn’t been there long. It’s a huge area, and she probably has no idea where to look. And with all those people around, she probably can’t just dive into the water unnoticed.”

“Sir?” the doorman called again to Brüder. “Would you like to enter now?”

Brüder could see another group of concertgoers approaching from across the street, and nodded to the doorman that he was indeed coming.

“I’m coming with you,” Langdon said, following.

Brüder turned and faced him. “No chance.”

Langdon’s tone was unyielding. “Agent Brüder, one of the reasons we’re in this situation is that Sienna Brooks has been playing me all day. And as you said, we may all be infected already. I’m helping you whether you like it or not.”

Brüder stared at him a moment and then relented.

As Langdon passed through the doorway and began descending the steep staircase behind Brüder, he could feel the warm wind rushing past them from the bowels of the cistern. The humid breeze carried on it the strains of Liszt’s Dante Symphony as well as a familiar, yet ineffable scent … that of a massive crush of people congregated together in an enclosed space.

Langdon suddenly felt a ghostly pall envelop him, as if the long fingers of an unseen hand were reaching out of the earth and raking his flesh.

The music .

The symphony chorus—a hundred voices strong—was now singing a well-known passage, articulating every syllable of Dante’s gloomy text.

“Lasciate ogne speranza,” they were now chanting, “voi ch’entrate.”

These six words—the most famous line in all of Dante’s Inferno —welled up from the bottom of the stairs like the ominous stench of death.

Accompanied by a swell of trumpets and horns, the choir intoned the warning again. “Lasciate ogne speranza voi ch’entrate!”

Abandon all hope, ye who enter here!

CHAPTER 91

Bathed in red light, the subterranean cavern resonated with the sounds of hell-inspired music—the wail of voices, the dissonant pinch of strings, and the deep roll of timpani, which thundered through the grotto like a seismic tremor.

As far as Langdon could see, the floor of this underground world was a glassy sheet of water—dark, still, smooth—like black ice on a frozen New England pond.

The lagoon that reflects no stars .

Rising out of the water, meticulously arranged in seemingly endless rows, were hundreds upon hundreds of thick Doric columns, each climbing thirty feet to support the cavern’s vaulted ceiling. The columns were lit from below by a series of individual red spotlights, creating a surreal forest of illuminated trunks that telescoped off into the darkness like some kind of mirrored illusion.

Langdon and Brüder paused at the bottom of the stairs, momentarily stalled on the threshold of the spectral hollow before them. The cavern itself seemed to glow with a reddish hue, and as Langdon took it all in, he could feel himself breathing as shallowly as possible.

The air down here was heavier than he’d imagined.

Langdon could see the crowd in the distance to their left. The concert was taking place deep in the underground space, halfway back against the far wall, its audience seated on an expanse of platforms. Several hundred spectators sat in concentric rings that had been arranged around the orchestra while a hundred more stood around the perimeter. Still others had taken up positions out on the near boardwalks, leaning on the sturdy railings and gazing down into the water as they listened to the music.