Dan Brown: Inferno: A Novel

Sienna seemed detached as she tossed a flotation cushion into the water, moved to the helm of the boat, and pushed the dual throttles forward.

The engines roared and the boat sped off.

Langdon stood on the dock, catching his breath as he watched the sleek white hull skimming away across the water, becoming a ghostly shadow in the night. Langdon raised his eyes toward the horizon and knew that Sienna now had access not only to the distant shores, but also to an almost endless web of waterways that stretched from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean.

She’s gone .

Nearby, the boat’s owner climbed out of the water, got to his feet, and hurried off to call the police.

Langdon felt starkly alone as he watched the lights of the stolen boat growing faint. The whine of the powerful engines was growing distant as well.

And then the engines faded abruptly to silence.

Langdon peered into the distance. Did she kill the motor?

The boat’s lights seemed to have stopped receding and were now bobbing gently in the small waves of the Golden Horn. For some unknown reason, Sienna Brooks had stopped.

Did she run out of gas?

He cupped his hands and listened, now able to hear the faint thrum of her engines idling.

If she’s not out of gas, what is she doing?

Langdon waited.

Ten seconds. Fifteen seconds. Thirty seconds.

Then, without warning, the engines revved up again, reluctantly at first, and then more decidedly. To Langdon’s bewilderment, the boat’s lights began banking into a wide turn, and the bow swung around toward him.

She’s coming back .

As the boat approached, Langdon could see Sienna at the wheel, staring blankly ahead. Thirty yards away, she throttled down and eased the boat safely back to the dock it had just left. Then she killed the engines.

Silence.

Above her, Langdon stared down in disbelief.

Sienna never looked up.

Instead, she buried her face in her hands. She began trembling, her shoulders hunched and shuddering. When she finally looked at Langdon, her eyes were overflowing with tears.

“Robert,” she sobbed. “I can’t run away anymore. I have nowhere left to go.”

CHAPTER 96

It’s out .

Elizabeth Sinskey stood at the bottom of the cistern stairwell and gazed at the void of the evacuated cavern. Her breathing felt strained through the respirator she was wearing. Although she had probably already been exposed to whatever pathogen might be down here, Sinskey felt relieved to be wearing a hazmat suit as she and the SRS team entered the desolate space. They were dressed in bulbous white jumpsuits that locked into airtight helmets, and the group looked like a team of astronauts breaching an alien spacecraft.

Sinskey knew that upstairs on the street, hundreds of frightened concertgoers and musicians were huddling in confusion, many being treated for injuries suffered in the stampede. Others had fled the area entirely. She felt lucky to have escaped with only a bruised knee and a broken amulet.

Only one form of contagion travels faster than a virus , Sinskey thought. And that’s fear .

The doors upstairs were now locked, hermetically sealed, and guarded by local authorities. Sinskey had anticipated a jurisdictional showdown with the arriving local police, but any potential conflicts had evaporated instantly when they saw the SRS team’s biohazard gear and heard Sinskey’s warnings of a possible plague.

We’re on our own , the director of the WHO thought, staring out at the forest of columns reflected in the lagoon. Nobody wants to come down here .

Behind her, two agents were stretching a huge polyurethane sheet across the bottom of the stairwell and sealing it to the wall with a heat gun. Two others had found an open area of boardwalk planks and had begun setting up an array of electronic gear as if preparing to analyze a crime scene.

That’s exactly what this is , Sinskey thought. A crime scene .

She again pictured the woman in the wet burka who had fled the cistern. By all appearances, Sienna Brooks had risked her own life in order to sabotage the WHO’s containment efforts and fulfill Zobrist’s twisted mission. She came down here and broke the Solublon bag …

Langdon had chased Sienna off into the night, and Sinskey had still not received word regarding what had happened to either of them.

I hope Professor Langdon is safe , she thought.

Agent Brüder stood dripping on the boardwalk, staring blankly out at the inverted head of Medusa and wondering how to proceed.

As an SRS agent, Brüder had been trained to think on the macro-cosmic level, setting aside any immediate ethical or personal concerns and focusing on saving as many lives as possible over the long term. Threats to his own health had barely registered on him until this moment. I waded into this stuff , he thought, chastising himself for the risky action he had taken and yet knowing he’d had little choice. We needed an immediate assessment .

Brüder forced his thoughts to the task at hand—implement Plan B. Unfortunately, in a containment crisis, Plan B was always the same: widen the radius . Fighting communicable disease was often like fighting a forest fire: sometimes you had to drop back and surrender a battle in hopes of winning the war.

At this point, Brüder had still not given up the idea that a full containment was possible. Most likely Sienna Brooks had ruptured the bag only minutes before the mass hysteria and evacuation. If that were true, even though hundreds of people had fled the scene, everyone might have been located far enough away from the source to avoid contamination.

Everyone except Langdon and Sienna , Brüder realized. Both of whom were here at ground zero, and are now someplace out in the city .

Brüder had another concern as well—a gap in logic that continued to nag at him. While in the water, he had never found the actual breached Solublon bag. It seemed to Brüder that if Sienna had broken the bag—by kicking it or ripping it or whatever she had done—he would have found the damaged, deflated remnants floating somewhere in the area.

But Brüder had found nothing. Any remains of the bag seemed to have vanished. Brüder strongly doubted that Sienna would have carried off the Solublon bag with her, since by this point it would have been no more than a slimy, dissolving mess.

So where did it go?

Brüder had an uneasy sense that he was missing something. Even so, he focused on a new containment strategy, which required him to answer one critical question.

What is the contagion’s current dispersal radius?

Brüder knew the question would be answered in a matter of minutes. His team had set up a series of portable virus-detection devices along the boardwalks at increasing distances from the lagoon. These devices—known as PCR units—used what was called a polymerase chain reaction to detect the presence of viral contamination.

The SRS agent remained hopeful. With no movement of the water in the lagoon, and the passage of very little time, he was confident that the PCR devices would detect a relatively small region of contamination, which they could then attack with chemicals and the use of suction.

“Ready?” a technician called out through a megaphone.

Agents stationed around the cistern gave the thumbs-up.

“Run your samples,” the megaphone crackled.

Throughout the cavern, analysts crouched down and started their individual PCR machines. Each device began analyzing a sample from the point at which its operator was located on the boardwalk, spaced in ever-widening arcs around Zobrist’s plaque.