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“A fire alarm?” Sienna said. “That’s your plan?”
“We can slip out with the crowd.” Langdon reached up and grabbed the alarm lever. Here goes nothing. Acting quickly before he could think better of it, he pulled down hard, seeing the mechanism cleanly shatter the small glass cylinder inside.
The sirens and pandemonium that Langdon expected never came.
Only silence.
He pulled again.
Nothing.
Sienna stared at him like he was crazy. “Robert, we’re in a stone cathedral packed with tourists! You think these public fire alarms are active when a single prankster could—”
“Of course! Fire laws in the U.S.—”
“You’re in Europe. We have fewer lawyers.” She pointed over Langdon’s shoulder. “And we’re also out of time.”
Langdon turned toward the glass door through which they’d just entered and saw two soldiers hurrying in from the balcony, their hard eyes scanning the area. Langdon recognized one as the same muscular agent who had fired at them on the Trike as they were fleeing Sienna’s apartment.
With precious few options, Langdon and Sienna slipped out of sight in an enclosed spiral stairwell, descending back to the ground floor. When they reached the landing, they paused in the shadows of the stairwell. Across the sanctuary, several soldiers stood guarding the exits, their eyes intently sweeping the entire room.
“If we step out of this stairwell, they’ll see us,” Langdon said.
“The stairs go farther down,” Sienna whispered, motioning to an ACCESSO VIETATO swag that cordoned off the stairs beneath them. Beyond the swag, the stairs descended in an even tighter spiral toward pitch blackness.
Bad idea, Langdon thought. Subterranean crypt with no exit.
Sienna had already stepped over the swag and was groping her way down the spiral tunnel, disappearing into the void.
“It’s open,” Sienna whispered from below.
Langdon was not surprised. The crypt of St. Mark’s was different from many other such places in that it was also a working chapel, where regular services were held in the presence of the bones of St. Mark.
“I think I see natural light!” Sienna whispered.
How is that possible? Langdon tried to recall his previous visits to this sacred underground space and guessed that Sienna was probably seeing the lux eterna—an electric light that remained lit on St. Mark’s tomb in the center of the crypt. With footsteps approaching from above him, though, Langdon didn’t have time to think. He quickly stepped over the swag, making sure he didn’t move it, and then he placed his palm on the rough-hewn stone wall, feeling his way down around the curve and out of sight.
Sienna was waiting for him at the bottom of the stairs. Behind her, the crypt was barely visible in the darkness. It was a squat subterranean chamber with an alarmingly low stone ceiling supported by ancient pillars and brick-vaulted archways. The weight of the entire basilica rests on these pillars, Langdon thought, already feeling claustrophobic.
“Told you,” Sienna whispered, her pretty face faintly illuminated by the hint of muted natural light. She pointed to several small, arched transoms, high on the wall.
Light wells, Langdon realized, having forgotten they were here. The wells—designed to bring light and fresh air into this cramped crypt—opened into deep shafts that dropped down from St. Mark’s Square above. The window glass was reinforced with a tight ironwork pattern of fifteen interlocking circles, and although Langdon suspected that they could be opened from inside, they were shoulder height and would be a tight fit. Even if they somehow managed to get through the window into the shaft, climbing out of the shafts would be impossible, since they were ten feet deep and covered by heavy security grates at the top.
In the dim light that filtered through the wells, St. Mark’s crypt resembled a moonlit forest—a dense grove of trunklike pillars that cast long and heavy-looking shadows across the ground. Langdon turned his gaze to the center of the crypt, where a lone light burned at St. Mark’s tomb. The basilica’s namesake rested in a stone sarcophagus behind an altar, before which there were lines of pews for those lucky few invited to worship here at the heart of Venetian Christendom.
A tiny light suddenly flickered to life beside him and Langdon turned to see Sienna holding the illuminated screen of Ferris’s phone.
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