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“So you shot me in the head?” Langdon replied angrily.
“We came up with a plan to make you trust us.”
Langdon felt lost. “How do you make someone trust you … after you’ve kidnapped and interrogated him?”
The man shifted uncomfortably now. “Professor, are you familiar with the family of chemicals known as benzodiazepines?”
Langdon shook his head.
“They are a breed of pharmaceutical that are used for, among other things, the treatment of post-traumatic stress. As you may know, when someone endures a horrific event like a car accident or a sexual assault, the long-term memories can be permanently debilitating. Through the use of benzodiazepines, neuroscientists are now able to treat post-traumatic stress, as it were, before it happens.”
Langdon listened in silence, unable to imagine where this conversation might be going.
“When new memories are formed,” the provost continued, “those events are stored in your short-term memory for about forty-eight hours before they migrate to your long-term memory. Using new blends of benzodiazepines, one can easily refresh the short-term memory … essentially deleting its content before those recent memories migrate, so to speak, into long-term memories. A victim of assault, for example, if administered a benzodiazepine within a few hours after the attack, can have those memories expunged forever, and the trauma never becomes part of her psyche. The only downside is that she loses all recollection of several days of her life.”
Langdon stared at the tiny man in disbelief. “You gave me amnesia!”
The provost let out an apologetic sigh. “I’m afraid so. Chemically induced. Very safe. But yes, a deletion of your short-term memory.” He paused. “While you were out, you mumbled something about a plague, which we assumed was on account of your viewing the projector images. We never imagined that Zobrist had created a real plague.” He paused. “You also kept mumbling a phrase that sounded to us like ‘Very sorry. Very sorry.’ ”
Vasari. It must have been all he had figured out about the projector at that point. Cerca trova. “But … I thought my amnesia was caused by my head wound. Somebody shot me.”
The provost shook his head. “Nobody shot you, Professor. There was no head wound.”
“What?!” Langdon’s fingers groped instinctively for the stitches and the swollen injury on the back of his head. “Then what the hell is this!” He raised his hair to reveal the shaved area.
“Part of the illusion. We made a small incision in your scalp and then immediately closed it up with stitches. You had to believe you had been attacked.”
This isn’t a bullet wound?!
“When you woke up,” the provost said, “we wanted you to believe that people were trying to kill you … that you were in peril.”
“People were trying to kill me!” Langdon shouted, his outburst drawing gazes from elsewhere in the plane. “I saw the hospital’s doctor—Dr. Marconi—gunned down in cold blood!”
“That’s what you saw,” the provost said evenly, “but that’s not what happened. Vayentha worked for me. She had a superb skill set for this kind of work.”
“Killing people?” Langdon demanded.
“No,” the provost said calmly. “Pretending to kill people.”
Langdon stared at the man for a long moment, picturing the gray-bearded doctor with the bushy eyebrows who had collapsed on the floor, blood gushing from his chest.
“Vayentha’s gun was loaded with blanks,” the provost said. “It triggered a radio-controlled squib that detonated a blood pack on Dr. Marconi’s chest. He is fine, by the way.”
Langdon closed his eyes, dumbstruck by what he was hearing. “And the … hospital room?”
“A quickly improvised set,” the provost said. “Professor, I know this is all very difficult to absorb. We were working quickly, and you were groggy, so it didn’t need to be perfect. When you woke up, you saw what we wanted you to see—hospital props, a few actors, and a choreographed attack scene.”
Langdon was reeling.
“This is what my company does,” the provost said. “We’re very good at creating illusions.”
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