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“Exactly. The provost suddenly comprehended what the Consortium had been involved in, and he was horrified. He immediately demanded to speak to the person who knew Zobrist best—FS-2080—to see if she knew what Zobrist had done.”
“FS-2080?”
“Sorry, Sienna Brooks. That was the code name she chose for this operation. It’s apparently a Transhumanist thing. And the provost had no way to reach Sienna except through me.”
“The phone call on the train,” Langdon said. “Your ‘ailing mother.’ ”
“Well, I obviously couldn’t take the provost’s call in front of you, so I stepped out. He told me about the video, and I was terrified. He was hoping Sienna had been duped as well, but when I told him you and Sienna had been talking about plagues and seemed to have no intention of breaking off the mission, he knew Sienna and Zobrist were in this together. Sienna instantly became an adversary. He told me to keep him abreast of our position in Venice … and that he was sending in a team to detain her. Agent Brüder’s team almost had her at St. Mark’s Basilica … but she managed to escape.”
Langdon stared blankly at the floor, still able to see Sienna’s pretty brown eyes gazing down at him before she fled.
I’m so sorry, Robert. For everything.
“She’s tough,” the man said. “You probably didn’t see her attack me at the basilica.”
“Attack you?”
“Yes, when the soldiers entered, I was about to shout out and reveal Sienna’s location, but she must have sensed it coming. She drove the heel of her hand straight into the center of my chest.”
“What?!”
“I didn’t know what hit me. Some kind of martial-arts move, I guess. Because I was already badly bruised there, the pain was excruciating. It took me five minutes to get my wind back. Sienna dragged you out onto the balcony before any witnesses could reveal what had happened.”
Stunned, Langdon thought back to the elderly Italian woman who had shouted at Sienna—“L’hai colpito al petto!”—and made a forceful motion of her fist on her own chest.
I can’t! Sienna had replied. CPR will kill him! Look at his chest!
As Langdon replayed the scene in his mind, he realized just how quickly Sienna Brooks thought on her feet. Sienna had cleverly mistranslated the old woman’s Italian. L’hai colpito al petto was not a suggestion that Sienna apply chest compressions … it was an angry accusation: You punched him in the chest!
With all the chaos of the moment, Langdon had not even noticed.
Ferris gave him a pained smile. “As you may have heard, Sienna Brooks is pretty sharp.”
Langdon nodded. I’ve heard.
“Sinskey’s men brought me back to The Mendacium and bandaged me up. The provost asked me to come along for intel support because I’m the only person other than you who spent time with Sienna today.”
Langdon nodded, distracted by the man’s rash. “Your face?” Langdon asked. “And the bruise on your chest? It’s not …”
“The plague?” Ferris laughed and shook his head. “I’m not sure if you’ve been told yet, but I actually played the part of two doctors today.”
“I’m sorry?”
“When I showed up at the baptistry, you said I looked vaguely familiar.”
“You did. Vaguely. Your eyes, I think. You told me that’s because you were the one who recruited me in Cambridge …” Langdon paused. “Which I know now is untrue, so …”
“I looked familiar because we had already met. But not in Cambridge.” The man’s eyes probed Langdon’s for any hint of recognition. “I was actually the first person you saw when you woke up this morning in the hospital.”
Langdon pictured the grim little hospital room. He had been groggy and his eyesight was compromised, so he was pretty certain that the first person he saw when he awoke was a pale, older doctor with bushy eyebrows and a shaggy graying beard who spoke only Italian.
“No,” Langdon said. “Dr. Marconi was the first person I saw when—”
“Scusi, professore,” the man interrupted with a flawless Italian accent. “Ma non si ricorda di me?” He hunched over like an older man, smoothing back imaginary bushy eyebrows and stroking a nonexistent graying beard. “Sono il dottor Marconi.”
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