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“Okay,” she said quickly. “Catrova. Cer.”
“Yes, and to put the cards back in order, we simply uncut the deck and place the bottom on top. The two halves swap places.”
Sienna eyed the letters. “Cer. Catrova.” She shrugged, looking unimpressed. “Still meaningless …”
“Cer catrova,” Langdon repeated. After a pause, he said the words again, eliding them together. “Cercatrova.” Finally, he said them with a pause in the middle. “Cerca … trova.”
Sienna gasped audibly and her eyes shot up to meet Langdon’s.
“Yes,” Langdon said with a smile. “Cerca trova.”
The two Italian words cerca and trova literally meant “seek” and “find.” When combined as a phrase—cerca trova—they were synonymous with the biblical aphorism “Seek and ye shall find.”
“Your hallucinations!” Sienna exclaimed, breathless. “The woman with the veil! She kept telling you to seek and find!” She jumped to her feet. “Robert, do you realize what this means? It means the words cerca trova were already in your subconscious! Don’t you see? You must have deciphered this phrase before you arrived at the hospital! You had probably seen this projector’s image already … but had forgotten!”
She’s right, he realized, having been so fixated on the cipher itself that it never occurred to him that he might have been through all of this already.
“Robert, you said earlier that La Mappa points to a specific location in the old city. But I still don’t understand where.”
“Cerca trova doesn’t ring any bells for you?”
She shrugged.
Langdon smiled inwardly. Finally, something Sienna doesn’t know. “As it turns out, this phrase points very specifically to a famous mural that hangs in the Palazzo Vecchio—Giorgio Vasari’s Battaglia di Marciano in the Hall of the Five Hundred. Near the top of the painting, barely visible, Vasari painted the words cerca trova in tiny letters. Plenty of theories exist as to why he did this, but no conclusive proof has ever been discovered.”
The high-pitched whine of a small aircraft suddenly buzzed overhead, streaking in out of nowhere and skimming the wooded canopy just above them. The sound was very close, and Langdon and Sienna froze as the craft raced past.
As the aircraft departed, Langdon peered up at it through the trees. “Toy helicopter,” he said, exhaling as he watched the three-foot-long, radio-controlled chopper banking in the distance. It sounded like a giant, angry mosquito.
Sienna, however, still looked wary. “Stay down.”
Sure enough, the little chopper banked fully and was now coming back their way, skimming the treetops, sailing past them again, this time off to their left above another glade.
“That’s not a toy,” she whispered. “It’s a reconnaissance drone. Probably has a video camera on board sending live images back to … somebody.”
Langdon’s jaw tightened as he watched the chopper streak off in the direction from which it had appeared—the Porta Romana and the Art Institute.
“I don’t know what you did,” Sienna said, “but some powerful people are clearly very eager to find you.”
The helicopter banked yet again and began a slow pass along the perimeter wall they had just jumped.
“Someone at the Art Institute must have seen us and said something,” Sienna said, heading down the path. “We’ve got to get out of here. Now.”
As the drone buzzed away toward the far end of the gardens, Langdon used his foot to erase the letters he’d written on the pathway and then hurried after Sienna. His mind swirled with thoughts of cerca trova, the Giorgio Vasari mural, as well as with Sienna’s revelation that Langdon must have already deciphered the projector’s message. Seek and ye shall find.
Suddenly, just as they entered a second glade, a startling thought hit Langdon. He skidded to a stop on the wooded path, a bemused look on his face.
Sienna stopped, too. “Robert? What is it?!”
“I’m innocent,” he declared.
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