“I know,” Langdon said, without breaking stride. “That’s Braccio di Bartolo—a famous court dwarf. If you ask me, they should put him out back in the giant bathtub.”
Langdon turned sharply to his right, heading down a set of stairs that Sienna had been unable to see until now.
A way out?!
The flash of hope was short-lived.
As she turned the corner and headed down the stairs behind Langdon, she realized they were dashing into a dead end—a cul-de-sac whose walls were twice as high as the others.
Furthermore, Sienna now sensed that their long journey was about to terminate at the mouth of a gaping cavern … a deep grotto carved out of the rear wall. This can’t be where he’s taking us!
Over the cave’s yawning entrance, daggerlike stalactites loomed portentously. In the cavity beyond, oozing geological features twisted and dripped down the walls as if the stone were melting … morphing into shapes that included, to Sienna’s alarm, half-buried humanoids extruding from the walls as if being consumed by the stone. The entire vision reminded Sienna of something out of Botticelli’s Mappa dell’Inferno.
Langdon, for some reason, seemed unfazed, and continued running directly toward the cave’s entrance. He’d made a comment earlier about Vatican City, but Sienna was fairly certain there were no freakish caverns inside the walls of the Holy See.
As they drew nearer, Sienna’s eyes moved to the sprawling entablature above the entrance—a ghostly compilation of stalactites and nebulous stone extrusions that seemed to be engulfing two reclining women, who were flanked by a shield embedded with six balls, or palle, the famed crest of the Medici.
Langdon suddenly cut to his left, away from the entrance and toward a feature Sienna had previously missed—a small gray door to the left of the cavern. Weathered and wooden, it appeared of little significance, like a storage closet or room for landscaping supplies.
Langdon rushed to the door, clearly hoping he could open it, but the door had no handle—only a brass keyhole—and, apparently, could be opened only from within.
“Damn it!” Langdon’s eyes now shone with concern, his earlier hopefulness all but erased. “I had hoped—”
Without warning, the piercing whine of the drone echoed loudly off the high walls around them. Sienna turned to see the drone rising up over the palace and clawing its way in their direction.
Langdon clearly saw it, too, because he grabbed Sienna’s hand and dashed toward the cavern. They ducked out of sight in the nick of time beneath the grotto’s stalactite overhang.
A fitting end, she thought. Dashing through the gates of hell.
CHAPTER 28
A quarter mile to the east, Vayentha parked her motorcycle. She had crossed into the old city via the Ponte alle Grazie and then circled around to the Ponte Vecchio—the famed pedestrian bridge connecting the Pitti Palace to the old city. After locking her helmet to the bike, she strode out onto the bridge and mixed with the early-morning tourists.
A cool March breeze blew steadily up the river, ruffling Vayentha’s short spiked hair, reminding her that Langdon knew what she looked like. She paused at the stall of one of the bridge’s many vendors and bought an AMO FIRENZE baseball cap, pulling it low over her face.
She smoothed her leather suit over the bulge of her handgun and took up a position near the center of the bridge, casually leaning against a pillar and facing the Pitti Palace. From here she was able to survey all the pedestrians crossing the Arno into the heart of Florence.
Langdon is on foot, she told herself. If he finds a way around the Porta Romana, this bridge is his most logical route into the old city.
To the west, in the direction of the Pitti Palace, she could hear sirens and wondered if this was good or bad news. Are they still looking for him? Or have they caught him? As Vayentha strained her ears for some indication as to what was going on, a new sound suddenly became audible—a high-pitched whine somewhere overhead. Her eyes turned instinctively skyward, and she spotted it at once—a small remote-controlled helicopter rising fast over the palace and swooping down over the treetops in the direction of the northeast corner of the Boboli Gardens.
A surveillance drone, Vayentha thought with a surge of hope. If it’s in the air, Brüder has yet to find Langdon.
The drone was approaching fast. Apparently it was surveying the northeast corner of the gardens, the area closest to Ponte Vecchio and Vayentha’s position, which gave her additional encouragement.
If Langdon eluded Brüder, he would definitely be moving in this direction.
As Vayentha watched, however, the drone suddenly dive-bombed out of sight behind the high stone wall. She could hear it hovering in place somewhere below the tree line … apparently having located something of interest.
CHAPTER 29
Seek and ye shall find, Langdon thought, huddled in the dim grotto with Sienna. We sought an exit … and found a dead end.
The amorphous fountain in the center of the cave offered good cover, and yet as Langdon peered out from behind it, he sensed it was too late.
The drone had just swooped down into the walled cul-de-sac, stopping abruptly outside the cavern, where it now hovered at a standstill, only ten feet off the ground, facing the grotto, buzzing intensely like some kind of infuriated insect … awaiting its prey.
Langdon pulled back and whispered the grim news to Sienna. “I think it knows we’re here.”
The drone’s high-pitched whine was nearly deafening inside the cavern, the noise reflecting sharply off the stone walls. Langdon found it hard to believe they were being held hostage by a miniature mechanical helicopter, and yet he knew that trying to run from it was fruitless. So what do we do now? Just wait? His original plan to access what lay behind the little gray door had been a reasonable one, except he hadn’t realized the door was openable only from within.