Inferno: (Robert Langdon Book 4)

thrum of The Mendacium ’s engines as the ship powered through its wide turn, banking back towardthe Venice Airport. On board, all hell had broken loose. The provost had dashed off, shouting orders to his crew. Elizabeth Sinskey had grabbed her phone and called the pilots of the WHO’s C-130 transport plane, demanding they be prepped as soon as possible to fly out of the Venice Airport. And Agent Brüder had jumped on a laptop to see if he could coordinate some kind of international advance team at their final destination.
    A world away.
    The provost now returned to the conference room and urgently addressed Brüder. “Any further word from the Venetian authorities?”
    Brüder shook his head. “No trace. They’re looking, but Sienna Brooks has vanished.”
    Langdon did a double take. They’re looking for Sienna?
    Sinskey finished her phone call and also joined the conversation. “No luck finding her?”
    The provost shook his head. “If you’re agreeable, I think the WHO should authorize the use of force if necessary to bring her in.”
    Langdon jumped to his feet. “Why?! Sienna Brooks is not involved in any of this!”
    The provost’s dark eyes cut to Langdon. “Professor, there are some things I have to tell you about Ms. Brooks.”

CHAPTER 79
    PUSHING PAST THE crush of tourists on the Rialto Bridge, Sienna Brooks began running again, sprinting west along the canal-front walkway of the Fondamenta Vin Castello.
    They’ve got Robert.
    She could still see his desperate eyes gazing up at her as the soldiers dragged him back down the light well into the crypt. She had little doubt that his captors would quickly persuade him, one way or another, to reveal everything he had figured out.
    We’re in the wrong country.
    Far more tragic, though, was her knowledge that his captors would waste no time revealing to Langdon the true nature of the situation.
    I’m so sorry, Robert.
    For everything.
    Please know I had no choice.
    Strangely, Sienna missed him already. Here, amid the masses of Venice, she felt a familiar loneliness settling in.
    The feeling was nothing new.
    Since childhood, Sienna Brooks had felt alone.
    Growing up with an exceptional intellect, Sienna had spent her youth feeling like a stranger in a strange land … an alien trapped on a lonely world. She tried to make friends, but her peers immersed themselves in frivolities that held no interest to her. She tried to respect her elders, but most adults seemed like nothing more than aging children, lacking even the most basic understanding of the world around them, and, most troubling, lacking any curiosity or concern about it.
    I felt I was a part of nothing.
    And so Sienna Brooks learned how to be a ghost. Invisible. She learned how to be a chameleon, a performer, playing just another face in the crowd. Her childhood passion for stage acting, she had no doubt, stemmed from what would become her lifelong dream of becoming someone else.
    Someone normal.
    Her performance in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream helped her feel a part of something, and the adult actors were supportive without being condescending. Her joy, however, was short-lived, evaporating the moment she left the stage on opening night and faced throngs of wide-eyed media people while her costars quietly skulked out the back door unnoticed.
    Now they hate me, too.
    By the age of seven, Sienna had read enough to diagnose herself with deep depression. When she told her parents, they seemed dumbfounded, as they usually were by the strangeness of their own daughter. Nonetheless, they sent her to a psychiatrist. The doctor asked her a lot of questions, which Sienna had already asked herself, and then he prescribed a combination of amitriptyline and chlordiazepoxide.
    Furious, Sienna jumped off his couch. “Amitriptyline?!” she challenged. “I want to be happier—not a zombie!”
    The psychiatrist, to his great credit, remained very calm in the face of her outburst and offered a second suggestion. “Sienna, if you prefer not to take pharmaceuticals, we can try a more holistic approach.” He paused. “It sounds as if you are trapped in a cycle of thinking about yourself and how you don’t belong in the world.”
    “That’s true,” Sienna replied. “I try to stop, but I can’t!”
    He smiled calmly. “Of course you can’t stop. It is physically impossible for the human mind to think of nothing. The soul craves emotion, and it will continue to seek fuel for that