Inferno: (Robert Langdon Book 4)

places—forests, labyrinths, grottoes, nymphaea. More important, traversing the Boboli Gardens would eventually lead them to the Palazzo Pitti, the stone citadel that once housed the main seat of the Medici grand duchy, and whose 140 rooms remained one of Florence’s most frequented tourist attractions.
    If we can reach the Palazzo Pitti , Langdon thought, the bridge to the old city is a stone’s throw away.
    Langdon motioned as calmly as possible to the high wall that enclosed the gardens. “How do we get into the gardens?” he asked. “I’d love to show my sister before we tour the institute.”
    The tattooed kid shook his head. “You can’t get into the gardens from here. The entrance is way over at Pitti Palace. You’d have to drive through Porta Romana and go around.”
    “Bullshit,” Sienna blurted.
    Everyone turned and stared at her, including Langdon.
    “Come on,” she said, smirking coyly at the students as she stroked her blond ponytail. “You’re telling me you guys don’t sneak into the gardens to smoke weed and fool around?”
    The kids all exchanged looks and then burst out laughing.
    The guy with the tattoos now looked utterly smitten. “Ma’am, you should totally teach here.” He walked Sienna to the side of the building and pointed around the corner to a rear parking lot. “See that shed on the left? There’s an old platform behind it. Climb up on the roof, and you can jump down on the other side of the wall.”
    Sienna was already on the move. She glanced back at Langdon with a patronizing smile. “Come on, brother Bob. Unless you’re too old to jump a fence?”

CHAPTER 22
    THE SILVER-HAIRED WOMAN in the van leaned her head against the bulletproof window and closed her eyes. She felt like the world was spinning beneath her. The drugs they’d given her made her feel ill.
    I need medical attention , she thought.
    Even so, the armed guard beside her had strict orders: her needs were to be ignored until their task had been successfully completed. From the sounds of chaos around her, it was clear that would be no time soon.
    The dizziness was increasing now, and she was having trouble breathing. As she fought off a new wave of nausea, she wondered how life had managed to deliver her to this surreal crossroads. The answer was too complex to decipher in her current delirious state, but she had no doubt where it had all begun.
    New York.
    Two years ago.
    She had flown to Manhattan from Geneva, where she was serving as the director of the World Health Organization, a highly coveted and prestigious post that she had held for nearly a decade. A specialist in communicable disease and the epidemiology of epidemics, she had been invited to the UN to deliver a lecture assessing the threat of pandemic disease in third-world countries. Her talk had been upbeat and reassuring, outlining several new early-detection systems and treatment plans devised by the World Health Organization and others. She had received a standing ovation.
    Following the lecture, while she was in the hall talking to some lingering academics, a UN employee with a high-level diplomatic badge strode over and interrupted the conversation.
    “Dr. Sinskey, we have just been contacted by the Council on Foreign Relations. There is someone there who would like to speak to you. A car is waiting outside.”
    Puzzled and a bit unnerved, Dr. Elizabeth Sinskey excused herselfand collected her overnight bag. As her limo raced up First Avenue, she began to feel strangely nervous.
    The Council on Foreign Relations?
    Elizabeth Sinskey, like most, had heard the rumors.
    Founded in the 1920s as a private think tank, the CFR had among its past membership nearly every secretary of state, more than a half-dozen presidents, a majority of CIA chiefs, senators, judges, as well as dynastic legends with names like Morgan, Rothschild, and Rockefeller. The membership’s unparalleled collection of brainpower, political influence, and wealth had earned the Council on Foreign Relations the reputation of being “the most influential private club on earth.”
    As director of the World Health Organization, Elizabeth was no stranger to rubbing shoulders with the big boys. Her long tenure at WHO, combined with her outspoken nature, had earned her a nod recently from a major newsmagazine that listed her among its twenty most influential people in the world. The Face of World Health , they had written beneath her photo, which Elizabeth found ironic