"I’m sorry," the camerlegno said. "It wasn’t supposed to happen this way." Then he opened his door and hurled himself into the night.
The image burned in Langdon’s unconscious mind, and with it came the pain. Real pain. Physical pain. Aching. Searing. He begged to be taken, to let it end, but as the water lapped louder in his ears, new images began to flash. His hell had only just begun. He saw bits and pieces. Scattered frames of sheer panic. He lay halfway between death and nightmare, begging for deliverance, but the pictures grew brighter in his mind.
The antimatter canister was locked out of reach. It counted relentlessly downward as the chopper shot upward. Fifty seconds. Higher. Higher. Langdon spun wildly in the cabin, trying to make sense of what he had just seen. Forty-five seconds. He dug under seats searching for another parachute. Forty seconds. There was none! There had to be an option! Thirty-five seconds. He raced to the open doorway of the chopper and stood in the raging wind, gazing down at the lights of Rome below. Thirty-two seconds.
And then he made the choice.
The unbelievable choice…
With no parachute, Robert Langdon had jumped out the door. As the night swallowed his tumbling body, the helicopter seemed to rocket off above him, the sound of its rotors evaporating in the deafening rush of his own free fall.
As he plummeted toward earth, Robert Langdon felt something he had not experienced since his years on the high dive—the inexorable pull of gravity during a dead drop. The faster he fell, the harder the earth seemed to pull, sucking him down. This time, however, the drop was not fifty feet into a pool. The drop was thousands of feet into a city—an endless expanse of pavement and concrete.
Somewhere in the torrent of wind and desperation, Kohler’s voice echoed from the grave… words he had spoken earlier this morning standing at CERN’s free-fall tube. One square yard of drag will slow a falling body almost twenty percent. Twenty percent, Langdon now realized, was not even close to what one would need to survive a fall like this. Nonetheless, more out of paralysis than hope, he clenched in his hands the sole object he had grabbed from the chopper on his way out the door. It was an odd memento, but it was one that for a fleeting instant had given him hope.
The windshield tarp had been lying in the back of the helicopter. It was a concave rectangle—about four yards by two—like a huge fitted sheet… the crudest approximation of a parachute imaginable. It had no harness, only bungie loops at either end for fastening it to the curvature of the windshield. Langdon had grabbed it, slid his hands through the loops, held on, and leapt out into the void.
His last great act of youthful defiance.
No illusions of life beyond this moment.
Langdon fell like a rock. Feet first. Arms raised. His hands gripping the loops. The tarp billowed like a mushroom overhead. The wind tore past him violently.
As he plummeted toward earth, there was a deep explosion somewhere above him. It seemed farther off than he had expected. Almost instantly, the shock wave hit. He felt the breath crushed from his lungs. There was a sudden warmth in the air all around him. He fought to hold on. A wall of heat raced down from above. The top of the tarp began to smolder… but held.
Langdon rocketed downward, on the edge of a billowing shroud of light, feeling like a surfer trying to outrun a thousand-foot tidal wave. Then suddenly, the heat receded.
He was falling again through the dark coolness.
For an instant, Langdon felt hope. A moment later, though, that hope faded like the withdrawing heat above. Despite his straining arms assuring him that the tarp was slowing his fall, the wind still tore past his body with deafening velocity. Langdon had no doubt he was still moving too fast to survive the fall. He would be crushed when he hit the ground.
Mathematical figures tumbled through his brain, but he was too numb to make sense of them… one square yard of drag… 20 percent reduction of speed. All Langdon could figure was that the tarp over his head was big enough to slow him more than 20 percent. Unfortunately, though, he could tell from the wind whipping past him that whatever good the tarp was doing was not enough. He was still falling fast… there would be no surviving the impact on the waiting sea of concrete.
Beneath him, the lights of Rome spread out in all directions. The city looked like an enormous starlit sky that Langdon was falling into. The perfect expanse of stars was marred only by a dark strip that split the city in two—a wide, unlit ribbon that wound through the dots of light like a fat snake. Langdon stared down at the meandering swatch of black.
Suddenly, like the surging crest of an unexpected wave, hope filled him again.
With almost maniacal vigor, Langdon yanked down hard with his right hand on the canopy. The tarp suddenly flapped louder, billowing, cutting right to find the path of least resistance. Langdon felt himself drifting sideways. He pulled again, harder, ignoring the pain in his palm. The tarp flared, and Langdon sensed his body sliding laterally. Not much. But some! He looked beneath him again, to the sinuous serpent of black. It was off to the right, but he was still pretty high. Had he waited too long? He pulled with all his might and accepted somehow that it was now in the hands of God. He focused hard on the widest part of the serpent and… for the first time in his life, prayed for a miracle.
The rest was a blur.
The darkness rushing up beneath him… the diving instincts coming back… the reflexive locking of his spine and pointing of the toes… the inflating of his lungs to protect his vital organs… the flexing of his legs into a battering ram… and finally… the thankfulness that the winding Tiber River was raging… making its waters frothy and air-filled… and three times softer than standing water.
Then there was impact… and blackness.
It had been the thundering sound of the flapping canopy that drew the group’s eyes away from the fireball in the sky. The sky above Rome had been filled with sights tonight… a skyrocketing helicopter, an enormous explosion, and now this strange object that had plummeted into the churning waters of the Tiber River, directly off the shore of the river’s tiny island, Isola Tiberina.
Ever since the island had been used to quarantine the sick during the Roman plague of A.D. 1656, it had been thought to have mystic healing properties. For this reason, the island had later become the site for Rome’s Hospital Tiberina.
The body was battered when they pulled it onto shore. The man still had a faint pulse, which was amazing, they thought. They wondered if it was Isola Tiberina’s mythical reputation for healing that had somehow kept his heart pumping. Minutes later, when the man began coughing and slowly regained consciousness, the group decided the island must indeed be magical.
126
Cardinal Mortati knew there were no words in any language that could have added to the mystery of this moment. The silence of the vision over St. Peter’s Square sang louder than any chorus of angels.
As he stared up at Camerlegno Ventresca, Mortati felt the paralyzing collision of his heart and mind. The vision seemed real, tangible. And yet… how could it be? Everyone had seen the camerlegno get in the helicopter. They had all witnessed the ball of light in the sky. And now, somehow, the camerlegno stood high above them on the rooftop terrace. Transported by angels? Reincarnated by the hand of God?
This is impossible…
Mortati’s heart wanted nothing more than to believe, but his mind cried out for reason. And yet all around him, the cardinals stared up, obviously seeing what he was seeing, paralyzed with wonder.
It was the camerlegno. There was no doubt. But he looked different somehow. Divine. As if he had been purified. A spirit? A man? His white flesh shone in the spotlights with an incorporeal weightlessness.
In the square there was crying, cheering, spontaneous applause. A group of nuns fell to their knees and wailed saetas. A pulsing grew from in the crowd. Suddenly, the entire square was chanting the camerlegno’s name. The cardinals, some with tears rolling down their faces, joined in. Mortati looked around him and tried to comprehend. Is this really happening?