Langdon’s tone was beseeching now. “Marta, you knowIgnazio. He would never have removed the mask without a good reason. There’s a bigger picture here. The owner of the mask, Bertrand Zobrist, was a very confused man. We think he may be involved in something terrible. I don’t have time to explain it all, but I’m begging you to trust us.”
Marta could only stare. None of this seemed to make any sense at all.
“Mrs. Alvarez,” Sienna said, fixing Marta with a stony look. “If you care about your future, and that of your baby, then you need to let us leave, right now.”
Marta folded her hands protectively across her abdomen, not at all pleased by the veiled threat to her unborn child.
The high-pitched buzz outside was definitely getting louder, and when Marta peered out the window, she couldn’t see the source of the noise, but she did see something else.
The guard saw it, too, his eyes widening.
Down in the Piazza della Signoria, the crowds had parted to make way for a long line of police cars that were arriving without sirens, led by two black vans, which now skidded to a stop outside the palace doors. Soldiers in black uniforms jumped out, carrying large guns, and ran into the palace.
Marta felt a surge of fear. Who the hell is that?!
The security guard looked equally alarmed.
The high-pitched buzzing sound grew suddenly piercing, and Marta withdrew in distress as she glimpsed a small helicopter rising into view just outside the window.
The machine hovered no more than ten yards away, almost as if it were staring in at the people in the room. It was a small craft, maybe a yard long, with a long black cylinder mounted on the front. The cylinder was pointed directly at them.
“It’s going to shoot!” Sienna shouted. “Sta per sparare!Everybody down! Tutti a terra!”She dropped to her knees beneath the windowsill, and Marta went cold with terror as she instinctively followed suit. The guard dropped down, too, reflexively aiming his gun at the little machine.
From Marta’s awkward crouch below the windowsill, she could see that Langdon was still standing, staring at Sienna with an odd look, clearly not believing there was any danger. Sienna was on the ground for only an instant before she bounded back up, grabbed Langdon by the wrist, and began pulling him in the direction of the hallway. An instant later, they were fleeing together toward the main entrance of the building.
The guard spun on his knees and crouched like a sniper — raising his weapon down the hallway in the direction of the departing duo.
“Non spari!”Marta ordered him. “Non possono scappare.” Don’t shoot! They can’t possibly escape!
Langdon and Sienna disappeared around a corner, and Marta knew it would be only a matter of seconds before the duo collided with the authorities coming in the other way.
“Faster!” Sienna urged, rushing with Langdon back the way they’d come in. She was hoping they could make it to the main entrance before running into the police head-on, but she now realized the chances of this were close to zero.
Langdon apparently had similar doubts. Without warning, he skidded to a full stop in a wide intersection of hallways. “We’ll never make it out this way.”
“Come on!” Sienna motioned urgently for him to follow. “Robert, we can’t just stand here!”
Langdon seemed distracted, gazing to his left, down a short corridor that appeared to dead-end in a small, dimly lit chamber. The walls of the room were covered with antique maps, and at the center of the room stood a massive iron globe. Langdon eyed the huge metal sphere and began nodding slowly, and then more vigorously.
“This way,” Langdon declared, dashing off toward the iron globe.
Robert!Sienna followed against her better judgment. The corridor clearly led deeper into the museum, away from the exit.
“Robert?” she gasped, finally catching up to him. “Where are you taking us?!”
“Through Armenia,” he replied.
“What?!”
“Armenia,” Langdon repeated, his eyes dead ahead. “Trust me.”
One story below, hidden among frightened tourists on the balcony of the Hall of the Five Hundred, Vayentha kept her head down as Brüder’s SRS team thundered past her into the museum. Downstairs, the sound of slamming doors resonated through the hall as police sealed the area.
If Langdon were indeed here, he was trapped.
Unfortunately, Vayentha was, too.
CHAPTER 45
With its warm oak wainscoting and coffered wooden ceilings, the Hall of Geographical Maps feels a world away from the stark stone and plaster interior of the Palazzo Vecchio. Originally the building’s cloakroom, this grand space contains dozens of closets and cabinets once used to store the portable assets of the grand duke. On this day, the walls were adorned with maps — fifty-three illuminations hand-painted on leather — depicting the world as it was known in the 1550s.
The hall’s dramatic collection of cartography is dominated by the presence of a massive globe that stands in the center of the room. Known as the Mappa Mundi, the six-foot-tall sphere had been the largest rotating globe of its era and was said to spin almost effortlessly with just the touch of a finger. Today the globe serves as more of a final stop for tourists who have threaded their way through the long succession of gallery rooms and reached a dead end, where they circle the globe and depart the way they came.
Langdon and Sienna arrived breathless in the Hall of Maps. Before them, the Mappa Mundirose majestically, but Langdon didn’t even glance at it, his eyes moving instead to the outer walls of the room.
“We need to find Armenia!” Langdon said. “The map of Armenia!”
Clearly nonplussed by his request, Sienna hurried off to the room’s right-hand wall in search of a map of Armenia.
Langdon immediately began a similar search along the left-hand wall, tracing his way around the perimeter of the room.
Arabia, Spain, Greece …
Each country was portrayed in remarkable detail, considering that the drawings had been made more than five hundred years ago, at a time when much of the world had yet to be mapped or explored.
Where is Armenia?
Compared to his usually vivid eidetic memories, Langdon’s recollections of his “secret passages tour” here several years ago felt cloudy, due in no small part to the second glass of Gaja Nebbiolo he’d enjoyed with lunch prior to the tour. Fittingly, the word nebbiolomeant “little fog.” Even so, Langdon now distinctly recalled being shown a single map in this room — Armenia — a map that possessed a unique property.
I know it’s in here, Langdon thought, continuing to scan the seemingly endless line of maps.
“Armenia!” Sienna announced. “Over here!”
Langdon spun toward where she was standing in the deep right-hand corner of the room. He rushed over, and Sienna pointed to the map of Armenia with an expression that seemed to say, “We found Armenia — so what?”
Langdon knew they didn’t have time for explanations. Instead, he simply reached out, grabbed the map’s massive wooden frame, and heaved it toward him. The entire map swung into the room, along with a large section of the wall and wainscoting, revealing a hidden passageway.
“All right, then,” Sienna said, sounding impressed. “Armenia it is.”
Without hesitation, Sienna hurried through the opening, moving fearlessly into the dim space beyond. Langdon followed her and quickly pulled the wall closed behind them.
Despite his foggy recollections of the secret passages tour, Langdon recalled this passageway clearly. He and Sienna had just passed, as it were, through the looking glass into the Palazzo Invisibile — the clandestine world that existed behindthe walls of the Palazzo Vecchio — a secret domain that had been accessible solely to the then-reigning duke and those closest to him.