“If we head northeast, we’ll reach the palace,” Langdon said, pointing down the path. “We can mix there with the tourists and exit unseen. I’m guessing it opens at nine.”
Langdon glanced down to check the time but saw only his bare wrist where his Mickey Mouse watch had once been strapped. He wondered absently if it was still at the hospital with the rest of his clothing and if he’d ever be able to retrieve it.
Sienna planted her feet defiantly. “Robert, before we take another step, I want to know where we’re going. What did you figure out back there? The Malebolge? You said it was out of sequence?”
Langdon motioned toward a wooded area just ahead. “Let’s get out of sight first.” He led her down a pathway that curled into an enclosed hollow—a “room,” in the parlance of landscape architecture—where there were some faux-bois benches and a small fountain. The air beneath the trees was decidedly colder.
Langdon took the projector from his pocket and began shaking it. “Sienna, whoever created this digital image not only added letters to the sinners in the Malebolge, but he also changed the order of the sins.” He hopped up on the bench, towering over Sienna, and aimed the projector down at his feet. Botticelli’s Mappa dell’Inferno materialized faintly on the flat bench top beside Sienna.
Langdon motioned to the tiered area at the bottom of the funnel. “See the letters in the ten ditches of the Malebolge?”
Sienna found them on the projection and read from top to bottom. “Catrovacer.”
“Right. Meaningless.”
“But then you realized the ten ditches had been shuffled around?”
“Easier than that, actually. If these levels were a deck of ten cards, the deck was not so much shuffled as simply cut once. After the cut, the cards remain in the correct order, but they start with the wrong card.” Langdon pointed down at the ten ditches of the Malebolge. “According to Dante’s text, our top level should be the seducers whipped by demons. And yet, in this version, the seducers appear … way down in the seventh ditch.”
Sienna studied the now-fading image beside her and nodded. “Okay, I see that. The first ditch is now the seventh.”
Langdon pocketed the projector and jumped back down onto the pathway. He grabbed a small stick and began scratching letters on a patch of dirt just off the path. “Here are the letters as they appear in our modified version of hell.”
“Catrovacer,” Sienna read.
“Yes. And here is where the ‘deck’ was cut.” Langdon now drew a line beneath the seventh letter and waited while Sienna studied his handiwork.
“Okay,” she said quickly. “Catrova. Cer.”
“Yes, and to put the cards back in order, we simply uncut the deck and place the bottom on top. The two halves swap places.”
Sienna eyed the letters. “Cer. Catrova.” She shrugged, looking unimpressed. “Still meaningless …”
“Cer catrova,” Langdon repeated. After a pause, he said the words again, eliding them together. “Cercatrova.” Finally, he said them with a pause in the middle. “Cerca … trova.”
Sienna gasped audibly and her eyes shot up to meet Langdon’s.
“Yes,” Langdon said with a smile. “Cerca trova.”
The two Italian words cerca and trova literally meant “seek” and “find.” When combined as a phrase—cerca trova—they were synonymous with the biblical aphorism “Seek and ye shall find.”
“Your hallucinations!” Sienna exclaimed, breathless. “The woman with the veil! She kept telling you to seek and find!” She jumped to her feet. “Robert, do you realize what this means? It means the words cerca trova were already in your subconscious! Don’t you see? You must have deciphered this phrase before you arrived at the hospital! You had probably seen this projector’s image already … but had forgotten!”
She’s right, he realized, having been so fixated on the cipher itself that it never occurred to him that he might have been through all of this already.
“Robert, you said earlier that La Mappa points to a specific location in the old city. But I still don’t understand where.”
“Cerca trova doesn’t ring any bells for you?”
She shrugged.
Langdon smiled inwardly. Finally, something Sienna doesn’t know. “As it turns out, this phrase points very specifically to a famous mural that hangs in the Palazzo Vecchio—Giorgio Vasari’s Battaglia di Marciano in the Hall of the Five Hundred. Near the top of the painting, barely visible, Vasari painted the words cerca trova in tiny letters. Plenty of theories exist as to why he did this, but no conclusive proof has ever been discovered.”
The high-pitched whine of a small aircraft suddenly buzzed overhead, streaking in out of nowhere and skimming the wooded canopy just above them. The sound was very close, and Langdon and Sienna froze as the craft raced past.
As the aircraft departed, Langdon peered up at it through the trees. “Toy helicopter,” he said, exhaling as he watched the three-foot-long, radio-controlled chopper banking in the distance. It sounded like a giant, angry mosquito.
Sienna, however, still looked wary. “Stay down.”
Sure enough, the little chopper banked fully and was now coming back their way, skimming the treetops, sailing past them again, this time off to their left above another glade.
“That’s not a toy,” she whispered. “It’s a reconnaissance drone. Probably has a video camera on board sending live images back to … somebody.”