The pilot looked like he was festooned for a Shakespearean melodrama. His puffy tunic was vertically striped in brilliant blue and gold. He wore matching pantaloons and spats. On his feet were black flats that looked like slippers. On top of it all, he wore a black felt beret.

"Traditional Swiss Guard uniforms," Langdon explained. "Designed by Michelangelo himself." As the man drew closer, Langdon winced. "I admit, not one of Michelangelo’s better efforts."

Despite the man’s garish attire, Langdon could tell the pilot meant business. He moved toward them with all the rigidity and dignity of a U.S. Marine. Langdon had read many times about the rigorous requirements for becoming one of the elite Swiss Guard. Recruited from one of Switzerland’s four Catholic cantons, applicants had to be Swiss males between nineteen and thirty years old, at least 5 feet 6 inches, trained by the Swiss Army, and unmarried. This imperial corps was envied by world governments as the most allegiant and deadly security force in the world.

"You are from CERN?" the guard asked, arriving before them. His voice was steely.

"Yes, sir," Langdon replied.

"You made remarkable time," he said, giving the X-33 a mystified stare. He turned to Vittoria. "Ma’am, do you have any other clothing?"

"I beg your pardon?"

He motioned to her legs. "Short pants are not permitted inside Vatican City."

Langdon glanced down at Vittoria’s legs and frowned. He had forgotten. Vatican City had a strict ban on visible legs above the knee—both male and female. The regulation was a way of showing respect for the sanctity of God’s city.

"This is all I have," she said. "We came in a hurry."

The guard nodded, clearly displeased. He turned next to Langdon. "Are you carrying any weapons?"

Weapons? Langdon thought. I’m not even carrying a change of underwear! He shook his head.

The officer crouched at Langdon’s feet and began patting him down, starting at his socks. Trusting guy, Langdon thought. The guard’s strong hands moved up Langdon’s legs, coming uncomfortably close to his groin. Finally they moved up to his chest and shoulders. Apparently content Langdon was clean, the guard turned to Vittoria. He ran his eyes up her legs and torso.

Vittoria glared. "Don’t even think about it."

The guard fixed Vittoria with a gaze clearly intended to intimidate. Vittoria did not flinch.

"What’s that?" the guard said, pointing to a faint square bulge in the front pocket of her shorts.

Vittoria removed an ultrathin cell phone. The guard took it, clicked it on, waited for a dial tone, and then, apparently satisfied that it was indeed nothing more than a phone, returned it to her. Vittoria slid it back into her pocket.

"Turn around, please," the guard said.

Vittoria obliged, holding her arms out and rotating a full 360 degrees.

The guard carefully studied her. Langdon had already decided that Vittoria’s form-fitting shorts and blouse were not bulging anywhere they shouldn’t have been. Apparently the guard came to the same conclusion.

"Thank you. This way please."

The Swiss Guard chopper churned in neutral as Langdon and Vittoria approached. Vittoria boarded first, like a seasoned pro, barely even stooping as she passed beneath the whirling rotors. Langdon held back a moment.

"No chance of a car?" he yelled, half-joking to the Swiss Guard, who was climbing in the pilot’s seat.

The man did not answer.

Langdon knew that with Rome’s maniacal drivers, flying was probably safer anyway. He took a deep breath and boarded, stooping cautiously as he passed beneath the spinning rotors.

As the guard fired up the engines, Vittoria called out, "Have you located the canister?"

The guard glanced over his shoulder, looking confused. "The what?"

"The canister. You called CERN about a canister?"

The man shrugged. "No idea what you’re talking about. We’ve been very busy today. My commander told me to pick you up. That’s all I know."

Vittoria gave Langdon an unsettled look.

"Buckle up, please," the pilot said as the engine revved.

Langdon reached for his seat belt and strapped himself in. The tiny fuselage seemed to shrink around him. Then with a roar, the craft shot up and banked sharply north toward Rome.

Rome… the caput mundi, where Caesar once ruled, where St. Peter was crucified. The cradle of modern civilization. And at its core… a ticking bomb.

Rome from the air is a labyrinth—an indecipherable maze of ancient roadways winding around buildings, fountains, and crumbling ruins.

The Vatican chopper stayed low in the sky as it sliced northwest through the permanent smog layer coughed up by the congestion below. Langdon gazed down at the mopeds, sight-seeing buses, and armies of miniature Fiat sedans buzzing around rotaries in all directions. Koyaanisqatsi, he thought, recalling the Hopi term for "life out of balance."

Vittoria sat in silent determination in the seat beside him.

The chopper banked hard.

His stomach dropping, Langdon gazed farther into the distance. His eyes found the crumbling ruins of the Roman Coliseum. The Coliseum, Langdon had always thought, was one of history’s greatest ironies. Now a dignified symbol for the rise of human culture and civilization, the stadium had been built to host centuries of barbaric events—hungry lions shredding prisoners, armies of slaves battling to the death, gang rapes of exotic women captured from far-off lands, as well as public beheadings and castrations. It was ironic, Langdon thought, or perhaps fitting, that the Coliseum had served as the architectural blueprint for Harvard’s Soldier Field—the football stadium where the ancient traditions of savagery were reenacted every fall… crazed fans screaming for bloodshed as Harvard battled Yale.

As the chopper headed north, Langdon spied the Roman Forum—the heart of pre-Christian Rome. The decaying columns looked like toppled gravestones in a cemetery that had somehow avoided being swallowed by the metropolis surrounding it.

To the west the wide basin of the Tiber River wound enormous arcs across the city. Even from the air Langdon could tell the water was deep. The churning currents were brown, filled with silt and foam from heavy rains.

"Straight ahead," the pilot said, climbing higher.

Langdon and Vittoria looked out and saw it. Like a mountain parting the morning fog, the colossal dome rose out of the haze before them: St. Peter’s Basilica.

"Now that," Langdon said to Vittoria, "is something Michelangelo got right."

Langdon had never seen St. Peter’s from the air. The marble façade blazed like fire in the afternoon sun. Adorned with 140 statues of saints, martyrs, and angels, the Herculean edifice stretched two football fields wide and a staggering six long. The cavernous interior of the basilica had room for over 60,000 worshipers… over one hundred times the population of Vatican City, the smallest country in the world.

Incredibly, though, not even a citadel of this magnitude could dwarf the piazza before it. A sprawling expanse of granite, St. Peter’s Square was a staggering open space in the congestion of Rome, like a classical Central Park. In front of the basilica, bordering the vast oval common, 284 columns swept outward in four concentric arcs of diminishing size… an architectural trompe de l’oiel used to heighten the piazza’s sense of grandeur.

As he stared at the magnificent shrine before him, Langdon wondered what St. Peter would think if he were here now. The Saint had died a gruesome death, crucified upside down on this very spot. Now he rested in the most sacred of tombs, buried five stories down, directly beneath the central cupola of the basilica.