Suddenly, just as they entered a second glade, a startling thought hit Langdon. He skidded to a stop on the wooded path, a bemused look on his face.

Sienna stopped, too. “Robert? What is it?!”

“I’m innocent,” he declared.

“What are you talking about?”

“The people chasing me … I assumed it was because I had done something terrible.”

“Yes, at the hospital you kept repeating ‘very sorry.’ ”

“I know. But I thought I was speaking English.”

Sienna looked at him with surprise. “You were speaking English!”

Langdon’s blue eyes were now filled with excitement. “Sienna, when I kept saying ‘very sorry,’ I wasn’t apologizing. I was mumbling about the secret message in the mural at Palazzo Vecchio!” He could still hear the recording of his own delirious voice. Ve … sorry. Ve … sorry.

Sienna looked lost.

“Don’t you see?!” Langdon was grinning now. “I wasn’t saying ‘very sorry, very sorry.’ I was saying the artist’s name—Va … sari, Vasari!”

Vayentha hit the brakes hard.

Her motorcycle fishtailed, screeching loudly as it left a long skid mark on the Viale del Poggio Imperiale, finally coming to an abrupt stop behind an unexpected line of traffic. The Viale del Poggio was at a standstill.

I don’t have time for this!

Vayentha craned her neck over the cars, trying to see what was causing the holdup. She had already been forced to drive in a wide circle to avoid the SRS team and all the chaos at the apartment building, and now she needed to get into the old city to clear out of the hotel room where she had been stationed for the last few days of this mission.

I’ve been disavowed — I need to get the hell out of town!

Her string of bad luck, however, seemed to be continuing. The route she had selected into the old city appeared to be blocked. In no mood to wait, Vayentha revved the bike off to one side of the traffic and sped along the narrow breakdown lane until she could see the snarled intersection. Up ahead was a clogged rotary where six major thoroughfares converged. This was the Porta Romana — one of Florence’s most trafficked intersections — the gateway to the old city.

What the hell is going on here?!

Vayentha now saw that the entire area was swarming with police — a roadblock or checkpoint of some sort. Moments later, she spotted something at the center of the action that left her baffled — a familiar black van around which several black-clad agents were calling out orders to the local authorities.

These men, without a doubt, were members of the SRS team, and yet Vayentha could not imagine what they were doing here.

Unless …

Vayentha swallowed hard, scarcely daring to imagine the possibility. Has Langdon eluded Brüder as well? It seemed unthinkable; the chances of escape had been near zero. Then again, Langdon was not working alone, and Vayentha had experienced firsthand how resourceful the blond woman could be.

Nearby, a police officer appeared, walking from car to car, showing a photo of a handsome man with thick brown hair. Vayentha instantly recognized the photo as a press shot of Robert Langdon. Her heart soared.

Brüder missed him …

Langdon is still in play!

An experienced strategist, Vayentha immediately began assessing how this development changed her situation.

Option one — flee as required.

Vayentha had blown a critical job for the provost and had been disavowed because of it. If she were lucky, she would face a formal inquiry and probable career termination. If, however, she were unlucky and had underestimated the severity of her employer, she might spend the rest of her life looking over her shoulder and wondering if the Consortium was lurking just out of sight.

There is a second option now.

Complete your mission.

Staying on task was in direct opposition to her disavowal protocol, and yet with Langdon still on the run, Vayentha now had the opportunity to continue with her original directive.

If Brüder fails to catch Langdon, she thought, her pulse quickening. And if I succeed …

Vayentha knew it was a long shot, but if Langdon managed to elude Brüder entirely, and if Vayentha could still step in and finish the job, she would single-handedly have saved the day for the Consortium, and the provost would have no choice but to be lenient.

I’ll keep my job, she thought. Probably even be promoted.

In a flash, Vayentha realized that her entire future now revolved around a single critical undertaking. I must locate Langdon … before Brüder does.

It would not be easy. Brüder had at his disposal endless manpower as well as a vast array of advanced surveillance technologies. Vayentha was working alone. She did, however, possess one piece of information that Brüder, the provost, and the police did not have.

I have a very good idea where Langdon will go.

Revving the throttle on her BMW, she spun it 180 degrees around and headed back the way she came. Ponte alle Grazie, she thought, picturing the bridge to the north. There existed more than one route into the old city.

Not an apology, Langdon mused. An artist’s name.

“Vasari,” Sienna stammered, taking a full step backward on the path. “The artist who hid the words cerca trova in his mural.”

Langdon couldn’t help but smile. Vasari. Vasari. In addition to shedding a ray of light on his strange predicament, this revelation also meant Langdon was no longer wondering what terrible thing he might have done … for which he had been profusely saying he was very sorry.

“Robert, you clearly had seen this Botticelli image on the projector before you were injured, and you knew it contained a code that pointed to Vasari’s mural. That’s why you woke up and kept repeating Vasari’s name!”

Langdon tried to calculate what all of this meant. Giorgio Vasari — a sixteenth-century artist, architect, and writer — was a man Langdon often referred to as “the world’s first art historian.” Despite the hundreds of paintings Vasari created, and the dozens of buildings he designed, his most enduring legacy was his seminal book, Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, a collection of biographies of Italian artists, which to this day remains requisite reading for students of art history.

The words cerca trova had placed Vasari back in the mainstream consciousness about thirty years ago when his “secret message” was discovered high on his sprawling mural in the Palazzo Vecchio’s Hall of the Five Hundred. The tiny letters appeared on a green battle flag, barely visible among the chaos of the war scene. While consensus had yet to be reached as to why Vasari added this strange message to his mural, the leading theory was that it was a clue to future generations of the existence of a lost Leonardo da Vinci fresco hidden in a three-centimeter gap behind that wall.

Sienna was glancing nervously up through the trees. “There’s still one thing I don’t understand. If you weren’t saying ‘very sorry, very sorry’ … then why are people trying to kill you?”

Langdon had been wondering the same thing.

The distant buzz of the surveillance drone was getting louder again, and Langdon knew the time had come for a decision. He failed to see how Vasari’s Battaglia di Marciano could possibly relate to Dante’s Inferno, or the gunshot wound he had suffered the night before, and yet he finally saw a tangible path before him.

Cerca trova.

Seek and find.

Again Langdon saw the silver-haired woman calling out to him from across the river. Time is running out! If there were answers, Langdon sensed, they would be at the Palazzo Vecchio.