It doesn’t open for several hours, Langdon thought, pleased. And nobody has been inside yet.

Instinctively, he checked his wristwatch, and was again reminded that Mickey Mouse was gone.

When he returned to Sienna, she had been joined by a group of tourists who were taking photos through the simple iron fence that had been erected several feet in front of the Gates of Paradise to prevent tourists from getting too close to Ghiberti’s masterwork.

This protective gate was made of black wrought iron topped with sunray spikes dipped in gold paint, and resembled the simple estate fencing that often enclosed suburban homes. Ambiguously, the informational placard describing the Gates of Paradise had been mounted not on the spectacular bronze doors themselves but on this very ordinary protective gate.

Langdon had heard that the placard’s placement sometimes caused confusion among tourists, and sure enough, just then a chunky woman in a Juicy Couture sweat suit pushed through the crowd, glanced at the placard, frowned at the wrought-iron gate, and scoffed, “Gates of Paradise? Hell, it looks like my dog fence at home!” Then she toddled off before anyone could explain.

Sienna reached up and grasped the protective gate, casually peering through the bars at the locking mechanism on the back.

“Look,” she whispered, turning wide-eyed to Langdon. “The padlock on the back is unlocked.”

Langdon looked through the bars and saw she was right. The padlock was positioned as if it were locked, but on closer inspection, he could see that it was definitely unlocked.

The gates are open to you, but you must hurry.

Langdon raised his eyes to the Gates of Paradise beyond the fencing. If Ignazio had indeed left the baptistry’s huge doors unbolted, they should simply swing open. The challenge, however, would be getting inside without drawing the attention of every single person in the square, including, no doubt, the police and Duomo guards.

“Look out!” a woman suddenly screamed nearby. “He’s going to jump!” Her voice was filled with terror. “Up there on the bell tower!”

Langdon spun now from the doors, and saw that the woman shouting was … Sienna. She stood five yards away, pointing up into Giotto’s bell tower and shouting, “There at the top! He’s going to jump!”

Every set of eyes turned skyward, searching the top of the bell tower. Nearby, others began pointing, squinting, calling out to one another.

“Someone is jumping?!”

“Where?!”

“I don’t see him!”

“Over there on the left?!”

It took only seconds for people across the square to sense the panic and follow suit, staring up at the top of the bell tower. With the fury of a wildfire consuming a parched hay field, the rush of fear billowed out across the piazza until the entire crowd was craning their necks, looking upward, and pointing.

Viral marketing, Langdon thought, knowing he’d have only a moment to act. Immediately he grabbed the wrought-iron fence and swung it open just as Sienna returned to his side and slipped with him into the small space beyond. Once the gate was closed behind them, they turned to face the fifteen-foot bronze doors. Hoping he had understood Ignazio correctly, Langdon threw his shoulder into one side of the massive double doors and drove his legs hard.

Nothing happened, and then, painfully slowly, the cumbersome section began to move. The doors are open! The Gates of Paradise swung open about one foot, and Sienna wasted no time turning sideways and slipping through. Langdon followed suit, inching sideways through the narrow opening into the darkness of the baptistry.

Together, they turned and heaved the door in the opposite direction, quickly closing the massive portal with a definitive thud. Instantly, the noise and chaos outside evaporated, leaving only silence.

Sienna pointed to a long wooden beam on the floor at their feet, which clearly had been set in side brackets on either side of the door to serve as a barricade. “Ignazio must have removed it for you,” she said.

Together they lifted the beam and dropped it back into its brackets, effectively locking the Gates of Paradise … and sealing themselves safely inside.

For a long moment Langdon and Sienna stood in silence, leaning against the door and catching their breath. Compared to the noises of the piazza outside, the interior of the baptistry felt as peaceful as heaven itself.

Outside the Baptistry of San Giovanni, the man in the Plume Paris spectacles and a paisley necktie moved through the crowd, ignoring the uneasy stares of those who noticed his bloody rash.

He had just reached the bronze doors through which Robert Langdon and his blond companion had cleverly disappeared; even from outside, he had heard the heavy thud of the doors being barred from within.

No entry this way.

Slowly, the ambience in the piazza was returning to normal. The tourists who had been staring upward in anticipation were now losing interest. No jumper. Everyone moved on.

The man was itchy again, his rash getting worse. Now his fingertips were swollen and cracking as well. He slid his hands into his pockets to keep himself from scratching. His chest continued to throb as he began circling the octagon in search of another entrance.

He had barely made it around the corner when he felt a sharp pain on his Adam’s apple and realized he was scratching again.

Legend proclaims that it is physically impossible, upon entering the Baptistry of San Giovanni, not to look up. Langdon, despite having been in this room many times, now felt the mystical pull of the space, and let his gaze climb skyward to the ceiling.

High, high overhead, the surface of the baptistry’s octagonal vault spanned more than eighty feet from side to side. It glistened and shimmered as if it were made of smoldering coals. Its burnished amber-gold surface reflected the ambient light unevenly from more than a million smalti tiles — tiny ungrouted mosaic pieces hand-cut from a glassy silica glaze — which were arranged in six concentric rings in which scenes from the Bible were depicted.

Adding stark drama to the lustrous upper portion of the room, natural light pierced the dark space through a central oculus — much like the one in Rome’s Pantheon — assisted by a series of high, small, deeply recessed windows that threw shafts of illumination that were so focused and tight that they seemed almost solid, like structural beams propped at ever-changing angles.

As Langdon walked with Sienna deeper into the room, he took in the legendary ceiling mosaic — a multitiered representation of heaven and hell, very much like the depiction in The Divine Comedy.

Dante Alighieri saw this as a child, Langdon thought. Inspiration from above.

Langdon fixed his gaze now on the centerpiece of the mosaic. Hovering directly above the main altar rose a twenty-seven-foot-tall Jesus Christ, seated in judgment over the saved and the damned.

At Jesus’ right hand, the righteous received the reward of everlasting life.

On His left hand, however, the sinful were stoned, roasted on spikes, and eaten by all manner of creatures.

Overseeing the torture was a colossal mosaic of Satan portrayed as an infernal, man-eating beast. Langdon always flinched when he saw this figure, which more than seven hundred years ago had stared down at the young Dante Alighieri, terrifying him and eventually inspiring his vivid portrayal of what lurked in the final ring of hell.

The frightening mosaic overhead depicted a horned devil that was in the process of consuming a human being headfirst. The victim’s legs dangled from Satan’s mouth in a way that resembled the flailing legs of the half-buried sinners in Dante’s Malebolge.