“Not on the phone,” the man said. “But you should be aware that Robert Langdon is unwittingly traveling with a very dangerous individual.”

“Who?!” Sinskey demanded.

“One of Zobrist’s closest confidants.” The man sighed heavily. “Someone I trusted. Foolishly, apparently. Someone I believe may now be a severe threat.”

As the private jet headed for Venice’s Marco Polo Airport carrying Sinskey and the six soldiers, Sinskey’s thoughts returned to Robert Langdon. He lost his memory? He recalls nothing? The strange news, while explaining several things, made Sinskey feel even worse than she already did about involving the distinguished academic in this crisis.

I left him no choice.

Almost two days ago, when Sinskey recruited Langdon, she hadn’t even let him go back to his house for his passport. Instead, she had arranged for his quiet passage through the Florence Airport as a special liaison to the World Health Organization.

As the C-130 lumbered into the air and pointed east across the Atlantic, Sinskey had glanced at Langdon beside her and noticed he did not look well. He was staring intently at the sidewall of the windowless hull.

“Professor, you do realize this plane has no windows? Until recently, it was used as a military transport.”

Langdon turned, his face ashen. “Yes, I noticed that the moment I stepped aboard. I’m not so good in enclosed spaces.”

“So you’re pretending to look out an imaginary window?”

He gave a sheepish smile. “Something like that, yes.”

“Well, look at this instead.” She pulled out a photo of her lanky, green-eyed nemesis and laid it in front of him. “This is Bertrand Zobrist.”

Sinskey had already told Langdon about her confrontation with Zobrist at the Council on Foreign Relations, the man’s passion for the Population Apocalypse Equation, his widely circulated comments about the global benefits of the Black Plague, and, most ominously, his total disappearance from sight over the past year.

“How does someone that prominent stay hidden for so long?” Langdon asked.

“He had a lot of help. Professional help. Maybe even a foreign government.”

“What government would condone the creation of a plague?”

“The same governments that try to obtain nuclear warheads on the black market. Don’t forget that an effective plague is the ultimate biochemical weapon, and it’s worth a fortune. Zobrist easily could have lied to his partners and assured them his creation had a limited range. Zobrist would be the only one who had any idea what his creation actually did.”

Langdon fell silent.

“In any case,” Sinskey continued, “if not for power or money, those helping Zobrist could have helped because they shared his ideology. Zobrist has no shortage of disciples who would do anything for him. He was quite a celebrity. In fact, he gave a speech at your university not long ago.”

“At Harvard?”

Sinskey took out a pen and wrote on the border of Zobrist’s photo — the letter H followed by a plus sign. “You’re good with symbols,” she said. “Do you recognize this one?”

H+

“H-plus,” Langdon whispered, nodding vaguely. “Sure, a few summers ago it was posted all over campus. I assumed it was some kind of chemistry conference.”

Sinskey chuckled. “No, those were signs for the 2010 ‘Humanity-plus’ Summit — one of the largest Transhumanism gatherings ever. H-plus is the symbol of the Transhumanist movement.”

Langdon cocked his head, as if trying to place the term.

“Transhumanism,” Sinskey said, “is an intellectual movement, a philosophy of sorts, and it’s quickly taking root in the scientific community. It essentially states that humans should use technology to transcend the weaknesses inherent in our human bodies. In other words, the next step in human evolution should be that we begin biologically engineering ourselves.”

“Sounds ominous,” Langdon said.

“Like all change, it’s just a matter of degree. Technically, we’ve been engineering ourselves for years now — developing vaccines that make children immune to certain diseases … polio, smallpox, typhoid. The difference is that now, with Zobrist’s breakthroughs in germ-line genetic engineering, we’re learning how to create inheritable immunizations, those that would affect the recipient at the core germ-line level — making all subsequent generations immune to that disease.”

Langdon looked startled. “So the human species would essentially undergo an evolution that makes it immune to typhoid, for example?”

“It’s more of an assisted evolution,” Sinskey corrected. “Normally, the evolutionary process — whether it be a lungfish developing feet or an ape developing opposable thumbs — takes millennia to occur. Now we can make radical genetic adaptations in a single generation. Proponents of the technology consider it the ultimate expression of Darwinian ‘survival of the fittest’—humans becoming a species that learns to improve its own evolutionary process.”

“Sounds more like playing God,” Langdon replied.

“I agree wholeheartedly,” Sinskey said. “Zobrist, however, like many other Transhumanists, argued strongly that it is mankind’s evolutionary obligation to use all the powers at our disposal — germ-line genetic mutation, for one — to improve as a species. The problem is that our genetic makeup is like a house of cards — each piece connected to and supported by countless others — often in ways we don’t understand. If we try to remove a single human trait, we can cause hundreds of others to shift simultaneously, possibly with catastrophic effects.”

Langdon nodded. “There’s a reason evolution is a gradual process.”

“Precisely!” Sinskey said, feeling her admiration for the professor growing with each passing moment. “We’re tinkering with a process that took aeons to build. These are dangerous times. We now literally have the capacity to activate certain gene sequences that will result in our descendants having increased dexterity, stamina, strength, even intelligence — essentially a super-race. These hypothetical ‘enhanced’ individuals are what Transhumanists refer to as posthumans, which some believe will be the future of our species.”

“Sounds eerily like eugenics,” Langdon replied.

The reference made Sinskey’s skin crawl.

In the 1940s, Nazi scientists had dabbled in a technology they’d dubbed eugenics — an attempt to use rudimentary genetic engineering to increase the birth rate of those with certain “desirable” genetic traits, while decreasing the birth rate of those with “less desirable” ethnic traits.

Ethnic cleansing at the genetic level.

“There are similarities,” Sinskey admitted, “and while it’s hard to fathom how one would engineer a new human race, there are a lot of smart people who believe it is critical to our survival that we begin that very process. One of the contributors to the Transhumanist magazine H+ described germ-line genetic engineering as ‘the clear next step,’ and claimed it ‘epitomized the true potential of our species.’ ” Sinskey paused. “Then again, in the magazine’s defense, they also ran a Discover magazine piece called ‘The Most Dangerous Idea in the World.’ ”

“I think I’d side with the latter,” Langdon said. “At least from the sociocultural standpoint.”

“How so?”

“Well, I assume that genetic enhancements — much like cosmetic surgery — cost a lot of money, right?”

“Of course. Not everyone could afford to improve themselves or their children.”

“Which means that legalized genetic enhancements would immediately create a world of haves and have-nots. We already have a growing chasm between the rich and the poor, but genetic engineering would create a race of superhumans and … perceived subhumans. You think people are concerned about the ultrarich one percent running the world? Just imagine if that one percent were also, quite literally, a superior species—smarter, stronger, healthier. It’s the kind of situation that would be ripe for slavery or ethnic cleansing.”