“I’ll be right back,” Ettore shouted, and then hurried off without another word.
Puzzled, Langdon went over to the railing and peered over. What’s going on down there?
At first he saw nothing at all, just tourists milling around. After a moment, though, he realized that many of the visitors were staring in the same direction, toward the main entrance, through which an imposing group of black-clad soldiers had just entered the church and was fanning out across the narthex, blocking all the exits.
The soldiers in black. Langdon felt his hands tighten on the railing.
“Robert!” Sienna called out behind him.
Langdon remained fixated on the soldiers. How did they find us?!
“Robert,” she called more urgently. “Something’s wrong! Help me!”
Langdon turned from the railing, puzzled by her cries for help.
Where did she go?
An instant later, his eyes found both Sienna and Ferris. On the floor in front of the Horses of St. Mark’s, Sienna was kneeling over Dr. Ferris … who had collapsed in convulsions, clutching his chest.
CHAPTER 75
“I think he’s having a heart attack!” Sienna shouted.
Langdon hurried over to where Dr. Ferris lay sprawled on the floor.
The man was gasping, unable to catch his breath.
What happened to him?! For Langdon, everything had come to a head in a single moment. With the soldiers’ arrival downstairs and Ferris thrashing on the floor, Langdon felt momentarily paralyzed, unsure which way to turn.
Sienna crouched down over Ferris and loosened his necktie, tearing open the top few buttons of his shirt to help him breathe. But as the man’s shirt parted, Sienna recoiled and let out a sharp cry of alarm, covering her mouth as she staggered backward, staring down at the bare flesh of his chest.
Langdon saw it, too.
The skin of Ferris’s chest was deeply discolored. An ominous-looking bluish-black blemish the circumference of a grapefruit spread out across his sternum. Ferris looked like he’d been hit in the chest with a cannonball.
“That’s internal bleeding,” Sienna said, glancing up at Langdon with a look of shock. “No wonder he’s been having trouble breathing all day.”
Ferris twisted his head, clearly trying to speak, but he could only make faint wheezing sounds. Tourists had started gathering around, and Langdon sensed that the situation was about to get chaotic.
“The soldiers are downstairs,” Langdon warned Sienna. “I don’t know how they found us.”
The look of surprise and fear on Sienna’s face turned quickly to anger, and she glared back down at Ferris. “You’ve been lying to us, haven’t you?”
Ferris attempted to speak again, but he could barely make a sound. Sienna roughly searched Ferris’s pockets and pulled out his wallet and phone, which she slipped into her own pocket, standing over him now with an accusatory glower.
At that moment an elderly Italian woman pushed through the crowd, shouting angrily at Sienna. “L’hai colpito al petto!” She made a forceful motion with her fist against her own chest.
“No!” Sienna snapped. “CPR will kill him! Look at his chest!” She turned to Langdon. “Robert, we need to get out of here. Now.”
Langdon looked down at Ferris, who desperately locked eyes with him, pleading, as if he wanted to communicate something.
“We can’t just leave him!” Langdon said frantically.
“Trust me,” Sienna said. “That’s not a heart attack. And we’re leaving. Now.”
As the crowd closed in, tourists began shouting for help. Sienna gripped Langdon’s arm with startling force and dragged him away from the chaos, out into the fresh air of the balcony.
For a moment Langdon was blinded. The sun was directly in front of his eyes, sinking low over the western end of St. Mark’s Square, bathing the entire balcony in a golden light. Sienna led Langdon to their left along the second-story terrace, snaking through the tourists who had stepped outside to admire the piazza and the replicas of the Horses of St. Mark’s.
As they rushed along the front of the basilica, the lagoon was straight ahead. Out on the water, a strange silhouette caught Langdon’s eye—an ultramodern yacht that looked like some kind of futuristic warship.
Before he could give it a second thought, he and Sienna had cut left again, following the balcony around the southwest corner of the basilica toward the “Paper Door”—the annex connecting the basilica to the Doge’s Palace—so named because the doges posted decrees there for the public to read.
Not a heart attack? The image of Ferris’s black-and-blue chest was imprinted in Langdon’s mind, and he suddenly felt fearful at the prospect of hearing Sienna’s diagnosis of the man’s actual illness. Moreover, it seemed something had shifted,