UK Book Cover
USA Book Cover
Inferno is a 2013 mystery thriller novel by American author Dan Brown and the fourth book in his Robert Langdon series, following Angels & Demons, The Da Vinci Code and The Lost Symbol.The book was released on May 14, 2013 by Doubleday in USA and by Bantam Press in UK . Can obtain in the market price of RM 98.80 Hardcover per copy.
Book Plot
Harvard University professor Robert Langdon wakes up in a hospital with a head wound and no memory of the last few days. His last memory is walking on the Harvard campus, but he quickly realizes that he is now in Florence. Sienna Brooks, one of the doctors tending to him, tells him he suffered a concussion from being grazed by a bullet, and had stumbled into the emergency ward. Suddenly, Vayentha, an assassin who has been following Robert, breaks into the hospital, shoots the doctor in charge of Robert's care, and approaches Robert's room. Sienna grabs Robert and they flee to her apartment.
After Sienna recounts the details of his admission to hospital, Robert finds a cylinder with a biohazard sign in his jacket and decides to call the U.S. consulate. He is told that they are searching for him and want his location. Robert gives them a location across the street from Sienna's apartment per Sienna's guidance and to avoid getting Sienna more involved in his mysterious situation than she already is. Soon, Robert sees an armed Vayentha pull up to the location Robert gave the consulate. At this point Robert believes the U.S. government wants to kill him.
Robert decides to open the container and finds a medieval bone cylinder fitted with a hi-tech projector that displays a modified version of Botticelli's Map of Hell. At the bottom of the illumination are the words "The truth can be glimpsed only through the eyes of death". Suddenly, soldiers raid Sienna's building. Sienna and Robert narrowly escape. Palazzo Vecchio of Florence
Robert and Sienna head toward the Old City, believing the cylinder must have something to do with Dante. However, they find that Florentine police and Carabinieri officers have sealed the bridges and are searching for them. They run into a construction site near the Boboli Gardens, where Robert illuminates the modified "Map of Hell" again and observes letters have been added to the ten layers of the Malebolge, and that the layers have been rearranged. Moving them back to the order in the original Botticelli "Map of Hell" yields the words "CERCA TROVA". Robert recognizes these are the same words on the painting The Battle of Marciano by Vasari, located in the Palazzo Vecchio. Robert and Sienna manage to evade the soldiers and get into the Old City using the Vasari Corridor.
Robert stands in front of The Battle of Marciano trying to figure out where to go next by connecting the "eyes of death" phrase in the modified "Map of Hell" with his location. A custodian sees Robert snooping around and gets the director of the museum in the Palazzo Vecchio, Marta Alvarez. Marta recognizes Robert after he and Ignazio Busoni, the director of Il Duomo, had met with her the previous night. She leads Robert and Sienna up a set of stairs by The Battle of Marciano, and Robert realizes the top of the stairs is on the same level as the words "cerca trova" in the The Battle of Marciano painting. Marta tells Robert that she showed them Dante's death mask the previous night, which sits in a room down the hall from the Battle of Marciano painting. Robert realizes he is retracing his own steps from last night. Marta takes Robert and Sienna to the mask who find that it's gone. They look at security footage and see Robert himself and Ignazio stealing the mask. The museum guards turn on Robert and Sienna. At this moment, Ignazio's secretary calls Robert and tells him that he died of a heart attack, and his last words were "Paradise Canto 25". Gates of Paradise at Florence Baptistery
Robert and Sienna escape the guards, but the soldiers arrive. They cross the attic over the Apotheosis of Cosimo I, where Sienna pushes Vayentha to her death. Robert connects the phrase "Paradise 25" to the Florence Baptistry, where he and Sienna find the Dante mask along with a riddle from its current owner, a billionaire geneticist named Bertrand Zobrist. A man named Jonathan Ferris, with a large bruise on his chest which he hides from the two, claiming to be from the World Health Organization, comes and helps them escape the soldiers. They follow the riddle to Venice, where Jonathan suddenly falls unconscious. Robert is captured by the black-clad soldiers while Sienna escapes.
Robert is taken to Elizabeth Sinskey, the director-general of the WHO, and is given an explanation of what is going on: Zobrist, who committed suicide the week before, was a mad scientist and Dante fanatic who engineered a new strain of the Black Death to cleanse the world of overpopulation. Elizabeth raided Zobrist's safe deposit box, found the cylinder, and flew Robert to Florence to follow the clues. However, Robert stopped calling in after meeting with Marta and Ignazio, and the WHO feared he betrayed them and was working with Zobrist to unleash the plague. The soldiers were the WHO's SWAT team and never meant to kill Robert.
Zobrist had paid a shadowy consulting group called The Consortium to protect the cylinder until a certain date. When Elizabeth took it away, they were obligated to protect whatever the bone cylinder pointed to. They kidnapped Robert after the meeting with Marta and Ignazio, but Robert hadn't yet solved the whole riddle. They gave Robert drugs to erase his short-term memory, created a fake head wound, and staged every event up to this point so that Robert would desperately solve it. Sienna, Vayentha, and Jonathan are all actors working for The Consortium; the call to the U.S. consulate was also staged. The leader of The Consortium, having become aware of the bioterrorism plot, has agreed to cooperate with the WHO. Tomb of Enrico Dandolo, at the Hagia Sophia.
Sienna goes rogue and The Consortium realizes she was a secret supporter and lover of Zobrist. She learned where the plague is being kept after Robert solved the riddle, and resolves to unleash it by herself. Robert, the WHO, and The Consortium team up to stop her by going to the riddle's actual location: Istanbul, where Enrico Dandolo is buried. At the Hagia Sophia, Robert and the others find the plague is in the Cistern, but discover that Sienna is already there. The bag that holds the plague has been broken, infecting all the tourists inside. Sienna runs out of the Cistern screaming, which causes panic among the tourists who stampede out into the city. Inside Basilica Cistern, with water below and tourists above.
It is discovered Sienna didn't puncture the bag; it was water soluble and had dissolved one week previously in the Cistern waters, meaning that the whole world has already been infected. It is also discovered that Sienna was trying to stop the virus herself, but didn't trust the WHO because samples of the virus would certainly find their way into weapons research. The leader of The Consortium tries to escape WHO custody with help from disguised underlings, but is caught later by Turkish police. It is implied that The Consortium will be investigated and ruined. Sienna receives amnesty in exchange for working with the WHO to address the crisis, since she is a medical doctor and transhumanist writer.
The virus employs DNA modification to cause sterility in humans. The virus has no cure, and even with future technology, changing the human genome back would be hazardous. The human race, therefore, has been forced into a new age of self-understanding.
