Hell

Robert Langdon, a Harvard professor of symbology, woke in a hospital bed in Florence with a splitting headache. He found himself surrounded by a tangle of tubes and medical equipment. He couldn’t understand how he had ended up in Italy when he should have been on the Harvard campus. In the dream he could vaguely recall, a breathtakingly beautiful masked woman whispered to him from across a churning river stained red with blood: “Seek, and you will find...”

Two doctors, the older Marconi and the younger Sienna, explained Robert Langdon’s condition and described how he had arrived there. Just then, a woman dressed in black suddenly burst into the intensive care unit and, without a word, shot Marconi dead as he tried to stop her. Sienna grabbed Robert Langdon and ran for his life.