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 (WHO), comes and helps them escape the soldiers. They follow the riddle to Venice, where Jonathan suddenly falls unconscious. Robert is captured by a group of 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 virus that would rewrite the human genome to
cleanse the world of overpopulation by approximately one third. 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 be motivated to 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.
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