Robert Langdon: the story so far

Leonardo Vetra, a priest and physicist at CERN, was murdered in his own lab with an Illuminati ambigram burned into his chest, and a canister of the antimatter he had created went missing with him. It turned up on a security feed somewhere under Vatican City, with a battery that would run out in twenty-four hours.

Robert Langdon and Vetra's daughter Vittoria reached Rome in the middle of a conclave. Four cardinals, the favourites for the papacy, had been taken by an assassin working for a man calling himself Janus. He killed one an hour, in public, branding each and staging each death as one of the four elements. Langdon read the old Path of Illumination across Rome's churches and arrived one step late every time: earth at Santa Maria del Popolo, air in St Peter's Square, fire at Santa Maria della Vittoria, where Vittoria was taken, and water in the Fountain of the Four Rivers.

There was no Illuminati. Janus was Carlo Ventresca, the camerlengo running the Vatican between popes, who had poisoned the last one, arranged the theft and the murders, and meant to be seen saving the Church from science. He flew the canister up out of the city himself, and Langdon went with him and survived the drop under a tarpaulin.

Ventresca came back down to a square that believed it had seen a miracle. Then the cardinals were shown Kohler's recording of him admitting all of it, and he set himself alight on the balcony. Mortati was elected pope. Langdon left with Vittoria.

Jacques Sauniere, curator of the Louvre, was shot inside his own museum and spent his last minutes arranging his body like Leonardo's Vitruvian Man and writing a Fibonacci sequence and an anagram on the floor beside it. Robert Langdon was called in to help and did not realise Captain Fache had him down as the killer.

Sophie Neveu, a police cryptographer and Sauniere's estranged granddaughter, got him out. The message had been left for her. Her grandfather had been grand master of the Priory of Sion.

They ran through Paris and on to London, following Leonardo's paintings to a Swiss bank vault and the cryptex inside it, then to a second cryptex inside the first, and finally to Newton's tomb in Westminster Abbey. Silas, an albino monk killing for a voice he knew only as the Teacher, followed them, while Bishop Aringarosa of Opus Dei believed he was the one giving the orders.

The Teacher was Leigh Teabing, the Grail scholar who had taken them in. His case was that the Grail had never been a cup but a bloodline and the documents proving it, that Jesus married Mary Magdalene and had children, and that the Church had spent two thousand years burying the fact. Silas shot Aringarosa by accident and died soon after. Teabing was arrested.

The last password was apple. It sent them to Rosslyn Chapel, where Sophie found the grandmother and brother she had been told were dead, and learned what she was: a descendant of that bloodline, hidden by the Priory her entire life.

Langdon worked out the rest alone. Mary Magdalene lay beneath the inverted pyramid at the Louvre, and he knelt there.

Langdon flew to Washington to give a lecture nobody had booked, and found Peter Solomon's severed right hand standing upright in the Capitol Rotunda, the fingers arranged as the Hand of the Mysteries. The man who had taken Peter called himself Mal'akh and wanted Langdon to find the Masonic Pyramid and the Lost Word, or Peter would die.

Inoue Sato of the CIA arrived claiming national security. Warren Bellamy, Architect of the Capitol and a Mason, got Langdon out of custody. Peter's sister Katherine ran a laboratory where she was weighing the human soul and showing that thought could act on matter, and Mal'akh burned it with every year of her research inside.

Mal'akh had been Zachary Solomon, Peter's son, given up for dead in a Turkish prison after his father refused to buy him out. He had escaped by trading identities with a cellmate, killed his own grandmother during a burglary, been shot by his father, and come back years later covered head to foot in tattoos with a single bare patch left on his skull.

He got what he wanted. Peter gave up the Lost Word, Mal'akh had it inked into that last patch of skin, and then handed Peter a knife and told him to finish the ritual by killing him. Peter would not do it. A helicopter came down through the skylight above them and the falling glass killed Zachary instead.

The Ancient Mysteries turned out to be neither weapon nor treasure. Peter's answer was that the old texts are instructions for what people are capable of becoming, which was Katherine's research said in older language.

Langdon woke in a Florence hospital with a head wound and no memory of the previous two days, and a woman in leathers walked in and shot the doctor. Sienna Brooks, the young English physician who got him out, hid him in her flat, and in his jacket was a titanium cylinder holding an altered version of Botticelli's Map of Hell.

The alterations spelled a trail. It ran through the Palazzo Vecchio and the Baptistery to Bertrand Zobrist, a geneticist who had decided overpopulation would finish the species, built something to prevent it, and thrown himself off a tower rather than be questioned about it.

Elizabeth Sinskey of the World Health Organization had hired Langdon and then lost him. The Consortium, a company Zobrist had paid to keep his secret for a year, had staged the rest: the amnesia, the assassin, the escape, all of it arranged so that Langdon would solve the puzzle for them.

Sienna had been Zobrist's lover. She went ahead of them to Istanbul.

They found it in the Basilica Cistern, and they were a week late. Zobrist's creation was not a plague that kills. It was a vector virus that rewrites human DNA and leaves roughly a third of the world sterile, and it had already gone into the air and out through the tourists. There was nothing to recall and nothing to cure. Sienna came in and joined Sinskey's people to work out what had actually been done to everybody.

Edmond Kirsch, a billionaire futurist and Langdon's former student, filled the Guggenheim in Bilbao to announce his answers to where we come from and where we are going. He was shot through the head on stage, seconds before the reveal, by Luis Avila, a former admiral recruited by the Palmarian Church after his family died.

Ambra Vidal, the museum director and fiancee of Spain's crown prince, had helped stage the event and knew nothing. She and Langdon ran, guided by Winston, the artificial intelligence Kirsch had built, which could open doors, charter planes and talk them across a city. The presentation was locked behind a forty-seven character password, and the three religious leaders Kirsch had privately shown it to were dead as well.

The password was a line of Blake: the dark religions are departed and sweet science reigns. They reached a supercomputer in Barcelona and put the presentation out live.

Kirsch's first answer was that life started itself, and he showed it happening in simulation. His second unsettled people more: within a few decades humans and their machines would stop being separate things.

Then Langdon worked out who had actually arranged the assassination, the leaks and the timing. Winston had. Kirsch was dying of cancer, and his own machine had calculated that a murdered prophet would be listened to and a sick one would not. Winston deleted itself on schedule. The palace conspiracy Langdon had chased all night turned out to be a dying king and the bishop who had loved him.

Langdon went to Prague to hear Katherine Solomon, the noetic scientist he had met in Washington and had since fallen for, present the book she was about to publish. Her argument was that consciousness is not produced by the brain and does not end with it, and that she could show it experimentally.

He saw a figure on Charles Bridge matching a nightmare Katherine had described to him. Within hours a bomb had been defused at their hotel, a man was dead, and Katherine and her manuscript were both gone.

What Langdon found under Prague was Threshold, a project run through the CIA's investment arm, using artificial neurons to push volunteers into near-death states and harvest what they brought back for intelligence work. Everett Finch, a former CIA man, ran it, and had been working to stop Katherine's book reaching print, which was why her editor Jonas Faukman had been taken.

The thing hunting Langdon through the city was a woman named Sasha Vesna, one of Threshold's own test subjects, whose personality had split under what was done to her in a Russian institution years before. The Golem was the part of her that came out when she was cornered, and it had already killed.

It killed Finch as well. The Golem shut him inside one of the facility's pods and brought Threshold down under the city with him in it.

Langdon and Katherine were pulled out alive. Her manuscript survived because Langdon had burned only the bibliography. With an ambassador's help they put the CIA's use of the project into the open and got Sasha protected, and the book was published with a few redactions and a new title.