Angels & Demons Read Online Free PDF

perspiration from his forehead. Langdon eyed the lone oak door before them. The name plate read:

LEONARDO VETRA
    “Leonardo Vetra,” Kohler said, “would have been fifty-eight next week. He was one of the most brilliant scientists of our time. His death is a profound loss for science.”
    For an instant Langdon thought he sensed emotion in Kohler’s hardened face. But as quickly as it had come, it was gone. Kohler reached in his pocket and began sifting through a large key ring. An odd thought suddenly occurred to Langdon. The building seemed deserted. “Where is everyone?” he asked. The lack of activity was hardly what he expected considering they were about to enter a murder scene.
    “The residents are in their labs,” Kohler replied, finding the key.
    “I mean the police ,” Langdon clarified. “Have they left already?”
    Kohler paused, his key halfway into the lock. “Police?”
    Langdon’s eyes met the director’s. “Police. You sent me a fax of a homicide. You must have called the police.”
    “I most certainly have not.”
    “What?”
    Kohler’s gray eyes sharpened. “The situation is complex, Mr. Langdon.”
    Langdon felt a wave of apprehension. “But . . . certainly someone else knows about this!”
    “Yes. Leonardo’s adopted daughter. She is also a physicist here at CERN. She and her father share a lab. They are partners. Ms. Vetra has been away this week doing field research. I have notified her of her father’s death, and she is returning as we speak.”
    “But a man has been murd—”
    “A formal investigation,” Kohler said, his voice firm, “will take place. However, it will most certainly involve a search of Vetra’s lab, a space he and his daughter hold most private. Therefore, it will wait until Ms. Vetra has arrived. I feel I owe her at least that modicum of discretion.”
    Kohler turned the key.
    As the door swung open, a blast of icy air hissed into the hall and hit Langdon in the face. He fell back in

    bewilderment. He was gazing across the threshold of an alien world. The flat before him was immersed in a thick, white fog. The mist swirled in smoky vortexes around the furniture and shrouded the room in opaque haze.
    “What the . . . ?” Langdon stammered.
    “Freon cooling system,” Kohler replied. “I chilled the flat to preserve the body.”
    Langdon buttoned his tweed jacket against the cold. I’m in Oz, he thought. And I forgot my magic slippers .
    9
    T he corpse on the floor before Langdon was hideous. The late Leonardo Vetra lay on his back, stripped naked, his skin bluish-gray. His neck bones were jutting out where they had been broken, and his head was twisted completely backward, pointing the wrong way. His face was out of view, pressed against the floor. The man lay in a frozen puddle of his own urine, the hair around his shriveled genitals spidered with frost.
    Fighting a wave of nausea, Langdon let his eyes fall to the victim’s chest. Although Langdon had stared at the symmetrical wound a dozen times on the fax, the burn was infinitely more commanding in real life. The raised, broiled flesh was perfectly delineated . . . the symbol flawlessly formed. Langdon wondered if the intense chill now raking through his body was the air-conditioning or his utter amazement with the significance of what he was now staring at.
    His heart pounded as he circled the body, reading the word upside down, reaffirming the genius of the symmetry. The symbol seemed even less conceivable now that he was staring at it.
    “Mr. Langdon?”
    Langdon did not hear. He was in another world . . . his world, his element, a world where history, myth, and fact collided, flooding his senses. The gears turned.
    “Mr. Langdon?” Kohler’s eyes probed expectantly.
    Langdon did not look up. His disposition now intensified, his focus total. “How much do you already know?”
    “Only what I had time to read on your website. The word Illuminati means ‘the enlightened ones.’ It is the