Free Inferno: A Novel by Dan Brown Page A

thought.
    “Yes.” Langdon paused, momentarily losing his train of thought. He had just noticed something about the cylinder that struck him as odd. Normally, a person could peer through a cylinder seal’s hollow center, as if through a section of empty pipe, but in this case, the shaft was blocked.
There’s something inserted inside this bone
. The end caught the light and shimmered.
    “There’s something inside,” Langdon said. “And it looks like it’s made of glass.” He flipped the cylinder upside down to check the other end, and as he did so, a tiny object rattled inside, tumbling from one end of the bone to the other, like a ball bearing in a tube.
    Langdon froze, and he heard Sienna let out a soft gasp beside him.
    What the hell was that?!
    “Did you hear that sound?” Sienna whispered.
    Langdon nodded and carefully peered into the end of the canister. “The opening appears to be blocked by … something made of metal.”
The cap of a test tube, maybe?
    Sienna backed away. “Does it look … broken?”
    “I don’t think so.” He carefully tipped the bone again to reexamine the glass end, and the rattling sound recurred. An instant later, the glass in the cylinder did something wholly unexpected.
    It began to glow.
    Sienna’s eyes opened wide. “Robert, stop! Don’t move!”

CHAPTER 14
    Langdon stood absolutely still, his hand in midair, holding the bone cylinder steady. Without a doubt, the glass at the end of the tube was emitting light … glowing as if the contents had suddenly awoken.
    Quickly, the light inside faded back to black.
    Sienna moved closer, breathing quickly. She tilted her head and studied the visible section of glass inside the bone.
    “Tip it again,” she whispered. “Very slowly.”
    Langdon gently turned the bone upside down. Again, a small object rattled the length of the bone and stopped.
    “Once more,” she said. “Gently.”
    Langdon repeated the process, and again the tube rattled. This time, the interior glass shimmered faintly, glowing again for an instant before it faded away.
    “It’s got to be a test tube,” Sienna declared, “with an agitator ball.”
    Langdon was familiar with the agitator balls used in spray-paint cans—submerged pellets that helped stir the paint when the can was shaken.
    “It probably contains some kind of phosphorescent chemical compound,” Sienna said, “or a bioluminescent organism that glows when it’s stimulated.”
    Langdon was having other ideas. While he had seen chemical glow sticks and even bioluminescent plankton that glowed when a boat churned up its habitat, he was nearly certain the cylinder in his hand contained neither of these things. He gently tipped the tube several more times, until it glowed, and then held the luminescent end over his palm. As expected, a faint reddish light appeared, projected onto his skin.
    Nice to know a 208 IQ can be wrong sometimes
.
    “Watch this,” Langdon said, and began shaking the tube violently. The object inside rattled back and forth, faster and faster.
    Sienna jumped back. “What are you doing!?”
    Still shaking the tube, Langdon walked over to the light switch and flipped it off, plunging the kitchen into relative darkness. “It’s not a testtube inside,” he said, still shaking as hard as he could. “It’s a Faraday pointer.”
    Langdon had once been given a similar device by one of his students—a laser pointer for lecturers who disliked wasting endless AAA batteries and didn’t mind the effort of shaking their pointer for a few seconds in order to transform their own kinetic energy into electricity on demand. When the device was agitated, a metal ball inside sailed back and forth across a series of paddles and powered a tiny generator. Apparently someone had decided to slide this particular pointer into a hollow, carved bone—an ancient skin to sheathe a modern electronic toy.
    The tip of the pointer in his hand was now glowing intensely, and Langdon gave