Free Angels & Demons by Dan Brown

returned home. But home to what? CERN, her world since she was twelve, seemed suddenly foreign. Her father, the man who had made it magical, was gone.
    Deep breaths, she told herself, but she couldn’t calm her mind. The questions circled faster and faster. Who killed her father? And why? Who was this American “specialist”? Why was Kohler insisting on seeing the lab?
    Kohler had said there was evidence that her father’s murder was related to the current project. What evidence? Nobody knew what we were working on! And even if someone found out, why would they kill him?
    As she moved down the LHC tunnel toward her father’s lab, Vittoria realized she was about to unveil her father’s greatest achievement without him there. She had pictured this moment much differently. She had imagined her father calling CERN’s top scientists to his lab, showing them his discovery, watching their awestruck faces. Then he would beam with fatherly pride as he explained to them how it had been one of Vittoria’s ideas that had helped him make the project a reality . . . that his daughter had been integral in his breakthrough. Vittoria felt a lump in her throat. My father and I were supposed to share this moment together. But here she was alone. No colleagues. No happy faces. Just an American stranger and Maximilian Kohler.
    Maximilian Kohler. Der König.
    Even as a child, Vittoria had disliked the man. Although she eventually came to respect his potent intellect, his icy demeanor always seemed inhuman, the exact antithesis of her father’s warmth. Kohler pursued science for its immaculate logic . . . her father for its spiritual wonder. And yet oddly there had always seemed to be an unspoken respect between the two men. Genius , someone had once explained to her, accepts genius unconditionally.
    Genius , she thought. My father . . . Dad. Dead.
    The entry to Leonardo Vetra’s lab was a long sterile hallway paved entirely in white tile. Langdon felt like he was entering some kind of underground insane asylum. Lining the corridor were dozens of framed, black-and-white images. Although Langdon had made a career of studying images, these were entirely alien to him. They looked like chaotic negatives of random streaks and spirals. Modern art? he mused. Jackson Pollock on amphetamines?
    “Scatter plots,” Vittoria said, apparently noting Langdon’s interest. “Computer representations of particle collisions. That’s the Z-particle,” she said, pointing to a faint track that was almost invisible in the confusion. “My father discovered it five years ago. Pure energy—no mass at all. It may well be the smallest building block in nature. Matter is nothing but trapped energy.”
    Matter is energy? Langdon cocked his head. Sounds pretty Zen . He gazed at the tiny streak in the photograph and wondered what his buddies in the Harvard physics department would say when he told them he’d spent the weekend hanging out in a Large Hadron Collider admiring Z-particles.
    “Vittoria,” Kohler said, as they approached the lab’s imposing steel door, “I should mention that I came down here this morning looking for your father.”
    Vittoria flushed slightly. “You did?”
    “Yes. And imagine my surprise when I discovered he had replaced CERN’s standard keypad security with something else.” Kohler motioned to an intricate electronic device mounted beside the door.
    “I apologize,” she said. “You know how he was about privacy. He didn’t want anyone but the two of us to have access.”
    Kohler said, “Fine. Open the door.”
    Vittoria stood a long moment. Then, pulling a deep breath, she walked to the mechanism on the wall. Langdon was in no way prepared for what happened next.
    Vittoria stepped up to the device and carefully aligned her right eye with a protruding lens that looked like a telescope. Then she pressed a button. Inside the machine, something clicked. A shaft of light oscillated back and forth, scanning her eyeball like a