Inferno

Brüder descends carefully into the water, using a waterproof penlight to slowly search for the submerged balloon. Langdon watches from the boardwalk and spots watery footprints nearby, indicating that someone has climbed out of the pool recently.

Langdon spots a woman in a burka hiding in the shadows and realizes it is Sienna just as she bursts out and plows past him.

Brüder finally locates the spot where the balloon was meant to be, but it has already burst, and he realizes in horror that the virus has been released.

Near the exit of the cistern, Sinskey receives word of this from Brüder via walkie-talkie and that the doors must be sealed to have any hope of containing its release. Before she can do so, Sienna sprints through the hall yelling something in Turkish that alarms the concertgoers, creating a mass panic. Sienna then beats Sinskey to the doors and breaks through while losing her burka disguise in the process.

Langdon, running close behind, is caught between the closing door and the crowd behind him, who forcefully push the doors open and thrust him out into the street. Without hesitation, he gives chase to Sienna.

Brüder, standing in the stagnant ground zero pool, despairs at the realization that all hope of containment has failed.

Sienna boards a bus before Langdon can catch her, forcing him to flag down a passing motorist and hitch a ride as the driver follows the bus. Langdon attempts to connect with the police using the driver’s cell phone, but most of the lines are busy responding to the crisis at the cistern.

Sienna realizes that Langdon is following her and pulls the emergency cord on the bus, then flees on foot into the Istanbul Spice Bazaar. Langdon runs after her, throwing the cell phone back to the driver and asking him to tell the police to surround the area.

Langdon chases Sienna through the tightly packed Spice Bazaar and down to the docs of the Golden Horn estuary. Sienna beats him there and commandeers a boat, throwing its pilot overboard with a flotation device as she speeds away from shore.

Langdon at first despairs that she will have access to foreign shores and infinite waterways connecting the Black Sea to the Mediterranean, but Sienna suddenly stops the boat and returns it to shore. After docking, she bursts into tears and calls out to Langdon that she has nowhere left to run.

Sinskey oversees the SRS team’s response to the crisis, hermetically sealing the doors of the cistern to keep any contagion from escaping to the streets above, and hopes Langdon is safe.

Brüder sits on the boardwalk by the Medusa and orders his men to set up PCR detectors throughout the cavern to search for viral contamination. All of the machines’ indicators blink red, indicating that the virus has completely saturated the entire cistern.

Langdon confronts Sienna and at first has trouble believing her, but she insists she was not at the cistern intending to release Inferno but to stop it. Her intention was never to aid Zobrist but to find Inferno before the WHO and hide its powerful biotechnological advances from the world. Once she arrived, however, she realized the Solublon bag had been broken for a long while. She offers proof by handing Langdon the program for the concert. Langdon had been under the impression the performance they had interrupted was opening night, but it was in fact closing night. The date of the virus’s release was opening night, and the concert has been playing all week, so Inferno has likely been in circulation all that time.

Sienna explains that Zobrist was a results-oriented scientist. The date of the plaque, which he was most fixated on, was not the release date of the plague but its global saturation date, when it would have infected the entire world.

When Langdon asks why no one is getting sick, Sienna explains that Zobrist did not create a plague but something far worse.

Sinskey, Brüder and the WHO team, now realizing containment is truly impossible and the virus had been released for the whole week, take samples from the water to study.

Sinskey worries about how Inferno will attack the body, reflecting on the viciousness of plagues like Ebola, hantavirus, oncoviruses, and HIV.

Brüder tells her he has confidentially contacted an associate at the CDC in America, who confirmed the pathogen’s presence in their own blood. Brüder and Sinskey realize the virus has already gone global.

Sienna explains to Langdon that Zobrist did not create a traditional virus but a “viral vector,” a variation of virus designed to implant replicable genetic information into a host cell rather than hijack the cell and destroy it, thus modifying an organism’s genetics at the most fundamental level.

Given his obsession with the Black Death’s culling of one-third of Europe’s population, Zobrist “programmed” the Inferno vector virus to activate randomly in only one-third of the global population and to propagate as such, causing one-third of all humans in perpetuity not to die but to become infertile. By doing so, he hoped to reduce the population slowly, over time, and without the suffering of a pandemic.

Sienna had attempted to capture the virus believing that the WHO, CDC, or any other government agency might use Zobrist’s technology to create different programmed pathogens—ones that might, for example, silently commit genocide by targeting genes attached to certain racial backgrounds. Langdon argues that the technology could also be used for good, such as for global inoculation.

Sienna hears helicopters overhead and turns to run, but Langdon refuses to allow it, insisting that she must start trusting people. He tells her the WHO and CDC will need to know what she knows of Zobrist’s technology either to reverse it or to prepare for the fallout.