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Vittoria was devastated. But Father Leonardo had some other news. He told Vittoria he had spoken to his superiors, and they said it was okay if Father Leonardo adopted her.

"Would you like me to adopt you?" Leonardo asked.

"What’s adopt mean?" Vittoria said.

Father Leonardo told her.

Vittoria hugged him for five minutes, crying tears of joy. "Oh yes! Yes!"

Leonardo told her he had to leave for a while and get their new home settled in Switzerland, but he promised to send for her in six months. It was the longest wait of Vittoria’s life, but Leonardo kept his word. Five days before her ninth birthday, Vittoria moved to Geneva. She attended Geneva International School during the day and learned from her father at night.

Three years later Leonardo Vetra was hired by CERN. Vittoria and Leonardo relocated to a wonderland the likes of which the young Vittoria had never imagined.

Vittoria Vetra’s body felt numb as she strode down the LHC tunnel. She saw her muted reflection in the LHC and sensed her father’s absence. Normally she existed in a state of deep calm, in harmony with the world around her. But now, very suddenly, nothing made sense. The last three hours had been a blur.

It had been 10 A.M. in the Balearic Islands when Kohler’s call came through. Your father has been murdered. Come home immediately. Despite the sweltering heat on the deck of the dive boat, the words had chilled her to the bone, Kohler’s emotionless tone hurting as much as the news.

Now she had 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."