Angels & Demons

After Langdon and Vittoria confront the Hassassin at Castel Sant'Angelo and send him falling to his death, they race back to St. Peter's Basilica, fearing that CERN director Maximilian Kohler is the mysterious Illuminati leader known as Janus. Kohler has instead gone to confront Camerlengo Carlo Ventresca, the late pope's chamberlain, in the papal apartment. Swiss Guards break down the locked doors and shoot Kohler as he holds a gun on the branded Ventresca. Before dying, Kohler passes Langdon a hidden video camera that recorded his private meeting with Ventresca. With the antimatter canister still missing and the crowd in St. Peter's Square refusing to evacuate, Ventresca appears to receive a divine sign, leads a search into the necropolis beneath the basilica, and finds the canister resting on the tomb of St. Peter. He flies off with it by helicopter, locks the canister into a floor safe, and parachutes to safety, while Langdon, who has climbed aboard, jumps out using a tarp as an improvised parachute and survives a near-fatal plunge into the Tiber River. Ventresca lands unharmed on the roof of St. Peter's, and the crowd hails his survival as a miracle.

While recovering in a hospital, Langdon watches Kohler's video and learns the truth: Ventresca himself is Janus. He had poisoned the previous pope after discovering the pope had secretly fathered a child, and, believing the Church needed to be shocked back into faith and that science's growing power (embodied by the antimatter) was a threat, he invented a resurrected Illuminati conspiracy. Acting as Janus, he hired the assassin known as the Hassassin to murder Leonardo Vetra, steal the antimatter, and kidnap and kill the four Preferiti cardinals, all as a staged false-flag plot meant to rally the Church around himself as a miraculous savior and discredit scientific progress.

Langdon brings the video to the assembled College of Cardinals. Before them, Cardinal Saverio Mortati reveals a further secret: Ventresca is the late pope's biological son, conceived through artificial insemination with a nun, a fact that makes his crimes an act of patricide as well as mass murder. Exposed and unraveling, Ventresca goes out onto the balcony overlooking St. Peter's Square, douses himself in oil, and sets himself on fire in front of the horrified crowd, dying by self-immolation. In the aftermath, Mortati is unanimously elected the new pope by the College of Cardinals.

In the novel's closing scene, Langdon and Vittoria, having survived the day's events together, reunite at the Hotel Bernini in Rome and spend the night together. Before they part, Mortati gives Langdon the ceremonial Illuminati diamond brand as a gift for his scholarly research, trusting him with its secrecy and legacy.

Robert Langdon, a Harvard symbology professor, is pulled into a single frantic day in Rome after Father Leonardo Vetra, a CERN physicist who helped develop antimatter, is murdered and branded with an Illuminati ambigram. Vetra's adopted daughter, Vittoria Vetra, also a physicist, teams up with Langdon after CERN director Maximilian Kohler summons them both. They discover that a canister of stolen antimatter is hidden somewhere in Vatican City and set to detonate within hours, timed to coincide with the conclave to elect a new pope.

An assassin known as the Hassassin, working for a shadowy figure calling himself Janus, kidnaps the four Preferiti (the leading papal candidates) and ritually murders them one by one at four "Altars of Science" around Rome, following a path of clues rooted in Illuminati history and Renaissance art and architecture. Langdon and Vittoria race between these sites, arriving too late to save three of the four cardinals, before finally confronting the Hassassin at Castel Sant'Angelo, where they kill him and rescue Vittoria from captivity.

Back at the Vatican, Kohler confronts the Camerlengo (papal chamberlain) Carlo Ventresca and is shot dead by Swiss Guards; but he secretly records the confrontation. Ventresca, appearing to receive a divine revelation, recovers the antimatter canister from St. Peter's tomb and flies it away by helicopter before parachuting to safety, staging what the public perceives as a miracle. Langdon, who stows away on the helicopter, jumps out using a tarp and barely survives landing in the Tiber River.

The book ends with the shocking reveal that Ventresca himself was "Janus" all along: he poisoned the previous pope after learning the pope had secretly fathered a child, then orchestrated the entire Illuminati conspiracy, hiring the Hassassin and stealing the antimatter, as a scheme to discredit science and elevate his own religious authority. It is further revealed that Ventresca is the late pope's biological son, conceived via artificial insemination with a nun. Exposed, Ventresca sets himself on fire on the papal balcony and dies. Cardinal Saverio Mortati is then unanimously elected as the new pope. Langdon and Vittoria, having grown close over the course of the ordeal, reunite and spend the night together at the Hotel Bernini, and Mortati gifts Langdon the Illuminati's ceremonial brand for his research.

Going into the next book, Langdon returns to his life as a Harvard symbologist with firsthand experience investigating secret societies, religious conspiracies, and the intersection of faith and science within the Vatican. His romantic connection with Vittoria Vetra is left open-ended, and he now personally possesses an Illuminati brand as a memento of the case. No plot threads from Angels & Demons are stated to directly carry forward into the next Langdon adventure, which involves an entirely new mystery.