Robert Langdon in his first adventure is awakened by an urgent telephone call from Maximilian Kohler the head of CERN. One of his top physicists Leonardo Vetra was murdered and he needed for the Harvard symbologist to make the trip to Geneva immediately. A fax with a picture of the dead scientist showing his chest branded with the words Illuminati jolted Robert into action. Arriving at a designated hangar located on the East side of Boston Harbor, he is amazed that the private jet a high speed civil transport or HSCT Boeing X-33 has the same look and the same speed as a space shuttle lands in Switzerland sixty-four minutes after he buckled his seatbelt.

After meeting the dead man's daughter Vittoria adopted from a catholic orphanage at the age of eight when Leonardo was a young priest. The action continues in Rome where Robert and Vittoria search for clues locating the whereabouts of four kidnapped cardinals on the eve of conclave to elect the new Papal head of the Catholic Church and also finding where a canister of anti-matter that is buried somewhere within the caverns of Vatican City before it explodes.

The novel is a page turner and the reader is thrust into both the worlds of the Scientist and the strong-arm grip of repression that forces mankind to take one-step foreward and two-steps back in the eternal search for the quest of the soul and the same ultimate need for the excitement of scientific discovery.

The novel's ending has a personal connotation when the passing papal is buried with his own secret known only to his faithful assistant and the newly elected Officiate. If fiction is truly an illusion of reality then the author has done a worthy job of presenting it.