Plant die längst vergessene Gesellschaft der Illuminaten einen Anschlag auf den Vatikan? Robert Langdon ermittelt. Ein Kernforscher wird in seinem Schweizer Labor ermordet aufgefunden. Auf seiner Brust finden sich merkwürdige Symbole eingraviert, Symbole, die nur der Harvardprofessor Robert Langdon zu entziffern vermag. Was er dabei entdeckt, erschreckt ihn zutiefst: Die Symbole gehören zu der legendären Geheimgesellschaft der Illuminati. Diese Gemeinschaft scheint wieder zum Leben erweckt zu sein, und sie verfolgt einen finsteren Plan, denn aus dem Labor des ermordeten Kernforschers wurde Antimaterie entwendet.

When ex-MI5 operative Joe Mason is sent to Rome to guard an elderly professor and his daughter, he thinks he’s in for an easy ride. But on their first day in the Vatican secret archives, a masked assassin gains entry, shoots Joe’s client in cold blood and steals an ancient manuscript. Giving chase, Joe can’t imagine what could lie within those pages that would make someone willing to kill. The search for answers leads Joe and his comrades in a race against time, across continents and into treacherous mountains.

Lubji Hoch escapes from the Nazis, moves to Berlin and changes his name to Richard Armitage. After a successful career in the British Army, he takes over a struggling newspaper and with unrivalled ruthlessness begins building his media empire. Meanwhile, Keith Townsend, the son of a millionaire and Oxford educated, returns to Australia from London to take over his father's newspaper with similar ambitions. As both men move their quest for power to the world stage, they realise they are more than a match for one another's brilliance and ambition.

Alex Reeve - known as OPERATIVE 66 - is a former special-ops soldier and one of the UK's most lethal weapons. Previously a member of SC9, an elite covert unit with a remit to assassinate the country's enemies, Reeve was framed for treason and now lives a nomadic existence - as the merciless killers he once trained alongside hunt him down. For a chance of a normal life, Reeve must expose and dismantle the sinister SC9. So when a series of brutal killings in Germany have all the hallmarks of an SC9 tactic.

Cotton Malone, one-time top operative for the U.S. Justice Department, is enjoying his quiet new life as an antiquarian book dealer in Copenhagen when an unexpected call to action reawakens his hair-trigger instincts—and plunges him back into the cloak-and-dagger world he thought he’d left behind.