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When cornered at a window, he said they would never find his virus. When the Consortium pursued him through Florence one morning, he ran up onto a church roof. He nicknamed himself "the Shade" because of his suicidal views and his ability to remain invisible. He said he had no fear of death and would end up like Jesus as a matyr and that he was only trying to save humanity, not kill it. Zobrist contacted his employees through webcam, using the Dante death mask and a plague doctor costume as his cover. As a result, Zobrist drove himself underground beneath Florence because of the hatred he was garnering. Zobrist, however, had agents from the World Health Organization and the Consortium at his heels they tried to kidnap Sinskey but were foiled when Robert Langdon entered the conflict. Elizabeth Sinskey on his population control scheme, but she dismissed him for being a madman. The two bonded and had sex afterwards, and Sienna became his protege. At one of these conferences he was visited by a young Sienna Brooks. He openly promoted transhumanism and encouraged people to support his views.
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Zobrist rose to become one of the world's leading biomedical engineer and a billionaire.
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In the film version, Zobrist is portrayed by Ben Foster who also portrayed Mars, Charlie Prince, Steve McKenna and Sebastian Abney. Stopping this plan is the goal of the protagonist, Robert Langdon, although Langdon soon realizes that Zobrist has a powerful ally on his side. To accomplish this, he created the titular Inferno virus to cause a massive population culling. He is a billionaire transhumanist scientist who is bent on solving the world's population problem. Dr Bertrand Zobrist is the posthumous overarching antagonist of Dan Brown's novel Inferno and its 2016 film adaption.
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