The Da Vinci Code
Dan Brown
FOR BLYTHE... AGAIN. MORE THAN EVER.
Acknowledgments
First and foremost, to my friend and editor, Jason Kaufman, for working so hard
on this project and for truly understanding what this book is all about. And to
the incomparable Heide Lange-tireless champion of The Da Vinci Code, agent
extraordinaire, and trusted friend.
I cannot fully express my gratitude to the exceptional team at Doubleday, for
their generosity, faith, and superb guidance. Thank you especially to Bill
Thomas and Steve Rubin, who believed in this book from the start. My thanks also
to the initial core of early in-house supporters, headed by Michael Palgon,
Suzanne Herz, Janelle Moburg, Jackie Everly, and Adrienne Sparks, as well as to
the talented people of Doubleday's sales force.
For their generous assistance in the research of the book, I would like to
acknowledge the Louvre Museum, the French Ministry of Culture, Project
Gutenberg, Bibliothèque Nationale, the Gnostic Society Library, the Department
of Paintings Study and Documentation Service at the Louvre, Catholic World News,
Royal Observatory GREenwich, London Record Society, the Muniment Collection at
Westminster Abbey, John Pike and the Federation of American Scientists, and the
five members of Opus Dei (three active, two former) who recounted their stories,
both positive and negative, regarding their experiences inside Opus Dei.
My gratitude also to Water Street Bookstore for tracking down so many of my
research books, my father Richard Brown-mathematics teacher and author-for his
assistance with the Divine Proportion and the Fibonacci Sequence, Stan Planton,
Sylvie Baudeloque, Peter McGuigan, Francis McInerney, Margie Wachtel, André
Vernet, Ken Kelleher at Anchorball Web Media, Cara Sottak, Karyn Popham, Esther
Sung, Miriam Abramowitz, William Tunstall-Pedoe, and Griffin Wooden Brown.
And finally, in a novel drawing so heavily on the sacred feminine, I would be
remiss if I did not mention the two extraordinary women who have touched my
life. First, my mother, Connie Brown-fellow scribe, nurturer, musician, and role
model. And my wife, Blythe-art historian,
painter, front-line editor, and without a doubt the most astonishingly talented
woman I have ever known.
FACT:
The Priory of Sion-a European secret society founded in 1099-is a real
organization. In 1975 Paris's Bibliothèque Nationale discovered parchments known
as Les Dossiers Secrets, identifying numerous members of the Priory of Sion,
including Sir Isaac Newton, Botticelli, Victor Hugo, and Leonardo da Vinci.
The Vatican prelature known as Opus Dei is a deeply devout Catholic sect that
has been the topic of recent controversy due to reports of brainwashing,
coercion, and a dangerous practice known as "corporal mortification." Opus Dei
has just completed construction of a $47 million World Headquarters at 243
Lexington Avenue in New York City.
All descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents, and secret rituals in this
novel are accurate.
Prologue
Louvre Museum, Paris 10:46 P.M.
Renowned curator Jacques Saunière staggered through the vaulted archway of the
museum's Grand Gallery. He lunged for the nearest painting he could see, a
Caravaggio. Grabbing the gilded frame, the seventy-six-year-old man heaved the
masterpiece toward himself until it tore from the wall and Saunière collapsed
backward in a heap beneath the canvas.
As he had anticipated, a thundering iron gate fell nearby, barricading the
entrance to the suite. The parquet floor shook. Far off, an alarm began to ring.
The curator lay a moment, gasping for breath, taking stock. I am still alive. He
crawled out from under the canvas and scanned the cavernous space for someplace
to hide.
A voice spoke, chillingly close. "Do not move."
On his hands and knees, the curator froze, turning his head slowly.
Only fifteen feet away, outside the sealed gate, the mountainous silhouette of
his attacker stared through the iron bars. He was broad and tall, with
ghost-pale skin and thinning white hair. His
irises were pink with dark red pupils. The albino drew a pistol from his coat
and aimed the barrel through the bars, directly at the curator. "You should not
have run." His accent was not easy to place. "Now tell me where it is."
"I told you already," the curator stammered, kneeling defenseless on the floor
of the gallery. "I have no idea what you are talking about!"
"You are lying." The man stared at him, perfectly immobile except for the glint
in his ghostly eyes. "You and your brethren possess something that is not
yours."
The curator felt a surge of adrenaline. How could he possibly know this?
"Tonight the rightful guardians will be restored. Tell me where it is hidden,
and you will live." The man leveled his gun at the curator's head. "Is it a
secret you will die for?"
Saunière could not breathe.
The man tilted his head, peering down the barrel of his gun.
Saunière held up his hands in defense. "Wait," he said slowly. "I will tell you
what you need to know." The curator spoke his next words carefully. The lie he
told was one he had rehearsed many times... each time praying he would never
have to use it.
When the curator had finished speaking, his assailant smiled smugly. "Yes. This
is exactly what the others told me."
Saunière recoiled. The others?
"I found them, too," the huge man taunted. "All three of them. They confirmed
what you have just said."
It cannot be! The curator's true identity, along with the identities of his
three sénéchaux, was almost as sacred as the ancient secret they protected.
Saunière now realized his sénéchaux, following strict procedure, had told the
same lie before their own deaths. It was part of the protocol.
The attacker aimed his gun again. "When you are gone, I will be the only one who
knows the truth."
The truth. In an instant, the curator grasped the true horror of the situation.
If I die, the truth will be lost forever. Instinctively, he tried to scramble
for cover.
The gun roared, and the curator felt a searing heat as the bullet lodged in his
stomach. He fell
forward... struggling against the pain. Slowly, Saunière rolled over and stared
back through the bars at his attacker.
The man was now taking dead aim at Saunière's head.
Saunière closed his eyes, his thoughts a swirling tempest of fear and reGREt.
The click of an empty chamber echoed through the corridor.
The curator's eyes flew open.
The man glanced down at his weapon, looking almost amused. He reached for a
second clip, but then seemed to reconsider, smirking calmly at Saunière's gut.
"My work here is done."
The curator looked down and saw the bullet hole in his white linen shirt. It was
framed by a small circle of blood a few inches below his breastbone. My stomach.
Almost cruelly, the bullet had missed his heart. As a veteran of la Guerre
d'Algérie, the curator had witnessed this horribly drawn-out death before. For
fifteen minutes, he would survive as his stomach acids seeped into his chest
cavity, slowly poisoning him from within.
"Pain is good, monsieur," the man said.
Then he was gone.
Alone now, Jacques Saunière turned his gaze again to the iron gate. He was
trapped, and the doors could not be reopened for at least twenty minutes. By the
time anyone got to him, he would be dead. Even so, the fear that now gripped him
was a fear far GREater than that of his own death.
I must pass on the secret.
Staggering to his feet, he pictured his three murdered brethren. He thought of
the generations who had come before them... of the mission with which they had
all been entrusted.
An unbroken chain of knowledge.
Suddenly, now, despite all the precautions... despite all the fail-safes...
Jacques Saunière was the only remaining link, the sole guardian of one of the
most powerful secrets ever kept.
Shivering, he pulled himself to his feet.
I must find some way....
He was trapped inside the Grand Gallery, and there existed only one person on
earth to whom he
could pass the torch. Saunière gazed up at the walls of his opulent prison. A
collection of the world's most famous paintings seemed to smile down on him like
old friends.
Wincing in pain, he summoned all of his faculties and strength. The desperate
task before him, he knew, would require every remaining second of his life.
CHAPTER 1
Robert Langdon awoke slowly.
A telephone was ringing in the darkness-a tinny, unfamiliar ring. He fumbled for
the bedside lamp and turned it on. Squinting at his surroundings he saw a plush
Renaissance bedroom with Louis XVI furniture, hand-frescoed walls, and a
colossal mahogany four-poster bed.
Where the hell am I?
The jacquard bathrobe hanging on his bedpost bore the monogram: HOTEL RITZ
PARIS.
Slowly, the fog began to lift.
Langdon picked up the receiver. "Hello?"
"Monsieur Langdon?" a man's voice said. "I hope I have not awoken you?"
Dazed, Langdon looked at the bedside clock. It was 12:32 A.M. He had been asleep
only an hour, but he felt like the dead.
"This is the concierge, monsieur. I apologize for this intrusion, but you have a
visitor. He insists it is urgent."
Langdon still felt fuzzy. A visitor? His eyes focused now on a crumpled flyer on
his bedside table.
THE AMERICAN UNIVERSITY OF PARIS
proudly presents
AN EVENING WITH ROBERT LANGDON
PROFESSOR OF RELIGIOUS SYMBOLOGY,
HARVARD UNIVERSITY
Langdon groaned. Tonight's lecture-a slide show about pagan symbolism hidden in
the stones of Chartres Cathedral-had probably ruffled some conservative feathers
in the audience. Most likely,
some religious scholar had trailed him home to pick a fight.
"I'm sorry," Langdon said, "but I'm very tired and-"
"Mais, monsieur," the concierge pressed, lowering his voice to an urgent
whisper. "Your guest is an important man."
Langdon had little doubt. His books on religious paintings and cult symbology
had made him a reluctant celebrity in the art world, and last year Langdon's
visibility had increased a hundredfold after his involvement in a widely
publicized incident at the Vatican. Since then, the stream of self-important
historians and art buffs arriving at his door had seemed never-ending.
"If you would be so kind," Langdon said, doing his best to remain polite, "could
you take the man's name and number, and tell him I'll try to call him before I
leave Paris on Tuesday? Thank you." He hung up before the concierge could
protest.
Sitting up now, Langdon frowned at his bedside Guest Relations Handbook, whose
cover boasted: SLEEP LIKE A BABY IN THE CITY OF LIGHTS. SLUMBER AT THE PARIS
RITZ. He turned and gazed tiredly into the full-length mirror across the room.
The man staring back at him was a stranger-tousled and weary.
You need a vacation, Robert.
The past year had taken a heavy toll on him, but he didn't appreciate seeing
proof in the mirror. His usually sharp blue eyes looked hazy and drawn tonight.
A dark stubble was shrouding his strong jaw and dimpled chin. Around his
temples, the gray highlights were advancing, making their way deeper into his
thicket of coarse black hair. Although his female colleagues insisted the gray
only accentuated his bookish appeal, Langdon knew better.
If Boston Magazine could see me now.
Last month, much to Langdon's embarrassment, Boston Magazine had listed him as
one of that city's top ten most intriguing people-a dubious honor that made him
the brunt of endless ribbing by his Harvard colleagues. Tonight, three thousand
miles from home, the accolade had resurfaced to haunt him at the lecture he had
given.
"Ladies and gentlemen..." the hostess had announced to a full house at the
American University of Paris's Pavilion Dauphine, "Our guest tonight needs no
introduction. He is the author of numerous books: The Symbology of Secret Sects,
The An of the Illuminati, The Lost Language of Ideograms, and when I say he
wrote the book on Religious Iconology, I mean that quite literally. Many of you
use his textbooks in class."
The students in the crowd nodded enthusiastically.
"I had planned to introduce him tonight by sharing his impressive curriculum
vitae. However..." She glanced playfully at Langdon, who was seated onstage. "An
audience member has just handed me a far more, shall we say... intriguing
introduction."
She held up a copy of Boston Magazine.
Langdon cringed. Where the hell did she get that?
The hostess began reading choice excerpts from the inane article, and Langdon
felt himself sinking lower and lower in his chair. Thirty seconds later, the
crowd was grinning, and the woman showed no signs of letting up. "And Mr.
Langdon's refusal to speak publicly about his unusual role in last year's
Vatican conclave certainly wins him points on our intrigue-o-meter." The hostess
goaded the crowd. "Would you like to hear more?"
The crowd applauded.
Somebody stop her, Langdon pleaded as she dove into the article again.
"Although Professor Langdon might not be considered hunk-handsome like some of
our younger awardees, this forty-something academic has more than his share of
scholarly allure. His captivating presence is punctuated by an unusually low,
baritone speaking voice, which his female students describe as 'chocolate for
the ears.' "
The hall erupted in laughter.
Langdon forced an awkward smile. He knew what came next-some ridiculous line
about "Harrison Ford in Harris tweed"-and because this evening he had figured it
was finally safe again to wear his Harris tweed and Burberry turtleneck, he
decided to take action.
"Thank you, Monique," Langdon said, standing prematurely and edging her away
from the podium. "Boston Magazine clearly has a gift for fiction." He turned to
the audience with an embarrassed sigh. "And if I find which one of you provided
that article, I'll have the consulate deport you."
The crowd laughed.
"Well, folks, as you all know, I'm here tonight to talk about the power of
symbols..."
The ringing of Langdon's hotel phone once again broke the silence.
Groaning in disbelief, he picked up. "Yes?"
As expected, it was the concierge. "Mr. Langdon, again my apologies. I am
calling to inform you that your guest is now en route to your room. I thought I
should alert you."
Langdon was wide awake now. "You sent someone to my room?"
"I apologize, monsieur, but a man like this... I cannot presume the authority to
stop him."
"Who exactly is he?"
But the concierge was gone.
Almost immediately, a heavy fist pounded on Langdon's door.
Uncertain, Langdon slid off the bed, feeling his toes sink deep into the
savonniere carpet. He donned the hotel bathrobe and moved toward the door. "Who
is it?"
"Mr. Langdon? I need to speak with you." The man's English was accented-a sharp,
authoritative bark. "My name is Lieutenant Jerome Collet. Direction Centrale
Police Judiciaire."
Langdon paused. The Judicial Police? The DCPJ was the rough equivalent of the
U.S. FBI.
Leaving the security chain in place, Langdon opened the door a few inches. The
face staring back at him was thin and washed out. The man was exceptionally
lean, dressed in an official-looking blue uniform.
"May I come in?" the agent asked.
Langdon hesitated, feeling uncertain as the stranger's sallow eyes studied him.
"What is this all about?"
"My capitaine requires your expertise in a private matter."
"Now?" Langdon managed. "It's after midnight."
"Am I correct that you were scheduled to meet with the curator of the Louvre
this evening?"
Langdon felt a sudden surge of uneasiness. He and the revered curator Jacques
Saunière had been slated to meet for drinks after Langdon's lecture tonight, but
Saunière had never shown up. "Yes. How did you know that?"
"We found your name in his daily planner."
"I trust nothing is wrong?"
The agent gave a dire sigh and slid a Polaroid snapshot through the narrow
opening in the door.
When Langdon saw the photo, his entire body went rigid.
"This photo was taken less than an hour ago. Inside the Louvre."
As Langdon stared at the bizarre image, his initial revulsion and shock gave way
to a sudden upwelling of anger. "Who would do this!"
"We had hoped that you might help us answer that very question, considering your
knowledge in symbology and your plans to meet with him."
Langdon stared at the picture, his horror now laced with fear. The image was
gruesome and profoundly strange, bringing with it an unsettling sense of déjà
vu. A little over a year ago, Langdon had received a photograph of a corpse and
a similar request for help. Twenty-four hours later, he had almost lost his life
inside Vatican City. This photo was entirely different, and yet something about
the scenario felt disquietingly familiar.
The agent checked his watch. "My capitaine is waiting, sir."
Langdon barely heard him. His eyes were still riveted on the picture. "This
symbol here, and the way his body is so oddly..."
"Positioned?" the agent offered.
Langdon nodded, feeling a chill as he looked up. "I can't imagine who would do
this to someone."
The agent looked grim. "You don't understand, Mr. Langdon. What you see in this
photograph..." He paused. "Monsieur Saunière did that to himself."
CHAPTER 2
One mile away, the hulking albino named Silas limped through the front gate of
the luxurious brownstone residence on Rue La Bruyère. The spiked cilice belt
that he wore around his thigh cut into his flesh, and yet his soul sang with
satisfaction of service to the Lord.
Pain is good.
His red eyes scanned the lobby as he entered the residence. Empty. He climbed
the stairs quietly, not wanting to awaken any of his fellow numeraries. His
bedroom door was open; locks were forbidden here. He entered, closing the door
behind him.
The room was spartan-hardwood floors, a pine dresser, a canvas mat in the corner
that served as his bed. He was a visitor here this week, and yet for many years
he had been blessed with a similar sanctuary in New York City.
The Lord has provided me shelter and purpose in my life.
Tonight, at last, Silas felt he had begun to repay his debt. Hurrying to the
dresser, he found the cell phone hidden in his bottom drawer and placed a call.
"Yes?" a male voice answered.
"Teacher, I have returned."
"Speak," the voice commanded, sounding pleased to hear from him.
"All four are gone. The three sénéchaux... and the Grand Master himself."
There was a momentary pause, as if for prayer. "Then I assume you have the
information?"
"All four concurred. Independently."
"And you believed them?"
"Their aGREement was too great for coincidence."
An excited breath. "Excellent. I had feared the brotherhood's reputation for
secrecy might prevail."
"The prospect of death is strong motivation."
"So, my pupil, tell me what I must know."
Silas knew the information he had gleaned from his victims would come as a
shock. "Teacher, all four confirmed the existence of the clef de vo?te... the
legendary keystone."
He heard a quick intake of breath over the phone and could feel the Teacher's
excitement. "The keystone. Exactly as we suspected."
According to lore, the brotherhood had created a map of stone-a clef de vo?te...
or keystone-an engraved tablet that revealed the final resting place of the
brotherhood's GREatest secret...
information so powerful that its protection was the reason for the brotherhood's
very existence.
"When we possess the keystone," the Teacher said, "we will be only one step
away."
"We are closer than you think. The keystone is here in Paris."
"Paris? Incredible. It is almost too easy."
Silas relayed the earlier events of the evening... how all four of his victims,
moments before death, had desperately tried to buy back their godless lives by
telling their secret. Each had told Silas the exact same thing-that the keystone
was ingeniously hidden at a precise location inside one of Paris's ancient
churches-the Eglise de Saint-Sulpice.
"Inside a house of the Lord," the Teacher exclaimed. "How they mock us!"
"As they have for centuries."
The Teacher fell silent, as if letting the triumph of this moment settle over
him. Finally, he spoke. "You have done a GREat service to God. We have waited
centuries for this. You must retrieve the stone for me. Immediately. Tonight.
You understand the stakes."
Silas knew the stakes were incalculable, and yet what the Teacher was now
commanding seemed impossible. "But the church, it is a fortress. Especially at
night. How will I enter?"
With the confident tone of a man of enormous influence, the Teacher explained
what was to be done.
When Silas hung up the phone, his skin tingled with anticipation.
One hour, he told himself, grateful that the Teacher had given him time to carry
out the necessary penance before entering a house of God. I must purge my soul
of today's sins. The sins committed today had been holy in purpose. Acts of war
against the enemies of God had been committed for centuries. Forgiveness was
assured.
Even so, Silas knew, absolution required sacrifice.
Pulling his shades, he stripped naked and knelt in the center of his room.
Looking down, he examined the spiked cilice belt clamped around his thigh. All
true followers of The Way wore this device-a leather strap, studded with sharp
metal barbs that cut into the flesh as a perpetual reminder of Christ's
suffering. The pain caused by the device also helped counteract the desires of
the flesh.
Although Silas already had worn his cilice today longer than the requisite two
hours, he knew today was no ordinary day. Grasping the buckle, he cinched it one
notch tighter, wincing as the barbs dug deeper into his flesh. Exhaling slowly,
he savored the cleansing ritual of his pain.
Pain is good, Silas whispered, repeating the sacred mantra of Father Josemaría
Escrivá-the Teacher of all Teachers. Although Escrivá had died in 1975, his
wisdom lived on, his words still whispered by thousands of faithful servants
around the globe as they knelt on the floor and performed the sacred practice
known as "corporal mortification."
Silas turned his attention now to a heavy knotted rope coiled neatly on the
floor beside him. The Discipline. The knots were caked with dried blood. Eager
for the purifying effects of his own agony, Silas said a quick prayer. Then,
gripping one end of the rope, he closed his eyes and swung it hard over his
shoulder, feeling the knots slap against his back. He whipped it over his
shoulder again, slashing at his flesh. Again and again, he lashed.
Castigo corpus meum.
Finally, he felt the blood begin to flow.
CHAPTER 3
The crisp April air whipped through the open window of the Citro?n ZX as it
skimmed south past the Opera House and crossed Place Vend?me. In the passenger
seat, Robert Langdon felt the city tear past him as he tried to clear his
thoughts. His quick shower and shave had left him looking reasonably presentable
but had done little to ease his anxiety. The frightening image of the curator's
body remained locked in his mind.
Jacques Saunière is dead.
Langdon could not help but feel a deep sense of loss at the curator's death.
Despite Saunière's reputation for being reclusive, his recognition for
dedication to the arts made him an easy man to revere. His books on the secret
codes hidden in the paintings of Poussin and Teniers were some of Langdon's
favorite classroom texts. Tonight's meeting had been one Langdon was very much
looking forward to, and he was disappointed when the curator had not shown.
Again the image of the curator's body FLASHed in his mind. Jacques Saunière did
that to himself? Langdon turned and looked out the window, forcing the picture
from his mind.
Outside, the city was just now winding down-street vendors wheeling carts of
candied amandes, waiters carrying bags of garbage to the curb, a pair of late
night lovers cuddling to stay warm in a
breeze scented with jasmine blossom. The Citro?n navigated the chaos with
authority, its dissonant two-tone siren parting the traffic like a knife.
"Le capitaine was pleased to discover you were still in Paris tonight," the
agent said, speaking for the first time since they'd left the hotel. "A
fortunate coincidence."
Langdon was feeling anything but fortunate, and coincidence was a concept he did
not entirely trust. As someone who had spent his life exploring the hidden
interconnectivity of disparate emblems and ideologies, Langdon viewed the world
as a web of profoundly intertwined histories and events. The connections may be
invisible, he often preached to his symbology classes at Harvard, but they are
always there, buried just beneath the surface.
"I assume," Langdon said, "that the American University of Paris told you where
I was staying?"
The driver shook his head. "Interpol."
Interpol, Langdon thought. Of course. He had forgotten that the seemingly
innocuous request of all European hotels to see a passport at check-in was more
than a quaint formality-it was the law. On any given night, all across Europe,
Interpol officials could pinpoint exactly who was sleeping where. Finding
Langdon at the Ritz had probably taken all of five seconds.
As the Citro?n accelerated southward across the city, the illuminated profile of
the Eiffel Tower appeared, shooting skyward in the distance to the right. Seeing
it, Langdon thought of Vittoria, recalling their playful promise a year ago that
every six months they would meet again at a different romantic spot on the
globe. The Eiffel Tower, Langdon suspected, would have made their list. Sadly,
he last kissed Vittoria in a noisy airport in Rome more than a year ago.
"Did you mount her?" the agent asked, looking over.
Langdon glanced up, certain he had misunderstood. "I beg your pardon?"
"She is lovely, no?" The agent motioned through the windshield toward the Eiffel
Tower. "Have you mounted her?"
Langdon rolled his eyes. "No, I haven't climbed the tower."
"She is the symbol of France. I think she is perfect."
Langdon nodded absently. Symbologists often remarked that France-a country
renowned for machismo, womanizing, and diminutive insecure leaders like Napoleon
and Pepin the Short-could not have chosen a more apt national emblem than a
thousand-foot phallus.
When they reached the intersection at Rue de Rivoli, the traffic light was red,
but the Citro?n didn't
slow. The agent gunned the sedan across the junction and sped onto a wooded
section of Rue Castiglione, which served as the northern entrance to the famed
Tuileries Gardens-Paris's own version of Central Park. Most tourists
mistranslated Jardins des Tuileries as relating to the thousands of tulips that
bloomed here, but Tuileries was actually a literal reference to something far
less romantic. This park had once been an enormous, polluted excavation pit from
which Parisian contractors mined clay to manufacture the city's famous red
roofing tiles-or tuiles.
As they entered the deserted park, the agent reached under the dash and turned
off the blaring siren. Langdon exhaled, savoring the sudden quiet. Outside the
car, the pale wash of halogen headlights skimmed over the crushed gravel
parkway, the rugged whir of the tires intoning a hypnotic rhythm. Langdon had
always considered the Tuileries to be sacred ground. These were the gardens in
which Claude Monet had experimented with form and color, and literally inspired
the birth of the Impressionist movement. Tonight, however, this place held a
strange aura of foreboding.
The Citro?n swerved left now, angling west down the park's central boulevard.
Curling around a circular pond, the driver cut across a desolate avenue out into
a wide quadrangle beyond. Langdon could now see the end of the Tuileries
Gardens, marked by a giant stone archway.
Arc du Carrousel.
Despite the orgiastic rituals once held at the Arc du Carrousel, art aficionados
revered this place for another reason entirely. From the esplanade at the end of
the Tuileries, four of the finest art museums in the world could be seen... one
at each point of the compass.
Out the right-hand window, south across the Seine and Quai Voltaire, Langdon
could see the dramatically lit facade of the old train station-now the esteemed
Musée d'Orsay. Glancing left, he could make out the top of the ultramodern
Pompidou Center, which housed the Museum of Modern Art. Behind him to the west,
Langdon knew the ancient obelisk of Ramses rose above the trees, marking the
Musée du Jeu de Paume.
But it was straight ahead, to the east, through the archway, that Langdon could
now see the monolithic Renaissance palace that had become the most famous art
museum in the world.
Musée du Louvre.
Langdon felt a familiar tinge of wonder as his eyes made a futile attempt to
absorb the entire mass of the edifice. Across a staggeringly expansive plaza,
the imposing facade of the Louvre rose like a citadel against the Paris sky.
Shaped like an enormous horseshoe, the Louvre was the longest building in
Europe, stretching farther than three Eiffel Towers laid end to end. Not even
the million square feet of open plaza between the museum wings could challenge
the majesty of the facade's breadth. Langdon had once walked the Louvre's entire
perimeter, an astonishing three-mile journey.
Despite the estimated five days it would take a visitor to properly appreciate
the 65,300 pieces of art in this building, most tourists chose an abbreviated
experience Langdon referred to as "Louvre Lite"-a full sprint through the museum
to see the three most famous objects: the Mona Lisa, Venus de Milo, and Winged
Victory. Art Buchwald had once boasted he'd seen all three masterpieces in five
minutes and fifty-six seconds.
The driver pulled out a handheld walkie-talkie and spoke in rapid-fire French.
"Monsieur Langdon est arrivé. Deux minutes."
An indecipherable confirmation came crackling back.
The agent stowed the device, turning now to Langdon. "You will meet the
capitaine at the main entrance."
The driver ignored the signs prohibiting auto traffic on the plaza, revved the
engine, and gunned the Citro?n up over the curb. The Louvre's main entrance was
visible now, rising boldly in the distance, encircled by seven triangular pools
from which spouted illuminated fountains.
La Pyramide.
The new entrance to the Paris Louvre had become almost as famous as the museum
itself. The controversial, neomodern glass pyramid designed by Chinese-born
American architect I. M. Pei still evoked scorn from traditionalists who felt it
destroyed the dignity of the Renaissance courtyard. Goethe had described
architecture as frozen music, and Pei's critics described this pyramid as
fingernails on a chalkboard. ProGREssive admirers, though, hailed Pei's
seventy-one-foot-tall transparent pyramid as a dazzling synergy of ancient
structure and modern method-a symbolic link between the old and new-helping
usher the Louvre into the next millennium.
"Do you like our pyramid?" the agent asked.
Langdon frowned. The French, it seemed, loved to ask Americans this. It was a
loaded question, of course. Admitting you liked the pyramid made you a tasteless
American, and expressing dislike was an insult to the French.
"Mitterrand was a bold man," Langdon replied, splitting the difference. The late
French president who had commissioned the pyramid was said to have suffered from
a "Pharaoh complex." Singlehandedly responsible for filling Paris with Egyptian
obelisks, art, and artifacts.
Fran?ois Mitterrand had an affinity for Egyptian culture that was so
all-consuming that the French still referred to him as the Sphinx.
"What is the captain's name?" Langdon asked, changing topics.
"Bezu Fache," the driver said, approaching the pyramid's main entrance. "We call
him le Taureau."
Langdon glanced over at him, wondering if every Frenchman had a mysterious
animal epithet. "You call your captain the Bull?"
The man arched his eyebrows. "Your French is better than you admit, Monsieur
Langdon."
My French stinks, Langdon thought, but my zodiac iconography is pretty good.
Taurus was always the bull. Astrology was a symbolic constant all over the
world.
The agent pulled the car to a stop and pointed between two fountains to a large
door in the side of the pyramid. "There is the entrance. Good luck, monsieur."
"You're not coming?"
"My orders are to leave you here. I have other business to attend to."
Langdon heaved a sigh and climbed out. It's your circus.
The agent revved his engine and sped off.
As Langdon stood alone and watched the departing taillights, he realized he
could easily reconsider, exit the courtyard, grab a taxi, and head home to bed.
Something told him it was probably a lousy idea.
As he moved toward the mist of the fountains, Langdon had the uneasy sense he
was crossing an imaginary threshold into another world. The dreamlike quality of
the evening was settling around him again. Twenty minutes ago he had been asleep
in his hotel room. Now he was standing in front of a transparent pyramid built
by the Sphinx, waiting for a policeman they called the Bull.
I'm trapped in a Salvador Dali painting, he thought.
Langdon strode to the main entrance-an enormous revolving door. The foyer beyond
was dimly lit and deserted.
Do I knock?
Langdon wondered if any of Harvard's revered Egyptologists had ever knocked on
the front door of a pyramid and expected an answer. He raised his hand to bang
on the glass, but out of the darkness below, a figure appeared, striding up the
curving staircase. The man was stocky and dark, almost Neanderthal, dressed in a
dark double-breasted suit that strained to cover his wide shoulders. He advanced
with unmistakable authority on squat, powerful legs. He was speaking on his cell
phone but finished the call as he arrived. He motioned for Langdon to enter.
"I am Bezu Fache," he announced as Langdon pushed through the revolving door.
"Captain of the Central Directorate Judicial Police." His tone was fitting-a
guttural rumble... like a gathering storm.
Langdon held out his hand to shake. "Robert Langdon."
Fache's enormous palm wrapped around Langdon's with crushing force.
"I saw the photo," Langdon said. "Your agent said Jacques Saunière himself did-"
"Mr. Langdon," Fache's ebony eyes locked on. "What you see in the photo is only
the beginning of what Saunière did."
CHAPTER 4
Captain Bezu Fache carried himself like an angry ox, with his wide shoulders
thrown back and his chin tucked hard into his chest. His dark hair was slicked
back with oil, accentuating an arrow-like widow's peak that divided his jutting
brow and preceded him like the prow of a battleship. As he advanced, his dark
eyes seemed to scorch the earth before him, radiating a fiery clarity that
forecast his reputation for unblinking severity in all matters.
Langdon followed the captain down the famous marble staircase into the sunken
atrium beneath the glass pyramid. As they descended, they passed between two
armed Judicial Police guards with machine guns. The message was clear: Nobody
goes in or out tonight without the blessing of Captain Fache.
Descending below ground level, Langdon fought a rising trepidation. Fache's
presence was anything but welcoming, and the Louvre itself had an almost
sepulchral aura at this hour. The staircase, like the aisle of a dark movie
theater, was illuminated by subtle tread-lighting embedded in each step. Langdon
could hear his own footsteps reverberating off the glass overhead. As he glanced
up, he could see the faint illuminated wisps of mist from the fountains fading
away outside the transparent roof.
"Do you approve?" Fache asked, nodding upward with his broad chin.
Langdon sighed, too tired to play games. "Yes, your pyramid is magnificent."
Fache grunted. "A scar on the face of Paris."
Strike one. Langdon sensed his host was a hard man to please. He wondered if
Fache had any idea
that this pyramid, at President Mitterrand's explicit demand, had been
constructed of exactly 666 panes of glass-a bizarre request that had always been
a hot topic among conspiracy buffs who claimed 666 was the number of Satan.
Langdon decided not to bring it up.
As they dropped farther into the subterranean foyer, the yawning space slowly
emerged from the shadows. Built fifty-seven feet beneath ground level, the
Louvre's newly constructed 70,000-square-foot lobby spread out like an endless
grotto. Constructed in warm ocher marble to be compatible with the honey-colored
stone of the Louvre facade above, the subterranean hall was usually vibrant with
sunlight and tourists. Tonight, however, the lobby was barren and dark, giving
the entire space a cold and crypt-like atmosphere.
"And the museum's regular security staff?" Langdon asked.
"En quarantaine," Fache replied, sounding as if Langdon were questioning the
integrity of Fache's team. "Obviously, someone gained entry tonight who should
not have. All Louvre night wardens are in the Sully Wing being questioned. My
own agents have taken over museum security for the evening."
Langdon nodded, moving quickly to keep pace with Fache.
"How well did you know Jacques Saunière?" the captain asked.
"Actually, not at all. We'd never met."
Fache looked surprised. "Your first meeting was to be tonight?"
"Yes. We'd planned to meet at the American University reception following my
lecture, but he never showed up."
Fache scribbled some notes in a little book. As they walked, Langdon caught a
glimpse of the Louvre's lesser-known pyramid-La Pyramide Inversée-a huge
inverted skylight that hung from the ceiling like a stalactite in an adjoining
section of the entresol. Fache guided Langdon up a short set of stairs to the
mouth of an arched tunnel, over which a sign read: DENON. The Denon Wing was the
most famous of the Louvre's three main sections.
"Who requested tonight's meeting?" Fache asked suddenly. "You or he?"
The question seemed odd. "Mr. Saunière did," Langdon replied as they entered the
tunnel. "His secretary contacted me a few weeks ago via e-mail. She said the
curator had heard I would be lecturing in Paris this month and wanted to discuss
something with me while I was here."
"Discuss what?"
"I don't know. Art, I imagine. We share similar interests."
Fache looked skeptical. "You have no idea what your meeting was about?"
Langdon did not. He'd been curious at the time but had not felt comfortable
demanding specifics. The venerated Jacques Saunière had a renowned penchant for
privacy and granted very few meetings; Langdon was grateful simply for the
opportunity to meet him.
"Mr. Langdon, can you at least guess what our murder victim might have wanted to
discuss with you on the night he was killed? It might be helpful."
The pointedness of the question made Langdon uncomfortable. "I really can't
imagine. I didn't ask. I felt honored to have been contacted at all. I'm an
admirer of Mr. Saunière's work. I use his texts often in my classes."
Fache made note of that fact in his book.
The two men were now halfway up the Denon Wing's entry tunnel, and Langdon could
see the twin ascending escalators at the far end, both motionless.
"So you shared interests with him?" Fache asked.
"Yes. In fact, I've spent much of the last year writing the draft for a book
that deals with Mr. Saunière's primary area of expertise. I was looking forward
to picking his brain."
Fache glanced up. "Pardon?"
The idiom apparently didn't translate. "I was looking forward to learning his
thoughts on the topic."
"I see. And what is the topic?"
Langdon hesitated, uncertain exactly how to put it. "Essentially, the manuscript
is about the iconography of goddess worship-the concept of female sanctity and
the art and symbols associated with it."
Fache ran a meaty hand across his hair. "And Saunière was knowledgeable about
this?"
"Nobody more so."
"I see."
Langdon sensed Fache did not see at all. Jacques Saunière was considered the
premiere goddess iconographer on earth. Not only did Saunière have a personal
passion for relics relating to fertility, goddess cults, Wicca, and the sacred
feminine, but during his twenty-year tenure as curator, Saunière had helped the
Louvre amass the largest collection of goddess art on earth-labrys axes from the
priestesses' oldest GREek shrine in Delphi, gold caducei wands, hundreds of Tjet
ankhs resembling small standing angels, sistrum rattles used in ancient Egypt to
dispel evil spirits, and an astonishing array of statues depicting Horus being
nursed by the goddess Isis.
"Perhaps Jacques Saunière knew of your manuscript?" Fache offered. "And he
called the meeting to offer his help on your book."
Langdon shook his head. "Actually, nobody yet knows about my manuscript. It's
still in draft form, and I haven't shown it to anyone except my editor."
Fache fell silent.
Langdon did not add the reason he hadn't yet shown the manuscript to anyone
else. The three-hundred-page draft-tentatively titled Symbols of the Lost Sacred
Feminine-proposed some very unconventional interpretations of established
religious iconography which would certainly be controversial.
Now, as Langdon approached the stationary escalators, he paused, realizing Fache
was no longer beside him. Turning, Langdon saw Fache standing several yards back
at a service elevator.
"We'll take the elevator," Fache said as the lift doors opened. "As I'm sure
you're aware, the gallery is quite a distance on foot."
Although Langdon knew the elevator would expedite the long, two-story climb to
the Denon Wing, he remained motionless.
"Is something wrong?" Fache was holding the door, looking impatient.
Langdon exhaled, turning a longing glance back up the open-air escalator.
Nothing's wrong at all, he lied to himself, trudging back toward the elevator.
As a boy, Langdon had fallen down an abandoned well shaft and almost died
treading water in the narrow space for hours before being rescued. Since then,
he'd suffered a haunting phobia of enclosed spaces-elevators, subways, squash
courts. The elevator is a perfectly safe machine, Langdon continually told
himself, never believing it. It's a tiny metal box hanging in an enclosed shaft!
Holding his breath, he stepped into the lift, feeling the familiar tingle of
adrenaline as the doors slid shut. Two floors. Ten seconds.
"You and Mr. Saunière," Fache said as the lift began to move, "you never spoke
at all? Never corresponded? Never sent each other anything in the mail?"
Another odd question. Langdon shook his head. "No. Never." Fache cocked his
head, as if making a mental note of that fact. Saying nothing, he stared dead
ahead at the chrome doors.
As they ascended, Langdon tried to focus on anything other than the four walls
around him. In the reflection of the shiny elevator door, he saw the captain's
tie clip-a silver crucifix with thirteen embedded pieces of black onyx. Langdon
found it vaguely surprising. The symbol was known as a crux gemmata-a cross
bearing thirteen gems-a Christian ideogram for Christ and His twelve apostles.
Somehow Langdon had not expected the captain of the French police to broadcast
his religion so openly. Then again, this was France; Christianity was not a
religion here so much as a birthright.
"It's a crux gemmata" Fache said suddenly.
Startled, Langdon glanced up to find Fache's eyes on him in the reflection.
The elevator jolted to a stop, and the doors opened.
Langdon stepped quickly out into the hallway, eager for the wide-open space
afforded by the famous high ceilings of the Louvre galleries. The world into
which he stepped, however, was nothing like he expected.
Surprised, Langdon stopped short.
Fache glanced over. "I gather, Mr. Langdon, you have never seen the Louvre after
hours?"
I guess not, Langdon thought, trying to get his bearings.
Usually impeccably illuminated, the Louvre galleries were startlingly dark
tonight. Instead of the customary flat-white light flowing down from above, a
muted red glow seemed to emanate upward from the baseboards-intermittent patches
of red light spilling out onto the tile floors.
As Langdon gazed down the murky corridor, he realized he should have anticipated
this scene. Virtually all major galleries employed red service lighting at
night-strategically placed, low-level, noninvasive lights that enabled staff
members to navigate hallways and yet kept the paintings in relative darkness to
slow the fading effects of overexposure to light. Tonight, the museum possessed
an almost oppressive quality. Long shadows encroached everywhere, and the
usually soaring vaulted ceilings appeared as a low, black void.
"This way," Fache said, turning sharply right and setting out through a series
of interconnected galleries.
Langdon followed, his vision slowly adjusting to the dark. All around,
large-format oils began to materialize like photos developing before him in an
enormous darkroom... their eyes following as
he moved through the rooms. He could taste the familiar tang of museum air-an
arid, deionized essence that carried a faint hint of carbon-the product of
industrial, coal-filter dehumidifiers that ran around the clock to counteract
the corrosive carbon dioxide exhaled by visitors.
Mounted high on the walls, the visible security cameras sent a clear message to
visitors: We see you. Do not touch anything.
"Any of them real?" Langdon asked, motioning to the cameras.
Fache shook his head. "Of course not."
Langdon was not surprised. Video surveillance in museums this size was
cost-prohibitive and ineffective. With acres of galleries to watch over, the
Louvre would require several hundred technicians simply to monitor the feeds.
Most large museums now used "containment security." Forget keeping thieves out.
Keep them in. Containment was activated after hours, and if an intruder removed
a piece of artwork, compartmentalized exits would seal around that gallery, and
the thief would find himself behind bars even before the police arrived.
The sound of voices echoed down the marble corridor up ahead. The noise seemed
to be coming from a large recessed alcove that lay ahead on the right. A bright
light spilled out into the hallway.
"Office of the curator," the captain said.
As he and Fache drew nearer the alcove, Langdon peered down a short hallway,
into Saunière's luxurious study-warm wood, Old Master paintings, and an enormous
antique desk on which stood a two-foot-tall model of a knight in full armor. A
handful of police agents bustled about the room, talking on phones and taking
notes. One of them was seated at Saunière's desk, typing into a laptop.
Apparently, the curator's private office had become DCPJ's makeshift command
post for the evening.
"Messieurs," Fache called out, and the men turned. "Ne nous dérangez pas sous
aucun prétexte. Entendu?"
Everyone inside the office nodded their understanding.
Langdon had hung enough NE PAS DERANGER signs on hotel room doors to catch the
gist of the captain's orders. Fache and Langdon were not to be disturbed under
any circumstances.
Leaving the small conGREgation of agents behind, Fache led Langdon farther down
the darkened hallway. Thirty yards ahead loomed the gateway to the Louvre's most
popular section-la Grande Galerie-a seemingly endless corridor that housed the
Louvre's most valuable Italian masterpieces. Langdon had already discerned that
this was where Saunière's body lay; the Grand Gallery's famous parquet floor had
been unmistakable in the Polaroid.
As they approached, Langdon saw the entrance was blocked by an enormous steel
grate that looked like something used by medieval castles to keep out marauding
armies.
"Containment security," Fache said, as they neared the grate.
Even in the darkness, the barricade looked like it could have restrained a tank.
Arriving outside, Langdon peered through the bars into the dimly lit caverns of
the Grand Gallery.
"After you, Mr. Langdon," Fache said.
Langdon turned. After me, where?
Fache motioned toward the floor at the base of the grate.
Langdon looked down. In the darkness, he hadn't noticed. The barricade was
raised about two feet, providing an awkward clearance underneath.
"This area is still off limits to Louvre security," Fache said. "My team from
Police Technique et Scientifique has just finished their investigation." He
motioned to the opening. "Please slide under."
Langdon stared at the narrow crawl space at his feet and then up at the massive
iron grate. He's kidding, right? The barricade looked like a guillotine waiting
to crush intruders.
Fache grumbled something in French and checked his watch. Then he dropped to his
knees and slithered his bulky frame underneath the grate. On the other side, he
stood up and looked back through the bars at Langdon.
Langdon sighed. Placing his palms flat on the polished parquet, he lay on his
stomach and pulled himself forward. As he slid underneath, the nape of his
Harris tweed snagged on the bottom of the grate, and he cracked the back of his
head on the iron.
Very suave, Robert, he thought, fumbling and then finally pulling himself
through. As he stood up, Langdon was beginning to suspect it was going to be a
very long night.
CHAPTER 5
Murray Hill Place-the new Opus Dei World Headquarters and conference center-is
located at 243 Lexington Avenue in New York City. With a price tag of just over
$47 million, the 133,000-square-foot tower is clad in red brick and Indiana
limestone. Designed by May & Pinska, the building contains over one hundred
bedrooms, six dining rooms, libraries, living rooms, meeting
rooms, and offices. The second, eighth, and sixteenth floors contain chapels,
ornamented with mill-work and marble. The seventeenth floor is entirely
residential. Men enter the building through the main doors on Lexington Avenue.
Women enter through a side street and are "acoustically and visually separated"
from the men at all times within the building.
Earlier this evening, within the sanctuary of his penthouse apartment, Bishop
Manuel Aringarosa had packed a small travel bag and dressed in a traditional
black cassock. Normally, he would have wrapped a purple cincture around his
waist, but tonight he would be traveling among the public, and he preferred not
to draw attention to his high office. Only those with a keen eye would notice
his 14-karat gold bishop's ring with purple amethyst, large diamonds, and
hand-tooled mitre-crozier appliqué. Throwing the travel bag over his shoulder,
he said a silent prayer and left his apartment, descending to the lobby where
his driver was waiting to take him to the airport.
Now, sitting aboard a commercial airliner bound for Rome, Aringarosa gazed out
the window at the dark Atlantic. The sun had already set, but Aringarosa knew
his own star was on the rise. Tonight the battle will be won, he thought, amazed
that only months ago he had felt powerless against the hands that threatened to
destroy his empire.
As president-general of Opus Dei, Bishop Aringarosa had spent the last decade of
his life spreading the message of "God's Work"-literally, Opus Dei. The
conGREgation, founded in 1928 by the Spanish priest Josemaría Escrivá, promoted
a return to conservative Catholic values and encouraged its members to make
sweeping sacrifices in their own lives in order to do the Work of God.
Opus Dei's traditionalist philosophy initially had taken root in Spain before
Franco's regime, but with the 1934 publication of Josemaría Escrivá's spiritual
book The Way-999 points of meditation for doing God's Work in one's own
life-Escrivá's message exploded across the world. Now, with over four million
copies of The Way in circulation in forty-two languages, Opus Dei was a global
force. Its residence halls, teaching centers, and even universities could be
found in almost every major metropolis on earth. Opus Dei was the
fastest-growing and most financially secure Catholic organization in the world.
Unfortunately, Aringarosa had learned, in an age of religious cynicism, cults,
and televangelists, Opus Dei's escalating wealth and power was a magnet for
suspicion.
"Many call Opus Dei a brainwashing cult," reporters often challenged. "Others
call you an ultraconservative Christian secret society. Which are you?"
"Opus Dei is neither," the bishop would patiently reply. "We are a Catholic
Church. We are a conGREgation of Catholics who have chosen as our priority to
follow Catholic doctrine as rigorously as we can in our own daily lives."
"Does God's Work necessarily include vows of chastity, tithing, and atonement
for sins through self-flagellation and the cilice?"
"You are describing only a small portion of the Opus Dei population," Aringarosa
said. "There are many levels of involvement. Thousands of Opus Dei members are
married, have families, and do God's Work in their own communities. Others
choose lives of asceticism within our cloistered residence halls. These choices
are personal, but everyone in Opus Dei shares the goal of bettering the world by
doing the Work of God. Surely this is an admirable quest."
Reason seldom worked, though. The media always gravitated toward scandal, and
Opus Dei, like most large organizations, had within its membership a few
misguided souls who cast a shadow over the entire group.
Two months ago, an Opus Dei group at a midwestern university had been caught
drugging new recruits with mescaline in an effort to induce a euphoric state
that neophytes would perceive as a religious experience. Another university
student had used his barbed cilice belt more often than the recommended two
hours a day and had given himself a near lethal infection. In Boston not long
ago, a disillusioned young investment banker had signed over his entire life
savings to Opus Dei before attempting suicide.
Misguided sheep, Aringarosa thought, his heart going out to them.
Of course the ultimate embarrassment had been the widely publicized trial of FBI
spy Robert Hanssen, who, in addition to being a prominent member of Opus Dei,
had turned out to be a sexual deviant, his trial uncovering evidence that he had
rigged hidden video cameras in his own bedroom so his friends could watch him
having sex with his wife. "Hardly the pastime of a devout Catholic," the judge
had noted.
Sadly, all of these events had helped spawn the new watch group known as the
Opus Dei Awareness Network (ODAN). The group's popular
website-www.odan.org-relayed frightening stories from former Opus Dei members
who warned of the dangers of joining. The media was now referring to Opus Dei as
"God's Mafia" and "the Cult of Christ."
We fear what we do not understand, Aringarosa thought, wondering if these
critics had any idea how many lives Opus Dei had enriched. The group enjoyed the
full endorsement and blessing of the Vatican. Opus Dei is a personal prelature
of the Pope himself.
Recently, however, Opus Dei had found itself threatened by a force infinitely
more powerful than the media... an unexpected foe from which Aringarosa could
not possibly hide. Five months ago, the kaleidoscope of power had been shaken,
and Aringarosa was still reeling from the blow.
"They know not the war they have begun," Aringarosa whispered to himself,
staring out the plane's window at the darkness of the ocean below. For an
instant, his eyes refocused, lingering on the reflection of his awkward
face-dark and oblong, dominated by a flat, crooked nose that had been shattered
by a fist in Spain when he was a young missionary. The physical flaw barely
registered now. Aringarosa's was a world of the soul, not of the flesh.
As the jet passed over the coast of Portugal, the cell phone in Aringarosa's
cassock began vibrating in silent ring mode. Despite airline regulations
prohibiting the use of cell phones during flights, Aringarosa knew this was a
call he could not miss. Only one man possessed this number, the man who had
mailed Aringarosa the phone.
Excited, the bishop answered quietly. "Yes?"
"Silas has located the keystone," the caller said. "It is in Paris. Within the
Church of Saint-Sulpice."
Bishop Aringarosa smiled. "Then we are close."
"We can obtain it immediately. But we need your influence."
"Of course. Tell me what to do."
When Aringarosa switched off the phone, his heart was pounding. He gazed once
again into the void of night, feeling dwarfed by the events he had put into
motion.
Five hundred miles away, the albino named Silas stood over a small basin of
water and dabbed the blood from his back, watching the patterns of red spinning
in the water. Purge me with hyssop and I shall be clean, he prayed, quoting
Psalms. Wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.
Silas was feeling an aroused anticipation that he had not felt since his
previous life. It both surprised and electrified him. For the last decade, he
had been following The Way, cleansing himself of sins... rebuilding his life...
erasing the violence in his past. Tonight, however, it had all come rushing
back. The hatred he had fought so hard to bury had been summoned. He had been
startled how quickly his past had resurfaced. And with it, of course, had come
his skills. Rusty but serviceable.
Jesus' message is one of peace... of nonviolence... of love. This was the
message Silas had been taught from the beginning, and the message he held in his
heart. And yet this was the message the enemies of Christ now threatened to
destroy. Those who threaten God with force will be met with force. Immovable and
steadfast.
For two millennia, Christian soldiers had defended their faith against those who
tried to displace it. Tonight, Silas had been called to battle.
Drying his wounds, he donned his ankle-length, hooded robe. It was plain, made
of dark wool, accentuating the whiteness of his skin and hair. Tightening the
rope-tie around his waist, he raised the hood over his head and allowed his red
eyes to admire his reflection in the mirror. The wheels are in motion.
CHAPTER 6
Having squeezed beneath the security gate, Robert Langdon now stood just inside
the entrance to the Grand Gallery. He was staring into the mouth of a long, deep
canyon. On either side of the gallery, stark walls rose thirty feet, evaporating
into the darkness above. The reddish glow of the service lighting sifted upward,
casting an unnatural smolder across a staggering collection of Da Vincis,
Titians, and Caravaggios that hung suspended from ceiling cables. Still lifes,
religious scenes, and landscapes accompanied portraits of nobility and
politicians.
Although the Grand Gallery housed the Louvre's most famous Italian art, many
visitors felt the wing's most stunning offering was actually its famous parquet
floor. Laid out in a dazzling geometric design of diagonal oak slats, the floor
produced an ephemeral optical illusion-a multi-dimensional network that gave
visitors the sense they were floating through the gallery on a surface that
changed with every step.
As Langdon's gaze began to trace the inlay, his eyes stopped short on an
unexpected object lying on the floor just a few yards to his left, surrounded by
police tape. He spun toward Fache. "Is that... a Caravaggio on the floor?"
Fache nodded without even looking.
The painting, Langdon guessed, was worth upward of two million dollars, and yet
it was lying on the floor like a discarded poster. "What the devil is it doing
on the floor!"
Fache glowered, clearly unmoved. "This is a crime scene, Mr. Langdon. We have
touched nothing. That canvas was pulled from the wall by the curator. It was how
he activated the security system."
Langdon looked back at the gate, trying to picture what had happened.
"The curator was attacked in his office, fled into the Grand Gallery, and
activated the security gate by pulling that painting from the wall. The gate
fell immediately, sealing off all access. This is the only door in or out of
this gallery."
Langdon felt confused. "So the curator actually captured his attacker inside the
Grand Gallery?"
Fache shook his head. "The security gate separated Saunière from his attacker.
The killer was locked out there in the hallway and shot Saunière through this
gate." Fache pointed toward an orange tag hanging from one of the bars on the
gate under which they had just passed. "The PTS team found FLASHback residue
from a gun. He fired through the bars. Saunière died in here alone."
Langdon pictured the photograph of Saunière's body. They said he did that to
himself. Langdon looked out at the enormous corridor before them. "So where is
his body?"
Fache straightened his cruciform tie clip and began to walk. "As you probably
know, the Grand Gallery is quite long."
The exact length, if Langdon recalled correctly, was around fifteen hundred
feet, the length of three Washington Monuments laid end to end. Equally
breathtaking was the corridor's width, which easily could have accommodated a
pair of side-by-side passenger trains. The center of the hallway was dotted by
the occasional statue or colossal porcelain urn, which served as a tasteful
divider and kept the flow of traffic moving down one wall and up the other.
Fache was silent now, striding briskly up the right side of the corridor with
his gaze dead ahead. Langdon felt almost disrespectful to be racing past so many
masterpieces without pausing for so much as a glance.
Not that I could see anything in this lighting, he thought.
The muted crimson lighting unfortunately conjured memories of Langdon's last
experience in noninvasive lighting in the Vatican Secret Archives. This was
tonight's second unsettling parallel with his near-death in Rome. He FLASHed on
Vittoria again. She had been absent from his dreams for months. Langdon could
not believe Rome had been only a year ago; it felt like decades. Another life.
His last correspondence from Vittoria had been in December-a postcard saying she
was headed to the Java Sea to continue her research in entanglement physics...
something about using satellites to track manta ray migrations. Langdon had
never harbored delusions that a woman like Vittoria Vetra could have been happy
living with him on a college campus, but their encounter in Rome had unlocked in
him a longing he never imagined he could feel. His lifelong affinity for
bachelorhood and the simple freedoms it allowed had been shaken somehow...
replaced by an unexpected emptiness that seemed to have grown over the past
year.
They continued walking briskly, yet Langdon still saw no corpse. "Jacques
Saunière went this far?"
"Mr. Saunière suffered a bullet wound to his stomach. He died very slowly.
Perhaps over fifteen or twenty minutes. He was obviously a man of GREat personal
strength."
Langdon turned, appalled. "Security took fifteen minutes to get here?"
"Of course not. Louvre security responded immediately to the alarm and found the
Grand Gallery sealed. Through the gate, they could hear someone moving around at
the far end of the corridor, but they could not see who it was. They shouted,
but they got no answer. Assuming it could only be a criminal, they followed
protocol and called in the Judicial Police. We took up positions within fifteen
minutes. When we arrived, we raised the barricade enough to slip underneath, and
I sent a
dozen armed agents inside. They swept the length of the gallery to corner the
intruder."
"And?"
"They found no one inside. Except..." He pointed farther down the hall. "Him."
Langdon lifted his gaze and followed Fache's outstretched finger. At first he
thought Fache was pointing to a large marble statue in the middle of the
hallway. As they continued, though, Langdon began to see past the statue. Thirty
yards down the hall, a single spotlight on a portable pole stand shone down on
the floor, creating a stark island of white light in the dark crimson gallery.
In the center of the light, like an insect under a microscope, the corpse of the
curator lay naked on the parquet floor.
"You saw the photograph," Fache said, "so this should be of no surprise."
Langdon felt a deep chill as they approached the body. Before him was one of the
strangest images he had ever seen.
The pallid corpse of Jacques Saunière lay on the parquet floor exactly as it
appeared in the photograph. As Langdon stood over the body and squinted in the
harsh light, he reminded himself to his amazement that Saunière had spent his
last minutes of life arranging his own body in this strange fashion.
Saunière looked remarkably fit for a man of his years... and all of his
musculature was in plain view. He had stripped off every shred of clothing,
placed it neatly on the floor, and laid down on his back in the center of the
wide corridor, perfectly aligned with the long axis of the room. His arms and
legs were sprawled outward in a wide spread eagle, like those of a child making
a snow angel... or, perhaps more appropriately, like a man being drawn and
quartered by some invisible force.
Just below Saunière's breastbone, a bloody smear marked the spot where the
bullet had pierced his flesh. The wound had bled surprisingly little, leaving
only a small pool of blackened blood.
Saunière's left index finger was also bloody, apparently having been dipped into
the wound to create the most unsettling aspect of his own macabre deathbed;
using his own blood as ink, and employing his own naked abdomen as a canvas,
Saunière had drawn a simple symbol on his flesh-five straight lines that
intersected to form a five-pointed star.
The pentacle.
The bloody star, centered on Saunière's navel, gave his corpse a distinctly
ghoulish aura. The photo
Langdon had seen was chilling enough, but now, witnessing the scene in person,
Langdon felt a deepening uneasiness.
He did this to himself.
"Mr. Langdon?" Fache's dark eyes settled on him again.
"It's a pentacle," Langdon offered, his voice feeling hollow in the huge space.
"One of the oldest symbols on earth. Used over four thousand years before
Christ."
"And what does it mean?"
Langdon always hesitated when he got this question. Telling someone what a
symbol "meant" was like telling them how a song should make them feel-it was
different for all people. A white Ku Klux Klan headpiece conjured images of
hatred and racism in the United States, and yet the same costume carried a
meaning of religious faith in Spain.
"Symbols carry different meanings in different settings," Langdon said.
"Primarily, the pentacle is a pagan religious symbol."
Fache nodded. "Devil worship."
"No," Langdon corrected, immediately realizing his choice of vocabulary should
have been clearer.
Nowadays, the term pagan had become almost synonymous with devil worship-a gross
misconception. The word's roots actually reached back to the Latin paganus,
meaning country-dwellers. "Pagans" were literally unindoctrinated country-folk
who clung to the old, rural religions of Nature worship. In fact, so strong was
the Church's fear of those who lived in the rural villes that the once innocuous
word for "villager"-villain-came to mean a wicked soul.
"The pentacle," Langdon clarified, "is a pre-Christian symbol that relates to
Nature worship. The ancients envisioned their world in two halves-masculine and
feminine. Their gods and goddesses worked to keep a balance of power. Yin and
yang. When male and female were balanced, there was harmony in the world. When
they were unbalanced, there was chaos." Langdon motioned to Saunière's stomach.
"This pentacle is representative of the female half of all things-a concept
religious historians call the 'sacred feminine' or the 'divine goddess.'
Saunière, of all people, would know this."
"Saunière drew a goddess symbol on his stomach?"
Langdon had to admit, it seemed odd. "In its most specific interpretation, the
pentacle symbolizes Venus-the goddess of female sexual love and beauty."
Fache eyed the naked man, and grunted.
"Early religion was based on the divine order of Nature. The goddess Venus and
the planet Venus were one and the same. The goddess had a place in the nighttime
sky and was known by many names-Venus, the Eastern Star, Ishtar, Astarte-all of
them powerful female concepts with ties to Nature and Mother Earth."
Fache looked more troubled now, as if he somehow preferred the idea of devil
worship.
Langdon decided not to share the pentacle's most astonishing property-the
graphic origin of its ties to Venus. As a young astronomy student, Langdon had
been stunned to learn the planet Venus traced a perfect pentacle across the
ecliptic sky every four years. So astonished were the ancients to observe this
phenomenon, that Venus and her pentacle became symbols of perfection, beauty,
and the cyclic qualities of sexual love. As a tribute to the magic of Venus, the
GREeks used her four-year cycle to organize their Olympiads. Nowadays, few
people realized that the four-year schedule of modern Olympic Games still
followed the cycles of Venus. Even fewer people knew that the five-pointed star
had almost become the official Olympic seal but was modified at the last
moment-its five points exchanged for five intersecting rings to better reflect
the games' spirit of inclusion and harmony.
"Mr. Langdon," Fache said abruptly. "Obviously, the pentacle must also relate to
the devil. Your American horror movies make that point clearly."
Langdon frowned. Thank you, Hollywood. The five-pointed star was now a virtual
cliché in Satanic serial killer movies, usually scrawled on the wall of some
Satanist's apartment along with other alleged demonic symbology. Langdon was
always frustrated when he saw the symbol in this context; the pentacle's true
origins were actually quite godly.
"I assure you," Langdon said, "despite what you see in the movies, the
pentacle's demonic interpretation is historically inaccurate. The original
feminine meaning is correct, but the symbolism of the pentacle has been
distorted over the millennia. In this case, through bloodshed."
"I'm not sure I follow."
Langdon glanced at Fache's crucifix, uncertain how to phrase his next point.
"The Church, sir. Symbols are very resilient, but the pentacle was altered by
the early Roman Catholic Church. As part of the Vatican's campaign to eradicate
pagan religions and convert the masses to Christianity, the Church launched a
smear campaign against the pagan gods and goddesses, recasting their divine
symbols as evil."
"Go on."
"This is very common in times of turmoil," Langdon continued. "A newly emerging
power will
take over the existing symbols and degrade them over time in an attempt to erase
their meaning. In the battle between the pagan symbols and Christian symbols,
the pagans lost; Poseidon's trident became the devil's pitchfork, the wise
crone's pointed hat became the symbol of a witch, and Venus's pentacle became a
sign of the devil." Langdon paused. "Unfortunately, the United States military
has also perverted the pentacle; it's now our foremost symbol of war. We paint
it on all our fighter jets and hang it on the shoulders of all our generals." So
much for the goddess of love and beauty.
"Interesting." Fache nodded toward the spread-eagle corpse. "And the positioning
of the body? What do you make of that?"
Langdon shrugged. "The position simply reinforces the reference to the pentacle
and sacred feminine."
Fache's expression clouded. "I beg your pardon?"
"Replication. Repeating a symbol is the simplest way to strengthen its meaning.
Jacques Saunière positioned himself in the shape of a five-pointed star." If one
pentacle is good, two is better.
Fache's eyes followed the five points of Saunière's arms, legs, and head as he
again ran a hand across his slick hair. "Interesting analysis." He paused. "And
the nudity?" He grumbled as he spoke the word, sounding repulsed by the sight of
an aging male body. "Why did he remove his clothing?"
Damned good question, Langdon thought. He'd been wondering the same thing ever
since he first saw the Polaroid. His best guess was that a naked human form was
yet another endorsement of Venus-the goddess of human sexuality. Although modern
culture had erased much of Venus's association with the male/female physical
union, a sharp etymological eye could still spot a vestige of Venus's original
meaning in the word "venereal." Langdon decided not to go there.
"Mr. Fache, I obviously can't tell you why Mr. Saunière drew that symbol on
himself or placed himself in this way, but I can tell you that a man like
Jacques Saunière would consider the pentacle a sign of the female deity. The
correlation between this symbol and the sacred feminine is widely known by art
historians and symbologists."
"Fine. And the use of his own blood as ink?"
"Obviously he had nothing else to write with."
Fache was silent a moment. "Actually, I believe he used blood such that the
police would follow certain forensic procedures."
"I'm sorry?"
"Look at his left hand."
Langdon's eyes traced the length of the curator's pale arm to his left hand but
saw nothing. Uncertain, he circled the corpse and crouched down, now noting with
surprise that the curator was clutching a large, felt-tipped marker.
"Saunière was holding it when we found him," Fache said, leaving Langdon and
moving several yards to a portable table covered with investigation tools,
cables, and assorted electronic gear. "As I told you," he said, rummaging around
the table, "we have touched nothing. Are you familiar with this kind of pen?"
Langdon knelt down farther to see the pen's label.
STYLO DE LUMIERE NOIRE.
He glanced up in surprise.
The black-light pen or watermark stylus was a specialized felt-tipped marker
originally designed by museums, restorers, and forgery police to place invisible
marks on items. The stylus wrote in a noncorrosive, alcohol-based fluorescent
ink that was visible only under black light. Nowadays, museum maintenance staffs
carried these markers on their daily rounds to place invisible "tick marks" on
the frames of paintings that needed restoration.
As Langdon stood up, Fache walked over to the spotlight and turned it off. The
gallery plunged into sudden darkness.
Momentarily blinded, Langdon felt a rising uncertainty. Fache's silhouette
appeared, illuminated in bright purple. He approached carrying a portable light
source, which shrouded him in a violet haze.
"As you may know," Fache said, his eyes luminescing in the violet glow, "police
use black-light illumination to search crime scenes for blood and other forensic
evidence. So you can imagine our surprise..." Abruptly, he pointed the light
down at the corpse.
Langdon looked down and jumped back in shock.
His heart pounded as he took in the bizarre sight now glowing before him on the
parquet floor. Scrawled in luminescent handwriting, the curator's final words
glowed purple beside his corpse. As Langdon stared at the shimmering text, he
felt the fog that had surrounded this entire night growing thicker.
Langdon read the message again and looked up at Fache. "What the hell does this
mean!"
Fache's eyes shone white. "That, monsieur, is precisely the question you are
here to answer."
Not far away, inside Saunière's office, Lieutenant Collet had returned to the
Louvre and was huddled over an audio console set up on the curator's enormous
desk. With the exception of the eerie, robot-like doll of a medieval knight that
seemed to be staring at him from the corner of Saunière's desk, Collet was
comfortable. He adjusted his AKG headphones and checked the input levels on the
hard-disk recording system. All systems were go. The microphones were
functioning flawlessly, and the audio feed was crystal clear.
Le moment de vérité, he mused.
Smiling, he closed his eyes and settled in to enjoy the rest of the conversation
now being taped inside the Grand Gallery.
CHAPTER 7
The modest dwelling within the Church of Saint-Sulpice was located on the second
floor of the church itself, to the left of the choir balcony. A two-room suite
with a stone floor and minimal furnishings, it had been home to Sister Sandrine
Bieil for over a decade. The nearby convent was her formal residence, if anyone
asked, but she preferred the quiet of the church and had made herself quite
comfortable upstairs with a bed, phone, and hot plate.
As the church's conservatrice d'affaires, Sister Sandrine was responsible for
overseeing all nonreligious aspects of church operations-general maintenance,
hiring support staff and guides, securing the building after hours, and ordering
supplies like communion wine and wafers.
Tonight, asleep in her small bed, she awoke to the shrill of her telephone.
Tiredly, she lifted the receiver.
"Soeur Sandrine. Eglise Saint-Sulpice."
"Hello, Sister," the man said in French.
Sister Sandrine sat up. What time is it? Although she recognized her boss's
voice, in fifteen years she had never been awoken by him. The abbé was a deeply
pious man who went home to bed immediately after mass.
"I apologize if I have awoken you, Sister," the abbé said, his own voice
sounding groggy and on edge. "I have a favor to ask of you. I just received a
call from an influential American bishop.
Perhaps you know him? Manuel Aringarosa?"
"The head of Opus Dei?" Of course I know of him. Who in the Church doesn't?
Aringarosa's conservative prelature had grown powerful in recent years. Their
ascension to grace was jump-started in 1982 when Pope John Paul II unexpectedly
elevated them to a "personal prelature of the Pope," officially sanctioning all
of their practices. Suspiciously, Opus Dei's elevation occurred the same year
the wealthy sect allegedly had transferred almost one billion dollars into the
Vatican's Institute for Religious Works-commonly known as the Vatican
Bank-bailing it out of an embarrassing bankruptcy. In a second maneuver that
raised eyebrows, the Pope placed the founder of Opus Dei on the "fast track" for
sainthood, accelerating an often century-long waiting period for canonization to
a mere twenty years. Sister Sandrine could not help but feel that Opus Dei's
good standing in Rome was suspect, but one did not argue with the Holy See.
"Bishop Aringarosa called to ask me a favor," the abbé told her, his voice
nervous. "One of his numeraries is in Paris tonight...."
As Sister Sandrine listened to the odd request, she felt a deepening confusion.
"I'm sorry, you say this visiting Opus Dei numerary cannot wait until morning?"
"I'm afraid not. His plane leaves very early. He has always dreamed of seeing
Saint-Sulpice."
"But the church is far more interesting by day. The sun's rays through the
oculus, the graduated shadows on the gnomon, this is what makes Saint-Sulpice
unique."
"Sister, I aGREe, and yet I would consider it a personal favor if you could let
him in tonight. He can be there at... say one o'clock? That's in twenty
minutes."
Sister Sandrine frowned. "Of course. It would be my pleasure."
The abbé thanked her and hung up.
Puzzled, Sister Sandrine remained a moment in the warmth of her bed, trying to
shake off the cobwebs of sleep. Her sixty-year-old body did not awake as fast as
it used to, although tonight's phone call had certainly roused her senses. Opus
Dei had always made her uneasy. Beyond the prelature's adherence to the arcane
ritual of corporal mortification, their views on women were medieval at best.
She had been shocked to learn that female numeraries were forced to clean the
men's residence halls for no pay while the men were at mass; women slept on
hardwood floors, while the men had straw mats; and women were forced to endure
additional requirements of corporal mortification... all as added penance for
original sin. It seemed Eve's bite from the apple of knowledge was a debt women
were doomed to pay for eternity. Sadly, while most of the Catholic Church was
gradually moving in the right direction with respect to women's rights, Opus Dei
threatened to reverse the proGREss. Even so, Sister Sandrine had her orders.
Swinging her legs off the bed, she stood slowly, chilled by the cold stone on
the soles of her bare feet. As the chill rose through her flesh, she felt an
unexpected apprehension.
Women's intuition?
A follower of God, Sister Sandrine had learned to find peace in the calming
voices of her own soul. Tonight, however, those voices were as silent as the
empty church around her.
CHAPTER 8
Langdon couldn't tear his eyes from the glowing purple text scrawled across the
parquet floor. Jacques Saunière's final communication seemed as unlikely a
departing message as any Langdon could imagine.
The message read:
13-3-2-21-1-1-8-5
O, Draconian devil!
Oh, lame saint!
Although Langdon had not the slightest idea what it meant, he did understand
Fache's instinct that the pentacle had something to do with devil worship.
O, Draconian devil!
Saunière had left a literal reference to the devil. Equally as bizarre was the
series of numbers. "Part of it looks like a numeric cipher."
"Yes," Fache said. "Our cryptographers are already working on it. We believe
these numbers may be the key to who killed him. Maybe a telephone exchange or
some kind of social identification. Do the numbers have any symbolic meaning to
you?"
Langdon looked again at the digits, sensing it would take him hours to extract
any symbolic meaning. If Saunière had even intended any. To Langdon, the numbers
looked totally random. He was accustomed to symbolic proGREssions that made some
semblance of sense, but everything here-the pentacle, the text, the
numbers-seemed disparate at the most fundamental level.
"You alleged earlier," Fache said, "that Saunière's actions here were all in an
effort to send some sort of message... goddess worship or something in that
vein? How does this message fit in?"
Langdon knew the question was rhetorical. This bizarre communiqué obviously did
not fit Langdon's scenario of goddess worship at all.
O, Draconian devil? Oh, lame saint?
Fache said, "This text appears to be an accusation of some sort. Wouldn't you
aGREe?"
Langdon tried to imagine the curator's final minutes trapped alone in the Grand
Gallery, knowing he was about to die. It seemed logical. "An accusation against
his murderer makes sense, I suppose."
"My job, of course, is to put a name to that person. Let me ask you this, Mr.
Langdon. To your eye, beyond the numbers, what about this message is most
strange?"
Most strange? A dying man had barricaded himself in the gallery, drawn a
pentacle on himself, and scrawled a mysterious accusation on the floor. What
about the scenario wasn't strange?
"The word 'Draconian'?" he ventured, offering the first thing that came to mind.
Langdon was fairly certain that a reference to Draco-the ruthless
seventh-century B.C. politician-was an unlikely dying thought. " 'Draconian
devil' seems an odd choice of vocabulary."
"Draconian?" Fache's tone came with a tinge of impatience now. "Saunière's
choice of vocabulary hardly seems the primary issue here."
Langdon wasn't sure what issue Fache had in mind, but he was starting to suspect
that Draco and Fache would have gotten along well.
"Saunière was a Frenchman," Fache said flatly. "He lived in Paris. And yet he
chose to write this message..."
"In English," Langdon said, now realizing the captain's meaning.
Fache nodded. "Précisément. Any idea why?"
Langdon knew Saunière spoke impeccable English, and yet the reason he had chosen
English as the language in which to write his final words escaped Langdon. He
shrugged.
Fache motioned back to the pentacle on Saunière's abdomen. "Nothing to do with
devil worship? Are you still certain?"
Langdon was certain of nothing anymore. "The symbology and text don't seem to
coincide. I'm sorry I can't be of more help."
"Perhaps this will clarify." Fache backed away from the body and raised the
black light again, letting the beam spread out in a wider angle. "And now?"
To Langdon's amazement, a rudimentary circle glowed around the curator's body.
Saunière had apparently lay down and swung the pen around himself in several
long arcs, essentially inscribing himself inside a circle.
In a FLASH, the meaning became clear.
"The Vitruvian Man," Langdon gasped. Saunière had created a life-sized replica
of Leonardo da Vinci's most famous sketch.
Considered the most anatomically correct drawing of its day, Da Vinci's The
Vitruvian Man had become a modern-day icon of culture, appearing on posters,
mouse pads, and T-shirts around the world. The celebrated sketch consisted of a
perfect circle in which was inscribed a nude male... his arms and legs
outstretched in a naked spread eagle.
Da Vinci. Langdon felt a shiver of amazement. The clarity of Saunière's
intentions could not be denied. In his final moments of life, the curator had
stripped off his clothing and arranged his body in a clear image of Leonardo da
Vinci's Vitruvian Man.
The circle had been the missing critical element. A feminine symbol of
protection, the circle around the naked man's body completed Da Vinci's intended
message-male and female harmony. The question now, though, was why Saunière
would imitate a famous drawing.
"Mr. Langdon," Fache said, "certainly a man like yourself is aware that Leonardo
da Vinci had a tendency toward the darker arts."
Langdon was surprised by Fache's knowledge of Da Vinci, and it certainly went a
long way toward explaining the captain's suspicions about devil worship. Da
Vinci had always been an awkward subject for historians, especially in the
Christian tradition. Despite the visionary's genius, he was a flamboyant
homosexual and worshipper of Nature's divine order, both of which placed him in
a perpetual state of sin against God. Moreover, the artist's eerie
eccentricities projected an admittedly demonic aura: Da Vinci exhumed corpses to
study human anatomy; he kept mysterious journals in illegible reverse
handwriting; he believed he possessed the alchemic power to turn lead into gold
and even cheat God by creating an elixir to postpone death; and his inventions
included horrific, never-before-imagined weapons of war and torture.
Misunderstanding breeds distrust, Langdon thought.
Even Da Vinci's enormous output of breathtaking Christian art only furthered the
artist's reputation for spiritual hypocrisy. Accepting hundreds of lucrative
Vatican commissions, Da Vinci painted Christian themes not as an expression of
his own beliefs but rather as a commercial venture-a
means of funding a lavish lifestyle. Unfortunately, Da Vinci was a prankster who
often amused himself by quietly gnawing at the hand that fed him. He
incorporated in many of his Christian paintings hidden symbolism that was
anything but Christian-tributes to his own beliefs and a subtle thumbing of his
nose at the Church. Langdon had even given a lecture once at the National
Gallery in London entitled: "The Secret Life of Leonardo: Pagan Symbolism in
Christian Art."
"I understand your concerns," Langdon now said, "but Da Vinci never really
practiced any dark arts. He was an exceptionally spiritual man, albeit one in
constant conflict with the Church." As Langdon said this, an odd thought popped
into his mind. He glanced down at the message on the floor again. O, Draconian
devil! Oh, lame saint!
"Yes?" Fache said.
Langdon weighed his words carefully. "I was just thinking that Saunière shared a
lot of spiritual ideologies with Da Vinci, including a concern over the Church's
elimination of the sacred feminine from modern religion. Maybe, by imitating a
famous Da Vinci drawing, Saunière was simply echoing some of their shared
frustrations with the modern Church's demonization of the goddess."
Fache's eyes hardened. "You think Saunière is calling the Church a lame saint
and a Draconian devil?"
Langdon had to admit it seemed far-fetched, and yet the pentacle seemed to
endorse the idea on some level. "All I am saying is that Mr. Saunière dedicated
his life to studying the history of the goddess, and nothing has done more to
erase that history than the Catholic Church. It seems reasonable that Saunière
might have chosen to express his disappointment in his final good-bye."
"Disappointment?" Fache demanded, sounding hostile now. "This message sounds
more enraged than disappointed, wouldn't you say?"
Langdon was reaching the end of his patience. "Captain, you asked for my
instincts as to what Saunière is trying to say here, and that's what I'm giving
you."
"That this is an indictment of the Church?" Fache's jaw tightened as he spoke
through clenched teeth. "Mr. Langdon, I have seen a lot of death in my work, and
let me tell you something. When a man is murdered by another man, I do not
believe his final thoughts are to write an obscure spiritual statement that no
one will understand. I believe he is thinking of one thing only." Fache's
whispery voice sliced the air. "La vengeance. I believe Saunière wrote this note
to tell us who killed him." Langdon stared. "But that makes no sense
whatsoever."
"No?"
"No," he fired back, tired and frustrated. "You told me Saunière was attacked in
his office by someone he had apparently invited in."
"Yes."
"So it seems reasonable to conclude that the curator knew his attacker."
Fache nodded. "Go on."
"So if Saunière knew the person who killed him, what kind of indictment is
this?" He pointed at the floor. "Numeric codes? Lame saints? Draconian devils?
Pentacles on his stomach? It's all too cryptic."
Fache frowned as if the idea had never occurred to him. "You have a point."
"Considering the circumstances," Langdon said, "I would assume that if Saunière
wanted to tell you who killed him, he would have written down somebody's name."
As Langdon spoke those words, a smug smile crossed Fache's lips for the first
time all night. "Précisément," Fache said. "Précisément."
I am witnessing the work of a master, mused Lieutenant Collet as he tweaked his
audio gear and listened to Fache's voice coming through the headphones. The
agent supérieur knew it was moments like these that had lifted the captain to
the pinnacle of French law enforcement.
Fache will do what no one else dares.
The delicate art of cajoler was a lost skill in modern law enforcement, one that
required exceptional poise under pressure. Few men possessed the necessary
sangfroid for this kind of operation, but Fache seemed born for it. His
restraint and patience bordered on the robotic.
Fache's sole emotion this evening seemed to be one of intense resolve, as if
this arrest were somehow personal to him. Fache's briefing of his agents an hour
ago had been unusually succinct and assured. I know who murdered Jacques
Saunière, Fache had said. You know what to do. No mistakes tonight.
And so far, no mistakes had been made.
Collet was not yet privy to the evidence that had cemented Fache's certainty of
their suspect's guilt, but he knew better than to question the instincts of the
Bull. Fache's intuition seemed almost supernatural at times. God whispers in his
ear, one agent had insisted after a particularly impressive display of Fache's
sixth sense. Collet had to admit, if there was a God, Bezu Fache would be on His
A-list. The captain attended mass and confession with zealous regularity-far
more than the requisite holiday attendance fulfilled by other officials in the
name of good public
relations. When the Pope visited Paris a few years back, Fache had used all his
muscle to obtain the honor of an audience. A photo of Fache with the Pope now
hung in his office. The Papal Bull, the agents secretly called it.
Collet found it ironic that one of Fache's rare popular public stances in recent
years had been his outspoken reaction to the Catholic pedophilia scandal. These
priests should be hanged twice! Fache had declared. Once for their crimes
against children. And once for shaming the good name of the Catholic Church.
Collet had the odd sense it was the latter that angered Fache more.
Turning now to his laptop computer, Collet attended to the other half of his
responsibilities here tonight-the GPS tracking system. The image onscreen
revealed a detailed floor plan of the Denon Wing, a structural schematic
uploaded from the Louvre Security Office. Letting his eyes trace the maze of
galleries and hallways, Collet found what he was looking for.
Deep in the heart of the Grand Gallery blinked a tiny red dot.
La marque.
Fache was keeping his prey on a very tight leash tonight. Wisely so. Robert
Langdon had proven himself one cool customer.
CHAPTER 9
To ensure his conversation with Mr. Langdon would not be interrupted, Bezu Fache
had turned off his cellular phone. Unfortunately, it was an expensive model
equipped with a two-way radio feature, which, contrary to his orders, was now
being used by one of his agents to page him.
"Capitaine?" The phone crackled like a walkie-talkie.
Fache felt his teeth clench in rage. He could imagine nothing important enough
that Collet would interrupt this surveillance cachée-especially at this critical
juncture.
He gave Langdon a calm look of apology. "One moment please." He pulled the phone
from his belt and pressed the radio transmission button. "Oui?"
"Capitaine, un agent du Département de Cryptographie est arrivé."
Fache's anger stalled momentarily. A cryptographer? Despite the lousy timing,
this was probably good news. Fache, after finding Saunière's cryptic text on the
floor, had uploaded photographs of the entire crime scene to the Cryptography
Department in hopes someone there could tell him what
the hell Saunière was trying to say. If a code breaker had now arrived, it most
likely meant someone had decrypted Saunière's message.
"I'm busy at the moment," Fache radioed back, leaving no doubt in his tone that
a line had been crossed. "Ask the cryptographer to wait at the command post.
I'll speak to him when I'm done."
"Her," the voice corrected. "It's Agent Neveu."
Fache was becoming less amused with this call every passing moment. Sophie Neveu
was one of DCPJ's biggest mistakes. A young Parisian déchiffreuse who had
studied cryptography in England at the Royal Holloway, Sophie Neveu had been
foisted on Fache two years ago as part of the ministry's attempt to incorporate
more women into the police force. The ministry's ongoing foray into political
correctness, Fache argued, was weakening the department. Women not only lacked
the physicality necessary for police work, but their mere presence posed a
dangerous distraction to the men in the field. As Fache had feared, Sophie Neveu
was proving far more distracting than most.
At thirty-two years old, she had a dogged determination that bordered on
obstinate. Her eager espousal of Britain's new cryptologic methodology
continually exasperated the veteran French cryptographers above her. And by far
the most troubling to Fache was the inescapable universal truth that in an
office of middle-aged men, an attractive young woman always drew eyes away from
the work at hand.
The man on the radio said, "Agent Neveu insisted on speaking to you immediately,
Captain. I tried to stop her, but she's on her way into the gallery."
Fache recoiled in disbelief. "Unacceptable! I made it very clear-"
For a moment, Robert Langdon thought Bezu Fache was suffering a stroke. The
captain was mid-sentence when his jaw stopped moving and his eyes bulged. His
blistering gaze seemed fixated on something over Langdon's shoulder. Before
Langdon could turn to see what it was, he heard a woman's voice chime out behind
him.
"Excusez-moi, messieurs."
Langdon turned to see a young woman approaching. She was moving down the
corridor toward them with long, fluid strides... a haunting certainty to her
gait. Dressed casually in a knee-length, cream-colored Irish sweater over black
leggings, she was attractive and looked to be about thirty. Her thick burgundy
hair fell unstyled to her shoulders, framing the warmth of her face. Unlike the
waifish, cookie-cutter blondes that adorned Harvard dorm room walls, this woman
was healthy with an unembellished beauty and genuineness that radiated a
striking personal confidence.
To Langdon's surprise, the woman walked directly up to him and extended a polite
hand. "Monsieur Langdon, I am Agent Neveu from DCPJ's Cryptology Department."
Her words curved richly around her muted Anglo-Franco accent. "It is a pleasure
to meet you."
Langdon took her soft palm in his and felt himself momentarily fixed in her
strong gaze. Her eyes were olive-GREen-incisive and clear.
Fache drew a seething inhalation, clearly preparing to launch into a reprimand.
"Captain," she said, turning quickly and beating him to the punch, "please
excuse the interruption, but-"
"Ce n'est pas le moment!" Fache sputtered.
"I tried to phone you." Sophie continued in English, as if out of courtesy to
Langdon. "But your cell phone was turned off."
"I turned it off for a reason," Fache hissed. "I am speaking to Mr. Langdon."
"I've deciphered the numeric code," she said flatly.
Langdon felt a pulse of excitement. She broke the code?
Fache looked uncertain how to respond.
"Before I explain," Sophie said, "I have an urgent message for Mr. Langdon."
Fache's expression turned to one of deepening concern. "For Mr. Langdon?"
She nodded, turning back to Langdon. "You need to contact the U.S. Embassy, Mr.
Langdon. They have a message for you from the States."
Langdon reacted with surprise, his excitement over the code giving way to a
sudden ripple of concern. A message from the States? He tried to imagine who
could be trying to reach him. Only a few of his colleagues knew he was in Paris.
Fache's broad jaw had tightened with the news. "The U.S. Embassy?" he demanded,
sounding suspicious. "How would they know to find Mr. Langdon here?"
Sophie shrugged. "Apparently they called Mr. Langdon's hotel, and the concierge
told them Mr. Langdon had been collected by a DCPJ agent."
Fache looked troubled. "And the embassy contacted DCPJ Cryptography?"
"No, sir," Sophie said, her voice firm. "When I called the DCPJ switchboard in
an attempt to contact you, they had a message waiting for Mr. Langdon and asked
me to pass it along if I got through to you."
Fache's brow furrowed in apparent confusion. He opened his mouth to speak, but
Sophie had already turned back to Langdon.
"Mr. Langdon," she declared, pulling a small slip of paper from her pocket,
"this is the number for your embassy's messaging service. They asked that you
phone in as soon as possible." She handed him the paper with an intent gaze.
"While I explain the code to Captain Fache, you need to make this call."
Langdon studied the slip. It had a Paris phone number and extension on it.
"Thank you," he said, feeling worried now. "Where do I find a phone?"
Sophie began to pull a cell phone from her sweater pocket, but Fache waved her
off. He now looked like Mount Vesuvius about to erupt. Without taking his eyes
off Sophie, he produced his own cell phone and held it out. "This line is
secure, Mr. Langdon. You may use it."
Langdon felt mystified by Fache's anger with the young woman. Feeling uneasy, he
accepted the captain's phone. Fache immediately marched Sophie several steps
away and began chastising her in hushed tones. Disliking the captain more and
more, Langdon turned away from the odd confrontation and switched on the cell
phone. Checking the slip of paper Sophie had given him, Langdon dialed the
number.
The line began to ring.
One ring... two rings... three rings...
Finally the call connected.
Langdon expected to hear an embassy operator, but he found himself instead
listening to an answering machine. Oddly, the voice on the tape was familiar. It
was that of Sophie Neveu.
"Bonjour, vous êtes bien chez Sophie Neveu," the woman's voice said. "Je suis
absenle pour le moment, mais..."
Confused, Langdon turned back toward Sophie. "I'm sorry, Ms. Neveu? I think you
may have given me-"
"No, that's the right number," Sophie interjected quickly, as if anticipating
Langdon's confusion. "The embassy has an automated message system. You have to
dial an access code to pick up your
messages."
Langdon stared. "But-"
"It's the three-digit code on the paper I gave you."
Langdon opened his mouth to explain the bizarre error, but Sophie FLASHed him a
silencing glare that lasted only an instant. Her GREen eyes sent a crystal-clear
message.
Don't ask questions. Just do it.
Bewildered, Langdon punched in the extension on the slip of paper: 454.
Sophie's outgoing message immediately cut off, and Langdon heard an electronic
voice announce in French: "You have one new message." Apparently, 454 was
Sophie's remote access code for picking up her messages while away from home.
I'm picking up this woman's messages?
Langdon could hear the tape rewinding now. Finally, it stopped, and the machine
engaged. Langdon listened as the message began to play. Again, the voice on the
line was Sophie's.
"Mr. Langdon," the message began in a fearful whisper. "Do not react to this
message. Just listen calmly. You are in danger right now. Follow my directions
very closely."
CHAPTER 10
Silas sat behind the wheel of the black Audi the Teacher had arranged for him
and gazed out at the GREat Church of Saint-Sulpice. Lit from beneath by banks of
floodlights, the church's two bell towers rose like stalwart sentinels above the
building's long body. On either flank, a shadowy row of sleek buttresses jutted
out like the ribs of a beautiful beast.
The heathens used a house of God to conceal their keystone. Again the
brotherhood had confirmed their legendary reputation for illusion and deceit.
Silas was looking forward to finding the keystone and giving it to the Teacher
so they could recover what the brotherhood had long ago stolen from the
faithful.
How powerful that will make Opus Dei.
Parking the Audi on the deserted Place Saint-Sulpice, Silas exhaled, telling
himself to clear his mind for the task at hand. His broad back still ached from
the corporal mortification he had
endured earlier today, and yet the pain was inconsequential compared with the
anguish of his life before Opus Dei had saved him.
Still, the memories haunted his soul.
Release your hatred, Silas commanded himself. Forgive those who trespassed
against you.
Looking up at the stone towers of Saint-Sulpice, Silas fought that familiar
undertow... that force that often dragged his mind back in time, locking him
once again in the prison that had been his world as a young man. The memories of
purgatory came as they always did, like a tempest to his senses... the reek of
rotting cabbage, the stench of death, human urine and feces. The cries of
hopelessness against the howling wind of the Pyrenees and the soft sobs of
forgotten men.
Andorra, he thought, feeling his muscles tighten.
Incredibly, it was in that barren and forsaken suzerain between Spain and
France, shivering in his stone cell, wanting only to die, that Silas had been
saved.
He had not realized it at the time.
The light came long after the thunder.
His name was not Silas then, although he didn't recall the name his parents had
given him. He had left home when he was seven. His drunken father, a burly
dockworker, enraged by the arrival of an albino son, beat his mother regularly,
blaming her for the boy's embarrassing condition. When the boy tried to defend
her, he too was badly beaten.
One night, there was a horrific fight, and his mother never got up. The boy
stood over his lifeless mother and felt an unbearable up-welling of guilt for
permitting it to happen.
This is my fault!
As if some kind of demon were controlling his body, the boy walked to the
kitchen and grasped a butcher knife. Hypnotically, he moved to the bedroom where
his father lay on the bed in a drunken stupor. Without a word, the boy stabbed
him in the back. His father cried out in pain and tried to roll over, but his
son stabbed him again, over and over until the apartment fell quiet.
The boy fled home but found the streets of Marseilles equally unfriendly. His
strange appearance made him an outcast among the other young runaways, and he
was forced to live alone in the basement of a dilapidated factory, eating stolen
fruit and raw fish from the dock. His only companions were tattered magazines he
found in the trash, and he taught himself to read them. Over time, he GREw
strong. When he was twelve, another drifter-a girl twice his age-mocked him on
the streets and attempted to steal his food. The girl found herself pummeled to
within
inches of her life. When the authorities pulled the boy off her, they gave him
an ultimatum-leave Marseilles or go to juvenile prison.
The boy moved down the coast to Toulon. Over time, the looks of pity on the
streets turned to looks of fear. The boy had grown to a powerful young man. When
people passed by, he could hear them whispering to one another. A ghost, they
would say, their eyes wide with fright as they stared at his white skin. A ghost
with the eyes of a devil!
And he felt like a ghost... transparent... floating from seaport to seaport.
People seemed to look right through him.
At eighteen, in a port town, while attempting to steal a case of cured ham from
a cargo ship, he was caught by a pair of crewmen. The two sailors who began to
beat him smelled of beer, just as his father had. The memories of fear and
hatred surfaced like a monster from the deep. The young man broke the first
sailor's neck with his bare hands, and only the arrival of the police saved the
second sailor from a similar fate.
Two months later, in shackles, he arrived at a prison in Andorra.
You are as white as a ghost, the inmates ridiculed as the guards marched him in,
naked and cold. Mira el espectro! Perhaps the ghost will pass right through
these walls!
Over the course of twelve years, his flesh and soul withered until he knew he
had become transparent.
I am a ghost.
I am weightless.
Yo soy un espectro... palido coma una fantasma... caminando este mundo a solas.
One night the ghost awoke to the screams of other inmates. He didn't know what
invisible force was shaking the floor on which he slept, nor what mighty hand
was trembling the mortar of his stone cell, but as he jumped to his feet, a
large boulder toppled onto the very spot where he had been sleeping. Looking up
to see where the stone had come from, he saw a hole in the trembling wall, and
beyond it, a vision he had not seen in over ten years. The moon.
Even while the earth still shook, the ghost found himself scrambling through a
narrow tunnel, staggering out into an expansive vista, and tumbling down a
barren mountainside into the woods. He ran all night, always downward, delirious
with hunger and exhaustion.
Skirting the edges of consciousness, he found himself at dawn in a clearing
where train tracks cut a
swath across the forest. Following the rails, he moved on as if dreaming. Seeing
an empty freight car, he crawled in for shelter and rest. When he awoke the
train was moving. How long? How far? A pain was growing in his gut. Am I dying?
He slept again. This time he awoke to someone yelling, beating him, throwing him
out of the freight car. Bloody, he wandered the outskirts of a small village
looking in vain for food. Finally, his body too weak to take another step, he
lay down by the side of the road and slipped into unconsciousness.
The light came slowly, and the ghost wondered how long he had been dead. A day?
Three days? It didn't matter. His bed was soft like a cloud, and the air around
him smelled sweet with candles. Jesus was there, staring down at him. I am here,
Jesus said. The stone has been rolled aside, and you are born again.
He slept and awoke. Fog shrouded his thoughts. He had never believed in heaven,
and yet Jesus was watching over him. Food appeared beside his bed, and the ghost
ate it, almost able to feel the flesh materializing on his bones. He slept
again. When he awoke, Jesus was still smiling down, speaking. You are saved, my
son. Blessed are those who follow my path.
Again, he slept.
It was a scream of anguish that startled the ghost from his slumber. His body
leapt out of bed, staggered down a hallway toward the sounds of shouting. He
entered into a kitchen and saw a large man beating a smaller man. Without
knowing why, the ghost grabbed the large man and hurled him backward against a
wall. The man fled, leaving the ghost standing over the body of a young man in
priest's robes. The priest had a badly shattered nose. Lifting the bloody
priest, the ghost carried him to a couch.
"Thank you, my friend," the priest said in awkward French. "The offertory money
is tempting for thieves. You speak French in your sleep. Do you also speak
Spanish?"
The ghost shook his head.
"What is your name?" he continued in broken French.
The ghost could not remember the name his parents had given him. All he heard
were the taunting gibes of the prison guards.
The priest smiled. "No hay problema. My name is Manuel Aringarosa. I am a
missionary from Madrid. I was sent here to build a church for the Obra de Dios."
"Where am I?" His voice sounded hollow.
"Oviedo. In the north of Spain."
"How did I get here?"
"Someone left you on my doorstep. You were ill. I fed you. You've been here many
days."
The ghost studied his young caretaker. Years had passed since anyone had shown
any kindness. "Thank you, Father."
The priest touched his bloody lip. "It is I who am thankful, my friend."
When the ghost awoke in the morning, his world felt clearer. He gazed up at the
crucifix on the wall above his bed. Although it no longer spoke to him, he felt
a comforting aura in its presence. Sitting up, he was surprised to find a
newspaper clipping on his bedside table. The article was in French, a week old.
When he read the story, he filled with fear. It told of an earthquake in the
mountains that had destroyed a prison and freed many dangerous criminals.
His heart began pounding. The priest knows who I am! The emotion he felt was one
he had not felt for some time. Shame. Guilt. It was accompanied by the fear of
being caught. He jumped from his bed. Where do I run?
"The Book of Acts," a voice said from the door.
The ghost turned, frightened.
The young priest was smiling as he entered. His nose was awkwardly bandaged, and
he was holding out an old Bible. "I found one in French for you. The chapter is
marked."
Uncertain, the ghost took the Bible and looked at the chapter the priest had
marked.
Acts 16.
The verses told of a prisoner named Silas who lay naked and beaten in his cell,
singing hymns to God. When the ghost reached Verse 26, he gasped in shock.
"...And suddenly, there was a GREat earthquake, so that the foundations of the
prison were shaken, and all the doors fell open."
His eyes shot up at the priest.
The priest smiled warmly. "From now on, my friend, if you have no other name, I
shall call you Silas."
The ghost nodded blankly. Silas. He had been given flesh. My name is Silas.
"It's time for breakfast," the priest said. "You will need your strength if you
are to help me build this church."
Twenty thousand feet above the Mediterranean, Alitalia flight 1618 bounced in
turbulence, causing passengers to shift nervously. Bishop Aringarosa barely
noticed. His thoughts were with the future of Opus Dei. Eager to know how plans
in Paris were proGREssing, he wished he could phone Silas. But he could not. The
Teacher had seen to that.
"It is for your own safety," the Teacher had explained, speaking in English with
a French accent. "I am familiar enough with electronic communications to know
they can be intercepted. The results could be disastrous for you."
Aringarosa knew he was right. The Teacher seemed an exceptionally careful man.
He had not revealed his own identity to Aringarosa, and yet he had proven
himself a man well worth obeying. After all, he had somehow obtained very secret
information. The names of the brotherhood's four top members! This had been one
of the coups that convinced the bishop the Teacher was truly capable of
delivering the astonishing prize he claimed he could unearth.
"Bishop," the Teacher had told him, "I have made all the arrangements. For my
plan to succeed, you must allow Silas to answer only to me for several days. The
two of you will not speak. I will communicate with him through secure channels."
"You will treat him with respect?"
"A man of faith deserves the highest."
"Excellent. Then I understand. Silas and I shall not speak until this is over."
"I do this to protect your identity, Silas's identity, and my investment."
"Your investment?"
"Bishop, if your own eagerness to keep abreast of proGREss puts you in jail,
then you will be unable to pay me my fee."
The bishop smiled. "A fine point. Our desires are in accord. Godspeed."
Twenty million euro, the bishop thought, now gazing out the plane's window. The
sum was approximately the same number of U.S. dollars. A pittance for something
so powerful.
He felt a renewed confidence that the Teacher and Silas would not fail. Money
and faith were
powerful motivators.
CHAPTER 11
"Une plaisanterie numérique?" Bezu Fache was livid, glaring at Sophie Neveu in
disbelief. A numeric joke? "Your professional assessment of Saunière's code is
that it is some kind of mathematical prank?"
Fache was in utter incomprehension of this woman's gall. Not only had she just
barged in on Fache without permission, but she was now trying to convince him
that Saunière, in his final moments of life, had been inspired to leave a
mathematical gag?
"This code," Sophie explained in rapid French, "is simplistic to the point of
absurdity. Jacques Saunière must have known we would see through it
immediately." She pulled a scrap of paper from her sweater pocket and handed it
to Fache. "Here is the decryption."
Fache looked at the card.
1-1-2-3-5-8-13-21
"This is it?" he snapped. "All you did was put the numbers in increasing order!"
Sophie actually had the nerve to give a satisfied smile. "Exactly."
Fache's tone lowered to a guttural rumble. "Agent Neveu, I have no idea where
the hell you're going with this, but I suggest you get there fast." He shot an
anxious glance at Langdon, who stood nearby with the phone pressed to his ear,
apparently still listening to his phone message from the U.S. Embassy. From
Langdon's ashen expression, Fache sensed the news was bad.
"Captain," Sophie said, her tone dangerously defiant, "the sequence of numbers
you have in your hand happens to be one of the most famous mathematical
proGREssions in history."
Fache was not aware there even existed a mathematical proGREssion that qualified
as famous, and he certainly didn't appreciate Sophie's off-handed tone.
"This is the Fibonacci sequence," she declared, nodding toward the piece of
paper in Fache's hand. "A proGREssion in which each term is equal to the sum of
the two preceding terms."
Fache studied the numbers. Each term was indeed the sum of the two previous, and
yet Fache could not imagine what the relevance of all this was to Saunière's
death.
"Mathematician Leonardo Fibonacci created this succession of numbers in the
thirteenth-century. Obviously there can be no coincidence that all of the
numbers Saunière wrote on the floor belong to Fibonacci's famous sequence."
Fache stared at the young woman for several moments. "Fine, if there is no
coincidence, would you tell me why Jacques Saunière chose to do this. What is he
saying? What does this mean?"
She shrugged. "Absolutely nothing. That's the point. It's a simplistic
cryptographic joke. Like taking the words of a famous poem and shuffling them at
random to see if anyone recognizes what all the words have in common."
Fache took a menacing step forward, placing his face only inches from Sophie's.
"I certainly hope you have a much more satisfying explanation than that."
Sophie's soft features GREw surprisingly stern as she leaned in. "Captain,
considering what you have at stake here tonight, I thought you might appreciate
knowing that Jacques Saunière might be playing games with you. Apparently not.
I'll inform the director of Cryptography you no longer need our services."
With that, she turned on her heel, and marched off the way she had come.
Stunned, Fache watched her disappear into the darkness. Is she out of her mind?
Sophie Neveu had just redefined le suicide professionnel.
Fache turned to Langdon, who was still on the phone, looking more concerned than
before, listening intently to his phone message. The U.S. Embassy. Bezu Fache
despised many things... but few drew more wrath than the U.S. Embassy.
Fache and the ambassador locked horns regularly over shared affairs of
state-their most common battleground being law enforcement for visiting
Americans. Almost daily, DCPJ arrested American exchange students in possession
of drugs, U.S. businessmen for soliciting underage Prostitutes, American
tourists for shoplifting or destruction of property. Legally, the U.S. Embassy
could intervene and extradite guilty citizens back to the United States, where
they received nothing more than a slap on the wrist.
And the embassy invariably did just that.
L'émasculation de la Police Judiciaire, Fache called it. Paris Match had run a
cartoon recently depicting Fache as a police dog, trying to bite an American
criminal, but unable to reach because it was chained to the U.S. Embassy.
Not tonight, Fache told himself. There is far too much at stake.
By the time Robert Langdon hung up the phone, he looked ill.
"Is everything all right?" Fache asked.
Weakly, Langdon shook his head.
Bad news from home, Fache sensed, noticing Langdon was sweating slightly as
Fache took back his cell phone.
"An accident," Langdon stammered, looking at Fache with a strange expression. "A
friend..." He hesitated. "I'll need to fly home first thing in the morning."
Fache had no doubt the shock on Langdon's face was genuine, and yet he sensed
another emotion there too, as if a distant fear were suddenly simmering in the
American's eyes. "I'm sorry to hear that," Fache said, watching Langdon closely.
"Would you like to sit down?" He motioned toward one of the viewing benches in
the gallery.
Langdon nodded absently and took a few steps toward the bench. He paused,
looking more confused with every moment. "Actually, I think I'd like to use the
rest room."
Fache frowned inwardly at the delay. "The rest room. Of course. Let's take a
break for a few minutes." He motioned back down the long hallway in the
direction they had come from. "The rest rooms are back toward the curator's
office."
Langdon hesitated, pointing in the other direction toward the far end of the
Grand Gallery corridor. "I believe there's a much closer rest room at the end."
Fache realized Langdon was right. They were two thirds of the way down, and the
Grand Gallery dead-ended at a pair of rest rooms. "Shall I accompany you?"
Langdon shook his head, already moving deeper into the gallery. "Not necessary.
I think I'd like a few minutes alone."
Fache was not wild about the idea of Langdon wandering alone down the remaining
length of corridor, but he took comfort in knowing the Grand Gallery was a dead
end whose only exit was at the other end-the gate under which they had entered.
Although French fire regulations required several emergency stairwells for a
space this large, those stairwells had been sealed automatically when Saunière
tripped the security system. Granted, that system had now been reset, unlocking
the stairwells, but it didn't matter-the external doors, if opened, would set
off fire alarms and were guarded outside by DCPJ agents. Langdon could not
possibly leave without Fache knowing about it.
"I need to return to Mr. Saunière's office for a moment," Fache said. "Please
come find me directly, Mr. Langdon. There is more we need to discuss."
Langdon gave a quiet wave as he disappeared into the darkness.
Turning, Fache marched angrily in the opposite direction. Arriving at the gate,
he slid under, exited the Grand Gallery, marched down the hall, and stormed into
the command center at Saunière's office.
"Who gave the approval to let Sophie Neveu into this building!" Fache bellowed.
Collet was the first to answer. "She told the guards outside she'd broken the
code."
Fache looked around. "Is she gone?"
"She's not with you?"
"She left." Fache glanced out at the darkened hallway. Apparently Sophie had
been in no mood to stop by and chat with the other officers on her way out.
For a moment, Fache considered radioing the guards in the entresol and telling
them to stop Sophie and drag her back up here before she could leave the
premises. He thought better of it. That was only his pride talking... wanting
the last word. He'd had enough distractions tonight.
Deal with Agent Neveu later, he told himself, already looking forward to firing
her.
Pushing Sophie from his mind, Fache stared for a moment at the miniature knight
standing on Saunière's desk. Then he turned back to Collet. "Do you have him?"
Collet gave a curt nod and spun the laptop toward Fache. The red dot was clearly
visible on the floor plan overlay, blinking methodically in a room marked
TOILETTES PUBLIQUES.
"Good," Fache said, lighting a cigarette and stalking into the hall. I've got a
phone call to make. Be damned sure the rest room is the only place Langdon
goes."
CHAPTER 12
Robert Langdon felt light-headed as he trudged toward the end of the Grand
Gallery. Sophie's phone message played over and over in his mind. At the end of
the corridor, illuminated signs bearing the international stick-figure symbols
for rest rooms guided him through a maze-like series of dividers displaying
Italian drawings and hiding the rest rooms from sight.
Finding the men's room door, Langdon entered and turned on the lights.
The room was empty.
Walking to the sink, he splashed cold water on his face and tried to wake up.
Harsh fluorescent lights glared off the stark tile, and the room smelled of
ammonia. As he toweled off, the rest room's door creaked open behind him. He
spun.
Sophie Neveu entered, her GREen eyes FLASHing fear. "Thank God you came. We
don't have much time."
Langdon stood beside the sinks, staring in bewilderment at DCPJ cryptographer
Sophie Neveu. Only minutes ago, Langdon had listened to her phone message,
thinking the newly arrived cryptographer must be insane. And yet, the more he
listened, the more he sensed Sophie Neveu was speaking in earnest. Do not react
to this message. Just listen calmly. You are in danger right now. Follow my
directions very closely. Filled with uncertainty, Langdon had decided to do
exactly as Sophie advised. He told Fache that the phone message was regarding an
injured friend back home. Then he had asked to use the rest room at the end of
the Grand Gallery.
Sophie stood before him now, still catching her breath after doubling back to
the rest room. In the fluorescent lights, Langdon was surprised to see that her
strong air actually radiated from unexpectedly soft features. Only her gaze was
sharp, and the juxtaposition conjured images of a multilayered Renoir
portrait... veiled but distinct, with a boldness that somehow retained its
shroud of mystery.
"I wanted to warn you, Mr. Langdon..." Sophie began, still catching her breath,
"that you are sous surveillance cachée. Under a guarded observation." As she
spoke, her accented English resonated off the tile walls, giving her voice a
hollow quality.
"But... why?" Langdon demanded. Sophie had already given him an explanation on
the phone, but he wanted to hear it from her lips.
"Because," she said, stepping toward him, "Fache's primary suspect in this
murder is you."
Langdon was braced for the words, and yet they still sounded utterly ridiculous.
According to Sophie, Langdon had been called to the Louvre tonight not as a
symbologist but rather as a suspect and was currently the unwitting target of
one of DCPJ's favorite interrogation methods-surveillance cachée-a deft
deception in which the police calmly invited a suspect to a crime scene and
interviewed him in hopes he would get nervous and mistakenly incriminate
himself.
"Look in your jacket's left pocket," Sophie said. "You'll find proof they are
watching you."
Langdon felt his apprehension rising. Look in my pocket? It sounded like some
kind of cheap magic trick.
"Just look."
Bewildered, Langdon reached his hand into his tweed jacket's left pocket-one he
never used. Feeling around inside, he found nothing. What the devil did you
expect? He began wondering if Sophie might just be insane after all. Then his
fingers brushed something unexpected. Small and hard. Pinching the tiny object
between his fingers, Langdon pulled it out and stared in astonishment. It was a
metallic, button-shaped disk, about the size of a watch battery. He had never
seen it before. "What the...?"
"GPS tracking dot," Sophie said. "Continuously transmits its location to a
Global Positioning System satellite that DCPJ can monitor. We use them to
monitor people's locations. It's accurate within two feet anywhere on the globe.
They have you on an electronic leash. The agent who picked you up at the hotel
slipped it inside your pocket before you left your room."
Langdon FLASHed back to the hotel room... his quick shower, getting dressed, the
DCPJ agent politely holding out Langdon's tweed coat as they left the room. It's
cool outside, Mr. Langdon, the agent had said. Spring in Paris is not all your
song boasts. Langdon had thanked him and donned the jacket.
Sophie's olive gaze was keen. "I didn't tell you about the tracking dot earlier
because I didn't want you checking your pocket in front of Fache. He can't know
you've found it."
Langdon had no idea how to respond.
"They tagged you with GPS because they thought you might run." She paused. "In
fact, they hoped you would run; it would make their case stronger."
"Why would I run!" Langdon demanded. "I'm innocent!"
"Fache feels otherwise."
Angrily, Langdon stalked toward the trash receptacle to dispose of the tracking
dot.
"No!" Sophie grabbed his arm and stopped him. "Leave it in your pocket. If you
throw it out, the signal will stop moving, and they'll know you found the dot.
The only reason Fache left you alone is because he can monitor where you are. If
he thinks you've discovered what he's doing..." Sophie did not finish the
thought. Instead, she pried the metallic disk from Langdon's hand and slid it
back into the pocket of his tweed coat. "The dot stays with you. At least for
the moment."
Langdon felt lost. "How the hell could Fache actually believe I killed Jacques
Saunière!"
"He has some fairly persuasive reasons to suspect you." Sophie's expression was
grim. "There is a piece of evidence here that you have not yet seen. Fache has
kept it carefully hidden from you."
Langdon could only stare.
"Do you recall the three lines of text that Saunière wrote on the floor?"
Langdon nodded. The numbers and words were imprinted on Langdon's mind.
Sophie's voice dropped to a whisper now. "Unfortunately, what you saw was not
the entire message. There was a fourth line that Fache photographed and then
wiped clean before you arrived."
Although Langdon knew the soluble ink of a watermark stylus could easily be
wiped away, he could not imagine why Fache would erase evidence.
"The last line of the message," Sophie said, "was something Fache did not want
you to know about." She paused. "At least not until he was done with you."
Sophie produced a computer printout of a photo from her sweater pocket and began
unfolding it. "Fache uploaded images of the crime scene to the Cryptology
Department earlier tonight in hopes we could figure out what Saunière's message
was trying to say. This is a photo of the complete message." She handed the page
to Langdon.
Bewildered, Langdon looked at the image. The close-up photo revealed the glowing
message on the parquet floor. The final line hit Langdon like a kick in the gut.
13-3-2-21-1-1-8-5
O, Draconian devil!
Oh, lame saint!
P.S. Find Robert Langdon
CHAPTER 13
For several seconds, Langdon stared in wonder at the photograph of Saunière's
postscript. P.S. Find Robert Langdon. He felt as if the floor were tilting
beneath his feet. Saunière left a postscript with my name on it? In his wildest
dreams, Langdon could not fathom why.
"Now do you understand," Sophie said, her eyes urgent, "why Fache ordered you
here tonight, and why you are his primary suspect?"
The only thing Langdon understood at the moment was why Fache had looked so smug
when Langdon suggested Saunière would have accused his killer by name.
Find Robert Langdon.
"Why would Saunière write this?" Langdon demanded, his confusion now giving way
to anger. "Why would I want to kill Jacques Saunière?"
"Fache has yet to uncover a motive, but he has been recording his entire
conversation with you tonight in hopes you might reveal one."
Langdon opened his mouth, but still no words came.
"He's fitted with a miniature microphone," Sophie explained. "It's connected to
a transmitter in his pocket that radios the signal back to the command post."
"This is impossible," Langdon stammered. "I have an alibi. I went directly back
to my hotel after my lecture. You can ask the hotel desk."
"Fache already did. His report shows you retrieving your room key from the
concierge at about ten-thirty. Unfortunately, the time of the murder was closer
to eleven. You easily could have left your hotel room unseen."
"This is insanity! Fache has no evidence!"
Sophie's eyes widened as if to say: No evidence? "Mr. Langdon, your name is
written on the floor beside the body, and Saunière's date book says you were
with him at approximately the time of the murder." She paused. "Fache has more
than enough evidence to take you into custody for questioning."
Langdon suddenly sensed that he needed a lawyer. "I didn't do this."
Sophie sighed. "This is not American television, Mr. Langdon. In France, the
laws protect the police, not criminals. Unfortunately, in this case, there is
also the media consideration. Jacques Saunière was a very prominent and
well-loved figure in Paris, and his murder will be news in the morning. Fache
will be under immediate pressure to make a statement, and he looks a lot better
having a suspect in custody already. Whether or not you are guilty, you most
certainly will be held by DCPJ until they can figure out what really happened."
Langdon felt like a caged animal. "Why are you telling me all this?"
"Because, Mr. Langdon, I believe you are innocent." Sophie looked away for a
moment and then back into his eyes. "And also because it is partially my fault
that you're in trouble."
"I'm sorry? It's your fault Saunière is trying to frame me?"
"Saunière wasn't trying to frame you. It was a mistake. That message on the
floor was meant for me."
Langdon needed a minute to process that one. "I beg your pardon?"
"That message wasn't for the police. He wrote it for me. I think he was forced
to do everything in such a hurry that he just didn't realize how it would look
to the police." She paused. "The numbered code is meaningless. Saunière wrote it
to make sure the investigation included cryptographers, ensuring that I would
know as soon as possible what had happened to him."
Langdon felt himself losing touch fast. Whether or not Sophie Neveu had lost her
mind was at this point up for grabs, but at least Langdon now understood why she
was trying to help him. P.S. Find Robert Langdon. She apparently believed the
curator had left her a cryptic postscript telling her to find Langdon. "But why
do you think his message was for you?"
"The Vitruvian Man," she said flatly. "That particular sketch has always been my
favorite Da Vinci work. Tonight he used it to catch my attention."
"Hold on. You're saying the curator knew your favorite piece of art?" She
nodded. "I'm sorry. This is all coming out of order. Jacques Saunière and I..."
Sophie's voice caught, and Langdon heard a sudden melancholy there, a painful
past, simmering just below the surface. Sophie and Jacques Saunière apparently
had some kind of special relationship. Langdon studied the beautiful young woman
before him, well aware that aging men in France often took young mistresses.
Even so, Sophie Neveu as a "kept woman" somehow didn't seem to fit.
"We had a falling-out ten years ago," Sophie said, her voice a whisper now.
"We've barely spoken since. Tonight, when Crypto got the call that he had been
murdered, and I saw the images of his body and text on the floor, I realized he
was trying to send me a message."
"Because of The Vitruvian Man?"
"Yes. And the letters P.S."
"Post Script?"
She shook her head. "P.S. are my initials."
"But your name is Sophie Neveu."
She looked away. "P.S. is the nickname he called me when I lived with him." She
blushed. "It stood for Princesse Sophie"
Langdon had no response.
"Silly, I know," she said. "But it was years ago. When I was a little girl."
"You knew him when you were a little girl?"
"Quite well," she said, her eyes welling now with emotion. "Jacques Saunière was
my grandfather."
CHAPTER 14
"Where's Langdon?" Fache demanded, exhaling the last of a cigarette as he paced
back into the command post.
"Still in the men's room, sir." Lieutenant Collet had been expecting the
question.
Fache grumbled, "Taking his time, I see."
The captain eyed the GPS dot over Collet's shoulder, and Collet could almost
hear the wheels turning. Fache was fighting the urge to go check on Langdon.
Ideally, the subject of an observation was allowed the most time and freedom
possible, lulling him into a false sense of security. Langdon needed to return
of his own volition. Still, it had been almost ten minutes.
Too long.
"Any chance Langdon is onto us?" Fache asked.
Collet shook his head. "We're still seeing small movements inside the men's
room, so the GPS dot is obviously still on him. Perhaps he feels ill? If he had
found the dot, he would have removed it and tried to run."
Fache checked his watch. "Fine."
Still Fache seemed preoccupied. All evening, Collet had sensed an atypical
intensity in his captain.
Usually detached and cool under pressure, Fache tonight seemed emotionally
engaged, as if this were somehow a personal matter for him.
Not surprising, Collet thought. Fache needs this arrest desperately. Recently
the Board of Ministers and the media had become more openly critical of Fache's
agGREssive tactics, his clashes with powerful foreign embassies, and his gross
overbudgeting on new technologies. Tonight, a high-tech, high-profile arrest of
an American would go a long way to silence Fache's critics, helping him secure
the job a few more years until he could retire with the lucrative pension. God
knows he needs the pension, Collet thought. Fache's zeal for technology had hurt
him both professionally and personally. Fache was rumored to have invested his
entire savings in the technology craze a few years back and lost his shirt. And
Fache is a man who wears only the finest shirts.
Tonight, there was still plenty of time. Sophie Neveu's odd interruption, though
unfortunate, had been only a minor wrinkle. She was gone now, and Fache still
had cards to play. He had yet to inform Langdon that his name had been scrawled
on the floor by the victim. P.S. Find Robert Langdon. The American's reaction to
that little bit of evidence would be telling indeed.
"Captain?" one of the DCPJ agents now called from across the office. "I think
you better take this call." He was holding out a telephone receiver, looking
concerned.
"Who is it?" Fache said.
The agent frowned. "It's the director of our Cryptology Department."
"And?"
"It's about Sophie Neveu, sir. Something is not quite right."
CHAPTER 15
It was time.
Silas felt strong as he stepped from the black Audi, the nighttime breeze
rustling his loose-fitting robe. The winds of change are in the air. He knew the
task before him would require more finesse than force, and he left his handgun
in the car. The thirteen-round Heckler Koch USP 40 had been provided by the
Teacher.
A weapon of death has no place in a house of God.
The plaza before the GREat church was deserted at this hour, the only visible
souls on the far side of Place Saint-Sulpice a couple of teenage hookers showing
their wares to the late night tourist traffic. Their nubile bodies sent a
familiar longing to Silas's loins. His thigh flexed instinctively, causing the
barbed cilice belt to cut painfully into his flesh.
The lust evaporated instantly. For ten years now, Silas had faithfully denied
himself all sexual indulgence, even self-administered. It was The Way. He knew
he had sacrificed much to follow Opus Dei, but he had received much more in
return. A vow of celibacy and the relinquishment of all personal assets hardly
seemed a sacrifice. Considering the poverty from which he had come and the
sexual horrors he had endured in prison, celibacy was a welcome change.
Now, having returned to France for the first time since being arrested and
shipped to prison in Andorra, Silas could feel his homeland testing him,
dragging violent memories from his redeemed soul. You have been reborn, he
reminded himself. His service to God today had required the sin of murder, and
it was a sacrifice Silas knew he would have to hold silently in his heart for
all eternity.
The measure of your faith is the measure of the pain you can endure, the Teacher
had told him. Silas was no stranger to pain and felt eager to prove himself to
the Teacher, the one who had assured him his actions were ordained by a higher
power.
"Hago la obra de Dios," Silas whispered, moving now toward the church entrance.
Pausing in the shadow of the massive doorway, he took a deep breath. It was not
until this instant that he truly realized what he was about to do, and what
awaited him inside.
The keystone. It will lead us to our final goal.
He raised his ghost-white fist and banged three times on the door.
Moments later, the bolts of the enormous wooden portal began to move.
CHAPTER 16
Sophie wondered how long it would take Fache to figure out she had not left the
building. Seeing that Langdon was clearly overwhelmed, Sophie questioned whether
she had done the right thing by cornering him here in the men's room.
What else was I supposed to do?
She pictured her grandfather's body, naked and spread-eagle on the floor. There
was a time when he had meant the world to her, yet tonight, Sophie was surprised
to feel almost no sadness for the
man. Jacques Saunière was a stranger to her now. Their relationship had
evaporated in a single instant one March night when she was twenty-two. Ten
years ago. Sophie had come home a few days early from graduate university in
England and mistakenly witnessed her grandfather engaged in something Sophie was
obviously not supposed to see. It was an image she barely could believe to this
day.
If I hadn't seen it with my own eyes...
Too ashamed and stunned to endure her grandfather's pained attempts to explain,
Sophie immediately moved out on her own, taking money she had saved, and getting
a small flat with some roommates. She vowed never to speak to anyone about what
she had seen. Her grandfather tried desperately to reach her, sending cards and
letters, begging Sophie to meet him so he could explain. Explain how!? Sophie
never responded except once-to forbid him ever to call her or try to meet her in
public. She was afraid his explanation would be more terrifying than the
incident itself.
Incredibly, Saunière had never given up on her, and Sophie now possessed a
decade's worth of correspondence unopened in a dresser drawer. To her
grandfather's credit, he had never once disobeyed her request and phoned her.
Until this afternoon.
"Sophie?" His voice had sounded startlingly old on her answering machine. "I
have abided by your wishes for so long... and it pains me to call, but I must
speak to you. Something terrible has happened."
Standing in the kitchen of her Paris flat, Sophie felt a chill to hear him again
after all these years. His gentle voice brought back a flood of fond childhood
memories.
"Sophie, please listen." He was speaking English to her, as he always did when
she was a little girl. Practice French at school. Practice English at home. "You
cannot be mad forever. Have you not read the letters that I've sent all these
years? Do you not yet understand?" He paused. "We must speak at once. Please
grant your grandfather this one wish. Call me at the Louvre. Right away. I
believe you and I are in grave danger." Sophie stared at the answering machine.
Danger? What was he talking about?
"Princess..." Her grandfather's voice cracked with an emotion Sophie could not
place. "I know I've kept things from you, and I know it has cost me your love.
But it was for your own safety. Now you must know the truth. Please, I must tell
you the truth about your family."
Sophie suddenly could hear her own heart. My family? Sophie's parents had died
when she was only four. Their car went off a bridge into fast-moving water. Her
grandmother and younger brother had also been in the car, and Sophie's entire
family had been erased in an instant. She had a
box of newspaper clippings to confirm it.
His words had sent an unexpected surge of longing through her bones. My family!
In that fleeting instant, Sophie saw images from the dream that had awoken her
countless times when she was a little girl: My family is alive! They are coming
home! But, as in her dream, the pictures evaporated into oblivion.
Your family is dead, Sophie. They are not coming home.
"Sophie..." her grandfather said on the machine. "I have been waiting for years
to tell you. Waiting for the right moment, but now time has run out. Call me at
the Louvre. As soon as you get this. I'll wait here all night. I fear we both
may be in danger. There's so much you need to know."
The message ended.
In the silence, Sophie stood trembling for what felt like minutes. As she
considered her grandfather's message, only one possibility made sense, and his
true intent dawned.
It was bait.
Obviously, her grandfather wanted desperately to see her. He was trying
anything. Her disgust for the man deepened. Sophie wondered if maybe he had
fallen terminally ill and had decided to attempt any ploy he could think of to
get Sophie to visit him one last time. If so, he had chosen wisely.
My family.
Now, standing in the darkness of the Louvre men's room, Sophie could hear the
echoes of this afternoon's phone message. Sophie, we both may be in danger. Call
me.
She had not called him. Nor had she planned to. Now, however, her skepticism had
been deeply challenged. Her grandfather lay murdered inside his own museum. And
he had written a code on the floor.
A code for her. Of this, she was certain.
Despite not understanding the meaning of his message, Sophie was certain its
cryptic nature was additional proof that the words were intended for her.
Sophie's passion and aptitude for cryptography were a product of growing up with
Jacques Saunière-a fanatic himself for codes, word games, and puzzles. How many
Sundays did we spend doing the cryptograms and crosswords in the newspaper?
At the age of twelve, Sophie could finish the Le Monde crossword without any
help, and her
grandfather graduated her to crosswords in English, mathematical puzzles, and
substitution ciphers. Sophie devoured them all. Eventually she turned her
passion into a profession by becoming a codebreaker for the Judicial Police.
Tonight, the cryptographer in Sophie was forced to respect the efficiency with
which her grandfather had used a simple code to unite two total strangers-Sophie
Neveu and Robert Langdon.
The question was why?
Unfortunately, from the bewildered look in Langdon's eyes, Sophie sensed the
American had no more idea than she did why her grandfather had thrown them
together.
She pressed again. "You and my grandfather had planned to meet tonight. What
about?"
Langdon looked truly perplexed. "His secretary set the meeting and didn't offer
any specific reason, and I didn't ask. I assumed he'd heard I would be lecturing
on the pagan iconography of French cathedrals, was interested in the topic, and
thought it would be fun to meet for drinks after the talk."
Sophie didn't buy it. The connection was flimsy. Her grandfather knew more about
pagan iconography than anyone else on earth. Moreover, he an exceptionally
private man, not someone prone to chatting with random American professors
unless there were an important reason.
Sophie took a deep breath and probed further. "My grandfather called me this
afternoon and told me he and I were in grave danger. Does that mean anything to
you?"
Langdon's blue eyes now clouded with concern. "No, but considering what just
happened..."
Sophie nodded. Considering tonight's events, she would be a fool not to be
frightened. Feeling drained, she walked to the small plate-glass window at the
far end of the bathroom and gazed out in silence through the mesh of alarm tape
embedded in the glass. They were high up-forty feet at least.
Sighing, she raised her eyes and gazed out at Paris's dazzling landscape. On her
left, across the Seine, the illuminated Eiffel Tower. Straight ahead, the Arc de
Triomphe. And to the right, high atop the sloping rise of Montmartre, the
graceful arabesque dome of Sacré-Coeur, its polished stone glowing white like a
resplendent sanctuary.
Here at the westernmost tip of the Denon Wing, the north-south thoroughfare of
Place du Carrousel ran almost flush with the building with only a narrow
sidewalk separating it from the Louvre's outer wall. Far below, the usual
caravan of the city's nighttime delivery trucks sat idling, waiting for the
signals to change, their running lights seeming to twinkle mockingly up at
Sophie.
"I don't know what to say," Langdon said, coming up behind her. "Your
grandfather is obviously trying to tell us something. I'm sorry I'm so little
help."
Sophie turned from the window, sensing a sincere reGREt in Langdon's deep voice.
Even with all the trouble around him, he obviously wanted to help her. The
teacher in him, she thought, having read DCPJ's workup on their suspect. This
was an academic who clearly despised not understanding.
We have that in common, she thought.
As a codebreaker, Sophie made her living extracting meaning from seemingly
senseless data. Tonight, her best guess was that Robert Langdon, whether he knew
it or not, possessed information that she desperately needed. Princesse Sophie,
Find Robert Langdon. How much clearer could her grandfather's message be? Sophie
needed more time with Langdon. Time to think. Time to sort out this mystery
together. Unfortunately, time was running out.
Gazing up at Langdon, Sophie made the only play she could think of. "Bezu Fache
will be taking you into custody at any minute. I can get you out of this museum.
But we need to act now."
Langdon's eyes went wide. "You want me to run?"
"It's the smartest thing you could do. If you let Fache take you into custody
now, you'll spend weeks in a French jail while DCPJ and the U.S. Embassy fight
over which courts try your case. But if we get you out of here, and make it to
your embassy, then your government will protect your rights while you and I
prove you had nothing to do with this murder."
Langdon looked not even vaguely convinced. "Forget it! Fache has armed guards on
every single exit! Even if we escape without being shot, running away only makes
me look guilty. You need to tell Fache that the message on the floor was for
you, and that my name is not there as an accusation."
"I will do that," Sophie said, speaking hurriedly, "but after you're safely
inside the U.S. Embassy. It's only about a mile from here, and my car is parked
just outside the museum. Dealing with Fache from here is too much of a gamble.
Don't you see? Fache has made it his mission tonight to prove you are guilty.
The only reason he postponed your arrest was to run this observance in hopes you
did something that made his case stronger."
"Exactly. Like running!"
The cell phone in Sophie's sweater pocket suddenly began ringing. Fache
probably. She reached in her sweater and turned off the phone.
"Mr. Langdon," she said hurriedly, "I need to ask you one last question." And
your entire future may depend on it. "The writing on the floor is obviously not
proof of your guilt, and yet Fache told
our team he is certain you are his man. Can you think of any other reason he
might be convinced you're guilty?"
Langdon was silent for several seconds. "None whatsoever."
Sophie sighed. Which means Fache is lying. Why, Sophie could not begin to
imagine, but that was hardly the issue at this point. The fact remained that
Bezu Fache was determined to put Robert Langdon behind bars tonight, at any
cost. Sophie needed Langdon for herself, and it was this dilemma that left
Sophie only one logical conclusion.
I need to get Langdon to the U.S. Embassy.
Turning toward the window, Sophie gazed through the alarm mesh embedded in the
plate glass, down the dizzying forty feet to the pavement below. A leap from
this height would leave Langdon with a couple of broken legs. At best.
Nonetheless, Sophie made her decision.
Robert Langdon was about to escape the Louvre, whether he wanted to or not.
CHAPTER 17
"What do you mean she's not answering?" Fache looked incredulous. "You're
calling her cell phone, right? I know she's carrying it."
Collet had been trying to reach Sophie now for several minutes. "Maybe her
batteries are dead. Or her ringer's off."
Fache had looked distressed ever since talking to the director of Cryptology on
the phone. After hanging up, he had marched over to Collet and demanded he get
Agent Neveu on the line. Now Collet had failed, and Fache was pacing like a
caged lion.
"Why did Crypto call?" Collet now ventured.
Fache turned. "To tell us they found no references to Draconian devils and lame
saints."
"That's all?"
"No, also to tell us that they had just identified the numerics as Fibonacci
numbers, but they suspected the series was meaningless."
Collet was confused. "But they already sent Agent Neveu to tell us that."
Fache shook his head. "They didn't send Neveu."
"What?"
"According to the director, at my orders he paged his entire team to look at the
images I'd wired him. When Agent Neveu arrived, she took one look at the photos
of Saunière and the code and left the office without a word. The director said
he didn't question her behavior because she was understandably upset by the
photos."
"Upset? She's never seen a picture of a dead body?"
Fache was silent a moment. "I was not aware of this, and it seems neither was
the director until a coworker informed him, but apparently Sophie Neveu is
Jacques Saunière's granddaughter."
Collet was speechless.
"The director said she never once mentioned Saunière to him, and he assumed it
was because she probably didn't want preferential treatment for having a famous
grandfather."
No wonder she was upset by the pictures. Collet could barely conceive of the
unfortunate coincidence that called in a young woman to decipher a code written
by a dead family member. Still, her actions made no sense. "But she obviously
recognized the numbers as Fibonacci numbers because she came here and told us. I
don't understand why she would leave the office without telling anyone she had
figured it out."
Collet could think of only one scenario to explain the troubling developments:
Saunière had written a numeric code on the floor in hopes Fache would involve
cryptographers in the investigation, and therefore involve his own
granddaughter. As for the rest of the message, was Saunière communicating in
some way with his granddaughter? If so, what did the message tell her? And how
did Langdon fit in?
Before Collet could ponder it any further, the silence of the deserted museum
was shattered by an alarm. The bell sounded like it was coming from inside the
Grand Gallery.
"Alarme!" one of the agents yelled, eyeing his feed from the Louvre security
center. "Grande Galerie! Toilettes Messieurs!"
Fache wheeled to Collet. "Where's Langdon?"
"Still in the men's room!" Collet pointed to the blinking red dot on his laptop
schematic. "He must have broken the window!" Collet knew Langdon wouldn't get
far. Although Paris fire codes
required windows above fifteen meters in public buildings be breakable in case
of fire, exiting a Louvre second-story window without the help of a hook and
ladder would be suicide. Furthermore, there were no trees or grass on the
western end of the Denon Wing to cushion a fall. Directly beneath that rest room
window, the two-lane Place du Carrousel ran within a few feet of the outer wall.
"My God," Collet exclaimed, eyeing the screen. "Langdon's moving to the window
ledge!"
But Fache was already in motion. Yanking his Manurhin MR-93 revolver from his
shoulder holster, the captain dashed out of the office.
Collet watched the screen in bewilderment as the blinking dot arrived at the
window ledge and then did something utterly unexpected. The dot moved outside
the perimeter of the building.
What's going on? he wondered. Is Langdon out on a ledge or-
"Jesu!" Collet jumped to his feet as the dot shot farther outside the wall. The
signal seemed to shudder for a moment, and then the blinking dot came to an
abrupt stop about ten yards outside the perimeter of the building.
Fumbling with the controls, Collet called up a Paris street map and recalibrated
the GPS. Zooming in, he could now see the exact location of the signal.
It was no longer moving.
It lay at a dead stop in the middle of Place du Carrousel.
Langdon had jumped.
CHAPTER 18
Fache sprinted down the Grand Gallery as Collet's radio blared over the distant
sound of the alarm.
"He jumped!" Collet was yelling. "I'm showing the signal out on Place du
Carrousel! Outside the bathroom window! And it's not moving at all! Jesus, I
think Langdon has just committed suicide!"
Fache heard the words, but they made no sense. He kept running. The hallway
seemed never-ending. As he sprinted past Saunière's body, he set his sights on
the partitions at the far end of the Denon Wing. The alarm was getting louder
now.
"Wait!" Collet's voice blared again over the radio. "He's moving! My God, he's
alive. Langdon's moving!"
Fache kept running, cursing the length of the hallway with every step.
"Langdon's moving faster!" Collet was still yelling on the radio. "He's running
down Carrousel. Wait... he's picking up speed. He's moving too fast!"
Arriving at the partitions, Fache snaked his way through them, saw the rest room
door, and ran for it.
The walkie-talkie was barely audible now over the alarm. "He must be in a car! I
think he's in a car! I can't-"
Collet's words were swallowed by the alarm as Fache finally burst into the men's
room with his gun drawn. Wincing against the piercing shrill, he scanned the
area.
The stalls were empty. The bathroom deserted. Fache's eyes moved immediately to
the shattered window at the far end of the room. He ran to the opening and
looked over the edge. Langdon was nowhere to be seen. Fache could not imagine
anyone risking a stunt like this. Certainly if he had dropped that far, he would
be badly injured.
The alarm cut off finally, and Collet's voice became audible again over the
walkie-talkie.
"...moving south... faster... crossing the Seine on Pont du Carrousel!"
Fache turned to his left. The only vehicle on Pont du Carrousel was an enormous
twin-bed Trailor delivery truck moving southward away from the Louvre. The
truck's open-air bed was covered with a vinyl tarp, roughly resembling a giant
hammock. Fache felt a shiver of apprehension. That truck, only moments ago, had
probably been stopped at a red light directly beneath the rest room window.
An insane risk, Fache told himself. Langdon had no way of knowing what the truck
was carrying beneath that tarp. What if the truck were carrying steel? Or
cement? Or even garbage? A forty-foot leap? It was madness.
"The dot is turning!" Collet called. "He's turning right on Pont des
Saints-Peres!"
Sure enough, the Trailor truck that had crossed the bridge was slowing down and
making a right turn onto Pont des Saints-Peres. So be it, Fache thought. Amazed,
he watched the truck disappear around the corner. Collet was already radioing
the agents outside, pulling them off the Louvre perimeter and sending them to
their patrol cars in pursuit, all the while broadcasting the truck's changing
location like some kind of bizarre play-by-play.
It's over, Fache knew. His men would have the truck surrounded within minutes.
Langdon was not going anywhere.
Stowing his weapon, Fache exited the rest room and radioed Collet. "Bring my car
around. I want to be there when we make the arrest."
As Fache jogged back down the length of the Grand Gallery, he wondered if
Langdon had even survived the fall.
Not that it mattered.
Langdon ran. Guilty as charged.
Only fifteen yards from the rest room, Langdon and Sophie stood in the darkness
of the Grand Gallery, their backs pressed to one of the large partitions that
hid the bathrooms from the gallery. They had barely managed to hide themselves
before Fache had darted past them, gun drawn, and disappeared into the bathroom.
The last sixty seconds had been a blur.
Langdon had been standing inside the men's room refusing to run from a crime he
didn't commit, when Sophie began eyeing the plate-glass window and examining the
alarm mesh running through it. Then she peered downward into the street, as if
measuring the drop.
"With a little aim, you can get out of here," she said.
Aim? Uneasy, he peered out the rest room window.
Up the street, an enormous twin-bed eighteen-wheeler was headed for the
stoplight beneath the window. Stretched across the truck's massive cargo bay was
a blue vinyl tarp, loosely covering the truck's load. Langdon hoped Sophie was
not thinking what she seemed to be thinking.
"Sophie, there's no way I'm jump-"
"Take out the tracking dot."
Bewildered, Langdon fumbled in his pocket until he found the tiny metallic disk.
Sophie took it from him and strode immediately to the sink. She grabbed a thick
bar of soap, placed the tracking dot on top of it, and used her thumb to push
the disk down hard into the bar. As the disk sank into the soft surface, she
pinched the hole closed, firmly embedding the device in the bar.
Handing the bar to Langdon, Sophie retrieved a heavy, cylindrical trash can from
under the sinks. Before Langdon could protest, Sophie ran at the window, holding
the can before her like a
battering ram. Driving the bottom of the trash can into the center of the
window, she shattered the glass.
Alarms erupted overhead at earsplitting decibel levels.
"Give me the soap!" Sophie yelled, barely audible over the alarm.
Langdon thrust the bar into her hand.
Palming the soap, she peered out the shattered window at the eighteen-wheeler
idling below. The target was plenty big-an expansive, stationary tarp-and it was
less than ten feet from the side of the building. As the traffic lights prepared
to change, Sophie took a deep breath and lobbed the bar of soap out into the
night.
The soap plummeted downward toward the truck, landing on the edge of the tarp,
and sliding downward into the cargo bay just as the traffic light turned GREen.
"Congratulations," Sophie said, dragging him toward the door. "You just escaped
from the Louvre."
Fleeing the men's room, they moved into the shadows just as Fache rushed past.
Now, with the fire alarm silenced, Langdon could hear the sounds of DCPJ sirens
tearing away from the Louvre. A police exodus. Fache had hurried off as well,
leaving the Grand Gallery deserted.
"There's an emergency stairwell about fifty meters back into the Grand Gallery,"
Sophie said. "Now that the guards are leaving the perimeter, we can get out of
here."
Langdon decided not to say another word all evening. Sophie Neveu was clearly a
hell of a lot smarter than he was.
CHAPTER 19
The Church of Saint-Sulpice, it is said, has the most eccentric history of any
building in Paris. Built over the ruins of an ancient temple to the Egyptian
goddess Isis, the church possesses an architectural footprint matching that of
Notre Dame to within inches. The sanctuary has played host to the baptisms of
the Marquis de Sade and Baudelaire, as well as the marriage of Victor Hugo. The
attached seminary has a well-documented history of unorthodoxy and was once the
clandestine meeting hall for numerous secret societies.
Tonight, the cavernous nave of Saint-Sulpice was as silent as a tomb, the only
hint of life the faint smell of incense from mass earlier that evening. Silas
sensed an uneasiness in Sister Sandrine's demeanor as she led him into the
sanctuary. He was not surprised by this. Silas was accustomed to people being
uncomfortable with his appearance.
"You're an American," she said.
"French by birth," Silas responded. "I had my calling in Spain, and I now study
in the United States."
Sister Sandrine nodded. She was a small woman with quiet eyes. "And you have
never seen Saint-Sulpice?"
"I realize this is almost a sin in itself."
"She is more beautiful by day."
"I am certain. Nonetheless, I am grateful that you would provide me this
opportunity tonight."
"The abbé requested it. You obviously have powerful friends."
You have no idea, Silas thought.
As he followed Sister Sandrine down the main aisle, Silas was surprised by the
austerity of the sanctuary. Unlike Notre Dame with its colorful frescoes, gilded
altar-work, and warm wood, Saint-Sulpice was stark and cold, conveying an almost
barren quality reminiscent of the ascetic cathedrals of Spain. The lack of decor
made the interior look even more expansive, and as Silas gazed up into the
soaring ribbed vault of the ceiling, he imagined he was standing beneath the
hull of an enormous overturned ship.
A fitting image, he thought. The brotherhood's ship was about to be capsized
forever. Feeling eager to get to work, Silas wished Sister Sandrine would leave
him. She was a small woman whom Silas could incapacitate easily, but he had
vowed not to use force unless absolutely necessary. She is a woman of the cloth,
and it is not her fault the brotherhood chose her church as a hiding place for
their keystone. She should not be punished for the sins of others.
"I am embarrassed, Sister, that you were awoken on my behalf."
"Not at all. You are in Paris a short time. You should not miss Saint-Sulpice.
Are your interests in the church more architectural or historical?"
"Actually, Sister, my interests are spiritual."
She gave a pleasant laugh. "That goes without saying. I simply wondered where to
begin your tour."
Silas felt his eyes focus on the altar. "A tour is unnecessary. You have been
more than kind. I can show myself around."
"It is no trouble," she said. "After all, I am awake."
Silas stopped walking. They had reached the front pew now, and the altar was
only fifteen yards away. He turned his massive body fully toward the small
woman, and he could sense her recoil as she gazed up into his red eyes. "If it
does not seem too rude, Sister, I am not accustomed to simply walking into a
house of God and taking a tour. Would you mind if I took some time alone to pray
before I look around?"
Sister Sandrine hesitated. "Oh, of course. I shall wait in the rear of the
church for you."
Silas put a soft but heavy hand on her shoulder and peered down. "Sister, I feel
guilty already for having awoken you. To ask you to stay awake is too much.
Please, you should return to bed. I can enjoy your sanctuary and then let myself
out."
She looked uneasy. "Are you sure you won't feel abandoned?"
"Not at all. Prayer is a solitary joy."
"As you wish."
Silas took his hand from her shoulder. "Sleep well, Sister. May the peace of the
Lord be with you."
"And also with you." Sister Sandrine headed for the stairs. "Please be sure the
door closes tightly on your way out."
"I will be sure of it." Silas watched her climb out of sight. Then he turned and
knelt in the front pew, feeling the cilice cut into his leg.
Dear God, I offer up to you this work I do today....
Crouching in the shadows of the choir balcony high above the altar, Sister
Sandrine peered silently through the balustrade at the cloaked monk kneeling
alone. The sudden dread in her soul made it hard to stay still. For a fleeting
instant, she wondered if this mysterious visitor could be the enemy
they had warned her about, and if tonight she would have to carry out the orders
she had been holding all these years. She decided to stay there in the darkness
and watch his every move.
CHAPTER 20
Emerging from the shadows, Langdon and Sophie moved stealthily up the deserted
Grand Gallery corridor toward the emergency exit stairwell.
As he moved, Langdon felt like he was trying to assemble a jigsaw puzzle in the
dark. The newest aspect of this mystery was a deeply troubling one: The captain
of the Judicial Police is trying to frame me for murder
"Do you think," he whispered, "that maybe Fache wrote that message on the
floor?"
Sophie didn't even turn. "Impossible."
Langdon wasn't so sure. "He seems pretty intent on making me look guilty. Maybe
he thought writing my name on the floor would help his case?"
"The Fibonacci sequence? The P.S.? All the Da Vinci and goddess symbolism? That
had to be my grandfather."
Langdon knew she was right. The symbolism of the clues meshed too perfectly-the
pentacle, The Vitruvian Man, Da Vinci, the goddess, and even the Fibonacci
sequence. A coherent symbolic set, as iconographers would call it. All
inextricably tied.
"And his phone call to me this afternoon," Sophie added. "He said he had to tell
me something. I'm certain his message at the Louvre was his final effort to tell
me something important, something he thought you could help me understand."
Langdon frowned. O, Draconian devil! Oh, lame saint.! He wished he could
comprehend the message, both for Sophie's well-being and for his own. Things had
definitely gotten worse since he first laid eyes on the cryptic words. His fake
leap out the bathroom window was not going to help Langdon's popularity with
Fache one bit. Somehow he doubted the captain of the French police would see the
humor in chasing down and arresting a bar of soap.
"The doorway isn't much farther," Sophie said.
"Do you think there's a possibility that the numbers in your grandfather's
message hold the key to understanding the other lines?" Langdon had once worked
on a series of Baconian manuscripts that contained epigraphical ciphers in which
certain lines of code were clues as to how to decipher the
other lines.
"I've been thinking about the numbers all night. Sums, quotients, products. I
don't see anything. Mathematically, they're arranged at random. Cryptographic
gibberish."
"And yet they're all part of the Fibonacci sequence. That can't be coincidence."
"It's not. Using Fibonacci numbers was my grandfather's way of waving another
flag at me-like writing the message in English, or arranging himself like my
favorite piece of art, or drawing a pentacle on himself. All of it was to catch
my attention."
"The pentacle has meaning to you?"
"Yes. I didn't get a chance to tell you, but the pentacle was a special symbol
between my grandfather and me when I was growing up. We used to play Tarot cards
for fun, and my indicator card always turned out to be from the suit of
pentacles. I'm sure he stacked the deck, but pentacles got to be our little
joke."
Langdon felt a chill. They played Tarot? The medieval Italian card game was so
replete with hidden heretical symbolism that Langdon had dedicated an entire
chapter in his new manuscript to the Tarot. The game's twenty-two cards bore
names like The Female Pope, The Empress, and The Star. Originally, Tarot had
been devised as a secret means to pass along ideologies banned by the Church.
Now, Tarot's mystical qualities were passed on by modern fortune-tellers.
The Tarot indicator suit for feminine divinity is pentacles, Langdon thought,
realizing that if Saunière had been stacking his granddaughter's deck for fun,
pentacles was an apropos inside joke.
They arrived at the emergency stairwell, and Sophie carefully pulled open the
door. No alarm sounded. Only the doors to the outside were wired. Sophie led
Langdon down a tight set of switchback stairs toward the ground level, picking
up speed as they went.
"Your grandfather," Langdon said, hurrying behind her, "when he told you about
the pentacle, did he mention goddess worship or any resentment of the Catholic
Church?"
Sophie shook her head. "I was more interested in the mathematics of it-the
Divine Proportion, PHI, Fibonacci sequences, that sort of thing."
Langdon was surprised. "Your grandfather taught you about the number PHI?"
"Of course. The Divine Proportion." Her expression turned sheepish. "In fact, he
used to joke that I was half divine... you know, because of the letters in my
name."
Langdon considered it a moment and then groaned.
s-o-PHI-e.
Still descending, Langdon refocused on PHI. He was starting to realize that
Saunière's clues were even more consistent than he had first imagined.
Da Vinci... Fibonacci numbers... the pentacle.
Incredibly, all of these things were connected by a single concept so
fundamental to art history that Langdon often spent several class periods on the
topic.
PHI.
He felt himself suddenly reeling back to Harvard, standing in front of his
"Symbolism in Art" class, writing his favorite number on the chalkboard.
1.618
Langdon turned to face his sea of eager students. "Who can tell me what this
number is?"
A long-legged math major in back raised his hand. "That's the number PHI." He
pronounced it fee.
"Nice job, Stettner," Langdon said. "Everyone, meet PHI."
"Not to be confused with PI," Stettner added, grinning. "As we mathematicians
like to say: PHI is one H of a lot cooler than PI!"
Langdon laughed, but nobody else seemed to get the joke.
Stettner slumped.
"This number PHI," Langdon continued, "one-point-six-one-eight, is a very
important number in art. Who can tell me why?"
Stettner tried to redeem himself. "Because it's so pretty?"
Everyone laughed.
"Actually," Langdon said, "Stettner's right again. PHI is generally considered
the most beautiful number in the universe."
The laughter abruptly stopped, and Stettner gloated.
As Langdon loaded his slide projector, he explained that the number PHI was
derived from the Fibonacci sequence-a proGREssion famous not only because the
sum of adjacent terms equaled the next term, but because the quotients of
adjacent terms possessed the astonishing property of approaching the number
1.618-PHI!
Despite PHI's seemingly mystical mathematical origins, Langdon explained, the
truly mind-boggling aspect of PHI was its role as a fundamental building block
in nature. Plants, animals, and even human beings all possessed dimensional
properties that adhered with eerie exactitude to the ratio of PHI to 1.
"PHI's ubiquity in nature," Langdon said, killing the lights, "clearly exceeds
coincidence, and so the ancients assumed the number PHI must have been
preordained by the Creator of the universe. Early scientists heralded
one-point-six-one-eight as the Divine Proportion."
"Hold on," said a young woman in the front row. "I'm a bio major and I've never
seen this Divine Proportion in nature."
"No?" Langdon grinned. "Ever study the relationship between females and males in
a honeybee community?"
"Sure. The female bees always outnumber the male bees."
"Correct. And did you know that if you divide the number of female bees by the
number of male bees in any beehive in the world, you always get the same
number?"
"You do?"
"Yup. PHI."
The girl gaped. "NO WAY!"
"Way!" Langdon fired back, smiling as he projected a slide of a spiral seashell.
"Recognize this?"
"It's a nautilus," the bio major said. "A cephalopod mollusk that pumps gas into
its chambered shell to adjust its buoyancy."
"Correct. And can you guess what the ratio is of each spiral's diameter to the
next?"
The girl looked uncertain as she eyed the concentric arcs of the nautilus
spiral.
Langdon nodded. "PHI. The Divine Proportion. One-point-six-one-eight to one."
The girl looked amazed.
Langdon advanced to the next slide-a close-up of a sunflower's seed head.
"Sunflower seeds grow in opposing spirals. Can you guess the ratio of each
rotation's diameter to the next?"
"PHI?" everyone said.
"Bingo." Langdon began racing through slides now-spiraled pinecone petals, leaf
arrangement on plant stalks, insect segmentation-all displaying astonishing
obedience to the Divine Proportion.
"This is amazing!" someone cried out.
"Yeah," someone else said, "but what does it have to do with art?"
"Aha!" Langdon said. "Glad you asked." He pulled up another slide-a pale yellow
parchment displaying Leonardo da Vinci's famous male nude-The Vitruvian
Man-named for Marcus Vitruvius, the brilliant Roman architect who praised the
Divine Proportion in his text De Architectura.
"Nobody understood better than Da Vinci the divine structure of the human body.
Da Vinci actually exhumed corpses to measure the exact proportions of human bone
structure. He was the first to show that the human body is literally made of
building blocks whose proportional ratios always equal PHI."
Everyone in class gave him a dubious look.
"Don't believe me?" Langdon challenged. "Next time you're in the shower, take a
tape measure."
A couple of football players snickered.
"Not just you insecure jocks," Langdon prompted. "All of you. Guys and girls.
Try it. Measure the distance from the tip of your head to the floor. Then divide
that by the distance from your belly button to the floor. Guess what number you
get."
"Not PHI!" one of the jocks blurted out in disbelief.
"Yes, PHI," Langdon replied. "One-point-six-one-eight. Want another example?
Measure the distance from your shoulder to your fingertips, and then divide it
by the distance from your elbow to your fingertips. PHI again. Another? Hip to
floor divided by knee to floor. PHI again. Finger joints. Toes. Spinal
divisions. PHI. PHI. PHI. My friends, each of you is a walking tribute to the
Divine Proportion."
Even in the darkness, Langdon could see they were all astounded. He felt a
familiar warmth inside. This is why he taught. "My friends, as you can see, the
chaos of the world has an underlying order. When the ancients discovered PHI,
they were certain they had stumbled across God's building
block for the world, and they worshipped Nature because of that. And one can
understand why. God's hand is evident in Nature, and even to this day there
exist pagan, Mother Earth-revering religions. Many of us celebrate nature the
way the pagans did, and don't even know it. May Day is a perfect example, the
celebration of spring... the earth coming back to life to produce her bounty.
The mysterious magic inherent in the Divine Proportion was written at the
beginning of time. Man is simply playing by Nature's rules, and because art is
man's attempt to imitate the beauty of the Creator's hand, you can imagine we
might be seeing a lot of instances of the Divine Proportion in art this
semester."
Over the next half hour, Langdon showed them slides of artwork by Michelangelo,
Albrecht Dürer, Da Vinci, and many others, demonstrating each artist's
intentional and rigorous adherence to the Divine Proportion in the layout of his
compositions. Langdon unveiled PHI in the architectural dimensions of the GREek
Parthenon, the pyramids of Egypt, and even the United Nations Building in New
York. PHI appeared in the organizational structures of Mozart's sonatas,
Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, as well as the works of Bartók, Debussy, and
Schubert. The number PHI, Langdon told them, was even used by Stradivarius to
calculate the exact placement of the f-holes in the construction of his famous
violins.
"In closing," Langdon said, walking to the chalkboard, "we return to symbols" He
drew five intersecting lines that formed a five-pointed star. "This symbol is
one of the most powerful images you will see this term. Formally known as a
pentagram-or pentacle, as the ancients called it-this symbol is considered both
divine and magical by many cultures. Can anyone tell me why that might be?"
Stettner, the math major, raised his hand. "Because if you draw a pentagram, the
lines automatically divide themselves into segments according to the Divine
Proportion."
Langdon gave the kid a proud nod. "Nice job. Yes, the ratios of line segments in
a pentacle all equal PHI, making this symbol the ultimate expression of the
Divine Proportion. For this reason, the five-pointed star has always been the
symbol for beauty and perfection associated with the goddess and the sacred
feminine."
The girls in class beamed.
"One note, folks. We've only touched on Da Vinci today, but we'll be seeing a
lot more of him this semester. Leonardo was a well-documented devotee of the
ancient ways of the goddess. Tomorrow, I'll show you his fresco The Last Supper,
which is one of the most astonishing tributes to the sacred feminine you will
ever see."
"You're kidding, right?" somebody said. "I thought The Last Supper was about
Jesus!"
Langdon winked. "There are symbols hidden in places you would never imagine."
"Come on," Sophie whispered. "What's wrong? We're almost there. Hurry!"
Langdon glanced up, feeling himself return from faraway thoughts. He realized he
was standing at a dead stop on the stairs, paralyzed by sudden revelation.
O, Draconian devil! Oh, lame saint!
Sophie was looking back at him.
It can't be that simple, Langdon thought.
But he knew of course that it was.
There in the bowels of the Louvre... with images of PHI and Da Vinci swirling
through his mind, Robert Langdon suddenly and unexpectedly deciphered Saunière's
code.
"O, Draconian devil!" he said. "Oh, lame saint! It's the simplest kind of code!"
Sophie was stopped on the stairs below him, staring up in confusion. A code? She
had been pondering the words all night and had not seen a code. Especially a
simple one.
"You said it yourself." Langdon's voice reverberated with excitement. "Fibonacci
numbers only have meaning in their proper order. Otherwise they're mathematical
gibberish."
Sophie had no idea what he was talking about. The Fibonacci numbers? She was
certain they had been intended as nothing more than a means to get the
Cryptography Department involved tonight. They have another purpose? She plunged
her hand into her pocket and pulled out the printout, studying her grandfather's
message again.
13-3-2-21-1-1-8-5
O, Draconian devil!
Oh, lame saint!
What about the numbers?
"The scrambled Fibonacci sequence is a clue," Langdon said, taking the printout.
"The numbers are a hint as to how to decipher the rest of the message. He wrote
the sequence out of order to tell us to apply the same concept to the text. O,
Draconian devil? Oh, lame saint? Those lines mean nothing.
They are simply letters written out of order."
Sophie needed only an instant to process Langdon's implication, and it seemed
laughably simple. "You think this message is... une anagramme?" She stared at
him. "Like a word jumble from a newspaper?"
Langdon could see the skepticism on Sophie's face and certainly understood. Few
people realized that anagrams, despite being a trite modern amusement, had a
rich history of sacred symbolism.
The mystical teachings of the Kabbala drew heavily on anagrams-rearranging the
letters of Hebrew words to derive new meanings. French kings throughout the
Renaissance were so convinced that anagrams held magic power that they appointed
royal anagrammatists to help them make better decisions by analyzing words in
important documents. The Romans actually referred to the study of anagrams as
ars magna-"the GREat art."
Langdon looked up at Sophie, locking eyes with her now. "Your grandfather's
meaning was right in front of us all along, and he left us more than enough
clues to see it."
Without another word, Langdon pulled a pen from his jacket pocket and rearranged
the letters in each line.
O, Draconian devil! Oh, lame saint!
was a perfect anagram of...
Leonardo da Vinci! The Mona Lisa!