one she had figured it out."
Collet could think of only one scenario to explain the troubling
developments: Sauniure 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 Sauniure
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 Sauniure'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 abbu 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 Sauniure 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 Sauniure'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 Durer, 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 Bartuk, 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 Sauniure'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!
CHAPTER 21
The Mona Lisa.
For an instant, standing in the exit stairwell, Sophie forgot all about
trying to leave the Louvre.
Her shock over the anagram was matched only by her embarrassment at not
having deciphered the message herself. Sophie's expertise in complex
cryptanalysis had caused her to overlook simplistic word games, and yet she
knew she should have seen it. After all, she was no stranger to
anagrams--especially in English.
When she was young, often her grandfather would use anagram games to
hone her English spelling. Once he had written the English word "planets"
and told Sophie that an astonishing sixty-two other English words of varying
lengths could be formed using those same letters. Sophie had spent three
days with an English dictionary until she found them all.
"I can't imagine," Langdon said, staring at the printout, "how your
grandfather created such an intricate anagram in the minutes before he
died."
Sophie knew the explanation, and the realization made her feel even
worse. I should have seen this! She now recalled that her grandfather--a
wordplay aficionado and art lover--had entertained himself as a young man by
creating anagrams of famous works of art. In fact, one of his anagrams had
gotten him in trouble once when Sophie was a little girl. While being
interviewed by an American art magazine, Sauniure had expressed his distaste
for the modernist Cubist movement by noting that Picasso's masterpiece Les
Demoiselles d'Avignon was a perfect anagram of vile meaningless doodles.
Picasso fans were not amused.
"My grandfather probably created this Mona Lisa anagram long ago,"
Sophie said, glancing up at Langdon. And tonight he was forced to use it as
a makeshift code. Her grandfather's voice had called out from beyond with
chilling precision.
Leonardo da Vinci!
The Mona Lisa!
Why his final words to her referenced the famous painting, Sophie had
no idea, but she could think of only one possibility. A disturbing one.
Those were not his final words....
Was she supposed to visit the Mona Lisa? Had her grandfather left her a
message there? The idea seemed perfectly plausible. After all, the famous
painting hung in the Salle des Etats--a private viewing chamber accessible
only from the Grand Gallery. In fact, Sophie now realized, the doors that
opened into the chamber were situated only twenty meters from where her
grandfather had been found dead.
He easily could have visited the Mona Lisa before he died.
Sophie gazed back up the emergency stairwell and felt torn. She knew
she should usher Langdon from the museum immediately, and yet instinct urged
her to the contrary. As Sophie recalled her first childhood visit to the
Denon Wing, she realized that if her grandfather had a secret to tell her,
few places on earth made a more apt rendezvous than Da Vinci's Mona Lisa.
"She's just a little bit farther," her grandfather had whispered,
clutching Sophie's tiny hand as he led her through the deserted museum after
hours.
Sophie was six years old. She felt small and insignificant as she gazed
up at the enormous ceilings and down at the dizzying floor. The empty museum
frightened her, although she was not about to let her grandfather know that.
She set her jaw firmly and let go of his hand.
"Up ahead is the Salle des Etats," her grandfather said as they
approached the Louvre's most famous room. Despite her grandfather's obvious
excitement, Sophie wanted to go home. She had seen pictures of the Mona Lisa
in books and didn't like it at all. She couldn't understand why everyone
made such a fuss.
"C'est ennuyeux," Sophie grumbled.
"Boring," he corrected. "French at school. English at home."
"Le Louvre, c'est pas chez moi!" she challenged.
He gave her a tired laugh. "Right you are. Then let's speak English
just for fun."
Sophie pouted and kept walking. As they entered the Salle des Etats,
her eyes scanned the narrow room and settled on the obvious spot of
honor--the center of the right-hand wall, where a lone portrait hung behind
a protective Plexiglas wall. Her grandfather paused in the doorway and
motioned toward the painting.
"Go ahead, Sophie. Not many people get a chance to visit her alone."
Swallowing her apprehension, Sophie moved slowly across the room. After
everything she'd heard about the Mona Lisa, she felt as if she were
approaching royalty. Arriving in front of the protective Plexiglas, Sophie
held her breath and looked up, taking it in all at once.
Sophie was not sure what she had expected to feel, but it most
certainly was not this. No jolt of amazement. No instant of wonder. The
famous face looked as it did in books. She stood in silence for what felt
like forever, waiting for something to happen.
"So what do you think?" her grandfather whispered, arriving behind her.
"Beautiful, yes?"
"She's too little."
Sauniure smiled. "You're little and you're beautiful."
I am not beautiful, she thought. Sophie hated her red hair and
freckles, and she was bigger than all the boys in her class. She looked back
at the Mona Lisa and shook her head. "She's even worse than in the books.
Her face is... brumeux."
"Foggy," her grandfather tutored.
"Foggy," Sophie repeated, knowing the conversation would not continue
until she repeated her new vocabulary word.
"That's called the sfumato style of painting," he told her, "and it's
very hard to do. Leonardo da Vinci was better at it than anyone."
Sophie still didn't like the painting. "She looks like she knows
something... like when kids at school have a secret."
Her grandfather laughed. "That's part of why she is so famous. People
like to guess why she is smiling."
"Do you know why she's smiling?"
"Maybe." Her grandfather winked. "Someday I'll tell you all about it."
Sophie stamped her foot. "I told you I don't like secrets!"
"Princess," he smiled. "Life is filled with secrets. You can't learn
them all at once."
"I'm going back up," Sophie declared, her voice hollow in the
stairwell.
"To the Mona Lisa?" Langdon recoiled. "Now?"
Sophie considered the risk. "I'm not a murder suspect. I'll take my
chances. I need to understand what my grandfather was trying to tell me."
"What about the embassy?"
Sophie felt guilty turning Langdon into a fugitive only to abandon him,
but she saw no other option. She pointed down the stairs to a metal door.
"Go through that door, and follow the illuminated exit signs. My grandfather
used to bring me down here. The signs will lead you to a security turnstile.
It's monodirectional and opens out." She handed Langdon her car keys. "Mine
is the red SmartCar in the employee lot. Directly outside this bulkhead. Do
you know how to get to the embassy?"
Langdon nodded, eyeing the keys in his hand.
"Listen," Sophie said, her voice softening. "I think my grandfather may
have left me a message at the Mona Lisa--some kind of clue as to who killed
him. Or why I'm in danger." Or what happened to my family. "I have to go
see."
"But if he wanted to tell you why you were in danger, why wouldn't he
simply write it on the floor where he died? Why this complicated word game?"
"Whatever my grandfather was trying to tell me, I don't think he wanted
anyone else to hear it. Not even the police." Clearly, her grandfather had
done everything in his power to send a confidential transmission directly to
her. He had written it in code, included her secret initials, and told her
to find Robert Langdon--a wise command, considering the American symbologist
had deciphered his code. "As strange as it may sound," Sophie said, "I think
he wants me to get to the Mona Lisa before anyone else does."
"I'll come."
"No! We don't know how long the Grand Gallery will stay empty. You have
to go."
Langdon seemed hesitant, as if his own academic curiosity were
threatening to override sound judgment and drag him back into Fache's hands.
"Go. Now." Sophie gave him a grateful smile. "I'll see you at the
embassy, Mr. Langdon."
Langdon looked displeased. "I'll meet you there on one condition," he
replied, his voice stern.
She paused, startled. "What's that?"
"That you stop calling me Mr. Langdon."
Sophie detected the faint hint of a lopsided grin growing across
Langdon's face, and she felt herself smile back. "Good luck, Robert."
When Langdon reached the landing at the bottom of the stairs, the
unmistakable smell of linseed oil and plaster dust assaulted his nostrils.
Ahead, an illuminated SORTIE/EXIT displayed an arrow pointing down a long
corridor.
Langdon stepped into the hallway.
To the right gaped a murky restoration studio out of which peered an
army of statues in various states of repair. To the left, Langdon saw a
suite of studios that resembled Harvard art classrooms--rows of easels,
paintings, palettes, framing tools--an art assembly line.
As he moved down the hallway, Langdon wondered if at any moment he
might awake with a start in his bed in Cambridge. The entire eveni