The Da Vinci Code (11 page)

“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, Saunière 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.”

Saunière 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 evening had felt like a bizarre dream.
I'm about to dash out of the
Louvre . . . a fugitive.

Saunière's clever anagrammatic message was still on his mind, and Langdon wondered what Sophie would find at the
Mona Lisa
. . . if anything. She had seemed certain her grandfather meant for her to visit the famous painting one more time. As plausible an interpretation as this seemed, Langdon felt haunted now by a troubling paradox.

P.S. Find Robert Langdon.

Saunière had written Langdon's name on the floor, commanding Sophie to find him. But why? Merely so Langdon could help her break an anagram?

It seemed quite unlikely.

After all, Saunière had no reason to think Langdon was especially skilled at anagrams.
We've never even met
. More important, Sophie had stated flat out that
she
should have broken the anagram on her own. It had been Sophie who spotted the Fibonacci sequence, and, no doubt, Sophie who, if given a little more time, would have deciphered the message with no help from Langdon.

Sophie was supposed to break that anagram on her own
. Langdon was suddenly feeling more certain about this, and yet the conclusion left an obvious gaping lapse in the logic of Saunière's actions.

Why me?
Langdon wondered, heading down the hall.
Why was Saunière's dying wish that his estranged granddaughter find me? What is it that Saunière thinks I know?

With an unexpected jolt, Langdon stopped short. Eyes wide, he dug in his pocket and yanked out the computer printout. He stared at the last line of Saunière's message.

P.S. Find Robert Langdon.

He fixated on two letters.

P.S.

In that instant, Langdon felt Saunière's puzzling mix of symbolism fall into stark focus. Like a peal of thunder, a career's worth of symbology and history came crashing down around him. Everything Jacques Saunière had done tonight suddenly made perfect sense.

Langdon's thoughts raced as he tried to assemble the implications of what this all meant. Wheeling, he stared back in the direction from which he had come.

Is there time?

He knew it didn't matter.

Without hesitation, Langdon broke into a sprint back toward the stairs.

CHAPTER
22

Kneeling in
the first pew, Silas pretended to pray as he scanned the layout of the sanctuary. Saint-Sulpice, like most churches, had been built in the shape of a giant Roman cross. Its long central section—the nave—led directly to the main altar, where it was transversely intersected by a shorter section, known as the transept. The intersection of nave and transept occurred directly beneath the main cupola and was considered the heart of the church . . . her most sacred and mystical point.

Not tonight,
Silas thought.
Saint-Sulpice hides her secrets elsewhere.

Turning his head to the right, he gazed into the south transept, toward the open area of floor beyond the end of the pews, to the object his victims had described.

There it is.

Embedded in the gray granite floor, a thin polished strip of brass glistened in the stone . . . a golden line slanting across the church's floor. The line bore graduated markings, like a ruler. It was a gnomon, Silas had been told, a pagan astronomical device like a sundial. Tourists, scientists, historians, and pagans from around the world came to Saint-Sulpice to gaze upon this famous line.

The Rose Line.

Slowly, Silas let his eyes trace the path of the brass strip as it made its way across the floor from his right to left, slanting in front of him at an awkward angle, entirely at odds with the symmetry of the church. Slicing across the main altar itself, the line looked to Silas like a slash wound across a beautiful face. The strip cleaved the communion rail in two and then crossed the entire width of the church, finally reaching the corner of the north transept, where it arrived at the base of a most unexpected structure.

A colossal Egyptian obelisk.

Here, the glistening Rose Line took a ninety-degree
vertical
turn and continued directly up the face of the obelisk itself, ascending thirty-three feet to the very tip of the pyramidical apex, where it finally ceased.

The Rose Line,
Silas thought.
The brotherhood hid the keystone at the Rose Line.

Earlier tonight, when Silas told the Teacher that the Priory keystone was hidden inside Saint-Sulpice, the Teacher had sounded doubtful. But when Silas added that the brothers had all given him a precise location, with relation to a brass line running through Saint-Sulpice, the Teacher had gasped with revelation. “You speak of the Rose Line!”

The Teacher quickly told Silas of Saint-Sulpice's famed architectural oddity—a strip of brass that segmented the sanctuary on a perfect north-south axis. It was an ancient sundial of sorts, a vestige of the pagan temple that had once stood on this very spot. The sun's rays, shining through the oculus on the south wall, moved farther down the line every day, indicating the passage of time, from solstice to solstice.

The north-south stripe had been known as the Rose Line. For centuries, the symbol of the Rose had been associated with maps and guiding souls in the proper direction. The Compass Rose—drawn on almost every map—indicated North, East, South, and West. Originally known as the Wind Rose, it denoted the directions of the thirty-two winds, blowing from the directions of eight major winds, eight half-winds, and sixteen quarter-winds. When diagrammed inside a circle, these thirty-two points of the compass perfectly resembled a traditional thirty-two petal rose bloom. To this day, the fundamental navigational tool was still known as a Compass Rose, its northernmost direction still marked by an arrowhead . . . or, more commonly, the symbol of the fleur-de-lis.

On a globe, a Rose Line—also called a meridian or longitude—was any imaginary line drawn from the North Pole to the South Pole. There were, of course, an infinite number of Rose Lines because every point on the globe could have a longitude drawn through it connecting north and south poles. The question for early navigators was
which
of these lines would be called
the
Rose Line—the zero longitude—the line from which all other longitudes on earth would be measured.

Today that line was in Greenwich, England.

But it had not always been.

Long before the establishment of Greenwich as the prime meridian, the zero longitude of the entire world had passed directly through Paris, and through the Church of Saint-Sulpice. The brass marker in Saint-Sulpice was a memorial to the world's first prime meridian, and although Greenwich had stripped Paris of the honor in 1888, the original Rose Line was still visible today.

“And so the legend is true,” the Teacher had told Silas. “The Priory keystone has been said to lie ‘beneath the Sign of the Rose.' ”

Now, still on his knees in a pew, Silas glanced around the church and listened to make sure no one was there. For a moment, he thought he heard a rustling in the choir balcony. He turned and gazed up for several seconds. Nothing.

I am alone.

Standing now, he faced the altar and genuflected three times. Then he turned left and followed the brass line due north toward the obelisk.

At that moment, at Leonardo da Vinci International Airport in Rome, the jolt of tires hitting the runway startled Bishop Aringarosa from his slumber.

I drifted off,
he thought, impressed he was relaxed enough to sleep.

“Benvenuto a Roma,”
the intercom announced.

Sitting up, Aringarosa straightened his black cassock and allowed himself a rare smile. This was one trip he had been happy to make.
I have been on the defensive for too long
. Tonight, however, the rules had changed. Only five months ago, Aringarosa had feared for the future of the Faith. Now, as if by the will of God, the solution had presented itself.

Divine intervention.

If all went as planned tonight in Paris, Aringarosa would soon be in possession of something that would make him the most powerful man in Christendom.