The Da Vinci Code, Page 26

  at stake here, you must either fully embrace this responsibility… or you must pass that responsibility to someone else.» «My grandfather gave the cryptex to me. I’m sure he thought I could handle the responsibility.» Teabing looked encouraged but unconvinced. «Good. A strong will is necessary. And yet, I amcurious if you understand that successfully unlocking the keystone will bring with it a far greatertrial.» «How so?» «My dear, imagine that you are suddenly holding a map that reveals the location of the Holy Grail. In that moment, you will be in possession of a truth capable of altering history forever. You will be the keeper of a truth that man has sought for centuries. You will be faced with the responsibility of revealing that truth to the world. The individual who does so will be revered by many and despised by many. The question is whether you will have the necessary strength to carry out that task.»

  Sophie paused. «I’m not sure that is my decision to make.»

  Teabing’s eyebrows arched. «No? If not the possessor of the keystone, then who?» «The brotherhood who has successfully protected the secret for so long.» «The Priory?» Teabing looked skeptical. «But how? The brotherhood was shattered tonight. Decapitated, as you so aptly put it. Whether they were infiltrated by some kind of eavesdropping or by a spy within their ranks, we will never know, but the fact remains that someone got to them and uncovered the identities of their four top members. I would not trust anyone who stepped forward from the brotherhood at this point.»

  «So what do you suggest?» Langdon asked.

  «Robert, you know as well as I do that the Priory has not protected the truth all these years to have it gather dust until eternity. They have been waiting for the right moment in history to share their secret. A time when the world is ready to handle the truth.»

  «And you believe that moment has arrived?» Langdon asked.

  «Absolutely. It could not be more obvious. All the historical signs are in place, and if the Priory did not intend to make their secret known very soon, why has the Church now attacked?» Sophie argued,» The monk has not yet told us his purpose.» «The monk’s purpose is the Church’s purpose,» Teabing replied,» to destroy the documents that reveal the great deception. The Church came closer tonight than they have ever come, and the Priory has put its trust in you, Miss Neveu. The task of saving the Holy Grail clearly includes carrying out the Priory’s final wishes of sharing the truth with the world.»

  Langdon intervened. «Leigh, asking Sophie to make that decision is quite a load to drop on someone who only an hour ago learned the Sangreal documents exist.»

  Teabing sighed. «I apologize if I am pressing, Miss Neveu. Clearly I have always believed these documents should be made public, but in the end the decision belongs to you. I simply feel it is important that you begin to think about what happens should we succeed in opening the keystone.»

  «Gentlemen,» Sophie said, her voice firm. «To quote your words, ‘You do not find the Grail, the Grail finds you.‘ I am going to trust that the Grail has found me for a reason, and when the time comes, I will know what to do.»

  Both of them looked startled.

  «So then,» she said, motioning to the rosewood box. «Let’s move on.»

  CHAPTER 70

  Standing in the drawing room of Château Villette, Lieutenant Collet watched the dying fire and felt despondent. Captain Fache had arrived moments earlier and was now in the next room, yelling into the phone, trying to coordinate the failed attempt to locate the missing Range Rover.

  It could be anywhere by now, Collet thought.

  Having disobeyed Fache’s direct orders and lost Langdon for a second time, Collet was grateful that PTS had located a bullet hole in the floor, which at least corroborated Collet’s claims that a shot had been fired. Still, Fache’s mood was sour, and Collet sensed there would be dire repercussions when the dust settled.

  Unfortunately, the clues they were turning up here seemed to shed no light at all on what was going on or who was involved. The black Audi outside had been rented in a false name with false credit card numbers, and the prints in the car matched nothing in the Interpol database.

  Another agent hurried into the living room, his eyes urgent. «Where’s Captain Fache?» Collet barely looked up from the burning embers. «He’s on the phone.» «I’m off the phone,» Fache snapped, stalking into the room. «What have you got?»

  The second agent said,» Sir, Central just heard from André Vernet at the Depository Bank of Zurich. He wants to talk to you privately. He is changing his story.» «Oh?» Fache said. Now Collet looked up.

  «Vernet is admitting that Langdon and Neveu spent time inside his bank tonight.» «We figured that out,» Fache said. «Why did Vernet lie about it?» «He said he’ll talk only to you, but he’s agreed to cooperate fully.» «In exchange for what?»

  «For our keeping his bank’s name out of the news and also for helping him recover some stolen property. It sounds like Langdon and Neveu stole something from Saunière’s account.»

  «What?» Collet blurted. «How?»

  Fache never flinched, his eyes riveted on the second agent. «What did they steal?» «Vernet didn’t elaborate, but he sounds like he’s willing to do anything to get it back.» Collet tried to imagine how this could happen. Maybe Langdon and Neveu had held a bank employee at gunpoint? Maybe they forced Vernet to open Saunière’s account and facilitate an escape in the armored truck. As feasible as it was, Collet was having trouble believing Sophie Neveu could be involved in anything like that.

  From the kitchen, another agent yelled to Fache. «Captain? I’m going through Mr. Teabing’s speed dial numbers, and I’m on the phone with Le Bourget Airfield. I’ve got some bad news.»

  Thirty seconds later, Fache was packing up and preparing to leave Château Villette. He had just learned that Teabing kept a private jet nearby at Le Bourget Airfield and that the plane had taken off about a half hour ago.

  The Bourget representative on the phone had claimed not to know who was on the plane or where it was headed. The takeoff had been unscheduled, and no flight plan had been logged. Highly illegal, even for a small airfield. Fache was certain that by applying the right pressure, he could get the answers he was looking for.

  «Lieutenant Collet,» Fache barked, heading for the door. «I have no choice but to leave you in charge of the PTS investigation here. Try to do something right for a change.»

  CHAPTER 71

  As the Hawker leveled off, with its nose aimed for England, Langdon carefully lifted the rosewood box from his lap, where he had been protecting it during takeoff. Now, as he set the box on the table, he could sense Sophie and Teabing leaning forward with anticipation.

  Unlatching the lid and opening the box, Langdon turned his attention not to the lettered dials of the cryptex, but rather to the tiny hole on the underside of the box lid. Using the tip of a pen, he carefully removed the inlaid Rose on top and revealed the text beneath it. Sub Rosa, he mused, hoping a fresh look at the text would bring clarity. Focusing all his energies, Langdon studied the strange text.

  After several seconds, he began to feel the initial frustration resurfacing. «Leigh, I just can’t seem to place it.»

  From where Sophie was seated across the table, she could not yet see the text, but Langdon’s inability to immediately identify the language surprised her. My grandfather spoke a language so obscure that even a symbologist can’t identify it? She quickly realized she should not find this surprising. This would not be the first secret Jacques Saunière had kept from his granddaughter.

  Opposite Sophie, Leigh Teabing felt ready to burst. Eager for his chance to see the text, he quivered with excitement, leaning in, trying to see around Langdon, who was still hunched over the box.

  «I don’t know,» Langdon whispered intently. «My first guess is a Semitic, but now I’m not so sure. Most primary Semitics include nekkudot.This has none.»

  «Probably ancient,» Teabing offered.

  « Nekkudot? » Sophie inquired.

 
Teabing never took his eyes from the box. «Most modern Semitic alphabets have no vowels and use nekkudot – tiny dots and dashes written either below or within the consonants – to indicate what vowel sound accompanies them. Historically speaking, nekkudot are a relatively modern addition to language.»

  Langdon was still hovering over the script. «A Sephardic transliteration, perhaps… ?»

  Teabing could bear it no longer. «Perhaps if I just…» Reaching over, he edged the box away from Langdon and pulled it toward himself. No doubt Langdon had a solid familiarity with the standard ancients – Greek, Latin, the Romances – but from the fleeting glance Teabing had of this language, he thought it looked more specialized, possibly a Rashi script or a STA’M with crowns.

  Taking a deep breath, Teabing feasted his eyes upon the engraving. He said nothing for a very long time. With each passing second, Teabing felt his confidence deflating. «I’m astonished,» he said.» This language looks like nothing I’ve ever seen!» Langdon slumped.» Might I see it?» Sophie asked.

  Teabing pretended not to hear her. «Robert, you said earlier that you thought you’d seen something like this before?»

  Langdon looked vexed. «I thought so. I’m not sure. The script looks familiar somehow.»

  «Leigh?» Sophie repeated, clearly not appreciating being left out of the discussion. «Might I have a look at the box my grandfather made?»

  «Of course, dear,» Teabing said, pushing it over to her. He hadn’t meant to sound belittling, and yet Sophie Neveu was light-years out of her league. If a British Royal Historian and a Harvard symbologist could not even identify the language –

  «Aah,» Sophie said, seconds after examining the box. «I should have guessed.» Teabing and Langdon turned in unison, staring at her.» Guessed what?» Teabing demanded.

  Sophie shrugged. «Guessed that this would be the language my grandfather would have used.» «You’re saying you can read this text?» Teabing exclaimed.» Quite easily,» Sophie chimed, obviously enjoying herself now. «My grandfather taught me this language when I was only six years old. I’m fluent.» She leaned across the table and fixed Teabing with an admonishing glare. «And frankly, sir, considering your allegiance to the Crown, I’m a little surprised you didn’t recognize it.»

  In a flash, Langdon knew.

  No wonder the script looks so damned familiar!

  Several years ago, Langdon had attended an event at Harvard’s Fogg Museum. Harvard dropout Bill Gates had returned to his alma mater to lend to the museum one of his priceless acquisitions – eighteen sheets of paper he had recently purchased at auction from the Armand Hammar Estate.

  His winning bid – a cool $30.8 million.

  The author of the pages – Leonardo Da Vinci.

  The eighteen folios – now known as Leonardo’s Codex Leicester after their famous owner, the Earl of Leicester – were all that remained of one of Leonardo’s most fascinating notebooks: essays and drawings outlining Da Vinci’s progressive theories on astronomy, geology, archaeology, and hydrology.

  Langdon would never forget his reaction after waiting in line and finally viewing the priceless parchment. Utter letdown. The pages were unintelligible. Despite being beautifully preserved and written in an impeccably neat penmanship – crimson ink on cream paper – the codex looked like gibberish. At first Langdon thought he could not read them because Da Vinci wrote his notebooks in an archaic Italian. But after studying them more closely, he realized he could not identify a single Italian word, or even one letter.

  «Try this, sir,» whispered the female docent at the display case. She motioned to a hand mirror affixed to the display on a chain. Langdon picked it up and examined the text in the mirror’s surface.

  Instantly it was clear.

  Langdon had been so eager to peruse some of the great thinker’s ideas that he had forgotten one of the man’s numerous artistic talents was an ability to write in a mirrored script that was virtually illegible to anyone other than himself. Historians still debated whether Da Vinci wrote this way simply to amuse himself or to keep people from peering over his shoulder and stealing his ideas, but the point was moot. Da Vinci did as he pleased.

  Sophie smiled inwardly to see that Robert understood her meaning. «I can read the first few words,» she said. «It’s English.»

  Teabing was still sputtering. «What’s going on?» «Reverse text,» Langdon said. «We need a mirror.»

  «No we don’t,» Sophie said. «I bet this veneer is thin enough.» She lifted the rosewood box up to a canister light on the wall and began examining the underside of the lid. Her grandfather couldn’t actually write in reverse, so he always cheated by writing normally and then flipping the paper over and tracing the reversed impression. Sophie’s guess was that he had wood-burned normal text into a block of wood and then run the back of the block through a sander until the wood was paper thin and the wood-burning could be seen through the wood. Then he’d simply flipped the piece over, and laid it in.

  As Sophie moved the lid closer to the light, she saw she was right. The bright beam sifted through the thin layer of wood, and the script appeared in reverse on the underside of the lid. Instantly legible.» English,» Teabing croaked, hanging his head in shame. «My native tongue.»

  At the rear of the plane, Rémy Legaludec strained to hear beyond the rumbling engines, but the conversation up front was inaudible. Rémy did not like the way the night was progressing. Not at all. He looked down at the bound monk at his feet. The man lay perfectly still now, as if in a trance of acceptance, or perhaps, in silent prayer for deliverance.

  CHAPTER 72

  Fifteen thousand feet in the air, Robert Langdon felt the physical world fade away as all of his thoughts converged on Saunière’s mirror-image poem, which was illuminated through the lid of the box.

  Sophie quickly found some paper and copied it down longhand. When she was done, the three of them took turns reading the text. It was like some kind of archaeological crossword… a riddle that promised to reveal how to open the cryptex. Langdon read the verse slowly.

  An ancient word of wisdom frees this scroll… and helps us keep her scatter’d family whole… a headstone praised by templars is the key… and at bash will reveal the truth to thee.

  Before Langdon could even ponder what ancient password the verse was trying to reveal, he felt something far more fundamental resonate within him – the meter of the poem. Iambic pentameter.

  Langdon had come across this meter often over the years while researching secret societies across Europe, including just last year in the Vatican Secret Archives. For centuries, iambic pentameter had been a preferred poetic meter of outspoken literati across the globe, from the ancient Greek writer Archilochus to Shakespeare, Milton, Chaucer, and Voltaire – bold souls who chose to write their social commentaries in a meter that many of the day believed had mystical properties. The roots of iambic pentameter were deeply pagan.

  Iambs. Two syllables with opposite emphasis. Stressed and unstressed. Yin yang. A balanced pair. Arranged in strings of five. Pentameter. Five for the pentacle of Venus and the sacred feminine.

  «It’s pentameter!» Teabing blurted, turning to Langdon. «And the verse is in English! La lingua pura!»

  Langdon nodded. The Priory, like many European secret societies at odds with the Church, had considered English the only European pure language for centuries. Unlike French, Spanish, and Italian, which were rooted in Latin – the tongue of the Vatican – English was linguistically removed from Rome’s propaganda machine, and therefore became a sacred, secret tongue for those brotherhoods educated enough to learn it.

  «This poem,» Teabing gushed,» references not only the Grail, but the Knights Templar and the scattered family of Mary Magdalene! What more could we ask for?»

  «The password,» Sophie said, looking again at the poem. «It sounds like we need some kind of ancient word of wisdom?»

  «Abracadabra?» Teabing ventured, his eyes twinkling.

  A word of fiv
e letters , Langdon thought, pondering the staggering number of ancient words that might be considered words of wisdom – selections from mystic chants, astrological prophecies, secret society inductions, Wicca incantations, Egyptian magic spells, pagan mantras – the list was endless.

  «The password,» Sophie said, «appears to have something to do with the Templars.» She read the text aloud. « ‘A headstone praised by Templars is the key. ‘»

  «Leigh,» Langdon said, «you’re the Templar specialist. Any ideas?»

  Teabing was silent for several seconds and then sighed. «Well, a headstone is obviously a grave marker of some sort. It’s possible the poem is referencing a gravestone the Templars praised at the tomb of Magdalene, but that doesn’t help us much because we have no idea where her tomb is.» «The last line,» Sophie said,» says that Atbash will reveal the truth. I’ve heard that word. Atbash.» «I’m not surprised,» Langdon replied. «You probably heard it in Cryptology 101. The Atbash Cipher is one of the oldest codes known to man.»

  Of course! Sophie thought. The famous Hebrew encoding system.

  The Atbash Cipher had indeed been part of Sophie’s early cryptology training. The cipher dated back to 500 B. C. and was now used as a classroom example of a basic rotational substitution scheme. A common form of Jewish cryptogram, the Atbash Cipher was a simple substitution code based on the twenty-two-letter Hebrew alphabet. In Atbash, the first letter was substituted by the last letter, the second letter by the next to last letter, and so on.

  «Atbash is sublimely appropriate,» Teabing said. «Text encrypted with Atbash is found throughout the Kabbala, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and even the Old Testament. Jewish scholars and mystics are stillfinding hidden meanings using Atbash. The Priory certainly would include the Atbash Cipher as part of their teachings.»

  «The only problem,» Langdon said,» is that we don’t have anything on which to apply the cipher.»

  Teabing sighed. «There must be a code word on the headstone. We must find this headstone praised by Templars.»

  Sophie sensed from the grim look on Langdon’s face that finding the Templar headstone would be no small feat.

  Atbash is the key, Sophie thought. But we don’t have a door.

  It was three minutes later that Teabing heaved a frustrated sigh and shook his head. «My friends, I’m stymied. Let me ponder this while I get us some nibblies and check on Rémy and our guest.» He stood up and headed for the back of the plane. Sophie felt tired as she watched him go. Outside the window, the blackness of the predawn was absolute. Sophie felt as if she were being hurtled through space with no idea where she would land. Having grown up solving her grandfather’s riddles, she had the uneasy sense right now that this poem before them contained information they still had not seen.

  There is more there, she told herself. Ingeniously hidden… but present nonetheless.

  Also plaguing her thoughts was a fear that what they eventually found inside this cryptex would not be as simple as» a map to the Holy Grail.» Despite Teabing’s and Langdon’s confidence that the truth lay just within the marble cylinder, Sophie had solved enough of her grandfather’s treasure hunts to know that Jacques Saunière did not give up his secrets easily.

  CHAPTER 73

  Bourget Airfield’s night shift air traffic controller had been dozing before a blank radar screen when the captain of the Judicial Police practically broke down his door.

  «Teabing’s jet,» Bezu Fache blared, marching into the small tower,» where did it go?»

  The controller’s initial response was a babbling, lame attempt to protect the privacy of their British client – one of the airfield’s most respected customers. It failed miserably.

  «Okay,» Fache said,» I am placing you under arrest for permitting a private plane to take off without registering a flight plan.» Fache motioned to another officer, who approached with handcuffs, and the traffic controller felt a surge of terror. He thought of the newspaper articles debating whether the nation’s police captain was a hero or a menace. That question had just been answered.

  «Wait!» the controller heard himself whimper at the sight of the handcuffs. «I can tell you this much. Sir Leigh Teabing makes frequent trips to London for medical treatments. He has a hangar at Biggin Hill Executive Airport in Kent. On the outskirts of London.»

  Fache waved off the man with the cuffs. «Is Biggin Hill his destination tonight?»

  «I don’t know,» the controller said honestly. «The plane left on its usual tack, and his last radar contact suggested the United Kingdom. Biggin Hill is an extremely likely guess.»

  «Did he have others onboard?»

  «I swear, sir, there is no way for me to know that. Our clients can drive directly to their hangars, and load as they please. Who is onboard is the responsibility of the customs officials at the receiving airport.»