"How do you know this?" Sophie was praying Langdon was not going to tell her that he
himself was a member.
"I've written about this group," he said, his voice tremulous with excitement. "Researching
the symbols of secret societies is a specialty of mine. They call themselves the Prieuréde Sion—
the Priory of Sion. They're based here in France and attract powerful members from all over
Europe. In fact, they are one of the oldest surviving secret societies on earth."
Sophie had never heard of them.
Langdon was talking in rapid bursts now. "The Priory's membership has included some of
history's most cultured individuals: men like Botticelli, Sir Isaac Newton, Victor Hugo." He
paused, his voice brimming now with academic zeal. "And, Leonardo da Vinci."
Sophie stared. "Da Vinci was in a secret society?"
"Da Vinci presided over the Priory between 1510 and 1519 as the brotherhood's Grand
Master, which might help explain your grandfather's passion for Leonardo's work. The two men
share a historical fraternal bond. And it all fits perfectly with their fascination for goddess
iconology, paganism, feminine deities, and contempt for the Church. The Priory has a well-
documented history of reverence for the sacred feminine."
"You're telling me this group is a pagan goddess worship cult?"
"More like the pagan goddess worship cult. But more important, they are known as the
guardians of an ancient secret. One that made them immeasurably powerful."
Despite the total conviction in Langdon's eyes, Sophie's gut reaction was one of stark
disbelief. A secret pagan cult? Once headed by Leonardo da Vinci? It all sounded utterly absurd.
And yet, even as she dismissed it, she felt her mind reeling back ten years— to the night she had
mistakenly surprised her grandfather and witnessed what she still could not accept. Could that
explain— ?
"The identities of living Priory members are kept extremely secret," Langdon said, "but the
P.S. and fleur-de-lis that you saw as a child are proof. It could only have been related to the
Priory."
Sophie realized now that Langdon knew far more about her grandfather than she had
previously imagined. This American obviously had volumes to share with her, but this was not
the place. "I can't afford to let them catch you, Robert. There's a lot we need to discuss. You
need to go!"
Langdon heard only the faint murmur of her voice. He wasn't going anywhere. He was lost in
another place now. A place where ancient secrets rose to the surface. A place where forgotten
histories emerged from the shadows.
Slowly, as if moving underwater, Langdon turned his head and gazed through the reddish
haze toward the Mona Lisa.
The fleur-de-lis... the flower of Lisa... the Mona Lisa.
It was all intertwined, a silent symphony echoing the deepest secrets of the Priory of Sion
and Leonardo da Vinci.
A few miles away, on the riverbank beyond Les Invalides, the bewildered driver of a twin-bed
Trailor truck stood at gunpoint and watched as the captain of the Judicial Police let out a guttural
roar of rage and heaved a bar of soap out into the turgid waters of the Seine.
CHAPTER 24
Silas gazed upward at the Saint-Sulpice obelisk, taking in the length of the massive marble shaft.
His sinews felt taut with exhilaration. He glanced around the church one more time to make sure
he was alone. Then he knelt at the base of the structure, not out of reverence, but out of
necessity.
The keystone is hidden beneath the Rose Line.
At the base of the Sulpice obelisk.
All the brothers had concurred.
On his knees now, Silas ran his hands across the stone floor. He saw no cracks or markings
to indicate a movable tile, so he began rapping softly with his knuckles on the floor. Following
the brass line closer to the obelisk, he knocked on each tile adjacent to the brass line. Finally, one
of them echoed strangely.
There's a hollow area beneath the floor!
Silas smiled. His victims had spoken the truth.
Standing, he searched the sanctuary for something with which to break the floor tile.
High above Silas, in the balcony, Sister Sandrine stifled a gasp. Her darkest fears had just been
confirmed. This visitor was not who he seemed. The mysterious Opus Dei monk had come to
Saint-Sulpice for another purpose.
A secret purpose.
You are not the only one with secrets, she thought.
Sister Sandrine Bieil was more than the keeper of this church. She was a sentry. And
tonight, the ancient wheels had been set in motion. The arrival of this stranger at the base of the
obelisk was a signal from the brotherhood.
It was a silent call of distress.
CHAPTER 25
The U.S. Embassy in Paris is a compact complex on Avenue Gabriel, just north of the Champs-
Elysées. The three-acre compound is considered U.S. soil, meaning all those who stand on it are
subject to the same laws and protections as they would encounter standing in the United States.
The embassy's night operator was reading Time magazine's International Edition when the
sound of her phone interrupted.
"U.S. Embassy," she answered.
"Good evening." The caller spoke English accented with French. "I need some assistance."
Despite the politeness of the man's words, his tone sounded gruff and official. "I was told you
had a phone message for me on your automated system. The name is Langdon. Unfortunately, I
have forgotten my three-digit access code. If you could help me, I would be most grateful."
The operator paused, confused. "I'm sorry, sir. Your message must be quite old. That
system was removed two years ago for security precautions. Moreover, all the access codes were
five -digit. Who told you we had a message for you?"
"You have no automated phone system?"
"No, sir. Any message for you would be handwritten in our services department. What was
your name again?"
But the man had hung up.
Bezu Fache felt dumbstruck as he paced the banks of the Seine. He was certain he had seen
Langdon dial a local number, enter a three-digit code, and then listen to a recording. But if
Langdon didn't phone the embassy, then who the hell did he call?
It was at that moment, eyeing his cellular phone, that Fache realized the answers were in the
palm of his hand. Langdon used my phone to place that call.
Keying into the cell phone's menu, Fache pulled up the list of recently dialed numbers and
found the call Langdon had placed.
A Paris exchange, followed by the three-digit code 454.
Redialing the phone number, Fache waited as the line began ringing.
Finally a woman's voice answered. "Bonjour, vous êtes bien chez Sophie Neveu," the
recording announced. "Je suis absente pour le moment, mais..."
Fache's blood was boiling as he typed the numbers 4... 5... 4.
CHAPTER 26
Despite her monumental reputation, the Mona Lisa was a mere thirty-one inches by twenty-one
inches— smaller even than the posters of her sold in the Louvre gift shop. She hung on the
northwest wall of the Salle des Etats behind a two-inch-thick pane of protective Plexiglas.
Painted on a poplar wood panel, her ethereal, mist-filled atmosphere was attributed to Da Vinci's
mastery of the sfumato style, in which forms appear to evaporate into one another.
Since taking up residence in the Louvre, the Mona Lisa— or La Jaconde as they call her in
France— had been stolen twice, most recently in 1911, when she disappeared from the Louvre's
"satte impénétrable"— Le Salon Carre. Parisians wept in the streets and wrote newspaper articles
begging the thieves for the painting's return. Two years later, the Mona Lisa was discovered
hidden in the false bottom of a trunk in a Florence hotel room.
Langdon, now having made it clear to Sophie that he had no intention of leaving, moved
with her across the Salle des Etats. The Mona Lisa was still twenty yards ahead when Sophie
turned on the black light, and the bluish crescent of penlight fanned out on the floor in front of
them. She swung the beam back and forth across the floor like a minesweeper, searching for any
hint of luminescent ink.
Walking beside her, Langdon was already feeling the tingle of anticipation that
accompanied his face-to-face reunions with great works of art. He strained to see beyond the
cocoon of purplish light emanating from the black light in Sophie's hand. To the left, the room's
octagonal viewing divan emerged, looking like a dark island on the empty sea of parquet.
Langdon could now begin to see the panel of dark glass on the wall. Behind it, he knew, in
the confines of her own private cell, hung the most celebrated painting in the world.
The Mona Lisa's status as the most famous piece of art in the world, Langdon knew, had
nothing to do with her enigmatic smile. Nor was it due to the mysterious interpretations
attributed her by many art historians and conspiracy buffs. Quite simply, the Mona Lisa was
famous because Leonardo da Vinci claimed she was his finest accomplishment. He carried the
painting with him whenever he traveled and, if asked why, would reply that he found it hard to
part with his most sublime expression of female beauty.
Even so, many art historians suspected Da Vinci's reverence for the Mona Lisa had nothing
to do with its artistic mastery. In actuality, the painting was a surprisingly ordinary sfumato
portrait. Da Vinci's veneration for this work, many claimed, stemmed from something far
deeper: a hidden message in the layers of paint. The Mona Lisa was, in fact, one of the world's
most documented inside jokes. The painting's well-documented collage of double entendres and
playful allusions had been revealed in most art history tomes, and yet, incredibly, the public at
large still considered her smile a great mystery.
No mystery at all, Langdon thought, moving forward and watching as the faint outline of
the painting began to take shape. No mystery at all.
Most recently Langdon had shared the Mona Lisa's secret with a rather unlikely group— a
dozen inmates at the Essex County Penitentiary. Langdon's jail seminar was part of a Harvard
outreach program attempting to bring education into the prison system— Culture for Convicts, as
Langdon's colleagues liked to call it.
Standing at an overhead projector in a darkened penitentiary library, Langdon had shared
the Mona Lisa's secret with the prisoners attending class, men whom he found surprisingly
engaged— rough, but sharp. "You may notice," Langdon told them, walking up to the projected
image of the Mona Lisa on the library wall, "that the background behind her face is uneven."
Langdon motioned to the glaring discrepancy. "Da Vinci painted the horizon line on the left
significantly lower than the right."
"He screwed it up?" one of the inmates asked.
Langdon chuckled. "No. Da Vinci didn't do that too often. Actually, this is a little trick Da
Vinci played. By lowering the countryside on the left, Da Vinci made Mona Lisa look much
larger from the left side than from the right side. A little Da Vinci inside joke. Historically, the
concepts of male and female have assigned sides— left is female, and right is male. Because Da
Vinci was a big fan of feminine principles, he made Mona Lisa look more majestic from the left
than the right."
"I heard he was a fag," said a small man with a goatee.
Langdon winced. "Historians don't generally put it quite that way, but yes, Da Vinci was a
homosexual."
"Is that why he was into that whole feminine thing?"
"Actually, Da Vinci was in tune with the balance between male and female. He believed
that a human soul could not be enlightened unless it had both male and female elements."
"You mean like chicks with dicks?" someone called.
This elicited a hearty round of laughs. Langdon considered offering an etymological sidebar
about the word hermaphrodite and its ties to Hermes and Aphrodite, but something told him it
would be lost on this crowd.
"Hey, Mr. Langford," a muscle-bound man said. "Is it true that the Mona Lisa is a picture of
Da Vinci in drag? I heard that was true."
"It's quite possible," Langdon said. "Da Vinci was a prankster, and computerized analysis of
the Mona Lisa and Da Vinci's self-portraits confirm some startling points of congruency in their
faces. Whatever Da Vinci was up to," Langdon said, "his Mona Lisa is neither male nor female.
It carries a subtle message of androgyny. It is a fusing of both."
"You sure that's not just some Harvard bullshit way of saying Mona Lisa is one ugly chick."
Now Langdon laughed. "You may be right. But actually Da Vinci left a big clue that the
painting was supposed to be androgynous. Has anyone here ever heard of an Egyptian god
named Amon?"
"Hell yes!" the big guy said. "God of masculine fertility!"
Langdon was stunned.
"It says so on every box of Amon condoms." The muscular man gave a wide grin. "It's got a
guy with a ram's head on the front and says he's the Egyptian god of fertility."
Langdon was not familiar with the brand name, but he was glad to hear the prophylactic
manufacturers had gotten their hieroglyphs right. "Well done. Amon is indeed represented as a
man with a ram's head, and his promiscuity and curved horns are related to our modern sexual
