slang 'horny.' "
"No shit!"
"No shit," Langdon said. "And do you know who Amon's counterpart was? The Egyptian
goddess of fertility?"
The question met with several seconds of silence.
"It was Isis," Langdon told them, grabbing a grease pen. "So we have the male god, Amon."
He wrote it down. "And the female goddess, Isis, whose ancient pictogram was once called
L'ISA."
Langdon finished writing and stepped back from the projector.
AMON L'ISA
"Ring any bells?" he asked.
"Mona Lisa... holy crap," somebody gasped.
Langdon nodded. "Gentlemen, not only does the face of Mona Lisa look androgynous, but
her name is an anagram of the divine union of male and female. And that, my friends, is Da
Vinci's little secret, and the reason for Mona Lisa's knowing smile."
"My grandfather was here," Sophie said, dropping suddenly to her knees, now only ten feet from
the Mona Lisa. She pointed the black light tentatively to a spot on the parquet floor.
At first Langdon saw nothing. Then, as he knelt beside her, he saw a tiny droplet of dried
liquid that was luminescing. Ink? Suddenly he recalled what black lights were actually used for.
Blood. His senses tingled. Sophie was right. Jacques Saunière had indeed paid a visit to the
Mona Lisa before he died.
"He wouldn't have come here without a reason," Sophie whispered, standing up. "I know he
left a message for me here." Quickly striding the final few steps to the Mona Lisa, she
illuminated the floor directly in front of the painting. She waved the light back and forth across
the bare parquet.
"There's nothing here!"
At that moment, Langdon saw a faint purple glimmer on the protective glass before the
Mona Lisa. Reaching down, he took Sophie's wrist and slowly moved the light up to the painting
itself.
They both froze.
On the glass, six words glowed in purple, scrawled directly across the Mona Lisa's face.
CHAPTER 27
Seated at Saunière's desk, Lieutenant Collet pressed the phone to his ear in disbelief. Did I hear
Fache correctly? "A bar of soap? But how could Langdon have known about the GPS dot?"
"Sophie Neveu," Fache replied. "She told him."
"What! Why?"
"Damned good question, but I just heard a recording that confirms she tipped him off."
Collet was speechless. What was Neveu thinking? Fache had proof that Sophie had
interfered with a DCPJ sting operation? Sophie Neveu was not only going to be fired, she was
also going to jail. "But, Captain... then where is Langdon now?"
"Have any fire alarms gone off there?"
"No, sir."
"And no one has come out under the Grand Gallery gate?"
"No. We've got a Louvre security officer on the gate. Just as you requested."
"Okay, Langdon must still be inside the Grand Gallery."
"Inside? But what is he doing?"
"Is the Louvre security guard armed?"
"Yes, sir. He's a senior warden."
"Send him in," Fache commanded. "I can't get my men back to the perimeter for a few
minutes, and I don't want Langdon breaking for an exit." Fache paused. "And you'd better tell the
guard Agent Neveu is probably in there with him."
"Agent Neveu left, I thought."
"Did you actually see her leave?"
"No, sir, but— "
"Well, nobody on the perimeter saw her leave either. They only saw her go in."
Collet was flabbergasted by Sophie Neveu's bravado. She's still inside the building?
"Handle it," Fache ordered. "I want Langdon and Neveu at gunpoint by the time I get back."
As the Trailor truck drove off, Captain Fache rounded up his men. Robert Langdon had proven
an elusive quarry tonight, and with Agent Neveu now helping him, he might be far harder to
corner than expected.
Fache decided not to take any chances.
Hedging his bets, he ordered half of his men back to the Louvre perimeter. The other half
he sent to guard the only location in Paris where Robert Langdon could find safe harbor.
CHAPTER 28
Inside the Salle des Etats, Langdon stared in astonishment at the six words glowing on the
Plexiglas. The text seemed to hover in space, casting a jagged shadow across Mona Lisa's
mysterious smile.
"The Priory," Langdon whispered. "This proves your grandfather was a member!"
Sophie looked at him in confusion. "You understand this?"
"It's flawless," Langdon said, nodding as his thoughts churned. "It's a proclamation of one
of the Priory's most fundamental philosophies!"
Sophie looked baffled in the glow of the message scrawled across the Mona Lisa's face.
SO DARK THE CON OF MAN
"Sophie," Langdon said, "the Priory's tradition of perpetuating goddess worship is based on
a belief that powerful men in the early Christian church 'conned' the world by propagating lies
that devalued the female and tipped the scales in favor of the masculine."
Sophie remained silent, staring at the words.
"The Priory believes that Constantine and his male successors successfully converted the
world from matriarchal paganism to patriarchal Christianity by waging a campaign of
propaganda that demonized the sacred feminine, obliterating the goddess from modern religion
forever."
Sophie's expression remained uncertain. "My grandfather sent me to this spot to find this.
He must be trying to tell me more than that."
Langdon understood her meaning. She thinks this is another code. Whether a hidden
meaning existed here or not, Langdon could not immediately say. His mind was still grappling
with the bold clarity of Saunière's outward message.
So dark the con of man, he thought. So dark indeed.
Nobody could deny the enormous good the modern Church did in today's troubled world,
and yet the Church had a deceitful and violent history. Their brutal crusade to "reeducate" the
pagan and feminine-worshipping religions spanned three centuries, employing methods as
inspired as they were horrific.
The Catholic Inquisition published the book that arguably could be called the most blood-
soaked publication in human history. Malleus Maleficarum— or The Witches' Hammer—
indoctrinated the world to "the dangers of freethinking women" and instructed the clergy how to
locate, torture, and destroy them. Those deemed "witches" by the Church included all female
scholars, priestesses, gypsies, mystics, nature lovers, herb gatherers, and any women
"suspiciously attuned to the natural world." Midwives also were killed for their heretical practice
of using medical knowledge to ease the pain of childbirth— a suffering, the Church claimed, that
was God's rightful punishment for Eve's partaking of the Apple of Knowledge, thus giving birth
to the idea of Original Sin. During three hundred years of witch hunts, the Church burned at the
stake an astounding five million women.
The propaganda and bloodshed had worked.
Today's world was living proof.
Women, once celebrated as an essential half of spiritual enlightenment, had been banished
from the temples of the world. There were no female Orthodox rabbis, Catholic priests, nor
Islamic clerics. The once hallowed act of Hieros Gamos— the natural sexual union between man
and woman through which each became spiritually whole— had been recast as a shameful act.
Holy men who had once required sexual union with their female counterparts to commune with
God now feared their natural sexual urges as the work of the devil, collaborating with his
favorite accomplice... woman.
Not even the feminine association with the left-hand side could escape the Church's
defamation. In France and Italy, the words for "left"— gauche and sinistra— came to have deeply
negative overtones, while their right-hand counterparts rang of righteousness, dexterity, and
correctness. To this day, radical thought was considered left wing, irrational thought was left
brain, and anything evil, sinister.
The days of the goddess were over. The pendulum had swung. Mother Earth had become a
man's world, and the gods of destruction and war were taking their toll. The male ego had spent
two millennia running unchecked by its female counterpart. The Priory of Sion believed that it
was this obliteration of the sacred feminine in modern life that had caused what the Hopi Native
Americans called koyanisquatsi— "life out of balance"— an unstable situation marked by
testosterone-fueled wars, a plethora of misogynistic societies, and a growing disrespect for
Mother Earth.
"Robert!" Sophie said, her whisper yanking him back. "Someone's coming!"
He heard the approaching footsteps out in the hallway.
"Over here!" Sophie extinguished the black light and seemed to evaporate before Langdon's
eyes.
For an instant he felt totally blind. Over where! As his vision cleared he saw Sophie's
silhouette racing toward the center of the room and ducking out of sight behind the octagonal
viewing bench. He was about to dash after her when a booming voice stopped him cold.
"Arrêtez!" a man commanded from the doorway.
The Louvre security agent advanced through the entrance to the Salle des Etats, his pistol
outstretched, taking deadly aim at Langdon's chest.
Langdon felt his arms raise instinctively for the ceiling.
"Couchez-vous!" the guard commanded. "Lie down!"
Langdon was face first on the floor in a matter of seconds. The guard hurried over and
kicked his legs apart, spreading Langdon out.
"Mauvaise idée, Monsieur Langdon," he said, pressing the gun hard into Langdon's back.
"Mauvaise idée."
Face down on the parquet floor with his arms and legs spread wide, Langdon found little
humor in the irony of his position. The Vitruvian Man, he thought. Face down.
CHAPTER 29
Inside Saint-Sulpice, Silas carried the heavy iron votive candle holder from the altar back toward
the obelisk. The shaft would do nicely as a battering ram. Eyeing the gray marble panel that
covered the apparent hollow in the floor, he realized he could not possibly shatter the covering
without making considerable noise.
Iron on marble. It would echo off the vaulted ceilings.
Would the nun hear him? She should be asleep by now. Even so, it was a chance Silas
preferred not to take. Looking around for a cloth to wrap around the tip of the iron pole, he saw
nothing except the altar's linen mantle, which he refused to defile. My cloak, he thought.
Knowing he was alone in the great church, Silas untied his cloak and slipped it off his body. As
he removed it, he felt a sting as the wool fibers stuck to the fresh wounds on his back.
Naked now, except for his loin swaddle, Silas wrapped his cloak over the end of the iron
rod. Then, aiming at the center of the floor tile, he drove the tip into it. A muffled thud. The
stone did not break. He drove the pole into it again. Again a dull thud, but this time accompanied
by a crack. On the third swing, the covering finally shattered, and stone shards fell into a hollow
area beneath the floor.
A compartment!
Quickly pulling the remaining pieces from the opening, Silas gazed into the void. His blood
pounded as he knelt down before it. Raising his pale bare arm, he reached inside.
At first he felt nothing. The floor of the compartment was bare, smooth stone. Then, feeling
deeper, reaching his arm in under the Rose Line, he touched something! A thick stone tablet.
Getting his fingers around the edge, he gripped it and gently lifted the tablet out. As he stood and
examined his find, he realized he was holding a rough-hewn stone slab with engraved words. He
felt for an instant like a modern-day Moses.
As Silas read the words on the tablet, he felt surprise. He had expected the keystone to be a
map, or a complex series of directions, perhaps even encoded. The keystone, however, bore the
simplest of inscriptions.
Job 38:11
A Bible verse? Silas was stunned with the devilish simplicity. The secret location of that
which they sought was revealed in a Bible verse? The brotherhood stopped at nothing to mock
the righteous!
Job. Chapter thirty -eight. Verse eleven.
Although Silas did not recall the exact contents of verse eleven by heart, he knew the Book
of Job told the story of a man whose faith in God survived repeated tests. Appropriate, he
thought, barely able to contain his excitement.
Looking over his shoulder, he gazed down the shimmering Rose Line and couldn't help but
smile. There atop the main altar, propped open on a gilded book stand, sat an enormous leather-
bound Bible.
Up in the balcony, Sister Sandrine was shaking. Moments ago, she had been about to flee and
carry out her orders, when the man below suddenly removed his cloak. When she saw his
alabaster-white flesh, she was overcome with a horrified bewilderment. His broad, pale back was
soaked with blood-red slashes. Even from here she could see the wounds were fresh.
This man has been mercilessly whipped!
She also saw the bloody cilice around his thigh, the wound beneath it dripping. What kind
of God would want a body punished this way? The rituals of Opus Dei, Sister Sandrine knew,
