all his dirty work? I plan to run Neveu's employment file— friends, family, personal contacts—
anyone she might turn to for help. I don't know what she thinks she's doing out there, but it's
going to cost her one hell of a lot more than her job!"
"Do you want me on the phones or in the field?"
"Field. Get over to the train station and coordinate the team. You've got the reins, but don't
make a move without talking to me."
"Yes, sir." Collet ran out.
Fache felt rigid as he stood in the alcove. Outside the window, the glass pyramid shone, its
reflection rippling in the windswept pools. They slipped through my fingers. He told himself to
relax.
Even a trained field agent would be lucky to withstand the pressure that Interpol was about
to apply.
A female cryptologist and a schoolteacher?
They wouldn't last till dawn.
CHAPTER 37
The heavily forested park known as the Bois de Boulogne was called many things, but the
Parisian cognoscenti knew it as "the Garden of Earthly Delights." The epithet, despite sounding
flattering, was quite to the contrary. Anyone who had seen the lurid Bosch painting of the same
name understood the jab; the painting, like the forest, was dark and twisted, a purgatory for
freaks and fetishists. At night, the forest's winding lanes were lined with hundreds of glistening
bodies for hire, earthly delights to satisfy one's deepest unspoken desires— male, female, and
everything in between.
As Langdon gathered his thoughts to tell Sophie about the Priory of Sion, their taxi passed
through the wooded entrance to the park and began heading west on the cobblestone crossfare.
Langdon was having trouble concentrating as a scattering of the park's nocturnal residents were
already emerging from the shadows and flaunting their wares in the glare of the headlights.
Ahead, two topless teenage girls shot smoldering gazes into the taxi. Beyond them, a well -oiled
black man in a G-string turned and flexed his buttocks. Beside him, a gorgeous blond woman
lifted her miniskirt to reveal that she was not, in fact, a woman.
Heaven help me! Langdon turned his gaze back inside the cab and took a deep breath.
"Tell me about the Priory of Sion," Sophie said.
Langdon nodded, unable to imagine a less congruous a backdrop for the legend he was
about to tell. He wondered where to begin. The brotherhood's history spanned more than a
millennium... an astonishing chronicle of secrets, blackmail, betrayal, and even brutal torture at
the hands of an angry Pope.
"The Priory of Sion," he began, "was founded in Jerusalem in 1099 by a French king named
Godefroi de Bouillon, immediately after he had conquered the city."
Sophie nodded, her eyes riveted on him.
"King Godefroi was allegedly the possessor of a powerful secret— a secret that had been in
his family since the time of Christ. Fearing his secret might be lost when he died, he founded a
secret brotherhood— the Priory of Sion— and charged them with protecting his secret by quietly
passing it on from generation to generation. During their years in Jerusalem, the Priory learned
of a stash of hidden documents buried beneath the ruins of Herod's temple, which had been built
atop the earlier ruins of Solomon's Temple. These documents, they believed, corroborated
Godefroi's powerful secret and were so explosive in nature that the Church would stop at nothing
to get them." Sophie looked uncertain.
"The Priory vowed that no matter how long it took, these documents must be recovered
from the rubble beneath the temple and protected forever, so the truth would never die. In order
to retrieve the documents from within the ruins, the Priory created a military arm— a group of
nine knights called the Order of the Poor Knights of Christ and the Temple of Solomon."
Langdon paused. "More commonly known as the Knights Templar."
Sophie glanced up with a surprised look of recognition. Langdon had lectured often enough
on the Knights Templar to know that almost everyone on earth had heard of them, at least
abstractedly. For academics, the Templars' history was a precarious world where fact, lore, and
misinformation had become so intertwined that extracting a pristine truth was almost impossible.
Nowadays, Langdon hesitated even to mention the Knights Templar while lecturing because it
invariably led to a barrage of convoluted inquiries into assorted conspiracy theories.
Sophie already looked troubled. "You're saying the Knights Templar were founded by the
Priory of Sion to retrieve a collection of secret documents? I thought the Templars were created
to protect the Holy Land."
"A common misconception. The idea of protection of pilgrims was the guise under which
the Templars ran their mission. Their true goal in the Holy Land was to retrieve the documents
from beneath the ruins of the temple."
"And did they find them?"
Langdon grinned. "Nobody knows for sure, but the one thing on which all academics agree
is this: The Knights discovered something down there in the ruins... something that made them
wealthy and powerful beyond anyone's wildest imagination."
Langdon quickly gave Sophie the standard academic sketch of the accepted Knights
Templar history, explaining how the Knights were in the Holy Land during the Second Crusade
and told King Baldwin II that they were there to protect Christian pilgrims on the roadways.
Although unpaid and sworn to poverty, the Knights told the king they required basic shelter and
requested his permission to take up residence in the stables under the ruins of the temple. King
Baldwin granted the soldiers' request, and the Knights took up their meager residence inside the
devastated shrine.
The odd choice of lodging, Langdon explained, had been anything but random. The Knights
believed the documents the Priory sought were buried deep under the ruins— beneath the Holy of
Holies, a sacred chamber where God Himself was believed to reside. Literally, the very center of
the Jewish faith. For almost a decade, the nine Knights lived in the ruins, excavating in total
secrecy through solid rock.
Sophie looked over. "And you said they discovered something?"
"They certainly did," Langdon said, explaining how it had taken nine years, but the Knights
had finally found what they had been searching for. They took the treasure from the temple and
traveled to Europe, where their influence seemed to solidify overnight.
Nobody was certain whether the Knights had blackmailed the Vatican or whether the
Church simply tried to buy the Knights' silence, but Pope Innocent II immediately issued an
unprecedented papal bull that afforded the Knights Templar limitless power and declared them
"a law unto themselves"— an autonomous army independent of all interference from kings and
prelates, both religious and political.
With their new carte blanche from the Vatican, the Knights Templar expanded at a
staggering rate, both in numbers and political force, amassing vast estates in over a dozen
countries. They began extending credit to bankrupt royals and charging interest in return, thereby
establishing modern banking and broadening their wealth and influence still further.
By the 1300s, the Vatican sanction had helped the Knights amass so much power that Pope
Clement V decided that something had to be done. Working in concert with France's King
Philippe IV, the Pope devised an ingeniously planned sting operation to quash the Templars and
seize their treasure, thus taking control of the secrets held over the Vatican. In a military
maneuver worthy of the CIA, Pope Clement issued secret sealed orders to be opened
simultaneously by his soldiers all across Europe on Friday, October 13 of 1307.
At dawn on the thirteenth, the documents were unsealed and their appalling contents
revealed. Clement's letter claimed that God had visited him in a vision and warned him that the
Knights Templar were heretics guilty of devil worship, homosexuality, defiling the cross,
sodomy, and other blasphemous behavior. Pope Clement had been asked by God to cleanse the
earth by rounding up all the Knights and torturing them until they confessed their crimes against
God. Clement's Machiavellian operation came off with clockwork precision. On that day,
countless Knights were captured, tortured mercilessly, and finally burned at the stake as heretics.
Echoes of the tragedy still resonated in modern culture; to this day, Friday the thirteenth was
considered unlucky.
Sophie looked confused. "The Knights Templar were obliterated? I thought fraternities of
Templars still exist today?"
"They do, under a variety of names. Despite Clement's false charges and best efforts to
eradicate them, the Knights had powerful allies, and some managed to escape the Vatican
purges. The Templars' potent treasure trove of documents, which had apparently been their
source of power, was Clement's true objective, but it slipped through his fingers. The documents
had long since been entrusted to the Templars' shadowy architects, the Priory of Sion, whose veil
of secrecy had kept them safely out of range of the Vatican's onslaught. As the Vatican closed in,
the Priory smuggled their documents from a Paris preceptory by night onto Templar ships in La
Rochelle."
"Where did the documents go?"
Langdon shrugged. "That mystery's answer is known only to the Priory of Sion. Because
the documents remain the source of constant investigation and speculation even today, they are
believed to have been moved and rehidden several times. Current speculation places the
documents somewhere in the United Kingdom."
Sophie looked uneasy.
"For a thousand years," Langdon continued, "legends of this secret have been passed on.
The entire collection of documents, its power, and the secret it reveals have become known by a
single name— Sangreal. Hundreds of books have been written about it, and few mysteries have
caused as much interest among historians as the Sangreal."
"The Sangreal? Does the word have anything to do with the French word sang or Spanish
sangre— meaning 'blood'?"
Langdon nodded. Blood was the backbone of the Sangreal, and yet not in the way Sophie
probably imagined. "The legend is complicated, but the important thing to remember is that the
Priory guards the proof, and is purportedly awaiting the right moment in history to reveal the
truth."
"What truth? What secret could possibly be that powerful?"
Langdon took a deep breath and gazed out at the underbelly of Paris leering in the shadows.
"Sophie, the word Sangreal is an ancient word. It has evolved over the years into another term...
a more modern name." He paused. "When I tell you its modern name, you'll realize you already
know a lot about it. In fact, almost everyone on earth has heard the story of the Sangreal."
Sophie looked skeptical. "I've never heard of it."
"Sure you have." Langdon smiled. "You're just used to hearing it called by the name 'Holy
Grail.' "
CHAPTER 38
Sophie scrutinized Langdon in the back of the taxi. He's joking. "The Holy Grail?"
Langdon nodded, his expression serious. "Holy Grail is the literal meaning of Sangreal. The
phrase derives from the French Sangraal, which evolved to Sangreal, and was eventually split
into two words, San Greal."
Holy Grail. Sophie was surprised she had not spotted the linguistic ties immediately. Even
so, Langdon's claim still made no sense to her. "I thought the Holy Grail was a cup. You just told
me the Sangreal is a collection of documents that reveals some dark secret."
"Yes, but the Sangreal documents are only half of the Holy Grail treasure. They are buried
with the Grail itself... and reveal its true meaning. The documents gave the Knights Templar so
much power because the pages revealed the true nature of the Grail."
The true nature of the Grail? Sophie felt even more lost now. The Holy Grail, she had
thought, was the cup that Jesus drank from at the Last Supper and with which Joseph of
Arimathea later caught His blood at the crucifixion. "The Holy Grail is the Cup of Christ," she
said. "How much simpler could it be?"
"Sophie," Langdon whispered, leaning toward her now, "according to the Priory of Sion,
the Holy Grail is not a cup at all. They claim the Grail legend— that of a chalice— is actually an
ingeniously conceived allegory. That is, that the Grail story uses the chalice as a metaphor for
something else, something far more powerful." He paused. "Something that fits perfectly with
everything your grandfather has been trying to tell us tonight, including all his symbologic
references to the sacred feminine."
Still unsure, Sophie sensed in Langdon's patient smile that he empathized with her
confusion, and yet his eyes remained earnest. "But if the Holy Grail is not a cup," she asked,
"what is it?"
Langdon had known this question was coming, and yet he still felt uncertain exactly how to
tell her. If he did not present the answer in the proper historical background, Sophie would be
left with a vacant air of bewilderment— the exact expression Langdon had seen on his own
editor's face a few months ago after Langdon handed him a draft of the manuscript he was
working on.
"This manuscript claims what?" his editor had choked, setting down his wineglass and
staring across his half-eaten power lunch. "You can't be serious."
