a congregation of Catholics who have chosen as our priority to follow Catholic doctrine as
rigorously as we can in our own daily lives."
"Does God's Work necessarily include vows of chastity, tithing, and atonement for sins
through self-flagellation and the cilice?"
"You are describing only a small portion of the Opus Dei population," Aringarosa said.
"There are many levels of involvement. Thousands of Opus Dei members are married, have
families, and do God's Work in their own communities. Others choose lives of asceticism within
our cloistered residence halls. These choices are personal, but everyone in Opus Dei shares the
goal of bettering the world by doing the Work of God. Surely this is an admirable quest."
Reason seldom worked, though. The media always gravitated toward scandal, and Opus
Dei, like most large organizations, had within its membership a few misguided souls who cast a
shadow over the entire group.
Two months ago, an Opus Dei group at a midwestern university had been caught drugging
new recruits with mescaline in an effort to induce a euphoric state that neophytes would perceive
as a religious experience. Another university student had used his barbed cilice belt more often
than the recommended two hours a day and had given himself a near lethal infection. In Boston
not long ago, a disillusioned young investment banker had signed over his entire life savings to
Opus Dei before attempting suicide.
Misguided sheep, Aringarosa thought, his heart going out to them.
Of course the ultimate embarrassment had been the widely publicized trial of FBI spy
Robert Hanssen, who, in addition to being a prominent member of Opus Dei, had turned out to
be a sexual deviant, his trial uncovering evidence that he had rigged hidden video cameras in his
own bedroom so his friends could watch him having sex with his wife. "Hardly the pastime of a
devout Catholic," the judge had noted.
Sadly, all of these events had helped spawn the new watch group known as the Opus Dei
Awareness Network (ODAN). The group's popular website— www.odan.org— relayed
frightening stories from former Opus Dei members who warned of the dangers of joining. The
media was now referring to Opus Dei as "God's Mafia" and "the Cult of Christ."
We fear what we do not understand, Aringarosa thought, wondering if these critics had any
idea how many lives Opus Dei had enriched. The group enjoyed the full endorsement and
blessing of the Vatican. Opus Dei is a personal prelature of the Pope himself.
Recently, however, Opus Dei had found itself threatened by a force infinitely more
powerful than the media... an unexpected foe from which Aringarosa could not possibly hide.
Five months ago, the kaleidoscope of power had been shaken, and Aringarosa was still reeling
from the blow.
"They know not the war they have begun," Aringarosa whispered to himself, staring out the
plane's window at the darkness of the ocean below. For an instant, his eyes refocused, lingering
on the reflection of his awkward face— dark and oblong, dominated by a flat, crooked nose that
had been shattered by a fist in Spain when he was a young missionary. The physical flaw barely
registered now. Aringarosa's was a world of the soul, not of the flesh.
As the jet passed over the coast of Portugal, the cell phone in Aringarosa's cassock began
vibrating in silent ring mode. Despite airline regulations prohibiting the use of cell phones during
flights, Aringarosa knew this was a call he could not miss. Only one man possessed this number,
the man who had mailed Aringarosa the phone.
Excited, the bishop answered quietly. "Yes?"
"Silas has located the keystone," the caller said. "It is in Paris. Within the Church of Saint-
Sulpice."
Bishop Aringarosa smiled. "Then we are close."
"We can obtain it immediately. But we need your influence."
"Of course. Tell me what to do."
When Aringarosa switched off the phone, his heart was pounding. He gazed once again into
the void of night, feeling dwarfed by the events he had put into motion.
Five hundred miles away, the albino named Silas stood over a small basin of water and dabbed
the blood from his back, watching the patterns of red spinning in the water. Purge me with
hyssop and I shall be clean, he prayed, quoting Psalms. Wash me, and I shall be whiter than
snow.
Silas was feeling an aroused anticipation that he had not felt since his previous life. It both
surprised and electrified him. For the last decade, he had been following The Way, cleansing
himself of sins... rebuilding his life... erasing the violence in his past. Tonight, however, it had all
come rushing back. The hatred he had fought so hard to bury had been summoned. He had been
startled how quickly his past had resurfaced. And with it, of course, had come his skills. Rusty
but serviceable.
Jesus' message is one of peace... of nonviolence... of love. This was the message Silas had
been taught from the beginning, and the message he held in his heart. And yet this was the
message the enemies of Christ now threatened to destroy. Those who threaten God with force
will be met with force. Immovable and steadfast.
For two millennia, Christian soldiers had defended their faith against those who tried to
displace it. Tonight, Silas had been called to battle.
Drying his wounds, he donned his ankle-length, hooded robe. It was plain, made of dark
wool, accentuating the whiteness of his skin and hair. Tightening the rope-tie around his waist,
he raised the hood over his head and allowed his red eyes to admire his reflection in the mirror.
The wheels are in motion.
CHAPTER 6
Having squeezed beneath the security gate, Robert Langdon now stood just inside the entrance to
the Grand Gallery. He was staring into the mouth of a long, deep canyon. On either side of the
gallery, stark walls rose thirty feet, evaporating into the darkness above. The reddish glow of the
service lighting sifted upward, casting an unnatural smolder across a staggering collection of Da
Vincis, Titians, and Caravaggios that hung suspended from ceiling cables. Still lifes, religious
scenes, and landscapes accompanied portraits of nobility and politicians.
Although the Grand Gallery housed the Louvre's most famous Italian art, many visitors felt
the wing's most stunning offering was actually its famous parquet floor. Laid out in a dazzling
geometric design of diagonal oak slats, the floor produced an ephemeral optical illusion— a
multi-dimensional network that gave visitors the sense they were floating through the gallery on
a surface that changed with every step.
As Langdon's gaze began to trace the inlay, his eyes stopped short on an unexpected object
lying on the floor just a few yards to his left, surrounded by police tape. He spun toward Fache.
"Is that... a Caravaggio on the floor?"
Fache nodded without even looking.
The painting, Langdon guessed, was worth upward of two million dollars, and yet it was
lying on the floor like a discarded poster. "What the devil is it doing on the floor!"
Fache glowered, clearly unmoved. "This is a crime scene, Mr. Langdon. We have touched
nothing. That canvas was pulled from the wall by the curator. It was how he activated the
security system."
Langdon looked back at the gate, trying to picture what had happened.
"The curator was attacked in his office, fled into the Grand Gallery, and activated the
security gate by pulling that painting from the wall. The gate fell immediately, sealing off all
access. This is the only door in or out of this gallery."
Langdon felt confused. "So the curator actually captured his attacker inside the Grand
Gallery?"
Fache shook his head. "The security gate separated Saunière from his attacker. The killer
was locked out there in the hallway and shot Saunière through this gate." Fache pointed toward
an orange tag hanging from one of the bars on the gate under which they had just passed. "The
PTS team found flashback residue from a gun. He fired through the bars. Saunière died in here
alone."
Langdon pictured the photograph of Saunière's body. They said he did that to himself.
Langdon looked out at the enormous corridor before them. "So where is his body?"
Fache straightened his cruciform tie clip and began to walk. "As you probably know, the
Grand Gallery is quite long."
The exact length, if Langdon recalled correctly, was around fifteen hundred feet, the length
of three Washington Monuments laid end to end. Equally breathtaking was the corridor's width,
which easily could have accommodated a pair of side-by-side passenger trains. The center of the
hallway was dotted by the occasional statue or colossal porcelain urn, which served as a tasteful
divider and kept the flow of traffic moving down one wall and up the other.
Fache was silent now, striding briskly up the right side of the corridor with his gaze dead
ahead. Langdon felt almost disrespectful to be racing past so many masterpieces without pausing
for so much as a glance.
Not that I could see anything in this lighting, he thought.
The muted crimson lighting unfortunately conjured memories of Langdon's last experience
in noninvasive lighting in the Vatican Secret Archives. This was tonight's second unsettling
parallel with his near-death in Rome. He flashed on Vittoria again. She had been absent from his
dreams for months. Langdon could not believe Rome had been only a year ago; it felt like
decades. Another life. His last correspondence from Vittoria had been in December— a postcard
saying she was headed to the Java Sea to continue her research in entanglement physics...
something about using satellites to track manta ray migrations. Langdon had never harbored
delusions that a woman like Vittoria Vetra could have been happy living with him on a college
campus, but their encounter in Rome had unlocked in him a longing he never imagined he could
feel. His lifelong affinity for bachelorhood and the simple freedoms it allowed had been shaken
somehow... replaced by an unexpected emptiness that seemed to have grown over the past year.
They continued walking briskly, yet Langdon still saw no corpse. "Jacques Saunière went
thisfar?"
"Mr. Saunière suffered a bullet wound to his stomach. He died very slowly. Perhaps over
fifteen or twenty minutes. He was obviously a man of great personal strength."
Langdon turned, appalled. "Security tookfifteen minutes to get here?"
"Of course not. Louvre security responded immediately to the alarm and found the Grand
Gallery sealed. Through the gate, they could hear someone moving around at the far end of the
corridor, but they could not see who it was. They shouted, but they got no answer. Assuming it
could only be a criminal, they followed protocol and called in the Judicial Police. We took up
positions within fifteen minutes. When we arrived, we raised the barricade enough to slip
underneath, and I sent a dozen armed agents inside. They swept the length of the gallery to
corner the intruder."
"And?"
"They found no one inside. Except..." He pointed farther down the hall. "Him."
Langdon lifted his gaze and followed Fache's outstretched finger. At first he thought Fache
was pointing to a large marble statue in the middle of the hallway. As they continued, though,
Langdon began to see past the statue. Thirty yards down the hall, a single spotlight on a portable
pole stand shone down on the floor, creating a stark island of white light in the dark crimson
gallery. In the center of the light, like an insect under a microscope, the corpse of the curator lay
naked on the parquet floor.
"You saw the photograph," Fache said, "so this should be of no surprise."
Langdon felt a deep chill as they approached the body. Before him was one of the strangest
images he had ever seen.
The pallid corpse of Jacques Saunière lay on the parquet floor exactly as it appeared in the
photograph. As Langdon stood over the body and squinted in the harsh light, he reminded
himself to his amazement that Saunière had spent his last minutes of life arranging his own body
in this strange fashion.
Saunière looked remarkably fit for a man of his years... and all of his musculature was in
plain view. He had stripped off every shred of clothing, placed it neatly on the floor, and laid
down on his back in the center of the wide corridor, perfectly aligned with the long axis of the
room. His arms and legs were sprawled outward in a wide spread eagle, like those of a child
making a snow angel... or, perhaps more appropriately, like a man being drawn and
quartered by some invisible force.
Just below Saunière's breastbone, a bloody smear marked the spot where the bullet had
pierced his flesh. The wound had bled surprisingly little, leaving only a small pool of blackened
blood.
Saunière's left index finger was also bloody, apparently having been dipped into the wound
to create the most unsettling aspect of his own macabre deathbed; using his own blood as ink,
and employing his own naked abdomen as a canvas, Saunière had drawn a simple symbol on his
flesh— five straight lines that intersected to form a five-pointed star.
The pentacle.
The bloody star, centered on Saunière's navel, gave his corpse a distinctly ghoulish aura.
The photo Langdon had seen was chilling enough, but now, witnessing the scene in person,
Langdon felt a deepening uneasiness.
He did this to himself.
"Mr. Langdon?" Fache's dark eyes settled on him again.
"It's a pentacle," Langdon offered, his voice feeling hollow in the huge space. "One of the
