"Lovely morning," she said in a cheerful British accent, leaving the tea and walking over.
"May I help you?"
"Thank you, yes," Langdon replied. "My name is— "
"Robert Langdon." She gave a pleasant smile. "I know who you are."
For an instant, he feared Fache had put him on English television as well, but the librarian's
smile suggested otherwise. Langdon still had not gotten used to these moments of unexpected
celebrity. Then again, if anyone on earth were going to recognize his face, it would be a librarian
in a Religious Studies reference facility.
"Pamela Gettum," the librarian said, offering her hand. She had a genial, erudite face and a
pleasingly fluid voice. The horn-rimmed glasses hanging around her neck were thick.
"A pleasure," Langdon said. "This is my friend Sophie Neveu."
The two women greeted one another, and Gettum turned immediately back to Langdon. "I
didn't know you were coming."
"Neither did we. If it's not too much trouble, we could really use your help finding some
information."
Gettum shifted, looking uncertain. "Normally our services are by petition and appointment
only, unless of course you're the guest of someone at the college?"
Langdon shook his head. "I'm afraid we've come unannounced. A friend of mine speaks
very highly of you. Sir Leigh Teabing?" Langdon felt a pang of gloom as he said the name. "The
British Royal Historian."
Gettum brightened now, laughing. "Heavens, yes. What a character. Fanatical! Every time
he comes in, it's always the same search strings. Grail. Grail. Grail. I swear that man will die
before he gives up on that quest." She winked. "Time and money afford one such lovely
luxuries, wouldn't you say? A regular Don Quixote, that one."
"Is there any chance you can help us?" Sophie asked. "It's quite important."
Gettum glanced around the deserted library and then winked at them both. "Well, I can't
very well claim I'm too busy, now can I? As long as you sign in, I can't imagine anyone being
too upset. What did you have in mind?"
"We're trying to find a tomb in London."
Gettum looked dubious. "We've got about twenty thousand of them. Can you be a little
more specific?"
"It's the tomb of a knight. We don't have a name."
"A knight. That tightens the net substantially. Much less common."
"We don't have much information about the knight we're looking for," Sophie said, "but this
is what we know." She produced a slip of paper on which she had written only the first two lines
of the poem.
Hesitant to show the entire poem to an outsider, Langdon and Sophie had decided to share
just the first two lines, those that identified the knight. Compartmentalized cryptography, Sophie
had called it. When an intelligence agency intercepted a code containing sensitive data,
cryptographers each worked on a discrete section of the code. This way, when they broke it, no
single cryptographer possessed the entire deciphered message.
In this case, the precaution was probably excessive; even if this librarian saw the entire
poem, identified the knight's tomb, and knew what orb was missing, the information was useless
without the cryptex.
Gettum sensed an urgency in the eyes of this famed American scholar, almost as if his finding
this tomb quickly were a matter of critical importance. The green-eyed woman accompanying
him also seemed anxious.
Puzzled, Gettum put on her glasses and examined the paper they had just handed her.
In London lies a knight a Pope interred.
His labor's fruit a Holy wrath incurred.
She glanced at her guests. "What is this? Some kind of Harvard scavenger hunt?"
Langdon's laugh sounded forced. "Yeah, something like that."
Gettum paused, feeling she was not getting the whole story. Nonetheless, she felt intrigued
and found herself pondering the verse carefully. "According to this rhyme, a knight did
something that incurred displeasure with God, and yet a Pope was kind enough to bury him in
London."
Langdon nodded. "Does it ring any bells?"
Gettum moved toward one of the workstations. "Not offhand, but let's see what we can pull
up in the database."
Over the past two decades, King's College Research Institute in Systematic Theology had
used optical character recognition software in unison with linguistic translation devices to
digitize and catalog an enormous collection of texts— encyclopedias of religion, religious
biographies, sacred scriptures in dozens of languages, histories, Vatican letters, diaries of clerics,
anything at all that qualified as writings on human spirituality. Because the massive collection
was now in the form of bits and bytes rather than physical pages, the data was infinitely more
accessible.
Settling into one of the workstations, Gettum eyed the slip of paper and began typing. "To
begin, we'll run a straight Boolean with a few obvious keywords and see what happens."
"Thank you."
Gettum typed in a few words:
LONDON, KNIGHT, POPE
As she clicked the SEARCH button, she could feel the hum of the massive mainframe
downstairs scanning data at a rate of 500 MB/sec. "I'm asking the system to show us any
documents whose complete text contains all three of these keywords. We'll get more hits than we
want, but it's a good place to start."
The screen was already showing the first of the hits now.
Painting the Pope. The Collected Portraits of Sir Joshua Reynolds. London University Press.
Gettum shook her head. "Obviously not what you're looking for." She scrolled to the next
hit.
The London Writings of Alexander Pope by G. Wilson Knight.
Again she shook her head.
As the system churned on, the hits came up more quickly than usual. Dozens of texts
appeared, many of them referencing the eighteenth-century British writer Alexander Pope,
whose counterreligious, mock-epic poetry apparently contained plenty of references to knights
and London.
Gettum shot a quick glance to the numeric field at the bottom of the screen. This computer,
by calculating the current number of hits and multiplying by the percentage of the database left
to search, provided a rough guess of how much information would be found. This particular
search looked like it was going to return an obscenely large amount of data.
Estimated number of total hits: 2,692
"We need to refine the parameters further," Gettum said, stopping the search. "Is this all the
information you have regarding the tomb? There's nothing else to go on?"
Langdon glanced at Sophie Neveu, looking uncertain.
This is no scavenger hunt, Gettum sensed. She had heard the whisperings of Robert
Langdon's experience in Rome last year. This American had been granted access to the most
secure library on earth— the Vatican Secret Archives. She wondered what kinds of secrets
Langdon might have learned inside and if his current desperate hunt for a mysterious London
tomb might relate to information he had gained within the Vatican. Gettum had been a librarian
long enough to know the most common reason people came to London to look for knights. The
Grail.
Gettum smiled and adjusted her glasses. "You are friends with Leigh Teabing, you are in
England, and you are looking for a knight." She folded her hands. "I can only assume you are on
a Grail quest."
Langdon and Sophie exchanged startled looks.
Gettum laughed. "My friends, this library is a base camp for Grail seekers. Leigh Teabing
among them. I wish I had a shilling for every time I'd run searches for the Rose, Mary
Magdalene, Sangreal, Merovingian, Priory of Sion, et cetera, et cetera. Everyone loves a
conspiracy." She took off her glasses and eyed them. "I need more information."
In the silence, Gettum sensed her guests' desire for discretion was quickly being outweighed
by their eagerness for a fast result.
"Here," Sophie Neveu blurted. "This is everything we know." Borrowing a pen from
Langdon, she wrote two more lines on the slip of paper and handed it to Gettum.
You seek the orb that ought be on his tomb.
It speaks of Rosy flesh and seeded womb.
Gettum gave an inward smile. The Grail indeed, she thought, noting the references to the
Rose and her seeded womb. "I can help you," she said, looking up from the slip of paper. "Might
I ask where this verse came from? And why you are seeking an orb?"
"You might ask," Langdon said, with a friendly smile, "but it's a long story and we have
very little time."
"Sounds like a polite way of saying 'mind your own business.' "
"We would be forever in your debt, Pamela," Langdon said, "if you could find out who this
knight is and where he is buried."
"Very well," Gettum said, typing again. "I'll play along. If this is a Grail-related issue, we
should cross-reference against Grail keywords. I'll add a proximity parameter and remove the
title weighting. That will limit our hits only to those instances of textual keywords that occur
near a Grail-related word."
Search for: KNIGHT, LONDON, POPE, TOMB
Within 100 word proximity of: GRAIL, ROSE, SANGREAL, CHALICE
"How long will this take?" Sophie asked.
"A few hundred terabytes with multiple cross-referencing fields?" Gettum's eyes glimmered
as she clicked the SEARCH key. "A mere fifteen minutes."
Langdon and Sophie said nothing, but Gettum sensed this sounded like an eternity to them.
"Tea?" Gettum asked, standing and walking toward the pot she had made earlier. "Leigh
always loves my tea."
CHAPTER 93
London's Opus Dei Centre is a modest brick building at 5 Orme Court, overlooking the North
Walk at Kensington Gardens. Silas had never been here, but he felt a rising sense of refuge and
asylum as he approached the building on foot. Despite the rain, Rémy had dropped him off a
short distance away in order to keep the limousine off the main streets. Silas didn't mind the
walk. The rain was cleansing.
At Rémy's suggestion, Silas had wiped down his gun and disposed of it through a sewer
grate. He was glad to get rid of it. He felt lighter. His legs still ached from being bound all that
time, but Silas had endured far greater pain. He wondered, though, about Teabing, whom Rémy
had left bound in the back of the limousine. The Briton certainly had to be feeling the pain by
now.
"What will you do with him?" Silas had asked Rémy as they drove over here.
Rémy had shrugged. "That is a decision for the Teacher." There was an odd finality in his
tone.
Now, as Silas approached the Opus Dei building, the rain began to fall harder, soaking his
heavy robe, stinging the wounds of the day before. He was ready to leave behind the sins of the
last twenty-four hours and purge his soul. His work was done.
Moving across a small courtyard to the front door, Silas was not surprised to find the door
unlocked. He opened it and stepped into the minimalist foyer. A muted electronic chime sounded
upstairs as Silas stepped onto the carpet. The bell was a common feature in these halls where the
residents spent most of the day in their rooms in prayer. Silas could hear movement above on the
creaky wood floors.
A man in a cloak came downstairs. "May I help you?" He had kind eyes that seemed not
even to register Silas's startling physical appearance.
"Thank you. My name is Silas. I am an Opus Dei numerary."
"American?"
Silas nodded. "I am in town only for the day. Might I rest here?"
"You need not even ask. There are two empty rooms on the third floor. Shall I bring you
some tea and bread?"
"Thank you." Silas was famished.
Silas went upstairs to a modest room with a window, where he took off his wet robe and
knelt down to pray in his undergarments. He heard his host come up and lay a tray outside his
door. Silas finished his prayers, ate his food, and lay down to sleep.
Three stories below, a phone was ringing. The Opus Dei numerary who had welcomed Silas
answered the line.
"This is the London police," the caller said. "We are trying to find an albino monk. We've
had a tip-off that he might be there. Have you seen him?"
The numerary was startled. "Yes, he is here. Is something wrong?"
"He is there now?"
"Yes, upstairs praying. What is going on?"
"Leave him precisely where he is," the officer commanded. "Don't say a word to anyone.
I'm sending officers over right away."
CHAPTER 94
St. James's Park is a sea of green in the middle of London, a public park bordering the palaces of
Westminster, Buckingham, and St. James's. Once enclosed by King Henry VIII and stocked with
deer for the hunt, St. James's Park is now open to the public. On sunny afternoons, Londoners
picnic beneath the willows and feed the pond's resident pelicans, whose ancestors were a gift to
