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CHAPTER 20
Emerging from the shadows, Langdon and Sophie moved stealthily up the deserted Grand Gallery
corridor toward the emergency exit stairwell.
As he moved, Langdon felt like he was trying to assemble a jigsaw puzzle in the dark. The newest
aspect of this mystery was a deeply troubling one: The captain of the Judicial Police is trying to
frame me for murder
"Do you think," he whispered, "that maybe Fache wrote that message on the floor?"
Sophie didn't even turn. "Impossible."
Langdon wasn't so sure. "He seems pretty intent on making me look guilty. Maybe he thought
writing my name on the floor would help his case?"
"The Fibonacci sequence? The P.S.? All the Da Vinci and goddess symbolism? That had to be my
grandfather."
Langdon knew she was right. The symbolism of the clues meshed too perfectly—the pentacle, The
Vitruvian Man, Da Vinci, the goddess, and even the Fibonacci sequence. A coherent symbolic set,
as iconographers would call it. All inextricably tied.
"And his phone call to me this afternoon," Sophie added. "He said he had to tell me something. I'm
certain his message at the Louvre was his final effort to tell me something important, something he
thought you could help me understand."
Langdon frowned. O, Draconian devil! Oh, lame saint.! He wished he could comprehend the
message, both for Sophie's well-being and for his own. Things had definitely gotten worse since he
first laid eyes on the cryptic words. His fake leap out the bathroom window was not going to help
Langdon's popularity with Fache one bit. Somehow he doubted the captain of the French police
would see the humor in chasing down and arresting a bar of soap.
"The doorway isn't much farther," Sophie said.
"Do you think there's a possibility that the numbers in your grandfather's message hold the key to
understanding the other lines?" Langdon had once worked on a series of Baconian manuscripts that
contained epigraphical ciphers in which certain lines of code were clues as to how to decipher the
other lines.
"I've been thinking about the numbers all night. Sums, quotients, products. I don't see anything.
Mathematically, they're arranged at random. Cryptographic gibberish."
"And yet they're all part of the Fibonacci sequence. That can't be coincidence."
"It's not. Using Fibonacci numbers was my grandfather's way of waving another flag at me—like
writing the message in English, or arranging himself like my favorite piece of art, or drawing a
pentacle on himself. All of it was to catch my attention."
"The pentacle has meaning to you?"
"Yes. I didn't get a chance to tell you, but the pentacle was a special symbol between my
grandfather and me when I was growing up. We used to play Tarot cards for fun, and my indicator
card always turned out to be from the suit of pentacles. I'm sure he stacked the deck, but pentacles
got to be our little joke."
Langdon felt a chill. They played Tarot? The medieval Italian card game was so replete with
hidden heretical symbolism that Langdon had dedicated an entire chapter in his new manuscript to
the Tarot. The game's twenty-two cards bore names like The Female Pope, The Empress, and The
Star. Originally, Tarot had been devised as a secret means to pass along ideologies banned by the
Church. Now, Tarot's mystical qualities were passed on by modern fortune-tellers.
The Tarot indicator suit for feminine divinity is pentacles, Langdon thought, realizing that if
Saunière had been stacking his granddaughter's deck for fun, pentacles was an apropos inside joke.
They arrived at the emergency stairwell, and Sophie carefully pulled open the door. No alarm
sounded. Only the doors to the outside were wired. Sophie led Langdon down a tight set of
switchback stairs toward the ground level, picking up speed as they went.
"Your grandfather," Langdon said, hurrying behind her, "when he told you about the pentacle, did
he mention goddess worship or any resentment of the Catholic Church?"
Sophie shook her head. "I was more interested in the mathematics of it—the Divine Proportion,
PHI, Fibonacci sequences, that sort of thing."
Langdon was surprised. "Your grandfather taught you about the number PHI?"
"Of course. The Divine Proportion." Her expression turned sheepish. "In fact, he used to joke that I
was half divine... you know, because of the letters in my name."
Langdon considered it a moment and then groaned.
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