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CHAPTER 92
King's College, established by King George IV in 1829, houses its Department of Theology and
Religious Studies adjacent to Parliament on property granted by the Crown. King's College
Religion Department boasts not only 150 years' experience in teaching and research, but the 1982
establishment of the Research Institute in Systematic Theology, which possesses one of the most
complete and electronically advanced religious research libraries in the world.
Langdon still felt shaky as he and Sophie came in from the rain and entered the library. The
primary research room was as Teabing had described it—a dramatic octagonal chamber dominated
by an enormous round table around which King Arthur and his knights might have been
comfortable were it not for the presence of twelve flat-screen computer workstations. On the far
side of the room, a reference librarian was just pouring a pot of tea and settling in for her day of
work.
"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.
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