The Da Vinci Code

they had warned her about, and if tonight she would have to carry out the orders she had been

holding all these years. She decided to stay there in the darkness and watch his every move.

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