Wednesday morning we received an anonymous package delivered to Pound Exclaim Headquarters. It arrived in a plain yellow A4 envelope with no address or any writing at all. The sole contents: a generic 32GB USB thumb drive. Our IT team warned us that this was probably a phishing attempt and that we should not plug it into any of our office computers. Smart. So I went to the library and plugged it into one of the city owned computers meant for the whole community to share. Much safer for that to get hacked or infected. There was a single file on the drive: "untitled.pdf." Obviously, this would be safe to open as you cannot put a "virus" into a digital "document" so I double-clicked to see what was contained within.
Words. Words upon words for nearly 8 whole pages. But I only had to read the first line to know what I had in front of me. My limbs tingled. Could it be true? I devoured the text ravenously and immediately went right back to the beginning to read again. Yes. This anonymously delivered anonymous file appeared to contain an excerpt from an unpublished or unreleased Dan Brown story featuring protagonist Robert Langdon.
As a huge The DaVinci Code fan, I've read every single Dan Brown book and I had never before read the words on the screen on that library computer. Someone must have hacked his laptop to steal this story excerpt. But why? Or maybe it is from a viral marketing campaign for his new forthcoming book The Secret of Secrets available September 9. Either way, I was thrilled to have this in my possession and honestly a little bit scared too. What if they knew I had this and they came for me?
In an act of extreme bravery and selflessness, I have decided to publish the contents of this document in full here on Pound Exclaim. You, the public, need to see this. It is journalistic integrity. As such, I make no claims regarding the contents of the file, their origin, or connection to any persons including author Dan Brown. I'm just a humble truth teller.
Hit the jump to read the full text of untitled.pdf -->
----- untitled.pdf -----
“It’s symbol time!” Robert exclaimed to no one.
He was seated in his office at his massive mahogany desk in
the center of the room. Langdon mused as he once again found himself surrounded
by his familiar books, rare international objects, and the darkness of his
personal library that was not illuminated by the soft warm glow of the
incandescent study lamp that sat at the corner of the desk.
It was a desk of which provenance alleged could be traced
back to the Thirteenth Century saint, Albertus Magnus—whose work in alchemy
revealed to him the truth of the rumored philosopher’s stone. Though widely
unbelieved by modern historians, renowned Symbologist Robert Langdon knew through
his vigorous research that Magnus had possession of the philosopher’s stone
late in his life and passed it to his protégé Thomas Aquinas. Several of
Aquinas’ destroyed manuscripts are said to attest to his personal witnessing of
the transmutation of base metals to into gold.
The rich warm red of the wood seemed to glow as if it were
imbued with the centuries of magic, science, and study that happened on its
surface. Somehow absorbing them. Robert knew in his brain that the world didn’t
work this way. That mahogany was simply a straight grained reddish-brown timber
whose name comes from the words “ma” and “hog” with “any” meaning “of the” or
simply put “of the ma hog.” That it was unlikely that any alchemy existed in
the object. But then, what if anything is there, if not for the power of
belief? If lead could rearrange its atomic structure to become gold, then could
not wood expand to fill with knowledge and experience? Because now Robert needed
to absorb those powers through his own proximity.
At the center of the mahogany desk of Saint Albert The Great
lay a single photograph. The image in the 8x10 glossy print was captured by a
hacked cellular phone camera. A phone which belonged to an unnamed Russian
ambassador while visiting the Hungarian capital city of Budapest. Previously
separate cities of Buda, Óbuda, and Pest were officially unified in 1873—the
same year as the Vienna World Fair. Langdon had received the photographic image
from his trusted friend and former colleague, Vanessa Edgewater, who now worked
for the NSA.
Ness, as she preferred to be called, was working a case and
needed help. She wouldn’t give any more detail than was necessary. And what was
necessary for Robert was in this photograph.
***
The average mobile phone features multiple high-megapixel
cameras on both sides of the device; not to mention the microphones, and GPS
and cellular triangulation that could be abused by the wrong people. Robert
marveled at how nearly every person in the developed world willingly carried a
device with so many intrusive technologies. They carried it with them at all
times to all places. With the device hardware IDs so tightly linked to your own
personal user, even when there’s a claimed veil of anonymity you can be
uniquely identified. And even when turned off, it is not fully off, it is in an
advanced standby mode that can still be pinged by satellites and towers. This
can be used to calculate a person’s assassination coordinates to an accuracy of
within 3 meters.
However, being aware of all of this didn’t keep Robert
Langdon from having his own mobile phone on him at all times. Unfortunately,
they are a necessity to life in the digital era. He received an abrupt reminder
of his own self-imposed e-shackles as the device vibrated in the inner breast pocket of his Italian
slim-fit camel hair twill jacket with full-grain tanned leather elbow patches.
Langdon nimbly reached for the interruption in order to silence its nagging
buzz, but changed plans when he saw the number of the incoming call and pressed
the green Accept button.
“Have you had a chance to look at what I sent you?”
“Well what a surprise, Ness, I was just sitting down to look
at it.”
Straight to the point, no messing around. This was normal
for Vanessa who was very no-nonsense when it came to important matters. And in
her line of work all matters were important.
“I’m obviously intrigued. Is there anything more you can
tell me about the photo?”
“Sorry, Robert, I’ve got to play this one close to the vest
for now. It’s sensitive and I can’t risk anything.”
Langdon smiled mentally. “Close to the vest” was a much
later and bastardized version of “close to the chest” which was an idiom for
keeping one’s playing cards hidden from view by holding them closely to the
chest. And now he was thinking about Ness’ beautiful, perfect chest. The
thought vanished as quickly as it arrived, they were purely platonic in their
relationship. Besides, Vanessa was only 32 to his own 61, though she is very
attractive. His attention snapped back to the current moment.
“I need a little bit more to go on, Ness. Any kind of
context you can provide could be a key to unlocking this. What I’ve got in
front of me isn’t exactly crystal clear.”
Langdon studied the photograph. It looked extremely cropped.
The digital film grain made a noisy mess of the objects the camera captured.
The lighting was dim, which means the camera shutter probably operated at a
speed of 1/60 of a second or slower, while increasing the ISO to
maximum levels. ISO, of course, coming from the International Organization for
Standardization. It’s based on an arithmetic and a logarithmic scale that once
was used to measure the sensitivity of film to light exposure, and now is applied
to the digital camera sensor.
And the movements of the Russian ambassador—unaware of his
phone being used without his own deliberate action—created a motion blur effect
in the image.
“Okay, here’s what I can tell you. There’s been some
agitation in the Kremlin and we’ve got our feelers out. And I think there’s
more to it than the higher ups want to let on. But I can’t prove anything yet.”
“And you think there’s a clue in this photograph that can
advance your theory?”
“I don’t have a theory yet, Robert.”
“But there’s something here that caught your attention, that
you think is important.” Langdon reached over to turn on his illuminated
magnifying lamp and moved to reposition the lens above the photograph.
“Look, there’s only one Russian ambassador to Hungary and
all of the official business is documented, so I may as well tell you that this
photograph was captured from the phone of Konstantin Malyshkin. Don’t ask me
how—top secret. It’s actually from a short video we have. He took his phone out
of his pocket to check the time or a message or whatever an ambassador checks
during a meeting and we had just started our camera and microphone capture
about a minute beforehand.”
“Would he have noticed the camera running when he looked at
his phone?”
“Not with us, no he’d never know. But he turned his phone
off right after looking at it, so our capture stops. We actually kind of
expected this to happen. Officials routinely turn off their phones for
meetings.”
“That makes sense,” Robert thought. “Probably basic security
if you’re paranoid about someone tapping in.”
“More or less. The meeting was scheduled to begin 20 minutes
after we started our capture. Some of the more interesting and unofficial intel
happens in the minutes immediately preceding and following after the official
discussion. In this particular case, the official discussion was supposed to be
about negotiating changes to boat traffic restrictions in the Danube. We
weren’t expecting anything groundbreaking with this. Like I said, we heard some
rumblings and put out our feelers.”
“So then what makes this photograph so interesting to you?”
He continued to examine the picture, now magnified and emphasizing the grain
more than before.
“Well for starters you probably don’t know what the
conference rooms in the consulate look like, and you wouldn’t from this image
anyways, because our dear friend Konstantin here is not where he’s supposed to be.”
It’s true that as a professor of Symbology at Harvard
University, Robert didn’t have much interior architectural knowledge of foreign
consulates. This is despite his personal love of architecture and art history,
combined with his eidetic memory. Still, he couldn’t see why it would flag the
attention of Ness that a typical bureaucratic meeting had occurred in a
different location.
“Where is he then?”
“That’s part of the problem. We can’t say for sure. The
active GPS data from his phone had him tracked to where he should be. And
besides the room he’s in looking completely different, we were able to extract
from the metadata an approximate location that’s on the other side of the city.
We just don’t know exactly where. Once we find out where he was, and who he was
with, the rest of this might start to make more sense.”
The strain was starting to creep into Vanessa’s voice and
Robert could tell that she’d been trying to assemble this puzzle for quite some
time before contacting him. “I’m sorry, that’s all I can tell you now. That’s
what I was hoping you could help me with. I cropped way in on the image to
enlarge the detail as much as possible, but you’ll probably still need to use a
jeweler’s loupe to see what I need you to see.”
“I’ve already got my magnifying lens out. What am I looking
for?” From the perspective of the ancient desk, Langdon’s left eye hovered
huge, an artificially distorted specter, or ethereal being surveying its lands
below.
To his observation, the photo depicted a partial scene. Part
of a room or hallway, part of a body or bodies, part of an unidentifiable dark
blur. He still wasn’t certain which part of the image he should be studying.
“Our capture barely got it in frame and this is the sharpest
image we could make from it. Look in the lower right.”
Robert Langdon moved the lens, peered closer, and scanned
the lower right with his full focus. And when he saw it, he couldn’t believe
that he’d missed it before.
***
“I see it now” Robert gasped to Ness in a shocked whisper.
“I need you to tell me everything you know about this symbol
as soon as you can.” There was urgency in Vanessa’s tone now, like she might be
holding back on just how critical deciphering this symbol could be to her.
“Okay,” Robert acquiesced, his mental gears already
churning. “Check with me tomorrow if I haven’t called you first.”
“I’m counting on you. You’re the best in the world at
symbols. If anyone can figure this out it’s you.” Vanessa disconnected while
Robert continued to stare in amazement at the tiny marking in the photo.
Barely visible in the corner of the photo, along the top
edge of a single stone tile on the outer perimeter of the floor, were engraved
a set of symbols that Langdon couldn’t recognize. There were four symbols
grouped into a quartet. At first, he thought they were Cyrillic characters
because he had been thinking about the Russians. And then he briefly recognized
what he thought might be Greek before dismissing that as well. They were
something altogether different, however. Possibly a pictograph. He’d need a
better image to study.
Langdon pulled open the middle right drawer of the desk to
retrieve a pad of graph paper, lined with light blue perpendicular lines made
at half centimeter intervals. Then he reached across the desk and grabbed a
perfectly sharp number 2 Saratoga cedar pencil from the mug he used as a pencil
holder. The front of the mug featured an image of the numerals “6” and “9”
interlocking and rotated 90 degrees clockwise. It’s the symbol of Cancer, the
zodiac sign for June 22. He received the mug long ago as a birthday gift from
his mentor and father figure Peter Solomon.
With pencil in hand, he copied the symbols from the
photograph on to the pad of paper so that he could concentrate more easily to
extract their meaning. One at a time, careful to accurately draw every curve
and line, he finally had a faithful duplicate of the symbol quartet in the
photo.
That was the easy part. Now to figure out what they represented. What was their meaning, and why were they engraved into a floor tile? Where was that room? More than that, what would it mean to Ness for him to solve this puzzle? Robert Langdon stared at the pad of paper as his mental rolodex of known symbols flashed through his mind at an alarmingly genius rate.
The four symbols looked strangely familiar. And yet they
still weren’t registering in any meaningful way to Robert. This could be more
of a challenge than he anticipated. He relished the opportunity.
Presumably, the symbols existed on a stone tile located in
Budapest, Hungary. It might make sense to work backward from there. There were
many reasons to have engraved bricks, stones, or tiles as part of a building.
The Freemasons have a long history of encoding their presence in their work.
From Washington Monument to the Arago Meridian Line in Paris, sometimes called
the Rose Line because of the esoteric order of the Rose Cross; also known as
the Rosicrucians.
Robert had never seen any symbol like this during his
research of Rosicrucianism. Their sacred
brotherhood tended toward more simple geometric shapes and repetition. Like the
seven and sevenfold overlapping circles of divine ascension.
Could there be a branch of the Masonic Order in Hungary
marking their buildings? Walked past daily, unnoticed by everyone except those
with special knowledge. The symbols could represent something as innocuous as a
builder’s personal signature. His instinct was telling him there was more to it
than a maker’s mark. These symbols were a signifier. This building was
important to whoever made them.
If it wasn’t the Freemasons, then maybe it had to do with
the Magyar tribes who descended the Ural Mountains to settle the Carpathian
Basin. The seven original tribes who came together in the Nineth Century in a
blood oath and formed the confederation of the Ten Arrows, swearing their
loyalty to Álmos, the future Grand Prince of the Hungarians. Mentally
calculating along this thought-path didn’t tingle Langdon’s symbology sensors.
There must be another clue he was missing.
Each symbol had certain characteristics of typography like
they were glyphs from an unknown alphabet. An alphabet that was different, but
somehow still the same. He walked over to a bookshelf on the far wall of the
room and found the book he was looking for on the third shelf down. “It’s a
shame they don’t make many books like this anymore,” he lamented while
appreciating the leather binding, gilt edge, and hand-colored marbling.
The book is a 424 page volume printed in 1872 by William
Skeen, and is titled plainly “Early Typography.” Skeen, a typographer himself,
was also a historian of the art form. And in his research, he posits that
modern printing was occurring long before Johannes Gutenburg came along to
steal the credit and fame for the printing press. Not only that, it wasn’t a
European invention at all. Its origins can be traced further east. Langdon
thought that there could be a connection between the Asiatic and European languages
that may have combined to create these glyphs.
Then, as if pure dumb luck, he saw an illustration in the
book that struck his mind like lightning. Of course!
***
Sometimes it’s better to be lucky than to be good. Tonight,
Robert Langdon was both.
The illustration in the typography book that ignited a flash
of brilliance for Robert was a reproduction of a woodblock print of an early
printing press. Carved in painstaking detail it showed a completely set up
press being operated in a print shop of the era. Woodblock prints, Robert knew,
were created by carving an image into wood, then layering with ink, which is
then applied to paper. Except because of the way the transfer process works,
the image carved in the wood has to be done in the mirror of how the final
image will appear.
Robert was amusing himself by thinking about how the
depiction of the letter blocks in the printing press in the illustration are
backwards, because when they are printed, they will appear mirrored—or, forward
like regular text. And so the artist had to carve the letters forward in his or
her wood block so that they would appear backward in the illustration so that
they were accurate to then appear forward in the hypothetical print being made
within the illustration.
This is the exact moment when he realized that the symbols
from the photograph are letters from the alphabet that appear both backwards
and forwards simultaneously! With this new revelation, Langdon set to work
separating the symbols into individual letters.
He should have seen it right away. The Rs back to back reflecting
across a vertical axis.
It still didn’t make sense. If he were to separate the
letters, though, into groups of those going forward and then those going
backward maybe that would reveal the meaning of the letters. Still working on
the pad of graphing paper, Langdon re-wrote the letters in separate groups.
Aha! Grouped in their new arrangement the message came into
focus.
Reading forward the letters spelled F A R T, and reading
backwards the letters read P R U B. Could this be an anagram? Langdon pulled at
his memories for any clues that could help.
The first word was straightforward to Langdon. It wasn’t an
anagram at all. It was an acronym.
Fraternal Antediluvian Royal Templars – A group so rumored
that there is barely any information beyond speculation. They are supposedly a highly
secretive intergenerational sect of knights ordained by God to protect His
entire creation here on Earth while He resides in Heaven. They are the
descendants of Biblical Noah who was the original protector of life on Earth
during the great flood—the only family from before the flood to survive.
God did not want to destroy his creation, only flush it of
the evil sinners and non-believers. In that great act of salvaging all of the
animals to endure the flood, Noah became the protector of all life on Earth.
And it became a pact that was passed through the generations from the worthy
chosen. So the rumors go.
Finding evidence that this group might actually exist sent
Robert’s mind reeling.
P R U B still didn’t make sense and didn’t align to any
organization that Langdon knew about. There was still more puzzle for him to
solve. Nonetheless, he wanted to let Ness know what he’d discovered during the
past three and a half hours. Even though it was already well past 1AM she’d
want to know as soon as possible.
Ness would have to wait.
Because at that same moment came a
loud bang from the front of the house and thick clouds of smoke quickly filled
Langdon’s formerly peaceful home.
***
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