Free The Dan Brown Enigma by Graham A Thomas Page A

Code has all these elements. Its central character, Robert Langdon, a Harvard professor of symbology lecturing in Paris, is woken in the middle of the night by the police and taken to the Louvre museum to help them solve the murder of the curator, Jacques Saunière. Langdon had been due to meet Saunière on the evening of his murder.
    From the moment Langdon arrives at the museum the action begins to heat up. He finds out, through Sophie Neveu – Saunière’s granddaughter and a cryptologist for the police – that the police captain, Bezu Fache, suspects Langdon as the killer. Langdon and Sophie embark on a trail of hidden clues as they try to sort out the bizarre code that Saunière left for Sophie to find.
    At this point none of the characters know that Saunière was a Grand Master of the Priory of Sion and that he was killed by a monk called Silas, who is an assassin for a man known only as The Teacher. They’re after the location of a keystone, a clue that will lead them to the Holy Grail. Sophie was very close to her grandfather when she was young until she accidentally found him involved in a pagan sex ritual on a surprise visit. This ritual she saw is hinted at throughout the book but only revealed at the end.
    The cipher they find near Saunière’s body leads to a second set of clues near Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa painting. Sophie works out the clues and discovers a key hidden behind the painting. The key has the symbols of the Priory of Sion on it and an address. Sophie and Langdon, now working together, manage to escape the police and discover that the numbers in the cipher beside Saunière’s body are part of a 10-digit account number to a safe deposit box at the Paris branch of the Depository Bank of Zurich.
    The key opens the safe deposit box, which contains a cylindrical device called a cryptex that Brown claims was invented by Da Vinci for transporting secure messages. The only way to open it is by turning a series of rotating dials until all the symbols are aligned in the correct order. Forcing it open will result in the rupture of an enclosed vial of vinegar which will dissolve the papyrus on which the message inside is written. The cryptex is held inside a rosewood box, which has clues on it to the combination of the cryptex, which is written in backward script, similar to Da Vinci’s journals.
    Before Silas shot Saunière, the curator told the murderous monk a well-rehearsed lie that the keystone was buried beneath an obelisk in the Church of Saint-Suplice. The obelisk lies directly along the ancient Rose Line, which was the Prime Meridian until it was moved to Greenwich. But there is no keystone at the base of the obelisk, just a passage from the Book of Job (38:11a): ‘Hitherto shalt thou go and no further.’ Furious, Silas realises he’s been tricked.
    The options for Langdon and Sophie are fast running out. With the police hot on their trail, they are desperate to find some answers. Langdon decides to take the keystone to his friend Sir Leigh Teabing, an expert on the Holy Grail.
    At Teabing’s chateau some of the background to the cryptex is revealed. Teabing tells Sophie of the clues in Da Vinci’s painting The Last Supper that reveal the disciple next to Jesus that looks like an effeminate boy is Mary Magdalene. However, Teabing’s history lesson is interrupted when Silas arrives and tries to kill them to get the cryptex. Teabing and Langdon fight Silas off and with Sophie they flee in Teabing’s private plane to London just as the police arrive to raid the house. (We later discover that there is a tracking device in the van that Langdon and Sophie had stolen from the bank.)
    On the plane they have time to think and figure out how to open the cryptex. Once they do, they discover it contains a smaller cryptex and a clue to reveal the combination to open it for the message inside. This code tells them to seek an orb on the tomb of ‘a knight a pope interred’. This refers to Sir Isaac