The Lost Symbol

Professor Langdon?” Sato said. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost. Are you okay?”

Langdon hoisted his daybag higher onto his shoulder and laid his hand on top of it, as if somehow this might better hide the cube-shaped package he was carrying. He could feel his face had gone ashen. “I’m. just worried about Peter.”

Sato cocked her head, eyeing him askew.

Langdon felt a sudden wariness that Sato’s involvement tonight might relate to this small package that Solomon had entrusted to him. Peter had warned Langdon: Powerful people want to steal this. It would be dangerous in the wrong hands. Langdon couldn’t imagine why the CIA would want a little box containing a talisman. or even what the talisman could be. Ordo ab chao?

Sato stepped closer, her black eyes probing. “I sense you’ve had a revelation?”

Langdon felt himself sweating now. “No, not exactly.”

“What’s on your mind?”

“I just. ” Langdon hesitated, having no idea what to say. He had no intention of revealing the existence of the package in his bag, and yet if Sato took him to the CIA, his bag most certainly would be searched on the way in. “Actually. ” he fibbed, “I have another idea about the numbers on Peter’s hand.”

Sato’s expression revealed nothing. “Yes?” She glanced over at Anderson now, who was just arriving from greeting the forensics team that had finally arrived.

Langdon swallowed hard and crouched down beside the hand, wondering what he could possibly come up with to tell them. You’re a teacher, Robert — improvise! He took one last look at the seven tiny symbols, hoping for some sort of inspiration.

Nothing. Blank.

As Langdon’s eidetic memory skimmed through his mental encyclopedia of symbols, he could find only one possible point to make. It was something that had occurred to him initially, but had seemed unlikely. At the moment, however, he had to buy time to think.

“Well,” he began, “a symbologist’s first clue that he’s on the wrong track when deciphering symbols and codes is when he starts interpreting symbols using multiple symbolic languages. For example, when I told you this text was Roman and Arabic, that was a poor analysis because I used multiple symbolic systems. The same is true for Roman and runic.”

Sato crossed her arms and arched her eyebrows as if to say, “Go on.”

“In general, communications are made in one language, not multiple languages, and so a symbologist’s first job with any text is to find a single consistent symbolic system that applies to the entire text.”

“And you see a single system now?”

“Well, yes. and no.” Langdon’s experience with the rotational symmetry of ambigrams had taught him that symbols sometimes had meanings from multiple angles. In this case, he realized there was indeed a way to view all seven symbols in a single language. “If we manipulated the hand slightly, the language will become consistent.” Eerily, the manipulation Langdon was about to perform was one that seemed to have been suggested by Peter’s captor already when he spoke the ancient Hermetic adage. As above, so below.

Langdon felt a chill as he reached out and grasped the wooden base on which Peter’s hand was secured. Gently, he turned the base upside down so that Peter’s extended fingers were now pointing straight down. The symbols on the palm instantly transformed themselves.

“From this angle,” Langdon said, “X–I-I–I becomes a valid Roman numeral — thirteen. Moreover, the rest of the characters can be interpreted using the Roman alphabet — SBB.” Langdon assumed the analysis would elicit blank shrugs, but Anderson’s expression immediately changed.

“SBB?” the chief demanded.

Sato turned to Anderson. “If I’m not mistaken, that sounds like a familiar numbering system here in the Capitol Building.”

Anderson looked pale. “It is.”

Sato gave a grim smile and nodded to Anderson. “Chief, follow me, please. I’d like a word in private.”

As Director Sato led Chief Anderson out of earshot, Langdon stood alone in bewilderment. What the hell is going on here? And what is SBB XIII?

Chief Anderson wondered how this night could possibly get any stranger. The hand says SBB13? He was amazed any outsider had even heard of SBB. much less SBB13. Peter Solomon’s index finger, it seemed, was not directing them upward as it had appeared. but rather was pointing in quite the opposite direction.

Director Sato led Anderson over to a quiet area near the bronze statue of Thomas Jefferson. “Chief,” she said, “I trust you know exactly where SBB Thirteen is located?”

“Of course.”

“Do you know what’s inside?”

“No, not without looking. I don’t think it’s been used in decades.”

“Well, you’re going to open it up.”