bursts in ITS MEE! I WAS THE TURKEY ALL ALONG!
FuchsiaII - thanks for the tres extended review!
Public apology: Sorry for making fun of you readers last chapter. You know I love you. 3
While The Bull and Langdon were amusing themselves by doodling on Jacques Sauniere, the albino man was calling his Teacher. Actually, he had been trying to call the man for an hour, but Cingular's coverage just wasn't what they claimed it to be. Finally, the albino heard the comforting sounds of a ringing phone. Coverage at last! Pick up pick up pick up pick up...he pleaded silently. "Hello? Is that you Silas?" came the Teacher's voice. Silas gasped, "Gasp! How did you know it was me, Teacher?" he asked, bewildered. The Teacher laughed, "I'm like Santa Claus. I see you when you're sleeping, and know when you're awake, and all that jazz. I'm spooky like that." In reality, the Teacher had simply set a different ringtone for Silas's calls. It was something by Brittany Spears, though why he choose that particular song was still shrouded in mystery.
"Sir, it's done. I've killed all four of them, as well as some pizza guy who looked at me funny on the subway." reported Silas as he munched on a slice of pizza. "And what have you learned?" asked the Teacher, sounding cool but eager. "The keystone...it's in Paris. In a church. I have the address written down somewhere..." Silas fumbled through his pockets. "Here we go!" he said in triumph. "Right. You know what to do. Fetch." said the Teacher as he hung up. Silas snorted, "How rude." Pocketing his own cell phone, he nibbled on another slice of pizza while casually whipping himself, to atone for the day's sins. Apparently it never occurred to him that pain did not actually equal redemption. If it did, Heaven would be populated with loads of emo cutters. And seriously, is that the kind of eternity you want?
Back at the Louve, the commissioner's corpse-poking extravaganza was interrupted when his radio crackled. This was incredibly painful for him. Since the Paris government had spent so much money building all kinds of fancy 'national monuments', they had to cut back on other costs...like police supplies. As a result, half the police officers in Paris only carried water-pistols, and most had defective communications equipment. So, every time the commissioner's radio crackled, it did so literarily, sending a shower of sparks across the commissioner's groin. "MERDE!" he shouted, snatching the sparking device from it's location over his codpiece. "What do you want?" he snapped in French, which sounded suspiciously like English. "Voulez vous coucher avec moi ce soir." came the voice over the radio. "A cryptographer?" asked Langdon. "Yes! How did you know?" asked the commissioner. "Because of language roots. Duh." said Langdon. The commissioner stared at him for several long moments, "What part of 'Voulez vous coucher avec moi ce soir' sounds anything like 'cryptographer'?" "Um..." said Langdon, fiddling with the tape that was holding the bridge of his glasses together. The commissioner shrugged, than began shouting some random, inarticulate commands into his radio, mostly for the Hell of it.
The cryptographer in question was Miss Sophie Neveu, who was widely renowned as one of the worst cryptographers in French history. Every day, her superiors questioned not only how she had gotten her job, but why they allowed her to keep it. With a tendency to over complicate even the simplest code, it took Sophie and hour to accomplish what most trained cryptographers could do in minutes, just because she added so many extra steps. In that respect, she was not so different from Langdon. As for how she got the job in the first place, there were rumors that the took the Bull by the horn...
If the commissioner had anything to do with getting Sophie hired, he was regretting it. Despite his express wishes, she had forced her way to the crime scene, quite literarily. Her knee-to-the-groin kendo move was world famous. As she entered, the Bull shouted, "Hey bitch! Why don't you go clean something! This is man work!" "Huzzah!" shouted the french police officers, as they clicking glasses of Bud Lite and noisily scarfed down hamburgers. Sophie rolled her eyes. Twice actually. Through a mouth-full of bubble gum, she said, "Ya don't look like ya workin ta me." The commissioner and his cronnies gasped, "Darn, she's good!" one of them said as they tried to hide an obscenely large keg of beer. "Well booii tha way, I cracked that stinkin code 'a yours." she said, examining her long nails, which were painted a shocking red. Langdon, who should have been intensely interested in the code, was intensely interested in something else, cop with boobs cop with boobs cop with boobs... was the extent of his thinking.
"Before I tell ya, I gotta give Langdon a message. Lemmie see ya phone, commissh." she said, snapping her fingers. The commissioner fumbled with the device, handing it over to her. Hey wait! Why am I loaning her my phone? I don't even like her! Mind controlling BITCH! Thought the commissioner. However, his mind lost his body with his hand (a common problem with him) and Sophie got the phone. She, in turn dialed a number and threw the phone at Langdon. It bounced painfully off his forehead. "Yeh code is 454. I donno what the Embassy wants with yous." Langdon stooped to pick up the phone, then pressed the 'dial' key. Instantly, he heard a women's voice saying, "Voulez vous coucher avec moi ce soirYou have reached the voice mail of Sophie Neveu. Please leave a message after the beep, kaay?" Langdon blinked, briefly wondering why Sophie spoke English with a New York accent. Shaking the question off, he said, "Um...Miss Neveu...I think..." "Just dial the code." she said tiredly. Langdon complied. "Where's my snow, baby doll? You said you had 5 or 5 kilos coming my way, but I ain't seen nothing yet! Bitch, if you don't get that shit to me now I'll..." came the message. "Oh! Oops, I meant cha gotta type '545'. My mistake." Langdon hastily typed the new number, and the man's voice was replaced by, "Langdon! Don't react to this message, kay? You're in danger..." Langdon did react however. He wet his pants. Fortunately, the commissioner was too busy trying to 'touch' Sophie to notice.
Meanwhile Silas was just kind of sitting around. Now seems like a really good time to think about my past...yeah...let's go back there for a second. He thought, drifting like a plastic bag among his tortured memories. Once upon a time, he had been a child in a house-hold filled with troubles and violence. Then he had been a murderer. Then he had been a ghost, in a metaphorical (not metaphysical snare) sense, and an inmate where he was sexually abused. (For more on prison, read 'The Shawshank Redemption'. One word: eeew). When Silas had escaped the horrific prison, with a number of other inmates (one of which was Captain Jack Sparrow. Him and Silas went way back), Silas had been taken in by a kindly priest. My life has kinda sucked, hasn't it. Though Silas, throughly depressed. So, he did what he always did when he was feeling down: grabbed his self discipline whip and listened to 'Bad Day'. That always helped.
And the only reason you need to know that is so this makes sense:
Unbeknownst to Silas, his friend and mentor, the priest who had since become a bishop, just sold him to the infamous Teacher. His life was about to start sucking even more.
"The numbers from a popular American TV show?" said the commissioner, enraged. He stuffed another croissant in his mouth with fury. Langdon was wondering where all the croissants were coming from. It was his theory that french people could spawn them, the way that meat spawned maggots. "Yeeah." said Sophie, snapping her fingers. "Pretty obvious really. Ya know, if you had just Googled the numbers, ya wouldn't have needed to involve my department in the first place." "I demand a better explanation than that, Sophie! You are a cryptographer! Surely you can do better than that!" the commissioner shouted, his nose ring quivering with rage. Sophie shrugged, "That's all I got for yous." with a final snap she said, "See ya later commish!" and she strode of in a sexy and distracting way. The commissioner's rage was instantly replaced by lust, and Langdon had trouble concentrating on his phone message.
As the message finished up, he said, "I gotta go...take a pee." and rushed off down the hallway. The commissioner glared angrily at Langdon's back, little spurts of steam rising from his nostrils. He could do things like that, being commissioner and all. "Make sure take a whizz is all that Langdon does! That man is a raging lunatic, and a danger to the public!" shouted the commissioner as his eyes rolled madly and froth spewed out from between his lips. Dan Brown ran past a few times, taking random shots at paintings and tapestries. And an exit sign. Several police officers drooled over a picture on another man's camera phone; he had taken several pictures up Sophie's skirt while she was talking to Langdon. To their surprise and delight, she had not been wearing panties. "The most dangerous man in Paris...is Robert Langdon." repeated the commissioner.
Then everything froze while there was a set change.