Sophie had spent the time between updates gaping in wonderment at Langdon. "You figured that out just now?" she asked. Apparently the rumor that Harvard professors were only good for use as lighter fluid was false. "Indeed." said Langdon, striking a dramatic Holmes like pose. Sophie, who appeared to be able to summon gum the way other french people summoned croissants, grabbed another packet out of thin air and stuffed it in her mouth, wrappers and all. Deep in thought, she began to chew furiously, as though the gum was a catalyst for thinking sounds.
"You know, you should really keep the wrappers separate, so you can spit the gum in it when you're done." observed Langdon. "We don't have time! I means seriously, unwrapping those tiny sticks takes, like, foreve hrr! We have to get to the Mona Lisa!" Sophie snapped. Through her giant mouthful of gum, it sounded more like, "Mpphhgarblesalaviate." However, since Langdon was a teacher, he was quite used to understanding people even when their words were garbled by gum. It was one of the few benefits of working with 'young people'.
"What happened to me escaping to glorious freedom in the American embassy?" asked Langdon nervously. It was beginning to sound more and more like he was about to be thrust into an over complicated adventure, which was not good at all. Adventures were bad for his liver. And they scared him.
"New plan!" shouted Sophie, tiny globes of gum shooting from her mouth and splattering across the canvas of a large and expansive painting. Before Langdon could escape, she grabbed his arm and dragged him off toward the Mona Lisa. "Help! Help! Raaape! Raaape!" he screamed as he was dragged down the hallway.
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Silas looked like he was praying. What he was actually doing was scanning the inside of the church with a contraption that was part night vision goggle, part themo-sensitive goggles, part EMF reader (Silas hunted ghosts in his spare time), and part tip calculator. It could also scale a fish, though the contraption had yet to serve that particular office.
So Silas wasn't praying. And honestly, with that giant mass of gears and lens clutching his face, he wasn't really doing a good job at pretending to pray either. Any sane, unmedicated observer would have guessed his plans in an instant. However, the nun who was spying on him was hopped up on pinkie toe medication. To her, Silas's actions seemed not only ordinary, but more pious than called for. She was convinced she was seeing a saint in action.
Unaware that he was being watched, Silas marched up to the alter of the church. The nun's breathing was erratic and heavy, as though she had been a chain smoker for her entire life, and continued to smoke many packs a day, even in her old age. This was, in fact, true. As she watched Silas, she was lighting up yet another cigar. If only Silas had not been listening to 'Bad Day' on his ipod, he might have been spared a lot of trouble later on.
There was this strange and very complicated line on the floor of this particular church, which looked a lot like a very very tall stick figure. Besides the fact that it resembled a crudely drawn man, this line was apparently out of place and unique. Silas didn't know why, really. The Teacher, while knowledgeable, was also long winded and dreadfully boring. While the Teacher had explained the complex relations of the line, the solstice, the Chinese zodiac and Barbra Walters, Silas had nodded off. Not that it mattered. All he really needed to know was that the line on the church floor pointed to what he sought...(gosh..one full sentence without a punch line. I'm slipping.)
Meanwhile, the bishop that had taken Silas under his wing was on a plane to some unknown destination for an unknown purpose. Besides being cryptic, this is irrelevant.
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Sophie arrived out of breath in front of the Mona Lisa. Langdon was nearly dead, and on the verge of complete cardiac meltdown. Harvard professors were not built with running in mind. Of course, both of them would have been in better condition, had Sophie not taken several wrong turns and ending up in the wrong wing of the Louve. She wanted to stop and ask a night watchman for directions, but Langdon convinced her that this was a bad idea. "I think I might be the only Caucasian male in a tweed suit and a John Deere hat wanted for murder at the time. They just might recognize me." he reasoned. Plus it was pretty darn conspicuous to be running around a museum at night.
After wasting nearly an hour, the pair finally stood, limbs flailing and organs heaving, before the Mona Lisa. "Hey before we mess with this...can I ask you a question?" asked Langdon from his position on the floor. He was talking between swigs of water, meant to chase his medication down his throat. "Shoot." said Sophie, prodding the Mona Lisa's nose with her pinkie finger. That moment, every person in France felt a slight twinge in their left nostril.
"Do the letters P.S mean anything else to you? Besides post script that is. Even I know that meaning." said Langdon. Sophie was suddenly flung into a flashback. She recalled a time when she was a snotty little child, who delighted in rooting into other people's things. One day, she broke into her grandfather's room with a small hatchet, and began to dig through his stuff. Like Bill Clinton to a secretary, Sophie went straight to her grandfather's chest of drawers. After burrowing through several layers of porn, a box of condoms (she inflated a few of these and made balloon animals out of them) bags of cocaine and a small caliber handgun, she found something interesting: a key. The key had the initials 'P.S' engraved on them. When Sophie's grandfather discovered that she had taken the key, he beat her within an inch of her life, and kept her home from school until the bruises healed. After that there was some other unless sentimental stuff about her childhood, then she returned to the present.
Blinking wildly, looked at Langdon, who was trying to rise from the Louve floor, "That shit with the aliens? Whateva makes ya think yer unstuck in time? That ain't...catching any chance, is it?" the vividness of the flashback had frightened her somewhat. Langdon cocked his head and looked at her, "Have you come unstuck in time as well? It's not bad really, but it can be a little hard on the gastric fluids." he cautioned. Sophie prayed she hadn't contracted what was screwing with Langdon's tiny brain.
"Forget it. The P.S did mean something else...it was on a key ah dug outta his cabinet when I was a shrimp." said Sophie hurriedly, "What's it to ya?" she asked.
"Well..." Langdom said, miming pulling an overhead screen down, "There is an secret society. Sort of like 'The Order of the Phoenix', but real. They call themselves the Priory of Sion. Da Vinci founded it." he explained, trading his John Deere hat for a hat reading Get-er-Done. Suddenly, Overworked Intern jumped from...out of nowhere really.
"FACT!" she shouted "The Priory of Sion was NOT founded by Da Vinci! It wasn't even around until 1956 when a low budget housing nut and an anti-Semitic crook founded it! It basically a front for embezzlement and fraud! Darnit Dan Brown! GOOGLE stuff before you write it!" she finished, out of breath and flushed with victory.
"SILENCE!" screamed Dan Brown, as he too sprang from some dark corner, "I'm a best selling author and can make up facts as I see fit! I shall squish the lungs of the fool who challenge my rightness! Be dead quick Catholic vermin! I have a meeting with Michael Moore at 2...in the morning." He whipped out a flame thrower, sending a great wall of flames in the general direction of Overworked Intern. She was spared from a painful and inferno-induced demise by the fact that Dan Brown's eyes were rolling so madly that his aim was off. Instead of roasting Overworked Intern, he toasted a few pieces of priceless art instead. Leaping away from the angry man, Overworked Intern escaped down a hallway. Dan Brown followed with his flamethrower, in literal hot pursuit.
Langdon and Sophie looked at each other and shrugged. "Anyway...P.S. They were founded by DaVinci, and a whole bunch of famous people joined it! Like Newton, Victor Hugo, Paris Hilton and Tom Cruise." said Langon, positively drooling with excitement. "I thought Tom Cruise was something else weird..." pointed out Sophie, "Somethin like sci..." that was as far as she got. Langdon had punched her in the jaw to shut her up, "Don't say their name! They have secret pirate lawyers that will hunt you down and kill you if you offend them." he warned, looking almost as wild-eyed as Dan Brown had been.
Sophie would have been mad that Langdon had punched her, but his skinny Harvard wrist couldn't manage much more then a tap, "Anyway." she continued, "What is this Priory thing all about?"
"Generally, you get member discounts on all Priory of Sion products, as well as a spiffy membership card, a t-shirt and a pass to go to the local Priory of Sion gym for free. But they also do goddess worship and hate on Catholic people." he explained, placing his John Deere hat on the statue of a naked man.
"Perhaps that has to do with the terrifying and life altering event I experienced as a young women, which, much to M3thod+Mak3r's chagrin, did not involve animal sacrifice. But more on that later. To the Mona Lisa." Sophie dragged Langdon a few feet, before announcing, "Behold the Mona Lisa."
"I could see it before..." muttered Langdon. Sophie kicked him enthusiastically in the groin, "This is France's treasure. Pay homage to it!" she said, genuflecting before the icon. Langon rolled his eyes, and was rewarded with another groin shot.
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Silas made it up to the alter. There was a hollow spot below the floor. Silas was happy, and began to break it open. In her medicated stupor, the nun had no idea what the man was up to. Then suddenly, like an unexpected ping pong ball, the answer hit her on the forehead. "He is here to steal our secret!" she said, very loudly. Silas did not hear her; he was listening to 'Minority' by Green Day now, headbanging to the music as he dug.
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Meanwhile, the commissioner had discovered that Sophie had told Langdon that they were pursuing him as a murder suspect. "SHITSHITSHITSHITTYSHITSHITSHITSHITSHITSHTI MERDE!" cursed the commissioner, using his nightstick liberally to bash in the skulls of his fellow officers. He would have gone on for hours like that, but the pace of the story had begun to pick up, and he had only a few sentences to make his point. And if there was one the commissioner was good it, it was being concisely violent.
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Langdon stared at the Mona Lisa. She stared back. "Quit laughing at me." he said to the painting, rubbing his injured manhood. Langdon new very well that the Mona Lisa was more than a tiny painting of a greenish and rather ugly woman. It was Da Vinci's way to praise the sacred feminine, as well as the wonders of drag. Behind the smudgy, blurry layers of cracked paint, there was a network of secrets and double meanings that would impress even Nixen. So claimed Langdon anyway. Langdon was also known for dragging deep symbolic meaning from the pictures on boxes of Trix cereal. It was a Harvard thing.
"Well, it appears by bringing us to this picture, your grandfather was trying to communicate to us his love for cross dressing. He wasn't actually a women was he?" Langdon asked Sophie. "Or maybe he was trying to get us to read the words he scrawled across the painting's face." she commented. In the last minutes of his life, Sophie's grandfather had removed the layers of protective bullet proof glass, fire proof glass and even soap proof glass to write directly on the artistic masterpiece. Using a felt tipped marker, he had written, "'Mona! Can't he do forks?" across Mona Lisa's forehead. He had also given her a mustache and eyeliner.
"Actually, she doesn't look so bad that way." commented Langdon. At that moment, ever French person on the planet had a near fatal heart attack, except for Sophie, leading Landgon to question her Frenchhood.
Sophie squinted at the words, "'oo! Can he do farts?' What the Hell is that supposed ta mean? That doesn't even make sense!" she said, poking the canvas and leaving an oily fingerprint smudge on the Mona Lisa's cheek. Not that it mattered. The posters in the Louve gift shop were in a better condition then the real painting at that point.
"I bet it's another anagram, meaning something weird like 'Madonna of the Rocks' or 'Catholics are mean spirited murderers who hate everyone and everything and are not above using, rape, pillaging, musical theater and Final Fantasy to ingrain their falsified propaganda in the minds of a helplessly gullible public'." said Langdon wisely. Sophie was stunned. "The Catholic church did all that? Well, it's a good thing that they didn't use an entertaining crime novel about a Harvard professor and a struggling cryptologist to trick millions of readers into thinking they actually knew what they were talking about." she said gravely. Langdon nodded in fear, hoping the Catholic church never discovered the power of popular fiction.