The Da Vinci Code Chapter 33-37

Section 33 Sophie's SmartCar tore through the discretionary quarter, weaving past international safe havens and departments, at long last hustling out a side road and taking a correct turn around onto the gigantic avenue of Champs-Elysees. Langdon sat white-knuckled in the front seat, wound in reverse, filtering behind them for any indications of the police. He out of nowhere wished he had not chosen to run. You didn't, he reminded himself. Sophie had settled on the choice for him when she tossed the GPS speck out the washroom window. Presently, as they hurried away from the international safe haven, serpentining through inadequate traffic on Champs-Elysees, Langdon felt his choices breaking down. Despite the fact that Sophie appeared to have lost the police, at any rate for the occasion, Langdon questioned their karma would hold for long. In the driver's seat Sophie was angling in her sweater pocket. She expelled a little metal item and held it out for him. â€Å"Robert, you would be advised to view this. This is the thing that my granddad deserted me Madonna of the Rocks.† Feeling a shudder of expectation, Langdon took the article and inspected it. It was overwhelming and formed like a cruciform. His first sense was that he was holding a burial service pieu †a scaled down variant of a dedication spike intended to be stuck into the ground at a gravesite. Be that as it may, at that point he noticed the pole projecting from the cruciform was kaleidoscopic and triangular. The pole was additionally blemished with many small hexagons that had all the earmarks of being finely tooled and dissipated aimlessly. â€Å"It's a laser-cut key,† Sophie let him know. â€Å"Those hexagons are perused by an electric eye.† A key? Langdon had seen nothing like it. â€Å"Look at the other side,† she stated, moving to another lane and cruising through a crossing point. When Langdon turned the key, he felt his jaw drop. There, complicatedly embellished on the focal point of the cross, was an adapted fleur-de-lis with the initials P. S. !† Sophie,† he said,† this is the seal I outlined for you! The official gadget of the Priory of Sion.† She gestured. â€Å"As I let you know, I saw the key quite a while prior. He let me know never to discuss it again.† Langdon's eyes were still bolted on the embellished key. Its cutting edge tooling and age-oldsymbolism radiated a spooky combination of old and present day universes. â€Å"He disclosed to me the key opened a case where he kept numerous secrets.† Langdon felt a chill to envision what sort of insider facts a man like Jacques Sauniere may keep. What an old fellowship was doing with a cutting edge key, Langdon had no clue. The Priory existed for the sole reason for securing a mystery. A mystery of mind boggling power. Could this key have something to do with it? The idea was overpowering. â€Å"Do you recognize what it opens?† Sophie looked frustrated. â€Å"I was trusting you knew.† Langdon stayed quiet as he turned the cruciform in his grasp, looking at it. â€Å"It looks Christian,† Sophie squeezed. Langdon was not entirely certain about that. The leader of this key was not the customary since quite a while ago stemmed Christian cross yet rather was a square cross †with four arms of equivalent length †which originated before Christianity by fifteen hundred years. This sort of cross conveyed none of the Christian meanings of torturous killing related with the more drawn out stemmed Latin Cross, started by Romans as a torment gadget. Langdon was constantly shocked what a small number of Christians who looked upon† the crucifix† understood their image's brutal history was reflected in its very name:† cross† and† crucifix† originated from the Latin action word cruciare †to torment. â€Å"Sophie,† he said,† everything I can let you know is that equivalent equipped crosses like this one are viewed as tranquil crosses. Their square designs make them illogical for use in torturous killing, and their reasonable vertical and flat components pass on a characteristic association of male and female, making them emblematically predictable with Priory philosophy.† She gave him a fatigued look. â€Å"You have no clue, do you?† Langdon glared. â€Å"Not a clue.† â€Å"Okay, we need to get off the road.† Sophie checked her rearview reflect. â€Å"We need a protected spot to make sense of what that key opens.† Langdon thought longingly about his agreeable room at the Ritz. Clearly, that was impossible. â€Å"How about my hosts at the American University of Paris?† â€Å"Too self-evident. Fache will check with them.† â€Å"You must know individuals. You live here.† â€Å"Fache will run my telephone and email records, converse with my associates. My contacts are undermined, and finding an inn is nothing but bad since they all require identification.† Langdon thought about again whether he may have been exceptional off taking his risks letting Fache capture him at the Louver. â€Å"Let's call the consulate. I can clarify the circumstance and have the international safe haven send somebody to meet us somewhere.† â€Å"Meet us?† Sophie turned and gazed at him as though he were insane. â€Å"Robert, you're dreaming. Your international safe haven has no ward aside from on their own property. Sending somebody to recover us would be viewed as helping an outlaw of the French government. It won't occur. In the event that you stroll into your international safe haven and solicitation impermanent refuge, that is a certain something, however requesting that they make a move against French law authorization in the field?† She shook her head. â€Å"Call your international safe haven at the present time, and they are going to advise you to keep away from further harm and surrender yourself to Fache. At that point they'll vow to seek after strategic channels to get you a reasonable trial.† She looked up the line of exquisite customer facing facades on Champs-Elysees. â€Å"How much money do you have?† Langdon checked his wallet. â€Å"A hundred dollars. A couple of euro. Why?† â€Å"Credit cards?† â€Å"Of course.† As Sophie quickened, Langdon detected she was planning an arrangement. Dead ahead, toward the finish of Champs-Elysees, stood the Arc de Triomphe †Napoleon's 164-foot-tall tribute to his own military intensity †surrounded by France's biggest rotating, a nine-path behemoth. Sophie's eyes were on the rearview reflect again as they moved toward the rotational. â€Å"We lost them for the time being,† she said,† however we won't last an additional five minutes on the off chance that we remain in this car.† So take an alternate one, Langdon pondered, presently that we're hoodlums. â€Å"What are you going to do?† Sophie gunned the SmartCar into the revolving. â€Å"Trust me.† Langdon made no reaction. Trust had not gotten him exceptionally far tonight. Pulling back the sleeve of his coat, he checked his watch †a vintage, collector's-version Mickey Mouse wristwatch that had been a present from his folks on his tenth birthday celebration. Despite the fact that its adolescent dial frequently drew odd looks, Langdon had never claimed some other watch; Disney activitys had been his first prologue to the enchantment of structure and shading, and Mickey currently filled in as Langdon's day by day suggestion to remain youthful on the most fundamental level. Right now, nonetheless, Mickey's arms were slanted at an ungainly edge, showing a similarly cumbersome hour. 2:51 A. M. â€Å"Interesting watch,† Sophie stated, looking at his wrist and moving the SmartCar around the wide, counterclockwise rotating. â€Å"Long story,† he stated, pulling his sleeve down. â€Å"I envision it would need to be.† She gave him a fast grin and left the turning, heading due north, away from the downtown area. Scarcely making two green lights, she arrived at the third crossing point and took a hard right onto Boulevard Malesherbes. They'd left the rich, tree-lined avenues of the conciliatory neighborhood and dove into a darker mechanical neighborhood. Sophie took a fast left, and after a second, Langdon acknowledged where they were. Gare Saint-Lazare. In front of them, the glass-roofed train terminal looked like the ungainly posterity of a plane storage and a nursery. European train stations never rested. Indeed, even at this hour, about six taxi steered close to the fundamental passageway. Merchants kept an eye on trucks of sandwiches and mineral water while grungy children in rucksacks rose up out of the station scouring their eyes, glancing around as though attempting to recollect what city they were in now. Up ahead in the city, two or three city cops remained on the check offering headings to some befuddled visitors. Sophie pulled her SmartCar in behind the line of taxicabs and stopped in a red zone in spite of a lot of legitimate stopping over the road. Before Langdon could ask what was happening, she was out of the vehicle. She rushed to the window of the taxi before them and started addressing the driver. As Langdon escaped the SmartCar, he saw Sophie hand the cab driver a major wad of money. The cab driver gestured and afterward, to Langdon's bewilderment, hurried off without them. â€Å"What happened?† Langdon requested, joining Sophie on the control as the taxi vanished. Sophie was at that point heading for the train station entrance. â€Å"Come on. We're purchasing two tickets on the following train out of Paris.† Langdon rushed along next to her. What had started as a one-mile run to the U. S. International safe haven had now become an undeniable departure from Paris. Langdon was loving this thought less and less. Part 34 The driver who gathered Bishop Aringarosa from Leonardo Da Vinci International Airport pulled up in a little, unremarkable dark Fiat vehicle. Aringarosa reviewed a day when all Vatican transports were huge extravagance vehicles that donned grille-plate emblems and banners decorated with the seal of the Holy See. Those days are gone.Vatican vehicles were currently less pompous and quite often plain. The Vatican asserted this was to reduce expenses to all the more likely serve their sees, however Aringarosa associated it was more with a safety effort. The world had gone frantic, and in numerous pieces of Europe, promoting your adoration for Jesus Christ resembled painting a bull's-eye on the top of your vehicle. Packaging his dark cassock around himself, Ar