Dan Brown - The Lost Symbol

Eyeing the holographic storage units, Mal’akh produced Trish’s key card and inserted it in the door’s security panel. To his surprise, the panel did not light up. Apparently, access to this room was not a trust extended to Trish Dunne. He now reached for the key card he had found in Katherine’s lab-coat pocket. When he inserted this one, the panel lit up.

Mal’akh had a problem. I never got Katherine’s PIN. He tried Trish’s PIN, but it didn’t work. Stroking his chin, he stepped back and examined the three-inch-thick Plexiglas door. Even with an ax, he knew he would be unable to break through and obtain the drives he needed to destroy.

Mal’akh had planned for this contingency, however.

Inside the power-supply room, exactly as Peter had described, Mal’akh located the rack holding several metal cylinders resembling large scuba tanks. The cylinders bore the letters LH, the number 2, and the universal symbol for combustible. One of the canisters was connected to the lab’s hydrogen fuel cell.

Mal’akh left one canister connected and carefully heaved one of the reserve cylinders down onto a dolly beside the rack. Then he rolled the cylinder out of the power-supply room, across the lab, to the Plexiglas door of the data-storage room. Although this location would certainly be plenty close enough, he had noticed one weakness in the heavy Plexiglas door — the small space between the bottom and the jamb.

At the threshold, he carefully laid the canister on its side and slid the flexible rubber tube beneath the door. It took him a moment to remove the safety seals and access the cylinder’s valve, but once he did, ever so gently, he uncocked the valve. Through the Plexiglas, he could see the clear, bubbling liquid begin draining out of the tube onto the floor inside the storage room. Mal’akh watched the puddle expand, oozing across the floor, steaming and bubbling as it grew. Hydrogen remained in liquid form only when it was cold, and as it warmed up, it would start to boil off. The resulting gas, conveniently, was even more flammable than the liquid.

Remember the Hindenburg.

Mal’akh hurried now into the lab and retrieved the Pyrex jug of Bunsen-burner fuel — a viscous, highly flammable, yet noncombustible oil. He carried it to the Plexiglas door, pleased to see the liquid hydrogen canister was still draining, the puddle of boiling liquid inside the data-storage room now covering the entire floor, encircling the pedestals that supported the holographic storage units. A whitish mist now rose from the boiling puddle as the liquid hydrogen began turning to gas… filling the small space.

Mal’akh raised the jug of Bunsen-burner fuel and squirted a healthy amount on the hydrogen canister, the tubing, and into the small opening beneath the door. Then, very carefully, he began backing out of the lab, leaving an unbroken stream of oil on the floor as he went.

The dispatch operator handling 911 calls for Washington, D.C., had been unusually busy tonight. Football, beer, and a full moon, she thought as yet another emergency call appeared on her screen, this one from a gas-station pay phone on the Suitland Parkway in Anacostia. A car accident probably.

“Nine-one-one,” she answered. “What is your emergency?”

“I was just attacked at the Smithsonian Museum Support Center,” a panicked woman’s voice said. “Please send the police! Forty-two-ten Silver Hill Road!”

“Okay, slow down,” the operator said. “You need to —”

“I need you to send officers also to a mansion in Kalorama Heights where I think my brother may be held captive!”

The operator sighed. Full moon.

“As I triedto tell you,” Bellamy was saying to Langdon, “there is more to this pyramid than meets the eye.”

Apparently so. Langdon had to admit that the stone pyramid sitting in his unzipped daybag looked much more mysterious to him now. His decryption of the Masonic cipher had rendered a seemingly meaningless grid of letters.

Chaos .

For a long while, Langdon examined the grid, searching for any hint of meaning within the letters — hidden words, anagrams, clues of any sort — but he found nothing.

“The Masonic Pyramid,” Bellamy explained, “is said to guard its secrets behind many veils. Each time you pull back a curtain, you face another. You have unveiled these letters, and yet they tell you nothing until you peel back another layer. Of course, the way to do that is known only to the one who holds the capstone. The capstone, I suspect, has an inscription as well, which tells you how to decipher the pyramid.”

Langdon glanced at the cube-shaped package on the desk. From what Bellamy had said, Langdon now understood that the capstone and pyramid were a “segmented cipher” — a code broken into pieces. Modern cryptologists used segmented ciphers all the time, although the security scheme had been invented in ancient Greece. The Greeks, when they wanted to store secret information, inscribed it on a clay tablet and then shattered the tablet into pieces, storing each piece in a separate location. Only when all the pieces were gathered together could the secrets be read. This kind of inscribed clay tablet — called a symbolon — was in fact the origin of the modern word symbol .

“Robert,” Bellamy said, “this pyramid and capstone have been kept apart for generations, ensuring the secret’s safety.” His tone turned rueful. “Tonight, however, the pieces have come dangerously close. I’m sure I don’t have to say this… but it is our duty to ensure this pyramid is not assembled.”

Langdon found Bellamy’s sense of drama to be somewhat overwrought. Is he describing the capstone and pyramid… or a detonator and nuclear bomb? He still couldn’t quite accept Bellamy’s claims, but it hardly seemed to matter. “Even if this is the Masonic Pyramid, and even if this inscription does somehow reveal the location of ancient knowledge, how could that knowledge possibly impart the kind of power it is said to impart?”

“Peter always told me you were a hard man to convince — an academic who prefers proof to speculation.”

“You’re saying you do believe that?” Langdon demanded, feeling impatient now. “Respectfully… you are a modern, educated man. How could you believe such a thing?”

Bellamy gave a patient smile. “The craft of Freemasonry has given me a deep respect for that which transcends human understanding. I’ve learned never to close my mind to an idea simply because it seems miraculous.”

Frantically,the SMSC perimeter patrolman dashed down the gravel pathway that ran along the outside of the building. He’d just received a call from an officer inside saying that the keypad to Pod 5 had been sabotaged, and that a security light indicated that Pod 5’s specimen bay door was now open.

What the hell is going on?!

As he arrived at the specimen bay, sure enough he found the door open a couple of feet. Bizarre, he thought. This can only be unlocked from the inside. He took the flashlight off his belt and shone it into the inky blackness of the pod. Nothing. Having no desire to step into the unknown, he moved only as far as the threshold and then stuck the flashlight through the opening, swinging it to the left, and then to the —

Powerful hands seized his wrist and yanked him into the blackness. The guard felt himself being spun around by an invisible force. He smelled ethanol. The flashlight flew out of his hand, and before he could even process what was happening, a rock-hard fist collided with his sternum. The guard crumpled to the cement floor… groaning in pain as a large black form stepped away from him.