The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown Read Free Book Online

shouted, but they got no answer. Assuming it could only be a criminal, they followed protocol and called in the Judicial Police. We took up positions within fifteen minutes. When we arrived, we raised the barricade enough to slip underneath, and I sent a dozen armed agents inside. They swept the length of the gallery to corner the intruder.”
    “And?”
    “They found no one inside. Except . . .” He pointed farther down the hall. “Him.”
    Langdon lifted his gaze and followed Fache's outstretched finger. At first he thought Fache was pointing to a large marble statue in the middle of the hallway. As they continued, though, Langdon began to see past the statue. Thirty yards down the hall, a single spotlight on a portable pole stand shone down on the floor, creating a stark island of white light in the dark crimson gallery. In the center of the light, like an insect under a microscope, the corpse of the curator lay naked on the parquet floor.
    “You saw the photograph,” Fache said, “so this should be of no surprise.”
    Langdon felt a deep chill as they approached the body. Before him was one of the strangest images he had ever seen.
     
    The pallid corpse of Jacques Saunière lay on the parquet floor exactly as it appeared in the photograph. As Langdon stood over the body and squinted in the harsh light, he reminded himself to his amazement that Saunière had spent his last minutes of life arranging his own body in this strange fashion.
    Saunière looked remarkably fit for a man of his years . . . and all of his musculature was in plain view. He had stripped off every shred of clothing, placed it neatly on the floor, and laid down on his back in the center of the wide corridor, perfectly aligned with the long axis of the room. His arms and legs were sprawled outward in a wide spread eagle, like those of a child making a snow angel . . . or, perhaps more appropriately, like a man being drawn and quartered by some invisible force.
    Just below Saunière's breastbone, a bloody smear marked the spot where the bullet had pierced his flesh. The wound had bled surprisingly little, leaving only a small pool of blackened blood.
    Saunière's left index finger was also bloody, apparently having been dipped into the wound to create the most unsettling aspect of his own macabre deathbed; using his own blood as ink, and employing his own naked abdomen as a canvas, Saunière had drawn a simple symbol on his flesh—five straight lines that intersected to form a five-pointed star.
    The pentacle.
    The bloody star, centered on Saunière's navel, gave his corpse a distinctly ghoulish aura. The photo Langdon had seen was chilling enough, but now, witnessing the scene in person, Langdon felt a deepening uneasiness.
    He did this to himself.
    “Mr. Langdon?” Fache's dark eyes settled on him again.
    “It's a pentacle,” Langdon offered, his voice feeling hollow in the huge space. “One of the oldest symbols on earth. Used over four thousand years before Christ.”
    “And what does it mean?”
    Langdon always hesitated when he got this question. Telling someone what a symbol “meant” was like telling them how a song should make them feel—it was different for all people. A white Ku Klux Klan headpiece conjured images of hatred and racism in the United States, and yet the same costume carried a meaning of religious faith in Spain.
    “Symbols carry different meanings in different settings,” Langdon said. “Primarily, the pentacle is a pagan religious symbol.”
    Fache nodded. “Devil worship.”
    “No,” Langdon corrected, immediately realizing his choice of vocabulary should have been clearer.
    Nowadays, the term
pagan
had become almost synonymous with devil worship—a gross misconception. The word's roots actually reached back to the Latin
paganus,
meaning country-dwellers. “Pagans” were literally unindoctrinated country-folk who clung to the old, rural religions of Nature worship. In fact, so strong was the Church's