The heavily forested park known as the Bois de Boulogne was called many things, but the Parisiancognoscenti knew it as "the Garden of Earthly Delights." The epithet, despite sounding flattering,was quite to the contrary. Anyone who had seen the lurid Bosch painting of the same nameunderstood the jab; the painting, like the forest, was dark and twisted, a purgatory for freaks andfetishists. At night, the forest's winding lanes were lined with hundreds of glistening bodies forhire, earthly delights to satisfy one's deepest unspoken desires—male, female, and everything inbetween.
As Langdon gathered his thoughts to tell Sophie about the Priory of Sion, their taxi passed throughthe wooded entrance to the park and began heading west on the cobblestone crossfare. Langdonwas having trouble concentrating as a scattering of the park's nocturnal residents were alreadyemerging from the shadows and flaunting their wares in the glare of the headlights. Ahead, twotopless teenage girls shot smoldering gazes into the taxi. Beyond them, a well-oiled black man in aG-string turned and flexed his buttocks. Beside him, a gorgeous blond woman lifted her miniskirtto reveal that she was not, in fact, a woman.
Heaven help me! Langdon turned his gaze back inside the cab and took a deep breath.
"Tell me about the Priory of Sion," Sophie said.
Langdon nodded, unable to imagine a less congruous a backdrop for the legend he was about totell. He wondered where to begin. The brotherhood's history spanned more than a millennium... anastonishing chronicle of secrets, blackmail, betrayal, and even brutal torture at the hands of anangry Pope.
"The Priory of Sion," he began, "was founded in Jerusalem in 1099 by a French king namedGodefroi de Bouillon, immediately after he had conquered the city."Sophie nodded, her eyes riveted on him.
"King Godefroi was allegedly the possessor of a powerful secret—a secret that had been in hisfamily since the time of Christ. Fearing his secret might be lost when he died, he founded a secretbrotherhood—the Priory of Sion—and charged them with protecting his secret by quietly passing iton from generation to generation. During their years in Jerusalem, the Priory learned of a stash ofhidden documents buried beneath the ruins of Herod's temple, which had been built atop the earlierruins of Solomon's Temple. These documents, they believed, corroborated Godefroi's powerfulsecret and were so explosive in nature that the Church would stop at nothing to get them." Sophielooked uncertain.
"The Priory vowed that no matter how long it took, these documents must be recovered from therubble beneath the temple and protected forever, so the truth would never die. In order to retrievethe documents from within the ruins, the Priory created a military arm—a group of nine knightscalled the Order of the Poor Knights of Christ and the Temple of Solomon." Langdon paused.
"More commonly known as the Knights Templar."Sophie glanced up with a surprised look of recognition. Langdon had lectured often enough on theKnights Templar to know that almost everyone on earth had heard of them, at least abstractedly.
For academics, the Templars' history was a precarious world where fact, lore, and misinformationhad become so intertwined that extracting a pristine truth was almost impossible. Nowadays,Langdon hesitated even to mention the Knights Templar while lecturing because it invariably led toa barrage of convoluted inquiries into assorted conspiracy theories.
Sophie already looked troubled. "You're saying the Knights Templar were founded by the Priory ofSion to retrieve a collection of secret documents? I thought the Templars were created to protectthe Holy Land.""A common misconception. The idea of protection of pilgrims was the guise under which theTemplars ran their mission. Their true goal in the Holy Land was to retrieve the documents frombeneath the ruins of the temple.""And did they find them?"Langdon grinned. "Nobody knows for sure, but the one thing on which all academics agree is this:
The Knights discovered something down there in the ruins... something that made them wealthyand powerful beyond anyone's wildest imagination."Langdon quickly gave Sophie the standard academic sketch of the accepted Knights Templarhistory, explaining how the Knights were in the Holy Land during the Second Crusade and toldKing Baldwin II that they were there to protect Christian pilgrims on the roadways. Althoughunpaid and sworn to poverty, the Knights told the king they required basic shelter and requested hispermission to take up residence in the stables under the ruins of the temple. King Baldwin grantedthe soldiers' request, and the Knights took up their meager residence inside the devastated shrine.
The odd choice of lodging, Langdon explained, had been anything but random. The Knightsbelieved the documents the Priory sought were buried deep under the ruins—beneath the Holy ofHolies, a sacred............