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“Professor,” she said, with no hint of warmth. “Your assistance tonight, while reluctant, was critical to our success. and for that, I thank you.” She took a long drag on her cigarette and blew it sideways. “However, one final bit of advice. The next time a senior administrator of the CIA tells you she has a national-security crisis. ” Her eyes flashed black. “Leave the bullshit in Cambridge.”

Langdon opened his mouth to speak, but Director Inoue Sato had already turned and was headed off across the parking lot toward a waiting helicopter.

Simkins glanced over his shoulder, stone-faced. “Are you gentlemen ready?”

“Actually,” Solomon said, “just one moment.” He produced a small, folded piece of dark fabric and handed it to Langdon. “Robert, I’d like you to put this on before we go anywhere.”

Puzzled, Langdon examined the cloth. It was black velvet. As he unfolded it, he realized he was holding a Masonic hoodwink — the traditional blindfold of a first-degree initiate. What the hell?

Peter said, “I’d prefer you not see where we’re going.”

Langdon turned to Peter. “You want to blindfold me for the journey?”

Solomon grinned. “My secret. My rules.”

The breeze felt cold outside CIA headquarters in Langley. Nola Kaye was shivering as she followed sys-sec Rick Parrish across the agency’s moonlit central courtyard.

Where is Rick taking me?

The crisis of the Masonic video had been averted, thank God, but Nola still felt uneasy. The redacted file on the CIA director’s partition remained a mystery, and it was nagging at her. She and Sato would debrief in the morning, and Nola wanted all the facts. Finally, she had called Rick Parrish and demanded his help.

Now, as she followed Rick to some unknown location outside, Nola could not push the bizarre phrases from her memory: Secret location underground where the. somewhere in Washington, D.C., the coordinates. uncovered an ancient portal that led. warning the pyramid holds dangerous. decipher this engraved symbolon to unveil.

“You and I agree,” Parrish said as they walked, “that the hacker who spidered those keywords was definitely searching for information about the Masonic Pyramid.”

Obviously, Nola thought.

“It turns out, though, the hacker stumbled onto a facet of the Masonic mystery I don’t think he expected.”

“What do you mean?”

“Nola, you know how the CIA director sponsors an internal discussion forum for Agency employees to share their ideas about all kinds of things?”

“Of course.” The forums provided Agency personnel a safe place to chat online about various topics and gave the director a kind of virtual gateway to his staff.

“The director’s forums are hosted on his private partition, and yet in order to provide access to employees of all clearance levels, they’re located outside the director’s classified firewall.”

“What are you getting at?” she demanded as they rounded a corner near the Agency cafeteria.

“In a word. ” Parrish pointed into the darkness. “That.”

Nola glanced up. Across the plaza in front of them was a massive metal sculpture glimmering in the moonlight.

In an agency that boasted over five hundred pieces of original art, this sculpture — titled Kryptos — was by far the most famous. Greek for “hidden,” Kryptos was the work of American artist James Sanborn and had become something of a legend here at the CIA.

The work consisted of a massive S-shaped panel of copper, set on its edge like a curling metal wall. Engraved into the expansive surface of the wall were nearly two thousand letters. organized into a baffling code. As if this were not enigmatic enough, positioned carefully in the area around the encrypted S-wall were numerous other sculptural elements — granite slabs at odd angles, a compass rose, a magnetic lodestone, and even a message in Morse code that referenced “lucid memory” and “shadow forces.” Most fans believed that these pieces were clues that would reveal how to decipher the sculpture.

Kryptos was art. but it was also an enigma.

Attempting to decipher its encoded secret had become an obsession for cryptologists both inside and outside the CIA. Finally, a few years back, a portion of the code had been broken, and it became national news. Although much of Kryptos’s code remained unsolved to this day, the sections that had been deciphered were so bizarre that they made the sculpture only more mysterious. It referenced secret underground locations, portals that led into ancient tombs, longitudes and latitudes.