Angels Demons Page 0,72

pure language the Illuminati had been referring to? The path of light is laid, the sacred test...

"Uh oh," Vittoria said.

Langdon wheeled to see her rotating the folio upside down. He felt a knot in his gut. Not again. "There's no way that line is an ambigram!"

"No, it's not an ambigram... but it's..." She kept turning the document, 90 degrees at every turn.

"It's what?"

Vittoria looked up. "It's not the only line."

"There's another?"

"There's a different line on every margin. Top, bottom, left, and right. I think it's a poem."

"Four lines?" Langdon bristled with excitement. Galileo was a poet? "Let me see!"

Vittoria did not relinquish the page. She kept turning the page in quarter turns. "I didn't see the lines before because they're on the edges." She cocked her head over the last line. "Huh. You know what? Galileo didn't even write this."

"What!"

"The poem is signed John Milton."

"John Milton?" The influential English poet who wrote Paradise Lost was a contemporary of Galileo's and a savant who conspiracy buffs put at the top of their list of Illuminati suspects. Milton's alleged affiliation with Galileo's Illuminati was one legend Langdon suspected was true. Not only had Milton made a well-documented 1638 pilgrimage to Rome to "commune with enlightened men," but he had held meetings with Galileo during the scientist's house arrest, meetings portrayed in many Renaissance paintings, including Annibale Gatti's famous Galileo and Milton, which hung even now in the IMSS Museum in Florence.

"Milton knew Galileo, didn't he?" Vittoria said, finally pushing the folio over to Langdon. "Maybe he wrote the poem as a favor?"

Langdon clenched his teeth as he took the sheathed document. Leaving it flat on the table, he read the line at the top. Then he rotated the page 90 degrees, reading the line in the right margin. Another twist, and he read the bottom. Another twist, the left. A final twist completed the circle. There were four lines in all. The first line Vittoria had found was actually the third line of the poem. Utterly agape, he read the four lines again, clockwise in sequence: top, right, bottom, left. When he was done, he exhaled. There was no doubt in his mind. "You found it, Ms. Vetra."

She smiled tightly. "Good, now can we get the hell out of here?"

"I have to copy these lines down. I need to find a pencil and paper."

Vittoria shook her head. "Forget it, professor. No time to play scribe. Mickey's ticking." She took the page from him and headed for the door.

Langdon stood up. "You can't take that outside! It's a - "

But Vittoria was already gone.

Chapter 55-57

55

Langdon and Vittoria exploded onto the courtyard outside the Secret Archives. The fresh air felt like a drug as it flowed into Langdon's lungs. The purple spots in his vision quickly faded. The guilt, however, did not. He had just been accomplice to stealing a priceless relic from the world's most private vault. The camerlegno had said, I am giving you my trust.

"Hurry," Vittoria said, still holding the folio in her hand and striding at a half-jog across Via Borgia in the direction of Olivetti's office.

"If any water gets on that papyrus - "

"Calm down. When we decipher this thing, we can return their sacred Folio 5."

Langdon accelerated to keep up. Beyond feeling like a criminal, he was still dazed over the document's spellbinding implications. John Milton was an Illuminatus. He composed the poem for Galileo to publish in Folio 5... far from the eyes of the Vatican.

As they left the courtyard, Vittoria held out the folio for Langdon. "You think you can decipher this thing? Or did we just kill all those brain cells for kicks?"

Langdon took the document carefully in his hands. Without hesitation he slipped it into one of the breast pockets of his tweed jacket, out of the sunlight and dangers of moisture. "I deciphered it already."

Vittoria stopped short. "You what?"

Langdon kept moving.

Vittoria hustled to catch up. "You read it once! I thought it was supposed to be hard!"

Langdon knew she was right, and yet he had deciphered the segno in a single reading. A perfect stanza of iambic pentameter, and the first altar of science had revealed itself in pristine clarity. Admittedly, the ease with which he had accomplished the task left him with a nagging disquietude. He was a child of the Puritan work ethic. He could still hear his father speaking the old New England aphorism: If it wasn't painfully difficult, you did it wrong. Langdon hoped the saying was false.