Secrets of The Lost Symbol

by Daniel Burstein

  Initially, there wasn’t any prize to be won. It was a chance for Dan Brown’s fans to have some fun. For mere bragging rights, people from all over the world had a chance to decrypt ciphers, grope at historical references, and soak up the deeper meaning of symbols of all cultures. Eventually, the marketing buzz coalesced into a contest to win one of thirty-three copies of The Lost Symbol signed by the author.

  That was the outer envelope of what was going on. But, like all mysteries, including The Lost Symbol, there were deeper levels. What developed was a special little cyber realm of a very few people who stayed up late into the night solving the puzzles. They formed a loose affiliation, fulfilling the promise of social networking. And there were moments of intrigue.

  It all started on June 23 when Facebook’s page for Dan Brown, and his Twitter page for The Lost Symbol, posted a clue: “Codes of ethics? T 10 C; 6 P O T SOD; 12 S O T Z.”

  This was promptly solved by—among others—Christopher Hodapp, author of Freemasons for Dummies and a leading figure in Freemasonry, who hosts his own blogsite at http://www.freemasonsfordummies.blogspot.com and is writing Deciphering the Lost Symbol: Freemasons, Myths and Mysteries of Washington, D.C.

  Hodapp decoded the clue as follows: “The 10 Commandments; 6 Points Of The Star Of David; 12 Signs Of The Zodiac.”

  The following day, more clues were posted by Doubleday, and thus began a steady stream, two to four clues on practically every weekday, right through the summer. Before the spigot was turned off, on the eve of TLS’s release on September 15, there were about 130 clues.

  In short order, another Freemason and author, Mark Koltko-Rivera, cranked up a blogsite, http://lostsymboltweets.blogspot.com, and began to post the clues daily in sequence, along with decryptions and thought-provoking explications. Very soon, he commanded a following. If you were going to try to keep track of the action on Lost Symbol clues, you more or less had to keep tabs on Hodapp’s or Koltko-Rivera’s blogs. (At times, Kathleeen Schmid Koltko-Rivera, Mark’s wife, was the puzzle solver.) Koltko-Rivera is a contributor to Secrets of The Lost Symbol. (See page 307 for his take on the Doubleday clues and chapter 2 for his essay on Masonic rituals.)

  Within days, Hodapp revealed another solution, to a puzzle posed as “MAEIETCTETAOTHPL.” This turned out to be one of Dan Brown’s previously used favorite coding systems, the Caesar square. If you put the letters in four rows of four, you get:

  M A E I

  E T C T

  E T A O

  T H P L

  If you now read down each column in turn, you get “MEET AT THE CAPITOL.” To all who were hoping to confirm that TLS would be set in Washington, this seemed to do the trick. As it turned out, this clue exactly presaged the plot of TLS, since Robert Langdon was taken directly to the Capitol building on his arrival in Washington.

  Another author joined the Twitter chatter in late June: Greg Taylor, an Australian who had long studied esoterica and for years had hosted a Web site at dailygrail.com. He had authored a predictive book about the sequel to The Da Vinci Code in 2004 called Da Vinci in America that eventually was retitled to The Guide to Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol. Taylor also had a blog at www.thecryptex.com to keep track of news about Dan Brown and TLS. On his Twitter account, he logged in the answers as people solved them, and he provided encouragement and shared bits of intel.

  There were now hundreds of netizens making stabs at solving the daily clues. At first it was a cacophony, with many players and many wild guesses or blurted-out half-solutions. But then a pattern began to emerge. Some of the puzzle sleuths were simply better at it than the others. Sometimes they were quicker, sometimes more accurate, and sometimes both.

  One star emerged almost from the start. She was Cheryl Lynn Helm, a music scholar and choral arranger from Delaware. She showed a full complement of skills, from the ability to decode ciphers to rapidly using search engines to ferret out answers to historical riddles. Here’s one:

  Near the buttonwood’s accord lies a field of Christ.

  His marker there would make even Khafra smile.

  The clue was posted on Facebook at 11:18 a.m. on July 9. Just twelve minutes later, Cheryl Helm posted the answer: the grave of Alexander Hamilton, America’s first secretary of the treasury. Helm had quickly discovered that Hamilton’s grave, topped with a pyramid (à la Khafra, a pharaoh entombed in Giza’s second-largest pyramid), lies in Trinity Churchyard, not far from New York’s Wall Street, where an agreement was signed in 1792 that established the New York Stock Exchange.

  Everything began to accelerate. Now it was almost a requirement that you needed to be on Twitter continuously while also monitoring Facebook and checking in every hour or two at several other Web sites and blogs. Dan Brown’s Twitter account eventually acquired more than 4,900 followers and, in turn, the Doubleday team was following more than 5,300 people on Twitter; meanwhile, Dan Brown’s Facebook page acquired more than 99,000 fans.

  Two other adepts began to work their way into the foreground. One was Simon Cassidy, a retired software engineer from England who divides his time between San Francisco and New Zealand. Cassidy is also an expert on Stonehenge and on the Elizabethan-era magus, John Dee. Another was Sari Valon, a writer from the Toronto area.

  Enter, too, a young computer programmer from Kansas with the improbable name of Bill Gates. As one of his hobbies, Gates had taken an interest in cryptography, and had even worked out his own algorithm for deciphering codes. Gates began to solve The Lost Symbol puzzles like a grand master, nailing the answers quicker than others, or at times being the only one to achieve a solution.

  In late July, Gates achieved an astounding solution of a two-part puzzle, one that almost defies description. (He actually published an explanation of it for those fascinated few who tried to keep up with him.)

  The clue confronting Gates was an image of a series of books on a shelf, with their titles obviously Photoshopped. The titles were anagrams that, when solved, spelled out cryptic instructions: “reverse alpha,” “number letter,” “follow sequence,” and “Vignere keyword.” (The last is a misspelling that refers to the Vigenere cipher technique, a “polyalphabetic cipher” that is arcane except to cryptography buffs.)

  Gates deduced that these instructions and a further line of code were to be applied to the solutions to the ten previous clues. These solutions had to be arranged in reverse alphabetical order, then the coded line could be applied by row and letter sequence, to find a single word solution: “enigma.” It would be tempting to stop at that point because Enigma was the nickname of the famous encryption machine used by the Germans in World War II.

  But a new image clue was posted by Doubleday, a series of apparently random letters in rows and columns, inscribed on a stone column. As Gates explained it, “At first I thought it was a columnar transcription cipher, which led me down a series of wrong paths and wasted several hours of my life.” However, using letter frequency analysis, Gates came to the conclusion that his strategy wasn’t going to yield an answer in English text.

  “After opening my mind to other possible types of ciphers, one of the clues from the first part of the puzzle jumped out at me—‘Vignere keyword,’ ” Gates said. “I had thought this was just a part of the first puzzle I hadn’t figured out what to do with yet. Then I realized that the solution to the puzzle was the keyword for a Vigenere cipher. So, the letters on the column are a Vigenere cipher, and the keyword is enigma. With that information I could quickly decipher the column text.”

  Gates came up with the answer, a quote from an obscure English cleric of the eighteenth century, Robert Hall: “A religion without its mystery is a temple without a god.” This well-turned phrase would later prove intellectually meaningful in the context of reading TLS (whereas many of the clues turned out to be red herrings), but Robert Hall was not part of the plot or otherwise directly relevant to the book.
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  The complexity of this particular solution began to lead some of us to wonder if Dan Brown really planned on incorporating such difficult codes into The Lost Symbol. As it turned out, Vigenere ciphers and the other really difficult coding methods did not appear in TLS. It also led to the suspicion that the unseen team at Doubleday launching the clues on the Web was not necessarily following any strict adherence to TLS, and they may not have seen the book’s manuscript.

  One clue brought this question into focus: “Mystery: Unmarked $20s. Airstair escape. Never seen again.”

  The answer was D. B. Cooper, the legendary airline hijacker who parachuted from the aft stairs of a Boeing 727 over Washington State in 1971 and was never caught. How did this connect with TLS? It didn’t. No one could find any connection. And there were further daily clues that pointed to great thefts and crimes, often involving artwork, but not really related to TLS, as it turned out.

  In other words, the Doubleday team was tossing out red herrings.

  It didn’t much matter, because now a remarkable transformation was occurring. The top puzzle sleuths—Bill Gates, Cheryl Helm, Simon Cassidy, and Sari Valon—began to meld themselves into a team. From here on out, they began to collaborate, and they made a ferocious combination, quite like a pack of hounds with the scent of a quarry in the air.

  Each day they would check the clues and begin to tweet suggestions and share discoveries. They would solve the puzzles, usually within minutes of their posting. After a while it no longer even mattered whether they got recognition, so they frequently began to skip mentioning the answers on the Facebook page. It was sufficient that their followers on Twitter could see their success. They had become a “crowd-sourcing” team—or, perhaps, a posse.

  Gates and Helm typically led the way in solving ciphers (including a supercomplicated “Vigenere autokey cipher”), but everyone in the posse joined in for the other clues, and usually solved them in minutes. Once in a while, though, they would still be at it past midnight, and that’s when Greg Taylor would chime in from Down Under, half a day ahead by time zones, with a tip or suggestion.

  I also got into the fray, mainly as a kind of cheerleader, although I did offer an occasional suggestion. Simon Cassidy and Bill Gates each credit me with one instance of being useful. Most of the time, I would have barely conjured up a strategy to try, when I would see the tweet or Facebook entry from one of the others, announcing a solution.

  Every conceivable symbolic coding system was thrown into the mix. There were clues in Egyptian hieroglyphics, Babylonian cuneiform, semaphore flags, Morse code, plenty of rebuses, and a healthy serving of ambigrams. In Angels & Demons, Dan Brown had provided a prominent display case for the exquisite ambigrams of the very talented John Langdon (a real-life friend of the Brown family whose surname was appropriated by Dan Brown in creating Robert Langdon). In the Doubleday team’s ambigrams, though, it was evident that Langdon’s touch was missing.

  One clue used a special alphabet, the unique stick figures from the Sherlock Holmes story “The Adventure of the Dancing Men,” by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. One clue was written in Hebrew, another in Basque.

  One clue was a very short snippet of written music—not even two full measures—and Cheryl Helm pounced quickly, within minutes announcing it was “Mozart: Rondo Alla Turca, from Sonata #11, K 331.” Mozart was a Freemason and composed many pieces of Masonic music.

  A series of clues for about a week seemed to be related to the general theme of women in history. Some of these answers included Queen Boudicca, Olympias (a snake-worshipping Greek princess), Cleopatra, Artemisia Gentileschi (an Italian Baroque painter), Emily Dickinson, and Wu Zetian (China’s only empress). It appears that none of them were connected to TLS specifically.

  Some of the puzzles were crafted in ways that required a bit of graphic skill. In one case, an image hid some letters until you changed the color balance and contrast in Photoshop, then the words “Invisible College” appeared. This is the name that the early members of the Royal Society gave themselves in seventeenth-century England. In those days, science and alchemy were essentially the same pursuits, but the Royal Society eventually came to stand for the pinnacle of scientific endeavors. Meanwhile, the coincidence that many of its members were also early Freemasons led to rumors of conspiracy. Isaac Newton was a president of the Royal Society, and later Benjamin Franklin was welcomed into its ranks. Both were connected to themes in TLS. Several other members of the Royal Society ended up being mentioned in the book, which also tells the story of the Invisible College and its transformation into the Royal Society.

  Another puzzle offered a grid of seemingly random letters, along with a black rectangle with some holes in it. If you could superimpose the black mask onto the grid, you could discover the sequence “stormonthesea,” which refers to Storm on the Sea of Galilee, a painting by Rembrandt that was stolen in 1990 from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston and has never been recovered, a heist said to be the largest art theft in history. Intriguing as the story of the museum heist is, none of it seemed to have any link to TLS.

  In early August, Bill Gates made a startling discovery. While the Doubleday team was releasing clues on Facebook and Twitter, Amazon.com had been posting the same clues on its sales page for TLS, apparently as a means of archiving the clues. However, Amazon had gotten out of sync, and the clues for the following day were being posted one day early!

  Gates promptly solved the clues and posted the answers. He also shared this news with the posse, and now they all fell into a routine of waiting until around midday when Amazon posted the new clues (for the following day), then solving them before most of the rest of the world had even seen them. They openly tweeted about it, but Doubleday never changed the routine, right up to the last clue, which was still released a day early on the Amazon page.

  But Gates and the posse had other challenges anyway. In July, Doubleday had released images of the dust jackets of TLS on U.S. and U.K. editions. On the U.S. jacket, there were lots of symbols and it was clear that some were arrayed as codes to be solved. There were two series of codes printed in red ink. One was a bunch of numbers, and Gates turned his attention to it.

  In decoding ciphers, sometimes a simple “brute force” method works best. Gates had a piece of software that simply tried out all the letter combinations that corresponded with the red numbers. It gave him a couple of dozen possible answers, but one stood out: POPES PANTHEON. It seemed the likely answer, and could apply to two different structures, both designed by John Russell Pope. One is the Scottish Rite’s House of the Temple, which figures prominently in TLS, and might be considered a “pantheon” in the sense that the Freemasons honor all religions there. The other is the Jefferson Memorial, which was specifically patterned after the Pantheon of Rome. Gates solved this in late August, well ahead of anyone else.

  The other group of red codes were scattered around the front jacket and spine; the back of TLS wasn’t revealed (and wouldn’t be until the book was released). But Gates and the posse could make a number of deductions. First, they recalled that when The Da Vinci Code was released, there was a contest that involved calling a phone number at Random House in New York. Second, the codes that were visible were B1, C2, H5, J5, hinting that the full sequence would correspond to letter-number pairs from A through J—in other words, likely a ten-digit phone number. Not only that, but it was possible to guess the Random House (the parent publishing company that owns Doubleday) office telephone exchange in New York. Gates had it figured out down to (212) 782-?5?5 and he knew that some netizens were surely dialing all 100 of the possible number combinations, hoping to score way ahead of everyone else, but he was reluctant to disturb that many people by calling wrong numbers. (This coded number is not to be confused with Peter Solomon’s phone number in Washington, published openly on page 15 of TLS, which many readers tried dialing—only to get a waggish Brownian message that pu
rported to be from Peter Solomon.)

  As expected, confirmation of a phone-number quest soon surfaced. At Dan Brown’s official The Lost Symbol Web site (thelostsymbol.com) on September 8, a contest called Symbol Quest opened up, and Gates and the posse soared over this hurdle. It involved answering 33 riddles to identify 33 symbols in perfect sequence, and dropping them into a center ring. If you did that without error, you got a voice message from Dan Brown saying that the TLS dust jacket would contain an encoded phone number. The first thirty-three people to call that number would receive copies of TLS signed by Dan Brown himself.

  It got down to the final week before the September 15 release of The Lost Symbol. At the Today show on NBC, Matt Lauer began to announce the last daily clues, a series of four locations that would definitely appear in TLS. Gates and the posse aced the first three locations (Smithsonian Support Center, U.S. Botanical Garden, House of the Temple) and only got the last one wrong because they listened to an errant journalist (me), who had been allowed into the deliberations and suggested Union Station. Otherwise, they would surely have chosen correctly, the George Washington Masonic National Memorial.

  And now it was the eve of TLS’s release, September 14, 2009. Everyone was hoping for a peek at the back of the dust jacket, which would reveal the last two digits of the phone number. And somehow, someone got it—Gates doesn’t know who. But he credits Greg Taylor for passing along the two numbers, and they were shared with the posse. For a very short window of time, each caller was instructed to send an e-mail to a specific address, with “Robert Langdon’s favorite symbol” mentioned in the subject (it’s the Egyptian ankh).

  At press time, Bill Gates and Cheryl Helm were proud recipients of their TLS copies, signed in silver ink by Dan Brown. Simon Cassidy and Sari Valon were still hoping.