Library Search

After the keystone was stolen from them in the Temple Church, Robert Langdon and Sophie Neveu realized that their only chance to recover it and help the kidnapped Leigh Teabing was to find the knight's tomb before their enemies did. They took the London Underground to King's College, whose Department of Theology and Religious Studies housed one of the most advanced electronic religious research libraries in the world. The library's primary research room was an octagonal chamber dominated by a large round table surrounded by twelve flat-screen computer workstations. The reference librarian, Pamela Gettum, recognized Langdon immediately and agreed to help them despite their unannounced visit.

The Search Parameters

Langdon and Sophie, practicing compartmentalized cryptography, showed Gettum only the first two lines of Saunière's poem: "In London lies a knight a Pope interred. / His labor's fruit a Holy wrath incurred." Gettum began with a Boolean search using the keywords LONDON, KNIGHT, and POPE, but the initial results were too broad, returning over 2,600 hits including references to the eighteenth-century writer Alexander Pope. She refined the search by adding a proximity parameter, requiring the keywords to appear within one hundred words of Grail-related terms like GRAIL, ROSE, SANGREAL, and CHALICE. This narrowed the search to a manageable number of results.

The Breakthrough

After several false leads, the computer returned a hit for a biography titled "The Gravity of Genius: Biography of a Modern Knight." The hypertext keywords revealed that the subject was Sir Isaac Newton, who died in London in 1727 and was buried in Westminster Abbey. The full sentence showed that Newton's funeral was presided over by Alexander Pope, who gave a eulogy. Langdon immediately recognized the double meaning: "a knight a Pope interred" referred not to a Catholic Pope but to the poet Alexander Pope. This was a classic Saunière double-entendre, consistent with the Grand Master's love of wordplay and layered meanings. The poem's reference to "his labor's fruit a Holy wrath incurred" matched Newton's scientific work, which challenged Church doctrine.

The Confirmation

Langdon realized that Newton was not only a knight buried in London but also a former Grand Master of the Priory of Sion, making him a fitting subject for Saunière's final riddle. The identification of Newton's tomb as the location of the missing orb set the stage for the final confrontation at Westminster Abbey, where Langdon and Sophie would attempt to intercept Teabing and recover the keystone.