Exclusive Excerpt from “The Casio Killer”

Dan Brown’s latest Robert Langdon adventure

Chapter 96

AS THE complexity of the puzzle seared the synapses of his brain, all Robert Langdon could think was how much he hated pickles.

He tried to focus as he steered the rented Dodge Stratus into the parking lot of Houston’s First Methodist Church. After a nod to Stacy, they jumped out of the car and ran, hand in hand, towards the front door of the church. A drab, gray, boxy concrete structure, it was one of the least architecturally significant buildings in the history of religion. Langdon tingled with excitement.

He rapped three times on the massive oak slab door and listened, trying sort through the events of the previous 24 hours. The midnight call to his Cambridge house from the head of the Rocky Mountain Institute, desperately seeking his advice on a string of murders of the world’s top environmental scientists. Meeting geologist Stacy Bernstein, heir to the Vlassic pickle fortune, who despite the loss of her father just hours earlier seemed eager to sleep with him. The three victims, killed inside three churches in southeast Texas, all found with Casio calculators in their pockets. The number visible on the screen in each instance, 71077345. Taunting him like a numerical ghost.

“It’s one of the mmm-ost s-s-s-s-ophisticated encoding systems ever created by m-m-man,” Robert described to Stacy as they sat locked inside the walk-in freezer of a grocery store in Corpus Christi.

The discovery of the first example of an adding machine used as a code, Langdon explained through chattering teeth, won historian Rector Von Richter the Nobel Prize in 1924. Richter showed that Marco Polo secretly proposed to Princess Xei Xeling in 1292 through a message left on an abacus.

Langdon liked to use this example with students of his Crossword Puzzle Trivia Posing As Symbology course at Harvard.

“Does anyone know what came of Polo’s proposal?” he asked his class one autumn morning. Roland Vandenberg, star of the baseball team and class clown, raised his hand.

“The most annoying swimming pool game of all time?” The class roared with laughter and Langdon shook his head. A lifelong swimmer, Langdon new the Marco Polo pool game better than most. He considered telling his class that he wrote his Master’s thesis on it but realized they would never understand.

Snapping back to the present, Langdon grasped the polished brass handle of the church door, and finding it open, he entered. To the rear of the church a one-legged man in a kimono hopped towards the emergency exit. As they started in pursuit, something entered Langdon’s field of vision from above. He looked up, and a wave of nausea spread over him. Hanging from the rafters was a middle-aged man in Dockers and a cornflower blue dress shirt.

His jaw dropped as he recognized the victim – Jim Bundy, Professor of Oceanography at UC Santa Barbara and vociferous critic of offshore oil drilling.

Stacy pulled over a chair from the corner of the entryway and stood to get a closer look. “His chest pocket!” she gasped, reaching up towards his shirt. She removed a calculator and handed it to Langdon.

His eyes bulged as big as golf balls when he saw the familiar string of numbers. 71077345. Mocking him like the phone number of a girl who was screening her calls. Like Vittoria, for instance, the attractive entanglement physicist he slept with in “Angels & Demons” just hours after falling out of a helicopter.

“It’s the same code!” Stacy whispered.

“Yes, but what could it mean?” Langdon looked at his new friend, suddenly wishing she was Sophie, the cryptography expert from “The Da Vinci Code” who was cute, smart, and happened to be a direct descendent of the Son of God. He hadn’t seen Sophie since she cracked the keyless entry system to his Ford Expedition and fled his Cape Cod timeshare last autumn.

Langdon gave Stacy the calculator and did a handstand against the wall to try to regain his composure. For some reason, he always had his best ideas upside down.

Suddenly, the answer came to him like a fortune cookie with the answer inside. UPSIDE DOWN.

“Stacy, give me back that calculator,” he said, flipping back onto his feet and feeling the blood rush back to his legs. He turned the device around and looked at the screen.

ShELLOIL

“But what could it mean?” Stacy said breathlessly, looking over Robert’s shoulder. “It sounds like Yiddish.”

Langdon clicked his tongue in disapproval and smiled. “You’re a pickle heiress to your very core, Stacy,” he said, hoping he hadn’t said something anti-Semitic. But there wasn’t time for apologies. He had cracked the code.

He was already halfway to the car when Stacy ran out of the church, yelling. “She lloil? Shello il? Robert!”

An hour later, Langdon and his not-so-bright geologist friend were on a chartered jet headed to Alaska. He tried to rest, knowing that the very future of clean and renewable energy rested on his shoulders.