Quarantine--Novel Excerpt # 2: Red Herrings and the Da Vinci Code

The meeting with Dan Brown took place as arranged by the Gimp Brigade. It was via a video conference link since neither party had time to travel to the other’s current location. Due to the time differences between London and Surf City, the meeting was held just past midnight in Surf City.

Sir Gimp: Hello, Mr. Brown.

Brown: How are you?

Sir Gimp: Not too bad for a gimp, if you know what I mean.

Brown: I think I do. What’s on your mind today?

Sir Gimp: I’m trying to connect the dots between some pretty strange data points.

Brown: As you may well know, I’m no stranger to strange data points. What are we talking about here?

Sir Gimp: Quarantine, Skull and Bones, and the Illuminati.

Dan Brown: Wow. The Holy Trinity of tough stuff.

Sir Gimp: Really? How so?

Dan Brown: You’ve read my stuff about the Illuminati in my book Angels and Demons?

Sir Gimp: Well...er...it’s one of my wife’s favorite books.

Dan Brown: I see. You haven’t read it then?

Sir Gimp: No, not really.

Dan Brown: Don’t equivicate with me. I’m a big boy now. It won’t hurt my feelings.

Sir Gimp: Well, I wanted to read it. I’ve heard so much about....

Dan Brown: Yeah, I know. Everybody’s heard about that damn Da Vinci Code. That’s what you were going to say, right?

Sir Gimp: Yeah, I guess I was. That book is so famous.

Dan Brown: Yeah, too famous if you ask me.

Sir Gimp: What do you mean?

Dan Brown: Is this off the record?

Sir Gimp: You bet.

Dan Brown: And is the line secure?

Sir Gimp: Absolutely. When I asked the Gimp Brigade to set up this video link, they knew that this was a Level One. All of our Level One links feature the latest MI6 data encryption technologies.

Dan Brown: Good. After Israel, those MI6 guys are the best.

Sir Gimp: Now how is it that your book the Da Vinci Code is “too famous?”

Dan Brown: The truth is, Angels and Demons is the real Da Vinci Code.

Sir Gimp: What? Did I hear you right? The real Da Vinci Code is Angels and Demons.

Dan Brown: Yes. You heard me right. I only wrote the Da Vinci Code as a red herring.

Sir Gimp: Red herring? But...

Dan Brown: You probably know that a red herring is a diversion intended to distract attention from the real issue. This technique is often used in the mystery thriller genre. The author describes a set of events that seem to point to a particular suspect while drawing attention away from the real criminal.

Sir Gimp: So how is...

Dan Brown: Give me a moment to explain! Angles and Demons is an artful blend of fact and fiction. When Angels and Demons was published, there were certain codes existing in the manuscript that were upon later examination decided to be too transparent and could potententially be damaging.

Sir Gimp: You’re kidding. Damaging to who? The Catholic Church? The citizens of Italy. Who, Dan, who?

Dan Brown: Calm down man. Calm down. I bet your propellers are already in high gear. I can’t answer your “who?” questions until you know something about the book. Since you haven’t read it, here’s a brief summary:

The book features Harvard symbologist, Robert Langdon, as he tries to stop the Illuminati, a legendary secret society, from destroying the Vatican City with the newly-discovered power of antimatter.

CERN researcher, Leonardo Vetra, is found murdered in his secured, private quarters at the research facility. On his chest is branded a symbol — the word "Illuminati", formed as an ambigram. After researching the Internet, Director Maximillian Kohler contacts Professor Langdon, an expert on the Illuminati who has written a book on the subject, and requests his assistance in uncovering the murderer.

What Langdon discovers at the murder scene frightens him: the symbol appears to be authentic, and the legendary secret society, long thought to be defunct, seems to have resurfaced. The Illuminati has also appropriated CERN's supply of antimatter, the ultimate weapon, and has its sights on fulfilling a centuries-old dream: to destroy Vatican City.

Time runs short as Langdon and Vetra's adopted daughter, Vittoria, race to stop not only the Vatican's destruction, but to save the life of four cardinals who have been kidnapped by a deadly assassin.

If you’d have read both books, you would see that there are startling similarities between the two. Here are just a few:

• The protagonist, Robert Langdon, unravels a trail of mystical, ancient clues which leads to his discovering the truth about a legendary, secret society and its relationship to the Vatican.

• Maximilian Kohler and Bezu Fache are portrayed in such a way that the reader would suspect them to have masterminded the killings until the revelation takes place.

• There are two prominent cripples in the books: Maximilian Kohler and Sir Leigh Teabing. Both use this to their advantage by bringing revolvers to meetings with the camerlengo or Langdon/Niveau, respectively, and escaping metal detectors because of their conditions.

• Langdon and the female protagonist end the story with the implication of a sexual relationship.

• In both, a message is written on papyrus based paper. This is later destroyed when the paper comes in contact with water.

• The female characters have a father and daughter relationship with the characters assasinated at the beginning of the book.

Sir Gimp: My God. I don’t mean to be insulting Dan, but it’s like the same book written twice.

Dan Brown: Perhaps now you can begin to understand. It would be too easy for certain “interests” as we say, to read between the lines and discover things that should not, for the good of the world, be discovered. So I had to rewrite the book and write those codes out and plant other codes that would deliberately lead those interests in the wrong direction.

Sir Gimp: Which would really be the right direction.

Dan Brown: Exactly! Now do you see how the Da Vinci Code is a red herring?

Sir Gimp: I’m beginning to get the picture!

Dan Brown: So where Angels and Demons talks about the Illuminati, I replaced that term with Opus Dei. But its deeper, much deeper. The codes that were indvertantly put in Angels and Demons, were not just names like Illuminati. The names of towns, directions to particular places, even descriptions of certain buildings and food menus, all contained codes that had to be removed.

Now I was really attached to the basic story of Angels and Demons, so I couldn’t just kill it. One night after that, I had a dream, and in that dream a solution presented itself.

Sir Gimp: What was that?

Dan Brown: To rewrite the story, keeping the basics but adding enough esoteric and exoteric codes to send the readers in a completely different direction. So I made a deal with the publisher. They were to promote the rewrite (which eventually became the Da Vinci Code) in such a way that it would become a runaway bestseller, selling over 36 million copies (as of August 2005). Once the book became a huge hit, I began to relax. Everyone was off and running, chasing the new (false) codes all over the globe and the internet. An entire cottage industry was built up around the book. I was able to relax, feeling that the secrets of Angels and Demons and my life were safe.

Sir Gimp: Your life?

At this point something happened and the video transmission suddenly ended.

Sir Gimp was taken off balance. He was quite surprised by Dan Brown’s red herring story, but couldn’t help but wonder if that itself was a red herring. It wouldn’t be unlike Dan to pull something like that. It was part of the Da Vinci Code’s appeal; this blurring of the line between fiction and “reality.” Sir Gimp’s own writing had been criticized for the same reason. There were times that even Sir Gimp could not make these distinctions between his “real” life and his writing.