Page 57 of The Lost Symbol

His airy tone was becoming more genial with every step, and Trish noticed he was actively taking it all in. In the bright lights of the hallway, she also noticed that his face looked like he had a fake tan. Odd. Nonetheless, as they navigated the deserted corridors, Trish gave him a general synopsis of the SMSC’s purpose and function, including the various pods and their contents.

The visitor looked impressed. “Sounds like this place has a treasure trove of priceless artifacts. I would have expected guards posted everywhere.”

“No need,” Trish said, motioning to the row of fish-eye lenses lining the ceiling high above. “Security here is automated. Every inch of this corridor is recorded twenty-four/seven, and this corridor is the spine of the facility. It’s impossible to access any of the rooms off this corridor without a key card and PIN number.”

“Efficient use of cameras.”

“Knock on wood, we’ve never had a theft. Then again, this is not the kind of museum anyone would rob—there’s not much call on the black market for extinct flowers, Inuit kayaks, or giant squid carcasses.”

Dr. Abaddon chuckled. “I suppose you’re right.”

“Our biggest security threat is rodents and insects.” Trish explained how the building prevented insect infestations by freezing all SMSC refuse and also by an architectural feature called a “dead zone”—an inhospitable compartment between double walls, which surrounded the entire building like a sheath.

“Incredible,” Abaddon said. “So, where is Katherine and Peter’s lab?”

“Pod Five,” Trish said. “It’s all the way at the end of this hallway.”

Abaddon halted suddenly, spinning to his right, toward a small window. “My word! Will you look at that!”

Trish laughed. “Yeah, that’s Pod Three. They call it Wet Pod.”

“Wet?” Abaddon said, face pressed to the glass.

“There are over three thousand gallons of liquid ethanol in there. Remember the giant squid carcass I mentioned earlier?”

“That’s the squid?!” Dr. Abaddon turned from the window momentarily, his eyes wide. “It’s huge!”

“A female Architeuthis,” Trish said. “She’s over forty feet.”

Dr. Abaddon, apparently enraptured by the sight of the squid, seemed unable to pull his eyes away from the glass. For a moment, the grown man reminded Trish of a little boy at a pet-store window, wishing he could go in and see a puppy. Five seconds later, he was still staring longingly through the window.

“Okay, okay,” Trish finally said, laughing as she inserted her key card and typed her PIN number. “Come on. I’ll show you the squid.”

As Mal’akh stepped into the dimly lit world of Pod 3, he scanned the walls for security cameras. Katherine’s pudgy little assistant began rattling on about the specimens in this room. Mal’akh tuned her out. He had no interest whatsoever in giant squids. His only interest was in using this dark, private space to solve an unexpected problem.

CHAPTER 35

The wooden stairs descending to the Capitol’s subbasement were as steep and shallow as any stairs Langdon had ever traversed. His breathing was faster now, and his lungs felt tight. The air down here was cold and damp, and Langdon couldn’t help but flash on a similar set of stairs he had taken a few years back into the Vatican’s Necropolis. The City of the Dead.

Ahead of him, Anderson led the way with his flashlight. Behind Langdon, Sato followed closely, her tiny hands occasionally pressing into Langdon’s back. I’m going as fast as I can. Langdon inhaled deeply, trying to ignore the cramped walls on either side of him. There was barely room for his shoulders on this staircase, and his daybag now scraped down the sidewall.

“Maybe you should leave your bag above,” Sato offered behind him.

“I’m fine,” Langdon replied, having no intention of letting it out of his sight. He pictured Peter’s little package and could not begin to imagine how it might relate to anything in the subbasement of the U.S. Capitol.

“Just a few more steps,” Anderson said. “Almost there.”

The group had descended into darkness, moving beyond the reach of the staircase’s lone lightbulb. When Langdon stepped off the final wooden tread, he could feel that the floor beneath his feet was dirt. Journey to the center of the Earth. Sato stepped down behind him.

Anderson now raised his beam, examining their surroundings. The subbasement was less of a basement than it was an ultranarrow corridor that ran perpendicular to the stairs. Anderson shone his light left and then right, and Langdon could see the passage was only about fifty feet long and lined on both sides with small wooden doors. The doors abutted one another so closely that the rooms behind them could not have been more than ten feet wide.

ACME Storage meets the Catacombs of Domatilla, Langdon thought as Anderson consulted the blueprint. The tiny section depicting the subbasement was marked with an X to show the location of SBB13. Langdon couldn’t help but notice that the layout was identical to a fourteen-tomb mausoleum—seven vaults facing seven vaults—with one removed to accommodate the stairs they had just descended. Thirteen in all.

He suspected America’s “thirteen” conspiracy theorists would have a field day if they knew there were exactly thirteen storage rooms buried beneath the U.S. Capitol. Some found it suspicious that the Great Seal of the United States had thirteen stars, thirteen arrows, thirteen pyramid steps, thirteen shield stripes, thirteen olive leaves, thirteen olives, thirteen letters in annuit coeptis, thirteen letters in e pluribus unum, and on and on.

“It does look abandoned,” Anderson said, shining the beam into the chamber directly in front of them. The heavy wooden door was wide open. The shaft of light illuminated a narrow stone chamber—about ten feet wide by some thirty feet deep—like a dead-end hallway to nowhere. The chamber contained nothing more than a couple of old collapsed wooden boxes and some crumpled packing paper.

Anderson shone his light on a copper plate mounted on the door. The plate was covered with verdigris, but the old marking was legible: