The Lost Symbol - Book Summary
by Dan Brown
"Thrilling and entertaining, like the experience on a rollercoaster".
– Los Angeles Times
"Impossible to put down...Another mind-blowing Robert Langdon story"
– The New York Times
Robert Langdon receives a phone call from Peter Solomon's assistant, asking him to come and give a lecture in DC that evening. Also, he is asked to bring a small package that was handed to him a long time ago.
When Robert arrived in DC he finds out that wasn't Peter who send the invite but his kidnapper Mal’akh and that there wasn't any lecture scheduled. In the centre of the Capital Building was discovered Peter’s hand, recreating the Hand of Mysteries, which is used as an invitation to discover the great secrets.
Roberts meets Inoue Sato, the head of the CIA, to help decode the Masonic Pyramid. Examining the hand they discover Solomon’s Masonic altar in a room in the Capital’s sub-basement.
Sato also confronts Robert with the security x-ray taken from his bag, showing a small pyramid. He tries to explain in vain that he didn’t know the content of the package and Sato wants to take Robert into custody. This is hijacked by Warren Bellamy, the Architect of the Capital and a freemason, who then leaves with Robert.
Roberts finds out that Warren was contacted by the kidnapper and wanted help in freeing Peter.
Mal’akh is a Freemason covered with tattoos, and he infiltrated the organization to steal the source of power. The relationship between him and Peters started years ago when Zachary, Peters’s son, received an inheritance and left for Europe where he lived a reckless life. When he gets imprisoned in Turkey, Peter flew to Turkey and decided to leave him there one more week, in order to teach him a lesson. Zachary apparently gets killed by his cellmate who steals his fortune and flies to Greece where he lives a luxurious life under the name Andros Dareios.
Soon he gets bored and remembering that Peter was a Mason, he broke into his home to steal the pyramid. Here he accidentally killed Peter’s mom and tries to escape, after that moment he called himself Mal’akh.
In the present day, he gets close to Peter's younger sister Katherine, and once he manages to find himself in her lab where she did Neotic Science experiments, he destroys it and tries to kill her. She manages to escape, meets Robert and they join forces to find Peter.
Authorities capture Warren but Katherine and Robert manage to escape, but then they get caught by Sato’s team. Katherine tells Robert that Mal’akh was pretending to be Peter’s psychologist.
They go to Mal’akh’s house, but they get captured by him. Robert is put in a sensory deprivation tank, where the tank gets slowly filled with water, and before that he manages to get Robert to decipher the code of the pyramid’s base. He ties Katherine to a chair and leaves her to bleed with an open-end transfusion needle. Mal'akh leaves with Peter to the Temple Room of the House of the Temple.
Sato leads the team and rescues Katerine and Robert, then they leave for the House of the Temple. There Mal’akh makes Peter reveal the Last Word, so he can tattoo it on his forehead. After this, he orders Peter to sacrifice him in order for him to become a demonic spirit. Peter tells him that he will gladly do so to the person who murdered his son and mother. At that moment Mal’akh reveals that he is Zachary and that he made a deal to escape the prison.
Now Peter is heartbroken and cannot stab Zachary. Robert and Sato arrive there while the helicopter hits the skylight Zachary is killed by those pieces of glass.
Peter reveals that the word Zachary tattooed on his head was not the real Word and that he made backups of the data so the research could continue.
Later Peters takes Robert to the room top of the Washington Monument to show him where the Last Word is buried revealing to him that the word is Bible.
The Bible is a mystical allegory written by humanity, and that, like most religious texts around the globe, it contains veiled instructions for harnessing humanity's natural God-like qualities—similar to Katherine's noetic research—and is not meant to be interpreted as the commands of an all-powerful divinity. The Masons have (metaphorically) buried it, believing that, when the time is right, its rediscovery will usher in a new era of human enlightenment.
“Open your minds, my friends. We all fear what we do not understand.”
― Dan Brown, The Lost Symbol
Note: Some pieces of information are left out of the book.
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