The Da Vinci Code Chapters 16–20 Summary & Analysis

Summary: Chapter 16

Sophie thinks about the phone message she got from Saunière earlier that day. She and Saunière were estranged for over a decade after she saw him engaged in an act she found despicable. He wrote her letters and tried to explain what she had seen, but Sophie refused to have any contact with him.

The message Sophie got from Saunière sounded urgent. In it, he said they were both in danger, and he had to tell her the truth about what happened to her family. Sophie’s family died in a car accident when she was little. She thought her grandfather’s message was just a ploy to get her to talk to him. She did not call him back.

Sophie asks Langdon to explain why Saunière would want to meet with him, but he doesn’t know. She tries to convince Langdon to leave the museum with her and go to the American Embassy for protection while they figure out what happened to her grandfather. Langdon refuses to run. Fache calls Sophie’s cell phone, but she turns it off. Sophie looks out the window and wonders whether Langdon could make it out of the building by jumping.

Summary: Chapter 17

Fache informs Collet that the director of cryptography cracked the code—like Sophie, he believes it to be meaningless Fibonacci numbers. The director also revealed that he did not send Sophie over to the museum, and that Saunière was Sophie’s grandfather. Collet, like Sophie, believes that Saunière must have written the code in order to get his granddaughter involved in the case.

Fache and Collet continue to try to reach Sophie. An alarm rings, signaling a security breach in the men’s room. The two policemen see on the GPS screen that Langdon has apparently jumped out of the window.

Summary: Chapter 18

Collet sees the tracking dot go out of the window and then come to a complete stop. The police assume Langdon has committed suicide, but then the dot starts moving away from the building and down the road. Fache looks out the bathroom window and sees a huge flatbed truck moving away. Assuming that Langdon must have jumped onto the truck, Fache runs out of the building to apprehend him.

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