WASHINGTON — Soon, Washingtonians will find themselves in a changed city. One invaded by Founding Fathers scandal, by fictitious Harvard symbologists, by very short chapters ending in cliffhangers and exclamation points!
One to which tourists will flock, brandishing conspiracy theories. We want the real story, they’ll say to helpless docents at the Smithsonian, perhaps, or the Scottish Rite Masonic temple. This is the real story, docents will reply. No, the reeeeal story. Wink wink.
Washington is about to be Dan Browned.
The inciting incident is the release of “The Lost Symbol,” the third installment of Brown’s mondo-selling adventure zeitgeist, sequel to “Angels & Demons” and “The Da Vinci Code.”
In “Angels,” professor Robert Langdon races through Rome, saving the city from an explosion and uncovering religious secrets that rock Christianity to the core. In “Da Vinci,” he races through Paris and London, solving a mysterious death and uncovering religious secrets that rock Christianity to the core.
In “The Lost Symbol,” Langdon will be racing through Washington; what, exactly, he’ll be doing here is unclear. In the five-plus years Brown has been working on this novel, nary an important plot point has leaked.
The initial print run of “The Lost Symbol” is 5 million copies, the largest in Random House history. Clues found on the novel’s recently released cover, combined with decoded messages from the “Da Vinci” jacket and elsewhere suggest that Freemason history will play a central role.
People. Are. Freaking. Out.
The “Today” show has begun a weeklong Dan Brown blitz, featuring Matt Lauer traipsing around the Washington locations expected to appear in the novel. Facebookers and Twitterers have been working overtime to decipher the novel-related clues — such as “AOFACFSOA FSZWBEIC EIOA ZOHSFWQWOA OQQSDW” — frequently posted by Brown’s marketing team on his social networking pages.
Masons are preparing themselves. “I’m expecting (tourism) to skyrocket,” said Heather Calloway, director of special programs for the Masonic House of the Temple on 16th Street NW, which gets 10,000 visitors a year.
“We might have to spend the next 25 years responding to Dan Brown’s fiction,” said Mark Tabbert, director of collections at the George Washington Masonic National Memorial in suburban Alexandria, Va. “That’s what I dread.”
Then there’s the “Lost Symbol” companion industry: the documentaries, Web sites and books created to analyze the meaning of a novel that has not yet come out.
“It’s all about, what’s Dan Brown going to assert?” said author Dan Burstein, who edited companion work “Secrets of the Widow’s Son” in 2005 based on his early research. He has another book coming out in December called “Secrets of the Lost Symbol.”
“Could he go in the direction of human cloning?” Burstein wonders. “Could some Freemasons ... have known something about the cloning?
“And now we hear that Dan Brown is interested in the Rosicrucians,” a secret society of mystics formed in medieval Europe. “So what does that mean? Some theories say the Rosicrucians had a piece of the cross. Maybe if you had bloodstains on some pieces of the cross, you could clone Christ.”
Brown’s notorious reclusiveness only adds to his mystique; for every interview he declines and cryptic clue his team tweets, his persona increasingly resembles his enigmatic characters.
His greatest achievement, arguably, is the outsize impact his novels have had on the cities in which they’re set.
Just ask Colin Glynne-Percy, director of the Rosslyn Chapel Trust, the rural Scottish church featured in “The Da Vinci Code.” which Langdon believed to be the location of the Holy Grail.
“Before the book came out, we had about 40,000 visitors a year,” Glynne-Percy said. “It went to 80,000. Then to 120,000. Then to 175,000.”
In Washington, Old Town Trolley Tours is already considering a Secret Symbols tour. And the Masonic Service Association in suburban Silver Spring, Md., is readying a Web site to fact-check “The Lost Symbol.”
“We’re in the cross hairs,” said S. Brent Morris, managing editor of the Scottish Rite Journal. “It could be good; it could be bad.
“We’ve decided to take a deep breath, take a chill pill and see what happens.”
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