`Da Vinci Code' ruling riddle is solved

Lawyer, reporter crack British judge's encrypted message, a tip of the cap to a Royal Navy great

April 29, 2006|By Tom Hundley, Tribune foreign correspondent

LONDON — Judge's secret Da Vinci code cracked! Reporter's job saved! Admiral of the fleet honored!

But who got there first?

A London lawyer and a reporter for the Times newspaper both claimed credit Friday for deciphering the coded message hidden in a judge's recent ruling in the copyright case over "The Da Vinci Code."

Dan Tench, the lawyer, was the first to notice the odd sequence of 42 boldface italicized letters interspersed throughout the 71-page text of Judge Peter Smith's ruling.

The first 10 spelled out "Smithy Code." The rest were gibberish. It was enough to send this Sudoku-crazed nation into frenzy.

The Daily Mail newspaper offered 1,000 pounds ($1,820) to the first person who could crack the code.

Times reporter Ben Hoyle, who was assigned to the task by his newspaper, dropped by the courthouse and submitted a note to the judge pleading for a clue.

"He e-mailed me back during the lunchtime break suggesting: `Try letter substitution letter by letter applying the Fibonacci Sequence [in correct form],'" Hoyle wrote.

The judge also told the reporter, "If you can't solve it now, you should be sacked."

As devotees of the Dan Brown novel will recall, the Fibonacci sequence is a string of numbers in which each number is the sum of the two that precede it, thus 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21.

Cracking the code requires one to repeatedly apply the Fibonacci sequence to the string of coded letters.

"After a few hours of excruciating scribbling and a brief consultation with Ray Keene, The Times chess correspondent, I finally decoded the message," Hoyle wrote.

So did Tench. Working with two other lawyers from the Olswang law firm, they also cracked the judge's encoded message: "Jackie Fisher who are you Dreadnought."

For the clueless, Jackie Fisher is Adm. John Arbuthnot Fisher, whose remarkable naval career spanned 60 years and who is perhaps best-known for modernization of the British navy and the introduction of the Dreadnought-class battleship.

He died in 1920.

Smith said he is a big Jackie Fisher fan.

So, too, is the writer Jan Morris, whose unusual biography "Fisher's Face. Or, Getting to Know the Admiral" describes him as "a cad . . . a great gentleman, a genius, a coxcomb, a fraud, a true Christian and a damned Socialist. Only one thing did everybody seem to agree upon: He had a marvelous face."

In an e-mail to reporters, Smith said he planted the code "for my own pleasure" and didn't expect anyone to notice.

He also added that the answer "has nothing to do with the case" in which he ruled that "The Da Vinci Code" author Brown had not improperly taken material from an earlier non-fiction book, "The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail."

But might not a lawyer ask whether inserting playful codes in court rulings is grounds for appeal?