Lawyers Crack "Da Vinci" Judge's Secret Code

"Jackie Fisher who are you Dreadnought."

Doesn't mean much, does it? It's actually an obscure reference to a British admiral credited with modernizing his country's navy. The Dreadnought was a ship.

While not exactly a must-know fact, Justice Peter Smith--the High Court judge who ruled several weeks ago that Dan Brown did not plagiarize another book on his way to writing his literary juggernaut, The Da Vinci Code--felt so strongly about passing the historical message along, he decided to mix work and play. And since The Da Vinci Code is all about puzzles and word trickery, Justice Smith figured two could play at that game.

In his 71-page ruling, he stated that Brown did not violate the copyright of British authors Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, whose 1982 book The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail explores ideas about Mary Magdalene and Catholicism--and secret messages, as it turns out--similar to those found in the Da Vinci Code. And then Justice Smith inserted his own code.

For a few weeks no one even noticed, until London lawyer Daniel Tench was perusing the decision and saw that some individual letters here and there were typed in a bold italic font.

When Tench told the Times of London that some of the judge's ruling was randomly italic, the newspaper ran an item noting how clever it would be if Justice Smith had stuck a code in his Code decision.

And then came an email from Justice Smith to Tench, advising him to take a closer look--and that he'd actually missed the first letter of the code. "It is always best to start at paragraph 1!" he wrote.

Okay, so Tench looked at paragraph one and so did the New York Times, which, during some back-and-forth emailing with Justice Smith also got a coy letter from the judge which read, "Did you find the coded message in the judgment?" The paper had just been innocently interviewing him about the Da Vinci case, when a mystery was dumped in its lap.

Well, that did it! The New York Times and Tench's law firm back in England were on the case. As it turned out, the first 13 1/2 pages of the ruling contained the out-of-place letters, the first 10 of which read, "Smithy Code," revealing the name of the judicial mastermind who orchestrated the little game.

After that, though, the interested parties were stuck. The rest of the italicized letters seemed to read nothing but nonsense.

But since The Da Vinci Code's Robert Langdon, embodied by Tom Hanks in the upcoming film, needed help along the way in his quest, Justice Smith was willing to dispense with a little more guidance to assist his puzzled would-be code crackers.

At first he toyed with the New York Times, writing, "I can't discuss the judgment until after I retire," the Times said in its recounting of the mini saga.

Then, however, he suggested checking the book--which he thankfully determined was not plagiarized, or else we wouldn't be having all these shenanigans!--for code-breaking techniques. First he told them to think about mathematics and directed them to page 255 in the British paperback edition of the novel (which has sold more than 1 million copies in paperback since its Mar. 28 release).

"Anything else gives it on a plate," Justice Smith wrote next.

With all that helpful information in mind, the New York Times went on its merry way. Meanwhile, Tench was working his code-breaking mojo in London with his colleagues at Olswang, a law firm that specializes in intellectual property and media law.

The first 10 letters were deciphered Tuesday, and by late Thursday, Tench and Olswang had figured out the rest, with The Times of London close behind, the New York Times reported.

On page 255 of Brown's novel, Langdon and his colleague Sophie Neveu (Audrey Tautou in the film) discuss the Fibonacci Sequence, a numerical series in which each number is the sum of the two preceding ones:

1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34?

Right. So, the pawns in Justice Smith's little game eventually discovered that applying the sequence and its corresponding letters to the jumble of italicized letters in the judge's ruling eventually spelled out the aforementioned tidbit about British Admiral John Arbuthnot "Jackie" Fisher.

Not even that amount of confusion was satisfactory for Justice Smith, though. He also intentionally stuck a typographical error to throw the numbers off course and then there was something involving one other number-letter substitution that is just way too confusing to explain.

Anyway, kudos to those London solicitors who solved the case.

"If the judge's motive was to draw attention to a long-lost war hero, then he's done it very effectively," Tench told the New York Times.

And, as Justice Smith told Bloomberg News Wednesday, he just did it for "a bit of fun." Apparently it took him 40 minutes to make up the code and 40 minutes to insert it into his ruling. And in paragraph 52 of the brief, although no one caught it at first, he wrote, "The key to solving the conundrum posed by this judgment is in reading HBHG and DVC." Now, obviously, those initials refer to the two books he was discussing in his ruling, see?

"Jackie Fisher was England's greatest admiral after [Horatio] Nelson," the crafty judge wrote in an email to the Times after the matter was settled. "Nevertheless, he has been airbrushed out of history."

Well, not anymore. In fact, there are probably quite a few blokes discussing him, over a pint of ale, in pubs all over London right this minute.

(Oh, and in case you missed the skywriting, The Da Vinci Code, directed by Ron Howard, opens May 19.)