Another 'Da Vinci' Code Cracked

Lawyer, Paper Decipher Riddle In U.K. Judge's Ruling

(CBS/AP) 

Tench said he and two other attorneys in the London media law firm Olswang used the sequence and trial and error to decode the message. He said Smith had confirmed it was correct in an e-mail.

The Times newspaper arrived at the same conclusion. On Friday, it quoted Smith, 53, as saying he had inserted the code "for my own pleasure" and had not expected anyone to notice it.

"The answer has nothing to do with the case," he said.

Tench said he noticed the code when he spotted the striking italicized script in an online copy of the judgment.

"To encrypt a message in this manner, in a High Court judgment no less? It's out there," Tench said. "I think he was getting into the spirit of the thing. It doesn't take away from the validity of the judgment. He was just having a bit of fun."

"I should think it's pretty sophisticated," Andrew Sinclair, Historian of the Knights Templar, remarked to CBS News correspondent Richard Roth. "Any judge with a sense of humor and a very clever man, which Peter Smith is, is going to do pretty well."

"The Da Vinci Code" has sold more than 40 million copies — including 12 million hardcover copies in the United States — since its release in March 2003. It came out in paperback in the United States earlier this year and quickly sold more than a million copies.

An initial print run of 5 million has already been raised to 6 million.