The New 'Da Vinci Code' Code

April 27, 2006 — -- A British High Court judge who rejected claims that "The Da Vinci Code" author Dan Brown had plagiarized his novel managed to inject a bit more mystery into the international bestseller.

It emerged on Wednesday that the judge at the center of the copyright trial has hidden his own code in his judgment -- and he seems to be daring anyone to try to crack it.

Dan Tench, an observant lawyer at the London-based law firm Olswang, noticed 38 random italicized letters in the 71-page court document. He said at first he didn't believe it was anything more than a problem with the judge's computer.

"One doesn't really think that a High Court judge is going to encipher a message in the text of a judgement, so I thought it was probably just a word processing error," Tench told ABC News.

Justice Peter Smith sent Tench an e-mail confirming his suspicions and told him to go back and look at the first paragraph of the judgement. When Tench did, he realized that the first italicized letters spell out "Smith Code."

For three weeks in March, Smith had presided over the case brought by authors Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, who claimed that Brown plagiarized their book, "The Holy Blood and Holy Grail."

"It's clear from the judgement itself, the text of the judgement, that the judge got very much into the substance of the two books in question and it was very much in the spirit of those two books that he's obviously encoded this message," Tench said.

If Tench's reading of the judge's ruling is correct, it would suggest that the code the jusge worked into his decision is related to Brown's theory that the descendents of Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene are still alive.

Although the judge would not reveal his code and its meaning, he did say he would probably confirm it if someone cracked it, which was "not a difficult thing to do." The first nine letters have been deciphered, but beyond that is anyone's guess.

These are the letters:

s, m, i, t, h, c, o, d, e, J, a, e, i, e, x, t, o, s, t, p, s, a, c, g, r, e, a, m, q, w, f, k, a, d, p, m, q, z.

It can only come as welcome public relations not only for the book, which has now sold more than 40 million copies worldwide, but also for the much-anticipated movie version of the novel, starring Tom Hanks as historian Robert Langdon, which is due to be released next month.