By the middle of the book, its true nature became clear to me. It seems to be aiming to be like "The Da Vinci Code", an adventure which relies upon an extreme blend of obscure facts, myths, and conspiracy theories. Here those include Kabbalah and the Jewish legend of the Golem, the history of porcelein, and (for a modern twist) cryptocurrency.

To be honest, the "Da Vinci Code"-genre is not one of my favorites. Once I recognized it for what it was, I merely skimmed the rest of the novel. The sole redeeming feature of that category of books (IMHO) is the apparent requirement that they have to include references to mathematics. For instance:

• Since Brink's football injury: "Patterns floated behind his eyes, a great web of geometric shapes -- lattices and networks, crystalline fractals -- and numbers, endless strings of numbers...He had a photographic memory that allowed him to reproduce images and structures with perfect recall and an ability to do instant numerical calculation, sincluding calendar counting, reciting pi places into the thousands, and calling up numerical solutions to complex equations in second."
• He analyzes his hotel room number as would a number theorist:

  (quoted from The Puzzle Master) He was in number 3, the smallest odd prime number, the first Mersenne Prime, and the second Fibonacci prime, ...

• Although a puzzle maker by profession, Brink is arguably a "mathematician" because:

  (quoted from The Puzzle Master) Instead of going to college on a football scholarship, he went to MIT , where he put his gift to good use. He majored in mathematics, specializing in topology, and found that his abilities gave him an instant advantage.

• A recurring character is one of his MIT math professors, Dr. Gupta, who "[a]side from his work in cryptography and mathematics,...was a visual artist who studied and replicated the techniques of the Dutch masters." Brink was a student in Gupta's class called "Patterns, Puzzles, and Equations" where he impressed the professor by reproducing from memory an outline of Wiles' proof of Fermat's Last Theorem on the board.
• A sudoku-like puzzle he created unintentionally revealed personal information when it was published.
• A spy working as a prison guard is identified by his tattoo of a tetractys, and so we hear just a tiny bit about Pythagoras and triangular numbers.
• When watching children playing with bubbles:

  (quoted from The Puzzle Master) Brink watched the soapy, iridescent spheres lift and spin in the sunlight, their shifting colors a miracle of constant air curvature. He saw each bubble's steradians, saw their edgeless symmetry. When numbers began to flood into his mind, he shook them away. There wasn't time to get lost in an endless stream of digits."

• Finally, a puzzle with mystical information about the name of God involving Hebrew letters also involves binary numbers, which leads into a minor digression mentioning G.W. Leibniz and his interests.