The Medici Secret

Chapter 13

London, present day Luc Fournier sat in an apartment once owned by the Rockefellers who had financed the construction of this Beaux Arts building overlooking Green Park almost a century earlier. Now the entire building was part of his multi-billion pound property portfolio.

Little was known of Fournier's past; he lived in the shadows but enjoyed the finest the world could offer. Flitting between homes on five continents, travelling by private jet, he was very rarely seen in public, and even then, few people knew who he was.

As he slowly stirred his peppermint tea, he reclined in a George Newton chair and glanced through a wall of windows to his immediate left. It offered a spectacular vista: Green Park was spread out before him like the baize of a billiard table, and in the distance, Buckingham Palace, The Mall and St James. On the wall behind him hung his favourite de Kooning, a mess of yellow, orange and turquoise which Fournier liked because, for him, it represented the world beyond the air-tight bubble he had created for himself.

He would soon be seventy. He didn't feel it, and he knew he looked twenty years younger thanks to a rigorous exercise and dietary regimen he had followed conscientiously since his thirties. Fair enough, he had been born into money, but he had seen this inheritance grow a hundredfold and at the same time he felt that he had contributed greatly to the world. Luc Fournier perceived himself as a warrior, or better still, a leader of warriors: a man who made things happen.

He took a sip of his tea and thought back over his many successes and his occasional failures. He had been in this industry for forty-five years. Using his intelligence and natural talents, and what had developed into a huge clandestine network of contacts, he supplied arms and other materiel to any anti-Western group who could afford him. A percentage of his earnings was reserved to maintain his lavish lifestyle, but a portion of every deal was used to finance his hobby, a hobby that was more like an obsession: a vast and growing collection of ancient artefacts mostly dating from the early renaissance. The beauty of this life was that every aspect of it brought him rewards. With the money he earned he could buy the things he desired and at the same time he could attack the thing he most hated: modern Western society.

Luc Fournier's loathing for the twenty-first century created by the West had not dissipated with age. No matter how much effort he devoted to insulating himself from the world, each new McDonald's that sprang up caused him real, physical pain. Every time he happened to catch a snatch of some ghastly pop song, his stomach turned. The edifice the West had created was, he believed, a deadly cancer that was spreading disease through what had once been a pure and noble body, metastasising into new and ever more repellent forms. One of his most vivid and cherished memories had been the day two passenger jets crashed into the twin towers. He had known of the mission in advance, of course, but the thrill of seeing the destruction of such iconic monuments to all that he abhorred was unmatched and surely unmatchable.

His career had begun in the early 1960s. Some of his earliest work had been supplying munitions to the Vietcong. In those days he had also dabbled in selling strategic information, but those were simpler times. With the rewards he had earned from the early days of that war, he had financed the operation to retrieve Cosimo de' Medici's journal from the chapel in Florence. But, in spite of all his efforts and the assistance of a team of experts, he had lost the prize. The fool who had found the journal in the flood waters had broken the seal and the precious contents were crumbled to dust.

The Western powers were never short of enemies and, as a consequence, Fournier had never been short of work. He had made hundreds of millions from Contra rebels, South American dictators, from Havana, from Moscow and latterly from the 'new' terrorist groups of the Middle East. And then, a few years earlier, he learned of the greatest treasure he could wish for. One of his many contacts informed him of a priceless document written by none other than Niccolo Niccoli, a close friend of Cosimo de' Medici. But more extraordinary revelations were to come, for apparently this document described the most unimaginable things, clues to great mysteries, remarkable secrets. Soon this document was his.

Placing his cup on a glass-topped table, he picked up a remote and depressed two buttons. A moment later, a large plasma screen was filled with images of the Niccoli document. Each page was frayed and a few had been torn, but the original was in remarkably good condition. He had had each page carefully photographed and stored on a drive for which only he had the password. He flicked through the pages, rereading his favourite passages.

Then after a few minutes Fournier clicked forward to the end section, the part that always produced the greatest thrill. He had read this section so many times he knew it almost off by heart. And now, as he read it for perhaps the hundredth time, he felt again a strange sensation of prescience, almost deja vu. But as always, comprehension lay just beyond his reach.