The Medici Secret

Chapter 2

Florence, present day Edie Granger locked her red Fiat in the private car park beside the Medici Chapel and strode across the cobblestones towards the front doors. She was five foot nine in stockings, and, thanks to a daily hour-long workout, she was extremely fit. Unusually for an English academic, Edie placed sartorial elegance high on her list of priorities, something that endeared her to her Italian friends, who only half-jokingly claimed she was a dead-ringer for the actress, Liv Tyler.

She studiously ignored the placard-carrying hooded figures in worn brown robes parading in front of the doors to the chapel, just as she had done every day for the past few months. The protestors were members of a strange group calling itself Workers For God. Led by a fanatical Dominican, a Father Baggio, they were opposed to any scientific research conducted in the Medici Chapel. To Edie they had long since become part of the landscape.

She waved her pass at the admissions booth just inside the doors, took the stairs two at a time, and strode into the part of the crypt where crowds of visitors milled around each day reading the inscriptions on the tombs of the Medici.

At the far end of the chapel an area had been cordoned off to the public, and a cream canvas tent concealed the entrance to a narrow staircase that descended into the burial chamber where deep alcoves on either side contained the sarcophagi. Entering the research area, Edie sidestepped a pair of dissection tables and passed through a doorway into the first of a pair of labs that led off to the left.

The burial chamber beneath the crypt of the Medici Chapel was a low-ceilinged room about ten by six metres. It was cramped and warm but the air was kept fresh with a powerful portable air-conditioning system. Around the walls of the lab stood X-ray machines, spectrometers and DNA analysers. Across the main chamber was the office of Carlin Mackenzie, where sealed cases of bones lay incongruously alongside a couple of souped-up Macs.

Edie had just settled down at her bench and was running through some read-outs from an infra-red spectrometer when Mackenzie walked in with two men in suits. She had met them before: the shorter of the pair was Umberto Nero, the Vice Chancellor of the University of Pisa; the other, younger man was a well-known local politician, Francesco della Pinoro, currently the hot favourite in the mayoral election.

'Ah, Edie,' Mackenzie said. The professor was a short, chubby man in his late sixties. He wore John Lennon glasses, had a shock of fine, white hair, and a soft, handsome face that had made him popular with TV documentary makers. 'Gentlemen, this is my niece, Dr Edie Granger.'

Delia Pinoro extended a hand and Nero nodded. He and Edie had met on many occasions and they had never much cared for each other.

'Edie, I wonder if you could spare a few moments for our guests? Their car is due here in a minute; could you give them a brief tour?'

'Of course.' Edie managed to inject a little enthusiasm into her voice.

'Excellent. Gentlemen, thank you for your valuable comments and I will be in touch very soon.' Mackenzie shook their hands and turned on his heel.

'This way.' Edie escorted della Pinoro and Nero back into the central chamber to a long metal table. As they walked across the stone floor, she described how the bodies in the alcoves had been embalmed and preserved in this vault. Pacing around the table, she looked across at the visitors. Between them lay a 470-year-old corpse.

Brushing away a lock of curly black hair that had fallen across her face, she fixed the men with her burnt-wood eyes, folded her arms and stretched herself up to her full height, towering over both of them.

'This is Ippolito de' Medici, the illegitimate son of Giuliano de' Medici, the Duke of Nemours,' she explained. 'For almost half a millennium, mystery has surrounded his death. Some people have speculated that this young man – he was only twenty-four when he died – was murdered by his cousin Alessandro, who was then bumped off by another friendly relative, Lorenzino de' Medici. There was no proof though, until now. We've just finished working on these remains and have found clear evidence that Ippolito was poisoned.'

Nero looked up from the mummy on the table. Edie noticed he was a little pale. She quickly led the men into a smaller room off the main chamber. Here the smell of earth and old cloth was fainter. A man was seated at a workbench, peering into an eyepiece of a large microscope. 'This is the very heart of the operation,' Edie said. 'This room and the lab next door once contained up to a dozen coffins, but most of these were badly damaged in the flood of 1966. The bodies, those of minor members of the Medici clan, were reburied in another part of the chapel. This is now the principal lab where we analyse materials taken from the mummies in the crypt.'

'How can you be sure the man out there was murdered?' Delia Pinoro asked. For the past few minutes, he had been taking particular interest in the V-shaped opening at the top of Edie's lab coat. 'Surely any evidence would have disappeared centuries ago?'

'A good question,' Edie said, feeling relieved she could demonstrate her knowledge. 'The main purpose of our work here is to ascertain the cause of death of prominent members of the Medici. These corpses may seem like lifeless husks,' she added and gestured towards the chamber they had just left, 'but they tell us an incredible amount that has remained hidden until now.' 'Such as?'

'Often we have to reconstruct a scenario just from skeletal remains. Usually this is all that's left after five hundred years. But even crumbling bones can tell us an enormous amount. Common diseases of the time, such as syphilis and smallpox, leave telltale signs in the fine structure of the victim's bones which we can study using immunohistochemical and ultra-structural analysis.'

Delia Pinoro looked confused. 'In the case of Ippolito,' Edie went on. 'We've been able to make a detailed analysis of his skeleton which has revealed unusual levels of chemicals called salicylates.' 'And this proves…?'

'Well, Alessandro got away with the murder because, on his deathbed, Ippolito displayed all the normal symptoms of malaria: fever, rigors, excruciating headaches and severe abdominal pain. But poisoning with oil of wintergreen produces almost identical effects, and oil of wintergreen contains methyl salicylate.'

Delia Pinoro was about to say something when a movement behind the men caught Edie's eye. 'Ah, they're bringing out the latest cause of disagreement.'

'Cause of disagreement?' Nero asked, as she headed towards the door.

'Apparently, this is Cosimo de' Medici, Cosimo the Elder,' Edie replied, leading the two men to another dissection table that stood head to tail with the platform containing Ippolito's remains. Mackenzie was there with his stepson, Jack Cartwright, the team's DNA expert.

'Apparently?' Mackenzie looked quizzically at Edie.

'We have conflicting opinions about the identity of this body,' Edie explained. 'My uncle is certain it's Cosimo, I'm yet to be convinced.'

Jack Cartwright, the tall, broad-shouldered man at Mackenzie's side stepped forward and introduced himself to the visitors. He had just returned from a morning at the University of Florence.

'And where do you stand in this matter, Dr Cartwright?' the vice chancellor asked, averting his eyes from the corpse.

Cartwright was about to reply when a young woman arrived, looking rather flustered. 'Sorry to interrupt,' she said. 'The car has arrived for our guests.'

The vice chancellor could not conceal his relief, and before della Pinoro could say anything, he had stepped up to Mackenzie. 'I'm very grateful you could make time,' he said. '… And thank you, Dr Granger, for showing us around.'

A few moments later, Edie returned having seen the visitors to their limo. Mackenzie and Cartwright were examining the body on the table. Mackenzie, with a loupe to his eye, was easing open a flap of a remarkably well-preserved silk tunic with a pair of tweezers. For two weeks they had been studying material taken from this body, running tests on tissue samples and bone structures using a portable X-ray machine. But only this morning they had agreed the body should be removed from its niche and inspected more closely. The body shared the alcove with another. Mackenzie believed it to be the remains of Contessina de' Medici, wife of Cosimo I, who had died in 1473.

'I do wish you wouldn't put out our dirty laundry for other people to see' Mackenzie said, without looking up.

'I don't see any harm in admitting academics have disagreements,' Edie replied, plucking another pair of tweezers from a tray.

'Well, I do. I don't trust those people. They're always on the lookout for anything to cut our funding.'

'I think they were more interested in getting out of here as quickly as possible.'

'Quite possibly, but I consider Pinoro to be a viper.'

'Is that why you lumbered me with them?' Edie retorted.

Mackenzie glared at her. Edie looked away and quickly changed the subject. 'Exquisite texture to this silk jacket.' 'Indeed it is. Take a look at this,' Mackenzie offered Cartwright his loupe. The corpse was dressed in a cream silk shirt and a velvet jacket which would once have been the most vivid and beautiful purple. The buttons of the jacket were solid gold. 'Adds weight to my theory, does it not?' Mackenzie muttered.

Edie shrugged. 'You would expect Cosimo to have been buried in the finest, but that could equally well apply to any prominent member of the family.'

'Perhaps. Found anything from the DNA samples, Jack?'

'We're still working on that,' Cartwright handed the eyepiece back to Mackenzie. 'It's proving to be more difficult than expected.'

Mackenzie sighed, carefully pulling back the crumbling jacket and exposing the crisp brown skin of the mummy beneath. It looked like a body made from papier mache. 'Well, that's why we've dragged the poor fellow out,' he said.

Cosimo de' Medici, or Cosimo the Elder as he was sometimes known, had been one of the most important members of the Medicis, a man who had done more than anyone to elevate the family into its illustrious place in history. Born in Florence in 1389, he had been de facto ruler of the city for a generation. He ignited the Italian Renaissance and made the equivalent of billions for the family. Upon his death in 1464, he was honoured with the official title Pater Patriae: 'Father of His Country'.

Mackenzie ran a scalpel along the body's desiccated torso. The blade slid through the skin effortlessly and he drew it down then across the body to produce a Y-cut. The embalmers had worked with remarkable skill. The ancient corpse was very different to that of Ippolito, whose body, although buried more recently, had been reduced to little more than a crumbling skeleton. But under the crisp skin lay a dry cavity. The organs had shrivelled to a fraction of their original size and were as dry as the man's skin.

Mackenzie removed pieces of each organ and placed them in individually labelled test tubes which he then stoppered up. Edie placed these carefully in a rack on one side of the table. Probing deeper, he scraped away a tiny sample of the breastbone and a rib, placing the flakes into their own sample bottles.

Leaning forward, Mackenzie examined the void inside the body's chest. 'Odd,' he said after a moment. 'There appears to be an alien object resting against the spine. I can't see it very clearly. Take a look Edie.'

She swung a mounted magnifying glass over the cadaver and peered down at the area around the shrivelled heart. 'I can see something, a black surface, it's embedded in the anterior epidermal layers I think. It certainly doesn't look like a natural artefact.'

'Help me turn the body over on to its side,' Mackenzie instructed them.

Edie and Jack Cartwright gently turned the corpse, raising one side two feet above the table. It weighed almost nothing.

'Just a little more,' Mackenzie said, squeezing his head and shoulders under the ancient mummy. With surgical precision, he ran his scalpel along the line of the spine making sure he inserted the blade in just a fraction of an inch so as not to damage the vertebrae. Straightening up, he raised a pair of metal tweezers up to the light. They held a thin and featureless black rectangle. Carlin Mackenzie was alone in the burial chamber of the Medici Chapel. The digital clock on his desk showed that it was approaching 9 p.m., but he felt neither tired nor in any mood to shut down the computers and walk the short distance to his apartment on Via Cavour.

It had been an extraordinary day, perhaps the most extraordinary of his life, certainly the most remarkable of his forty-year career as a palaeopathologist The nature of the artefact they had discovered inside the body of Cosimo de' Medici remained a total mystery; but the simple fact of its existence presented a conundrum. Save for the natural disturbance of the flood of 1966, these bodies had not been touched since they were buried. Yet here was this strange rectangular object concealed in the dried epidermal tissue of a man who had died over 500 years earlier.

The object was resting in a Petri dish next to Mackenzie's computer. He, Edie and Jack Cartwright had studied it as thoroughly as they dared without taking unnecessary risks. It was entirely black, a piece of granite-like stone measuring exactly 3.9 by 1.9 centimetres, and was just a few millimetres thick. A single X-ray had shown it to be solid, apparently featureless and of uniform density. They had refrained from any form of chemical test until they could be sure these would not harm the stone. Using a powerful microscope, its crystalline structure was revealed to be a blend of feldspar, quartz and potassium, an exceptionally pure granite called Amanorthosite.

Mackenzie began to write some comments in a notebook. He listed what they already knew: the object's chemical structure, mass, density, dimensions. Then, putting down his pen, he picked up the stone rectangle and held it up to the light between latexed finger and thumb. With a jolt, he realised something about it had changed. Across what had been a featureless surface, faint green lines had begun to appear. They were changing and merging even as he stared. He reached for his loupe and looked closer. This was truly remarkable. A faint green outline was forming close to one end of the rectangle. Below this, he could just begin to see some letters, and two-thirds of the way down, a set of lines appeared.

'This is amazing,' he heard himself say. For a few seconds he wasn't quite sure what to do. Then, he grabbed the phone and quickly dialled a number. An answer machine came on. He dialled another number from memory. A second machine clicked on, and without hesitating, he began to describe what he could see on the face of the stone tablet.

Two minutes later, he was about to make some final remarks when he heard a bleep and knew he had used up the memory on the answer system. He replaced the phone and stared at the wall. What he had seen thrilled but also scared him. He had never been a superstitious man. He had been trained as a scientist, but he couldn't deny his deepest fears. This was merely the latest in a string of weird events and coincidences that he had spoken of to no one. By leaving this message, had he done enough? Or had he done too much? Had he placed others in terrible danger?

He heard a faint noise from the chamber beyond. He looked towards the plastic screen dividing the office from the burial chamber. Silence.

He placed the tablet back in the Petri dish and removed the loupe. It was at that precise moment he felt a sudden, intense pain in his neck. He sensed rather than saw someone leaning in towards him. His hands flew to his neck and felt the cold steel of a garrotte. His assailant twisted on the wire with incredible force.

The scientist's eyes bulged. Gasping for breath, he tried to pull away and at the same time to force his fingers beneath the garrotte. But it was utterly futile. A terrible pain roared through his head and he began to lose focus. His attacker was pulling him further and further back, slicing into his neck. For a fleeting moment, Mackenzie believed he could twist free, but the man behind him was far too strong. Mackenzie's sphincter opened and he voided himself; a foul smell rose from his seat. There was a tiny almost imperceptible crack as Mackenzie's trachea was sliced open and darkness closed about him.