The Medici Secret

Chapter 9

London, June 2003 Several venues had been booked then rejected before the meeting had finally taken place in a small hotel in Bayswater. There were three men in the room: Sean Clifton, Professor Arnold Rossiter, an Oxford don and expert consultant, and Patrick McNeill, Senior Vice-President of Vitax, a division of Fournier Holdings Inc., a vast corporation owned by a French-Canadian billionaire art collector named Luc Fournier; McNeill was also Luc Fournier's chief aide. Rossiter, a consultant for hire, had been selected for the job by Fournier himself because the businessman knew so much about the professor's murky private life he could trust the man almost unconditionally.

It was hot and there was no air-conditioning in the hotel. Clifton was nervous and sweating so profusely dark rings had appeared at the armpits of his shirt. Mopping his brow with an off-white cotton handkerchief, he eyed the other two silently and removed a rectangular clear-plastic document wallet from his briefcase. He had not met Rossiter but knew him by reputation. The scholar was a man in his late-sixties, his face mottled, veins clearly visible through the pale skin of his bald head. He was little more than five foot six and his shapeless linen suit completed the image of the crumpled intellectual

Clifton handed the wallet to McNeill. 'These are copies of course.' His nerves belied the coolness it had taken to walk past the guard in Sotheby's vault two weeks earlier.

McNeill removed the photocopies from the wallet. There were about forty pages, double-sided, handwritten. He read the first few pages in fascinated silence. 'And your family inherited these recently?'

Clifton nodded and walked over to the window, eyeing the street below with suspicion. Turning back to the room, he lit a cigarette.

'I'll obviously need some time to read through…' Rossiter said.

'Ten minutes.' Clifton replied squinting through the smoke. 'You have ten minutes.'

McNeill gave Rossiter an amused look. 'You'd better get cracking,' he said and settled into a sofa.

Rossiter sat at a table near the door and began reading.

'I suggest you look at the marked pages,' Clifton said.

Rossiter turned the pages slowly, his excitement mounting. He had never seen this document before, although academics had long discussed the possibility of its existence. The originals, he knew, had been presumed lost years earlier, and rumours spoke of copies of fragments that might still survive, vanished perhaps into the attics of the unsuspecting or lying at the back of cupboards in dusty storerooms. As a consequence, very few had seen this document since it had first been composed some six centuries earlier. And so, as he read he began to realise why Sean Clifton was so keen to strike a deal with Fournier. One of the few things known by the media about the head of Fournier Holdings was that he was the world's wealthiest and most enthusiastic collector of early Renaissance documents and artefacts. And this was a most remarkable find.

Clifton walked over to the table and began picking up the photocopied pages. 'Time's up.'

Rossiter made to protest but McNeill silenced him with a wave of his hand. 'Has our time been wasted, Professor?'

'No. These are copies of a genuine manuscript in the hand of Niccolo Niccoli.'

'Thank you. That's all I wanted to know. Now, I wonder if you might leave us.'

Rossiter looked surprised for a moment, then he turned and left.

'So,' McNeill said as the door closed. 'You want ten million pounds, is that correct?' 'It is.' 'Quite out of the question.' For a second Clifton looked deflated. 'Why?'

'Because my boss is offering four million. One hundred thousand now, the rest in two stages after other… requirements have been met.' 'Ridiculous!'

'In that case, I'm afraid we cannot do business.' He turned to leave.

McNeill had taken only two paces and was reaching for the handle when Clifton said, 'OK, OK. Eight, with a million up front.'

McNeill didn't even break his stride and started to pull the door open.

Clifton sighed and took a couple of steps towards him. 'All right… six.'

McNeill stopped and returned to the room. Standing so close to Clifton that he made sure the man could feel his breath on his face, he said slowly and deliberately 'Four and a half with two fifty now. That's our final offer.'

Clifton took a step back and lit another cigarette. 'Five million and it's yours.'

McNeill gazed across the room to the window. The only sound was coming from the traffic below. 'Very well. Five million. But, these are our conditions.' Clifton took a deep drag on his cigarette.

'For our Ј250,000 we have the copies for two weeks. If my boss likes what he sees, one of our people will retrieve the originals from the Sotheby vault. Only then will you receive the rest of the money.' 'No!' 'Take them elsewhere then.' Clifton bit his lip. 'And the money?'

'Ј250,000 will be placed in a Swiss account by noon Monday. You must have the documents in another specified account by 10 a.m. the same day. The transfer of funds to your account will automatically decode a six-digit security sequence of your own choosing which will then be transmitted through the Internet to my representative. This code will enable us to access the document. No money, no code and vice versa. My people will email the details.'