Chase Baker and the Da Vinci Divinity (A Chase Baker Thriller Series Book 6) (17 page)

The rest of the men drop down and
take cover when the mortar projectile hits and explodes sending limbs flying
through the cool air and laying a gray-white smoke screen over the bodies. The
wounded are screaming for medics and their mothers while Mahaz begins an all-out
sprint toward my position.

Shifting the aim of the machine
gun, I spin the second set of locked and loaded guns into place, light the
fuse. It fires, forcing Mahaz down onto his belly while another four men are
cut to ribbons leaving only three survivors. Survivors who are no longer moving
toward me but holding their ground.

“Come on, Mahaz,” I taunt. “Come on,
you son of bitch. You want the cave? Come and get it.”

His black-mustached face filled
with rage, he pulls himself up, his pistol in hand, firing in my direction. The
rounds ricochet off the stone sending sparks and stone fragments up into my
face. But, I don’t feel the sting as I spin the third and last set of guns into
position, aim them point-blank for the monstrous man.

“You are a dead man, Chase Baker!”
he screams.

“You got it wrong, Mahaz,” I say
under my breath while lighting the final fuse. “It’s you who’s already dead,
motherfucker.”

The guns fire. All twelve of the
cannon-like guns spray the hillside with their lead ball vengeance. One of the
rounds connects with Mahaz’s left hand, disintegrating it, leaving him with
only a bloodied stump. He peers at me with a face that’s frightened and pale.
Grabbing hold of his blood-spurting stump, he turns and starts running back
down the hill. Terrified, the three remaining soldiers also about-face and make
a hasty retreat right on their leader’s tail.

Raising both my fists in the air, I
let loose with a scream that must be heard for miles across the valley. Chase
Baker the victor! Or perhaps I should be satisfied with, Chase Baker the
survivor. Because, when it comes to defending the divine, maybe just surviving
is victory in itself.

Turning, I go to hug my
brown-robed, monk friend.

But like a holy spirit, his
physical presence is nowhere to be found.

Standing on the edge of the hilltop, I stare down into the
valley and soak in my first good view of it since I arrived maybe an hour or
more ago. The afternoon sun seems to be glistening off the surface of the
valley, almost like it’s topped with a giant mirror that’s acres long and acres
wide. It suddenly dawns on me, the only thing that can possibly glisten in the
sun like that is surface water.

A lake or a large pond. A body of
water fed by a wide stream. Maybe the same stream we crossed earlier, near da
Vinci’s childhood home.

But, if the center of the valley is
the location of the cave, how can a lake be covering it? Maybe it’s possible it
has filled with ground water over the centuries. But somehow I’m not convinced
of that theory, if only because this region of Italy hasn’t experienced any
kind of massive geologic shift in recent centuries. Nothing that I know of,
anyway.

As I continue to look down onto the
serene setting, I can’t help but sense I’ve seen this place before. Like I
said, I’ve been to Vinci a few times over the years, and I’ve even done some
four-wheeling in a Jeep over the rugged, unpaved Roman roadways that still
exist two thousand years later. But, I’ve never been to this particular spot.
Yet why is it I
feel
like I have?

I detect something shooting over my
shoulder.

It’s a bird. A hawk. It lands on
one of the tall bushes that miraculously grows out of the cracks in the
granite. He stares at me with black eyes that glisten in the sun. He squawks,
flaps his enormous wings, and takes flight once more, over the hilltop and down
the other side as if guiding the way for me.

I begin the downhill trek into the
isolated valley. Da Vinci’s valley.

While I descend the hillside, it
dawns on me that I should try to contact Deputy Inspector Millen. But when I
retrieve my phone, I can see there’s no signal. I make a check on the GPS app
just to establish my precise location. It, too, isn’t working. It’s like I’ve
landed in some place that isn’t located on the global grid. But, then, how can
that be? I’ll chalk it up to a bad satellite connection.

After a time, I enter into a thick,
tree-covered portion of the hillside which gives way to the open valley beyond
it. My heart begins to pound, the adrenalin speeding through the capillaries in
my brain matter. But as I break through the tree-line, I come upon the small,
stream-fed lake that must measure at least one square mile. I was right about
the valley all along. It’s covered in water.

“But how the hell can that be?” I
ask myself out loud.

Reaching into my satchel, I pull
out the map, open it. Holding it up toward the sun, I examine the map within
the map, seeking out any clue I can find that might lead me to believe I’m in
the right place. In my head, the strange voice speaks up once more. It tells me
to check the sketch book. When I first discovered the book back at the museum
in Florence, the map had been pressed between two specific pages bookmarked
with red ribbon. The position of the map inside the volume was not
indiscriminate.

Folding up the map, I slip my hand back
into the satchel, grab hold of
The Book of Truths
. I open the book to the
pages bookmarked with the old ribbon. The pages contain a sketching of the
valley. A precise drawing created from the point of view where I am standing,
as if the young Leonardo da Vinci once stood in this very spot.

The drawing is not only of a cave,
but also a lake fed by a stream situated at the bottom of a series of hills.
The natural scene is just like the one I am looking at now. Written in the
mirror writing are two sentences.

odoirep ognul nu rep onnarenrot non e oleic li osrev erigguf
àras auqca’lled etrap narG

I don’t have a mirror to work with,
so I do my best to decipher the words in my limited Italian. It takes a couple
of minutes, but in the end I translate the passage as, “Much of the water will
escape toward the sky and will not come back for a long time.”

“Holy crap,” I say to myself. “It’s
a riddle.”

Like I said, I don’t know too many
scholarly details about da Vinci, but I do know this: he was not only a master
of hiding clues and messages in his works, he was also fond of riddles. So what
does he mean by water escaping into the sky and not returning for a long time?

It comes to me in the form of the
strange voice inside my head.

“Evaporation.”

Pulse speeds up. I scan the
following pages of the sketch book. There’s a detailed drawing of the valley no
longer filled with water, but, instead, giving over to a flat plain that leads
to what appears to be a large opening in the earth. Two more mirrored words are
sketched above the drawing. I immediately read them as, “Look up.” Almost like
da Vinci is standing beside me, not asking me, but insisting I look up through
the openings in the trees to the blue sky above.

That’s precisely what I do.

I look up.

And that’s when I see something
falling out of the sun. I see a disk-shaped object, a beam of concentrated
light shooting out of its shiny, stainless steel-like bottom, no different from
the beams of light the Renaissance artists painted inside their masterpieces so
very long ago. The beams strike the center of the lake in a thunderous concussion,
sends me onto my back. My skull collides with a rock and, for what seems a
brief moment or two, I’m seeing only darkness.

I sit up and wait for the stars to
stop revolving around my head, for the throbbing pain to abate. It’s then, as
my eyesight returns to normal, I see something extraordinary. The lake is gone
exposing a flat, rocky bottom in the center of which is an opening. Standing, I
take a moment to regain my balance while making my way through the tree line
onto the lake bed.

Crossing over the rocky bottom, I
spot fish that are struggling out of water, slapping their tales and heads on
the stones. Several black snakes slither between rocks, trying to avoid the sun’s
warm rays. Turtles, frogs, and other creatures scurry about, confused and
probably just plain panicked over the suddenly evaporated lake.

When I come to the opening—the cave—I
can see it will be possible to enter into it by descending a stone staircase
that corkscrews its way around the interior of the deep shaft. Stepping down
onto the first tread, the sound my boot sole makes with the stone surface
echoes across the wide cave expanse. Heart lodged in my throat, I continue down
into the damp, dripping shaft, the air turning cooler and moister the deeper I
go.

When I come to the bottom, I’m
faced with a pool of water in the center which must be the remnants of the lake
on the earth’s surface. To my left is a horizontal shaft entirely blacked out.
Digging in my pocket for the Zippo, I thumb open the lid and strike a flame.
Then, making my way slowly over to the shaft, I enter.

The ground is wet under my feet,
the stone walls smooth. As smooth, in fact, as the stone work on the interior
of the Giza pyramids telling me this cave isn’t a natural formation but the
work of a civilization that possessed advance construction techniques. The
reflection of the flame bounces off the shaft’s walls. I continue to move
slowly, knowing something alive must exist somewhere on the other side of this
tunnel. Why else would the lake have suddenly vanished like that? Why would the
robed monk bother leading me here in the first place? Why protect me against my
enemies?

The free world’s enemies …

I walk, the lighter getting hot in
my hand until I have no other choice but to extinguish the flame. But, coming
from up ahead, I see a light. It’s faint at first, but most definitely a light
breaking through the darkness. Soon, a shape begins to take form in the center
of that light. As the white light grows in intensity, the shape begins to
define itself. It doesn’t take me long to realize it is the form of a human
being, its arms outstretched, its feet spread shoulder length apart.

Vitruvian Man.

The light is almost blinding now as
the dark-silhouetted, long-haired figure slowly lowers his arms and begins
walking in my direction. My stomach constricts, my entire blood supply feels
like it’s spilling out onto the rocky floor. Have I died and this is heaven? Or
is it hell?

He moves toward me, a faceless
shadow, the almost superhuman sculpted-out-of- granite body now somehow
shrinking, becoming smaller with each step it takes toward me inside the dark
shaft. By the time he is only a few feet away, he has lost the musculature altogether
along with his nakedness, giving way to a white-bearded man who wears a long
brown robe and sandals on his feet.

The monk.

I open my mouth to speak, but no
words will come. I am so dumbfounded and surprised by this man and the magic of
this cave that my ability to speak cannot keep up with the messages coming from
the rapid-fire synapses in my brain.

Then, finally, I ask, “Who … are
… you?”

Raising his hands, he removes the
hood, exposing the same old face I witnessed on the hilltop. A face covered in
a white beard, the nose long and hooked, and a head covered in thinning, white
hair that’s so long it hangs over his narrow shoulders.

“I am the one you seek,” he says,
his voice Italian-accented, but the words spoken in English. Perfect English. “You
know who I am, do you not, Chase Baker?”

“You are him? You are Leonardo da Vinci?”
I hesitate, the words peeling themselves from my throat. “But, how can that be?
You’ve been dead for six hundred years. It’s impossible.”

He shakes his head.

“I spent my entire life disproving
the impossible,” he reminds me. “Most people are limited to their system of
beliefs and not their inability to see the possibilities, but their refusal to
embrace them. People trust in their fears more than they do their imagination.
You see, man is capable of anything and everything.”

“The universe,” I say. “Is this cave
a part of that universe?”

He nods. “There are answers to be
found here. Knowledge not to be found anywhere else on earth.”

“What is this place exactly?”

“Perhaps it’s better if I
demonstrate the purpose of this cave rather than simply telling you.”

He raises his arm and his right
hand emerges from the robe. It is a hand that contains long, graceful, if not
dramatic, fingers. Like the hands of Jesus in
The Last Supper
. The hands
of the twelve disciples. Hands that speak louder than words. Hands that provide
movement, tension, conflict. The same hand that painted the face of the
Mona
Lisa
.

He touches me with his fingers and
something shoots through my system—a shock, but a pleasant shock. Like stepping
into a hot bath after a long, cold, wet day. The sensation courses through my
veins and the next thing I know I’m falling. Falling fast, and oh so sweetly.