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

Naturally, I’m blindfolded prior to being shoved back into the
van. I feel like a puppet minus the strings. When the Poseidon Brothers stop
outside of what I can only guess is my apartment, some twenty minutes later,
and open the back doors of the van, they rip my blindfold off and unceremoniously
tell me to get out. They don’t have to tell me twice or even kindly, for that
matter.

Before I leave them, they hand me a
parcel that contains a smartphone encased in thick, heavy duty plastic, like
something the military or a construction crew might carry. The parcel contains
a couple thousand Euros. If this were the old days, it would contain a physical
map upon which I would draw a big X once I located the cave. Because, after
all, X marks the spot. But nowadays, a GPS-equipped smartphone application will
do the trick. The digital age is no fun. Chase the cynical.

I thank the big brothers for their
kind service while they get back into the van, but they don’t so much as shoot
me a second glance before peeling out on their way back to HQ, wherever the
hell that is.

Once inside, I set the smartphone
and the money on my writing desk in the dining room and put on some coffee. When
it’s done, I take it with me back to my desk and set myself in front of my laptop.
Opening Google, I type in “da Vinci’s cave” just to see what I can see.

What I discover is a whole lot of
sites devoted to ancient conspiracy theories and UFOs. One site does raise my
eyebrows when it mentions all the major disciplines da Vinci contributed to—from
botany, to art, to medicine, to engineering—and that we’re still utilizing his contributions
today all these centuries later. So what does this have to do with the
mysterious cave? I can see how people might think some kind of divine intervention
must have touched da Vinci for him to have become a genius of such inhuman— or
superhuman—proportions. Like the narrator of the web page attests, “The most
important man of the first millennia was Jesus Christ. The most important man
of the second millennia was Leonardo da Vinci.”

A chime and a vibrating buzz. My
cell phone. Not the military grade phone MI16 provided me. I’m talking my own,
beat up, energy sucking Android that should have been replaced a couple of
years back. But who’s got the money or the time to purchase a new phone every
few months? Lawyers maybe. Bankers. Real estate moguls. People with real jobs
and real money coming in consistently.

I get up and head into the living
room where my phone is plugged into the charger and stored on the bookshelf. My
heart lifts when I see it’s a text from Ava. At the same time, my stomach
muscles tighten wondering if there’s an emergency. How would I handle it half a
world away? That’s my constant problem, isn’t it? Being half a world away from
my child. Rather, it’s her problem and I wish to God it weren’t.

I click on the text.

“Hi Daddy … I miss you.”

Heart melts …

“Hi Angel. Isn’t it very early in
the morning?”

“Can’t sleep.”

I picture the brunette-haired
beauty lying in her big bed, in her big bedroom, in her big townhouse on
Gramercy Park. The fact that she lives very well with her well-to-do investment
banker stepdad does little to ease my guilt over not being there for her
consistently.

“Bad dream, kiddo?”

“No … Mom and Brian had a party
last night. Lots of drunk people in suits and gowns.”

Stomach grows tighter. I don’t know
why my ex, Leslie, and her new husband hosting a house party should bother me
like it does. But it does.

“Is everything all right? You need
me to call?”

“No, I just miss you. I was
secretly wishing you’d show up at the party and take me away from all the drunk
assholes. J“

“Language, Angel! You know what
happens when you swear.”

“You take one hundred dollars out
of my college account and give it to the homeless. L“

“I’ll let this one slide. How’s
that?”

“Okay good. Thanks! J“

“How’s Lulu?”

“Asleep right next to me. When are
you coming back home to New York? We miss you.”

The stomach, growing as tight as it
possibly can. The heart melting and breaking.

“Soon. I promise. I have a new job
I have to finish and then we’ll do dinner at my place. How’s that sound?”

“Cheeseburgers and fries and lots
of ketchup.”

“It’s a date. I’ll buy a case of
Heinz 57. Now get some sleep. It’s a school day.”

“Okay Daddy. I love you J XXXXXXXXXXXXXXOOOOOOO”

“I love you too Angel XXXXXXXOOOOO”

In my head, I see Ava slipping deep
under the covers while swimming in a sea of down pillows, a little smile
painted on her divine face, my pit bull asleep beside her, protecting her. The
image makes me want to shutter the Florence apartment and hop the next flight
back to JFK. Breathing in deeply, I feel a tear run down my cheek.

I’m wiping the tear with the back
of my hand when I hear footsteps outside the door, and then the undeniable
sound of something being slid under the door—a piece of mail or a note. Setting
the phone back down on the shelf, I quickly go for the door, but not before
pulling out my Colt .45 Model 1911 from its holster hanging on the wall-mounted
coat rack.

Peering down at my feet, I spot the
folded note. I bend at the knees, pick it up. But rather than take the time to
read it right away, I throw the door open, peer out into the narrow vestibule
and the stone steps that lead up to it. No one there. Bounding down the steps,
I run to the exterior door, open it. Stepping out onto the cobbled street, I
look both ways.

The street is empty.

But how can that be? It took me
only a few seconds to make it down the stairs to the building’s exterior. The
pistol gripped in one hand and the note in the other, I head back into my
building, up the steps, and into my apartment.

Holstering the .45, I step into a
living room that also serves as a library, with its far wall filled with
floor-to-ceiling bookshelves that contain more than a few relics from my sandhogging
days beside a thousand or so volumes. And yes, I’ve actually read them all.

I peer down at the handwriting and
the sketch that accompanies it. Not only is the paper thick and almost
antiquated, like an old papyrus or parchment, the handwriting is something from
another age. Letters are scrawled artfully like calligraphy, not in ballpoint
or No. 2 Ticonderoga pencil either—more like a feather quill.

.dees a htiw nigeb ot deen lliw uoy ,tuo ti kees tsum uoy fi tuB
.htaed htiw dellif si ti rof evac eht eraweB

Since the note is impossible to
read, the letters and the words they form seemingly jotted down at random, I
focus my energy on the sketch instead.

At closer inspection, it’s not so
much a sketch but a map. A map of Florence, in fact. The streets depicted emerge
from the Piazza del Duomo almost like the spokes on a bicycle tire. A small
circle surrounds one specific location on the map, as if that’s where its
creator intended me to concentrate my attention. But why? What the hell does
this note have to do, if anything, with my new assignment to locate da Vinci’s
cave? Maybe it has nothing to do with it. Maybe it’s some person’s idea of a
joke. Florence is full of drunks and crazy people, the sort who have been
attracted to this city for centuries. For all I know, every apartment in my
building has received a note just like it.

Stepping into the dining room, I
toss the note onto the writing desk. But that’s when something catches my
attention. The blank, almost glossy black screen on my laptop reflects the
writing from the note just enough for me to make out a word.

Seed.

I pick the note back up. Pulse
picking up in my temples, I stand and hold the note in front of the
wall-mounted mirror.

Beware the cave for it is filled with death. But if you must
seek it out, you will need to begin with a seed.

Well, I’ll be damned. Despite the
location of my Florence apartment, I don’t know a hell of a lot about da Vinci.
But, I do know some things. And one of the things he liked to do was mirror
write. Meaning, he would right backward from left to right, rather than the
other way around like a normal person would. Da Vinci was largely uneducated
and left-handed, so some have speculated that he developed the mirror writing
out of habit. Other, more conspiracy-minded authors, however, have stated that
the master did write like that on purpose to fool the Vatican and the religious
authorities who would have accused him of heresy had his observations, ideas,
and thoughts not been somewhat hidden by the backward scrawl. I tend to lean toward
the former suggestion because it wouldn’t have taken a papal authority much time
to figure out what I just figured out—that all one has to do is place the
writing in front of a mirror and there you have your message as clear as the
noon daylight.

But, what of the note and the
accompanying sketch?

It comes with a warning to stay away
from the cave. So, whoever wrote this somehow knows about my assignment. Is
there a spy in our midst? Almost certainly. But who? And why the warning? I’m
thinking of the cave as being home to a divine entity, not one that will kill
me as soon as I ring the doorbell.

My built-in shit detector continues
to speak to me.

I’m to beware the death inside the
cave, but knowing that I’m going to pursue it anyway, it says to start with a
seed.

“A seed,” I say aloud.

It comes to me then. The map
sketched on the note.

Sitting back in front of my
computer, I open Google maps. For the hell of it, I once more type in Leonardo da
Vinci. A couple dozen red location dots appear on a digital map of downtown
Florence. That’s when I place the sketch beside the computer screen and attempt
to match the roads with those depicted on the note.

It doesn’t take me long to see that
the place marked so prominently on the map matches up with the Leonardo da
Vinci Museum which is located between the Academia, where the statue of
Michelangelo’s
David
is housed, and the Florence Cathedral. With that
mystery solved, I sit back, sip some of the now cool coffee, consider the use
of the word
seed
.

“Seed,” I repeat aloud, as if this
will help my mind spin a little faster. “Sprout, grow, plant, bush, tree,
flower. Seed grows into a tree. A true tree … a seed of truth.” Slapping
the note back down on the desk. “The
Book of Truths
.”

I push out my chair, stand, glance
at my watch. Ten in the morning. The exact time when museums open in Florence.

“Da Vinci’s lost sketch book,” I
say, grabbing my pistol off the coat hook, wrapping it around my shoulders, the
weight of the .45 pressing against my left rib cage. “Could it possibly be
located inside the Leonardo da Vinci Museum? The book would have to actually exist
for that to happen.”

I grab my leather coat, slip it on
over the gun, shove the MI16 smartphone into the interior pocket. I leave my
apartment entirely optimistic that I am already making progress in the hunt for
da Vinci’s long-lost, all-knowing cave.

The Leonardo da Vinci Museum is housed in an old storefront
located directly beside the Florence Museum of the Dark Ages. A museum that stands
in stark contrast to the brightly illuminated, pleasant da Vinci museum interior
with its dark cavernous space accessible by a staircase that leads underground
into what is billed as one of Florence’s only surviving Dark Age dungeons.

Entering into the da Vinci Museum,
I quickly realize I am more than likely the first customer of the day. There’s
a man standing behind a counter that also serves as a book rack, filled with
various da Vinci histories and books of his art and even some miniature
versions of his inventions that double as kid’s toys. The man’s maybe a little
taller than me, and thinner. He’s wearing a dark sweater over a white shirt,
the collar tabs hanging out like bat wings. His salt and pepper hair is cut
like someone put a bowl over his head, but it doesn’t hide the center of his
scalp that’s exposed when he lowers his head. His face is covered in a seven-day
shadow and his teeth bear the brown stains of a pack-a-day smoker.

“Buongiorno,” he says, a half smile
planted on his face like it’s presently an effort to make a full one for me.

I have a choice here. I can either
pound this guy with questions right away about the
Book of Truths
, or I
can play it cool, not arouse suspicions, take a look at the museum, maybe scope
the place out. The note was slid under my door by someone who is watching me .
. . watching my employers. It led me directly here. There must be a reason. That
in mind, I go with the latter.

Bowl Haircut asks me for ten euros,
which I pay him. He then hands me a ticket and pamphlet that explains the
displays and exhibits I’ll be encountering inside the museum. He fakes another
smile, tells me in English to enjoy myself.