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

by Vincent Zandri

  “Oh, fellas,” I say, as Poseidon Jackie places his meaty hand on the door opener. “I’ll take a chocolate frosted and a plain cruller … chop chop.”

  Poseidon Jackie slips his hand off the handle, raises his middle finger high, flips me off. The finger is about the size of my forearm. He then storms out along with his big twin brother.

  “You really know how to make friends,” Andrea says.

  “You and I got along pretty well,” I say. “I’m hoping that we can get out of here soon and pick up where we left off.”

  Millen clears his throat, opens his file.

  “We really must get down to business,” he insists.

  The photo on top isn’t a photo at all, but an old sketching. A very old sketching.

  “Do you recognize this man, Mr. Baker?”

  “Of course, I do,” I say. “I live in Florence part time. It’s Leonardo da Vinci. He owns the joint. So to speak.”

  Millen raises his head, peers up at the ceiling.

  “Run it,” he says.

  “You got it,” replies a piped in voice. “Killing the lights now.”

  The lights dim. A screen that’s just as translucent as the glass walls descends from the ceiling. Displayed on it is a panoramic view of Florence, Italy, the famous Duomo which covers the altar of the Florence Cathedral taking up the center of the still shot.

  Andrea stands.

  “Florence, Italy,” she says. “Ground zero of the Renaissance which lasted approximately 1300 to 1700 AD, and gave birth to such artistic and scientific geniuses as Michelangelo, Galileo, and, of course, Leonardo da Vinci. A literal interpretation of Renaissance is rebirth. In this case, Europe was arising out of the ashes of the Dark Ages and beginning to redefine itself in a new age of enlightenment that mirrored ancient Rome and Greece some fifteen hundred to three thousand years before. The creative groundswell was nothing less than a revolution artistically, scientifically, financially … and, also, politically and militarily.”

  I’m listening to her, and I appreciate the history lesson, but what does this have to do with me? Why the hell did it necessitate my kidnapping?

  A new photograph takes up half the screen. It’s what I recognize as the black flag of ISIS or what some might refer to as ISIL. On the other half of the screen is a video of the black clad radical Islamists in action, driving through some portion of a bombed out and concrete shattered Iraq, or maybe Syria, in heavy equipment ripped off from the retreating US Army.

  “I’m sure you recognize this band of thugs,” Andrea says.

  I nod.

  “And I’m sure you recognize these people also,” she adds.

  Next up, on the left half of the screen, is Vladimir Putin standing before the Russian national flag and, on the right, a video of Russian forces invading what I take to be the Crimea in the Baltics.

  “And, finally, these nice individuals as well.”

  Putin and his flag are replaced by the Ayatollah Khomeini who stands at a podium, his fist raised defiantly in the air, the Iranian national flag blowing in the wind behind him. On the video beside the robed and bearded Islamist leader, Iran Kud forces working side by side the Russians to take out Syrian Rebel forces. Forces backed by NATO attempting to oust the current dictator-in-chief, Assad.

  “Yup, it’s the more recent big three of global malcontent,” I say.

  Next, the digital screen lights up with video of fighter jets taking out targets, troops firing from trenches, the remains of a Russian jetliner blown out of the sky over the Sanai by an ISIS IED made out of a soda can, a Russian fighter jet being fired upon and downed by Turkish forces, US special forces liberating a stone house, dragging a terrorist out by the head of his hair, ISIS members blowing up precious antiquities and archaeological sites in Iraq. The Paris November ISIS terrorist attack, bodies strewn outside a café, President Obama addressing a press conference looking both defeated and angry.

  The video goes on and on.

  “What’s your point?” I say, my eyes shifting from Andrea to the now quiet, but still tense, Deputy Inspector Millen and back to Andrea again.

  “You’re not the type to mince words, Chase,” she says. “So, I’ll just say it. At present, the world order, or sit rep, as DI Millen likes to say, is molto fucked up. World War Three is literally at our doorstep while an isolationist United States of America and our NATO allies pretty much sit back and watch it all play out.”

  “Okay,” I say, “I’m not going to get into why you kidnapped me, Andrea. But I am wondering what the connection is between Leonardo da Vinci, the Renaissance, and our new and improved enemies.”

  Millen leans forward.

  “We’re undergoing a new Renaissance, Mr. Baker,” he says. “You see, for Russia and Iran, in particular, this is a new age of enlightenment. A new age of financial riches, national pride, political strength on the world stage, and a rapidly growing military might. You might even include the Chinese and North Korea in the mix, but, for now, let’s focus on what we know to be true.”

  “Okay,” I say, “I’m with you there. Unless NATO makes a concerted effort to stop these emerging powers now, there’s no telling what damage they can do.”

  “Chase, if things continue the way they are going, it’s not hard to imagine the Iranian or Russian or even, God forbid, the ISIS flag hanging over number ten Down Street within a year.”

  We sit in a heavy, ear-piercing silence for a few long beats while the violence on the screen is replaced with a sea of refugees fleeing war-torn Syria.

  “So, tell me, Andrea, what do you want from me … besides my body?”

  “Have you ever heard of da Vinci’s cave?” she says.

  The words strike home, because I have heard of the cave, and I tell her so.

  “It’s the stuff of legend,” I add. “The story goes that a young da Vinci stumbled upon it one day while tending to his father’s sheep. Being the ever-curious kid, he entered into the cave only to be confronted with something so frightening yet, at the same time, alluring, he was said to never be the same.”

  “However,” Millen interjects, “some scholars believe that whatever he encountered inside that cave changed him radically. He became a genius overnight. He became the man who would go from normal boy, to a mastermind of unfathomable proportions. A man who would create not only magnificent works of art, but works of engineering so ahead of their time that the Renaissance era world could not possibly build them with the resources and technological knowhow at hand.”

  “Listen, Chase,” Andrea interjects, “some scholars think it’s possible that when da Vinci entered into that cave, he entered into a kind of star gate, or space-time portal, that allowed him a vision some five or six hundred years into the future, and that the engineering designs he was to create in his notebooks, were his fifteenth and sixteenth century interpretations of what he witnessed.”

  On the screen now, da Vinci’s hand drawings of a tank that allowed for a three hundred sixty degree spread of fire power. A screw-like flying apparatus that mimics today’s helicopters. A rapid-fire machine gun. A snorkeling device that is easily the precursor to modern scuba equipment and, of course, dozens of wing-like designs for airplanes and gliders. The sketches are replaced by others showing creatures that possess human bodies, but heads and faces so distorted they might as well be out of this world. Those are followed by super-detailed dissections of human bodies.

  “What about those?” I say. “The dissections. The grotesque heads.”

  “Once he emerged from the cave,” Millen says, “da Vinci became obsessed with the human body, how it worked. Could be his experience inside the depths of that cave led him to believe the human body contained many secrets. He performed illegal dissections right under the Pope’s nose down in the depths of the Vatican. If he’d been discovered, they would have burned him at the stake. That’s how obsessed he was with finding out some secret information hidden inside the body.”

  “My personal opinion,�
�� Andrea goes on, “is that what da Vinci encountered inside the cave was out of this world. Extraterrestrial, if you will.”

  I can’t help but smile. “You mean, da Vinci found E.T.?”

  Even Millen cracks a hint of a smile at that one.

  “It’s true,” she insists. “There are numerous accounts of strange occurrences in the skies above Europe during the fifteen hundreds, in particular. Just take a look at many of the paintings that exist from that day.” Now on the monitor, a familiar painting from the Renaissance period. She brings her hand up toward the painting on the monitor. “Here we see the infant, Jesus, and his mother, Mary. Hovering above them is clearly a disk-shaped metallic object, bright white lights shining down from it, bathing the two.” Another painting. “And here we have an illustration of the crucified Christ while two spaceship-like machines make a fly by. One of them even contains a star insignia, just like modern military aircraft will prominently display its country of origin.” A third painting. “And in this painting, the Virgin Mary and Baby Jesus clearly dominate the foreground, while in the background you can see a man, his hand shielding his eyes against the bright lights emanating from a spacecraft that’s hovering above him.”

  “These images are curious,” I say. “If not uncanny. I’ll give you that.”

  “But perhaps the most convincing evidence of a painting hiding something out of the then known world can be evidenced in one of da Vinci’s own masterpieces housed inside Florence’s Uffizi Gallery. Rather, a painting he finished for his master, Verrocchio. Titled, the Annunciation, Verrocchio painted the mother Mary and the entire background, while da Vinci later painted the angel Gabriel, who not only bears the wingspan you might find on a modern jet fighter, but he’s also capable of complete stealth.”

  “I’m not following you on the stealth part,” I say.

  “Just watch what happens when you view the painting through X-ray vision.”

  The painting comes back up, this time in a video.

  “As the X-rays are applied,” Millen explains, “Gabriel not only begins to fade out, he disappears completely. Just like a stealth aircraft of today.”

  My stomach constricts, hardens. I’ve seen this painting a dozen times before and had no idea that it possessed a message as strange and important as a disappearing angel. Maybe da Vinci had been exposed to something out of this world inside that cave after all.

  E.T.

  “How did he do that?” I ask.

  “While Verrocchio painted his portion of the canvas in lead-based paint, da Vinci painted Gabriel in non-lead-based paints so that they wouldn’t show up under the proper conditions.”

  “But he would have had to know about X-rays in the first place.”

  “Something that modern man wouldn’t know about for centuries. And when you consider Gabriel is God’s right-hand angel when it comes to delivering earth-shattering messages to human’s on earth, you begin to get a sense of what da Vinci was trying to relay to us. The use of Gabriel wasn’t indiscriminate at all. Gabriel isn’t a messenger so much as he is a vehicle for traversing from the heavens to the earth and back again.”

  My pulse pumps a little faster, my brain beginning to buzz with adrenalin.

  “Da Vinci couldn’t come right out and say what he’d seen inside the cave or he’d risk being burned at the stake as a heretic,” Millen goes on. “He had to send messages in his paintings and sketches. In this case, the Angel Gabriel, the divine messenger, helped da Vinci send his own message.”

  We’re quiet for another few beats while I try to digest what’s being communicated about a long dead artist who just might have been touched by the Divine. Or an extraterrestrial divinity, anyway.

  “I’m guessing this cave, and our more recent evil nemeses, are somehow connected,” I say after a time. “What about the Mona Lisa?” I add. “I thought that’s the painting with all the big secrets. The big enchilada as far as da Vinci and his symbols go.”

  “Like in all those Dan Brown conspiracy theory books,” Millen adds.

  “That’s right,” I say. “The New York Times bestseller guy.”

  “Mona Lisa,” Andrea says aloud to whoever is manning our audio-visual presentation. Within a second, the famous painting is illuminated on the screen. Andrea eyes the painting and goes on, “We’ve studied it for clues to the cave’s presence … an out of context image, a spacecraft, a beam of light pointing in a particular direction on a piece of background landscape. But thus far … nothing.”

  “Maybe Mona Lisa is hiding the secret in her brain, and that’s why she’s smiling so slyly,” I quip.

  “And a lot of good that will do us,” Millen says. “Not only is she dead, but so are all her grandchildren and their grandchildren and their grandchildren.”

  “And you’ve X-rayed the painting, of course?” I ask.

  “The Mona Lisa is the most examined artwork in the history of man,” Andrea says. “Only The Shroud of Turin has been placed under more scrutiny for the symbols and messages it might secretly bear.”

  “The Shroud of Turin,” I remark, pursing my lips. “I think I’ve heard of that relic before.”

  The image on the screen disappears. Andrea turns to Millen who’s back to wearing his serious face.

  “So, what’s the bottom line here?” I inquire.

  Turning to me, Andrea says, “As we speak, the evil nemeses—Russia and Iran—have begun their own search for the da Vinci cave. Like any evil force on earth, what they seek is divine-like inspiration.”

  My pulse rises. “They want to steal the cave’s power?” It’s a question to which I already know the answer.

  “And once stolen,” Millen says, “they wish for one thing and one thing only.”

  “To take over the world,” Andrea confirms.

  5

  Not to be disrespectful to Her Majesty’s elite secret agent men and women, but I can’t help but laugh.

  “Come on, Andrea,” I contest. “There is no cave. Or if there is a cave, it’s already been discovered a thousand times over by scores of snotty nosed curious kids just like da Vinci once was. There’s no magical hocus pocus going on inside it. People always look for reasons behind somebody’s creative genius because they can’t conceive of someone so damned smart. They need to create an outlandish story for it to be believable.”

  “I agree with you,” she replies. “And my colleague here believes you. But the fact remains, our intercepts have spotted these two men leading a guerilla expedition into the forested territory between the Tuscan village of Vinci and the Dolomite Mountains all the way up to the north, in search of what could possibly be the most important hole in the ground in mankind’s history.”

  On the left side of the screen is a handsome, gray-bearded, middle-aged man wearing an olive green military uniform. And on the right, a clean shaven man with small but intense eyes, pointy ears, and receding blond hair wearing a business suit.

  “Chase Baker,” Millen says, “I’d like to introduce you to Persian General Qasem Soleimani and his alliance partner, Igor Putin. The former is the leader of the elite Iranian Army of the Guardians of the Islamic Revolution, or Kud forces loyal to the Khomeini. A devout radical Muslim and bloodthirsty killer, of Americans in particular. He foresees an opportunity for a new, international sanctions-free Iran to not only dominate the Middle East but also huge territories in Africa, Europe, South America, and, who knows, perhaps the United States of America. He’s the muscle of the two.” Inhaling, exhaling. “And the latter, is Vladimir Putin’s first cousin. A Moscow businessman who runs the AVTOVAZBANK, which is a corrupt sponsored bank directly associated with cousin Vlad. The bank, if you want to call it that, is also dubbed ‘The Laundromat’ since it is said to move huge amounts of rubles through Putin’s and other banks using duplicitous offshore loans. He would be the money man. The countries both men represent are technically fighting ISIS, at least publically. But you and I both know, Chase, that they will have no trouble making peace wi
th terrorist Caliphate if it will promote their overall goal of world domination.”

  I can’t help but laugh again.

  “Laugh if you want, Chase,” Andrea adds. “But it’s no secret Putin will do anything to reestablish the old Soviet Union and create a new age of Russian world domination. It’s also no secret that Iran wishes, and indeed professes, to seek the total and complete destruction of Israel, Western Europe, and, of course, your friends and mine—the United States.”

  I feel a knot twist itself tight in my stomach. Because as crazy as it is to believe there are still world leaders on this planet who harbor evil goals of world domination, it is nonetheless a reality.

  “Okay, my apologies for finding the humor in all this,” I say. “But what difference does it make if these idiots stumble upon da Vinci’s cave? So what? They’ll get bat shit on their combat boots and walk away disappointed.”

  Andrea sets herself on the table so that one leg hangs off, the other planted firmly on the floor.

  She challenges, “What if the legend of the cave is true, Chase? What if something inside it is so powerful it can make a man see things and know things that no mortal man possibly can fathom? What if whatever is there can turn seemingly normal human beings into a kind of supermen, capable of great feats of creativity and, more importantly, military engineering? If there is something like that in the cave, and those two stumble upon it, they will possess the one single weapon that could wipe freedom loving people off the face of the earth forever.”

  Millen exhales. “Hell on earth is when evil becomes so large we cannot possibly defeat it.”

  I bring both hands to my face, attempt to rub the reality, or the surreality, into my stubbly skin and flesh.

  “Tell that to all the freedom loving people of the world,” I say.

  Andrea slips off the table, comes around to me so that she’s standing over me, looking far more serious and more formidable than the sweet bar-girl I signed a Chase Baker novel for last evening.

  “Chase, if the Russians and the Iranians find the cave,” she says, “they will not be defeated.”