I shove the note in my pocket, open up the bottled figment of my imagination and drink.
I drink until the water is gone, some of it spilling down my lips onto my shirt. An amazing thing happens, then. I feel refreshed, energized. Not because of simple rehydration, there’s something else. Something I can’t begin to explain. I only know that my body no longer feels beat up, or exhausted, or defeated. I feel younger than I was moments ago.
Years younger.
Setting the bottle back on the ground, where I found it, I continue my uphill hike. This time, with spring in my step.
When the tree line ends and the landscape gives over mostly to granite rock, I know I’ve come to the hilltop. The air is noticeably cooler, cleaner, crisper. I climb the last few feet to a summit that contains maybe half a dozen jagged, steeple-like peaks, and I gaze down upon the valley. It’s difficult to explain the sensation that takes over inside my body. As I peer down upon the thick, green vegetation that fills the deep valley and the many birds flying over it as they emerge from their nests in the surrounding, smaller hillsides, I can’t help but feel as if I have entered a different dimension altogether. As though, by emerging through the trees, I’ve stepped into a kind of portal, or time warp, in which all things twenty-first century have disappeared entirely.
My breathing grows shallow, and my head spins. The granite beneath me begins to feel like mush and the world gyrates far too fast. Was I injured in the crash more than I realized? Is the shock only now wearing off to give way to stroke … or worse, heart failure? I can’t feel anything in my extremities and the ground seems to disappear entirely while all strength seeps out of my body. I drop down to my knees and finally to my side. I peer out onto a pristine valley that seems to go for miles and miles until it all fades to black.
I see myself flying over the valley. A pair of wings attached to my back. Glider wings made of wood and white fabric. They are identical to the ones da Vinci invented more than six hundred years ago. I’m amazed because they work so well. I use the wings to dive and then recover, gaining altitude so that I’m once again far above the forest floor. Circling for a while, I peer down at an area of earth within the valley that is not forested but, instead, covered only with only dark rock. The patch of barren ground I’m looking at forms an almost a perfect circle … like a lake bed that has been drained of its water. It’s not immediately discernable until I begin a slow descent, but I begin to make out something that occupies the center of the circle. It’s the figure of a human being. A man with long hair parted in the middle. The man is naked, his arms outstretched and his feet spread shoulder width apart.
Vitruvian Man.
I’m filled with awe at the scale of the man carved into the earth, at the sheer size. For certain, the man would not be discernable at ground level. You would have to be flying in order to make it out, just like the Nazca Lines in Peru. Whoever created it would have to be knowledgeable about flight and flying. Or, perhaps, whoever created it did so as a beacon or a lighthouse. A way of attracting extraterrestrial ships to this very spot on earth.
I’m circling the Vitruvian Man when he begins to spin and the earth beneath him opens up …
Opening my eyes, I see feet clad in old, leather sandals. I gaze up at the robed figure. The same robed figure who has been following me for a full day now. Following me and giving me notes and sketches. Or so my built-in shit detector is convinced. Slowly, I stand. Heart in my throat, I face the monk directly for the first time since he entered my life.
His face is still somewhat hidden beneath the hood, so all I can make out is his thick, white beard. But when he lifts his hands, pulls the hood back, he reveals his face. He’s an older man, if not downright ancient. His beard and mustache white, his nose long and accented with a distinct peak in the center, lips thin and red. His eyes are big brown pools and his thick hair, as white as the clouds, spills down onto his shoulders.
My pulse is pounding in my chest and in my head. My mouth has gone dry, pasty. The cold breeze blows up from the valley, filling the monk’s robes like a sail, making his white hair tremble. He smiles at me, but he does not speak a word. Instead, I can almost hear his voice in my head. It tells me he’s been keeping an eye on me. Helping me. Because the location of the cave must not fall into the wrong hands or it will signal the end of humankind. Even now, right this very moment, forces of evil are threatening me. Threatening us. If they are to overrun us, they could very well find the cave, and we cannot allow that.
Coming from behind, the sound of footsteps, and orders shouted out.
I about-face, peer downhill at the soldiers Soleimani and Putin left behind. There must be a dozen of them, and they are loaded to the gills with automatic weapons slung over their shoulders, semi-automatic sidearms, and fighting knives attached to their utility belts . . . maybe even hand grenades.
The small army is being led by Mahaz—the giant, broad-shouldered figure looking like a Goliath that’s emerged from the thick woods. Now I know for sure, he must have been tossed from the Defender as it rolled down the steep hillside. Lucky him. Lucky me.
He raises his right hand issuing the hand-signal order for his men to stop. They do, but at the same time they shoulder their AK47s, plant a direct bead on me and my robed friend.
“It’s over, Chase Baker!” Mahaz shouts, his deep, baritone voice echoing through the valley. “I want the map and the sketch book. Do you understand me? I want them both now, or you will die.” He looks over one shoulder and then the other. “You can’t possibly win. It’s just you and an old man. Now, do yourself a favor and give me what I want, and I’ll see to it that you live another day.”
Mahaz waves his men on. Their weapons still aimed at me and the robed monk, they proceed to climb the granite hillside toward my position. I could reach for the sidearm I stole off of a very dead Soleimani, but somehow, I know it would only result in my getting shot to pieces. What I need is a machine gun. Or artillery. A weapon that can stop a small army.
That’s when I hear the strange voice inside my head once more.
“You have your arsenal,” it tells me. “All you have to do is open your eyes.”
Shifting my gaze from the soldiers, who are spread out along the hillside to form a solid line of death, to one of the many scrub bushes that litter the mostly rocky terrain, I spot something that takes my breath away. How is it I haven’t noticed this machine until now? It’s a replica of the repeating gun da Vinci invented half a millennium ago. A wheeled device that supports three separate rows of a dozen guns apiece so that after firing the first volley, all the operator is required to do is spin the next row of twelve guns into place. Altogether, it should afford me thirty-six rapid-fire rounds in less than half a minute. The piece is completely hidden from Mahaz and his men by the tall brush cover.
Set beside the ancient machine gun is the piece of heavy artillery I wished for. A mortar that houses what I guess to be a one-hundred-pound projectile. It, too, appears to be armed and ready to go. Its white, waxed fuse stands stiff and at the ready. How the hell did this old man manage to transport a couple tons worth of heavy metal and wood artillery pieces all the way up here onto this hilltop?
Right now, I’m not interested in answers so much as I am survival.
Eyes on the enemy soldiers and their giant leader Mahaz, I realize they are just about in range. If I’m going to stop them, I must do it now. But first, I need fire. I rummage through my jacket pocket for my Zippo, pull it out, light a flame.
“Hands up, Chase!” Mahaz shouts. “Hands up where I can seem them, or we will fire on you!”
I smile.
“Drop your weapon, Mahaz!” I bark. “Or face the wrath of God!”
He laughs aloud causing some of his men to laugh. “What will you do exactly? Spit on us?”
I, too, laugh because the jokes on him. “I’m going to blow you all back to hell.”
I light the mortar fuse then light the first fuse on the machine gun. The
mortar launches in a blast of black powder and smoke, the projectile going airborne.
“Incoming!” a suddenly wide-eyed Mahaz shouts as the first rapid-fire volley from the machine gun bursts forth, cutting down three men on his left flank.
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.
29
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.
Chase Baker and the Da Vinci Divinity (A Chase Baker Thriller Series Book 6) Page 11
