Michael White - The Medici secret

Delia Pinoro looked confused. 'In the case of Ippolito,' Edie went on. 'We've been able to make a detailed analysis of his skeleton which has revealed unusual levels of chemicals called salicylates.' 'And this proves…?'

'Well, Alessandro got away with the murder because, on his deathbed, Ippolito displayed all the normal symptoms of malaria: fever, rigors, excruciating headaches and severe abdominal pain. But poisoning with oil of wintergreen produces almost identical effects, and oil of wintergreen contains methyl salicylate.'

Delia Pinoro was about to say something when a movement behind the men caught Edie's eye. 'Ah, they're bringing out the latest cause of disagreement.'

'Cause of disagreement?' Nero asked, as she headed towards the door.

'Apparently, this is Cosimo de' Medici, Cosimo the Elder,' Edie replied, leading the two men to another dissection table that stood head to tail with the platform containing Ippolito's remains. Mackenzie was there with his stepson, Jack Cartwright, the team's DNA expert.

'Apparently?' Mackenzie looked quizzically at Edie.

'We have conflicting opinions about the identity of this body,' Edie explained. 'My uncle is certain it's Cosimo, I'm yet to be convinced.'

Jack Cartwright, the tall, broad-shouldered man at Mackenzie's side stepped forward and introduced himself to the visitors. He had just returned from a morning at the University of Florence.

'And where do you stand in this matter, Dr Cartwright?' the vice chancellor asked, averting his eyes from the corpse.

Cartwright was about to reply when a young woman arrived, looking rather flustered. 'Sorry to interrupt,' she said. 'The car has arrived for our guests.'

The vice chancellor could not conceal his relief, and before della Pinoro could say anything, he had stepped up to Mackenzie. 'I'm very grateful you could make time,' he said. '… And thank you, Dr Granger, for showing us around.'

A few moments later, Edie returned having seen the visitors to their limo. Mackenzie and Cartwright were examining the body on the table. Mackenzie, with a loupe to his eye, was easing open a flap of a remarkably well-preserved silk tunic with a pair of tweezers. For two weeks they had been studying material taken from this body, running tests on tissue samples and bone structures using a portable X-ray machine. But only this morning they had agreed the body should be removed from its niche and inspected more closely. The body shared the alcove with another. Mackenzie believed it to be the remains of Contessina de' Medici, wife of Cosimo I, who had died in 1473.

'I do wish you wouldn't put out our dirty laundry for other people to see' Mackenzie said, without looking up.

'I don't see any harm in admitting academics have disagreements,' Edie replied, plucking another pair of tweezers from a tray.

'Well, I do. I don't trust those people. They're always on the lookout for anything to cut our funding.'

'I think they were more interested in getting out of here as quickly as possible.'

'Quite possibly, but I consider Pinoro to be a viper.'

'Is that why you lumbered me with them?' Edie retorted.

Mackenzie glared at her. Edie looked away and quickly changed the subject. 'Exquisite texture to this silk jacket.' 'Indeed it is. Take a look at this,' Mackenzie offered Cartwright his loupe. The corpse was dressed in a cream silk shirt and a velvet jacket which would once have been the most vivid and beautiful purple. The buttons of the jacket were solid gold. 'Adds weight to my theory, does it not?' Mackenzie muttered.

Edie shrugged. 'You would expect Cosimo to have been buried in the finest, but that could equally well apply to any prominent member of the family.'

'Perhaps. Found anything from the DNA samples, Jack?'

'We're still working on that,' Cartwright handed the eyepiece back to Mackenzie. 'It's proving to be more difficult than expected.'

Mackenzie sighed, carefully pulling back the crumbling jacket and exposing the crisp brown skin of the mummy beneath. It looked like a body made from papier mache. 'Well, that's why we've dragged the poor fellow out,' he said.

Cosimo de' Medici, or Cosimo the Elder as he was sometimes known, had been one of the most important members of the Medicis, a man who had done more than anyone to elevate the family into its illustrious place in history. Born in Florence in 1389, he had been de facto ruler of the city for a generation. He ignited the Italian Renaissance and made the equivalent of billions for the family. Upon his death in 1464, he was honoured with the official title Pater Patriae: 'Father of His Country'.

Mackenzie ran a scalpel along the body's desiccated torso. The blade slid through the skin effortlessly and he drew it down then across the body to produce a Y-cut. The embalmers had worked with remarkable skill. The ancient corpse was very different to that of Ippolito, whose body, although buried more recently, had been reduced to little more than a crumbling skeleton. But under the crisp skin lay a dry cavity. The organs had shrivelled to a fraction of their original size and were as dry as the man's skin.

Mackenzie removed pieces of each organ and placed them in individually labelled test tubes which he then stoppered up. Edie placed these carefully in a rack on one side of the table. Probing deeper, he scraped away a tiny sample of the breastbone and a rib, placing the flakes into their own sample bottles.

Leaning forward, Mackenzie examined the void inside the body's chest. 'Odd,' he said after a moment. 'There appears to be an alien object resting against the spine. I can't see it very clearly. Take a look Edie.'

She swung a mounted magnifying glass over the cadaver and peered down at the area around the shrivelled heart. 'I can see something, a black surface, it's embedded in the anterior epidermal layers I think. It certainly doesn't look like a natural artefact.'

'Help me turn the body over on to its side,' Mackenzie instructed them.

Edie and Jack Cartwright gently turned the corpse, raising one side two feet above the table. It weighed almost nothing.

'Just a little more,' Mackenzie said, squeezing his head and shoulders under the ancient mummy. With surgical precision, he ran his scalpel along the line of the spine making sure he inserted the blade in just a fraction of an inch so as not to damage the vertebrae. Straightening up, he raised a pair of metal tweezers up to the light. They held a thin and featureless black rectangle. Carlin Mackenzie was alone in the burial chamber of the Medici Chapel. The digital clock on his desk showed that it was approaching 9 p.m., but he felt neither tired nor in any mood to shut down the computers and walk the short distance to his apartment on Via Cavour.

It had been an extraordinary day, perhaps the most extraordinary of his life, certainly the most remarkable of his forty-year career as a palaeopathologist The nature of the artefact they had discovered inside the body of Cosimo de' Medici remained a total mystery; but the simple fact of its existence presented a conundrum. Save for the natural disturbance of the flood of 1966, these bodies had not been touched since they were buried. Yet here was this strange rectangular object concealed in the dried epidermal tissue of a man who had died over 500 years earlier.

The object was resting in a Petri dish next to Mackenzie's computer. He, Edie and Jack Cartwright had studied it as thoroughly as they dared without taking unnecessary risks. It was entirely black, a piece of granite-like stone measuring exactly 3.9 by 1.9 centimetres, and was just a few millimetres thick. A single X-ray had shown it to be solid, apparently featureless and of uniform density. They had refrained from any form of chemical test until they could be sure these would not harm the stone. Using a powerful microscope, its crystalline structure was revealed to be a blend of feldspar, quartz and potassium, an exceptionally pure granite called Amanorthosite.