Michael White - The Medici secret

He nodded to the captain and the shrouded body of Ambrogio Tommasini slid into the sea.

Macedonia, present day As the heli-jet came in low over Skopje airport, Jeff could see the city below, a low-rise mass of white buildings skirted by green mottled mountains. An hour later, they were through customs and being driven across the city in a black Toyota Landcruiser Sahara. Their driver and guide took them out on to the freeway heading west. The road climbed slowly as the landscape grew more mountainous. It was late afternoon by the time they reached the foothills of Golem Korab, the tallest mountain in Macedonia and the site of an ancient, now-ruined monastery. This stood beside a wide stretch of water, Lake Angja. Using a software package called Google Earth that enabled them to zoom in to within a few metres of any spot on the surface of the planet, they had checked over the site and were able to pinpoint a large stone cube, a featureless building on a small island close to the centre of the lake. There was no information available about the building but, from the slightly blurred images on Google Earth, it looked like some sort of marble mausoleum. Crucially, it was the same shape as the outline of the building etched into the key.

The main road soon petered out and the four-wheel drive Toyota turned off on to a steep dirt track. After about thirty minutes, they reached a hikers' base, called Refuge Karadjek. From here, the guide had told them, a leisurely climb would bring them to the ruins.

Jeff and Edie pressed on up the mountain alone. They each had a rucksack, torches, food, and walkie-talkies because there was no signal here for their phones. They had also packed a lighter, emergency flares and a change of clothing. Jeff was also carrying an inflatable kayak made from ultra-light carbon fibre.

It was freezing cold, but stunningly beautiful, a hard and brittle beauty, like a cubist-era Picasso or a woman past her prime but radiant still with cheekbones chiselled from ice. It reminded Edie of childhood holidays in Scotland, walking through the Grampians. She hadn't then appreciated the spectacular skyscrapers of rock and the long spindly lakes squeezed almost into oblivion by the pincer movement of ancient stone; but now she could see the wonder of it all.

The monastery reared up like the remains of a fossilised wood, great columns of stone soaring into the sky, jagged and irregular. Looking at it now, Jeff could visualise how once, long ago, it had been a magnificent sight, a monument both to the ingenuity of man and to his piety, for this had been a place of worship as much as a sanctuary where hardy souls had vowed to dedicate their lives to their God. And there, immediately behind it, perhaps a hundred feet down the other side of the hill, Lake Angja. It lay in the shadow of the mountains. Shafts of evening sun broke through the clouds and cast pools of brilliance on the hills close to the water. But the lake had the appearance of black glass, utterly still and forbidding, almost alien.

'Can I see the printout?' Jeff asked. The wind had come up and they had both pulled on their fur-lined hoods. Jeff compared the Google Earth image with the copy they had made of the schematic etched into the key. 'The island must be just around that promontory,' he said, pointing vaguely north-east.

Passing close to the remains of the towers, they found a rough path between the rocks that took them down to the edge of the lake. A small island was visible about a hundred metres across the still black water. Trees obscured much of the shoreline but they could just make out the sides of a squat building, its walls straight and unadorned.

They dumped their rucksacks and Jeff slipped the protective cover from the kayak and let it unfurl on the shingle. He pushed a small lever on the side and a canister of gas opened, inflating the kayak. Together they pushed the boat into the water and clambered in.

There was no current, so the crossing was easy. As they stepped on to a rocky outcrop of the island, they were struck by the stillness, and the almost complete silence all around them. The building dominated the island, a giant marble slab, featureless and foreboding. The walls were smooth, immaculately crafted to the point of complete blandness, leaving only the grain of the stone to offer texture or to break its uniformity. It reminded them of something Albert Speer would have dreamed up for Adolf Hitler's fantasy of the Third Reich.

They circumvented the building twice before finding the door. It was a narrow marble rectangle made from the same piece of stone as the wall. The grain flowed from the door across the seam to the wall. The door would have been almost invisible when closed, but now it was slightly ajar. The lock had been tampered with recently, and there was still the residue of some lubricating oil. Jeff felt a tingle of excitement shoot down his spine.

'You don't have to go any further, Edie,' he said, pulling a torch from his bag. 'Don't be bloody ridiculous.'

'Perhaps one of us should stay here anyway, just incase.'

'Oh sod off, Jeff. In case of what? Don't you think it's a bit late for that sort of thinking?'

'OK,' he said, ducking under the lintel and flicking on his torch.

Their feet echoed on the marble floor of a narrow corridor. Their torch beams cut spectral tubes of illumination through the darkness and they could just make out the far wall, another featureless stone barrier. But as their eyes adjusted to the void they could see a faint patch of light and the blankness of empty space gave way to an outline, a rectangular opening and a corridor beyond.

The distant light was just enough to see by and they flicked off their torches. The stone walls were as smooth and plain as the rest of the mausoleum: cold, soulless marble that glistened very faintly. Instinctively, they moved to the edge of the corridor, clinging to the wall and slowing their pace. As they approached the end of the passageway they could see another rectangular opening cut into the stone. A vast metal door opened into another corridor, and through the opening on to a high-ceilinged chamber. The walls were splashed with orange light that danced and shimmered over the stone. Edie slid around the stone and leaned into the room as far as she dared.

It was vast, a circular chamber with a domed roof, almost a hemisphere, but pinched at the centre like the domes of St Basil's Cathedral in Red Square. The walls and the floor were constructed from the purest white stone. In the centre stood a massive block of black marble.

At first, Edie couldn't understand how the room was lit. There were no torches on the walls. But a channel, perhaps two feet wide cut into the floor, ran around the perimeter of the room and flames licked the air with their roots in a viscous black liquid. Someone had obviously been here very recently.

This does not bode well, thought Jeff. But it was too late to turn back now.

They left their rucksacks by the entrance, and walked over to the black object, which lay directly beneath the apex of the ceiling. Along one edge were three deep steps. They took them slowly. Reaching the top, Edie gasped and almost lost her footing. 'My God!' she exclaimed. Beneath a glass canopy, two large caskets lay side by side. One casket contained the body of a woman who was wearing what looked like a wedding dress, except it was cream and laced in pale blue. A gossamer veil covered her face. The man in the other casket wore a long gown of royal blue velvet with gold brocade. Their faces had crumbled, the skin frayed along the chin and across the cheeks. Their hands lay on cream silk, the flesh all gone, which made their identical rings of white gold and amethyst look many sizes too big. Beside the nearest casket stood two marble columns. Upon the left pedestal sat a plain rectangular wooden box, about a foot long. On the column to the right was a gold plaque with words in Latin etched into it. All they could understand immediately were the words: COSIMO ET CONTESSINA DE' MEDICI. 'Quite spectacular, is it not?' The voice came from the entrance. They spun round.