close but on every occasion, Flamel and Perenelle had managed to slip away.
Sitting back in the air-conditioned car while the guards continued their
inspections, he recalled the first time he had met the famous Alchemyst,
Nicholas Flamel.
John Dee was born in 1527. His was the world of Queen Elizabeth I, and he had
served the Queen in many capacities: as an advisor and a translator, a
mathematician and an astronomer, and a personal astrologer. It had been left
to him to choose the date of her coronation, and he had picked noon on
January 15, 1559. He promised the young princess that hers would be a long
reign. It lasted for forty-five years.
Dr. John Dee was also the Queen s spy.
Dee spied for the English Queen across Europe and was her most influential
and powerful agent operating on the Continent. As a renowned scholar and
scientist, magician and alchemist, he was welcomed at the courts of kings and
the palaces of nobles. He professed to speak only English, Latin and
Greek though in actuality, he spoke a dozen languages well, and understood at
least a dozen more, even Arabic and a smattering of the language of Cathay.
He learned early on that people were often indiscreet when they didn't know
that he understood their every word, and he used that to his fullest
advantage. Dee signed his confidential and coded reports with the numbers
007. He thought it wonderfully ironic that hundreds of years later when Ian
Fleming created James Bond, he gave Bond the same code name.
John Dee was one of the most powerful magicians of his age. He had mastered
necromancy and sorcery, astrology and mathematics, divination and scrying.
His journeys across Europe brought him into contact with all the great
magicians and sorcerers of that time including the legendary Nicholas Flamel,
the man known as the Alchemyst.
Dee discovered the existence of Nicholas Flamel who had supposedly died in
1418 entirely by accident. That encounter was to shape the rest of his life
and, in so many ways, influence the history of the world.
Nicholas and Perenelle had returned to Paris in the first decade of the
sixteenth century, and were working as physicians, tending to the poor and
sick in the very hospitals the Flamels had founded more than a hundred years
earlier. They were living and working virtually in the shadow of the great
Cathedral of Notre Dame. Dee was in Paris on a secret mission for the Queen,
but the moment he saw the slender dark-haired man and his green-eyed wife
working together in the high-ceiling wards of the hospital, he knew who they
were. Dee was one of the few people in the world who had a copy of Flamel's
masterwork,
famous Alchemyst opposite the title page. When Dee had introduced himself to
the doctor and his wife, calling them by their true names, neither had denied
it. Of course, they also knew of the famous Dr. John Dee by reputation.
Although Perenelle had had some reservations, Nicholas had been delighted
with the opportunity to take on the English magician as a new apprentice. Dee
had immediately left England and spent the next four years training with
Nicholas and Perenelle in Paris.
And it was in Paris, in the year 1575, that he had first learned of the
existence of the Elder Race.
He had been studying late at night in his tiny attic room in Flamel's house
when a creature out of a nightmare had slithered down the chimney, scattering
coal and wood as it crawled out onto the scorched mat. The creature was a
gargoyle, one of the ancient breed of ghouls that infested the sewers and
graveyards of most European cities. Similar to the crude shapes carved in
stone that decorated the cathedral almost directly opposite the house, this
was a living creature of veined, marble-like flesh and cinder black eyes.
Speaking in an archaic form of Greek, the gargoyle invited him to a meeting
on the roof of the Cathedral of Notre Dame. Recognizing that this invitation
was not one he could refuse, Dee followed the creature into the night. Loping
along, sometimes on two legs, often on four, the gargoyle led him through
increasingly narrow alleys, then down into the sewers, and eventually into a
secret passageway that took him deep within the great cathedral s walls. He
followed the gargoyle up the thousand and one steps carved into the interior
of the wall that finally led onto the roof of the Gothic cathedral.
Wait, it had commanded, and then said no more. Its mission accomplished,
the gargoyle ignored Dee and settled down on the parapet, hunched forward,
wings folded over its shoulders, tail curled tightly against its back, tiny
horns visible as they jutted from its forehead. It peered over the square far
below, tracking the movements of the late-night stragglers or those who had
no homes to go to, looking for a suitable meal. If anyone had chanced to
glance up, the gargoyle would have been indistinguishable from any of the
countless stone carvings on the building.
Dee had walked to the edge of the roof and looked across the city. All of
nighttime Paris was laid out below him, thousands of winking lights from
cooking fires, oil lamps and candles, the smoke rising straight up into the
still air, the countless dots of light split by the black curve of the Seine.
From this height, Dee could hear the buzz of the city a low drone, like a
beehive settling down for the night and smell the noxious stench that hung
over the streets a combination of sewers, rotting fruit and spoiled meat,
human and animal sweat and the stink of the river itself.
Perched over the cathedral s famous rose window, Dee waited. The study of
magic had taught him many things especially the value of patience. The
scholar in him enjoyed the experience of standing on the roof of the tallest
building in Paris, and he wished he d brought his sketch pad with him. He
contented himself with looking around, committing everything he saw to his
incredible memory. He recalled a recent visit to Florence. He had gone there
to examine the diaries of Leonardo da Vinci. They were written in a strange
cipher which no one had been able to break: it had taken him less than an
hour to crack the code no one had realized that Leonardo had written his
diaries not only in code, but in mirror image. The diaries were full of many
amazing drawings for proposed inventions: guns that fired many times, an
armored coach that moved without the need of horses, and a craft that could
sail beneath the sea. There was one, however, that particularly interested
Dee: a harness that da Vinci claimed would allow a man to take to the air and
fly like a bird. Dee had not been entirely convinced that the design would
work, though he wanted nothing more in the world than to fly. Looking out
over Paris now, he began to imagine what it would be like to strap da Vinci s
wings to his arms and sail out over the roofs.
His thoughts were interrupted as a flicker of movement caught his attention.
He turned to the north, where a shape was moving in the night sky, a black
