01_-_The_Alchemyst

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