Da Vinci Code of Terror

Anti-terror mediums are to question the phantom of Leonardo da Vinci tonight in the basement of London Police Station over blueprints for a 500 year-old plot of terror.

The polymath’s spirit stands accused of designing Weapons of Mass Destruction more centuries before their time than is proper, and of having the mental capacity to imagine many more. Plans include a terror submarine – in the form of a small boy armed with bombadilloes and an incredibly fragile, giant, tin umbrella – plus a plot to ride hijacked horses into a castle wall with the intention of weakening a bastion.

The quirky sketches, which art historians had till now dismissed as joie de vivre, were long known to be annotated in a secret code of fiendish complexity. But when the cipher was cracked this week by monkeys, who hit on the idea of moving each letter one place forward in the alphabet, it revealed a deadly scheme.

The monkeys, whose bungled circus escape led them, by chance, to the Accademia dell’Arte, Florence, are said to have run riot after the discovery, trashing masterpieces and pooing on important cultural treasures, actions which police claim “only go to emphasise the seriousness of the threat.”

But it wasn’t till Suspect X, a captive of the CIA, confessed to guessing the meaning of the monkeys’ fevered screams as they were played back to him on a loop every night for the past decade, that the full extent of the plot emerged. According sources, 3 000 hijacked shire horses, with the combined horsepower of one megaton of TNT, were to be ridden full tilt at the masonry, consecutively, over the course of 20 years, effectively grinding it to dust.

“Imagine the damage this could do to an Abrams tank,” said General Sir Dennis Raffles simultaneously with his Siamese twin and wife, Dame Mary Raffles (who has to be put to sleep during classified briefings because she is not a general), “or a Mark 6 Saracen Armoured Personal Carrier if one of those were to be left behind in a terrorist quarter by absentminded soldiers, distracted from battle by their love of country.”

The gentle genius’s arrest is only the latest in a series of Renaissance busts. Last month, Dutch artist Rubens Varicello was sent down for possession of mental images of “landscapes of an adult nature,” even though he was merely a minor painter at the time of the offence. And the aberrant watercolorist’s demise was followed hotly on its own heels by the discovery of Shakespeare’s 155th sonnet, in which the Swan of Avon likens or appears to liken the human condition to a depraved act.

The name of the act, if it has one, has not been made public.

“It’s that extreme,” said Ministry of Justice spokesdroid 6EQUJ5 who refused to elaborate, saying simply, “It’s just a very extreme metaphor, okay? That’s all you need to know to form a mob.”

The disgraced Bard’s spectre is currently being held at an undisclosed location on the north bank of the Thames – in the extreme western portion of the borough of Tower Hamlets, on the border with the central City of London – along with twelve hundred English teachers who possess or appear to posses, or stand accused of appearing possess the intent to think they possess, memories of the graphic figure of speech.