The Alexander Cipher

by Will Adams

  Blue police lights flashed away to his left as he pulled out onto the main road. He turned right instead, heading toward Cairo. The lights shrank and then disappeared from his mirror. Police cars with flashing lights hurtled past on the other side of the highway. He found that he was holding his breath, had to make himself start again. Where the fuck was he going to go now? He couldn’t stay in Cairo, but he needed to avoid checkpoints, too. That cut out Sinai, the Western Desert, and the south. Alexandria, then. It was just three hours north, and of all Egypt’s cities, he liked it most. He had friends there, too, so he could avoid hotels. But he was a fugitive; he couldn’t inflict himself on just anyone. He needed someone who’d believe in him, someone with strong nerves who relished a little transgression from time to time, just to keep the blood pumping. Put like that, there was only one contender. Knox felt his spirits lifting for the first time in hours. He stamped down on the accelerator and roared north.

  Chapter Six

  MAIS ATTENDS!” yelled Augustin Pascal at whatever bastard was pounding at his door. “J’arrive! J’arrive!” He clambered across the naked girl lying with her face down between his pillows. With that long, wavy, tawny hair, it looked like Sophia. He lifted her mane to make sure. Shit! Shit! He’d been excited for a week at the prospect of nailing her, and now he’d gone and wasted it while too drunk to remember.

  A terrible thing, growing old.

  The pounding on the door began again, resonating with the demolition works inside his skull. He checked his alarm clock. Five thirty! Five fucking thirty! But this was unbelievable! “Mais attends!” he yelled again. He kept emergency bottles of water and pure oxygen on his bedside table. He alternated long swallows from one with deep breaths from the other, until he felt able to stand without keeling over. He wrapped a ragged towel around his waist, lit a cigarette, and went to open his front door. Knox was standing there. “The fuck do you want?” demanded Augustin. “You know what fucking time this is?”

  “I’m in trouble,” said Knox simply. “I need help.”

  IBRAHIM BEYUMI, Head of the SCA in Alexandria, felt in high spirits as he drove through his beloved city. The sun had only just risen, but he’d been too excited to stay in bed. He’d had a dream during the night. No, that wasn’t quite right. He’d been lying there half awake, waiting for his alarm to sound, when he was suddenly overwhelmed by a sense of exquisite and intense well-being. He couldn’t shake off the idea that he was on the verge of something momentous, and not even the occasional twinge of anxiety about taking Nicolas Dragoumis’s money could touch his mood.

  He pulled up outside the apartment block that Mohammed, the man who had reported this mysterious underground necropolis, had given as his home address. It was a wretched-looking place, tall and pockmarked with discolored gray walls, its front doors broken and hanging loose, intestinal wires spilling out of the intercom. Mohammed was already waiting in the lobby. His eyes lit up when he saw Ibrahim’s Mercedes, and he walked proudly and slowly across, turning around as he did so, like an actor or a sportsman milking his time on the stage, wanting as many of his friends and neighbors as possible to see him climb in.

  “Good morning,” said Ibrahim.

  “We travel in style, then,” said Mohammed, pushing back the passenger seat as far as it would go to accommodate his legs, yet still struggling to fit.

  “Yes.”

  “My wife’s very excited,” said the big man. “She’s convinced we have found Alexander.” He glanced slyly at Ibrahim, as though to gauge his reaction.

  “I doubt it, I’m afraid,” said Ibrahim. “Alexander was buried in a huge mausoleum.”

  “And this isn’t part of it?”

  Ibrahim shrugged. “It’s very unlikely. It wasn’t just Alexander, you see. The Ptolemies were buried there, too.” He smiled across at Mohammed. “They wanted Alexander’s glory to rub off on them. It didn’t work all that well, though. When the Roman emperor Augustus made his pilgrimage to Alexander’s tomb, the priests asked him if he’d like to see the bodies of the Ptolemies, too. You know what he replied?”

  “What?”

  “That he’d come to see a king, not corpses.”

  Mohammed laughed loudly. Alexandrians had always enjoyed watching the powerful get taken down a peg or two. Ibrahim was so pleased that he ventured another anecdote. “You know Pompey’s Pillar?”

  “Of course. I can see it from my site.”

  “Did you know it had nothing to do with Pompey? It was actually erected in honor of the emperor Diocletian after he led an expeditionary force here to quash an uprising that had made him so angry he vowed to revenge himself on the Alexandrians until his horse was knee-deep in blood. Guess what happened?”

  “I can’t think.”

  “His horse stumbled and grazed its knees, so that they became covered in blood. Diocletian took this as a sign and spared the city. His officials put up his pillar and statue in remembrance. But do you know what the Alexandrians did?”

  “No.”

  “They built a statue, too. But not to Diocletian—to his horse.”

  Mohammed guffawed and slapped his knee. “To his horse! I like that!”

  They were drawing closer to the city center. “Which way?” asked Ibrahim.

  “Left,” said Mohammed. “Then left again.” They paused for a tram. “So where was Alexander’s tomb?” he asked.

  “No one knows for sure. Ancient Alexandria suffered terribly from fires, riots, wars, and earthquakes. And then there was a catastrophic tsunami during the fourth century. First it sucked away the water from the harbors, luring citizens out to pick up the fish and valuables just lying there. Then the wave struck. They never stood a chance.”

  Mohammed shook his head in wonder. “I never heard.”

  “No? Anyway, the city fell into ruin and all the great sites became lost, even Alexander’s mausoleum. And we’ve never found it since, though we’ve tried, believe me.” Countless excavators had tried, including Heinrich Schliemann, fresh from his triumphs at Troy and Mycenae. All had come up empty.

  “You must have some idea.”

  “All the sources agree that it was on the northeast of the ancient crossroads,” said Ibrahim. “The trouble is, we’re not sure where that was. All these new buildings, you see. Two hundred years ago, yes. A thousand years ago, easy. But now . . .”

  “People say Alexander is buried beneath the Mosque of the Prophet Daniel. They say he’s in a golden casket.”

  “They’re wrong, I’m afraid.”

  “Then why do they say this?”

  Ibrahim was quiet for a moment, collecting his thoughts. “You know that Alexander appears in the Qur’an?” he asked. “Yes, as the prophet Zulkarnein, the two-horned one. Leo the African, a sixteenth-century Arab writer, talked of pious Muslims making pilgrimages to Alexander’s tomb, and he said it was near the church of Saint Mark, as the Mosque of the Prophet Daniel also is. And Arab legends talk of a prophet Daniel who conquered all Asia, founded Alexandria, and was buried here in a golden coffin. Who else could that be but Alexander? You can certainly see why people might confuse the mosque with Alexander’s tomb. And then, oh, about a hundred and sixty years ago now, a Greek man claimed he’d glimpsed a body wearing a diadem on a throne in the mosque’s vaults. It’s a very seductive idea. There’s only one problem with it.”

  “Yes?”

  “It’s completely wrong.”

  Mohammed laughed. “You’re sure?”

  “I’ve searched the vaults myself,” said Ibrahim. “Believe me, they’re Roman, not Ptolemaic. Five or six hundred years too late. But the idea has stuck, not least because our best map of the ancient city marks Alexander’s mausoleum very near the mosque.”

  “There you are, then!”

  “The map was made for Napoleon the Third,” said Ibrahim. “A nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte who became emperor of France. Anyway, he was writing a biography of Julius Caesar, and he needed information on ancient Alexandria, so he asked hi
s friend Khedive Ismail for a map of it. But there wasn’t one at the time, not a reliable one at least, so Khedive Ismail commissioned a man called Mahmoud el-Falaki to make it.”

  “Research is certainly easier if you’re an emperor.”

  “Quite,” agreed Ibrahim. “And it’s a really fine piece of cartography, too. But not perfect, I’m afraid. He fell for the old legends, too. He marked Alexander’s tomb near the mosque, and all the modern guidebooks and histories now reprint it, keeping the myth alive. The poor imam of the Nabi Daniel Mosque is constantly being pestered by tourists hoping to find Alexander, but they won’t find him there, believe me.”

  “Where should they be looking?”

  “On the northeast side of the old crossroads, as I said. Near the Terra Santa cemetery, probably. A little northwest of the Shallalat Gardens.”

  Mohammed was looking downcast. Ibrahim patted his forearm. “Don’t give up hope just yet,” he said. “There’s something I haven’t told you.”

  “What?”

  “I haven’t told anyone. I don’t want rumors to start, you know.”

  “Tell me.”

  “The thing is, Alexander didn’t have just one tomb in Alexandria. He had two.”

  “Two?”

  “Yes. The Soma, the great mausoleum I told you about, was built around 215 BC by Ptolemy Philopater, the fourth of the Ptolemaic kings. But, before that, he had a different tomb, almost certainly more in the traditional Macedonian style. More, as it happens, like the one you and your men found yesterday.”

  Mohammed looked wonderingly at him. “You think this is what we have found?”

  “We won’t know until we see it,” said Ibrahim. “But don’t get too excited. This was Alexander, remember; the Ptolemies would surely have built something spectacular for him.” Not that they knew what. They didn’t even know when Alexander’s body had been brought up here from Memphis, where it had been held while his mausoleum was being built. The modern consensus was 285 BC, nearly forty years after his death, though no one had satisfactorily explained why the transfer should have taken so long. “Apart from anything else, we believe that they would have wanted to keep his body on display, so it’s unlikely he’d have been kept deep underground. But that’s the wonderful thing about archaeology,” grinned Ibrahim. “You never know for sure.”

  There was something else, too, though nothing he felt like sharing with Mohammed. It was that ever since he’d been a small boy, listening to his father murmur him to sleep with tales of the founder of this great city, he’d had a sense of destiny. One day, he would play his part in the rediscovery of the tomb of Alexander. And this morning, as he lay awake in bed, he had a reprise of that feeling, a conviction that the time was upon him. And for all his intellectual misgivings, he was sure in his heart that it had something to do with the tomb they were on their way to inspect.

  NESSIM HAD BEEN ON THE GO ALL NIGHT, working furiously to catch Knox before Hassan woke. But he had failed. Fifteen minutes ago he received his summons, and now here he was, steeling himself with a clenched fist before knocking on his boss’s bedroom door at Sharm’s medical center.

  Nessim had joined the Egyptian Army at the age of seventeen and had become a paratrooper, one of the elite. But a twisted knee put an end to his hopes of active service, so he resigned his commission out of boredom to become a mercenary in the endless African wars. When a mortar round had landed fizzing practically in his lap yet hadn’t exploded, it convinced him that it was time for another change of pace. Back in Egypt, he had made a name for himself as a bodyguard before being recruited by Hassan as his head of security. Nessim didn’t scare easily; if he did, he would never have survived such a life. But Hassan scared him. Having to report bad news scared him.

  “Come in,” muttered Hassan. His voice was softer than usual, and a little wheezy. He’d lost a tooth and suffered severe bruising of his ribs, too, which evidently made breathing painful. “Well?” he asked.

  “Would you please excuse us?” Nessim asked the doctor sitting beside his bed.

  “With pleasure,” said the doctor, a shade too emphatically for his own good.

  Nessim closed the door behind him. “We’ve got the girl,” he told Hassan. “She was going for a bus.”

  “And Knox?”

  “We almost had him. At Cairo Airport. He got away.”

  “Almost?” said Hassan. “What good is almost?”

  “I’m sorry, sir.”

  Hassan closed his eyes. Evidently, yelling hurt too much. “You call yourself my head of security?” he said. “Look at me! And you let the man who did this wander around Egypt like some kind of tourist?”

  “You’ll have my resignation as soon as—”

  “I don’t want your resignation,” said Hassan. “I want Knox. I want him here. Do you understand? I want you to bring him to me. I want to see his face. I want him to know what he’s done and what’s going to happen to him because of it.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I don’t care what it takes. I don’t care how much you spend. I don’t care what favors you have to call in. Use the army. Use the police. Whatever is necessary. Am I clear?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Well?” asked Hassan. “Why are you still here?”

  “With respect, sir, there are different ways to catch him. One, as you rightly suggest, is by using our contacts in the police and the army.”

  Hassan squinted. He was a shrewd man, for all his wrath. “But?”

  “It was easy enough to secure their help last night. We simply told them that Knox had caused a serious incident on a boat though the details were still unclear. But tomorrow and the day after, if we still want their active help, they’ll want evidence of this serious incident.”

  Hassan looked at Nessim in disbelief. “Are you saying what he did to me isn’t sufficient evidence?”

  “Of course not, sir.”

  “Then what are you saying?”

  “So far, very few people know anything more than rumors. I picked your medical team myself, and they know better than to talk. I’ve had my own people guarding your door; no one has been allowed in without my explicit permission. But if we involve the police, they’ll want to investigate for themselves. They’ll send officers to interview you and take photographs and talk to the other guests on the boat, including your Stuttgart friend and the girl. And I wonder if that would be helpful at this particular moment—or, indeed, whether it would be good for your reputation to have photographs of your injuries reaching the newspapers or the Internet alongside exaggerated reports of how they were incurred, which could easily happen, because we both know you have enemies as well as friends in the police. And you should ask yourself what it would do for your personal authority if people got to see what a mere dive instructor had done to you—and that he’d managed to escape, too, even if only for a little while.”

  Hassan frowned. He knew the value of being feared. “What’s our alternative?”

  “We drop the charges. We say it was all a misunderstanding, and we put the fear of god into the girl and then get her out of the country. You lie low until you’ve recovered. Meanwhile, we go after Knox ourselves.”

  There was a long silence. “Very well,” said Hassan finally. “But you’re to take personal charge. And I expect results. Understand?”

  “Yes, sir. I understand entirely.”

  Chapter Seven

  IT WAS GAILLE’S FIRST VISIT TO ALEXANDRIA, and it didn’t make much of a first impression, with traffic barely moving along the Corniche, the city’s famous seafront. The masts of fishing boats and yachts in the Eastern Harbor jangled in a light breeze that brought with it a faint acidic tang. She rested her head back, shielding her eyes from the early morning sun as it flickered between tall, rectangular, sun-bleached hotels, apartment blocks, and offices, all pocked with satellite dishes. The place was coming to life like a gigantic yawn. Alexandria had always been the late riser of Egyptian cities. Shops were raisin
g steel shutters, lowering canopies. Groups of portly men sipped coffees at pastry cafés and watched benignly as ragged boys and girls wended through the traffic selling packs of napkins and cigarettes. The alleys leading away from the harbor front were tight, dark, and faintly menacing. A tram already crammed with passengers paused to take on more. A policeman in a dazzling white uniform and flat cap held up his hand to divert them right. An ancient commuter train clanked and rattled with taunting slowness through a crossing. Young boys played chase in its open cattle cars.

  Elena glanced pointedly at her watch. “You’re sure this is the right way?”

  Gaille shrugged helplessly. Her only map was a crude photocopy from an outdated backpacker guidebook. She had a nagging suspicion that she had already gone badly wrong, though she had learned enough about her new boss not to admit it. “I think so,” she equivocated.

  Elena sighed loudly. “At least you could make an effort.”

  “I’m doing my best.” Gaille couldn’t shake off the suspicion that she was being punished for her intrusion into the site yesterday or was at least being opportunistically expelled from the Delta dig because of it. They were approaching a large intersection. Elena looked at her expectantly for directions. “Turn right,” said Gaille.

  “Are you sure?”

  “It should be somewhere along here on the left or right.”

  “Somewhere along here on the left or right?” snorted Elena. “That’s really helpful.”

  Gaille leaned forward, staring through the windshield, her brain aching from lack of sleep and too much coffee. There was a construction site ahead, a huge concrete high-rise with steel rebar waggling like spider legs from the top. She said in desperation, “I think this must be it.”

  “You think this must be it; or this is actually it?”

  “I’ve never been to Alexandria before,” protested Gaille. “How should I know?”