The Alexander Cipher

by Will Adams

  There was a fat black shaft in the floor, just as Ibrahim had glimpsed. They all gathered around. Mansoor directed his flashlight down. Light glinted brightly from five yards below.

  “Water,” said Mansoor. “I’ll go first.” He turned to Mohammed. “Tie a noose in a rope. You’ll lower me, yes?”

  “Yes,” agreed Mohammed.

  KNOX HAD NO TIME FOR FINESSE. He clutched his hand over the bulb of his flashlight to dim it yet allow him just enough light to see what he was doing; then he stripped off his T-shirt so that he could use it to erase his footprints in the dust as he backed out of the chamber and down the steps. But Mansoor was already being lowered on a rope, flashing his light all around him and down the passage, so that Knox had to duck back out of sight. “There’s a corridor!” shouted Mansoor as he splashed into the shallow water and stepped off the stirrup. “I’ll take a look.”

  “No!” said Ibrahim. “Wait.”

  “But I’ll just—”

  “Wait for us.”

  The light vanished momentarily. Knox risked another glance, saw the stirrup slithering back up. But then Mansoor shone his flashlight again down the corridor, his frustration evident, giving Knox no chance to escape. Someone else was being lowered now: Gaille, twisting this way and that on the rope. Mansoor turned to help her down. It was Knox’s only chance. He ran along the corridor to his dismantled wall, trying hard not to make waves. But Gaille gave a shriek of alarm. “There’s someone there!” she cried.

  Knox stepped through the hole in the wall as Mansoor blazed his flashlight down the corridor. “There’s no one,” he laughed. “How could there be?”

  “I could have sworn,” said Gaille.

  “Just your imagination,” said Mansoor. “Places like this will do that.”

  Knox was only half listening, his heart still hammering, frantically rebuilding his wall from within, taking care to keep as silent as possible. He couldn’t risk his flashlight, so he had to work by feel and what little light reached him from Mansoor, Gaille, and the others as they gathered one by one. But by the time they were all down, his wall was still only three-quarters rebuilt.

  “Okay,” said Ibrahim. “Lead on.”

  Knox froze. He couldn’t do any more now except press himself back into the shadows and pray. Light flickered and flashed and then grew almost blinding. There was still a great, gaping hole in his wall. They had to spot it. But somehow, first one then the next walked past with heads bowed, watching the floor to make certain of their footing. Ibrahim, Mansoor, Elena, Gaille, and then, shockingly, Nicolas Dragoumis. Nicolas Dragoumis! Last night’s mock execution suddenly had a completely new suspect.

  They paused, as he had, to illuminate and read the inscription on the architrave. “Look!” said Elena excitedly, nudging Nicolas. “Kelonymus!” Her tone, and the presence of Nicolas Dragoumis, triggered recognition in Knox, so that he remembered at last why the names Kelonymus and Akylos were so familiar.

  IBRAHIM ENTERED THE CHAMBER FIRST. He stood there in silent awe as the others arrived behind him and took their own places on the bottom step. He gazed almost drunkenly around the chamber. It was only when Nicolas made to step up into the chamber that he came back to his senses. “Stop!” he said. “No one goes in.”

  “But—”

  “No one goes in,” he repeated. He felt, suddenly, a surge of authority. He was the senior representative here of the Supreme Council for Antiquities, and this—as no one could for a moment doubt—was a find of historic importance. He beckoned for Mansoor. “We have to inform Cairo at once,” he said.

  “Cairo?” winced Nicolas. “Is that really necessary? Surely this isn’t a matter for—”

  “It’s a matter for whoever I say it is.”

  “But—”

  “You’re our sponsor and we appreciate your support. This is no longer a matter for you. Is that clear?”

  Nicolas had to force his smile. “Whatever you say.”

  “Gaille. You will take photographs, yes?”

  “Of course.”

  “Mansoor, you stay with her.”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll instruct Mohammed and the security guards not to let anyone else down. I’ll arrange for the necropolis to be cleared. When you’re satisfied that Gaille has enough photographs, replace the plinth over the shaft. Then make sure the site is empty and seal off the mouth of the stairwell. I’m sure Mohammed can find a way. Sealed tight, mind. No one is to get in or out. Understood?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I’ll have Maha arrange around-the-clock security. You’re not to leave until they arrive. Then bring Gaille to my villa. Drive her yourself. And don’t let her camera out of your sight.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “As for me, I’m going to notify the Supreme Council that we’ve just discovered the most important antiquity in the modern history of Alexandria.”

  KNOX QUIETLY FINISHED rebuilding the wall before Ibrahim and the others left. Since Gaille and Mansoor remained behind taking photographs, he didn’t dare move, scared the noise would give him away. Cramps built agonizingly in his thighs and calves until Mansoor was finally satisfied, and they left.

  There was no time to waste. If he didn’t get out quick, he’d be sealed in with all the other corpses. He cleared the area of traces of his presence, then squeezed back into the chamber beneath the rotunda, replacing the blocks as he’d found them. He stripped naked and stuffed everything into his bag, dropped down into the water, breathed deeply, then navigated his way back to the steps, pulling the bag behind him. He was lucky, there was no one waiting. In fact, the whole necropolis was eerily dark and silent. He brushed himself dry, pulled on his trousers and T-shirt, filled his pockets with everything of value, then stuffed the rest deep into an empty loculus. Then he hurried for the rotunda. Metal screeched and banged as he reached it. He looked up to see daylight already partially eclipsed by the bottom of a blue container, with a second already being positioned next to it to complete the seal. Knox pounded up the steps, his thighs protesting, diving out just as the container was maneuvered into place. Everyone stared incredulously as he rolled up onto his feet and ran for the gates. “Stop him!” yelled Mansoor. “Someone stop him!”

  At the site exit, two security guards blocked his way. He dropped a shoulder, feinted right, sidestepped left, spinning one of the guards around, bursting out into the street, across traffic, dodging a minibus, putting distance between himself and the chasing pack, shouting at people to stop him, yelling into their phones. He cut down an alley toward his Jeep, three men chasing hard. A shopkeeper jumped out to block his path, but he broke through the halfhearted tackle, glancing around to see the three getting closer. And now two soldiers appeared ahead, reaching for their guns. This was turning ugly fast, but it was too late to stop now. He ducked left, his chest aching, a stitch burning in his side, his legs on fire with lactic acid. He vaulted a wall, crawled beneath a gate, then ran to the dark alley where he’d left the Jeep. He pulled the tarpaulin back just far enough for him to sneak beneath, unlock and open his door, and climb inside, where he sprawled across the front seats, keening for breath while simultaneously struggling for silence, listening to frantic footsteps hurrying up the alley behind him, praying he hadn’t been seen.

  Chapter Nineteen

  IBRAHIM GREETED GAILLE and Mansoor impatiently when finally they arrived at his villa. “There was a problem at the site,” explained Mansoor. “An intruder.”

  “An intruder?”

  “Don’t worry. Nowhere near the Macedonian tomb.”

  “Did you get him?”

  “They’re still looking. He won’t get far.” He held up his cell phone. “They’ll call when they have news.”

  “Good. And the site?”

  “Sealed. The guards are in place, too. It’ll be fine for the moment. How about our secretary general? Have you notified him yet?”

  “He’s in a meeting,” said Ibrahim.

  “A meetin
g?” frowned Mansoor. “Didn’t you have him called out?”

  Ibrahim’s cheeks flamed. “You know what he’s like. I’m sure he’ll call back soon.” He turned to Gaille. “May we see your pictures?”

  “Of course.”

  She transferred her pictures to her laptop and opened them one by one. Nicolas and Elena joined them as they gathered around the kitchen table to look. “Demotic,” muttered Ibrahim gloomily when she showed him the inscription. “Why did it have to be Demotic?”

  “Gaille knows Demotic,” volunteered Elena. “She’s working on the Sorbonne dictionary project.”

  “Excellent,” beamed Ibrahim. “So you can translate this for us?”

  Gaille gave a dry laugh. Demotic was a brute, as Ibrahim had to know full well. Asking her if she could translate this was like asking someone if they spoke English, then jabbering at them in coarse Anglo-Saxon.

  Ancient Egypt had had just the one main spoken language, but that language had been written down with a number of different alphabets. The first was hieroglyphics, the stylized pictographs familiar from temples, tombs, and Hollywood movies. These had first appeared around 3100 BC. Pioneering Egyptologists had assumed the language to be pictorial, each symbol representing a single concept. But after the Rosetta Stone was found, with identical text inscribed in hieroglyphics, Demotic, and ancient Greek, Thomas Young and then Jean-Francois Champollion had deduced that these pictographs had had phonetic as well as symbolic value—that they were, in short, letters that could be combined in multiple ways to form words and thus a broad vocabulary, and that this language had its own syntax and grammar, too.

  Hieroglyphics, while they looked fantastic on the walls of temples and palaces and formal documents, had been far too elaborate to be practical for everyday use. Almost from the start, therefore, a simpler and quicker alphabet had developed alongside. This was known as Hieratic, and it had become the language of literature, business, and administration in ancient Egypt, which was why it was usually found on cheaper materials like wood, papyrus, and ostraka. Then, around 600 BC, a third written language, called Demotic, had evolved, reducing Hieratic to a series of strokes, dashes, and dots, like Egyptian shorthand. To make matters worse, it had neither vowels nor breaks between words, its vocabulary had been large and vernacular, its alphabet had varied significantly from region to region, and it had evolved massively over the centuries, so that it was really a family of related languages, not just one. Mastery took years of dedication and a set of dictionaries the size of a Volkswagen Beetle. Depending on how mainstream this inscription was, and what resources would be available to her, decipherment could take hours or days, or even weeks. She summed this all up with a wry glance at Ibrahim.

  “Yes, I know,” he said, having the grace to blush. “But still.”

  Gaille sighed, though in truth she felt exhilarated by the challenge. It had been too dark in the chamber to make much of the inscription earlier. But her camera had astonishing resolution and her photographs had come out crisply, despite the dust and cobwebs, making the Demotic characters clearly legible. She zoomed out again. Something about the inscription was bothering her, but she couldn’t figure out what.

  “Well?” asked Ibrahim.

  “May I have a minute by myself?”

  “Of course.” And he ushered everyone out to give her some peace.

  KNOX LAY ABSOLUTELY STILL across the Jeep’s front seats. The chasing pack had gathered directly outside and now were discussing plans and catching their breath. Sweat was cooling all over his body, giving him chills despite the warmth of the day. The Jeep lurched as someone sat on its hood. He heard the rasp of a lighter, cigarettes being lit, people gossiping and bantering, chiding each other for being too slow, too old. The Jeep creaked as someone else leaned against it. Christ! How long before one of them thought to check beneath the covers? But there was nothing he could do but lie still. Nothing except make plans. Yet what plans? Hassan, Nessim, the Dragoumises, the police, and the army were all after him, and Christ knew who else. He couldn’t risk turning on his cell phone to review his photographs lest Nessim trace the signal. Besides, he’d barely be able to see anything on the tiny screen, and anyway he needed them deleted as soon as possible, because if they were found, they would prove he’d been inside the lower chamber and earn him ten years in jail. Ideally, he would have liked to transfer them to his laptop, but that was in the back of Nessim’s Freelander along with the rest of his stuff, and anyway it didn’t have a USB port, so his only way of getting the photos to it was by e-mailing them to himself, then downloading them. But none of that was going to happen while he was lying in his Jeep with his pursuers on his hood.

  He turned his thoughts elsewhere: The names Kelonymus and Akylos. The Ptolemaic archives in Mallawi that he and Richard had discovered had included letters, bills, reports, codices, poems, religious texts, and all the other kinds of documents that you would expect in a small town. There had been far too much for them to translate as they went along, so they had conserved them instead, then cataloged them and passed them to the SCA for safekeeping and later study. Their preferred method of cataloging had been to collect the fragments of a particular papyrus together and photograph them, then assign the fragments and the photograph a single file name, based on where they were found or (if too many had been found in one place) a name of a place or a person from the text. And two of the names that had cropped up most during this process, and almost always in tandem, had been Akylos and Kelonymus.

  The originals had long ago been taken by Yusuf Abbas of the SCA for “safekeeping,” so God only knew where they were now, but Knox had photographs of them on CDs. Unfortunately, they, too, were in the trunk of Nessim’s Freelander, probably under closed-circuit television surveillance in the parking lot of some high-end Alexandrian hotel; and he wasn’t exactly in a position to go hunting from hotel to hotel in hopes of a smash and grab. No, he needed another way.

  The Jeep lurched as the man got off his hood. Footsteps scuffed and faded. Knox waited until there had been silence for a good couple of minutes, then climbed out and stripped off the tarpaulin. He had no time to waste. He had phone calls to make.

  DESPITE STARING FURIOUSLY at the inscription, it still took Gaille several minutes to work out what was bothering her. But finally she got it. The bottom line of text was incomplete, and it was written left to right. Yet Demotic, like Arabic, had been written right to left.

  The inscription in the Macedonian tomb had been in Greek. The few words of text in the antechamber paintings had been in Greek. The dedication on the architrave was in Greek. The shield bearers had been Greek. The gods they invoked had been Greek. This looked like Demotic, but it didn’t read that way, not initially at least. And it seemed perverse to switch to Demotic just for the inscription. So maybe it had simply been too sensitive to be written in plain Greek. Maybe the writer had used the Demotic alphabet instead. Codes, after all, hadn’t been unknown to the ancients. Alexander himself had used subterfuge to hide sensitive messages. The Admonitions of the Sons of Dawn, one of the Dead Sea Scrolls, had used code for particularly sensitive words. Valerius Probus had written an entire treatise on substitution ciphers. They had been simple things, because people had believed them unbreakable. But Gaille didn’t.

  She copied the inscription out onto a pad, checking for patterns as she did so. If this was a simple transliteration cipher, and the same word was encrypted more than once, then it would produce identical sequences every time. It wasn’t long before she had her first strike, then a second and a third. The third looked particularly helpful: ten characters long, and appearing no fewer than four times. That surely had to be a single word—an important one, too. What could it signify? A person’s name, perhaps. Mentally, she ran through all the names they had come across in the upper chamber. Akylos, too short. Likewise Kelonymus and Apelles, Bilip and Timoleum. She had a little surge of excitement when she thought to try Alexander, but that fell short, too. Her spirits san
k again. She stood up and walked in brisk circuits around the small room, sensing she was missing something, scowling in an almost physical effort to impel her mind to the answer.

  When finally it came, her cheeks flushed and she looked around, worried that her schoolgirl error might have been observed. For “Alexander,” the name by which the world knew him, was in fact a Latin name. To Greeks, he had been known as Alexandros. She sat back down and used the letters in “Alexandros” to begin a transposition alphabet, replacing the Demotic symbols with the matching Greek letters wherever they appeared throughout the text. That gave her enough to guess the word adjacent to the first Alexandros: Macedonia. With half the alphabet now broken, the rest swiftly followed.

  Ancient Greek was her thing; she made the translation on her pad, so utterly absorbed in her task that she lost track of time and her surroundings until her name was suddenly called, bringing her back to the real world.

  She looked up to see Ibrahim, Nicolas, Mansoor, and Elena standing in a semicircle, looking expectantly at her, as though someone had just asked her a question and they were waiting for her answer.

  Ibrahim sighed and said, “I was explaining to Nicolas how difficult Demotic can be. We want as few people as possible to know about this, so we very much want you to work on it by yourself. How long do you think you’ll need? One day? Two? A week?”

  It had to be the most gratifying moment of Gaille’s professional life. “Actually,” she said airily, holding up her pad, “it’s already done.”

  Chapter Twenty

  NESSIM WAS IN HIS HOTEL ROOM, discussing plans with Hosni, Ratib, and Sami. There was no great zest to their conversation, however. Knox had vanished off the radar, and nothing they tried had picked him up again.