The Alexandria Connection

by Adrian D'hagé

  ‘Do we know why?’

  ‘My sources tell me there’s been a rift between Buchanan and Hailey Campbell for some time, principally over policy on global warming. That’s not at the centre of her campaign – like Davis, she’s been concentrating on jobs and the economy, but when she’s asked about it, Campbell leaves no doubt that she believes global warming is real, that a big factor is human activity, especially our burning of fossil fuels, and that we have to do something. For her part, she’s been very clear that she won’t allow the big emitters to continue as they have been. I’m told this all came to a head the other day when her team was discussing strategy for the last debate of the campaign, which goes to air tomorrow night. No doubt global warming will come up, because Davis is equally clear that, in his words, “global warming is a conspiracy theory from the loonie Left’’. The problem for Campbell is that the Nobel Laureate, Professor Marcus Ahlstrom, has been touring the country, supporting Davis, and if the polls are anything to go by, a lot of Americans are listening to him . . . especially when in spring, they were still shovelling snow off their driveways.’

  ‘And the media, particularly Omega Centauri outlets, have been very pro-Davis?’

  ‘And pro-Ahlstrom. In the early part of the race, Campbell was so well respected from her time as energy secretary that many analysts thought she would get to the White House in a canter, but the relentless pressure from the Omega Centauri corporation, coupled with saturation television advertising for Davis and a backing from Ahlstrom, has seen her lead virtually evaporate.’

  ‘That was Susan Murkowski, reporting from Juneau in Alaska. Now in other news, President McGovern . . .’

  Abigail’s tears welled up again as she glanced at the front page of the Montana Mercury. The Omega Centauri tabloid boasted a huge headline:

  BUCHANAN SACKED: CAMPBELL IN CLIMATE CHANGE CUCKOO LAND

  The headline was accompanied by a cartoon of a big clump of mushrooms at the bottom of the garden. The biggest mushroom was capped with Hailey Campbell’s head and the smaller ones with the heads of key advisors like Megan Becker. The subtitle read:

  CAMPBELL AND THE DEMOCRATS: IN THE DARK, AND FED ON . . .

  Abigail knew in her heart that her hopes of Davis divorcing his wife were gone forever, but she wasn’t going to stand by and see that bitch on the front page of every paper and magazine, being interviewed as the new first lady. She flicked off the television and looked at her watch. Lunchtime. It was bitterly cold outside, but she needed some fresh air, and she took the lift down to the office foyer and walked the few blocks to the Higgins Avenue bridge across the Clark Fork River. Abigail stood in the middle of the bridge on the pedestrian walkway and pulled her parka hood tight. The wind was coming from the south-east and the pines on top of Mount Sentinel were heavy with snow. She looked toward Montana University, nestled at the base. In 1909, forestry students had erected a big white “M” on the side of the mountain. Since 1919, university freshmen hiked up the mountain each year to light the outline of the M with railroad lanterns to mark homecoming, the tradition of welcoming alumni back to the campus. Today the M was covered in snow, and Abigail’s tears threatened to freeze before they reached the river flowing under the bridge. Her mind made up, she retraced her steps, determined to track down Susan Murkowski. Murkowski struck Abigail as a journalist who would listen.

  38 Evran Headquarters, Dallas, Texas

  Crowley stood at the plate glass windows of his office and stared at the ant-like humanity on the streets of Dallas below. He felt a surge of exhilaration. It was all coming together. It had taken some months of complex planning, but the Cobalt 60 was finally in position and the plans for the attacks on the nuclear plants were well advanced.

  The authorities in the gulf had dredged new channels around the hulks of the Leila and the Atlantic Giant, their burned-out superstructures protruding grotesquely above the waters. It would take many months to salvage them, and the oil had left greasy scars on the shoreline and all but wiped out the marine life. But the stock markets had recovered, and it was time to strike again. The long delays in the repair of the EVRAN I had irritated Crowley, but in less than two weeks, the Taipan and Scorpion missiles would be loaded and on their way from Manaus to Karachi, once again destined for the Hindu Kush and Iran. Best of all, despite Rachel’s scepticism, Carter Davis was now ahead of Hailey Campbell in the polls, albeit just. A lot would ride on their final debate, but the Campbell team, he knew, was in wild disarray over Campbell’s stance on global warming, and with the help of Ahlstrom and Louis Walden, Crowley had a feeling Pharos would soon be in charge of the White House. From there, the path to the New World Order would become a reality.

  He buzzed for Miranda.

  ‘Ask Reid to step in.’

  Crowley found himself savouring another evening with the tall, leggy blonde, and perhaps, he thought, it was time to give Rachel the flick; although, deep in the recesses of his mind, warning bells were sounding. Rachel might not have known about the extensive collection of stolen art held on the island of Corsica, but she still knew more than enough to damage him, perhaps irreparably.

  Miranda flashed him a willing smile and departed, and Crowley dismissed the warning bells. The blonde was exciting, and Rachel had become passé.

  ‘Have a seat, Reid,’ said Crowley when the head of Area 15 arrived. ‘Where are we at with O’Connor and Weizman?’

  ‘Our source Aboud has reported only this morning that Weizman has not long returned from Abydos. And interestingly, O’Connor has joined her. They’re preparing to descend into an ancient water table beneath the Pyramids.’

  ‘Any clues to the Euclid Papyrus?’

  ‘Not as yet, but Aboud is in no doubt that they’re searching for it.’

  ‘Keep me informed, and make sure Ruger is on standby.’

  Ruger left and Crowley got up from his desk and stared out the window again, deep in thought. The path to the New World Order was on track, but the Euclid Papyrus threatened Pharos in general, and the EVRAN conglomerate in particular. Just as the discovery of oil in the early twentieth century had transformed the global energy sector, rendering coal-fired bunkers on ships obsolete and revolutionising the world’s automobile and aircraft industry, any new form of energy hung like the sword of Damocles over Crowley and the other members of Pharos’s sinister quest for ultimate power. Crowley returned to his desk, more determined than ever that the Euclid Papyrus would not see the light of day.

  ‘Mr Reid to see you again, sir.’

  ‘So soon? Show him in.’

  ‘I thought you should see this intercept that just came in from Abigail Roxburgh’s cell phone,’ Reid said. ‘It would appear she’s considering exposing Davis. That’s a text between her and that Susan Murkowski.’

  Crowley stared at the printout, his anger rising.

  Have been watching your coverage of the presidential race with interest, but there is something you need to know about Carter Davis, and we should meet.

  ‘Leave it with me.’ Crowley waited for Reid to depart and buzzed Miranda. ‘Get Ruger to come and see me . . . now,’ he said, throwing caution to the winds.

  39 Missoula, Montana

  Ruger waited for Abigail Roxburgh to leave work, and then followed her at a discreet distance in his nondescript Chevrolet Cruze. He’d already reconnoitred her home – a hectare of Bitterroot River frontage in Lolo, south of Missoula. The mists were closing in as he followed his target out of the city on to Bitterroot Road. Fifteen minutes later, Abigail slowed at the lights and turned left into Glacier Drive, and then into River Drive.

  Good, she’s headed home, Ruger thought, as he followed her on to Red Fox Road. The house was set back, but better still from Ruger’s point of view, it was on acreage, and the house was surrounded by aspen, old-growth cottonwood and ponderosa pines, offering a covered approach to the back deck, which overlooked the river and the hills to the east. He drove past as she turned into her driveway and pondered his opt
ions. One possibility was a shot from among the trees on the riverbank. He’d already ascertained that a dirt track near the river would give him a covered route to the back of the property, with a clear line of sight. He’d packed his Knights M110 7.62-millimetre sniper rifle in the trunk of the car, a rifle that had been used with impressive results in both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. But Ruger knew a successful shot would depend on Roxburgh choosing to sit out on her deck to enjoy the misty evening, and as good as Area 15 was, they had no information on the habits of this target.

  Failing that, he knew he could approach the house through the trees without being seen, and from his observations through binoculars, it didn’t appear as if the house was alarmed. It would be a matter of defeating the locks.

  The American Airlines Airbus A320 touched down in Missoula on time, and it took Susan Murkowski just fifteen minutes to clear the small red-brick international terminal, and another twenty minutes to book into the Hilton Garden Inn, by which time it was not yet six-thirty p.m. Her meeting with Roxburgh was not until eight at Roxburgh’s house in Lolo. Unlike New York or Washington, at least everything was close here, Murkowski thought, and she headed down to the Blue Canyon Kitchen Tavern, the Garden Inn’s rustic restaurant. She chose a table near the high windows. Outside, a misty evening was enveloping the distant, snow-capped hills.

  It was odd that Roxburgh wanted the meeting at her home, Murkowski thought, as she ordered the honey and pecan encrusted baked brie, and the clams, sautéed in garlic, pesto and white wine. The braised pork belly and the grilled mountain buffalo, she would leave to the Montanans. Perhaps Roxburgh was afraid of being seen with a well-known journalist, although to date, no one had recognised her up here, for which she was grateful.

  Ruger drove quietly down the dirt track beside the Bitterroot River with his lights extinguished, and he parked under a clump of ponderosa pines, 200 metres from the house. He scanned the rear of the property with his night vision goggles, but the back deck was vacant. Ruger looked at his watch. Coming on toward eight p.m. Time to move.

  40 Bir el-Samman Well, Giza

  O’Connor had no way of knowing how far the tunnel went, but a cardinal rule of diving forbade cave exploration on his own, and he set his dive computer and began the slow ascent to the surface. The deeper the dive, the more nitrogen would be absorbed into his bloodstream, exacerbated by the time spent at depth. Decompression sickness, commonly known as ‘the bends’, resulted from not making stops in an ascent to reduce the pressure of the nitrogen dissolved in the body.

  He eventually reached the surface, removed his mouthpiece and called back up the shaft to Aleta. ‘Okay, lower the tanks down, and then follow . . . but take it easy on the rope.’

  Aleta lowered two foam-lined tanks that had been made to look like cylinders of air.

  When Aleta reached him, he said quietly, ‘I’ve found a linking tunnel at 25 metres. I’ll lead.’

  Aleta put her fins on and followed O’Connor into the depths of the well.

  O’Connor reached the linking tunnel and hammered a steel peg into the rock, to which he fastened the end of a guideline from a dispenser on his belt. More than one diver had died swimming into what seemed like a single tunnel, only to turn around hundreds of metres later and be confronted with a maze of passageways, with no way of determining which one led to the exit.

  O’Connor and Aleta exchanged the thumb and forefinger ‘o-ring’. O’Connor checked his air pressure and made a mental note to leave at least two thirds of the remaining air for the exit. It was yet another rule for what was easily the most dangerous form of diving. They made their way along a passage that from time to time expanded into small flooded caverns formed out of the natural rock, but it wasn’t until they were almost 500 metres in that they came to a much larger cave. O’Connor pointed upwards to where the torch light picked up empty recesses cut into the rocks just below the surface of the water. Aleta followed O’Connor and they broke the surface to find themselves in a large subterranean cavern.

  ‘Mon Dieu!’ Aleta exclaimed.

  ‘The Hall of Records?’

  ‘Very possibly, but any papyri that were not stored in waterproof urns would long since have deteriorated.’ She gazed around in wonderment. ‘Look! Up there!’ she said excitedly. ‘Someone’s gone to the same trouble they went to in Alexandria.’

  O’Connor followed Aleta’s gaze to where a number of urns had been stored in the recesses above a ledge. O’Connor heaved himself up and helped Aleta out of the water.

  ‘There are inscriptions here,’ Aleta said, after they’d taken off their rebreathers, ‘but they’re in ancient Greek, not hieroglyphics.’ Aleta ran her eye over the carvings on the bottom of each recess. ‘Every space has a different author, but it’s the date that’s interesting . . . they’re all marked 31 BC.’

  ‘What’s the significance?’ O’Connor asked.

  ‘The battle of Actium,’ said Aleta. ‘In September of that year the Roman Senate declared war on Cleopatra because of the influence she wielded over Marc Antony. Antony had given her several of the eastern Roman territories, the so-called Donations of Alexandria, and a furious Senate threw its support behind his rival, Octavian,’ she said. ‘Octavian went on to defeat Antony and Cleopatra in a naval engagement on the Ionian Sea near the city of Actium in what is now Greece.’

  ‘So what’s the connection? I know that Octavian was the founder of the Roman Empire, but beyond that . . .’

  ‘We’ll make an historian out of you yet! But it’s not the history of Rome that makes the inscription of the dates important, it’s what was happening in Alexandria in 31 BC. After Octavian’s victory, the librarians in Alexandria feared retribution from Octavian’s advancing forces. In the end, Octavian’s takeover of Alexandria was relatively peaceful, but they had no way of predicting that, so when Antony and Cleopatra committed suicide, the librarians smuggled the library’s prize collections overland to Giza, probably by camel train.’

  ‘Prize collections?’

  ‘Look at the catalogue of names here,’ she said, pointing to the markings on the recesses. ‘Eratosthenes was the library’s third librarian and is credited with calculating the circumference of the earth. He produced the first map of the world based on the knowledge of the day . . . wrote numerous treatises, and I suspect there are copies of them in that urn,’ she said, staring at the ancient receptacle. ‘Archimedes . . . probably one of the most famous of the ancient mathematicians, and the discoverer of pi. And look . . . Aristarchus, the first person to state the earth revolves around the sun, a full 1800 years before Copernicus. And here!’ she said excitedly. ‘Euclid!’

  ‘Just two urns for him,’ said O’Connor, ‘and one a little larger than the other.’

  Aleta’s face was flushed with excitement. ‘We have to take these back to the surface!’

  O’Connor looked at his watch. ‘I doubt Professor Badawi has too much of an idea of diving tables, but it’s time we returned, in case he sounds an alarm. We don’t want the eyes of the world on this just yet, and not a word about this, especially in front of Aboud.’

  Aleta’s disappointment showed clearly on her face. ‘I suppose so,’ she said, scanning the rest of the as-yet-unexplored recesses.

  ‘We’ll just tell them the passage was interesting, and we’ll need to bring down a longer supply of air to explore it further.’

  ‘We’ll have to tell Badawi . . . we can’t possibly not.’

  ‘But not in front of his deputy. I’ve done some background checks on this guy . . . let’s just say he’s not what he seems.’

  Aleta nodded resignedly. O’Connor’s was a shadowy world, she knew, but she had long ago learned to trust this extraordinary man.

  ‘We’ll hide these urns in our satchels,’ O’Connor said, ‘and we can bring Badawi into the picture later.’

  O’Connor carefully removed the urns, and placed them in the foam-lined tanks.

  Back in the Montgomery suite, O’Conn
or pulled the curtains on the view of the Great Pyramid and on any prying eyes, and switched on the lights.

  Not for the first time, Aleta’s heart raced as she put on a pair of white gloves, ran her knife around the pitch seal on the larger urn and carefully prised open the lid. Just as carefully, she extracted the contents, two leather pouches, and opened the first of them.

  ‘An original copy of The Elements! Or at least the first three books of it,’ she exclaimed, quickly translating the Greek.

  ‘And I’m betting that the other pouches contain the rest of it. Quite a find. A first edition, so to speak,’ O’Connor said with a grin.

  Aleta turned her attention to the smaller of the two urns, and after painstakingly removing the lid, she extracted the contents. ‘Just a single leather pouch.’ She slowly unravelled it, and laid the papyrus from within on the table.

  41 Lolo, Montana

  The mists drifted silently through the trees. Ruger checked the silencer on his M110 sniper rifle and crept toward the house, keeping to the shadows. Fifty metres from the back door, he laid the rifle behind a large cottonwood tree, checked the garotte in his pocket, and approached the back deck. He crept up the wooden steps, and moved toward the door. The sounds of country music were drifting from the living room. Through the curtains, he could see his well-endowed quarry. Abigail was in her kitchen, preparing supper. Ruger checked the lock on the French doors, only to find they were fitted with an old-style mortice lock. Prepared for any contingency, he selected a set of keys from his satchel. At least the music would shroud the sounds of the lock jigglers, he thought, as he tried first one, then another. It wasn’t until the fourth jiggler that he felt the lock give.