The Alexander Cipher

Chapter Twenty-five

KAREEM BARAK’S FEET WERE RAW AND ACHING. Too much tramping these wretched roads in tight boots with leaky soles. He cursed himself for having answered Abdullah’s summons and for agreeing to his terms. One hundred dollars to whoever found this one wretched Jeep! It had seemed too good to be true. But when Abdullah had assigned districts to search, he received this godforsaken stretch of farmland. How the others had sniggered! As if anyone would park out here! He ought just to give up, but those dollars had him by the throat. For Abdullah to offer a one-hundred-dollar reward, he had to be looking to make five or ten times that himself, which meant opportunities for a smart young man like Kareem to exploit. But first he needed some luck.
It was dusk when he saw the farm track and the ramshackle buildings some two hundred meters along it. The way his feet burned, it might as well have been two hundred kilometers. He had a sudden craving for a huge bowl of his aunt’s kushari with extra fried onions, mopped up with great chunks of aysh baladi, then the welcoming embrace of his mattress. No way was the Jeep down there. Enough! He scowled and turned, hobbling painfully back the way he had come. But he’d barely gone twenty steps when a minibus of schoolgirls rattled past. One of them caught his eye and smiled shyly. She had good skin and huge brown eyes and luscious red lips. Staring after her, he forgot all about kushari and bed and aching feet. That was what he truly wanted: a beautiful, coy young woman to call his own. And for all his romantic dreams, he was a realist enough to know he would never have one until he earned some serious money.
He turned yet again and made the painful trudge up the track to the farm buildings.
art

MOHAMMED FOUND IT DIFFICULT even to walk as he followed the nurse. He had to remind himself how it was done: one foot and then the other. She led him to a large office, where Professor Rafai was flicking through the dividers of a white filing cabinet. Mohammed had seen him often on his rounds but had never before been granted a private audience. Mohammed didn’t know how to read this. Some men delighted in granting good news; others felt it their duty to break bad. Rafai turned to Mohammed with a bland, professional smile that gave nothing away. “Sit, sit,” he said, gesturing to his small round corner table. He pulled out a brown folder and came to join him. “I hope you’ve not been waiting long.”
Mohammed swallowed. Did Rafai truly not understand? Then, suddenly, all Mohammed wanted was to go back outside and wait some more. When hope was all a man had, he fought hard to hold on to it. Rafai opened the brown folder and peered through his half-moon glasses at a sheet inside. He frowned as though he had just read something of which he had previously been unaware. “You understand what a bone marrow transplant would have involved?” he asked without looking up. “You understand what you were asking me to put your daughter through?”
It was a numb feeling, catastrophe. Mohammed felt cold and sick, yet at the same time immensely calm. He wondered bleakly how he would break this to Nur, if Layla would understand what it meant.
Rafai proceeded remorselessly: “We call this procedure bone marrow transplantation, but that is misleading. In ordinary chemotherapy we target only cancerous fast-dividing cells, but in this procedure we deliberately poison a person’s entire system in order to destroy all their fast-dividing cells, cancerous or otherwise. That includes the bone marrow. The transplant is not the treatment. The transplant is necessary because after we annihilate all these fast-dividers, the patient will die without new marrow. It is a traumatic and extremely painful experience, without guarantee of success. Rejections occur despite perfect matches. And even if the new marrow takes, convalescence is extensive. Tests, tests, always tests. This is not the treatment of a few days. Scars stay for life. And then there’s infertility, cataract blindness, secondary cancers, complications in the liver, kidneys, lungs, heart . . .”
Mohammed understood something then. Rafai wasn’t here because the task was difficult; he was here because he relished exercising power. Mohammed reached forward to push down Rafai’s folder. “Say what you have to say,” he demanded. “Say it straight. Look me in the eye.”
Rafai sighed. “You must understand that we cannot give a bone marrow transplant to every patient who needs it. We allocate our resources on the basis of clinical evidence, on who will be most likely to benefit. I am afraid the lymphoma has advanced so far in your daughter—”
“Because you would not do the tests in time!” cried Mohammed. “Because you would not do the tests!”
“You must understand that everyone here loves your—”
Mohammed rose to his feet. “When did you decide this? Did you decide before we did the tests? You did, didn’t you? Why didn’t you tell us? Why did you let us go through that?”
“You’re wrong,” said Rafai. “We didn’t make the final—”
“Is there anything I can do?” pleaded Mohammed. “Anything at all? I beg you. Please. You can’t do this.”
“I’m sorry.” He smiled blandly. The interview was over.
Mohammed had never previously understood failed suicides; the ones commonly described as cries for help. But in a moment of insight he realized that some conversations were simply too difficult to broach without some kind of act to demonstrate the overwhelming strength of feeling involved. He couldn’t face Nur and Layla with this news. It was beyond him. So he picked Rafai up by the lapels of his jacket instead and slammed him against his office wall.
art

IT WAS A GOOD SEVEN-HOUR DRIVE from Alexandria to Siwa Oasis, where Elena and Gaille were due to begin a survey of antiquities as cover for their search for Alexander’s tomb. It was an uninspiring journey, too, first heading west along the scrubby, overbuilt Mediterranean coast, then south through flat and empty desert, with nothing to see for mile after mile but the occasional service station or herd of wild camels, until they topped a rise and the relentless emptiness was suddenly broken by glittering white salt lakes and orchards of silver-green.
They pulled into Siwa’s market square as a muezzin called the faithful to prayer, and the sun vanished behind the dark rose ruins of the old Shali Fortress. The streets here were wide, spacious, and dusty. There were few cars or trucks. People walked, cycled, or took donkey carts. After the bustle of Alexandria, Siwa seemed gloriously leisurely and content. Gaille rolled down her window and inhaled deeply. Her spirits lifted. Siwa was truly the end of the road. There was nothing beyond it but the great Sea of Sand. The oasis had no purpose but itself.
They found available places in a hotel located in a date palm orchard. Their rooms were newly painted, clean, and polished, with sparkling windows and gleaming bathrooms. Gaille took a shower and put on some fresh clothes; then Elena knocked on her door, and they set off to visit Dr. Aly Sayed, Siwa’s representative of the Supreme Council for Antiquities.
art

KNOX AND RICK ducked down in the front seats of the Subaru as one of the flatbed trucks left for the night, its headlights flickering over the grove of trees where they had hidden. A good day’s sleep had recharged Knox’s batteries, and his laptop’s, too. He reopened it once the flatbed had driven off, resuming his study of the Mallawi papyri, fragments of ancient letters, and other documents.
“I reckon the other one must have already left,” said Rick. “I mean, they can’t excavate in the dark.”
“Let’s give it ten minutes, just to be safe.”
Rick pulled a face but let it go. “How you getting on?” he asked.
“Not too bad.” His laptop screen was old and fuzzy. The photographs had been taken for cataloging purposes, not for decipherment. The lighting was variable, to put it kindly. Most of the papyri were completely unreadable. Yet he could still make out occasional words and even phrases, many of them in a recognizable hand, so written by a single person. Often they were vague, almost deliberately so, such as “and then the thing happened that brought me to Mallawi.” Elsewhere, the author referred again and again to “the enlightened,” “the truth bearer,” “the knowledgeable,” “the holder of the secret.” And in other places they were downright treasonous. “I don’t know who wrote this,” he told Rick, “but he wasn’t very respectful.”
“How do you mean?”
“Ptolemaic pharaohs were all called Ptolemy, so they distinguished themselves by their cult titles instead. For example, the first Ptolemy was known as Soter, the Greek word for ‘savior.’ But here he’s referred to as Sotades.”
“Sotades?”
“A scurrilous Alexandrian Greek poet and playwright. Wrote a lot of homoerotic verse, invented the palindrome, then got himself into trouble for mocking Ptolemy Two Philadelphos for marrying his sister. Speaking of which, Philadelphos actually means ‘sister lover,’ but he’s referred to here as ‘sin-lover.’ Ptolemy Euergetes, ‘the benefactor,’ is ‘the malefactor.’ Philopator, ‘the father loving,’ is ‘the lie-building.’ Epiphanes, ‘the manifest god,’ is ‘the manifest fraud.’ You get the idea?”
“Not exactly the world’s greatest satirist, was he?”
“No. But even referring to the Ptolemies like this . . .”
Rick leaned forward in his seat, squinting through his windshield into the moonlit night, impatient to get moving. “They must have left by now,” he muttered, turning on his ignition. “Let’s go in.”
“Five more minutes.”
“Okay,” grumbled Rick, turning the engine off again. He leaned across to look at the laptop. “What else are you finding?”
“Lots of place names. Tanis, Buto, Busiris, Mendes. All important Delta towns. But the place that comes up by far the most is Lycopolis.”
“Lycopolis. City of the Wolves, yeah?”
“It was the Greek name for ancient Asyut,” nodded Knox. Asyut was some fifty miles south of Mallawi, where the papyri had been found, so it made some sense. But all the other place names were in the Nile Delta, well over a hundred miles north of Asyut. Besides, something was knocking at his memory, and it wasn’t Asyut.
Another pair of headlights came down the farm track. They both ducked again. “Looks like you were right,” grinned Rick, his teeth glowing white. The second flatbed came to a complete stop as it reached the road, waiting for a car to pass. They could hear its turn signal clicking, and the tired banter of laborers in the back, glad that a long day was over. Then it pulled out onto the Tanta road and was gone. “Right,” said Rick, turning the ignition on once more. “Let’s do it, yeah?”
“Yes.”
The moon was bright enough for them to drive with only their sidelights on, not wanting to advertise their presence yet not wanting to look unduly stealthy, either. They reached the line of trees where the flatbed had parked earlier. A stake hammered into the ground declared in Arabic and English that this was a restricted area, reserved by the Supreme Council for Antiquities in partnership with the Macedonian Archaeological Foundation. They retreated a little way, concealed the Subaru in a small copse, then went searching. Rick had been out shopping while Knox had slept, and now he handed Knox a flashlight, though it was light enough not to need it. A cool breeze rustled and whispered in the branches. A bird hooted. They could see the static umber glow of a distant settlement, and yellow headlights crisscrossing on a road. Their boots balled up with soil as they crossed a field. In its far corner they found a site in midexcavation, a honeycomb of roped-off four-by-four-meter pits divided by balk walls, then a series of emptied graves, each a meter deep, their contents removed, their bases hidden in shadow from the slanting moonlight, freshly dug earth by their sides. It took them barely fifteen minutes to check it all out. “Not exactly the Valley of the Kings, is it?” muttered Rick.
“You can’t expect them to—”
“Shhhh!” went Rick suddenly, crouching down, a finger to his lips. Knox turned to look at what had caught Rick’s eye. Several seconds later, he saw it: a small orange glow moving between the trees. “Two people,” whispered Rick. “Sharing a smoke.” He motioned at an empty grave, its foot in darkness. Knox nodded. They climbed down inside, watching over the rim as two men in dark uniforms and caps advanced. Private security contractors, rather than army or police, but with black holsters on their belts. One of them was holding the leash of a huge German shepherd, growling and baring its fangs as if it had caught a scent but wasn’t yet quite sure of what. His companion was curious enough to turn on his flashlight, which he shone around as they drew closer, discussing some TV movie they both had watched earlier. Rick smeared earth on his hands and the back of his neck and gestured for Knox to do likewise; then they lay motionless and facedown in the grave as the two guards walked right up to them, the German shepherd getting thoroughly excited but being hauled back and cursed at. A flare of light bloomed in the bottom of the grave, then was gone. A still lit cigarette butt landed by Knox’s cheek. One of the men, while talking to his companion, unzipped his trousers and took a leak on the earth above, the splash-off spattering around Knox and Rick, while his companion made lewd comments about some actress he fancied. Then the two men turned and trudged away, dragging the agitated dog with them.
Rick was first to stir. “F*ck me, that was close,” he muttered.
“We should get out of here,” said Knox.
“Ballocks,” said Rick. “Two men and a German shepherd guarding an empty field—I want to see what they’re really protecting.”
“They had guns, mate,” said Knox.
“Exactly,” grinned Rick. “This is getting interesting.”
“I don’t want you getting hurt,” said Knox. “Not on my account.”
“F*ck that; I haven’t had this much fun in years.” And he set off before Knox could argue further, keeping low to the ground, using his experience to find the stealthiest path. Knox followed, grateful to have such a friend. The moon made ghostly shadows through the trees as they mounted a gentle but lengthy rise. He glimpsed gray ahead and pointed it out. Rick nodded and motioned for Knox to stay where he was. He vanished for a minute before reappearing out of the shadows. “Two buildings,” he whispered. “One large, one small. Made of concrete block. No windows. Steel doors. Padlocks. But both guards are outside the small one. That’s the one we need to get inside.”
“I thought you said it was a concrete-block building with no windows. How the f*ck are we going to get inside?”
Rick grinned. “You’ll see.”
art

GAILLE AND ELENA found Dr. Aly Sayed easily enough. He lived in an impressive two-story house at the end of a narrow tree-lined lane. A dark man with snowy hair, eyebrows, and trimmed beard sat outside, a tumbler in one hand, a bulbous fountain pen in the other, his tabletop spread with papers. “Hola!” he cried cheerfully. “You must be my secretary general’s friends.” He rested his tumbler on his papers to stop them from being blown away, then bounded across. Siwa had been on the ancient slave route, and he clearly had Negro as well as Arab blood, which he seemed to emphasize deliberately with his open sandals, khaki shorts, and short-sleeved gold and scarlet shirt.
“You must be Ms. Koloktronis,” he said to Elena, shaking her hand. “And Gaille Bonnard,” he said, turning to her. “Yes! Your father’s eyes.”
Gaille was shocked. “I beg your pardon?”
“You are not Richard Mitchell’s daughter?”
“Yes, but—”
“Good! When Yusuf tell me to expect Elena Koloktronis and Gaille Bonnard, I think to myself, ah, yes, I recognize this name! When your father dies in his terrible fall, I post to you I think a great package of papers and belongings. You received it, I trust?”
“That was you? Yes. Thank you.”
Aly nodded. “Your father was my very good friend. He stay with me often. You are welcome for your own sake, of course. But the daughter of such a good man is a thousand times welcome.”
“Thank you.”
“Though I must say I am surprised that Yusuf Abbas commended you so warmly to me.” He raised an eyebrow. “It couldn’t be that he is unaware of who your father is, could it?”
“I don’t know,” blushed Gaille, who always felt slightly awkward when her father was discussed in Egypt.
“Perhaps I should tell him myself next time we speak,” he mused. But then he saw her expression, and touched her elbow. “Of course you know I’m joking. I would never do such a thing. You have my word. Now, come inside. You’ll honor and adorn my humble home. Inside! Inside!”
Gaille and Elena exchanged a glance as they followed. They hadn’t expected such an exuberant welcome. He slapped his hand against the rough yellow exterior wall. “Kharshif,” he announced. “Mud and salt. Strong like rock but with one weakness. She turn back into mud again when she rain!” He put his hands on his sides and laughed uproariously. “Fortunately, she not rain like this often in Siwa. Not since 1985! Now Siwa is all one concrete block.” He thumped his chest. “Me, I like the old ways.” His front door opened onto a long hallway. Framed photographs jostled for space. More were stacked on the floor. Discolored patches from previous hangings showed that he often changed them around. He wasn’t camera shy, that was for sure. He appeared in picture after picture: Discussing excavation matters on-site; out hunting with an army officer, holding up a white gazelle with a gunshot wound in its head; in mountaineering kit halfway up some cliff; sightseeing in Paris, St. Louis, Granada, and other cities she couldn’t place; shaking hands with dignitaries, celebrities, and Egypt experts. Not an ego wall so much as an ego house.
They reached his kitchen, its broad fireplace open to the night sky. A huge old yellowing refrigerator clicked on as they entered, and began to rattle loudly. He kicked it, and the rattling became more subdued. “A drink?” he suggested. “You may not know, but Siwa is dry of alcohol. Our young men enjoy too much the labgi, the alcohol we make from dates, and labgi makes them enjoy too much each other, so no more alcohol! In this sense, however, my house is the oasis!” Gaille found his boisterous good humor disconcerting, as though he was laughing up his sleeve at them. He opened the refrigerator door to reveal a jungle of fresh fruit and vegetables inside, stacks of beer and white wine. He wagged a finger at Gaille. “Your father teach me wicked habits. A terrible thing, the love of alcohol. Each time I run low I must invent SCA business in Cairo, and I hate Cairo. It means I have to pay respects to my secretary general, and, believe me, that is a privilege made all the greater by its rarity.”
He poured them drinks, led them back to the hallway, where he unlocked a blue door, pushed it open, flipped on a light, and stood aside. A wave of delicious cool air wafted out. The room was large and lushly carpeted. A single heavy air-conditioning unit stood hissing beneath the closed, bolted, and shuttered windows. A computer, a flatbed scanner, and a color printer rested on two archival tables next to three gray steel filing cabinets and white-painted shelving stacked with books above locked glass-fronted cabinets. She noted the straight lines on the walls. There was no risk of this room, at least, turning back into mud. “I understand you’re here to research our old sites, yes?” He waved his hand. “My collection is at your service. If it is published about Siwa and the Western Desert, it is here. And if not published, also.”
“You’re extremely kind,” said Elena.
He waved her thanks away. “We’re all archaeologists here. Why would we keep secrets from one another?”
“Do you have photographs?”
“Of course.” He opened the top drawer of a filing cabinet, withdrew a large map, and spread it out. Grid lines ran north to south and east to west, giving each square a unique reference number that corresponded to an indexed folder in the cabinets, which contained grainy black-and-white aerial photographs as well as occasional color, ground-level site prints. While he explained his system to Elena, Gaille wandered along the shelves, fingering sheaves of press cuttings on the golden mummies of Baharriya; histories of Kharga, Dakhla, and Farafra and of the geology of desert. Two entire ranges had been given over to Siwa, the shelves packed so tight that she had to pull hard to pluck out a first edition copy of Qibell’s A Visit to Siwa. She turned the crumbling yellow pages with great tenderness. She loved the whimsy in the accounts of pioneer travelers like this.
“You know these?” murmured Aly, suddenly at her side.
“Not all of them,” she admitted. “In fact . . .”
He laughed warmly, then stooped to unlatch and open a low cabinet. Inside, wire racks bulged with gray and tan folders of loose papers. Notebooks and journals were stacked in separate piles. He found and removed a thick green folder and handed it to her. “You know the Siwan Manuscript? The history of our Oasis kept by the Mosalims since . . .” he waved his hand to indicate forever. “These notes in red pen are mine. You’ll find them valuable, I think.” He set the folder down and returned to his books. “Ah, yes! Ahmed Fakhry. A great man. My mentor and my very good friend. You have read his works?”
“Yes.” It was the only research she’d managed so far.
“Excellent. Ah! And this! W. G. Browne’s Travels in Africa, Egypt and Syria from the year 1792 to 1798. The first European for centuries to visit Siwa—or to write of it, at least. He thought us nasty, dirty people, while we hurled stones at him because he pretended to be a man of faith. How far the world has come! Here’s Belzoni, everyone’s favorite circus strongman. And Frederick Hornemann—German, of course, but he wrote in English. His journey was sponsored by the London African Society in, let me see, yes, 1798.”
“Is there nothing more up-to-date?”
“Of course, of course. Many books. Copies of every excavation log. But, believe me, when these old people visit, our monuments and tombs were in much better condition. Now many are nothing but dust and sand. ‘My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings.’ ” He sighed, shook his head sadly. “So much lost. You read German, yes?”
“Yes.”
“Good. One never knows these days. Even reputable universities seem to hand out doctorates to people who can barely speak their own language. Here is J. C. Ewald Falls’s Siwa: Die Oase des Sonnengottes in der Libyschen Wüste. Cailliaud’s Voyage à Meroe; you must read that. And that criminal Drovetti! I had to travel to Turin to see the Canon of Kings. Turin! Worse even than Cairo! They tried to kill me with their trams!”
“When can we start?” asked Elena.
“When you would like?”
“Tonight.”
“Tonight!” laughed Aly. “Do you never relax?”
“We only have two weeks.”
“Not tonight, I’m afraid,” said Aly. “I have plans. But I’m an early riser. You’re welcome here at any time from seven.”
“Thank you.”
art

RICK AND KNOX CIRCLED DOWNWIND so that the German shepherd wouldn’t catch their scent. It was another ninety minutes before the guards set off on their rounds once more. The moment they were gone, Rick hurried into the clearing and over to the smaller building. He examined its two hefty padlocks, produced a hooked length of thick steel wire from his pocket, then proceeded swiftly to unlock them both.
“Where in hell did you learn that?” murmured Knox.
“Australian Special Forces, mate,” grinned Rick, pocketing the padlocks and ushering him inside. “They don’t teach knitting.” There was a deep hole in the floor, a wooden ladder tied to one wall. “It’s sixteen minutes to the other site,” said Rick. “I timed it. Sixteen more back makes thirty-two. We need to be out of here in twenty-five tops. Okay?”
“We’d better hurry,” agreed Knox, adrenaline pumping as he led the way down. The ladder creaked but held, and he was soon crunching on stone chips. Rick joined him a moment later. They walked side by side down the narrow corridor, Rick picking out a wall painting with his flashlight. “Jesus!” he muttered. “I thought Wolf-man was out of the Marvel comics.”
“Not Wolf-man,” corrected Knox. “Wolf god. Wepwawet.”
Rick was looking at him strangely. “What’s the matter?” he asked. “You seen a ghost?”
“Not exactly.”
“Then what? Have you worked out where we are or something?”
“I think so. Yes.”
“Come on, then, mate. Spill.”
Knox frowned. “What do you know about the Rosetta Stone?” he asked.