The Alexander Cipher

Chapter Two

A hotel construction site, Alexandria
MOHAMMED EL-DAHAB kept a framed photograph of his daughter Layla on his desk. It was taken two years ago, just before she fell sick. He had developed the habit, while he worked, of glancing at it every few moments. Sometimes it gladdened him to see her face, but mostly these days it made his heart sink. He pinched the bridge of his nose between his thumb and index finger and muttered a short but heartfelt prayer. He prayed for her like this perhaps thirty times each day, as well as during his formal rek’ahs. His prayers had done little good so far, but faith was like that—without testing it was nothing.
There were incongruous noises outside: shouting, jubilant laughing. He glanced irritably through his office window. Work on the building site had come to a halt while his crew congregated in a corner, and Ahmed was dancing like a dervish at a moulid. Mohammed hurried out angrily. Allah had cursed him with the laziest crew in all Egypt. Any excuse! He scowled to put himself in the right frame of mind for delivering a proper tongue-lashing, but when he saw what had caused the commotion, he forgot about it. The mechanical digger had ripped a great, gaping hole in the ground, exposing a spiral staircase that wound around a deep, black shaft, still thick with settling dust. It looked yellow, dark, and old—old as the city itself.
Mohammed and his men all gazed at each other with the same thought. Who knew how long this had lain hidden? Who could guess what riches might lie at its base? Alexandria was not only one of the great cities of antiquity, it boasted a lost treasure of world renown. Was there a man among them who hadn’t dreamed of discovering the golden sarcophagus of the city’s founder, Iskandar al-Akbar, Alexander the Great? Young boys dug holes in public gardens; women confided in their friends the strange echoes they heard when they tapped the walls of their cellars; robbers broke into ancient cisterns and the forbidden cellars of temples and mosques. But if it was anywhere, it was here, right in the heart of the city’s ancient Royal Quarter. Mohammed was not given to idle dreams, but gazing down into this deep shaft, his gut clenched tight as a fist.
Could this be his miracle at last?
He beckoned for Fahd’s flashlight, then lowered his left foot slowly onto the top step. He was a big man, Mohammed, and his heart was in his mouth as he rested his considerable weight upon the rutted stone, but it bore him without protest. He tested more steps, his back turned to the rough limestone of the outer wall. The inner wall that separated the spiral staircase from the great central shaft was built of crumbled bricks, many of which had fallen away, leaving jagged black gaps. Mohammed tossed a pebble through a gap and waited, breathless, until it clattered four heartbeats later at the foot. The spiral closed above him, and he saw that the entire staircase was carved from the rock—a sculpture rather than a construction! It gave him confidence. He continued his descent, around and around. The spiral at last straightened out, doubled back through an arched portal into a large, circular room, calf deep with sand, rock, and fallen bricks. At the center, four sturdy pillars surrounded the open base of the central shaft. The thin reflected daylight was thick with chalky motes, swirling slow as planets, clotting like salve on his lips, tickling his throat.
It was cool down here, gloriously quiet after the incessant din of the building site. Including the stairwell from which he had just emerged, four arched doorways led off this rotunda, one for each point of the compass. Curved benches with oyster-shell hoods were recessed into limestone walls sumptuously carved with prancing gods, hissing medusas, rampant bulls, soaring birds, bursting flowers, and drapes of ivy. A dark, downward-sloping corridor showed through the first doorway, humped with rubble and dust. Mohammed swallowed with distaste and premonition as he tore aside its cobweb veil. A low side passage led off the winding corridor into a vast, tall chamber, its walls pocked by columns of square-mouthed openings. A catacomb. He went to the left wall, lit up a dusty yellow skull with the flashlight, and tipped the dome aside with a finger. A small, blackened coin fell from its jaw. He picked it up, examined it, set it back down. He shone his flashlight deep into the niche, lighting up a heap of skulls and bones pushed to the far end to make room for later occupants. He grimaced at the sight and retreated to the main corridor to continue his survey. He passed four more burial chambers before descending a flight of twelve steps, then another five before he reached the top of another flight of steps and the water table. He returned to the rotunda. Ahmed, Husni, and Fahd had come down, too, and were now on their hands and knees, scrabbling through the rubble. He was puzzled that they hadn’t explored farther until he realized it was the only spot with natural light—he had taken their one flashlight.
“What is this place?” asked Ahmed. “What have I found?”
“A necropolis,” answered Mohammed flatly. “A city of the dead.” Vaguely angered by their presence, he moved off, walking through a second portal into a high-ceilinged chamber lined with limestone blocks. A banqueting hall, perhaps, where mourners would have come each year to commemorate their loved ones. A short flight of steps led down through the final portal into a small forecourt. On a raised step, a pair of tall, blackened studded metal doors with hexagonal handles were set into a white marble wall. Mohammed pulled the left door. It opened with a grinding screech. He squeezed through into a broad, high, empty antechamber. Plaster had fallen away in places from the walls to reveal rough limestone beneath. Two lines of ancient writing were carved into the lintel above the arched doorway in the facing wall, but Mohammed could make nothing of them. He crossed a high step into a second, main chamber, of similar width and height but twice as deep. A knee-high plinth stood in its center, giving the strong impression that something important like a sarcophagus had once lain upon it. If so, it had long since vanished.
A dull bronze button shield was pinned to the wall beside the doorway, and Ahmed tried to wrest it free. “Stop!” cried Mohammed. “Are you mad? Will you truly risk ten years in Damanhur for an old shield and a handful of broken pots?”
“No one knows of this but us,” retorted Ahmed. “Who can tell what treasures are here? Enough for us all.”
“This place was looted centuries ago.”
“But not of everything,” pointed out Fahd. “Tourists will pay mad prices for all kinds of ancient rubbish. My cousin has a stall near al-Gomhurriya. He knows the value of such things. If we bring him down—”
“Listen to me,” said Mohammed. “All of you, listen. You’ll take nothing and you’ll tell no one.”
“Who gave you the right to make decisions?” demanded Fahd. “Ahmed found this, not you.”
“But this project is mine, not yours. This site is mine. If one word of this gets out, you’ll answer to me. Understand?” He faced them down, one by one, until they broke and stalked away. He watched them uneasily. Entrusting secrets to such men was like entrusting water to a sieve. Alexandria’s slums writhed with villains who would cut twenty throats on the mere rumor of such a prize. But he wasn’t going to back down because of that. Though he had striven to be good all his life, since Layla had fallen ill, he cared only for making her better. The question was how to turn this find to that end. Looting it was impractical. For all Ahmed’s optimism, there wasn’t enough to go around; and if he tried to cut out the others, they would sneak on him to his bosses, maybe even to the police, and that would go hard for him. As site manager, he was legally bound to report this find to the Supreme Council for Antiquities. If they learned he had kept it quiet, he’d lose his job, his license to operate, and almost certainly his liberty, too. He couldn’t risk that. His salary was pitiful, but it was all that stood between Layla and the abyss.
The solution, when it finally came to him, was so simple that he couldn’t believe he hadn’t thought of it at once.
art

“EXCUSE ME. You please will help me with this?”
Knox looked up to see Roland Hinz holding up his huge black wet suit. “Of course,” he smiled. “Forgive me. I was miles away.”
He stood behind the big German to make sure he didn’t tumble as he tried to pull on the neoprene leggings—that wouldn’t go down well. Roland was a Stuttgart banker considering investing in Hassan’s latest Sinai venture. Today’s outing was largely in his honor, and he was making the most of it, too, giggly with champagne, more than a little coked, getting on everyone’s nerves. In truth, he shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near the water, but Hassan paid well to have the rules stretched. And not just rules. Getting Roland into his wet suit was like trying to stuff a duvet into its cover: he kept plopping out in unexpected places. Roland found this intensely funny, but then, he found everything funny and seemed to think people found him charming. He tripped over his own feet and laughed hysterically as he and Knox spilled inelegantly onto the deck, then looked around at the other guests as though expecting rapturous applause.
With a strained smile, Knox helped him back up, then knelt down to pull on his booties for him. He had bloated, pinkish-yellow feet with dirt caked between his toes, which looked as though he hadn’t washed between them for years. Knox distracted himself with thoughts of the quest he and Rick had embarked on. The afternoon when he’d shared his ideas about Alexander’s catafalque had been just the beginning, though the big Australian’s initial euphoria hadn’t lasted long. “So this procession came through Sinai, did it?” he had asked.
“No,” said Knox. “Not according to any of our sources.”
“Oh, ballocks, mate,” protested Rick, sitting back in his chair. “You had me all excited for a minute.”
“You want me to tell you what we know?”
“Sure,” he said, still annoyed. “Why not?”
“Okay,” said Knox. “The first thing you need to understand is that our sources are unreliable. We don’t have any eyewitness accounts of Alexander’s life or campaigns. Everything we have, we have from later historians citing earlier ones—second-, third-, even fourthhand accounts.”
“Chinese whispers,” suggested Rick.
“Exactly, but it’s even worse than that. When Alexander’s empire split up, each of the various factions wanted to paint themselves in the best light, and all the others in the worst, so there was a lot of propaganda written. Then the Romans came along, and while the Caesars worshipped Alexander, the Republicans loathed him. Historians were selective in their stories, depending on which camp they belonged to. One way or another, most of what we have is very badly slanted. Working out the truth is a nightmare.”
“Duly noted.”
“But we’re pretty sure that the catafalque traveled along the Euphrates from Babylon to Opis, then northwest along the Tigris. A magnificent procession, as you can imagine. People trekked hundreds of miles just to see it. And, sometime in 322 or 321 BC, it reached Syria. After that, it’s hard to know. Bear in mind that we’re talking about two things here. The first is Alexander’s embalmed body, lying in its coffin. The second is the funeral carriage and all the rest of the gold. Okay?”
“Yes.”
“Now, we know pretty much what happened to Alexander’s body and coffin. Ptolemy hijacked it and took it to Memphis, probably with the collaboration of the escort commander. But we don’t know what happened to the rest of the catafalque. Diodorus says that Alexander’s body was eventually taken to Alexandria in it, but his story is confused, and it seems clear he’s actually talking about the coffin, not the catafalque. And the most vivid description comes from a guy called Aelian. He says that Ptolemy was so fearful that Perdiccas would try to seize Alexander back that he dressed a likeness of his body in royal robes and a shroud, then laid it on a carriage of silver, gold, and ivory, so that Perdiccas would charge off in pursuit of this decoy while Ptolemy took Alexander’s body on into Egypt by another route.”
Rick squinted. “You mean Ptolemy left the catafalque behind?”
“That’s what Aelian suggests,” said Knox. “You’ve got to remember, the main prize was Alexander. Ptolemy needed to get him back to Egypt quick, and you couldn’t travel quickly with the catafalque. Estimates suggest that it moved a maximum of six miles a day, and that was with a large team of sappers preparing the road. It would have taken months to reach Memphis. And it couldn’t exactly have traveled discreetly, either. Yet I’ve never come across any account of it being seen traveling the obvious route south from Syria through Lebanon and Israel to Sinai and the Nile; and surely someone would have seen it.”
“So he left it behind, like I said?”
“Possibly. But the catafalque represented an enormous amount of raw wealth. I mean, put yourself in Ptolemy’s shoes. What would you have done?”
Rick considered a few moments. “I’d have split up,” he said. “One lot scoots ahead with the body. The other takes a different route with the catafalque.”
Knox grinned. “That’s what I’d have done, too. There’s no proof, of course. But it makes sense. The next question is how. Syria’s on the Mediterranean, so he might have sailed down. But the Med was notoriously infested with pirates, and he’d have needed ships on hand; and if he felt it was possible, he’d surely have taken Alexander’s body that way—and we’re pretty certain he didn’t.”
“What were his alternatives?”
“Well, assuming that he couldn’t move the catafalque as it was, he could have had it chopped up into manageable pieces and taken southwest along the coast through Israel to Sinai; but that was the route he almost certainly took himself with Alexander’s body, and there’s not much point splitting up if you’re going to go the same way. So there’s a third possibility: that he sent it due south to the Gulf of Aqaba, then by boat around the Sinai Peninsula to the Red Sea coast.”
“The Sinai Peninsula,” grinned Rick. “You mean past these reefs here?”
“These very dangerous reefs,” agreed Knox.
Rick laughed and raised his glass in a toast toward the sea. “So all that gold might just be sitting out there waiting for us?” he said. “What say we go find it, eh?”
And that was exactly what they had been trying to do ever since, though without success. On the other hand, the more they searched, the more Rick had learned, and the more he had caught the archaeological bug. He had originally been a Clearance Diver in the Australian Navy—the closest they had to Special Forces—and working in Sharm had allowed him to keep diving, though he missed that sense of mission. Their quest had restored it to him, so much so that he determined to make a new career in underwater archaeology. So he was studying hard, borrowing Knox’s books and other materials, pestering him with questions.
Roland’s booties were now on. Knox stood and helped strap him into his buoyancy control device, then ran through his safety checks. He heard footsteps on the bridge above him and glanced up as Hassan sauntered into view, leaning on the railing and looking down. “You guys have fun, now,” he said.
“Oh, yes,” enthused Roland, giving the thumbs-up. “We have great fun.”
“And don’t hurry back.” He beckoned behind him, and Fiona came reluctantly into view. She had put on long cotton trousers and a thin white T-shirt, as though more modest clothing could somehow protect her, yet still she was shivering visibly. When Hassan caught Knox staring at her, he grinned wolfishly and put his arm around her shoulders, almost daring Knox to do something about it.
It was said on the streets of Sharm that Hassan had slit the throat of a second cousin for sleeping with a woman he had put his mark on. Another story held that he had beaten an American tourist into a coma for protesting when Hassan propositioned his wife.
Knox lowered his eyes and looked around, hoping to share the burden of responsibility. Max and Nessim, Hassan’s ex-paratrooper head of security, were checking out each other’s dive gear. He’d get no joy there. Ingrid and Birgit, two Scandinavians Max had brought along to keep Roland company, were already suited and waiting by the stern ladder. Knox tried to catch Ingrid’s eye, but she knew what he was up to, and kept her eyes firmly averted. He glanced back up at the bridge. Hassan was still grinning down at him, aware of exactly what was going through Knox’s mind. An alpha male in his prime, savoring the challenge. He ran his hand slowly down Fiona’s flank to her backside, cupping and squeezing her buttock. The man had risen from nothing to make himself the most powerful shipping agent on the Suez Canal by the age of thirty, and you didn’t achieve that by being soft. Now they said he was bored, looking to extend his empire every way he could, including through tourism, buying up waterfront properties in the slump that had followed recent terrorist outrages.
Roland was ready at last. Knox helped him down the ladder into the Red Sea, then knelt to pass him his fins. The big German kept losing his balance as he tried to pull them on, splashing around wildly, guffawing maniacally, slapping the water.
“Hold on,” said Knox tightly. “I’ll be with you in a second.” He geared up, shrugged on his BCD and tank, goggles loose around his neck, fins in his hand, and started down the ladder. He was about to let go when he glanced up at the bridge one last time. Hassan was still staring down at him, while beside him, Fiona had her arms crossed anxiously over her chest. Her hair was tousled, her shoulders hunched and forlorn. She looked her age suddenly, or lack of it—a child who had met a friendly Egyptian man in a bar and thought she’d worked herself a freebie for the day, confident she could wriggle and flirt her way out of any expectations he might have. Her eyes were wide, lost, and frightened, yet somehow still hopeful, as though she believed that everything would work out fine, because people were basically nice.
Just for a moment, he imagined it was his sister, Bee, standing there.
Knox shook his head angrily. This girl was nothing like Bee. She was an adult. She made her own choices. Next time she would know better. He glanced over his shoulder to make sure the sea was clear behind him, put his regulator into his mouth, bit down hard, and threw himself backward to explode like fireworks into the Red Sea. He resolutely didn’t look back as he led Roland toward the reef, staying a modest four meters deep, in easy reach of the surface should anything go wrong. A pageant of tropical fish watched their progress intently but without alarm. Sometimes it was difficult to know which was the show and which the audience. A Napoleon fish, surrounded by a shoal of angels and wrasse, turned regally, effortlessly away. He pointed it out to Roland with exaggerated diving gestures—beginners always enjoyed feeling like initiates.
They reached the coral shelf, a wall of ochre and purple that fell dizzily away into blackness. The waters were still and unclouded; visibility was extraordinary. He glanced around unthinkingly and saw the dark hull of the boat and the menacing blurs of distant big fish in the deeper, cooler waters, and he felt a sharp twinge as he suddenly remembered the worst day of his life, visiting his sister in an intensive care unit in Thessalonike after the car crash. The place had been oppressive with the sounds of life support: the steady wheeze of ventilators, the low yet precarious pulse of monitors, the respectful, funeral home whispering of staff and visitors. The doctor had tried her best to prepare him, but he had still been too numb from his trip to the morgue, where he had to identify his parents, and so it had come as a shock to see Bee on the business end of a respirator and all the other attachments. He had felt dislocated, as though watching a play rather than real events. Her head had been unnaturally swollen, her skin pale and blue. He could still remember its waxy pallor, its uncharacteristic flabbiness. And he had never before realized how freckled she was around her eyes and in the crook of her elbow. He hadn’t known what to do. He had looked around at her doctor, who gestured for him to sit down beside her. He had felt awkward putting his hand on hers; they’d never been a physically demonstrative family. He pressed her cool hand beneath his own, felt intense and startling anguish, something like parenthood. He squeezed her fingers between his own, held them to his lips, and remembered how he had joked to friends about what a curse it was to have a younger sister to look after. But having a younger sister wasn’t something he had to worry about any longer.
He tapped Roland on the arm and pointed upward. They surfaced together to find the boat perhaps sixty meters away, with no sign of anyone on deck. He felt a flutter of nerves in his chest as he spat the regulator from his mouth. “Stay here,” he warned Roland. Then he set out in strong strokes across the crystal water.
art

MOHAMMED EL-DAHAB clasped his case protectively in front of his chest as the woman led him up to the private office of Ibrahim Beyumi, head of the Supreme Council for Antiquities in Alexandria. She knocked once on the door, then pushed it open, beckoning Mohammed through. A dapper and rather effeminate-looking man looked up from where he sat behind a pine desk. “Yes, Maha?” he asked.
“This is Mohammed el-Dahab, sir. A builder. He says he’s found something on his site.”
“What kind of something?”
“Perhaps he should tell you himself,” she suggested.
“Very well,” sighed Ibrahim. He gestured for Mohammed to sit at his corner table. Mohammed looked around, dispiritedly assessing with a builder’s eye the bulging wood-paneled walls, the fractured high ceiling with its missing clumps of plaster, the mildewed drawings of Alexandria’s monuments. If this was the office of the top archaeologist in Alexandria, there wasn’t as much money in antiquities as he had hoped.
Ibrahim read his expression. “I know,” he complained. “But what can I do? Which is more important, excavation or my comfort?” Mohammed shrugged as Ibrahim came to sit beside him. He, at least, looked expensive with his sharp suit and gold watch. Settling his hands primly in his lap, he asked: “So you’ve found something, then?”
“Yes.”
“You care to tell me about it?”
Mohammed swallowed. He was a big man, not easily cowed by physical dangers, but educated people intimidated him. Yet there was something kindly about Ibrahim; he seemed like a man who could be trusted. Mohammed set his case on the table, opened it, withdrew his framed photograph of Layla, and laid it facing Ibrahim. Touching and seeing her image restored his courage. “This is my daughter,” he said. “Her name is Layla.”
Ibrahim squinted curiously at Mohammed. “Allah has indeed blessed you.”
“Thank you, yes. Unfortunately, Layla is sick.”
“Ah,” said Ibrahim, leaning back. “I’m sorry to hear that.”
“They call it Burkitt’s lymphoma. It appeared in her stomach like a grape, and then a mango, beneath her skin. Her surgeons removed it; she had chemotherapy. We thought she’d conquered it.”
Ibrahim rubbed his throat. “Maha said you’d found something—”
“Her doctors are good people,” said Mohammed. “But they’re overworked, underequipped, and they have no money. They wait for—”
“Excuse me, but Maha said you’d found—”
“They wait for her disease to progress so far that there’s nothing more they can do.” Mohammed leaned forward and said softly but fiercely: “That time is not yet here. My daughter still has one chance.”
Ibrahim hesitated, then asked reluctantly, “And that is?”
“A bone marrow transplant.”
A look of polite horror crossed Ibrahim’s face. “But aren’t those incredibly expensive?”
Mohammed waved that aside. “Our Medical Research Institute has a program of publicly funded transplants, but they won’t consider a patient unless they’ve already identified a donor match. But they’ll not run tests for a match unless the patient is already in the program.”
“But that makes it impossible—”
“It’s their way of choosing without having to choose. So unless I can finance these tests, my daughter will die.”
Ibrahim said weakly: “You can’t expect the SCA to—”
“These tests aren’t expensive,” said Mohammed urgently. “It’s just that the chances of a match are low. My wife and I, our closest family, our friends—we’ve all taken the tests, but without success. I can persuade others, more distant cousins, friends of friends, but only if I organize and pay. I’ve tried everywhere to borrow money for this, but already this disease has put me so far in debt that . . .” He felt tears coming; he broke off, bowing his head to prevent Ibrahim from seeing.
There was silence for a while. Then Ibrahim murmured, “Maha said you’d found something on your site.”
“Yes.”
“Am I to understand that you want money for these tests in exchange for telling me about it.”
“Yes.”
“You realize you’re legally obliged to inform me anyway.”
“Yes.”
“That you could go to jail if you don’t.”
Mohammed lifted his face and met Ibrahim’s gaze with perfect calmness. “Yes.”
Ibrahim nodded, gestured around his shabby offices. “And you understand I cannot promise anything?”
“Yes.”
“Very well. Why don’t you tell me what you’ve found.”