The Alexander Cipher Read online

  She crouched, cupped her hands around her mouth, and called down, but there was no answer. She waited a few seconds, then called down again. Still hearing nothing, she stood with her hands on her hips, brooded. Elena Koloktronis, head of this Macedonian Archaeological Foundation excavation, was one of those leaders who believed all her team incompetent and who therefore tried to do everything herself. She was constantly running off in the middle of one task to see to another. Maybe that was what had happened here. Or maybe there had just been a mix-up with the message. The trouble was, with Elena it was impossible to do the right thing. If you went looking for her, you should have stayed where you were. If you stayed, she was furious that you hadn’t come looking.

  Gaille crouched again, her hams and calves aching from her long day’s work, and called down a third time, feeling just a tremor of alarm. What if Elena had fallen? She turned on a battery lamp, but the shaft was deep and the beam was lost in its darkness. She had a sudden vision of Elena lying unconscious at the foot, her neck twisted, in urgent need of medical attention.

  Gaille had little head for heights, so she took a deep breath as she put her hand on the ladder, reached one foot tentatively onto the top rung, then the other. When she felt secure, she began a cautious descent. The ladder creaked, as did the ropes that bound it to the wall. The shaft was deeper than she had imagined, perhaps six meters. You couldn’t normally go down so far in the delta without reaching the water table, but the site was on the crown of a hill, safe from the annual inundation of the Nile—one reason it had been occupied in ancient times. She called out again. Still silence, except for her own breathing, magnified by her narrow confines. Displaced earth trickled past. Curiosity began to get a hold of her. She had heard whispers about this place, of course, though none of her colleagues dared speak openly about it.

  She reached the bottom at last, her feet crunching on shards of basalt, granite, and quartzite, as though old monuments and statues had been smashed into smithereens and dumped. There was no sign of Elena, but a narrow passage led away to the left. She called out again, more quietly this time, half hoping there would be no answer, so that she would have the opportunity to explore a little. Her lamp started flickering and stuttering, then went out altogether, so she tapped it against the wall and it sprang back on. The stone chips under her feet crackled as she advanced. There was a painting on the left wall, its colors remarkably bright. It had evidently been cleaned, perhaps even retouched. A profiled humanoid figure dressed as a soldier but with the head and mane of a gray wolf was holding a mace in his left hand and, in his right, a military standard, its base planted between his feet, a scarlet flag unfurling beside his right shoulder in front of a turquoise sky.

  Ancient Egyptian gods weren’t Gaille’s specialty, but she knew enough to recognize Wepwawet, a wolf god who had eventually merged with others into Anubis, the jackal. He had been seen primarily as an army scout and had often been depicted on shedsheds—Egyptian military standards such as the one he was holding here. His name had meant “Opener of the Ways,” which was why the miniaturized robot designed to explore the mysterious air shafts of the Great Pyramids had been christened with a version of his name, Upuaut. He had gone out of fashion during the Middle Kingdom, around 1600 BC, so this painting should be over three and a half thousand years old. Yet the shedshed that Wepwawet was holding told a different story. For a handsome young man was depicted on it, his face tilted up like that of some renaissance Madonna. It was hard to know for sure when you were looking at a portrait of Alexander the Great, since his impact on iconography had been so profound that for centuries afterward people had aspired to look like him. But if this wasn’t Alexander himself, it was unquestionably influenced by him, which meant it couldn’t possibly date to earlier than 332 BC. And that begged an obvious question: What on earth was he doing on a standard held by Wepwawet, over a millennium after Wepwawet had faded from view?

  She set this conundrum aside and continued on her way, still murmuring Elena’s name, though only as an excuse should she suddenly encounter anyone. Her battery lamp went out again, plunging the place into complete blackness, and again she tapped it on the wall until it sprang on once more. She passed another painting—identical to the first, as far as she could tell, though it was not yet fully cleaned. The walls began to show signs of charring, as though a great fire had once raged here. She glimpsed a flash of white marble ahead, and two stone wolves lying prone yet alert. More wolves. She frowned. When the Macedonians had taken Egypt, they gave many of the towns Greek names for administrative purposes, often basing the names on local cult gods. If Wepwawet was the cult god of this place, then surely this must be—

  “Gaille! Gaille!” From far behind her, Elena was shouting. “Are you down there? Gaille!”

  Gaille hurried back along the passage. “Elena?” she called up. “Is that you?”

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing down there?”

  “I thought you’d fallen. I thought you might be in trouble.”

  “Get out!” ordered Elena furiously. “Get out now.”

  Gaille started to climb. She saved her breath until she reached the top, then she said hurriedly, “Kristos told me you wanted to—”

  Elena thrust her face in Gaille’s. “How many times have I told you this is a restricted area?” she yelled. “How many times?”

  “I’m sorry, Ms. Koloktronis, but—”

  “Who the hell do you think you are?” Her face was red; tendons stood out on her neck, reminding Gaille of a straining racehorse. “How dare you go down there? How dare you?”

  “I thought you’d fallen,” Gaille repeated helplessly. “I thought you might need help.”

  “Don’t you dare interrupt me when I’m talking.”

  “I wasn’t—”

  “Don’t you dare!”

  Gaille stiffened. For a moment she considered snapping back. It had barely been three weeks ago, after all, that Elena had called her out of the blue and begged her—begged her—to take a month out from the Sorbonne’s Demotic Dictionary project to fill in for a languages assistant who had fallen ill. But Gaille knew instinctively how well she matched up against other people, and she didn’t stand a chance against Elena, not when she lost her temper like this. The first time Elena exploded, it had left Gaille shell-shocked. Her new colleagues always shrugged it off, telling her that Elena had been that way ever since her husband died. Full of internal rage, she boiled like a young planet, erupting unpredictably in gushes of indiscriminate, molten, and sometimes spectacular violence. It had become almost routine now, something to be feared and placated, like the wrath of ancient gods. So Gaille stood there and took on the chin all Elena’s scathing remarks about the poverty of her abilities, her ingratitude, and the damage this incident would doubtless do her career when it got out, though she herself of course would do her best to protect Gaille.

  “I’m sorry, Ms. Koloktronis,” she said when the tirade finally began to slacken. “Kristos said you wanted to see me.”

  “I told him to tell you I was coming over.”

  “That’s not what he told me. I just wanted to make sure you hadn’t fallen.”

  “Where did you go?”

  “Nowhere. I just checked at the bottom.”

  “Very well,” said Elena grudgingly. “Then we’ll say no more about it. But don’t mention it to Qasim, or I won’t be able to protect you.”

  “No, Ms. Koloktronis,” said Gaille. Qasim, the on-site representative of the Supreme Council, was every bit as secretive about this place as Elena herself. No doubt it would be embarrassing for Elena to have to admit to him that she’d left the door unlocked and unguarded.

  “Come with me,” said Elena, locking the steel door then leading her across to the magazine. “There’s an ostracon I’d like your opinion on. I’m ninety-nine point nine nine percent sure of its translation. You can perhaps help me with the other naught point naught one percent.”

  “Yes, Ms.
Koloktronis,” said Gaille meekly. “Thank you.”

  “ARE YOU AN IDIOT?” GROWLED MAX, having followed Knox to the stern of the dive boat. “Do you have a death wish or something? Didn’t I tell you to leave Hassan’s woman alone?”

  “She came to talk to me,” answered Knox. “Did you want me to be rude?”

  “You were flirting with her.”

  “She was flirting with me.”

  “That’s even worse. Christ!” He looked around, his face suffused with fear. Working for Hassan would do that to people.

  “I’m sorry,” said Knox. “I’ll stay away from her.”

  “You’d better. Trust me, you get on Hassan’s wrong side, you and your mate Rick can forget about your little project, whatever the fuck it is.”

  “Keep your voice down.”

  “I’m just warning you.” He wagged a finger as if he had more to say, but then he turned and walked away.

  Knox watched him go. He didn’t like Max; Max didn’t like him. But they had a valuable relationship. Max ran a dive school, and Knox was a good, reliable dive instructor who knew how to charm tourists into recommending him to others they met on their travels—and he worked for peanuts, too. In return, Max let him use his boat and side-scan sonar for what he disparagingly referred to as their “little project.” Knox smiled wryly. If Max ever found out what he and Rick were after, he wouldn’t be so dismissive.

  Knox had arrived in Sharm nearly three years ago, needing a place to lie low for a while. While he was sitting by the seafront one evening enjoying a beer, a powerfully built Australian man had come up to him. “Mind if I join you?” he had asked.

  “Help yourself.”

  “I’m Rick.”

  “Daniel, but everyone calls me Knox.”

  “Yeah, so I’ve been told.”

  Knox squinted at him. “You’ve been asking?”

  “They say you’re an archaeologist.”

  “Used to be.”

  “You gave it up to become a dive instructor?” Rick sounded skeptical.

  “It gave me up,” explained Knox. “A bust-up with the establishment.”

  “Ah.” He nodded at Knox’s arm. “Interesting tattoo you’ve got there.”

  “You think?”

  Rick nodded. “If I show you something, you’ll keep it to yourself, right?”

  “Sure,” said Knox.

  Reaching into his pocket, he pulled out a matchbox. Inside, embedded in cotton wool, was a fat golden teardrop about an inch long, with an eyelet at the narrow end for a clasp or a chain. Specks of pink were accreted from where it had apparently been chiseled out of coral, and on its base a sixteen-pointed star had been faintly inscribed. “I found it a couple of years back,” said Rick. “I thought you might be able to tell me more about it. I mean, it’s Alexander’s symbol, right?”

  “Yes. Where’d you find it?”

  “Sure!” snorted Rick. “Like I’m going to tell you that.” He took it back and replaced it jealously in its matchbox, which he returned to his pocket. “Well? Any idea?”

  “It could be anything,” said Knox. “A tassel for a robe, a drinking cup, something like that. An earring.”

  “What?” frowned Rick. “Alexander wore earrings?”

  “The star doesn’t mean it belonged to him personally. Just to his household.”

  “Oh.” He looked disappointed.

  Knox frowned. “And you found it in these reefs, yes?”

  “Yeah. Why?”

  “It’s odd, that’s all. Alexander never came near here. Nor did his men.”

  Rick snorted. “And I thought you said you were an archaeologist! Even I know he came to Egypt. He went to visit that place out in the desert.”

  “The Oracle of Ammon in Siwa Oasis. Yes. But he didn’t travel via Sharm, believe me. He cut across the north coast of Sinai.”

  “Oh. And that was his only visit, was it?”

  “Yes, except for . . .” And Knox’s heart suddenly skipped as a wild idea occurred to him. “Jesus Christ!” he muttered.

  “What?” asked Rick, excitedly.

  “No, no, it couldn’t be.”

  “What? Tell me.”

  Knox shook his head decisively. “No. I’m sure it’s nothing.”

  “Come on, mate. You’ve got to tell me now.”

  “Only if you tell me where you found it.”

  Rick squinted shrewdly at him. “You reckon there’s more? That’s what you’re thinking, yeah?”

  “Not exactly, but it’s possible.”

  Rick hesitated. “And you’re a diver, yeah?”

  “Yes.”

  “I could do with a buddy. The place isn’t easy on my own. If I tell you, we’ll go look together, yeah?”

  “Sure.”

  “Okay. Then spill.”

  “Fine. But you’ve got to remember, this is pure speculation. The chances of this being what I think it is—”

  “I get the point. Now, spill.”

  “Long version or short?”

  Rick shrugged. “I’ve got nowhere I need to be.”

  “I’ll need to give you some background first. Alexander only came to Egypt once during his life, like I said, and then only for a few months. Across north Sinai to the Nile Delta, then south to Memphis, the old capital, just south of Cairo, where he was crowned. After that it was north again to found Alexandria, westwards along the coast to Paraetonium, modern Marsa Matruh, then due south through the desert to Siwa. He and his party got lost, apparently. According to one account, they’d have died of thirst except that two talking snakes guided them to the oasis.”

  “Those talking snakes—always there when you need them.”

  “Aristobulus tells a more plausible story, that they followed a pair of crows. Spend any time in the desert, you’re pretty much certain to see some brown-necked ravens. They’re about the only birds you will see in many places. They often travel in pairs. And they’re cheeky buggers, too; if they can’t find any snakes or locusts to eat, they’ll happily scout around your campsite looking for scraps, before heading off back to the nearest oasis. So if you were to follow them . . .”

  Rick nodded. “Like dolphins in the Sea of Sand.”

  “If you want to put it that way,” agreed Knox. “Anyway, they got Alexander to Siwa, where he consulted the oracle, and then it was back into the desert again; but this time he headed east along the caravan trails to Bahariyya Oasis, where there’s a famous temple dedicated to him, and then back to Memphis. That was pretty much that. It was off beating up Persians again. But then, after he died, he was brought back to Egypt for burial.”

  “Ah! And you think this was from then?”

  “I think it’s possible. You’ve got to bear something in mind. This was Alexander the Great we’re talking about. He led thirty thousand Macedonians across the Hellespont to avenge Xerxes’ invasion of Greece, knowing that he’d face armies ten times larger. He hammered the Persians not once, not twice, but three times, and then he just kept on going. He fought countless battles, and he won them all, making himself the most powerful man the world has ever seen. When his best friend, Hephaiston, died, he sent him on his way on top of a beautifully carved wooden pyre eighty meters high—like building Sydney Opera House, then putting a match to it, just to enjoy the blaze. So you can imagine, his men would have insisted on something pretty special when Alexander himself died.”

  “I get you.”

  “A pyre was out of the question. Alexander’s body was far too precious to be burned. Apart from anything else, one of the duties of a new Macedonian king was to bury his predecessor. So whoever possessed Alexander’s body had a serious claim to kingship, especially as Alexander hadn’t left an obvious successor, and everyone was jostling for position.”

  Rick nodded at Knox’s empty glass. “You fancy another?”

  “Sure. Thanks.”

  “Two beers!” shouted Rick at the barman. “Sorry. You were saying, people jostling for position . . .”
/>   “Yes. The throne was pretty much open. Alexander had a brother, but he was a half-wit. And his wife, Roxanne, was pregnant, but no one could be sure she’d have a son; and anyway, Roxanne was a barbarian, and the Macedonians hadn’t conquered the known world to be ruled by a half-breed. So there was an assembly of the army in Babylon, and they came to a compromise. The half-wit brother and the unborn child, if he turned out to be a boy—which he did, Alexander the Fourth—would rule together; but the various regions of the empire would be administered for them by a number of satraps all reporting to a triumvirate. You with me?”

  “Yes.”

  “One of Alexander’s generals was a man named Ptolemy. He was the one who made the claim about the talking snakes leading Alexander to Siwa, as it happens. But don’t let that fool you—he was a very shrewd, very capable man. He realized that without Alexander to hold it together, the empire was bound to fragment, and he wanted Egypt for himself. It was rich, out of the way, unlikely to get caught up in other people’s wars. So he got himself awarded the satrapy, bedded himself in, and eventually became pharaoh, founding the Ptolemaic dynasty that ended with Cleopatra. Okay?”

  Their beers arrived and they clinked them in a toast. “Go on,” said Rick.

  “It wasn’t easy for Ptolemy, making himself pharaoh,” said Knox. “Egyptians wouldn’t recognize just anyone. Legitimacy was very important to them. Alexander was different, a living god of unquestioned royal blood, who’d driven out the hated Persians—there was no shame in being ruled by such a man. But Ptolemy was a nobody as far as the Egyptians were concerned. So one of the things he needed was a symbol of kingship.”