The Alexander Cipher

by Will Adams

  And all the while, Mohammed had brooded on why Nicolas would want such equipment in Siwa. None of the possible answers made him feel any better. The rising sun threw his truck’s shadow far ahead of him on the black highway. Mohammed drove into it as into a dreadful premonition.

  KNOX STARED THROUGH the Jeep’s windshield at the sands stretching out before him. The desert was at its most beautiful in the early morning and late afternoon, when the angle of the sun created chiaroscuro shadows in the golden dunes, and the heat was less intense. But when the sun was high, the landscape turned monochrome and flat, except for those areas covered by a layer of salt crystals from some long-vanished sea, where it was so dazzling he had to squint to protect his eyes.

  The track he was driving had been in use since ancient times—an old caravan trail from the Nile to Siwa. On either side lay the bones of camels, empty petrol cans, burst tires, discarded water bottles. They had been here perhaps a week, perhaps decades. The Western Desert didn’t recycle like other places; instead, it froze like a time capsule. On one of his trips with Richard, retracing the tracks of the Zerzura Club explorers who had mapped the Western Desert and the Gilf Kabir, Knox had encountered the remains of a man in Bedouin dress sitting by the ashes of a fire in a dune valley, who had apparently died abruptly of a heart attack, and his hobbled camel nearby, which, unable to move, had perished with him.

  His lips were badly cracked with dehydration; his tongue kept gluing itself to the roof of his mouth. He took another swig from the water bottle he kept clamped between his legs, swilling it around before swallowing. Within seconds, however, his mouth was as dry as before. He glanced over his shoulder to reassure himself that he and Rick had gotten sufficient supplies.

  “What’s that?” frowned Rick, pointing ahead.

  The Jeep’s windshield had smeared so badly that Knox had to lean his head out the window to make it out clearly. There was a low darkness on the horizon, like rain, except that there were no clouds in the sky, and rain was the least of one’s worries out here in the Western Desert. “Trouble,” muttered Knox.

  ELENA WAS IN A FIERY MOOD when she reached Ibrahim’s villa, fresh from her trip to Cairo.

  “You’re late,” said Nicolas angrily, leading her into the kitchen, where Philip Dragoumis was at the table discussing plans with Costis, his longtime head of security, and several of his team, battle-hardened veterans of the various Balkan conflicts. “I told you to be here at nine.”

  Just the sight of Dragoumis made Elena’s bag weigh heavier on her shoulder, but this wasn’t the moment. “I had something to do,” she said. “What’s the rush, anyway?”

  “We need to be in Siwa by nightfall.”

  “Siwa!” she protested. “You made me drive all the way up here just to drive straight back down again.”

  “It’s for your own good,” said Nicolas, nodding at the security monitor. “You’ve been recorded arriving. Tomorrow evening you’ll be recorded leaving. And Ibrahim will swear you’ve stayed here all the time in between.”

  “Then how—”

  “There’s a back gate,” said Nicolas. “We’ve rigged the camera on it to show nothing.” He glanced at his watch. “But we need to get moving. Can I have your cell phone, please?”

  “Why?”

  “Because if you use it while we’re traveling, you can be traced,” he said with exaggerated patience. “There’s not much point in having an alibi if you’re going to blow it with a phone call.”

  “Then how will we communicate?”

  “We have phones in the cars,” said Nicolas. “Now, please just give it to me.”

  “I don’t have it,” admitted Elena, a little sheepishly. “I threw it away.”

  He frowned. “You threw it away? Why?”

  “Does it matter? Now, what’s this about? It had better be good.”

  “I think you’ll find it good,” growled Dragoumis. She frowned at him. He beckoned for her to join him at the table. He opened the two books of Siwa for her to see and laid them alongside a photograph of the mosaic from the Alexandrian tomb.

  “Christ!” murmured Elena.

  “Yes. We’ve found it at last. Now all we have to do is bring it home.”

  She looked at him in horror. For all that she sympathized wholeheartedly with the Macedonian cause, she was an archaeologist, too. Sites and artifacts were sacred to her. “Bring it home?”

  “Of course. What else do you think we’ve been working for?”

  “But… this is crazy. You’ll never get away with it.”

  “Why not?”

  “For one thing, it may not be there.”

  “If it isn’t, it isn’t,” shrugged Dragoumis. “But it is.” He put his hand over his heart. “I know it in here.”

  “But an excavation like this can take months. Years.”

  “We have one night,” grinned Nicolas. “Tonight. A mechanical digger will meet us there. Eneas and Vasileios are bringing other equipment and a container truck. One of our ships is headed to Alexandria. It’ll be docked by morning, in plenty of time to load whatever we find. Believe me, our captains are skilled at playing the three-card trick with sealed containers. Within days it will be back in Thessalonike, and then we can make the announcement.”

  “Announcement? But you can’t! Everyone will know we stole it.”

  “So? They won’t be able to prove it. Especially when you say that the Macedonian Archaeological Foundation made this discovery in the mountains of Macedonia. As a respected archaeologist, people will accept your word.”

  “I don’t believe this!” protested Elena. “I’ll be an international joke.”

  “I don’t see why,” said Nicolas. “If it’s possible Alexander had a tomb prepared for him in Siwa, why not in Macedonia?”

  “We have an explanation for Siwa: the Alexander Cipher.”

  “Yes,” said Dragoumis. “And what does it say, exactly? That the shield bearers prepared a tomb for Alexander in the place of his father and that they crossed the desert to take him there. That applies to Siwa, certainly. Ammon was Alexander’s divine father, and Siwa lay across the Western Desert. But it applies to Macedonia, too. Philip was Alexander’s mortal father. And the shield bearers would have had to cross the Sinai desert to reach it.”

  Elena’s mouth fell open. She couldn’t refute the logic, yet still she felt appalled. “But people would still know,” she said weakly.

  “We certainly hope so,” grinned Nicolas.

  “How do you mean?”

  “What do you imagine the reaction will be when Athens tries to wrest it off us, as international pressure will force them to do? Can you imagine the outcry? Macedonia will never stand for it.”

  “There’ll be war,” said Elena numbly.

  “Yes,” agreed Nicolas.

  Elena turned to Dragoumis. “I thought you were a man of peace,” she said.

  “And so I am,” he agreed. “But every nation has the right to defend itself. And we are no different.”

  THE PLACE WHERE GAILLE’S FATHER had fallen to his death was at the eastern edge of the Siwa Depression, some three hours’ drive from Siwa Town. When Gaille asked Mustafa and Zayn to take her out there, they looked deeply uncomfortable. But she pointed out to them that she was his daughter, that she had never had a proper chance to say good-bye to him, and finally they agreed.

  They drove east along the Bahariyya track for the best part of a hundred kilometers, then turned north. It was a beautiful though slightly eerie setting. High cliffs jutted from the great Sea of Sand. There was no greenery out here. A white snake slithered down a steep dune. Apart from that, Gaille saw no life at all, not even a bird.

  It was a five-minute scramble from where they parked to the foot of a high, sheer cliff. A cairn of stones marked the exact spot. His full name, Richard Josiah Mitchell, had been scratched crudely into the top one. He had always hated being called Josiah. His closest friends, knowing this, had teased him mercilessly with it. She picked it
up and asked her guides if either of them was responsible. They shook their heads, then suggested it must have been Knox. She set it back as she had found it, uncertain what to think.

  As she stood there, Mustafa explained how they and Knox had hurried down here to find her father already cold, his blood everywhere, how they had offered to help Knox take his body back to the truck, how he had snarled at them.

  She looked around at where they had parked. “You mean that truck?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  She felt a little weak. “My father’s body was in your truck?”

  Mustafa looked a little sheepish. He told her how much he and Zayn had respected her father, what a tragedy it had been, how unnecessary. Gaille stared upward while he talked. The rock face rose sheer and high above them. It made her toes tingle. She felt light-headed, a little nauseated. She had never been good with heights. She took a step back, stumbled, and might have fallen had Zayn not grabbed her by the arm and restored her to balance.

  Her sense of vertigo stayed with her as she and Mustafa climbed the rock face. Zayn elected to stay behind with the truck, in case of robbers. Gaille had snorted softly when she heard that. Robbers! There was no one for fifty miles. But she couldn’t blame him. The growing heat and the gradient made the climb far more difficult than she had anticipated. There was no path, just a series of steep shelves of rock too sandy to provide secure footing. Mustafa led the way, dancing up in his ragged flip-flops, careless of his thick white robes and heavy pack, five times bulkier than her own. Each time he got far enough ahead, he would squat like a frog on an outcrop to smoke one of his foul cigarettes and watch amiably as she labored to catch up. She grew increasingly indignant. Didn’t he know that men his age shouldn’t be able to ingest tar so relentlessly and still be fit? Didn’t he realize he should be a physical wreck? She scowled up at him. He waved cheerily back. Her feet ached despite her leather boots; her calves and thighs were trembling with exertion; her mouth was tacky with thirst. She reached him at last, slumped down, fetched out her water bottle, swilled and swallowed a mouthful, and asked plaintively, “Are we nearly there yet?”

  “Ten minute.”

  She squinted suspiciously at him. He had said that every time.

  THE SANDSTORM HIT LIGHTLY AT FIRST. Rick sat back in his seat with a relieved smile. “This isn’t so bad,” he said.

  “If it doesn’t get any worse.”

  It was still light enough outside that he could see the track, despite the sand being blasted against his door and window. Sandstorms tended to fall into two broad categories. One was effectively a dust storm, hundreds of feet high, that blocked out the sun and was disorienting without being particularly brutal. The other—like this one—was a true sandstorm: a fierce wind picking up sand from the dunes and firing them like shotgun pellets.

  It wasn’t long before Rick was regretting his complacency. The wind buffeted them so hard, they were creaking back and forth on their suspension; the paint and windows were being assailed by a nonstop barrage, loud and frantic, that seemed certain to break through the fragile old glass. Visibility deteriorated so badly that Knox could barely see the track anymore. He kept skewing into soft sand that cloyed beneath their wheels, or over stray sharp rocks that threatened their tires, so that he had to go down into first gear and slow almost to a crawl.

  “Shouldn’t we stop?” asked Rick.

  Knox shook his head. Stop for even a minute, and the wind would blow away the sand beneath their tires, making them sink into the pits it created, until they were stuck. Then it would pile up a drift against their side until they were completely buried and their doors pinned, making them dependent on being rescued. And there wasn’t much chance of that out here.

  The winds grew indescribably fierce, causing the Jeep to rock precariously back and forth. The left wheels dropped suddenly just as a gust blew viciously hard, so that for a moment it felt as if they were about to be blown onto their side.

  “Christ!” muttered Rick, clutching his door handle as they slammed back down onto four wheels. “Have you been through one like this before?”

  “Once,” said Knox.

  “How long did it last?”

  “Seven days.”

  “You’re fucking with me.”

  Knox allowed himself a small smile. It wasn’t often he had seen Rick rattled. “You’re right,” he admitted. “It was more like seven and a half.”

  A WAFT OF TOBACCO SMOKE tickled Gaille’s throat and made her cough. Mustafa held up a hand in apology, then screwed the butt into the dust with his flip-flop. Gaille dribbled water onto her palm, ran it over her brow, and rose reluctantly to her feet. “How much further?” she asked.

  Mustafa nodded keenly. “Ten minute,” he said. She clenched her teeth together. Damned if she would give him the satisfaction of begging for more recovery time. She followed him wearily up a gully in the hillside. After a little while, it suddenly sheared away, so that she could see for tens of kilometers over the golden desert. It looked endless. “You see,” said Mustafa with an impresario’s whirl of the hand. “Ten minute.”

  By God, they were high up. Gaille inched closer to the edge. It fell away beneath her directly to the rocks below, fawn cliffs riven by black shadows. A ledge ran above the precipice before reaching again the safe embrace of a gully, but it was ridiculously narrow, more like stepping stones than a path. “You crossed that?” she asked.

  Mustafa shrugged. He kicked off his flip-flops and walked quickly across, left hand against the cliff wall, soles of his feet molding themselves to the meager holds. He dislodged a small stone, and she put a hand against the cliff wall and leaned out to watch it fall. It hit a knob of rock and bounced away from the cliff. Still it fell… and still. She could barely see the cairn on the rocks far below.

  Mustafa reached the far side. “See?” he grinned. “Is nothing.”

  She shook her head. There was no way she could do it. Her balance was poor; her ankles were tired. It would be difficult enough at ground level, but up here… Mustafa shrugged and came back across. Chills cramped Gaille’s toes just watching him. He placed his hand on her back to give her courage. She reached her left foot tentatively onto the first small outcrop and brought her right foot to join it. She spent an age looking at the place where she had to set her foot next. She made that step jerkily, then another. The world warped and grew indistinct around her, shearing away from her at the same time that it rushed up at her face. She wanted to go back, but she couldn’t move. She closed her eyes, pressed her back against the cliff wall, stretched out her arms for balance. Her fingers and toes felt bloodless and weak; her knees threatened to buckle. It was then that she understood at last what had happened to her father, and Knox’s part in it. Tears sprang from her eyes as she realized how wrong she had been about him, about everything. “I can’t do this,” she said. “I can’t—”

  Mustafa grabbed her hand and pulled her to safety. “You see,” he grinned. “That was all Knox must do.”

  She shook her head at him and collapsed, dry-heaving, into a bowl of rocks from which she couldn’t possibly fall. She turned onto her back, covering her eyes with her hand while wiping away the tickle of tears from her cheeks. Her father’s life insurance policy had included a handsome bonus for accidental death, enough for Gaille to buy herself an apartment. An apartment! She felt wretched. She struggled to her feet and, with weak, rubbery legs, followed Mustafa on the long, silent walk down to the truck.

  Chapter Thirty-two

  KNOX AND RICK drove through the sandstorm for what seemed like hour after hour. The whine and screech and roar got to them both, like furious harpies clawing at the Jeep’s metalwork, trying to get at them. The engine was increasingly strained, too, with unsettling glugs and belches coming from the radiator. But finally the storm began to abate; and then, in what seemed little more than a moment, the wind died away altogether and they were through, with nothing but open desert around them.

  They
had driven off the track some time before, and there was no sign of it, either, or any landmarks to give them guidance. They had neither GPS nor a decent map against which to plot it.

  “You know where we are?” asked Rick.

  “No.”

  “Then what the fuck do we do now?”

  “Don’t worry,” said Knox. He climbed up onto the Jeep’s hood and scoured the horizon through binoculars. People thought of the desert as a single flat landscape, bereft of personality and recognizable features, but it wasn’t like that at all, not once you had been out here a few times. Every region had its own personality and look. Some parts were like those Utah salt flats where the land speed records were set. Others were like raging high seas frozen into dunes, and though the sands shifted, the underlying shapes themselves were immortal and unchanging. And there were numerous cliffs and ridges, too, many of which Knox had climbed.

  The air was still hazy, but away to the north he spotted a familiar escarpment. Half an hour’s drive, and they’d be back in business. “We should eat,” he told Rick. “Give the engine a rest.”

  They sat in the shade of the Jeep and washed cold rice and vegetables down with water, the engine creaking and groaning as it cooled. When they were done, they topped up the water in the radiator and set off again, reaching the track right where Knox had thought they would, then drove on through the seemingly endless desert. Yet it wasn’t endless. In fact, it was only a little after dusk that they reached a sealed track, and then progress was even swifter. Within another hour, they pulled into Siwa’s main square.

  “I could kill a cold drink,” muttered Rick.

  “Not if I see it first,” answered Knox.

  MOHAMMED REFUELED FIFTY KILOMETERS north of Siwa, then drove for half an hour with his phone on the seat next to him, waiting for it to pick up a signal. When finally it did, he pulled off the road to call Nur. It did him good just to hear her voice. His premonitions of his own doom had been growing stronger with every passing minute, but then Nur mentioned Layla’s name and Mohammed blurted out suddenly how much he loved them both, that if something went wrong and she shouldn’t see him again—