Will Adams - The Alexander Cipher

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."