Will Adams - The Alexander Cipher

"We've been everywhere, sweetheart," grinned Rick.

"The holder of the secret," muttered Knox. "So now we know what it was: the location of the tomb the shield bearers built for Alexander, with all the grave goods still inside."

"The exact location," added Rick, pointing out the two outcrops of rock that mapped exactly onto Akylos's splayed knees and Wepwawet's outspread feet, and between which both sword and standard were planted.

Gaille sucked in a breath anxiously. Knox squinted at her. "What?" he asked.

"It's just, I asked Ibrahim to send me copies of these books. And then Elena was summoned to Alexandria. And Aly to Cairo. You don't think someone's… trying something, do you?"

"I don't know," said Knox grimly. "But I think we should make sure."

It was the wee hours of the night, so Knox took it easy on his Jeep until they were out of town; then he opened it up over the rutted desert track, the old suspension groaning and squeaking as they bounced and jarred. Icy air blew through the cracks in the doors and the empty ventilator slots. Rick was in the back, leaning forward between the front seats, while Gaille clamped her hands beneath her armpits. "We must be mad!" she said, shivering. "Why don't we come back in the morning?"

"We can't risk it."

"Risk what?" she grumbled. "Even if people know about the tomb, they can't exactly just loot it."

"Trust me, the Dragoumises will do exactly that if the prize is big enough."

"But is it big enough? I mean, they're certain to be found out. Would they really risk international condemnation and life in prison just for some goods fit for Alexander?"

"Maybe that's not what they're after. Maybe there's more."

"Like what?" asked Rick.

"There's only one thing they'd risk everything for."

"Come on, mate. Spill."

"Dragoumis wants an independent Macedonia. That's only going to happen through an all-out war. He knows that. But nations don't go to war for nothing. They need a cause, something greater than themselves that they can all believe in. The Jews followed the Ark of the Covenant into battle. Christians followed the true cross. If you were Macedonian, what would you follow?"

"The body of Alexander," said Gaille numbly.

"The immortal, invincible lord of the world," agreed Knox.

"But that's not possible," protested Rick. "Alexander was on display in Alexandria hundreds of years after the shield bearers all died."

"Was he?"

"Of course," said Gaille. "Julius Caesar visited him. Octavian. Caracalla."

Knox waved impatiently. "Think about it from a different perspective for a moment. Imagine you're Ptolemy, just settling into Egypt. News comes that these bastard shield bearers have made off with Alexander's body. You need that body. It's the only thing that gives your reign legitimacy, so you set off after them, but by the time you catch them, there's no sign of Alexander, and the shield bearers have all killed themselves. What the hell do you do now?"

"A double?" frowned Rick. "You're suggesting he used a double?"

"It has to be possible, doesn't it? I mean, Ptolemy had already used a decoy once to send Perdiccas off in the wrong direction. Surely the idea would at least have occurred to him."

"But Alexander had the most famous face in antiquity," protested Gaille. "Ptolemy couldn't just embalm a substitute and hope no one noticed."

"Why not? There was no TV, remember. No photography. There was memory and there was art, but all of it was idealized. Listen, Ptolemy kept Alexander's body in Memphis for thirty or forty years before he moved him to Alexandria; archaeologists have been arguing about the reason for that for decades. Do you really believe it took that long to build an appropriate tomb? Or that Ptolemy held the transfer back deliberately so he'd have a grand state event for his son's succession? Bullshit. Maybe this is why. Maybe Ptolemy couldn't risk bringing the body to a Greek city because it wasn't Alexander at all, and he had to wait until everyone who'd known Alexander well was either dead or too gaga to remember what he looked like."

"You're dreaming."

"Am I? You showed me the painting yourself."

"What painting?"

"In the antechamber of the Macedonian tomb, of Akylos with Apelles of Cos. Tell me this: why would Alexander's personal portrait painter waste time on a humble shield bearer? Could it be because Akylos was sitting in as Alexander's model? I mean, we never found his body in Alexandria, did we? And you saw the mosaic. Akylos was short and slight with reddish hair. Now, describe Alexander."

"No," said Gaille weakly. "It can't be."

Knox read it on her face. "What?" he asked. "Tell me."

"It's just," she said, "it seemed odd that Kelonymus buried the shield bearers in the Royal Quarter. I mean, that was the absolute heart of Ptolemy's power. Taking them there would have been suicidal."

"Unless?"

"Kelonymus wrote in the Alexander Cipher that he'd pledged to reunite the thirty-three in death as in life. If you're right-I mean, if it really was Akylos buried as Alexander in Alexandria-then the necropolis would have been as close as Kelonymus could possibly have got the other shield bearers to him. This was his effort to reunite them."

Knox stomped on the gas pedal. They roared across the sand.

Elena watched raptly as Mohammed cleared the marble slab of sand and set the teeth of his scoop between the top of the marble and the limestone lintel, then toppled it forward. She flinched as it fell, professionally appalled by such cavalier vandalism, but the sand was soft and it didn't shatter. She was still as determined as ever on her vendetta, but she also had to see what lay inside. In every way possible, this was the climax of her career.

They each took flashlights, shining them down into the black mouth. A flight of steps almost entirely submerged beneath a slant of sand led down to a rough-hewn corridor just tall and wide enough for two men to stand shoulder to shoulder. Elena followed Nicolas and his father fifty paces into the hill before the corridor opened out into a cavernous chamber. But as they shone their flashlights eagerly around, they soon realized it was empty except of dust and detritus: a broken drinking vessel, an earthenware amphora, the hilt of a dagger, the bones and feathers of a bird, presumably trapped here centuries before. Only the walls repaid in any way the efforts they had made to find this place, for the raw sandstone was handsomely sculpted like the stations of the cross, with scenes from Alexander's life in deep relief, furnished with real artifacts.

In the first, to their left, Alexander was a gurgling infant in his cot, strangling snakes like Hercules-and evidently there had once been real snakes there, though time had disintegrated them, leaving only wafer-thin translucent skins. In the second, he was leading his famed horse Bucephalus away from his own shadow, the better to tame him. The third showed him with other young men around the feet of an elderly man, perhaps Aristotle himself, reading from what would once have been a parchment scroll but which had long since crumbled into fragments that lay at his feet. The fourth showed Alexander on horseback, exhorting his men to battle. The fifth had him plunging a wooden-shafted javelin through the chest of a Persian soldier with a bronze ax. Then came the celebrated Gordian knot. Legend had promised sovereignty over all Asia to the person who could untie it, even though untying it was impossible-a conundrum that Alexander resolved with his customary directness by cutting straight through the rope, represented here by a carved trunk of wood, one end looped around the metal yoke of a chariot, the other anchored inside a slot in the rock wall. The next scene showed him consulting the oracle of Siwa itself, the chief priest assuring him of his divinity. And so it went on, his victories, his setbacks, and his deathbed, all beautifully recorded. The final scene showed his spirit ascending a mountain to join the other gods, being welcomed as an equal.