The Alexander Cipher. Will Adams

insisting on returning to her hotel. From the way she wouldn’t meet his gaze, it seemed she’d figured out that Hassan’s wrath would be at Knox, not her; and therefore the safest place was anywhere away from him. Not so dumb after all. Knox revved his Jeep furiously. He was glad not to have her to worry about, but it pissed him off anyway. His passport, cash and plastic were in his money-belt. His laptop, clothes, books and all his research were in his hotel room, but he dared not go back for them.

      At the main road, he faced his first major decision. North-east to the Israeli border or up the west coast highway towards the main body of Egypt? Israel was safety, but the road was in bad repair, slow and choking with army checkpoints. West, then. He’d arrived here nine years ago on a boat into Port Said. It seemed a fitting way to leave. But Port Said was on the Suez, and the Suez belonged to Hassan. No. He needed out of Sinai altogether. He needed an international airport. Cairo, Alexandria, Luxor.

      He jammed his mobile against his ear as he drove, warning Rick and his other friends to watch out for Hassan. Then he turned it off altogether, lest they use the signal to trace him. He pushed his old Jeep as fast as it would go, engine roaring. Blue oil fires flickered ahead on the Gulf of Suez, like some distant hell. They matched his mood. He’d been driving for less than an hour when he saw an army checkpoint up ahead, a chicane of concrete blocks between two wooden cabins. He choked a sudden urge to swing round and flee. Such checkpoints were routine in Sinai; there was nothing sinister about this. He was waved to the side of the road, felt the bump as he left the road, then cloying soft sand beneath his wheels. An officer swaggered across, a short, broad-shouldered man, with hooded, arrogant eyes; the kind who’d enjoy taunting weaker men until they broke and attacked him, before battering them to pulp and protesting innocently that they had started it. He held out his hand for Knox’s passport, took it away with him. There was little traffic; the other soldiers were chatting around a radio, automatic rifles slung nonchalantly over their shoulders. Knox kept his head down. There was always one who wanted to show off his English.

      A long green insect was walking slowly along the rim of his lowered window. A caterpillar. No, a centipede. He put his finger in its way. It climbed unhesitatingly upon it, its feet tickling his skin. He brought it up to eye-level to inspect as it continued on its way, unaware of just having been hijacked, the precariousness of its situation. He watched it up and around his wrist with a sense of fellow feeling. Centipedes had had great resonance for the ancient Egyptians. They’d been closely connected with death, but in a welcome way, because they’d fed upon the numerous microscopic insects that themselves feasted upon corpses, and so had been seen as protectors of the human body, guarding against decomposition, and thus an aspect of Osiris himself. He gently tapped his hand against the outside of his Jeep’s door until the centipede fell off and tumbled to the ground. Then he leaned out the window and watched it creep away until he lost it in the darkness.

      Inside the cabin, the officer was reading details from his passport into the telephone. He replaced the handset, perched on the edge of his desk, waiting to be called back. Minutes passed. Knox looked around. No one else was being kept: cursory inspections and then a wave through. The phone in the cabin finally rang. Knox watched apprehensively as the officer reached out to answer it.

       FOUR

      I

      A church outside Thessalonike, Northern Greece ‘The ram which thou sawest having two horns are the kings of Media and Persia,’ intoned the old preacher, reading aloud from the open Bible upon his pulpit. ‘And the rough goat is the king of Grecia: and the great horn that is between his eyes is the first king.’ He paused and looked around the packed church. ‘Every bible scholar will tell you the same thing,’ he said, leaning forward a little, lowering his voice, confiding to his audience. ‘The ram Daniel speaks of represents the Persian king Darius. The king of Grecia represents Alexander the Great. These verses are talking about Alexander’s defeat of the Persians. And do you know when Daniel wrote them? Six hundred years before the birth of Christ, two hundred and fifty years before Alexander was even born. Two hundred and fifty years! Can you even begin to imagine what will be happening in the world two hundred and fifty years from now? But Daniel did it.’

      Nicolas Dragoumis nodded as he listened. He knew the old preacher’s text word for word. He’d written much of it himself, and then they’d worked together in rehearsals until every word was perfect. But you could never really tell with something like this until you took it to the people. This was their first night, and it was going well so far. Atmosphere; that was the key. That was why they’d chosen this old church, though it wasn’t an official service. The moon showed through the stained-glass windows. A bird hooted in the rafters. Thick doors excluded the outside world. Incense caught in nostrils, covering the smell of honest sweat. The only lighting came from lines of fat white candles, just bright enough for the congregation to be able to check in their own bibles that these verses were truly from Chapter 8 of the Book of Daniel, as the preacher had assured them, but dark enough to retain a sense of the numinous, the unknown. People knew, in this part of the world, that things were stranger and more complex than modern science tried to paint them. They understood, as Nicolas did, the concept of mysteries.

      He looked around the pews. These haggard people. People with compacted lives, old before their time, taking on backbreaking work at fourteen, becoming parents at sixteen, grandparents at thirty-five, few of them making it past fifty; unshaven faces gaunt from stress, sour from disappointment, skin leathery and dark from too much sun, hands callused from their endless struggle against hunger. And angry too, simmering with resentment at their poverty and the punitive taxation they paid on what little they earned. Anger was good. It made them receptive to angry ideas.

      The preacher stood up straighter, relaxed his shoulders, continued his reading. ‘Now that being broken, whereas four stood up for it, four kingdoms shall stand up out of the nation, but not in his power.’ He gazed out into his congregation with the slightly manic blue eyes of a madman and a prophet. Nicolas had chosen well. ‘“Now that being broken”,’ he repeated. ‘That phrase refers to the death of Alexander. “Four kingdoms shall stand up out of the nation”. And that refers to the break-up of the Macedonian Empire. As you all know, it was broken into four parts by four successors: Ptolemy, Antigonus, Kassandros and Seleucus. And, remember, this was written by Daniel nearly three hundred years earlier.’

      But unrest and anger weren’t enough, reflected Nicolas. Where there was poverty, there was always unrest and anger; but there wasn’t always revolution. There’d been unrest and anger in Macedonia for two millennia, as first the Romans, then the Byzantines and Ottomans had oppressed his people. And every time they’d struggled free from one yoke, another had been placed upon them. A hundred years ago, prospects had at last looked bright. The 1903 Ilinden Uprising had been brutally crushed, but then in 1912, 100,000 Macedonians had fought side-by-side with Greeks, Bulgarians and Serbs finally to expel the Turks. It should by rights have been the birth date of an independent Macedonia. But they’d been betrayed. Their former allies had turned upon them, the so-called Great Powers had collaborated in the infamy, and Macedonia had been cut up into three parts under the wretched Treaty of Bucharest. Aegean Macedonia had been awarded to Greece, Serbian Macedonia to Serbia, and Pirin Macedonia to Bulgaria.

      ‘And out of one of them came forth a little horn, which waxed exceeding great, toward the south, and toward the east, and toward the pleasant land. The little horn is Demetrios,’ asserted the preacher. ‘For those of you who may not remember, Demetrios was the son of Antigonus, and he had himself acclaimed king of Macedonia, even though he was not of Alexander’s blood.’

      The Treaty of Bucharest! Just the name had the power to twist and torture Nicolas’ heart. For nearly one hundred years, the borders the Treaty had laid down had remained largely unchanged. And the loathsome Greeks, Serbs and Bulgars had done everything they could to eradicate Macedonian history, language and culture. They’d shut down free speech, imprisoned anyone who showed the slightest defiance. They’d appropriated the land of Macedonian