The Alexander Cipher. Will Adams

this project is mine, not yours. This site is mine. One word of this gets out, you’ll answer to me. Understand?’ He faced them down, one by one, until they broke and stalked away. He watched them uneasily. Trusting secrets to such men was like trusting water to a sieve; Alexandria’s slums writhed with villains who’d cut twenty throats on the mere rumour of such a prize. But he wasn’t going to back down because of that. All his life, Mohammed had striven to be good. Virtue had been a source of great pleasure to him. He’d leave a room after he’d done something particularly generous or judicious, and warmly imagine the admiring words being exchanged about him. Then Layla had fallen ill and he’d realised he didn’t give one fig what people thought of him. He cared only for making her better.

      The question now was how to turn this find to that end. Looting it was impractical. For all Ahmed’s optimism, there wasn’t enough to go around; and if he tried to cut out the others, they’d sneak on him to his bosses, maybe even to the police. That would go hard with him. As site manager, he was legally bound to report this find to the Supreme Council for Antiquities. If they learned he’d kept it quiet, he’d lose his job, his licence to operate and almost certainly his liberty too. He couldn’t risk that. His salary was pitiful, but it was all that stood between Layla and the abyss.

      The solution, when it finally came to him, was so simple that he couldn’t believe he hadn’t thought of it at once.

      II

      ‘Excuse me. You please will help me with this?’

      Knox looked up to see Roland Hinz holding up his huge black wetsuit. ‘Of course,’ he smiled. ‘Forgive me. I was miles away.’

      He stood behind the big German to make sure he didn’t tumble as he tried to pull it on. That wouldn’t go down well. Roland was a Stuttgart banker considering investing in Hassan’s latest Sinai venture. Today’s jag was largely in his honour. He was making the most of it too, giggly with champagne, more than a little coked, getting on everyone’s nerves. He shouldn’t, in truth, be allowed anywhere near the water, but Hassan paid well to have rules stretched. And not just rules. Getting Roland into his wetsuit was like trying to stuff a duvet into its cover; he kept plopping out in unexpected places. Roland found this intensely funny. He found everything funny. He clearly believed himself the life and soul. He tripped over his own feet and laughed hysterically as he and Knox spilled inelegantly onto the deck, looking around at the other guests as though expecting rapturous applause.

      Knox helped him back up with a strained smile, then kneeled down to pull on his booties for him. He had bloated, pinkish-yellow feet with dirt caked between his toes, as though he hadn’t washed between them for years. Knox distracted himself by letting his mind drift back to that afternoon when he’d shared his wild ideas about Alexander’s catafalque with Rick. The big Australian’s initial euphoria hadn’t lasted long.

      ‘So this procession came through Sinai, did it?’ he’d asked.

      ‘No,’ said Knox. ‘Not according to any of our sources.’

      ‘Oh bollocks, mate,’ protested Rick, sitting back in his chair, shaking his head angrily. ‘You really had me going.’

      ‘You want me to tell you what we know?’

      ‘Sure,’ he said, still annoyed. ‘Why not?’

      ‘OK,’ said Knox. ‘The first thing you need to understand is that our sources are very unreliable. We don’t have any eyewitness accounts of Alexander’s life or campaigns. Everything we have, we have from later historians citing earlier ones. Second-, third-, even fourth-hand accounts.’

      ‘Chinese whispers,’ suggested Rick.

      ‘Exactly. But it’s worse even than that. When Alexander’s empire split up, each of the various factions wanted to paint themselves in the best light, and all the others in the worst, so there was a lot of propaganda written. Then the Romans came along. The Caesars worshipped Alexander. The Republicans loathed him. Historians were consequently extremely selective in their stories, depending on which camp they belonged to. One way or another, most of what we have is very badly slanted. Working out the truth is a nightmare.’

      ‘Duly noted.’

      ‘But we’re pretty sure that the catafalque travelled along the Euphrates from Babylon to Opis, then north-west along the Tigris. A magnificent procession, as you can imagine. People trekked hundreds of miles just to see it. And, sometime in 322 or 321 cV, it reached Syria. After that, it’s hard to know. Bear in mind that we’re talking about two things here. The first is Alexander’s embalmed body, lying in its coffin. The second is the funeral carriage and all the rest of the gold. OK?’

      ‘Yes.’

      ‘Now we know pretty much what happened to Alexander’s body and coffin. Ptolemy hijacked it and took it to Memphis, probably with the collaboration of the escort commander. But we don’t know what happened to the rest of the catafalque. Diodorus says that Alexander’s body was eventually taken to Alexandria in it, but his story is confused, and it seems clear he’s actually talking about the coffin, not the catafalque. And the most vivid description comes from a guy called Aelian. He says that Ptolemy was so fearful that Perdiccas would try to seize Alexander back that he dressed a likeness of his body in royal robes and a shroud, then laid it on a carriage of silver, gold and ivory, so that Perdiccas would charge off in pursuit of this decoy while Ptolemy took Alexander’s body on into Egypt by another route.’

      Rick squinted. ‘You mean Ptolemy left the catafalque behind?’

      ‘That’s what Aelian suggests,’ said Knox. ‘You’ve got to remember, the main prize was Alexander. Ptolemy needed to get him back to Egypt quick, and you couldn’t travel quickly with the catafalque. Estimates suggest that it moved a maximum of ten kilometres a day, and that was with a large team of sappers preparing the road. It would have taken months to reach Memphis. And it couldn’t exactly have travelled discreetly either. Yet I’ve never come across any account of it being seen travelling the obvious route south from Syria through Lebanon and Israel to Sinai and the Nile; and surely someone would have seen it.’

      ‘So he left it behind, like I said?’

      ‘Possibly. But the catafalque represented an enormous amount of raw wealth. I mean, put yourself in Ptolemy’s shoes. What would you have done?’

      Rick considered a few moments. ‘I’d have split up,’ he said. ‘One lot scoots ahead with the body. The other takes a different route with the catafalque.’

      Knox grinned. ‘That’s what I’d have done too. There’s no proof, of course. But it makes sense. The next question is how. Syria’s on the Mediterranean, so he might have sailed down. But the Med was notoriously infested with pirates, and he’d have needed ships on hand; and if he’d felt it possible, he’d surely have taken Alexander’s body that way, and we’re pretty certain he didn’t.’

      ‘What were his alternatives?’

      ‘Well, assuming that he couldn’t move the catafalque as it was, he could have had it chopped up into manageable pieces and taken them southwest along the coast through Israel to Sinai; but that was the route he almost certainly took himself with Alexander’s body, and there’s not much point splitting up if you’re going to go the same way. So there’s a third possibility: that he sent it due south to the Gulf of Aqaba, then by boat around the Sinai Peninsula to the Red Sea coast.’

      ‘The Sinai Peninsula,’ grinned Rick. ‘You mean past these reefs here?’

      ‘These very dangerous reefs,’ agreed Knox.

      Rick laughed and raised his glass in a toast. ‘Then let’s go find the bugger,’ he said.

      And that’s exactly what they’d been trying to do ever since, though without success. At least, Knox had had a success of sorts. Initially, Rick had only been interested in finding treasure. But the more they’d searched, the more