The Alexander Cipher Page 0,104
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