The Alexander Cipher Page 0,116

swirl of random yet comforting colors, patterns, sensations, aromas, all bathed in the warm love of Nur and Layla… and then a burst of bright, white light.

NICOLAS CALLED IBRAHIM’S VILLA as he led his small convoy north on the Marsa Matruh road. There was no reply. He called Manolis and then Sofronio on their cell phones. Neither answered. Something was wrong. Anxiety gnawed at his stomach. He glanced at Vasileios.

“What is it?” asked Vasileios.

“I don’t know.”

He looked around at the second SUV, and then the container truck immediately behind it. Burdened by its precious cargo, it was struggling to reach and maintain 70kph. At such a rate, it would take them at least ten hours to reach Alexandria. Ten hours. Christ! Who knew what might happen in that time, especially with Knox on the loose? And he had thought everything would go so smoothly! He picked up his phone to try Ibrahim and the guys again, only to see his signal fade and die altogether. If their journey down was any way to judge, his phone wouldn’t pick up again until they neared Marsa Matruh and the coast.

There was nothing for it but to press on.

STREAMS OF RELEASED AIR and lake bed gasses simmered the surface of the lake, and slicks of oil, algae, and detritus made overlapping circles, marking the places where the vehicles lay on the bottom. Knox swam from the center of one to the other, then kicked down. The flatbed truck had made it farther into the lake than the digger, but the water, usually so clear, was badly roiled; Knox had to work by feel. His lungs were about done when he touched something metallic. He surfaced for more air, then dived once more, pulling himself through an open window into the flatbed’s cab. He searched with his hands. The first corpse he found was Rick. He felt that sickness in his gut again but squashed it down. The second body had long hair. A woman—Elena. He pushed her aside and grabbed a foot instead, following it up a trouser leg to a belt. He fumbled along it, found a key chain, then unbuckled the belt and slipped the key chain off. Clutching it tight, he pulled himself out of the cab, kicked for the surface, and heaved in a breath, then swam back until he judged himself to be above the digger. Filling his lungs with air, he kicked down. His eyes were raw and burning as he searched for the excavator, which had tipped completely onto its side. He pulled himself in the broken window to find all the air escaped, and Mohammed slumped and lifeless. In his haste, Knox dropped the keys. By the time he found them and picked them up again, the pressure was building relentlessly in his own lungs, his brain screeching for air. He took Mohammed’s wrist. The first key didn’t fit; the second, either. In panicked disbelief, he tried the keys again. Still nothing. He wanted to scream. He needed air. The other cuff was locked around the steering wheel. He tried the first key on that, then the second. This time it went in. He turned it, and the cuff released. Grabbing the big man’s collar, he dragged him to the window, out and up to the surface, then sidestroked to the shallows, hauling Mohammed behind him with one arm across his chest, pulling him up onto the bank.

He put one hand on the unmoving chest, his other on the throat. The big man’s heart had stopped. Of course it had fucking stopped—he’d been breathing nothing but water for the past three minutes. Knox thought back to the drowning and near-drowning course he had attended as a diving instructor. When water entered the airway, people automatically experienced larygnospasm, which was to say that their throat constricted to divert the inhaled water to their stomachs. But after cardiac arrest, the airways often relaxed again, allowing water to enter the lungs. Kurt, a beanpole Austrian with a beard down to his nipples, had taught no-drainage cardiopulmonary resuscitation straight from the book; but in an acerbic aside had remarked that if his life depended upon it, he’d want the Heimlich first, whatever the current thinking was, because if your airways were blocked, your brain was fucked anyway. Knox stretched both arms around the big man’s waist, made a fist of his right hand, thumb just below the solar plexus, then squeezed his abdomen with a sharp upward thrust. Frothy

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