The Alexander Cipher Page 0,13

respirator and all the other attachments. He had felt dislocated, as though watching a play rather than real events. Her head had been unnaturally swollen, her skin pale and blue. He could still remember its waxy pallor, its uncharacteristic flabbiness. And he had never before realized how freckled she was around her eyes and in the crook of her elbow. He hadn’t known what to do. He had looked around at her doctor, who gestured for him to sit down beside her. He had felt awkward putting his hand on hers; they’d never been a physically demonstrative family. He pressed her cool hand beneath his own, felt intense and startling anguish, something like parenthood. He squeezed her fingers between his own, held them to his lips, and remembered how he had joked to friends about what a curse it was to have a younger sister to look after. But having a younger sister wasn’t something he had to worry about any longer.

He tapped Roland on the arm and pointed upward. They surfaced together to find the boat perhaps sixty meters away, with no sign of anyone on deck. He felt a flutter of nerves in his chest as he spat the regulator from his mouth. “Stay here,” he warned Roland. Then he set out in strong strokes across the crystal water.

MOHAMMED EL-DAHAB clasped his case protectively in front of his chest as the woman led him up to the private office of Ibrahim Beyumi, head of the Supreme Council for Antiquities in Alexandria. She knocked once on the door, then pushed it open, beckoning Mohammed through. A dapper and rather effeminate-looking man looked up from where he sat behind a pine desk. “Yes, Maha?” he asked.

“This is Mohammed el-Dahab, sir. A builder. He says he’s found something on his site.”

“What kind of something?”

“Perhaps he should tell you himself,” she suggested.

“Very well,” sighed Ibrahim. He gestured for Mohammed to sit at his corner table. Mohammed looked around, dispiritedly assessing with a builder’s eye the bulging wood-paneled walls, the fractured high ceiling with its missing clumps of plaster, the mildewed drawings of Alexandria’s monuments. If this was the office of the top archaeologist in Alexandria, there wasn’t as much money in antiquities as he had hoped.

Ibrahim read his expression. “I know,” he complained. “But what can I do? Which is more important, excavation or my comfort?” Mohammed shrugged as Ibrahim came to sit beside him. He, at least, looked expensive with his sharp suit and gold watch. Settling his hands primly in his lap, he asked: “So you’ve found something, then?”

“Yes.”

“You care to tell me about it?”

Mohammed swallowed. He was a big man, not easily cowed by physical dangers, but educated people intimidated him. Yet there was something kindly about Ibrahim; he seemed like a man who could be trusted. Mohammed set his case on the table, opened it, withdrew his framed photograph of Layla, and laid it facing Ibrahim. Touching and seeing her image restored his courage. “This is my daughter,” he said. “Her name is Layla.”

Ibrahim squinted curiously at Mohammed. “Allah has indeed blessed you.”

“Thank you, yes. Unfortunately, Layla is sick.”

“Ah,” said Ibrahim, leaning back. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

“They call it Burkitt’s lymphoma. It appeared in her stomach like a grape, and then a mango, beneath her skin. Her surgeons removed it; she had chemotherapy. We thought she’d conquered it.”

Ibrahim rubbed his throat. “Maha said you’d found something—”

“Her doctors are good people,” said Mohammed. “But they’re overworked, underequipped, and they have no money. They wait for—”

“Excuse me, but Maha said you’d found—”

“They wait for her disease to progress so far that there’s nothing more they can do.” Mohammed leaned forward and said softly but fiercely: “That time is not yet here. My daughter still has one chance.”

Ibrahim hesitated, then asked reluctantly, “And that is?”

“A bone marrow transplant.”

A look of polite horror crossed Ibrahim’s face. “But aren’t those incredibly expensive?”

Mohammed waved that aside. “Our Medical Research Institute has a program of publicly funded transplants, but they won’t consider a patient unless they’ve already identified a donor match. But they’ll not run tests for a match unless the patient is already in the program.”

“But that makes it impossible—”

“It’s their way of choosing without having to choose. So unless I can finance these tests, my daughter will die.”

Ibrahim said weakly: “You can’t expect the SCA to—”

“These tests aren’t expensive,” said Mohammed urgently. “It’s just that the chances of a match are low. My wife and I, our closest family, our friends—we’ve all