The Alexander Cipher Page 0,17

heart beat a little faster, a little louder, as though he were standing on the very edge of a high cliff. “Good. Then, could you find me his telephone number, please?”

KNOX BEACHED THE SPEEDBOAT near his Jeep and waded ashore. Fiona had pulled herself together and was now 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 that therefore the safest place was anywhere away from him. Not so dumb after all. Knox revved the Jeep furiously as she hurried off along the seafront. 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 dare not go back for them.

At the main road, he faced his first major decision: northeast to the Israeli border or up the west coast highway toward the main landmass of Egypt. Israel was safety, but the road was in bad repair, slow, and choked 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, or Luxor.

He jammed his cell phone 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 the 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 stifled the sudden urge to swing around and flee. Such checkpoints were routine in Sinai; there was nothing sinister about this. Waved to the side of the road, he 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. He held out his hand for Knox’s passport, then 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 onto it, its feet tickling his skin. He brought it up to eye-level to inspect it as it continued on its way, unaware of just having been hijacked, of the precariousness of its situation. He watched it move up and around his wrist with a sense of fellow feeling. Centipedes had held great significance for the ancient Egyptians. They’d been closely connected with death, but in a welcome way, because they fed on the numerous insects that themselves feasted on 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 the Jeep’s door until it 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 and sat perched on the edge of his desk, waiting to be called back. Minutes passed. Knox looked around, noting that no one else was being kept—just cursory inspections and then a wave through. The phone in the cabin finally rang, and Knox watched apprehensively as the officer reached out to answer it.

Chapter Four

A church outside Thessalonike, northern Greece

THE RAM WHICH THOU SAWESThaving two horns are the kings of Me’dia and Persia,” intoned the old preacher, reading aloud from the open Bible on his pulpit. “And the rough goat is the king of Gre’cia: 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,