The Alexander Cipher Page 0,23

seven.” She took a look round Gaille’s messy hotel bedroom, shook her head in exaggerated disbelief, then slammed the door behind her as she left.

IT SADDENED KNOX to abandon his Jeep in long-term parking. It had been his one constant companion since he’d been in Egypt. Eight hundred thousand already on the clock, and more left beneath the hood. You grew to love a car when it had done that well for you. He left his keys and the parking lot receipt beneath the seat. He’d give one of his Cairo friends a call, see if they wanted it.

The airport was busy. There was so much refurbishment going on that everything was squeezed into half the space. Knox pulled his baseball cap down over his eyes, though it seemed unlikely that Hassan’s people would be ahead of him. He had a choice of flights. Many planes arrived in Egypt late at night, turning around to reach their home airports around dawn. He wandered along the bank of check-in desks. New York? Screw that. When you’d fucked up your life, the last thing you wanted was to be reminded of it by the success of old friends. Athens was out, too. When he’d lost his marbles in the wake of family tragedy, Greece had been put off limits to him. London? Stuttgart? Paris? Amsterdam? The thought of such places depressed him horribly. A dark-haired woman in the queue for Rome caught his eye and smiled coyly. It seemed as good a reason as any. He went to the inquiries counter to see if there were tickets. The man in line ahead of him was moaning about freight surcharges for his computer, but Knox tuned him out. “Go home,” that checkpoint officer had urged. But Egypt was his home. He’d lived here ten years. He’d grown to love it, for all its heat, discomfort, chaos, and clamor. He loved the desert most of all: its searing clean lines, its extraordinary gift of solitude, the kaleidoscopic sunsets and the chill mists in the dune valleys in the moments before dawn. He loved the hard labor of excavation, the thrill of potential discovery, that glorious kick it gave you getting out of bed each morning. Not that he ever got the chance to excavate anymore.

The man ahead of him finally paid up. Knox stepped forward, fluttery with nerves. If he was going to have problems, this was where he’d find out. The booking clerk smiled blandly. He asked about seats; she assured him there were plenty. Knox handed across his passport and a credit card. She tapped keys, glanced up. “Mi scusi un momento.” She took his passport and card and vanished through a door at the back of her booth. He leaned forward to see what it said on her screen. He saw nothing to alarm him. He looked around the concourse. Everything appeared normal. The clerk returned. She wouldn’t quite meet his eye. She kept his passport and credit card in her hand, fractionally out of his reach. He glanced around again. Teams of security guards appeared almost simultaneously through doors at either end of the concourse. Knox lunged forward to snatch his passport and card from the startled clerk, then turned, ducked his head, and walked briskly away, his heart pumping wildly. To his left, a security guard yelled. Knox abandoned all pretense and raced for the exit. The doors were automatic, but they slid open so slowly that he turned shoulder-first and still crashed into them, forcing his way through, spinning around. A guard on duty outside unslung his rifle from his shoulder so hastily that he fumbled it and it fell clattering to the floor. Knox fled left, away from the bright lights of the terminal building and into the darkness beyond. He vaulted a rail, ran down a steep embankment to a poorly lit airport bus stop, leaped between a group of young travelers sitting on their backpacks, then smashed into the wall of an underpass, grazing his palm. Two uniformed janitors sharing a cigarette looked at him in astonishment as he ran between them, the whiff of their black tobacco catching in his throat. He turned left, sprinting hard, ignoring the shouting and the sirens. There were trees to his left; he ducked into their cover, running for another ten minutes until he couldn’t manage anymore, and came to a stop, bent double, hands on his knees, heaving for air. Car headlights were slowly patrolling the roads,