The Alexander Cipher Page 0,26

with it.”

“Yes?”

“It’s completely wrong.”

Mohammed laughed. “You’re sure?”

“I’ve searched the vaults myself,” said Ibrahim. “Believe me, they’re Roman, not Ptolemaic. Five or six hundred years too late. But the idea has stuck, not least because our best map of the ancient city marks Alexander’s mausoleum very near the mosque.”

“There you are, then!”

“The map was made for Napoleon the Third,” said Ibrahim. “A nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte who became emperor of France. Anyway, he was writing a biography of Julius Caesar, and he needed information on ancient Alexandria, so he asked his friend Khedive Ismail for a map of it. But there wasn’t one at the time, not a reliable one at least, so Khedive Ismail commissioned a man called Mahmoud el-Falaki to make it.”

“Research is certainly easier if you’re an emperor.”

“Quite,” agreed Ibrahim. “And it’s a really fine piece of cartography, too. But not perfect, I’m afraid. He fell for the old legends, too. He marked Alexander’s tomb near the mosque, and all the modern guidebooks and histories now reprint it, keeping the myth alive. The poor imam of the Nabi Daniel Mosque is constantly being pestered by tourists hoping to find Alexander, but they won’t find him there, believe me.”

“Where should they be looking?”

“On the northeast side of the old crossroads, as I said. Near the Terra Santa cemetery, probably. A little northwest of the Shallalat Gardens.”

Mohammed was looking downcast. Ibrahim patted his forearm. “Don’t give up hope just yet,” he said. “There’s something I haven’t told you.”

“What?”

“I haven’t told anyone. I don’t want rumors to start, you know.”

“Tell me.”

“The thing is, Alexander didn’t have just one tomb in Alexandria. He had two.”

“Two?”

“Yes. The Soma, the great mausoleum I told you about, was built around 215 BC by Ptolemy Philopater, the fourth of the Ptolemaic kings. But, before that, he had a different tomb, almost certainly more in the traditional Macedonian style. More, as it happens, like the one you and your men found yesterday.”

Mohammed looked wonderingly at him. “You think this is what we have found?”

“We won’t know until we see it,” said Ibrahim. “But don’t get too excited. This was Alexander, remember; the Ptolemies would surely have built something spectacular for him.” Not that they knew what. They didn’t even know when Alexander’s body had been brought up here from Memphis, where it had been held while his mausoleum was being built. The modern consensus was 285 BC, nearly forty years after his death, though no one had satisfactorily explained why the transfer should have taken so long. “Apart from anything else, we believe that they would have wanted to keep his body on display, so it’s unlikely he’d have been kept deep underground. But that’s the wonderful thing about archaeology,” grinned Ibrahim. “You never know for sure.”

There was something else, too, though nothing he felt like sharing with Mohammed. It was that ever since he’d been a small boy, listening to his father murmur him to sleep with tales of the founder of this great city, he’d had a sense of destiny. One day, he would play his part in the rediscovery of the tomb of Alexander. And this morning, as he lay awake in bed, he had a reprise of that feeling, a conviction that the time was upon him. And for all his intellectual misgivings, he was sure in his heart that it had something to do with the tomb they were on their way to inspect.

NESSIM HAD BEEN ON THE GO ALL NIGHT, working furiously to catch Knox before Hassan woke. But he had failed. Fifteen minutes ago he received his summons, and now here he was, steeling himself with a clenched fist before knocking on his boss’s bedroom door at Sharm’s medical center.

Nessim had joined the Egyptian Army at the age of seventeen and had become a paratrooper, one of the elite. But a twisted knee put an end to his hopes of active service, so he resigned his commission out of boredom to become a mercenary in the endless African wars. When a mortar round had landed fizzing practically in his lap yet hadn’t exploded, it convinced him that it was time for another change of pace. Back in Egypt, he had made a name for himself as a bodyguard before being recruited by Hassan as his head of security. Nessim didn’t scare easily; if he did, he would never have survived such a life. But Hassan scared him. Having to report bad news scared him.

“Come in,” muttered Hassan. His voice was