The Alexander Cipher Page 0,4

on a battery lamp, but the shaft was deep and the beam was lost in its darkness. She had a sudden vision of Elena lying unconscious at the foot, her neck twisted, in urgent need of medical attention.

Gaille had little head for heights, so she took a deep breath as she put her hand on the ladder, reached one foot tentatively onto the top rung, then the other. When she felt secure, she began a cautious descent. The ladder creaked, as did the ropes that bound it to the wall. The shaft was deeper than she had imagined, perhaps six meters. You couldn’t normally go down so far in the delta without reaching the water table, but the site was on the crown of a hill, safe from the annual inundation of the Nile—one reason it had been occupied in ancient times. She called out again. Still silence, except for her own breathing, magnified by her narrow confines. Displaced earth trickled past. Curiosity began to get a hold of her. She had heard whispers about this place, of course, though none of her colleagues dared speak openly about it.

She reached the bottom at last, her feet crunching on shards of basalt, granite, and quartzite, as though old monuments and statues had been smashed into smithereens and dumped. There was no sign of Elena, but a narrow passage led away to the left. She called out again, more quietly this time, half hoping there would be no answer, so that she would have the opportunity to explore a little. Her lamp started flickering and stuttering, then went out altogether, so she tapped it against the wall and it sprang back on. The stone chips under her feet crackled as she advanced. There was a painting on the left wall, its colors remarkably bright. It had evidently been cleaned, perhaps even retouched. A profiled humanoid figure dressed as a soldier but with the head and mane of a gray wolf was holding a mace in his left hand and, in his right, a military standard, its base planted between his feet, a scarlet flag unfurling beside his right shoulder in front of a turquoise sky.

Ancient Egyptian gods weren’t Gaille’s specialty, but she knew enough to recognize Wepwawet, a wolf god who had eventually merged with others into Anubis, the jackal. He had been seen primarily as an army scout and had often been depicted on shedsheds—Egyptian military standards such as the one he was holding here. His name had meant “Opener of the Ways,” which was why the miniaturized robot designed to explore the mysterious air shafts of the Great Pyramids had been christened with a version of his name, Upuaut. He had gone out of fashion during the Middle Kingdom, around 1600 BC, so this painting should be over three and a half thousand years old. Yet the shedshed that Wepwawet was holding told a different story. For a handsome young man was depicted on it, his face tilted up like that of some renaissance Madonna. It was hard to know for sure when you were looking at a portrait of Alexander the Great, since his impact on iconography had been so profound that for centuries afterward people had aspired to look like him. But if this wasn’t Alexander himself, it was unquestionably influenced by him, which meant it couldn’t possibly date to earlier than 332 BC. And that begged an obvious question: What on earth was he doing on a standard held by Wepwawet, over a millennium after Wepwawet had faded from view?

She set this conundrum aside and continued on her way, still murmuring Elena’s name, though only as an excuse should she suddenly encounter anyone. Her battery lamp went out again, plunging the place into complete blackness, and again she tapped it on the wall until it sprang on once more. She passed another painting—identical to the first, as far as she could tell, though it was not yet fully cleaned. The walls began to show signs of charring, as though a great fire had once raged here. She glimpsed a flash of white marble ahead, and two stone wolves lying prone yet alert. More wolves. She frowned. When the Macedonians had taken Egypt, they gave many of the towns Greek names for administrative purposes, often basing the names on local cult gods. If Wepwawet was the cult god of this place, then surely this must be—

“Gaille! Gaille!” From far behind her, Elena was shouting. “Are you down there?