The Alexander Cipher Page 0,42
well, then?”
“I used to.” Down the hotel’s front steps, he steered Gaille away from the bustling and carnival-like Sharia Nabi Daniel, along a quieter road. With Hassan on his tail, he needed to stay in the shadows. He kept looking around, sensing eyes on him, people frowning, taking a second look. In the darkness behind, a man in pale blue robes was talking quietly but urgently on his cell phone, darting glances his way.
“Are you all right?” asked Gaille. “Is something the matter?”
“No,” he said. “Forgive me. Just a little distracted.” They came to a fork in the road, a minaret on its corner, giving him the opportunity to cover his jitters with conversation. “The Attarine Mosque,” he said, pointing it out. “Did you know that that’s where they found what might be the sarcophagus of Alexander the Great?”
“No.”
“It was your man Napoleon,” Knox explained. “He had his people scour Egypt for treasures. Anyway, they found this huge breccia sarcophagus covered in hieroglyphics, which no one could decipher back then but which the locals swore blind had been Alexander’s. Alexander was Napoleon’s hero, so he decided to be buried in it himself and ordered it back to France. But it got diverted to the British Museum instead, where it’s now on show near the Rosetta Stone.”
“I’ll look out for it.”
The man was still the same distance behind, talking earnestly on his cell phone. Knox felt his anxiety increase. He steered Gaille down a narrow side road to see if that would dislodge him. “Of course,” he said, “when hieroglyphics were finally cracked, it turned out that it wasn’t Alexander’s sarcophagus at all, but Nectanebo the Second’s.”
“Ah.”
He glanced around once more, but the road was clear. “Exactly,” he said, allowing himself to relax a little. “Nothing annoys a Brit more than being sold a pup by the natives. And no one even considered that there might be a glimmer of truth to the story. After all, Ptolemy would surely never have put Alexander the Great in the cast-off sarcophagus of some fugitive pharaoh like Nectanebo, would he?”
“It does seem unlikely.”
“Exactly. Do you know much about Nectanebo?”
Gaille shrugged. “A little.”
“The last native Egyptian pharaoh. He defeated the Persians in battle and commissioned lots of new buildings, including a temple in Saqqara, city of the dead for Memphis, Egypt’s capital at the time.”
“I’m not completely ignorant, you know. I do know Saqqara.”
“He also commissioned this sarcophagus,” grinned Knox, “though he never got to use it. The Persians came back, and Nectanebo had to flee. So, when Ptolemy took Egypt twenty years later and needed somewhere to keep Alexander’s body while he built him a proper mausoleum in Alexandria, Nectanebo’s temple and sarcophagus were both lying empty.”
“You’re suggesting he used them as a stopgap?”
The man who had been following them earlier suddenly appeared ahead of them, still talking quietly but earnestly on his phone. He glanced their way and immediately dropped his eyes. Knox steered Gaille down a side alley, prompting her to frown at him. He quickly regretted his choice. The alley was deserted and dark, and their footsteps rang and echoed on the pavement, emphasizing just how alone they were. And when he glanced around, he saw the man entering the alley behind them.
“What is it?” asked Gaille. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” said Knox, taking her arm and hurrying her along. “Just hungry, that’s all.”
She frowned, unconvinced, but let it go. “You were telling me about the sarcophagus,” she prompted.
“Yes.” He glanced back and was relieved to see that they had put some distance between themselves and their tail. “Ptolemy certainly needed a stopgap. I mean, it was several decades before he transferred Alexander to Alexandria. And it would explain how the sarcophagus came to be here. I mean, you should see this thing. It’s a beast. But perfect for protecting Alexander’s body in transit.”
“It makes sense from an Egyptian point of view, too,” agreed Gaille. “You know they believed Alexander to be the son of Nectanebo the Second?”
Knox frowned. “You don’t mean that old Alexander Romance story?” The Alexander Romance had been a runaway best-seller of ancient times, a book of half-truths, exaggerations, and lies about Alexander, including a story that Nectanebo II had visited the Macedonian court, where he seduced Philip’s wife, Olympias, and fathered Alexander.
“It’s more than that. When Alexander beat the Persians at Issus, he didn’t just make himself de facto ruler of Egypt. To Egyptian eyes, it proved he was Nectanebo’s legitimate successor. Did you know that one of