The Alexander Cipher Page 0,63
directly outside and now were discussing plans and catching their breath. Sweat was cooling all over his body, giving him chills despite the warmth of the day. The Jeep lurched as someone sat on its hood. He heard the rasp of a lighter, cigarettes being lit, people gossiping and bantering, chiding each other for being too slow, too old. The Jeep creaked as someone else leaned against it. Christ! How long before one of them thought to check beneath the covers? But there was nothing he could do but lie still. Nothing except make plans. Yet what plans? Hassan, Nessim, the Dragoumises, the police, and the army were all after him, and Christ knew who else. He couldn’t risk turning on his cell phone to review his photographs lest Nessim trace the signal. Besides, he’d barely be able to see anything on the tiny screen, and anyway he needed them deleted as soon as possible, because if they were found, they would prove he’d been inside the lower chamber and earn him ten years in jail. Ideally, he would have liked to transfer them to his laptop, but that was in the back of Nessim’s Freelander along with the rest of his stuff, and anyway it didn’t have a USB port, so his only way of getting the photos to it was by e-mailing them to himself, then downloading them. But none of that was going to happen while he was lying in his Jeep with his pursuers on his hood.
He turned his thoughts elsewhere: The names Kelonymus and Akylos. The Ptolemaic archives in Mallawi that he and Richard had discovered had included letters, bills, reports, codices, poems, religious texts, and all the other kinds of documents that you would expect in a small town. There had been far too much for them to translate as they went along, so they had conserved them instead, then cataloged them and passed them to the SCA for safekeeping and later study. Their preferred method of cataloging had been to collect the fragments of a particular papyrus together and photograph them, then assign the fragments and the photograph a single file name, based on where they were found or (if too many had been found in one place) a name of a place or a person from the text. And two of the names that had cropped up most during this process, and almost always in tandem, had been Akylos and Kelonymus.
The originals had long ago been taken by Yusuf Abbas of the SCA for “safekeeping,” so God only knew where they were now, but Knox had photographs of them on CDs. Unfortunately, they, too, were in the trunk of Nessim’s Freelander, probably under closed-circuit television surveillance in the parking lot of some high-end Alexandrian hotel; and he wasn’t exactly in a position to go hunting from hotel to hotel in hopes of a smash and grab. No, he needed another way.
The Jeep lurched as the man got off his hood. Footsteps scuffed and faded. Knox waited until there had been silence for a good couple of minutes, then climbed out and stripped off the tarpaulin. He had no time to waste. He had phone calls to make.
DESPITE STARING FURIOUSLY at the inscription, it still took Gaille several minutes to work out what was bothering her. But finally she got it. The bottom line of text was incomplete, and it was written left to right. Yet Demotic, like Arabic, had been written right to left.
The inscription in the Macedonian tomb had been in Greek. The few words of text in the antechamber paintings had been in Greek. The dedication on the architrave was in Greek. The shield bearers had been Greek. The gods they invoked had been Greek. This looked like Demotic, but it didn’t read that way, not initially at least. And it seemed perverse to switch to Demotic just for the inscription. So maybe it had simply been too sensitive to be written in plain Greek. Maybe the writer had used the Demotic alphabet instead. Codes, after all, hadn’t been unknown to the ancients. Alexander himself had used subterfuge to hide sensitive messages. The Admonitions of the Sons of Dawn, one of the Dead Sea Scrolls, had used code for particularly sensitive words. Valerius Probus had written an entire treatise on substitution ciphers. They had been simple things, because people had believed them unbreakable. But Gaille didn’t.
She copied the inscription out onto a pad, checking for patterns as she did so.