The Alexander Cipher

Chapter Seventeen

Knox had no choice but to retrieve the flashlight. Ibrahim, Mansoor, and others were about to raise the plinth, and if they found it, he was certain to be discovered. Besides, he had time. The place was still quiet. He began dismantling the wall, brick by brick, placing them precisely on the ground, the old mortar still resting on them, so that he would be able to rebuild the wall exactly as he'd found it. When he had created enough space, he poked his head through, catching a pungent whiff of ammonia. It was a low, arched corridor with a watery floor, like some Victorian sewer. Its walls were even scratched with lines to make it look as though it had been built of bricks rather than excavated, perhaps to disguise the passage he had just broken through, but possibly because the ancients had simply considered construction more prestigious than excavation.

He stretched down for his flashlight but couldn't quite reach it, not without leaning on the wall, which he didn't trust to hold his weight. He removed another two rows of bricks, then straddled what remained. The water felt sharp on his bare foot as he stooped to retrieve the light. He listened intently. Nothing but silence. He was here now. It would be criminal not to take a quick look.

He splashed along the corridor, brushing aside cobwebs, his imagination sensing eels and nocturnal creatures around his bare ankles. He came to a compact chamber beneath a chimney shaft, its mouth blocked by some kind of slab. The plinth, no doubt. He went back the other way and came to a marble portal with an Ancient Greek inscription cut into its architrave:

Together in life; together in death. Kelonymus.

Kelonymus. The name was familiar, as Akylos had been. But the memory wouldn't come and time was short, so he passed beneath it, reaching the foot of a broad flight of stone steps that spread out like a fan as it rose. And at the top…

"Jesus Christ!" muttered Knox.

"What's going on?" demanded Nicolas, as a large crowd of senior excavators and other guests descended the stairwell to the rotunda.

"How do you mean?" frowned Ibrahim.

"All these people?" said Nicolas. "You can't seriously be inviting them all."

"Just to watch. From the antechamber. This is a big moment for us."

"No," said Nicolas. "You, me, your archaeologist, Elena. That's all."

"But I've already-"

"I mean it. If you want the remainder of your Dragoumis sponsorship money, you'll kick these people out now."

"It's not that simple," protested Ibrahim. "We need Mohammed to lift the plinth. We need the girl to take photographs. Moments like these don't come often, you know."

"Fine. Those two. No others."

"But I-"

"No others," said Nicolas emphatically. "This isn't a circus. This is supposed to be a serious excavation."

"Fine," sighed Ibrahim. And he turned with a sagging heart to disappoint the crowd of excited excavators

Knox's mouth hung open as he played his flashlight over the chamber like a searchlight over a bombarded city. He struggled to believe his eyes. To his right, a terrace had been hewn in the limestone. Sixteen golden larnaxes, or burial caskets, stood on each of two shelves, making thirty-two in all. Glass bowls had toppled and fallen both over the shelves and the floor, scattering their contents of precious and semiprecious stones. Also on the floor were countless precious artifacts: swords and spears and shields and amphorae of silver and clay. White marble had been inlaid into the far wall, a lengthy inscription carved into it, though too distant for him to make out what it said.

But it was the left-hand wall that mesmerized Knox. It was a huge mosaic, framed at the top by turquoise-painted plaster that represented the sky, and which contoured the main subject matter like a chalk mark around a corpse. Thirty-three men, clearly soldiers, though not all armed, were gathered into two overlapping clusters, one in the foreground, the other farther back. They looked remarkably relaxed and cheerful. Some talked among themselves, arms around each other's shoulders. Others wrestled on the sand or played dice. But kneeling at the center was the mosaic's focal point and the group's clear leader: a slight, handsome man with russet hair, who looked out of the wall with a purposeful gaze. Both his hands were clasped on the hilt of his sword, plunged deep into the sand. Knox blinked. No one could study Greco-Roman history without developing a knowledge of mosaic. Yet he'd never seen anything like this.

He had no camera with him except for the one in his mobile phone. He hadn't even turned it on since Sinai, worried that it would lead Hassan straight to him, but there was no chance of it transmitting a signal this deep underground. He tiptoed carefully into the chamber, photographing the mosaic, the burial caskets, the grave goods scattered on the floor, the inscription. He became so completely absorbed in this work that it was only when he heard a grinding, ripping noise from way behind him that he belatedly remembered the raising of the plinth.