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over with a rubber hose and a cattle prod—he deserves nothing less—but unfortunately that’s not possible, and we sure as hell don’t want to do anything that could come back to haunt us at the trial. He may be crazy, but he’s not dumb. You can’t give a guy like that an opening. He’s got enough money to dig up Johnnie Cochran and hire him for the defense.”
    Coffey stopped talking. Because for the first time, Imhof had smiled. And something about the look in the man’s blue eyes chilled Coffey.
    “I understand your problem, Agent Coffey. The prisoner must be shown the value of respect. I’ll see to it personally.”

8

    O n the morning appointed for opening the sealed Tomb of Senef, Nora arrived in Menzies’s capacious office to find him sitting in his usual wing chair, in conversation with a young man. They both rose as she came in.
    “Nora,” he said. “This is Dr. Adrian Wicherly, the Egyptologist I mentioned to you. Adrian, this is Dr. Nora Kelly.”
    Wicherly turned to her with a smile, a thatch of untidy brown hair the only eccentricity in his otherwise perfectly dressed and groomed person. At a glance, Nora took in the understated Savile Row suit, the fine wing tips, the club tie. Her sweep came to rest on an extraordinarily handsome face: dimpled cheeks, flashing blue eyes, and perfect white teeth. He was, she thought, no more than thirty.
    “Delighted to meet you, Dr. Kelly,” he said in an elegant Oxbridge accent. He clasped her hand gently, blessing her with another dazzling smile.
    “A pleasure. And please call me Nora.”
    “Of course. Nora. Forgive my formality—my stuffy upbringing has left me rather hamstrung this side of the pond. I just want to say how smashing it is to be here, working on this project.”
    Smashing. Nora suppressed a smile—Adrian Wicherly was almost a caricature of the dashing young Brit, of a type she didn’t think even existed outside P. G. Wodehouse novels.
    “Adrian comes to us with some impressive credentials,” Menzies said. “D.Phil. from Oxford, directed the excavation of the tomb KV 42 in the Valley of the Kings, university professor of Egyptology at Cambridge, author of the monograph Pharaohs of the XX Dynasty .”
    Nora looked at Wicherly with fresh respect. He was amazingly young for an archaeologist of such stature. “Very impressive.”
    Wicherly put on a self-deprecating face. “A lot of academic rubbish, really.”
    “It’s hardly that.” Menzies glanced at his watch. “We’re meeting someone from the Maintenance Department at ten. As I understand it, nobody knows quite precisely where the Tomb of Senef is anymore. The one certainty is that it was bricked up and has been inaccessible ever since. We’re going to have to break our way in.”
    “How intriguing,” said Wicherly. “I feel rather like Howard Carter.”
    They descended in an old brass elevator, which creaked and groaned its way to the basement. They emerged in the Maintenance Section and threaded a complex path through the machine shop and carpentry, at last arriving at the open door of a small office. Inside, a small man sat at a desk, poring over a thick press of blueprints. He rose as Menzies rapped on the door frame.
    “I’d like to introduce you both to Mr. Seamus McCorkle,” said Menzies. “He probably knows more about the layout of the museum than anyone alive.”
    “Which still isn’t saying much,” said McCorkle. He was an elvish man in his early fifties with a fine Celtic face and a high, whistling voice. He pronounced the final word mitch .
    After completing the introductions, Menzies turned back to McCorkle. “Have you found our tomb?”
    “I believe so.” McCorkle nodded at the slab of old blueprints. “It’s not easy, finding things in this old pile.”
    “Why ever not?” Wicherly asked.
    McCorkle began rolling up the top blueprint. “The museum consists of thirty-four interconnected buildings, with a footprint of more than six acres, over two