Douglas Preston - The Book of the Dead

Coffey turned to Rabiner and said, as calmly as possible, “Turn it off.”

“Yes, sir.”

Pendergast didn’t pause, although his voice changed in tone to cool sarcasm. “How’s the PTSD treatment coming, by the way? I understand they’ve got a new approach that works wonders.”

Coffey gestured to the guard and said, with an effort at detachment, “I can see that further questioning of the prisoner is pointless. Open the door, please.”

Even as the guard outside fumbled with the door, Pendergast continued speaking.

“On another note, knowing your love of great literature, I recommend to you Shakespeare’s marvelous comedy Much Ado About Nothing. Particularly the character of Constable Dogberry. You could learn much from him, Spencer. Much.”

The cell door opened. Coffey glanced at the two guards, their expressions studiously neutral. Then, straightening his back, he proceeded down the corridor toward the solitary confinement security doors, Rabiner and the guards following in silence.

It took almost ten minutes of walking through endless corridors to reach Imhof’s office, located in a sunny corner of the administrative building. By that time, some of the color had returned to Coffey’s face.

“Wait outside,” he told Rabiner, then marched stiffly past the obnoxious secretary, entered Imhof’s office, and shut the door.

“How did it-?” Imhof began, but fell silent when he saw Coffey’s face.

“Put him back in yard 4,” Coffey said. “Tomorrow.”

Surprise blossomed on the warden’s face. “Agent Coffey, when I mentioned that earlier, it was suggested merely as a threat. If you put him back there, they’ll kill him.”

“Social conflicts among prisoners are their business, not ours. You assigned this prisoner to exercise in yard 4, and yard 4 is where he will stay. To move him now would be to let him win.”

Imhof began to speak, but Coffey cut him off with a sharp gesture. “Listen to me well, Imhof. I’m giving you a direct, official demand. The prisoner stays in yard 4. The FBI will take full responsibility.”

There was a silence.

“I’ll need that in writing,” said Imhof at last.

Coffey nodded. “Just tell me where to sign.”

Dr. Adrian Wicherly walked through the deserted Egyptian gallery, feeling a certain smug satisfaction at the special assignment Menzies had charged him with-him, and not Nora Kelly. He flushed at the thought of the way she had led him on and then humiliated him; he had heard that American women liked to burst one’s bollocks, and now he’d had a taste of it, good and proper. The woman was as common as muck.

Well, he would be back in London soon enough, his C.V. nicely buffed up from this plum little assignment. His thoughts strayed to all the young, eager docents who volunteered at the British Museum-they had already proved to be delightfully flexible in their thinking. A pox on American women and their hypocritical puritanical moralism.

On top of that, Nora Kelly was bossy. Although he was the Egyptologist, she had never relinquished the riding crop; she had always remained firmly in charge. Although he had been hired to write the script for the sound-and-light extravaganza, she had insisted on proofreading it, making changes, and in general making a bloody nuisance of herself. What was she doing working in a big museum, anyway, when she really should be tucked away in some semidetached house in the suburbs with a pack of squalling brats? Who was this husband she was allegedly so loyal to? Maybe the problem was she was rogering someone on the side already. Yes, that was probably it…

Wicherly arrived at the annex and paused. It was very late-Menzies had been quite insistent on the time-and the museum was almost unnaturally silent. He listened to that silence. There were some sounds-but what, exactly, he couldn’t say. A faint sighing somewhere of… what? Forced-air ducts? And then a slow, methodical ticking: tick… tick… tick… every two or three seconds, like a moribund clock. There were also faint thumps and groans, which could be ducts or something to do with the museum’s mechanical systems.

Wicherly smoothed down his thatch of hair, glancing around nervously. They had caught the killer the day before and there was nothing to worry about. Nothing. Strange, though, what had happened to Lipper… typical smart-arsed New Yorker, one wouldn’t have thought he would snap like that. Well, they were all a little tense. These Americans worked themselves half to death-he couldn’t believe the hours they worked. Back at the British Museum, such demands would be looked on as downright uncivilized, if not illegal. Look at him now, for example: three o’clock in the bloody morning. Of course, given the nature of Menzies’s assignment, it was understandable.

Wicherly swiped his card through the reader attached to the wall, punched in his code, and the gleaming new stainless-steel doors to the Tomb of Senef opened with a whisper of well-machined metal. The tomb exhaled the scent of dry stone, epoxy glue, dust, and warm electronics. The lights came up automatically. Nothing had been left to chance; everything was now fully programmed. A backup tech to succeed poor Lipper had already reported for duty, but so far had proved superfluous. The grand opening was only five days away, and although the tomb’s collections were only partially installed, the lighting, electronics, and the sound-and-light show were ready to go.

Still, Wicherly hesitated. His eye strayed down the long, sloping staircase to the corridor beyond. He felt a small tingle of apprehension. Trying to shake it off, he stepped inside and walked down the stairs, his oxfords making a chuff-chuff sound on the worn stones.

At the first door, he paused, almost against his will, glance arrested by the great Eye of Horus and the hieroglyphs below. To any who cross this threshold, may Ammut swallow his heart. It was a standard enough curse; he had entered a hundred tombs under a similar threat, and never once had it put the wind up him. But the image of Ammut on the far wall was unusually hideous. And then, there was the strange, dark history of the tomb, not to mention the business with Lipper…

The ancient Egyptians believed in the magical powers of the incantations and images written on tomb walls, especially in the Book of the Dead. These were not mere decoration: they had a power against which the living were helpless. In studying Egypt for so long, in learning to read hieroglyphics fluently, in immersing himself in their ancient beliefs, Wicherly had come to half believe them himself. Of course, they were all rubbish, but at one level he understood them so thoroughly they almost seemed real.

And never had they seemed more real than at that moment: especially the squatting, grotesque form of Ammut, its slavering crocodile jaws open and glistening, the scaly head morphing into a leopard’s spotted body, which in turn segued into the hindquarters of a hippo. Those hindquarters were the most vile of all: a bloated, slimy, misshapen fundament spreading over the ground. All three animals, Wicherly knew, were common killers of people during the time of the pharaohs, and greatly feared. A monstrous amalgamation of all three was the worst creature the ancient Egyptians could imagine.

Shaking his head and forcing a rueful chuckle, Wicherly walked on. He was letting himself get spooked by his own erudition, by all the ridiculous talk and silly rumors circulating through the museum. After all, this was not some tomb lost in the wastes of the Upper Nile: one of the biggest, most modern cities in the world was sitting right on top of him. Even as he stood there, he heard the distant, muffled rumble of a late-night subway. It annoyed him: despite all their efforts, they had been unable to block out totally the sound of the Central Park West subway.