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Napp checked his outfit. “I exercised earlier. Does my workout attire bother you? I’d planned on changing.”

“No. Just an observation.” Hagen shifted in his seat.

“The dinner should be a good one. Though I’m sure you’d find it tedious. Ancient experts talking about ancient things.”

“That actually sounds like something I’m very interested in. There’s a lot to learn from experts.” Lucas shot Napp a bright smile. “Maybe we’ll go with you. Meet some of them.”

Dr. Napp’s eyes widened for an instant. “It’s invitation only, Agent…”

“Sullivan.”

“Maybe another time.”

Hagen lifted a finger, redirecting the man. “I understand you were at the Laurel Mount University library archives last week as well as a few days ago.”

“I’m there often. You just met me there.”

“I did. Do you do that often in general? Visit other institutions?” Hagen took point on the questioning now, letting Lucas loom over Dr. Napp to add pressure.

“As I need to. It’s one of the perks of working in a museum. You gain free access to exhibitions, specialist libraries, and so on. We let each other skip the lines, and we request access to each other’s archives. ”

“Have you studied the collection at the Louvre?”

“The Louvre? Well, they’re very sensitive there.

I can view what’s on display easily enough, but to see the giant piles they keep stashed away in the storerooms, I’d have to fill in a dozen different forms and make an appointment months in advance.

There’s more than enough here to keep me occupied without wrestling with French bureaucracy. ”

“I hear they don’t have much worth studying anyway.”

Hagen watched for Dr. Napp’s reaction. A repeat of the direct message the Administrator had sent to Tyra Scharf would confirm he was on the right track. He’d push further, try to prompt the curator to react, to say something that would let Hagen slam the handcuffs on and bring the man in.

Dr. Napp laughed quietly. “Agent Yates, Agent Sullivan, I don’t think you came here to talk to me about the warehouses of Paris.”

“I was just wondering what you think of their collection.”

“I don’t think about it. I have enough material here to think about.

Far too much, in fact. Until some brainy student trains artificial intelligence to do the work for us, we’ll probably be translating this stuff by hand,” he flicked a finger toward the tablet at the end of the table, “for thousands of years.”

Dr. Napp had changed the subject. Whether the shift was deliberate or just an attempt to avoid a conversation about Parisian storage rooms, Hagen wasn’t sure. He tried a different tack.

“Artificial intelligence, huh? You sound like you’re pretty comfortable with technology.”

“I try to keep up.” Dr. Napp pulled on the glove again and picked up the tablet.

He held the baked clay gently between the fingers of one hand.

“This was new technology once, a way of recording and transmitting information. The first cordless phone of the ancient world.” He returned the piece to its mount.

“And it went the way of that three-pound brick of a device too.”

Hagen watched Dr. Napp remove the glove and lay it between his phone and his art deco desk lamp. There was a meticulousness in the curator’s movements, a precision that would have been useful as he tried to make sense of the lines and the marks on an ancient tablet.

Hagen pointed at his smartphone on the desk. “Do you use Dispatch?”

“The app?” Dr. Napp gave a small shake of his head. “I’ve heard of it, but no one uses Dispatch in my line of work. Many people in this field still send faxes.”

“Do you mind if I take a look?”

“At my phone?” Dr. Napp’s white eyebrows rose in surprise. He took his device from the table. “I suppose I should ask to see a warrant for this kind of thing, but I’ve really got nothing to hide.”

He unlocked his screen and passed the phone to Hagen.

Hagen scrolled quickly through the apps. Most he’d never heard of. A cuneiform dictionary, some complex note-taking apps, a bunch of museum guides, including one for the Louvre.

He searched for Dispatch, but he knew even as he typed the word that he’d find nothing.

If Dr. Napp did have something to hide, he’d have cited his right to privacy, demanded a warrant, kicked up a stink about the FBI asking to see people’s devices, and Hagen wouldn’t be scrolling through his phone.

And the curator would have had the right to refuse.

It wouldn’t have been a confession. It would’ve barely been suspicious.

But agreement was a pretty powerful denial.

“Thanks.” Hagen slid the phone onto the desk. He met Lucas’s gaze and shook his head.

Dr. Napp checked his watch and rose from his seat .

The movement was an invitation to leave.

Hagen dropped his notebook back into his pocket.

He hadn’t learned enough to make an arrest, and he hadn’t found the device that could cancel the slaughter.

He hoped Stella was doing better. If she was making progress, if Professor Whelan looked like a more likely suspect, Hagen could let Dr. Napp go and join her.

“Sorry. Would you excuse me a minute? I just need to make a quick call.”

“Of course.” Dr. Napp stood and slid his phone into his pants pocket. “But as I said, I really must get moving.”

“Won’t be but a minute.”

Hagen stepped out into the passage and called Stella. The line rang and rang, and Hagen remembered the poor coverage in Professor Whelan’s office.

He missed her then. He couldn’t remember the last time they’d been out of contact, and he didn’t like it.

“Hey, call me when you get a chance. I’m not getting anywhere here.

You picking up something from Whelan? Starting to think we’re either barking up the wrong tree, or we’ve cut down the list too much.

Maybe someone else visited the university library and we missed them.

” He sighed. “Feels like we’re screwing this up, Stella, and we’re running out of time.

” He held his finger over the end button but didn’t disconnect the call.

“And Stella? I’ll do whatever you want for Christmas. I just want to be with you.”

He hung up and returned to Dr. Napp’s office.

Napp stood behind his desk, a raincoat folded over his arm. In one hand, he held a blue cardboard box about half the size of a shoebox. He lifted the container.

“The tablet. I have to take it back to my storeroom before I leave. Why don’t you join me? We can walk out together. Save you trying to find your way back through the museum by yourself.”

Hagen exchanged a glance with Lucas, who gave the slightest of shrugs. A little more time with Dr. Napp might reveal something useful, a chance for the curator to slip up or the possibility of a loose piece of information that could send the agents off in a new direction.

But as he glanced at Napp’s expectant face and the blue box, somehow Hagen didn’t think there was a new direction. They were on the right track, but he couldn’t quite see where it led.

He grabbed his coat off the chair, and he and Lucas followed Dr. Napp to the end of the passage. The curator stopped in front of a door marked No Entry . He fumbled in his pocket for the keys.

“Would you hold this for a moment?” Dr. Napp gave the box to Hagen while sorting through the bunch. “You can always measure the complexity of someone’s life by the number of keys they’ve acquired. I seem to have picked up more than a piano.”

Hagen forced a smile. Out of the corner of his eye, Lucas’s head was on a swivel. Hagen had solid backup, allowing him to focus on the professor.

Lucas waved at a security guard down the corridor, and the guy waved back and walked away. Hagen thought he recognized the guard they’d seen at the entrance, but he couldn’t be sure.

Hagen held the box with both hands as Napp worked the keys. The package wasn’t heavy, yet it contained four thousand years of history that would be lost with one careless slip of his fingers. The responsibility was much weightier than the box itself.

When the lock clicked, the door swung open to reveal a set of metal stairs leading down into darkness.

Dr. Napp dropped the keys back into his pocket. He took the box from Hagen and pushed a light switch just inside the door .

“Thanks. We should be quick. This light’s on a timer when the museum’s closed. It has a nasty habit of turning off when I’m halfway there.”

He headed down the steps. Hagen followed. The steel staircase clanged under their feet. Dr. Napp pulled open the door at the bottom just as the light turned off, plunging them into darkness. A click, and the light came on again.

Dr. Napp lowered his hand from the switch.

“There. Just in time.”

In front of them stretched row after row of metal shelves.

A section twenty feet long held a line of clay pots and ancient amphorae.

The items looked identical to Hagen’s eye, the remains of a civilization’s disposable food containers.

The next set of shelves held marble busts and pieces of ancient statuary.

Chunks of carved stone were laid out along one shelf to his right, but most of the units were filled with blue cardboard boxes, only the labels on the front revealing their contents.

The air smelled of decades’ worth of dust.

Doors stood closed at the ends of some of the spaces between the shelves, promises of more secrets to come. Dr. Napp strode into the area like he owned the place and paused in front of a double-armed amphora about three feet high.

“I think someone could spend a lifetime digging around in here.”

“If you’re into that sort of thing,” Lucas muttered.

“And there’s more through each of these doors. Every curator also has their own storeroom.” He pulled the amphora forward and peered inside. “I think this one’s a fake. I told the curator of Ancient Greece. She wasn’t happy.”