Late at night, while returning the tablet to its case at Sir William’s request, a Junior Exhibition Officer, Waring Smith, is attacked and partly strangled, apparently with the Golden Twine.

The Soviets do indeed make that assumption and, to show that they know the game the British are playing, they allow Smith and Untermensch into the Kremlin to view the real Garamantian treasures.

A Museum technician reveals that the tablet Smith took back to its case was a fake that he had made himself on Sir William’s instructions.

[3] It included chapters on the continuing cover-up of the fraud, as well as scenes in which the Cabinet Secretary discusses the possibility of public disorder sparked by the fake exhibition.

[8] Writing in the Library Journal, Henri C. Veit called the novel "A muddle of violence and intrigue that I wouldn't have missed for the world.

"[9] In a 2014 introduction to the Fourth Estate paperback reissue Charles Saumarez Smith called the book "taut, finely plotted [and] richly comic, with some of the elements of exaggerated satire characteristic of a campus novel.