Deep Six (28 page)

OSCAR LUCAS PARKED HIS CAR
in a
VIP
slot at the Walter Reed Army Medical School and hurried through a side entrance. He jogged around a maze of corridors, finally stopping at a double door guarded by a Marine sergeant whose face had a Mount Rushmore solemnity about it. The sergeant carefully screened his identification and directed him into the hospital wing where sensitive and highly secret autopsies were held. Lucas quickly found the door marked
LABORATORY AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY
and entered.

“I hope I haven’t kept you waiting,” he said.

“No, Oscar,” said Alan Mercier. “I only walked in a minute ago myself.”

Lucas nodded and looked around the glass-enclosed room. There were five men besides himself: General Metcalf, Sam Emmett, Martin Brogan, Mercier and a short chesty man with rimless glasses introduced as Colonel Thomas Thornburg, who carried the heavy title of Director of Comparative Forensics and Clinical Pathology.

“Now that everyone is here,” said Colonel Thornburg in a strange alto voice, “I can show you gentlemen our results.”

He went over to a large window and peered at a huge circular machine on the other side of the glass. It looked like a finned turbine attached by a shaft to a generator. Half of the turbine disappeared into the concrete floor. Inside its inner diameter was a cylindrical opening, while just outside lay a corpse on a translucent tray.

“A spatial analyzer probe, or SAP as it’s affectionately called by my staff of researchers who developed it. What it does essentially is explore the body electronically through enhanced X rays while revealing precise moving pictures of every millimeter of tissue and bone.”

“A kind of CAT scanner,” ventured Brogan.

“Their basic function is the same, yes,” answered Thornburg. “But that’s like comparing a propeller aircraft to a supersonic jet. The CAT scanner takes several seconds to display a single cross section of the body. The SAP will deliver twenty-five thousand in less time. The findings are then automatically fed into the computer, which analyzes the cause of death. I’ve oversimplified the process, of course, but that’s a nuts-and-bolts description.”

“I assume your data banks hold nutritional and metabolic disorders associated with all known poisons and infectious diseases?” Emmett asked. “The same information as our computer records at the Bureau?”

Thornburg nodded. “Except that our data are more extensive because we occasionally deal with living tissue.”

“In a pathology lab?” asked Lucas.

“We also examine the living. Quite often we receive field agents from our intelligence agencies—and from our allies too—who have been injected by a poisonous material or artificially infected by a contagious disease and are still alive. With SAP we can analyze the cause and come up with an antidote. We’ve saved a few, but most arrive too late.”

“You can do an entire analysis and determine a cause in a few seconds?” General Metcalf asked incredulously.

“Actually in microseconds,” Thornburg corrected him. “Instead of gutting the corpse and going through an elaborate series of tests, we can now do it in the wink of an eye with one elaborate piece of equipment, which, I might add, cost the taxpayer something in the neighborhood of thirty million dollars.”

“What did you find on the bodies from the river?”

As if cued, Thornburg smiled and patted the shoulder of a technician who was sitting at a massive panel of lights and buttons. “I’ll show you.”

All eyes instinctively turned to the naked body lying on the tray. Slowly it began moving toward the turbine and disappeared into the center cylinder. Then the turbine began to revolve at sixty revolutions a minute. The X-ray guns encircling the corpse fired in sequence as a battery of cameras received the images from a fluorescent screen, enhanced them and fed the results into the computer bank. Before any of the men in the lab control room turned around, the cause of the corpse’s demise flashed out in green letters across the center of a display screen. Most of the wording was in anatomical terminology, giving description of the internal organs, the amount of toxicity present and its chemical code. At the bottom were the words “Conium maculatum.”

“What in hell is Conium maculatum?” wondered Lucas out loud.

“A member of the parsley family,” said Thornburg, “more commonly known as hemlock.”

“Rather an old-fashioned means of execution,” Metcalf remarked.

“Yes, hemlock was very popular during classical times. Best remembered as the drink given to Socrates. Seldom used these days, but still easy to come by and quite lethal. A large enough dose will paralyze the respiratory organs.”

“How was it administered?” Sam Emmett inquired.

“According to SAP, the poison was ingested by this particular victim along with peppermint ice cream.”

“Death for dessert,” Mercier muttered philosophically.

“Of the Coast Guard crewmen we identified,” Thornburg continued, “eight took the hemlock with the ice cream, four with coffee, and one with a diet soft drink.”

“SAP could tell all that from bodies immersed in water for five days?” asked Lucas.

“Decay starts immediately at death,” explained Thornburg, “and travels outward from the intestines and other organs containing body bacteria. The process develops rapidly in the presence of air. But when the body is underwater, where the oxygen content is low, decay proceeds very slowly. The preservation factor that worked in our favor was the confinement of the bodies. A drowning victim, for example, will float to the surface after a few days as the decomposition gases begin to expand, thereby hastening decay from air exposure. The bodies you brought in, however, had been totally submerged until an hour before we began the autopsies.”

“The chef was a busy man,” noted Metcalf.

Lucas shook his head. “Not the chef, but the dining-room steward. He’s the only crewman unaccounted for.”

“An impostor,” said Brogan. “The real steward was probably murdered and his corpse hidden.”

“What about the others?” queried Emmett.

“The Asians?”

“Were they poisoned too?”

“Yes, but in a different manner. They were all shot.”

“Shot, poisoned, which is it?”

“They were killed by fragmenting darts loaded with a highly lethal venom that comes from the dorsal spines of the stonefish.”

“No amateurs, these guys,” commented Emmett.

Thornburg nodded in agreement. “The method was very professional, especially the means of penetration. I removed a similar dart two years ago from a Soviet agent brought in by Mr. Brogan’s people. As I recall, the poison was injected by a bio-inoculator.”

“I’m not familiar with it,” said Lucas.

“An electrically operated handgun,” said Brogan, giving Thornburg an icy stare. “Totally silent, used on occasion by our resident agents.”

“A little loose with your arsenal, aren’t you, Martin?” Mercier goaded him good-naturedly.

“The unit in question was probably stolen from the manufacturer,” Brogan said defensively.

“Has an ID been made on any of the Asian bodies?” Lucas asked.

“They have no records in FBI files,” admitted Emmett.

“Nor with the CIA and Interpol,” Brogan added. “None of the intelligence services of friendly Asian countries have anything on them either.”

Mercier stared idly at the corpse moving out from the interior of the spatial analyzer probe. “It appears, gentlemen, that every time we open a door we walk into an empty room.”

35

“WHAT KIND OF MONSTERS
are we dealing with?” Douglas Oates growled after listening to General Metcalf’s report on the autopsies. His face wore a chalky pallor and his voice was cold with fury. “Twenty-one murders. And for what purpose? Where is the motive? Is the President dead or alive? If this is a grand extortion scheme, why haven’t we received a ransom demand?”

Metcalf, Dan Fawcett and Secretary of Defense Jesse Simmons sat in silence in front of Oates’s desk.

“We can’t sit on this thing much longer,” Oates continued. “Any minute now the news media will become suspicious and stampede into an investigation. Already they’re grousing because no presidential interviews have been granted. Press Secretary Thompson has run out of excuses.”

“Why not have the President face the press?” Fawcett suggested.

Oates looked dubious. “That actor—what’s his name—Sutton? He would never get away with it.”

“Not up close on a podium under a battery of lights, but in a setting under shadows at a distance of a hundred feet. . . Well, it might work.”

“You got something in mind?” Oates asked.

“We stage a photo opportunity to enhance the President’s image. It’s done all the time.”

“Like Carter playing softball and Reagan chopping wood,” said Oates thoughtfully. “I think I see a down-home scene on the President’s farm.”

“Complete with crowing roosters and bleating sheep,” allowed Fawcett.

“And Vice President Margolin? Our double for him can’t be faked in shadows at a hundred feet.”

“A few references by Sutton and a friendly wave by the double at a distance should suffice,” Fawcett answered, becoming more enthusiastic over his brainstorm.

Simmons gazed steadily at Fawcett. “How soon can you have everyone ready?”

“First thing in the morning. Dawn, as a matter of fact. Reporters are night owls. They hang around waiting for late news to break. They’re not at their best before sunup.”

Oates looked at Metcalf and Simmons. “Well, what do you think?”

“We’ve got to throw the reporters a bone before they become bored and start snooping,” answered Simmons. “I vote yes.”

Metcalf nodded. “The only stalling tactic we’ve got.”

Fawcett came to his feet and peered at his watch. “If I leave for Andrews Air Force Base now, I should arrive at the farm in four hours. Plenty of time to arrange the details with Thompson and make an announcement to the press corps.”

Fawcett’s hand froze on the doorknob as Oates’s voice cut across the room like a bayonet.

“Don’t bungle it, Dan. For God’s sake, don’t bungle it.”

36

VLADIMIR POLEVOI CAUGHT UP
with Antonov as the Soviet leader strolled beneath the outer Kremlin wall with his bodyguards. They were moving past the burial area where heroes of the Soviet Union were interred. The weather was unusually warm and Antonov carried his coat over one arm.

“Taking advantage of the fine summer day?” Polevoi asked conversationally as he approached.

Antonov turned. He was young for a Russian head of state, sixty-two, and he walked with a brisk step. “Too pleasant to waste behind a desk,” he said with a curt nod.

They walked for a while in silence as Polevoi waited for a sign or a word that Antonov was ready to talk business. Antonov paused before the small structure marking Stalin’s gravesite.

“You know him?” he asked.

Polevoi shook his head. “I was too far down the party ladder for him to notice me.”

Antonov’s expression went stern and he muttered tensely. “You were fortunate.” Then he stepped on, dabbing a handkerchief at the perspiration forming on the back of his neck.

Polevoi could see his chief was in no mood for small talk, so he came to the point. “We may have a break on the Huckleberry Finn Project.”

“We could use one,” Antonov said grudgingly.

“One of our agents in New York who is in charge of security for our United Nations workers has turned up missing.”

“How does that concern Huckleberry Finn?”

“He disappeared while following Dr. Lugovoy.”

“Any possibility he defected?”

“I don’t think so.”

Antonov stopped in midstep and gave Polevoi a hard stare. “We’d have a disaster in the making if he went over to the Americans.”

“I personally vouch for Paul Suvorov,” said Polevoi firmly. “I’d stake my reputation on his loyalty.”

“The name is familiar.”

“He is the son of Viktor Suvorov, the agriculture specialist.”

Antonov seemed appeased. “Viktor is a dedicated party member.”

“So is his son,” said Polevoi. “If anything, he’s overzealous.”

“What do you think happened to him?”

“I suspect he somehow passed himself off as one of Lugovoy’s staff of psychologists and was taken along with them by Madame Bougainville’s men.”