The Green Ripper Part 5

When Meyer arrived, Swimmer frisked him, declared him clean, and then winked at me and said, "I was looking for your hat."

"Was it all that obvious?" I asked.

"Don't worry about it," Weightlifter said. "It's good procedure. Simple and useful. Keep it. Because it doesn't work with us doesn't mean it isn't any good. But, Dr. Meyer, I'm curious."

"Just Meyer, please."

"Fine. What if he'd asked you to bring his hat?"

"There are several ways he could have asked me to bring it. Each one is an option. If he felt the two of us could handle things, I would have been ready when I came through the door, and so would he."

"Nice. Very nice," Swimmer said.

"You seem to know a h.e.l.l of a lot," I said. Weightlifter shrugged and sat on the edge of a bed, and motioned Meyer over to a wing chair by the sliding doors. "Not as much as we tried to find out. I'll give you credit. You have some very solid friends around that marina, McGee. We didn't have much time to work on it. We put a lot of people on it. We pulled your military record. We put some tourists into that Bahia Mar Marina. We had somebody at Timber Bay. We sent somebody to Petaluma. We know-or at least we feel able to a.s.sume-that you are not wanted anywhere, that your ident.i.ty is correct, that you are not into the c.o.ke or gra.s.s trade, and that you are not political."

"Who is we?" Meyer asked.

"We won't go into that. Just as I told Mr. McGee, we won't go into names either. And we won't show identification. And if you check the register later, it won't do you a bit of good. And, I'll be frank with you, the names and the connections wouldn't mean much to you. We are going to ask questions. Lots of them. This might take a long time. But we start with evidence of good faith."

Swimmer went to the closet and came back with a nine-by-twelve manila envelope and handed it to Weightlifter.

"Before I show you these," Weightlifter said, "I must explain how we happened to luck out. Dr. Tower reported the symptoms to the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta. They have had standing orders for over a year to report any case which has those same symptoms to a certain branch of the Federal Government. An expert in forensic medicine flew down to Atlanta from New York, starting about an hour after word came to Washington. When it became obvious to Dr. Tower that Mrs. Howard was going to die, he phoned Atlanta. The expert came down here in time to partic.i.p.ate in the autopsy. He found what we had instructed him to look for. Take a look at these prints."

I had been watching him covertly. He was left handed. He wore a sport shirt that hung outside his trousers, and once when he moved I had identified the bulge on his right side, halfway between the belly b.u.t.ton and the point of the hip bone.

He handed me the print, and when he turned to take the other one over to Meyer, I let mine slip to the floor, moved quickly behind him, locked his left arm, and reached around and under with the right hand and yanked the belly holster out, gun, belt clip, and all, and then slammed him into Swimmer, who was heading for the closet. They went into a lamp table and snapped a couple of slender legs as they brought it down.

By then I had the short-barreled revolver properly in hand, and Meyer was standing beside me. "Slow and easy." I said, and they did indeed move slowly as they separated themselves from each other and from the pieces of lamp and table. There was nothing pleasant about their faces, but nothing ugly either. No sign of strain or worry. A watchful competence, like a very good boxer waiting for the opening.

I have to go on instinct. Sometimes it has betrayed me. Never fatally, fortunately. Most of the time it works for me.

I said, "We'll play it your way, gentlemen. I didn't want you to go away with the impression we're a pair of clowns. It is a matter of pride with me. Let's say our relationship has reached a new level. First names would help."

I tossed the gun onto the nearest bed and extended my hand to Weightlifter. As he took it and I pulled him to his feet, he said, "Max. He's Jake."

Jake got up and c.o.c.ked his head as he stared at me. "Maybe if I hadn't read off the name of that walkie-talkie?"

"Maybe. I don't know."

Max slid the revolver into the holster after checking it over, and clipped the holster to his pants and smoothed the sport shirt down over the bulge. He looked thoughtful. "McGee, you may be half again as big as I expected, and you are certainly twice as quick as anybody your size I've ever seen, but it was still a h.e.l.l of a risk. It was a stupid risk. You miss the gun and maybe I kill you as I am falling. From instinct. From training. From too long doing what I do."

"He wanted to make an impression on you," Meyer said.

Jake said, "There are some folks we work with and work for who would never let us forget how we got taken."

"And never understand it," Max said.

"But they weren't here to watch," I said.

I saw the tension going out of him, little by little. Jake had a bad bruise on his shin. It was swelling and turning blue. I had torn a fingernail s.n.a.t.c.hing the revolver.

Finally Max grinned at me and said, "Now I understand a little bit more about some of the things I found out about you. Now they make more sense. But it was still stupid."

Meyer made an odd sound. He looked up from the print he was holding. He looked questioningly at Max and said, "Markov?"

"Yes. And you better tell me how you know about that!"

Seven.

MEYER LOOKED at Max, his expression puzzled. "But why wouldn't I know about it? It had a lot of publicity."

"But how would you make the connection from these photographs?"

Still puzzled, Meyer said, "The details made an impression on me." He looked toward the ceiling, frowned, closed his eyes, and said, "A sphere of platinum and iridium-I forget the percentages of each in the alloy. One fifteenth of an inch in diameter, with two tiny holes drilled into it at right angles to each other, with traces of an unknown substance in the holes."

"But you glanced at these photos and made the connection."

Meyer straightened and glared at him. "If you are pretending to be professional, act like a professional. If I had any trace of guilty knowledge, would I have revealed it? The people who do have guilty knowledge are certainly too professional to reveal it."

I interrupted, saying, "Let me explain something. Meyer has a fantastic memory. I don't know what the h.e.l.l either of you are talking about. What I've got here is a picture of what looks like a lumpy silver bowling ball with the holes drilled badly."

"The scale, Travis," Meyer said. "Look at the scale."

Yes, it was very small. Maybe not quite as small as the head of a pin, but almost.

"That item," said Max, "is a twin to the one removed from the right thigh of a Bulgarian defector in London named Georgi Markov after he died-with the symptoms of high fever, sharp drop in blood pressure, and renal failure. That was quite some time ago."

"Somebody jabbed him with an umbrella," Meyer said.

"Yes. That one. This is a photograph of an identical object removed from the right side of the back of the neck of Mrs. Howard. The traces of the poison found inside those holes are being a.n.a.lyzed. They did not get a complete a.n.a.lysis of the poison in the Markov case, or in the Kostov attempt which happened a month before Markov was killed. The pellet hit Kostov in the back in a Paris subway. We can a.s.sume a better delivery system was devised to take care of Markov. Kostov recovered."

I sat heavily and stared at the picture of the dull silver ball. Somebody had stuck that thing into the back of the neck of my woman and killed her. I had been trying not to accept the fact that such a thing could happen, and had happened.

"I'm burning up. I feel terrible, Trav. Terrible." Her face had become gaunt so quickly. Fever had eaten her up, eaten the quickness and happiness, eaten the brightness.

The reason for doing that to her seemed beyond any comprehension. But somebody did it. And from this moment on, the only satisfying purpose in life would be to find out exactly, precisely, specifically who.

I came back from a long way off and heard the last part of Meyer's question. "-many more since the Markov case?"

"Cla.s.sified information."

"Who does such a thing?" I demanded.

Jake took the answer to that one. "We could say that we have reason to believe the poison itself, a complex chemical structure, was developed by Kamera, a section of Department V of the KGB. We have reason to believe they have been working for many years on poisons which, after injection, break down into substances normally found in the human body. They killed Vladimir Tkachenko back in 1967 in London when, we think, he tried to defect. Method of delivery unknown. Poison unknown."

"It's like you're speaking a foreign language. This is Fort Lauderd.a.m.ndale. This is the palmtree Christmas coming, with Sanny Claus in shorts, and the tourists swarming. What has all this Russian stuff got to do with Gretel and me?"

Max said, "It has something to do with everyone who lives on the planet, in one way or another."

"Philosophy I don't need," I said.

"Okay. Markov, most probably, was killed by an agent from the Soviet bloc. He was making the big man in Bulgaria, Todor Zhivkov, very unhappy by his broadcasts over Radio Free Europe. We can guess that Zhivkov asked for help to get him silenced. But when it comes to the a.s.sa.s.sination of a young woman in Florida, we can't make the same kind of reasonable a.s.sumption. Put it this way. Russia and the United States are each supportive of various groups and movements all over the world. Arms and ammunition move toward areas of tension. There is no way to exert final control over the use of a weapon. The two major powers try to supply those whose goals are closest to their own, and then they hope for the best. This is a very advanced and exotic a.s.sa.s.sination device. We can a.s.sume the KGB would be cautious about supplying it to anyone over here. We could have missed it easily. When they took a sc.r.a.p of tissue for biopsy while Mrs. Howard was still alive, they could have gotten that platinum bead along with it, missed it when they sliced a section for the microscope, and thrown it out without ever knowing. So the intent was to simulate a natural death. That leads us to the point. Why could she not be permitted to live? Why did it have to look like a natural death?"

I looked at each of them in turn. "And that's it? You don't know who did it?"

Max shook his head. "We have no idea. We can't find a starting point, except with you two."

Meyer asked, "What kind of people would it be rational for them to supply over here with a thing like that?"

Max shrugged. "A mole, maybe. Somebody who was put in place a long time ago. Any agitator of any consequence. Weathermen, Symbionese, anybody trying to alter the political equilibrium by violent means. But that doesn't make it sound rational. It doesn't seem like a useful target. One would expect it should be a visiting shah, a premier, or a red-hot research physicist. Let's get to it. Mr. McGee, do you have any reason to believe that Gretel Howard was connected in any way with any political action group?"

I looked down at my fists as I sought the right way to say it. "We had a lot of intense time alone with each other. A couple of months aboard my houseboat. We talked a lot. We opened up to each other all the way. We tracked each other from childhood right on up to the moment. She was as apolitical as I am. We both lived in the world, and didn't get too red-hot about who was running it. Maybe that's wrong in your eyes. But it is the way she was and the way I am."

"And she could not have been conning you?"

"Absolutely no way."

"When and how did she get the alleged insect sting?"

"No idea. She was telling me over the phone everything that had gone wrong with her day. No, sorry. She didn't tell me about the insect bite until I saw her in the hospital. She broke a mug I had given her when she was having breakfast, and then she learned her boss had fallen off his bike and died, and then a bug bit her, and then she had fainted and fallen and broken a lamp in the Ladwigg house. From the sequence I'd say she got bitten, or shot, between eight and ten o'clock that morning. How was it done?"

Jake shook his long sandy head. "The thing is so d.a.m.n small, delivery systems are difficult. It has so little ma.s.s it makes a poor projectile. Like a man trying to hurl a single grain of rice. One of the groups... I mean to say, we've experimented with silver beads which closely approximate the size and weight of one of the deadly ones. The propulsion force can be compressed air, a spring mechanism, or a small charge of propellant. Compressed air seems to provide the most convenient, quiet, and compact unit. But for it to penetrate the skin, the maximum effective range is about ten inches. Beyond that, the lack of ma.s.s reduces velocity and penetrating power drastically. So someone had to put the weapon within a few inches of her neck. It could have looked like a book, a camera, a walking stick, a tobacco pipe, a purse-almost any small unremarkable portable object. The best time and place would be out of doors, in a crowd."

"Like a crowd around Ladwigg after he fell?" I said.

"Yes, like that," Max said. "Here's the scenario. Ladwigg's early morning bike ride had been cased. Somebody picked the right spot, out of sight of any of the houses, where they could step out and chunk a rock into the front of his face as he came along at twenty miles an hour on his ten-speed. When the body was discovered, the sirens arriving brought people out of the houses widely scattered around there. And the people from the offices. It's a new community. For the most part, the people are strangers to each other. An unfamiliar person would be a.s.sumed to be a new homeowner. When they got Markov, they poked him in the back of the leg with an umbrella tip. Mrs. Howard got it in the back of the neck, so, as I said, the weapon could have looked like any innocuous familiar object. And the crowd watching them load Ladwigg's body provided enough diversion. After we learned what had killed the woman and went back in time and took a closer look at the way Ladwigg died, it became obvious they were part of the same a.s.signment for somebody."

"If you know that," I said, "then you've probably done a lot more homework. Why don't you tell us what you know, so we won't be repeating stuff?"

"It's better this way. It's a check on our own information."

"And on us."

"Why not? Memories aren't flawless. Don't have such a low boiling point. Your honor isn't at stake any more," Max said.

"So ask me something."

Meyer interrupted. "Gentlemen!" he said. "Let's all be friends. I think that what I will do at this point is relate the details of a visit by two men to Mr. McGee last Sat.u.r.day, a visit by one man to Bonnie Brae on Thursday, the thirteenth, some phone calls I made yesterday morning, and a visit to Bonnie Brae which we made yesterday afternoon. But before I get into that narrative, I will first tell you what Gretel Howard told the two of us on the evening of Friday, December seventh. Knowing your area of interest and suspecting the extent of your training, I shall tell this in what may seem like infinite detail, adding my suspicions, inferences, and conjectures as I proceed. Will that be useful?"

"Very."

"Before I begin, let me say that I am taking you two on faith. I am a.s.suming your hats are white. Left to my own devices, I would not be so revelatory. But when my friend Travis threw the revolver onto the bed, he was exercising his right to have a hunch, and because I have seen how his hunches usually work, I am following it."

I moved over to a more comfortable chair. Jake taped the extraordinary performance. Meyer remembered so much more than I did, I wondered if my brain was slowly turning to mush. He spoke in sentences, in paragraphs, in chapters. Max scribbled a note to himself from time to time. Whenever I thought Meyer was going to leave something out, he came around to it in the next few minutes. When he was through he was slightly hoa.r.s.e, and we took a break and ordered up a late room-service lunch. Jake intercepted the cart at the door, signed, and wheeled it in.

During lunch there were some obligatory comments about the weather, the price of hotel rooms, the Miami Dolphins' season, and how much vitamin C you take to ward off the common cold.

After the cart was wheeled out again by Jake and the door closed, Max got up and paced, frowning, chunking his fist into his palm from time to time.

He went back to the desk and looked at his notes. "Give me her description of this Brother t.i.tus again, please. As close to her words as you can make it."

"I can make it exact," Meyer said.

"How the h.e.l.l can you do that?"

"Give me a couple of minutes," Meyer said. He closed his eyes and began to breathe slowly and deeply. His eyelids fluttered. His mouth sagged partly open. I had seen him do it before. It was a form of autohypnosis, and he was projecting himself back to the evening of the seventh.

He lifted his head and opened his eyes. Jake inserted a fresh ca.s.sette and punched the tape on again. Meyer spoke in his own voice and diction. "Big, but not fat. Big-boned. About forty, maybe a little less. Kind of a round face, with all of his features sort of small and centered in the middle of all that face." It made the backs of my hands tingle and the back of my neck crawl. It was Gretel's word choice, phrasing, cadence, pauses. It was Gretel, speaking again through Meyer, telling us whom to look for.

"Wispy blond hair cut quite short. No visible eyebrows or eyelashes. Lots and lots of pits and craters in his cheeks, from terrible acne when he was young. Little mouth, little pale eyes, girlish little nose. He was wearing a khaki jacket over a white turtleneck. He was holding on to the side of the pa.s.senger door because of the rough ride. His hands are very big and... well, brutal-looking."

He stopped and gave himself a little shake, and all three of them looked questioningly at me.

"Absolutely exact," I said. "Just as I remember it. I mean, better than I remember it." I was too boisterous, too jovial, too loud, the way you get when you want to disavow being moved by something. I caught Meyer's look of concern. I envied him his ability to regress himself to the actual scene, to be with her in that way. I had no way to be with her. Memory has a will of its own. When I forced it, she would blur out. It had to come to me in sudden takes, little snippets from the cutting-room floor of the mind. They came smoking in, stunning me.

The tape was stopped. Jake had put the ca.s.settes in a row, in order. He began numbering them, dating them.

Max looked at his notes. "When there is a near collision in the air, NASA is the investigating agency. They recommend to the FAA the action to be taken. So do the controllers and airport managers. We'll recheck the three of them-Toomey, Kline, and Ryan, but will come up probably with just what you have, Meyer."

Meyer nodded and said, "I keep thinking, Max, wondering what those three do represent. Travis caught that faint continental flavor. But he says the speech was colloquial American."

"Buffalo, St. Louis, or Santa Barbara," I said, "or anyplace in between. Middle height, middle age, no distinguishing features. Office fellows. Flabby and pale. Both with gla.s.ses. Invisible men. Clothes off the rack, not cheap and not expensive. h.e.l.l, if you walked through any downtown past the banks on a Tuesday noon, you'd see them walking together to lunch. If you lined up ten of them, I'd have a sorry job trying to pick out my two."

"You're describing the average; upper-echelon, middle-European, or Eastern European agent. They don't see enough daylight. They spend a lot of time on the files. They eat too much starch. And the KGB has the best language schools in the world. Crash courses, and they turn out people who can speak the language of the a.s.signed country like a native. Of course, those guys are motivated. If they don't work hard enough learning the language, they end up in Magnitogorsk or some d.a.m.n place, processing internal travel permits. They're good. Just not very flexible. They're not good at jettisoning one plan in mid-flight and inventing a second one that might work."

"But how could they fit into all this?" Meyer asked.

Max grinned at him. "You want another scenario? The way I read it, somebody goofed badly on something very important. So they sent Igor and Vashily here on a tidy-up mission. Plug the holes. Find out who knows what, report back, and await orders."

"Their presence would imply some importance to this."

Jake laughed, and snapped one of the eight-byten glossies with a fingernail. "You bet your a.s.s there's something important going on. The presence of this little sphere proves that. We'll go through the Church of the Apocrypha to locate this Brother t.i.tus and find out if he is coincidence or part of it somehow. I don't have much hope of unwinding anything in Brussels. We've bounced off that wall before. It's very tight over there."

Max stood up and said, "We're very grateful for your cooperation, gentlemen."

"Will you contact us again?" I asked.

"Doubtful."

"How would we get in touch with you?"

"Why should you?" There was some amus.e.m.e.nt in his steady gaze.