Deep Six

Lugovoy was standing there patiently smoking his cigar. In less than ten seconds the elevator door silently opened and Lugovoy stepped inside. The time was exactly twelve o’clock. Every twelve hours, Suvorov noted, the project’s psychologist escaped the laboratory, returning twenty to thirty minutes later.

He left and walked past the monitoring room. Two of the staff members were intently examining the President’s brain rhythms and life signs. One of them looked up at Suvorov and nodded, smiling slightly.

“Going smoothly?” Suvorov asked, making conversation.

“Like a prima ballerina’s debut,” answered the technician.

Suvorov entered and looked up at the TV monitors. “What’s happening with the others?” he inquired, nodding toward the images of Margolin, Larimer and Moran in their sealed cocoons.

“Sedated and fed heavy liquid concentrations of protein and carbohydrates intravenously.”

“Until it’s their time for programming,” Suvorov added.

“Can’t say. You’ll have to ask Dr. Lugovoy that question.”

Suvorov watched one of the screens as an attendant in a laboratory coat lifted a panel on Senator Larimer’s cocoon and inserted a hypodermic needle into one arm.

“What’s he doing?” Suvorov asked, pointing.

The technician looked up. “We have to administer a sedative every eight hours or the subject will regain consciousness.”

“I see,” said Suvorov quietly. Suddenly it all became clear in his mind as the details of his escape plan fell into place. He felt good, better than he had in days. To celebrate, he returned to the dining room and opened another bottle of port. Then he took a small notebook from his pocket and scribbled furiously on its pages.

34

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 fi

“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 sca

“Their basic function is the same, yes,” answered Thornburg. “But that’s like comparing a propeller aircraft to a supersonic jet. The CAT sca

“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.