The doctor examined each rapidly, searching mouths, throats, and eyes, feeling pulses and listening to chests. When he had done, he stalked from the second cell. The superintendent followed him into the corridor; he was a badly worried man.
“What the hell’s happened?” he asked the doctor.
“I can do a full autopsy later,” said the doctor, “or maybe it will be taken out of my hands. But as to what has happened, they’ve been poisoned, that’s what happened.”
“But they haven’t eaten anything,” protested the policeman. “They haven’t drunk anything. They were just going to have supper. Perhaps at the airport ... or on the plane ...?”
“No,” said the doctor, “a slow-acting poison would not work with such speed, and simultaneously. Body systems vary too much. Each either administered to himself, or was administered, a massive dose of instantaneously fatal poison, which I suspect to be potassium cyanide, within the five to ten seconds before they died.”
“That’s not possible,” shouted the police chief. “My men were outside the cells all the time. Both prisoners were thoroughly examined before they entered the cells. Mouths, anuses—the lot. There were no hidden poison capsules. Besides, why would they commit suicide? They’d soon have had their freedom.”
“I don’t know,” said the doctor, “but they both died within seconds of that poison’s hitting them.”
“I’m phoning the Prime Minister’s office at once,” said the chief superintendent grimly, and strode off to his office.
The Prime Minister’s personal security adviser, like almost everyone else in Israel, was an ex-soldier. But the man whom those within a five-mile radius of the Knesset called simply “Barak” had never been an ordinary soldier. He had started as a paratrooper under the paracommander Rafael Eytan, the legendary Raful. Later he had transferred, to serve as a major in General Arik Sharon’s elite 101 Unit until he stopped a bullet in the kneecap during a dawn raid on a Palestinian apartment block in Beirut.
Since then he had specialized in the more technical side of security operations, using his knowledge of what he would have done to kill the Israeli Premier, and then reversing it to protect his master. It was he who took the call from Tel Aviv and entered the office where Benyamin Golen was working late, to break the news to him.
“Inside the cell itself?” echoed the stunned Premier. “Then they must have taken the poison themselves.”
“I don’t think so,” said Barak. “They had every reason to want to live.”
“Then they were killed by others?”
“It looks like it, Prime Minister.”
“But who would want them dead?”
“The KGB, of course. One of them muttered something about the KGB, in Russian. It seems he was saying the head of the KGB wanted them dead.”
“But they haven’t been in the hands of the KGB. Twelve hours ago they were in Moabit Prison. Then for eight hours in the hands of the British. Then two hours with us. In our hands they ingested nothing—no food, no drink, nothing. So how did they take in an instant-acting poison?”
Barak scratched his chin, a dawning gleam in his eye.
“There is a way, Prime Minister. A delayed-action capsule.”
He took a sheet of paper and drew a diagram.
“It is possible to design and make a capsule like this. It has two halves; one is threaded so that it screws into the other half just before it is swallowed.”
The Prime Minister looked at the diagram with growing anger.
“Go on,” he commanded.
“One half of the capsule is of a ceramic substance, immune both to the acidic effects of the gastric juices of the human stomach and to the effects of the much stronger acid inside it. And strong enough not to be broken by the muscles of the throat when it is swallowed.
“The other half is of a plastic compound, tough enough to withstand the digestive juices, but not enough to resist the acid. In the second portion lies the cyanide. Between the two is a copper membrane. The two halves are screwed together; the acid begins to burn away at the copper wafer. The capsule is swallowed. Several hours later, depending on the thickness of the copper, the acid burns through. It is the same principle as certain types of acid-operated detonators.
“When the acid penetrates the copper membrane, it quickly cuts through the plastic of the second chamber, and the cyanide floods out into the body system. I believe it can be extended up to ten hours, by which time the indigestible capsule has reached the lower bowel. Once the poison is out, the blood absorbs it quickly and carries it to the heart.”
Barak had seen his Premier annoyed before, even angry. But he had never seen him white and trembling with rage.
“They send me two men with poison pellets deep inside them,” he whispered, “two walking time bombs, triggered to die when they are in our hands? Israel will not be blamed for this outrage. Publish the news of the deaths immediately. Do you understand? At once. And say a pathology examination is under way at this very moment. That is an order.”
“If the terrorists have not yet left the Freya,” suggested Barak, “that news could reverse their plans to leave.”
“The men responsible for poisoning Mishkin and Lazareff should have thought of that,” snapped Premier Golen. “But any delay in the announcement and Israel will be blamed for murdering them. And that I will not tolerate.”
The fog rolled on. It thickened; it deepened. It covered the sea from the coast of East Anglia across to Walcheren. It embalmed the flotilla of tugs bearing the emulsifier that were sheltering west of the warships, and the Navy vessels themselves. It whirled around the Cutlass, Sabre, and Scimitar as they lay under the stern of the Argyll, engines throbbing softly, straining to be up and away to track down their prey. It shrouded the biggest tanker in the world at her mooring between the warships and the Dutch shore.
At six-forty-five all the terrorists but two climbed down into the larger of the inflatable speedboats. One of them, the Ukrainian-American, jumped into the old fishing launch that had brought them to the middle of the North Sea, and glanced upward.
From the rail above him, Andrew Drake nodded. The man pushed the starter button, and the sturdy engine coughed into life. The prow of the launch was pointed due west, her wheel lashed with cord to hold her steady on course. The terrorist gradually increased the power of the engine, holding her in neutral gear.
Across the water, keen ears, human and electronic, had caught the sound of the motor; urgent commands and questions flashed among the warships, and from the Argyll to the circling Nimrod overhead. The spotter plane looked to its radar but detected no movement on the sea below.
Drake spoke quickly into his walkie-talkie, and far up on the bridge, Azamat Krim hit the Freya’s siren button.
The air filled with a booming roar of sound as the siren blew away the silence of the surrounding fog and the lapping water.
On his bridge on the Argyll, Captain Preston snorted with impatience.
“They’re trying to drown the sound of the launch engine,” he observed. “No matter; we’ll have it on radar as soon as it leaves the Freya’s side.”
Seconds later the terrorist in the launch slammed the gear into forward, and the fishing boat, its engine revving high, pulled violently away from the Freya’s stern. The terrorist leaped for the swinging rope above him, lifted his feet, and let the empty boat churn out from under him. In two seconds it was lost in the fog, plowing its way strongly toward the warships to the west.
The terrorist swung on the end of his rope, then lowered himself into the speedboat where his four companions waited. One of them jerked at the engine’s lanyard: the outboard coughed and roared. The five men in it gripped the handholds, and the helmsman pushed on the power. The inflatable dug its motor into the water, cleared the stern of the Freya, lifted its blunt nose high, and tore away across the calm water toward Holland.