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?"
"Classified 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 Lauderdamodale. This is the palm-tree 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 Zhiviov, 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 assassination of a young woman in Florida, we can't make the same kind of reasonable assumption. 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 assassination device. We can assume the KGB would be cautious about supplying it to any
The Green Ripper one over here. We could have missed it easily. When they took a scrap 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?"
Marc 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 an 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 every~ing 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 Lad- wigg 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 damn small, delivery systems are difficult. It has so little mass 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,
The Green Ripper 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 mass 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 chug} 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 assumed 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 assignment 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 stuffy"
"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 Saturday, 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?"