Deep Six dp-7

by Clive Cussler

  Lugovoy shook his head in exasperation. He did not know what else to say. Trying to reason with a mind scored by patriotic fervor was like trying to teach calculus to a drunk. He knew that when it was all over Suvorov would write up a report depicting him as unreliable and a potential threat to Soviet security. Yet he laughed inwardly. If the experiment succeeded, President Antonov might be of a mood to name him Hero of the Soviet Union.

  He stood up, stretched and yawned. “I think I’ll catch a few hours’ sleep. We’ll begin programming the President’s responses first thing in the morning.”

  “What time is it now?” Suvorov inquired dully. “I’ve lost all track of day and night in this tomb.”

  “Five minutes to midnight.”

  Suvorov yawned and sprawled on a couch. “You go ahead to bed. I’m going to have another drink. A good Russian never leaves the room before the bottle is empty.”

  “Good night,” said Lugovoy. He turned and entered the hallway.

  Suvorov waved halfheartedly and pretended he was on the verge of dozing off. But he studied the second hand of his watch for three minutes. Then he rose swiftly, crossed the room and noiselessly made his way down the hallway to where it made a ninety-degree turn toward the sealed elevator. He stopped and pressed his body to the wall and glanced around the edge of the corner.

  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 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 identi
fied,” 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.”

  “Then we have a security man on the inside.”

  “An assumption. We have no proof.”

  “Did he know anything?”

  “He was aware of nothing,” Polevoi said unequivocally. “His involvement is purely coincidental.”

  “A mistake to have Dr. Lugovo
y watched.”

  Polevoi took a deep breath. “The FBI keeps a tight collar on our United Nations delegates. If we had allowed Dr. Lugovoy and his team of psychologists to roam freely about New York without our security agents observing their actions, the Americans would have become suspicious.”

  “So they watch us while we watch ours.”

  “In the last seven months, three of our people have asked for political asylum. We can’t be too careful.”

  Antonov threw up his hands in a vague gesture. “I accept your argument.”

  “If Suvorov is indeed with Lugovoy, he will no doubt attempt to make contact and disclose the location of the laboratory facility.”

  “Yes, but if Suvorov, in his ignorance, makes a stupid move, there is no predicting how that old bitch Bougainville will react.”

  “She might raise the ante.”

  “Or worse, sell the President and the others to the highest bidder.”

  “I can’t see that,” said Polevoi thoughtfully. “Without Dr. Lugovoy, the project isn’t possible.”

  Antonov made a thin smile. “Excuse my cautious nature, Comrade Polevoi, but I tend to look on the dark side. That way I’m seldom taken by surprise.”

  “The completion of Lugovoy’s experiment is only three days away. We should be thinking of how to handle the payment.”

  “What are your proposals?”

  “Not to pay her, of course.”

  “How?”

  “There are any number of ways. Switching the gold bars after her representative has examined them. Substituting lead that is painted gold or bars of lesser purity.”

  “And the old bitch would smell out every one of them.”

  “Still, we must try.”

  “How will it be transferred?” Antonov asked.

  “One of Madame Bougainville’s ships is already docked at Odessa, waiting to load the gold on board.”

  “Then we’ll do what she least expects.”