“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 baclc of the neck of Mrs. Howard. The traces of the poison found inside those holes are being analyzed. They did not get a complete analysis of the poison
The Green Ripper 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 assume 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 lulled 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?”
“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?”