“Tom?”
“I like it, Gerry,” Davis replied. “Doc, how confident are you about this stuff dissipating after the subject goes down for the count?”
“Confident,” Dr. Pasternak answered, and both of his hosts remembered that he was professor of anesthesiology at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. He probably knew his stuff. Besides, they’d trusted him enough to let him in on the secrets of The Campus. It was a little late to stop trusting him now. “It’s just basic biochemistry. Succinylcholine is made up of two acetylcholine molecules. Esterases in the body break the chemical down into acetylcholine fairly rapidly, so it is very likely to be undetectable, even by someone up at Columbia-Presbyterian. The only hard part: to have it done covertly. If you could bring him into a doctor’s office, for example, it would just be a matter of infusing potassium chloride. That would put the heart into fibrillation. When cells die, they give off potassium anyway, and so the relative increase would not be noticed, but the IV mark would be hard to hide. There are a lot of ways to do this. I just had to pick one that is applied relatively conveniently by fairly unskilled people. As a practical matter, a really good pathologist might not be able to determine the exact cause of death—and he would know that he didn’t know, and that would bother him—but that’s only if the body is examined by a really talented guy. Not too many of them around. I mean, the best guy up at Columbia is Rich Richards. He really hates not knowing something. He’s a real intellectual, a problem solver, and genius biochemist in addition to being a superb physician. I asked him about this, and he told me it would be extremely difficult to detect even if he had a heads-up on what to look for. Ordinarily, extraneous factors come into play, the specific biochemistry of the victim’s body, what he’s had to eat or drink, ambient temperature would be a huge factor. On a cold winter day, outside, the esterases might not be able to break down the succinylcholine because of a diminution of chemical processes.”
“So, don’t do a guy in Moscow in January?” Hendley asked. This deep science stuff was troublesome for him, but Pasternak knew his stuff.
The professor smiled. Cruelly. “Correct. Also Minneapolis.”
“Miserable death?” Davis asked.
He nodded. “Decidedly unpleasant.”
“Reversible?”
Pasternak shook his head. “Once the succinylcholine is in the bloodstream, there’s nothing you can do about it . . . well, theoretically you could put the guy on a ventilator and breathe for him until the drug metabolizes—I’ve seen that done with Pavulon in an OR—but that would be a stretch. Theoretically possible to survive, but very, very unlikely. People have survived being shot right between the eyes, gentlemen, but it’s not exactly common.”
“How hard do you have to hit your target?” Davis asked.
“Not very, just a good poke. Enough to penetrate his clothing. A thick coat might be a problem because of the length of the needle. But ordinary business wear, no problem.”
“Is anyone immune to the drug?” Hendley asked.
“Not to this one, no. That would be one in a billion.”
“No chance he’d make noise?”
“As I explained, it’s like a bee sting at most—more than a mosquito, but not enough to make a man cry out in pain. At most, you’d expect for the victim to be puzzled, maybe to turn around and see what caused it, but your agent will be walking away normally, not running. Under those conditions, without a target to yell at, and since the initial discomfort is transitory, the most likely reaction is to rub the spot and walk on . . . for about, oh, ten yards or so.”
“So, rapid-acting, lethal, and undetectable, right?”
“All of the above,” Dr. Pasternak agreed.
“How do you reload it?” Davis required. Damn, how has CIA not developed something this good? he wondered. Or KGB, for that matter.
“You unscrew the barrel, like this”—he demonstrated—”and take it apart. You use an ordinary syringe to inject a new supply of the drug, and swap out the gas charge. These little gas capsules are the only hard part to manufacture. You toss the used one into a trash can or the gutter—they’re only four millimeters long and two millimeters wide—and reinsert the fresh one. When you screw in the replacement, a little spike in the back of the barrel punctures it and recharges the system. The gas capsules are coated with sticky stuff to make them harder to drop.” And just that fast, the blue one was “hot” except for the absence of succinylcholine. “You want to be careful with the syringe, of course, but you’d have to be pretty stupid to stick yourself. If you cover your man as a diabetic, you can explain away the presence of syringes. There’s an ID card to get insulin refills that works just about anywhere in the world, and diabetes has no outward symptoms.”
“Damn, Doc,” Tom Davis observed. “Anything else you could deliver this way?”
“Botulism toxin is similarly lethal. It’s a neurotoxin; it blocks nerve transmissions, and it causes death by asphyxia, also fairly rapidly, but it’s readily detectable in the blood during a post-, and kind of hard to explain away. It’s available fairly readily around the world, but in microgram doses, because of its use in cosmetic surgery.”
“Dots shoot women in the face with that, don’t they?”
“Only the dumb ones,” Pasternak replied. “It takes wrinkles away, sure, but since it kills the nerves in the face, it also takes away your ability to smile much. That’s not my field, exactly. There are a lot of toxic and lethal chemicals. It’s the combination of rapid action and difficult detectability that made this a problem. Another quick way to kill someone is to use a small knife at the back of the skull, where the spinal cord enters the base of the brain. The trick is getting right behind your victim and then hitting a fairly small target with the knife, and not having the knife jam between the vertebrae—at that range, why not a silenced .22 pistol? It’s fast enough, but it leaves something behind. This method can easily be misdiagnosed as a heart attack. It’s just about perfect,” the physician concluded, in a voice sufficiently cold as to sprinkle snow on the carpet.
“Richard,” Hendley said, “you have earned your fee on this one.” The professor of anesthesiology stood, checking his watch. “No fee, Senator. This one’s for my little brother. Let me know if you need me for anything else. I have a train to catch back to New York.”
“Jesus,” Tom Davis said, after he left. “I always knew docs had to have evil thoughts.”
Hendley picked up a package on his desk. There were a total of ten “pens” in it, with computer-printed instructions for this use, a plastic bag full of gas capsules, and twenty large vials of succinylcholine, plus a bunch of throwaway syringes. “He and his brother must have been pretty close.”
“Know him?” Davis asked.
“Yeah, I did. Good guy, wife and three kids. Name was Bernard, Harvard Business School graduate, smart guy, very astute trader. Worked on the ninety-seventh floor of Tower One. Left a lot of money behind—anyway, his family’s well taken care of. That’s something.”
“Rich is a nice guy to have on our side,” Davis thought aloud, suppressing the shiver that came along with the opinion.
“That he is,” Gerry agreed.
THE DRIVE ought to have been pleasant. The weather was fair and clear, the road not at all crowded and mostly straight northeast. But it was not pleasant. Mustafa kept getting “How far now?” and “Are we there yet?” from Rafi and Zuhayr in the backseat, to the point that more than once he considered pulling the car over and strangling them. Maybe it was hard sitting in the backseat, but he had to drive this Goddamned car!!! Tension. He was feeling it, and they probably were, too, and so he took a deep breath and commanded himself to be calm. The end of their journey was hardly four hours away, and what was that compared to their transcontinental trek? Certainly it was farther than the Holy Prophet ever walked or rode from Mecca to Medina and back—but he stopped that thought at once. He had no standing to compare himself with Mohammed, did he? No, you do not. One thing he was sure of. On getting to his destination, he was going to bathe and sleep just as long as he could. Four hours to rest was what he kept saying to himself, as Abdullah slept in the right-front seat.
THE CAMPUS had its own cafeteria, whose food was catered from a variety of outside sources. Today it was from a Baltimore deli called Atman’s whose corned beef was pretty good, if not quite New York class—saying that might result in a fistfight, he thought, as he picked up a corned beef on a kaiser roll. What to drink? If he was having a New York lunch, then cream soda, but Utz, the local potato chips, of course, because they’d even had them in the White House—at his father’s insistence. They probably had something from Boston there now. It was not exactly a renowned restaurant town, but every city has at least one good eatery, even Washington, D.C.