these prints.'
I had been watching him covertly. He was lefthadded. He wore a sport shirt that hung outside his trousers, and once when he moved I had identified the bulge on his right side, halfway between the belly button and the point of the hip bone.
He handed me the print, and when he turned to take the other one over to Meyer, I let mine slip to the floor, moved quickly behind him, locked his left arm, and reached around and under with the right hand and yanked the belly holster out, gun, belt clip, and all, and then slammed him into Swimmer, who was heading for the closet. They went into a lamp table and snapped a couple of slender legs as they brought it down.
By then I had the short-barreled revolver properly in hand, and Meyer was standing beside me.
'Slow and easy,' I said, and they did indeed move slowly as they separated themselves from each other and from the pieces of lamp and table. There was nothing pleasant about their faces, but nothing ugly either. No sign of strain or worry. A watchful competence, like a very good boxer waiting for the opening.
I have to go on instinct. Sometimes it has betrayed me. Never fatally, fortunately. Most of the time it works for me.
I said, 'Well play it your way, gentlemen. I didn't want you to go away with the impression we're a pair of clowns. It is a matter of pride with me. Let's say our relationship has reached a new level. First names would help.'
The Green Ripper
I tossed the gun onto the nearest bed and extended my hand to Weightlifter. As he tools it and I pulled him to his feet, he said, 'Max. He's Jake.'
Jake got up and cocked his head as he stared at me. 'Maybe if I hadn't read off the name of that walkie-talkie?'
'Maybe. I don't know.'
Max slid the revolver into the holster after checking it over, and clipped the holster to his pants and smoothed the sport shirt down over the bulge. He looked thoughtful. 'McGee, you may be half again as big as I expected, and you are certainly twice as quick as anybody your size I've ever seen, but it was still a hell of a risk. It was a stupid risk. You miss the gun and maybe I kill you as I am falling. From instinct. From training. From too long doing what I do.'
'He wanted to mate an impression on you,' Meyer said.
Jake said, 'There are some folks we work with and work for who would never let us forget how we got taken.'
'And never understand it,' Max said.
'Tut they weren't here to watch,' I said.
I saw the tension going out of him, little by lithe. Jake had a bad bruise on his shin. It was swelling and turning blue. I had torn a fingernail snatching the revolver.
Finally Max grinned at me and said, 'mow I understand a little bit more about some of the things I found out about you. Now they make more sense. But it was still stupid.'
Meyer made an odd sound. He looked up from the print he was holding. He looked questioningly at Max and said, 'Markov?'
'~Yes. And you better tell me how you know about that!'
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Meyer looked at Max, his expression puzzled. 'But why wouldn't I know about it? It had a lot of pubs licity.'
'But how would you make the connection from these photographs?'
Still puzzled, Meyer said, 'The details made an impression on me.' He looked toward the ceiling, frowned, closed his eyes, and said, 'A sphere of platinum and iridium I forget the percentages of each in the alloy. One fifteenth of an inch in diameter, with two tiny holes dolled into it at right angles to each other, with traces of an unknown substance in the holes.'
'But you glanced at these photos and made the connection.'
Meyer straightened and glared at him. 'If you are pretending to be professional, act like a profes- sional. If I had any trace of guilty knowledge, would I have revealed it? The people who do have guilty knowledge are certainly too professional to reveal it.'
I interrupted, saying, 'Let me explain something. Meyer has a fantastic memory. I don't know what the hell either of you are talking about. What Eve got here is a picture of what looks like a lumpy silver bowling ball with the holes drilled badly.'
'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?'
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
