"Coincidence," I told Meyer. "Maybe there was somebody thinning about hustling her on her way, but they didn't have to. She got sick. And antibiotics wouldn't touch it. And she died."
"Maybe," he said. "Maybe it was that way."
My phone aboard the Flush rang at eight fifteen the next morning, and when I answered it I heard the click of someone hanging up. Fifteen minutes later it rang again, and when I answered it, a voice said, 'remember this number, McGee. Seven-ninetwo, oh-seven-oh-one. Go to a pay phone as soon as you can and call this number. Seven-nine-two, ohseven-oh-one."
He hung up. The voice was soft. There was no regional accent. I wrote the number down and finished my coffee while I thought about it. Then I locked up and walked to a pay phone.
The same voice answered. "This is McGee," I said.
"What was your mother's maiden name?"
'l~evlin. Mary Catherine Devlin."
"Drive to Pier Sixty-six and park in the marina lot. Walk to the hotel and go in one of the lowerlevel entrances that face toward the marina, the one nearest the water. Turn right and walk slowly down the corridor toward the main part of the hotel."
"Why?"
After a pause he said, "Because you want to know why somebody died."
'who the hell are you?"
The Green Ripper
"Can you remember what I told you to do?"
"Of course."
He hung up. I went to Meyer's stubby little cabin cruiser, the John Maynard Keynes, and roused him. He came out, blinking into the sunlight, carrying his coffee onto the fantail, looking grainy and whiskery. I repeated the two conversations as accurately as I could.
Mother's maiden name. Standard security procedure. Not generally available."
'A know that. Somebody wants to tell me why Gretel died."
"You're going, of course."
"That's why I came over to tell you. So you'll be able to give somebody a lead if I don't show up back here. If somebody wants to take me out, forget the hotel. It will be the marina parking lot. Drop me there at long range, and untie the lines and take off."
'Y'll come along."
"If you wouldn't mind. He didn't say to come alone. You could wait in the truck. Armed."
'Tut not very dangerous."
'~What we will have are those stupid walkie-talkies, the little ones you bought as a gag. With fresh batteries. The mysterious strangers are probably in one of those rooms. I am assuming more than one. I can keep my unit in my pocket. Without my aerial up you should be able to read a signal from me based on Off-On. We can test them here."
With fresh batteries we found out that he would receive a definite alteration in the buying sound when my unit was turned on, even at a hundred yards. I could give him numbers. Short bursts for numbers from 1 to 9. A steady blast for a zero. Room 302 would be dit-dit-dit duaaa~ nitwit.
"In a building with a steel frame?" he asked.
"Listen harder. They'll take it away from me pretty quick, I imagine. I'll give you the room num- ber soon as I can."
There are a lot of trees in that parking lot, and it has a considerable depth. I circled around the back of it, walking swiftly through the open areas. Then I circled back to an arched entrance, went in; turned right, walked slowly. The rooms were on my nght. So they could have watched me through a window.
I kept my hand in my pocket, finger on the switch. A door opened behind me and I spun around. Room 121. Very easy. A sallow young man, tall, with a lot of nose and a lot of neck, mo- tioned to me to come in. He wore pale-blue trunks, and he had a bath towel around his neck. His hair was still wet from his morning swim.
The familiar voice was right behind me, and I had neither heard him nor sensed him. "Hand out of the pocket. That's nice. Move right on in. Fine. You're doing fine."
With the voice still behind me and the room door
The Green Ripper closed, the swimmer patted me down and took the little gadget out of my pocket. He read the label on it aloud. "Junior Space Cadet." He grinned and tossed it onto one of the double beds. "Clean," he said.
"Sit right down aver there, in the straight chair by that countertop, Mr. McGee," the voice said. Large room. I\vo double beds. Pile carpeting. Small refrigerator. Recently redecorated. Between the half-open draperies I could see beach chairs and a table on the tiny ground-level terrace outside sliding doors, and I could look out toward the marina parking lot.
When I sat down I got my first look at the voice. Like Swimmer, he seemed to be in his late twenties. Mid-height, with the shoulder meat of one who works out with weights. Glossy dark hair, square jaw, neck as broad as the jaw. Metal-rimmed glasses with a slight amber tint. A pleasant smile.
"My name is McGee," I said.
'I think well try to get along without names."
He took the toy off the bed, inspected it, pulled the sectional aerial to full length, and went over and opened the sliding door. "Dr. Meyer? Every~ing is in order here. Why don't you come on in?"
When there was no answer, he tossed the unit to me. I pushed the little piano key and said, 'Jo rea- son why you shouldn't, Meyer."
"Okay." The voice was tinny and remote. "ShaU I bring your hat?"
"No. Leave it in the car and lock up. Room One-two-one."
When Meyer arrived, Swimmer frisked him, declared him clean, and then winked at me and said, 'I was looking for your hat."
"Was it all that obvious?" I asked.
'~Don't worry about it," Weightlifter said. Yt's good procedure. Simple and useful. Keep it. Because it doesn't work with us doesn't mean it isn't any good. But, Dr. Meyer, I'm CUfiOUS."
"Just Meyer, please."
"Fine. What if he'd asked you to bring his hat?.
"There are several ways he could have asked me to bring it. Each one is an option. If he felt the two of us could handle things, I would have been ready when I came through the door, and so would he."
'~ice. Very nice," Swimmer said.
"You seem to know a hell of a lot," I said.
Weightlifter shrugged and sat on the edge of a bed, and motioned Meyer over to a wing chair by the sliding doors. "Not as much as we tried to find out. I'll give you credit. You have some very solid friends around that marina, McGee. We didn't have much time to work on it. We put a lot of people on it. We pulled your military record. We put some tourists into that Bahia Mar Marina We had somebody at Timber Bay. We sent somebody to Petaluma. We know or at least we feel able to assume that you are not wanted anywhere, that
The Green Ripper your identity is correct, that you are not into the coke or grass trade, and that you are not political."
"Who is we?" Meyer asked.
'Eve won't go into that. Just as I told Mr. McGee, we won't go into names either. And we won't show identification. And if you check the register later, it won't do you a bit of good. And, 111 be frank with you, the names and the connections wouldn't mean much to you. We are going to ask questions. Lots of them. This might take a long time. But we start with evidence of good faith."
Swimmer went to the closet and came bac} with a nine-by-twelve manila envelope and handed it to Weightlifter.
"Before I show you these," Weightlifter said, Y must explain how we happened to luck out. Dr. Tower reported the symptoms to the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta They have had standing orders for over a year to report any case which has those same symptoms to a certain branch of the Federal Government. An expert in forensic medicine flew down to Atlanta from New York, starting about an hour after word came to Washington. When it became obvious to Dr. Tower that Mrs. Howard was going to die, he phoned Atlanta. The expert came down here in time to participate in the autopsy. He found what we had instructed him to look for. Take a look at 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!"
94 t
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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