“I can do a full autopsy later,” said the doctor, “or maybe it will be taken out of my hands. But as to what has happened, they’ve been poisoned, that’s what happened.”
“But they haven’t eaten anything,” protested the policeman. “They haven’t drunk anything. They were just going to have supper. Perhaps at the airport ... or on the plane ...?”
“No,” said the doctor, “a slow-acting poison would not work with such speed, and simultaneously. Body systems vary too much. Each either administered to himself, or was administered, a massive dose of instantaneously fatal poison, which I suspect to be potassium cyanide, within the five to ten seconds before they died.”
“That’s not possible,” shouted the police chief. “My men were outside the cells all the time. Both prisoners were thoroughly examined before they entered the cells. Mouths, anuses—the lot. There were no hidden poison capsules. Besides, why would they commit suicide? They’d soon have had their freedom.”
“I don’t know,” said the doctor, “but they both died within seconds of that poison’s hitting them.”
“I’m phoning the Prime Minister’s office at once,” said the chief superintendent grimly, and strode off to his office.
The Prime Minister’s personal security adviser, like almost everyone else in Israel, was an ex-soldier. But the man whom those within a five-mile radius of the Knesset called simply “Barak” had never been an ordinary soldier. He had started as a paratrooper under the paracommander Rafael Eytan, the legendary Raful. Later he had transferred, to serve as a major in General Arik Sharon’s elite 101 Unit until he stopped a bullet in the kneecap during a dawn raid on a Palestinian apartment block
in Beirut.
Since then he had specialized in the more technical side of security operations, using his knowledge of what he would have done to kill the Israeli Premier, and then reversing it to protect his master. It was he who took the call from Tel Aviv and entered the office where Benyamin Golen was working late, to break the news to him.
“Inside the cell itself?” echoed the stunned Premier. “Then they must have taken the poison themselves.”
“I don’t think so,” said Barak. “They had every reason to want to live.”
“Then they were killed by others?”
“It looks like it, Prime Minister.”
“But who would want them dead?”
“The KGB, of course. One of them muttered something about the KGB, in Russian. It seems he was saying the head of the KGB wanted them dead.”
“But they haven’t been in the hands of the KGB. Twelve hours ago they were in Moabit Prison. Then for eight hours in the hands of the British. Then two hours with us. In our hands they ingested nothing—no food, no drink, nothing. So how did they take in an instant-acting poison?”
Barak scratched his chin, a dawning gleam in his eye.
“There is a way, Prime Minister. A delayed-action capsule.”
He took a sheet of paper and drew a diagram.
“It is possible to design and make a capsule like this. It has two halves; one is threaded so that it screws into the other half just before it is swallowed.”
The Prime Minister looked at the diagram with growing anger.
“Go on,” he commanded.
“One half of the capsule is of a ceramic substance, immune both to the acidic effects of the gastric juices of the human stomach and to the effects of the much stronger acid inside it. And strong enough not to be broken by the muscles of the throat when it is swallowed.
“The other half is of a plastic compound, tough enough to withstand the digestive juices, but not enough to resist the acid. In the second portion lies the cyanide. Between the two is a copper membrane. The two halves are screwed together; the acid begins to burn away at the copper wafer. The capsule is swallowed. Several hours later, depending on the thickness of the copper, the acid burns through. It is the same principle as certain types of acid-operated detonators.
“When the acid penetrates the copper membrane, it quickly cuts through the plastic of the second chamber, and the cyanide floods out into the body system. I believe it can be extended up to ten hours, by which time the indigestible capsule has reached the lower bowel. Once the poison is out, the blood absorbs it quickly and carries it to the heart.”
Barak had seen his Premier annoyed before, even angry. But he had never seen him white and trembling with rage.
“They send me two men with poison pellets deep inside them,” he whispered, “two walking time bombs, triggered to die when they are in our hands? Israel will not be blamed for this outrage. Publish the news of the deaths immediately. Do you understand? At once. And say a pathology examination is under way at this very moment. That is an order.”
“If the terrorists have not yet left the Freya,” suggested Barak, “that news could reverse their plans to leave.”
“The men responsible for poisoning Mishkin and Lazareff should have thought of that,” snapped Premier Golen. “But any delay in the announcement and Israel will be blamed for murdering them. And that I will not tolerate.”
The fog rolled on. It thickened; it deepened. It covered the sea from the coast of East Anglia across to Walcheren. It embalmed the flotilla of tugs bearing the emulsifier that were sheltering west of the warships, and the Navy vessels themselves. It whirled around the Cutlass, Sabre, and Scimitar as they lay under the stern of the Argyll, engines throbbing softly, straining to be up and away to track down their prey. It shrouded the biggest tanker in the world at her mooring between the warships and the Dutch shore.