The Teeth of the Tiger - Tom Clancy [157]
"Seventy-three point six kilograms. One hundred eighty-one centimeters in length," the brand-new physician responded.
"There are no distinguishing marks on the body, on visual inspection, suggesting a cardiovascular or neurological incident. What's the hurry on this, Richard? The body is still warm." No tattoos and so on. Lips were somewhat bluish. His nonofficial comments would be edited from the tape, of course, but a body still warm was quite unusual.
"Police request, sir. Seems he dropped dead on the street while being observed by a constable." It wasn't exactly the truth, but it was close enough.
"Did you see any needle marks?" Sir Percy asked.
"No, sir, not a hint of that."
"So, lad, what do you think?"
Richard Gregory, the new M.D. doing his first pathology rotation, shrugged in his surgical greens. "From what the police say, the way he went down, sounds like a possible massive heart attack or a seizure of some sort-unless it's drug-related. He looks healthy for that, and there are no needle-mark clusters to suggest drugs."
"Rather young for a fatal infarction," the senior man said. To him, the body might as easily have been a piece of meat in the market, or a dead deer in Scotland, not the remaining shell of a human being who'd been alive-what?-as little as two or three hours earlier. Bad bloody luck for the poor bastard. Looked vaguely Middle Eastern. The smooth, unmarked skin on the hands did not suggest manual labor, though he did appear reasonably fit. He lifted the eyelids. Eyes were brown enough to appear black at a distance. Good teeth, not much dental work. On the whole, a young man who appeared to have taken decent care of himself. This was odd. Congenital heart defect, perhaps? They'd have to crack his chest for that. Nutter didn't mind doing it-it was just a routine part of the job, and he'd long since learned to forget about the immense sadness associated with it-but on such a young body, it struck him as a waste of time, even though the cause of death was mysterious enough to be of intellectual interest, perhaps even something for an article in The Lancet, something he'd done many times in the preceding thirty-six years. Along the way, his dissection of the dead had saved hundreds, even thousands, of living people, which was why he'd chosen pathology. You also didn't have to talk to your patients much.
For the moment, they'd wait for the blood-toxicology readings to come out of the serology lab. It would at least give him a direction for his investigation.
Brian and Dominic took a cab back to their hotel. Once there, Brian lit up his laptop and logged on. The brief e-mail he sent was automatically encrypted and dispatched in a matter of four minutes. He figured an hour or so for The Campus to react, assuming nobody wet his pants, which was unlikely. Granger looked like a guy who could have done this job himself, fairly tough for an old guy. His time in the Corps had taught him that you read the tough ones from the eyes. John Wayne had played football for USC. Audie Murphy, rejected by a Marine recruiter-to the everlasting shame of the Corps-had looked like a street waif, but he'd killed more than three hundred men all by himself. He'd also had cold eyes when provoked.
It was suddenly and surprisingly lonely for both Carusos.
They'd just murdered a man they didn't know and to whom neither had spoken a single word. It had all seemed logical and sensible at The Campus, but that was now a place far away in both linear distance and spiritual vastness. But the man they'd killed had funded the creatures who'd shot up Charlottesville, killing women and children without mercy, and, in facilitating that act of barbarism, he'd made himself guilty as a matter of law and common morality. So, it wasn't as though they'd wasted Mother Teresa's