"Yes, hemlock was very popular during classical times. Best remembered as the drink given to Socrates. Seldom used these days, but still easy to come by and quite lethal. A large enough dose will paralyze the respiratory organs."

"How was it administered?" Sam Emmett inquired.

"According to SAP, the poison was ingested by this particular victim along with peppermint ice cream."

"Death for dessert," Mercier muttered philosophically.

"Of the Coast Guard crewmen we identified," Thornburg continued, "eight took the hemlock with the ice cream, four with coffee, and one with a diet soft drink."

"SAP could tell all that from bodies immersed in water for five days?" asked Lucas.

"Decay starts immediately at death," explained Thornburg, "and travels outward from the intestines and other organs containing body bacteria. The process, develops rapidly in the presence of air.

But when the body is underwater, where the oxygen content is low, decay proceeds very slowly. The preservation factor that worked in our favor was the confinement of the bodies. A drowning victim, for example, will float to the surface after a few days as the decomposition gases begin to expand, thereby hastening decay from air exposure. The bodies you brought in, however, had been totally submerged until an hour before we began the autopsies."

"The chef was a busy man," noted Metcalf.

Lucas shook his head. "Not the chef, but the dining-room steward.

He's the only crewman unaccounted for."

"An impostor," said Brogan. "The real steward was probably murdered and his corpse hidden."

"What about the others?" queried Emmett.

"The Asians?"

"Were they poisoned too?"

"Yes, but in a different manner. They were all shot."

"Shot, poisoned, which is it?"

"They were killed by fragmenting darts loaded with a highly lethal venom that comes from the dorsal spines of the stonefish."

"No amateurs, these guys," commented Emmett.

Thornburg nodded in agreement. "The method was very professional, especially the means of penetration. I removed a similar dart two years ago from a Soviet agent brought in by Mr. Brogan's people. As I recall, the poison was injected by a bio-inoculator."

"I'm not familiar with it," said Lucas.

"An electrically operated handgun," said Brogan, giving Thornburg an icy stare. "Totally silent, used on occasion by our resident agents."

"A little loose with your arsenal, aren't you, Martin?" Mercier goaded him good-naturedly.

"The unit in question was probably stolen from the manufacturer," Brogan said defensively.

"Has an id been made on any of the Asian bodies?" Lucas asked.

"They have no records in FBI files," admitted Emmett.

"Nor with the CIA and Interpol," Brogan anded. "None of the intelligence services of friendly Asian countries have anything on them either."

Mercier stared inly at the corpse moving out from the interior of the spatial analyzer probe. "It appears, gentlemen, that every time we open a door we walk into an empty room."

"WHAT KIND OF MONSTERs are we dealing with?" Douglas Oates growled after listening to General Metcalf's report on the autopsies.