Vector js&lm-4

by Robin Cook

  "Wait! " Jack called. He tossed the papers he was holding onto the desk and ran after the taxi driver.

  He caught up to him on the sidewalk.

  "Did you call a taxi, Mr. Papparis? " Yuri asked. He glanced over at his waiting cab. E le wanted to get the hell out of there.

  "I'm not Mr. Papparis, " Jack said. He pulled off his latex gloves and struggled to get out his medical examiner badge. He showed it to Yuri, who backed up another step. Yuri thought it was a police badge.

  "The name's Jack Stapleton, I'm a medical examiner, " Jack said. He put away his wallet, then undid his face mask. "How well did you know Mr. Papparis? Did you drive him often? "

  "I'm just a cab driver, " Yuri said meekly. He wasn't sure what a medical examiner was, although with an official badge he obviously worked for the government.

  "How well did you know Mr. Papparis? " Jack repeated.

  "I didn't know him, " Yuri said. "I never drove him."

  "How did you know his name? "

  "I just got a call to pick him up."

  "That's interesting, " Jack said.

  Yuri felt distinctly uncomfortable. He did not like dealing with state officials of any kind. Besides, the individual standing in front of him looked vaguely familiar, a fact that added to his unease. And on top of that the stranger was looking at him curiously, even suspiciously.

  "Are you sure you got a call from a Mr. Papparis on Walker Street? "

  Jack said. "Mr. Papparis of the Corinthian Rug Company? "

  "I think that's what dispatch said, " Yuri said.

  "I find that hard to believe, " Jack said. "Mr. Papparis died over the weekend."

  "Oh! " Yuri said. He coughed nervously while he struggled to come up with some plausible explanation.

  Nothing came to mind.

  "Maybe he called last week? " Jack suggested.

  "That could be, " Yuri said.

  "Maybe we should call your cab company, " Jack suggested. "It would be helpful to know if Mr.

  Papparis was a regular customer. You see, he died of a rare infectious disease which I'm eager to investigate. Any information I could find out about his activities last week such as whether he visited his warehouse could be important. I'm also interested in contacts. Especially last week and particularly Friday."

  "I can give you the dispatch phone number, " Yuri said.

  "Fair enough, " Jack said. "Let me get a pencil and a piece of paper.

  " While Jack ducked back into the rug company office, Yuri breathe a sigh of relief. For a moment he thought that he'd made a terrible blunder coming to the rug company's office. Now he was confident there wouldn't be a problem. Dispatch wouldn't offer any information. They never did, especially not about yellow cabs.

  Jack returned in a moment and wrote down the name and number.

  "What kind of disease did Mr. Papparis die of? " Yuri asked. He was curious what the authorities knew or suspected.

  "A disease called anthrax, " Jack said.

  "I know something about that, " Yuri said. "It's a disease mostly of cattle."

  "I'm impressed, " Jack said. "How did you happen to know that? "

  "I saw it as a boy, " Yuri explained. "I grew up in the Soviet Union in a city called Sverdlovsk. In the rural areas outside the city cows and sheep occasionally were infected."

  "I've heard of Sverdlovsk, " Jack said. "In fact, it was just today.

  I read that there was a leak there of anthrax from a secret bio-weapons plant." Yuri practically gulped.

  He was staggered by Jack's offhand comment.

  It was so totally unexpected, especially after Yuri had just been torturing himself with its recollection.

  "Did you ever hear anything about that episode? " Jack asked.

  "Apparently there were a lot of cases and a lot of deaths."

  "I didn't hear about anything like that, " Yuri said. He had to clear his throat.

  "I'm not surprised, " Jack said. "I don't think the Soviet government wanted anybody to know. For years they tried to say that it came from contaminated meat."

  "There were episodes of contaminated meat, " Yuri managed.

  "The problem I'm talking about occurred in 1979," Jack said. "Did you live in Sverdlovsk then? "

  "I guess, " Yuri said vaguely. He was aware he was trembling. As soon as he could, Yuri broke away from Jack and hurried back to his cab. While he started the engine he looked back. Jack was putting his mask and gloves back on. At least he wasn't out in the street trying to write down Yuri's license number.

  Putting the car in gear, Yuri drove off. His euphoria had been shortlived. Now he felt panic again.

  Although Jason Papparis's death confirmed the potency of his anthrax, Yuri was concerned that a state official who related anthrax to its use as a weapon was out on site investigating the case. He had taken pains to infect someone who could have gotten the disease through occupational exposure. That fact was supposed to preclude any investigation.

  Despite his distress, Yuri snapped off his off-duty light. Rush hour was a prime time for taxi work, provided the traffic didn't bog down.

  Yuri needed the money. He had to work, and he picked up a fare almost immediately.

  For the next hour, Yuri did short hops up and down Manhattan and back and forth across town. None of the customers bothered him too much, but the traffic did. Preoccupied and agitated, he found his patience stretched to the breaking point. After several near accidents, particularly one at Third Avenue and Fifty-fifth Street, Yuri decided to give up. When the fare climbed from the taxi at his destination, Yuri called it quits for the day. He put on his off-duty sign and headed for home in Brighton Beach. It was only a little after five P. M. , his shortest day since he'd had the flu six months previously.

  But Yuri didn't care. What he needed was a shot of vodka and, unfortunately, his flask was dry.

  During the trip across the Brooklyn Bridge, which seemed to take forever with the bumper-to-bumper traffic, Yuri agonized over the meeting with Jack Stapleton. He couldn't understand what was motivating the man.

  What worried him particularly was that Jack might find some residue from the ACME Cleaning Service letter if not the letter itself. Yuri had no idea what had become of it. His original assumption was that the letter would be thrown away like all junk mail. But now that Jack was on the scene, Yuri wasn't so confident.

  South of Prospect Park Yuri stopped in a liquor store for a pint of vodka. Later, on Ocean Parkway, with the pint hidden in a brown paper bag, he took a couple of slugs when he was stopped for lights.

  That calmed him down considerably.

  As he entered Brighton Beach and all the signs switched to the familiar Cyrillic alphabet, Yuri's agitation ratcheted down a notch. The familiar letters provided a sense of nostalgia. Yuri felt like he was already home in Mother Russia. With the calmness came an ability to think. The first thought that came to him was that it might be wise to consider pushing up the date for Operation Wolverine.

  Yuri nodded to himself as he turned onto his street. There was no doubt that advancing the date would help in regard to security concerns. It wasn't that he was worried about being discovered. He just didn't want his plans to be suspected. To be truly effective, a bio-weapon should be launched with no warning.

  Yet pushing up the date was not without problems, particularly two big ones.

  The first was that Yuri had yet to test the botulinum toxin, although he was more confident of its toxicity than he'd been about the pathogenicity of the anthrax powder. The other stumbling block was production. He wanted at least four or five pounds of the anthrax and about a quarter pound of the crystallized botulinum toxin. He didn't care which agent he used for Central Park or which agent Curt used for the Jacob Javits Federal Building, since he was confident both would be equivalently effective.

  Meeting the production quota for the anthrax was not a problem, since he was already close to the amount needed, but the same was not true for the botulinum toxin. He
was having difficulty with the Clostridium botulinum cultures. They just weren't growing as he'd hoped or expected.

  Yuri slowed as he approached his house. It was located in a warren of small structures that had been built as summer cottages in the nineteentwenties. They all had wooden frames and small yards with postagestamp-sized areas of fenced-in grass. Yuri's house was one of the largest, and in contrast to most of the others, it had a freestanding two-car garage. Yuri rented the house from a man who'd moved to Florida but who was reluctant to give up his toehold in Brooklyn.

  The garage door squeaked loudly as Yuri raised it. The interior was mostly empty, in contrast to the other garages in the area, which were crammed to the rafters with everything but cars. The floor of Yuri's garage was stained from more than a half century's worth of drippings from leaky vehicles. The stale smell of gas and oil fumes hung in the air. There was a small collection of yard tools, including an old push lawn mower against one wall. A wheelbarrow, some spare cinderblocks, and a collection of lumber leaned up against the other wall.

  With his cab safely stored for the night, Yuri carried his empty flask and the half-empty pint of vodka to the house. With his house key he tried to open the back door. To his surprise the door was unlocked.

  He pushed it open and suspiciously looked inside.

  | Yuri had been robbed once. It had happened only months after renting the house. He'd come home around nine o'clock in the evening to find the place trashed. The burglars, apparently irritated at not finding anything of value, vented their frustration on Yuri's meager furniture.

  Pausing to listen, Yuri could hear the television in Connie's bedroom.

  It was then that he noticed his wife's purse sitting in the middle of the Formica kitchen table along with the telltale wrappings from one of the neighborhood's fast-food joints.

  Yuri had been married for almost four years. He'd met his wife, Connie, when he'd first started working for the taxi company as a radio car driver and before he had his own vehicle. At the time he'd been rather desperate. His visa was about to run out. Marriage to a U. S. citizen seemed his only option.

  Connie was an African-American woman in her twenties who'd seemed bored with her life and had been happy to flirt with the newly arrived Russian. She went out of her way to be nice to him and, using her position as a dispatcher, made sure he got choice runs.

  Yuri had initially been attracted to Connie separately from his necessity to obtain a green card. As a youth in the Soviet Union, he'd loved jazz, which he associated with American blacks. Becoming acquainted with one socially was exciting. He'd known no Negroes as he'd grown up in Sverdlovsk but had seen them on television, particularly in sporting events, and was duly impressed.

  Connie's attentions were even more welcome in light of Yuri's loneliness. The mostly Russian Jewish community in Brighton Beach where he'd been advised to move ignored him. The couple began to date and frequented jazz clubs both in Manhattan, where Connie lived, and in Brooklyn near Yuri's apartment. At the same time Yuri began to learn about American racism, which initially confused him, since he'd assumed African-Americans would be held in high esteem for their cultural contributions. He'd never heard the term "nigger" until he and Connie were accosted on the street on several occasions. He was also surprised to learn that Connie's family, particularly her brother Flash and his friends, did not think highly of him. They called him a "honky, " which he learned was as derogatory a term as "nigger."

  For Yuri marriage solved both the green card and the loneliness issues, at least initially. Unfortunately, Yuri soon learned that Connie had no intention of being the wife that Yuri expected from his Russian heritage. She had no interest in domestic duties and anticipated eating out every night as they'd done during their brief courtship. As Yuri's climb up the economic ladder reached an impasse with the realization that he would not be able to use his microbiological background without expensive retraining and that he could not afford to stop driving a cab, his tolerance for Connie's lifestyle dwindled. If it wasn't for the fear of losing his green card, he would have kicked her out.

  Connie's ardor ebbed equivalently. Initially she'd seen Yuri as a romantic figure who'd come from a distant land to rescue her from a boring life. But soon after their marriage Yuri refused to do anything except drive his cab and drink vodka in front of the television. And then there was the violence. Connie had never been beaten before.

  After the first incident she would have left if she'd had someplace to go. The problem was that she'd burned her bridges when she married Yuri against her family's wishes. Pride kept her rooted where she was.

  Connie's method of dealing with her unhappiness was to eat. She could find solace in a quart of ice cream, French fried potatoes, and a Big Mac, and she sought that solace frequently. Between that and a routine devoid of exercise, it wasn't long before Connie's weight ballooned.

  The more Yuri drank, the more Connie ate.

  As they became more entrenched in their respective bad habits, their mutual hostility grew. Yuri and Connie lived in the same house but ignored each other until mere proximity would ignite a conflagration.

  Invariably, the quarrels escalated from stereotypic epithe's to physical violence, and when they did, Connie suffered more.

  A break in this pattern occurred when Yuri befriended Curt Rogers and Steve Henderson. He did not tell Connie-about his new friends but spent much of his time away from home as a result of their acquaintance.

  Curt and Steve never came to Brighton Beach. Yuri always traveled to Bensonhurst to see them. Connie was convinced he was having an affair, a belief that caused several knock-down, drag-out fights.

  Then, all at once, Yuri began spending inordinate amounts of time in the basement. First he did construction, and the hammering and sawing drove Connie crazy. When she asked him what was going on, he told her it was none of her business. Then he started bringing in equipment, including powerful fans. Connie even caught sight of large stainless steel drums being carried in by white-trash "honky"

  skinhead youths.

  Such people terrified Connie, and she made sure they didn't see her.

  On more than one occasion, Connie demanded to know what was going on in her basement, but Yuri refused to discuss it. She began to think that Yuri was setting up a distillery to manufacture his own vodka. When she suggested this to him one evening, he responded by leaping at her and grabbing her throat.

  "Yes, it's a still, " Yuri snarled. "And if you tell anyone, I'll kill you! I swear! And if you ever mess with it, I'll beat you to a pulp.

  You stay the hell out of my basement! " Connie had vainly tried to break Yuri's hold on her neck by pulling his arms away, but she couldn't. Usually when he was mad he just smacked her a few times, and that was it. But this was different. His black eyes drilled into her like he'd gone crazy.

  In utter terror, Connie started to feel faint, her image of Yuri's empurpled face began to blur, and her knees buckled. Only then did Yuri let go of her. Connie staggered to regain her balance and choked from the pressure he'd kept on her throat. With a burst of tears she ran from the room and threw herself onto her bed. From then on, Connie refrained from bringing up the issue of what was going on in the basement. Whatever it was, it wasn't worth risking her life.

  Yuri was irritated that Connie was home. On Monday nights she was supposed to work until at least nine. Her unexpected presence only added to the stress of a day that had already taken him on a roller coaster of emotions. With a trembling hand he poured himself a glass of ice-cold vodka from the freezer.

  Leaning back against the countertop he took a sip of the glacial fluid and eyed the greasy remains of the fast food. In the background he heard the canned laughter of a television sitcom. He took more of the vodka in an attempt to stem his rising resentment. As he swallowed, his eyes wandered to the basement door. He was surprised to see that it was partially ajar.

  "What the hell? " Yuri questioned. He usually swore in Russian, but through hi
s friendship with Curt and Steve he'd become equally capable in English. Confused and progressively dismayed, he put down his drink and stepped over to the door. He was certain that he'd closed it that morning before heading out in his cab. It was Yuri's routine to work in his basement lab for at least an hour in the morning and another hour in the evening to make sure his miniature bio-weapons production facility was working smoothly.

  On Wednesday, his usual day off, he spent the whole day in the basement. That was when he activated his makeshift pulverizer, since most of the neighbors were at work. Like the pulverizer in Sverdlovsk, it made a racket even though it was a fraction of the size.

  The door creaked as Yuri opened it wide. Snapping on the light, he started down the stairs. He stopped dead when he had a view of the stout combination steel and plywood door he'd made for the lab.

  Someone had taken a crowbar to the padlock, snapping off the hasp.

  Yuri stumbled down the rest of the stairs in haste. Outrage clouded his vision. His breath came in angry and worried snorts between clenched teeth. The lab and the revenge it promised was the current focus of his life. He was terrified it had been violated.

  Beyond the plywood door was the entry chamber with a showerhead and plastic bottles of bleach.

  Hanging on a wooden peg was a SCBA hazardous materials suit Curt had managed to get out of the firehouse.

  The face mask was supplied by a steel cylinder filled with compressed air. When Yuri was in the lab he wore the suit with the cylinder on his back like a scuba diver.

  The entry chamber had two other doors, both constructed similarly to that at the entrance. Both also had been secured by padlocks for safekeeping and both padlocks had been similarly broken off. Yuri yanked open the door to his left. It was his storage compartment and was surrounded on two sides with the concrete foundation walls of the house.

  The third wall contained floor-to-ceiling shelving, which was filled with microbiological supplies such as petri dishes, spare HEPA filters, agar, and jars of nutrients. The room's interior was undisturbed, despite the broken lock.