by Saul Herzog
He looked at Sam. She wasn’t impressed. She’d slept all night and most of the day. He’d offered her the bed but she took the couch.
“Snow,” he said, “you know what that means?”
“What does that mean?” Sam said.
“Hot toddy.”
She shrugged.
Lance held up two fingers and the bartender reached for the Jameson’s.
“How about the Maker’s?” Lance said.
She took the bottle of Kentucky bourbon from the shelf and broke the wax seal.
“I had a buddy in the army from Kentucky,” Lance said.
The bartender nodded. She was used to his stories.
Sam wasn’t, but she knew what this was.
“You know it snows in Afghanistan?” he said.
“I did not know that,” the bartender said.
“Everyone thinks it’s hot as hell over there.”
She put their drinks on the bar in front of them.
“Turns out it’s cold as a witch’s tit.”
He was addressing the bartender but Sam knew the story was for her benefit.
“Me and my buddy, we were in mountains as big as the Rockies. I won’t tell you the name of the place, you’re not interested anyhow.”
“Sure I am,” the bartender said.
He smiled at her.
“Anyway, all I wanted to say was my buddy was from Kentucky, and it was a night like this. We were in the snow and we thought we had a real cold night ahead of us, and then out of his pack comes this bottle of Maker’s. If that don’t make you love the stuff, I don’t know what will.”
Sam took a long sip of her drink, then turned to Lance and said, “What do you think you’re doing?”
Lance shrugged.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” she said.
“I don’t know, honey.”
“Seriously. What am I supposed to do with that?”
“Look,” he said. “I don’t know what to tell you. I was friends with your dad. I brought you here because of that.”
“You know I can’t go back, right? You know that’s the only reason I’m still here?”
Lance nodded. He knew she was afraid of her ex. He’d beat the crap out of her if he showed up now. But old habits died hard.
“It’s not so bad here, is it?”
“I don’t know, Lance,” she said, indicating the empty bar. “Buttfuck, Montana. You tell me.”
Lance finished his drink and ordered two beers.
“It’s not so bad here,” he said again, as much to himself as anyone.
Sam bit her lip. “You’ve lost your mind, haven’t you?” she said. “You’re one of those guys who comes back all loopy. Too many grenades went off close to your head.”
“Maybe,” he said.
“Seriously. What did you think? That I’d come home with you and just settle in? Become your daughter?”
“No,” he said.
“Then what, Lance? For God’s sake, what were you thinking?”
He took a sip of his beer. “Why don’t we just wait and see?” he said.
Sam sighed, but he could tell she was less angry than before.
“Just stay a few days,” he said. “See how you like it. It’s not like you’ve got anything to go back to.”
“Thanks to you,” she said.
Lance raised his bottle. “Thanks to me,” he said.
She shook her head, but clinked his bottle.
Two young guys came into the bar and they couldn’t have been better timed. They were right up her alley. Lance saw the way she looked at them.
He wondered if things might work out after all.
The bartender went to serve the guys, they were at a table near the fire, and Lance said, “You know I nailed that chick?”
Sam gave him a withering look. “Don’t make me throw up.”
5
Tatyana Aleksandrova didn’t have the heart of a killer.
But she killed.
She didn’t have the heart of a traitor.
But she did anything she had to.
She didn’t have the heart of a zealot.
But she worked for the Main Directorate, Russia’s CIA, still referred to by its Soviet moniker, the GRU. It was an organization that required blind faith as much as any religion ever had.
She’d sworn an oath to the “Greatness of the Motherland.”
She had reasons to hate the Motherland, but she was too much of a pragmatist to do so.
Hate was a luxury. As was love.
If Tatyana believed in anything, it was austerity. Austerity of emotion. Austerity of hope. Austerity of despair.
It was the only way she could live in a world that killed so frequently and so callously.
She grew up in the post-Soviet era, but in many ways was better suited to the world that existed before. She understood those times. She related to them, and to the people who lived in them.
People who grew up in Communism understood things differently.
They did the things that had to be done.
Not because those things were necessary in themselves, but because if they were not done, there would be punishment.
They believed only in what they could see.
Steel, coal, grain, railway lines, nuclear reactors, rockets.
Those were things they could count on. Cold things. They offered nothing. They took more life than they gave.
But they were real, and only a madman or a liar would deny them.
She believed in the Akula-class submarine her father died on, suffocated when a freon leak sucked the oxygen out of his chamber.
Tatyana was in her mother’s womb at the time.
She believed in Saint Petersburg Hospital Number 40, which refused to admit her mother because she didn’t have the right paperwork. It was one of the largest hospitals on earth, and one of the most renowned. It had treated soldiers during the Russian Civil War. It was destroyed by the Germans during the Second World War and rebuilt larger and better. It was said to have treated a quarter of a million Soviet citizens by the time of the collapse.
Tatyana’s mother was not one of them. A bureaucrat refused to admit her. She died a month later of tuberculosis in their two-room apartment. Tatyana didn’t know it at the time, she was only four years old, but she later found out that tuberculosis had killed as many as one out of every seven people who’d ever lived.
That was until the cure was found.
In 1943, Streptomycin was discovered by doctors in the United States and by the 1950s, was being used to treat and cure tuberculosis all over the world. The UN listed it as one of the essential medicines every human on the planet should have access to.
The wholesale cost of a streptomycin treatment was thirty-eight cents.
That was what Tatyana believed in. A thirty-eight cent dose of Streptomycin. She thought of it every time a cashier handed her a few coins.
She believed in the coldness of the world. The hardness of it. Being locked in that two-room apartment with her dead mother for six days, holding her hand, talking to her, telling her bedtime stories, opening and closing her eyes every morning and night, made her believe in things other people were afraid to accept. That life was as hard as nature, and that man was the cruelest animal of all.
Winston Churchill once called his rival a sheep in sheep’s clothing. Tatyana knew all too well that too many of them were really wolves.
She wasn’t a traitor, she was a realist.
She worked for the GRU not because she believed in it, not the dogma, not the philosophy, not the politics. Like her mother and grandmother before her, she was a pragmatist before all else. She had no other choice.
And for all the pomp and ceremony, the oaths and emblems and mottos, that was how her superiors liked it. They believed it made her predictable, tractable.
As her car approached the gates, the eight concrete floors of the Permafrost Pathogen Institute loomed above her imperiously.
The government ha
d established the institute when thawing cattle burial grounds in Yakutsk began causing spikes in anthrax deaths that hadn’t been seen in centuries. Traditionally, Siberians didn’t burn butchered animal carcasses. Firewood was too valuable. Instead, they buried them in the permafrost, which until recently, had been an effective means of disposal.
Now that the ground was thawing, spores that had been frozen for centuries were coming back to life.
Anthrax had always been a scourge in the region. They called it Siberian ulcer or Siberian plague. It caused painful black ulcers on the skin, fever, vomiting, bloody diarrhea, and eventually death.
During the Soviet era, it had been a favorite of bioweapons scientists. They tinkered with it, tailored it, developed new strains. A single gram of dried, aerosolized anthrax contained a trillion spores. There was no limit to the havoc it could wreak.
The scientists had two objectives when working on anthrax, increasing virulence and increasing antibiotics resistance. A number of bioweapons treaties, and a leak in 1979 from that very compound, hampered their progress.
But the work continued.
Even after the collapse of the Soviet Union it continued.
Right up to the present day.
Now, they were finding that the ancient strains coming from the permafrost were more lethal than anything the labs could ever come up with.
An outbreak in the Yamal region two years earlier had been completely untreatable. A hundred percent mortality rate.
The entire village, man, woman, child, dog, cat, rat and farm animal perished.
And the Kremlin took notice.
They called it a gift from the Motherland.
Tatyana was there to meet the head of the institute, the leading researcher in the field of paleo-pathogens. Her name was Sofia Ivanovna, and she’d made waves when she wrote a paper about some soldiers from the civil war who’d surfaced in the tundra with viable traces of smallpox and Spanish flu in their clothing. In her lab, she successfully reanimated the diseases, and in the process accidentally killed a lab technician in the only known case of small pox in Russia since the disease had been eradicated.
Under the illusion her job was curing disease, Sofia tried to publish her findings, but the GRU suppressed her article, seized her data, and made her an offer she couldn’t refuse. Run their new lab, or she and her team could sleep under blankets doused in small pox .
“The way the Americans did with the Indians,” the generals said.
Now she was working on weaponizing thousand year old strains of diseases that the world would be as powerless against as any Shawnee tribe ever was.
Tatyana went through the building’s extensive security procedures and waited for Sofia in a small lobby that reminded her of her dentist’s office.
When the doctor emerged, Tatyana was startled by how much weight she’d lost. The photos she’d seen of her were just six months old. This woman was a ghost of her former self.
“Agent Aleksandrova,” Sofia said.
“Please, call me Tatyana.”
“Very well.”
“I got your message,” Tatyana said, getting straight to the point.
She knew she had to be careful. This meeting wasn’t authorized. If anyone ever found out they’d met, they’d both be killed.
Sofia hesitated. Tatyana could see she was terrified.
“They sent us to dig up thousand year old carcasses from the ice,” Sofia said.
“And did you find what you were looking for?”
“We found pathogens. Ancient pathogens.”
“And were they viable?”
Sofia said nothing.
Tatyana could only imagine what this was like for her.
“You can trust me,” she said.
Sofia looked at her and there were tears in her eyes.
“There’s still hope, Sofia,” Tatyana said. “As long as people like you and I resist, there’s still hope.”
“I found what they wanted,” Sofia said hesitantly.
“A weapon?”
“It really is what they asked for,” Sofia said. “A biological Chernobyl. Unstoppable.”
“I see,” Tatyana said.
“Do you?”
Tatyana looked at the doctor closely. “You’re losing your resolve, Sofia.”
“It’s not a small thing,” Sofia said. “To unleash something like this. To be involved in something so…” Her voice trailed off.
“Destructive?” Tatyana said.
Sofia didn’t seem to hear.
She reached into her pocket and pulled something out. Two small glass vials. To Tatyana they looked like perfume samples they’d give out at a department store.
“You know it’s what ended the Soviet system,” Sofia said.
“What is?”
“Chernobyl.”
Tatyana shook her head. “Sofia, if you didn’t accept this post, someone else would have.”
“I know,” Sofia said quietly.
“It had to be you. If it was anyone else, this never would have gotten out.”
“I know,” Sofia said again.
The two women looked at each other. Then Sofia placed one of the vials in a secure titanium case, snapped the clasps, and handed it to Tatyana.
“This isn’t an anthrax bacillus,” she said. “This is something else.”
“Something else?”
“Something the president requested personally.”
“What did he request?”
“Something that would spread from person to person. Something that would never stop.”
“A virus?” Tatyana said.
“A virus more deadly than anything we’ve ever seen.”
6
The US consulate in Istanbul was a fortress on a hill. Attacks in 2008 and 2015 led to the implementation of some of the most stringent security measures of any diplomatic building on earth. The compound’s outer perimeter extended seamlessly from the rocky cliffs overlooking the Bosphorus in a sheer wall of stone a hundred feet high. Multispectral cameras and motion sensors scanned the approaching slopes for intruders. Four companies of marines were stationed inside the compound and round-the-clock satellite surveillance was fed to the control room in the basement.
There was absolutely no way of getting in undetected.
The closest anyone could hope to get was the massive security post on Kaplicalar Street, a structure that looked more like the fortified entrance of a medieval castle than anything built in modern times. The main gate was guarded by a fifty-foot high tower, beyond which was a steep, rocky slope leading to the main consulate building.
The entire compound looked like it had been designed to withstand a military assault.
And it had.
Directly across the street from the entrance was the Café Americano, an upscale establishment serving cappuccinos and lattes that tasted more like traditional Turkish coffee than the prices suggested. Not that it stopped the consulate employees from frequenting the place. A brief glance around their offices revealed dozens of the café’s distinctive white and yellow take-out cups.
On a drizzly afternoon in December, a taxicab pulled up in front of the café and Tatyana stepped out in a pair of over-sized sunglasses. She wore an Audrey Hepburn-style silk scarf in her hair and a knee-length black coat.
She entered the café and ordered an espresso in English. She spoke with a slight accent. She waited at the counter, paid in cash, and took a seat by the window. She searched her purse for her phone before remembering she hadn’t brought it.
She tapped her spoon against her cup and kept looking at her watch. She had a manila envelope in front of her that she flipped incessantly on the table. She read and reread the name on the front.
Lance Spector
US Army SFOD-D
Syria
Hand Deliver
She looked at her watch. Forty-five minutes had passed and she was running out of time. Any longer and her absence would be noticed.
She got up and asked the proprietor, an overweight, overworked, bearded man in his fifties with a coffee stain on the front of his skin-tight shirt, to call her a cab. She returned to her seat and when she saw the cab she got up and left.
She’d left the envelope on the table.
7
Sofia glanced nervously at Vasily and prayed he didn’t do anything stupid.
Before them stood Major General Yevchenko, his uniform bristling with enough ornaments for a Victory Day parade. From what Sofia had seen, he was a man used to being disliked. His men called him the Kaiser because of his mustache and it was no compliment.
He’d come with three other officers. They’d arrived at the institute unannounced in an armored cavalcade. The expressions on their faces said it wasn’t a social call.
“What can we do for you, Major General?” Sofia said.
She was standing behind her desk as if it would somehow protect her. Next to her was Vasily, his temper simmering below the surface. He’d had his share of run-ins with the army. Growing up where he had made it unavoidable.
Technically, the institute was a civilian facility, no one wanted international inspectors coming around waving their treaty provisions, but everyone in the room knew who called the shots.
The fact they were located within the electrified fence of a military compound said it all. It was in that very compound that the USSR’s most notorious bioweapons facility, Biopreparat, had operated during the Cold War. The fact was an open secret. The Moscow bureau chief of the Wall Street Journal broke the story decades ago. The KGB later got to him and he disappeared without a trace, but they were too late. The word was out and the world knew about Biopreparat and the work that was done there. They knew what the government had been up to.
“I’m sure you can guess why we’ve come,” Yevchenko said.
It was always the same song and dance. The military bigwigs loved nothing better than playing games, showing her who was boss.
“Why don’t you give us a clue?” Vasily said.
Sofia’s heart pounded. He was feeling punchy. She could hear it in his voice. Yevchenko would jump at any excuse to get rid of him.
“I’m sorry,” Yevchenko said. “I haven’t met your second in command.”