Sherbokov shrugged, and Barashi stopped talking. Perhaps the Russian was more concerned with the threat to his job than any threat, real or imagined, from America. But then again, he wasn’t an Arab.
Sherbokov took out a pack of cigarettes and offered one to Barashi. “You smoke?” he asked.
Barashi reached for the offering. “Bad for your health,” he said.
Sherbokov let loose a deep, rumbling laugh that ended in a cough. “So. You are worried about your health?” he said when the coughing subsided. He extracted a cigarette for himself, lit it, then Barashi’s. “Perhaps you should not be working here.”
“Is it that dangerous?”
“Everything we work with here will kill you. You make a mistake, you have an accident, you are dead.”
“Researchers have died?”
Sherbokov held his cigarette in his hand, his elbow resting on his desk. “1988. Nikolai Ustinov was injecting the Marburg virus, a slightly less deadly relative of Ebola, into guinea pigs. He was working through a glove box and wearing only two thin layers of rubber gloves instead of the thick mitts he was supposed to. The gloves gave him more flexibility to control the little animals, but he was not following standard procedure. The rules stated guinea pigs must be strapped to a board before injecting them. Ustinov perhaps thought the guinea pigs would be quieter if he held them. Or perhaps he was just in a hurry.”
The Russian inhaled deeply from his cigarette, blew the smoke back into the stale air of the office, then continued. “A technician assisting Ustinov became distracted and bumped him accidentally. Ustinov’s hand slipped just as he was pressing down on the syringe. The needle went through the animal and punctured his thumb. Only a half centimeter in. But the virus was highly concentrated. There was, and is, no effective antiserum. He was dead in less than three weeks.”
Sherbokov paused. A sad smile crept across his face. “All the time Ustinov was dying, his colleagues were not allowed to stop working. After he was dead, they cultured the virus that had killed him. They discovered it had mutated. The new variant turned out to be particularly virulent. It was weaponized as a replacement for the original. We named it ‘Variant U.’”
“After Ustinov?”
“Yes.”
“Probably not the legacy he wished.”
“No.” Sherbokov studied the paperwork in front of him and took another drag on his cigarette. A long, glowing ash dangled precariously from the end of it, then broke off and tumbled onto the papers. He swatted distractedly at the nuisance. “So. You earned a Ph. D. at Emory. An excellent school.”
“Yes, it is. I studied in their microbiology and molecular genetics program.”
“America is not all bad then?”
“In terms of technological innovation and application it perhaps has no peer.” He took a puff on his own cigarette and tapped the end of it into a ceramic ashtray molded into the shape of a double helix. “It’s the export of their religion and culture, often by blunt force, that my part of the world is fearful and suspicious of.”
“You are a Saudi?”
“No. I attended King Abdul Aziz University in Jeddah, but I was born into a family of Marsh Arabs in southern Iraq.”
“Marsh Arabs?” Sherbokov leaned forward, his cigarette dangling from his lips. A layer of acrid tobacco smoke, bitterly pungent, formed a gray overcast near the ceiling of his office.
“Near the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers,” Barashi said, “the Ma’dan people, Marsh Arabs, have spent the last 5000 years subsisting on farming, fishing and hunting. They dammed the rivers, built irrigation canals and erected cathedral-like homes made of reeds. The marshlands they developed were the Middle East’s largest wetland ecosystem.”
“Yet you left.”
“My parents saw no future for me in a country dominated politically by Sunni Muslims—the Marsh Arabs are Shiite—and Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party. They persuaded an uncle to smuggle me into Saudi Arabia. That’s where I was raised.”
“Perhaps you will go back now, now that the Americans have liberated Kuwait and destroyed Saddam’s army?”
Barashi waved his hand in dismissal. “Faah!” He spit the word out. “The Americans didn’t finish the job, they didn’t get Saddam. Instead, they encouraged the Kurds and Shiites to do it, then betrayed them. Now, in retribution against the Marsh Arabs, Saddam has begun a systematic effort to drain the marshes, to drive out all remaining residents and allow his military greater access. Soon there will be nothing left but salt desert. Dead. Useless. Like my family. Like so much of the Arab world.” He thrust his cigarette into the double helix dish, creating a small explosion of ashes, and ground it out with fierce effort.
“I understand,” Sherbokov said, almost softly. He paused, then stood. “Come, I wish to show you something.” He reached for his parka that hung by its fur-rimmed hood on a plain, wooden coat tree. “Just so you don’t think the Americans cannot be challenged in science and technology.”
“We have to go out?”
Sherbokov chuckled. “You prefer to hibernate in my office until spring?”
“When is that?” Barashi wasn’t sure that such a season even existed here.
“May, sometimes June.”
“Faah,” Barashi said again. He donned his own parka and followed Sherbokov out the door.
They crossed the Vector campus toward what appeared to be a relatively new, yet singularly unattractive—as only the Soviets seemed capable of producing—multi-storied building in a far corner of the complex. The wind had come up, and the snow on the concrete-like earth drifted over the sidewalk in long, white streamers, like sand blowing in a desert. The sun had struggled a bit higher into the sky, but not much. Barashi held up his gloved hand. Only three fingers separated the horizon from the sun’s disc. He mumbled a curse wreathed in condensation from his breath. The brittle cold bore into him even more deeply than before.
They reached the building, number fifteen, surrounded by yet another fence, and entered through a checkpoint guarded by a Kalashnikov-toting soldier and an emaciated German shepherd. Inside, they climbed several flights of stairs, then walked along a dingy yellow hallway festooned in what Barashi assumed were propaganda banners. He couldn’t translate the Cyrillic writing, but Sherbokov saw him eyeing the standards.
The Russian pointed at one and said, “‘Fulfill our Five-Year Plan in four years!’ Well, we’d better. Russia may not survive another five.” He gestured at an adjacent banner. “‘Long Live the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.’ Out of date already.” He shook his head in disgust, or disappointment, Barashi wasn’t sure which.
Traffic in the corridor was not heavy, but steady; mostly men and women in white lab coats and pants. All had picture ID cards clipped to their smocks. “In Russia,” Sherbokov said, as he returned a nod one of the workers gave him, “we divide our biocontaminant areas into three levels or zones. The U.S. and most of the rest of the world use four. We’re in Zone One. It’s mostly administrative and security offices, and laboratories that prepare nutrient media.”
Sherbokov turned left at an unmarked corridor. “We’re going to be entering a ‘hot’ zone now, Zone Two. We won’t be going into Three, so don’t worry. Three is where we work with the really nasty stuff; filoviruses like Marburg and Ebola, for instance. No vaccines, no cures.”
At the end of the corridor they came to a steel door. The door was marked with a symbol familiar to Barashi, the four intersecting rings used as the international warning for biohazard. Sherbokov punched in a code on a keypad. The metallic click of a heavy-duty latch releasing followed. There was a slight hiss of air as he pulled open the door. Barashi felt a tiny breeze following them as they stepped into a connecting hallway.
“We keep Zones Two and Three under negative air pressure,” Sherbokov said. “If something bad happens i
nside, if there’s an accident, if a hot agent is released, we don’t want it getting out of the containment area.”
He turned to look at Barashi, who was behind him. “So. This is a sanitary passageway. We’ll strip, get examined by a nurse, then put on ‘antiplague’ suits.”
“Strip? Examined? You mean naked, by a woman?” Barashi felt more uncomfortable over that eventuality than entering a biohazard zone.
Sherbokov laughed. “She’s seen it all before, my friend. Your equipment is no different than any other man’s. She’ll stick a thermometer under your armpit, then examine you for cuts or bruises. Any kind of a little nick, any blood at all, and you go no farther.”
They moved into a small, white-tiled room lined with lockers. They undressed, then Sherbokov pointed to another door. “Time to meet nurse Hammersickle,” he said. Barashi hesitated, and Sherbokov laughed again. “Don’t worry, she won’t hurt you. But don’t make any sudden moves.” He chortled softly as he opened the door.
Nurse ‘Hammersickle’—Svetlana turned out to be her real name—was a Russian bear of a woman with tiny, pig-like eyes and a wispy, gray mustache. She said nothing to the two men as she took their temperature and examined their skin thoroughly, even checking their mouth and gums.
Finished, Svetlana flicked her head toward an adjacent door, and the men moved on.
In the next room, the hum of a heavy-duty ventilating system became apparent, and an unusual odor permeated the air. Barashi wrinkled his nose. It was something he had smelled before but couldn’t readily identify.
“It’s a disinfectant, hydrogen peroxide,” Sherbokov said. “It’s sprayed into Zones Two and Three from those nozzles.” He pointed to an overhead latticework of exposed pipes, valves and vents.
The journey to see whatever Sherbokov wanted to show him was becoming a bit surreal for Barashi. Here he was, standing naked in a bioweapon hot zone in the middle of a Siberian winter, being showered by hydrogen peroxide after getting groped by a hulking Russian woman.
Sherbokov seemed to sense the Iraqi’s discomfort. “You’ll get used to it,” he said. “It’ll become routine within a few weeks. So. Time to don our battle dress.”
He gestured toward a series of stalls that contained the requisite attire for Zone Two. “Watch me. Then I’ll step you through the procedure.”
Barashi looked on, shivering slightly—perhaps a bit from the chill in the air, perhaps a bit from apprehension—as Sherbokov pulled on a pair of long-johns and white socks, followed by a surgeon’s smock that reached to his ankles. Next came a cloth hood with openings for his eyes and nose. It made him look akin to the KKK clowns Barashi had seen pictures of in America. Next, Sherbokov pulled on high rubber boots, then a pair of thin rubber gloves. Finally, he picked up a sealed respirator mask and set of goggles and slung them over his shoulder. “Let’s get you suited up now,” he said, “then I’ll show you how to use the respirator.”
It took another twenty minutes to get Barashi properly attired and comfortable using the breathing apparatus. “Breathe normally,” Sherbokov urged. “Relax. We aren’t going deep-sea diving. The respirator is more a precaution than a necessity.”
Once Barashi’s breathing had settled into a controlled rhythm, they stepped into a dimly lit lab filled with the muted sound of something churning or mixing. In the middle of the room stood a metal vat. About five feet high, it had a convex top and was enclosed within thick, stainless steel walls. A plethora of pipes sprouted from the container and disappeared into the ceiling.
“The first of its kind in the world,” Sherbokov announced, gesturing at the vat. His voice sounded distant and distorted because of the respirator mask.
Barashi looked at him.
Sherbokov continued. “It’s a 630-liter viral reactor for manufacturing weaponized smallpox.”
Barashi’s heart rate accelerated.
“Mikhail Gorbachev signed off on this as part of the Soviet Union’s last five-year plan. Overall, the equivalent of one billion U.S. dollars was funneled into Soviet biological weapons development over the past decade. It allowed us to catch up with and surpass Western technology. Come. Look.”
They moved to the opposite side of the reactor and a small, thick window on its domed roof. Barashi peered in, struggling to get a clear line of sight through his goggles. An agitator at the bottom of the vat churned an innocuous-looking liquefied mixture.
“The pipes coming out of the reactor,” Sherbokov said, “are for disposing of waste and extracting weapons-ready material. We produce about 100 metric tons per year of weaponized variola virus. Smallpox.”
Barashi tried to whistle softly, a habit he’d picked up in America, but it didn’t work well with a sealed mask over his mouth and nose.
Sherbokov seemed to think he was gagging and stepped toward him.
Barashi held up his hands. “I’m fine,” he said. “And impressed. One hundred tons!”
“Yes. You are perhaps interested in weaponized smallpox?”
“Not necessarily,” Barashi said, recalling what Sherbokov had told him about Nikolai Ustinov. “You say the Marburg virus became more virulent after it killed your colleague?”
Sherbokov nodded. “A virus grown in laboratory conditions often becomes more potent after it passes through a live incubator: an animal or a human. In Ustinov’s case, the Marburg virus morphed into a much more powerful and stable pathogen.”
“What about Ebola?”
“Ah, my young friend, you must like poking your finger in the eye of the Grim Reaper.”
Barashi smiled. “Maybe. At least at a distance. Tell me about Vector’s work with Ebola.”
Sherbokov seemed to think about his response, or whether to respond at all, but after a short silence said, “Then let us continue our conversation in Zone One, without respirator masks.” He beckoned Barashi away from the reactor, and they walked toward the exit.
A half-hour later they were dressed again, walking through a hallway in Zone One.
Sherbokov picked up the conversation they had aborted in the lab. “We have found it much more difficult to cultivate Ebola than Marburg. For a long time we had difficulty achieving effective concentrations of Ebola, but think now we have overcome that.”
“What about its virulence?”
Sherbokov laughed, a bleak chuckle devoid of humor and edged in darkness. “Ebola is the most deadly virus in the world. It probably couldn’t mutate into anything worse than what it is already. In 1976, an outbreak of Ebola in the Republic of Zaire killed 280 people of 318 infected. That’s a death rate of almost 90 percent. That’s pretty damn virulent. And a God-awful way to die.”
“Have you weaponized it yet?” Barashi asked.
“We haven’t been able to cultivate enough of it to integrate it into a weapons system. And of course, as with any hemorrhagic fever, there’s the problem of developing a truly effective delivery system.”
Barashi nodded.
Sherbokov continued. “Hemorrhagic fevers, at least those deadly to humans, can be transmitted only by direct contact with the secretions—blood, vomit, feces, urine, even saliva—of infected people. Syringes can be dangerous, too, as poor Ustinov found out. Usually the disease is spread among caregivers: family, friends and healthcare workers.” Sherbokov fumbled in his shirt pocket for his cigarettes but couldn’t find them. He cut loose with a string of invectives in Russian.
“Sorry,” he said. “Left my cigarettes on my desk. So. Ebola can replicate—in effect, live—only within the cells of a host, that is, an animal or human being. The trouble is, at least in terms of the virus, it devastates its host. Kills it. It needs to find a new host, a new home, as quickly as possible. Or it dies. Fortunately, for humans, it can’t be transmitted through the air. At least that’s never been observed outside of a laboratory setting.”
“But if it could be?”
“You mean like the common cold?”
“Yes.”
“Then the world wouldn’t have to worry about overpopulation any longer.”
The men walked on in silence, their boots clicking on the hard linoleum floor, echoing off the cold walls of Koltsovo’s Building Fifteen. Barashi thought he could hear the moan of the frigid Siberian wind outside. Or maybe it was just the icy breath of death.
But there would be no icy breath of death in Atlanta. Death, yes. But riding the warm breezes of a gentle Southern summer, not the icy gales of Siberia.
Satisfied his dispersal mechanism worked and would be reliable, Barashi dried it, disassembled it and stored it. He checked again to make sure he had the proper inventory of mounting brackets and hardware, then marked and stored them, also.
Though it was possible his venture might fail, that seemed a low probability outcome. He’d planned meticulously, run the scenario over and over in his mind, rehearsed the actual attack at least a dozen times: timing it, looking for pitfalls, developing contingency actions. Still, he was a realist. Shit happens, as Americans liked to say, so he had prepared for that eventuality.
From a commercial-quality freezer he withdrew two heavily wrapped, tightly sealed boxes, each about the size of a desktop computer printer. Each container held a seed stock of his chimera Ebola. The Ebola was packed in a glass jar secured within an aluminum canister. The canister, in turn, was suspended in a sea of dry ice inside a Styrofoam box. For all anyone knew, the box could have contained Omaha Steaks. But the box would never have been recognized as such, for it was so heavily layered in duct tape the Styrofoam was hidden.
Given the nearness of his attack, it was time to transport the seed stock, the backup virus for his weapon, to a place of safekeeping. Only he and one or two others knew where. In case he didn’t survive his mission, someone else would be able to start over. In truth, the thought appalled him, for he realized there were few people, maybe no one, who could accomplish what he had.
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