Biohazard

Silently, I congratulated myself on my good fortune. I tried to imagine what might have happened if I had lost my footing on the slippery floor. Although tularemia isn't usually deadly, we were working with a far more virulent strain than any I would ever have been exposed to in nature.

When we regrouped in Zone One, I advised Nazil and the others to take the antibiotics we had on hand for emergencies.

I went to my office and called Savva Yermoshin, chief of the KGB detachment at Omutninsk. Savva would later work with me at Biopreparat headquarters in Moscow.

I had obviously pulled him from a deep slumber.

"Savva, I'm sorry to wake you," I said. "I just wanted to let you know a small amount of tularemia was released inside Building 107 tonight."

I didn't expect him to do anything, but regulations required us to inform the KGB about the slightest break in routine.

"Anybody hurt?" he said in a voice fogged with sleep.

"No, it's all under control," I continued cheerfully. "We've got it cleaned up. There's nothing for you to do."

I looked at my watch after hanging up. It was almost 2 A.M.. It was pointless to call Moscow at that hour. I decided to wait until morning and went home, tired and relieved.

"What was the emergency?" Lena asked me sleepily as I padded around in the dark of our bedroom.

"Nothing important," I told her. "Go back to sleep."

Around lunchtime the next day I got a call from an extremely upset Kalinin.

"I've been trying to find you all morning and they keep telling me you're in meetings," he yelled. "How can you sit around in meetings when your building is leaking tularemia into the ground?"

Yermoshin, it appeared, knew more about the regulations than I did. He was supposed to inform his superiors whenever an emergency occurred, and he had duly contacted the KGB director for the Kirov region as soon our brief conversation ended. It didn't occur to me that such a minor mishap would need to be relayed up the chain of command, but the KGB chief in Kirov had called his bosses in Moscow, who called Kalinin early that morning.

By then, the story had become hopelessly mangled. Whatever the sleep-addled Yermoshin had told his senior officer, it had been magnified into a disaster threatening the entire region.

I tried to calm Kalinin down, but he didn't believe me. He had absolute faith in the KGB.

"I'm sending someone out there on the first train tomorrow morning," he said, and hung up.

The next morning I went to the station to pick up General Lev Klyucherov, the head of Biopreparat's scientific directorate. He arrived looking as if he'd spent the entire journey stewing with rage.

"Whatever you're trying to hide," he said at once, his face reddening, "it's not going to work."

I asked him to come into my office and went over the entire incident step by step. Klyucherov softened slightly and seemed persuaded. After all, he could see for himself that no one had fallen ill.

No one, that is, but me.

Toward the end of Klyucherov's visit, my body started to shake. Chills, and a sudden wave of nausea, overcame me so quickly I wanted to bury my head in my arms.

It's a cold, I thought. I've been working too hard.

But it felt worse than any cold I'd ever had. I could feel my face burning with fever.

"What's happened to you?" Klyucherov asked in a tone that was now much friendlier. "You look like you're about to die."

I smiled weakly. "It's just a cold," I said. "I had a long night. I could do with some tea."

I went home as soon as the general left. There was no doubt in my mind as to what was wrong: tularemia begins with flu-like symptoms and it moves through the body quickly.

At home I went straight to my small library of medical textbooks and took down from the shelves every book on infectious diseases I could find. Antidotes were not my field of expertise. I tried to think through my next step.

If this ever got out, Klyucherov, Kalinin, and everyone else in Moscow would make my life more miserable than it was even now. They would accuse me of trying to hide the seriousness of the incident and would wonder what kind of scientist would forget in such a situation to take the proper antibiotics. I had told Nazil and the others to take antibiotics, but for some inexplicable reason I hadn't taken any myself.

I felt humiliated and confused. By the time I'd left Building 107 that night, I had been completely disinfected. I must have caught the disease in a matter of seconds, between leaving the sanitary passageway and entering the shower. But how? Then it came to me. I must have brushed my face while taking off my mask and hood. A hundred cells, an amount smaller than a speck of dust, would have been enough to infect me through an imperceptible cut or scratch.

I knew it was safe to stay at home: there was no danger that the infection in my body would spread to Lena and the children.