Biohazard

The next day Kalinin agreed to see me. He handed me the paper I had written, which was now attached to an official reprimand, and told me to sign my name to both sheets. It was a tradition that went back to Stalin's time: my signature affirmed t,he charges against me and concurred in advance with whatever "people's punishment" I was deemed to deserve.

My humiliation, apparently, was my punishment.

"If you ever break the rules again," Kalinin said, "it will be the last time."

Today, I understand that they could not have fired me, but it was not obvious to me then. Putting another manager in my place would have slowed the momentum of our program, perhaps even derailed it, and Kalinin had too much invested in Stepnogorsk's success. He must have used all of his influence to fight off the KGB. If I failed, his career would be destroyed as surely as mine.

I shared Kalinin's determination to succeed at any cost, which added irony to my predicament. The idealistic young doctor from Tomsk who had agonized over the difference between saving lives and taking them was gone. The worst possible fate for me had become banishment from Biopreparat, and from the privileges that came with it.

The transformation wasn't yet complete. I still shuddered occasionally when I looked at the bacteria multiplying in our fermenters and considered that they could end the lives of millions of people. But the secret culture of our labs had changed my outlook. My parents would not have recognized the man I had become.

I returned to Stepnogorsk determined to work with the dispassionate efficiency Biopreparat required of all its managers. My family took second place. Some weeks I lost all track of time while I was inside the compound, going home only for a nap and a snack before setting off again. In 1985, my third child, Timur, was born, but I was almost never there: while Lena took care of the baby, I was working feverishly in the labs.

I was angrier and lonelier than I had ever been in my life. When I first arrived at Progress, I had been filled with excitement about returning to Kazakhstan after so many years in the Russian north. Stepnogorsk was only a short plane ride from my parents' home, and I looked forward to being around people who looked like me and who spoke the language I had learned as a child. But there were no Kazakhs at my facility, and only a few were scattered among the Russian faces in the city of Stepnogorsk. Even as I had become the perfect model of a Soviet bureaucrat, I felt alienated from everything and everyone around me.

My oldest child, Mira, was treated well by her teachers and friends because she was the daughter of the director, but I knew that some of her classmates mocked her as "black" and called her "funny-face" behind her back.

The few quiet moments I stole in our apartment were used to work on my Ph.D. thesis. It was absolutely necessary to complete the thesis if I was to maintain my career path at Biopreparat. Nothing else seemed important.

Eventually, Bulgak and I came to an uneasy truce. He was shrewd enough never to ask me about my trip to Moscow, although he clearly relished my humiliation. He would eventually, to my relief, be transferred back to his provincial detachment, but not before he became embroiled in a security problem of his own.

One of the units under Bulgak's control was called the Division for Special Countermeasures Against Foreign Engineering Intelligence Services. It was a convoluted title for the straightforward job of making sure that nothing we did at Stepnogorsk was detectable in the outside world.

My improvements to the plant had complicated Bulgak's life. He needed people with sufficient technical expertise to mask all traces of the prodigious flow of waste from our fermenters. Bulgak found a civilian engineer to head the Countermeasures Division who soon proved to be one of our most talented workers in the arts of camouflage. His name was Markin.

Markin was a shy man in his late thirties or early forties. Although most of his coworkers liked him, he kept largely to himself. Few knew how complicated his personal life was.

Markin had fallen in love with the widow of one of the KGB officers who had worked at the plant. They married after a brief courtship, but the marriage quickly soured. They fought constantly, and Markin began to look more downcast with each passing month.

Finally, he applied for a leave of absence, explaining that he needed to take care of his sick mother. The leave was granted. A few weeks later, Bulgak walked into my office holding a letter from a small village in the Gorky region.

"Read this," he said, his brow furrowing with anxiety.