Biohazard

Nearly three hundred projects were outlined in the last Five-Year Plan we had been given by the Military Industrial Commission, known by its Russian initials as the VPK. The VPK coordinated all of the Soviet Union's industrial production for military purposes. This gave it effective control over two thirds of the nation's industrial enterprises. A separate biological weapons directorate monitored our progress until our "products" were ready to be delivered to the Ministry of Defense, which we referred to as the Customer.

Our meeting ended after an hour or so of additional calculations. We shook hands, packed our papers, and congratulated one another on a productive session. On my way out I looked into Lebedinsky's office, but he was already gone. I never saw the colonels again.

Driving back to my office, I opened my briefcase to jot down a few more notes. Anyone who peered through the window would have seen a frowning, slightly overweight bureaucrat preoccupied with the country's business.

A strange twist of fortune had brought me to the pinnacle of power in Russia, a country that was not my own. My great-grandfather had been a khan, a member of the nobility in what is now Kazakhstan, in Central Asia, but I grew up in a system that lavished few of its privileges on non-Russians. My wife and daughter and two young sons had risen with me to a lifestyle inconceivable to the majority of Soviet citizens. With the combined salary of a senior bureaucrat and a high-ranking military officer, I earned as much as a Soviet government minister. But in the Communist system, money was not the measure of worth. What counted was the special status that gave us access to perks and influence in our supposedly egalitarian society.

Turning into the hidden driveway that led to the offices of Biopreparat on Samokatnaya Street, I began to focus on the rest of the day. I would only have time for a quick lunch before facing the mountain of messages and paperwork on my desk. The Volga glided past a concrete wall into a small courtyard. I packed up my notes and said a quick good-bye to Slava.

Slava never gave any hint of suspecting what went on in the meetings he took me to, and I never confided in him. We had been warned to be careful of what we said to lower-ranking employees. But I imagined he drew conclusions of his own, given the odd bits of conversation he overheard.

"Will you need me later?" he asked.

"Probably not till I go home," I told him. "I might be late again tonight."

The Moscow headquarters of Biopreparat, or the Main Directorate of the Council of Soviet Ministers as it was officially (and uninformatively) called, protected its secrets behind a yellow brick mansion with a green roof that had served as the home of the nineteenth-century vodka merchant Pyotr Smirnoff. The building's past and present associations provided an ironic symmetry: Smirnoff's product has done more than any foreign invader to undermine the health of Russian citizens.

Samokatnaya Street is so small and narrow that a pedestrian could easily miss it while walking down the nearby Yauza Embankment, overlooking one of the waterways that joins the Moscow River as it flows toward the Kremlin. There were five other buildings on our street, all largely obscured in the spring and summer by the thick foliage of ancient trees mercifully ignored by Communist city planners.

Despite its image as an impersonal city of cold buildings and wide boulevards, Moscow is dotted with hidden havens such as these. Even in winter, Samokatnaya Street was free from the surrounding bustle of the neighborhood, with its shabby residential apartment blocks, factories, and onion-dome churches.

Three centuries ago the area around Samokatnaya Street was known as the German Quarter. It was the only place in old Muscovy where foreigners (then universally described as German, regardless of their nationality) were allowed to live and carry on their business — at a safe distance from ordinary Russians, whom they might otherwise have infected with alien ideas, but close enough for the czars to exploit their skills.

A car bearing American diplomatic plates once turned up the street and parked opposite the building. KGB guards watched from inside as several people got out, peered at the fence for a few moments, and then returned and drove off. We talked about it for days afterward.

Savva Yermoshin, the KGB commander in charge of the building, was one of my closest friends at the time. He declared confidently that there was nothing to worry about, but security was tighter than usual for weeks.

I walked up a marble staircase, one of the few remaining architectural features of the old mansion, to my offices on the second floor. Nearly 150 people worked at headquarters, including technicians and administrative personnel, but the building exuded an air of restrained silence.