Biohazard

"Pasechnik hasn't come."

"Hasn't come? You mean he's not yet in Protvino? Don't worry, it's okay if he's a little late."

"No, no!" Frolov nearly yelled into the phone. "I mean, he hasn't come back from France."

"France? What is he doing in France?" I almost laughed, thinking this was a strange practical joke.

"But you sent him there. You gave him permission to go."

All at once, I remembered. Six months earlier, during one of my official visits to Leningrad, Pasechnik told me that he had been invited by a French manufacturer of pharmaceutical equipment to visit its facilities in Paris. Their new line of fermenters might be worth our while to investigate, he intimated. I agreed.

"Why not go?" I told him. "It will be nice for you to visit Paris. You've been working hard."

A few months later he phoned to remind me of the trip. I was surprised. I thought he'd already gone.

"I was too busy," he explained quickly. "I just wanted to make sure it was still all right with you for me to go."

It was now October, and I'd heard nothing since. I'd assumed that Pasechnik's vacillating travel plans had finally taken him to Paris and that he had long since returned to Leningrad.

"Can you explain to me what is going on?" I asked Frolov as calmly as I could.

The story emerged in a torrent of excited words. At times, Frolov sounded as if he couldn't quite believe what he was telling me.

Pasechnik had flown to France the week before with a colleague from the Leningrad institute. Their meetings had gone well, and the occasional telephone conversation with the home office suggested that they were enjoying themselves. My cryptogram informing senior staff of the general meeting had arrived in Leningrad a few days earlier, and Frolov had telephoned the details to Pasechnik in Paris. "The two of them were staying in a nice hotel just outside the city," Frolov said. "They were booked to come back Saturday. But after your message, Pasechnik told his assistant to book an earlier flight Friday because he wanted to prepare for the meeting. He said the assistant was welcome to stay on for the extra day, as they had originally planned.

"So early Friday morning, the guy walked into Pasechnik's room and found him in bed, fully dressed. He looked like he hadn't slept all night. There were cigarette butts all over the floor — and Pasechnik doesn't smoke. The guy was shocked. He said, 'Director, you'd better get ready, you're going to miss your flight,' and Pasechnik got up slowly and mumbled, 'Thank you.' He was like a man in a daze.

"He walked over to his assistant and hugged him and said 'proshchai' [farewell], which was a little surprising instead of the usual do svidaniya [good-bye]. The next day, the assistant took the flight back to Moscow that they'd planned to take together. He found Pasechnik's wife waiting at the airport.

" 'What are you doing here?' he said, and she told him she was waiting for Vladimir. They waited together for the next flight from Paris on Sunday, but Pasechnik wasn't on that one either. That's when I decided I'd better call you."

I listened to the entire story with a knot tightening in my stomach. There were only two possibilities. Pasechnik had been in an accident, or he was alive and not coming back.

I thought back to our last meeting in Leningrad. We had spent a long, tiring day going over various projects. Pasechnik seemed sad and a bit depressed as he drove me to the railway station, where I planned to catch the overnight train back to Moscow. I asked him if anything was wrong. Posing such a personal question to a man like Pasechnik was risky. He was one of our senior scientists, twelve years older than me, and had always been somewhat aloof. I worried he might take offense.

"Kanatjan," he had answered, looking at me sadly, "can I be honest with you?"

"Of course."

"It's like this, I'm fifty-one years old, and I'm going through a strange time in my life. I don't know if I've accomplished what I want to. And they're going to make me retire soon."

It was true: the mandatory age for retirement in all weapons programs was fifty-five. But I clapped him heartily on the shoulder.

"I don't know what you're worrying about," I laughed. "Four years is a long time, and they could be your best years!"

He smiled thinly, we shook hands, and I boarded my train.

I might have picked up the distress signals from that conversation or from his wavering Paris plans if I had not been so preoccupied with work. But at Biopreparat we didn't spend time thinking about staff problems. Nor did we concern ourselves with the insecurities of our top managers. Now I was faced with a crisis that would affect not just the morale of personnel but the entire direction of our scientific program.