Biohazard

My secretary, Marina, was a plump, efficient woman in her late twenties. A slight tilt of her head told me that Yury Kalinin, the director of Biopreparat and my immediate boss, was already at work.

Marina sat with Kalinin's secretary, Tatyana, in the reception area connecting our offices. The two women disliked each other intensely because of some ancient quarrel and rarely spoke. When I wanted to speak to Kalinin, I had to address Tatyana directly. This time I bypassed her and knocked on his door. A brusque voice told me to enter.

Major General Yury Tikhonovich Kalinin, chief of the Main Directorate and deputy minister in the Ministry of Medical and Microbiological Industry, was sitting behind an enormous antique desk. A pair of heavy curtains had been drawn over the window near his armchair, and his office was wrapped in gloomy darkness. A picture of Mikhail Gorbachev hung on one wall. There was a gray safe in the corner.

I coughed and waited for him to notice me.

"So?" he said at last, without looking up.

"The meeting on Kirov Street lasted a little longer than I had expected," I said. "I thought I would check in."

"Interesting?" The general never used two words when one would do.

When I first visited his office as a young captain, Leonid Brezhnev's picture was hanging on the wall. Over the years, the portraits had changed to Yury Andropov, and then, briefly, to Konstantin Chernenko, reflecting the quick succession of ailing leaders who occupied the Kremlin during the early 1980s. Kalinin had no political opinions so far as I could tell. One leader was as good as another. What he respected was power.

I began to tell him about the plan to use SS-18s, but he seemed to know everything already. I wondered if Lebedinsky had called him.

"I knew you could handle it," he said and raised his hand in a gesture of dismissal. "Back to work, right?"

As usual, I was left with the impression that there were areas of this strange secret universe that I would never have access to. Not until much later did I realize that this was only Kalinin's way of spinning the illusions he needed to strengthen and maintain his authority.

Kalinin had risen swiftly in the army's chemical warfare corps— some claimed thanks to well-placed marriages — but he was an engineer, not a scientist. He was also impetuous, a man who enjoyed making quick decisions that took people by surprise — not the least his decision to bring me to Moscow. Against my natural inclinations, I admired him. In our gray bureaucracy, he stood out as an aristocrat.

He was tall, slim, an elegant dresser. His imported suits must have cost him more than he could afford, even on a general's salary. He lived with his second wife, a shy woman said to be the daughter of a four-star general, in a neighborhood Muscovites nicknamed "Tsarskoye Selo" ("Czar's Village") — a kind of inside joke because of the high-level officials it housed.

Kalinin never smoked and rarely drank, which set him apart from his peers, and was in excellent shape for a Soviet man in his early fifties. His black hair was always impeccably combed. With his high cheekbones and eagle nose, he looked like a member of the old Russian nobility.

Women adored him, and rumors of his amorous inclinations spiced up office gossip. Late one night I knocked on his door and walked in just as the general and Tatyana were hastily rearranging their clothes. He never mentioned it, and neither did I.

The charm Kalinin reserved for women was rarely experienced by his male subordinates. As I came to feel less awed in his presence, I would sometimes bring to him the case of a scientist or technician who needed a leave of absence for personal reasons. He invariably refused to listen.

"So," he would bark. "Now you're a psychiatrist!"

And he would order me back to work.

After even the briefest session with Kalinin I would retreat to my office with a sense of relief. I worked in a large room with a high ceiling and a window that looked out over a park by the river-bank. An oak desk I'd inherited from my predecessor occupied nearly half the space. The desk held the real symbols of my authority: five telephones. In Soviet government offices, an executive's status could be measured by the number of his phones — an indication of multiple sources of authority. I even had a kremlyovka, the small white phone that connects everyone in the upper reaches of the Soviet government, from the general secretary of the Communist Party to ordinary ministers of state.

Personal mementos of family or friends were taboo in the offices of senior government officials, but I had hung portraits of a few Russian scientists: D. I. Mendeleyev, who invented the periodic table of elements; Nikolai Pirogov, a nineteenth-century pioneer in military surgery; Professor Ilya Mechnikov, a Russian microbiologist who discovered cellular immunity.

I was eager to identify with Russia's glorious scientific past. Some day, I promised myself, I would return to pure research, or medicine.