Biohazard

In that first year after communism it sometimes seemed as if you only had to leave your apartment to make money. Friends had pockets bulging with rubles and dollars. One handed me a sports bag so heavy I could barely lift it. "I've got one hundred thousand dollars inside," he announced proudly. I was unemployed for the first time in twenty years, but poverty was not one of my fears. Government officials everywhere, in and out of office, were regarded as prime catches for the new Russian biznesmeni.

Within a few weeks of my departure, I was working as the Moscow representative of a Kazakh bank. My brother had given them my name, and they hired me immediately to develop their overseas interests. I had no aptitude for finance, but I was soon making deals like everyone else.

The idea at the time was to make as many millions as you could, in whatever way you could, before it ended in an inevitable disaster. Corruption and crime were everywhere, and I heard ominous talk of high-flying acquaintances put "on the time-clock" by mobsters who had loaned them money and were now doubling the interest every day that the debt remained unpaid.

My phones soon started to click and crackle every time I made a call. The telephone company insisted that nothing was wrong with the line. The noise vanished when I changed the number, only to reappear after a few days. When I was away on business trips Lena would receive mystifying calls from people who introduced themselves as "general" or "colonel." They would ask when I was expected back. We wouldn't hear from them again.

In the spring of 1992,1 placed a call to a business partner during a meeting in my office. Just as I finished dialing his number, I remembered something I'd forgotten to say and put the phone back on the hook. Five minutes later, my partner, Naum, called.

"Kanatjan, something's wrong," he said.

"What's wrong?"

"My phone rang once, and when I picked it up no one was there. But I heard you talking to someone else."

"It's just a bad connection," I said.

"No, there's more. I not only heard what you were saying, I heard everybody else too. It felt like I was in the middle of the room."

Then he repeated word for word everything that had been said in my meeting.

"That's not just a poor connection," he said.

One evening a policeman appeared on the sidewalk outside our building. He was gone the next morning, but a new one showed up when I returned from work that night. From then on police made frequent appearances, jotting down in their notepads my arrivals and departures. They never came when I was out of Moscow.

On April 11, Yeltsin signed a decree banning offensive biological warfare research. I heard about it almost immediately from one of my former colleagues, and I was overjoyed. It meant, or so I thought, that Kalinin had lost his battle. The decree banned all offensive biological work and cut research into defensive programs by 50 percent. The Fifteenth Directorate was dissolved and replaced by a new army department of nuclear, biological, and chemical defense. The decree didn't mention Biopreparat, but I felt as if a huge burden had been lifted from my shoulders. My former life was no longer a military secret. Presumably no one would care what I did with my new one.

A few weeks later, I concluded a sale of oil from Kazakhstan with a business associate whom I'd been dealing with over the previous six months. The client, Mark Severinovsky, was a flamboyant character, a diamond merchant and entrepreneur who enjoyed sprinkling his conversation with the names of cities he'd visited: Tel Aviv, London, Bonn. Our discussion had never gone much beyond business, but after we finished our oil negotiations, we decided to unwind over coffee.

Halfway through our conversation, he leaned back and said, "Kanatjan, I hear that you want to leave the country."

"Who told you that?" I was stunned.

"It doesn't matter."

"And why would you care?"

"You're carrying around a lot of secret information in your head."

I considered what to say next. Finally, I told him that Yeltsin's decree had made the issue academic.

He suggested that "others" would see things differently, that I had no idea how damaging what I knew might be. Damaging to whom? I asked, but he merely smiled and said he was telling me this for my own good and returned to his coffee as if nothing had happened.

The idea of returning to Kazakhstan gradually went from a half formed notion to a desperate conviction. Kazakhstan had declared independence while I was still on my trip to America, on Decein her 16, 1991, and I considered applying for citizenship.

I was spending at least one week a month in Almaty on business, staying at my parents' apartment. As soon as I walked through the door of the old building on Communist Prospekt where I'd grown up, I escaped from the tensions of my past and present lives. My family still knew nothing about my career. My sister once confided that she thought I was involved in a secret program to clone people.