Colonel Vassily Kravchenko's cottage. At half past the hour, Kravchenko was in his office, listening to Potrenko's detailed orders to install an undetectable quarantine that would seal Bioaparat from the outside world.
A short, stocky man, Kravchenko was a veteran of Afghanistan, Chechnya, and other places where his Special Forces had been sent. Wounded in action, he'd been relieved of active duty and sent to Vladimir to oversee the training of new recruits. After hearing what Potrenko had to say, the timing of the call gratified him: he had two hundred soldiers who had just completed their field exercises. With them, he could seal off the entire town of Vladimir, much less the Bioaparat complex.
Kravchenko answered Potrenko's questions quickly and succinctly, assuring him that within the hour, he could have his men in position. No one inside the compound or in the town would be any the wiser.
"Mr. President," he said. "What are my exact orders if someone attempts to exit Bioaparat after the quarantine is in place?"
"Give one warning, Colonel. Only one. If he resists or attempts to escape, use of deadly force is hereby authorized. I need not remind you why."
"No, Mr. President."
Kravchenko was all too familiar with the hellish concoctions stored in the ultrasecret holds of Bioaparat. He had also witnessed chemical warfare in Afghanistan, and its results were indelibly printed on his memory.
"I will execute your directive as ordered, Mr. President."
"And I will expect to hear from you when the cordon is in place, Colonel."
While Kravchenko and Potrenko were finishing their call, Lieutenant Grigori Yardeni of the Bioaparat Security Detail (BSD) was in his office in Building 103. He was watching the bank of closed-circuit television monitors when the cell phone in his pocket went off.
The voice was garbled by a synthesizer and sounded like a strangled whisper. "Do it now. And prepare to use the Option Two. Do you understand?"
Yardeni managed to get the words out, barely: "Option Two."
He sat there for a moment, frozen by the implications of what he'd just heard. So many nights he had imagined receiving the call that now, having come, it seemed unreal.
You've been waiting your whole life for this chance. Get on with it!
There were sixty cameras situated throughout Zones One and Two, all of them hooked up to video players. The machines themselves were in a fireproof cabinet equipped with a time lock that could be opened only at the end of a shift, and only by Yardeni's superiors. In addition, the video players were absolutely tamperproof. Yardeni had long ago realized that he had no options as to how to carry out the theft.
The lieutenant was a strapping young man, well over six feet, with curly blond hair and chiseled features. He was a favorite at the Little Boy Blue cabaret, a male strip club in Vladimir. Every Tuesday and Thursday, Yardeni and a few other BSD officers rubbed baby oil over their bulked-up frames and gyrated in front of screaming women. They made more money in those few hours than in a month working for the state.
But Yardem had always had bigger ambitions. A fanatical devotee of action films, his favorite star was Arnold Schwarzenegger, except that he was getting a little too old. Yardeni thought there was no reason why someone with his looks and physique couldn't replace Arnold. He'd heard that Hollywood was a mecca for tough, goodlooking hustlers with attitude.
For the past three years, Yardeni had been scheming to get to the West. A problem he had in common with thousands of other Russians was money: not only for the prohibitive exit taxes and air tickets, but enough to live on afterward. Yardeni had seen pictures of Bel Air; he had no intention of arriving in Los Angeles penniless, forced to live in the Russian-immigrant ghetto.
The lieutenant checked the clock above his desk and rose, his military-style tunic straining across his chest. It was after one o'clock, that time of night when the body is in its deepest slumber, when it is most vulnerable to death. Except for the human and animal patrols outside and the security inside, Bioaparat, too, slept.
Yardeni reviewed the procedures he already knew by heart, then steadied himself and opened the door. As he made his way through Zone One, he thought about the man who'd approached him almost a year ago. Contact had been made at the Little Boy Blue, and at first he had thought that the man, one of the very few in the audience, was