boots, he removed his parka and folded it into a pillow. As he stretched out, Beria stood up.
"Where are you going?" Yardeni asked.
"To the bathroom. Don't worry. I won't wake you when I return." Beria stepped into the corridor, locked the door behind him, and walked to the end of the car. He lowered the top half of a window just enough so that the antenna on his cell phone would protrude through the crack. Seconds later, the connection to Moscow was established, the voice on the other end as clear as if the party was standing next to him.
Chapter Eleven
The pounding on the door wrenched Smith out of a light sleep. He fumbled for the bedside lamp as two militiamen burst in, followed by Lara Telegin.
"What the hell's going on?" he demanded.
"Please come with me, Doctor," Telegin replied. Stepping closer, she lowered her voice. "There have been developments. The general needs to see you in his office immediately. We'll be waiting outside."
Smith dressed quickly and followed Telegin to a waiting elevator. "What happened?"
"The general will brief you," Telegin said.
They walked through an empty lobby to a sedan idling at the curb outside. The ride to Dzerzhinsky Square took less than ten minutes. Smith detected no unusual activity in the building until they reached the fifteenth floor. The halls were filled with uniformed personnel rushing from office to office, dispatches in hand. In the cubicles, young men and women were hunched over computer keyboards, talking quietly into headsets. A keen urgency crackled in the air.
"Dr. Smith. I would say good morning except it is anything but that. Lara, close the door, would you?"
Smith took stock of Kirov, thinking that he too must have been rousted from his bed not long ago.
"What do you have?"
Kirov passed him a glass of tea set in a filigree metal holder. "Earlier this morning, President Potrenko ordered the Special Forces contingent outside Vladimir to surround the Bioaparat complex and establish a cordon sanitaire. This was done without incident.
"For the next several hours, everything was quiet. However, thirty minutes ago, a roving patrol reported that two guards had been found dead--- murdered--- at their post."
Smith felt a cold sensation deep in his stomach. "Did the Special Forces intercept anyone coming out?"
Kirov shook his head. "No. Nor did anyone try to get in."
"What about the security inside the complex--- specifically Building 103?"
Kirov turned to Telegin. "Play the tape."
She aimed the remote at a wall-mounted monitor. "This is the video from the security cameras inside 103. Please note the time stamp in the lower-right corner."
Smith watched the black-and-white images on the screen. A big, uniformed guard walked down a corridor and disappeared into Zone Two. Another set of cameras picked him up in the changing rooms in the decontamination areas.
"Freeze that!" Smith pointed to the canister that the guard, now in full biohazard gear, was holding in his left hand. "What's that?"
"You'll see for yourself in a minute. Lara?"
The tape rolled on. With growing incredulity, Smith watched the guard enter the refrigerated walk-in safe and begin removing ampoules.
"Tell me that's not smallpox."
"I wish I could," Kirov replied.
The suited-up thief completed his work and returned to the first of the decontamination chambers.
"Where are the backup security measures?" Smith demanded. "How the hell could he just walk in like that?"
"The same way your security personnel at USAMRIID can walk into your vaults," Lara Telegin snapped. "Our system is almost a duplicate of yours, Doctor. We rely just as heavily on coded locks and electronic countermeasures as you do in order to reduce the risk of the human factor. But in the end, it always comes down to one man." She paused. "Bioaparat guards are subjected to an intensive screening procedure. Still, you cannot see into a man's soul, can you?"
Smith's eyes were riveted on the screen, which showed a close-up of Grigori Yardem's face.
"He doesn't care if the camera captures him. It's as though he knows there's nothing he can do about it."
"Precisely," Kirov said, and quickly explained why the guards on duty could not tamper with the tapes made during their watch.
"If we hadn't installed this feature, it would have taken far longer to identify the thief. As it is---"
"As it is, he knew he was never coming back. How the hell could he have gotten through the quarantine?"
"Please note the time," Kirov said, pointing to the corner of the screen. "The theft occurs before the Special Forces are in position. This one had the devil's own luck: he