Soul of the Assassin

“Of course.”

“What do you mean, ‘of course’? You should have waited until I came in.”

Lauren clamped her teeth together. Corrigan was efficient and generally reasonable, but he had a very strict interpretation of the chain of command. He was the lead desk officer; she was relief — which to him meant he was the boss, she was whale shit.

“Really, Lauren, you should have told me.”

“The conference starts with a reception in two hours. I didn’t know when you were getting in,” she told him.

“You could have called me at home.”

“Right,” said Lauren. She took the briefing paper. “I have to get back to the desk.”

4

BOLOGNA, ITALY

Artur Rostislawitch frowned at himself in the mirror, turning his chin slowly as he inspected the whiskers he’d just shaven. Even as a young man, he’d never had a particularly smooth face, but the worries of the past few years had dug deep lines around his chin, and pulled out his cheeks so that he looked like an emaciated walrus. That made it difficult to shave closely, and there were still a few lines of hair caught in the furrows. He turned on the water and refilled the basin, deciding to try again. He wanted to look good tonight, even though he wasn’t meeting the Iranian until tomorrow.

What if someone believed the story the Iranian had told him to tell, and really did offer him a job — a real job doing research?

He fantasized about it, thinking he might actually be offered a job. He saw himself leaving the city and immediately setting up somewhere — Switzerland, maybe, or even Taiwan, slightly away from the mainstream but still in a legitimate position. It could still happen, he told himself as he lathered on the foam; a scientist with his knowledge was a valuable commodity.

But Rostislawitch knew the truth. He was fifty, and Russian, and even the people who didn’t know the specifics of his past weren’t likely to take a chance on a scientist whose resume was nebulous — let alone knowingly hire a scientist who’d worked with weaponized bacteria. The public hysteria about genetic engineering would make him a positive liability to any big company that hired him, even as a janitor: he’d be proof positive that they were out to poison the food chain.

The world was an ironic place — very Russian, Rostislawitch thought. One’s past channeled him into a difficult future.

Twenty-five years ago, Artur Rostislawitch had been the equivalent of a superstar in his field, a young prodigy who had found a way to easily induce mutations in a select group of bacteria. His work for the Defense Ministry had earned him not just an apartment in Moscow and a dacha on the Black Sea but his own research lab about fifty miles outside of the capital. Two years later, his work had progressed to the point where a special bunker had been built to contain it; completely underground, the facility had elaborate protocols and security equipment not so much to keep people out but the bacteria being developed there in. The only unfortunate thing about the facility was its location in northeastern Chechnya, a vile place in Rostislawitch’s opinion, though the lack of any real possibility of culture or entertainment did help focus him on his work.

He’d celebrated his thirtieth birthday alone, toasting himself in his lab room with a large cake and a bottle of vodka. He’d felt a bit sorry for himself. His wife was at the dacha, but a pending visit by Gorbachev to the lab meant Rostislawitch couldn’t get away long enough to visit her. He’d gotten pretty drunk that night — so drunk in fact that he had spent the next day in bed, trying to overcome his hangover.

Little did he know that that would be the highlight of his career.

The discoveries that had come so easily in his twenties had already started to thin out. The strands of bacteria that he had produced — members of the same family as those that cause botulism — proved insufficiently hardy; slight variations in temperature killed them, making them unsuitable for use in weapons. And since his work was designed to produce bacteria that could be used as weapons in a war against the U.S., this was a major problem.

Still, he persevered. He found a family of bacteria that seemed promising — B^589-A. It was uncharacteristically difficult to replicate, unfortunately, because of a quirk in its genetic structure. That took even longer to solve.

In the meantime, the Soviet Union ceased being the Soviet Union. Gorbachev was replaced by Yeltsin — a boob who had Rostislawitch’s dacha and apartment taken away. Biological weapons, never as glamorous as nuclear bombs or energy rays, fell further out of favor.

The war in Chechnya was an utter disaster; at the end, Rostislawitch and his staff fled barely twelve hours ahead of a rebel assault. As a safety precaution, he had ordered that the bunker be blown up, along with all the stores of B^589-A. Tears came to his eyes as the ground reverberated with the first explosion; he watched as the earth rolled with the shock waves, dust rising like steam as the plastique did its work sixty feet below. By the time he boarded the canvas-topped UAZ jeep the military had sent to evacuate him, Rostislawitch was bawling like a baby.

For eight months, he did absolutely nothing. He and his wife had moved to St. Petersburg and lived with his brother and his family. Ironically, he looked on that period as now one of the happiest of his life. He and his wife had renewed not so much their marriage but their friendship; Olga went everywhere with him, to all of the ministries as he applied for funds to resume his research. She remained faithful and encouraging, supportive in a way that she’d had little chance to show in his years of success.

An image of her came to him now — Olga with his two nephews, minding them while his brother and sister- in-law went out to the store. The boys were three and four, a handful but in a good way. They called Rostislawitch “Uncle Baboon” because he could pretend to be one so well. Olga would hide her grin as they begged him to play.

It was only after Yeltsin died that Rostislawitch had found his way back to the research. The lab was a poor one, outside Saratov. The security was a joke, and the equipment was worse. He was lucky, however, to have two decent assistants, and slowly began re-creating his original research.

And then, five years ago, after a long, long struggle, they had made a breakthrough with B^{589- A}, creating a mutation that allowed the bacteria to breed five times as fast as other members of the family. This made it virtually impossible to stop. Anyone infected would begin to die within twelve hours; by the time the symptoms were seen, it would be far too late to treat.

Several problems remained to be solved before the bacteria could be actually used as a weapon, but they were mechanical things, in Rostislawitch’s opinion. He stood on the brink of a great success, one that would revolutionize warfare.

And then the roof caved in.

One afternoon, Rostislawitch was summoned to Moscow without explanation. He was driven to the Kremlin, and surprised — stunned, really — to be brought into the presence of the Premier, Mikal Fradkov, the second most important man in the Russian government after the President. Rostislawitch felt flattered, and stood trembling. When Fradkov began to speak, Rostislawitch was so nervous that he didn’t comprehend the Premier’s few sentences.

Suddenly Rostislawitch realized that Fradkov was very angry.

“What kind of man are you?” Fradkov demanded.

Rostislawitch looked at him in amazement. “Just a Russian.”

“A Russian who wishes to doom mankind.”

Rostislawitch had long considered the consequences of his work; he knew very well that his creation was designed to kill indiscriminately and in great numbers. But he considered it nothing more than what a nuclear bomb would do. The Americans, he was sure, were working along much the same lines. Russia needed its own weapon as a defense.

Unsure what to say, Rostislawitch began to explain that he was only following orders.