“We both know that I can’t do that. The CIA has invested a lot of money into your work. They want you back again.”

Koralev slumped farther down into the chair. He had no fight in him at all. “I knew this would happen,” he said. “You will take me back?”

“Yes.”

“I knew they would never let me go. I can’t run. I’m too tired.”

Beatrix felt a flutter of sympathy for him. “Are you thirsty?”

“Yes,” he said.

There was a bottle of water in the back of the Vivaro. She collected it and, after removing the cuffs, gave it to him. He drank heartily.

“Thank you,” he said.

“I have some questions for you,” she said.

Koralev nodded wearily. “I have nothing to hide. Ask me whatever you want.”

“Why did you run?”

“You don’t know?”

“No,” she said.

“Have you heard of the Soviet Biopreparat program?”

Beatrix had never heard of it. “No,” she said.

“It goes back years. All the way back to Stalin. The Red Army was crushed in the First World War; then the Nazis killed millions more in the Second. My father died. My mother could barely find the food to feed me and my sister when we were growing up. Stalin wanted to make sure that the motherland was better prepared should a similar conflict arise in the future. He wanted to develop soldiers with advantages that would make them more efficient than the men they faced.”

“What kind of advantages?”

“Metabolic ones. Faster. Stronger. More endurance.” He coughed and then blew his nose into a handkerchief he took from his pocket. “He started with an embryologist. His name was Vladimir Ivanosky. He had been experimenting on chimpanzees. It didn’t work. Then he started working on monkey sperm, trying to impregnate volunteers. That didn’t work, either. But they didn’t give up.”

Beatrix had no idea where Koralev was going with this. She let him talk.

“Biopreparat is a bioweapons program. Chemical weapons. Diseases. Research into all of it. Vladimir worked there for many years, as did his son and then his grandson. The grandson is Nikita Ivanosky—he is also an embryologist. Nikita started to look at monkey DNA, examining how it could be changed.”

“How do you know this?” Beatrix asked.