Lance shook his head. “They’d risk war to win an election?”

Roth looked at him. “They’d do anything to stay in power.”

He pulled out a tablet and opened some video footage. It was satellite surveillance of a Russian city.

“This is Yekaterinburg,” Roth said.

“What am I looking at?”

“That’s the former Biopreparat Biological Weapon’s compound. Compound 19 they call it now.”

The compound looked like any other utilitarian, Russian science facility. Steam billowed from a chimney stack. Some cars made their way from the front gate toward one of the buildings. The camera panned across the city.

“What’s this?”

“One of the city’s main hospitals.”

It was a big facility. Multiple buildings. It looked like a group had gathered in the parking lot and they were protesting something.

“What’s going on?”

“The hospital was on lock down. From what we’ve been able to tell, there was a leak at a bioweapons production facility in the city. People were getting sick.”

“Are those corpses?” Lance said, pointing to some tarps in the parking lot.

Roth was about to answer when, bang, a flash of light disrupted the footage.

“What was that?”

“An airstrike.”

“Their own?”

Roth nodded.

“They hit their own facility?”

“Yes.”

“With an airstrike?”

Roth nodded gravely.

Lance said nothing. Roth didn’t have to tell him that anything that could cause the Russians to bomb one of their own hospitals in broad daylight was serious.

“What are you proposing?”

“Flying you to Yekaterinburg.”

“So that compound is where the bioweapon was produced?”

Roth pulled up satellite images. “The compound is quite large. They’ve got a lot of low-security buildings in there. Army administration. A factory producing kevlar vests. Another working on drone technology.”

“So a lot of workers?”

“A lot of workers. A lot of traffic.”

“Not a lot of security?”

“You won’t have any trouble getting into the compound itself. This building here is the Permafrost Pathogen Institute. From what we’ve been able to gather, that’s where the bioweapons research is being conducted.”

“Do we have schematics for the building?”

“Yes. They’re incomplete, but we were able to get the original drawings from when the building was constructed in the seventies. It was originally intended to be a civilian research center. It’s been retrofitted but the layout should be mostly the same.”

“All right.”

“Your biggest risk won’t be getting in. It will be accidentally releasing a pathogen.”

Roth pulled up some more photos.

“This is another facility in the south of the city,” he said. “This is where the leak seems to have occurred.”

“This is where the sick people are coming from?” Lance said.

“This building here is a textile factory. The first cases came from there. Then they spread in this direction. This is a school. These are apartments. That’s a shopping mall.”

“The area is very contained,” Lance said.

Roth nodded.