She believed in the coldness of the world. The hardness of it. Being locked in that two-room apartment with her dead mother for six days, holding her hand, talking to her, telling her bedtime stories, opening and closing her eyes every morning and night, made her believe in things other people were afraid to accept. That life was as hard as nature, and that man was the cruelest animal of all.

Winston Churchill once called his rival a sheep in sheep’s clothing. Tatyana knew all too well that too many of them were really wolves.

She wasn’t a traitor, she was a realist.

She worked for the GRU not because she believed in it, not the dogma, not the philosophy, not the politics. Like her mother and grandmother before her, she was a pragmatist before all else. She had no other choice.

And for all the pomp and ceremony, the oaths and emblems and mottos, that was how her superiors liked it. They believed it made her predictable, tractable.

As her car approached the gates, the eight concrete floors of the Permafrost Pathogen Institute loomed above her imperiously.

The government had established the institute when thawing cattle burial grounds in Yakutsk began causing spikes in anthrax deaths that hadn’t been seen in centuries. Traditionally, Siberians didn’t burn butchered animal carcasses. Firewood was too valuable. Instead, they buried them in the permafrost, which until recently, had been an effective means of disposal.

Now that the ground was thawing, spores that had been frozen for centuries were coming back to life.

Anthrax had always been a scourge in the region. They called it Siberian ulcer or Siberian plague. It caused painful black ulcers on the skin, fever, vomiting, bloody diarrhea, and eventually death.

During the Soviet era, it had been a favorite of bioweapons scientists. They tinkered with it, tailored it, developed new strains. A single gram of dried, aerosolized anthrax contained a trillion spores. There was no limit to the havoc it could wreak.

The scientists had two objectives when working on anthrax, increasing virulence and increasing antibiotics resistance. A number of bioweapons treaties, and a leak in 1979 from that very compound, hampered their progress.

But the work continued.

Even after the collapse of the Soviet Union it continued.

Right up to the present day.

Now, they were finding that the ancient strains coming from the permafrost were more lethal than anything the labs could ever come up with.

An outbreak in the Yamal region two years earlier had been completely untreatable. A hundred percent mortality rate.

The entire village, man, woman, child, dog, cat, rat and farm animal perished.

And the Kremlin took notice.

They called it a gift from the Motherland.