It was there also, in July 1918, that Tsar Nicholas II, with his wife and children, was executed by the Bolsheviks. The site of the execution, or massacre depending on one’s viewpoint, was the famous Ipatiev House. In 1977, at the order of the Politburo and to prevent its becoming a symbol of revolution to future generations, local party chiefs oversaw the complete demolition of the house. Even the foundations were dug out of the ground.

The streets of the city were laid out on a sprawling grid exhibiting some of the Soviet Union’s most historically significant, if unattractive, constructivist architecture.

The mile upon mile of uniform, concrete buildings appeared soulless even to the men who built them. One of the more distinctive neighborhoods, known as the Chekist town, was built in the 1930’s to house the hundreds of members of the NKVD based in the city.

Rumors still circulated of underground interrogation rooms and torture chambers that the secret police used to terrorize the population.

It was in this neighborhood, in the city’s Infectious Disease Center a few blocks from the train station, that doctor Olga Abramova ran from her ward to make an urgent phone call.

The number she dialed was in the secretive government research institute located inside the military compound south of the city center.

Sofia Ivanovna was in her lab when the orderly came to get her.

“Doctor, you have a call. Very urgent.”

She followed him to the main office and picked up the phone. It was rare she got a call through the switchboard. It usually signaled something official, a dreaded Moscow call.

“This is Doctor Ivanovna,” she said.

“My patients are dying,” Olga said in her distinctive Irkutsk accent.

Olga grew up in a small village south of Lake Baikal close to the Mongolian border. She had a way of speaking that some people called unsophisticated.

Sofia had always thought it charming.

“Excuse me?” Sofia said.

Sofia was the daughter of a prestigious doctor in Moscow and had gone to all the best schools. Her youth had been about as different from Olga’s as was possible. She spoke English, German, and French fluently and had a way of making her Russian sound so soft and elegant that people in industrial Yekaterinburg sometimes mistook her for a foreigner.

She and Olga had studied together. They’d worked together before Sofia was plucked into military service and given the directorship of the institute. They’d been friends, and remained so.

“Pneumonia,” Olga said. She was agitated. “Something like that. We’ve had nine now.”

“Olga,” Sofia said. “Slow down. What on earth are you talking about?”

“Something’s not right,” Olga said. “Nine dead on this shift.”

“What?” Sofia said.

Sofia had never told Olga what exactly she did at the institute, only that it was classified government work, but of course Olga had her suspicions.