The other source of their anger—that Connie was black— was equally mysterious. It wasn’t so much the prejudice itself that surprised Yuri. He was well aware of Curt and Steve’s racial bigotry. What got him was the amount of anger involved. It was so out of proportion, and the pseudo-religious explanation Steve had given seemed contrived. Neither Curt nor Steve had ever said anything to suggest they were at all religious.

And finally, there was the issue of the pest control truck and aerosolizer. Yuri couldn’t understand why they’d not obtained it yet. That was an important part of the agreement. Without it, Yuri would not be able to carry out his part of the operation. He needed a sprayer, and he needed it to be mobile. A point source was not anywhere near as effective.

In order to fix the inner door, Yuri suited up in the hazmat suit and opened the valve on the compressed air cylinder. The regulator wasn’t the demand variety used for scuba diving. Instead it kept a constant flow of air into the suit as a means of keeping any particles from the environment from gaining entry.

It was much harder to work in the suit and it was very hot, but Yuri didn’t mind. He knew the risk he’d be taking if he didn’t wear it. But it did slow him down.

After the door was fixed, Yuri turned his attention to the fermenter with the Clostridium botulinum. He tested the bacterial concentration and was again disappointed. He could not figure out why the culture continued to grow so slowly. As far as he knew he’d followed the culture conditions carefully that had been used so successfully in the Soviet Union when he’d worked with the organism a decade previously. The conditions had been determined to produce maximum culture growth and maximum toxin production.

The only thing Yuri could imagine was that air was getting into the fermenter. Clostridium botulinum was a bacteria that grew without oxygen. Consequently, Yuri had used carbon dioxide gas instead of air over the culture. Perhaps there was something wrong with the cylinder of carbon dioxide Curt’s troops had obtained for him. Unfortunately, Yuri didn’t have any way to analyze it, and requesting a new cylinder would take too long.

Yuri stood up from where he’d been bending down to check the internal fermenter temperature. It was a few degrees cooler than optimum, so he adjusted his jury-rigged waterbath thermostat. Having the temperature off certainly didn’t help, but it was not an adequate explanation for the slow growth.