“Thank you,” Yuri said. “It’s very kind but I’m okay ...” He intended to elaborate but found himself surprisingly choked up. Reluctantly his mind pulled him back to 1979, the fateful year he lost both his mother and his brother. In particular, he thought about April 2nd.

The day started like every other workday with the raucous alarm pulling Yuri from the depths of sleep. At five A.M. it was as black as midnight, since Sverdlovsk was at about the same latitude as Sitka, Alaska. Winter had loosened its grip on the city, but spring had yet to arrive. The apartment wasn’t below freezing as it had been on February mornings and even into March, but it was cold just the same. Yuri dressed in the darkness without waking Nadya or Yegor, both of whom did not need to get up until seven. Nadya still worked at the ceramics factory. Yegor was in his last year of school and scheduled to finish that June.

After a quick, cold breakfast of stale bread and cheese in the deserted communal kitchen, Yuri set off in the darkness for the pharmaceutical plant. He’d been working there for only two years following the completion of his college training. Yet it had been a long enough period for him to know that the factory was not what it seemed. Yuri was not doing microbiological cultures for vaccine production as he’d been hired to do. Although some vaccines were being produced in the outer ring of the factory, Yuri worked in the larger, inner part. The vaccine work was a KGB cover for the real mission. The Sverdlovsk pharmaceutical facility was actually part of Bio-preparat, the massive Soviet bioweapons program. Yuri was a single cog in a work force of fifty-five thousand spread among institutions throughout the Soviet Union.

The factory was benignly called Compound 19. At the gate Yuri had to stop and present his identification card. Yuri knew the man in the gatehouse was KGB. Yuri stamped his feet against the predawn cold as he waited. There were no words. None were needed. The man nodded, handed back the card, and Yuri entered.

Yuri was one of the first members of the day shift to arrive. The facility ran twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. It fell to Yuri, a junior employee, and a few of his equivalent-level colleagues to do the required menial cleaning of the inner biocontainment core. The regular janitorial staff were not allowed into the area.

In the changing room Yuri nodded to his lockermate, Alexis. It was too early for conversation, especially since no one had had their morning tea or coffee. Silently they and two other peers donned their red biocontainment suits and switched on their ventilators. They didn’t even bother to look at each other through their clear plastic face masks as they checked themselves.

Fully encapsulated the group waited outside the pressure door until it automatically opened. No one tried to communicate as the pressure dropped in the entrance chamber. When the inner door opened, they went silently to their assigned stations. They moved slowly in the cumbersome suits, walking rather stiff-legged and appearing more like futuristic robots than people.