South of Prospect Park Yuri stopped in a liquor store for a pint of vodka. Later, on Ocean Parkway, with the pint hidden in a brown paper bag, he took a couple of slugs when he was stopped for lights. That calmed him down considerably.

As he entered Brighton Beach and all the signs switched to the familiar Cyrillic alphabet, Yuri’s agitation ratcheted down a notch. The familiar letters provided a sense of nostalgia. Yuri felt like he was already home in Mother Russia. With the calmness came an ability to think. The first thought that came to him was that it might be wise to consider pushing up the date for Operation Wolverine.

Yuri nodded to himself as he turned onto his street. There was no doubt that advancing the date would help in regard to security concerns. It wasn’t that he was worried about being discovered. He just didn’t want his plans to be suspected. To be truly effective, a bioweapon should be launched with no warning. Yet pushing up the date was not without problems, particularly two big ones.

The first was that Yuri had yet to test the botulinum toxin, although he was more confident of its toxicity than he’d been about the pathogenicity of the anthrax powder. The other stumbling block was production. He wanted at least four or five pounds of the anthrax and about a quarter pound of the crystallized botulinum toxin. He didn’t care which agent he used for Central Park or which agent Curt used for the Jacob Javits Federal Building, since he was confident both would be equivalently effective. Meeting the production quota for the anthrax was not a problem, since he was already close to the amount needed, but the same was not true for the botulinum toxin. He was having difficulty with the Clostridium botulinum cultures. They just weren’t growing as he’d hoped or expected.

Yuri slowed as he approached his house. It was located in a warren of small structures that had been built as summer cottages in the 1920s. They all had wooden frames and small yards with postage-stamp-sized areas of fenced-in grass. Yuri’s house was one of the largest, and in contrast to most of the others, it had a freestanding two-car garage. Yuri rented the house from a man who’d moved to Florida but who was reluctant to give up his toehold in Brooklyn.

The garage door squeaked loudly as Yuri raised it. The interior was mostly empty, in contrast to the other garages in the area, which were crammed to the rafters with everything but cars. The floor of Yuri’s garage was stained from more than a half century’s worth of drippings from leaky vehicles. The stale smell of gas and oil fumes hung in the air. There was a small collection of yard tools, including an old push lawn mower against one wall. A wheelbarrow, some spare cinderblocks, and a collection of lumber leaned up against the other wall.

With his cab safely stored for the night, Yuri carried his empty flask and the half-empty pint of vodka to the house. With his house key he tried to open the back door. To his surprise the door was unlocked. He pushed it open and suspiciously looked inside.