Robin Cook - Vector

“Maybe he called last week?” Jack suggested.

“That could be,” Yuri said.

“Maybe we should call your cab company,” Jack suggested. “It would be helpful to know if Mr. Papparis was a regular customer. You see, he died of a rare infectious disease which I’m eager to investigate. Any information I could find out about his activities last week such as whether he visited his warehouse could be important. I’m also interested in contacts. Especially last week and particularly Friday.”

“I can give you the dispatch phone number,” Yuri said.

“Fair enough,” Jack said. “Let me get a pencil and a piece of paper.”

While Jack ducked back into the rug company office, Yuri breathe a sigh of relief. For a moment he thought that he’d made a terrible blunder coming to the rug company’s office. Now he was confident there wouldn’t be a problem. Dispatch wouldn’t offer any information. They never did, especially not about yellow cabs.

Jack returned in a moment and wrote down the name and number.

“What kind of disease did Mr. Papparis die of?” Yuri asked. He was curious what the authorities knew or suspected.

“A disease called anthrax,” Jack said.

“I know something about that,” Yuri said. “It’s a disease mostly of cattle.”

“I’m impressed,” Jack said. “How did you happen to know that?”

“I saw it as a boy,” Yuri explained. “I grew up in the Soviet Union in a city called Sverdlovsk. In the rural areas outside the city cows and sheep occasionally were infected.”

“I’ve heard of Sverdlovsk,” Jack said. “In fact, it was just today. I read that there was a leak there of anthrax from a secret bioweapons plant.”

Yuri practically gulped. He was staggered by Jack’s offhand comment. It was so totally unexpected, especially after Yuri had just been torturing himself with its recollection.

“Did you ever hear anything about that episode?” Jack asked. “Apparently there were a lot of cases and a lot of deaths.”

“I didn’t hear about anything like that,” Yuri said. He had to clear his throat.

“I’m not surprised,” Jack said. “I don’t think the Soviet government wanted anybody to know. For years they tried to say that it came from contaminated meat.”

“There were episodes of contaminated meat,” Yuri managed.

“The problem I’m talking about occurred in 1979,” Jack said. “Did you live in Sverdlovsk then?”

“I guess,” Yuri said vaguely. He was aware he was trembling. As soon as he could, Yuri broke away from Jack and hurried back to his cab. While he started the engine he looked back. Jack was putting his mask and gloves back on. At least he wasn’t out in the street trying to write down Yuri’s license number.

Putting the car in gear, Yuri drove off. His euphoria had been short-lived. Now he felt panic again. Although Jason Papparis’s death confirmed the potency of his anthrax, Yuri was concerned that a state official who related anthrax to its use as a weapon was out on site investigating the case. He had taken pains to infect someone who could have gotten the disease through occupational exposure. That fact was supposed to preclude any investigation.

Despite his distress, Yuri snapped off his off-duty light. Rush hour was a prime time for taxi work, provided the traffic didn’t bog down. Yuri needed the money. He had to work, and he picked up a fare almost immediately.

For the next hour, Yuri did short hops up and down Manhattan and back and forth across town. None of the customers bothered him too much, but the traffic did. Preoccupied and agitated, he found his patience stretched to the breaking point. After several near accidents, particularly one at Third Avenue and Fifty-fifth Street, Yuri decided to give up. When the fare climbed from the taxi at his destination, Yuri called it quits for the day. He put on his off-duty sign and headed for home in Brighton Beach. It was only a little after five P.M., his shortest day since he’d had the flu six months previously. But Yuri didn’t care. What he needed was a shot of vodka and, unfortunately, his flask was dry.

During the trip across the Brooklyn Bridge, which seemed to take forever with the bumper-to-bumper traffic, Yuri agonized over the meeting with Jack Stapleton. He couldn’t understand what was motivating the man. What worried him particularly was that Jack might find some residue from the ACME Cleaning Service letter if not the letter itself. Yuri had no idea what had become of it. His original assumption was that the letter would be thrown away like all junk mail. But now that Jack was on the scene, Yuri wasn’t so confident.

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 nineteen-twenties. 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.

Yuri had been robbed once. It had happened only months after renting the house. He’d come home around nine o’clock in the evening to find the place trashed. The burglars, apparently irritated at not finding anything of value, vented their frustration on Yuri’s meager furniture.