Koltsovo is a naukograd, a Russian term meaning a ‘science city’, located in the Novosibirsk Oblast, roughly 1,800 miles due east of Moscow on the eastern outskirts of the city of Novosibirsk itself, the largest city in Siberia.
In the heyday of the USSR some naukograds were also designated as closed cities or ZATOs, meaning that specific permission was required before they could be visited by outsiders, but Vektor, as a relatively new institute established in 1974 and which only became a naukograd in 2003, twelve years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, was never a ZATO. Vektor is the core around which Koltsovo, originally the village of Novoborsk, grew. It’s a group of nondescript buildings, dominated by a main six-storey structure and all located within a boundary road. Despite its proximity to the city of Novosibirsk it’s fairly secluded, though probably not secluded enough bearing in mind what its vaults and freezers contain. Vektor holds samples of virtually all of the species-killer bugs found on the planet, including the deadliest of them all, the Filoviridae family, which includes the Ebola and Marburg filoviruses, as well as the less lethal but still profoundly unpleasant and sometimes fatal dengue, Lassa and yellow fever viruses.
Russian authorities are not big on identifying buildings, and particularly not those where activities of a classified or covert nature take place, but one fairly obvious clue that the buildings at Koltsovo contain something unusual is the permanent garrison of Russian Army soldiers who ensure that all visitors are both legitimate and expected.
The man who approached the Vektor complex that afternoon was very obviously, from his appearance alone, not a local.
The CIS, the Commonwealth of Independent States, is far and away the biggest national unit on the planet, covering well over 20 million square kilometres and bigger than the combined landmasses of North America and Canada. The population is equally massive, numbering about 240 million people speaking ten officially recognised regional languages and a host of minority tongues and dialects. With the freedom of movement that gradually became possible following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 a certain degree of population mixing has occurred, creating something of an international flavour in the bigger cities. But even in the most cosmopolitan and crowded of environments, the visitor to Koltsovo would have stood out.
Physically, he was about half a head taller than the average Russian male, and noticeably broad across the shoulders, but his build alone did not mark him out from the crowd. The complexions of the citizens of the CIS vary considerably with genetics and location, with people living in the north of the huge landmass tending to have a lighter skin colour than those from the south; there is also a kind of folk-belief in Russia that people hailing from the north of the country tend to be tall, white-skinned, lacking body hair, of good character, kind and pure. In contrast, those from the south are supposed to be the precise opposite, with dark complexions, lots of hair, short of stature and generally speaking of a bad or evil character. And it is certainly true that many Russian women, perhaps even a majority of them, tend to wear cosmetics that make their skin look a few shades lighter than its natural colour. In the West, of course, using spray tan to achieve precisely the opposite effect is more common.
But the one skin type that is rarely seen in Russia is an olive complexion, especially a dark olive complexion, and that was probably the defining characteristic of the visitor. Coupled with his imposing build, the combination meant that he was particularly noticeable. It also meant that when Mahdi Sadir had approached the Vektor buildings at Koltsovo on his first planned visit, almost a decade earlier, he had been immediately stopped at gunpoint by a Russian Army patrol and held for nearly half an hour while his documentation was scrutinised and his reason for being there questioned and checked. It was only when a senior member of the Vektor management had been contacted that he had been permitted to be escorted into the complex. That embarrassment had only occurred on his first trip to Koltsovo: the documentation he had carried with him after that had ensured his access to the building with a minimum of fuss on each of his later visits.
Sadir’s first visit to the complex had set the tone for his subsequent meetings, and the request he had made of the management and two of the scientists, in tandem with the financial package he was offering, had taken Vektor in an entirely new direction, into a field they had never explored before. It was new technology, with exciting and almost limitless potential, and the scientists at Koltsovo had embraced it. They were helped initially by the considerable amount of information they found published openly on the Internet, but quite quickly they had moved beyond that and begun carving their own paths and developing their own techniques and methods. And all of it had been funded by that single and effectively anonymous investor client who had told the Vektor management exactly what he wanted, what he needed it to do and when he wanted it.
And the Vektor scientists had risen to the challenge.
They had developed the product Sadir had wanted on time. It had been a relatively simple device and had proved comparatively easy to fabricate, ‘easy’ in this sense meaning that it was only required to do one thing, while the actual manufacturing process had been complex and detailed, involving manipulation at the smallest possible scale. It had also been complicated by the need to use external substances to achieve the required result.
But they had done it, and a slightly modified version of the product had been live-tested on an anonymous subject in front of the client in a suite of sealed rooms located deep inside the complex.
Sadir had declared himself happy with the result and had handed over the balance of the agreed fee in cash – in American dollars, in fact – and then left Koltsovo. That test had been performed on his second visit, when he had also authorised the manufacture of specific variants of the product in the quantities he required, to be collected the next time he visited Russia.
Delivery of the product had been the easiest part of the entire process. For each of his visits Sadir had followed exactly the same routine. He had arrived in Russia with a tourist visa, flying in to the Tolmachevo Airport in Novosibirsk on an internal flight from Saint Petersburg. He’d booked into the Marriott hotel in the city centre and then spent about a week acting as a tourist in the third most populous city in Russia. On one day that week he’d taken a taxi to Koltsovo, ostensibly to visit the railway museum, the park and the churches. The day after that he’d flown back to Saint Petersburg’s Pulkovo Airport and from there to Rome by Alitalia, and from Italy onwards to his final destination.
Each of his visits to Koltsovo had only lasted half a day, but that had been easily long enough for him to visit Vektor. On his third and final visit to the laboratory, when Sadir collected the products he had ordered, there had been ample time for him to pick up the goods in an isothermal cool pack. This was a grey fabric bag that looked something like a small washbag with two compartments secured by zips, which had been prepared for him by the staff at the laboratory. In fact, very little preparation had been needed because the bag and its contents – which in the larger compartment included a meter, testing equipment and other peripherals and in the second compartment space for a number of vials, needles and syringes as well as a pouch of cooling gel to keep the contents at the appropriate temperature – was an absolutely standard off-the-shelf item. Because of the quantity of the product he had ordered, he was also given a second isothermal pack that only contained vials.
There had been remarkably little chance of Sadir being stopped or searched anywhere along his route – the Russian authorities were always very wary of targeting or interfering with any tourist spending the hard currency that the country desperately needed – but the reality was that even if his bags were to be opened and searched by some inquisitive customs officer, and even if the isothermal pack was handled and examined, it would make no difference. Nobody would interfere with it and he would be allowed to continue his journey.
The product was only a single weapon in Sadir’s armoury, and it wasn’t even a particularly important part of his plan. It was just a device that would allow him to snip off one specific loose end that would inevitably be created because of what he was going to do, and it represented the only method of achieving the result he needed in the way he needed it to be done. And he had already decided that he would make additional use of the product ahead of the operation itself. It would be a useful test of its functionality, not to mention acting as a small payment towards a debt that in his opinion was long overdue.
More importantly, the first phase of his operation would begin in less than a month, and his preparations for it had already started, albeit from a distance. Now that Sadir had the product from Vektor he could make his final preparations and then begin the journey that he had planned for so long.