He ran a hand through his hair and swung a heavy gaze over the bodies of the girls in the corner. Perhaps he could join them? Ask if they knew Petrov? Suggest a dance.
Oh for God’s sake.
From behind Vasin came the scrape of a chair. Kuznetsov, his oiled hair falling over his brow in an untidy lick, settled his sturdy bulk at Vasin’s table.
“Enjoying our Arzamas nightlife? Hear you’ve been busy.”
Vasin, slowed by the drink, focused blearily on his roommate. To his own surprise, Vasin found himself pleased to see him.
“Help me finish the bottle?”
“It’s in my job description, old man. Duty to my Motherland.”
Vasin was back under the kontora’s watchful eye.
CHAPTER THREE
MONDAY, 23 OCTOBER 1961
SEVEN DAYS BEFORE THE TEST
I
Vasin awoke late. He found Kuznetsov in the kitchen, immersed in a copy of Science and Life magazine.
“Morning. Coffee’s cold, I’m afraid.”
“It’s nearly nine. Why didn’t you wake me?”
“Thought you needed your beauty sleep, old man. Seemed tired last night.” Kuznetsov looked up from his magazine with an affectionate smile. “We want you to have a restful time in Arzamas.”
“Fuck off, Kuznetsov.”
“You’re welcome.”
Vasin dressed quickly in his civilian clothes, swigged the remains of Kuznetsov’s cold coffee straight from the pan. There was something about last night’s conversation with Adamov that had sent Vasin’s mind running. That catch in the Professor’s voice as he spoke of Petrov’s father. A curious tension as he spoke of his old colleague from the heroic days.
“Drive me to kontora in that crate of yours?”
“Your wish is my command, O master.”
“And while I’m there, I need to speak to Axelrod.”
“Axelwho?”
“Come on. Vladimir Axelrod. Petrov’s colleague from the lab. Adamov said I should speak to him about laboratory security.”
“Adamov said that?” The warmth had vanished from Kuznetsov’s voice.
Vasin paused as he pulled on his mackintosh and shot his roommate a raised-eyebrow glance.
“Want me to send some more telegrams? I thought we were all in a hurry to get this done.”
“Okay, okay. Calm down. I get it, old man. You can summon lightning from the heavens. No need to repeat the trick. I’ll find you your Axelrod. Will have him washed and brought to your tent.”
II
The registry of the KGB headquarters was almost deserted. The duty archivist, a plump brunette with a lopsided hairdo, looked up resentfully from her novel as Vasin leaned into the doorway.
“Registry’s shut till lunch. Sanitary day.”
“Library?”
“Library’s open.”
“Library’s what I need. Great Soviet Encyclopedia?”
Vasin tried a smile, which the girl extinguished with an irritated sneer.
“Over there. General Reference.”
He recognized the familiar dull red volumes massed officiously in the corner.
“Thanks. Here.” Vasin pulled Zaitsev’s copy of Krokodil out of his mackintosh pocket and tossed it onto the girl’s desk. “It’s a good one. Hilarious piece on collecting the sperm of champion bulls.”
Vasin quickly found the encyclopedia entry on Fyodor Petrov’s father.
“Petrov, Arkady Vasilyevich, born St. Petersburg, Russian Empire, 10 July 1901. Nuclear physicist. Member of the All-Union Academy of Sciences. Hero of Socialist Labor. Laureate of the Stalin Prize, 1951.”
Arkady Petrov’s brilliant career occupied half a page. A doctorate at age twenty-one from the Physics Department of Leningrad State University. Work at Niels Bohr’s Institute for Theoretical Physics in Copenhagen, 1930. Then Cambridge in 1934, working with Pyotr Kapitsa. Zurich, 1935. Returned to the USSR 1936, appointed deputy head of the Department of Theoretical Physics at the Institute of Physics and Technology in Kharkov, Ukraine. Became the department’s director the following year. Then a place at the All-Union Academy of Sciences; prizes; State laurels.
Vasin puzzled over the list of Petrov senior’s discoveries and scientific articles: “The Density Matrix Method in Quantum Mechanics.” “The Quantum Mechanical Theory of Diamagnetism.” “The Theory of Superfluidity.” He understood not a word. Only at the very end of the entry did Petrov’s official life revert to simple human terms: “Spouse: Nina Petrovna Scherbakova, b. Kursk 1913, d. Moscow 1959. Issue: Fyodor Arkadyevich Petrov, b. Moscow 1929.” In the encyclopedia’s next edition, doubtless, the painstaking editors would add the date of Fyodor’s death.
Vasin opened another volume.
“Adamov, Yury Vladimirovich. Born Baku, Russian Empire, 9 December 1900.” Adamov’s path through the Soviet physics world had been no less stellar than Petrov’s. A post at the People’s Commissariat for Education. Work at Göttingen and Leipzig in the twenties. He had, according to the encyclopedia, put his name to the “Adamov pole in quantum electrodynamics,” “Adamov’s equations for S matrix singularities,” “Adamov’s theory of second-order phase transitions.” Whatever those might be.
Then Vasin spotted it. “1932–37: Head of the Department of Theoretical Physics, Kharkov Institute of Physics and Technology.” So Adamov had been Petrov senior’s boss in Kharkov, before Petrov took over his post.
But what followed immediately after was stranger. “1944: Senior researcher, All-Union Scientific Research Institute of Experimental Physics.” Nothing between 1937 and 1944. Petrov’s entry for the same period had been a steady stream of publications, academic posts, prizes. But for seven years Adamov’s biography was a perfect blank. Which could mean only one thing.
The Professor had spent those years as a prisoner in the Gulag.
III
By daylight the colonnaded entrance of the Citadel, with its crowds of hurrying people, reminded Vasin more than ever of a grand transport terminus. And like a railway station, the facade on Kurchatov Square concealed a deep hinterland of offices, glass-roofed laboratories, and bunkers that extended back into the far distance, shut off from the surrounding boulevards by high brick walls. Kuznetsov effortfully parked his car almost straight in an official spot under the critical gaze of a traffic policeman.
Vasin recognized Axelrod from the crowd of assistants around Adamov the night of the lecture. He was angular and pale, with the kind of face that was sharp in the flesh but fudged in memory. He stood alone in the echoing lobby, his clothes hanging off his skinny frame.
“Axelrod. Vladimir Moiseyevich.”
The scientist pronounced his name in a murmur, standing almost to attention.
“Vasin. Alexander Ilyich.”
They shook hands. Vasin removed his trilby hat and tried a smile that was not returned. Axelrod peered through rimless spectacles, waiting for his visitor to speak.
“Thank you for seeing me at such short notice. I know how valuable your time is.”
Axelrod’s faced twitched at the irony. Did he have a choice?
Axelrod motioned the KGB men toward the turnstiles. Kuznetsov made to go through, but Vasin stopped him with a hand on the shoulder, leaning close to whisper into his ear.
“Can I handle this one alone? He looks like a nervous customer to me.”
Kuznetsov began to answer, but Vasin cut him off.
“Please. Trust an old detective. It will save time, I promise.”
Kuznetsov frowned, but nodded.
After their passes had been scrutinized, Axelrod moved quickly, disappearing at speed down a corridor that led into the heart of the building.
They reached a stairwell fragrant with tobacco smoke.
&n
bsp; “Wait. Vladimir Moiseyevich,” called Vasin. “Shall we?”
Axelrod resignedly retraced his steps. Vasin offered him an Orbita, but the scientist declined in favor of his own, an unfamiliar blue packet with a swirl of stylized blue smoke on the cover. Foreign.
“You know why I am here?”
Axelrod nodded.
“You were friends with the deceased?”
“Yes. Dr. Petrov and I were friendly.”
The man was clearly nervous.
“I saw your late friend yesterday morning.”
Axelrod went pale.
“What do you mean?”
“In the morgue.” Vasin paused a moment to let the thought sink in. “What killed him was terrible.”
“I…I can’t imagine.”
“I think you can imagine it. And I believe it keeps you awake at night.”
Axelrod said nothing, inhaling deeply through his cigarette.
“I’ve read your interview. General Zaitsev is a brute.”
A spark kindled in Axelrod’s eye. A sideways glance that said: Come now, Major, you’re going to have to try harder than that.
Vasin plowed on.
“Understand Zaitsev. To an axe, every problem looks like a log to be split. Zaitsev’s job is to provide solutions that are acceptable to all. So, he looks for a solution to the Petrov problem. Negligence? The Institute will be upset. Madness? Petrov’s father won’t believe it. So Petrov himself cannot be the culprit. So Zaitsev finds other factors that can be blamed. Subversive foreign literature. Pressure of work. Comrades too distracted by their heroic labors to notice a mind under strain. In Zaitsev’s world, he begins with the solution and works back to his suspect.”
The scientist looked Vasin over with a new curiosity.
“Are you always so frank with your interviewees?”
“No. But they’re usually not cultured men such as yourself. I thought we would save time by dispensing with the formalities.”
Axelrod brushed the compliment aside.
“By saying this you wish to tell me that Zaitsev’s world is not your world?”
“I am saying that I wish to get to the truth.”
“Of course you do.”
Axelrod sounded unconvinced. He volunteered nothing else, and they crushed out their cigarettes in unison. The urn had been freshly emptied, Vasin noticed, not the usual filthy mess of week-old butts he found in most offices.
“You wanted to inspect Dr. Petrov’s last workstation, Comrade Major?”
Vasin followed Axelrod’s retreating figure as he clattered down stairs, deep into the basement. The levels were marked with codes. The young scientist finally stopped before a set of heavy double doors marked LABORATORY ZH-4.
They stepped inside a vast concrete hangar lit with rows of industrial lamps. In the center was a machine at least as long as a locomotive, a massive tubular structure sprouting cables. On either side was a row of steel-cased instruments with buttons and dials that reminded Vasin of soda-vending machines. The place had the sacramental atmosphere of the Kremlin cathedrals he had visited with Nikita, cavernous and full of unfathomable mysteries. He sniffed the air. The place had a familiar odor that Vasin couldn’t place.
“The smell? Everyone notices it the first time they come in here. It’s the same as the metro. High-voltage electricity creates charged plasma when it passes through air. Ionizes it, creates ozone. That’s what you’re smelling.”
Axelrod led the way past banks of instruments, some attended by lab-coated young men who cast quick, unfriendly glances at Vasin as he passed. Raised voices came echoing down the hall in a high-pitched argument. Axelrod paused for a moment to tune in to the quarrel, got the gist, then dismissed it with a shake of the head.
“Sorry. Everyone’s on edge around here. Not much sleep. The test, you know. Working the machine day and night.”
They had paused at the foot of the giant cylinder with a clear view along its whole mighty bulk, twice the length of a metro carriage.
“What does it…do?”
Axelrod grinned for the first time. Here he was on home territory.
“It’s a mass spectrometer.” Axelrod registered the investigator’s blank look. “We bombard samples with ions and pass them through a magnetic field. It separates the stream into their different atoms, by weight. The heaviest atoms bend more. This one is based on an American design they called a calutron. It’s mostly used for separating uranium into its different isotopes. On an industrial scale, it’s one of the ways of refining uranium to weapons grade. But this is a baby one. For experiments.”
As a young detective Vasin had wasted hours following up citizens’ paranoid denunciations of neighbors who were taking too close an interest in radio parts. But here Axelrod scattered military secrets like the husks of sunflower seeds.
“Don’t look so alarmed, Major. There’s nothing secret about the principle. While we were having our Great October Revolution, the English were building the first of these machines. In forty years’ time, I promise you, the capitalists will be trying to copy ours.”
A row of large glass-walled rooms lined one wall. In each one stood a laboratory bench topped with powerful ventilator fans. Axelrod led Vasin up to one of the plate-glass windows.
“This is where the samples are prepared for spectrum analysis. They must be turned into gases for the process to work. And—there—you see where the samples are kept.”
Vasin followed his guide’s pointing finger and saw a glass cabinet in the corner of the chamber. It had its own ventilator and contained stacks of dull metal cylinders the size of large coffee mugs. In the corner stood an instrument that Vasin was coming to recognize, a Geiger counter.
“The radioactive samples are kept in those lead cylinders. One or two grams in each.”
They were interrupted by a momentary dimming of the lights in the hall, like the lamps on the metro signaling the arrival of the last train. A bass thrum began to vibrate through the concrete floor.
“Bother,” said Axelrod.
Bother? Vasin looked askance. That’s how they swear round here?
“It’s the next-door laboratory. We share a generator. They’re starting up their pneumatic rams. They’re meant to bloody warn us.”
“Pneumatic rams?”
“For a barometric chamber. Measures sudden changes in pressure. We built it for particle and gas research. But for the last year they’ve been letting Dr. Mueller use it. One of our German guests. Been with us since the war. He uses it for his experiments on shock wave effects.”
The lights flickered slightly as the thrum increased. Vasin turned back to the workstations.
“Petrov worked here?”
“Right here.”
“And he used thallium?”
“Certainly. We use thallium as a control. It’s one of our most predictable alpha emitters.”
“Alpha?”
“There are three general types of radiation. Gamma is the most penetrating. Cosmic rays are gamma radiation. They cross the universe at the speed of light and travel right through the earth. Thousands of them are passing through your body every second. The atmosphere screens us from their most harmful effects. Beta radiation is less penetrating, but more dangerous because it has more energy. Alpha radiation is the opposite of gamma. It has far more energy than beta or gamma. But luckily for us it cannot penetrate human skin. Thallium emits mostly alpha radiation.”
“So why…?”
“Why is it deadly? Because once it gets inside the body it is absorbed by the digestive system. Your bloodstream takes it to every part of the body. The alpha particles destroy everything around them, especially human cells. So every organ disintegrates from inside. The effect is…as you saw.”
Axelrod�
�s face flushed, like a child’s, and tears abruptly spilled from his eyes.
The scientist turned and walked quickly away, a handkerchief to his face. Vasin tactfully turned his back. The cellar looked like a cave from a futuristic fairy tale. A captive monster squatted obscenely in its center sprouting wires from its head and guts. To dominate and conquer one’s fellow man, that was easy. The stupidest and most brutal of Vasin’s colleagues could do that in minutes. But to enslave nature itself to your purposes, like a genie inside a lamp? That was something akin to black magic.
“Forgive me.” Axelrod returned, his freckled face blotched red.
Vasin nodded in sympathy. The shock wave of bereavement could sometimes be an ally, he knew. He’d seen it burst men’s composure apart at the seams. Made them want to confide in strangers. He was glad of Kuznetsov’s absence.
“Do you have any idea how a man in this laboratory could ingest thallium by accident?”
“No.” Axelrod’s voice had become a bleak whisper. “In theory it might be possible that a few milligrams might escape from the fume chamber. We wear gas masks in there, of course. But we swabbed the one that Fyodor was using the day before he was taken ill and found nothing. He was a first-rate scientist, Major. And the technicians who work here designed the fume chamber. They would know if someone had made a foolish mistake. Not to mention the radiation alarms, those boxes that look like gramophone speakers along the wall. So, no. To answer your question, I do not see how a man could ingest a fatal dose of reagent by accident and not know it. But it’s hard to say without knowing how much was inside him. No one told us. Or me, anyway.”
“The pathologist believes Dr. Petrov ingested a lot.”
“How much?”
“Two thousand milligrams.”
Axelrod blanched.
“God almighty. He said milligrams? Are you sure? He must have said micrograms.”
“No. I know what he said, Doctor.”
“Two grams…” Axelrod barely registered Vasin as his eyes darted to the fume chamber, to his white-coated colleagues huddling over a disemboweled meter. He lowered his voice still further, making Vasin lean in to hear. “Two grams is the weight of an entire sample. We use maybe a thousandth of that as a control in the spectrometer. That is not an amount that could in any way be taken accidentally.”
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