The Demon in the Freezer Read Free

was nothing in nature. On Sunday night, October 6th, Brad Perkins telephoned the director of the CDC, Dr. Jeffrey Koplan. “We have evidence for an intentional cause of death of Robert Stevens,” he said to Koplan. “The FBI needs to come into this full force.”
    Communiqué from Nowhere
    OCTOBER 15, 2001
    AT TEN O’CLOCK on a warm autumn morning in Washington, D.C., a woman—her name has not been made public—was opening mail in the Hart Senate Office Building, on Delaware Avenue. She worked in the office of Senator Tom Daschle, the Senate majority leader, and she was catching up with mail that had come in on the previous Friday. The woman slit open a hand-lettered envelope that had the return address of the fourth-grade class at the Greendale School in Franklin Park, New Jersey. It had been sealed tightly with clear adhesive tape. She removed a sheet of paper, and powder fell out, the color of bleached bone, and landed on the carpet. A puff of dust came off the paper. It formed tendrils, like the smoke rising from a snuffed-out candle, and then the tendrils vanished.
    By this time, letters containing grayish, crumbly, granular anthrax had arrived in New York City at the offices of NBC, addressed to Tom Brokaw, and at CBS, ABC, and the
New York Post.
Several people had contracted cutaneous anthrax. The death of Robert Stevens from inhalation anthrax ten days earlier had been widely reported in the news media. The woman threw the letter into a wastebasket and called the Capitol Police.
    Odorless, invisible, buffeted in currents of air, the particles from the letter were pulled into the building’s high-volume air-circulation system. For forty minutes, fans cycled the air throughout the Hart Senate Office Building, until someone finally thought to shut them down. In the end, the building was evacuated for a period of six months, and the cleanup cost twenty-six million dollars.
    THE HAZARDOUS MATERIALS RESPONSE UNIT of the Federal Bureau of Investigation—the HMRU—is stationed in two buildings at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia. When there is a serious or credible threat of bioterrorism, an HMRU team will be dispatched to assess the hazard, collect potentially dangerous evidence, and transport it to a laboratory for analysis.
    Soon after the Capitol Police got the call from the woman in Senator Daschle’s office, a team of HMRU agents was dispatched from Quantico. The Capitol Police had sealed off the senator’s office. The HMRU team put on Tyvek protective suits, with masks and respirators, retrieved the letter from the wastebasket, and did a rapid test for anthrax—they stirred a little bit of the powder into a test tube. It came up positive, though the test is not particularly reliable. This was a forensic investigation of a crime scene, so the team members did forensic triage. They wrapped the envelope and the letter in sheets of aluminum foil, put them in Ziploc bags, and put evidence labels on the bags. They cut out a piece of the carpet with a utility knife. They put all the evidence into white plastic containers. Each container was marked with the biohazard symbol and was sealed across the top with a strip of red evidence tape. In the early afternoon, two special agents from the HMRU put the containers in the trunk of an unmarked Bureau car and drove north out of Washington and along the Beltway. They turned northwest on Interstate 270, heading for Fort Detrick, outside Frederick, Maryland.
    Traffic is always bad on Interstate 270, but the HMRU agents resisted the temptation to weave around cars, and they went with the flow. It was hot and thunderstormy, too warm for October. Interstate 270 proceeds through rolling piedmont. The route is known as the Maryland Biotechnology Corridor, and it is lined with dozens of biotech firms and research institutes dealing with the life sciences. The biotech companies are housed in buildings of modest size, often covered with darkened or mirrored glass, and they are