The Demon in the Freezer Read Free Page A

mixed in among office parks.
    The office parks thinned out beyond Gaithersburg, and the land opened into farms broken by stands of brown hickory and yellow ash. White farmhouses gleamed among fields of corn drying on the stalk. Catoctin Mountain appeared on the horizon, a low wave of the Appalachians, streaked with rust and gold. The car arrived at the main gate of Fort Detrick, where an Abrams tank was parked with its barrel aimed toward downtown Frederick. A little more than a month after September 11th, Fort Detrick remained in a condition of Delta Alert, which is the highest level of alert save for when an attack is in progress. There were more guards than usual, and they were conspicuously armed with M16s and were searching all vehicles, but the HMRU car went through without a search.
    The agents drove past the parade ground and parked in a lot that faces the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, or USAMRIID, the principal biodefense laboratory in the United States. U SAMRIID is pronounced “you-sam-rid,” but many people call it simply Rid, or they refer to it as the Institute. U SAMRIID ’s mission is to develop defenses against biological weapons, both medicines and methods, and to help protect the population against a terrorist attack with a biological weapon. U SAMRIID sometimes performs work for outside “clients”—that is, other agencies of the U.S. government. Fort Detrick was the center of the Army’s germ weapons research and development until 1969, when President Richard Nixon shut down all American offensive biowarfare programs. Three years later, the United States signed the Biological Weapons and Toxin Convention, or BWC, which bans the development, possession, or use of biological weapons. The BWC has been signed by more than one hundred and forty nations, some of which are observing the treaty while others are not.
    The main building of U SAMRIID is a dun-colored, two-story monolith that looks like a warehouse. It has virtually no windows, and tubular chimneys sprout from its roof. The building covers seven acres of ground. There are biocontainment suites near the center of the building—groups of laboratory rooms that are sealed off and kept under negative air pressure so that nothing contagious will leak out. The suites are classified at differing levels of biosecurity, from Biosafety Level 2 to Level 3 and finally to Level 4, which is the highest, and where scientists wearing biosafety space suits work with hot agents—lethal, incurable viruses. (A bioprotective space suit is a pressurized plastic suit that covers the entire body. It has a soft plastic head-bubble with a clear faceplate, and it is fed by sterile air coming through a hose and an air regulator.) The chimneys of the building are always exhausting superfiltered and superheated sterilized air, which is drawn out of the biocontainment zones. U SAMRIID was now surrounded by concrete barriers, to prevent a truck bomb from cracking open a Biosafety Level 4 suite and releasing a hot agent into the air.
    The HMRU agents opened the trunk of their car, took out the biohazard containers, and carried them across the parking lot into USAMRIID. In a small front lobby, the agents were met by a civilian microbiologist named John Ezzell. Ezzell is a tall, rangy, intense man, with curly gray hair and a full beard. FBI people who know him like to remark on the fact that Ezzell drives a Harley-Davidson motorcycle; they like his style. John Ezzell has been the anthrax specialist for the FBI’s Hazardous Materials Response Unit since 1996, when the unit was formed. Over the years, he has analyzed hundreds of samples of putative anthrax collected by the HMRU. The samples had all proven to be hoaxes or incompetent attempts to make anthrax—slime, baby powder, dirt, you name it. When Ezzell was analyzing samples for the HMRU, he would often live in the U SAMRIID building, sleeping on a folding cot near his lab.The agents