The Demon in the Freezer Read Free Page B

had brought him many samples before—there had been many anthrax threats in the past. The FBI had become an important client of USAMRIID.
    They went through some security doors, turned down a corridor that had green cinder-block walls, and stopped in front of the entry door to suite AA3, a group of laboratory rooms kept at Biosafety Level 3, where Ezzell worked. The agents formally transferred the containers to USAMRIID, and they gave Ezzell some chain-of-custody forms, or “green sheets,” which had to be kept with the evidence, in case it was used in a trial.
    Ezzell carried the containers into a small changing room at the entrance of the suite. He stripped down to his skin and put on green surgical scrubs but no underwear. He put on surgical gloves and sneakers and booties, he gowned up, and he fitted a respirator over his nose and mouth. Ezzell has been immunized to anthrax—all laboratory workers at Rid get booster shots once a year against anthrax. He carried the containers into a warren of labs in suite AA3 and placed them inside a laminar-flow hood—a glass safety cabinet with an open front in which the air is pulled up and away from a sample, preventing contamination.
    Ezzell broke the evidence tape, opened the containers and the bags, and carefully unwrapped the aluminum foil. A silky-smooth, pale tan powder started coming off the foil and floating into the air, and up into the hood. The envelope inside one foil packet contained about two grams of the powder—enough to fill one or two sugar packets. It was postmarked Trenton, New Jersey, October 9th.
    He opened the other foil packet, which contained the letter that had been inside the envelope. It was covered with words written in block capitals:

    09-11-01
    YOU CAN NOT STOP US.
    WE HAVE THIS ANTHRAX.
    YOU DIE NOW.
    ARE YOU AFRAID?
    DEATH TO AMERICA.
    DEATH TO ISRAEL.
    ALLAH IS GREAT.

    John Ezzell took up a metal spatula—a sort of metal knife—and slid it very slowly inside the envelope. He took up a small amount of the powder on the tip of the spatula, lifted it out, and held it up inside the hood. He wanted to get the powder into a test tube, but it started flying off the spatula, the particles dancing up and away into the hood, pulled by the current of air in the hood. The powder had a pale, uniform, light tan color. It had tested positive in the rapid field test for anthrax, and it had the appearance of a biological weapon.
“Oh, my God,”
Ezzell said aloud, staring at the particles flying off his knife.
    National Security
    OCTOBER 16, 2001
    IN THE EARLY HOURS of the day after the anthrax-laden letter was opened in Tom Daschle’s office, Peter Jahrling, the senior scientist at USAMRIID, was awakened by the sound of his pager. Jahrling (his name is pronounced “Jar-ling”) lives in a small, split-level house in an outer suburb of Washington. The house is yellow and has a picket fence around it. Jahrling’s wife, Daria, was asleep beside him, and their children were asleep in their rooms—two daughters, Kira and Bria, and a son named Jordan, whom Peter calls the Karate Kid because Jordan is a black-belt champion. Their oldest child, a daughter named Yara, had left for college earlier that fall.
    Jahrling looked at his watch: four o’clock. He put on his glasses, and, wearing only Jockey shorts, he walked down a short hallway into the kitchen, where his pager was sitting on the counter. It indicated that the call had come from the commander’s office at USAMRIID— from Colonel Edward M. Eitzen, Jr.
    Jahrling called him back. “Hey, Ed, this is Peter. What’s up?”
    Eitzen had been awake all night. “I want you to come into the office right now.” Some issues, he said, had arisen relative to the Institute’s characterization of the “sample.” He was being vague. “There’s highly placed interest in the sample.”
    Jahrling realized that the sample in question was the anthrax letter that had been delivered to U SAMRIID by the FBI the