"Richard Preston - The Demon In The Freezer" - читать интересную книгу автора (Preston Richard)

Russian Federation, which seems to have secret military labs working on smallpox weapons today. The
list would also likely include India, Pakistan, China, Israel (which has never signed the Biocal Weapons
and Toxin Convention), Iraq, North Korea, Iran, the former Yugoslavia, perhaps Cuba, perhaps Taiwan,
and possibly France. Some of those counties may be doing genetic engineering on smallpox. Al-Qaeda
would be on the list, as well as Aum Shinrikyo, a Japanese religious cult that released satin nerve gas in
the Tokyo subway system. There is most likely a fair amount of smallpox loose in the world. The fact is
that nobody knows where all of it is or what, exactly, people intend to do with it.
Having been professionally obsessed with smallpox for years, Peter Jahrling couldn't help thinking
about what would happen if a loose pinch of dried variola virus had found its way into the letter to
Senator Daschle. We don't really know what is in that powder, he said to himself. What if it's a Trojan
horse? Anthrax does not spread as a contagious disease-you can't catch anthrax from someone who has
it, even if the victim coughs in your face-but smallpox could spread through North America like wildfire.
Jahrling wanted someone to look at the powder, and fast. He picked up his telephone and called the
office of a microscopist named Tom Geisbert, who worked on the second floor. He got no answer.
Tom Geisbert drove in that morning from Shepherdstown, West Virginia, where he lives, and
arrived at the USAMRIID parking lot around seven o'clock. He was driving a beat-up station wagon
with dented doors and body rust and an engine that had begun to sound like an outboard motor. He had
a new pickup truck with a V-8, but he drove the clunker to save money on gas. Geisbert, who was then
thirty-nine years old, grew up around Fort Detrick. His father, William Geisbert, had been the top
building engineer at USAMRIID and had specialized in biohazard containment. Tom became an electron
microscopist and a space-suit researcher. Geisbert is an informal, easygoing person, with shaggy, light
brown hair, blue eyes, rather large ears, and an athletic frame. He likes to hunt and fish. He usually
wears blue jeans and snakeskin cowboy boots; in cold weather, he'll have on a cable-knit sweater.
Geisbert went up a dingy stairwell to his office on the second floor of Rid. The office is small but
comfortable, and it has one of the few windows in the building, which gives him a view across a rooftop
to the slopes of Catoctin Mountain. He sat at his desk, starting to get his mind ready for the day. He
was thinking about a cup of coffee and maybe a chocolate-covered doughnut when Peter Jahrling barged
in, looking upset, and closed the door. "Where the heck have you been, Tom?"
Geisbert hadn't heard anything about the anthrax letter. Jahrling explained and said that he
wanted Geisbert to look at the powder using an electron microscope, and to do it immediately. "You
want to look for anything unusual. I'm concerned that this powder could be laced with pox. You also
want to look for Ebola-virus particles. If it's got smallpox in it, everybody's going to go around saying,
`Hey, it's anthrax,' and then ten days later we have a smallpox outbreak in Washington."
Geisbert forgot about his doughnut and coffee. He went downstairs to some windows that look
in on suite AA3, where John Ezzell was still working with the Daschle letter. Geisbert banged on the
window and got his attention. Speaking through a port in the glass, he asked if he could have a bit of the
powder to look at.




Part 2 - The Dreaming Demon

The Man in Room 151
EARLY 1970
 On the last day of December 1969, a man I will call Peter Los arrived at the airport in D├╝sseldorf,
West Germany, on a flight from Pakistan. He had been ill with hepatitis in the Civil Hospital in Karachi
and had been discharged, but he wasn't feeling well. He was broke and had been holed up in a seedy
hotel in a Karachi slum. His brother and father met him at the airport-his father was a supervisor in a
slaughterhouse near the small city of Meschede, in the mountains of NorthRhine Westphalia, in northern