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

retouching job was on a photograph of Elvis lying dead in his coffin, which ran on the cover of the
Enquirer. Elvis's bloated face looked a lot better in Stevens's version than it did in the handiwork of the
mortician.
Robert Stevens was a kindhearted man. He filed the barbs off his fishing hooks so that he could
release a lot of the fish he caught, and he took care of feral cats that lived in the swamps around his
house. There was something boyish about him. Even when he was in his sixties, children in the
neighborhood would knock on the door and ask his wife, Maureen, "Can Bobby come out and play?"
Not long before he died, he began working for The Sun, a tabloid published by American Media, the
company that also owns the National Enquirer. The two tabloids shared space in an office building in
Boca Raton.
On Thursday, September 27th, Robert Stevens and his wife drove to Charlotte, North Carolina,
to visit their daughter Casey. They hiked at Chimney Rock Park, where each autumn brings the
spectacular sight of five hundred or more migrating hawks soaring in the air at once, and Maureen took a
photograph of her husband with the mountains behind him. By Sunday, Stevens was not feeling well.
They left for Florida Sunday night, and he got sick to his stomach during the drive home. On Monday,
he began running a high fever and became incoherent. At two o'clock on Tuesday morning, Maureen
took him to the emergency room of the John F. Kennedy Medical Center in Palm Beach County. A
doctor there thought he might have meningitis. Five hours later, Stevens started having convulsions.
The doctors performed a spinal tap on him, and the fluid came out cloudy. Dr. Larry Bush, an
infectious-disease specialist, looked at slides of the fluid and saw that it was full of rod-shaped bacteria
with flat ends, a little like slender macaroni. The bacteria were colored blue with Gram stain-they were
Gram-positive. Dr. Bush thought, anthrax. Anthrax, or Bacillus anthracis, is a single-celled bacterial
micro-organism that forms spores, and it grows explosively in lymph and blood. By Thursday, October
4th, a state lab had confirmed the diagnosis. Stevens's symptoms were consistent with inhalation anthrax,
which is caused when a person breathes in the spores. The disease is extremely rare.
There had been only eighteen cases of inhalation anthrax in the past hundred years in the United
States, and the last reported case had been twenty-three years earlier. The fact that anthrax popped into
Dr. Bush's mind had not a little to do with recent news reports about two of the September 11th
hijackers casing airports around south Florida and inquiring about renting crop-dusting aircraft. Anthrax
could be distributed from a small airplane.
Stevens went into a coma, and at around four o'clock in the afternoon of Friday, October 5th, he
suffered a fatal breathing arrest. Minutes later, one of his doctors made a telephone call to the Federal
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention-the CDC-in Atlanta, and spoke with Dr. Sherif Zaki, the
chief of infectious-diseases pathology.
Sherif Zaki inhabits a tiny office on the second floor of Building 1 at the CDC. The hallway is
made of white cinder block, and the floor is linoleum. The buildings of the CDC sit jammed together and
joined by walkways on a tight little campus in a green and hilly neighborhood in northeast Atlanta.
Building 1 is a brick oblong with aluminum-framed windows. It was built in the nineteen fifties, and the
windows look as if they haven't been cleaned since then. Sherif Zaki is a shy, quiet man in his late forties,
with a gentle demeanor, a slight stoop in his posture, a round face, and pale green eyes distinguished by
dazzling pupils, which give him a piercing gaze. He speaks precisely, in a low voice. Zaki went out into
the hallway, where his pathology group often gathered to talk about ongoing cases. "Mr. Stevens has
passed away," he said.
"Who's going to do the post?" someone asked. A post is a postmortem exam, an autopsy.
Zaki and his team were going to do the post.

Early the next morning, on Saturday, October 6th, Sherif Zaki and his team of CDC pathologists
arrived in West Palm Beach in a chartered jet, and a van took them to the Palm Beach County medical
examiner's office, which takes up two modern, one-story buildings set under palm trees on a stretch of
industrial land near the airport. They went straight to the autopsy suite, carrying bags of tools and gear.