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

fifty different strains of smallpox inside the freezer. The samples are frozen in the little plastic vials called
cryovials. The cryovials stand upright in small white boxes made of cardboard or plastic, which are
divided with grid inserts, like cartons for storing wine. The boxes are stacked in metal racks, and they sit
suspended over the pool of liquid nitrogen, bathed in cold fumes. The entire volume of the CDC's
smallpox is about the size of a beach ball.t Officials at the CDC do not comment on such matters as
where exactly the smallpox is stored or what the freezer looks like. The freezer is on wheels, and it can
be moved around, and it may be moved from time to time, as in a shell game. It is covered with huge
chains that are festooned with padlocks the size of grapefruits. The chains are connected to anchors or
bolts in the floor or the walls, so that the freezer can't be moved unless the chains are unlocked or cut. I
have been told that the smallpox freezer can often be found sitting inside a steel chamber that is said to
resemble a bank vault. The variola vault is enlaced with alarms, and it may be disguised. You might look
straight at the vault and not know that your eyes are resting on the place where half the world's known
smallpox is hidden. There may be more than one variola vault. There may be a decoy vault. If you
opened the decoy vault, you could find a freezer full of vials labeled SMALLPOX that held nothing but
vaccine-a raised middle finger from the CDC to a feckless smallpox thief. The variola vault could be
disguised to look like a janitor's closet, but if you opened the door in search of a mop, you could find
yourself face-to-face with a locked vault, having set off screaming alarms. If the variola alarms go off,
armed federal marshals will show up fast.
The smallpox at the CDC's repository may be kept in mirrored form: there may be two freezers,
designated the A freezer and the B freezer. The A and B freezers (if they exist, which is unclear) would
each contain identical sets of vials-mirrored smallpox-so that if one freezer malfunctioned and its contents
were ruined, the variola mirror would remain. No one will talk about mirrored smallpox today, but
twenty years ago the smallpox was kept in mirrored form at the CDC. Whether that arrangement holds
true today is presumably not known to anyone but a handful of top people at the CDC and to some of
the security staff. People at the CDC do not discuss details of the storage, and many of them may not
know of the existence of the vault. They don't know, and they don't ask.
Part Four - THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOON

A Flash of Darkness
October 27, 1989

Dr. Christopher J. Davis, a British intelligence officer, was tidying up his office in the old
Metropole Building off Trafalgar Square and was getting ready to catch a train home to Wiltshire at the
end of chill, dank day. Davis was an analyst on the Defence Intelligence Staff, with an area of expertise
in chemical and biological weapons. He s a medical doctor with a Ph.D. from Oxford, and was then a
surgeon commander in the Royal Navy. He has a serious, crisp manner, trim good looks, blue eyes and
light brown hair, and an angular face.
The papers on Davis's desk contained source intelligence-bits and pieces of information, some
credible, some not, about chemical and biological weapons that some countries might or might not have.
His ob was to take all the bits and move them around, look at them, like fragments of broken glass, and
try to assemble them into a picture of something. Chemical and biological weapons were then a
backwater. Christopher Davis peered into the wastebasket-you couldn't leave any papers there. Below
his window, people were heading off into the darkness across Great Scotland Yard, toward their pubs
and the Tube. He was anticipating with pleasure the long train ride home.... He ould decompress, read,
sleep.... A little trolley would come along with food....
The telephone rang. It was his boss, a man referred to as ADI-53.
Chris, you'd better come to my office right away. I've got a telegram you need to look at."
Davis dropped and locked-dropped all the loose papers into combination safes in his office, spun
the tumblers, locked his office-and hurried down the hall.
ADI-53 handed him a two-page, highly secret telegram. He said that the Secret Intelligence