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

dish full of blood agar-sheep's blood in jelly-and by late in the afternoon of the day the autopsy took
place, colonies and spots of anthrax cells were growing vigorously on the blood. The spots were pale
gray, and they sparkled like powdered glassthey had the classic, glittery look of anthrax. Something full
of spores must have arrived in the mail. It meant that the point source of the outbreak was nothing in
nature. On Sunday night, October 6th, Brad Perkins telephoned the director of the CDC, Dr. Jeffrey
Koplan. "We have evidence for an intentional cause of death of Robert Stevens," he said to Koplan.
"The FBI needs to come into this full force."



Communiqu├й from Nowhere
OCTOBER 15, 2001

AT TEN O'CLOCK on a warm autumn morning in Washington, D. C., a woman-her name, has
not been made public-was opening mail in the Hart Senate Office Building, on Delaware Avenue. She
worked in the office of Senator Tom Daschle, the Senate majority leader, and she was catching up with
mail that had come in on the previous Friday. The woman slit open a hand-lettered envelope that had the
return address of the fourth-grade class at the Greendale School in Franklin Park, New Jersey. It had
been sealed tightly with clear adhesive tape. She removed a sheet of paper, and powder fell out, the
color of bleached bone, and landed on the carpet. A puff of dust came off the paper. It formed tendrils,
like the smoke rising from a snuffed-out candle, and then the tendrils vanished.
By this time, letters containing grayish, crumbly, granular anthrax had arrived in New York City
at the offices of NBC, addressed to Tom Brokaw, and at CBS, ABC, and the New York Post. Several
people had contracted cutaneous anthrax. The death of Robert Stevens from inhalation anthrax ten days
earlier had been widely reported in the news media. The woman threw the letter into a wastebasket and
called the Capitol Police.
Odorless, invisible, buffeted in currents of air, the particles from the letter were pulled into the
building's high-volume air-circulation system. For forty minutes, fans cycled the air throughout the Hart
Senate Office Building, until someone finally thought to shut them down. In the end, the building was
evacuated for a period of six months, and the cleanup cost twenty-six million dollars.

The Hazardous Materials Response Unit of the Federal Bureau of Investigation-the HMRU-is
stationed in two buildings at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia. When there is a serious or credible
threat of bioterrorism, an HMRU team will be dispatched to assess the hazard, collect potentially
dangerous evidence, and transport it to a laboratory for analysis.
Soon after the Capitol Police got the call from the woman in Senator Daschle's office, a team of
HMRU agents was dispatched from Quantico. The Capitol Police had sealed off the senator's office.
The HMRU team put on Tyvek protective suits, with masks and respirators, retrieved the letter from the
wastebasket, and did a rapid test for anthrax-they stirred a little bit of the powder into a test tube. It
came up positive, though the test is not particularly reliable. This was a forensic investigation of a crime
scene, so the team members did forensic triage. They wrapped the envelope and the letter in sheets of
aluminum foil, put them in Ziploc bags, and put evidence labels on the bags. They cut out a piece of the
carpet with a utility knife. They put all the evidence into white plastic containers. Each container was
marked with the biohazard symbol and was sealed across the top with a strip of red evidence tape. In
the early afternoon, two special agents from the HMRU put the containers in the trunk of an unmarked
Bureau car and drove north out of Washington and along the Beltway. They turned northwest on
Interstate 270, heading for Fort Detrick, outside Frederick, Maryland.
Traffic is always bad on Interstate 270, but the HMRU agents resisted the temptation to weave
around cars, and they went with the flow. It was hot and thunderstormy, too warm for October.
Interstate 270 proceeds through rolling piedmont. The route is known as the Maryland Biotechnology