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

Corridor, and it is lined with dozens of biotech firms and research institutes dealing with the life sciences.
The biotech companies are housed in buildings of modest size, often covered with darkened or mirrored
glass, and they are mixed in among office parks.
The office parks thinned out beyond Gaithersburg, and the land opened into farms broken by
stands of brown hickory and yellow ash. White farmhouses gleamed among fields of corn drying on the
stalk. Catoctin Mountain appeared on the horizon, a low wave of the Appalachians, streaked with rust
and gold. The car arrived at the main gate of Fort Detrick, where an Abrams tank was parked with its
barrel aimed toward downtown Frederick. A little more than a month after September 11th, Fort
Detrick remained in a condition of Delta Alert, which is the highest level of alert save for when an attack
is in progress. There were more guards than usual, and they were conspicuously armed with M-l6s and
were searching all vehicles, but the HMRU car went through without a search.
The agents drove past the parade ground and parked in a lot that faces the United States Army
Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, or USAMRIID, the principal biodefense laboratory in
the United States. USAMRIID is pronounced "you-sam-rid," but many people call it simply Rid, or they
refer to it as the Institute. USAMRIID's mission is to develop defenses against biological weapons, both
medicines and methods, and to help protect the population against a terrorist attack with a biological
weapon. USAMRIID sometimes performs work for outside "clients"-that is, other agencies of the U.S.
government. Fort Detrick was the center of the Army's germ weapons research and development until
1969, when President Richard Nixon shut down all American offensive biowarfare programs. Three
years later, the United States signed the Biological Weapons and Toxin Convention, or BWC, which
bans the development, possession, or use of biological weapons. The BWC has been signed by more
than one hundred and forty nations, some of which are observing the treaty while others are not.
The main building of USAMRIID is a dun-colored, two-story monolith that looks like a
warehouse. It has virtually no windows, and tubular chimneys sprout from its roof. The building covers
seven acres of ground. There are biocontainment suites near the center of the building-groups of
laboratory rooms that are sealed off and kept under negative air pressure so that nothing contagious will
leak out. The suites are classified at differing levels of biosecurity, from Biosafety Level 2 to Level 3 and
finally to Level 4, which is the highest, and where scientists wearing biosafety space suits work with hot
agents-lethal, incurable viruses. (A bioprotective space suit is a pressurized plastic suit that covers the
entire body. It has a soft plastic head-bubble with a clear faceplate, and it is fed by sterile air coming
through a hose and an air regulator.) The chimneys of the building are always exhausting superfiltered and
superheated sterilized air, which is drawn out of the biocontainment zones. USAMRIID was now
surrounded by concrete barriers, to prevent a truck bomb from cracking open a Biosafety Level 4 suite
and releasing a hot agent into the air.
The HMRU agents opened the trunk of their car, took out the biohazard containers, and carried
them across the parking lot into USAMRIID. In a small front lobby, the agents were met by a civilian
microbiologist named John Ezzell. Ezzell is a tall, rangy, intense man, with curly gray hair and a full beard.
FBI people who know him like to remark on the fact that Ezzell drives a Harley-Davidson motorcycle;
they like his style. John Ezzell has been the anthrax specialist for the FBI's Hazardous Materials
Response Unit since 1996, when the unit was formed. Over the years, he has analyzed hundreds of
samples of putative anthrax collected by the HMRU. The samples had all proven to be hoaxes or
incompetent attempts to make anthrax slime, baby powder, dirt, you name it. When Ezzell was analyzing
samples for the HMRU, he would often live in the USAMRIID building, sleeping on a folding cot near his
lab.The agents 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.