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

Jahrling returned to the bedroom and dressed quickly. He put on a light gray suit that looked like
it came from Sears, Roebuck, a blue and white candy-striped shirt, and a jazzy black-and-white necktie.
He fitted a silver tie bar over his tie, put on brown shoes, and hung the chain holding his federal ID card
around his neck.
Peter Jahrling has a craggy face, and he wears Photogray glasses with metal rims. His hair was
once yellow-blond, but it is now mostly gray. When he was younger, some of his colleagues at the
Institute called him "The Golden Boy of USAMRIID" because of his blond hair and his apparent luck in
making interesting discoveries about lethal viruses. He has an angular way of moving his arms and legs, a
gawky posture, and it gives him the look of a science geek. It is a look he has had since he was a boy.
He grew up an only child, and became fascinated with microscopes and biology at a young age. He
thinks of himself as shy and socially awkward, although others think of him as blunt and outspoken, and
sometimes abrasive.
Jahrling got into his car-a red Mustang with the license plate LASSA 3. His scientific interest is
viruses that make people bleed-hemorrhagic fever viruses-and among them is one called Lassa, a West
African virus that Jahrling studied early in his career. (He uses LASSA 1, a bashed, corroded Pontiac
with a vinyl roof that's shredding away in strips, for long-distance drives, because he likes its soft seats
and its boatlike ride. Daria drives LASSA 2, a Jeep.) He backed out of the driveway and drove fast
along exurban roads through a beautiful night. The moon was down, and the air felt like summer, though
the belt of Orion, a constellation of winter, blazed in the south. He was at the Institute by five o'clock.
The place was usually dead at this hour, but the letter to Congress with some powder in it had kept
people in the building overnight. He went to Colonel Eitzen's office and sat down at a conference table.
Ed Eitzen is a medical doctor with thinning brown hair and a square face, eyeglasses, and a
straightforward, low-key way about him. He was dressed in a pale green shirt with silver oak leaves on
the shoulder bars, and he was looking tense. He is a well-known expert in medical biodefense. He had
delivered speeches at conferences on how to plan for bioterrorism; this was the real thing.
At FBI headquarters in the J. Edgar Hoover Building on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, the
FBI's emergency operations center, known as the SIOC (the Strategic Information Operations Center),
was up and running. The SIOC is a wedge-shaped complex of rooms on the fifth floor of the
headquarters, surrounded by layers of copper to keep it secure against radio eavesdropping. Desks are
arrayed around a huge wall of video displays, which are updated in real time. The FBI had initiated
around-the-clock SIOC operations on September 11th, and now a number of desks at the center had
been devoted to the anthrax attacks. Agents from the FBI's Weapons of Mass Destruction Operations
Unit were stationed at the SIOC. They had set up a live videoconference link with a crisis operations
center at the National Security Council. The NSC operations center is in the Old Executive Office
Building, across the street from the White House. An NSC official named Lisa Gordon-Hagerty was
there and running things. The federal government had gone live.
Colonel Eitzen had been hooked into the SIOC and the NSC op center all night, while John
Ezzell phoned him from his lab with the results of tests he was doing on the anthrax. Since his "Oh, my
God," Ezzell had been working furiously, trying to get a sense of what kind of a weapon it was. He
wasn't going to be sleeping on his cot during this terror event; he wouldn't sleep anytime soon.
Meanwhile, the White House people were spinning over the word weapon. They wanted to know what,
exactly, the USAMRIID scientists meant by the terms weapon and weapons-grade, and they wanted
answers fast. What is "weaponsgrade" anthrax? Had the Senate been hit with a weapon? Jahrling and
Eitzen discussed what USAMRIID should say. The White House was USAMRIID's most important
client. Eitzen felt that the Institute should steer away from using the words weapon or weaponized until
more was known about the powder. Jahrling agreed with him, and together they came up with the words
professional and energetic to describe it, and they decided to take back the word weapon, which was
making people too nervous.
Eitzen called the national-security people to discuss the adjustment of thinking. He used an
encrypted telephone-a secure telephonic unit, or STU (pronounced "stew") phone. A stew phone makes