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

you sound like Donald Duck eating sushi. Eitzen said, "I'm going secure." Then, speaking slowly, he told
the national-security people and the FBI what John Ezzell was learning about the anthrax.
At six o'clock that morning, Peter Jahrling went into his office to check his e-mail. Jahrling's
office is small and windowless, and is decoNational Security rated with heaps of paper along with
memorabilia from his travels-a license plate from Guatemala, where he once worked as a virus hunter; a
carved wooden cat; a map of Africa showing the types of vegetation on the continent; a metal telephone,
with a speaking horn, that he picked up at Vector, the Russian State Research Center of Virology and
Biotechnology, in Siberia. In the nineteen eighties and early nineties, the Soviets had carried out all kinds
of secret work on virus weapons at Vector. The metal telephone once sat inside a clandestine Level 4
biocontainment lab; you could shout into the speaking horn while you were wearing a protective space
suit-to call for help during an emergency with a military strain of smallpox, perhaps. Jahrling had been to
Vector many times. He worked in the Cooperative Threat Reduction Program, which gave money to
former Soviet bioweaponeers in the hope of encouraging them to do peaceful research, so they wouldn't
sell their expertise to countries such as Iran and Iraq.
Jahrling sat down at his desk and sighed. There was a landfill of papers on his desk, mostly
about smallpox, and it was discouraging. On top of the heap sat a large red book with silver lettering on
its cover: Smallpox and Its Eradication. The experts in poxviruses call it the Big Red Book, and it was
supposed to be the last word on smallpox, or variola, which is the scientific name of the smallpox virus.
The authors of the Big Red Book had led the World Health Organization campaign to eradicate smallpox
from the face of the earth, and on December 9, 1979, their efforts were officially certified a success. The
disease no longer existed in nature. Doctors generally consider smallpox to be the worst human disease.
It is thought to have killed more people than any other infectious pathogen, including the Black Death of
the Middle Ages. Epidemiologists think that smallpox killed roughly one billion people during its last
hundred years of activity on earth.
Jahrling kept the Big Red Book sitting on top of his smallpox papers, where he could reach for it
in a hurry. He reached for it practically every day. For the last two years, Jahrling had run a program
that was attempting to open the way for new drugs and vaccines that could cure or prevent smallpox.
Scientifically, he was more deeply involved with smallpox than anyone else in the world, and he regarded
smallpox as the greatest biological threat to human safety. Officially, the smallpox virus exists in only two
repositories: in freezers in a building called Corpus 6 at Vector in Siberia, and in a freezer in a building
called the Maximum Containment Laboratory at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta. But, as
Peter Jahrling often says, "If you believe smallpox is sitting in only two freezers, I have a bridge for you to
buy. The genie is out of the lamp."
Peter Jahrling has a high-level national-security clearance known as codeword clearance, or SCI
clearance, which stands for Sensitive Compartmentalized Information. Access to SCI, which is
sometimes termed ORCON information ("originator controlled"), is available through code words. If you
have been cleared for the ORCON code word, you can see the information. The information is written
on a document that has red-slashed borders. You look at the information inside a secure room, and you
cannot walk out of the room with anything except the memory of what you've seen.
Around the corner from Jahrling's office is a room known as the Secure Room, which is always
kept locked. Inside it there is a stew phone, a secure fax machine, and several safes with combination
locks. Inside the safes are sheets of paper in folders. The sheets contain formulas for biological
weapons. Some of the weapons may be Soviet, some possibly may be Iraqi, and a number of the
formulas are American and were developed at Fort Detrick in the nineteen sixties, before offensive
bioweapons research in the United States was banned. When the old biowarfare program was at its
peak, an Army scientist named William C. Patrick III led a team that developed a powerful version of
weaponized anthrax. Patrick held several classified patents on bioweapons.
There is probably a piece of paper sitting in the classified safe at USAMRIID-I have no way of
knowing this for certain-containing a list of the nations and groups that the CIA believes either have
clandestine stocks of smallpox or are trying actively to get the virus. At the top of the list would be the