The Demon in the Freezer

by Richard Preston

  Alibek started laughing. “Don’t point that thing at me, Bill!”

  “It’s actually my wife’s bath powder.” A pleasant scent of baby powder filled the room.

  The room had become a bit stuffy with the powder, so we went outdoors on the lawn in front of the house. Alibek lit a cigarette, and we admired the view down the meadow and over the piedmont of Maryland to a blue line in the distance, the Mount Airy ridge. The patchy clouds now covered the sun.

  “Wind’s ten to twelve miles an hour, gusting a bit,” Patrick said. “Which way is the wind going, Ken?”

  Alibek turned around and looked up. He seemed to be feeling the air with his face. “East? It’s going east.”

  “Smallpox would get to Frederick from here on a day like today,” Patrick remarked.

  Alibek nodded in agreement and pulled on his cigarette.

  “Hold on,” Patrick said abruptly, and he strode up the hill and disappeared around the corner of the garage. We heard the electric motor of the garage door. He returned in a few moments, carrying a mayonnaise jar that contained a powder. He unscrewed the metal lid and showed me the jar’s contents. It was half full of an extremely fine powder of a mottled, pinkish color. He explained that it, too, was a simulated bioweapon. The pink color in the powder came from the blood of chicken embryos. The powder was a surrogate of a weaponized brain virus called VEE, which travels easily in the air—but the powder was sterile and had no infectious material in it. He shook the jar under my face, and smoky, hazy tendrils wafted toward my nose. I fought an urge to jerk my head back—the mind may know the fog is harmless, but the instincts are hard to convince.

  Patrick walked across the lawn with the jar and stood by an oak tree. Suddenly, he straightened his arm and heaved the contents of the jar into the air. The powder boiled out, making a small mushroom cloud, and then the simulated brain virus blasted through the branches of a dogwood tree and took off down the meadow, moving at a fast clip toward Frederick. Within seconds, the cloud started becoming transparent, and then, abruptly, it vanished. The particles seemed to be gone. It had looked like steam coming out of a teapot.

  “See how it disappears instantly?” Patrick remarked.

  Alibek watched, tugging at his cigarette, mildly amused. “Yeah. You won’t see the cloud now,” he said. “Depending on the altitude of the dispersal, some of those particles will go fifty miles.”

  “Some of them’ll get to the Mount Airy ridge. It’s twenty miles away,” Patrick said. The simulated brain weapon would arrive at the ridge in a couple of hours. A couple of hours after that, the simulated brain virus would be beyond the horizon.

  Patrick was eyeing the clouds, seeming to sniff the wind. He turned to Alibek. “Say you wanted to hit Frederick today, Ken, what would you use?”

  Alibek glanced at the sky, weighing the weather and his options. “I’d use anthrax mixed with smallpox.”

  Stew Phone

  OCTOBER 25, 2001

  TOM GEISBERT drove his beat-up station wagon to the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, in Northwest Washington, carrying a whiff of sterilized dry Daschle anthrax mounted in a special cassette. He spent the day with a group of technicians running tests with an X-ray machine to find out if the powder contained any metals or elements. By lunchtime, the machine had shown that there were two extra elements in the spores: silicon and oxygen.

  Silicon oxide.

  Silicon dioxide is glass.

  The anthrax terrorist or terrorists had put powdered glass, or silica, into the anthrax. The silica was powdered so finely that under Geisbert’s electron microscope it had looked like fried-egg gunk dripping off the spores.

  Geisbert called Jahrling on an open telephone line and said, “We have a signature of something.” Jahrling asked him to stop talking on an open line.

  Geisbert asked someone if he could use the stew phone, and he was shown into a secure room. The stew phone looked like a normal telephone, except that it had an LCD screen and an encryption lock. They gave Geisbert the encryption key, and he unlocked the phone.

  Jahrling, meanwhile, had gone to the Secure Room at USAMRIID. He unlocked his stew phone and waited. Geisbert called in, they spoke a few words in open mode, and then Jahrling pushed a button on the phone. The screen flashed: GOING SECURE.

  The phones went silent. The two men waited half a minute. Then the screen on the stew phone read: US GOVERNMENT SECRET, and their voices came back on the line, distorted.

  “So—what—do—you—have?” Jahrling said.

  “Wisten, Weet! We ow-wowo-wooow, wow.” Geisbert’s voice turned into a stretched-out robo-gargle.

  “Slow—it—up.”

  “We fow wow-wow!”

  “Whoa. You—have—to—speak—distinctly.”

  “Pete! There’s—glass—in—the—anthrax.”

  YOU COULD GO ON the Internet and find places to buy superfine powdered glass, known as silica nanopowder, which has industrial uses. The grains of this type of glass are very small. If an anthrax spore was an orange, then these particles of glass would be grains of sand clinging to the orange. The glass was slippery and smooth, and it may have been treated so that it would repel water. It caused the spores to crumble apart, to pass more easily through the holes in the envelopes, and fly everywhere, filling the Hart Senate Office Building and the Brentwood and Hamilton mail-sorting facilities like a gas.

  No one knows how many anthrax spores leaked into the air at the Brentwood mail facility. At least two letters containing dry skull anthrax went through the machines. The skulls were crumbling and falling apart, and individual spores were leaking through pores in the paper and perhaps coming out through the corners of the letters. If all of the spores that went into the air inside the Brentwood building were gathered into a heap, it’s doubtful they would have covered the head of a thumbtack. The Environmental Protection Agency spent an estimated thirty million dollars trying to get rid of the spores there.

  The Feds

  THE WASHINGTON FIELD OFFICE of the FBI is a new stone-and-glass building at Fourth and F streets, a few blocks east of the FBI headquarters, on the edge of Chinatown. The Washington office was given overall management of the criminal investigation into the anthrax attacks, which came to be called Amerithrax. There were five homicides in the Amerithrax case. Robert Stevens in Boca Raton and the two Brentwood postal workers, Joseph Curseen, Jr., and Thomas Morris, Jr., were the first to die. Then a sixty-one-year-old woman in New York City named Kathy Nguyen became ill and died of inhalation anthrax; the source of her exposure was never identified. On the day before Thanksgiving, in Connecticut, a ninety-four-year-old woman named Ottilie Lundgren also died of anthrax. The source of her exposure was not found either, but was likely to have been a few spores that she inhaled from a piece of mail that had touched some other piece of mail that had gone through the Hamilton, New Jersey, sorting facility and had probably been in close contact with an anthrax letter. This was a murder and terrorism case that cut across jurisdictions. The FBI termed it Major Case 184.

  The Washington field office was run by an assistant director of the FBI named Van A. Harp. Directly under him were three special agents in charge of the office, or SACs. One of the SACs was Arthur Eberhart, who had served earlier as a section chief at Quantico, overseeing the Hazardous Materials Response Unit. In early October, as the first anthrax deaths occurred, Eberhart began assembling assets—calling people into the team, sometimes drafting them out of other units, “for the needs of the Bureau.” A working group formed up quickly, and eventually it became two squads, known as Amerithrax 1 and Amerithrax 2. Eberhart put John “Jack” Hess in charge of Amerithrax 1 and David Wilson in charge of Amerithrax 2. Hess’s squad handled much of the classic detective work, while Wilson’s squad took care of the scientific side of the investigation. Jack Hess and David Wilson were basically given the job of solving the Amerithrax case.

  I first met David Wilson in 1996, when I was doing some research at the FBI Academy at
Quantico, and he had just been assigned to the HMRU as an agent. He was a quiet man who stayed in the background and said little, but like many FBI people, he had a casually aware manner, as if there was a part of him that was always evaluating things. At that time, FBI scientists were saying that a bioterror attack could be very difficult to solve, because the evidence left in its wake might only be dead people with a strain of a micro-organism in their bodies, and precious little else. One evening, I drank beers with some FBI scientists at the Quantico Boardroom, a bare-bones cafeteria and pub, and they started tossing out all sorts of ideas about how you would actually solve a bioterror crime. Most of them were high-tech solutions, involving sensor machines and exotic lab techniques, but a section chief named Randall Murch, who had created the Hazardous Materials Response Unit, told the group that he thought that, in the end, traditional detective work would solve a biological crime. “Ultimately, humans make mistakes,” Murch said.

  DAVID LEE WILSON is a tall man in his mid-forties, with broad shoulders and large hands. He has straight brown hair, dark eyebrows, and pale gray eyes. On the job, he usually wears a starched white button-down shirt. He was raised in Tennessee, in a farmhouse that his grandfather built out of sawn planks of poplar, and he has a Tennessee accent. When he speaks, his voice goes along rapidly and softly over a wide range of topics. He has a degree in botany, with an emphasis on marine biology. He spent time on research ships studying the biological productivity of seas full of phytoplankton. When he joined the FBI, he gravitated to the forensic examination of trace evidence. At home, to relax, he picks a Martin acoustic guitar. He picks precisely and with a flowing musical sense. He told me that he doesn’t like attention. “It makes me uncomfortable to have any kind of single focus on me,” he said. He was careful to explain to me that he was only one member of a large FBI operation. “Teamwork is critical for this case,” he said. “A major case is like an organism. It is almost alive. It changes in response to evidence that comes in, and it has feedback loops.”

  Wilson was the head of the HMRU between 1997 and 2000, and during those years the number of credible bioterror threats or incidents rose dramatically, up to roughly two hundred a year, or one biological threat every couple of days. Most of them were anthrax hoaxes. The HMRU teams were constantly doing flyaways, taking helicopters or FBI fixed-wing aircraft to various places around the United States in order to assess a threat of anthrax and collect evidence. Running the HMRU was a little like running a firehouse that went out on a lot of false alarms, and Wilson got a little tired of it, particularly because he was trying to build a national program and kept finding himself sitting on a jump seat in a Huey loaded with biohazard equipment, flying to another bioscare. His young daughter would ask her father to leave his cell phone behind when they went to a restaurant, and if his pager beeped, she would roll her eyes and say, “Not again, Daddy.” Wilson wanted to supervise field investigations in which he could develop and pursue criminal cases. He ended up transferring to the Washington Field Office. Then along came Amerithrax, and they put him in charge of the science in the case.

  Wilson’s case strategy for Amerithrax 2 involved reaching out across the spectrum of scientific talent in the United States and getting help wherever he could find it. He developed relationships with the national laboratories (which are run by the Department of Energy), with the Defense Department, the CIA, and with the National Academy of Sciences and the National Science Foundation. He recruited dozens of outside scientists—chemists, biologists, geneticists. He pulled in a Navy expert in anthrax named James Burans, and he took in a CDC epidemiologist, Dr. Cindy Friedman, who joined Amerithrax 2 as a full-time squad member.

  Kenneth C. Kohl, an assistant U.S. attorney, was attached to the Amerithrax squads full-time, and he moved into an office in the building on Fourth and F streets. He advised agents about developing evidence that could be used in court. The FBI was mindful of the case of Richard Jewell, a security guard whom the FBI had suspected of planting a bomb in Centennial Park in Atlanta during the summer Olympics in 1996. Jewell was exonerated, and it was a huge embarrassment to the FBI; it made the Bureau look incompetent and prejudiced, and the case is still unsolved. Of all the pressures hitting the Amerithrax agents, the most potent was the knowledge that, in the end, all the paths of Amerithrax led to a jury.

  It was quite possible that if anyone was charged with the Amerithrax crimes, Kohl might seek the federal death penalty. But to bring a prosecution in a multiple murder case in which the murder weapon was a living microbe, the evidence would have to be tight and clear, persuasive to a jury, and sharp with proof—probatory, in the language of police work. There would not necessarily be any testimony from eyewitnesses. The crimes could have been perpetrated by one person acting alone, and so the Amerithrax case might have to be tried largely on forensic evidence: on the science squad’s work. “I wonder, though, if Randy Murch’s words of yesteryear may prove prophetic for Amerithrax,” Wilson said, recalling that evening in the Quantico Boardroom. “We just don’t know how it’s going to go, and sometimes you just get lucky. Somebody calls you and says, ‘You know, I saw something.’ And you say to yourself, ‘That’s it.’ ”

  Amerithrax became one of the most complex cases ever run by the FBI. The two Amerithrax squads occupied half of the seventh floor of the Washington field office. Each squad was small, with only about ten or so members, but they were supported by teams of analysts, and the squads were given the power to order practically anyone in the FBI to follow a lead or accomplish a task. There are twenty-five thousand people in the FBI. The Amerithrax squads used them to cover thousands of leads, and they relied on the work of many other people across the federal government.

  Trenton was an obvious place to examine, and FBI agents went all over the area, looking for sites where the letters had been mailed, setting up surveillance, checking out connections to possible al-Qaeda suspects. But there was remarkably little to go on. Wilson and his squad began grinding on the science of the case. “Not that Dave won’t work the case to death,” a former top FBI official said to me, “but basically all the leads, all you get, are what is captured in the biological material in the letters, in the tape that sealed the letters, and in the writing in the letter itself.”

  The Quantico behavioral profilers went to work on the handwriting and language of the letters. The profilers came to be convinced that the anthrax terrorist was a white male, a loner, perhaps quite shy, with a grudge, and with scientific training, and they felt the terrorist would be a native speaker of English, not Arabic. A native speaker of Arabic would be more likely to have written “God is great,” not “Allah is great.”

  ON NOVEMBER 16th, another anthrax-laden letter was found in a sealed plastic bag full of mail. This letter was addressed to Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont. It was among the mail in the Hart building that had been sequestered. The Leahy letter contained something like a gram of finely powdered anthrax spores, bone white, treated the same way as the Daschle spores. The FBI delivered the Leahy letter to USAMRIID, where diagnostic scientists began analyzing the powder.

  FBI forensic experts in hair and fiber analysis also examined the letter, most particularly the tape that sealed the envelope. Tape is a valuable forensic material because it picks up dust, including tiny fibers of hair, carpet, and clothing. Forensic samples that are collected from criminal evidence are known as questioned samples, or Q samples, because they come from an unknown (“questioned”) source—which may be associated with the unidentified perpetrator of the crime. These Q samples may be matched to known samples, or K samples, which are reference samples that are fully identified. In this way, trace evidence can be understood and can be linked to a known source, such as the perpetrator or the perpetrator’s environment. A single human hair can contain unknown human DNA—a questioned sample of DNA—which can be matched to a known sample of a person’s DNA. The FBI’s hair and fiber experts can take a particular questioned fiber and match it precisely
to a fiber that has come from a known manufacturer in a particular color and style. Manufacturers use constantly changing formulas for dye and for materials, and fibers can come in all sorts of sizes and shapes—round, delta, trilobal, oval, wrinkly. The top hair-and-fiber person in the FBI is a unit chief named Douglas Deedrick, who works at the Laboratory at FBI headquarters. They say that Deedrick has a near photographic memory for fibers he may have seen just once before in his career. He’ll throw out a line of patter: “I’ve seen this before. . . . I know this fiber. . . . That’s a carpet fiber from a stinkin’ seventy-three Bonneville,” is the sort of thing he can say when he’s working.” If a Q sample can be matched to a K sample, it can have probative value—it can lead to a suspect and, ultimately, to a conviction in a criminal trial. (When O.J. Simpson struggled to put on the glove at his murder trial, he gave a dramatic show to the jury of an apparent blundering attempt by the prosecution to try to match something questioned to something known—the glove to his hand.)

  The FBI’s forensic scientists apparently had great difficulty getting Q samples from the letters. They won’t comment, but it seems that they found no hairs or fibers of particular interest on the tape. The anthrax terrorist or terrorists had perhaps been quite careful to load the letters in an environment that was free of dust and hair—possibly inside a laminar flow hood. They did find that the cut edges of the strips of tape matched one another. The perpetrator had loaded and taped the envelopes one after the other using the same roll of tape. They tested the paper of the envelopes for human DNA, using the PCR (polymerase chain reaction) method, which can amplify tiny trace amounts of DNA. The method is so sensitive that if a person breathes on a sheet of paper, the paper can retain fragments of the person’s DNA that can be detected. There was apparently no questioned human DNA found on the envelopes or on the stamps. This suggested that the perpetrators might have worn a breathing mask while loading the letters. There were no questioned fingerprints on the letters, either, which probably meant that the perpetrators had worn rubber gloves. The anthrax terrorist or terrorists seemed to have been careful to avoid leaving any evidence on any of the letters. What was left was the powder inside the envelopes, and the handwriting and contents of the letters. Those were apparently the best Q samples that the FBI had to go on, and it was precious little.