Amerithrax (18 page)

Also on Thursday the USPS wrote its employees that “The U.S. Postal Service has had no confirmed incidents involving the use of the mail to transmit any harmful bio- logical or chemical weapons,” and asked its workers “how likely was it that someone would receive a harmful biolog- ical or chemical substance in the mail?” The USPS answered its own question: “Presently, we have not seen any real incidents—including anthrax—only threats or hoaxes.”

In the meantime, the contaminated Daschle letter was routed through a
second
postal facility on Friday, October 12, long after it should have been delivered. Water damage to the address on its envelope (the blurred zip code) had

delayed it just as a misread at the Trenton post office had misrouted the Leahy letter to the State Department.

On Saturday, October 13, the Daschle letter was proc- essed yet again at Brentwood. The facility’s three giant ma- chines, each canceling, coding, and sorting some thirty thousand pieces of mail an hour, whipped letters by so swiftly that enormous lines of employees functioned in a white blizzard generated as the paper crumbles slightly while flying on its way. Workers should have been shivering in the snowstorm swirling about the seventeen-and-a-half- million cubic feet of Brentwood’s interior. Not one of them knew the danger they were in.

The postal workers trusted the air, never guessing it could kill them. And why shouldn’t they? Amerithrax’s poison had no smell, no taste, and there was no way to know if one were inside the invisible cloud or not. It floated and settled like a biblical plague, striking down the unfortunate and sparing others for no reason at all as it passed.

Mailworker Thomas Morris Jr., a fifty-five-year-old Brentwood distribution clerk, handled mail destined for fed- eral offices. The thirty-two-year Postal Service veteran lived in Suitland with his wife, Mary, and son, Thomas Morris

III. Saturday morning, he came into contact with anthrax spores.

“A woman found an envelope, and I was in the vicinity [ten feet away],” Morris said later. “It had powder in it. They never let us know whether the thing was anthrax or not. They never treated the people who were around this partic- ular individual and the supervisor who handled the enve- lope.” Helen Lewis, fifty-one, a clerk in the government mail sections, had handled an envelope leaking a suspicious pow- der. Lewis tried to get medical attention according to Postal Service policy for possible anthrax exposure. However, she was denied treatment by the Washington Hospital Center. She later received Cipro at Providence Hospital. She later told UPI, “They said they could not treat [for anthrax] be- cause they did not want a panic. My question is, Why didn’t they give the rest of my colleagues Cipro? Why didn’t they treat them on the sixteenth? Why didn’t they treat them on the seventeenth? The eighteenth? The nineteenth? They

could be living today if they received it.” The Postal Service said later this letter tested negative for anthrax.

The Daschle letter finally broke free of the whirlpool and traveled on to Capitol Hill through a mail sorting facility that serviced the House and Senate and 177 federal agencies. Cross-contamination traces later turned up at offsite mail centers serving the White House, the State Department, the CIA, Walter Reed Army Medical Center, Landover (Jus- tice), the BATF, the Anacostia mailroom adjacent to the BATF, and the U.S. Supreme Court Warehouse. Fifty-six USPS facilities serviced by Brentwood later tested positive for environmental samples of anthrax. These spread to two post office stations, Southwest and Friendship, and to two branches, Dulles and Pentagon.

The Daschle letter reached the Capitol police mail intake around noon. Senate-bound mail was hauled to the P Street NW mail-sorting room, the Dirksen Senate Office Building’s mailroom for distribution. From there the anthrax-laced let- ter was sent down a hallway to Daschle’s offices in the Hart Building. The Capitol rests at the center of the Russell, Dirk- sen, and Hart Senate Office Buildings (all to the north); the Supreme Court Building, the Library of Congress, the Long- worth and Rayburn House Office Buildings (to the south); the Humphrey and Ford Office Buildings, the National Air and Space Museum, and the U.S. District Court. On the way the letter infected sorting trays, trucks, and even mailbags.

Cross-contamination from the Daschle letter carried from the P Street sorter to a mail-bundling machine at the Gerald

R. Ford House Annex. The annex housed the Congressional Budget Office and a child care center, but no anthrax spores got beyond the mailroom. However, the Ford annex handled mail for the Longworth House Office Building, where more than one hundred lawmakers had their offices, and spores were later found in three sites there.

On Sunday, Norma Wallace, the Hamilton mail sorter, became ill with vomiting and diarrhea. She found a scab on the back of her neck that did not respond to antibiotics. She continued work anyway. By the next day, she had a mild fever and chills. Aspirin didn’t help. The vomiting and di- arrhea improved, but over the next two days she had fevers

to 38.4 degrees Celcius with shaking chills, headache, and fatigue. A nonproductive cough developed, along with mild shortness of breath and anterior chest pain. Then her co- worker Patrick O’Donnell became ill with the same symp- toms.

In lower Manhattan, amid the whirling vapors, people still struggled for breath. When two of the Con Edison sub- stations providing electrical power for them were destroyed by the collapse of Seven World Trade Center, more than 130,000 gallons of oil and insulating fluid had been released from high-power voltage lines and transformers. The smol- dering underground fires choking rescue workers contained fiberglass. All over the nation, as mail was handled gingerly, people washed their hands religiously, brushed invisible par- ticles from their clothes. They choked, loosened their col- lars, and wondered if America would ever catch its breath again.

Outbreak

BRIGHT
and early Monday morning, October 15, 2001, Amerithrax’s long-delayed letter to the Senate Majority Leader reached its destination.
8
Forty of Senator Daschle’s aides were already at work in his sixth-floor Capitol Hill offices in the Hart Building. Jet fighters still patrolled the skies above them. The day was unusually hot and humid and for that reason the powerful air-conditioning system was

8
This was the same day the first wave of anti-abortion hoax letters mailed by Clayton Lee Waagner arrived at over 270 Midwestern abor- tion and family planning clinics.

functioning at full blast. A storm threatened. During the Sen- ate and House votes on the USA Patriot Act on Friday, the Senate had passed a version that favored Attorney General John Ashcroft’s views. Daschle had argued for a firm money-laundering provision in the bill, but was averse to the rapid timetable of the legislation. Senator Leahy had abandoned the modifications guarding against an infringe- ment of constitutional liberties his people had told the ACLU he would fight for. On October 4, he had been at- tacked by several conservative talk show hosts. The House had voted 337–79 to pass the bill. Though Daschle’s letter had arrived, there was no sign of Leahy’s letter.

At 9:45 a.m. coffee was brewing in the suites and there was the pleasant murmur of voices in the background. The envelope in the basket bore the same Trenton, New Jersey, postmark as envelopes NBC and the
Post
had received weeks earlier. Amerithrax had neatly sealed the seams of his tainted envelope with Scotch tape. Inside the bright airy room, a female intern turned the envelope in her hands. She felt a small bulge at one end, but slit open the flap anyway. A puff of choking gray powder disgorged itself onto the desktop. Motes of dust shimmered in a bright shaft of light.

Robin Cook’s 1999 novel,
Vector
, opened with anthrax mailed in an envelope:

With his thumb and index finger, Jason tried to determine the source of the bulge... he picked up his letter opener and sliced through the envelope’s top flap... at the same time a coiled spring mechanism propelled a puff of dust along with a handful of tiny glittering stars into the air... he sneezed several times from the dust.

Similarly, the Daschle letter had exploded in a puff of powder.

A message inside, photocopied from an original, written in the same childlike printing as previous letters, read:

09-11-01

Y
OU CAN NOT STOP US.

W
E HAVE THIS ANTHRAX.

Y
OU DIE NOW.

A
RE YOU AFRAID?
D
EATH TO AMERICA.
D
EATH TO ISRAEL.
A
LLAH IS GREAT.

Amerithrax’s letter to Tom Brokaw had failed to drive home the fact that the powder inside was anthrax. This time the killer warned specifically of it, but failed to recommend an antibiotic. His earlier advisement, in any case, had been false. Penicillin was not the best antibiotic for anthrax; Cipro was. But suggesting Cipro might have revealed a degree of medical knowledge on the part of the anonymous mailer he wished to conceal. He did use the phrase “You die now,” just as fifteen letters posted from Indianapolis to the media had. For the first time Amerithrax used closing punctuation and threatened not just individuals, but a nation.

Amerithrax had done a more orderly job of printing sen- tences composed of capital letters this go-round. And the eight printed lines were closer together than on the six-line Brokaw letter. The first character of each sentence was larger, as were the words “America” and “Israel.” The FBI had been openly skeptical that foreign terrorists had mailed the anthrax letters. “Handwriting and linguistic analysis,” they said, “forensic data and other evidence” had led them to believe at this point in their investigation that Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda network was not the force behind the anthrax attacks.

Daschle’s aide hurled the letter into a wastebasket and called the police, who notified health officials and sealed off the office. Some of the floating particles were sucked into the high-powered air-conditioning system and blown throughout the Hart Building for over half an hour. A spe- cialized bioterrorism team from Quantico, clad in Hazmat suits, rushed to the office of the South Dakota Democrat. The Hazardous Materials Response Unit tested the air, and at 10:30 a.m. shut down the air conditioners. They swabbed the noses of staffers and lobbyists for anthrax spores and did a preliminary field test with handheld “Smart Tickets.”

First responder and law enforcement agencies often used these commercially sold, hand-held immunoassays for the swift detection of
Bacillus anthracis.
The instant screening devices were intended only for the sorting out of environ- mental specimens, not for treatment of patients. The rapid field tests were intended to be used in tandem with more sensitive antibody tests and microbiological cultures. When a polymerase chain reaction for the detection of anthrax spores in the Daschle letter tested positive, the entire office building was evacuated and sealed off.

The anthrax sent to Brokaw and the
Post
had been rel- atively crude—the
Post
sample less so—and contaminated with harmless cells. Many of the spore clumps had been too large to penetrate deep into the lungs where they could in- flict the most harm. There was something different about the half-teaspoonful of anthrax mailed to Senator Daschle. It was more refined, light and airy. It had spread speedily once the envelope was opened.

By car, FBI special agent Darrin Steele and his partner rushed two rapid assays (a fragment of office carpet in a sealed white plastic container, and the Daschle letter and envelope in double Ziploc bags) to the Institute. At Fort Detrick, they handed the specimens over to the Special Path- ogens Laboratory for expert analysis. First, the letter and envelope were brought to Biological Safety Level 2 (BSL- 2). Whenever a clinical sample was potentially infectious the lab personnel used BSL-2 or Level 3 (BSL-3) facilities to handle clinical samples. The highest and hottest contain- ment level was Level 4 (BSL-4)—decon showers, air locks, air hoses coiled from the ceiling, and bright blue full-body spacesuits.