Amerithrax (2 page)

THE
squeak of a wayward wheel marked the path of an elderly man. Outside in the Florida sunshine, Americans gathered themselves and reached inward for courage. They prayed there would be a warning next time so they could prepare themselves. Yet a new death already moved among them as silently as the cruising jets in the dazzling blue skies of the eleventh of September. Invisible yet tangible, dead but alive, colorless, odorless, as small as a human cell, the killer hid in a cloud of dust. The dust was eerily similar to that which still choked New York City. It trailed invisibly, a mixture of fine and coarse particles trickling from an en- velope, behind the man with his squeaking cart.

The killer within the dust was capable of incredible growth, growth that spawned into billions. It could with- stand heat and cold. It did not drink or breathe or eat. In the end it would be a tangled mass of rods and threads, choking out life, yet able to return to inertness outside its victim, to lie sleeping for decades yet be reborn once more as a living microbe. The killer bypassed some—the man at the coffeepot, a visitor from Virginia just leaving, a woman on her cell phone. It briefly touched a mailroom worker and passed on. The airborne cloud of particles was particularly deadly. By the time any symptoms developed, it would al- ready be too late. The old man’s envelope leaked invisible death—a killer dispatched by a killer.

Outside the American Media Incorporated building a brisk inshore breeze, humid and smelling of the sea, was blowing. Flags and beach umbrellas strained all over Boca

Raton. Sand kicked up on the long golden beach and blew among the palm trees and neat gravel walks. The gumbo- limbo trees swayed—their red peeling bark like blood and bone. Boca sits between Delray Beach and Pompano Beach along Gold Coast Highway A1A, a fifty-mile-long stretch. Wildlife preserves are to its west. Lauderdale-by-the-Sea is to its south as is Miami Beach.

AMI had recently purchased six supermarket tabloids— the
National Examiner
, the
Globe
, the
Sun
, the
Weekly World News
, the
National Enquirer
, and the
Star
. For six million dollars more they’d bought a new sixty-seven- thousand-square-foot headquarters on Broken Sound Boul- evard. They had laid down another fourteen million renovating the three-story building near Yamato Road. Since the sea bred dampness, AMI had installed a sophis- ticated air handling system to protect its yellowed clip- pings, back issues, reporters’ files, business records, and high-tech equipment. A subcontractor, Lasertech Interna- tional, did the heavy lifting, handling production of all six publications.

Ernesto “Ernie” Blanco, a seventy-three-year-old Miami- Dade resident, was AMI’s mailroom supervisor. Since the six tabloids often received packages for celebrities, he was not surprised one morning when a “weird” love letter from a fan ended up in his sorting bin. Though addressed to singer and actor “Jennifer Lopez
%
the
Sun
,” it had been mailed to the
Enquirer
’s previous address in nearby Lantana. But CEO David Pecker had moved AMI to Boca Raton—what had it been?—a year now.

Whoever had written the “J-Lo” letter had been unfa- miliar with either the
Sun
or the
Enquirer.
Either that or they had worked from an out-of-date reference. When the odd letter arrived at the Boca Raton Main Substation, which serviced AMI, Blanco collected it in the AMI van. The let- ter’s path had taken it through the West Palm Main Branch, the Green Acres and Lake Worth Post Offices, and finally the substation. No one recalled when that errant letter had been forwarded to the
Sun.
It might have been that day, Friday, September 21, 2001, or a week before or a week

after four jets crashed into the WTC, the Pentagon, and a Pennsylvania field.

Blanco began his regular route. Outside the huge tan building, the humid wind gusted and waves crested blocks away. Inside, AMI’s new air-conditioning system hummed. “Squeak—squeak—squeak,” the wayward wheel com- plained all the way from the first-floor mailroom where thirty-six-year-old Stephanie Dailey was busy sorting. As Blanco went, his load spilled bluish white powder. Experts with high-tech gear would later be able to read an almost in- visible trail of contamination. It marked his meandering path along a series of desks, computers and keyboards, and file cabinets. Hot spots glowed where letters entered mail slots and at each of the thirty-one places where powder and mi- croscopic beads had littered the floor. The Hispanic man paused. He rested a handful of mail atop stacks of copy pa- per, then moved on. Beads clinging to those reams of paper would infect every copying machine on all three floors.

Delivering mail to AMI’s seven hundred employees, Blanco winded his way up to the second floor and finally the third. Along the way, the fan letter with its coarse pow- der had been surrendered to a
Sun
editor. Because the edi- torial assistant who was normally there had the day off, the editor perused the mail, discarding some and opening others. The fan letter was opened and a small cheap Star of David dropped out. Inside the envelope was a “childish” one-page, handwritten love letter to Jennifer Lopez. Also enclosed was a tablespoon of “soapy, powdery substance,” a bluish dust that resembled dishwashing powder. It might have come from a ruptured detergent packet, a sample, but an inspec- tion revealed no packet inside. The letter was discarded.

Sometime later, a
Sun
staffer retrieved the odd letter from the wastebasket. He had a daughter who was a Lopez fan and thought the fan letter was funny. He passed it around the office for “amusement value.” For a moment, staffers on the tabloid ceased writing about alien abductions and Elvis sightings to chuckle over the naive letter. The
Star
had re- cently written about “J-Lo.” The envelope reached the
Sun
’s photo retoucher, Bob Stevens. Coincidentally, the sixty-

three-year-old artist lived in Lantana, where the letter had been misaddressed. In a way Stevens’s poor eyesight killed him.

Because he was nearsighted, Stevens brought the letter up close to his eyes. “The only difference between Bob and those who watched him open the letter,” a staffer said later, “was that Bob held it up to his face.” Dust, so like WTC dust, settled over the kind-featured, expressive man. It was a good face and filled with humor. As Stevens held the note near his nose, he automatically breathed in the microscopic killer riding upon the fine dust. Inhaled air flowed through his nostrils and into his nasal cavity. In his nose, hair, cilia, and mucus trapped some of the dust particles, powder, and some invisible ovoid beads about a micron long.

A second breath—Stevens’s shoulders lifted and low- ered. His chest expanded, then moved downward and in. He drew more tiny beads into his windpipe. Death in the form of those micro-beads rushed past C-shaped cartilage rings along the tube connecting his mouth and nose to his lungs. The tube divided into right and left bronchi as it entered moist lungs, moist to minimize water evaporation. Dry lungs can’t exchange gases. Like Ernie Blanco, Stevens was not a smoker. Unfortunately, Stevens’s healthy lungs became the efficient entry point for a deadly disease. Someone had designed the beads to gravitate to the wettest membrane in the body and stick like glue.

Inside each lung, bronchi branch off into lesser and lesser limbs. The system is like a brittle, upside-down tree. Be- neath Stevens’s lungs, a powerful diaphragm muscle con- tracted and moved down, allowing his ribs to move up and outward. With his chest expanded, his lungs sucked in more air to fill the additional room. The beads were propelled along the fine tree branches into three hundred million grapelike clusters—the fruit of the upside-down tree. Oxy- gen and carbon dioxide were exchanged in these grapelike air sacs.

Stevens exhaled. His diaphragm relaxed, moved back up, and forced his rib cage down and in. This bellows-type movement increased the pressure inside his lungs, which pulled air up and out of his body. In the exhaled air shim-

mered the carbon dioxide that red blood cells had deposited, but the shining, glasslike beads had remained behind.

Bob Stevens went back to chatting. Stevens was sunny- faced with neatly combed sandy gray hair. He had an easy- going, almost lackadaisical nature that made him a favorite with the neighborhood children. Yet sunny as he was, his features bore a remarkable resemblance to those of the man in the moon. He had crescent eyes, a wide nose, ruddy cheeks, and large close-set ears. He was not a worrier. He had no wrinkles in his broad forehead.

He put the “J-Lo” letter aside and returned to retouching photos, enhancing them dramatically on his Macintosh com- puter. He was one of the top retouchers in the nation. Thirty years ago, he had been enticed from his London birthplace to Florida by the
National Enquirer.
Stevens had retouched the famous cover photo of Elvis in his coffin. Stevens was a U.S. citizen now and completely assimilated, some said too assimilated. He was an avid spincaster, fishing for bass and panfish around the region’s lakes and canals at every opportunity. As he worked, he manipulated a mousepad dec- orated with photos of his friends. Affectionately, he touched colored crayon drawings from a colleague’s young son. Stevens had taped them to his Mac. All the while, an invis- ible contagion, stirred by the air-conditioning and disturbed by Stevens’s movements, was crawling over his workstation. For two hours nothing happened within Bob Stevens’s lungs. The beads, the airborne spores of a microbe, settled into the grapelike clusters, which were just the right tem- perature for them. The bacteria infecting Bob Stevens spent whatever time they were not actively infecting men and an- imals as tough-skinned infectious particles. In that hard- bitten form bacteria could endure great heat, cold, and drying. They could survive in a dormant state for decades. But whenever spores encountered a potential host, they ger- minated as fast as thought. They became active and started

reproducing again.

In no time at all a short, bamboolike rod was floating among the beads. Then a few more little sticks, tiny bacterial rods quivering among blood globules. Who could fathom that such miserably small bacilli—a billion times smaller

than a man—could annihilate a human? As Stevens com- pleted his work, the little drifting rods had only begun their task. Continuing to multiply, they hooked together without joints—lining up end to end and ingeniously gluing them- selves together. The long threads were a thousand times thinner than the finest silk—twenty-five thousandths of an inch thick.

From a few rods grew myriads, then millions as the bac- teria made copies of themselves. Speckled throughout the entire length of each filament were oval glass beads that shone brightly—a string of pearls inside the threads. The tangled skeins of colorless yarn spun until they became hopelessly tangled. One slowly stretched itself out into a long thread, pushing its snaky way toward an extensive net- work of pulmonary capillaries. The single cell throbbed with energy.

Gases diffuse quickly across the one-cell-thick mem- branes separating air sacs from blood vessels. A simple exchange from an area of higher concentration to one of lower is made. There is more carbon dioxide than oxygen in the capillaries. Once oxygen is in the capillaries, red blood cells carry it to every part of the body. In Stevens, the oxygenated blood ferried along the tangled threads too. But the glassy beads and swarming sticks and threads themselves were not the killer. Once activated inside the body, the bacterium secreted a deadly toxin, a poison pro- duced by a living organism. That poison crippled the ability of white blood cells to fight off disease. Rapidly the toxin flooded the lymph system. The constantly circulating lymph is a river of clear liquid derived from blood serum. Flowing out of capillaries, it washes through tissues on a surveillance mission as the body’s disease fighter to filter out foreign particles. When experts later speculated that Stevens had been sickened by drinking from a tainted stream they had

not been far wrong. It had been a tainted lymph stream.

But the spores multiplied in lymph nodes near the lungs, broke them down, and spread the infection. Unknown to Stevens, a poisonous fluid was building up in his lungs and filling the space between his lungs and chest wall. At first the discharge was watery and bloody. It would soon become

a foamy, golden paste streaked with crimson. Patchy areas in his lower right lung hemorrhaged, bled into the middle of his chest, then slowly became solid. The poison moved like a marching army through his organs, causing bleeding and deterioration as it went. Stevens, feeling none of this, returned to his Palm Beach County home, a cozy nest sur- rounded by the swamps of the Loxahatchee Wildlife Refuge. On Saturday he went fishing, probably at Boynton Beach Inlet. Afterward, he and his wife, Maureen, fine-tuned their vacation plans—a visit to their daughter Casey in Charlotte, North Carolina. As for the “odd,” long-delayed J-Lo letter, it was nowhere in sight.

The weekend passed uneventfully. On Monday, Septem- ber 24, Ernie Blanco, the mailroom supervisor, had a sudden onset of fatigue. Blanco was puzzled. He was in remarkable shape for his age. Over the next three days, he experienced a gradual progression of cough, lethargy, shortness of breath, and fever. He began sweating and experienced mild abdominal pain that he associated with vomiting. But he couldn’t vomit. With the exception of a fleeting ischemic attack the previous month, the result of an inadequate blood supply to his heart, he had no underlying chronic illnesses. On Wednesday Stevens worked very late at AMI. The next day, he and Maureen drove north along the long At- lantic coastline. They flew past islands, reefs, sandbars, and choppy seas, moving relentlessly northward into North Car- olina. Along the way to Charlotte they passed neat rows of tobacco plants and fertile farms, crossed swamps, and climbed pleasant hills into cities and towns. On Thursday, September 27, Stevens had an indefinable feeling of oncom- ing illness. On Friday the family went to Lake Lure and hiked at Chimney Rock about twenty-five miles southeast of Asheville. An elevator inside the granite mountain could have whisked them to the summit, but instead they took an easy trail to a four-hundred-foot-high waterfall. A few days had passed since the bacteria had begun secreting poisons that bound to the protective membranes of target cells inside his body. Stevens was thirsty. He cupped his hands to drink