Amerithrax (33 page)

It was the lack of symptoms that frightened most folks. A person who breathed the white powder in from a letter may feel fine for a week, then develop flulike symptoms: cold or flu with fever, tiredness, mild cough, or chest pain. This initial period was followed by a second phase with breathing problems and shock coming after several days.

This second phase was characterized by acute respiratory distress, sepsis, and acute hemorrhagic mediastinitis causing the widening seen on chest X rays as a ghastly shadow. By this stage, the infected person had received a death sentence. Investigators still had more questions than answers. Why had the purity of the anthrax improved? Was the terrorist learning as the attacks went on? Stealing anthrax from sev- eral different sources? Increasing the potency as time passed in a malicious demonstration of his capabilities? Or had all those extra passes that the Daschle letter took through postal sorting machines like No. 17 crumbled the contained anthrax into smaller, more floatable bits? The only sure thing was

that investigators were mystified.

Why had the killer chosen anthrax? Was the disease something he felt comfortable with—was it within his area of expertise?
Bacillus anthracis
had a unique appeal for those attempting to show their power or to even a score.

The investigators were reduced to counting on shows like
America’s Most Wanted
and a huge reward to incite a snitch to come forward.

Though congressional office buildings had been shut down for decontamination, other buildings that had received anthrax letters had inexplicably remained open. However, ABC News’s New York and Washington offices, CBS News, and CNN suspended mail while their systems were reevaluated and safety measures put in place. J. P. Morgan Chase even issued an internal “anthrax advisory.”

Then there were those postal workers who thought Bush was purposely holding back information as a cover-up or to avoid panicking the public. America’s vulnerability had never been more revealed. Officials from the Postal Service and CDC were sharply criticized for failing to test postal workers at the Brentwood facility sooner, as cross- contamination spread the invisible anthrax to State Depart- ment offices worldwide.

If anthrax spores could escape through the ten-micron pores in the paper fiber of a typical envelope when squashed by a postal sorter, secondary contamination was a possibility (though this would not be confirmed immediately); the dead- liest clumps of anthrax spores are one to five microns across.

Few germs could survive so virulently on a paperbound journey.

B. anthracis
needs no food or water and is probably the only pathogen so hardy. Viruses that live only in living cells cannot survive without food and water. A vial of Ebola- poisoned blood could be mailed, but would not be the sur- reptitious killer that anthrax is by the time it reached its destination. Sarin or VX, liquids, would evaporate before the envelope was sealed. Anthrax was formidable, yet could be neutralized with existing, though expensive, machines.

The impact upon the beleaguered post office was night- marish. Everyone wore nitrile gloves and certified filtering face pieces (FFPs). The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) divided N-95, N, or P-100 FFP particulate respirators into three levels of filter efficiency and three categories of resistance to filter efficiency degradation. The “N” in N-95 meant the filter had been tested with so- dium chloride particles under “worst-case” conditions—very high air flows, extremely high dust concentration and using extremely small particles neutralized to enhance maximum penetration. The “95” meant the filter blocked out at least

95 percent of the particles. The P-100 elastomeric mask would do the best job of protecting against bio-agents. The CDC also suggested that exhaust hoods be placed over the mail-sorting machines and that mail facilities and vacuum cleaners be outfitted with HEPA filters. Any public building with a HEPA-equipped ventilation system became a more difficult target for Amerithrax or any bioterrorist.

Simple respirators could filter out most of the anthrax particles, but there was always the danger of spores slipping around the sides. Through rain, heat, gloom of night, and anthrax, the postal handlers kept one eye on the in-boxes and the other on their masks. They scrubbed their hands with soap and water every two hours during their tour, washing and breathing and waiting every moment. A postal equip- ment repair company in Indianapolis discovered spores; then a Kansas City mail center that processed a tainted letter tested positive. Twelve Topeka postal employees were ex- posed, but tested negative for anthrax. Later, thankfully, so did 166 of their coworkers.

Worried branch-office workers handled potentially lethal mail as brave soldiers. One recalled the case of a homemade bomb. It had exploded in a mail pouch at the main New Orleans, Louisiana, post office, injuring two mail handlers. The parcel had been addressed to the police department. Just a bomb. Those were the good old days. With trepidation the nation’s postmen and -women scrutinized every package and letter they picked up. Postal workers, thrust unexpectedly on the front lines, could only take so much. They handled 680 million pieces of mail every day. But the brave soldiers shouldered their bags and trudged on. Before new ap- proaches to handling mail began to take hold nationwide, postal employees faced the burden of keeping their work- place safe from lethal letters and doing their job. They could screen for bombs, but no real systems of detecting biological agents on mail had been developed. But it wasn’t as if the country hadn’t been trying.

Since World War II, the U.S. had been investigating biodetection systems. Most methods involved the exposure of vials or petri dishes containing laboratory-grown cultures to air samples from a suspected target area. A field moni- toring device used during the Gulf War took between thir- teen and twenty-four hours to make a positive identification. The Biological Integrated Detection System (BIDS) cut the time to thirty minutes and was able to determine the pres- ence of anthrax, plague, botulinum toxin, and staphylococ- cus enterotoxin B.

The CDC had been ordered to evaluate the sensitivity of the commercially available rapid, hand-held assays for

1. anthracis.
   They reported that the CDC did not have enough scientific data to recommend the use of field assays at this time. Data provided by the manufacturers indicated that a minimum of ten thousand spores is required to gen- erate a positive signal. This number of spores would suggest a heavy contamination of the area, but a negative result would not rule out a lower level of contamination and ex- perience had shown, as in the case of Kathy Nguyen, that very many spores were not necessary to cause death.
   

   Americans asked themselves what kills anthrax. Micro- waving mail to kill the spores doesn’t work. Microwaves
   

   heat by exciting the water molecules, but there are very few in a fluffy sample of the most dangerous kind of anthrax. Clostridium botulinum forms spores, but they’re anaerobic— oxygen in air kills them. Steam kills spores in from one to ten minutes because a moist heat is a better killer than dry heat. Fumigation on the spores can be performed with eth- ylene or propylene oxides or paraformaldehyde gas. Ironing envelopes before opening was a good idea, as long as there was a cloth between the iron and the letter. The spores, in their thick, hard shells, resist most radiation except gamma irradiation.
   

   The Postal Service was also investigating ways to kill anthrax spores before they reached mailboxes across the na- tion. Irradiation was the most promising technology—it tore apart an organism’s DNA without harming paper mail. However, gamma radiation made hand-held computers com- pletely inoperable. Electron beam irradiation, which oper- ated in the range of 55 kGy (a measure of gamma radiation levels), irreparably damaged semiconductors, “smart” credit cards with embedded chips, contact lenses, compact flash memory cards in digital cameras, and pharmaceuticals. The USPS began working to devise new procedures to sanitize the mail, yet not damage sensitive items like film. One of the admonitions of the FBI was not to open any letter marked
   do not x-ray
   .
   

   Electron-beam radiation, a stream of electrons bombard- ing a target, could penetrate mail to a depth of a quarter-inch. X rays drive even further. In February the Postal Service would truck mail from Brentwood and Hamilton sorting centers to the Titan Corp. irradiation facilities in Lima, Ohio. First letters, then flats and packages, would be sterilized with electronic beams. Over December, January, and February, the service arranged to buy irradiation machinery for “tar- geted areas” like Washington and New York postal facili- ties. To treat mail from the nation’s thirty-eight thousand post offices would require 250 new distribution centers. Postmaster General Potter said at the end of October 2001, “This new technology won’t be cheap, but we are committed to spending what it takes to make the mail safe.” The irra- diation machines cost about $2.5 billion. By June 2002,
   

   Bridgeport, New Jersey, would have its own X-ray machine to sterilize mail.
   

   The post office planned to use the most highly sophisti- cated technology available—polymerase chain reaction. PCR, or “molecular photocopying,” could detect anthrax in mail as it was sorted. Unprocessed mail is dumped into me- chanical lifts. The lifts move the mail onto conveyor belts where individual pieces of mail are “pinched” and placed on high-speed sorter belts. As the pinch is made, a vacuum draws air from the mail along a two-foot strip. Every half hour the air samples are tested. Anthrax and other bacteria have specific DNA signatures and PCR uses specific en- zymes to magnify minute amounts of DNA and make a def- inite DNA equivalent. In the event of a biohazard, the supervisor monitoring the system shuts down the post office, the workers are given antibiotics, and Hazmat crews cleanse the building.
   

   PCR technology was still being analyzed for adaptation to high-speed sorters, but by the following fall, the Postal Service was prepared to sign a $200 million contract to in- stall the systems at nearly three hundred facilities across the nation. PCR can be automated to detect biohazards without waiting twenty-four hours for a lab analysis. Both the avail- able prototypes grabbed air samples sucked from the mail and analyzed them for biohazards.
   

   The USPS also decided to spend $9 million on a PCR pilot to test which of the two competitive firms had the best system. An additional $10.5 million was earmarked to repair some of the $25 million in damage to the Church Street post office in Manhattan, and another $500,000 to complete the plan to protect against bioterror attacks. The seven hundred displaced Church Street carriers who had delivered the Twin Towers mail were working out of makeshift quarters, sixty blocks from Ground Zero. Carrier Emma Thorton’s route had been Tower One, a route so big it had its own Zip Code—10048. “It was like my own little town in the sky,” she said. But those 16,000 addresses no longer existed.
   

   During the year following the anthrax mail attacks, the Postal Service purchased eight “e-beam” machines for $40 million to irradiate and kill bacteria on mail. Four machines
   

   were designated for Brentwood and the other four were to be installed at a site not yet determined.
   

   As a deterrent, an “identified-mailer” initiative, under re- view by the Mail Security Task Force, would allow the post office to track the mail back to the sender. Mail involved in that system would not have to go through the sanitization steam process that damaged and delayed the mail. They needed a system that would vacuum up air near the mail and feed it through a filter to capture any harmful bacteria. A continuous dust vacuuming and air filtration system was needed at all mail sorting, processing, and distribution fa- cilities. This would keep a constant flow of air playing across the mail and directed away from the mail sorters, through the equipment and into filtration units. Inside the filtration units the air would undergo two stages of filtration. The last stage would use HEPA (high-efficiency particulate air) filters.
   

   Other technology to detect and identify mail biohazards had been suggested. The most promising were a biological indicator strip that would change color in the presence of toxins in envelopes and air monitors that would trigger a second confirmation tester to establish an actual threat. On the drawing board was an automated mass spectrometry sys- tem that would constantly monitor the air and identify the invisible enemy moving over the postal workers in waves.
   

   All of the safety improvements were at the mercy of funds to be appropriated. Postmaster General John E. Potter asked Congress for $5 billion, half to go toward irradiation technology to kill anthrax bacteria. Congress set aside $500 million to help the Postal Service safeguard against bioterror attacks. The Postal Service planned to spend $245 million to retrofit its high-speed sorters. Another $35 million would go to decontaminate and reopen the Brentwood and Ham- ilton Township sorting and distribution centers. This was the agency’s “number one priority.”
   

   The Postal Service was in dire financial waters. They faced an annual loss of $1.65 billion. There had already been two rate increases in 2001, now there was a request for a third. Rate hikes were only a stopgap measure. Potter was concerned that users of the mail would be burdened with
   

   these extra costs through the price of postage and that could threaten the foundation of universal postal service. On No- vember 8, while testifying before the Senate Appropriations subcommittee, he projected a fiscal 2002 deficit of $1.35 billion. The USPS had just spent $100 million on gloves, masks, and antibiotics, unanticipated expenses related to en- suring employee safety. Most of the money in a $20 billion terrorism spending bill had been used as bailout money for insurance companies and airlines, those hit hard by 9-11. The USPS had already received $175 million from the mul- tibillion emergency fund.
   

   “The Post Office was bleeding and now it’s hemorrhag- ing,” said Robert Wientzen, president of the Direct Market- ing Association. Direct mailers were worried. They were afraid that people would toss out their catalogs unread be- cause of anthrax fears. John Potter looked on the bright side. He suggested that consumers might be more responsive to direct mail because their “heightened awareness” would cause them to read direct mail more closely. Behind the scenes the postal inspectors dredged for clues.
   

   STRAIN 16
   

   

   Monsters of the Mail
   

   EVER
   wonder why postal inspectors always show up at air- plane crashes? It’s because planes carry mail. Inspectors are inextricably involved with any form of transportation that moves the mail. There were precedents for Amerithrax. There had been a number of Masters of Terror by Mail; the Unabomber was one. Another was George Metesky, “the Mad Bomber,” who terrorized New York City from 1950 to 1957 by planting thirty-two bombs. In an anonymous letter,
   

   the Mad Bomber revealed that the Consolidated Edison Power Company had been responsible for his contracting tuberculosis. This valuable clue led to his capture.
   

   Dr. James A. Brussel, a New York psychiatrist and au- thor of
   Case Book of a Crime Psychiatrist
   , sometimes served as a consultant to local police, never more so than on the Mad Bomber investigation. Brussel created a near perfect portrait of the bomber through the first use of a profile. His contention was that the bomber, who held New York in a grip of fear unequaled until Son of Sam and Amerithrax, was an Eastern European immigrant in his forties. Dr. Brus- sel believed the bomber lived with his mother and wore a neatly buttoned, double-breasted suit. Metesky was dressed just that way when he was arrested. Apprehended on Janu- ary 22, 1957, Metesky was found criminally insane and in- carcerated in the New York State Mental Hospital. After his release on December 12, 1973, the lifelong bachelor (he turned down a marriage proposal from a pen pal while in jail) spent his last years caring for his ailing sister, Mae. Dr. Brussel’s portrait of the Mad Bomber was the first and last time a psychological profile worked to such perfection— with one exception.
   

   “The best example of profiling in history,” former FBI profiler Candice DeLong said, “was the profile done on the Sacramento Vampire Killer, Richard Trenton Chase, in 1978. The profile that was developed was handed out to the police. They went door to door in the neighborhood where a missing car was found. The second victim’s car was seen leaving the scene by the neighbor. That was the entire family that Chase had slaughtered. They had a bright red station wagon. There was only one in the world that bright a color and they had it. The neighbor who was waiting to hear from them to join them for a day at the zoo looked out her win- dow. It was a half hour after the time for them to call. She sees their car going down the street and thinks, ‘What’s that all about?’ She walks across the street and finds them all slain. Here’s what we have to go on: the offender must have arrived on foot and then he stole his victims’ car. And of course the baby was missing, the eighteen-month-old baby. “They eventually found that car about a mile and a half
   

   away parked very haphazardly with the back end of the car kind of out on the street (like I park a car). That particular neighborhood was residential, commercial, and storefront. Robert Ressler and Russ Borpagel, one of my instructors at the Academy, both FBI people, developed a very specific profile—approximate age twenty-five to twenty-eight years old, white male, thin and emaciated, unkempt, lives alone in rental property, does not drive, would be described by others as ‘weird,’ tends to stay to himself,—unmarried, un- employed at the time—now that’s a profile.
   

   “And they took that profile and they went door to door in the neighborhood where the car was found. They also said in the profile that they thought the offender would be living within 250 yards of where the car was parked. They saturated the neighborhood and actually said to people, ‘We’re looking for somebody like this—know anyone who might fit that profile?’ More than one person said, ‘You know, that sounds a lot like Richard.’ ‘Who’s Richard?’ ‘Well, he’s this weird guy who lives by himself, is probably mentally ill.’ The profile also said the person would prob- ably be mentally ill and have a long history of mental illness. ‘And he’s kind of a nice guy. He loves animals. He’s always asking people for puppies and kittens.’ ‘Where does Richard live?’ ‘Why, right over there.’
   

   “So they did a little investigation and found that a guy named Richard Trenton Chase was renting an apartment in a particular neighborhood. He had been a schizophrenic since he was sixteen, in and out of facilities until the family finally kicked him out when he was twenty-one. He becomes a ward of the state. In those days people were not forced to take medication. He had been arrested six months prior to the Sacramento Vampire Murders by the Reno County sher- iff. He had been living in the woods trapping animals. They checked his psychiatric records. They noticed that in some of the nurses’ notes they had mentioned that they had found him on the grounds of the hospital trapping animals in nets and drinking their blood.
   

   “His delusion, which he suffered from since his original schizophrenic break at age sixteen, his delusion was that his blood was being turned into mud by spaceships and by the
   

   soap scum on the soap dish in the bathtub. He had to replace his blood or he would die. For many years he would replace it with the blood of animals. He finally escalated to people. He did not torture his victims. He shot them immediately between the eyes and then he would attempt to get their blood through evisceration. In the first victim’s home, he drank it at the scene. The second victim they found a bathtub full of water and blood. He bathed in it.