Amerithrax (65 page)

used in the anthrax attacks might have been disposed of in a pond a few miles from the Institute and Hatfill’s former residence. About a hundred federal agents conducting “fo- rensic searches” would fine-comb a woodland clearing and a watershed area of about a dozen spring-fed ponds north- west of Frederick. The snowbound forest reposes in the hills above Fishing Creek Reservoir, the wellspring of Frederick’s drinking water. Several divers would hack their way through the foot-thick ice of one pond. Below, they would discover vials wrapped in plastic and a partially sub- merged, clear airtight chamber with two holes in the sides. The plastic container was similar to a scientific glove box like the ones used at the Institute. Or one to make home- made PCP.

“They’ve been taking things out of two fire ponds and labeling everything and taking it away,” a spokeswoman for the city of Frederick would say. “If they found what they’re looking for, we still don’t know.” The next month agents would return to set up three roadblocks and close off the city-owned timberland and ponds. Speculation was that Amerithrax might have waded into the water to delicately manipulate lethal anthrax bacteria into envelopes within a partially submerged airtight chamber. This theory, called “far-fetched” by one of Dr. Hatfill’s attorneys, Thomas Con- nolly, might explain how Amerithrax’s letters had gotten wet. The fact that Dr. Hatfill had a postgraduate diploma in diving and underwater medicine from a South African naval training institute only made a few eager investigators lick their chops. However, experts doubted if spores could later be found in a natural body of water, having been long dis- persed. Investigators would conduct 300 soil, water, and sediment tests anyway.

Forensic searchers would return in the summer to con- struct a plastic mesh fence around the perimeter of the muddy pond. A private engineering firm would feed a fire hose into the pond and, operating backhoes, a generator, and a pump, drain it. The FBI would find logs, coins, fishing lures, a street sign, a bicycle, and a handgun (which they turned over to the Frederick police), but no residual anthrax spores in the bottom mud. Agents with a sense of humor

would call the exercise, “The Blair Witch Project” or “Op- eration Pond Scum.”
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Dr. Timothy Holtz, a preventive medicine fellow at the New York City Health Department, was less optimistic. Speaking at an Atlanta medical meeting, he concluded his appraisal of the Amerithrax case with a slide: “We will likely never know.”

ALL
day Thursday, September 5, agents, exhausted now but still hopeful, combed the living tomb. They were solemn as archaeologists disinterring a Pharaoh’s vault during their ex- cavation. AMI’s burial chamber was not buried in dunes, only surrounded by drifting beaches. Unlike with workmen tunneling into pyramids, there was no sound of pick and shovel, no rustle of rope tackles or shouting, singing, and clapping to work songs. In fact, there was a deliberate lack of motion on the part of the diggers. It was crucial they not stir up spores.

Instead of the heated air of a tomb, like the hottest of steam baths, the air was chilly inside. After sealing the building a year before, AMI executives had kept the air conditioner functioning full blast. This prevented humidity and heat from harming AMI’s 4.5 million pages of news- paper clippings, 5 million images and slides, and 600,000 pages of bound copies. As agents wandered the dim rooms, the hollow echo of their footsteps resounding, they won- dered if those ancient papers would crumble to dust at the slightest touch. Shafts of light cut through stagnant air. Par- ticles of dust danced there.

Because the air-conditioning system might have spirited spores to other locations, searchers from the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, the FBI, and the CDC, using state-of-the-art technology, painstakingly re- mapped the tainted complex. Had there been any redistri- bution of anthrax spores?

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The diving searches would take place from December 13 to Decem- ber 19, 2002, and again in January 2003. The last search would go from June 9 through June 28, 2003. Draining the pond cost $250,000.

The modern archeologists unearthed no libation vessels or bronze canopic jars. They saw no fine statuary, only the imagined unmoving figures of men and women who had once worked there. Instead of altars, they discovered only dust-covered desks. There were no rolled papyrus, just cop- ying machines. It developed that only the powerful fans in two dozen high-speed copiers had been capable of dislodg- ing, aerosolizing, and disseminating spores once they had settled. The spores had been scattered and were clinging to reams of copier paper once stored inside the “hot” mailroom. As the searchers exited the quarantined building, they entered a shower unit. As their protective suits were hosed down, the anthrax runoff was collected in five-hundred- gallon and thousand-gallon tanks and chemically treated with chlorine before being dumped into the city sewer sys-

tem.

“Things are going very well,” said SAIC Pesquera. “We hope this investigation will bring to justice the person or persons responsible for this horrific act.” But the FBI’s fourteen-day search warrant was running out fast. There was another time limit as well. The White House wanted an an- swer in the Amerithrax case by the anniversary of 9-11, a symbolic deadline. A more fitting symbol would be to put the faces of Morris and Curseen, the first postal workers to die on the front lines of a new kind of war, on a stamp.

On Tuesday morning, September 10, 2002, agents finally completed their search of AMI. Exactly one year earlier, terrorists had flown jets into the Twin Towers, a Pennsyl- vania field, and the Pentagon. The FBI piled its considerable bounty like rubble at the foot of AMI—items for “further forensic examination.” The FBI’s five thousand evidence samples included air filters, culture plates, and air samplers used in their search. They packaged up two vacuum sam- ples, six carpet samples, broom and dust mop heads, and a single wet-type mop head. Thousands of other samples would be compared to the anthrax-tainted letters.

As for the mailroom, investigators dismantled and carried out everything that had been in the mailroom—twelve shelves, thirty-three mail-cart folders, eleven mail-slot vac- uum samplings, and an equal number of box tops. The FBI

also transferred a dark green plastic trash bag containing 769 anthrax-tainted pieces of mail to a truck. The mail had been left in AMI’s underground parking garage after the previous fall’s evacuation. Agents gathered up all the letters stuffed into mail cubbyholes and snatched another forty-two letters from sorting bins. They left the heavy copiers behind. “I can confirm that we finished up today, and that we have left,” Orihuela said. “We did leave the building today. I can’t say anything more.” She would not say if their goals had been met, that of discovering the source of the contagion—the missing letter.

“It comes down to this: the building is a public health hazard,” said Gerald McKelvey, an AMI spokesman. McKelvey added that the company had offered to give the building to the federal government. AMI employees would probably never consent to return to the building. The search this time was “highly successful,” said John Florence, spokesman for the Toxic Substances and Disease Registry. “This was the first time that FBI agents had worked literally side by side with public health scientists. People were de- termined to get results out of the time we had available.”

The results would provide the FBI with valuable data to advance the ongoing Amerithrax investigation.

With the 9-11 anniversary now a reality, it was observed that panic and fear had abated and been replaced with a national anger and resolve. Empty chairs representing the 2,823 Americans lost at Ground Zero were lined up. The choking dust, unbelievably, was still there and swept over a site littered with flags and dump trucks. Even though a year had passed, Ground Zero was still buffeted by high winds which raised endless clouds of dust. The mournful benedic- tion in New York, the empty chairs, mirrored the silent, still, and deserted AMI building in Florida.

The images were still with Americans, but it was the unforgivable cruelty of the anthrax mailings following so closely on the heels of tragedy that stayed with the detec- tives. As for another attack by Amerithrax, that was doubtful for several reasons. His motive had most likely been to in- fluence a Congressional vote on a tough version of the Pa- triot Act that had passed on October 12, 2001. The timing

and choice of targets suggested that Senators Daschle and Leahy were impediments to the bill in its most invasive form. On October 4, Leahy, who had opposed Ashcroft’s nomination as Attorney General, had been attacked by sev- eral conservative talk shows as the bill’s lead opposition. If Amerithrax’s letters to the senators, mailed on October 8, had not gotten wet, blurring the zip code, they would have arrived in time to potentially influence the vote.

Whether Amerithrax’s intention had been to alert the na- tion to the dangers of bioterror or not, the country was alerted. Jack the Ripper experts such as Donald Rumbelow have conjectured he was merely a social reformer. The Rip- per’s ghastly murders and letters to the press might have been committed to draw attention to the grinding poverty of Whitechapel’s streetwalking women. Ultimately, the Amer- ithrax case might well be called “the Case of the Patriotic Murders.”

Amerithrax might not strike again for another reason. His anthrax may have been stolen from a secret U.S. bioweapons program or appropriated from among the ten-gram ship- ments of anthrax sent to the Institute by Dugway to be ir- radiated (after the Gulf War Dugway created small quantities of freeze-dried aerosol anthrax). Amerithrax may have used up his anthrax.

The agents might not have caught Amerithrax yet, but they had gotten close. The letters had stopped. Amerithrax might have been an antisocial loner, as the profile said, a lone wolf within the United States who had no links to ter- rorist groups and who might have been, as the FBI specu- lated, “an opportunist” using 9-11 events to “vent his rage.”
Newsweek
said in a cover story that the contaminated mail would be “remembered less for the pain it caused than the message it sent... This fall’s anthrax attacks have turned a distant fear into a fact of life... Bioterror is no longer a hypothetical hazard but a real one.”

Anger was everywhere in America, as passengers rose up and beat down skyjackers like Richard Reid the shoe- bomber, as one after another child kidnapper or killer was captured via the Amber Alert. The greatest words any man- hunter had uttered were spoken—to the killer of a California

child, one policeman said pointedly on television: “Don’t eat. Don’t sleep. We’re coming for you.”

Death from the tangled blood of a beast had stretched to a journalist in Florida, postal workers in Washington, and innocent women in New York and Connecticut.

Agents stood outside in the darkness of the AMI parking lot. It was nearly deserted. There was only a Boca Raton police bus, a few office trailers, and a small blue tent flut- tering in the sea breeze.

They surveyed the site of the first intentional anthrax release in the United States thoughtfully. They wondered, “Where was that letter?” Inside, a breeze from somewhere fluttered the crayon drawings on Bob Stevens’s computer. Untouched coffee cups and family photographs and unfin- ished stories remained on desks.

The clouds outside had faded and the sun began to set. Dusk was gathering, twilight settling behind the palms on the road. The huge building seemed eternal, as eternal as anthrax. The tainted envelope, possibly addressed to “J-Lo,” had become a Holy Grail. Where was that letter? If the FBI had found it, they were not saying. The howling wind had ceased. The nation took a deep collective breath. It could breathe again.

Americans vowed not to live in terror. America was a country with a future.

BY
September 10, 2003, the noxious dust swirling about Ground Zero had bequeathed a lethal legacy. In the past two years thousands of New Yorkers had contacted the WTC health registry, recounting cases of shortness of breath, sinus inflammation, wheezing, and unremitting coughs. Babies born near Ground Zero weighed about a half-pound less than the norm. Nearly five-hundred New York firemen, suf- fering from chronic breathing problems caused by exposure to substantial clouds of carcinogenic organic matter, air- borne sulfuric acid, and ultra-fine glass particles, might be forced into premature retirement.