Amerithrax (17 page)
Letters inside a collection box have a tendency to stay together. Through bar codes and magnetic strips and an in- visible trail of spores and infections postal inspectors later traced their path. And so a clumping of mail definitely de- veloped around both letters. They would sail along with each other, at least for a while.
It takes letters about two and a half hours to get from postbox to bar code machine. Bar codes on Amerithrax’s new letters indicated a processing time that suggested Amer- ithrax’s letters had been collected from their mailbox around 3:00 p.m.
The first transmittal envelope (prestamped with a thirty- four-cent eagle stamp) was postmarked “Trenton, NJ 10/09/01 (Tues.).” The envelope, handprinted by a right-handed adult, was addressed
7
to:
7
Lake theorized that Amerithrax copied the address from a computer
509 HART SENATE OFFICE BUILDING
WASHINGTON D.C. 20510
+
4103
Sen. Thomas A. Daschle of South Dakota was the Senate majority leader, the nation’s top Democrat. Sharp-featured with a lynx-eyed, intelligent look, he is a lean and fit man with a strong thrust to his chin and a determined set to his mouth. Though not yet well-known nationally, he was about to be propelled into the spotlight. This morning he is dressed in a dark suit with a red power tie and powder blue shirt.
At some point water damaged the Daschle letter. There had been water damage to the Brokaw and
Post
letters too. Was it raining the day it was prepared? Had the envelope fluttered out of the box and into a puddle as the postman placed it in his plastic bin? Though mailed almost a month apart, three of Amerithrax’s letters had gotten damp. Had the damage occurred in Amerithrax’s lab or was something in his anthrax process causing the letters to be wet? Could the dampness be involved in his method of transit to the mailbox? The spores might have been refrigerated to pre- serve them and prevent germination or hidden in some wet container.
The blurring of the address was significant. It made the nine-digit zip code written very close to the bottom of the Daschle envelope partially illegible. It delayed the letter, a letter that would arrive too late to influence the USA Patriot Act (as in Provide Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism) Daschle was debating. The zip code might now have to be read by hand by a human being who could direct it to the right slot. The return address read:
printout because the word “building” was on a line by itself. “Computer formats have two address lines because only twenty-five to thirty char- acters are allowed per line. There is no comma between city and state on all the letters. This is very unusual, but computers don’t put down commas.”
FRANKLIN PARK NJ 08852
Greendale was a nonexistent grade school in New Jersey. Did the address have some symbolic meaning? More than likely the return address was to make the letters more ac- ceptable to politically savvy senators who might see some value in answering a child’s letter. Besides, the Postal Ser- vice had been cautioning Americans against opening any letters without return addresses. Judith Miller had chastised herself for not remembering that when she opened hers at the
New York Times
.
The second letter, sailing along with its companion, was addressed to Senator Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, Democrat and chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, another major player in the Patriot Act debate. It read:
SENATOR LEAHY
433 RUSSELL SENATE OFFICE BUILDING
WASHINGTON D.C. 20510-4502
Both Leahy and Daschle were Democrats and important figures in the debate over “the Antiterror Bill.” On Friday the Senate and House would be arguing whether to pass the 342-page law, which would amend fifteen different federal statutes. Whatever Amerithrax’s intentions, his letters would arrive too late to influence the October 12 vote.
Later, postal inspectors were able to determine the route the two letters from Princeton, New Jersey, traveled. They were identified using masses of computer data recorded as each letter entered the highly automated sorting centers. Upon entry, each letter is scanned for an address, given identifying bar codes recording its time and place of posting, and rushed on its way. Available data included digital im- ages of almost every hand-addressed envelope, which opti- cal scanners cannot easily read. Letter codes sprayed on the back of some letters during processing later enabled postal
inspectors to get a more precise idea of which letters were touched with anthrax.
Data stored on magnetic tapes in the thousands of sorting machines in the 362 regional sorting centers around the na- tion are a way for postal inspectors to check on a lost letter. This time the data could be used to identify the tens of thousands of other letters that passed through the central processing station within an hour or so of each other about fifteen miles from the Princeton mailbox. The same sorting center had processed the anthrax-contaminated mail sent in September to NBC and the
New York Post.
Amerithrax’s two letters were still in close proximity to each other when they arrived at the Hamilton Processing Facility in Hamilton Township. At 5:27 p.m., amid tons of bills, credit offers, birthday greetings, and chatty letters, an anthrax-laced letter to Sen. Patrick J. Leahy zipped into the humming, high-speed machinery at the postal sorting center. Powder from the Leahy letter coated the lens of the electric eye that scans bar codes on envelopes.
Exactly twenty seconds and 283 items later, an envelope addressed to the John Farkas household on Great Hill Road in Seymour, Connecticut, followed the Leahy letter through the machinery. As the machine pounded the mail, the Farkas letter picked up highly refined anthrax forced through pores in the cheap envelopes. Later, a post office facility in Wal- lingford, Connecticut, would report a cluster of three million anthrax spores in the dust under a sorting machine.
Norma Wallace, fifty-seven, of Willingboro, New Jersey, worked as a repairperson for the Hamilton Processing Fa- cility. When the facility’s automated mail-sorting machine jammed, she went in to fix it. Wallace found powder on the electric eye. Taking a deep breath, she leaned down to rub it away.
A forty-three-year-old South Asian woman, Jyotsna Patel of Princeton Junction, New Jersey, was working at a differ- ent mail-sorting machine. Though Patel was not near the broken machine, she still fell victim to an invisible cloud created as the envelope was squeezed and unsqueezed by mail-sorting equipment and by personnel touching it and placing it in stacks and in mail bags. Tiny spores floated
The sorting machines later tested positive for anthrax spores and were responsible for transmitting spores to in- bound mail as it was segregated at Hamilton for distribution in the Trenton area. The cross-contamination (which many experts believed to be impossible) touched some of the 464 postal centers in central New Jersey. Mail from boxes in Princeton was routed through three centers before it went to Edison or Eatontown, New Jersey, for further processing.
Anthrax spores were left at Edison and Eatontown, parts of the Carnegie Center in West Windsor, and at a smaller post office on Palmer Square in downtown Princeton. Mov- ing against the flow, cross-contaminates moved through dis- tribution plants processing bulk mail in Hackensack, Central New Jersey, and Newark Main all the way to the Bellmawr Distribution Plant. Later, the Stamp Fulfillment Center in Kansas City would receive letters from the D.C. mail center that had processed Sen. Tom Daschle’s letter and would test positive for anthrax.
Letters for the greater D.C. area, including Daschle’s and Leahy’s, were next funneled through the Carteret Hub and Spoke Facility in New Jersey. On Wednesday, October 10, they headed on to a brick-walled mail hub on Brentwood Avenue northeast of the Capitol, the Brentwood Mail Fa- cility. The U.S. Post Office Main Branch on Brentwood Road NE, the sorting center that served all of Washington, hummed with activity round the clock. Its more than two thousand workers seemingly never rested. They managed four million pieces of mail a day. Amerithrax’s letters were among them. All of the considerable mail for lawmakers’ offices passed through Brentwood before being routed to either the House or the Senate. At one end of the vast facility was a loading dock. At the other was the express mailroom. In between was an ocean of air, its flow impeded by few barriers throughout the huge barn. Bagged letters were
sorted into bar-coded trays and conveyed by belt to large- tray sorting machines.
At 7:10 p.m., the Daschle letter was manually fed through Sorter No. 17, one of the huge high-speed machines that channeled up to 550 letters per minute. A series of belts on the machine seized each letter and pinched it, compressing the envelope. No. 17 pounded and punched the mail like an old prizefighter. The conveyor belt fed an endlessly hungry mouth that filled with powdered paper. The giant was huff- ing and puffing by 8:00 a.m., Thursday, October 11, wheez- ing until it was shut down by a worker in mask and gloves. He unclogged it with a few powerful blasts of compressed air from a hose. Dislodged anthrax spores floated into the air, “self-crumbling” as they had been designed to do. They broke into smaller and smaller particles, each microscopic bit sweating a “splatty white goop” around its border. It was some sort of additive.
Sometime during this period, Bill Paliscak, a criminal investigator for the U.S. Postal Inspectors, removed a filter above No. 17. Dust showered down on him from the sorting machine. He breathed some into his lungs. His face and body became swollen, the membrane around his lungs be- came inflamed, and he grew unsteady on his feet. Within days he could only speak haltingly and had lost his short- term memory. He was in horrible pain and there seemed to be no cure.
Four workers at thirty machines inhaled a snowstorm of fibers into their lungs as they toiled. The paper fibers were sweet, warm, and deadly. Was there a finer fragrance? The odor of all their variations—cotton, hemp, pulp, even su- garcane and rice papers—filled the vast sorting room. That most permanent of erections, an Egyptian tomb, was per- meated with similar smells. Astonishingly, its papyrus scrolls and papier-maˆche´ sculptures, seemingly fragile, have lasted thousands of years. The paper of the tomb was as eternal as anthrax. Each letter in the endless stream had a personality and a mission. The letters wore their watermarks and postmarks like tattoos.
On Thursday the Daschle letter and the Leahy letter took separate routes in the automated system as electronic eyes
The Leahy letter was misrouted and made an unexpected side trip to the State Department. The sorting machine’s op- tical reader had misconstrued the blurred handwritten zip code on the Leahy letter and translated it into a digital bar code, turning 20510-4502 into 20520-4502. Afterward the Leahy letter was trucked to a separate sorter at the U.S. State Department, Facility Annex 32 in Winchester, Virginia. Meanwhile the Daschle letter continued on straight to Cap- itol Hill. The accidental detour, experts later said, might also explain the extra level of potency in the smaller size of spores in the Leahy anthrax in that envelope.
“An additional process of milling, like a mortar and pes- tle,” suggested Ken Alibek, a former Soviet germ-warfare official. “The high-powered sorters could have acted like a mill,” said an investigator months later, “crumbling the mi- croscopic clumps of deadly spores into smaller and more floatable bits with each pass.” He added that the overall grade contrasts were probably caused by “different batches of the product, one more sophisticated than the other.” The Leahy letter at this point simply vanished near the State Department mailroom. Potentially, it was the most danger- ous of all Amerithrax’s letters.