Free Amerithrax by Robert Graysmith Page B

House would begin discounting the 9-11 terrorists as the originators of the anthrax letter.
    The FBI pursued the 9-11 terrorist-anthrax connection doggedly, but Atta and his terrorists weren’t the only ones toying with the idea of buying up crop dusters and sprayers that could be outfitted to spray invisible clouds of anthrax over U.S. cities. The investigators had no shortage of sus- pects in the bio-attack against America. One of America’s greatest foreign enemies had a biological warfare stockpile, much of it kept in secret, and had actually modified crop dusters to spray liquid anthrax.
    One week after the terrorists died and more than two weeks before Bob Stevens’s death, someone mailed a hand- ful of anthrax letters to some of the most famous and trusted names in America.

STRAIN 5

The Postman Always Rings Twice

    “A lunatic. With the killer of all times. It gives me the creeps. This whole operation gives me the creeps.”
    — A character in The Satan Bug

    IT was one envelope, then two, a handful inserted very care- fully into a mail slot. The letters all fluttered into the belly of the same mailbox, but their paths would soon separate. The plastic bin used to catch the mail deposited into the box
    barely registered the weight of the letters that would shake a nation. A gloved hand posted them into the center box of three blue mailboxes sometime on Tuesday, September 18, 2001. This day was a one-week anniversary of sorts. Only a week earlier jets had crashed into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a Pennsylvania field. Dust still howled around Ground Zero. Firemen and volunteers, digging for the bodies of thousands, unknowingly inhaled powder as lethal as the bacterial dust mailed to AMI.
    It was quieter here on Nassau Street, except for the busy hum of traffic in the business district around the trio of cor- ner boxes. The envelopes lay atop others, alike, yet unalike. These letters were the most unique ever mailed in America. The envelopes, though, were plain and white and of the thirty-four-cent prestamped metered variety. By using me- tered envelopes, the mailer avoided any possibility of being traced back through the stamps. Saliva might give away the identity of the mailer through DNA, the molecular code upon which so much modern biotechnology research de- pends. They can be bought directly from post office vending machines (without creating much notice) in sets of five. The killer’s first mailing probably used all five. The main Prince- ton post office stood only a couple of blocks away, one of four New Jersey post offices that would be contaminated by anthrax spores.
    The envelopes, of an extraordinarily cheap, porous paper, were a smaller size than traditional business-size envelopes— measuring approximately 6 1 ⁄ 4 inches by 3 1 ⁄ 2 inches. The hand-printing on the envelope slanted down to the right. The writer had trouble keeping words in a straight line on un- lined paper. He clumped them together as if he were afraid he would run out of room by the time he got to the right edge of the small envelope. He almost did.
    Were the letters neatly taped? It was hard to tell in the darkness of the box. A ray of light as another letter fell. Yes, taped, but not as securely as later letters. It was as if the killer came to have second thoughts about hurting any- one except the addressee. The anthrax mailer had not yet realized how porous the envelopes were. Their wide pores allowed even the crude, less-refined anthrax spores he was
    mailing to slip through the paper. If the microscopic parti- cles inside, no bigger than a human cell, had had a voice it would have been the whispering hiss of a cobra.
    Amerithrax’s own name had a harsh sound, like that of a James Bond villain like Drax or a real-life killer like Zo- diac. Though Amerithrax was just as fantastic and as much a supercriminal as they, he had not named himself. The FBI had christened him. Their code name for the anthrax mailer was