The Hunt For The Anthrax Killers

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The race is on for scientists to determine whether chemicals were added to the spores to make them float so freely in air currents. Simultaneously, there is a continuing frenzy to find the outer edge of the contamination, a line that officials have so far miscalculated daily--and sometimes hourly. With the two deaths from inhalation anthrax last week, the investigation has become immeasurably more urgent; with each casualty, the public's faith in government slips a little more. If order and the economy are to be preserved, not to mention support for military action, then that faith must be shored up.

Oct. 14 marked a turning point for the investigation, even if not all the investigators realized it. That day an aide to Daschle opened a letter with a return address of a fictitious New Jersey school. With that, investigators got their first look at the most potent anthrax spores in the case to date. Three days later, 31 people tested positive for exposure (that number was later reduced to 28), confirming what Army scientists studying the spores had already concluded. This is an extremely dangerous version of the bacterium. "What happened in Daschle's office was a dramatic milestone," says Dr. Alan Zelicoff, senior scientist at Sandia National Laboratories for National Security and Arms Control.

With this news, the roughly 1,000 FBI agents working on the case moved to zero in on people with access to milling equipment that could grind anthrax to such a fine powder. They intensified efforts already under way to survey emergency rooms and coroners to see whether any patients had recently died from shock or severe flulike symptoms and to check with pharmaceutical and chemical companies and university labs.

Last week officials went public with a more detailed profile of the bacterium being studied at the Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Md. It is highly concentrated and pure. The material's light, fine texture and a brown ring around each spore suggest an additive had been introduced to prevent clumping. "All these things tell me that whoever is doing this has a knowledge base that's pretty damn good," says William Patrick III, who spent 20 years designing biological weapons for the U.S. before President Richard Nixon halted the program in 1969. Patrick, now a consultant in Maryland, has not examined the anthrax himself. But a Fort Detrick scientist he trusts, who is involved in the investigation, has given him a detailed description.

"When you shake it up, it's fluffy," Patrick says. "It forms a little aerosol in whatever container it's in." That's unnerving because it means the spores will float on even imperceptible air currents--those caused, for example, by air whooshing out of envelopes as they churn through mail sorters. One of the many daunting questions is how much more stock the culprit possesses. The experts are not reassuring on that point. "I think it's prudent to prepare for a mass-casualty event," says Raymond Zilinskas, a former U.N. bioweapons inspector in Iraq.