The Stew Phone
Those who work in the intelligence field are by nature paranoid and suspicious. That trepidation about carelessly spilling secrets which are better left on the plate has led to an entire secret history of really quite absurd inventions to keep the secrets intact. It surely must take an utter lack of a sense of humor to make it through the average day of dealing with this technology without recognizing the silliness of it all:
“He used an encrypted telephone—a secure telephonic unit, or STU (pronounced ‘stew’) phone. A stew phone makes you like Donald Duck eating sushi.”
Something You Don’t Wanna Catch
If you think anthrax sounds bad, don’t ever take the opportunity to look at it through a microscope. The anthrax which had been sent to Senator Tom Daschle is viewed by a top scientist and the results is a horrifying image conveyed in appropriately horrifying metaphor:
“They reminded him of grinning jack-o’-lanterns, skeletons, hip sockets, and Halloween goblin faces…One boulder looked to him like a human skull, with eye sockets and a jaw hanging open and screaming. It was an anthrax skull.”
Asian Horror
While smallpox was eradicated (or so it was assumed) from most the world, it managed to stubbornly cling to throughout parts of southern Asia. The virus in Bangladesh in particular seemed to reveal an annual capacity to rise from the dead and being attacking victims anew:
“In Bangladesh, they attacked the virus as hard as possible from September to November each year, when the virus seemed almost to rest—this was like killing a vampire in its sleep.”
The Demon
The title of the book is a metaphor. The demon in the freezer refers to the only two places in the world where smallpox was supposed to exist in 1991: at the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta and at its Russian equivalent in Moscow.
Would You Buy a Car From…
The scientists working with the FBI was saying one thing about the anthrax sent to Daschle. The scientists from the US Army were saying almost the complete opposite. Why? It was the exact same sample. Funny thing about samples, however: they behave different depending on the way you test them.
“The people at Batelle took the anthrax and heated it an autoclave, and this caused the material to clump up, and then they told the FBI it looked like puppy chow. It was a like a used-car dealer offering a car fro sale that’s been in an accident and is covered with dents, and the dealer is trying to claim this is the way the car looked when it was new.”
