Soon enough, Stevens’s astonished doctors began to understand why: Anthrax was charging through his body, whistling as it worked, shutting down every vital organ, one by one. Anthrax, it is said, does to its victims from the inside what South American flesh-eating ants do from the outside.
But I didn’t want to believe that Saddam Hussein, or Osama bin Laden, or any other celebrity killer on the international terror circuit had used a biological weapon to murder Stevens. The very idea of someone launching an anthrax attack on a Florida supermarket tabloid seemed comic, worthy of one of The Sun’s own wacky news items. For the first time in journalistic history, however, the facts were on The Sun’s side: It was virtually impossible to catch the inhalation form of anthrax by accident. Cutaneous anthrax, the more common version of the disease, was usually passed on by cattle in Third World countries. Stevens, whose most adventurous activity before his death was a five-day fishing trip to North Carolina, could have spent a decade herding goats in Africa, and he would still have been unlikely to catch skin anthrax—never mind the inhalation version. But even before the statistical improbability of Stevens’s death had time to sink in, another employee of The Sun, a seventy-four-year-old grandfather, Ernesto Blanco, came down with the disease. Blanco, born in Cuba, was initially diagnosed with pneumonia before doctors at Miami’s Cedars Medical Center decided that the fluid in his lungs was caused by inhaled anthrax spores. To me, the only positive aspect of the whole affair was that it was happening more than a thousand miles south of Manhattan. Then anthrax arrived, refreshed from the Florida sunshine, in the Rockefeller Center, yards from my veal-fattening cubicle. It was ready for work.
New York had already faced spectacular, televised violence; now, it seemed, it was going to face invisible, biological violence. Living in Manhattan felt like living in some distant, war-weary outpost: how I imagined Casablanca might have felt during World War II. The White Horse Tavern, an Irish pub on Hudson Street, became my Rick’s Bar. Only a few blocks south, debris from a two-kiloton blast still smoldered; every day brought color-coded alerts and closed bridges; and every conversation seemed to end with a suicide attack scenario. “What if they, like, just walked into Grand Central Station with an AK-47 and opened fire?” I heard one woman ask at the checkout of D’Agostino, a West Village supermarket.
The Times’s bureau on Sixth Avenue, meanwhile, became a fortress. Before entering 1211, I had to show my British passport and put my Starbucks chocolate croissant through an X-ray machine. It was, I suppose, a new kind of normality, but it didn’t feel very normal—especially not with the posters for missing World Trade Center workers still gummed to every surface imaginable, including the entrance to 666 Greenwich Street; or, of course, the firehouses in the West Village, their bloodred doorways strewn with wreaths, candles, and makeshift shrines to dead emergency workers. Then there were the news reports of President Bush ordering the bombing of Taliban forces in Afghanistan, and the hit song “I Wanna Bomb Osama” (to the tune of “La Bamba”) that was all over morning radio and the Internet. In Times Square it was possible to buy a “Wanted: Dead or Alive” T-shirt with Osama bin Laden’s face on it for twenty dollars. The War on Terror had even affected the gay boutiques on Christopher Street. One of them had put a pink sign in its window saying, “We Love Everything the Taliban Hates.” I had a serious conversation with James Bone about buying a kayak to escape Manhattan, in case of another attack. But I knew a kayak wouldn’t stop me from getting the plague. “Ring around the rosy,” I heard a pack of boisterous ten-year-olds chant outside the school yard on West Eleventh Street. “Pocket full of posies. Anthrax! Anthrax! And we all fall down…” They thought it was hilarious.
Half an hour passed and nothing happened. Barrow, who had asked me to “hold tight,” hadn’t called back. I stared at the television, wondering whether to take the next subway back to the West Village. I started monitoring myself for flulike symptoms. I wished I had bought some Cipro over the Internet. I had been put off, however, by the price: $399 for sixty pills. It also occurred to me that I was at the scene of the first ever bioterror attack on America, and should be writing about it. But how do you write about airborne germs? The drama of invisible violence is psychological, not physicaclass="underline" Bioterrorism could end up putting war correspondents out of business.
Not, of course, that I wanted to write anything: I wanted to run. On the television, a brave or foolish reporter was standing outside the headquarters of NBC, opposite the news ticker at 1211 Avenue of the Americas. “After everything New York’s been through over the past month,” he was saying, “it’s hard to believe the city is now having to cope with a biological terror attack.”
The NBC building, like 1211, is part of Rockefeller Center, an eleven–acre village of concrete, glass, and nasty Trump-style gold fixtures, connected by windy underground tunnels, one of which leads to the Forty-ninth Street subway station. The centerpiece is Rockefeller Plaza, which features a food court and, during winter, an ice rink and Christmas tree. If one part of the complex became contaminated with Bacillus anthracis, I calculated, it would spread to the others, affecting tens of thousands of workers. One of those poor bastards would be me.
“Business new-ews?”
This was Martin again; I couldn’t wait any longer.
“Martin? It’s me.”
“Chris. You okay?”
“No.”
“Oh dear. What’s up?”
“You told me to ‘hold tight.’”
“Bit snowed under, sorry. James Bone’s covering the anthrax.”
“Oh, righ—”
“I’ll put you over to foreign.”
I heard Chopin, then a familiar posh voice.
“Chr-is?” Again, the info-seeking dip.
Me: “Hi. I’m in the Rockefeller Center: where they’ve found the anthrax. Should I go over to the NBC building?”
I was hoping for a brisk “no.” Let Bone get infected.
“Good idea,” the voice said. “Go.”
Shit.
Outside, as I leaped between the yellow cabs heading upstream on Sixth Avenue, I thought about a film I had once watched called The Andromeda Strain. It was about a U.S. Army satellite, named Scoop VII, that had fallen to earth in the New Mexico desert. The satellite, army scientists discovered, had become contaminated with a deadly extraterrestrial virus. The plot revolved around the race to find a cure for the virus before it wiped out humankind. The cast of The Andromeda Strain, I recalled, wore white chemical suits throughout the entire film.
I, on the other hand, was wearing blue jeans and a YSL shirt. I wondered how effective they would be at protecting me from killer bacteria. I wished I had a gas mask, or some bloody Cipro tablets. Should I even be going anywhere near NBC? Would I end up being wheeled into St. Vincent’s Hospital at 2:00 A.M., a chart above my head reading “not oriented to person, place, or time”? Would the wind carry the anthrax spores deep into my lungs? I imagined the anthrax bacteria multiplying inside my body. I had read that a thousand anthrax bacilli can grow into trillions within three days. By the time they kill you, 30 percent of your blood weight is live bacilli. Through a microscope they look like teeming worms. Your bodily fluids, meanwhile, ooze into the gap between your brain and skull, making your face swell into an unrecognizable balloon of putrid, yellowing flesh. That was why anthrax was described as “repugnant to the conscience of mankind” by the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention, which banned its use on the battlefield. I pictured my face as an anthrax-inflated balloon. But it was too late: I was under orders from the foreign desk. And that, in my warped mind, was more terrifying than any biological weapon.