rather large ears, and an athletic frame. He likes to hunt and fish. He usually wears blue jeans and snakeskin cowboy boots; in cold weather, he’ll have on a cable-knit sweater.
Geisbert went up a dingy stairwell to his office on the second floor of Rid. The office is small but comfortable, and it has one of the few windows in the building, which gives him a view across a rooftop to the slopes of Catoctin Mountain. He sat at his desk, starting to get his mind ready for the day. He was thinking about a cup of coffee and maybe a chocolate-covered doughnut when Peter Jahrling barged in, looking upset, and closed the door. “Where the heck have you been, Tom?”
Geisbert hadn’t heard anything about the anthrax letter. Jahrling explained and said that he wanted Geisbert to look at the powder using an electron microscope, and to do it immediately. “You want to look for anything unusual. I’m concerned that this powder could be laced with pox. You also want to look for Ebola-virus particles. If it’s got smallpox in it, everybody’s going to go around saying, ‘Hey, it’s anthrax,’ and then ten days later we have a smallpox outbreak in Washington.”
Geisbert forgot about his doughnut and coffee. He went downstairs to some windows that look in on suite AA3, where John Ezzell was still working with the Daschle letter. Geisbert banged on the window and got his attention. Speaking through a port in the glass, he asked if he could have a bit of the powder to look at.
T HE D REAMING D EMON
The Man in Room 151
EARLY 1970
ON THE LAST DAY of December 1969, a man I will call Peter Los arrived at the airport in Düsseldorf, West Germany, on a flight from Pakistan. He had been ill with hepatitis in the Civil Hospital in Karachi and had been discharged, but he wasn’t feeling well. He was broke and had been holed up in a seedy hotel in a Karachi slum. His brother and father met him at the airport—his father was a supervisor in a slaughterhouse near the small city of Meschede, in the mountains of North-Rhine Westphalia, in northern Germany.
Peter Los was twenty years old, a former apprentice electrician with no job who had been journeying in pursuit of dreams that receded before him. He was tall and good-looking—thin now—with a square, chiseled face and dark, restless, rather guarded eyes under dark eyelashes. He had short, curly hair, and he wore faded jeans. He was traveling with a backpack, in which he’d tucked brushes, pencils, paper, and a set of watercolor paints, and he carried a folding easel.
Peter Los is alive today in Germany. The details of his character have been forgotten by the experts, but his case and its aftermath haunt them like the ruins of a fire.
Los had been living in a commune in the city of Bochum while he studied to be an electrician, but the members of the commune had split ideologically. Some favored a disciplined approach to communal living, while others, including Peter, favored the hippie ideals of the sixties. In August 1969—the month of the Woodstock music festival—eight members of the Bochum commune, including Peter, packed themselves into a Volkswagen bus and set off for Asia on an
Orientreise.
There were six men and two women on the bus, and they were apparently hoping to find a guru in the monasteries of the Himalayas, where they could meditate and seek a higher knowledge, and possibly also find good hashish. They drove the bus down through Yugoslavia to Istanbul, crossed Turkey, and went through Iraq and Iran, camping out under the stars or staying in the cheapest places. They rattled across Afghanistan on the world’s worst roads, and the Volkswagen bus made it over the Khyber Pass. They hung out in Pakistan, but things didn’t go as well as they had hoped, and they didn’t connect with a guru. The two women lost interest in the trip and went back to Germany, and toward December, three men in the group drove the Volkswagen into India and down the coast to Goa, to
Geisbert went up a dingy stairwell to his office on the second floor of Rid. The office is small but comfortable, and it has one of the few windows in the building, which gives him a view across a rooftop to the slopes of Catoctin Mountain. He sat at his desk, starting to get his mind ready for the day. He was thinking about a cup of coffee and maybe a chocolate-covered doughnut when Peter Jahrling barged in, looking upset, and closed the door. “Where the heck have you been, Tom?”
Geisbert hadn’t heard anything about the anthrax letter. Jahrling explained and said that he wanted Geisbert to look at the powder using an electron microscope, and to do it immediately. “You want to look for anything unusual. I’m concerned that this powder could be laced with pox. You also want to look for Ebola-virus particles. If it’s got smallpox in it, everybody’s going to go around saying, ‘Hey, it’s anthrax,’ and then ten days later we have a smallpox outbreak in Washington.”
Geisbert forgot about his doughnut and coffee. He went downstairs to some windows that look in on suite AA3, where John Ezzell was still working with the Daschle letter. Geisbert banged on the window and got his attention. Speaking through a port in the glass, he asked if he could have a bit of the powder to look at.
T HE D REAMING D EMON
The Man in Room 151
EARLY 1970
ON THE LAST DAY of December 1969, a man I will call Peter Los arrived at the airport in Düsseldorf, West Germany, on a flight from Pakistan. He had been ill with hepatitis in the Civil Hospital in Karachi and had been discharged, but he wasn’t feeling well. He was broke and had been holed up in a seedy hotel in a Karachi slum. His brother and father met him at the airport—his father was a supervisor in a slaughterhouse near the small city of Meschede, in the mountains of North-Rhine Westphalia, in northern Germany.
Peter Los was twenty years old, a former apprentice electrician with no job who had been journeying in pursuit of dreams that receded before him. He was tall and good-looking—thin now—with a square, chiseled face and dark, restless, rather guarded eyes under dark eyelashes. He had short, curly hair, and he wore faded jeans. He was traveling with a backpack, in which he’d tucked brushes, pencils, paper, and a set of watercolor paints, and he carried a folding easel.
Peter Los is alive today in Germany. The details of his character have been forgotten by the experts, but his case and its aftermath haunt them like the ruins of a fire.
Los had been living in a commune in the city of Bochum while he studied to be an electrician, but the members of the commune had split ideologically. Some favored a disciplined approach to communal living, while others, including Peter, favored the hippie ideals of the sixties. In August 1969—the month of the Woodstock music festival—eight members of the Bochum commune, including Peter, packed themselves into a Volkswagen bus and set off for Asia on an
Orientreise.
There were six men and two women on the bus, and they were apparently hoping to find a guru in the monasteries of the Himalayas, where they could meditate and seek a higher knowledge, and possibly also find good hashish. They drove the bus down through Yugoslavia to Istanbul, crossed Turkey, and went through Iraq and Iran, camping out under the stars or staying in the cheapest places. They rattled across Afghanistan on the world’s worst roads, and the Volkswagen bus made it over the Khyber Pass. They hung out in Pakistan, but things didn’t go as well as they had hoped, and they didn’t connect with a guru. The two women lost interest in the trip and went back to Germany, and toward December, three men in the group drove the Volkswagen into India and down the coast to Goa, to
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