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“Oh my God,” Ezzell said aloud, staring at the particles flying off his knife. This had the appearance of a biological weapon.

The next day Peter Jahrling, the senior scientist at USAMRIID, was woken by his pager at home in an outer suburb of Washington. Jahrling looked at his watch: 4am. His wife Dana lay asleep beside him. He put on his glasses and, wearing only shorts, walked to the kitchen where he called USAMRIID’s commander, Colonel Edward Eitzen.

“Hey, Ed, this is Peter. What’s up?” Eitzen had been awake all night. “I want you to come into the office right now.” Some issues had arisen about the “sample”.

Jahrling dressed quickly: a blue and white striped shirt, jazzy black and white tie and a light grey suit. He was at the institute by 5am.

Eitzen, who normally had a low-key way about him, was looking tense. All night, Ezzell had been phoning him from within suite 3, relaying the results of tests he was doing on the anthrax. He was trying to get a sense of what kind of a weapon it was.

Eitzen was hooked into the FBI’s emergency operations centre, the Strategic Information Operations Center (SIOC), at the bureau’s headquarters in Washington, and to a crisis operations centre at the national security council, across the street from the White House.

The White House people were spinning over the word weapon. They wanted to know what exactly USAMRIID meant. What is “weapons-grade” anthrax? Had the Senate been hit with a weapon? Jahrling and Eitzen decided “weapon” was making people too nervous, and came up with “professional” and “energetic” to describe the powder.

Eitzen called the national security people to discuss the adjustment of thinking. He used an encrypted telephone — a secure telephonic unit or STU phone. A “stew” phone makes you sound like Donald Duck eating sushi.

Jahrling went into his small office, sat at his desk and sighed. His specialism was smallpox. Scientifically, he was more deeply involved with smallpox than anyone else in the world, and he regarded it as the greatest biological threat to human safety. What would happen if a loose pinch of dried smallpox virus had found its way into Daschle’s letter. What if it was a Trojan horse? You cannot catch anthrax from someone who has it, even if the victim coughs in your face — but smallpox could spread through America like wildfire. Jahrling wanted someone to look at the powder, and fast. He called the office of a microscopist named Tom Geisbert. He got no answer.

Geisbert drove in that morning about 7am and went up a dingy stairwell to his second-floor office. He was thinking about a cup of coffee and maybe a chocolate-covered doughnut when Jahrling barged in asking: “Where the heck have you been, Tom?” Geisbert hadn’t heard about the anthrax letter. Jahrling explained his fears. Forgetting his coffee, Geisbert went to suite AA3, banged on the window and asked Ezzell if he could have a bit of the anthrax to look at.

A technician brought out two small test tubes, which Geisbert took through a massive steel door and airlock into a level 4 suite called the submarine.

He opened the tube of milky anthrax liquid and poured a droplet onto a slip of wax. Using tweezers, he placed a tiny copper grid on top of the droplet and waited a few minutes while the anthrax liquid dried to a crust. Then he put the grid in a test tube of chemicals, so any live spores would be killed. He put the tiny grid into a holder and shoved it into an electron microscope.