Halloween night was neither dark nor stormy in Washington, but it did get eerie when my doorbell rang at 1 A.M. My wife Barbara was up late, working on party invitations. I was asleep, though not for long. Barbara opened the door, checked out the caller, and immediately yelled, and yelled loudly, for me to come downstairs. Now there would have been no reason for me to hop out of bed like a soldier at reveille, except we live in terrorism-conscious and anthrax-spooked Washington, or more precisely a couple miles outside in Alexandria, Virginia. And we don’t take the terrorism or anthrax threats lightly, especially since I’m in the media and have been noisily critical of Osama bin Laden, radical Islam, and Muslim fellow travelers in this country. True, I’m not a high-visibility anchor like Tom Brokaw. But you never know who might have caught my comments on Fox News Channel or read THE WEEKLY STANDARD and decided to take hostile action. Of course we don’t get many late-night visitors either–other than friends of my son Freddy, who’s 16. And the person at the door was no teenager. He was a Middle Eastern-looking man holding a package. And I mean very Middle Eastern-looking. His small white car was parked in our driveway. He was smiling. He wasn’t wearing a uniform from a carry-out. Speaking with a heavy accent, the man said he was delivering the sandwich we’d ordered. Sandwich we’d ordered? At 1 A.M. on a weeknight? This struck us as strange since we hadn’t ordered anything. Barbara figured it must have been Freddy, who sometimes stays up late doing homework. She scrounged up some money and paid the delivery man (including a tip). The fellow departed. We examined the package. The sandwich–or whatever was inside–felt warm and smelled like some kind of food. But it was wrapped in paper with no markings from any carry-out or food store. Suspicious, no? And we didn’t know any carry-out that stayed open this late anyway. We didn’t open the package, for safety reasons. Freddy, it turned out, was sound asleep. So maybe it was the college kid who lives next door who’d ordered the sandwich. The light was on in his room. We left the package on the front stoop in case he came looking for it. The next morning, it was still there. If we left it outside much longer, our two dogs or other dogs from the neighborhood were sure to get hold of it. I wrapped my hand in a paper towel, picked up the package, put it in a plastic grocery bag, and deposited it in a trash can in the garage. Our conclusion: It was a mistaken delivery or a practical joke. Nothing for us or Tom Ridge to worry about. Soon the plot thickened. The kid next door hadn’t ordered a sandwich. Nor had anyone else in the neighborhood. At school, no one asked Freddy if–ha, ha, ha–he’d got a late delivery at home. Nobody knew of a carry-out that was open that late on a weeknight. Barbara mentioned the mysterious delivery to her friends at a Bible study. They were suspicious. Our neighbors didn’t like the looks of the whole situation either, and I couldn’t blame them. Barbara finally called the local police station. She was told to throw the package away and leave it at that. This placated no one. Telephone calls began coming in from friends and neighbors, inquiring about the package. Had we found out what it was? Had we gotten a hazardous materials team to come by and check it out? The answer was no–until three days later when a neighbor pleaded with us to do something. Barbara called 911. They said to call the fire department, which immediately sent a large fire engine. It also sent a hazmat guy. He questioned us about the circumstances of the package’s arrival and asked to see it. In the garage, he plucked the package from the trash can. He put it on the floor and began to remove the paper wrapping. A sandwich-shaped object was inside, wrapped in aluminum foil. There was barely legible writing on it. I thought it might be Arabic. Suddenly I feared the worst. It flashed through my mind that it might bear a message like “Death to America” or “Slay the Infidel.” Perhaps we should have summoned the hazmat inspector days before. A lethal biochemical might have seeped out and wafted around the neighborhood. I asked the hazmat man what it said. He looked up from the package. “What it says,” the hazmat guy announced, “is ‘bacon cheeseburger.'” November 19, 2001 – Volume 7, Number 10
