The Hot Zone
By Richard Preston
THE MONKEY HOUSE
RESTON
1989
OCTOBER 4, WEDNESDAY
THE CITY OF Reston, Virginia, is a prosperous community about ten miles
west of Washington, D.C., just beyond the Beltway. On a fall day, when a
western wind clears the air, from the upper floors of the office buildings in
Reston you can see the creamy spike of Washington Monument, sitting in
the middle of the Mall, and beyond it the Capitol dome. The population of
Reston has grown in recent years, and high-technology business and bluechip consulting firms have moved into office parks there, where glass
buildings grew up during the nineteen-eighties like crystals. Before the
crystals appeared, Reston was surrounded by farmland, and it still contains
meadows. In spring, the meadows burst into galaxies of yellow-mustard
flowers, and robins and thrashers sing in stands of tulip tresses and white
ash. The town offers handsome residential neighborhoods, good schools,
parks, golf courses, excellent day care for children. There are lakes in
Reston named American naturalists (like Thoreau, Lake Audubon),
surrounded by expensive water-front homes. Reston is situated within easy
commuting distance of downtown Washington. Along Leesburg Pike, which
funnels traffic into the city, there are developments of executive homes with
Mercedes-Benzes parked in crescent-shaped driveways. Reston was once a
country town, and its history still flights obliteration, like a nail that won't
stay hammered down. Among the upscale houses, you see the occasionally
bungalow with cardboard stuffed in a broken window and a pickup truck
parked in the side yard. In the autumn, vegetable stands along Leeburg Pike
sell pumpkins and butternut squash.
Not far from Leesburg Pike there is a small office park. It was built in nineteen-sixties, and is not as glassy or as fashionable as the newer office parks, but it is clean and neat, and it has been there long enough for sycamores and sweet-gum trees to grow up around it and throw shade over the lawns. Across the street, a McDonald's is jammed at lunch hour with office workers. In the autumn of 1989, a company called Hazleton Research Products was using a one-story building in the office park as a monkey house. Hazleton Research Products is a division of Corning, Inc. Corning's Hazleton unit is involved with the importation and sale of laboratory animals. The Hazleton monkey house was known as the Reston Primate Quarantine Unit.
Each year, about sixteen thousand wild monkeys are imported into the United States from the tropical regions of the earth. Imported monkeys must be held in quarantine for a month before they are shipped anywhere else in the United States. This is prevent the spread of infectious diseases that could kill other primates, including humans.
Dan Dalgard, a doctor of veterinary medicine, was the consulting veterinarian at the Reston Primate Quarantine Unit. He was on call to take care of the monkeys if they became sick or needed medical attention.
He was actually a principal scientist at another company owned by Corning, called Hazleton Washington. This company has its headquarters on Leesburg Pike not far from the monkey house, and so Dalgard could easily drive his car over to Reston to check on the monkeys if he was needed there.
Dalgard was a tall man in his fifties, with metal-framed glasses, pale blue eyes, and a soft drawl that he had picked up in Tedas at veterinary school. Generally he wore a gray business suit if he was working in his office, or a white lab coat if he was working with animals. He had an international reputation as knowledgeable and skilled veterinarian who specialized in primate husbandry. He was a calm even-tempered man. On evenings and weekends, he repaired antique clocks as a hobby. He liked to fix things with his hands; it made him feel peaceful and calm, and he was patient with a jammed clock. He sometimes had longings to leave veterinary medicine and devote himself full-time to clocks.
On Wednesday, October 4, 1989, Hazleton Research Products accepted a shipment of a hundred wild monkeys from the Philippines. The shipment originated at Ferlite Farms, a monkey wholesale facility located not far from Manila. The monkeys themselves came from coastal rainforests on the island of Mindanao. The monkeys had been shipped by boat to Ferlite Farms, where they were grouped together in large cages known as gang cages. The monkeys were then put into wooden crates and flown to Amsterdam on a specially fitted cargo airplane, and from Amsterdam they were flown to New York City. They arrived at JFK International Airport and were driven by truck down the eastern seaboard of the United Sates to Reston monkey house.
The monkeys were crab-eating monkeys, a species that lives along rivers and in mangrove swamps in Southeast Asia. Crab eaters are used as laboratory animals because they are common, cheap, and easily obtained.
They have long, arching, whip like tails, whitish fur on the chest, and cream color fur on the back. The crab eater is a type of macaque (pronounced maKACK). It is sometimes called a long-tailed macaque. The monkey has a protrusive, doglike snout with flaring nostrils and sharp canine teeth. The skin is pinkish gray, close to the color of a white person. The hand looks quite human, with a thumb and delicate fingers with fingernails. The females have two breasts on the upper chest that look startlingly human, with pale nipples.
Crab eaters do not like humans. They have a competitive relationship with people who live in the rain forest. They like vegetables, especially eggplants, and they like to raid farmers' crops.
Crab-eating monkeys travel in a troop, making tumbling jumps through the trees, screaming, "Kra! Kra!". They know perfectly well that after they have pulled off an eggplant raid they are likely to have a visit from a farmer, who will come around looking for them with a shotgun, and so they have to be ready to move out and head deep into the forest at a moment's notice. The sight of a gun will set off their alarm cries: "Kra! Kra! Kra!". In some parts of the world, these monkeys are called kras, because of the sound they make, and many people who live in Asian rain forests consider them to be obnoxious pests. At the close of day, when night comes, the troop goes to sleep in a dead, leafless tree. This is the troop's home tree. The monkeys prefer to sleep in a dead tree so that they can see in all directions, keeping watch for humans and other predators. The monkey tree usually hangs out over a river, so that they can relieve themselves from the branches without littering the ground.
At sunrise, the monkeys stir and wake up, and you hear their cries as they greet the sun. The mothers gather their children and herd them along the branches, and the troop moves out, leaping through trees, searching for fruit. They like to eat all kinds of things. In addition to vegetables and fruits, they eat insects, grass, roots, and small pieces of clay, which they chew and swallow, perhaps to get salt and minerals.
They lust after crabs. When the urge for crabs comes upon them, the troop will head for a mangrove swamp to have a feeding bout. They descend from the trees and take up positions in the water beside crab holes. A crab comes out of its hole, and the monkey snatches it out of the water. The monkey has a way to deal with the crab's claws. He grabs the crab from behind as it emerges from its hole and rips off the claws and throws them away and then devours the rest of the crab. Sometimes a monkey isn't quick enough with the claws, and the crab latches onto the monkey's fingers, and the monkey lets out a shriek and shakes its hand, trying to get the crab off, and jumps around in the water. You can always tell when crab eaters are having a feeding bout on crabs because you hear an occasionally string of shrieks coming out of the swamp as a result of difficulty with a crab.
The troop has a strict hierarchy. It is led by a dominant male, the largest, most aggressive monkey. He maintains control over the troop by staring. He stares down subordinates if they challenge him. If a human stares at a dominant male monkey in a cage, the monkey will rush to the front of the cage, staring back, and will become exceedingly angry, slamming against the bars, trying to attack the person. He will want to kill the human who stared at him: he can't afford to show fear when his authority is challenged by another primate. If two dominant male monkeys are placed in the same cage, only one monkey will leave the cage alive.
The crab-eating monkeys at the Reston monkey house were placed each in its own cage, under artificial lights, and were fed monkey biscuits and fruit. There were twelve monkey rooms in the monkey house, and they were designated by the letters A through L. Two of the monkeys that arrived on October 4 were dead in their crates. That was not unusual, since monkeys die during shipments. But in the next three weeks, an unusual number of monkeys began to die at the Reston monkey house.
ON OCTOBER 4, the same day the shipment of monkeys reached the Reston monkey house, something happened that would change Jerry Jaax's life forever. Jerry had a brother named John, who lived in Kansas City with his wife and two small children. John Jaax was a prominent businessman and a banker, and he was a partner in a manufacturing company that made plastic for credit cards. He was a couple of years younger than Jerry, and the two men were as close as brothers can be. They had grown up together on a farm in Kansas and had both gone to college at Kansas State.
They looked very much alike: tall, with prematurely gray hair, a beak nose, sharp eyes, a calm manner; and their voices sounded alike. They only difference in appearance between them was John wore a mustache and Jerry did not.
John Jaax and his wife planned to attend a parent-teachers' meeting on the evening of October 4 at their children's school. Near the end of the day, John telephoned his wife from his office at the manufacturing plant to tell her that he would be working late. She happened to be out of house when he called, so he left a message on the answering machine, explaining that he would go directly from the office to the meeting, and he would see her there. When he did not show up, she became worried. She drove over to the factory.
The place was deserted, the machines silent. She walked the length of the factory floor to a staircase. John's office overlooked the factory floor from a balcony at the top of the staircase. She climbed the stairs. The door to his office was standing open a crack, and she went inside. John had been shot many times, and there was blood all over the room. It was a violent killing.
The police officer who took the case at Kansas City Homicide was named Reed Buente. He has know John personally and had admired him, having worked for him as a security guard at the Bank of Kansas City when John was president of the bank. Officer Buente was determined to solve the case and bring the killer or killers to trial. But as time went by and no breaks came along, the investigator became discouraged. John Jaax had been having difficulties with his partner in the plastic business, a man named John Weaver, and Kansas City homicide looked at the partner as a suspect. (When I called Officer Buente recently, he confirmed this.
Weaver has since died of a heart attack, and the case remains open, since unsolved murder cases are never closed.) There were few physical clues, and Weaver, as it turned out, had an alibi. The investigator ran into more and more difficulties with the case. At one point, he said to Jerry,
"You can have someone killed pretty easy. And it's cheap. You can have someone killed for what you would pay for a desk."
The murder of John Jaax threw Jerry into a paralysis of grief.
Time is supposed to heal all things, but time opened an emotional gangrene in Jerry. Nancy began to think that he was in a clinical depression.
"I feel like my life is over," he said to her. "It's just not the same anymore. My life will never be the same. It's just inconceivable that Johnny could have had an enemy." At the funeral in Kansas City, Nancy and Jerry's children, Jaime and Jason, looked into coffin and said to their father, "Gee, Dad, he looks like you lying there."
He called Kansas City Homicide nearly every day during October and November. The investigator just couldn't break the case. Jerry began to think about getting a gun and going out to Kansas City to kill John's business partner. He thought. If I do it, I'll be in jail, and what about my children? And what if John's partner hadn't been behind the murder? Then I'll have killed an innocent man.
NOVEMBER 1, WEDNESDAY
THE COLONY MANAGER at the Reston monkey house will be called Bill Volt. As he watched his monkeys die, Volt became concerned. On November 1, a little less than a month after the shipment of monkeys had arrived, he put in a telephone call to Dan Dalgard, telling him that the monkeys that had recently arrived from the Philippines were dying in unusually large numbers. He had counted twenty-nine deaths out of a shipment of a hundred monkeys. That is, nearly a third of the monkeys had died. At the same time, a problem had developed with the building's heating and air-handling system.
The thermostat had failed, and the heat would not go off. The heaters dumped heat at full blast into the building, and the air-conditioning system would not kick in. It had become awfully hot inside the building. Volt wondered if the heat might be putting stress on the monkeys. He had noticed that most of the deaths had taken place in one room, Room F, which was located on a long hallway at the back of the building.
Dalgard agreed to drive over to the monkey house and have a look, but he became busy with other thing and did not get there until the following week. When he arrived, Bill Volt took him to Room F, the focus of the deaths, so that Dalgard could inspect the monkeys. They put on white coats and surgical masks, and the two men walked down a long cinder-block corridor lined on both sides with steel doors leading to monkey rooms. The corridor was very warm, and they began to sweat.
Through windows in the doors, they could see hundreds of monkey eyes looking at them as they passed. The monkeys were exquisitely sensitive to the presence of humans. Room F contained only crab-eating monkeys from the October shipment from Ferlite Farms in the Philippines. Each monkey sat on its own cage. The monkeys were subdued. A few weeks ago, they had been swinging in the trees, and they didn't like what had happened to them.
Dalgard went from cage to cage, glancing at the animals. He could tell a lot about a monkey from the look in its eyes. He could also read its body language. He searched for animals that seemed passive or in pain.
Dalgard's staring into their eyes drove them berserk. When he passed a dominant male and looked carefully at it, it rushed him, wanting to take him out. He found a monkey whose eyes had a dull appearance, not shiny and bright but glazed and somewhat inactive. The eyelids were down, slightly squinted. Normally the lids would be retracted so that could see the entire iris. A healthy monkey's eyes would be like two bright circles in the monkey's face. This animal's eyelids had closed down slightly, and they dropped, so that the iris had become a squinting oval.
He put on leather gauntlet gloves, opened the door of the cage, reached inside, and pinned the monkey down. He slipped one hand out of a glove and quickly felt the monkey's stomach. Yes – the animal felt warm to the touch. It had a fever. And it had a runny nose. He let go of the monkey and shut the door. He didn't think that the animal was suffering from pneumonia or a cold. Perhaps the animal was affected by heat stress.
It was very warm in this room. He advised Bill Volt to put some pressure on the landlord to get the heating system fixed. He found a second animal that also had droopy eyelids, with that certain squint in the eyes. This one also felt hot to the touch, feverish. So there were two sick monkeys in Room F.
BOTH MONKEYS DIED during the night. Bill Volt found them in the morning, hunched up in their cages, staring with glassy, half-open eyes. This greatly concerned Volt, and he decided to dissect the animals, to try to see what had killed them. He carried the two deceased monkeys into an examination room down the hallway and shut the door after him, out of sight of the other monkeys. (You can't cut up a dead monkey in front of other monkeys – it will cause a riot.) He opened the monkeys with a scalpel and began his inspection. He did not like what he saw, and did not understand it, so he called Dalgard on the telephone and said, "I wonder if you could come over here and have a look at these monkeys."
Dalgard drove over to the monkey house immediately. His hands, which were so confident and skillful at taking apart clocks, probed the monkeys. What he saw inside the animals puzzled him. They appeared to have died of heat stress, brought on, he suspected, by the problems with the heating system in the building – but their spleens were weirdly enlarged. Heat stress wouldn't blow up the spleen, would it? He noticed something else that gave him pause. Both animals had small amounts of blood in their intestines. What could do that?
Later that same day, another large shipment of crab-eating monkeys arrived from Ferlite Farms. Bill Volt put the new monkeys in Room H, two doors down the hall from Room F.
Dan Dalgard became very worried about the monkeys in Room F. He wondered if there was some kind of infectious agent going around the room.
The blood in the gut looked like the effects of a monkey virus called simian hemorrhagic fever, or SHF. This virus is deadly to monkeys, although it is harmless to people. (It can't live in humans.) Simian fever can spread rapidly through a monkey colony and will generally wipe it out.
It was now Friday, November 10. Dalgard planned to spend the weekend fixing his clocks in the family room of his house. But as he laid out his tools and the pieces of an antique clock that needed fixing, he could not stop thinking about the monkeys. He was worried about them.
Finally he told his wife that he had to go out on company business, and he put on his coat and drove over to the monkey house and parked in front of the building and went in through the front door. It was a glass door, and as he opened it, he felt the unnatural heat in the building wash over him, and he heard the familiar screeches of monkeys. He went into Room F.
"Kra! Kra!" the monkeys cried at him in alarm. There were three more dead monkeys. They were curled up in their cages, their eyes open, expressionless. This was not good. He carried the dead monkeys into the examination room and slit the animals open, and looked inside.
SOON AFTERWARD, DALGARD began to keep a diary. He kept it on a personal computer, and he would type in a few words each day. Working quickly and without much thought, he gave his diary a title, calling it, "Chronology of Events". It was now getting close to the middle of November, and as the sun went down in the afternoon and traffic jams built up on Leesburg Pike near his office, Dalgard worked on his diary. Tapping at the keys, he could recall in his mind's eye what he had seen inside the monkeys.
The lesions by this time were showing a pattern of marked splenomegaly (swollen spleen) – strikingly dry on cut surface, enlarged kidneys, and sporadic occurrences of hemorrhage in a variety of organs ... Clinically, the animals showed abrupt anorexia (loss of appetite), and lethargy. When an animal began showing signs of anorexia, its condition deteriorated rapidly. Rectal temperatures taken on monkeys being sacrificed were not elevated. Nasal discharge, epistaxis (blood nose) or bloody stools were not evident... Many of the animals were in prime condition and had more body fat than is customary for animals arriving from the wild.
There was nothing much wrong with the dead animals, nothing that he could put his finger on. They simply stopped eating and died. They died with their eyes open, and with staring expressions on their faces.
Whatever this disease was, the cause of death was not obvious. Was it heart attack? a fever? What?
The spleen was inexplicably weird. The spleen is a kind of bag that filters the blood, and it plays a role in the immune system. A normal spleen is a soft sack with a drippy red center, which reminded Dalgard of a jerry doughnut. When you cut into a normal spleen with a scalpel, it gives about as much resistance to the knife as a jelly doughnut, and it drips a lot of blood. But these spleens had swelled up and turned as hard as a rock. A normal monkey spleen would be about the size of a walnut. These spleens were the size of a tangerine and were leathery. They reminded him of a piece of salami – meaty, tough, dry. His scalpel practically bounced off them. He could actually tap the blade of the scalpel on the spleen, and the blade wouldn't dig in very much. What he didn't realize – what he couldn't see because it was almost inconceivable – was that the entire spleen had become a solid clot of blood.
He was tapping his scalpel on a blood clot the size of a tangerine.
On Sunday, November 12, Dalgard putted around the house in the morning, fixing things, doing little errands. After lunch, he once again returned to the monkey house. There was a mystery developing in the Reston Primate Quarantine Unit. He found three more dead monkeys in Room F. They were dying steadily, a handful every night.
One of the dead animals had been given the name O53. Dalgard carried the carcass of Monkey O53 in the examination room and opened it up and looked inside the body cavity. With a scalpel, he removed a piece of Monkey O53's spleen. It was huge, hard, and dry. He took a Q-tip and rubbed it in the monkey's throat, collecting a little bit of mucus, a throat wash. Then he swirled the Q-Tip in a test tube full of distilled water and capped the tube. Anything alive in the mucus would be preserved temporarily.
Dalgard ended up talking by phone with a civilian virologist named Peter Jahrling, Jahrling had a reputation for knowing something about monkey viruses. They had never talked before. Dalgard said to Jahrling,
"I think we've got some SHF (simian hemorrhagic fever) in our monkeys.
The spleen looks like a piece of salami when you slice it." Dalgard asked Jahrling if he would look at some samples and give a diagnosis, and Jahrling agreed to help. The problem attracted Peter Jahrling's curiosity.
Jahrling had worked at the Institute for most of his career, after an early period in which he had lived in Central America and hunted for viruses in the rain forest (he had discovered several previously known strains). He had blond hair, beginning to go gray, steel-rimmed glasses, a pleasant, mobile face, and a dry sense of humor. He was by nature a cautious, careful person. Peter Jahrling spent large amounts of time in a Chemturion biological space suit. He performed research on defenses against hot viruses – vaccines, drug treatments – and he did basic medical research on rain-forest viruses. The killers and the unknowns were his specialty. He deliberately kept his mind off the effects of hot agents.
He told himself, If you did think about it, you might decide to make a living another way.
Jahrling, his wife, and their three children lived in Thurmont, not far from Nancy and Jerry Jaax, in a brick ranch house with a white picket fence out front. The fence surrounded a treeless yard, and there was a large brown car parked in the garage. Although they lived near each other, the Jahrlings did not socialize with Jaax, since their children were of different ages and since the families had different styles.
Pete Jahrling mowed his lawn regularly to keep the grass neat, so that his neighbors wouldn't think he was a slob. Externally he lived a nearly featureless life among suburban neighbors, and very few of them knew that when he climbed into his mud-colored car he was headed for work in a hot zone, although the license plate on the car was a vanity plate that said LASSA. Lassa is a Level 4 virus from West Africa, and it was one of Peter Jahrling's favorite life forms – he thought it was fascinating and beautiful, in certain ways. He had held in his gloved hands virtually every hot agent known, except for Ebola and Marburg. When people asked him why he didn't work with them, he replied, "I don't particularly feel like dying."
AFTER HIS TELEPHONE conversation with Dan Dalgard, Peter Jahrling was surprised and annoyed when, the next day, a few bits of frozen meat from Monkey O53 arrived at the Institute, brought by courier. What annoyed him was the fact that the bits of meat were wrapped in aluminum foil, like pieces of leftover hot dog.
The hot-dog-like meat was monkey spleen, and the ice around it was tinged with red and had begun to melt and drip. The samples also included the tube containing the throat wash and some blood serum from the monkey.
Jahrling carried the samples into a Level 3 laboratory. Level 3 is kept under negative air pressure, to prevent things from leaking out, but you don't need to wear a space suit there. People who work in Level 3 dress like surgeons in an operating room. Jahrling wore a paper surgical mask, a surgical scrub suit, and rubber gloves. He peeled off the tin foil. A pathologist helped him do it, standing next to him. The bit of spleen rolled about the tin foil as they poked it – a hard little pink piece of meat, just as Dalgard had described it. He thought, Like the kind of mystery meat you get in a school lunchroom. Jahrling turned to the other man and remarked, "Good thing this ain't Marburg" and they chuckled.
Later that day, he called Dalgard on the telephone and said to him something like, "Let me tell you how to send a sample to us. People around here may be slightly paranoid, but they get a little upset when you send a sample and it drips on the carpet."
ONE WAY TO identify a virus is to make it grow inside living cells in a flask of water. You drop a sample of the virus into the flask, and the virus spreads through the cells. If the virus likes the cells, it will multiply. One or two viruses can become a billion viruses in a few days – a China of viruses in a bottle the size of one's thumb.
A civilian technician named Joan Rhoderick cultured the unknown agent from Monkey O53. She ground up a bit of the monkey's spleen with a mortar and pestle. That made sort of bloody mush. She dropped the mush into flasks that contained living cells from the kidney of a monkey. She also took some of the throat mucus from Monkey O53 and put it into a flask, and she took some of the monkey's blood serum and put it into another flask. Eventually she had a whole rack of flasks. She put them into a warmer – an incubator, held at body temperature – and hoped that something would grow. Growing up a virus in culture is a lot like making beer. You follow the recipe, and you keep the brew nice and warm until something happens.
DAN DALGARD DID not visit the monkey house the next day, but he telephoned Bill Volt, the manager, to find out how things were going. Volt reported that all animals looked good. None of them had died during the night.
The illness seemed to be fading away naturally. It looked like things were quieting down in Reston, and Dalgard felt relieved that his company had dodged a bullet.
But what were those Army people doing with the samples of monkey?
He called Jahrling and learned that it was too soon to know anything. It takes several days to grow up a virus.
A day later, Bill Volt called Dalgard with bad news. Eight monkeys in Room F had stopped eating. Eight monkeys were getting ready to die. The thing had come back.
Dalgard hurried over to the monkey house, where he found that the situation had deteriorated suddenly. There were many more animals with squinting, glazed, oval-shaped eyes. Whatever the thing was, it was steadily working its way through Room F. By now, fully half the animals in the room had died. It was going to kill the entire room if nothing was done to stop it. Dalgard became extremely anxious for some news from Peter Jahrling.
Thursday, November 16, arrived, and with it came news that monkeys had begun to die in rooms down the hallway from Room F. Late in the morning, Dan Dalgard received a telephone call from Peter Jahrling. A pathologist at the Institute had inspected the meat very carefully and had given it a tentative diagnosis of simian hemorrhagic fever – harmless to humans, lethal to monkeys.
Dalgard now knew that he had to move fast to contain the outbreak before the virus spread through the monkey house. Simian hemorrhagic fever is highly contagious in monkeys. That afternoon, he drove up Leesburg Pike to the office park in Reston. At five o'clock on a gray, rainy evening on the edge of winter, as commuters streamed home from Washington, he and another Hazleton veterinarian injected all the monkeys in Room F with lethal doses of anesthetic. It was all over quickly. The monkeys died in minutes.
Dalgard opened up eight healthy-looking carcasses to see if he could find any signs of simian fever inside them. He was surprised to see that there didn't seem to be anything wrong with them. This greatly troubled him. Sacrificing the monkeys had been a difficult, disgusting, and disheartening task. He knew there was a disease in this room, and yet these monkeys were beautiful, healthy animals, and he had just killed them. The sickness had been entrenched in the building since early October, and it was now the middle of November. The Army had given him a tentative diagnosis, probably the best diagnosis he would ever get, and he had been left with the unpleasant task of trying to salvage the lives of the remaining animals. He went home that evening feeling that he had a very bad day. Later he would write in his diary:
There was a notable absence of any hemorrhagic component. In general, the animals were unusually well fleshed (butterballs), young (less than 5 years), and in prime condition.
Before he left the monkey house, he and the other veterinarian placed the dead monkeys in clear plastic bags and carried some of them across the hall to a chest freezer. A freezer can be as hot as hell.
When a place is biologically hot, no sensors, no alarms, no instruments can tell the story. All instruments are silent and register nothing. The monkeys' bodies were visible in the clear bags. They froze into contorted shapes, with their chest cavities spread wide and their intestines hanging out and dripping red icicles. Their hands were clenched into fists or open like claws, as if they were grasping at something, and their faces were expressionless masks, their eyes glazed with frost, staring at nothing.
His father was the chief building engineer at the Institute, the man who repaired and operated the hot zones. When Tom Geisbert was a boy, his father had taken him to visit the Institute, and Tom had stared through the heavy glass windows at people in space suits, thinking it would be cool to do that. Now he was doing it, and it made him happy.
The Institute hired him to operate its electron microscope, which uses a beam of electrons to make images of small objects, such as viruses.
It is an essential tool to have around a virus lab because you can use it to make a photograph of a tiny piece of meat and find viruses in the meat.
For Geisbert, identifying hot strains and classifying the tribes of viruses was like sorting butterflies or collecting flowers. He liked the loneliness of inner space, the sense of being forgotten by the world. He felt quiet and at peace with himself when he was padding around a hot zone carrying a rack of test tubes that held an unknown agent. He liked to go into the Level 4 suites alone, rather than with a buddy, especially in the middle of the night, but his tendency to spend large amounts of time at his work had begun to affect his personal life, and his marriage was breaking up. He and his wife had separated in September. His troubles at home only reinforced his tendency to bury himself in Level 4.
One of Geisbert's greatest happiness in life, apart from his work, came from being in the outdoors, fishing for black bass and hunting for deer. He hunted for meat – he gave the venison to members of his family – and then, when he had got the meat he needed, he hunted for trophies. Every year around Thanksgiving, he went hunting in West Virginia, where he and some buddies rented a house for the opening of deer season. His friends did not know much about what he did for a living, and he made no effort to tell them about it.
Geisbert tried to look at many samples of virus as a way of sharpening his skills with an electron microscope. He was learning how to identify hot agents by eye, by looking at photographs of the particles.
When the samples of the Cardinal boy had arrived from Africa, Geisbert spent days gazing at them. They attracted him. The Cardinal strain was a tangled mass of 6's, U's, g's, Y's, snakes, and Cheerios mixed up with partly liquefied human flesh. Geisbert spent so much time staring at the virus, one of the true horrors of nature, that the shapes became implanted in his mind.
TOM GEISBERT HAD HEARD about the sick monkeys in Virginia, and he wanted to take photographs of the meat to see if he could identify any simian-fever-virus particles in it. On Friday morning, November 17, the day after Dan Dalgard had killed all the animals in Room F, Geisbert decided to take a look at the flasks of monkey cell that were ripening.
He wanted to examine them with a light microscope before he went on his Thanksgiving hunt, to see if he could observe any changes. A light microscope is a standard microscope that uses lens to focus light.
At nine o'clock on that Friday morning, he put on a surgical scrub suit and a paper mask and went into the Level 3 lab where the flasks were being kept warm. There he met Joan Rhoderick, the technician who had started the Reston culture. She was staring through the binocular eyepieces of the microscope at a small flask. The flask contained cells that had been infected with the simian-fever-virus that came from Monkey O53.
She turned to Geisbert. "There's something flaky going on in this flask," she said.
The flask was a typical virus flask. It was about the size of a person's thumb and was made of clear plastic so that you could place it in a microscope and look into the flask. It had a black screw cap.
Geisbert stared through the eyepieces of the microscope. He saw a complicated world in the flask. As always in biology, the problem was to know what you were looking at. The patterns of nature are deep and complex, constantly changing. He saw cells all over the place. They were tiny bags, each containing a nucleus, which was a darker blob near the center. The cells looked a little bit like fried eggs, sunny-side up.
The egg yolk would be the cell's nucleus.
Living cells ordinarily stick to the bottom of a flask to form a living carpet,cells prefer to cling to something when they grow. This carpet had been eaten by moths. The cells had died and drifted away, leaving holes in the carpet.
Geisbert checked all the flasks, and most of them looked the same way, like moth-eaten carpet. They looked real bad, they looked sick.
Something was killing these cells. They were swollen and puffy, fat looking, as if they were pregnant. Tom could see that they contained granules or specks. The specks looked like pepper. As if someone had shaken pepper over fried eggs. He may have seen reflection of light in the pepper, as if light was gleaming through crystals. Crystals? These cells were unrecognizably sick. And they were very sick, because the fluid was milky and clouded with dead cells, cells that had exploded.
They decided that their boss, Peter Jahrling, should have a look.
Geisbert went to find Jahrling. He exited Level 3 – removed his scrub suit and took a water shower and dressed in civilian clothes – and went to Jahrling's office. Then he and Jahrling returned to the Level 3 lab. It took a few minutes for both of them to change in the locker room and put on scrub suits. When they were ready to go in – dressed like surgeons – they entered and sat down at the eyepieces of the microscope. Geisbert said to him, "There's something very strange going on in that flask, but I'm not sure what it is. This isn't like SHF."
Jahrling looked. He saw that the flask had turned milky, as if it had gone rotten. "This is contaminated," he said. "These cells are blown away. They're crud." The cells were exploded and dead. "They're off the plastic," he remarked. By off the plastic he meant that the dead cells had detached from the surface of the flask, and had floated away in the broth. He thought that a wild strain of bacteria had invaded the cell culture. This is an annoying and common occurrence when you are trying to grow virus, and it wipes out the flask. The wild bacteria consume the cell culture, eat it up, and make a variety of different smells in the air while they're growing, whereas viruses kill cells without releasing an odor. Jahrling guessed that the flask had been wiped out by a common soil bacterium called pseudomonas. It lives in dirt. It lives in everyone's backyard and under fingernails. It is one of the most common forms of life on the planet, and it often gets into cell cultures and wrecks them.
Jahrling unscrewed the little black cap and waved his hand over the flask to bring the scent to his nose, and then he took a whiff. Hm.
Funny. No smell.
He said to Tom Geisbert, "Have you ever smelled pseudomonas?"
"No," Tom replied.
"It smells like Welch's grape juice. Here – " He offered the flask to Tom.
Tom sniffed it. There was no smell.
Jahrling took back the flask and whiffed it again. His nose registered nothing. But the flask was milky, and the cells were blown away. He was puzzled. He handed the flask back to Tom and said, "Put it in the beam, and let's look at it." By put it in the beam, he meant "look at it using the electron microscope," which is much more powerful than a light microscope, and can see deeper into the universe within.
GEISBERT POURED SOME of the milky fluid out of the flask into a test tube and then spun it in a centrifuge machine. A button grayish ooze collected at the bottom of the test tube-a tiny pill of dead and dying cells. The pill was the size of a pinhead, and it had a pale brownish color.
Geisbert thought it looked like a dab of mashed potato. He lifted out the button with a wooden stick and soaked the button in plastic resin to preserve it. But now, what was on his mind was the hunting season. Later that afternoon – Friday – he went home to get packed. He had been planning to drive his Ford Bronco, but it had broken down; so one of his hunting buddies met him in a pickup truck and they loaded Geisbert's duffel bag and gun case into it and set off on his hunting trip. When a filovirus begins to amplify itself in a human being, the incubation period is from three to eighteen days, while the number of virus particles climbs steadily in the bloodstream. Then comes the headache.
On Wednesday, November 22, they put their children in the family van and drove straight through the night to Kansas. Jaime was now twelve, and Jason was thirteen. They were used to long drives to Kansas, and they slept peacefully. Jerry had almost lost his ability to sleep since the murder of his brother, and Nancy stayed awake with him, trading places behind the steering wheel. They arrived in Wichita on Thanksgiving Day and ate a meal of turkey with Nancy's father, Curtis Dunn, who was living with Nancy's brother.
Nancy's father was dying of cancer. He had gone through life fearing that he might come down with cancer – he once took to his bed for eight months while claiming he had cancer when, in fact, he did not – and now he had come down with real cancer. He had lost a lot of weight that fall. He was like a human skeleton, down to less than a hundred pounds, but he was still a relatively young man, and his hair was black and curly and oiled with Vitalis. He looked so terrible that the children were afraid of him. He did his best to show sympathy for Jerry. "How awful it was, what happened to you Jaaxes," he said to Jerry. Jerry did not want to talk about it.
Nancy's father sat and slept in a reclining chair most of the day.
At night, he couldn't sleep on account of the pain, and he would wake up at three o'clock in the morning, and get out of bed, and rummage around the house, looking for something. He smoked cigarettes continually, and complained that he couldn't taste his food, that he had lost his appetite.
Nancy felt sorry for him, but she felt a distance from him that she could not overcome. He was man of strong opinions, and lately, from the way he had been talking while he wandered about the house at night, it seemed that he was going to try to sell the family farm in Kansas and use the money to get himself to Mexico for a cure involving peach pits. Nancy was angry with him for having such ideas, and that anger was mixed with pity for him in his illness.
After they had finished their turkey with Nancy's father, they drove out to Andale, Kansas, a town northwest of Wichita, and ate another dinner, with Jerry's mother, Ada, and the rest of the Jaax family in Ada's house on the edge of town, near the grain elevator. Ada was a widow who lived alone in a ranch house that looked out across beautiful wheat fields. The fields were bare and planted with winter wheat, and Ada sat in her chair in the living room and stared outdoors. She could not watch television because she was afraid she would see a gun. They sat around the living room and talked, telling stories about the old days on Ada's farm, laughing and joking and trying to have a good time, and suddenly John's name would come up. The conversation would flag into silence, and everyone would look at the floor, not knowing what to say, and someone would start crying, and then they would see tears running down Ada's face.
She had always been a strong woman, and none of her children had ever seen her cry. When she felt she could not stop it, she would get up and leave the room, and go into her bedroom and close the door.
They set up tables in the kitchen and served roast beef – the Jaaxes did not like turkey. After a while, people drifted into the living room with plates in their hands and watched a football game. The women, including Nancy, cleaned up around the kitchen and helped with the children. Afterward, Nancy and Jerry stayed on in Wichita for a few days to help Nancy's father get to the hospital for his cancer treatments.
Then they drove back to Maryland in the van with their children.
DAN DALGARD SPENT an uneasy Thanksgiving week. On Monday, he called Peter Jahrling at the Institute to find out if Jahrling had any further news about what had been killing the monkeys at Reston. Jahrling now had a tentative diagnosis. It looked like they really did have SHF. Bad for monkeys, no problem for humans. He said to Dalgard that he felt strongly that it was simian fever, but he was reluctant to say so categorically.
He wanted to play it carefully until the final tests were finished.
Dalgard hung up the phone believing that his decision to sacrifice the monkeys in Room F had been correct. Those monkeys had been inflected with simian fever and would have died anyway. What now worried Dalgard was the possibility that the virus had somehow escaped from Room F. It might be quietly working his way through the building, in which case monkeys might start dying in other rooms. And then the virus would be very hard to control.
On Thanksgiving morning, Dan and his wife drove to Pittsburgh, to be with Dan's wife's parents. They drove back to Virginia on Friday, and Dan headed over to the monkey house to see if there had been any changes.
He was shocked by what he found. Over Thanksgiving, five monkeys had died in Room H, two doors down the hall from Room F. So the virus was moving, and what was worse, it was skipping rooms as it moved. How could it do that? Five dead monkeys in one room during the night ... He felt very uneasy.
The button was a dot the size of toast crumb, embedded in a tiny plug of yellow plastic. He unlocked a filing cabinet and removed his diamond knife. A diamond knife is a metal object no larger than a small pocket-size pencil sharpener – about an inch long. It costs about four thousand dollars. It has a diamond edge – a large, flawless prism – sharp diamond, a gem-quality stone.
He carried the diamond knife and the plug of plastic containing the toast crumb of cells into the cutting room. He sat down at a table, facing the cutting machine, and fitted his diamond knife into it, taking extreme care not to let his fingers touch the edge of the knife. One touch of a fingertip would destroy it. The diamond would also cut your fingertip, perhaps badly. The knife is extraordinarily sharp. It has the sharpest cutting edge of any tool on earth. It is sharp enough to split a virus cleanly in half, like a razor blade going through a peanut. If you consider the idea that a hundred million viruses could cover the dot on this i, then you get an idea of the sharpness of a diamond knife. If you happened to cut yourself with it, it would go through your skin without resistance, as if your skin were air – and it would split individual blood cells as it went through your finger. And then the knife edge would be covered with skin oil and blood cells, and would be ruined.
Tom looked into the eyepieces of a microscope that was attached to the cutting machine. Now he could see the toast crumb clearly. He threw a switch, and the machine hummed, and the sample began to move back and forth, the toast crumb sliding across the edge of the diamond knife. The cutting machine worked like a deli slicer, peeling off slices about this size:
The slices fell onto a droplet of water, and rested on the surface. Each contained as many as ten thousand cells, and the cells themselves were split by the knife. The blade peeled off slice after slice. They spread out like lily pads.
He took his eyes away from the microscope and looked around the table until he found a wooden stick that had a human eyelash glued to it with a droplet of nail polish. It was a device for handling the slices.
The eyelash had come from one of the women in the lab – it was generally believed that she had superior eyelashes for this kind of work, not too thick and not too thin, tapered, ending in fine points. He poked the eyelash into the water droplet and stirred it, separating the slices from one another. With the tip of the eyelash, he then lifted a few damaged slices out of the water and wiped them on a piece of tissue paper to get rid of them.
Next, using a pair of tweezers, he picked up a small metal grid.
The grid was this size – * – and it was made of copper.
Holding the grid with his tweezers, he dipped it into the water and brought it up slowly underneath a floating slice, like a fisherman lifting up a dip net. The slice was now stuck to the grid. Still holding the grid with his tweezers, he put it into a tiny box. He carried the box down the hall to a darkened room. In the middle of the room stood a metal tower taller than a person. This was his electron microscope. My scope, he thought; he was very fond of it. He opened the tiny box, lifted out the grid with tweezers, and fitted it into a steel rod the size of a tire iron – the sample holder, as it was called.
He slid the rod into the microscope until it clanked, locked in place.
Now the slice, sitting on the grid, which was held in place by the tire iron, was positioned in the microscope, centered in the beam of electrons.
He switched off the lights in the room and sat down at a console that was covered with dials and digital readouts. In the middle of the console there was a viewing screen. The room had become the command deck of a starship, and the viewing screen was a window that looked down into the infinity within.
He hit a switch, hunched down in his chair, and put his head close to the viewing screen. His face glowed greenish in the light of the screen, and was reflected in the glass: long hair, serious expression, deep-set eyes that scanned the terrain. He was looking into a corner of one cell. It was like looking at a landscape from high altitude. It was a cellscape. What loomed before his eyes was a huge complicated vista, crowded with more detail than the mind could absorb. You could spend days scanning cells, looking for a virus. In one slice, there might be thousands of cells that needed to be searched – and you still might not find what you were looking for. The incredible thing about living systems is that no matter how small the view, it is just as complicated as ever. He could see forms and shapes that resembled rivers and streams and oxbow lakes, and he could see specks that might be towns, and he could see belts of forest. It was an aerial view of rain forest. The cell was a world down there, and somewhere in that jungle hid a virus.
He turned a knob, and the cellscape drifted across his field of view, and he wandered through it. He zoomed in. The scene rushed up toward him.
His breath stopped. Wait a minute – there was something wrong with this cell. This cell was a mess. It wasn't just dead – it had been destroyed. It was blown apart. And it was crawling with worms. The cell wall-to-wall with worms. Some parts of the cell were so thick with virus they looked like buckets of rope. There was only one kind of virus that looked like rope. A filovirus.
He thought, Marburg. This stuff looks like Marburg. He hunched over the screen. His stomach screwed up into a knot and turned over, and he felt an unpleasant sensation. The puke factor. He almost panicked, almost ran out of the room shouting, "Marburg! We've got Marburg!" He thought, Is this really happening? He sucked in his breath. He didn't know if this thing was Marburg, but it sure as hell looked like a filovirus, a thread virus. Then an image came into his mind – an image of Peter Cardinal's liver cells exploded and flooded with snakes. He brought the image into mental focus and compared it with what he saw on the screen. He knew exactly what the Cardinal strain looked like because he had memorized its curlicues and Cheerio shapes. What the virus did to that boy ... the devastating effect on that boy's tissue ... oh, man! – oh, man! – Peter and I smelled this stuff. Peter and I have been handling this stuff, and this is a Biosafety Level agent, Marburg ... oh, man ... A foul feeling washed over him, a sudden awareness of male reproductive glands hanging on the exterior of the body between the legs ... testicles the size of pears, black and putrid, the skin peeling off them.
He began snapping photographs with his microscope. Several negatives came out of the machine. He carried them into a dark room and switched out the lights and began developing them. In pitch-darkness, he had time to think. He counted the days back to the date of his exposure.
Let's see, he had sniffed that flask on the Friday before he went hunting.
That would have been ... ten days ago. What's the incubation period for Marburg? He didn't know offhand. Let's see – monkeys that inhaled Marburg virus took a long time to develop the disease, from six to eighteen days.
He was on day ten.
I am in the window to be sick. I am in prime time to be dropping over! Did I have a headache yesterday? Do I have a headache now? Do I have a fever? He placed his hand on his forehead. Feels okay. Just because I don't get a headache on day ten doesn't mean I won't get a headache on day twelve. How deep did I breathe when I sniffed that flask?
Did I snap the cap? That would spray stuff around. I can't remember.
Did I rub my eye with my finger afterward? I can't remember. Did I touch my mouth with my finger? I might have, I don't know.
He wondered if he had made a mistake. Maybe this wasn't Marburg.
He was only an intern; he was just learning this stuff. Finding major Biosafety Level 4 agents on the outskirts of Washington, D.C., is not the kind of things interns do every day. Maybe this isn't a filovirus. How sure am I? If you go and tell you boss that you've found Marburg and you are wrong, your career goes down the tubes. If you make a bad call, then first of all you start a panic. Second, you become a laughingstock.
He switched on the darkroom light and pulled the negatives out of the bath and held them up to the light.
He saw virus particles shaped like snakes, in negative images.
They were white cobras tangled among themselves, like the hair of Medusa.
They were face of Nature herself, the obscene goddess revealed naked.
This thing was breathtakingly beautiful. As he stared at it, he found himself being pulled out of the human world into a world where moral boundaries blur and finally dissolve completely. He was lost in wonder and admiration, even though he knew that he was the prey. Too bad he couldn't bring it down with a clean shot from a rifle.
He saw something else in the pictures that left him frightened and filled with awe. The virus had altered the structure of the cell almost beyond recognition. It had transformed the cell into something that resembled a chocolate – chip cookie that was mostly chocolate chips. The "chips" were crystal – like blocks of pure virus. He knew them as "inclusion bodies."
They were broods of virus getting ready to hatch. As the virus grows inside a cell, crystalloids, or bricks, appear at the center. Then they move outward, toward the surface of the cell. When a brick touches the inner surface of the cell wall, it breaks apart into hundred of individual viruses. The viruses are shaped like threads. The threads push through the cell wall and grow out of the cell, like grass rising from seeded loam. As the bricks appear and move outward, they distort the cell, causing it to bulge and change shape, and finally the cell pops – it bursts and dies. The threads break away from the cell and drift into the bloodstream of the host, multiplying and taking over more cells and forming bricks and bursting the cells.
As he looked at the bricks, he realized that what he had thought was "pepper" when he had looked at the cells in the flask ten days ago – those specks in the cells – were really inclusion bodies. That was also why the cells had looked swollen and fat. Because they were pregnant and jammed with bricks of virus. Because they were getting ready to burst.
He nodded to a soldier – there were soldiers everywhere, going about their business – and went up another flight of stairs and past a conference room that displayed a map of the world on the wall. In this room, Army people discussed outbreaks of virus. A meeting was in progress in the room.
Beyond it, he came to a cluster of offices. One of them was an awe-inspiring mess, papers everywhere. It belonged to Gene Johnson, the biohazard expert who had led the expedition to Kitum Cave. Across the way was Peter Jahrling's office. It was neatly kept and small, but it had a window. Jahrling had placed his desk under the window to get some extra light. On the walls he had hung drawings done by his children. There was a drawing by his daughter that showed a rabbit under a shining yellow sun.
A shelf held an African sculpture of a human hand holding an egg on the tips of its fingers, as if the egg contained something interesting about to hatch.
"What's up, Tom?" Jahrling asked.
"We have a big problem here." Geisbert placed the photographs in a row on Jahrling's desk. It was a gray November day, and the light from the window fell gently on the images of Medusa. "This came from the Reston monkeys," Geisbert said, "I think it's a filovirus, and there may be a good chance it's Marburg."
Jahrling remembered sniffing the flask and said, "You're playing a joke on me. This isn't funny."
"This is no joke, Peter."
"Are you sure?" Jahrling asked.
Geisbert said he felt very sure.
Jahrling looked carefully at the photographs. Yes, he could see worms. Yes, he and Geisbert might have breathed it into their lungs.
Well, they didn't have headaches yet. He remembered remarking to the pathologist, as he cut up the little pink chunk of mystery meat in the tin foil, "Good thing this ain't Marburg." Yeah, right.
"Is this stuff the right size?" Jahrling asked. He got a ruler and measured the particles.
"It looks a little long to be Marburg," Geisbert said. Marburg particles form loops like Cheerios. This stuff was more like spaghetti.
They opened a textbook and compared Geisbert's pictures with the textbook pictures.
"It looks good to me," Jahrling said. "I'm going to show it to C.J. Peters."
JAHRLING, A CIVILIAN, had decided to notify the military chain of command.
It started with Colonel Clarence James Peter, MD. He was the chief of the disease-assessment division at the Institute, the doctor who dealt with the dangerous unknowns. ("The interesting stuff," as he called it.)
Peters had built up this division almost single handedly, and he ran it single handedly. He was a strange sort of military man, easygoing and casually brilliant. He had wire-rimmed glasses, a round, ruddy, pleasant face with mustache, a light Texas drawl. He was not a large man, but he liked to eat, and he believed himself to be overweight. He spoke fluent Spanish, which he had learned during his years in the jungles of Central and South America, hunting for hot agents. He was required by Army regulations to show up for work at eight o'clock in the morning, but he usually drifted in around ten o'clock. He disliked wearing a uniform.
Usually he wore faded blue jeans with a flaming Hawaiian shirt, along with sandals and dweebish white socks, looking like he had just spent the night in a Mexican hotel. His excuse for his lack of uniform was that he suffered from athlete's foot, an incurable tropical strain that he had picked up in Central America and could never quite get rid of, and so he had to wear socks with sandals in order to keep air circulating around his toes, and the jeans and flaming shirt were part of the package. Peters worked twelve-hour days and left work at night, often long after everyone else had gone home.
C.J. Peters could swim through a bureaucracy like a shark. He inspired great loyalty in his staff, and he made enemies easily and deliberately, when it suited him. He drove a red Toyota that had seen better days. On his travels in rain forests and tropical savannas, he ate with pleasure whatever the locals were eating. He had consumed frogs, snakes, zebra meat, jellyfish, lizards, and toads cooked whole in their skin, but he thought he had never eaten salamanders, at least none that he had been able to identify in a soup. He had eaten boiled monkey thigh, and he had drunk banana beer fermented with human saliva. In central America, while leading an expedition in search of Ebola virus, he had found himself in termite country during swarming season, and he had waited by termite nest and collected the termites as they swarmed out and had eaten them raw. He thought they had a nice sort of nutty taste. He liked termites so much that he refrigerated them with his blood samples, to keep the termites fresh all day so that he could snack on them like peanuts with his evening gin as the sun went down over the African plains. He was fond of suffocated guinea pig baked in its own blood and viscera. The guinea pig is split open like a book, offering treasures, and he enjoyed picking out and eating the guinea pig's lungs, adrenal glands, and brain.
And then, inevitably, he would pay a price. "I always get sick, but it's worth it," he once said to me. He was a great believer in maps, and his offices always contained many maps hung on the walls, showing locations of outbreaks of virus.
Jahrling put Geisbert's photographs in a folder. He didn't want anyone to see them. He found Peters at a meeting in the conference room that held the map of the world.
Jahrling tapped him on the shoulder. "I don't know what you are doing right now, C.J., but I've got something more important."
"What is it?"
Jahrling held the folder closed. "It's a little sensitive. I really don't want to flash it here."
"What's so sensitive?"
Jahrling opened the folder slightly, just enough to give C.J. a glimpse of spaghetti, and snapped it shut.
The colonel's face took on a look of surprise. He stood up, and without a word to the others, without even excusing himself, he walked out of the room with Jahrling. They went back to Jahrling's office and closed the door behind them. Geisbert was there, waiting for them.
Jahrling spread the photographs on his desk. "Take a look at these, C.J."
The colonel flipped through the photographs. "What's this from, anyway?" he asked.
"It's from those monkeys in Reston. It doesn't look good to me. Tom thinks it's Marburg."
"We've been fooled before," C.J. said. "A lot of things look like worms." He stared at the photographs. The worms were unmistakable – and there were the crystalloids – the bricks. It looked real. It felt real.
He experienced what he would later describe as a major pucker factor setting in. He thought, This is going to be an awful problem for that town in Virginia and these people there. "The first question," he went on, "is what are the chances of laboratory contamination?" The stuff could be the Army's own Cardinal strain – it might have somehow leaked out of a freezer and gotten into those flasks. But that seemed impossible. And the more they pondered, the more impossible it seemed. The Cardinal strain was kept in a different area of the building, behind several walls of biocontainment, a long distance from the monkey flasks. There were multiple safeguards to prevent the accidental release of a virus like Marburg Cardinal. That just wasn't possible. It could not be a contamination. But it might be something other than a virus. It might be a false alarm.
"People around here see something long and stringy, and they think they've got a filovirus," C.J. Peters said. "I'm skeptical. A lot of things look like Marburg."
"I agree," Jahrling replied. "It could be nothing. It could be just another Loch Ness monster."
"What are you doing to confirm it?" the colonel asked him.
Jahrling explained that he was planning to test the cells with human blood samples that would make them glow if they were infected by Marburg.
"Okay, you're testing for Marburg," C.J. said. "Are you going to include a test for Ebola?"
"Sure, I already thought of that."
"When will your tests be done? Because if those Monkeys have Marburg, we have to figure out what to do."
Dan Dalgard, for example, was a prime candidate for coming down with Marburg, because he had dissected that monkey.
"I'll have a definite yes or no on Marburg by tomorrow," Jahrling said.
C.J. Peters turned to Tom Grisbert and said that he wanted more proof – he wanted pictures of the agent actually growing in monkey liver from a monkey that had died in the monkey house. That would prove that it lived in the monkeys.
C.J. could see that a military and political crisis was brewing.
If the public found out what Marburg does, there could be panic. He stood up with a photograph of snakes in his hand and said, "If we are going to announce that Marburg has broken out near Washington, we had better be damned sure we are right." Then he dropped the photograph on Jahrling's desk and returned to his meeting under the map of the world.
AFTER C.J. PETERS left Jahrling's office, a delicate conversation occurred between Peter Jahrling and Tom Geisbert. They shut the door and talked quietly about the whiffing incident. It was something they had better get straight between them. Neither of them had mentioned to Colonel C.J. Peters that they had whiffed that flask.
They counted the days back to their exposure. Ten days had passed since they had uncapped the flask and whiffed what could be eau de Marburg. Tomorrow would be day eleven. The clock was ticking. They were in the incubation period. What were they going to do? What about their families?
They wondered what Colonel Peters would do if he found out what they had done. He might order them into the Slammer – the Level 4 biocontainment hospital. They could end up in the Slammer behind air locks and double steel doors, tended by nurses and doctors wearing space suits. A month in the Slammer while the doctors hovered over you in space suits drawing samples of your blood just waiting for you to crash.
The doors of the Slammer are kept locked, the air is kept under negative pressure, and your telephone calls are monitored – because people have emotional breakdowns in the Slammer and try to escape. They start flaking out by the second week. They become clinically depressed.
Non-communicative. They stare at the walls, speechless, passive, won't even watch television. Some of them become agitated and fearful. Some of them need to have a continual drip of Valium in the arm to keep them from pounding on the walls, smashing the viewing windows, tearing up the medical equipment. They sit on death row in solitary confinement, waiting for the spiking fevers, horrible pain in the internal organs, brain strokes, and finally the endgame, with its sudden, surprising, uncontrollable gushes of blood. Most of them claim loudly that they have not be exposed to anything. They deny that anything could go wrong with them, and ordinarily nothing does go wrong with them, physically, in the Slammer, and they come out healthy. Their minds are another story. In the Slammer, they become paranoid, convinced that the Army bureaucracy has forgotten about them, has left them to rot. When they come out, they are disoriented. They emerge through the air-lock door, pale, shaken, tentative, trembling, angry with the Army, angry with themselves. The nurses, trying to cheer them up, give them a cake studded with the number of candles equal to the number of days they've been living in the Slammer.
They blink in confusion and terror at a mass of flaming candles on their Slammer cake, perhaps more candles than they've ever seen on one of their own birthday cakes. One guy was locked in the Slammer for forty-two days.
Forty-two candles on his Slammer cake.
Many people who have been isolated in the Slammer choose to cut down on their work in Level 4, begin to find all kinds of excuses for why they really can't put on a space suit today or tomorrow or the day after that. Many of the people who have been in the Slammer end up quitting their jobs and leaving the Institute altogether.
Peter Jahrling felt that, on the whole, he was not at much risk of contracting virus , nor was Tom. If he did contract it, he would know soon enough. His blood west test positive, or he would get a headache that wouldn't go away. In any case, he believed very strongly that Marburg wasn't easy to catch, and he didn't think there was any danger to his family or to anyone else around town.
But think about Dan Dalgard cutting into monkeys. Bending over and breathing monkey when he opened their abdomens. He was bending over their intestines, over a pool of Marburg blood. So then, why isn't Dalgard dead? Well, he reasoned, nothing's happened to him, so maybe nothing will happen to us.
Where had it come from? Was it a new strain? What was it capable of doing to human? The discoverer of a new strain of virus gets to name it. Jahrling thought about that, too. If he and Tom were locked up in the Slammer, they would not be able to carry out any research on this virus. They were on the verge of a major discovery, and the glory of it perhaps tantalized them. To find a filovirus near Washington was the discovery of a lifetime.
For all these reasons, they decided to keep their mouths shut.
They decided to test their blood for the virus. Jahrling said something to Geisbert like, "We are going to get blood samples drawn from ourselves like right now." If their blood went positive, they could immediately report to the Slammer. If their blood remained negative and they didn't develop other symptoms, then there are little chance they could infect anyone else.
Obviously they did not want to go to the regular clinic to have an Army nurse take their blood. So they found a friendly civilian technician and he twisted a rubber band around their arms, and they watched while he filled some tubes with their blood. He understood what had happened, and he said he would keep his mouth shut. Jahrling then put on a space suit and carried his own blood into his Level 4 hot lab. He also took with him Geisbert's blood and the flasks of milky stuff. It was very strange, handling your own blood while wearing a space suit. It seemed, however, quite risky to let his blood lie around where someone might be accidentally exposed to it. His blood had to be bio-contained in a hot zone. If it was infected with Marburg, he didn't want to be responsible for it killing anyone. He said to himself, Given that this was a piece of mystery meat sniffed out of a monkey carcass, I should have been a little more careful...
Tom Geisbert went off to collect some pickled monkey liver that he could photograph for viruses, hoping to prove that the Marburg-like agent lived in the monkeys. He found a plastic jug that contained sterilized pieces of liver from Monkey O53. He fished some liver out of the jug, clipped a few bits of it, and fixed the bit in plastic. This was a slow job and took many hours to finish. He left the plastic to cure overnight and went home for a couple of hours to try to get some sleep.
He got up at four o'clock in the morning, drank a cup of coffee, and skipped breakfast. He drove his Bronco in pitch darkness across the Potomac River and through Antietam National Battlefield, a broad ridge of cornfields and farmland scattered with stone monuments to the dead. He passed through the front gate of Fort Detrick, parked, and went past the security desk and into his microscope area.
The dawn came gray, gusty, and warm. As light the color of old aluminum glimmered around the Institute, Tom sliced pieces of monkey liver with his diamond knife and put them into the electron microscope. A few minutes later, he took a photograph of virus particles budding directly out of cells in the liver of Monkey O53. The animal's liver was full of snakes. These photographs were definite proof that the virus was multiplying the Reston monkeys – that it was not a laboratory contamination.
He also found inclusion bodies inside the monkey's liver cells. The animal's liver was being transformed into crystal bricks.
He carried his new photographs to Peter Jahrling's office. Then they both went to see Colonel C.J. Peters. The colonel stared at the photographs. Okay – he was convinced, too.
The agent was growing in those monkeys. Now they would have to wait for Jahrling's test results, because that would be the final confirmation that it was indeed Marburg.
Jahrling wanted to nail down this Marburg as fast as he could. He spent most of the day in a space suit, working in his hot lab, putting together his tests. In the middle of the day, he decided that he had to call Dan Dalgard. He couldn't wait any longer, even without test results.
He wanted to warn Dalgard of the danger, yet he wanted to deliver the warning carefully, so as not to cause a panic in the monkey house. "You definitely have SHF in the monkey house," he said. "We have definitely confirmed that. However, there is also the possibility of a second agent in at least some of the animals."
"What agent? Can you tell me what agent?" Dalgard asked.
"I don't want to identify the agent right now," Jahrling said, "because I don't want to start a panic. But there are serious potential public health hazards associated with it, if, in fact, we are dealing with this particular agent."
Somehow, the way Jahrling used the words panic and particular made Dalgard think of Marburg virus. Everyone who handled monkeys knew about Marburg. It was a virus that could easily make people panic.
"Is it Marburg or some similar agent?" Dalgard asked.
"Yes, something like that," Jahrling said. "We'll have confirmation later in the day. I'm working on the tests now. I feel it's unlikely the results will be positive for this second agent. But you should take precautions not to do any necropsies on any animals until we've completed the tests. Look, I don't want to set off too many whistles and bells, but I don't want you and your employees walking into that room unnecessarily."
"How soon can you get back to me with definite yes or no about this second agent? We need to know as soon as possible."
"I'll call you back today. I promise," Jahrling said.
Dalgard hung up the phone highly disturbed, but he maintained his usual calm manner. A second agent, and it sounded as if it was Marburg.
The people who had died in Germany, he knew, had been handling raw, blood monkey meat. The meat was full of virus, and they got it on their hands, or they rubbed it on their eyelids. He and other people at the company had been cutting into sick monkeys since October – and yet no one had become sick. Everyone had worn rubber gloves. He wasn't afraid for himself – he felt fine – but he began to worry about the others. He thought, Even if the virus is Marburg, the situation is still no different from before. We're still stuck in a pot. The question is how to get ourselves out of this pot. He called Bill Volt and ordered him not to cut into any more monkeys. Then he sat in his office, getting more and more annoyed as the day darkened and Peter Jahrling did not call him back. He wondered if any of the men had cut themselves with a scalpel while performing a dissection of diseased monkey. Chances were they wouldn't file an accident report.
He knew for sure that he had not cut himself. But he had performed a mass sacrifice of approximately fifty animals. He had been in contact with fifty animals. How long had it been since then? He should be showing some symptoms by now. Bloody nose, fever, something like that.
At five-thirty, he called Jahrling's office and got a soldier on the phone, who answered by saying, "How can I help you, sir or ma'am? ...
I'm sorry, sir, Dr. Jahrling is not in his office ... No sir, I don't know where he is, sir ... No, he has not left work. May I take a message, sir?" Dalgard left a message for Jahrling to call him at home. He was feeling steadily more annoyed.
In order to do this, he needed to use blood serum from human victims. The blood serum would react to viruses. He went to the freezers, and got out vials of frozen blood serum from three people. Two of the people had died; and one had survived. They were:
1. Musoke – A test for Marburg. Serum from the blood of Dr. Shem Musoke, a survivor. (Presumably reactive against the Kitum Cave strain, which had started with Charles Monet and jumped into Dr. Musoke's eyes in the black vomit.)
2. Boniface – A test for Ebola Sudan. From a man named Boniface who died in Sudan.
3. Mayinga – A test for Ebola Zaire. Nurse Mayinga's blood serum.
The test was delicate, and took hours to complete. It was not made easier by the fact that he was shuffling around in his space suit the whole time.
First he put droplets of cells from the monkey culture onto glass slides, and let them dry, and treated them with chemicals. Then he put drops of the blood serum on the slides. They would glow in the presence of target virus.
Now it was time to look. This had to be done in total darkness, because the glow would be faint. He shuffled over to a storage closet, and went inside it, and closed the door behind him. A microscope sat on a table in the closet, and there was a chair, and from the wall hung an air hose. He plugged the hose into his space suit and put the slides into the microscope. Then he turned out the lights. He felt around in the darkness for the chair, and sat down. This was not a fun place to be if you happened to have a touch of claustrophobia – sitting in a pitch-black Level 4 closet while wearing a space suit. Peter Jahrling had made his peace with suffocation and darkness a long time ago. He waited for a minute to give his eye time to adapt to the dark, and the little sparkles of light in his eyes as they adjusted to the darkness eventually faded away, while cool, dry air roared around his face and whiffled the hair on his forehead. Then he looked through the binocular eyepieces of the microscope. He wore his eyeglasses inside his space suit, and that made it particularly difficult to see. He pressed the faceplate against his nose and squinted. He moved his face from side to side. His nose left a greasy streak inside his faceplate. He twisted his helmet unit it was turned nearly sideways. Finally he saw through the eyepieces.
Two circles drifted into his sight, and he focused his eyes, bringing the circles together. He was looking down into vast terrain. He saw cells dimly outlined in a faint glow. It was like flying over a country at night, over thinly populated lands. It was normal to see a faint glow. He was looking for a bright glow. He was looking for a city.
He scanned the slides with his eyes, back and forth, back and forth, moving across the microscopic world, looking for a telltale greenish glow.
The Musoke did not glow.
The Boniface glowed weakly.
To his horror, the Mayinga glowed brightly.
He jerked his head back. Aw, no! He adjusted his helmet and looked again. The Mayinga blood serum was still glowing. The dead woman's blood was reacting to the virus in the monkey house. He got an ugly feeling in the pit of his stomach. Those monkeys didn't have Marburg. They had Ebola. Those animals were dying of Ebola Zaire. His stomach lurched and turned over, and he sat frozen in the dark closet, with only the sound of his air and the thud of his heart.
He decided to do the test again. He turned on the lights in the closet and scuffled out into his lab, this time keeping careful track of his vials, bottles, and slides to make sure that nothing got mixed up.
Then he carried the new samples back into the closet and turned out the lights and looked again into the his microscope.
Once again, the Mayinga blood glowed.
So maybe it really was Ebola Zaire or something closely related to it – the dead woman's blood "knew" this virus, and reacted to it. Good thing this ain't Marburg – well, guess what, it ain't Marburg. This is the honker from Zaire, or maybe its twin sister. Ebola had never been seen outside Africa. What was it doing near Washington? How in the hell had it gotten here? What would it do? He thought, I'm onto something really hot.
He was wearing his space suit, but he didn't want to take the time to decon out through the air lock. There was an emergency telephone on the wall in his lab. He disconnected his air hose to extinguish the roar of air so that he could hear through the receiver, and he punched C.J. Peters' phone number.
"C.J.!" he shouted through his helmet. "IT'S PETER JAHRLING. IT'S REAL, AND IT'S EBOLA."
"Naw!" C.J. replied.
"YEAH."
"Ebola? It's gotta be a contamination," C.J. said.
"no, IT ISN'T A CONTAMINATION."
"Could you have gotten the samples mixed up?"
"YEAH, I KNOW – MY FIRST THOUGHT WAS THAT SOMEBODY HAD SWITCHED THE SAMPLES. BUT THEY WEREN'T SWITCHED, C.J.-BECAUSE I DID THE TEST TWICE."
"Twice?"
"EBOLA ZAIRE BOTH TIMES. I'VE GOT THE RESULTS RIGHT HERE. I CAN PASS THEM TO YOU. TAKE A LOOK FOR YOURSELF."
"I'm coming down there," C.J. said. He hung up the phone and hurried downstairs to Jahrling's hot lab.
Jahrling, meanwhile, picked up a sheet of waterproof paper on which he had written the results of his tests. He slid the paper into a tank full of EnviroChem. The tank went through the wall to a Level 0 corridor outside the hot zone. The tank worked on the same principle as a sliding cash drawer in a teller's window. You could pass an object from the hot zone through a tank into the normal world. It would be disinfected on its way through the tank.
C.J. stood at a thick glass window on the other side, looking in at Jahrling. They waited for several minutes while the chemicals penetrated the paper and sterilized it. Then C.J. opened the tank from his side and removed the paper, dripping with chemicals, and held it in his hands. He motioned to Jahrling through the window: Go back to the phone.
Jahrling shuffled back to the emergency telephone and waited for it to ring. It rang, and there was C.J.'s voice on the line: "Get out of there, and let's go see the commander!"
It was time to move this thing up the chain of command.
Jahrling deconned out through the air lock, got dressed in his street clothes, and hurried to C.J. Peters's office, and they both went to the office of the commander of USAMRIID, a colonel named David Huxsoll.
They brushed past his secretary – told her it was an emergency – and sat down at a conference table in his office.
"Guess what?" C.J. said. "It looks like we've found a filovirus in a bunch of monkeys outside Washington. We've recovered what we think is Ebola."
Colonel David Huxsoll was an expert in biohazards, and this was the sort of situation he thought the Institute was prepared to handle.
Within minutes, he telephoned Major General Philip K. Russell, MD, who was the commander of the United States Army Medical Research and Development Command, which has authority over USAMRIID, and had set up a meeting in Russell's office in another building at Fort Detrick.
Huxsoll and C.J. Peters spent a few moments talking about who else should be brought in. They hit upon Lieutenant Colonel Nancy Jaax, the Institute's chief of pathology. She could identify the signs of Ebola in a monkey. Huxsoll picked up his phone. "Nancy , it's David Huxsoll. Can you get over to Phil Russell's office right now? It's damned important."
"It was a dark November evening, and the base was beginning to quiet down for the night. At the moment of sundown that day, there was no sun visible, only a dying of the light behind clouds that flowed off Catoctin Mountain. Jaax met Jahrling and the two colonels on their way across the parade ground beside the Institute. A detail of marching soldiers stopped before the flagpole. The group of people from the Institute also stopped. From a loudspeaker came a roar of a cannon and then the bugle music of "Retreat," cracklish and cheap-sounding in the air, and the soldiers lowered the flag while the officers came to attention and saluted. C.J. Peters felt both embarrassed and oddly moved.
"Retreat" ended, and the soldiers folded up the flag, and the Institute people continued on their way.
General Russell's office occupied a corner of a low-slung Second World War barracks that had been recently plastered with stucco into a hopeless effort to make it look new. It had a view of the legs of Fort Detrick's water tower. Consequently, the general never opened his curtains. The visitors sat on a couch and hairs, and the general settled behind his desk. He was a medical doctor who had hunted viruses in Southeast Asia. He was in his late fifties, a tall man with hair thinning on top and gray at the temples, lined cheeks, a long jaw, pale blue eyes that gave him a look of intensity, and a booming, deep voice.
C.J. Peters handed the general a folder containing the photographs of the life form in the monkey house.
General Russell stared, "Holy shit," he said. He drew a breath. "Man. That's filovirus. Who the hell took this picture?" He flipped to the next one.
"These were done by my microscopist, Tom Geisbert," Jahrling said. "It could be Ebola. The tests are showing positive for Ebola Zaire."
C.J. then gave an overview of the situation, telling the general about the monkeys in Reston, and finishing with these words: "I'd say we have a major pucker factor about the virus in those monkeys."
"Well, how certain are you that it's Ebola?" General Russell asked. "I'm wondering if this could be Marburg."
Jahrling explained why he didn't think it was Marburg. He had done his test twice, he said, and both times the samples were positive to the Mayinga strain of Ebola Zaire. As he spoke to the general, he was very careful to say that test did not in itself prove that the virus was Ebola Zaire. It showed only that is was closely related to Ebola Zaire.
It might be Ebola, or it might be something else – something new and different.
C.J. said, "We have to be very concerned and very puckered if it is of the same ilk as Ebola."
They had to be very puckered, Russell agreed. "We have a natural emergency on our hands," he said. "This is an infectious threat of major consequences." He remarked that this type of virus had never been seen before in the United States, and it was right outside Washington. "What the hell are we going to do about it?" he said. Then he asked them if there was any evidence that the virus could travel through air. That was a crucial question.
There was evidence, horrifying but incomplete, that Ebola could travel through the air. Nancy Jaax described the incident in which her two healthy monkeys had died of presumably airborne Ebola in the weeks after the bloody-glove incident, in 1983. There was more evidence, and she described that, too. In 1986, Gene Johnson had infected monkeys with Ebola and Marburg by letting them breathe it into their lungs, and she had been the pathologist for that experiment. All of the monkeys exposed to airborne virus had died except for one monkey, which managed to survive Marburg. The virus, therefore, could infect the lungs on contact.
Furthermore, the lethal dose was fairly small: as small as five hundred infectious virus particles. That many particles of airborne Ebola could easily hatch out of a single cell. A tiny amount of airborne Ebola could nuke a building full of people if it got into the air conditioning system.
The stuff could be like plutonium. The stuff could be worse than plutonium because it could replicate.
C.J. said, "We know it's infectious by air, but we don't know how infectious."
Russell turned to Jaax and asked, "Has this been published? Did you publish it?"
"No, sir," she said.
He glared at her. She could see him thinking, Well, Jaax, why the hell hasn't it been published?
There were plenty of reasons, but she didn't feel like giving them just now. She believed that Gene Johnson, her collaborator, had difficulty writing papers. And, well, they just had not gotten around to publishing it, that was all. It happens. People sometimes just don't get around to publishing papers.
Hearing the discussion, Peter Jahrling chose not to mention to the general that he might have sniffed just a little bit of it. Anyway, he hadn't sniffed it, he had only whiffed it. He had kind of like waved his hand over it, just to bring the scent to his nose. He hadn't inhaled it.
He hadn't like jammed the flask up in his nostril and snorted it or anything like that. Yet he had a feeling he knew what the general might do if he found out about it – the general would erupt in enough profanity to lift Jahrling off his feet and drop him into the Slammer.
Then there was the additional frightening possibility that this virus near Washington was not Ebola Zaire. That it was something else.
Another hot strain from the rain forest. An unknown emerger. And who could say how it moved or what it could do to humans? General Russell began to think out loud. "We could be in for a hellacious event," he said. "Given that we have an agent with a potential to cause severe human disease, and given that it appears to be uncontrolled in the monkey house, what do we do? We need to do the right thing, and we need to do it fast.
How big is this sucker? And are people going to die?" He turned to Colonel C.J. Peters and asked, "So what are our option here?"
C.J. had been thinking about this already. There are three ways to stop a virus – vaccines, drugs and biocontainment. For Ebola, there was only one way to stop it. There was no vaccine for Ebola. There was no drug treatment for Ebola. That left only biocontainment.
But how to achieve biocontainment? That was tricky. As far as C.J. could see, there were only two options. The first option was to seal off the monkey colony and watch the monkey die – and also keep a close watch on the people who had handled the monkeys and possibly put them into quarantine as well. The second option was to go into the building and sterilize the whole place. Kill the monkeys – give them lethal injections – burn their carcasses, and drench the entire building with chemicals and fumes – a major biohazard operation.
General Russell listened and sad, "So option one is to cut the monkeys off from the rest of the world and let the virus run its course in them. And option two is to wipe them out. There aren't any more options."
Everyone agreed that there were no other options.
Nancy Jaax was thinking. It may be in the monkey house now, but it ain't going to stay there very damn long. She had never seen a monkey survive Ebola. And Ebola is a species jumper. All of those monkeys were going to die, and they were going to die in a way that was almost unimaginable. Very few people on earth had seen Ebola do its work on a primate, but she knew exactly what it could do. She did not see how the virus could be contained unless the monkey house was set up for quarantine with an independently filtered air supply. She said, "How ethical is it to let these animals go a long time before they die? And how do we assure the safety of people in the meantime? I've watched these guys die of Ebola, and it's not a fun way to go – they're sick, sick, sick animals."
She said that she wanted to go into the monkey house to look at the monkeys. "The lesions are easy to miss unless you know what you are looking for," she said, "and then it's as plain as the nose on your face."
She also wanted to go there to look at pieces of tissue under a microscope. She wanted to look for crystalloids, or "inclusion bodies"
Bricks. If she could find them in the monkey meat, that would be another confirmation that the monkeys were hot.
Meanwhile, there was the larger question of politics. Should the Army become involved? The Army has a mission, which is to defend the country against military threats. Was this virus a military threat? The sense of the meeting ran like this: military threat or not, if we are going to stop this agent, we've got to throw everything at it that we've got.
That would create a small political problem. Actually it would create a large political problem. The problem had to do with the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia. The C.D.C. is the federal agency that deals with emerging diseases. It has a mandate from Congress to control human disease. This is the C.D.C.'s lawful job. The Army does not exactly have a mandate to flight viruses on American soil. Yet the Army has the capability and the expertise to do it. Everyone in the room could see that a confrontation might boil up with the C.D.C. if the Army decided to move in on the monkey house. There were people at C.D.C. who could be jealous of their turf. "The Army doesn't have the statutory responsibility to take care of this situation," General Russell pointed out, "but the Army has the capability. The C.D.C. doesn't have the capability. We have the muscle but not the authority. The C.D.C. has the authority but not the muscle. And there's going to be a pissing contest."
In the opinion of General Russell, this was a job for soldiers operating under a chain of command. There would be a need for people trained in biohazard work. They would have to be young, without families, willing to risk their lives. They would have to know each other and be able to work in teams. They had to be ready to die.
In fact, the Army had never before organized a major field operation against a hot virus. The whole thing would have to be put together from scratch.
Obviously there were legal questions here. Lawyers were going to have to be consulted. Was this legal? Could the Army simply put together a biohazard SWAT team and move in on the monkey house? General Russell was afraid the Army's lawyers would tell him that it could not, and should not, be done, so he answered the legal doubts with these words: "A policy of moving out and doing it, an asking forgiveness afterward, is much better than a policy of asking permission and having it denied. You never ask a lawyer for permission to do something. We are going to do the needful, and the lawyers are going to tell us why it's legal."
By this time, the people in the room were shouting and interrupting one another. General Russell, still thinking out loud, boomed, "So the next question is, Who the fuck is going to pay for it?"
Before anyone had a chance to speak, he answered the question himself.
"I'll get the money. I'll beat it out of somebody."
More shouting.
The general's voice rose above the noise. "This is a big one coming, so let's not screw it up, fellas," he said. "Let's write the right game plan and then execute it." In the Army, an important job is called a mission, and a mission is always carried out by a team, and every team has a leader. "We have to agree on who is going to be in charge of this operation," the general continued. "C.J. Peters has got this action here.
He's in charge of the operation. He's the designated team leader. Okay?
Everybody agreed on that?
Everybody agreed.
"C.J., what we need is a meeting," the general said. "Tomorrow we're going to have a meeting. We have to call everybody."
He looked at the clock on the wall. It was five-thirty, rush hour. People were leaving work, and monkeys were dying in Reston, and the virus was on the move. "We've got to pull the chain on this whole thing,' the general said. "We'll have to inform everybody simultaneously, as soon as possible. I want to start with Fred Murphy at the C.D.C. I don't want him to be sandbagged by this."
Frederick A. Murphy was one of the original discovers of Ebola virus, the wizard with an electron microscope who had first photographed the virus and whose work had hung in art museums. He was an old friend of General Russell's. He was also an important official at C.D.C., the director of the National Center for Infectious Diseases.
Russells put his hand on the telephone on his desk. He stared around the room. "One last time: are you sure you've got what you think you've got? Because I'm gonna to make this phone call. If you don't have a filovirus, we will look like real assholes."
Around the room, one by one, they told him they were convinced it was a thread virus.
"All right. Then I'm satisfied we've got it."
He dialed Murphy's number in Atlanta.
"Sorry – Dr. Murphy has gone home for the day."
He pulled out his black book and found Murphy's home phone number.
He reached Murphy in his kitchen, where he was chatting with his wife.
"Fred, It's Phil Russell ... Great, how about yourself? ... Fred, we've isolated an Ebola-like agent outside Washington ... Yeah. Outside Washington."
A grin spread over Russell's face, and he held the phone away from his ear and looked around the room. Evidently Murphy was having some kind of a noisy reaction. Then General Russell said into the receiver, "No, Fred, we're not smoking dope. We've got an Ebola-like virus. We've seen it ... Yeah, we have pictures." There was a pause, and he put his hand over the mouthpiece and said to the room, "He thinks we've got crud in our scope."
Murphy wanted to know who took the pictures and who analyzed them.
"It was a kid who took the pictures. Young guy named – what's his name? – Geisbert. And we're looking at them right here."
Murphy said he would fly up to Fort Detrick tomorrow morning to look at the pictures and review the evidence. He took it extremely seriously.
Fairfax County, Virginia. My, oh my, a nice place to live. Fairfax County – beautiful neighborhoods, lakes, golf course, expensive homes, good schools, and Ebola. "We'll have to call the county health department," the general said. They would also have to call the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which has control over imported monkeys. They would have to call the Environmental Protection Agency, which has jurisdiction in cases of environmental contamination by an extreme biohazard. General Russell also decided to call an assistant secretary of defense, just to get the Pentagon noticed.
People left the room and fanned out along the hallways, going into empty offices and making the calls. C.J. Peters, now the team leader, went into another office down the hall and called Dan Dalgard's office, with Peter Jahrling on an extension line. Dalgard had gone home. They called Dalgard's home, and Dalgard's wife told him that Dan hadn't arrived yet. At about half past six, they called Dalgard's house again, and this time they got him. "This is Colonel C.J. Peters, up at USAMRIID. I'm the chief of the disease assessment division ... How do you do? ... Anyway, I'm calling to report that the second agent is apparently not Marburg.
The second agent is Ebola virus."
"What is Ebola?" Dalgard asked. He had never heard of Ebola. The word had no meaning for him.
In his smoothest Texas voice, C.J. Peters said, "It's a rather rare viral disease that has been responsible for human fatalities in outbreaks in Zaire and Sudan within the past ten or twelve years."
Dalgard was starting to feel relieved – good thing it isn't Marburg.
"What is the nature of Ebola virus?" he asked.
C.J. described the virus in vague terms. "It is related to Marburg. It is transmitted the same way, through contact with infected tissue and blood, and the signs and symptoms are much the same."
"How bad is it?"
"The case-fatality rate is fifty to ninety percent."
Dalgard understood exactly what that meant. The virus was much worse than Marburg.
C.J. continued, "With the information we have, we are going to notify state and national public health officials." Dalgard spoke carefully, "Would you, ahem, would you please wait until seven p.m., to allow me to apprise my corporate head-quarters of recent development?"
C.J. agreed to wait before pulling the trigger, through in fact General Russell had already called the C.D.C. Now C.J. had a favor to ask of Dalgard. Would it be all right if he sent someone down to Reston tomorrow to have a look at some sample of dead monkeys?
Dalgard resisted. He had sent a little bit of blood and tissue to the Army for diagnosis – and look what was happening. This thing could go way out of control. He sensed that Colonel Peters was not telling him all there was to know about this virus called Ebola. Dalgard feared he could lose control of the situation in a hurry if he let the Army get its foot in the door. "Why don't we meet by phone early tomorrow and discuss this approach?" Dalgard replied.
After the phone call, C.J. Peters found Nancy Jaax and asked her if she would come with him to meet Dalgard the next day and look at some monkey tissue. He assumed Dalgard would give permission. She agreed to go with him.
NANCY Jaax WALKED across the parade ground back to the Institute and found Jerry in his office. He looked up at her with a pained expression on his face. He had been staring out the window and thinking about his brother.
It was dark; there was nothing to see out there except a blank wall.
She closed the door. "I've got something for you. This is close hold. This is hush-hush. You are not going to believe this. There's Ebola virus in a monkey colony in Virginia."
They drove home, talking about it, traveling north on the road that led to Thurmont along the foot of Catoctin Mountain.
"This is killing me – I'll never get away from this bug," she said to him.
It seemed clear that they both were going to be involved in the Army action. It wasn't clear what kind of an action it would be, but certainly something big was going to go down. She told Jerry that tomorrow she would probably visit the monkey house with C.J. and that she would be looking at monkey tissues for signs of Ebola.
Jerry was profoundly surprised: so this was what Nancy's work with Ebola had come to. He was impressed with his wife and bemused by the situation. If he was worried about her, he didn't show it.
They turned up a gentle swing of road that ran along the side of the mountain, and passed through apple orchards, and turned into their driveway. It was eight o'clock, and Jason was home. Jaime had gone off to her gymnastic practice. The kids were latchkey children now.
Jason was doing his homework. He had made himself a microwave dinner of God knows what. Their son was a self-starter, a little bit of a loner, and very self-sufficient. All he needed was food and money, and he ran by himself.
The two colonels changed out of their uniforms into sweat clothes, and Nancy put a frozen chunk of her homemade stew into the microwave and thawed it. When the stew was warm, she poured it into a Thermos jar. She put the dog and the Thermos into a car, and she drove out to get Jaime at her gymnastics practice. The gym was a half hour's drive from Thurmont.
Nancy picked up Jaime and gave her the stew to eat in the car. Jaime was an athletic girl, short, dark haired, sometimes inclined to worry about things – and she was exhausted from her workout. She ate the stew and fell asleep on the back seat while Nancy drove her home.
The Colonel Jaaxes had a water bed, where they spent a lot of time. Jaime got into her pajama and curled up on the water bed next to Nancy and fell asleep again.
Nancy and Jerry read books in bed for a while. The bedroom had red wallpaper and a balcony that overlooked the town. They talked about the monkey house, and then Nancy picked up Jaime and carried her into her own bedroom and tucked her into her bed. Around midnight, Nancy fell asleep.
Jerry continued to read. He liked to read military history. Some of the most brutal combat in history had occurred in the rolling country around Catoctin Mountain: at the cornfield at Antietam, where every individual stalk of corn had been slashed away by bullets, and where the bodies had lain so thick a person could walk on them from one end of the cornfield to the other. He could look out his bedroom window and imagine the blue and gray armies crawling across the land. That night he happened to be reading The Killer Angels, a novel by Michael Shaara about the Battle of Gettysburg:
Then Lee said slowly, "Soldiering has one great trap."
Longstreet turned to see his face. Lee was riding slowly ahead, without expression. He spoke in that same slow voice.
"To be a good soldier you must love the army. But to be a good officer you must be willing to order the death of the thing you love. That is ... a very hard thing to do. No other profession requires it. That is one reason why there are so few very good officers. Although there are many good men."
He switched out the light, but he could not sleep. He rolled over, and the water bed gurgled. Every time he closed his eyes, he thought about his brother, John, and he saw in his mind's eye an office splattered with blood. Eventually it was two o'clock in the morning and he was still awake, thinking to himself, I'm just laying here in the dark, and nothing's happening.
Early in the morning, his telephone rang at home. It was Colonel Peters calling. Again Peters asked him if he could send some people down to look at specimens of tissue from the monkeys. Dalgard said that would be all right. Peters then repeated his request to see the monkey house.
Dalgard turned away the question and wouldn't answer it. He didn't know Peters, and he wasn't going to open any doors to him until he had met the man and had a chance to size him up.
He drove down Leesburg Pike to work, turned through a gate, parked his car, and went into the main building of Hazleton Washington. His office was a tiny cubicle with a glass wall that looked across the lawn; his door looked back to a secretarial pool, a cramped area where you could hardly move around with bumping into people. There was no privacy in Dalgard's office, it was a fishbowl. He tended to spend a lot of time looking out the window. Today he behaved with deliberate calm. No one in the office detected any unusual emotion, any fear.
He called Bill Volt, the manager of the monkey house. Volt gave him a shocking piece of news. One of the animal caretakers was very sick, might be dying. During the night, the man had a heart attack and had been taken to London Hospital, not far away. There's no further information, Volt said, and we're still trying to find out what happened. He's in the cardiac-care unit, and no one can talk to him. (The man's name will be given here as Jarvis Purdy. He was one of four workers in the monkey house, not including Volt.)
Dalgard was extremely dismayed and couldn't rule out the possibility that the man was breaking with Ebola. A heart attack is usually caused by a blood clot in the heart muscle. Had he thrown a clot?
Was Jarvis Purdy clotting up? Suddenly Dalgard felt as if he was losing control of the situation.
He told Bill Volt that he was to suspend all unnecessary activity in the monkey rooms. As he later recorded in his diary:
All operations other than feeding, observation and cleaning were to be suspended. Anyone entering the rooms was to have full protection – Tyvek suit, respirator, and gloves. Dead animals were to be double-bagged and placed in a refrigerator.
He also mentioned to Volt that the news media were almost certainly going to get onto this story. He told Volt that he didn't want any employees to go outside the building wearing their biohazard gear. If pictures of Hazleton workers wearing face masks and white suits wound up on the evening news, it could cause panic.
Dalgard called the hospital and reached Purdy's doctor. The doctor said that Purdy's condition was guarded but stable. Dalgard told the doctor that if any aspect of Purdy's heart attack wasn't typical, he should please call Colonel C.J. Peters at Fort Detrick. He was careful not to mention the word Ebola.
LATER THAT MORNING, C.J. Peters and Nancy Jaax headed out from Fort Detrick for Virginia, and Gene Johnson came with them. The officers wore their uniforms, but they drove in civilian cars so as not to attract attention. The traffic moved slowly. It was a clear, cold, windy day.
The grass along the road was wet and green, still growing, untouched by frost. They turned off Leesburg Pike at the Hazleton offices. Dalgard met them in the lobby and escorted them to another building, which was a laboratory. There a pathologist had prepared a set of slides for Nancy to look at. The slides contained slices of liver from monkeys that had died in the monkey house.
She sat down at a microscope, adjusted the eyepieces, and began to explore the terrain. She zoomed around and paused. The terrain was a mess. Something had ravaged these cells. They were blitzed and pock-marked, as if the liver had been carpet bombed. Then she saw the dark blobs in the cells-the shadows that did not belong there. They were crystalloids. And they were huge.
This was extreme amplification.
"Oh, fuck," she said in a low voice.
The bricks did not look like crystals. Ebola bricks come in all kinds of shapes – horseshoes, blobs, lumps, even rings. Some of the cells consisted of a single brick, a huge mother of a brick, a brick that had grown so fat that the whole cell had plumped up. Shed saw rotten pockets where all the cells had popped and died, forming a liquefied spot that was packed with wall-to wall bricks.
While she looked at the slides, C.J. Peters and Gene Johnson took Dan Dalgard aside and questioned him closely about the use of needles at the monkey house. The Ebola virus had spread in Zaire through dirty needles. Had the company been giving monkeys shots with dirty needles?
Dalgard was not sure. The company had an official policy of always using clean needles. "Our policy is to change needles after every injection," he said. "Whether it is done religiously is anybody's guess." Nancy collected some pieces of sterilized liver and spleen that were embedded in wax blocks, and she put the blocks in a Styrofoam cup to take back to Fort Detrick for analysis. These samples were exceedingly valuable to her and to the Army. What would be even more valuable would be a sample containing live virus.
C.J. Peters asked Dalgard again if they could all go see the monkey house.
"Well – let's not go there now," Dalgard replied. He made it clear to the officers that the building was a private property.
"What about some samples of monkey? Can we get some samples?" they asked.
"Sure," Dalgard said. He told them to drive out Leesburg Pike in the direction of the monkey house. There was an Amoco gas station on the pike, he said, and the colonels were to park their cars there and wait. "A guy is going to come and meet you. He'll bring some samples with him.
And he can answer your questions," he said.
"The samples ought to be wrapped in plastic and put in boxes for safety," C.J. said to Dalgard. "I want you to do that."
Dalgard agreed to wrap the samples in plastic.
Then C.J., Nancy and Gene drove out to the gas station, where they parked in a cul-de-sac by the highway, near some pay telephones. By now it was early afternoon, and they were hungry – they had missed lunch. Nancy went into the gas station and bought Diet Cokes for everyone and a pack of cheddar-cheese crackers for herself, and she bought C.J. some peanut-butter crackers. The Army people sat in their two cars, eating junk food, feeling cold, and hoping that someone would show up soon with samples of monkey.
C.J. Peters observed the comings and goings at the gas station.
It gave him a sense of life and time passing, and he enjoyed the pleasant normality of the scene. Truckers stopped for diesel and Cokes, and businesspeople stopped for cigarettes. He noticed an attractive woman park her car and go over to one of the pay telephones, where she spoke at length to someone. He whiled away the time imagining that she was a housewife talking to a boyfriend. What would these people think if they knew what had invaded their town? He had begun to think that the Army might have to act decisively to put out this fire. He had been in Bolivia when a hot agent called Machupo had broken out, and he had seen a young woman die, covered with blood. North America had not yet seen an emergence of an agent that turned people into bleeders. North America was not ready for that, not yet. But the possibilities for a huge break of Ebola around Washington were impressive when you thought about it.
He wondered about AIDS. What would have happened if someone had noticed AIDS when it first began to spread? It had appeared without warning, secretly, and by the time we noticed it, it was too late. If only we had the right kind of research station in central Africa during the nineteen seventies ... we might have seen it hatching from the forest.
If only we had seen it coming ... we might have been able to stop it, or at least slow it down; ... we might have been able to save at least a hundred million lives. At least. Because the AIDS virus's penetration of the human species was still in its early stages, and the penetration was happening inexorably. People didn't realize that the AIDS thing had only just began. No one could predict how many people were going to die of AIDS, but he believed that the death toll, in the end, could hit hundreds of millions – and that possibility had not sunk in with the general public.
On the other hand, suppose AIDS had been noticed? Any "realistic" review of the AIDS virus when it was first appearing in Africa would probably have led experts and government officials to conclude that the virus was of little significance for human health and that scarce research funds should not be 149 allocated to it – after all, it was just a virus that infected a handful of Africans, and all it did was suppress their immune systems.
So what? And then the agent had gone on a tremendous amplification all over the planet, and it was still expanding its burn, with no end in sight.
We didn't really know what Ebola virus could do. We didn't know if the agent in the monkey house was, in fact, Ebola Zaire or it was something else, some new strain of Ebola. An agent that could travel in a cough? Probably not, but who could tell? The more he thought about it, the more he wondered, Who is going to take out those monkeys? Because someone is going to have to go in there and take them out. We can't just walk away from that building and let it self-destruct. This is a human-lethal virus. Who is going to sack the monkeys? The guys who work for the company?
He had begun to wonder whether the Army should move in with a military biohazard SWAT team. His own term for this type of action was NUKE. To nuke a place means to sterilize it, to render it lifeless. If the hosts are people, you evacuate them and put them in the Slammer. If the hosts are animals, you kill them and incinerate the carcasses. Then you drench the place with chemicals and fumes. He wondered if the Army would have to nuke the monkey house.
Gene Johnson sat in the passenger seat next to C.J. Peters. His mind was somewhere else. His mind was in Africa. He was thinking about Kitum Cave.
Gene was very worried about this situation, not to say shit scared. He thought to himself, I don't know how we are going to get out of this one without people dying. His worry was growing all the time, every minute. The U.S. military, he thought, is stepping into a crisis that is already full blown, and if something goes wrong and people die, the military will be blamed.
Suddenly he turned to C.J. and spoke his mind. He said, "It looks inevitable that we're going to have to take out all the monkeys. A Level 4 outbreak is not a game. I want to warn you about just how detailed and major an effort this is going to be. It's going to be very complex, it's going to take some time, and we have to be very fucking careful to do it right. If we are going to do it right, the gist of what I'm saying, C.J., is that we cannot have amateurs in key positions. We need to have experienced people who know what they are doing. Do you understand what's going to happen if something goes wrong?" And he was thinking:
Peters – Peters – he's never been in an outbreak this complicated – none of us has – the only thing like it was Kitum Cave. And Peters wasn't there.
C.J. Peters listened to Gene Johnson in silence, and didn't reply.
He felt that it was sort of irritating to get this kind of advice from Gene – when he's telling you the obvious, telling you what you already know.
C.J. Peters and Gene Johnson had a stressful, complicated relationship. They had journeyed together in a truck expedition across central Africa, looking for Ebola virus, and a lot of tension had built up between the two men by the end of the trip. The traveling had been brutal, as hard as any on earth – roads didn't exists, bridges were gone, the maps must have been drawn by a blind monk, the people spoke languages not even the native translators could understand, and the expedition had not been able to find enough food and water. Worst of all, they ran into difficulty finding human cases of Ebola – they were not able to discover the virus in a natural host or in people.
It was during that trip, perhaps as a result of the chronic food shortage, that C.J. had taken to eating termites. The ones that swarmed out of their nests. They had wings. Gene, who was more fastidious than C.J., had not been quite so eager to try them. Popping termites in his mouth, C.J. would make remarks like, "they have this extra...mmm...," and he would smack his lips, smack, smack, and you'd hear a mouthful of termites crunching between his teeth, and he'd spit out the wings, pah, ptah. The African members of expedition, who liked termites, had pushed Gene to try them, too, and finally he did. He placed a handful of them in his mouth, and was surprised to find that they tasted like walnuts. C.J. had spoken longingly of finding the African termite queen, the glistening white sac that was half a foot long and as thick as bratwurst, bursting with eggs and creamy insect fat, the queen you ate alive and whole, and she was said to twitch as she went down your throat. Although snacking on termites had amused them, they had argued with each other about how to do the science, how to search for the virus. In Africa, Gene had felt that C.J. was trying to run the show, and it irritated Gene to no end.
SUDDENLY A BLUE, windowless, unmarked van turned off the road and pulled through the gas station and parked next to them. The van parked in such a way that no one on the road or at the gas station could see what went on between the two vehicles. A man swung heavily out of the driver's seat.
It was Bill Volt. He walked over to the Army people, and they got out of their cars.
"I've got'em right back here," he said, and he threw open the side door of the van.
They saw seven black plastic garbage bags sitting on the floor of the van. They could see the outlines of limbs and heads in the bags.
C.J. said to himself, What is this?
Nancy gritted her teeth and silently pulled in a breath. She could see how the bags bulged in places, as if liquid had pooled inside them. She hoped it wasn't blood. "What on earth is all of that?" she exclaimed.
"They died last night," Volt said. "They're in double bags."
Nancy was getting a nasty feeling in the pit of her stomach. "Has anybody cut himself fooling around with these monkeys?" she asked.
"No," Volt replied.
Then Nancy noticed that C.J. was looking sideways at her. It was a significant look. The message was, So who's going to drive the dead monkeys back to Fort Detrick?
Nancy stared back at C.J. He was pushing her, and she knew it.
They were both division chiefs at the Institute. He outranked her, but he was not her boss. He can push me just so far, and I can push him right back. "I'm not putting that shit in the trunk of my car, C.J.," she said.
"As a veterinarian, I have certain responsibilities with regard to the transportation of dead animals, sir. I can't just knowingly ship a dead animal with an infectious disease across state lines."
Dead silence. A grin spread over C.J.'s face.
"I agree that it needs to be done," Nancy went on. "You're a doc. You can get away with this." She nodded at his shoulder boards. "This is why you put on those big eagles."
They burst into nervous laughter.
Time was slipping away while the virus was amplifying inside the monkey house. C.J. inspected the bags – it was a relief to see that the monkeys were double-bagged or triple-bagged – and he decided to take them back to Fort Detrick and worry about health laws afterward. His reasoning, as he explained to me later, went like this: "If the guy drove them back to the Reston monkey facility, I felt there would be a certain added risk to the population just from his driving them around in the van, and there would be a delay in diagnosing them. We felt that we could quickly get a definite diagnosis of Ebola it would be in everyone's favor." Surely some smart Army lawyers could figure out why the act of carrying Ebola-ridden dead monkeys across state lines in the trunk of a private automobile was so completely legal that there had never ever been any question about it.
His red Toyota was not in the best of shape, and he had lost any interest in its resale value. He popped the trunk. It was lined with carpet, and he didn't see any sharp edges anywhere that might puncture a plastic bag.
They didn't have rubber gloves. So they would do the lifting bare-handed. Nancy , keeping her face well away from the enclosed air of the van, inspected the outside of the bags for any droplets of blood.
"Have the exteriors of the bags been disinfected?" she asked Volt.
Volt said he'd washed the outsides of the bags with Clorox bleach.
She held her breath, fighting the puke factor, and picked up a bag. The monkey kind of slid around inside it. They piled the bags one by one gently in the Toyota's trunk. Each monkey weighed between five and twelve 153 pounds. The total weight came to around fifty pounds of Biohazard Level 4 liquefying primate. It depressed the rear end of the Toyota.
C.J. closed the trunk.
Nancy was anxious to dissect the monkeys right away. If you left an Ebola monkey inside a plastic bag for a day, you'd end up with a bag of soup.
"Follow behind me, and watch for drips," C.J. joked.
SPACE WALK
1400 HOURS, WEDNESDAY
THEY ARRIVED AT the Institute in mid afternoon. C.J. Peters parked beside a loading dock on the side of the building and found some soldiers to help him carry the garbage bags to a supply air lock that led to the Ebola suite. Nancy went to the office of a member of her staff, a lieutenant colonel named Ron Trotter, and told him to suit up and go in; and she would follow. They would be buddies in the hot zone.
As she always did before going into Level 4, she took off her engagement ring and her wedding band, and locked them away in her desk.
She and Trotter walked down the hall together, and he went first into the small locker room that led to AA-5 while she waited in the corridor. A light went on, telling her that he had gone on to the next level, and she swiped her security card across a sensor, which opened the door into the locker room. She took off all of her clothes, put on a long-sleeved scrub suit, and stood before the door that led inward, blue light falling on her face. Beside the door there was another security sensor. This one was a numerical key pad. You can't bring your security card with you into the higher levels. A security card would be melted or ruined by chemicals during the decontamination process. Therefore you memorize your security code. She punched a string of numbers on the key pad, and the building's central computer noticed that JAAX, NANCY , was attempting entry. Finding that she was CLEARED TO ENTER AA-5, the computer unlocked the door and beeped to let her know that she could proceed inward without setting off alarms. She walked through the shower stall into the bathroom, put on white socks, and continued inward, opening a door that led to the Level 3 staging area.
There she met Lieutenant Colonel Trotter, a stocky, dark haired man whom Nancy had worked with for many years. They put on their inner gloves and taped the cuffs. Nancy put a pair of hearing protectors over her ears. She had started wearing them a while back, when people had begun to suspect that the roar of air in you suit might be loud enough to damage your hearing. They edged around each other as they fiddled with their suits. People wearing biohazard space suits tend to step around on another like two wrestlers at the beginning of a match, watching the other person's every move, especially watching the hands to make sure they don't hold a sharp object. This cringing becomes instinctive.
They closed up their suits and lumbered across the staging area to a larger air-lock door. This was a supply air lock. It did not lead into the hot zone. It led to the outside world.
They opened it. On the floor of the air lock sat the seven garbage bags.
"TAKE AS MANY AS YOU CAN CARRY," she said to Lieutenant Colonel Trotter.
He picked up a few bags, and so did she. They shuffled back across the staging area to the air-lock door that led to Level 4. She picked up a metal pan containing tools. She was getting warm, and her faceplate fogged up. They opened air-lock door and stepped in together.
Nancy took a breath and gathered her thoughts. She imagined that passing through the gray-zone door into Level 4 was like a space walk, except that instead of going into outer space, you went into inner space, which was full of pressure of life trying to get inside you suit. People went into Level 4 areas all the time at the Institute, particularly the civilian animal caretakers. But going into a containment zone to perform a necropsy on an animal that had died of an amplified unknown hot agent was something a little different. This was high-hazard work.
Nancy centered herself and brought her breathing under control.
She opened the far door and went through to the hot side. Then she reached back inside the air lock and pulled the chain in the chemical shower. That started a decon cycle running in the air lock that would eliminate any hot agents that might have leaked into the air lock as they were going through.
They put on their boots and headed down the cinder-block hallway, lugging the monkeys. Their air was going stale inside their space suits, and they needed to plug in right away.
They came to a refrigerator room, and put all the bags in the refrigerator except for one. This bag they carried into the necropsy room. Stepping around each other cautiously, they plugged in their air hose, and dry air cleared their faceplates. The air thundered distantly beyond Nancy's hearing protectors. They gloved up, pulling surgical gloves over their space-suit gloves. She laid her tools and specimen container at the head of the table, counting them off one by one.
Trotter untwisted some ties on the garbage bag and opened it, and the hot zone inside the bag merged with the hot zone of the room. He and Nancy together lifted the monkey out and laid it on the dissection table.
She switched on a surgical lamp.
Unclouded brown eyes stared at her. The eyes looked normal. They were not red. The whites were white, and the pupils were clear and black, dark as night. She could see a reflection of the lamp in the pupils.
Inside the eyes, behind the eyes, there was nothing. No mind, no existence. The cells had stopped working.
Once the cells in a biological machine stop working, it can never be started again. It goes into a cascade of decay, falling toward disorder and randomness. Except in the case of viruses. They can turn off and go dead. Then, if they come in contact with a living system, they switch on and multiply. The only thing that "lived" inside this monkey was the unknown agent, and it was dead, for the time being. It was not multiplying or doing anything, since the monkey's cells were dead. But if the agent touched living cells, Nancy's cells, it would come alive and begin to amplify itself. In theory, it could amplify itself around the world in the human species.
She took up a scalpel and slit the monkey's abdomen, making a slow and gentle cut, keeping the blade well away from her gloved fingers. The spleen was puffed up and tough, leathery, like a glob of smoke salami.
She did not see any bloody lesions inside this monkey. She had expected that the monkey's interior would be a lake of blood, but no, this monkey looked all right, it had not bled into itself. If the animal had died of Ebola, this was not a clear case. She opened up the intestine. There was no blood inside it. The gut looked okay. Then she examined the stomach.
There she found a ring of bleeding spots at the junction between the stomach and the small intestine. This could be a sign of Ebola, but it was not a clear sign. It could also be a sign of simian fever, not Ebola virus in this animal based on a visual inspection of internal organs during necropsy.
Using a pair of blunt scissors, she clipped wedges out of the liver and pressed them on glass slides. Slides and blood tubes were the only glass objects allowed in a hot zone, because of the danger of glass splinters if something broke. All laboratory beakers in the room were made of plastic.
She worked slowly, keeping her hands out of the body cavity, away from blood as much as possible, rinsing her gloves again and again in a pan of EnviroChem. She changed her gloves frequently.
Trotter glanced at her once in a while. He held the body open for her and clamped blood vessel, handing her tools when she asked for them.
They could read each other's lips.
"FORCEPS," she mouthed silently, pointing to it. He nodded and handed her a forceps. They did not talk. She was alone with the sound of her air.
She was beginning to think that this monkey did not have Ebola virus. In biology, nothing is clear, everything is too complicated, everything is a mess, and just when you think you understand something, you peel off a layer and find deeper complications beneath. Nature is anything but simple. This emerging virus was like a bat crossing the sky at evening. Just when you thought you saw it flicker through your field of view, it was gone.
SHOOT-OUT
1400 HOUR, WEDNESDAY
WHILE NANCY Jaax was working on the monkeys, C.J. Peters was in the conference room at Fort Detrick's headquarters building. Careers were at stake in this room. Almost all of the people in the world who understood the meaning of Ebola virus were sitting around a long table. General Russell sat at the head of the table, a tall, tough-looking figure in uniform; he chaired the meeting. He did not want the meeting to turn into a power struggle between the Centers for Disease Control and the Army. He also did not want to let the C.D.C. take over this thing.
Dan Dalgard was there, wearing a dark suit, seeming reserved and cool; in fact, he churned with nervousness. Gene Johnson glowered over the table, bearded and silent. There were officials from the Virginia Department of Health and from Fairfax County. Fred Murphy – the co-discoverer of Ebola virus, the C.D.C. official whom General Russell had called – sat at the table beside another official from C.D.C., Dr. Joseph B. McCormick.
Joe McCormick was the chief of the Special Pathogens Branch of the C.D.C., the branch that had been run by Karl Johnson, another co-discoverer of Ebola. Joe McCormick was the successor to Karl Johnson – he had been appointed to the job when Johnson retired. He had lived and worked in Africa. He was a handsome, sophisticated medical doctor with curly dark hair and round Fiorucci spectacles, a brilliant, ambitious man, charming and persuasive, with a quick, flaring temper, who had done extraordinary things in his career. He had published major research articles on Ebola.
Unlike anyone else in the room, he had seen and treated human cases of Ebola virus.
It happened that Joe McCormick and C.J. Peters couldn't stand each other. There was bad blood between these two doctors that went back many years. They had both rifled the darkest corners of Africa searching for Ebola, and neither of them had found its natural hiding place. Like Peters, Joe McCormick evidently felt that now, finally, he was closing in on the virus and getting ready to make a spectacular kill.
THE MEETING BEGAN with Peter Jahrling, the co-discoverer of the strain that burned in the monkeys. Jahrling stood up and spoke, using charts and photographs. Then he sat down.
Now it was Dalgard's turn to speak. He was exceedingly nervous.
He described the clinical signs of disease that he had seen at the monkey house, and by the end he felt that no one had noticed his nervousness.
Immediately afterward, Joe McCormick got up and spoke. What he said remains a matter of controversy. There is an Army version and there is another version. According to Army people, he turned to Peter Jahrling and said words to this effect: Thanks very much, Peter. Thanks for alerting us. The big boys are here now. You can just turn this thing over to us before you hurt yourselves. We've got excellent containment facilities in Atlanta. We'll just take all your materials and your samples of virus. We'll take care of it from here.
In other words, the Army people thought McCormick tried to present himself as the only real expert on Ebola. They thought to be tried to take over the management of the outbreak and grab the Army's samples of virus.
C.J. Peters fumed, listening to McCormick. He heard the speech with a growing sense of outrage, and thought it was "very arrogant and insulting."
McCormick remembers something different. "I'm sure I offered some help or assistance with the animal situation at Reston," he recalled, when I telephoned him. "I don't know that there was any conflict. If there was any animosity, it came from their side, not ours, for reasons they know better than I. Our attitude was, Hey guys, good work."
In the past, McCormick had publicly criticized Gene Johnson, the Army's Ebola expert, for spending a lot of money to explore Kitum Cave and then not publishing his findings. McCormick expressed his feelings to me this way: "They want to tell you about their experiments, but the way to tell people about them is to publish them. That's not an unreasonable criticism. They're spending taxpayers' money." And besides, "None of them had spent as much time in the field as I had. I was the one of those who had dealt with human case of Ebola. No one else there had done that."
What McCormick had done was this. In 1979, reports reached the C.D.C. that Ebola had come out of hiding and was burning once again in southern Sudan, in the same places where it had first appeared, in 1976.
The situation was dangerous, not only because of the virus but because a civil war was going on in Sudan at the time – the areas where Ebola raged was also a war zone. McCormick volunteered to try to collect some human blood and bring strain back alive to Atlanta. No one else wanted to go to Sudan with him, so he went there alone. (It will be recalled that in 1976 Sudan outbreak, three years earlier, a C.D.C. doctor had allegedly become too frightened to get on the plane to Sudan.) McCormick arrived in southern Sudan in a light plane flown by tow terrified bush pilots.
Around sunset, they landed at an airstrip near a Zande village. The pilots were too scared to get out of the plane. It was getting dark, and the pilots decided to spend the night in the cockpit, sitting on the airstrip. They warned McCormick they would leave the next morning at sunrise. He had until dawn to find the virus.
McCormick shouldered his backpack and walked into the village, looking for Ebola. He arrived at a mud hut. Villagers stood around the hut, but they wouldn't go inside. He heard sounds of human agony. A dark doorway led inside. He couldn't see into the hunt, but he know that Ebola was in there. He rummaged in his backpack and found his flashlight, but it was dead, and he realized that he had forgotten to bring batteries. He asked the crowd if anyone had a light, and someone brought him a lantern.
Holding the lantern in front of him, he entered the hut.
He would never forget the sight. The first thing he saw was a number of red eyes staring at him. The air inside the hut reeked of blood. People lay on straw mats on the floor. Some were having convulsion – the final phase, as death sets in – their bodies rigid and jerking, their eyes rolled up into the head, blood streaming out of the nose and flooding from the rectum. Others had gone into terminal comas, and were motionless and bleeding out. The hut was a hot zone.
He opened his backpack and fished out rubber gloves, a paper gown, a paper surgical mask, and paper boots to cover his shoes, to keep them from becoming wet with blood. After he had dressed himself, he laid out his blood tubes and syringes on a mat. Then he began drawing blood from people. He worked all night in the hut on his knees, collecting blood samples and taking care of the patients as best he could.
Sometime during the night, he was drawing blood from an old woman.
Suddenly she jerked and thrashed, having a seizure. Here arm lashed around, and the bloody needle came out of her arm and jabbed into his thumb. Uh, oh, he thought. That would be enough to do it. The agent had entered his bloodstream.
At dawn, he gathered up his tubes of blood serum and ran to the airplane and handed the samples to the pilots. The question was what to do with himself, now that he had been pricked with a bloody needle. That was a massive exposure to Ebola virus. He probably had three to four days before he broke with Ebola. Should he leave Sudan now, get himself to a hospital? He had to make a decision – whether to leave with the pilots or stay with the virus. It seemed obvious that the pilots would not come back later to pick him up. If he planned to leave and medical help for himself, the time to do it was now. There was an additional factor. He was a physician, and those people in the hut were his patients.
He returned to the village. He thought he might be infected with Ebola virus, but he wanted to get more samples, and he figured that if he developed a headache, he could radio for help, and perhaps a plane would come and get him. He rested that day in a hut, and gave himself a transfusion of two bags of blood serum that supposedly contained antibodies that might protect him from Ebola virus – he had carried the bags with him, chilled on ice, and now he hoped they would save his life. That night he could not sleep, thinking about the needle jabbing his thumb, thinking about the agent beginning its massive replication in his bloodstream. He drank half a bottle of scotch whisky to put himself to sleep.
He worked with Ebola patients for the next four days inside the hut, and still he did not have a headache. Meanwhile, he watched the old lady like a hawk to see what happened to her. On the fourth day, to his surprise, the old lady recovered. She had not had Ebola. She had probably been suffering from malaria. She had not been having an Ebola seizure but, rather, had been shivering from a fever. He had walked away from a firing squad.
Now, at the meeting at Fort Detrick, Joe McCormick of the C.D.C. was convinced that Ebola virus does not travel easily, especially not through the air. He had not become sick, even though he had breathed the air inside an Ebola-ridden hut for days and nights on end. He felt strongly that Ebola is a disease that is not easy to catch. Therefore, in his view, it was not as dangerous as perhaps the Army people believed.[I believe he is correct in this assessment,yes a horrible way to get,but not nearly what the MSM has made it outbreak during the outbreaks.I also think the alternative media dropped the ball on this one and fell in line with the MSM on the issue, choosing to go the terrorize route,instead of research IMO. DC]
Dan Dalgard asked a question of the assembled experts. He said,
"How soon after we give you samples can you tell us whether they have virus in them?"
C.J. Peters replied, "It may take a week. This is all we know."
Joe McCormick spoke up. Wait a minute, he said – he had a new, fast probe test for Ebola virus that would work in twelve hours. He argued that the C.D.C. should have the virus and the samples.
C.J. Peters turned and stared at McCormick. C.J. was furious. He didn't believe McCormick had any quick test for Ebola. He thought it was Joe McCormick blowing smoke, trying to get his hands on the virus. He thought it was a poker bluff in a high-stakes game for control of the virus. It was a delicate situation, because how could he say in front of all these state health officials, "Joe, I just don't believe you?" He raised his voice and said, "An ongoing epidemic is not the time to try to field-test a new technique." He argued that Fort Detrick was closer to the outbreak than was the C.D.C., in Atlanta, and therefore it was appropriate for the Army to have the samples and try to isolate the virus.
What he did not say – no reason to rub it in – was that seven dead monkeys were at that very moment being examined by Nancy Jaax. Even as they argued, she was exploring the monkeys. What's more, the Army was growing the virus in cultures. Possession is nine tenths of the law, and the Army had the meat and the agent.
Fred Murphy, the other C.D.C. man, was sitting next to McCormick.
He began to realize that the C.D.C. was not in a good position to argue the matter. He leaned over and whispered, "Joe! Calm you jets. Stifle it, Joe. We're outnumbered here."
General Philip Russell had been sitting back, watching the argument, saying nothing. Now he stepped in. In a calm but almost deafeningly loud voice he suggested that they work out a compromise. He suggested that they split the management of the outbreak.
A compromise seemed to be the best solution. The general and Fred Murphy quickly worked out the deal, while McCormick and Peters stared at each other with little to say. It was agreed that the C.D.C. would manage the human-health aspects of the outbreak and would direct the car of any human patients. The Army would handle the monkeys and the monkey house, which was the nest of the outbreak.
THE MISSION
1630 HOURS, WEDNESDAY
COLONEL C. J. PETERS now felt that he had permission to get the action under way. As soon as the meeting broke up, he began to line up his ducks. the first thing he needed was field officer who could lead a team of soldiers and civilians into the monkey house. He needed to form a military-action unit.
He had already decided who was going to lead the mission. It was going to be Colonel Jerry Jaax, Nancy's husband. Jerry had never worn a space suit, but he was the chief of the veterinary division at the Institute, and he understood monkeys. His people, both soldiers and civilians, were certainly going to be needed. No one else had the training to handle monkeys.
He found Jerry in his office, staring out the window and chewing on a rubber band. C.J. said, "Jerry, I believe we have a situation down in Reston." A situation. Code for a hot agent. "It looks like we're going to have to go down and take those monkeys out, and we're going to do it in Biosafety Level 4 conditions." He asked Jerry to assemble teams of soldiers and civilian employees to be ready to move out with space suits in twenty-four hours.
Jerry walked over to Gene Johnson's office and told him that he'd been put in charge of the mission. The office was a mess. He wondered how Gene, as large a man as he was, could even fit himself in among the stacks of paper.
Jerry and Gene immediately began to plan a biohazard operation.
There had been a general decision to take out one room of monkeys, and see how that worked, see how things went – see if the virus was spreading. They set up their priorities.
Priority One – Safety of the human population.
Priority Two – Euthanasia of the animals with a minimum of suffering.
Priority Three – Gathering of scientific samples.
Purpose: to identify the strain and determine how it travels.
Gene felt that if the team did its job properly, the human population of Washington would be safe. He put on his glasses and hunched over and fished through his papers, his beard crushed on his chest. He knew already that he was not going to go inside that building. No way in hell. He had seen monkeys die too many times, and he could not bear it anymore. In any case, his job was to gather equipment and people and move them into the building, and then to extract the people and equipment and dead animals safely.
He had saved lists, long lists of all the gear he had brought to Kitum Cave. He pawed through his papers, swearing gently. He had literally tons of African gear. He had squirreled it away in all kinds of hiding places at the Institute, where other people couldn't find it and rip it off.
Gene was terribly excited, and also afraid. His nightmares about Ebola virus, the bad dreams of liquid running through pinholes into his space suit, had never really gone away. He would still wake up thinking, My god, there's been an exposure. He had spent almost ten years hunting Ebola and Marburg in Africa, with little success, and suddenly one of the bastards had reared its head in Washington. His favorite saying came back to him: "Chance favors the prepared mind." Well, the chance had come. If a piece of gear had been handy in Kitum Cave, it would be handy in the monkey house. As Gene thought about it, he realized that the building was very much like Kitum Cave. It was an enclosed air space. Dead air.
Air-handling system broken, failed. During all over the place. Monkey urine in pools. A hot cave near Washington. And there were people who had been inside the cave who might be infected with virus by now. How would you move your teams in and out of the cave? You would have to set up a staging area. You would have to have a gray area – an air lock with a chemical shower of some kind. Somewhere inside that building lived a Level 4 life form, and it was growing, multiplying, cooking inside hosts.
The hosts were monkeys and, perhaps, people.
2000 HOURS, WEDNESDAY
DAN DALGARD LEFT USAMRIID and drove back to his office on Leesburg Pike, arriving there around eight o'clock. The office was deserted; everyone had gone home. He straightened up his desk, shut down his computer, and removed a floppy disk that contained his diary, his "Chronology of Events." He put the disk into his brief case. He said good night to a security guard at the front desk and drove home. On the road, he realized that he had forgotten to call his wife to tell her that he would be late.
He stopped at a Giant Food supermarket and bought her a bunch of cut flowers, carnations and mums. When he arrived home, he reheated his dinner in the microwave and joined his wife in the family room, where he ate sitting in a recliner chair. He was exhausted. He put another log into the wood stove and sat down at his personal computer, which was located next to his clock-repair bench. He inserted the floppy disk and began typing. He was bringing his diary up to date.
So much had happened that he had difficulty keeping it all straight in his mind. In the morning, he had learned that the monkey caretaker named Jarvis Purdy was in the hospital, reportedly with a heart attack. Jarvis was resting comfortably, and there had been no reports that his condition was getting worse. Should I have notified the hospital that Jarvis might be infected with Ebola? If he does have Ebola, and it spreads within the hospital, am I liable? Jesus! I'd better get someone to go over to the hospital first thing tomorrow and tell Jarvis what's going on. If he hears on the news first, he's liable to have another heart attack!
He had gotten all the other monkey caretakers fitted with respirators, and he had briefed them on what was known about the transmission of Ebola and Marburg to humans, and he had suspended all daily operations in the building other than feeding once a day, observation, and cleaning of the animal rooms. He had briefed the staff in the laboratory on Leesburg Pike – which had been handling monkey blood and tissue samples – about the need to handle these specimens as if they were infected with the AIDS virus.
I must remember to inform labs that have received animal shipments from us to notify the C.D.C. if any unusual animal deaths occur. What about the exposure to those people who had been working on the air-handling system? What about the laundry service? Wasn't there a telephone repairman in recently? Perhaps last week – I can't remember just when that was. Holy Christ! Have I missed anything?
While he was updating the day's events on the computer, the telephone rang. It was Nancy Jaax on the line. She sounded tired. She told him that her findings were consistent with either SHF or Ebola. She said it could be either one or both. Her results were ambiguous.
RECONNAISSANCE
NOVEMBER 30, THURSDAY
BY THE TIME Dan Dalgard woke up the next morning – it was now Thursday, exactly a week after Thanksgiving Day – he had made up his mind to invite the Army in to clean up one room, Room H, where the outbreak now seemed to be centered. He telephoned C.J. Peters and gave the Army permission to enter the monkey house. The news that they had the green light for a biohazard operation spread instantly through USAMRIID.
Colonel Jerry Jaax called a meeting of all the commissioned officers on his staff, along with two sergeants. They were Major Nathaniel (Nate) Powell, Captain Mark Haines, Captain Steven Denny, Sergeant Curtis Klages, and Sergeant Thomas Amen, and he invited a civilian animal caretaker named Merhl Gibson to attend. These people were the core of his team. He put it casually to them: "Do you want to go to Reston? " Some of them had not heard of Reston. He explained what was going on, saying, "There are some monkeys that need to be euthanized.
We'd like for you to play. Do you want in? Do you want to go?" They all said they wanted to play. He also figured that Nancy was going to play.
That meant that he and Nancy would be inside the building at the same time. The children would be on their own tomorrow.
They were going to make an insertion into the monkey house, go into one room, kill the monkeys in that room, and take samples of tissue back to the Institute for analysis. They were going to do the job in space suits, under condition of Level 4 biocontainment. The team would move out at 0500 hours tomorrow morning. They had less than twenty-four hours to get ready. Gene Johnson was gathering his biohazard equipment right now.
GENE DROVE DOWN to Virginia and arrived at the monkey house in midmorning for a reconnaissance, to get a sense of the layout of the building and to figure out where to put the air lock and gray zone, and how to insert the team into the building. He went with Sergeant Klages, who was wearing fatigues. As they turned into the parking lot, they saw a television van parked in front of the monkey house, the newscaster and his crew drinking coffee and waiting for something to happen. It made Gene nervous. The news media had begun to circle around the story early one, but they couldn't seem to get a handle on it, and USAMRIID was trying to keep it that way.
Gene and sergeant parked under a sweet-gum tree by the low brick building and went in through the front door. As they opened the door, the smell of monkey almost knocked them over. Whoa, Sergeant Klages thought, Whoa – we shouldn't even be in here without a space suit. The building stank of monkey. Something ugly was happening here. The whole goddamned place could be hot; every surface could be hot. The monkey workers had stopped cleaning the cages, because they did not want to go into the monkey rooms.
They found Bill Volt and told him they wanted to scout the building to determine the best way for the teams to enter tomorrow. Volt offered them a chair in his office while they talked. They didn't want to sit down, didn't want to touch any surfaces in his office with their bare hands. They noticed that Volt had a candy habit. He offered them a box full of Life Savers, BitO-Honeys, and Snickers bars – "Help yourselves," he said. Sergeant Klanges stared at the candy with horror and mumbled, "No, thank you." He was afraid to touch it.
Gene wanted to go into the monkey area and see Room H, the hot spot. It was at the back of the building. He did not want to walk through the building to get to that room. He did not want to breathe too much of the building's air. Poking around, he discovered another route to the back of the building. The office space next door was empty and had been vacated some time ago; the electric power was cut off, and ceiling panels were falling down. He got a flashlight and circled around through these dark rooms. This is like a bombed-out area, he thought.
He found a door leading back into the monkey house. It led to a storeroom, and there was a closed corridor that headed deeper into the monkey house. Now he could see it all in his mind's eye. The closed corridor would be the air lock. The storeroom would be the staging area.
The team could put their space suits in this storeroom, out of sight of the television cameras. He drew a map on a sheet of paper.
When he understood the layout of the building, he circled to the front and told the monkey workers that he wanted the back areas of the building completely sealed off-airtight. He didn't want an agent from Room H to drift to the front of the building and get into the offices. He wanted to lower the amount of contaminated air flowing into those offices.
There was a door that led to the back monkey rooms. They taped it shut with military brown sticky tape: the first line of defense against a hot agent. From now on, as Gene explained to the monkey workers, no one was to break the sticky tape, no one was to go inside those back rooms except Army people until Room H had been cleaned out. What Gene did not realize was that there was another way into the back rooms. You could get there without breaking the sticky tape on the door.
AT ELEVEN-THIRTY in the morning, Lieutenant Colonel Nancy Jaax and Colonel C.J. Peters arrived at the corporate offices of Hazleton Washington on Leesburg Pike to meet with Dan Dalgard and to speak to a group of Hazleton lab workers who had been exposed to tissues and blood from sick monkeys.
Since C.D.C. now had charge of the human aspects of the Ebola outbreak, Joe McCormick also arrived at the Hazleton offices at the same time as Jaax and Peters.
The lab employees had been handling tissue and blood from the monkeys, running tests on the material. They were mainly women, and some of them were extremely frightened, nearly in a panic. That morning, there had been radio reports during rush hour, as the women were coming to work, that Ebola virus had killed hundreds of thousands of people in Africa. This was a wild exaggeration. But the radio newscasters had no idea what was going on, and now the women thought they were going to die. "We've been hearing about this on the radio," they said to Jaax and McCormick.
Nancy Jaax claims that Joe McCormick did his best to calm them down, but that as he talked to the women about his experiences with Ebola in Africa, they seemed to become more and more frightened.
A woman got up and said, "We don't care if he's been to Africa.
We want to know if we're going to get sick!"
McCormick doesn't have any recollection of speaking to the women. He said to me,
"I never talked to them. Nancy Jaax talked to them about Ebola."
Nancy thinks that they began to calm down when they saw a female Army colonel in a uniform. She asked the women, "Did any of you break a test tube? Do we have anyone here who stuck himself with a needle or cut himself?"
No one raised a hand.
"Then you'll be all right," she said to them.
A few minutes afterward, Dan Dalgard turned to C.J. Peters and said something like, "Why don't you come over to the primate facility with me to look at the monkeys?"
Now they would finally get a chance to see the building.
They drove to the monkey house. By this time, Gene Johnson had closed off the back rooms and sealed the main entry door with sticky tape.
Nancy and C.J., along with Dan Dalgard, circled around to the back of the building, put on rubber gloves and paper surgical masks, and went into Room H to look at the sick monkeys. Nancy and C.J. noticed with some concern that the monkey workers around the building were not wearing respirators, despite Dalgard's order. No one offered a respirator to Nancy or C.J. either. This made them both nervous, but they did not say anything. When in a monkey house, do as the monkey workers do. They did not want to give offense by asking for breathing equipment, not at this delicate moment, not when they had finally gotten their first chance to look at the building.
In Room H, Dalgard picked out the sick animals, pointing to them.
"This one is sick, this one looks sick, this one over here looks sick," he said. The monkeys were quiet and subdued, but they rattled their cages now and then. Nancy stood well back from the cages and took shallow breaths, not wanting to let the smell of monkey get too deep into her lungs. A number of animals had already died – there were many empty cages in the room – and many of the other animals were obviously sick. They sat at the backs of their cages, passive and blank faced. They were not eating their monkey biscuits. She saw that some had runny noses. She averted her eyes and behaved respectfully around the monkeys, because she did not want a monkey to get a notion in its head to spit at her. They have good aim when they spit, and they aim for your face. She worried more about her eyes than anything else. Ebola has a special liking for the eyes. Four or five virus particles on the eyelid would probably do it.
She noticed something else that made her fearful. These monkeys had their canine teeth. The company had not filed down the monkeys' fangs. The canines on these hummers were as big as the canines on any guard dog you'll ever see, and that was a rude awakening. A monkey can run amazingly fast, it can jump long distances, and it uses its tail as a gripper or a hook. It also has a mind. Nancy thought, An angry monkey is like a flying pit bull terrier with five prehensile limbs-these critters can do a job on you. A monkey directs its attacks toward the face and head. It will grab you by the head, using all four limbs, and then it will wrap its tail around your neck to get a good grip, and it will make slashing attacks all over your face with its teeth, aiming especially for the eyes. This is not a good situation if the monkey happens to be infected with Ebola virus. A six-foot-tall man and a ten-pound monkey are pretty evenly matched in a stand-up fight. The monkey will be all over the man. By the end of the fight, the man may need hundreds of stitches, and could be blinded. Jerry and his team would have to be exquisitely careful with these monkeys.
THAT EVENING, JERRY drove home alone. Nancy had put on a space suit and gone back into her lab to continue analyzing the monkey samples, and he had no idea when she would finish. He changed out of his uniform, and the telephone rang. It was Nancy's brother on the line, calling from Kansas, saying that Nancy's father was slipping, and that it looked as if the end was near. Nancy might be called home at any time for her father's funeral. Jerry said that he would pass the word along to Nancy , and explained that she was working late.
Then he and Jason drove for half an hour in the direction of Washington and picked up Jaime at her gym. They decided to have supper at McDonald's. The Jaax family, minus the mother, sat at a table, and while they ate, Jerry explained to the children why Mom was working late. He said, "Tomorrow morning, we're going to be going down to a civilian place in space suits. There's an important thing going on there. There are some monkeys that are sick. The situation has kind of emergency feel to it. We'll be gone real early, and we may not get back until real late.
You kids will be on your own." They didn't react much to what he said.
Jerry went on, "It's possible that humans could get sick from the monkeys."
"Well, there's not really any danger," Jaime said, chewing her chicken nuggets.
"Well, no, it's not really dangerous," he said. "It's more exciting than dangerous. And anyway, it's just what your mom and I are doing right now."
Jason said that he had seen something on television about it. It was on the news.
"I think what your mom does is something pretty unusual," Jerry said to his son. And he thought, I'll never convince him of that.
They returned home around nine-thirty, and Jerry had trouble making the kids go to bed. Perhaps they were afraid of what was happening but didn't know how to express it; he wasn't sure. More likely, they sensed an opportunity to have their own way when their mother wasn't around. They said they wanted to wait up for her. He thought he would wait up for her, too. He made them put on their pajamas, and he brought them into bed with him, and they curled up on Nancy's side of the water bed. There was a television in the room, and he watched the eleven-o'clock news. A newscaster was standing in front of the monkey house, and he was talking about people dying in Africa. By this time, the children had fallen asleep. He thought about John for a while, and then he picked up a book to try to read.
He was still awake when Nancy arrived home at one o'clock in the morning, looking fresh and clean, having taken a shower and shampooed her hair on her way out of Level 4.
As she looked around the house to see what needed to be done, she saw that Jerry had not tended to the animals. She put out food for the cats and dogs, and changed their water. She checked on Herky, the parrot, to see how he was doing. He started making noise the moment he perceived that the cats were being fed. He wanted some attention, too.
"Mom! Mom!" Herky hung upside down and laughed like a maniac, and cried, "Bad bird! Bad bird!" She took him out of his cage and stroked him on the head. He moved onto her shoulder and she preened his feathers.
Upstairs in the bedroom, she found the children asleep next to Jerry. She picked up Jaime and carried her into her own bedroom and tucked her into bed. Jerry picked up Jason and carried him to his bed – he was getting too big for Nancy to haul around.
Nancy settled into bed with Jerry. She said to him, "I have a gut feeling they're not going to be able to contain the virus in that one room." She told him she was worried that it could be spreading into other rooms through the air. That virus was just so damned infective she didn't see how it would stay in one room. Something that Gene Johnson had once said to her came into her mind: "We don't really know what Ebola has done in the past, and we don't know what it might do in the future."
Then Jerry broke the news to her about her father. Nancy was beginning to feel extremely guilty about not going home to be with him as he lay dying. She felt the tug of her last obligation to him. She wondered if she should bag this monkey thing and fly to Kansas. But she felt that it was her duty to go through with the operation. She decided to take a chance that her father would live awhile longer.
next
PART THREE
SMASHDOWN
INSERTION
DECEMBER 1, FRIDAY
Not far from Leesburg Pike there is a small office park. It was built in nineteen-sixties, and is not as glassy or as fashionable as the newer office parks, but it is clean and neat, and it has been there long enough for sycamores and sweet-gum trees to grow up around it and throw shade over the lawns. Across the street, a McDonald's is jammed at lunch hour with office workers. In the autumn of 1989, a company called Hazleton Research Products was using a one-story building in the office park as a monkey house. Hazleton Research Products is a division of Corning, Inc. Corning's Hazleton unit is involved with the importation and sale of laboratory animals. The Hazleton monkey house was known as the Reston Primate Quarantine Unit.
Each year, about sixteen thousand wild monkeys are imported into the United States from the tropical regions of the earth. Imported monkeys must be held in quarantine for a month before they are shipped anywhere else in the United States. This is prevent the spread of infectious diseases that could kill other primates, including humans.
Dan Dalgard, a doctor of veterinary medicine, was the consulting veterinarian at the Reston Primate Quarantine Unit. He was on call to take care of the monkeys if they became sick or needed medical attention.
He was actually a principal scientist at another company owned by Corning, called Hazleton Washington. This company has its headquarters on Leesburg Pike not far from the monkey house, and so Dalgard could easily drive his car over to Reston to check on the monkeys if he was needed there.
Dalgard was a tall man in his fifties, with metal-framed glasses, pale blue eyes, and a soft drawl that he had picked up in Tedas at veterinary school. Generally he wore a gray business suit if he was working in his office, or a white lab coat if he was working with animals. He had an international reputation as knowledgeable and skilled veterinarian who specialized in primate husbandry. He was a calm even-tempered man. On evenings and weekends, he repaired antique clocks as a hobby. He liked to fix things with his hands; it made him feel peaceful and calm, and he was patient with a jammed clock. He sometimes had longings to leave veterinary medicine and devote himself full-time to clocks.
On Wednesday, October 4, 1989, Hazleton Research Products accepted a shipment of a hundred wild monkeys from the Philippines. The shipment originated at Ferlite Farms, a monkey wholesale facility located not far from Manila. The monkeys themselves came from coastal rainforests on the island of Mindanao. The monkeys had been shipped by boat to Ferlite Farms, where they were grouped together in large cages known as gang cages. The monkeys were then put into wooden crates and flown to Amsterdam on a specially fitted cargo airplane, and from Amsterdam they were flown to New York City. They arrived at JFK International Airport and were driven by truck down the eastern seaboard of the United Sates to Reston monkey house.
The monkeys were crab-eating monkeys, a species that lives along rivers and in mangrove swamps in Southeast Asia. Crab eaters are used as laboratory animals because they are common, cheap, and easily obtained.
They have long, arching, whip like tails, whitish fur on the chest, and cream color fur on the back. The crab eater is a type of macaque (pronounced maKACK). It is sometimes called a long-tailed macaque. The monkey has a protrusive, doglike snout with flaring nostrils and sharp canine teeth. The skin is pinkish gray, close to the color of a white person. The hand looks quite human, with a thumb and delicate fingers with fingernails. The females have two breasts on the upper chest that look startlingly human, with pale nipples.
Crab eaters do not like humans. They have a competitive relationship with people who live in the rain forest. They like vegetables, especially eggplants, and they like to raid farmers' crops.
Crab-eating monkeys travel in a troop, making tumbling jumps through the trees, screaming, "Kra! Kra!". They know perfectly well that after they have pulled off an eggplant raid they are likely to have a visit from a farmer, who will come around looking for them with a shotgun, and so they have to be ready to move out and head deep into the forest at a moment's notice. The sight of a gun will set off their alarm cries: "Kra! Kra! Kra!". In some parts of the world, these monkeys are called kras, because of the sound they make, and many people who live in Asian rain forests consider them to be obnoxious pests. At the close of day, when night comes, the troop goes to sleep in a dead, leafless tree. This is the troop's home tree. The monkeys prefer to sleep in a dead tree so that they can see in all directions, keeping watch for humans and other predators. The monkey tree usually hangs out over a river, so that they can relieve themselves from the branches without littering the ground.
At sunrise, the monkeys stir and wake up, and you hear their cries as they greet the sun. The mothers gather their children and herd them along the branches, and the troop moves out, leaping through trees, searching for fruit. They like to eat all kinds of things. In addition to vegetables and fruits, they eat insects, grass, roots, and small pieces of clay, which they chew and swallow, perhaps to get salt and minerals.
They lust after crabs. When the urge for crabs comes upon them, the troop will head for a mangrove swamp to have a feeding bout. They descend from the trees and take up positions in the water beside crab holes. A crab comes out of its hole, and the monkey snatches it out of the water. The monkey has a way to deal with the crab's claws. He grabs the crab from behind as it emerges from its hole and rips off the claws and throws them away and then devours the rest of the crab. Sometimes a monkey isn't quick enough with the claws, and the crab latches onto the monkey's fingers, and the monkey lets out a shriek and shakes its hand, trying to get the crab off, and jumps around in the water. You can always tell when crab eaters are having a feeding bout on crabs because you hear an occasionally string of shrieks coming out of the swamp as a result of difficulty with a crab.
The troop has a strict hierarchy. It is led by a dominant male, the largest, most aggressive monkey. He maintains control over the troop by staring. He stares down subordinates if they challenge him. If a human stares at a dominant male monkey in a cage, the monkey will rush to the front of the cage, staring back, and will become exceedingly angry, slamming against the bars, trying to attack the person. He will want to kill the human who stared at him: he can't afford to show fear when his authority is challenged by another primate. If two dominant male monkeys are placed in the same cage, only one monkey will leave the cage alive.
The crab-eating monkeys at the Reston monkey house were placed each in its own cage, under artificial lights, and were fed monkey biscuits and fruit. There were twelve monkey rooms in the monkey house, and they were designated by the letters A through L. Two of the monkeys that arrived on October 4 were dead in their crates. That was not unusual, since monkeys die during shipments. But in the next three weeks, an unusual number of monkeys began to die at the Reston monkey house.
ON OCTOBER 4, the same day the shipment of monkeys reached the Reston monkey house, something happened that would change Jerry Jaax's life forever. Jerry had a brother named John, who lived in Kansas City with his wife and two small children. John Jaax was a prominent businessman and a banker, and he was a partner in a manufacturing company that made plastic for credit cards. He was a couple of years younger than Jerry, and the two men were as close as brothers can be. They had grown up together on a farm in Kansas and had both gone to college at Kansas State.
They looked very much alike: tall, with prematurely gray hair, a beak nose, sharp eyes, a calm manner; and their voices sounded alike. They only difference in appearance between them was John wore a mustache and Jerry did not.
John Jaax and his wife planned to attend a parent-teachers' meeting on the evening of October 4 at their children's school. Near the end of the day, John telephoned his wife from his office at the manufacturing plant to tell her that he would be working late. She happened to be out of house when he called, so he left a message on the answering machine, explaining that he would go directly from the office to the meeting, and he would see her there. When he did not show up, she became worried. She drove over to the factory.
The place was deserted, the machines silent. She walked the length of the factory floor to a staircase. John's office overlooked the factory floor from a balcony at the top of the staircase. She climbed the stairs. The door to his office was standing open a crack, and she went inside. John had been shot many times, and there was blood all over the room. It was a violent killing.
The police officer who took the case at Kansas City Homicide was named Reed Buente. He has know John personally and had admired him, having worked for him as a security guard at the Bank of Kansas City when John was president of the bank. Officer Buente was determined to solve the case and bring the killer or killers to trial. But as time went by and no breaks came along, the investigator became discouraged. John Jaax had been having difficulties with his partner in the plastic business, a man named John Weaver, and Kansas City homicide looked at the partner as a suspect. (When I called Officer Buente recently, he confirmed this.
Weaver has since died of a heart attack, and the case remains open, since unsolved murder cases are never closed.) There were few physical clues, and Weaver, as it turned out, had an alibi. The investigator ran into more and more difficulties with the case. At one point, he said to Jerry,
"You can have someone killed pretty easy. And it's cheap. You can have someone killed for what you would pay for a desk."
The murder of John Jaax threw Jerry into a paralysis of grief.
Time is supposed to heal all things, but time opened an emotional gangrene in Jerry. Nancy began to think that he was in a clinical depression.
"I feel like my life is over," he said to her. "It's just not the same anymore. My life will never be the same. It's just inconceivable that Johnny could have had an enemy." At the funeral in Kansas City, Nancy and Jerry's children, Jaime and Jason, looked into coffin and said to their father, "Gee, Dad, he looks like you lying there."
He called Kansas City Homicide nearly every day during October and November. The investigator just couldn't break the case. Jerry began to think about getting a gun and going out to Kansas City to kill John's business partner. He thought. If I do it, I'll be in jail, and what about my children? And what if John's partner hadn't been behind the murder? Then I'll have killed an innocent man.
NOVEMBER 1, WEDNESDAY
THE COLONY MANAGER at the Reston monkey house will be called Bill Volt. As he watched his monkeys die, Volt became concerned. On November 1, a little less than a month after the shipment of monkeys had arrived, he put in a telephone call to Dan Dalgard, telling him that the monkeys that had recently arrived from the Philippines were dying in unusually large numbers. He had counted twenty-nine deaths out of a shipment of a hundred monkeys. That is, nearly a third of the monkeys had died. At the same time, a problem had developed with the building's heating and air-handling system.
The thermostat had failed, and the heat would not go off. The heaters dumped heat at full blast into the building, and the air-conditioning system would not kick in. It had become awfully hot inside the building. Volt wondered if the heat might be putting stress on the monkeys. He had noticed that most of the deaths had taken place in one room, Room F, which was located on a long hallway at the back of the building.
Dalgard agreed to drive over to the monkey house and have a look, but he became busy with other thing and did not get there until the following week. When he arrived, Bill Volt took him to Room F, the focus of the deaths, so that Dalgard could inspect the monkeys. They put on white coats and surgical masks, and the two men walked down a long cinder-block corridor lined on both sides with steel doors leading to monkey rooms. The corridor was very warm, and they began to sweat.
Through windows in the doors, they could see hundreds of monkey eyes looking at them as they passed. The monkeys were exquisitely sensitive to the presence of humans. Room F contained only crab-eating monkeys from the October shipment from Ferlite Farms in the Philippines. Each monkey sat on its own cage. The monkeys were subdued. A few weeks ago, they had been swinging in the trees, and they didn't like what had happened to them.
Dalgard went from cage to cage, glancing at the animals. He could tell a lot about a monkey from the look in its eyes. He could also read its body language. He searched for animals that seemed passive or in pain.
Dalgard's staring into their eyes drove them berserk. When he passed a dominant male and looked carefully at it, it rushed him, wanting to take him out. He found a monkey whose eyes had a dull appearance, not shiny and bright but glazed and somewhat inactive. The eyelids were down, slightly squinted. Normally the lids would be retracted so that could see the entire iris. A healthy monkey's eyes would be like two bright circles in the monkey's face. This animal's eyelids had closed down slightly, and they dropped, so that the iris had become a squinting oval.
He put on leather gauntlet gloves, opened the door of the cage, reached inside, and pinned the monkey down. He slipped one hand out of a glove and quickly felt the monkey's stomach. Yes – the animal felt warm to the touch. It had a fever. And it had a runny nose. He let go of the monkey and shut the door. He didn't think that the animal was suffering from pneumonia or a cold. Perhaps the animal was affected by heat stress.
It was very warm in this room. He advised Bill Volt to put some pressure on the landlord to get the heating system fixed. He found a second animal that also had droopy eyelids, with that certain squint in the eyes. This one also felt hot to the touch, feverish. So there were two sick monkeys in Room F.
BOTH MONKEYS DIED during the night. Bill Volt found them in the morning, hunched up in their cages, staring with glassy, half-open eyes. This greatly concerned Volt, and he decided to dissect the animals, to try to see what had killed them. He carried the two deceased monkeys into an examination room down the hallway and shut the door after him, out of sight of the other monkeys. (You can't cut up a dead monkey in front of other monkeys – it will cause a riot.) He opened the monkeys with a scalpel and began his inspection. He did not like what he saw, and did not understand it, so he called Dalgard on the telephone and said, "I wonder if you could come over here and have a look at these monkeys."
Dalgard drove over to the monkey house immediately. His hands, which were so confident and skillful at taking apart clocks, probed the monkeys. What he saw inside the animals puzzled him. They appeared to have died of heat stress, brought on, he suspected, by the problems with the heating system in the building – but their spleens were weirdly enlarged. Heat stress wouldn't blow up the spleen, would it? He noticed something else that gave him pause. Both animals had small amounts of blood in their intestines. What could do that?
Later that same day, another large shipment of crab-eating monkeys arrived from Ferlite Farms. Bill Volt put the new monkeys in Room H, two doors down the hall from Room F.
Dan Dalgard became very worried about the monkeys in Room F. He wondered if there was some kind of infectious agent going around the room.
The blood in the gut looked like the effects of a monkey virus called simian hemorrhagic fever, or SHF. This virus is deadly to monkeys, although it is harmless to people. (It can't live in humans.) Simian fever can spread rapidly through a monkey colony and will generally wipe it out.
It was now Friday, November 10. Dalgard planned to spend the weekend fixing his clocks in the family room of his house. But as he laid out his tools and the pieces of an antique clock that needed fixing, he could not stop thinking about the monkeys. He was worried about them.
Finally he told his wife that he had to go out on company business, and he put on his coat and drove over to the monkey house and parked in front of the building and went in through the front door. It was a glass door, and as he opened it, he felt the unnatural heat in the building wash over him, and he heard the familiar screeches of monkeys. He went into Room F.
"Kra! Kra!" the monkeys cried at him in alarm. There were three more dead monkeys. They were curled up in their cages, their eyes open, expressionless. This was not good. He carried the dead monkeys into the examination room and slit the animals open, and looked inside.
SOON AFTERWARD, DALGARD began to keep a diary. He kept it on a personal computer, and he would type in a few words each day. Working quickly and without much thought, he gave his diary a title, calling it, "Chronology of Events". It was now getting close to the middle of November, and as the sun went down in the afternoon and traffic jams built up on Leesburg Pike near his office, Dalgard worked on his diary. Tapping at the keys, he could recall in his mind's eye what he had seen inside the monkeys.
The lesions by this time were showing a pattern of marked splenomegaly (swollen spleen) – strikingly dry on cut surface, enlarged kidneys, and sporadic occurrences of hemorrhage in a variety of organs ... Clinically, the animals showed abrupt anorexia (loss of appetite), and lethargy. When an animal began showing signs of anorexia, its condition deteriorated rapidly. Rectal temperatures taken on monkeys being sacrificed were not elevated. Nasal discharge, epistaxis (blood nose) or bloody stools were not evident... Many of the animals were in prime condition and had more body fat than is customary for animals arriving from the wild.
There was nothing much wrong with the dead animals, nothing that he could put his finger on. They simply stopped eating and died. They died with their eyes open, and with staring expressions on their faces.
Whatever this disease was, the cause of death was not obvious. Was it heart attack? a fever? What?
The spleen was inexplicably weird. The spleen is a kind of bag that filters the blood, and it plays a role in the immune system. A normal spleen is a soft sack with a drippy red center, which reminded Dalgard of a jerry doughnut. When you cut into a normal spleen with a scalpel, it gives about as much resistance to the knife as a jelly doughnut, and it drips a lot of blood. But these spleens had swelled up and turned as hard as a rock. A normal monkey spleen would be about the size of a walnut. These spleens were the size of a tangerine and were leathery. They reminded him of a piece of salami – meaty, tough, dry. His scalpel practically bounced off them. He could actually tap the blade of the scalpel on the spleen, and the blade wouldn't dig in very much. What he didn't realize – what he couldn't see because it was almost inconceivable – was that the entire spleen had become a solid clot of blood.
He was tapping his scalpel on a blood clot the size of a tangerine.
On Sunday, November 12, Dalgard putted around the house in the morning, fixing things, doing little errands. After lunch, he once again returned to the monkey house. There was a mystery developing in the Reston Primate Quarantine Unit. He found three more dead monkeys in Room F. They were dying steadily, a handful every night.
One of the dead animals had been given the name O53. Dalgard carried the carcass of Monkey O53 in the examination room and opened it up and looked inside the body cavity. With a scalpel, he removed a piece of Monkey O53's spleen. It was huge, hard, and dry. He took a Q-tip and rubbed it in the monkey's throat, collecting a little bit of mucus, a throat wash. Then he swirled the Q-Tip in a test tube full of distilled water and capped the tube. Anything alive in the mucus would be preserved temporarily.
INTO LEVEL 3
1989 NOVEMBER 13, MONDAY
BY MONDAY MORNING – the day after he dissected Monkey O53 – Dan
Dalgard had decided to bring the problem with his monkeys to the attention
of USAMRIID, at Fort Detrick. He had heard that the place had experts who
could identify monkey diseases, and he wanted to get a positive
identification of the sickness. Fort Detrick was about an hour's drive
northwest of Reston, on the other side of the Potomac River. Dalgard ended up talking by phone with a civilian virologist named Peter Jahrling, Jahrling had a reputation for knowing something about monkey viruses. They had never talked before. Dalgard said to Jahrling,
"I think we've got some SHF (simian hemorrhagic fever) in our monkeys.
The spleen looks like a piece of salami when you slice it." Dalgard asked Jahrling if he would look at some samples and give a diagnosis, and Jahrling agreed to help. The problem attracted Peter Jahrling's curiosity.
Jahrling had worked at the Institute for most of his career, after an early period in which he had lived in Central America and hunted for viruses in the rain forest (he had discovered several previously known strains). He had blond hair, beginning to go gray, steel-rimmed glasses, a pleasant, mobile face, and a dry sense of humor. He was by nature a cautious, careful person. Peter Jahrling spent large amounts of time in a Chemturion biological space suit. He performed research on defenses against hot viruses – vaccines, drug treatments – and he did basic medical research on rain-forest viruses. The killers and the unknowns were his specialty. He deliberately kept his mind off the effects of hot agents.
He told himself, If you did think about it, you might decide to make a living another way.
Jahrling, his wife, and their three children lived in Thurmont, not far from Nancy and Jerry Jaax, in a brick ranch house with a white picket fence out front. The fence surrounded a treeless yard, and there was a large brown car parked in the garage. Although they lived near each other, the Jahrlings did not socialize with Jaax, since their children were of different ages and since the families had different styles.
Pete Jahrling mowed his lawn regularly to keep the grass neat, so that his neighbors wouldn't think he was a slob. Externally he lived a nearly featureless life among suburban neighbors, and very few of them knew that when he climbed into his mud-colored car he was headed for work in a hot zone, although the license plate on the car was a vanity plate that said LASSA. Lassa is a Level 4 virus from West Africa, and it was one of Peter Jahrling's favorite life forms – he thought it was fascinating and beautiful, in certain ways. He had held in his gloved hands virtually every hot agent known, except for Ebola and Marburg. When people asked him why he didn't work with them, he replied, "I don't particularly feel like dying."
AFTER HIS TELEPHONE conversation with Dan Dalgard, Peter Jahrling was surprised and annoyed when, the next day, a few bits of frozen meat from Monkey O53 arrived at the Institute, brought by courier. What annoyed him was the fact that the bits of meat were wrapped in aluminum foil, like pieces of leftover hot dog.
The hot-dog-like meat was monkey spleen, and the ice around it was tinged with red and had begun to melt and drip. The samples also included the tube containing the throat wash and some blood serum from the monkey.
Jahrling carried the samples into a Level 3 laboratory. Level 3 is kept under negative air pressure, to prevent things from leaking out, but you don't need to wear a space suit there. People who work in Level 3 dress like surgeons in an operating room. Jahrling wore a paper surgical mask, a surgical scrub suit, and rubber gloves. He peeled off the tin foil. A pathologist helped him do it, standing next to him. The bit of spleen rolled about the tin foil as they poked it – a hard little pink piece of meat, just as Dalgard had described it. He thought, Like the kind of mystery meat you get in a school lunchroom. Jahrling turned to the other man and remarked, "Good thing this ain't Marburg" and they chuckled.
Later that day, he called Dalgard on the telephone and said to him something like, "Let me tell you how to send a sample to us. People around here may be slightly paranoid, but they get a little upset when you send a sample and it drips on the carpet."
ONE WAY TO identify a virus is to make it grow inside living cells in a flask of water. You drop a sample of the virus into the flask, and the virus spreads through the cells. If the virus likes the cells, it will multiply. One or two viruses can become a billion viruses in a few days – a China of viruses in a bottle the size of one's thumb.
A civilian technician named Joan Rhoderick cultured the unknown agent from Monkey O53. She ground up a bit of the monkey's spleen with a mortar and pestle. That made sort of bloody mush. She dropped the mush into flasks that contained living cells from the kidney of a monkey. She also took some of the throat mucus from Monkey O53 and put it into a flask, and she took some of the monkey's blood serum and put it into another flask. Eventually she had a whole rack of flasks. She put them into a warmer – an incubator, held at body temperature – and hoped that something would grow. Growing up a virus in culture is a lot like making beer. You follow the recipe, and you keep the brew nice and warm until something happens.
DAN DALGARD DID not visit the monkey house the next day, but he telephoned Bill Volt, the manager, to find out how things were going. Volt reported that all animals looked good. None of them had died during the night.
The illness seemed to be fading away naturally. It looked like things were quieting down in Reston, and Dalgard felt relieved that his company had dodged a bullet.
But what were those Army people doing with the samples of monkey?
He called Jahrling and learned that it was too soon to know anything. It takes several days to grow up a virus.
A day later, Bill Volt called Dalgard with bad news. Eight monkeys in Room F had stopped eating. Eight monkeys were getting ready to die. The thing had come back.
Dalgard hurried over to the monkey house, where he found that the situation had deteriorated suddenly. There were many more animals with squinting, glazed, oval-shaped eyes. Whatever the thing was, it was steadily working its way through Room F. By now, fully half the animals in the room had died. It was going to kill the entire room if nothing was done to stop it. Dalgard became extremely anxious for some news from Peter Jahrling.
Thursday, November 16, arrived, and with it came news that monkeys had begun to die in rooms down the hallway from Room F. Late in the morning, Dan Dalgard received a telephone call from Peter Jahrling. A pathologist at the Institute had inspected the meat very carefully and had given it a tentative diagnosis of simian hemorrhagic fever – harmless to humans, lethal to monkeys.
Dalgard now knew that he had to move fast to contain the outbreak before the virus spread through the monkey house. Simian hemorrhagic fever is highly contagious in monkeys. That afternoon, he drove up Leesburg Pike to the office park in Reston. At five o'clock on a gray, rainy evening on the edge of winter, as commuters streamed home from Washington, he and another Hazleton veterinarian injected all the monkeys in Room F with lethal doses of anesthetic. It was all over quickly. The monkeys died in minutes.
Dalgard opened up eight healthy-looking carcasses to see if he could find any signs of simian fever inside them. He was surprised to see that there didn't seem to be anything wrong with them. This greatly troubled him. Sacrificing the monkeys had been a difficult, disgusting, and disheartening task. He knew there was a disease in this room, and yet these monkeys were beautiful, healthy animals, and he had just killed them. The sickness had been entrenched in the building since early October, and it was now the middle of November. The Army had given him a tentative diagnosis, probably the best diagnosis he would ever get, and he had been left with the unpleasant task of trying to salvage the lives of the remaining animals. He went home that evening feeling that he had a very bad day. Later he would write in his diary:
There was a notable absence of any hemorrhagic component. In general, the animals were unusually well fleshed (butterballs), young (less than 5 years), and in prime condition.
Before he left the monkey house, he and the other veterinarian placed the dead monkeys in clear plastic bags and carried some of them across the hall to a chest freezer. A freezer can be as hot as hell.
When a place is biologically hot, no sensors, no alarms, no instruments can tell the story. All instruments are silent and register nothing. The monkeys' bodies were visible in the clear bags. They froze into contorted shapes, with their chest cavities spread wide and their intestines hanging out and dripping red icicles. Their hands were clenched into fists or open like claws, as if they were grasping at something, and their faces were expressionless masks, their eyes glazed with frost, staring at nothing.
EXPOSURE
NOVEMBER 17, FRIDAY
THOMAS GEISBERT WAS an intern at the Institute, a kind of trainee. He
was twenty-seven years old, a tall man with dark blue eyes and longish
brown hair parted in the middle and hanging over his forehead. Geisbert was
a skilled fisherman and a crack shot with a rifle, and he spent a lot of time in
the woods. He wore blue jeans and cowboy boots, and tended to ignore
authority. He was a local boy who had grown up near Fort Detrick. His father was the chief building engineer at the Institute, the man who repaired and operated the hot zones. When Tom Geisbert was a boy, his father had taken him to visit the Institute, and Tom had stared through the heavy glass windows at people in space suits, thinking it would be cool to do that. Now he was doing it, and it made him happy.
The Institute hired him to operate its electron microscope, which uses a beam of electrons to make images of small objects, such as viruses.
It is an essential tool to have around a virus lab because you can use it to make a photograph of a tiny piece of meat and find viruses in the meat.
For Geisbert, identifying hot strains and classifying the tribes of viruses was like sorting butterflies or collecting flowers. He liked the loneliness of inner space, the sense of being forgotten by the world. He felt quiet and at peace with himself when he was padding around a hot zone carrying a rack of test tubes that held an unknown agent. He liked to go into the Level 4 suites alone, rather than with a buddy, especially in the middle of the night, but his tendency to spend large amounts of time at his work had begun to affect his personal life, and his marriage was breaking up. He and his wife had separated in September. His troubles at home only reinforced his tendency to bury himself in Level 4.
One of Geisbert's greatest happiness in life, apart from his work, came from being in the outdoors, fishing for black bass and hunting for deer. He hunted for meat – he gave the venison to members of his family – and then, when he had got the meat he needed, he hunted for trophies. Every year around Thanksgiving, he went hunting in West Virginia, where he and some buddies rented a house for the opening of deer season. His friends did not know much about what he did for a living, and he made no effort to tell them about it.
Geisbert tried to look at many samples of virus as a way of sharpening his skills with an electron microscope. He was learning how to identify hot agents by eye, by looking at photographs of the particles.
When the samples of the Cardinal boy had arrived from Africa, Geisbert spent days gazing at them. They attracted him. The Cardinal strain was a tangled mass of 6's, U's, g's, Y's, snakes, and Cheerios mixed up with partly liquefied human flesh. Geisbert spent so much time staring at the virus, one of the true horrors of nature, that the shapes became implanted in his mind.
TOM GEISBERT HAD HEARD about the sick monkeys in Virginia, and he wanted to take photographs of the meat to see if he could identify any simian-fever-virus particles in it. On Friday morning, November 17, the day after Dan Dalgard had killed all the animals in Room F, Geisbert decided to take a look at the flasks of monkey cell that were ripening.
He wanted to examine them with a light microscope before he went on his Thanksgiving hunt, to see if he could observe any changes. A light microscope is a standard microscope that uses lens to focus light.
At nine o'clock on that Friday morning, he put on a surgical scrub suit and a paper mask and went into the Level 3 lab where the flasks were being kept warm. There he met Joan Rhoderick, the technician who had started the Reston culture. She was staring through the binocular eyepieces of the microscope at a small flask. The flask contained cells that had been infected with the simian-fever-virus that came from Monkey O53.
She turned to Geisbert. "There's something flaky going on in this flask," she said.
The flask was a typical virus flask. It was about the size of a person's thumb and was made of clear plastic so that you could place it in a microscope and look into the flask. It had a black screw cap.
Geisbert stared through the eyepieces of the microscope. He saw a complicated world in the flask. As always in biology, the problem was to know what you were looking at. The patterns of nature are deep and complex, constantly changing. He saw cells all over the place. They were tiny bags, each containing a nucleus, which was a darker blob near the center. The cells looked a little bit like fried eggs, sunny-side up.
The egg yolk would be the cell's nucleus.
Living cells ordinarily stick to the bottom of a flask to form a living carpet,cells prefer to cling to something when they grow. This carpet had been eaten by moths. The cells had died and drifted away, leaving holes in the carpet.
Geisbert checked all the flasks, and most of them looked the same way, like moth-eaten carpet. They looked real bad, they looked sick.
Something was killing these cells. They were swollen and puffy, fat looking, as if they were pregnant. Tom could see that they contained granules or specks. The specks looked like pepper. As if someone had shaken pepper over fried eggs. He may have seen reflection of light in the pepper, as if light was gleaming through crystals. Crystals? These cells were unrecognizably sick. And they were very sick, because the fluid was milky and clouded with dead cells, cells that had exploded.
They decided that their boss, Peter Jahrling, should have a look.
Geisbert went to find Jahrling. He exited Level 3 – removed his scrub suit and took a water shower and dressed in civilian clothes – and went to Jahrling's office. Then he and Jahrling returned to the Level 3 lab. It took a few minutes for both of them to change in the locker room and put on scrub suits. When they were ready to go in – dressed like surgeons – they entered and sat down at the eyepieces of the microscope. Geisbert said to him, "There's something very strange going on in that flask, but I'm not sure what it is. This isn't like SHF."
Jahrling looked. He saw that the flask had turned milky, as if it had gone rotten. "This is contaminated," he said. "These cells are blown away. They're crud." The cells were exploded and dead. "They're off the plastic," he remarked. By off the plastic he meant that the dead cells had detached from the surface of the flask, and had floated away in the broth. He thought that a wild strain of bacteria had invaded the cell culture. This is an annoying and common occurrence when you are trying to grow virus, and it wipes out the flask. The wild bacteria consume the cell culture, eat it up, and make a variety of different smells in the air while they're growing, whereas viruses kill cells without releasing an odor. Jahrling guessed that the flask had been wiped out by a common soil bacterium called pseudomonas. It lives in dirt. It lives in everyone's backyard and under fingernails. It is one of the most common forms of life on the planet, and it often gets into cell cultures and wrecks them.
Jahrling unscrewed the little black cap and waved his hand over the flask to bring the scent to his nose, and then he took a whiff. Hm.
Funny. No smell.
He said to Tom Geisbert, "Have you ever smelled pseudomonas?"
"No," Tom replied.
"It smells like Welch's grape juice. Here – " He offered the flask to Tom.
Tom sniffed it. There was no smell.
Jahrling took back the flask and whiffed it again. His nose registered nothing. But the flask was milky, and the cells were blown away. He was puzzled. He handed the flask back to Tom and said, "Put it in the beam, and let's look at it." By put it in the beam, he meant "look at it using the electron microscope," which is much more powerful than a light microscope, and can see deeper into the universe within.
GEISBERT POURED SOME of the milky fluid out of the flask into a test tube and then spun it in a centrifuge machine. A button grayish ooze collected at the bottom of the test tube-a tiny pill of dead and dying cells. The pill was the size of a pinhead, and it had a pale brownish color.
Geisbert thought it looked like a dab of mashed potato. He lifted out the button with a wooden stick and soaked the button in plastic resin to preserve it. But now, what was on his mind was the hunting season. Later that afternoon – Friday – he went home to get packed. He had been planning to drive his Ford Bronco, but it had broken down; so one of his hunting buddies met him in a pickup truck and they loaded Geisbert's duffel bag and gun case into it and set off on his hunting trip. When a filovirus begins to amplify itself in a human being, the incubation period is from three to eighteen days, while the number of virus particles climbs steadily in the bloodstream. Then comes the headache.
THANKSGIVING
NOVEMBER 20-25
FOR NANCY AND Jerry Jaax, it was the worst Thanksgiving of their lives. On Wednesday, November 22, they put their children in the family van and drove straight through the night to Kansas. Jaime was now twelve, and Jason was thirteen. They were used to long drives to Kansas, and they slept peacefully. Jerry had almost lost his ability to sleep since the murder of his brother, and Nancy stayed awake with him, trading places behind the steering wheel. They arrived in Wichita on Thanksgiving Day and ate a meal of turkey with Nancy's father, Curtis Dunn, who was living with Nancy's brother.
Nancy's father was dying of cancer. He had gone through life fearing that he might come down with cancer – he once took to his bed for eight months while claiming he had cancer when, in fact, he did not – and now he had come down with real cancer. He had lost a lot of weight that fall. He was like a human skeleton, down to less than a hundred pounds, but he was still a relatively young man, and his hair was black and curly and oiled with Vitalis. He looked so terrible that the children were afraid of him. He did his best to show sympathy for Jerry. "How awful it was, what happened to you Jaaxes," he said to Jerry. Jerry did not want to talk about it.
Nancy's father sat and slept in a reclining chair most of the day.
At night, he couldn't sleep on account of the pain, and he would wake up at three o'clock in the morning, and get out of bed, and rummage around the house, looking for something. He smoked cigarettes continually, and complained that he couldn't taste his food, that he had lost his appetite.
Nancy felt sorry for him, but she felt a distance from him that she could not overcome. He was man of strong opinions, and lately, from the way he had been talking while he wandered about the house at night, it seemed that he was going to try to sell the family farm in Kansas and use the money to get himself to Mexico for a cure involving peach pits. Nancy was angry with him for having such ideas, and that anger was mixed with pity for him in his illness.
After they had finished their turkey with Nancy's father, they drove out to Andale, Kansas, a town northwest of Wichita, and ate another dinner, with Jerry's mother, Ada, and the rest of the Jaax family in Ada's house on the edge of town, near the grain elevator. Ada was a widow who lived alone in a ranch house that looked out across beautiful wheat fields. The fields were bare and planted with winter wheat, and Ada sat in her chair in the living room and stared outdoors. She could not watch television because she was afraid she would see a gun. They sat around the living room and talked, telling stories about the old days on Ada's farm, laughing and joking and trying to have a good time, and suddenly John's name would come up. The conversation would flag into silence, and everyone would look at the floor, not knowing what to say, and someone would start crying, and then they would see tears running down Ada's face.
She had always been a strong woman, and none of her children had ever seen her cry. When she felt she could not stop it, she would get up and leave the room, and go into her bedroom and close the door.
They set up tables in the kitchen and served roast beef – the Jaaxes did not like turkey. After a while, people drifted into the living room with plates in their hands and watched a football game. The women, including Nancy, cleaned up around the kitchen and helped with the children. Afterward, Nancy and Jerry stayed on in Wichita for a few days to help Nancy's father get to the hospital for his cancer treatments.
Then they drove back to Maryland in the van with their children.
DAN DALGARD SPENT an uneasy Thanksgiving week. On Monday, he called Peter Jahrling at the Institute to find out if Jahrling had any further news about what had been killing the monkeys at Reston. Jahrling now had a tentative diagnosis. It looked like they really did have SHF. Bad for monkeys, no problem for humans. He said to Dalgard that he felt strongly that it was simian fever, but he was reluctant to say so categorically.
He wanted to play it carefully until the final tests were finished.
Dalgard hung up the phone believing that his decision to sacrifice the monkeys in Room F had been correct. Those monkeys had been inflected with simian fever and would have died anyway. What now worried Dalgard was the possibility that the virus had somehow escaped from Room F. It might be quietly working his way through the building, in which case monkeys might start dying in other rooms. And then the virus would be very hard to control.
On Thanksgiving morning, Dan and his wife drove to Pittsburgh, to be with Dan's wife's parents. They drove back to Virginia on Friday, and Dan headed over to the monkey house to see if there had been any changes.
He was shocked by what he found. Over Thanksgiving, five monkeys had died in Room H, two doors down the hall from Room F. So the virus was moving, and what was worse, it was skipping rooms as it moved. How could it do that? Five dead monkeys in one room during the night ... He felt very uneasy.
MEDUSA
NOVEMBER 27,
0700 HOURS, MONDAY
EARLY ON MONDAY morning of the week following Thanksgiving, Tom
Geisbert went to work at the Institute wearing blue jeans, a flannel shirt, and
cowboy boots, as a kind of memento of his time in the woods. He was
anxious to check up on the button of dead monkey cells that he had
harvested from the little flask just before he had gone hunting. He wanted to
look at the cells in his electron microscope to try to find some visual
evidence that they were inflected with simian fever. The button was a dot the size of toast crumb, embedded in a tiny plug of yellow plastic. He unlocked a filing cabinet and removed his diamond knife. A diamond knife is a metal object no larger than a small pocket-size pencil sharpener – about an inch long. It costs about four thousand dollars. It has a diamond edge – a large, flawless prism – sharp diamond, a gem-quality stone.
He carried the diamond knife and the plug of plastic containing the toast crumb of cells into the cutting room. He sat down at a table, facing the cutting machine, and fitted his diamond knife into it, taking extreme care not to let his fingers touch the edge of the knife. One touch of a fingertip would destroy it. The diamond would also cut your fingertip, perhaps badly. The knife is extraordinarily sharp. It has the sharpest cutting edge of any tool on earth. It is sharp enough to split a virus cleanly in half, like a razor blade going through a peanut. If you consider the idea that a hundred million viruses could cover the dot on this i, then you get an idea of the sharpness of a diamond knife. If you happened to cut yourself with it, it would go through your skin without resistance, as if your skin were air – and it would split individual blood cells as it went through your finger. And then the knife edge would be covered with skin oil and blood cells, and would be ruined.
Tom looked into the eyepieces of a microscope that was attached to the cutting machine. Now he could see the toast crumb clearly. He threw a switch, and the machine hummed, and the sample began to move back and forth, the toast crumb sliding across the edge of the diamond knife. The cutting machine worked like a deli slicer, peeling off slices about this size:
The slices fell onto a droplet of water, and rested on the surface. Each contained as many as ten thousand cells, and the cells themselves were split by the knife. The blade peeled off slice after slice. They spread out like lily pads.
He took his eyes away from the microscope and looked around the table until he found a wooden stick that had a human eyelash glued to it with a droplet of nail polish. It was a device for handling the slices.
The eyelash had come from one of the women in the lab – it was generally believed that she had superior eyelashes for this kind of work, not too thick and not too thin, tapered, ending in fine points. He poked the eyelash into the water droplet and stirred it, separating the slices from one another. With the tip of the eyelash, he then lifted a few damaged slices out of the water and wiped them on a piece of tissue paper to get rid of them.
Next, using a pair of tweezers, he picked up a small metal grid.
The grid was this size – * – and it was made of copper.
Holding the grid with his tweezers, he dipped it into the water and brought it up slowly underneath a floating slice, like a fisherman lifting up a dip net. The slice was now stuck to the grid. Still holding the grid with his tweezers, he put it into a tiny box. He carried the box down the hall to a darkened room. In the middle of the room stood a metal tower taller than a person. This was his electron microscope. My scope, he thought; he was very fond of it. He opened the tiny box, lifted out the grid with tweezers, and fitted it into a steel rod the size of a tire iron – the sample holder, as it was called.
He slid the rod into the microscope until it clanked, locked in place.
Now the slice, sitting on the grid, which was held in place by the tire iron, was positioned in the microscope, centered in the beam of electrons.
He switched off the lights in the room and sat down at a console that was covered with dials and digital readouts. In the middle of the console there was a viewing screen. The room had become the command deck of a starship, and the viewing screen was a window that looked down into the infinity within.
He hit a switch, hunched down in his chair, and put his head close to the viewing screen. His face glowed greenish in the light of the screen, and was reflected in the glass: long hair, serious expression, deep-set eyes that scanned the terrain. He was looking into a corner of one cell. It was like looking at a landscape from high altitude. It was a cellscape. What loomed before his eyes was a huge complicated vista, crowded with more detail than the mind could absorb. You could spend days scanning cells, looking for a virus. In one slice, there might be thousands of cells that needed to be searched – and you still might not find what you were looking for. The incredible thing about living systems is that no matter how small the view, it is just as complicated as ever. He could see forms and shapes that resembled rivers and streams and oxbow lakes, and he could see specks that might be towns, and he could see belts of forest. It was an aerial view of rain forest. The cell was a world down there, and somewhere in that jungle hid a virus.
He turned a knob, and the cellscape drifted across his field of view, and he wandered through it. He zoomed in. The scene rushed up toward him.
His breath stopped. Wait a minute – there was something wrong with this cell. This cell was a mess. It wasn't just dead – it had been destroyed. It was blown apart. And it was crawling with worms. The cell wall-to-wall with worms. Some parts of the cell were so thick with virus they looked like buckets of rope. There was only one kind of virus that looked like rope. A filovirus.
He thought, Marburg. This stuff looks like Marburg. He hunched over the screen. His stomach screwed up into a knot and turned over, and he felt an unpleasant sensation. The puke factor. He almost panicked, almost ran out of the room shouting, "Marburg! We've got Marburg!" He thought, Is this really happening? He sucked in his breath. He didn't know if this thing was Marburg, but it sure as hell looked like a filovirus, a thread virus. Then an image came into his mind – an image of Peter Cardinal's liver cells exploded and flooded with snakes. He brought the image into mental focus and compared it with what he saw on the screen. He knew exactly what the Cardinal strain looked like because he had memorized its curlicues and Cheerio shapes. What the virus did to that boy ... the devastating effect on that boy's tissue ... oh, man! – oh, man! – Peter and I smelled this stuff. Peter and I have been handling this stuff, and this is a Biosafety Level agent, Marburg ... oh, man ... A foul feeling washed over him, a sudden awareness of male reproductive glands hanging on the exterior of the body between the legs ... testicles the size of pears, black and putrid, the skin peeling off them.
He began snapping photographs with his microscope. Several negatives came out of the machine. He carried them into a dark room and switched out the lights and began developing them. In pitch-darkness, he had time to think. He counted the days back to the date of his exposure.
Let's see, he had sniffed that flask on the Friday before he went hunting.
That would have been ... ten days ago. What's the incubation period for Marburg? He didn't know offhand. Let's see – monkeys that inhaled Marburg virus took a long time to develop the disease, from six to eighteen days.
He was on day ten.
I am in the window to be sick. I am in prime time to be dropping over! Did I have a headache yesterday? Do I have a headache now? Do I have a fever? He placed his hand on his forehead. Feels okay. Just because I don't get a headache on day ten doesn't mean I won't get a headache on day twelve. How deep did I breathe when I sniffed that flask?
Did I snap the cap? That would spray stuff around. I can't remember.
Did I rub my eye with my finger afterward? I can't remember. Did I touch my mouth with my finger? I might have, I don't know.
He wondered if he had made a mistake. Maybe this wasn't Marburg.
He was only an intern; he was just learning this stuff. Finding major Biosafety Level 4 agents on the outskirts of Washington, D.C., is not the kind of things interns do every day. Maybe this isn't a filovirus. How sure am I? If you go and tell you boss that you've found Marburg and you are wrong, your career goes down the tubes. If you make a bad call, then first of all you start a panic. Second, you become a laughingstock.
He switched on the darkroom light and pulled the negatives out of the bath and held them up to the light.
He saw virus particles shaped like snakes, in negative images.
They were white cobras tangled among themselves, like the hair of Medusa.
They were face of Nature herself, the obscene goddess revealed naked.
This thing was breathtakingly beautiful. As he stared at it, he found himself being pulled out of the human world into a world where moral boundaries blur and finally dissolve completely. He was lost in wonder and admiration, even though he knew that he was the prey. Too bad he couldn't bring it down with a clean shot from a rifle.
He saw something else in the pictures that left him frightened and filled with awe. The virus had altered the structure of the cell almost beyond recognition. It had transformed the cell into something that resembled a chocolate – chip cookie that was mostly chocolate chips. The "chips" were crystal – like blocks of pure virus. He knew them as "inclusion bodies."
They were broods of virus getting ready to hatch. As the virus grows inside a cell, crystalloids, or bricks, appear at the center. Then they move outward, toward the surface of the cell. When a brick touches the inner surface of the cell wall, it breaks apart into hundred of individual viruses. The viruses are shaped like threads. The threads push through the cell wall and grow out of the cell, like grass rising from seeded loam. As the bricks appear and move outward, they distort the cell, causing it to bulge and change shape, and finally the cell pops – it bursts and dies. The threads break away from the cell and drift into the bloodstream of the host, multiplying and taking over more cells and forming bricks and bursting the cells.
As he looked at the bricks, he realized that what he had thought was "pepper" when he had looked at the cells in the flask ten days ago – those specks in the cells – were really inclusion bodies. That was also why the cells had looked swollen and fat. Because they were pregnant and jammed with bricks of virus. Because they were getting ready to burst.
THE FIRST ANGEL
NOVEMBER 27,
1000 HOURS, MONDAY
TOM GEISBERT PRINTED the negatives on eight-by-ten glossy paper,
and headed for the office of his boss, Peter Jahrling. He carried his
photographs down a long hallway, went downstairs, and through a security
door, swiping his ID card across a sensor, and entered a warren of rooms. He nodded to a soldier – there were soldiers everywhere, going about their business – and went up another flight of stairs and past a conference room that displayed a map of the world on the wall. In this room, Army people discussed outbreaks of virus. A meeting was in progress in the room.
Beyond it, he came to a cluster of offices. One of them was an awe-inspiring mess, papers everywhere. It belonged to Gene Johnson, the biohazard expert who had led the expedition to Kitum Cave. Across the way was Peter Jahrling's office. It was neatly kept and small, but it had a window. Jahrling had placed his desk under the window to get some extra light. On the walls he had hung drawings done by his children. There was a drawing by his daughter that showed a rabbit under a shining yellow sun.
A shelf held an African sculpture of a human hand holding an egg on the tips of its fingers, as if the egg contained something interesting about to hatch.
"What's up, Tom?" Jahrling asked.
"We have a big problem here." Geisbert placed the photographs in a row on Jahrling's desk. It was a gray November day, and the light from the window fell gently on the images of Medusa. "This came from the Reston monkeys," Geisbert said, "I think it's a filovirus, and there may be a good chance it's Marburg."
Jahrling remembered sniffing the flask and said, "You're playing a joke on me. This isn't funny."
"This is no joke, Peter."
"Are you sure?" Jahrling asked.
Geisbert said he felt very sure.
Jahrling looked carefully at the photographs. Yes, he could see worms. Yes, he and Geisbert might have breathed it into their lungs.
Well, they didn't have headaches yet. He remembered remarking to the pathologist, as he cut up the little pink chunk of mystery meat in the tin foil, "Good thing this ain't Marburg." Yeah, right.
"Is this stuff the right size?" Jahrling asked. He got a ruler and measured the particles.
"It looks a little long to be Marburg," Geisbert said. Marburg particles form loops like Cheerios. This stuff was more like spaghetti.
They opened a textbook and compared Geisbert's pictures with the textbook pictures.
"It looks good to me," Jahrling said. "I'm going to show it to C.J. Peters."
JAHRLING, A CIVILIAN, had decided to notify the military chain of command.
It started with Colonel Clarence James Peter, MD. He was the chief of the disease-assessment division at the Institute, the doctor who dealt with the dangerous unknowns. ("The interesting stuff," as he called it.)
Peters had built up this division almost single handedly, and he ran it single handedly. He was a strange sort of military man, easygoing and casually brilliant. He had wire-rimmed glasses, a round, ruddy, pleasant face with mustache, a light Texas drawl. He was not a large man, but he liked to eat, and he believed himself to be overweight. He spoke fluent Spanish, which he had learned during his years in the jungles of Central and South America, hunting for hot agents. He was required by Army regulations to show up for work at eight o'clock in the morning, but he usually drifted in around ten o'clock. He disliked wearing a uniform.
Usually he wore faded blue jeans with a flaming Hawaiian shirt, along with sandals and dweebish white socks, looking like he had just spent the night in a Mexican hotel. His excuse for his lack of uniform was that he suffered from athlete's foot, an incurable tropical strain that he had picked up in Central America and could never quite get rid of, and so he had to wear socks with sandals in order to keep air circulating around his toes, and the jeans and flaming shirt were part of the package. Peters worked twelve-hour days and left work at night, often long after everyone else had gone home.
C.J. Peters could swim through a bureaucracy like a shark. He inspired great loyalty in his staff, and he made enemies easily and deliberately, when it suited him. He drove a red Toyota that had seen better days. On his travels in rain forests and tropical savannas, he ate with pleasure whatever the locals were eating. He had consumed frogs, snakes, zebra meat, jellyfish, lizards, and toads cooked whole in their skin, but he thought he had never eaten salamanders, at least none that he had been able to identify in a soup. He had eaten boiled monkey thigh, and he had drunk banana beer fermented with human saliva. In central America, while leading an expedition in search of Ebola virus, he had found himself in termite country during swarming season, and he had waited by termite nest and collected the termites as they swarmed out and had eaten them raw. He thought they had a nice sort of nutty taste. He liked termites so much that he refrigerated them with his blood samples, to keep the termites fresh all day so that he could snack on them like peanuts with his evening gin as the sun went down over the African plains. He was fond of suffocated guinea pig baked in its own blood and viscera. The guinea pig is split open like a book, offering treasures, and he enjoyed picking out and eating the guinea pig's lungs, adrenal glands, and brain.
And then, inevitably, he would pay a price. "I always get sick, but it's worth it," he once said to me. He was a great believer in maps, and his offices always contained many maps hung on the walls, showing locations of outbreaks of virus.
Jahrling put Geisbert's photographs in a folder. He didn't want anyone to see them. He found Peters at a meeting in the conference room that held the map of the world.
Jahrling tapped him on the shoulder. "I don't know what you are doing right now, C.J., but I've got something more important."
"What is it?"
Jahrling held the folder closed. "It's a little sensitive. I really don't want to flash it here."
"What's so sensitive?"
Jahrling opened the folder slightly, just enough to give C.J. a glimpse of spaghetti, and snapped it shut.
The colonel's face took on a look of surprise. He stood up, and without a word to the others, without even excusing himself, he walked out of the room with Jahrling. They went back to Jahrling's office and closed the door behind them. Geisbert was there, waiting for them.
Jahrling spread the photographs on his desk. "Take a look at these, C.J."
The colonel flipped through the photographs. "What's this from, anyway?" he asked.
"It's from those monkeys in Reston. It doesn't look good to me. Tom thinks it's Marburg."
"We've been fooled before," C.J. said. "A lot of things look like worms." He stared at the photographs. The worms were unmistakable – and there were the crystalloids – the bricks. It looked real. It felt real.
He experienced what he would later describe as a major pucker factor setting in. He thought, This is going to be an awful problem for that town in Virginia and these people there. "The first question," he went on, "is what are the chances of laboratory contamination?" The stuff could be the Army's own Cardinal strain – it might have somehow leaked out of a freezer and gotten into those flasks. But that seemed impossible. And the more they pondered, the more impossible it seemed. The Cardinal strain was kept in a different area of the building, behind several walls of biocontainment, a long distance from the monkey flasks. There were multiple safeguards to prevent the accidental release of a virus like Marburg Cardinal. That just wasn't possible. It could not be a contamination. But it might be something other than a virus. It might be a false alarm.
"People around here see something long and stringy, and they think they've got a filovirus," C.J. Peters said. "I'm skeptical. A lot of things look like Marburg."
"I agree," Jahrling replied. "It could be nothing. It could be just another Loch Ness monster."
"What are you doing to confirm it?" the colonel asked him.
Jahrling explained that he was planning to test the cells with human blood samples that would make them glow if they were infected by Marburg.
"Okay, you're testing for Marburg," C.J. said. "Are you going to include a test for Ebola?"
"Sure, I already thought of that."
"When will your tests be done? Because if those Monkeys have Marburg, we have to figure out what to do."
Dan Dalgard, for example, was a prime candidate for coming down with Marburg, because he had dissected that monkey.
"I'll have a definite yes or no on Marburg by tomorrow," Jahrling said.
C.J. Peters turned to Tom Grisbert and said that he wanted more proof – he wanted pictures of the agent actually growing in monkey liver from a monkey that had died in the monkey house. That would prove that it lived in the monkeys.
C.J. could see that a military and political crisis was brewing.
If the public found out what Marburg does, there could be panic. He stood up with a photograph of snakes in his hand and said, "If we are going to announce that Marburg has broken out near Washington, we had better be damned sure we are right." Then he dropped the photograph on Jahrling's desk and returned to his meeting under the map of the world.
AFTER C.J. PETERS left Jahrling's office, a delicate conversation occurred between Peter Jahrling and Tom Geisbert. They shut the door and talked quietly about the whiffing incident. It was something they had better get straight between them. Neither of them had mentioned to Colonel C.J. Peters that they had whiffed that flask.
They counted the days back to their exposure. Ten days had passed since they had uncapped the flask and whiffed what could be eau de Marburg. Tomorrow would be day eleven. The clock was ticking. They were in the incubation period. What were they going to do? What about their families?
They wondered what Colonel Peters would do if he found out what they had done. He might order them into the Slammer – the Level 4 biocontainment hospital. They could end up in the Slammer behind air locks and double steel doors, tended by nurses and doctors wearing space suits. A month in the Slammer while the doctors hovered over you in space suits drawing samples of your blood just waiting for you to crash.
The doors of the Slammer are kept locked, the air is kept under negative pressure, and your telephone calls are monitored – because people have emotional breakdowns in the Slammer and try to escape. They start flaking out by the second week. They become clinically depressed.
Non-communicative. They stare at the walls, speechless, passive, won't even watch television. Some of them become agitated and fearful. Some of them need to have a continual drip of Valium in the arm to keep them from pounding on the walls, smashing the viewing windows, tearing up the medical equipment. They sit on death row in solitary confinement, waiting for the spiking fevers, horrible pain in the internal organs, brain strokes, and finally the endgame, with its sudden, surprising, uncontrollable gushes of blood. Most of them claim loudly that they have not be exposed to anything. They deny that anything could go wrong with them, and ordinarily nothing does go wrong with them, physically, in the Slammer, and they come out healthy. Their minds are another story. In the Slammer, they become paranoid, convinced that the Army bureaucracy has forgotten about them, has left them to rot. When they come out, they are disoriented. They emerge through the air-lock door, pale, shaken, tentative, trembling, angry with the Army, angry with themselves. The nurses, trying to cheer them up, give them a cake studded with the number of candles equal to the number of days they've been living in the Slammer.
They blink in confusion and terror at a mass of flaming candles on their Slammer cake, perhaps more candles than they've ever seen on one of their own birthday cakes. One guy was locked in the Slammer for forty-two days.
Forty-two candles on his Slammer cake.
Many people who have been isolated in the Slammer choose to cut down on their work in Level 4, begin to find all kinds of excuses for why they really can't put on a space suit today or tomorrow or the day after that. Many of the people who have been in the Slammer end up quitting their jobs and leaving the Institute altogether.
Peter Jahrling felt that, on the whole, he was not at much risk of contracting virus , nor was Tom. If he did contract it, he would know soon enough. His blood west test positive, or he would get a headache that wouldn't go away. In any case, he believed very strongly that Marburg wasn't easy to catch, and he didn't think there was any danger to his family or to anyone else around town.
But think about Dan Dalgard cutting into monkeys. Bending over and breathing monkey when he opened their abdomens. He was bending over their intestines, over a pool of Marburg blood. So then, why isn't Dalgard dead? Well, he reasoned, nothing's happened to him, so maybe nothing will happen to us.
Where had it come from? Was it a new strain? What was it capable of doing to human? The discoverer of a new strain of virus gets to name it. Jahrling thought about that, too. If he and Tom were locked up in the Slammer, they would not be able to carry out any research on this virus. They were on the verge of a major discovery, and the glory of it perhaps tantalized them. To find a filovirus near Washington was the discovery of a lifetime.
For all these reasons, they decided to keep their mouths shut.
They decided to test their blood for the virus. Jahrling said something to Geisbert like, "We are going to get blood samples drawn from ourselves like right now." If their blood went positive, they could immediately report to the Slammer. If their blood remained negative and they didn't develop other symptoms, then there are little chance they could infect anyone else.
Obviously they did not want to go to the regular clinic to have an Army nurse take their blood. So they found a friendly civilian technician and he twisted a rubber band around their arms, and they watched while he filled some tubes with their blood. He understood what had happened, and he said he would keep his mouth shut. Jahrling then put on a space suit and carried his own blood into his Level 4 hot lab. He also took with him Geisbert's blood and the flasks of milky stuff. It was very strange, handling your own blood while wearing a space suit. It seemed, however, quite risky to let his blood lie around where someone might be accidentally exposed to it. His blood had to be bio-contained in a hot zone. If it was infected with Marburg, he didn't want to be responsible for it killing anyone. He said to himself, Given that this was a piece of mystery meat sniffed out of a monkey carcass, I should have been a little more careful...
Tom Geisbert went off to collect some pickled monkey liver that he could photograph for viruses, hoping to prove that the Marburg-like agent lived in the monkeys. He found a plastic jug that contained sterilized pieces of liver from Monkey O53. He fished some liver out of the jug, clipped a few bits of it, and fixed the bit in plastic. This was a slow job and took many hours to finish. He left the plastic to cure overnight and went home for a couple of hours to try to get some sleep.
THE SECOND ANGEL
NOVEMBER 28, TUESDAY
TOM GEISBERT LIVED in a small town in West Virginia, across the
Potomac River. After his separation from his wife, his two children had
stayed with her for a time, and now they were staying with him, or rather,
they were staying with his parents in their house down the road. Both his
children were toddlers. He got up at four o'clock in the morning, drank a cup of coffee, and skipped breakfast. He drove his Bronco in pitch darkness across the Potomac River and through Antietam National Battlefield, a broad ridge of cornfields and farmland scattered with stone monuments to the dead. He passed through the front gate of Fort Detrick, parked, and went past the security desk and into his microscope area.
The dawn came gray, gusty, and warm. As light the color of old aluminum glimmered around the Institute, Tom sliced pieces of monkey liver with his diamond knife and put them into the electron microscope. A few minutes later, he took a photograph of virus particles budding directly out of cells in the liver of Monkey O53. The animal's liver was full of snakes. These photographs were definite proof that the virus was multiplying the Reston monkeys – that it was not a laboratory contamination.
He also found inclusion bodies inside the monkey's liver cells. The animal's liver was being transformed into crystal bricks.
He carried his new photographs to Peter Jahrling's office. Then they both went to see Colonel C.J. Peters. The colonel stared at the photographs. Okay – he was convinced, too.
The agent was growing in those monkeys. Now they would have to wait for Jahrling's test results, because that would be the final confirmation that it was indeed Marburg.
Jahrling wanted to nail down this Marburg as fast as he could. He spent most of the day in a space suit, working in his hot lab, putting together his tests. In the middle of the day, he decided that he had to call Dan Dalgard. He couldn't wait any longer, even without test results.
He wanted to warn Dalgard of the danger, yet he wanted to deliver the warning carefully, so as not to cause a panic in the monkey house. "You definitely have SHF in the monkey house," he said. "We have definitely confirmed that. However, there is also the possibility of a second agent in at least some of the animals."
"What agent? Can you tell me what agent?" Dalgard asked.
"I don't want to identify the agent right now," Jahrling said, "because I don't want to start a panic. But there are serious potential public health hazards associated with it, if, in fact, we are dealing with this particular agent."
Somehow, the way Jahrling used the words panic and particular made Dalgard think of Marburg virus. Everyone who handled monkeys knew about Marburg. It was a virus that could easily make people panic.
"Is it Marburg or some similar agent?" Dalgard asked.
"Yes, something like that," Jahrling said. "We'll have confirmation later in the day. I'm working on the tests now. I feel it's unlikely the results will be positive for this second agent. But you should take precautions not to do any necropsies on any animals until we've completed the tests. Look, I don't want to set off too many whistles and bells, but I don't want you and your employees walking into that room unnecessarily."
"How soon can you get back to me with definite yes or no about this second agent? We need to know as soon as possible."
"I'll call you back today. I promise," Jahrling said.
Dalgard hung up the phone highly disturbed, but he maintained his usual calm manner. A second agent, and it sounded as if it was Marburg.
The people who had died in Germany, he knew, had been handling raw, blood monkey meat. The meat was full of virus, and they got it on their hands, or they rubbed it on their eyelids. He and other people at the company had been cutting into sick monkeys since October – and yet no one had become sick. Everyone had worn rubber gloves. He wasn't afraid for himself – he felt fine – but he began to worry about the others. He thought, Even if the virus is Marburg, the situation is still no different from before. We're still stuck in a pot. The question is how to get ourselves out of this pot. He called Bill Volt and ordered him not to cut into any more monkeys. Then he sat in his office, getting more and more annoyed as the day darkened and Peter Jahrling did not call him back. He wondered if any of the men had cut themselves with a scalpel while performing a dissection of diseased monkey. Chances were they wouldn't file an accident report.
He knew for sure that he had not cut himself. But he had performed a mass sacrifice of approximately fifty animals. He had been in contact with fifty animals. How long had it been since then? He should be showing some symptoms by now. Bloody nose, fever, something like that.
At five-thirty, he called Jahrling's office and got a soldier on the phone, who answered by saying, "How can I help you, sir or ma'am? ...
I'm sorry, sir, Dr. Jahrling is not in his office ... No sir, I don't know where he is, sir ... No, he has not left work. May I take a message, sir?" Dalgard left a message for Jahrling to call him at home. He was feeling steadily more annoyed.
1500 HOURS
JAHRLING WAS IN his space suit. He worked steadily all afternoon in his
own lab, hot zone AA-4, at the center of the building, where he fiddled with
the flasks of virus culture from the monkey house. It was a slow, irritating
job. His tests involved making samples glow under ultraviolet light. If he
could make the samples glow, then he knew he had the virus. In order to do this, he needed to use blood serum from human victims. The blood serum would react to viruses. He went to the freezers, and got out vials of frozen blood serum from three people. Two of the people had died; and one had survived. They were:
1. Musoke – A test for Marburg. Serum from the blood of Dr. Shem Musoke, a survivor. (Presumably reactive against the Kitum Cave strain, which had started with Charles Monet and jumped into Dr. Musoke's eyes in the black vomit.)
2. Boniface – A test for Ebola Sudan. From a man named Boniface who died in Sudan.
3. Mayinga – A test for Ebola Zaire. Nurse Mayinga's blood serum.
The test was delicate, and took hours to complete. It was not made easier by the fact that he was shuffling around in his space suit the whole time.
First he put droplets of cells from the monkey culture onto glass slides, and let them dry, and treated them with chemicals. Then he put drops of the blood serum on the slides. They would glow in the presence of target virus.
Now it was time to look. This had to be done in total darkness, because the glow would be faint. He shuffled over to a storage closet, and went inside it, and closed the door behind him. A microscope sat on a table in the closet, and there was a chair, and from the wall hung an air hose. He plugged the hose into his space suit and put the slides into the microscope. Then he turned out the lights. He felt around in the darkness for the chair, and sat down. This was not a fun place to be if you happened to have a touch of claustrophobia – sitting in a pitch-black Level 4 closet while wearing a space suit. Peter Jahrling had made his peace with suffocation and darkness a long time ago. He waited for a minute to give his eye time to adapt to the dark, and the little sparkles of light in his eyes as they adjusted to the darkness eventually faded away, while cool, dry air roared around his face and whiffled the hair on his forehead. Then he looked through the binocular eyepieces of the microscope. He wore his eyeglasses inside his space suit, and that made it particularly difficult to see. He pressed the faceplate against his nose and squinted. He moved his face from side to side. His nose left a greasy streak inside his faceplate. He twisted his helmet unit it was turned nearly sideways. Finally he saw through the eyepieces.
Two circles drifted into his sight, and he focused his eyes, bringing the circles together. He was looking down into vast terrain. He saw cells dimly outlined in a faint glow. It was like flying over a country at night, over thinly populated lands. It was normal to see a faint glow. He was looking for a bright glow. He was looking for a city.
He scanned the slides with his eyes, back and forth, back and forth, moving across the microscopic world, looking for a telltale greenish glow.
The Musoke did not glow.
The Boniface glowed weakly.
To his horror, the Mayinga glowed brightly.
He jerked his head back. Aw, no! He adjusted his helmet and looked again. The Mayinga blood serum was still glowing. The dead woman's blood was reacting to the virus in the monkey house. He got an ugly feeling in the pit of his stomach. Those monkeys didn't have Marburg. They had Ebola. Those animals were dying of Ebola Zaire. His stomach lurched and turned over, and he sat frozen in the dark closet, with only the sound of his air and the thud of his heart.
CHAIN OF COMMAND
1600 HOURS, TUESDAY
THIS CAN'T BE Ebola Zaire, Peter Jahrling thought. Somebody must have
switched the samples by accident. He looked again. Yeah, the Mayinga
blood serum was definitely glowing. It meant he and Tom could be infected
with Ebola Zaire, which kills nine out of ten victims. He decided that he had
made a mistake in his experiment. He must have accidentally switched
around his samples or gotten something mixed up. He decided to do the test again. He turned on the lights in the closet and scuffled out into his lab, this time keeping careful track of his vials, bottles, and slides to make sure that nothing got mixed up.
Then he carried the new samples back into the closet and turned out the lights and looked again into the his microscope.
Once again, the Mayinga blood glowed.
So maybe it really was Ebola Zaire or something closely related to it – the dead woman's blood "knew" this virus, and reacted to it. Good thing this ain't Marburg – well, guess what, it ain't Marburg. This is the honker from Zaire, or maybe its twin sister. Ebola had never been seen outside Africa. What was it doing near Washington? How in the hell had it gotten here? What would it do? He thought, I'm onto something really hot.
He was wearing his space suit, but he didn't want to take the time to decon out through the air lock. There was an emergency telephone on the wall in his lab. He disconnected his air hose to extinguish the roar of air so that he could hear through the receiver, and he punched C.J. Peters' phone number.
"C.J.!" he shouted through his helmet. "IT'S PETER JAHRLING. IT'S REAL, AND IT'S EBOLA."
"Naw!" C.J. replied.
"YEAH."
"Ebola? It's gotta be a contamination," C.J. said.
"no, IT ISN'T A CONTAMINATION."
"Could you have gotten the samples mixed up?"
"YEAH, I KNOW – MY FIRST THOUGHT WAS THAT SOMEBODY HAD SWITCHED THE SAMPLES. BUT THEY WEREN'T SWITCHED, C.J.-BECAUSE I DID THE TEST TWICE."
"Twice?"
"EBOLA ZAIRE BOTH TIMES. I'VE GOT THE RESULTS RIGHT HERE. I CAN PASS THEM TO YOU. TAKE A LOOK FOR YOURSELF."
"I'm coming down there," C.J. said. He hung up the phone and hurried downstairs to Jahrling's hot lab.
Jahrling, meanwhile, picked up a sheet of waterproof paper on which he had written the results of his tests. He slid the paper into a tank full of EnviroChem. The tank went through the wall to a Level 0 corridor outside the hot zone. The tank worked on the same principle as a sliding cash drawer in a teller's window. You could pass an object from the hot zone through a tank into the normal world. It would be disinfected on its way through the tank.
C.J. stood at a thick glass window on the other side, looking in at Jahrling. They waited for several minutes while the chemicals penetrated the paper and sterilized it. Then C.J. opened the tank from his side and removed the paper, dripping with chemicals, and held it in his hands. He motioned to Jahrling through the window: Go back to the phone.
Jahrling shuffled back to the emergency telephone and waited for it to ring. It rang, and there was C.J.'s voice on the line: "Get out of there, and let's go see the commander!"
It was time to move this thing up the chain of command.
Jahrling deconned out through the air lock, got dressed in his street clothes, and hurried to C.J. Peters's office, and they both went to the office of the commander of USAMRIID, a colonel named David Huxsoll.
They brushed past his secretary – told her it was an emergency – and sat down at a conference table in his office.
"Guess what?" C.J. said. "It looks like we've found a filovirus in a bunch of monkeys outside Washington. We've recovered what we think is Ebola."
Colonel David Huxsoll was an expert in biohazards, and this was the sort of situation he thought the Institute was prepared to handle.
Within minutes, he telephoned Major General Philip K. Russell, MD, who was the commander of the United States Army Medical Research and Development Command, which has authority over USAMRIID, and had set up a meeting in Russell's office in another building at Fort Detrick.
Huxsoll and C.J. Peters spent a few moments talking about who else should be brought in. They hit upon Lieutenant Colonel Nancy Jaax, the Institute's chief of pathology. She could identify the signs of Ebola in a monkey. Huxsoll picked up his phone. "Nancy , it's David Huxsoll. Can you get over to Phil Russell's office right now? It's damned important."
"It was a dark November evening, and the base was beginning to quiet down for the night. At the moment of sundown that day, there was no sun visible, only a dying of the light behind clouds that flowed off Catoctin Mountain. Jaax met Jahrling and the two colonels on their way across the parade ground beside the Institute. A detail of marching soldiers stopped before the flagpole. The group of people from the Institute also stopped. From a loudspeaker came a roar of a cannon and then the bugle music of "Retreat," cracklish and cheap-sounding in the air, and the soldiers lowered the flag while the officers came to attention and saluted. C.J. Peters felt both embarrassed and oddly moved.
"Retreat" ended, and the soldiers folded up the flag, and the Institute people continued on their way.
General Russell's office occupied a corner of a low-slung Second World War barracks that had been recently plastered with stucco into a hopeless effort to make it look new. It had a view of the legs of Fort Detrick's water tower. Consequently, the general never opened his curtains. The visitors sat on a couch and hairs, and the general settled behind his desk. He was a medical doctor who had hunted viruses in Southeast Asia. He was in his late fifties, a tall man with hair thinning on top and gray at the temples, lined cheeks, a long jaw, pale blue eyes that gave him a look of intensity, and a booming, deep voice.
C.J. Peters handed the general a folder containing the photographs of the life form in the monkey house.
General Russell stared, "Holy shit," he said. He drew a breath. "Man. That's filovirus. Who the hell took this picture?" He flipped to the next one.
"These were done by my microscopist, Tom Geisbert," Jahrling said. "It could be Ebola. The tests are showing positive for Ebola Zaire."
C.J. then gave an overview of the situation, telling the general about the monkeys in Reston, and finishing with these words: "I'd say we have a major pucker factor about the virus in those monkeys."
"Well, how certain are you that it's Ebola?" General Russell asked. "I'm wondering if this could be Marburg."
Jahrling explained why he didn't think it was Marburg. He had done his test twice, he said, and both times the samples were positive to the Mayinga strain of Ebola Zaire. As he spoke to the general, he was very careful to say that test did not in itself prove that the virus was Ebola Zaire. It showed only that is was closely related to Ebola Zaire.
It might be Ebola, or it might be something else – something new and different.
C.J. said, "We have to be very concerned and very puckered if it is of the same ilk as Ebola."
They had to be very puckered, Russell agreed. "We have a natural emergency on our hands," he said. "This is an infectious threat of major consequences." He remarked that this type of virus had never been seen before in the United States, and it was right outside Washington. "What the hell are we going to do about it?" he said. Then he asked them if there was any evidence that the virus could travel through air. That was a crucial question.
There was evidence, horrifying but incomplete, that Ebola could travel through the air. Nancy Jaax described the incident in which her two healthy monkeys had died of presumably airborne Ebola in the weeks after the bloody-glove incident, in 1983. There was more evidence, and she described that, too. In 1986, Gene Johnson had infected monkeys with Ebola and Marburg by letting them breathe it into their lungs, and she had been the pathologist for that experiment. All of the monkeys exposed to airborne virus had died except for one monkey, which managed to survive Marburg. The virus, therefore, could infect the lungs on contact.
Furthermore, the lethal dose was fairly small: as small as five hundred infectious virus particles. That many particles of airborne Ebola could easily hatch out of a single cell. A tiny amount of airborne Ebola could nuke a building full of people if it got into the air conditioning system.
The stuff could be like plutonium. The stuff could be worse than plutonium because it could replicate.
C.J. said, "We know it's infectious by air, but we don't know how infectious."
Russell turned to Jaax and asked, "Has this been published? Did you publish it?"
"No, sir," she said.
He glared at her. She could see him thinking, Well, Jaax, why the hell hasn't it been published?
There were plenty of reasons, but she didn't feel like giving them just now. She believed that Gene Johnson, her collaborator, had difficulty writing papers. And, well, they just had not gotten around to publishing it, that was all. It happens. People sometimes just don't get around to publishing papers.
Hearing the discussion, Peter Jahrling chose not to mention to the general that he might have sniffed just a little bit of it. Anyway, he hadn't sniffed it, he had only whiffed it. He had kind of like waved his hand over it, just to bring the scent to his nose. He hadn't inhaled it.
He hadn't like jammed the flask up in his nostril and snorted it or anything like that. Yet he had a feeling he knew what the general might do if he found out about it – the general would erupt in enough profanity to lift Jahrling off his feet and drop him into the Slammer.
Then there was the additional frightening possibility that this virus near Washington was not Ebola Zaire. That it was something else.
Another hot strain from the rain forest. An unknown emerger. And who could say how it moved or what it could do to humans? General Russell began to think out loud. "We could be in for a hellacious event," he said. "Given that we have an agent with a potential to cause severe human disease, and given that it appears to be uncontrolled in the monkey house, what do we do? We need to do the right thing, and we need to do it fast.
How big is this sucker? And are people going to die?" He turned to Colonel C.J. Peters and asked, "So what are our option here?"
C.J. had been thinking about this already. There are three ways to stop a virus – vaccines, drugs and biocontainment. For Ebola, there was only one way to stop it. There was no vaccine for Ebola. There was no drug treatment for Ebola. That left only biocontainment.
But how to achieve biocontainment? That was tricky. As far as C.J. could see, there were only two options. The first option was to seal off the monkey colony and watch the monkey die – and also keep a close watch on the people who had handled the monkeys and possibly put them into quarantine as well. The second option was to go into the building and sterilize the whole place. Kill the monkeys – give them lethal injections – burn their carcasses, and drench the entire building with chemicals and fumes – a major biohazard operation.
General Russell listened and sad, "So option one is to cut the monkeys off from the rest of the world and let the virus run its course in them. And option two is to wipe them out. There aren't any more options."
Everyone agreed that there were no other options.
Nancy Jaax was thinking. It may be in the monkey house now, but it ain't going to stay there very damn long. She had never seen a monkey survive Ebola. And Ebola is a species jumper. All of those monkeys were going to die, and they were going to die in a way that was almost unimaginable. Very few people on earth had seen Ebola do its work on a primate, but she knew exactly what it could do. She did not see how the virus could be contained unless the monkey house was set up for quarantine with an independently filtered air supply. She said, "How ethical is it to let these animals go a long time before they die? And how do we assure the safety of people in the meantime? I've watched these guys die of Ebola, and it's not a fun way to go – they're sick, sick, sick animals."
She said that she wanted to go into the monkey house to look at the monkeys. "The lesions are easy to miss unless you know what you are looking for," she said, "and then it's as plain as the nose on your face."
She also wanted to go there to look at pieces of tissue under a microscope. She wanted to look for crystalloids, or "inclusion bodies"
Bricks. If she could find them in the monkey meat, that would be another confirmation that the monkeys were hot.
Meanwhile, there was the larger question of politics. Should the Army become involved? The Army has a mission, which is to defend the country against military threats. Was this virus a military threat? The sense of the meeting ran like this: military threat or not, if we are going to stop this agent, we've got to throw everything at it that we've got.
That would create a small political problem. Actually it would create a large political problem. The problem had to do with the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia. The C.D.C. is the federal agency that deals with emerging diseases. It has a mandate from Congress to control human disease. This is the C.D.C.'s lawful job. The Army does not exactly have a mandate to flight viruses on American soil. Yet the Army has the capability and the expertise to do it. Everyone in the room could see that a confrontation might boil up with the C.D.C. if the Army decided to move in on the monkey house. There were people at C.D.C. who could be jealous of their turf. "The Army doesn't have the statutory responsibility to take care of this situation," General Russell pointed out, "but the Army has the capability. The C.D.C. doesn't have the capability. We have the muscle but not the authority. The C.D.C. has the authority but not the muscle. And there's going to be a pissing contest."
In the opinion of General Russell, this was a job for soldiers operating under a chain of command. There would be a need for people trained in biohazard work. They would have to be young, without families, willing to risk their lives. They would have to know each other and be able to work in teams. They had to be ready to die.
In fact, the Army had never before organized a major field operation against a hot virus. The whole thing would have to be put together from scratch.
Obviously there were legal questions here. Lawyers were going to have to be consulted. Was this legal? Could the Army simply put together a biohazard SWAT team and move in on the monkey house? General Russell was afraid the Army's lawyers would tell him that it could not, and should not, be done, so he answered the legal doubts with these words: "A policy of moving out and doing it, an asking forgiveness afterward, is much better than a policy of asking permission and having it denied. You never ask a lawyer for permission to do something. We are going to do the needful, and the lawyers are going to tell us why it's legal."
By this time, the people in the room were shouting and interrupting one another. General Russell, still thinking out loud, boomed, "So the next question is, Who the fuck is going to pay for it?"
Before anyone had a chance to speak, he answered the question himself.
"I'll get the money. I'll beat it out of somebody."
More shouting.
The general's voice rose above the noise. "This is a big one coming, so let's not screw it up, fellas," he said. "Let's write the right game plan and then execute it." In the Army, an important job is called a mission, and a mission is always carried out by a team, and every team has a leader. "We have to agree on who is going to be in charge of this operation," the general continued. "C.J. Peters has got this action here.
He's in charge of the operation. He's the designated team leader. Okay?
Everybody agreed on that?
Everybody agreed.
"C.J., what we need is a meeting," the general said. "Tomorrow we're going to have a meeting. We have to call everybody."
He looked at the clock on the wall. It was five-thirty, rush hour. People were leaving work, and monkeys were dying in Reston, and the virus was on the move. "We've got to pull the chain on this whole thing,' the general said. "We'll have to inform everybody simultaneously, as soon as possible. I want to start with Fred Murphy at the C.D.C. I don't want him to be sandbagged by this."
Frederick A. Murphy was one of the original discovers of Ebola virus, the wizard with an electron microscope who had first photographed the virus and whose work had hung in art museums. He was an old friend of General Russell's. He was also an important official at C.D.C., the director of the National Center for Infectious Diseases.
Russells put his hand on the telephone on his desk. He stared around the room. "One last time: are you sure you've got what you think you've got? Because I'm gonna to make this phone call. If you don't have a filovirus, we will look like real assholes."
Around the room, one by one, they told him they were convinced it was a thread virus.
"All right. Then I'm satisfied we've got it."
He dialed Murphy's number in Atlanta.
"Sorry – Dr. Murphy has gone home for the day."
He pulled out his black book and found Murphy's home phone number.
He reached Murphy in his kitchen, where he was chatting with his wife.
"Fred, It's Phil Russell ... Great, how about yourself? ... Fred, we've isolated an Ebola-like agent outside Washington ... Yeah. Outside Washington."
A grin spread over Russell's face, and he held the phone away from his ear and looked around the room. Evidently Murphy was having some kind of a noisy reaction. Then General Russell said into the receiver, "No, Fred, we're not smoking dope. We've got an Ebola-like virus. We've seen it ... Yeah, we have pictures." There was a pause, and he put his hand over the mouthpiece and said to the room, "He thinks we've got crud in our scope."
Murphy wanted to know who took the pictures and who analyzed them.
"It was a kid who took the pictures. Young guy named – what's his name? – Geisbert. And we're looking at them right here."
Murphy said he would fly up to Fort Detrick tomorrow morning to look at the pictures and review the evidence. He took it extremely seriously.
1830 HOURS, TUESDAY
DAN DALGARD HAD to be called, and they had to notify Virginia state
health authorities. "I'm not even sure who the state authorities are," Russell
said. "And we've got to get them on the phone right now." People were
leaving work. "We'll have to call people at home. It's going to be a bunch of
phone calls." What county was that monkey house located in? Fairfax County, Virginia. My, oh my, a nice place to live. Fairfax County – beautiful neighborhoods, lakes, golf course, expensive homes, good schools, and Ebola. "We'll have to call the county health department," the general said. They would also have to call the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which has control over imported monkeys. They would have to call the Environmental Protection Agency, which has jurisdiction in cases of environmental contamination by an extreme biohazard. General Russell also decided to call an assistant secretary of defense, just to get the Pentagon noticed.
People left the room and fanned out along the hallways, going into empty offices and making the calls. C.J. Peters, now the team leader, went into another office down the hall and called Dan Dalgard's office, with Peter Jahrling on an extension line. Dalgard had gone home. They called Dalgard's home, and Dalgard's wife told him that Dan hadn't arrived yet. At about half past six, they called Dalgard's house again, and this time they got him. "This is Colonel C.J. Peters, up at USAMRIID. I'm the chief of the disease assessment division ... How do you do? ... Anyway, I'm calling to report that the second agent is apparently not Marburg.
The second agent is Ebola virus."
"What is Ebola?" Dalgard asked. He had never heard of Ebola. The word had no meaning for him.
In his smoothest Texas voice, C.J. Peters said, "It's a rather rare viral disease that has been responsible for human fatalities in outbreaks in Zaire and Sudan within the past ten or twelve years."
Dalgard was starting to feel relieved – good thing it isn't Marburg.
"What is the nature of Ebola virus?" he asked.
C.J. described the virus in vague terms. "It is related to Marburg. It is transmitted the same way, through contact with infected tissue and blood, and the signs and symptoms are much the same."
"How bad is it?"
"The case-fatality rate is fifty to ninety percent."
Dalgard understood exactly what that meant. The virus was much worse than Marburg.
C.J. continued, "With the information we have, we are going to notify state and national public health officials." Dalgard spoke carefully, "Would you, ahem, would you please wait until seven p.m., to allow me to apprise my corporate head-quarters of recent development?"
C.J. agreed to wait before pulling the trigger, through in fact General Russell had already called the C.D.C. Now C.J. had a favor to ask of Dalgard. Would it be all right if he sent someone down to Reston tomorrow to have a look at some sample of dead monkeys?
Dalgard resisted. He had sent a little bit of blood and tissue to the Army for diagnosis – and look what was happening. This thing could go way out of control. He sensed that Colonel Peters was not telling him all there was to know about this virus called Ebola. Dalgard feared he could lose control of the situation in a hurry if he let the Army get its foot in the door. "Why don't we meet by phone early tomorrow and discuss this approach?" Dalgard replied.
After the phone call, C.J. Peters found Nancy Jaax and asked her if she would come with him to meet Dalgard the next day and look at some monkey tissue. He assumed Dalgard would give permission. She agreed to go with him.
NANCY Jaax WALKED across the parade ground back to the Institute and found Jerry in his office. He looked up at her with a pained expression on his face. He had been staring out the window and thinking about his brother.
It was dark; there was nothing to see out there except a blank wall.
She closed the door. "I've got something for you. This is close hold. This is hush-hush. You are not going to believe this. There's Ebola virus in a monkey colony in Virginia."
They drove home, talking about it, traveling north on the road that led to Thurmont along the foot of Catoctin Mountain.
"This is killing me – I'll never get away from this bug," she said to him.
It seemed clear that they both were going to be involved in the Army action. It wasn't clear what kind of an action it would be, but certainly something big was going to go down. She told Jerry that tomorrow she would probably visit the monkey house with C.J. and that she would be looking at monkey tissues for signs of Ebola.
Jerry was profoundly surprised: so this was what Nancy's work with Ebola had come to. He was impressed with his wife and bemused by the situation. If he was worried about her, he didn't show it.
They turned up a gentle swing of road that ran along the side of the mountain, and passed through apple orchards, and turned into their driveway. It was eight o'clock, and Jason was home. Jaime had gone off to her gymnastic practice. The kids were latchkey children now.
Jason was doing his homework. He had made himself a microwave dinner of God knows what. Their son was a self-starter, a little bit of a loner, and very self-sufficient. All he needed was food and money, and he ran by himself.
The two colonels changed out of their uniforms into sweat clothes, and Nancy put a frozen chunk of her homemade stew into the microwave and thawed it. When the stew was warm, she poured it into a Thermos jar. She put the dog and the Thermos into a car, and she drove out to get Jaime at her gymnastics practice. The gym was a half hour's drive from Thurmont.
Nancy picked up Jaime and gave her the stew to eat in the car. Jaime was an athletic girl, short, dark haired, sometimes inclined to worry about things – and she was exhausted from her workout. She ate the stew and fell asleep on the back seat while Nancy drove her home.
The Colonel Jaaxes had a water bed, where they spent a lot of time. Jaime got into her pajama and curled up on the water bed next to Nancy and fell asleep again.
Nancy and Jerry read books in bed for a while. The bedroom had red wallpaper and a balcony that overlooked the town. They talked about the monkey house, and then Nancy picked up Jaime and carried her into her own bedroom and tucked her into her bed. Around midnight, Nancy fell asleep.
Jerry continued to read. He liked to read military history. Some of the most brutal combat in history had occurred in the rolling country around Catoctin Mountain: at the cornfield at Antietam, where every individual stalk of corn had been slashed away by bullets, and where the bodies had lain so thick a person could walk on them from one end of the cornfield to the other. He could look out his bedroom window and imagine the blue and gray armies crawling across the land. That night he happened to be reading The Killer Angels, a novel by Michael Shaara about the Battle of Gettysburg:
Then Lee said slowly, "Soldiering has one great trap."
Longstreet turned to see his face. Lee was riding slowly ahead, without expression. He spoke in that same slow voice.
"To be a good soldier you must love the army. But to be a good officer you must be willing to order the death of the thing you love. That is ... a very hard thing to do. No other profession requires it. That is one reason why there are so few very good officers. Although there are many good men."
He switched out the light, but he could not sleep. He rolled over, and the water bed gurgled. Every time he closed his eyes, he thought about his brother, John, and he saw in his mind's eye an office splattered with blood. Eventually it was two o'clock in the morning and he was still awake, thinking to himself, I'm just laying here in the dark, and nothing's happening.
GARBAGE BAGS
NOVEMBER 29, WEDNESDAY
DAN DALGARD SLEPT peacefully that night, as he always did. He had
never heard of Ebola virus, but the brief conversation with Colonel C.J.
Peters had given him the basic picture. He had been around monkeys and
monkey diseases for a long time, and he was not particularly frightened.
Many days had passed during which he had been exposed to infected blood,
and he certainly had not become sick yet. Early in the morning, his telephone rang at home. It was Colonel Peters calling. Again Peters asked him if he could send some people down to look at specimens of tissue from the monkeys. Dalgard said that would be all right. Peters then repeated his request to see the monkey house.
Dalgard turned away the question and wouldn't answer it. He didn't know Peters, and he wasn't going to open any doors to him until he had met the man and had a chance to size him up.
He drove down Leesburg Pike to work, turned through a gate, parked his car, and went into the main building of Hazleton Washington. His office was a tiny cubicle with a glass wall that looked across the lawn; his door looked back to a secretarial pool, a cramped area where you could hardly move around with bumping into people. There was no privacy in Dalgard's office, it was a fishbowl. He tended to spend a lot of time looking out the window. Today he behaved with deliberate calm. No one in the office detected any unusual emotion, any fear.
He called Bill Volt, the manager of the monkey house. Volt gave him a shocking piece of news. One of the animal caretakers was very sick, might be dying. During the night, the man had a heart attack and had been taken to London Hospital, not far away. There's no further information, Volt said, and we're still trying to find out what happened. He's in the cardiac-care unit, and no one can talk to him. (The man's name will be given here as Jarvis Purdy. He was one of four workers in the monkey house, not including Volt.)
Dalgard was extremely dismayed and couldn't rule out the possibility that the man was breaking with Ebola. A heart attack is usually caused by a blood clot in the heart muscle. Had he thrown a clot?
Was Jarvis Purdy clotting up? Suddenly Dalgard felt as if he was losing control of the situation.
He told Bill Volt that he was to suspend all unnecessary activity in the monkey rooms. As he later recorded in his diary:
All operations other than feeding, observation and cleaning were to be suspended. Anyone entering the rooms was to have full protection – Tyvek suit, respirator, and gloves. Dead animals were to be double-bagged and placed in a refrigerator.
He also mentioned to Volt that the news media were almost certainly going to get onto this story. He told Volt that he didn't want any employees to go outside the building wearing their biohazard gear. If pictures of Hazleton workers wearing face masks and white suits wound up on the evening news, it could cause panic.
Dalgard called the hospital and reached Purdy's doctor. The doctor said that Purdy's condition was guarded but stable. Dalgard told the doctor that if any aspect of Purdy's heart attack wasn't typical, he should please call Colonel C.J. Peters at Fort Detrick. He was careful not to mention the word Ebola.
LATER THAT MORNING, C.J. Peters and Nancy Jaax headed out from Fort Detrick for Virginia, and Gene Johnson came with them. The officers wore their uniforms, but they drove in civilian cars so as not to attract attention. The traffic moved slowly. It was a clear, cold, windy day.
The grass along the road was wet and green, still growing, untouched by frost. They turned off Leesburg Pike at the Hazleton offices. Dalgard met them in the lobby and escorted them to another building, which was a laboratory. There a pathologist had prepared a set of slides for Nancy to look at. The slides contained slices of liver from monkeys that had died in the monkey house.
She sat down at a microscope, adjusted the eyepieces, and began to explore the terrain. She zoomed around and paused. The terrain was a mess. Something had ravaged these cells. They were blitzed and pock-marked, as if the liver had been carpet bombed. Then she saw the dark blobs in the cells-the shadows that did not belong there. They were crystalloids. And they were huge.
This was extreme amplification.
"Oh, fuck," she said in a low voice.
The bricks did not look like crystals. Ebola bricks come in all kinds of shapes – horseshoes, blobs, lumps, even rings. Some of the cells consisted of a single brick, a huge mother of a brick, a brick that had grown so fat that the whole cell had plumped up. Shed saw rotten pockets where all the cells had popped and died, forming a liquefied spot that was packed with wall-to wall bricks.
While she looked at the slides, C.J. Peters and Gene Johnson took Dan Dalgard aside and questioned him closely about the use of needles at the monkey house. The Ebola virus had spread in Zaire through dirty needles. Had the company been giving monkeys shots with dirty needles?
Dalgard was not sure. The company had an official policy of always using clean needles. "Our policy is to change needles after every injection," he said. "Whether it is done religiously is anybody's guess." Nancy collected some pieces of sterilized liver and spleen that were embedded in wax blocks, and she put the blocks in a Styrofoam cup to take back to Fort Detrick for analysis. These samples were exceedingly valuable to her and to the Army. What would be even more valuable would be a sample containing live virus.
C.J. Peters asked Dalgard again if they could all go see the monkey house.
"Well – let's not go there now," Dalgard replied. He made it clear to the officers that the building was a private property.
"What about some samples of monkey? Can we get some samples?" they asked.
"Sure," Dalgard said. He told them to drive out Leesburg Pike in the direction of the monkey house. There was an Amoco gas station on the pike, he said, and the colonels were to park their cars there and wait. "A guy is going to come and meet you. He'll bring some samples with him.
And he can answer your questions," he said.
"The samples ought to be wrapped in plastic and put in boxes for safety," C.J. said to Dalgard. "I want you to do that."
Dalgard agreed to wrap the samples in plastic.
Then C.J., Nancy and Gene drove out to the gas station, where they parked in a cul-de-sac by the highway, near some pay telephones. By now it was early afternoon, and they were hungry – they had missed lunch. Nancy went into the gas station and bought Diet Cokes for everyone and a pack of cheddar-cheese crackers for herself, and she bought C.J. some peanut-butter crackers. The Army people sat in their two cars, eating junk food, feeling cold, and hoping that someone would show up soon with samples of monkey.
C.J. Peters observed the comings and goings at the gas station.
It gave him a sense of life and time passing, and he enjoyed the pleasant normality of the scene. Truckers stopped for diesel and Cokes, and businesspeople stopped for cigarettes. He noticed an attractive woman park her car and go over to one of the pay telephones, where she spoke at length to someone. He whiled away the time imagining that she was a housewife talking to a boyfriend. What would these people think if they knew what had invaded their town? He had begun to think that the Army might have to act decisively to put out this fire. He had been in Bolivia when a hot agent called Machupo had broken out, and he had seen a young woman die, covered with blood. North America had not yet seen an emergence of an agent that turned people into bleeders. North America was not ready for that, not yet. But the possibilities for a huge break of Ebola around Washington were impressive when you thought about it.
He wondered about AIDS. What would have happened if someone had noticed AIDS when it first began to spread? It had appeared without warning, secretly, and by the time we noticed it, it was too late. If only we had the right kind of research station in central Africa during the nineteen seventies ... we might have seen it hatching from the forest.
If only we had seen it coming ... we might have been able to stop it, or at least slow it down; ... we might have been able to save at least a hundred million lives. At least. Because the AIDS virus's penetration of the human species was still in its early stages, and the penetration was happening inexorably. People didn't realize that the AIDS thing had only just began. No one could predict how many people were going to die of AIDS, but he believed that the death toll, in the end, could hit hundreds of millions – and that possibility had not sunk in with the general public.
On the other hand, suppose AIDS had been noticed? Any "realistic" review of the AIDS virus when it was first appearing in Africa would probably have led experts and government officials to conclude that the virus was of little significance for human health and that scarce research funds should not be 149 allocated to it – after all, it was just a virus that infected a handful of Africans, and all it did was suppress their immune systems.
So what? And then the agent had gone on a tremendous amplification all over the planet, and it was still expanding its burn, with no end in sight.
We didn't really know what Ebola virus could do. We didn't know if the agent in the monkey house was, in fact, Ebola Zaire or it was something else, some new strain of Ebola. An agent that could travel in a cough? Probably not, but who could tell? The more he thought about it, the more he wondered, Who is going to take out those monkeys? Because someone is going to have to go in there and take them out. We can't just walk away from that building and let it self-destruct. This is a human-lethal virus. Who is going to sack the monkeys? The guys who work for the company?
He had begun to wonder whether the Army should move in with a military biohazard SWAT team. His own term for this type of action was NUKE. To nuke a place means to sterilize it, to render it lifeless. If the hosts are people, you evacuate them and put them in the Slammer. If the hosts are animals, you kill them and incinerate the carcasses. Then you drench the place with chemicals and fumes. He wondered if the Army would have to nuke the monkey house.
Gene Johnson sat in the passenger seat next to C.J. Peters. His mind was somewhere else. His mind was in Africa. He was thinking about Kitum Cave.
Gene was very worried about this situation, not to say shit scared. He thought to himself, I don't know how we are going to get out of this one without people dying. His worry was growing all the time, every minute. The U.S. military, he thought, is stepping into a crisis that is already full blown, and if something goes wrong and people die, the military will be blamed.
Suddenly he turned to C.J. and spoke his mind. He said, "It looks inevitable that we're going to have to take out all the monkeys. A Level 4 outbreak is not a game. I want to warn you about just how detailed and major an effort this is going to be. It's going to be very complex, it's going to take some time, and we have to be very fucking careful to do it right. If we are going to do it right, the gist of what I'm saying, C.J., is that we cannot have amateurs in key positions. We need to have experienced people who know what they are doing. Do you understand what's going to happen if something goes wrong?" And he was thinking:
Peters – Peters – he's never been in an outbreak this complicated – none of us has – the only thing like it was Kitum Cave. And Peters wasn't there.
C.J. Peters listened to Gene Johnson in silence, and didn't reply.
He felt that it was sort of irritating to get this kind of advice from Gene – when he's telling you the obvious, telling you what you already know.
C.J. Peters and Gene Johnson had a stressful, complicated relationship. They had journeyed together in a truck expedition across central Africa, looking for Ebola virus, and a lot of tension had built up between the two men by the end of the trip. The traveling had been brutal, as hard as any on earth – roads didn't exists, bridges were gone, the maps must have been drawn by a blind monk, the people spoke languages not even the native translators could understand, and the expedition had not been able to find enough food and water. Worst of all, they ran into difficulty finding human cases of Ebola – they were not able to discover the virus in a natural host or in people.
It was during that trip, perhaps as a result of the chronic food shortage, that C.J. had taken to eating termites. The ones that swarmed out of their nests. They had wings. Gene, who was more fastidious than C.J., had not been quite so eager to try them. Popping termites in his mouth, C.J. would make remarks like, "they have this extra...mmm...," and he would smack his lips, smack, smack, and you'd hear a mouthful of termites crunching between his teeth, and he'd spit out the wings, pah, ptah. The African members of expedition, who liked termites, had pushed Gene to try them, too, and finally he did. He placed a handful of them in his mouth, and was surprised to find that they tasted like walnuts. C.J. had spoken longingly of finding the African termite queen, the glistening white sac that was half a foot long and as thick as bratwurst, bursting with eggs and creamy insect fat, the queen you ate alive and whole, and she was said to twitch as she went down your throat. Although snacking on termites had amused them, they had argued with each other about how to do the science, how to search for the virus. In Africa, Gene had felt that C.J. was trying to run the show, and it irritated Gene to no end.
SUDDENLY A BLUE, windowless, unmarked van turned off the road and pulled through the gas station and parked next to them. The van parked in such a way that no one on the road or at the gas station could see what went on between the two vehicles. A man swung heavily out of the driver's seat.
It was Bill Volt. He walked over to the Army people, and they got out of their cars.
"I've got'em right back here," he said, and he threw open the side door of the van.
They saw seven black plastic garbage bags sitting on the floor of the van. They could see the outlines of limbs and heads in the bags.
C.J. said to himself, What is this?
Nancy gritted her teeth and silently pulled in a breath. She could see how the bags bulged in places, as if liquid had pooled inside them. She hoped it wasn't blood. "What on earth is all of that?" she exclaimed.
"They died last night," Volt said. "They're in double bags."
Nancy was getting a nasty feeling in the pit of her stomach. "Has anybody cut himself fooling around with these monkeys?" she asked.
"No," Volt replied.
Then Nancy noticed that C.J. was looking sideways at her. It was a significant look. The message was, So who's going to drive the dead monkeys back to Fort Detrick?
Nancy stared back at C.J. He was pushing her, and she knew it.
They were both division chiefs at the Institute. He outranked her, but he was not her boss. He can push me just so far, and I can push him right back. "I'm not putting that shit in the trunk of my car, C.J.," she said.
"As a veterinarian, I have certain responsibilities with regard to the transportation of dead animals, sir. I can't just knowingly ship a dead animal with an infectious disease across state lines."
Dead silence. A grin spread over C.J.'s face.
"I agree that it needs to be done," Nancy went on. "You're a doc. You can get away with this." She nodded at his shoulder boards. "This is why you put on those big eagles."
They burst into nervous laughter.
Time was slipping away while the virus was amplifying inside the monkey house. C.J. inspected the bags – it was a relief to see that the monkeys were double-bagged or triple-bagged – and he decided to take them back to Fort Detrick and worry about health laws afterward. His reasoning, as he explained to me later, went like this: "If the guy drove them back to the Reston monkey facility, I felt there would be a certain added risk to the population just from his driving them around in the van, and there would be a delay in diagnosing them. We felt that we could quickly get a definite diagnosis of Ebola it would be in everyone's favor." Surely some smart Army lawyers could figure out why the act of carrying Ebola-ridden dead monkeys across state lines in the trunk of a private automobile was so completely legal that there had never ever been any question about it.
His red Toyota was not in the best of shape, and he had lost any interest in its resale value. He popped the trunk. It was lined with carpet, and he didn't see any sharp edges anywhere that might puncture a plastic bag.
They didn't have rubber gloves. So they would do the lifting bare-handed. Nancy , keeping her face well away from the enclosed air of the van, inspected the outside of the bags for any droplets of blood.
"Have the exteriors of the bags been disinfected?" she asked Volt.
Volt said he'd washed the outsides of the bags with Clorox bleach.
She held her breath, fighting the puke factor, and picked up a bag. The monkey kind of slid around inside it. They piled the bags one by one gently in the Toyota's trunk. Each monkey weighed between five and twelve 153 pounds. The total weight came to around fifty pounds of Biohazard Level 4 liquefying primate. It depressed the rear end of the Toyota.
C.J. closed the trunk.
Nancy was anxious to dissect the monkeys right away. If you left an Ebola monkey inside a plastic bag for a day, you'd end up with a bag of soup.
"Follow behind me, and watch for drips," C.J. joked.
SPACE WALK
1400 HOURS, WEDNESDAY
THEY ARRIVED AT the Institute in mid afternoon. C.J. Peters parked beside a loading dock on the side of the building and found some soldiers to help him carry the garbage bags to a supply air lock that led to the Ebola suite. Nancy went to the office of a member of her staff, a lieutenant colonel named Ron Trotter, and told him to suit up and go in; and she would follow. They would be buddies in the hot zone.
As she always did before going into Level 4, she took off her engagement ring and her wedding band, and locked them away in her desk.
She and Trotter walked down the hall together, and he went first into the small locker room that led to AA-5 while she waited in the corridor. A light went on, telling her that he had gone on to the next level, and she swiped her security card across a sensor, which opened the door into the locker room. She took off all of her clothes, put on a long-sleeved scrub suit, and stood before the door that led inward, blue light falling on her face. Beside the door there was another security sensor. This one was a numerical key pad. You can't bring your security card with you into the higher levels. A security card would be melted or ruined by chemicals during the decontamination process. Therefore you memorize your security code. She punched a string of numbers on the key pad, and the building's central computer noticed that JAAX, NANCY , was attempting entry. Finding that she was CLEARED TO ENTER AA-5, the computer unlocked the door and beeped to let her know that she could proceed inward without setting off alarms. She walked through the shower stall into the bathroom, put on white socks, and continued inward, opening a door that led to the Level 3 staging area.
There she met Lieutenant Colonel Trotter, a stocky, dark haired man whom Nancy had worked with for many years. They put on their inner gloves and taped the cuffs. Nancy put a pair of hearing protectors over her ears. She had started wearing them a while back, when people had begun to suspect that the roar of air in you suit might be loud enough to damage your hearing. They edged around each other as they fiddled with their suits. People wearing biohazard space suits tend to step around on another like two wrestlers at the beginning of a match, watching the other person's every move, especially watching the hands to make sure they don't hold a sharp object. This cringing becomes instinctive.
They closed up their suits and lumbered across the staging area to a larger air-lock door. This was a supply air lock. It did not lead into the hot zone. It led to the outside world.
They opened it. On the floor of the air lock sat the seven garbage bags.
"TAKE AS MANY AS YOU CAN CARRY," she said to Lieutenant Colonel Trotter.
He picked up a few bags, and so did she. They shuffled back across the staging area to the air-lock door that led to Level 4. She picked up a metal pan containing tools. She was getting warm, and her faceplate fogged up. They opened air-lock door and stepped in together.
Nancy took a breath and gathered her thoughts. She imagined that passing through the gray-zone door into Level 4 was like a space walk, except that instead of going into outer space, you went into inner space, which was full of pressure of life trying to get inside you suit. People went into Level 4 areas all the time at the Institute, particularly the civilian animal caretakers. But going into a containment zone to perform a necropsy on an animal that had died of an amplified unknown hot agent was something a little different. This was high-hazard work.
Nancy centered herself and brought her breathing under control.
She opened the far door and went through to the hot side. Then she reached back inside the air lock and pulled the chain in the chemical shower. That started a decon cycle running in the air lock that would eliminate any hot agents that might have leaked into the air lock as they were going through.
They put on their boots and headed down the cinder-block hallway, lugging the monkeys. Their air was going stale inside their space suits, and they needed to plug in right away.
They came to a refrigerator room, and put all the bags in the refrigerator except for one. This bag they carried into the necropsy room. Stepping around each other cautiously, they plugged in their air hose, and dry air cleared their faceplates. The air thundered distantly beyond Nancy's hearing protectors. They gloved up, pulling surgical gloves over their space-suit gloves. She laid her tools and specimen container at the head of the table, counting them off one by one.
Trotter untwisted some ties on the garbage bag and opened it, and the hot zone inside the bag merged with the hot zone of the room. He and Nancy together lifted the monkey out and laid it on the dissection table.
She switched on a surgical lamp.
Unclouded brown eyes stared at her. The eyes looked normal. They were not red. The whites were white, and the pupils were clear and black, dark as night. She could see a reflection of the lamp in the pupils.
Inside the eyes, behind the eyes, there was nothing. No mind, no existence. The cells had stopped working.
Once the cells in a biological machine stop working, it can never be started again. It goes into a cascade of decay, falling toward disorder and randomness. Except in the case of viruses. They can turn off and go dead. Then, if they come in contact with a living system, they switch on and multiply. The only thing that "lived" inside this monkey was the unknown agent, and it was dead, for the time being. It was not multiplying or doing anything, since the monkey's cells were dead. But if the agent touched living cells, Nancy's cells, it would come alive and begin to amplify itself. In theory, it could amplify itself around the world in the human species.
She took up a scalpel and slit the monkey's abdomen, making a slow and gentle cut, keeping the blade well away from her gloved fingers. The spleen was puffed up and tough, leathery, like a glob of smoke salami.
She did not see any bloody lesions inside this monkey. She had expected that the monkey's interior would be a lake of blood, but no, this monkey looked all right, it had not bled into itself. If the animal had died of Ebola, this was not a clear case. She opened up the intestine. There was no blood inside it. The gut looked okay. Then she examined the stomach.
There she found a ring of bleeding spots at the junction between the stomach and the small intestine. This could be a sign of Ebola, but it was not a clear sign. It could also be a sign of simian fever, not Ebola virus in this animal based on a visual inspection of internal organs during necropsy.
Using a pair of blunt scissors, she clipped wedges out of the liver and pressed them on glass slides. Slides and blood tubes were the only glass objects allowed in a hot zone, because of the danger of glass splinters if something broke. All laboratory beakers in the room were made of plastic.
She worked slowly, keeping her hands out of the body cavity, away from blood as much as possible, rinsing her gloves again and again in a pan of EnviroChem. She changed her gloves frequently.
Trotter glanced at her once in a while. He held the body open for her and clamped blood vessel, handing her tools when she asked for them.
They could read each other's lips.
"FORCEPS," she mouthed silently, pointing to it. He nodded and handed her a forceps. They did not talk. She was alone with the sound of her air.
She was beginning to think that this monkey did not have Ebola virus. In biology, nothing is clear, everything is too complicated, everything is a mess, and just when you think you understand something, you peel off a layer and find deeper complications beneath. Nature is anything but simple. This emerging virus was like a bat crossing the sky at evening. Just when you thought you saw it flicker through your field of view, it was gone.
SHOOT-OUT
1400 HOUR, WEDNESDAY
WHILE NANCY Jaax was working on the monkeys, C.J. Peters was in the conference room at Fort Detrick's headquarters building. Careers were at stake in this room. Almost all of the people in the world who understood the meaning of Ebola virus were sitting around a long table. General Russell sat at the head of the table, a tall, tough-looking figure in uniform; he chaired the meeting. He did not want the meeting to turn into a power struggle between the Centers for Disease Control and the Army. He also did not want to let the C.D.C. take over this thing.
Dan Dalgard was there, wearing a dark suit, seeming reserved and cool; in fact, he churned with nervousness. Gene Johnson glowered over the table, bearded and silent. There were officials from the Virginia Department of Health and from Fairfax County. Fred Murphy – the co-discoverer of Ebola virus, the C.D.C. official whom General Russell had called – sat at the table beside another official from C.D.C., Dr. Joseph B. McCormick.
Joe McCormick was the chief of the Special Pathogens Branch of the C.D.C., the branch that had been run by Karl Johnson, another co-discoverer of Ebola. Joe McCormick was the successor to Karl Johnson – he had been appointed to the job when Johnson retired. He had lived and worked in Africa. He was a handsome, sophisticated medical doctor with curly dark hair and round Fiorucci spectacles, a brilliant, ambitious man, charming and persuasive, with a quick, flaring temper, who had done extraordinary things in his career. He had published major research articles on Ebola.
Unlike anyone else in the room, he had seen and treated human cases of Ebola virus.
It happened that Joe McCormick and C.J. Peters couldn't stand each other. There was bad blood between these two doctors that went back many years. They had both rifled the darkest corners of Africa searching for Ebola, and neither of them had found its natural hiding place. Like Peters, Joe McCormick evidently felt that now, finally, he was closing in on the virus and getting ready to make a spectacular kill.
THE MEETING BEGAN with Peter Jahrling, the co-discoverer of the strain that burned in the monkeys. Jahrling stood up and spoke, using charts and photographs. Then he sat down.
Now it was Dalgard's turn to speak. He was exceedingly nervous.
He described the clinical signs of disease that he had seen at the monkey house, and by the end he felt that no one had noticed his nervousness.
Immediately afterward, Joe McCormick got up and spoke. What he said remains a matter of controversy. There is an Army version and there is another version. According to Army people, he turned to Peter Jahrling and said words to this effect: Thanks very much, Peter. Thanks for alerting us. The big boys are here now. You can just turn this thing over to us before you hurt yourselves. We've got excellent containment facilities in Atlanta. We'll just take all your materials and your samples of virus. We'll take care of it from here.
In other words, the Army people thought McCormick tried to present himself as the only real expert on Ebola. They thought to be tried to take over the management of the outbreak and grab the Army's samples of virus.
C.J. Peters fumed, listening to McCormick. He heard the speech with a growing sense of outrage, and thought it was "very arrogant and insulting."
McCormick remembers something different. "I'm sure I offered some help or assistance with the animal situation at Reston," he recalled, when I telephoned him. "I don't know that there was any conflict. If there was any animosity, it came from their side, not ours, for reasons they know better than I. Our attitude was, Hey guys, good work."
In the past, McCormick had publicly criticized Gene Johnson, the Army's Ebola expert, for spending a lot of money to explore Kitum Cave and then not publishing his findings. McCormick expressed his feelings to me this way: "They want to tell you about their experiments, but the way to tell people about them is to publish them. That's not an unreasonable criticism. They're spending taxpayers' money." And besides, "None of them had spent as much time in the field as I had. I was the one of those who had dealt with human case of Ebola. No one else there had done that."
What McCormick had done was this. In 1979, reports reached the C.D.C. that Ebola had come out of hiding and was burning once again in southern Sudan, in the same places where it had first appeared, in 1976.
The situation was dangerous, not only because of the virus but because a civil war was going on in Sudan at the time – the areas where Ebola raged was also a war zone. McCormick volunteered to try to collect some human blood and bring strain back alive to Atlanta. No one else wanted to go to Sudan with him, so he went there alone. (It will be recalled that in 1976 Sudan outbreak, three years earlier, a C.D.C. doctor had allegedly become too frightened to get on the plane to Sudan.) McCormick arrived in southern Sudan in a light plane flown by tow terrified bush pilots.
Around sunset, they landed at an airstrip near a Zande village. The pilots were too scared to get out of the plane. It was getting dark, and the pilots decided to spend the night in the cockpit, sitting on the airstrip. They warned McCormick they would leave the next morning at sunrise. He had until dawn to find the virus.
McCormick shouldered his backpack and walked into the village, looking for Ebola. He arrived at a mud hut. Villagers stood around the hut, but they wouldn't go inside. He heard sounds of human agony. A dark doorway led inside. He couldn't see into the hunt, but he know that Ebola was in there. He rummaged in his backpack and found his flashlight, but it was dead, and he realized that he had forgotten to bring batteries. He asked the crowd if anyone had a light, and someone brought him a lantern.
Holding the lantern in front of him, he entered the hut.
He would never forget the sight. The first thing he saw was a number of red eyes staring at him. The air inside the hut reeked of blood. People lay on straw mats on the floor. Some were having convulsion – the final phase, as death sets in – their bodies rigid and jerking, their eyes rolled up into the head, blood streaming out of the nose and flooding from the rectum. Others had gone into terminal comas, and were motionless and bleeding out. The hut was a hot zone.
He opened his backpack and fished out rubber gloves, a paper gown, a paper surgical mask, and paper boots to cover his shoes, to keep them from becoming wet with blood. After he had dressed himself, he laid out his blood tubes and syringes on a mat. Then he began drawing blood from people. He worked all night in the hut on his knees, collecting blood samples and taking care of the patients as best he could.
Sometime during the night, he was drawing blood from an old woman.
Suddenly she jerked and thrashed, having a seizure. Here arm lashed around, and the bloody needle came out of her arm and jabbed into his thumb. Uh, oh, he thought. That would be enough to do it. The agent had entered his bloodstream.
At dawn, he gathered up his tubes of blood serum and ran to the airplane and handed the samples to the pilots. The question was what to do with himself, now that he had been pricked with a bloody needle. That was a massive exposure to Ebola virus. He probably had three to four days before he broke with Ebola. Should he leave Sudan now, get himself to a hospital? He had to make a decision – whether to leave with the pilots or stay with the virus. It seemed obvious that the pilots would not come back later to pick him up. If he planned to leave and medical help for himself, the time to do it was now. There was an additional factor. He was a physician, and those people in the hut were his patients.
He returned to the village. He thought he might be infected with Ebola virus, but he wanted to get more samples, and he figured that if he developed a headache, he could radio for help, and perhaps a plane would come and get him. He rested that day in a hut, and gave himself a transfusion of two bags of blood serum that supposedly contained antibodies that might protect him from Ebola virus – he had carried the bags with him, chilled on ice, and now he hoped they would save his life. That night he could not sleep, thinking about the needle jabbing his thumb, thinking about the agent beginning its massive replication in his bloodstream. He drank half a bottle of scotch whisky to put himself to sleep.
He worked with Ebola patients for the next four days inside the hut, and still he did not have a headache. Meanwhile, he watched the old lady like a hawk to see what happened to her. On the fourth day, to his surprise, the old lady recovered. She had not had Ebola. She had probably been suffering from malaria. She had not been having an Ebola seizure but, rather, had been shivering from a fever. He had walked away from a firing squad.
Now, at the meeting at Fort Detrick, Joe McCormick of the C.D.C. was convinced that Ebola virus does not travel easily, especially not through the air. He had not become sick, even though he had breathed the air inside an Ebola-ridden hut for days and nights on end. He felt strongly that Ebola is a disease that is not easy to catch. Therefore, in his view, it was not as dangerous as perhaps the Army people believed.[I believe he is correct in this assessment,yes a horrible way to get,but not nearly what the MSM has made it outbreak during the outbreaks.I also think the alternative media dropped the ball on this one and fell in line with the MSM on the issue, choosing to go the terrorize route,instead of research IMO. DC]
Dan Dalgard asked a question of the assembled experts. He said,
"How soon after we give you samples can you tell us whether they have virus in them?"
C.J. Peters replied, "It may take a week. This is all we know."
Joe McCormick spoke up. Wait a minute, he said – he had a new, fast probe test for Ebola virus that would work in twelve hours. He argued that the C.D.C. should have the virus and the samples.
C.J. Peters turned and stared at McCormick. C.J. was furious. He didn't believe McCormick had any quick test for Ebola. He thought it was Joe McCormick blowing smoke, trying to get his hands on the virus. He thought it was a poker bluff in a high-stakes game for control of the virus. It was a delicate situation, because how could he say in front of all these state health officials, "Joe, I just don't believe you?" He raised his voice and said, "An ongoing epidemic is not the time to try to field-test a new technique." He argued that Fort Detrick was closer to the outbreak than was the C.D.C., in Atlanta, and therefore it was appropriate for the Army to have the samples and try to isolate the virus.
What he did not say – no reason to rub it in – was that seven dead monkeys were at that very moment being examined by Nancy Jaax. Even as they argued, she was exploring the monkeys. What's more, the Army was growing the virus in cultures. Possession is nine tenths of the law, and the Army had the meat and the agent.
Fred Murphy, the other C.D.C. man, was sitting next to McCormick.
He began to realize that the C.D.C. was not in a good position to argue the matter. He leaned over and whispered, "Joe! Calm you jets. Stifle it, Joe. We're outnumbered here."
General Philip Russell had been sitting back, watching the argument, saying nothing. Now he stepped in. In a calm but almost deafeningly loud voice he suggested that they work out a compromise. He suggested that they split the management of the outbreak.
A compromise seemed to be the best solution. The general and Fred Murphy quickly worked out the deal, while McCormick and Peters stared at each other with little to say. It was agreed that the C.D.C. would manage the human-health aspects of the outbreak and would direct the car of any human patients. The Army would handle the monkeys and the monkey house, which was the nest of the outbreak.
THE MISSION
1630 HOURS, WEDNESDAY
COLONEL C. J. PETERS now felt that he had permission to get the action under way. As soon as the meeting broke up, he began to line up his ducks. the first thing he needed was field officer who could lead a team of soldiers and civilians into the monkey house. He needed to form a military-action unit.
He had already decided who was going to lead the mission. It was going to be Colonel Jerry Jaax, Nancy's husband. Jerry had never worn a space suit, but he was the chief of the veterinary division at the Institute, and he understood monkeys. His people, both soldiers and civilians, were certainly going to be needed. No one else had the training to handle monkeys.
He found Jerry in his office, staring out the window and chewing on a rubber band. C.J. said, "Jerry, I believe we have a situation down in Reston." A situation. Code for a hot agent. "It looks like we're going to have to go down and take those monkeys out, and we're going to do it in Biosafety Level 4 conditions." He asked Jerry to assemble teams of soldiers and civilian employees to be ready to move out with space suits in twenty-four hours.
Jerry walked over to Gene Johnson's office and told him that he'd been put in charge of the mission. The office was a mess. He wondered how Gene, as large a man as he was, could even fit himself in among the stacks of paper.
Jerry and Gene immediately began to plan a biohazard operation.
There had been a general decision to take out one room of monkeys, and see how that worked, see how things went – see if the virus was spreading. They set up their priorities.
Priority One – Safety of the human population.
Priority Two – Euthanasia of the animals with a minimum of suffering.
Priority Three – Gathering of scientific samples.
Purpose: to identify the strain and determine how it travels.
Gene felt that if the team did its job properly, the human population of Washington would be safe. He put on his glasses and hunched over and fished through his papers, his beard crushed on his chest. He knew already that he was not going to go inside that building. No way in hell. He had seen monkeys die too many times, and he could not bear it anymore. In any case, his job was to gather equipment and people and move them into the building, and then to extract the people and equipment and dead animals safely.
He had saved lists, long lists of all the gear he had brought to Kitum Cave. He pawed through his papers, swearing gently. He had literally tons of African gear. He had squirreled it away in all kinds of hiding places at the Institute, where other people couldn't find it and rip it off.
Gene was terribly excited, and also afraid. His nightmares about Ebola virus, the bad dreams of liquid running through pinholes into his space suit, had never really gone away. He would still wake up thinking, My god, there's been an exposure. He had spent almost ten years hunting Ebola and Marburg in Africa, with little success, and suddenly one of the bastards had reared its head in Washington. His favorite saying came back to him: "Chance favors the prepared mind." Well, the chance had come. If a piece of gear had been handy in Kitum Cave, it would be handy in the monkey house. As Gene thought about it, he realized that the building was very much like Kitum Cave. It was an enclosed air space. Dead air.
Air-handling system broken, failed. During all over the place. Monkey urine in pools. A hot cave near Washington. And there were people who had been inside the cave who might be infected with virus by now. How would you move your teams in and out of the cave? You would have to set up a staging area. You would have to have a gray area – an air lock with a chemical shower of some kind. Somewhere inside that building lived a Level 4 life form, and it was growing, multiplying, cooking inside hosts.
The hosts were monkeys and, perhaps, people.
2000 HOURS, WEDNESDAY
DAN DALGARD LEFT USAMRIID and drove back to his office on Leesburg Pike, arriving there around eight o'clock. The office was deserted; everyone had gone home. He straightened up his desk, shut down his computer, and removed a floppy disk that contained his diary, his "Chronology of Events." He put the disk into his brief case. He said good night to a security guard at the front desk and drove home. On the road, he realized that he had forgotten to call his wife to tell her that he would be late.
He stopped at a Giant Food supermarket and bought her a bunch of cut flowers, carnations and mums. When he arrived home, he reheated his dinner in the microwave and joined his wife in the family room, where he ate sitting in a recliner chair. He was exhausted. He put another log into the wood stove and sat down at his personal computer, which was located next to his clock-repair bench. He inserted the floppy disk and began typing. He was bringing his diary up to date.
So much had happened that he had difficulty keeping it all straight in his mind. In the morning, he had learned that the monkey caretaker named Jarvis Purdy was in the hospital, reportedly with a heart attack. Jarvis was resting comfortably, and there had been no reports that his condition was getting worse. Should I have notified the hospital that Jarvis might be infected with Ebola? If he does have Ebola, and it spreads within the hospital, am I liable? Jesus! I'd better get someone to go over to the hospital first thing tomorrow and tell Jarvis what's going on. If he hears on the news first, he's liable to have another heart attack!
He had gotten all the other monkey caretakers fitted with respirators, and he had briefed them on what was known about the transmission of Ebola and Marburg to humans, and he had suspended all daily operations in the building other than feeding once a day, observation, and cleaning of the animal rooms. He had briefed the staff in the laboratory on Leesburg Pike – which had been handling monkey blood and tissue samples – about the need to handle these specimens as if they were infected with the AIDS virus.
I must remember to inform labs that have received animal shipments from us to notify the C.D.C. if any unusual animal deaths occur. What about the exposure to those people who had been working on the air-handling system? What about the laundry service? Wasn't there a telephone repairman in recently? Perhaps last week – I can't remember just when that was. Holy Christ! Have I missed anything?
While he was updating the day's events on the computer, the telephone rang. It was Nancy Jaax on the line. She sounded tired. She told him that her findings were consistent with either SHF or Ebola. She said it could be either one or both. Her results were ambiguous.
RECONNAISSANCE
NOVEMBER 30, THURSDAY
BY THE TIME Dan Dalgard woke up the next morning – it was now Thursday, exactly a week after Thanksgiving Day – he had made up his mind to invite the Army in to clean up one room, Room H, where the outbreak now seemed to be centered. He telephoned C.J. Peters and gave the Army permission to enter the monkey house. The news that they had the green light for a biohazard operation spread instantly through USAMRIID.
Colonel Jerry Jaax called a meeting of all the commissioned officers on his staff, along with two sergeants. They were Major Nathaniel (Nate) Powell, Captain Mark Haines, Captain Steven Denny, Sergeant Curtis Klages, and Sergeant Thomas Amen, and he invited a civilian animal caretaker named Merhl Gibson to attend. These people were the core of his team. He put it casually to them: "Do you want to go to Reston? " Some of them had not heard of Reston. He explained what was going on, saying, "There are some monkeys that need to be euthanized.
We'd like for you to play. Do you want in? Do you want to go?" They all said they wanted to play. He also figured that Nancy was going to play.
That meant that he and Nancy would be inside the building at the same time. The children would be on their own tomorrow.
They were going to make an insertion into the monkey house, go into one room, kill the monkeys in that room, and take samples of tissue back to the Institute for analysis. They were going to do the job in space suits, under condition of Level 4 biocontainment. The team would move out at 0500 hours tomorrow morning. They had less than twenty-four hours to get ready. Gene Johnson was gathering his biohazard equipment right now.
GENE DROVE DOWN to Virginia and arrived at the monkey house in midmorning for a reconnaissance, to get a sense of the layout of the building and to figure out where to put the air lock and gray zone, and how to insert the team into the building. He went with Sergeant Klages, who was wearing fatigues. As they turned into the parking lot, they saw a television van parked in front of the monkey house, the newscaster and his crew drinking coffee and waiting for something to happen. It made Gene nervous. The news media had begun to circle around the story early one, but they couldn't seem to get a handle on it, and USAMRIID was trying to keep it that way.
Gene and sergeant parked under a sweet-gum tree by the low brick building and went in through the front door. As they opened the door, the smell of monkey almost knocked them over. Whoa, Sergeant Klages thought, Whoa – we shouldn't even be in here without a space suit. The building stank of monkey. Something ugly was happening here. The whole goddamned place could be hot; every surface could be hot. The monkey workers had stopped cleaning the cages, because they did not want to go into the monkey rooms.
They found Bill Volt and told him they wanted to scout the building to determine the best way for the teams to enter tomorrow. Volt offered them a chair in his office while they talked. They didn't want to sit down, didn't want to touch any surfaces in his office with their bare hands. They noticed that Volt had a candy habit. He offered them a box full of Life Savers, BitO-Honeys, and Snickers bars – "Help yourselves," he said. Sergeant Klanges stared at the candy with horror and mumbled, "No, thank you." He was afraid to touch it.
Gene wanted to go into the monkey area and see Room H, the hot spot. It was at the back of the building. He did not want to walk through the building to get to that room. He did not want to breathe too much of the building's air. Poking around, he discovered another route to the back of the building. The office space next door was empty and had been vacated some time ago; the electric power was cut off, and ceiling panels were falling down. He got a flashlight and circled around through these dark rooms. This is like a bombed-out area, he thought.
He found a door leading back into the monkey house. It led to a storeroom, and there was a closed corridor that headed deeper into the monkey house. Now he could see it all in his mind's eye. The closed corridor would be the air lock. The storeroom would be the staging area.
The team could put their space suits in this storeroom, out of sight of the television cameras. He drew a map on a sheet of paper.
When he understood the layout of the building, he circled to the front and told the monkey workers that he wanted the back areas of the building completely sealed off-airtight. He didn't want an agent from Room H to drift to the front of the building and get into the offices. He wanted to lower the amount of contaminated air flowing into those offices.
There was a door that led to the back monkey rooms. They taped it shut with military brown sticky tape: the first line of defense against a hot agent. From now on, as Gene explained to the monkey workers, no one was to break the sticky tape, no one was to go inside those back rooms except Army people until Room H had been cleaned out. What Gene did not realize was that there was another way into the back rooms. You could get there without breaking the sticky tape on the door.
AT ELEVEN-THIRTY in the morning, Lieutenant Colonel Nancy Jaax and Colonel C.J. Peters arrived at the corporate offices of Hazleton Washington on Leesburg Pike to meet with Dan Dalgard and to speak to a group of Hazleton lab workers who had been exposed to tissues and blood from sick monkeys.
Since C.D.C. now had charge of the human aspects of the Ebola outbreak, Joe McCormick also arrived at the Hazleton offices at the same time as Jaax and Peters.
The lab employees had been handling tissue and blood from the monkeys, running tests on the material. They were mainly women, and some of them were extremely frightened, nearly in a panic. That morning, there had been radio reports during rush hour, as the women were coming to work, that Ebola virus had killed hundreds of thousands of people in Africa. This was a wild exaggeration. But the radio newscasters had no idea what was going on, and now the women thought they were going to die. "We've been hearing about this on the radio," they said to Jaax and McCormick.
Nancy Jaax claims that Joe McCormick did his best to calm them down, but that as he talked to the women about his experiences with Ebola in Africa, they seemed to become more and more frightened.
A woman got up and said, "We don't care if he's been to Africa.
We want to know if we're going to get sick!"
McCormick doesn't have any recollection of speaking to the women. He said to me,
"I never talked to them. Nancy Jaax talked to them about Ebola."
Nancy thinks that they began to calm down when they saw a female Army colonel in a uniform. She asked the women, "Did any of you break a test tube? Do we have anyone here who stuck himself with a needle or cut himself?"
No one raised a hand.
"Then you'll be all right," she said to them.
A few minutes afterward, Dan Dalgard turned to C.J. Peters and said something like, "Why don't you come over to the primate facility with me to look at the monkeys?"
Now they would finally get a chance to see the building.
They drove to the monkey house. By this time, Gene Johnson had closed off the back rooms and sealed the main entry door with sticky tape.
Nancy and C.J., along with Dan Dalgard, circled around to the back of the building, put on rubber gloves and paper surgical masks, and went into Room H to look at the sick monkeys. Nancy and C.J. noticed with some concern that the monkey workers around the building were not wearing respirators, despite Dalgard's order. No one offered a respirator to Nancy or C.J. either. This made them both nervous, but they did not say anything. When in a monkey house, do as the monkey workers do. They did not want to give offense by asking for breathing equipment, not at this delicate moment, not when they had finally gotten their first chance to look at the building.
In Room H, Dalgard picked out the sick animals, pointing to them.
"This one is sick, this one looks sick, this one over here looks sick," he said. The monkeys were quiet and subdued, but they rattled their cages now and then. Nancy stood well back from the cages and took shallow breaths, not wanting to let the smell of monkey get too deep into her lungs. A number of animals had already died – there were many empty cages in the room – and many of the other animals were obviously sick. They sat at the backs of their cages, passive and blank faced. They were not eating their monkey biscuits. She saw that some had runny noses. She averted her eyes and behaved respectfully around the monkeys, because she did not want a monkey to get a notion in its head to spit at her. They have good aim when they spit, and they aim for your face. She worried more about her eyes than anything else. Ebola has a special liking for the eyes. Four or five virus particles on the eyelid would probably do it.
She noticed something else that made her fearful. These monkeys had their canine teeth. The company had not filed down the monkeys' fangs. The canines on these hummers were as big as the canines on any guard dog you'll ever see, and that was a rude awakening. A monkey can run amazingly fast, it can jump long distances, and it uses its tail as a gripper or a hook. It also has a mind. Nancy thought, An angry monkey is like a flying pit bull terrier with five prehensile limbs-these critters can do a job on you. A monkey directs its attacks toward the face and head. It will grab you by the head, using all four limbs, and then it will wrap its tail around your neck to get a good grip, and it will make slashing attacks all over your face with its teeth, aiming especially for the eyes. This is not a good situation if the monkey happens to be infected with Ebola virus. A six-foot-tall man and a ten-pound monkey are pretty evenly matched in a stand-up fight. The monkey will be all over the man. By the end of the fight, the man may need hundreds of stitches, and could be blinded. Jerry and his team would have to be exquisitely careful with these monkeys.
THAT EVENING, JERRY drove home alone. Nancy had put on a space suit and gone back into her lab to continue analyzing the monkey samples, and he had no idea when she would finish. He changed out of his uniform, and the telephone rang. It was Nancy's brother on the line, calling from Kansas, saying that Nancy's father was slipping, and that it looked as if the end was near. Nancy might be called home at any time for her father's funeral. Jerry said that he would pass the word along to Nancy , and explained that she was working late.
Then he and Jason drove for half an hour in the direction of Washington and picked up Jaime at her gym. They decided to have supper at McDonald's. The Jaax family, minus the mother, sat at a table, and while they ate, Jerry explained to the children why Mom was working late. He said, "Tomorrow morning, we're going to be going down to a civilian place in space suits. There's an important thing going on there. There are some monkeys that are sick. The situation has kind of emergency feel to it. We'll be gone real early, and we may not get back until real late.
You kids will be on your own." They didn't react much to what he said.
Jerry went on, "It's possible that humans could get sick from the monkeys."
"Well, there's not really any danger," Jaime said, chewing her chicken nuggets.
"Well, no, it's not really dangerous," he said. "It's more exciting than dangerous. And anyway, it's just what your mom and I are doing right now."
Jason said that he had seen something on television about it. It was on the news.
"I think what your mom does is something pretty unusual," Jerry said to his son. And he thought, I'll never convince him of that.
They returned home around nine-thirty, and Jerry had trouble making the kids go to bed. Perhaps they were afraid of what was happening but didn't know how to express it; he wasn't sure. More likely, they sensed an opportunity to have their own way when their mother wasn't around. They said they wanted to wait up for her. He thought he would wait up for her, too. He made them put on their pajamas, and he brought them into bed with him, and they curled up on Nancy's side of the water bed. There was a television in the room, and he watched the eleven-o'clock news. A newscaster was standing in front of the monkey house, and he was talking about people dying in Africa. By this time, the children had fallen asleep. He thought about John for a while, and then he picked up a book to try to read.
He was still awake when Nancy arrived home at one o'clock in the morning, looking fresh and clean, having taken a shower and shampooed her hair on her way out of Level 4.
As she looked around the house to see what needed to be done, she saw that Jerry had not tended to the animals. She put out food for the cats and dogs, and changed their water. She checked on Herky, the parrot, to see how he was doing. He started making noise the moment he perceived that the cats were being fed. He wanted some attention, too.
"Mom! Mom!" Herky hung upside down and laughed like a maniac, and cried, "Bad bird! Bad bird!" She took him out of his cage and stroked him on the head. He moved onto her shoulder and she preened his feathers.
Upstairs in the bedroom, she found the children asleep next to Jerry. She picked up Jaime and carried her into her own bedroom and tucked her into bed. Jerry picked up Jason and carried him to his bed – he was getting too big for Nancy to haul around.
Nancy settled into bed with Jerry. She said to him, "I have a gut feeling they're not going to be able to contain the virus in that one room." She told him she was worried that it could be spreading into other rooms through the air. That virus was just so damned infective she didn't see how it would stay in one room. Something that Gene Johnson had once said to her came into her mind: "We don't really know what Ebola has done in the past, and we don't know what it might do in the future."
Then Jerry broke the news to her about her father. Nancy was beginning to feel extremely guilty about not going home to be with him as he lay dying. She felt the tug of her last obligation to him. She wondered if she should bag this monkey thing and fly to Kansas. But she felt that it was her duty to go through with the operation. She decided to take a chance that her father would live awhile longer.
next
PART THREE
SMASHDOWN
INSERTION
DECEMBER 1, FRIDAY
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