The Hot Zone (21 page)

“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. (This is a military slang term that refers to a certain tightening sensation in the nether regions of the body, in response to fear.) He thought, This is going to be an awful problem for that town in Virginia and those 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 it, 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 with 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 Geisbert 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 breathed 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. Noncommunicative. 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 been 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 the virus, nor was Tom. If he did contract it, he would know soon enough. His blood would 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, inhaling fumes from a pool of Marburg blood. So then, why isn’t Dalgard dead? Well, he reasoned, nothing’s happened to Dalgard, so maybe nothing will happen to us.

Where had it come from? Was it a new strain? What was it capable of doing to humans? 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 to Geisbert, “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 was 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: that would be a tip-off to the military authorities that they thought they’d been exposed. 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 biocontained 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.…

Meanwhile, 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 off it, and fixed the bits 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.

Tom Geisbert lived in a small town in West Virginia, across the Potomac River from Maryland. 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 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 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. These photographs were definite proof that the virus was multiplying in 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. “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 a 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. So there was a second agent in the building, and it sounded as if it was Marburg. The people who had died in Germany, he knew, had been handling raw, bloody 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 a 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 the blood and secretions of
fifty
animals. That had been on the sixteenth of November. Eleven days ago. He should be showing some symptoms by now. Bloody nose, fever, something like that. Or maybe he just hadn’t broken with virus yet.

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.

While Dalgard fretted, 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 the samples glow under ultraviolet light. If he could make the samples glow, then he knew he had the virus.