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, an 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 int 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 rainforest 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.”
