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 outskins of Washington, D.C., is not the kind of things interns do everyday. Maybe this isn’t a filovirus. How sure am I? If you go and tell you boss that you’ve found Marburg an 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
Tome 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 solider—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 tine 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 singlehandedly, and he ran it singlehandedly. 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
