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. 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 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
