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…
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 felling 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
