tissues for signs of Ebola.
Jerry was profoundly surprised: so this was what Nancy’s work with Ebola had come to. He was impressed with his wife and bemused by the situation. If he was worried about her, he didn’t show it.
They turned up a gentle swing of road that ran along the side of the mountain, and passed through apple orchards, and turned into their driveway. It was eight o’clock, and Jason was home. Jaime had gone off to her gymnastic practice. The kids were latchkey children now.
Jason was doing his homework. He had made himself a microwave dinner of God knows what. Their son was a self-starter, a little bit of a loner, and very self-sufficient. All he needed was food and money, and he ran by himself.
The two colonels changed out of their uniforms into sweat clothes, and Nancy put a frozen chunk of her homemade stew into the microwave and thawed it. When the stew was warm, she poured it into a Thermos jar. She put the dog and the Thermos into a car, and she drove out to get Jaime at her gymnastics practice. The gym was a half hour’s drive from Thurmont. Nancy picked up Jaime and gave her the stew to eat in the car. Jaime was an athletic girl, short, dark haired, sometimes inclined to worry about things—and she was exhausted from her workout. She ate the stew and fell asleep on the back seat while Nancy drove her home.
The Colonel Jaaxes had a water bed, where they spent a lot of time. Jaime got into her pajama and curled up on the water bed next to Nancy and fell asleep again.
Nancy and Jerry read books in bed for a while. The bedroom had red wallpaper and a balcony that overlooked the town. They talked about the monkey house, and then Nancy picked up Jaime and carried her into her own bedroom and tucked her into her bed. Around midnight, Nancy fell asleep.
Jerry continued to read. He liked to read military history. Some of the most brutal combat in history had occurred in the rolling country around Catoctin Mountain: at the cornfield at Antietam, where every individual stalk of corn had been slashed away by bullets, and where the bodies had lain so thick a person could walk on them from one end of the cornfield to the other. He could look out his bedroom window and imagine the blue and gray armies crawling across the land. That night he happened to be reading The Killer Angels, a novel by Michael Shaara about the Battle of Gettysburg:
Then Lee said slowly, “Soldiering has one great trap.”
Longstreet turned to see his face. Lee was riding slowly ahead, without expression. He spoke in that same slow voice.
“To be a good soldier you must love the army. But to be a good officer you must be willing to order the death of the thing you love. That is… a very hard thing to do. No other profession requires it. That is one reason why there are so few very good officers. Although there are many good men.”
He switched out the light, but he could not sleep. He rolled over, and the water bed gurgled. Every time he closed his eyes, he thought about his brother, John, and he saw in his mind’s eye an office splattered with blood. Eventually it was two o’clock in the morning and he was still awake, thinking to himself, I’m just laying here in the dark, and nothing’s happening.
GARBAGE BAGS
November 29, Wednesday
Dan Dalgard slept peacefully that night, as he always did. He had never heard of Ebola virus, but the brief conversation with Colonel C.J. Peters had given him the basic picture. He had been around monkeys and monkey diseases for a long time, and he was not particularly frightened. Many days had passed during which he had been exposed to infected blood, and he certainly had not become sick yet.
Early in the morning, his telephone rang at home. It was Colonel Peters calling. Again Peters asked him if he could send some people down to look at specimens of tissue from the monkeys. Dalgard said that would be all right. Peters then repeated his request to see the monkey house. Dalgard turned away the question and wouldn’t answer it. He didn’t know Peters, and he wasn’t going to open any doors to him until he had met the man and had a chance to size him up.
He drove down Leesburg Pike to work, turned through a gate, parked his car, and went into the main building of Hazleton Washington. His office was a tiny cubicle with a glass wall that looked across the lawn; his door looked back to a secretarial pool, a cramped area where you could hardly move around with bumping into people. There was no privacy in Dalgard’s office, it was a fishbowl. He tended to spend a lot of time looking out the window. Today he behaved with deliberate calm. No one in the office detected any unusual emotion, any fear.
He called Bill Volt, the manager of the monkey house. Volt gave him a shocking piece of news. One of the animal caretakers was very sick, might be dying. During the night, the man had a heart attack and had been taken to London Hospital, not far away. There’s no further information, Volt said, and we’re still trying to find out what happened. He’s in the cardiac-care unit, and no one can talk to him. (The man’s name will be given here as Jarvis Purdy. He was one of four workers in the monkey house, not including Volt.)
Dalgard was extremely dismayed and couldn’t rule out the possibility that the man was breaking with Ebola. A heart attack is usually caused by a blood clot in the heart muscle. Had he thrown a clot?
Was Jarvis Purdy clotting up? Suddenly Dalgard felt as if he was losing control of the situation.
He told Bill Volt that he was to suspend all unnecessary activity in the monkey rooms. As he later recorded in his diary:
All operations other than feeding, observation and cleaning were to be suspended. Anyone entering the rooms was to have full protection—Tyvek suit, respirator, and gloves. Dead animals were to be double-bagged and placed in a refrigerator.
He also mentioned to Volt that the news media were almost certainly going to get onto this story. He told Volt that he didn’t want any employees to go outside the building wearing their biohazard gear. If pictures of Hazleton workers wearing face masks and white suits wound up on the evening news, it could cause panic.
Dalgard called the hospital and reached Purdy’s doctor. The doctor said that Purdy’s condition was guarded but stable. Dalgard told the doctor that if any aspect of Purdy’s heart attack wasn’t typical, he should please call Colonel C.J. Peters at Fort Detrick. He was careful not to mention the word Ebola.
Later that morning, C.J. Peters and Nancy Jaax headed out from Fort Detrick for Virginia, and Gene Johnson came with them. The officers wore their uniforms, but they drove in civilian cars so as not to attract attention. The traffic moved slowly. It was a clear, cold, windy day. The grass along the road was wet and green, still growing, untouched by frost. They turned off Leesburg Pike at the Hazleton offices. Dalgard met them in the lobby and escorted them to another building, which was a laboratory. There a pathologist had prepared a set of slides for Nancy to look at. The slides contained slices of liver from monkeys that had died in the monkey house.
She sat down at a microscope, adjusted the eyepieces, and began to explore the terrain. She zoomed around and paused. The terrain was a mess. Something had ravaged these cells. They were blitzed and pock- marked, as if the liver had been carpet bombed. Then she saw the dark blobs in the cells—the shadows that did not belong there. They were crystalloids. And they were huge.
This was extreme amplification.
“Oh, fuck,” she said in a low voice.
The bricks did not look like crystals. Ebola bricks come in all kinds of shapes—horsehoes, blobs, lumps, even rings. Some of the cells consisted of a single brick, a huge mother of a brick, a brick that had grown so fat that the whole cell had plumped up. Shed saw rotten pockets where all the cells had popped and died, forming a liquefied
