They saw seven black plastic garbage bags sitting on the floor of the van. They could see the outlines of limbs and heads in the bags.
C.J. said to himself, What is this?
Nancy gritted her teeth and silently pulled in a breath. She could see how the bags bulged in places, as if liquid had pooled inside them. She hoped it wasn’t blood. “What on earth is all of that?” she exclaimed.
“They died last night,” Volt said. “They’re in double bags.”
Nancy was getting a nasty feeling in the pit of her stomach. “Has anybody cut himself fooling around with these monkeys?” she asked.
“No,” Volt replied.
Then Nancy noticed that C.J. was looking sideways at her. It was a significant look. The message was, So who’s going to drive the dead monkeys back to Fort Detrick?
Nancy stared back at C.J. He was pushing her, and she knew it. They were both division chiefs at the Institute. He outranked her, but he was not her boss. He can push me just so far, and I can push him right back. “I’m not putting that shit in the trunk of my car, C.J.,” she said. “As a veterinarian, I have certain responsibilities with regard to the transportation of dead animals, sir. I can’t just knowingly ship a dead animal with an infectious disease across state lines.”
Dead silence. A grin spread over C.J.‘s face.
“I agree that it needs to be done,” Nancy went on. “You’re a doc. You can get away with this.” She nodded at his shoulder boards. “This is why you put on those big eagles.”
They burst into nervous laughter.
Time was slipping away while the virus was amplifying inside the monkey house. C.J. inspected the bags—it was a relief to see that the monkeys were double-bagged or triple-bagged—and he decided to take them back to Fort Detrick and worry about health laws afterward. His reasoning, as he explained to me later, went like this: “If the guy drove them back to the Reston monkey facility, I felt there would be a certain added risk to the population just from his driving them around in the van, and there would be a delay in diagnosing them. We felt that we could quickly get a definite diagnosis of Ebola it would be in everyone’s favor.” Surely some smart Army lawyers could figure out why the act of carrying Ebola-ridden dead monkeys across state lines in the trunk of a private automobile was so completely legal that there had never ever been any question about it.
His read Toyota was not in the best of shape, and he had lost any interest in its resale value. He popped the trunk. It was lined with carpet, and he didn’t see any sharp edges anywhere that might puncture a plastic bag.
They didn’t have rubber gloves. So they would do the lifting bare-handed. Nancy, keeping her face well away from the enclosed air of the van, inspected the outside of the bags for any droplets of blood. “Have the exteriors of the bags been disinfected?” she asked Volt.
Volt said he’d washed the outsides of the bags with Clorox bleach.
She held her breath, fighting the puke factor, and picked up a bag. The monkey kind of slid around inside it. They piled the bags one by one gently in the Toyota’s trunk. Each monkey weighed between five and twelve pounds. The total weight came to around fifty pounds of Biohazard Level 4 liquefying primate. It depressed the rear end of the Toyota. C.J. closed the trunk.
Nancy was anxious to dissect the monkeys right away. If you left an Ebola monkey inside a plastic bag for a day, you’d end up with a bag of soup.
“Follow behind me, and watch for drips,” C.J. joked.
SPACE WALK
1400 Hours, Wednesday
They arrived at the Institute in midafternoon. C.J. Peters parked beside a loading dock on the side of the building and found some soldiers to help him carry the garbage bags to a supply air lock that led to the Ebola suite. Nancy went to the office of a member of her staff, a lieutenant colonel named Ron Trotter, and told him to suit up and go in; and she would follow. They would be buddies in the hot zone.
As she always did before going into Level 4, she took off her engagement ring and her wedding band, and locked them away in her desk. She and Trotter walked down the hall together, and he went first into the small locker room that led to AA-5 while she waited in the corridor. A light went on, telling her that he had gone on to the next level, and she swiped her security card across a sensor, which opened the door into the locker room. She took off all of her clothes, put on a long-sleeved scrub suit, and stood before the door that led inward, blue light falling on her face. Beside the door there was another security sensor. This one was a numerical key pad. You can’t bring your security card with you into the higher levels. A security card would be melted or ruined by chemicals during the decontamination process. Therefore you memorize your security code. She punched a string of numbers on the key pad, and the building’s central computer noticed that JAAX, NANCY, was attempting entry. Finding that she was CLEARED TO ENTER AA-5, the computer unlocked the door and beeped to let her know that she could proceed inward without setting off alarms. She walked through the shower stall into the bathroom, put on white socks, and continued inward, opening a door that led to the Level 3 staging area.
There she met Lieutenant Colonel Trotter, a stocky, dark haired man whom Nancy had worked with for many years. They put on their inner gloves and taped the cuffs. Nancy put a pair of hearing protectors over her ears. She had started wearing them a while back, when people had begun to suspect that the roar of air in you suit might be loud enough to damage your hearing. They edged around each other as they fiddled with their suits. People wearing biohazard space suits tend to step around on another like two wrestlers at the beginning of a match, watching the other person’s every move, especially watching the hands to make sure they don’t hold a sharp object. This cringing becomes instinctive.
They closed up their suits and lumbered across the staging area to a larger air-lock door. This was a supply air lock. It did not lead into the hot zone. It led to the outside world. They opened it. On the floor of the air lock sat the seven garbage bags.
“TAKE AS MANY AS YOU CAN CARRY,” she sad to Lieutenant Colonel Trotter.
He picked up a few bags, and so did she. They shuffled back across the staging area to the air-lock door that led to Level 4. She picked up a metal pan containing tools. She was getting warm, and her faceplate fogged up. They opened air-lock door and stepped in together. Nancy took a breath and gathered her thoughts. She imagined that passing through the gray-zone door into Level 4 was like a space walk, except that instead of going into outer space, you went into inner space, which was full of pressure of life trying to get inside you suit. People went into Level 4 areas all the time at the Institute, particularly the civilian animal caretakers. But going into a containment zone to perform a necropsy on an animal that had died of an amplified unknown hot agent was something a little different. This was high-hazard work.
Nancy centered herself and brought her breathing under control. She opened the far door and went through to the hot side. Then she reached back inside the air lock and pulled the chain in the chemical shower. That started a decon cycle running in the air lock that would eliminate any hot agents that might have leaked into the air lock as they were going through.
They put on their boots and headed down the cinder-block hallway, lugging the monkeys. Their air was going stale inside their space suits, and they needed to plug in right away.
They came to a refrigerator room, and put all the bags in the refrigerator except for one. This bag they carried into the necropsy room. Stepping around each other cautiously, they plugged in their air hose, and dry air cleared their faceplates. The air thundered distantly beyond Nancy’s hearing protectors. They gloved up, pulling surgical gloves over their space-suit gloves. She laid her tools and specimen container at the head of the table, counting them off one by one.
Trotter untwisted some ties on the garbage bag and opened it, and the hot zone inside the bag merged with the hot zone of the room. He and Nancy together lifted the monkey out and laid it on the dissection table. She
