switched on a surgical lamp.
Unclouded brown eyes stared at her. The eyes looked normal. They were not red. The whites were white, and the pupils were clear and black, dark as night. She could see a reflection of the lamp in the pupils. Inside the eyes, behind the eyes, there was nothing. No mind, no existence. The cells had stopped working.
Once the cells in a biological machine stop working, it can never be started again. It goes into a cascade of decay, falling toward disorder and randomness. Except in the case of viruses. They can turn off and go dead. Then, if they come in contact with a living system, they switch on and multiply. The only thing that “lived” inside this monkey was the unknown agent, and it was dead, for the time being. It was not multiplying or doing anything, since the monkey’s cells were dead. But if the agent touched living cells, Nancy’s cells, it would come alive and begin to amplify itself. In theory, it could amplify itself around the world in the human species.
She took up a scalpel and slit the monkey’s abdomen, making a slow and gentle cut, keeping the blade well away from her gloved fingers. The spleen was puffed up and tough, leathery, like a glob of smoke salami. She did not see any bloody leisons inside this monkey. She had expected that the monkey’s interior would be a lake of blood, but no, this monkey looked all right, it had not bled into itself. If the animal had died of Ebola, this was not a clear case. She opened up the intestine. There was no blood inside it. The gut looked okay. Then she examined the stomach. There she found a ring of bleeding spots at the junction between the stomach and the small intestine. This could be a sign of Ebola, but it was not a clear sign. It could also be a sign of simian fever, not Ebola virus in this animal based on a visual inspection of internal organs during necropsy.
Using a pair of blunt scissors, she clipped wedges out of the liver and pressed them on glass slides. Slides and blood tubes were the only glass objects allowed in a hot zone, because of the danger of glass splinters if something broke. All laboratory beakers in the room were made of plastic.
She worked slowly, keeping her hands out of the body cavity, away from blood as much as possible, rinsing her gloves again and again in a pan of EnviroChem. She changed her gloves frequently.
Trotter glanced at her once in a while. He held the body open for her and clamped blood vessel, handing her tools when she asked for them. They could read each other’s lips.
“FORCEPS,” she mouthed silently, pointing to it. He nodded and handed her a forceps. They did not talk. She was alone with the sound of her air.
She was beginning to think that this monkey did not have Ebola virus. In biology, nothing is clear, everything is too complicated, everything is a mess, and just when you think you understand something, you peel off a layer and find deeper complications beneath. Nature is anything but simple. This emerging virus was like a bat crossing the sky at evening. Just when you thought you saw it flicker through your field of view, it was gone.
SHOOT-OUT
1400 Hour, Wednesday
While Nancy Jaax was working on the monkeys, C.J. Peters was in the conference room at Fort Detrick’s headquarters building. Careers were at stake in this room. Almost all of the people in the world who understood the meaning of Ebola virus were sitting around a long table. General Russell sat at the head of the table, a tall, tough- looking figure in uniform; he chaired the meeting. He did not want the meeting to turn into a power struggle between the Centers for Disease Control and the Army. He also did not want to let the C.D.C. take over this thing.
Dan Dalgard was there, wearing a dark suit, seeming reserved and cool; in fact, he churned with nervousness. Gene Johnson glowered over the table, bearded and silent. There were officials from the Virginia Department of Health and from Fairfax County. Fred Murphy—the codiscoverer of Ebola virus, the C.D.C. official whom General Russell had called—sat at the table beside another official from C.D.C., Dr. Joseph B. McCormick.
Joe McCormick was the chief of the Special Pathogens Branch of the C.D.C., the branch that had been run by Karl Johnson, another codiscoverer of Ebola. Joe McCormick was the successor to Karl Johnson—he had been appointed to the job when Johnson retired. He had lived and worked in Africa. He was a handsome, sophisticated medical doctor with curly dark hair and round Fiorucci spectacles, a brilliant, ambitious man, charming and persuasive, with a quick, flaring temper, who had done extraordinary things in his career. He had published major research articles on Ebola. Unlike anyone else in the room, he had seen and treated human cases of Ebola virus.
It happened that Joe McCormick and C.J. Peters couldn’t stand each other. There was bad blood between these two doctors that went back many years. They had both rifled the darkest corners of Africa searching for Ebola, and neither of them had found its natural hiding place. Like Peters, Joe McCormick evidently felt that now, finally, he was closing in on the virus and getting ready to make a spectacular kill.
The meeting began with Peter Jahrling, the codiscoverer of the strain that burned in the monkeys. Jahrling stood up and spoke, using charts and photographs. Then he sat down.
Now it was Dalgard’s turn to speak. He was exceedingly nervous. He described the clinical signs of disease that he had seen at the monkey house, and by the end he felt that no one had noticed his nervousness.
Immediately afterward, Joe McCormick got up and spoke. What he said remains a matter of controversy. There s an Army version and there is another version. According to Army people, he turned to Peter Jahrling and said words to this effect: Thanks very much, Peter. Thanks for alerting us. The big boys are here now. You can just turn this thing over to us before you hurt yourselves. We’ve got excellent containment facilities in Atlanta. We’ll just take all your materials and your samples of virus. We’ll take care of it from here.
In other words, the Army people thought McCormick tried to present himself as the only real expert on Ebola. They thought to be tried to take over the management of the outbreak and grab the Army’s samples of virus.
C.J. Peters fumed, listening to McCormick. He heard the speech with a growing sense of outrage, and thought it was “very arrogant and insulting.”
McCormick remembers something different. “I’m sure I offered some help or assistance with the animal situation at Reston,” he recalled, when I telephoned him. “I don’t know that there was any conflict. If there was any animosity, it came from their side, not ours, for reasons they know better than I. Our attitude was, Hey guys, good work.”
In the past, McMormick had publicly criticized Gene Johnson, the Army’s Ebola expert, for spending a lot of money to explore Kitum Cave and then not publishing his findings. McCormick expressed his feelings to me this way: “They want to tell you about their experiments, but the way to tell people about them is to publish them. That’s not an unreasonable criticism. They’re spending taxpayers’ money.” And besides, “None of them had spent as much time in the field as I had. I was the one of those who had dealt with human case of Ebola. No one else there had done that.”
What McCormick had done was this. In 1979, reports reached the C.D.C. that Ebola had come out of hiding and was burning once again in southern Sudan, in the same places where it had first appeared, in 1976. The situation was dangerous, not only because of the virus but because a civil war was going on in Sudan at the time— the areas where Ebola raged was also a war zone. McCormick volunteered to try to collect some human blood and bring strain back alive to Atlanta. No one else wanted to go to Sudan with him, so he went there alone. (It will be recalled that in 1976 Sudan outbreak, three years earlier, a C.D.C. doctor had allegedly become too frightened to get on the plane to Sudan.) McCormick arrived in southern Sudan in a light plane flown by tow terrified bush pilots. Around sunset, they landed at an airstrip near a Zande village. The pilots were too scared to get out of the plane. It was getting dark, and the pilots decided to spend the night in the cockpit, sitting on the airstrip. They warned McCormick they would leave the next morning at sunrise. He had until dawn to find the virus.
McCormick shouldered his backpack and walked into the village, looking for Ebola. He arrived at a mud hut.
