he was not going to go inside that building. No way in hell. He had seen monkeys die too many times, and he could not bear it anymore. In any case, his job was to gather equipment and people and move them into the building, and then to extract the people and equipment and dead animals safely.
He had saved lists, long lists of all the gear he had brought to Kitum Cave. He pawed through his papers, swearing gently. He had literally tons of African gear. He had squirreled it away in all kinds of hiding places at the Institute, where other people couldn’t find it and rip it off.
Gene was terribly excited, and also afraid. His nightmares about Ebola virus, the bad dreams of liquid running through pinholes into his space suit, had never really gone away. He would still wake up thinking, My god, there’s been an exposure. He had spent almost ten years hunting Ebola and Marburg in Africa, with little success, and suddenly one of the bastards had reared its head in Washington. His favorite saying came back to him: “Chance favors the prepared mind.” Well, the chance had come. If a piece of gear had been handy in Kitum Cave, it would be handy in the monkey house. As Gene thought about it, he realized that the building was very much like Kitum Cave. It was an enclosed air space. Dead air. Air-handling system broken, failed. During all over the place. Monkey urine in pools. A hot cave near Washington. And there were people who had been inside the cave who might be infected with virus by now. How would you move your teams in and out of the cave? You would have to set up a staging area. You would have to have a gray area—an air lock with a chemical shower of some kind. Somewhere inside that building lived a Level 4 life form, and it was growing, multiplying, cooking inside hosts. The hosts were monkeys and, perhaps, people.
2000 Hours, Wednesday
Dan Dalgard left USAMRIID and drove back to his office on Leesburg Pike, arriving there around eight o’clock. The office was deserted; everyone had gone home. He straightened up his desk, shut down his computer, and removed a floppy disk that contained his diary, his “Chronology of Events.” He put the disk into his brief case. He said good night to a security guard at the front desk and drove home. On the road, he realized that he had forgotten to call his wife to tell her that he would be late. He stopped at a Giant Food supermarket and bought her a bunch of cut flowers, carnations and mums. When he arrived home, he reheated his dinner in the microwave and joined his wife in the family room, where he ate sitting in a recliner chair. He was exhausted. He put another log into the wood stove and sat down at his personal computer, which was located next to his clock-repair bench. He inserted the floppy disk and began typing. He was bringing his diary up to date.
So much had happened that he had difficulty keeping it all straight in his mind. In the morning, he had learned that the monkey caretaker named Jarvis Purdy was in the hospital, reportedly with a heart attack. Jarvis was resting comfortably, and there had been no reports that his condition was getting worse. Should I have notified the hospital that Jarvis might be infected with Ebola? If he does have Ebola, and it spreads within the hospital, am I liable? Jesus! I’d better get someone to go over to the hospital first thing tomorrow and tell Jarvis what’s going on. If he hears on the news first, he’s liable to have another heart attack!
He had gotten all the other monkey caretakers fitted with respirators, and he had briefed them on what was known about the transmission of Ebola and Marburg to humans, and he had suspended all daily operations in the building other than feeding once a day, observation, and cleaning of the animal rooms. He had briefed the staff in the laboratory on Leesburg Pike—which had been handling monkey blood and tissue samples—about the need to handle these specimens as if they were infected with the AIDS virus.
I must remember to inform labs that have received animal shipments from us to notify the C.D.C. if any unusual animal deaths occur. What about the exposure to those people who had been working on the air-handling system? What about the laundry service? Wasn’t there a telephone repairman in recently? Perhaps last week—I can’t remember just when that was. Holy Christ! Have I missed anything?
While he was updating the day’s events on the computer, the telephone rang. It was Nancy Jaax on the line. She sounded tired. She told him that her findings were consistent with either SHF or Ebola. She said it could be either one or both. Her results were ambiguous.
RECONNAISSANCE
November 30, Thursday
By the time Dan Dalgard woke up the next morning—it was now Thursday, exactly a week after Thanksgiving Day—he had made up his mind to invite the Army in to clean up one room, Room H, where the outbreak now seemed to be centered. He telephoned C.J. Peters and gave the Army permission to enter the monkey house. The news that they had the green light for a biohazard operation spread instantly through USAMRIID.
Colonel Jerry Jaax called a meeting of all the commissioned officers on his staff, along with two sergeants. They were Major Nathaniel (Nate) Powell, Captain Mark Haines, Captain Steven Denny, Sergeant Curtis Klages, and Sergeant Thomas Amen, and he invited a civilian animal caretaker named Merhl Gibson to attend. These people were the core of his team. He put it casually to them: “Do you want to go to Reston? ” Some of them had not heard of Reston. He explained what was going on, saying, “There are some monkeys that need to be euthanized. We’d like for you to play. Do you want in? Do you want to go?” They all said they wanted to play. He also figured that Nancy was going to play. That meant that he and Nancy would be inside the building at the same time. The children would be on their own tomorrow.
They were going to make an insertion into the monkey house, go into one room, kill the monkeys in that room, and take samples of tissue back to the Institute for analysis. They were going to do the job in space suits, under condition of Level 4 biocontainment. The team would move out at 0500 hours tomorrow morning. They had less than twenty-four hours to get ready. Gene Johnson was gathering his biohazard equipment right now.
Gene drove down to Virginia and arrived at the monkey house in midmorning for a reconnaissance, to get a sense of the layout of the building and to figure out where to put the air lock and gray zone, and how to insert the team into the building. He went with Sergeant Klages, who was wearing fatigues. As they turned into the parking lot, they saw a television van parked in front of the monkey house, the newscaster and his crew drinking coffee and waiting for something to happen. It made Gene nervous. The news media had begun to circle around the story early one, but they couldn’t seem to get a handle on it, and USAMRIID was trying to keep it that way.
Gene and sergeant parked under a sweet-gum tree by the low brick building and went in through the front door. As they opened the door, the smell of monkey almost knocked them over. Whoa, Sergeant Klages thought, Whoa—we shouldn’t even be in here without a space suit. The building stank of monkey. something ugly was happening here. The whole god-damned place could be hot; every surface could be hot. The monkey workers had stopped cleaning the cages, because they did not want to go into the monkey rooms.
They found Bill Volt and told him they wanted to scout the building to determine the best way for the teams to enter tomorrow. Volt offered them a chair in his office while they talked. They didn’t want to sit down, didn’t want to touch any surfaces in his office with their bare hands. They noticed that Volt had a candy habit. He offered them a box full of Life Savers, Bit-O-Honeys, and Snickers bars—“Help yourselves,” he said. Sergeant Klanges stared at the candy with horror and mumbled, “No, thank you.” He was afraid to touch it.
Gene wanted to go into the monkey area and see Room H, the hot spot. It was at the back of the building. He did not want to walk through the building to get to that room. He did not want to breathe too much of the building’s air. Poking around, he discovered another route to the back of the building. The office space next door was empty and had been vacated some time ago; the electric power was cut off, and ceiling panels were falling down. He got a flashlight and circled around through these dark rooms. This is like a bombed-out area, he
