thought.
He found a door leading back into the monkey house. It led to a storeroom, and there was a closed corridor that headed deeper into the monkey house. Now he could see it all in his mind’s eye. The closed corridor would be the air lock. The storeroom would be the staging area. The team could put their space suits in this storeroom, out of sight of the television cameras. He drew a map on a sheet of paper.
When he understood the layout of the building, he circled to the front and told the monkey workers that he wanted the back areas of the building completely sealed off—airtight. He didn’t want an agent from Room H to drift to the front of the building and get into the offices. He wanted to lower the amount of contaminated air flowing into those offices.
There was a door that led to the back monkey rooms. They taped it shut with military brown sticky tape: the first line of defense against a hot agent. From now on, as Gene explained to the monkey workers, no one was to break the sticky tape, no one was to go inside those back rooms except Army people until Room H had been cleaned out. What Gene did not realize was that there was another way into the back rooms. You could get there without breaking the sticky tape on the door.
At eleven-thirty in the morning, Leutenant Colonel Nancy Jaax and Colonel C.J. Peters arrived at the corporate offices of Hazleton Washington on Leesburg Pike to meet with Dan Dalgard and to speak to a group of Hazleton lab workers who had been exposed to tissues and blood from sick monkeys. Since C.D.C. now had charge of the human aspects of the Ebola outbreak, Joe McCormick also arrived at the Hazleton offices at the same time as Jaax and Peters.
The lab employees had been handling tissue and blood from the monkeys, running tests on the material. They were mainly women, and some of them were extremely frightened, nearly in a panic. That morning, there had been radio reports during rush hour, as the women were coming to work, that Ebola virus had killed hundred of thousand of people in Africa. This was a wild exaggeration. But the radio newscasters had no idea what was going on, and now the women thought they were going to die. “We’ve been hearing about this on the radio,” they said to Jaax and McCormick.
Nancy Jaax claims that Joe McCormick did his best to calm them down, but that as he talked to the women about his experiences with Ebola in Africa, they seemed to become more and more frightened.
A woman got up and said, “We don’t care if he’s been to Africa. We want to know if we’re going to get sick!”
McCormick doesn’t have any recollection of speaking to the women. He said to me, “I never talked to them. Nancy Jaax talked to them about Ebola.”
Nancy thinks that they began to calm down when they saw a female Army colonel in a uniform. She asked the women, “Did any of you break a test tube? Do we have anyone here who stuck himself with a needle or cut himself?”
No one raised a hand.
“Then you’ll be all right,” she said to them.
A few minutes afterward, Dan Dalgard turned to C.J. Peters and said something like, “Why don’t you come over to the primate facility with me to look at the monkeys?”
Now they would finally get a chance to see the building.
They drove to the monkey house. By this time, Gene Johnson had closed off the back rooms and sealed the main entry door with sticky tape. Nancy and C.J., along with Dan Dalgard, circled around to the back of the building, put on rubber gloves and paper surgical masks, and went into Room H to look at the sick monkeys. Nancy and C.J. noticed with some concern that the monkey workers around the building were not wearing respirators, despite Dalgard’s order. No one offered a respirator to Nancy or C.J. either. This made them both nervous, but they did not say anything. When in a monkey house, do as the monkey workers do. They did not want to give offense by asking for breathing equipment, no at this delicate moment, not when they had finally gotten their first chance to look at the building.
In Room H, Dalgard picked out the sick animals, pointing to them. “This one is sick, this one looks sick, this one over here looks sick,” he said. The monkeys were quiet and subdued, but they rattled their cages now and then. Nancy stood well back from the cages and took shallow breaths, not wanting to let the smell of monkey get too deep into her lungs. A number of animals had already died—there were many empty cages in the room—and many of the other animals were obviously sick. They sat at the backs of their cages, passive and blank faced. They were not eating their monkey biscuits. She saw that some had runny noses. She averted her eyes and behaved respectfully around the monkeys, because she did not want a monkey to get a notion in its head to spit at her. They have good aim when they spit, and they aim for your face. She worried more about her eyes than anything else. Ebola has a special liking for the eyes. Four or five virus particles on the eyelid would probably do it.
She noticed something else that made her fearful. These monkeys had their canine teeth. The company had not filed down the monkeys’ fangs. The canines on these hummers were as big as the canines on any guard dog you’ll ever see, and that was a rude awakening. A monkey can run amazingly fast, t can jump long distances, and it uses its tail as a gripper or a hook. It also has a mind. Nancy thought, An angry monkey is like a flying pit bull terrier with five prehensile limbs—these critters can do a job on you. A monkey directs its attacks toward the face and head. It will grab you by the head, using all four limbs, and then it will wrap its tail around your neck to get a good grip, and it will make slashing attacks all over your face with its teeth, aiming especially for the eyes. This is not a good situation if the monkey happens to be infected with Ebola virus. A six-foot-tall man and a ten-pound monkey are pretty evenly matched in a stand-up fight. The monkey will be all over the man. By the end of the fight, the man may need hundreds of stitches, and could be blinded. Jerry and his team would have to be exquisitely careful with these monkeys.
That evening, Jerry drove home alone. Nancy had put on a space suit and gone back into her lab to continue analyzing the monkey samples, and he had no idea when she would finish. He changed out of his uniform, and the telephone rang. It was Nancy’s brother on the line, calling from Kansas, saying that Nancy’s father was slipping, and that it looked as if the end was near. Nancy might be called home at any time for her father’s funeral. Jerry said that he would pass the word along to Nancy, and explained that she was working late.
Then he and Jason drove for half an hour in the direction of Washington and picked up Jaime at her gym. They decided to have supper at McDonald’s. The Jaax family, minus the mother, sat at a table, and while they ate, Jerry explained to the children why Mom was working late. He said, “Tomorrow morning, we’re going to be going down to a civilian place in space suits. There’s an important thing going on there. There are some monkeys that are sick. The situation has kind of emergency feel to it. We’ll be gone real early, and we may not get back until real late. You kids will be on your own.” They didn’t react much to what he said.
Jerry went on, “It’s possible that humans could get sick from the monkeys.”
“well, there’s not really any danger,” Jaime said, chewing her chicken nuggets.
“Well, no, it’s not really dangerous,” he said. “It’s more exciting than dangerous. And anyway, it’s just what your mom and I are doing right now.”
Jason said that he had seen something on television about it. It was on the news.
“I think what your mom does is something pretty unusual,” Jerry said to his son. And he thought, I’ll never convince him of that.
They returned home around nine-thirty, and Jerry had trouble making the kids go to bed. Perhaps they were afraid of what was happening but didn’t know how to express it; he wasn’t sure. More likely, they sensed an opportunity to have their own way when their mother wasn’t around. They said they wanted to wait up for her. He thought he would wait up for her, too. He made them put on their pajamas, and he brought them into bed with him, and they curled up on Nancy’s side of the water bed. There was a television in the room, and he watched the eleven-o’clock news. A newscaster was standing in front of the monkey house, and he was talking about people dying in Africa. By this time, the children had fallen asleep. He thought about John for a while, and then he picked up a book to try to read.
He was still awake when Nancy arrived home at one o’clock in the morning, looking fresh and clean, having taken a shower and shampooed her hair on her way out of Level 4.
As she looked around the house to see what needed to be done, she saw that Jerry had not tended to the animals. She put out food for the cats and dogs, and changed their water. She checked on Herky, the parrot, to see
