Today she might put on a biohazard space suit. She was in training for veterinary pathology, the study of disease in animals. Her specialty was turning out to be the effects Biosafety Level 4 hot agents, and in the presence of those kinds of agents you need to wear a space unit. She was also studying for her pathology-board exams, which were coming up in a week. As the sun rose that morning over the apple orchards and fields to the east of town, she opened her books and hunched over them. Grackles began croaking in the trees, and trucks began to move along the streets of Thurmont, below her window. The palm of her right hand still throbbed.
At seven o’clock, she went down t the master bedroom and woke Jaime, who was curled up in the bed. She went into Jason’s room. Jason was harder to wake, and Nancy had to shake him several times. Then the babysitter arrived, an older woman named Mrs. Trapane, who got Jaime and Jason dressed and gave them their breakfasts while Nancy climbed back up to the cupola and returned to her books. Mrs. Trapane would see Jason off to the school bus and would watch Jaime at home until Nancy came back from work that evening.
At seven-thirty, Nancy closed her books and kissed her children goodbye. She thought to herself, Have to remember to stop at the bank and get some money to pay Mrs. Trapane. She drove the Honda alone to work, heading south on the Gettysburg road, along the foot of Catoctin Mountain.
As she approached Fort Detrick, in the city of Frederick, the traffic thickened and slowed. She turned off the highway and arrived at the main gate of the base. A guard waved her through. She turned right, drove past the parade grounds with its flagpole, and parked her car near a massive, almost windowless building made of concrete and yellow bricks that covered almost ten acres of ground. Tall vent pipes on the roof discharged filtered exhaust air that was being pumped out of sealed biological laboratories inside the building. This was the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, or USAMRIID.
Military people often call USAMRIID the Institute. When they call the place USAMRIID, they drawl the word in a military way, making it sound like “you Sam rid,” which gives it some hang time in the air. The mission of USAMRIID is medical defense. The Institute conducts research into ways to protect soldiers again biological weapons and natural infectious diseases. It specializes in drugs, vaccines, and biocontainment. At the Institute, there are always a number of programs going on simultaneously—research into vaccines for various kind of bacteria, such as anthrax and botulism, research into the characteristics of viruses that might infect American troops, either naturally or in the form of a battlefield weapon. Beginning with the Second World War, Army labs at Fort Detrick performed research into offensive biological weapons—the Army was developing strains of lethal bacteria and viruses that could be loaded into bombs and dropped on an enemy. In 1969, President Richard M. Nixon signed an executive order that outlawed the development of offensive biological weapons in the United States. From then on, the Army labs were converted to peaceful uses, and USAMRIID was founded. It devoted itself to developing protective vaccines, and it concentrated on basic research into ways to control lethal micro- organisms. The Institute knows ways to stop a monster virus before it ignites an explosive chain of lethal transmission in the human race.
Major Nancy Jaax entered the building through the back entrance an showed her security badge to a guard behind a desk, who nodded and smiled at her. She headed into the main block of containment zones, traveling through a maze of corridors. There were soldiers everywhere, dressed in fatigues, and there were civilian scientists and technicians wearing ID badges. People seemed very busy, and rarely did anyone stop to chat with someone else in the corridors.
Nancy wanted to see what had happened to the Ebola monkeys during the night. She walked along a Biosafety Level 0 corridor, heading for a Level 4 biocontainment area known as AA-5, or the Ebola suite. The levels are numbered 0, 2, 3 and finally 4, the highest. (For some reason, there is no Level 1.) All the containment levels at the Institute, from Level 2 to Level 4, are kept under negative air pressure, so that if a leak develops, air will flow into the zones rather than outward to the normal world. The suite known as AA-5 was a group of negative-pressure biocontainment rooms that had been set up as a research lab for Ebola virus by a civilian Army scientist named Eugene Johnson. He was an expert in Ebola and its sister, Marburg. He had infected several monkeys with Ebola virus, and he had been giving them various drugs to see if they would stop the Ebola infection. In recent days, the monkeys had begun to die. Nancy had joined Johnson’s Ebola project as the pathologist. It was her job to determine the cause of death in the monkeys.
She came to a window in a wall. The window was made of heavy glass, like that in an aquarium, and it looked directly into the Ebola suite, directly into Level 4. You could not see the monkeys through this window. Every morning, a civilian animal caretaker put on a space unit and went inside to feed the monkeys and clean their cages and check on their physical condition. This morning there was a piece of paper taped to the inside of the glass, with handwritten lettering on it. It had been left there by a caretaker. The note said that during the night two of the animals had “gone down”. This is, they had crashed and bled out.
When she saw the note, she knew that she would be putting on a space suit and going in to dissect the monkeys. Ebola virus destroyed an animal’s internal organs, and the carcass deteriorated abruptly after death. It softened, and the tissue turned into jelly, even if you put it in a refrigerator to keep it cold. You wanted to dissect the animals quickly, before the spontaneous liquefaction began, because you can’t dissect gumbo.
When Nancy Jaax first applied to join the pathology group at the Institute, the colonel in charge it didn’t want to accept her. Nancy thought it was because she was a woman. He said to her, “This work is not for a married female. You can either going to neglect your work or neglect your family.” One day, she brought her resume into his office, hoping to persuade him to accept her. He said, “I can have anybody I want in my group”—implying that he didn’t want her because she wasn’t good enough—and he mentioned the great Thoroughbred stallion Secretariat. “If I want to have Secretariat in my group,” he said, “I can get Secretariat.”
“Well, sir, I am no plow horse!” she roared at him, and slammed her resume on his desk. He reconsidered the matter and allowed her to join the group.
When you begin working with biological agents, the Army starts you in Biosafety Level 2, and then you move up to Level 3. You don’t go into Level 4 until you have a lot of experience, and the Army may never allow you to work there. In order to work in the lower levels, you must have a number of vaccinations. Nancy had vaccinations for yellow fever, Q fever, Rift Valley fever, the VEE, EEE, and WEE complex (brain viruses that live in horses), and tularemia, anthrax and botulism. And, of course, she had a serious of shots for rabies, since she was a veterinarian. Her immune system reacted badly to all the shots; they made her sick. The Army therefore yanked her out of the vaccination program. At this point, Nancy Jaax was essentially washed up. She couldn’t proceed with any kind of work with Level 3 agents, because she couldn’t tolerate the vaccinations. There was only one way she could continue working with dangerous infectious agents. She had to get her assigned to work in a space suit in Level 4 areas. There aren’t any vaccines for Level 4 hot agents. A Level 4 hot agent is a lethal virus for which there is no vaccine and no cure.
Ebola virus is named for the Ebola River, which is the headstream of the Mongala River, a tributary of the Congo, or Zaire, River. The Ebola River empties tracts of rain forest, winding past scattered villages. The first known emergence of Ebola Zaire—the hottest type of Ebola virus—occurred September 1976, when it erupted simultaneously in fifty-five villages near the headwaters of the Ebola River. It seemed to come out of nowhere, and killed nine out of ten people it infected. Ebola Zaire is the most feared agent at the Institute. The general feeling around USAMRIID has always been “Those people who work with Ebola are crazy.” to mess around with Ebola is an easy way to die. Better to work with something safer, such as anthrax.
Eugene Johnson, the civilian biohazard expert who was running the Ebola research program at the Institute, had a reputation for being a little bit wild. He is something of a legend to the handful of people in the world who really know about hot agents and how to handle them. He is one of the world’s leading Ebola hunters. Gene Johnson is a large man, not to say massive, with a broad, heavy face and loose-flying disheveled brown hair and bushy brown beard and a gut that hangs over his belt, and glaring, deep eyes. If Gene Johnson were to put on a black leather jacker, he could pass for a roadie with Grateful Dead. He does not look at all like a man who works for the Army. He has a reputation for being a top-notch field epidemiologist (a person who studies viral diseases in the wild), but for some reason he does not often get around to publishing his work. That explains his somewhat mysterious reputation. When people who know Johnson’s work talk about him, you hear things like “Gene Johnson did this, Gene Johnson did that,” and it all sounds clever and imaginative. He is a rather shy man, somewhat suspicious of people, deeply suspicious of viruses, I think I have never met someone who is more afraid of viruses than Gene Johnson, and what makes his fear impressive is the fact that it is a deep intellectual respect, rooted in
