The Hot Zone (18 page)

Soon afterward, Dan Dalgard began to keep a diary. He kept it on a personal computer, and he would type in a few words each day. Working quickly and without much thought, he gave his diary a title, calling it, “Chronology of Events.” It was now getting close to the middle of November, and as the sun went down in the afternoon and traffic jams built up on Leesburg Pike near his office, Dalgard worked on his diary. Tapping at the
keys, he would later recall in his mind’s eye what he had seen inside the monkeys.

There was nothing much wrong with the dead animals, nothing that he could put his finger on. They simply stopped eating and died. They died with their eyes open, and with staring expressions on their faces. Whatever this disease was, the cause of death was not obvious. Was it a heart attack? A fever? What?

The spleen was inexplicably damaged. The spleen is a kind of bag that filters the blood, and it plays a role in the immune system. A normal spleen is a soft sack with a drippy red center, which reminded Dalgard of a jelly doughnut. When you cut into a normal spleen with a scalpel, it gives about as much resistance to the knife as a
jelly doughnut, and it drips a lot of blood. But these spleens had swelled up and turned as hard as a rock. A normal monkey spleen would be about the size of a walnut. These spleens were the size of a tangerine and were leathery. They reminded him of a piece of salami—meaty, tough, dry. His scalpel practically bounced off them. He could actually tap the blade of the scalpel on the spleen, and the blade wouldn’t dig in very much. What he didn’t realize—what he couldn’t see because it was almost inconceivable—was that the entire spleen had become a solid clot of blood. He was tapping his scalpel on a blood clot the size of a tangerine.

On Sunday, November 12, Dalgard puttered around the house in the morning, fixing things, doing little errands. After lunch, he once again returned to the monkey house. He found three more dead monkeys in Room F. They were dying steadily, a handful every night. There was a mystery developing in the Reston Primate Quarantine Unit.

One of the dead animals had been given the name O53. Dalgard carried the carcass of Monkey O53 into the examination room and opened it up and looked inside the body cavity. With a scalpel, he removed a piece of Monkey O53’s spleen. It was huge, hard, and dry. He took a Q-Tip and rubbed it in the dead monkey’s throat, collecting a little bit of mucus, a throat wash. Then he swirled the Q-Tip in a test tube full of distilled water and capped the tube. Anything alive in the mucus would be preserved temporarily.

By Monday morning—the day after he dissected Monkey O53—Dan Dalgard had decided to bring the problem with his monkeys to the attention of
USAMRIID
, at Fort Detrick. He had heard that the place had experts who could identify monkey diseases, and he wanted to get a positive identification of the sickness. Fort Detrick was about an hour’s drive northwest of Reston, on the other side of the Potomac River.

Dalgard ended up talking by phone with a civilian virologist named Peter Jahrling. Jahrling had a reputation for knowing something about monkey viruses. They had never talked before. Dalgard said to Jahrling, “I think we’ve got some
SHF
[simian hemorrhagic fever] in our monkeys. The spleen looks like a piece of salami when you slice it.” Dalgard asked Jahrling if he would look at some samples and give a diagnosis, and Jahrling agreed to help. The problem attracted Peter Jahrling’s curiosity.

Jahrling had worked at the Institute for most
of his career, after an early period in which he had lived in Central America and hunted for viruses in the rain forest (he had discovered several previously unknown strains). He had blond hair, beginning to go gray, steel-rimmed glasses, a pleasant, mobile face, and a dry sense of humor. He was by nature a cautious, careful person. Peter Jahrling spent large amounts of time wearing a Chemturion biological space suit. He performed research on defenses against hot viruses—vaccines, drug treatments—and he did basic medical research on rain-forest viruses. The killers and the unknowns were his specialty. He deliberately kept his mind off the effects of hot agents. He told himself, If you did think about it, you might decide to make a living another way.

Jahrling, his wife, and their three children lived in Thurmont, not far from Nancy and Jerry Jaax, in a brick ranch house with a white picket fence out front. The fence surrounded a treeless yard, and there was a large brown car parked in the garage. Although they lived near each other, the Jahrlings did not socialize with the Jaaxes, since their children were of different ages and since the families had different styles.

Peter Jahrling mowed his lawn regularly to keep the grass neat, so that his neighbors wouldn’t think he was a slob. Externally he lived a nearly featureless life among suburban neighbors, and very few of them knew that when he climbed into his mud-colored car he was headed for work in a hot zone, although the license plate on the car was
a vanity plate that said
LASSA
. Lassa is a Level 4 virus from West Africa, and it was one of Peter Jahrling’s favorite life forms—he thought it was fascinating and beautiful, in certain ways. He had held in his gloved hands virtually every hot agent known, except for Ebola and Marburg. When people asked him why he didn’t work with those viruses, he replied, “I don’t particularly feel like dying.”

After his telephone conversation with Dan Dalgard, Peter Jahrling was surprised and annoyed when, the next day, a few bits of frozen meat from Monkey O53 arrived at the Institute, brought by courier. What annoyed him was the fact that the bits of meat were wrapped in aluminum foil, like pieces of leftover hot dog.

The hot-dog-like meat was monkey spleen, and the ice around it was tinged with red and had begun to melt and drip. The samples also included the tube containing the throat wash and some blood serum from the monkey. Jahrling carried the samples into a Level 3 laboratory. Level 3 is kept under negative air pressure, to prevent things from leaking out, but you don’t need to wear a space suit there. People who work in Level 3 dress themselves like surgeons in an operating room. Jahrling wore a paper surgical mask, a surgical scrub suit, and rubber gloves. He peeled off the tin foil. A pathologist helped him do it, standing next to him. The bit of spleen rolled about on the
tin foil as they poked it—a hard little pink piece of meat, just as Dalgard had described it. Jahrling thought, Like the kind of mystery meat you get in a school lunchroom. Jahrling turned to the other man and remarked, “Good thing this ain’t Marburg,” and they chuckled.

Later that day, he called Dalgard on the telephone and said to him something like, “Let me tell you how to send a sample to us. People around here may be slightly paranoid, but they get a little upset when you send a sample and it drips blood on the carpet.”

One way to identify a virus is to make it grow inside living cells in a flask of water. You drop a sample of the virus into the flask, and the virus spreads through the cells. If the virus likes the cells, it will multiply. One or two viruses can become a billion viruses in a few days—a China of viruses in a bottle the size of one’s thumb.

A civilian technician named Joan Rhoderick cultured the unknown agent from Monkey O53. She ground up a bit of the monkey’s spleen with a mortar and pestle. That made sort of a bloody mush. She dropped the mush into flasks that contained living cells from the kidney of a monkey. She also took some of the throat mucus from Monkey O53 and put it into a flask, and she took some of the monkey’s blood serum and put it into another flask. Eventually she had a whole rack of flasks. She put them into a warmer—an incubator,
held at body temperature—and hoped that something would grow. Growing up a virus in culture is a lot like making beer. You follow the recipe, and you keep the brew nice and warm until something happens.

Dan Dalgard did not visit the monkey house the next day, but he telephoned Bill Volt, the manager, to find out how things were going. Volt reported that all the animals looked good. None of them had died during the night. The illness seemed to be fading away naturally. Fortunately, it looked like things were quieting down in Reston, and Dalgard felt relieved that his company had dodged a bullet.

But what were those Army people doing with the samples of monkey? He called Jahrling and learned that it was too soon to know anything. It takes several days to grow up a virus.

A day later, Bill Volt called Dalgard with bad news. Eight monkeys in Room F had stopped eating. In other words, eight monkeys were getting ready to die. The thing had come back.

Dalgard hurried over to the monkey house, where he found that the situation had deteriorated suddenly. There were many more animals with squinting, glazed, oval-shaped eyes. Whatever the thing was, it was steadily working its way through Room F. By now, fully half the animals in the room had died. It was going to kill the entire room if nothing was done to stop it. Dalgard became
extremely anxious for some news from Peter Jahrling.

Thursday, November 16, arrived, and with it came news that monkeys had begun to die in rooms down the hallway from Room F. Late in the morning, Dan Dalgard received a telephone call from Peter Jahrling. A pathologist at the Institute had inspected the meat very carefully and had given it a tentative diagnosis of simian hemorrhagic fever—harmless to humans, lethal to monkeys.

Dalgard now knew that he had to move fast to contain the outbreak before the virus spread through the monkey house. Simian hemorrhagic fever is highly contagious in monkeys. That afternoon, he drove up Leesburg Pike to the office park in Reston. At five o’clock on a gray, rainy evening on the edge of winter, as commuters streamed home from Washington, he and another Hazleton veterinarian injected all the monkeys in Room F with lethal doses of anesthetic. It was all over quickly. The monkeys died in minutes.

Dalgard opened up eight healthy-looking carcasses to see if he could find any signs of simian fever inside them. He was surprised to see that there didn’t seem to be anything wrong with them. This greatly troubled him. Sacrificing the monkeys had been a difficult, disgusting, and disheartening task. He knew there was a disease in this room, and yet these monkeys were beautiful, healthy animals, and he had just killed them. The sickness had been entrenched in the building since early
October, and it was now the middle of November. The Army had given him a tentative diagnosis, probably the best diagnosis he would ever get, and he had been left with the unpleasant task of trying to salvage the lives of the remaining animals. He went home that evening feeling that he had had a very bad day. Later he would write in his diary:

Before he left the monkey house, he and the other veterinarian placed the dead monkeys in clear plastic bags and carried some of them across the hall to a chest freezer. A freezer can be as hot as hell. When a place is biologically hot, no sensors, no alarms, no instruments can tell the story. All instruments are silent and register nothing. The monkeys’ bodies were visible in the clear bags. They froze into contorted shapes, with their chest cavities spread wide and their intestines hanging out and dripping red icicles. Their hands were clenched into fists or open like claws, as if they were grasping at something, and their faces were expressionless masks, their eyes glazed with frost, staring at nothing.

Thomas Geisbert was an intern at the Institute, a kind of trainee. He was twenty-seven years old, a tall man with dark blue eyes and longish brown hair parted in the middle and hanging over his forehead. Geisbert was a skilled fisherman and a crack shot with a rifle, and he spent a lot of time in the woods. He wore blue jeans and cowboy boots, and tended to ignore authority. He was a local boy who had grown up near Fort Detrick. His father was the chief building engineer at the Institute, the man who repaired and operated the hot zones. When Tom Geisbert was a boy, his father had taken him to visit the Institute, and Tom had stared through the heavy glass windows at people in space suits, thinking it would be cool to do that. Now he was doing it, and it made him happy.

The Institute hired him to operate its electron microscope, which uses a beam of electrons to make images of small objects, such as viruses. It is an essential tool to have around a virus lab because
you can use it to make a photograph of a tiny piece of meat and find viruses in the meat. For Geisbert, identifying hot strains and classifying the tribes of viruses was like sorting butterflies or collecting flowers. He liked the loneliness of inner space, the sense of being forgotten by the world. He felt quiet and at peace with himself when he was padding around a hot zone in a space suit, carrying a rack of test tubes that held an unknown deadly agent. He liked to go into the Level 4 suites alone, rather than with a buddy, especially in the middle of the night, but his tendency to spend large amounts of time at his work had begun to affect his personal life, and his marriage was breaking up. He and his wife had separated in September. His troubles at home only reinforced his tendency to bury himself in Level 4.

One of Geisbert’s greatest happinesses in life, apart from his work, came from being in the outdoors, fishing for black bass and hunting for deer. He hunted for meat—he gave the venison to members of his family—and then, when he had got the meat he needed, he hunted for trophies. Every year around Thanksgiving, he went hunting in West Virginia, where he and some buddies rented a house for the opening of the deer season. His friends did not know much about what he did for a living, and he made no effort to tell them about it.