The Hot Zone (27 page)

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 feedings 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 she had just finished the necropsies of the seven animals. 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.

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 conditions 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 on, but they couldn’t seem to get a handle on it, and
USAMRIID
was trying to keep it that way.

Gene and the 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 Klages 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
around through these dark rooms. This is like a bombed-out area, he 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 on 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 that morning, Lieutenant 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 the 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 hundreds of thousands 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, in a low voice, said something like, “Why don’t you come over to the primate facility with me to look at the monkeys?”

Conspicuously, he did not invite McCormick of the C.D.C.

The Army was finally getting its foot in the door of 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, not 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 the 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, it 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 an 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 his dead brother 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 how he was doing. He started making noise the moment he perceived that the cats were being fed. He wanted some attention, too.