The expedition was a dry hole. All the sentinel animals remained healthy, and the blood and tissue samples from the other animals, insects, birds, Masai people, and their cattle showed no sign of Marburg virus. It must have been a bitter disappointment for Gene Johnson, so disheartening that he was never able to bring himself to publish an account of the expedition and its findings. There seemed to be no point in publishing the fact that he hadn’t found anything in Kitum Cave. All that he could say for sure is that Marburg lives in the shadow of Mount Elgon.
What Johnson did not know at the time, but what he sensed almost instinctively after the failure of the Kitum Cave expedition, was that the knowledge and experience he gained inside a cover in Africa, and the space suits and biohazard gear he carried back with him to the Institute, might serve him well at another time and in another place. He kept his African gear hidden away at the Institute, piled in olive-drab military trunks in storage rooms and in tractor trailers parked behind buildings and padlocked, because he did not want anyone else to touch his gear or use it or take it away from him. He wanted to be ready to load it on an airplane at a moment’s notice, in case Marburg or Ebola came to the surface again in Africa. And sometimes he thought of a favorite saying, a remark by Louis Pasteur, “Chance favors the prepared mind.” Pasteur developed vaccines for anthrax and rabies.
1989 Summer
The Army had always had a hard time figuring out what to do with Nancy and Jerry Jaax. They were married officers at the same rank in a small corps, the veterinary Corps. What do you do with a married pair of doggy doctors who need to be promoted? What if one of them (the wife) is trained in the use of space suits? Where do you send them? The Army assigned the Jaaxes to the Institute of Chemical Defense, near Aberdeen, Maryland. They sold their Victorian house and moved, bring their birds and animals with them. Nancy was not sorry to leave the house in Thurmont. They moved into a tract house, which was more to her liking, and there they began to raise fish in tanks, as a hobby, and Nancy went to work in an Army program to study the effects of nerve gas on rat brains. Her job was to open up the rat’s head and figure out what the nerve gas has done to the brain. This was safer and more pleasant than working with Ebola, but it was a little dull. Eventually she and Jerry both received promotions to lieutenant colonel and wore silver oak leaves on their shoulders. Jaime and Jason were growing up. Jaime became a superb gymnast, short and wiry like Nancy, and Nancy and Jerry had hopes for her in the nationals, if not the Olympics. Jason grew into a tall, quiet kid. Herky, their parrot, did not change. Parrots live for many years. He went on shouting “Mom! Mom!” and whistling the march from The Bridge on The River Kwai.
Colonel Tony Johnson, Nancy’s commanding officer when she had worked at USAMRIID, remembered her competence in a space suit and wanted to get her back. He felt she belonged at the Institute. He was eventually appointed head of pathology at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, and when that happened, his old job came open, the job of chief of pathology at the Institute. He urged the Army to appoint Nancy Jaax to the position, and the Army listened. They agreed that she ought to be doing hot biological work, and she got the job in the summer of 1989. At the same time, the Army appointed Jerry Jaax head of the veterinary division at the Institute. So the Jaax became important and rather powerful figures. Nancy went back to biological work in space suits. Jerry still didn’t like it, but he had learned to live with it.
With these promotions, the Jaax sold their house in Aberdeen and moved back to Thurmont, in August 1989. This time, Nancy told Jerry it was not going to be a Victorian. They bought a contemporary Cape house with dormer windows, with a lot of land around it, meadow and forest, where the dogs could run and the children could play. Their house stood on the lower slope of Catoctin Mountain, overlooking the town, above a sea of apple orchards. From their kitchen window, they could look into the distance over rolling farmland where armies had marched during the Civil War. Central Maryland stretched away to the horizon in folds and hollows, in bands of trees and rumpled field, studded by silos that marked the presence of family farms. High over the beautiful countryside, passenger jets crisscrossed the sky, leaving white contrails behind them.
PART TWO
The Monkey House
RESTON
1989 October 4, Wednesday
The city of Reston, Virginia, is a prosperous community about ten miles west of Washington, D.C., just beyond the Beltway. On a fall day, when a western wind clears the air, from the upper floors of the office buildings in Reston you can see the creamy spike of Washington Monument, sitting in the middle of the Mall, and beyond it the Capitol dome. The population of Reston has grown in recent years, and high-technology business and blue-chip consulting firms have moved into office parks there, where glass buildings grew up during the nineteen-eighties like crystals. Before the crystals appeared, Reston was surrounded by farmland, and it still contains meadows. In spring, the meadows burst into galaxies of yellow-mustard flowers, and robins and thrashers sing in stands of tullip tresses and white ash. The town offers handsome residential neighborhoods, good schools, parks, golf courses, excellent day care for children. There are lakes in Reston named American naturalists (like Thoreau, Lake Audubon), surrounded by expensive water-front homes. Reston is situated within easy commuting distance of downtown Washington. Along Leesburg Pike, which funnels traffic into the city, there are developments of executive homes with Mercedes-Benzes parked in crescent-shaped driveways. Reston was once a country town, and its history still flights obliteration, like a nail that won’t stay hammered down. Among the upscale houses, you see the occasionally bungalow with cardboard stuffed in a broken window and a pickup truck parked in the side yard. In the autumn, vegetable stands along Leeburg Pike sell pumpkins and butternut squash.
Not far from Leesburg Pike there is a small office park. It was built in nineteen-sixties, and is not as glassy or as fashionable as the newer office parks, but it is clean and neat, and it has been there long enough for sycamores and sweet-gum trees to grow up around it and throw shade over the lawns. Across the street, a McDonald’s is jammed at lunch hour with office workers. In the autumn of 1989, a company called Hazleton Research Products was using a one-story building in the office park as a monkey house. Hazleton Research Products is a division of Corning, Inc. Corning’s Hazleton unit is involved with the importation an sale of laboratory animals. The Hazleton monkey house was known as the Reston Primate Quarantine Unit.
Each year, about sixteen thousand wild monkeys are imported into the United States from the tropical regions of the earth. Imported monkeys must be held in quarantine for a month before they are shipped anywhere else in the United States. This is prevent the spread of infectious diseases that could kill other primates, including humans.
Dan Dalgard, a doctor of veterinary medicine, was the consulting veterinarian at the Reston Primate Quarantine Unit. He was on call to take care of the monkeys if they became sick or needed medical attention. He was actually a principal scientist at another company owned by Corning, called Hazleton Washington. This company has its headquarters on Leesburg Pike not far from the monkey house, and so Dalgard could easily drive his car over to Reston to check on the monkeys if he was needed there. Dalgard was a tall man in his fifties, with metal-framed glasses, pale blue eyes, and a soft drawl that he had picked up in Tedas at veterinary school. Generally he wore a gray business suit if he was working in his office, or a white lab coat if he was working with animals. He had an international reputation as knowledgeable and skilled veterinarian who specialized in primate husbandry. He was a calm even-tempered man. On evenings and weekends, he repaired antique clocks as a hobby. He liked to fix things with his hands; it made him feel peaceful and calm, and he was patient with a jammed clock. He sometimes had longings to leave veterinary medicine and devote himself full-time to clocks.