Jahrling, a civilian, had decided to notify the military chain of command.
It started with Colonel Clarence James Peter, MD. He was the chief of the disease-assessment division at the Institute, the doctor who dealt with the dangerous unknowns. (“The interesting stuff,” as he called it.) Peters had built up this division almost singlehandedly, and he ran it singlehandedly. He was a strange sort of military man, easygoing and casually brilliant. He had wire-rimmed glasses, a round, ruddy, pleasant face with mustache, a light Texas drawl. He was not a large man, but he liked to eat, and he believed himself to be overweight. He spoke fluent Spanish, which he had learned during his years in the jungles of Central and South America, hunting for hot agents. He was required by Army regulations to show up for work at eight o’clock in the morning, but he usually drifted in around ten o’clock. He disliked wearing a uniform. Usually he wore faded blue jeans with a flaming Hawaiian shirt, along with sandals and dweebish white socks, looking like he had just spent the night in a Mexican hotel. His excuse for his lack of uniform was that he suffered from athlete’s foot, an incurable tropical strain that he had picked up in Central America and could never quite get rid of, and so he had to wear socks with sandals in order to keep air circulating around his toes, and the jeans and flaming shirt were part of the package. Peters worked twelve-hour days and left work at night, often long after everyone else had gone home.
C.J. Peters could swim through a bureaucracy like a shark. He inspired great loyalty in his staff, and he made enemies easily and deliberately, when it suited him. He drove a red Toyota that had seen better days. On his travels in rain forests and tropical savannas, he ate with pleasure whatever the locals were eating. He had consumed frogs, snakes, zebra meat, jellyfish, lizards, and toads cooked whole in their skin, but he thought he had never eaten salamanders, at least none that he had been able to identify in a soup. He had eaten boiled monkey thigh, and he had drunk banana beer fermented with human saliva. In central America, while leading an expedition in search of Ebola virus, he had found himself in termite country during swarming season, and he had waited by termite nest and collected the termites as they swarmed out and had eaten them raw. He thought they had a nice sort of nutty taste. He liked termites so much that he refrigerated them with his blood samples, to keep the termites fresh all day so that he could snack on them like peanuts with his evening gin as the sun went down over the African plains. He was fond of suffocated guinea pig baked in its own blood and viscera. The guinea pig is split open like a book, offering treasures, and he enjoyed picking out and eating the guinea pig’s lungs, adrenal glands, and brain. And then, inevitably, he would pay a price. “I always get sick, but it’s worth it,” he once said to me. He was a great believer in maps, and his offices always contained many maps hung on the walls, showing locations of outbreaks of virus.
Jahrling put Geisbert’s photographs in a folder. He didn’t want anyone to see them. He found Peters at a meeting in the conference room that held the map of the world. Jahrling tapped him on the shoulder. “I don’t know what you are doing right now, C.J., but I’ve got something more important.”
“What is it?”
Jahrling held the folder closed. “It’s a little sensitive. I really don’t want to flash it here.”
“What’s so sensitive?”
Jahrling opened the folder slightly, just enough to give C.J. a glimpse of spaghetti, and snapped it shut.
The colonel’s face took on a look of surprise. He stood up, and without a word to the others, without even excusing himself, he walked out of the room with Jahrling. They went back to Jahrling’s office and closed the door behind them. Geisbert was there, waiting for them.
Jahrling spread the photographs on his desk. “Take a look at these, C.J.”
The colonel flipped through the photographs. “What’s this from, anyway?” he asked.
“It’s from those monkeys in Reston. It doesn’t look good to me. Tom thinks it’s Marburg.”
“We’ve been fooled before,” C.J. said. “A lot of things look like worms.” He stared at the photographs. The worms were unmistakable—and there were the crystalloids—the bricks. It looked real. It felt real. He experienced what he would later describe as a major pucker factor setting in. He thought, This is going to be an awful problem for that town in Virginia and these people there. “The first question,” he went on, “is what are the chances of laboratory contamination?” The stuff could be the Army’s own Cardinal strain—it might have somehow leaked out of a freezer and gotten into those flasks. But that seemed impossible. And the more they pondered, the more impossible it seemed. The Cardinal strain was kept in a different area of the building, behind several walls of biocontainment, a long distance from the monkey flasks. There were multiple safeguards to prevent the accidental release of a virus like Marburg Cardinal. That just wasn’t possible. It could not be a contamination. But it might be something other than a virus. It might be a false alarm.
“People around here see something long and stringy, and they think they’ve got a filovirus,” C.J. Peters said. “I’m skeptical. A lot of things look like Marburg.”
“I agree,” Jahrling replied. “It could be nothing. It could be just another Loch Ness monster.”
“What are you doing to confirm it?” the colonel asked him.
Jahrling explained that he was planning to test the cells with human blood samples that would make them glow if they were infected by Marburg.
“Okay, you’re testing for Marburg,” C.J. said. “Are you going to include a test for Ebola?”
“Sure, I already thought of that.”
“When will your tests be done? Because if those Monkeys have Marburg, we have to figure out what to do.”
Dan Dalgard, for example, was a prime candidate for coming down with Marburg, because he had dissected that monkey.
“I’ll have a definite yes or no on Marburg by tomorrow,” Jahrling said.
C.J. Peters turned to Tom Grisbert and said that he wanted more proof—he wanted pictures of the agent actually growing in monkey liver from a monkey that had died in the monkey house. That would prove that it lived in the monkeys.
C.J. could see that a military and political crisis was brewing. If the public found out what Marburg does, there could be panic. He stood up with a photograph of snakes in his hand and said, “If we are going to announce that Marburg has broken out near Washington, we had better be damned sure we are right.” Then he dropped the photograph on Jahrling’s desk and returned to his meeting under the map of the world.
After C.J. Peters left Jahrling’s office, a delicate conversation occurred between Peter Jahrling and Tom Geisbert. They shut the door and talked quietly about the whiffing incident. It was something they had better get straight between them. Neither of them had mentioned to Colonel C.J. Peters that they had whiffed that flask.
They counted the days back to their exposure. Ten days had passed since they had uncapped the flask and whiffed what could be eau de Marburg. Tomorrow would be day eleven. The clock was ticking. They were in the incubation period. What were they going to do? What about their families?
They wondered what Colonel Peters would do if he found out what they had done. He might order them into the Slammer—the Level 4 biocontainment hospital. They could end up in the Slammer behind air
locks and double steel doors, tended by nurses and doctors wearing space suits. A month in the Slammer while the doctors hovered over you in space suits drawing samples of your blood just waiting for you to crash.