The doors of the Slammer are kept locked, the air is kept under negative pressure, and your telephone calls are monitored—because people have emotional breakdowns in the Slammer and try to escape. They start flaking out by the second week. They become clinically depressed. Noncommunicative. They stare at the walls, speechless, passive, won’t even watch television. Some of them become agitated and fearful. Some of them need to have a continual drip of Valium in the arm to keep them from pounding on the walls, smashing the viewing windows, tearing up the medical equipment. They sit on death row in solitary confinement, waiting for the spiking fevers, horrible pain in the internal organs, brain strokes, and finally the endgame, with its sudden, surprising, uncontrollable gushes of blood. Most of them claim loudly that they have not be exposed to anything. They deny that anything could go wrong with them, and ordinarily nothing does go wrong with them, physically, in the Slammer, and they come out healthy. Their minds are another story. In the Slammer, they become paranoid, convinced that the Army bureaucracy has forgotten about them, has left them to rot. When they come out, they are disoriented. They emerge through the air-lock door, pale, shaken, tentative, trembling, angry with the Army, angry with themselves. The nurses, trying to cheer them up, give them a cake studded with the number of candles equal to the number of days they’ve been living in the Slammer.
They blink in confusion and terror at a mass of flaming candles on their Slammer cake, perhaps more candles than they’ve ever seen on one of their own birthday cakes. One guy was locked in the Slammer for forty-two days.
Forty-two candles on his Slammer cake.
Many people who have been isolated in the Slammer choose to cut down on their work in Level 4, begin to find all kinds of excuses for why they really can’t put on a space suit today or tomorrow or the day after that. Many of the people who have been in the Slammer end up quitting their jobs and leaving the Institute altogether.
Peter Jahrling felt that, on the whole, he was not at much risk of contracting virus , nor was Tom. If he did contract it, he would know soon enough. His blood west test positive, or he would get a headache that wouldn’t go away. In any case, he believed very strongly that Marburg wasn’t easy to catch, and he didn’t think there was any danger to his family or to anyone else around town.
But think about Dan Dalgard cutting into monkeys. Bending over and breathing monkey when he opened their abdomens. He was bending over their intestines, over a pool of Marburg blood. So then, why isn’t Dalgard dead? Well, he reasoned, nothing’s happened to him, so maybe nothing will happen to us.
Where had it come from? Was it a new strain? What was it capable of doing to human? The discoverer of a new strain of virus gets to name it. Jahrling thought about that, too. If he and Tom were locked up in the Slammer, they would not be able to carry out any research on this virus. They were on the verge of a major discovery, and the glory of it perhaps tantalized them. To find a filovirus near Washington was the discovery of a lifetime.
For all these reasons, they decided to keep their mouths shut.
They decided to test their blood for the virus. Jahrling said something to Geisbert like, “We are going to get blood samples drawn from ourselves like right now.” If their blood went positive, they could immediately report to the Slammer. If their blood remained negative and they didn’t develop other symptoms, then there are little chance they could infect anyone else.
Obviously they did not want to go to the regular clinic to have an Army nurse take their blood. So they found a friendly civilian technician and he twisted a rubber band around their arms, and they watched while he filled some tubes with their blood. He understood what had happened, and he said he would keep his mouth shut. Jahrling then put on a space suit and carried his own blood into his Level 4 hot lab. He also took with him Geisbert’s blood and the flasks of milky stuff. It was very strange, handling your own blood while wearing a space suit. It seemed, however, quite risky to let his blood lie around where someone might be accidentally exposed to it. His blood had to be biocontained in a hot zone. If it was infected with Marburg, he didn’t want to be responsible for it killing anyone. He said to himself, Given that this was a piece of mystery meat sniffed out of a monkey carcass, I should have been a little more careful…
Tom Geisbert went off to collect some pickled monkey liver that he could photograph for viruses, hoping to prove that the Marburg-like agent lived in the monkeys. He found a plastic jug that contained sterilized pieces of liver from Monkey O53. He fished some liver out of the jug, clipped a few bits of it, and fixed the bit in plastic. This was a slow job and took many hours to finish. He left the plastic to cure overnight and went home for a couple of hours to try to get some sleep.
THE SECOND ANGEL
November 28, Tuesday
Tom Geisbert lived in a small town in West Virginia, across the Potomac River. After his separation from his wife, his two children had stayed with her for a time, and now they were staying with him, or rather, they were staying with his parents in their house down the road. Both his children were toddlers.
He got up at four o’clock in the morning, drank a cup of coffee, and skipped breakfast. He drove his Bronco in pitch darkness across the Potomac River and through Antietam National Battlefield, a broad ridge of cornfields and farmland scattered with stone monuments to the dead. He passed through the front gate of Fort Detrick, parked, and went past the security desk and into his microscope area.
The dawn came gray, gusty, and warm. As light the color of old aluminum glimmered around the Institute, Tom sliced pieces of monkey liver with his diamond knife and put them into the electron microscope. A few minutes later, he took a photograph of virus particles budding directly out of cells in the liver of Monkey O53. The animal’s liver was full of snakes. These photographs were definite proof that the virus was multiplying the Reston monkeys—that it was not a laboratory contamination.
He also found inclusion bodies inside the monkey’s liver cells. The animal’s liver was being transformed into crystal bricks.
He carried his new photographs to Peter Jahrling’s office. Then they both went to see Colonel C.J. Peters. The colonel stared at the photographs. Okay—he was convinced, too. The agent was growing in those monkeys. Now they would have to wait for Jahrling’s test results, because that would be the final confirmation that it was indeed Marburg.
Jahrling wanted to nail down this Marburg as fast as he could. He spent most of the day in a space suit, working in his hot lab, putting together his tests. In the middle of the day, he decided that he had to call Dan Dalgard. He couldn’t wait any longer, even without test results.
He wanted to warn Dalgard of the danger, yet he wanted to deliver the warning carefully, so as not to cause a panic in the monkey house. “You definitely have SHF in the monkey house,” he said. “We have definitely confirmed that. However, there is also the possibility of a second agent in at least some of the animals.”
“What agent? Can you tell me what agent?” Dalgard asked.
“I don’t want to identify the agent right now,” Jahrling said, “because I don’t want to start a panic. But there are serious potential public health hazards associated with it, if, in fact, we are dealing with this particular agent.”
Somehow, the way Jahrling used the words panic and particular made Dalgard think of Marburg virus. Everyone who handled monkeys knew about Marburg. It was a virus that could easily make people panic.