“Is it Marburg or some similar agent?” Dalgard asked.
“Yes, something like that,” Jahrling said. “We’ll have confirmation later in the day. I’m working on the tests now. I feel it’s unlikely the results will be positive for this second agent. But you should take precautions not to do any necropsies on any animals until we’ve completed the tests. Look, I don’t want to set off too many whistles and bells, but I don’t want you and your employees walking into that room unnecessarily.”
“How soon can you get back to me with definite yes or no about this second agent? We need to know as soon as possible.”
“I’ll call you back today. I promise,” Jahrling said.
Dalgard hung up the phone highly disturbed, but he maintained his usual calm manner. A second agent, and it sounded as if it was Marburg. The people who had died in Germany, he knew, had been handling raw, blood monkey meat. The meat was full of virus, and they got it on their hands, or they rubbed it on their eyelids. He and other people at the company had been cutting into sick monkeys since October—and yet no one had become sick. Everyone had worn rubber gloves. He wasn’t afraid for himself—he felt fine—but he began to worry about the others. He thought, Even if the virus is Marburg, the situation is still no different from before. We’re still stuck in a pot. The question is how to get ourselves out of this pot. He called Bill Volt and ordered him not to cut into any more
monkeys. Then he sat in his office, getting more and more annoyed as the day darkened and Peter Jahrling did not call him back. He wondered if any of the men had cut themselves with a scalpel while performing a dissection of diseased monkey. Chances were they wouldn’t file an accident report. He knew for sure that he had not cut himself. But he had performed a mass sacrifice of approximately fifty animals. He had been in contact with fifty animals. How long had it been since then? He should be showing some symptoms by now. Bloody nose, fever, something like that.
At five-thirty, he called Jahrling’s office and got a soldier on the phone, who answered by saying, “How can I help you, sir or ma’am? …I’m sorry, sir, Dr. Jahrling is not in his office… No sir, I don’t know where he is, sir… No, he has not left work. May I take a message, sir?” Dalgard left a message for Jahrling to call him at home. He was felling steadily more annoyed.
1500 Hours
Jahrling was in his space suit. He worked steadily all afternoon in his own lab, hot zone AA-4, at the center of the building, where he fiddled with the flasks of virus culture from the monkey house. It was a slow, irritating job. His tests involved making samples glow under ultraviolet light. If he could make the samples glow, then he knew he had the virus.
In order to do this, he needed to use blood serum from human victims. The blood serum would react to viruses. He went to the freezers, and got out vials of frozen blood serum from three people. Two of the people had died; and one had survived. They were:
1. Musoke—A test for Marburg. Serum from the blood of Dr. Shem Musoke, a survivor. (Presumably reactive against the Kitum Cave strain, which had started with Charles Monet and jumped into Dr. Musoke’s eyes in the black vomit.)
2. Boniface—A test for Ebola Sudan. From a man named Boniface who died in Sudan.
3. Mayinga—A test for Ebola Zaire. Nurse Mayinga’s blood serum.
The test was delicate, and took hours to complete. It was not made easier by the fact that he was shuffling around in his space suit the whole time.
First he put droplets of cells from the monkey culture onto glass slides, and let them dry, and treated them with chemicals. Then he put drops of the blood serum on the slides. They would glow in the presence of target virus.
Now it was time to look. This had to be done in total darkness, because the glow would be faint. He shuffled over to a storage closet, and went inside it, and closed the door behind him. A microscope sat on a table in the closet, and there was a chair, and from the wall hung an air hose. He plugged the hose into his space suit and put the slides into the microscope. Then he turned out the lights. He felt around in the darkness for the chair, and sat down. This was not a fun place to be if you happened to have a touch of claustrophobia—sitting in a pitch-black Level 4 closet while wearing a space suit. Peter Jahrling had made his peace with suffocation and darkness a long time ago. He waited for a minute to give his eye time to adapt to the dark, and the little sparkles of light in his eyes as they adjusted to the darkness eventually faded away, while cool, dry air roared around his face and whiffled the hair on his forehead. Then he looked through the binocular eyepieces of the microscope. He wore his eyeglasses inside his space suit, and that made it particularly difficult to see. He pressed the faceplate against his nose and squinted. He moved his face from side to side. His nose left a greasy streak inside his faceplate. He twisted his helmet unit it was turned nearly sideways. Finally he saw through the eyepieces.
Two circles drifted into his sight, and he focused his eyes, bringing the circles together. He was looking down into vast terrain. He saw cells dimly outlined in a faint glow. It was like flying over a country at night, over thinly populated lands. It was normal to see a faint glow. He was looking for a bright glow. He was looking for a city.
He scanned the slides with his eyes, back and forth, back and forth, moving across the microscopic world, looking for a telltale greenish glow.
The Musoke did not glow.
The Boniface glowed weakly.
To his horror, the Mayinga glowed brightly.
He jerked his head back. Aw, no! He adjusted his helmet and looked again. The Mayinga blood serum was still glowing. The dead woman’s blood was reacting to the virus in the monkey house. He got an ugly feeling in the pit of his stomach. Those monkeys didn’t have Marburg. They had Ebola. Those animals were dying of Ebola Zaire. His stomach lurched and turned over, and he sat frozen in the dark closet, with only the sound of his air and the thud of his heart.
CHAIN OF COMMAND
1600 Hours, Tuesday
This can’t be Ebola Zaire, Peter Jahrling thought. Somebody must have switched the samples by accident. He looked again. Yeah, the Mayinga blood serum was definitely glowing. It meant he and Tom could be infected with Ebola Zaire, which kills nine out of ten victims. He decided that he had made a mistake in his experiment. He must have accidentally switched around his samples or gotten something mixed up.
He decided to do the test again. He turned on the lights in the closet and scuffled out into his lab, this time keeping careful track of his vials, bottles, and slides to make sure that nothing got mixed up. Then he carried the new samples back into the closet and turned out the lights and looked again into the his microscope.
Once again, the Mayinga blood glowed.
So maybe it really was Ebola Zaire or something closely related to it—the dead woman’s blood “knew” this virus, and reacted to it. Good thing this ain’t Marburg—well, guess what, it ain’t Marburg. This is the honker from Zaire, or maybe its twin sister. Ebola had never seen outside Africa. What was it doing near Washington? How in the hell had it gotten here? What would it do? He thought, I’m onto something really hot.
He was wearing his space suit, but he didn’t want to take the time to decon out through the air lock. There was an emergency telephone on the wall in his lab. He disconnected his air hose to extinguish the roar of air so that he could hear through the receiver, and he punched C.J. Peters’ phone number.