Gene and 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 Klanges 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 circled 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 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 in the morning, Leutenant 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 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 hundred of thousand 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 said something like, “Why don’t you come over to the primate facility with me to look at the monkeys?”
Now they would finally get a chance to see 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, no 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 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, t 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.