That evening, Jerry drove home alone. Nancy had put on a space suit and gone back into her lab to continue analyzing the monkey samples, and he had no idea when she would finish. He changed out of his uniform, and the telephone rang. It was Nancy’s brother on the line, calling from Kansas, saying that Nancy’s father was slipping, and that it looked as if the end was near. Nancy might be called home at any time for her father’s funeral. Jerry said that he would pass the word along to Nancy, and explained that she was working late.
Then he and Jason drove for half an hour in the direction of Washington and picked up Jaime at her gym. They decided to have supper at McDonald’s. The Jaax family, minus the mother, sat at a table, and while they ate, Jerry explained to the children why Mom was working late. He said, “Tomorrow morning, we’re going to be going down to a civilian place in space suits. There’s an important thing going on there. There are some monkeys that are sick. The situation has kind of emergency feel to it. We’ll be gone real early, and we may not get back until real late. You kids will be on your own.” They didn’t react much to what he said.
Jerry went on, “It’s possible that humans could get sick from the monkeys.”
“well, there’s not really any danger,” Jaime said, chewing her chicken nuggets.
“Well, no, it’s not really dangerous,” he said. “It’s more exciting than dangerous. And anyway, it’s just what your mom and I are doing right now.”
Jason said that he had seen something on television about it. It was on the news.
“I think what your mom does is something pretty unusual,” Jerry said to his son. And he thought, I’ll never convince him of that.
They returned home around nine-thirty, and Jerry had trouble making the kids go to bed. Perhaps they were afraid of what was happening but didn’t know how to express it; he wasn’t sure. More likely, they sensed an opportunity to have their own way when their mother wasn’t around. They said they wanted to wait up for her. He thought he would wait up for her, too. He made them put on their pajamas, and he brought them into bed with him, and they curled up on Nancy’s side of the water bed. There was a television in the room, and he watched the eleven-o’clock news. A newscaster was standing in front of the monkey house, and he was talking about people dying in Africa. By this time, the children had fallen asleep. He thought about John for a while, and then he picked up a book to try to read.
He was still awake when Nancy arrived home at one o’clock in the morning, looking fresh and clean, having taken a shower and shampooed her hair on her way out of Level 4.
As she looked around the house to see what needed to be done, she saw that Jerry had not tended to the animals. She put out food for the cats and dogs, and changed their water. She checked on Herky, the parrot, to see how he was doing. He started making noise the moment he perceived that the cats were being fed. He wanted some attention, too.
“Mom! Mom!” Herky hung upside down and laughed like a maniac, and cried, “Bad bird! Bad bird!” She took him out of his cage and stroked him on the head. He moved onto her shoulder and she preened his feathers.
Upstairs in the bedroom, she found the children asleep next to Jerry. She picked up Jaime and carried her into her own bedroom and tucked her into bed. Jerry picked up Jason and carried him to his bed—he was getting too big for Nancy to haul around.
Nancy settled into bed with Jerry. She said to him, “I have a gut feeling they’re not going to be able to contain the virus in that one room.” She told him she was worried that it could be spreading into other rooms through the air. That virus was just so damned infective she didn’t see how it would stay in one room. Something that Gene Johnson had once said to her came into her mind: “We don’t really know what Ebola has done in the past, and we don’t know what it might do in the future.”
Then Jerry broke the news to her about her father. Nancy was beginning to feel extremely guilty about not going home to be with him as he lay dying. She felt the tug of her last obligation to him. She wondered if she should bag this monkey thing and fly to Kansas. But she felt that it was her duty to go through with the operation. She decided to take a chance that her father would live awhile longer.
PART THREE
Smashdown
INSERTION
December 1, Friday
The alarm went off at four-thirty. Jerry Jaax got up, shaved, brushed his teeth, threw on clothes, and was out of there. The teams were going to wear civilian clothes. No one wanted to attract attention. Soldiers in uniform and camouflage, putting on space suits… it could set off a panic.
It was five o’clock by the time he arrived at the Institute. There was no sign of dawn in the sky. A crowd of people had already gathered by a loading dock on the side of the building, under floodlights. There had been a hard freeze during the night, and their breath steamed in the air. Gene Johnson, the Ajax of this biological war, paced back and forth across the loading dock among a pile of camouflaged military trunks—his stockpile of gear from Kitum Cave. The trunks contained field space suits, battery packs, rubber gloves, surgical scrub suits, syringes, needles, drugs, dissection tools, flashlights, one or two human surgery packs, blunt scissors, sample bags, plastic bottles, pickling preservatives, biohazard bags marked with red flowers, and hand-pumped garden sprayers for spraying beach on space suits and objects that needed to be decontaminated. Holding a cup of coffee in his fist, Gene grinned at the soldiers and rumbled, “Don’t touch my trunks.”
A white unmarked supply van showed up. Gene loaded his trunks into the van by himself and set off for Reston. He was the first wave.
By now, copies of The Washington Post were hitting driveways all over the region. It contained a front-page story about the monkey house:
One of the deadliest known human viruses has turned up for the first time in the United States, in a shipment of monkeys imported from the Philippines by a research laboratory in Reston.
A task force of top-level of yesterday devising a detailed program to trace the path of the rare Ebola virus and who might have been exposed to it. That includes interviews with the four or five laboratory workers who cared for the animals, which have since been destroyed as a precaution, and any other people who were near the monkeys.
Federal and state health officials played down the possibility that any people had contracted the virus, which has a 50 to 90 percent mortality rate and can be highly contagious to those coming into direct contact with its victims. There is no known vaccine. “There’s always a level of concern, but I don’t think anybody’s panicked,” said Col. C.J. Peters, a physician and expert on the virus.
C.J. knew that if people learned what this virus could do, there would be traffic jams heading out of Reston, with mothers screaming at television cameras, “Where are my children?” When he talked to the Washington Post reporters, he was careful not to discuss the more dramatic aspects of the operation. (“I thought it would not be a good idea to talk about space suits,” he explained to me much later.) He was careful not to use scary military terms such as amplification, lethal chain of transmission, crash and bleed, or major pucker factor. A military biohazard operation was about to go down in a suburb of Washington, and he sure as hell didn’t want the Post to find out about it.