Jerry Jaax called Kansas City Homicide nearly every day during October and November. The investigator just couldn’t break the case. He began to think about getting a gun and going out to Kansas City to kill John’s business partner. He thought, If I do it, I’ll be in jail, and what about my children? And what if John’s partner hadn’t been behind the murder? Then I’ll have killed an innocent man.
NOVEMBER 1, WEDNESDAY
The colony manager at the Reston monkey house will be called Bill Volt. As he watched his monkeys die, Volt became alarmed. On November 1, a little less than a month after the shipment of monkeys had arrived, he put in a telephone call to Dan Dalgard, telling him that the monkeys that had recently arrived from the Philippines were dying in unusually large numbers. He had counted twenty-nine deaths out of a shipment of a hundred monkeys. That is, nearly a third of the monkeys had died. At the same time, a problem had developed with the building’s heating and air-handling system. The thermostat had failed, and the heat would not go off. The heaters dumped heat at full blast into the building, and the air-conditioning system would not kick in. It had become awfully hot inside the building. Volt wondered if the heat might be putting stress on the monkeys. He had noticed that most of the deaths had taken place in one room, Room F, which was located on a long hallway at the back of the building.
Dalgard agreed to drive over to the monkey house and have a look, but he became busy with other things and did not get there until the following week. When he arrived, Bill Volt took him to Room F, the focus of the deaths, so that Dalgard could inspect the monkeys. They put on white coats and surgical masks, and the two men walked down a long cinder-block corridor lined on both sides with steel doors leading to monkey rooms. The corridor was very warm, and they began to sweat. Through windows in the doors, they could see hundreds of monkey eyes looking at them as they passed. The monkeys were exquisitely sensitive to the presence of humans.
Room F contained only crab-eating monkeys from the October shipment from Ferlite Farms in the Philippines. Each monkey sat in its own cage. The monkeys were subdued. A few weeks ago, they had been swinging in the trees, and they didn’t like what had happened to them. Dalgard went from cage to cage, glancing at the animals. He could tell a lot about a monkey from the look in its eyes. He could also read its body language. He searched for animals that seemed passive or in pain.
Dalgard’s staring into their eyes drove them berserk. When he passed a dominant male and looked carefully at it, it rushed him, wanting to take him out. He found a monkey whose eyes had a dull appearance, not shiny and bright but glazed and somewhat inactive. The eyelids were down, slightly squinted. Normally the lids would be retracted so that you could see the entire iris. A healthy monkey’s eyes would be like two bright circles in the monkey’s face. This animal’s eyelids had closed down slightly, and they drooped, so that the iris had become a squinting oval. That was a sign of illness in the monkey.
He put on leather gauntlet gloves, opened the door of the cage, reached inside, and pinned the monkey down. He slipped one hand out of a glove and quickly felt the monkey’s stomach. Yes—the animal felt warm to the touch. So it had a fever. And it had a runny nose. He let go of the monkey and shut the door. He didn’t think that the animal was suffering from pneumonia or a cold. Perhaps the animal was affected by heat stress. It was very warm in this room. He advised Bill Volt to put some pressure on the landlord to get the heating system fixed. He found a second animal that also had droopy eyelids, with that certain squint in the eyes. This one also felt hot to the touch, feverish. So there were two sick monkeys in Room F.
Both monkeys died during the night. Bill Volt found them in the morning, hunched up in their cages, staring with glassy, half-open eyes. This greatly concerned Volt, and he decided to dissect the animals, to try to see what had killed them. He carried the two deceased monkeys into an examination room down the hallway and shut the door after him, out of sight of the other monkeys. (You can’t cut up a dead monkey in front of other monkeys—it will cause a riot.) He opened the monkeys with a scalpel and began his inspection. He did not like what he saw, and did not understand it, so he called Dalgard on the telephone and said, “I wonder if you could come over here and have a look at these monkeys.”
Dalgard drove over to the monkey house immediately. His hands, which were so confident and skillful at taking apart clocks, probed the monkeys. What he saw inside the animals puzzled him. They appeared to have died of heat stress, brought on, he suspected, by the problems with the heating system in the building—but their spleens were weirdly enlarged. Heat stress wouldn’t enlarge the spleen, would it? He noticed something else that gave him pause. Both animals had small amounts of blood in their intestines. What could do that?
Later that same day, another large shipment of crab-eating monkeys arrived from Ferlite Farms. Bill Volt put the new monkeys in Room H, two doors down the hall from Room F.
Dan Dalgard became very worried about the monkeys in Room F. He wondered if there was some kind of infectious agent going around the room. The blood in the gut looked like the effects of a monkey virus called simian hemorrhagic fever, or SHF. This virus is deadly to monkeys, although it is harmless to people. (It can’t live in humans.) Simian fever can spread rapidly through a monkey colony and will generally wipe it out.
It was now Friday, November 10. Dalgard planned to spend the weekend fixing his clocks in the family room of his house. But that Saturday morning at home, as he laid out his tools and the pieces of an antique clock that needed fixing, he could not stop thinking about the monkeys. He was worried about them. Finally he told his wife that he had to go out on company business, and he put on his coat and drove over to the monkey house and parked in front of the building and went in through the front door. It was a glass door, and as he opened it, he felt the unnatural heat in the building wash over him, and he heard the familiar screeches of monkeys. He went into Room F. “Kra! Kra!” the monkeys cried at him in alarm. There he found three more dead monkeys. They were curled up in their cages, their eyes open, expressionless. This was not good. He carried the dead monkeys into the examination room and slit the animals open, and looked inside.
Soon afterward, Dan Dalgard began to keep a diary. He kept it on a personal computer, and he would type in a few words each day. Working quickly and without much thought, he gave his diary a title, calling it, “Chronology of Events.” It was now getting close to the middle of November, and as the sun went down in the afternoon and traffic jams built up on Leesburg Pike near his office, Dalgard worked on his diary. Tapping at the keys, he would later recall in his mind’s eye what he had seen inside the monkeys.
The lesions by this time were showing a pattern of marked splenomegaly [swollen spleen]—strikingly dry on cut surface, enlarged kidneys, and sporadic occurrences of hemorrhage in a variety of organs.… Clinically, the animals showed abrupt anorexia [loss of appetite], and lethargy. When an animal began showing signs of anorexia, its condition deteriorated rapidly. Rectal temperatures taken on monkeys being sacrificed were not elevated. Nasal discharge, epistaxis [bloody nose] or bloody stools were not evident.… Many of the animals were in prime condition and had more body fat than is customary for animals arriving from the wild.
There was nothing much wrong with the dead animals, nothing that he could put his finger on. They simply stopped eating and died. They died with their eyes open, and with staring expressions on their faces. Whatever this disease was, the cause of death was not obvious. Was it a heart attack? A fever? What?
The spleen was inexplicably damaged. The spleen is a kind of bag that filters the blood, and it plays a role in the immune system. A normal spleen is a soft sack with a drippy red center, which reminded Dalgard of a jelly doughnut. When you cut into a normal spleen with a scalpel, it gives about as much resistance to the knife as a jelly doughnut, and it drips a lot of blood. But these spleens had swelled up and turned as hard as a rock. A normal monkey spleen would be about the size of
a walnut. These spleens were the size of a tangerine and were leathery. They reminded him of a piece of salami—meaty, tough, dry. His scalpel practically bounced off them. He could actually tap the blade of the scalpel on the spleen, and the blade wouldn’t dig in very much. What he didn’t realize—what he couldn’t see because it was almost inconceivable—was that the entire spleen had become a solid clot of blood. He was tapping his scalpel on a blood clot the size of a tangerine.
On Sunday, November 12, Dalgard puttered around the house in the morning, fixing things, doing little errands. After lunch, he once again returned to the monkey house. He found three more dead monkeys in Room F. They were dying steadily, a handful every night. There was a mystery developing in the Reston Primate Quarantine Unit.
One of the dead animals had been given the name O53. Dalgard carried the carcass of Monkey O53 into the examination room and opened it up and looked inside the body cavity. With a scalpel, he removed a piece of Monkey O53’s spleen. It was huge, hard, and dry. He took a Q-Tip and rubbed it in the dead monkey’s throat, collecting a little bit of mucus, a throat wash. Then he swirled the Q-Tip in a test tube full of distilled water and capped the tube. Anything alive in the mucus would be preserved temporarily.
INTO LEVEL 3
1989 NOVEMBER 13, MONDAY
By Monday morning—the day after he dissected Monkey O53—Dan Dalgard had decided to bring the problem with his monkeys to the attention of USAMRIID, at Fort Detrick. He had heard that the place had experts who could identify monkey diseases, and he wanted to get a positive identification of the sickness. Fort Detrick was about an hour’s drive northwest of Reston, on the other side of the Potomac River.
Dalgard ended up talking by phone with a civilian virologist named Peter Jahrling. Jahrling had a reputation for knowing something about monkey viruses. They had never talked before. Dalgard said to Jahrling, “I think we’ve got some SHF [simian hemorrhagic fever] in our monkeys. The spleen looks like a piece of salami when you slice it.” Dalgard asked Jahrling if he would look at some samples and give a diagnosis, and Jahrling agreed to help. The problem attracted Peter Jahrling’s curiosity.
Jahrling had worked at the Institute for most of his career, after an early period in which he had lived in Central America and hunted for viruses in the rain forest (he had discovered several previously unknown strains). He had blond hair, beginning to go gray, steel-rimmed glasses, a pleasant, mobile face, and a dry sense of humor. He was by nature a cautious, careful person. Peter Jahrling spent large amounts of time wearing a Chemturion biological space suit. He performed research on defenses against hot viruses—vaccines, drug treatments—and he did basic medical research on rain-forest viruses. The killers and the unknowns were his specialty. He deliberately kept his mind off the effects of hot agents. He told himself, If you did think about it, you might decide to make a living another way.
Jahrling, his wife, and their three children lived in Thurmont, not far from Nancy and Jerry Jaax, in a brick ranch house with a white picket fence out front. The fence surrounded a treeless yard, and there was a large brown car parked in the garage. Although they lived near each other, the Jahrlings did not socialize with the Jaaxes, since their children were of different ages and since the families had different styles.
Peter Jahrling mowed his lawn regularly to keep the grass neat, so that his neighbors wouldn’t think he was a slob. Externally he lived a nearly featureless life among suburban neighbors, and very few of them knew that when he climbed into his mud-colored car he was headed for work in a hot zone, although the license plate on the car was a vanity plate that said LASSA. Lassa is a Level 4 virus from West Africa, and it was one of Peter Jahrling’s favorite life forms—he thought it was fascinating and beautiful, in certain ways. He had held in his gloved hands virtually every hot agent known, except for Ebola and Marburg. When people asked him why he didn’t work with those viruses, he replied, “I don’t particularly feel like dying.”
After his telephone conversation with Dan Dalgard, Peter Jahrling was surprised and annoyed when, the next day, a few bits of frozen meat from Monkey O53 arrived at the Institute, brought by courier. What annoyed him was the fact that the bits of meat were wrapped in aluminum foil, like pieces of leftover hot dog.
The hot-dog-like meat was monkey spleen, and the ice around it was tinged with red and had begun to melt and drip. The samples also included the tube containing the throat wash and some blood serum from the monkey. Jahrling carried the samples into a Level 3 laboratory. Level 3 is kept under negative air pressure, to prevent things from leaking out, but you don’t need to wear a space suit there. People who work in Level 3 dress themselves like surgeons in an operating room. Jahrling wore a paper surgical mask, a surgical scrub suit, and rubber gloves. He peeled off the tin foil. A pathologist helped him do it, standing next to him. The bit of spleen rolled about on the tin foil as they poked it—a hard little pink piece of meat, just as Dalgard had described it. Jahrling thought, Like the kind of mystery meat you get in a school lunchroom. Jahrling turned to the other man and remarked, “Good thing this ain’t Marburg,” and they chuckled.
Later that day, he called Dalgard on the telephone and said to him something like, “Let me tell you how to send a sample to us. People around here may be slightly paranoid, but they get a little upset when you send a sample and it drips blood on the carpet.”
One way to identify a virus is to make it grow inside living cells in a flask of water. You drop a sample of the virus into the flask, and the virus spreads through the cells. If the virus likes the cells, it will multiply. One or two viruses can become a billion viruses in a few days—a China of viruses in a bottle the size of one’s thumb.
A civilian technician named Joan Rhoderick cultured the unknown agent from Monkey O53. She ground up a bit of the monkey’s spleen with a mortar and pestle. That made sort of a bloody mush. She dropped the mush into flasks that contained living cells from the kidney of a monkey. She also took some of the throat mucus from Monkey O53 and put it into a flask, and she took some of the monkey’s blood serum and put it into another flask. Eventually she had a whole rack of flasks. She put them into a warmer—an incubator, held at body temperature—and hoped that something would grow. Growing up a virus in culture is a lot like making beer. You follow the recipe, and you keep the brew nice and warm until something happens.
Dan Dalgard did not visit the monkey house the next day, but he telephoned Bill Volt, the manager, to find out how things were going. Volt reported that all the animals looked good. None of them had died during the night. The illness seemed to be fading away naturally. Fortunately, it looked like things were quieting down in Reston, and Dalgard felt relieved that his company had dodged a bullet.
But what were those Army people doing with the samples of monkey? He called Jahrling and learned that it was too soon to know anything. It takes several days to grow up a virus.
A day later, Bill Volt called Dalgard with bad news. Eight monkeys in Room F had stopped eating. In other words, eight monkeys were getting ready to die. The thing had come back.
Dalgard hurried over to the monkey house, where he found that the situation had deteriorated suddenly. There were many more animals with squinting, glazed, oval-shaped eyes. Whatever the thing was, it was steadily working its way through Room F. By now, fully half the animals in the room had died. It was going to kill the entire room if nothing was done to stop it. Dalgard became extremely anxious for some news from Peter Jahrling.
Thursday, November 16, arrived, and with it came news that monkeys had begun to die in rooms down the hallway from Room F. Late in the morning, Dan Dalgard received a telephone call from Peter Jahrling. A pathologist at the Institute had inspected the meat very carefully and had given it a tentative diagnosis of simian hemorrhagic fever—harmless to humans, lethal to monkeys.
Dalgard now knew that he had to move fast to contain the outbreak before the virus spread through the monkey house. Simian hemorrhagic fever i
s highly contagious in monkeys. That afternoon, he drove up Leesburg Pike to the office park in Reston. At five o’clock on a gray, rainy evening on the edge of winter, as commuters streamed home from Washington, he and another Hazleton veterinarian injected all the monkeys in Room F with lethal doses of anesthetic. It was all over quickly. The monkeys died in minutes.
Dalgard opened up eight healthy-looking carcasses to see if he could find any signs of simian fever inside them. He was surprised to see that there didn’t seem to be anything wrong with them. This greatly troubled him. Sacrificing the monkeys had been a difficult, disgusting, and disheartening task. He knew there was a disease in this room, and yet these monkeys were beautiful, healthy animals, and he had just killed them. The sickness had been entrenched in the building since early October, and it was now the middle of November. The Army had given him a tentative diagnosis, probably the best diagnosis he would ever get, and he had been left with the unpleasant task of trying to salvage the lives of the remaining animals. He went home that evening feeling that he had had a very bad day. Later he would write in his diary:
There was a notable absence of any hemorrhagic component. In general, the animals were unusually well fleshed (butterballs), young (less than 5 years), and in prime condition.
Before he left the monkey house, he and the other veterinarian placed the dead monkeys in clear plastic bags and carried some of them across the hall to a chest freezer. A freezer can be as hot as hell. When a place is biologically hot, no sensors, no alarms, no instruments can tell the story. All instruments are silent and register nothing. The monkeys’ bodies were visible in the clear bags. They froze into contorted shapes, with their chest cavities spread wide and their intestines hanging out and dripping red icicles. Their hands were clenched into fists or open like claws, as if they were grasping at something, and their faces were expressionless masks, their eyes glazed with frost, staring at nothing.
The Hot Zone Page 13