The Hot Zone

1980 New Year’s Day

Charles Monet was a loner. He was a Frenchman who lived by himself in a little wooden bungalow on the private lands of Nzoia Sugar Factory, a plantation in western Kenya what spread along the Nzoia River within sight of Mount Elgon, a huge, solitary extinct volcano that rises to a height of fourteen thousand feet near the edge of the Rift Valley. Monet’s history is a little obscure. As with so many expatriates who end up in Africa, it is not clear what brought him there. Perhaps he had been in some kind of trouble in France, or perhaps he had been drawn to Kenya by the beauty of the country. He was an amateur naturalist, fond of birds and animals but not of humanity in general. He was fifty-six years old, of medium height and medium build, with smooth, straight brown hair, a good-looking man. It seems that his only close friends were women who lived in towns around the mountain, yet even they could not recall much about him for the doctors who investigated his death. His job was to take care of the sugar factory’s water-pumping machinery, which drew water from the Nzoia River and delivered it to many miles of sugar-cane fields. They say that he spent most of his day inside the pump house by the river, as if it pleased him to watch and listen to machines doing their work.

So often in a case like this, it’s hard to pin down the details. The doctors remember the clinical signs, because no one who has seen the effects of a Biosafety Level 4 hot agent on a human being can ever forget them, but the effects pile up, one after the other, until they obliterate the person beneath them. The case of Charles Monet emerges in a cold geometry of clinical fact mixed with flashes of horror so brilliant and disturbing that we draw back and blink, as if we are staring into a discolored alien sun.

Monet came into the country in the summer of 1979, around the time that human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV, which causes AIDS, made a final breakout from the rain forest of central Africa and began its long burn through the human race. AIDS had already fallen like a shadow over the population, although no one yet knew it existed. It had been spreading quietly along the Kinshasa Highway, a transcontinental road that wanders across Africa from east to west and passes along the shores of Lake Victoria within sight of Mount Elgon. HIV is a highly lethal but not very infective Biosafety Level 2 agent. It does not travel easily from person to person, and it does not travel through the air. You don’t need to wear a biological suit while handling blood infected with HIV.

Monet worked hard in the pump house during the week, and on his weekends and holidays he would visit forested areas near the sugar factory. He would bring food with him, and he would scatter it around and watch while birds and animals ate it. He could sit in perfect stillness while he observed an animal. People who knew him recalled that he was affectionate with wild monkeys, that he had a special way with them. They said that he would sit holding a piece of food while a monkey approached him, and the animal would eat from his hand.

On the evenings, he kept to himself in his bungalow. He had a housekeeper, a woman named Johnnie, who cleaned up and prepared his meals.

He was teaching himself how to identify African birds. A colony of weaverbirds lived in a tree near his house, and he spent time watching them build and maintain their baglike nests. They say that one day near Christmas he carried a sick bird into his house, where it died, perhaps in his hands. The bird may have been a weaverbird—no one knows—and it may have died of a Level 4 virus—no one knows. He also had a friendship with a crow. It was a pied crow, a black-and-white bird that people in Africa sometimes make into a pet. This crow was a friendly, intelligent bird that liked to peek on the roof of Monet’s bungalow and watch his comings and goings. When the crow was hungry, it would land on the veranda and walk indoors, and Monet would feed it scraps of food from his table.

He walked to work every morning through the cane fields, a journey of two miles. That Christmas season, the workers had been burning the fields, and so the fields were scorched and black. To the north across the charred landscape, twenty-five miles away, he could see Mount Elgon. The mountain displayed a constantly changing face of weather and shadow, rain and sun, a spectacle of African light. At dawn, Mount Elgon appeared as a slumped pile of gray ridges receding into haze, culminating in a summit with two peaks, which are opposed lips of the eroded cone. As the sun came up, the mountain turned silvery green, the color of the Mount Elgon rain forest, and as the day progressed clouds appeared and hid the mountain from view. Late in the afternoon, near sunset, the clouds thickened and boiled up into an anvil thunderhead that flickered with silent lightning. The bottom of the cloud was the color of charcoal, and the top of the cloud feathered out against the upper air and glowed a dull orange, illuminated by the setting sun, and above the cloud the sky was deep blue and gleamed with a few tropical stars.

He had a number of women friends who lived in the town of Eldoret, to the southeast of the mountain, where the people are poor and live in shacks made of boards and metal. He gave money to his women friends, and they, in return, were happy to love him. When his Christmas vacation arrived, he formed a plan to go camping on Mount Elgon, and he invited one of the women from Eldoret to accompany him. No one seems to remember her name.

Monet and his friend drove in a Land Rover up the long, straight red-dirt road that leads to Endebess Bluff, a prominent cliff on the eastern side the volcano. The road was volcanic dust, as red as dried blood. They climbed onto the lower skirts of the volcano and went through cornfields and coffee plantations, which gave way to grazing land, and the road passed old, half-ruined English colonial farms hidden behind lines of blue-gum trees. The air grew cool as they went higher, and crested eagles flapped out of cedar trees. Not many tourists visit Mount Elgon, so Monet and his friend were probably the only vehicle on the road, although there would have been crowds of people walking on foot, villagers who cultivate small farms on the lower slopes of the mountain. They approached the frayed outer edge of the Mount Elgon rain forest, passing by fingers and islands of trees, and they passed the Mount Elgon Lodge, an English inn built in the earlier part of century, now falling into disrepair, its walls cracked and its paint peeling off in the sun and rain.

Mount Elgon straddles the border between Uganda and Kenya and is not far from Sudan. The mountain is a biological island of rain forest in the center of Africa, an isolated world rising above dry plains, fifty miles across, blanketed with trees, bamboo, and alpine moor. It is a knob in the backbone of central Africa. The volcano grew up seven to ten million years ago, producing fierce eruptions and explosions of ash, which repeatedly wiped out the forests that grew on its slopes, until it attained a tremendous height. Before Mount Elgon was eroded down, it may have been the highest mountain in Africa, higher than Kilmanjaro is today.

It is still the widest. When the sun rises, it throws the shadow of Mount Elgon westward and deep into Uganda, and when the sun sets, the shadow reaches eastward across Kenya. Within the shadow of Mount Elgon lie villages and cities inhabited by various tribal groups, including the Elgon Masai, a pastoral people who came from the north and settled around the mountain some centuries ago, and who raise cattle. The lower slopes of the mountain are washed with gentle rains, and the air remains cool and fresh all year, and the volcanic soil produces rich crops of corn. The villages form a ring of human settlement around the volcano, and the ring is steadily closing around the forest on its slopes, a noose that is tangling the wild habitat of the mountain. The forest is being cleared away, the trees are being cut down for firewood or to make room for grazing land, and the elephant are vanishing.

A small part of Mount Elgon is a national park. Monet and his friend stopped at the park gate to pay their entrance fees. A monkey or perhaps a baboon—no one seems to remember—used to hang out around the gate, looking for handouts, and Monet enticed the animal to sit on his shoulder by offering it a banana. His friend laughed, but they stayed perfectly still while the animal ate. They drove a short way up the mountain and pitched their tent in a clearing of moist green grass that sloped down to a stream. The stream gurgled out of the rain forest, and it was a strange color, milky with volcanic dust. The grass was kept short by Cape buffalo grazing it, and was spotted with their dung.

The Elgon forest towered around their campsite, a web of gnarled African olive trees hung with moss and creepers and dotted with a black olive that is poisonous to humans. They heard a scuffle of monkeys feeding in the trees, a hum of insects, an occasional low huh-huh call of a monkey. They were colobus monkeys, and sometimes one would come down from a tree and scuttle across the meadow near the tent, watching them with alert, intelligent eyes. Flocks of olive pigeons burst from the trees on swift downward slants, flying at terrific speed, which is their strategy to escape from harrier hawks that can dive on them and rip them apart on the wing. There were camphor trees and teaks and African cedars and red stinkwood trees, and here and there a dark green cloud of leaves mushroomed above the forest canopy. These were the crowns of podocarpus trees, or podos, the largest trees in Africa, nearly as large as California sequoias. Thousands of elephants lived on the mountain then, and they could be heard moving through forest, making cracking sounds as they peeled bark and broke limbs from trees.

In the afternoon, it would have rained, as it usually does on Mount Elgon, and so Monet and his friend would have stayed in their tent, and perhaps they made love while a thunderstorm hammered the canvas. It grew dark; the rain tapered off. They built a fire and cooked a meal. It was New Year’s Eve. Perhaps they celebrated, drinking champagne. The clouds would have cleared off in a few hours, as they usually do, and the volcano would have emerged as a black shadow under the Milky Way. Perhaps Monet stood on the grass at the stroke of midnight and looked at the stars—neck bent backward, unsteady on his feet from the champagne.

On New Year’s morning, sometime after breakfast—a cold morning, air temperature in the forties, the grass wet and cold—they drove up the mountain along a muddy track and parked in a small valley below Kitum Cave. They bushwhacked up the valley, following elephant trails that meandered besides a little stream that ran through stands of olive trees and grassy meadows. They kept an eye out for Cape buffalo, a dangerous animal to encounter in the forest. The cave opened at the head of the valley, and the stream cascaded over its mouth. The elephant trails joined at the entrance and headed inside. Monet and his friend spent the whole of New Year’s Day there. It probably rained, and so they would have sat in the entrance for hours while the little stream poured down in a veil. Looking across the valley, they watched for elephants, and they saw rock hyraxes—furry animals the size of groundhogs—running up and down the boulders near the mouth of the cave.

Herds of elephants go inside Kitum Cave at night to obtain minerals and salts. On the plains, it is easy for elephants to find salt in hardpans and dry water holes, but in the rain forest salt is precious thing. The cave is large enough to hold as many as seventy elephant at a time. They spend the night inside the cave, dozing on their feet or mining the rock with their tusks. They pry and gouge rocks off the walls, and chew them to fragments between their teeth, and swallow the broken bits of rock. Elephant dung around the cave is full of crumbled rock.

Monet and his friend had a flashlight, and they walked back into the cave to see where it went. The mouth of the cave is huge—fifty-five yards wide—and it opens out even wider beyond the entrance. They crossed a platform covered with powdery dry elephant dung, their feet kicking up puffs of dust as they advanced. The light grew dim, and the floor of the cave rose upward in a series of shelves coated with green slime. The slime was bat guano, digested vegetable matter that had been excreted by a colony of fruit bats on the ceiling.

Bats whirred out of holes and flicked through their flashlight beams, dodging around their heads, making high-pitched cries. Their flashlights disturbed the bats, and more bats woke up. Hundreds of bat eyes, like red jewels, looked down on them from the ceiling of the cave. Waves of bat sound rippled across the ceiling and echoed back and forth, a dry, squeaky sound, like many small doors being opened on dry hinges. Then they saw the most wonderful thing about Kitum Cave. The cave is petrified rain forest. Mineralized logs stuck out of the walls and ceiling. They were trunks of rainforest trees turned to stone—teaks, podo trees, evergreens. An eruption of Mount Elgon about seven million years ago had buried the rain forest in ash, and the logs had been tranformed into opal and chert. The logs were surrounded by crystals, white needles of minerals that had grown out of the rock. The crystals were as sharp as hypodermic syringes, and they glittered in the beams of the flashlights.

Monet and his friend wandered through the cave, shining their lights on the petrified rain forest. Did he run his hands over the stone trees and prick his finger on a crystal? They found petrified bones of ancient hippos and ancestors of elephants. There were spiders hanging in webs among the logs. The spiders were eating moths and insects.

They came to a gentle rise, where the main chamber widened to more than a hundred yards across—wider than the length of a football field. They found a crevice and shined their lights down to the bottom. There was something strange down there—a mass of gray and brownish material. It was the mummified corpses of baby elephants. When elephants walk through the cave at night, they navigate by their sense of touch, probing the floor ahead of them with the tips of their trunks. The babies sometimes fall into the crevice.

Monet and his friend continued deeper into the cave, descending a slope, until they came to a pillar that seemed to support the roof. The pillar was scored with hatch marks and grooves, the marks of elephant tusks. If the elephants continued to dig away at the base of the pillar, it might eventually collapse, bringing down the roof of Kitum Cave with it. At the back of the cave, they found another pillar. This one was broken. Over it hung a velvety mass of bats, which had fouled the pillar with black guano—a different kind of guano from the green slime near the mouth of the cave. These bats were insect eaters, and the guano was an ooze of digested insects. Did Monet put his hand in the ooze?

Monet’s friend dropped out of sight for several years after that trip to Mount Elgon. Then, unexpectedly, she surfaced in a bar in Mombasa, where she was working as a prostitute. A Kenyan doctor who had investigated the Monet case happened to be drinking a beer in the bar, and he struck up an idle conversation with her and mentioned Monet’s name. He was stunned when she said, “I know about that. I come from western Kenya. I was the woman with Charles Monet.” He didn’t believe her, but she told him the story in enough detail that he became convinced she was telling the truth. She vanished after that meeting in the bar, lost in the warrens of Mombasa, and by now she has probably died of AIDS.

Charles Monet returned to his job at the pump house at the sugar factory. He walked to work each day across the burned cane fields, no doubt admiring the view of Mount Elgon, and when the mountain was buried in clouds, perhaps he could still feel its pull, like the gravity of an invisible planet. Meanwhile, something was making copies of itself inside Monet. A life form had acquired Charles Monet as a host, and it was replicating.

The headache begins, typically, on the seventh day after exposure to the agent. On the seventh day after his New Year’s visit to Kitum Cave—January 8, 1980—Monet felt a throbbing pain behind his eyeballs. He decided to stay home from work and went to bed in his bungalow. The headache grew worse. His eyeballs ached, and then his temples began to ache, the pain seeming to circle around inside his head. It would not go away with aspirin, and then he got a severe backache. His housekeeper, Johnnie, was still on her Christmas vacation, and he had recently hired a temporary housekeeper. She tried to take care of him, but she really did not know what to do. Then, on the third day after his headache started, he became nauseated, spiked a fever, and began to vomit. His vomiting grew intense and turned into dry heaves. At the same time, he became strangely passive. His face lost all appearance of life and set itself into an expressionless mask, with the eyeballs fixed, paralytic, and staring. The eyelids were slightly droopy, which gave him a peculiar appearance, as if his eyes were popping out of his head and half-closed at the same time. The eyeballs themselves seemed almost frozen in their sockets, and they turned bright red. The skin of his face turned yellowish, with brilliant starlike red speckles. He began to look like a zombie. His appearance frightened the temporary housekeeper. She didn’t understand the transformation in this man. His personality changed. He became sullen, resentful, angry, and his memory seemed to be blown away. He was not delirious. He could answer questions, although he didn’t seem to know exactly where he was.

When Monet failed to show up for work, his colleagues began to wonder about him, and eventually they went to his bungalow to see if he was all right. The black-and-white crow sat on the roof and watched them as they went inside. They looked at Monet and decided that he needed to get to a hospital. Since he was very unwell and no longer able to drive a car, one of his co-workers drove him to a private hospital in the city of Kisumu, on the shore of Lake Victoria. The doctors at the hospital examined Monet, and could not come up with any explanation for what he might have some kind of bacterial infection, they gave him injections of antibiotics, but the antibiotics had no effect on his illness.

The doctors thought he should go to Nairobi Hospital, which is the best private hospital in East Africa. The telephone system hardly worked, and it did not seem worth the effort to call any doctors to tell them that he was coming. He could still walk, and he had to get to Nairobi. They put him in a taxi to the airport, and he boarded a Kenya Airways flight.

A hot virus from the rain forest lives within a twenty-four-hour plan flight from every city on earth. All of the earth’s cities are connected by a web of airline routes. The web is a network. Once a virus hits the net, it can shoot anywhere in a day—Paris, Tokyo, New York, Los Angeles, wherever planes fly. Charles Monet and the life form inside him had entered the net.

The plane was a Fokker Friendship with propellers, a commuter aircraft that seats thirty-five people. It started its engines and took off over Lake Victoria, blue and sparkling, dotted with dugout canoes of fishermen. The Friendship turned and banked eastward, climbing over green hills quilted with tea plantations and small farms. The commuter flights hat drone across Africa are often jammed with people, and this flight was probably full. The plane climbed over belts of forest and clusters of round huts and villages with tin roofs. The land suddenly dropped away, going down in shelves and ravines, and changed in color from green to brown. The plane was crossing the Eastern Rift Valley. The passengers looked out the windows at the place where the human species was born. They saw specks of huts clustered inside circles of thornbush, with cattle trails radiating from the huts. The propellers moaned, and the Friendship passed through cloud streets, lines of puffy Rift clouds, and began to bounce and sway. Monet became airsick.

The seats are narrow and jammed together on these commuter airplanes, and you notice everything that is happening inside the cabin. The cabin is tightly closed, and the air recirculates. If there are any smells in the air, you perceive them. You would not have been able to ignore the man who was getting sick. He hunches over in his seat. There is something wrong with him, but you can’t tell exactly what is happening.

He is holding an airsickness bag over his mouth. He coughs a deep cough and regurgitates something into the bag. The bag swells up. Perhaps he glances around, and then you see that his lips are smeared with something slippery and red, mixed with black specks, as if he has been chewing coffee grounds. His eyes are the color of rubies, and his face is an expressionless mass of bruises. The red spots, which a few days before had started out as starlike speckles, expanded and merged into huge, spontaneous purple shadows; his whole head is turning black-and-blue. The muscles of his face droop. The connective tissue in his face is dissolving, and his face appears to hang from underlying bone, as if the face is detaching itself from the skull. He opens his mouth and gasps into the bag, and the vomiting goes on endlessly. It will not stop, and he keeps bringing up liquid, long after his stomach should have been empty. The airsickness bag fills up to the brim with a substance known as vomit negro, or the black vomit. The black vomit is not really black; it is a speckled liquid of two colors, black and red, a stew of tarry granules mixed with fresh red arterial blood. It is hemorrhage, and it smells like a slaughterhouse. The black vomit is loaded with virus. It is highly infective, lethally hot, a liquid that smell of the vomit negro fills the passenger cabin. The airsickness bag is brimming with black vomit, so Monet closes the bag and rolls up the top. The bag bulging and softening, threatening to leak, and he hands it to a flight attendant. When a hot virus multiplies in a host, it can saturate the body with virus particles, from the brain to the skin. The military experts then say that the virus has undergone “extreme amplification”. This is not something like the common cold. By the time an extreme amplification peaks out, an eyedropper of the victim’s blood may contain a hundred million particles of virus. During this process, the body is partly transformed into virus particles. In other words, the host is possessed by a life form that is attempting to convert the host into itself. The transformation is not entirely successful, however, and the end result is a great deal of liquefying flesh mixed with virus, a kind of biological accident. Extreme amplification has occurred in Monet, and the sign of it is the black vomit.

He appears to be holding himself rigid, as if any movement would rupture something inside him. His blood is clotting up—his bloodstream is throwing clots, and the clots are lodging everywhere. His liver, kidneys, lungs, hands, feet, and head are becoming jammed with blood clots. In effect, he is having a stroke through the whole body. Clots are accumulating in his intestinal muscles, cutting off the blood supply to his intestines. The intestinal muscles are beginning to die, and the intestines are starting to go slack. He doesn’t seem to be fully aware of pain any longer because the blood clots lodged in his brain are cutting off blood flow. His personality is being wiped away by brain damage. This is called depersonalization, in which the liveliness and details of character seem to vanish. He is becoming an automaton. Tiny spots in his brain are liquefying. The higher functions of consciousness are winking out first, leaving the deeper parts of the brain stem (the primitive rat brain, the lizard brain) still alive and functioning. It could be said that the who of Charles Mont has already died while the what of Charles Monet continues to live.

The vomiting attack appears to have broken some blood vessels in his nose—he gets a nosebleed. The blood comes from both nostrils, a shining, cloudless, arterial liquid that drips over his teeth and chin. This blood keeps running, because the clotting factors have been used up. A flight attendant gives him some paper towels, which he uses to stop up his nose, but the blood still won’t coagulate, and the towels soak through.

When a man is ill in an airline seat next to you, you may not want to embarrass him by calling attention to the problem. You say to yourself that this man will be all right. Maybe he doesn’t travel well in airplanes. He is airsick, the poor man, and people do get nosebleeds in airplanes, the air is so dry and thin… and you ask him, weakly, if there is anything you can do to help. He does not answer, or he mumbles words you can’t understand, so you try to ignore it, but the flight seems to go on forever. Perhaps the flight attendants offer to help him. But victims of this type of hot virus have changes in behavior that can render them incapable of responding to an offer of help. They become hostile, and don’t want to be touched. They don’t want to speak. They answer questions with grunts or monosyllables. They can’t seem to find words. They can tell you their name, but they can’t tell you the day of the week or explain what has happened to them.

The Friendship drones through the clouds, following the length of the Rift Valley, and Monet slumps back in the seat, and now he seems to be dozing… Perhaps some of the passengers wonder if he is dead. No, no, he is not dead. He is moving. His red eyes are open and moving around a little bit.

It is late afternoon, and the sun is falling down into the hills to the west of the Rift Valley, throwing blades of light in all directions, as if the sun is cracking up on the equator. The Friendship makes a gentle turn and crosses the eastern scarp of the Rift. The land rises higher and changes in color from brown to green. The Ngong Hills appear under the right wing, and the plane, now descending, passes over parkland dotted with zebra and giraffes. A minute later, it lands at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport. Monet stirs himself. He is still able to walk. He stands up, dripping. He stumbles down the gangway onto the tarmac. His shirt is a red mess. He carries no luggage. His only luggage is internal, and it is a load of amplified virus. Monet has ben transformed into a human virus bomb. He walks slowly into the airport terminal and through the building and out to a curving road where taxis are always parked. The taxi drivers surround him—“Taxi?” “Taxi?”

“Nairobi… Hospital,” he mumbles.

One of them helps him into a car. Nairobi taxi drivers like to chat with their fares, and this one probably asks if he is sick. The answer should be obvious. Monet’s stomach feels a little better now. It is heavy, dull, and bloated, as if he has eaten a meal, rather than empty and torn and on fire.

The taxi pulls onto the Uhuru Highway and heads into Nairobi. It goes through grassland studded with honey-acacia trees, and it goes past factories, and then it comes to a rotary and enters the bustling street life of Nairobi. Crowds are milling on the shoulders of the road, women walking on beaten dirt pathways, men loitering, children riding bicycles, a man repairing shoes by the side of the road, a tractor pulling a wagonload of charcoal. The taxi turns left onto the Ngong Road and goes past a city park and up a hill, past lines of tall blue-gum trees, and it turns up a narrow road and goes past a guard gate and enters the grounds of Nairobi Hospital. It parks at a taxi stand beside a flower kiosk. A sign by a glass door says CASUALTY DEPT. Monet hands the driver some money and gets out of the tax and opens the glass door and goes over to the reception window and indicates that he is very ill. He has difficulty speaking.

The man is bleeding, and they will admit him in just a moment. He must wait until a doctor can be called, but the doctor will see him immediately, not to worry. He sits down in the waiting room.

It is a small room lined with padded benches. The clear, strong ancient light of East Africa pours through a row of window and falls across a table heaped with soiled magazines, and makes rectangles on a pebbled gray floor that has a drain in the center. The room smells vaguely of woodsmoke and sweat, and it is jammed with bleary-eyed people, Africans and Europeans sitting shoulder to shoulder. There is always someone in Casualty who has a cut and is waiting for stitches. People wait patiently, holding a washcloth against the scalp, holding a bandage pressed around a finger, and you may see a spot of blood on the cloth. So Charles Monet is sitting on a bench in casualty, and he does not look very much different from someone else in the room, except for his bruised, expressionless face and his red eyes. A sign on the wall warns patients to watch out for purse thieves, and another sign says:

Monet maintains silence, waiting to receive attention. Suddenly he goes into the last phase. The human virus bomb explodes. Military biohazard specialists have ways of describing this occurrence. They say that the victim has “crashed and bled out”. Or more politely they say that the victim has “gone down”.

He becomes dizzy and utterly weak, and his spine goes limp and nerveless and he loses all sense of balance. The room is turning around and around. He is going into shock. He leans over, head on his knees, and brings up an incredible quantity of blood from his stomach and spills it onto the floor with a gasping groan. He loses consciousness and pitches forward onto the floor. The only sound is a choking in his throat as he continues to vomit while unconscious. Then come a sound like bedside being torn in half, which is the sound of his bowels opening and venting blood from sloughed his gut. The linings of his intestines have come off and are being expelled along with huge amount of blood. Monet has crashed and is bleeding out.

The other patients in the waiting room stand up and move away from the man on the floor, calling for a doctor. Pools of blood spread out around him, enlarging rapidly. Having destroyed its host, the agent is now coming out of every orifice, and is “trying” to find a new host.

1980 January 15

Nurses and aides came running, pushing a gurney along with them, and they lifted Charles Monet onto the gurney and wheeled him into the intensive care unit at Nairobi Hospital. A call for a doctor went out over the loudspeakers: a patient was bleeding in the ICU. A young doctor named Shem Musoke ran to the scene. Dr. Musoke was widely considered to be one of the best young physicians at the hospital, an energetic man with a warm sense of humor, who worked long hours and had a good feel for emergencies.

He found Monet lying on the gurney. He has no idea what was wrong with the man, except that he was obviously having some kind of massive hemorrhage. There was no time to try to figure out what has caused it. He was having difficulty breathing—and then his breathing stopped. He had inhaled blood and had a breathing arrest.

Dr. Musoke felt for a pulse. It was weak and sluggish. A nurse ran and fetched a laryngoscope, a tube that can be used to open a person’s airway. Dr. Musoke ripped open Monet’s shirt so that he could observe any rise and fall of the chest, and he stood at the head of the gurney and bent over Monet’s face until he was looking directly into his eyes, upside down.

Monet stared redly at Dr. Musoke, but there was no movement in the eyeballs, and the pupils were dilated. Brain damage: nobody home. His nose was bloody and his mouth was bloody. Dr. Musoke tilted the patient’s head back to open the airway so that he could insert the laryngoscope. He was not wearing rubber gloves. He ran his finger around the patient’s tongue to clear the mouth of debris, sweeping out mucus and blood. His hands became greasy with black curd. The patient smelled of vomit and blood, but this was nothing new to Dr. Musoke, and he concentrated on his work. He leaned down until his face was a few inches away from Monet’s face, and he looked into Monet’s mouth in order to judge the position of the scope. Then he slid the scope over Monet’s tongue and pushed the tongue out of the way so that he could see down the airway past the epiglottis, a dark hole leading inward to the lungs. He pushed the scope into the hole, peering into the instrument. Monet suddenly jerked and thrashed.

Monet vomited.

The black vomit blew up around the scope and out of Monet’s mouth. Black-and-red fluid spewed into the air, showering down over Dr. Musoke. It struck him in the eyes. It splattered over his white coat and down his chest, marking him with strings of red slime dappled with dark flecks. It landed in his mouth.

He repositioned his patient’s head and swept the blood out of the patient’s mouth with his fingers. The blood had covered Dr. Musoke’s hands, wrists and forearms. It had gone everywhere—all over the gurney, all over Dr. Musoke, all over the floor. The nurses in the intensive care unit couldn’t believe their eyes, and they hovered in the background, not knowing quite what to do. Dr. Musoke peered down into the airway and pushed the scope deeper into the lungs. He saw that the airways were bloody.

Air rasped into the man’s lungs. The patient had began to breathe again. The patient was apparently in shock from loss of blood. He had lost so much blood that he was becoming dehydrated. The blood had come out of practically every opening in his body. There wasn’t enough blood left to maintain circulation, so his heartbeat was very sluggish, and blood pressure was dropping toward zero. He needed a blood transfusion.

A nurse brought a bag of whole blood. Dr. Musoke hooked the bag on a stand an inserted the needled into the patient’s arm. There was something wrong with the patient’s veins; his blood poured out around the needle. Dr. Musoke tried again, putting the needle into another place in the patient’s arm and probing for the vein. Failure. More blood poured out. At every place in the patient’s arm where he stuck the needle, the vein broke apart like cooked macaroni and spilled blood, and the blood ran from the punctures down the patient’s arm and wouldn’t coagulate. Dr. Musoke abandoned his efforts to give his patient a blood transfusion for fear that the patient would bleed to death out of the small hole in his arm. The patient continued to bleed from the bowels, and these hemorrhages were now as black as pitch.

Monet’s coma deepened, and he never regained consciousness. He died in the intensive care unit in the early hours of the morning. Dr. Musoke stayed by his bedside the whole time.

They has no idea what had killed him. It was unexplained death. They opened him up for an autopsy and found that his kidneys were destroyed and that his liver was dead. His liver had ceased functioning several days before he died. It was yellow, and parts of it had liquefied—it looked like the liver of a three-day-old cadaver. It was as if Monet had become a corpse before his death. Sloughing of the gut, in which the intestinal ling comes off, is another effect that is ordinarily seen in a corpse that is days old. What, exactly, was the cause of death?

It was impossible to say because there were too many possible causes. Everything had gone wrong inside this man, absolutely everything, any one of which could have been fatal: the clotting, the massive hemorrhages, the liver turned into pudding, the intestines full of blood. Lacking words, categories, or language to describe what had happened, they called it, finally, a case of “fulminating liver failure”. His remain were placed in a waterproof bag and, according to one account, buried locally. When I visited Nairobi, years later, no one remembered where the grave was.

1980 January 24

Nine days after the patient vomited into Dr. Shem Musoke’s eyes and mouth, Musoke developed an aching sensation in his back. He was not prone to backaches—really, he had never had a serious backache, but he was approaching thirty, and it occurred to him that he was getting into the time of life when some men begin to get bad backs. He had been driving himself hard these past few weeks. He had been up all night with a patient who had heart problems, and then, the following night, he had been up most of the night with that Frenchman with hemorrhages who ha come from somewhere upcountry. So he had been going nonstop for days without sleep.

He hadn’t thought much about the vomiting incident, and when the ache began to spread through his body, he still didn’t think about it. Then, when he looked in a mirror, he noticed that his eyes were turning red.

Red eyes—he began to wonder if he had malaria. He had a fever now, so certainly he had some kind of infection. The backache had spread until all the muscles in his body ached badly. He started taking malaria pills, but they didn’t do any good, so he asked one of the nurses to give him an injection of an antimalarial drug.

The nurse gave it to him in the muscle of his arm. The pain of the injection was very, very bad. He had never felt such pain from a shot; it was abnormal and memorable. He wondered why a simple shot would give him this kind of pain. Then he developed abdominal pain, and that made him think that he might have typhoid fever, so he gave himself a course of antibiotic pills, but that had no effect on his illness. Meanwhile, his patients needed him, and he continued to work at the hospital. The pain in his stomach and in his muscles grew unbearable, and he developed jaundice.

Unable to diagnose himself, in severe pain, and unable to continue with his work, he presented himself to Dr. Antonia Bagshawe, a physician at Nairobi Hospital. She examined him, observed his fever, his red eyes, his jaundice, his abdominal pain, and came up with nothing definite, but wondered if he had gallstones or a liver abscess. A gall-bladder attack or a liver abscess could cause fever and jaundice and abdominal pain—the red eyes she could not explain—and she ordered an ultrasound examination of his liver. She studied the images of his liver and saw that it was enlarged, but, other than that, she could see nothing unusual. By this time, he was very sick, and they put him in a private room with nurses attending him around the clock. His face set itself into an expressionless mask.

This possible gallstone attack could be fatal. Dr. Bagshawe recommended that Dr. Musoke have exploratory surgery. He was opened up in the main operating theater at Nairobi Hospital by a team of surgeons headed by Dr. Imre Lofler. They made an incision over his liver and pulled back the abdominal muscles. What they found inside Musoke was eerie and disturbing, and they could not explain it. His liver was swollen and red and did not look healthy, but they could not find any sign of gallstones. Meanwhile, he would not stop bleeding. Any surgical procedure will cut through blood vessels, and the cut vessels will ooze for a while and then clot up, or if the oozing continues, the surgeon will put dabs of gel foam on them to stop the bleeding. Musoke’s blood vessels would not stop oozing—his blood would not clot. It was as if he had become a hemophiliac. They dabbed gel foam all over his liver, and the blood cam through the foam. He leaked blood like a sponge. They had to suction off a lot of blood, but as they pumped it out, the incision filled up again. It was like digging a hole below the water table; it fills up as fast as you pump it out. One of the surgeons would later tell people that the team had been “up to the elbows in blood”. They cut a wedge out of his liver—a liver biopsy—and dropped the wedge into a bottle of pickling fluid and closed up Musoke as quickly as they could.

He deteriorated rapidly after the surgery, and his kidneys began to fail. He appeared to be dying. At that time, Antonia Bagshawe, his physician, had to travel abroad, and he came under the care of a doctor named David Silverstein. The prospect of kidney failure and dialysis for Dr. Musoke created a climate of emergency at the hospital—he was well liked by his colleagues, and they didn’t want to lose him. Silverstein began to suspect that Musoke was suffering from an unusual virus. He collected some blood from his patient and drew off the serum, which is a clear, golden-colored liquid that remains when the red cells are removed from the blood. He sent some tubes of frozen serum to laboratories for testing—to the National Institute of Virology in Sandringham, South Africa, and to the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia, U.S.A.

Then he waited for results.

1983 September 25, 1800 Hours

Thurmont, Maryland, nearly four years after the death of Charles Monet. Evening, A typical American town. On Catoctin Mountain, a ridge of the Appalachians that runs north to south through the western part of the state, the trees were brightening into soft yellows and golds. Teenagers drove their pickup trucks slowly along the streets of the town, looking for something to happen, wishing that the summer had not ended. Faint smells of autumn touched the air, the scent of ripening apples, a soreness of dead leaves, cornstalks drying in the fields. In the apple groves at the edge of town, flocks of grackles settled into the branches for the night, squawking. Headlights streamed north on the Gettysburg road.

In the kitchen of a Victorian house near the center of town, Major Nancy Jaax, a veterinarian in the United States Army, stood at a counter making dinner for her children. She slid a plate into the microwave oven and pushed a button. Time to nuke up some chicken for the kids. Nancy Jaax wore sweatpants and a T-shirt, and she was barefoot. Her feet had calluses on them, the result of martial-arts training. She had way auburn hair, which was cut above the shoulders, and greenish eyes. Her eyes were actually two colors, green with an inner rim around the iris was amber. She was a former homecoming queen from Kansas—Miss Agriculture, Kansas State. She had a slender, athletic build, and she displayed quick motions, flickery gestures, with her arms and hands. Her children were restless and tired, and she worked as fast as she could to fix the dinner.

Jaime, who was five, hung on Nancy’s leg. She grabbed the leg of Nancy’s sweatpants and pulled, and Nancy lurched sideways, and then Jaime pulled the other way, and Nancy lurched to the other side. Jaime was short for her age had greenish eyes, like her mother. Nancy’s son, Jason, who was seven, was watching television in the living room. He was rail thin and quiet, and when he grew up he would probably be tall, like his father.

Nancy’s husband, Major Gerald Jaax, whom everyone called Jerry, was also a veterinarian. He was a Texas at a training class, and Nancy was alone with the children. Jerry had telephoned to say that it was hot as hell in Texas, and he missed her badly and wished he was home. She missed him, too. They had not been apart for more than a few days at a time ever since they had first started dating, in college.

Nancy and Jerry Jaax—the name is pronounced Jacks—were both members of the Army Veterinary Corps, a tiny corps of “doggy doctors”. They take care of Army’s guard dogs, as well as Army horses, Army cow, Army sheeps, Army pigs, Army mules, Army rabbits, Army mice, and Army monkeys. They also inspect the Army’s food.

Nancy and Jerry had bought the Victorian house not long after they had been assigned to Fort Detrick, which was nearby, within easy commuting distance. The kitchen was small, and at the moment you could see plumbing and wires hanging out of the walls. Not far from the kitchen, the living room had a bay window with a collection of tropical plants and ferns in it, and there was a cage among the plants that held an Amazon parrot named Herky. The parrot burst into a song: Heigh-ho, heigh-ho, it’s home from work we go! “Mom! Mom!” he cried excitedly. His voice sounded like Jason’s.

“What?” Nancy said. Then she realized it was the parrot. “Nerd brain,” she muttered.

The parrot wanted to sit on Nancy’s shoulder. “Mom! Mom! Jerry! Jaime! Jason!” the parrot shouted, calling everyone in the family. When he didn’t get any response, he whistled the “Colonel Bogey March” from The Bridge on the River Kwai. And then: “What? What? Mom! Mom!”.

Nancy did not want to take Herky out of his cage. She worked quickly, putting plates and silverware out on the counter. Some of the officers at Fort Detrick had noticed a certain abrupt quality in her hand motions and had accused her of having hands that were “too quick” to handle delicate work in dangerous situations. Nancy had begun martial-arts training partly because she hoped to make her gestures cool and smooth and powerful, and also because he had felt the frustrations of a woman officer trying to advance her career in the Army. She was five feet four inches tall. She liked to spar with six-foot male solders, big guys. She enjoyed knocking them around a little bit; it gave her a certain satisfaction to be able to kick higher than the guy’s head. She used her feet more than her hands when she sparred with an opponent, because her hands were delicate. She could break four boards with a spinning back kick. She had reached the point where she could kill a man with her bare feet, an idea that did not in itself give her much satisfaction. On occasion, she had come home from her class with a broken toe, a bloody nose, or a black eye. Jerry would just shake his head: Nancy with another shiner.

Major Nancy Jaax did all the housework. She could not stand housework. Scrubbing grape jelly out of rugs didn’t give her a feeling of reward, and in any case she did not have time for it. Occasionally she would go into a paroxysm of cleaning, and she would race around the house for an hour, throwing things into closets. She also did all the cooking for her family. Jerry was useless in the kitchen. Another point of contention was his tendency to buy things impulsively—a motorcycle, a sailboat. Jerry had bought a sailboat when they were stationed at Fort Riley in Kansas. And then there was that god-awful diesel Cadillac with a red leather interior. She and Jerry had commuted to work together in it, but the car had started to lay smoke all over the road even before the payments were finished. One day, she had finally said to Jerry, “You can sit in the driveway in those red leather seats all you want, but I’m not getting in there with you.” So they sold the Cadillac and bought a Honda Accord.

The Jaaxes’ house was the largest Victorian house in town, a pile of turreted brick with a slate roof and tall windows and a cupola and wooden paneling made of golden American chestnut. It stood on a street corner near the ambulance station. The sirens woke them up at night. They had bought the house cheap. It had sat on the market a long time, and a story had been going around town that the previous owner had hanged himself in the basement. After the Jaaxes bought it, the dead man’s widow showed up at the door one day. She was a wizened old lady, come to have a look around her old place, and she fixed a blue eye on Nancy and said, “Little girl, you are going to hate this house. I did.”

There were other animals in the house besides the parrot. In a wire cage in the living room lived a python named Sampson. He would occasionally escape from his cage, wander around the house, and eventually climb up inside the hollow center post of the dining room table and go to sleep. There he would stay for a few days. It gave Nancy a creepy feeling to think that there was a python asleep inside the dining table. You wondered whether the snake was going to wake up while you were eating dinner. Nancy had a study in the cupola at the top of the house. The snake had once escaped from his cage and disappeared for a few days. They pounded and knocked on the dining room table to try to flush him out, but he wasn’t there. Late one night when Nancy was in her study, the snake oozed out of the rafters and hung in front of her face, staring at her with lidless eyes, and she screamed. The family also had an Irish setter and an Airelale terrier. Whenever the Jaaxes were assigned to a different Army post, the animals moved with them in boxes and cages, a portable ecosystem of the Jaax family.

Nancy loved Jerry. He was tall and fine looking, a handsome man with prematurely gray hair. She thought of his hair as silver, to go along with his silver tongue, which he used trying to talk her into buy diesel Cadillacs with red-leather interiors. He had sharp brown eyes and a shape nose, like a hawk’s, and he understood her better than anyone else on earth. Nancy and Jerry Jaax had very little social life outside of their marriage. They had grown up on farms in Kansas, twenty miles apart as the crow flies, but had not known each other as children. They met in veterinary school at Kansas State University had gotten engaged a few weeks later, and they were married when Nancy was twenty. By the time they graduated, they were broke and in debt, with no money to set up a practice as veterinarians, and so they had enlisted in the Army together.

Since Nancy didn’t have time to cook during the week, she would spend her Saturdays cooking. She would make up a beef stew in a Crock-Pot, or she would broil several chickens. Then she would freeze the food in bags. On weekday nights, she would take a bag out of the freezer and heat it in the microwave. Tonight, while she thawed chicken, she considered the question of vegetables. How about canned green beans? The children liked that. Nancy opened a cabinet and pulled down a can of Libby’s green beans.

She searched through one or two drawers, looking for a can opener.

Couldn’t find it. She turned to the main junk drawer, which held all the utensils, the stirring spoons and vegetable peelers. It was a jam-packed nightmare.

The hell with the can opener. She pulled a butcher knife out of the drawer. Her father had always warned her not to use a knife to open a can, but Nancy Jaax had never mae a point of listening to her father’s advice. She jabbed the butcher knife into the can, and the point stuck in the metal. She hit the handle with the heel of the right hand. All of a sudden her hand slipped down the handle, struck the tang of the blade, and slid down the blade. She felt the edge bit deep.

The butcher knife clattered to the floor, an big drops of blood fell on the counter. “Son of a bitch!” she said. The knife had sliced through the middle of her right hand, on the palm. It was a deep cut. She put pressure on the cut to stanch the bleeding and went over to the sink, turned on the faucet, and thrust her hand under the stream of water.

The sink turned red. She wiggled her fingers. They worked; so she had not sliced a tendon. This was not such a bad cut. Holding her hand over her head, she went into the bathroom and found a Band-Aid. She waited for the blood to coagulate, and then she pressed the Band-Aid over the cut, drawing the sides of the cut together to seal the wound. She hated the sight of blood, even if it was her own blood. She had a thing about blood. She knew what some blood could contain.

Nancy skipped the children’s baths because of the cut on her hand and gave them their usual snuggle in bed. That night, Jaime slept in bed with her. Nancy didn’t mind, especially because Jerry was out of town, and it made her feel close to her children. Jaime seemed to need the reassurance. Jaime was always a little edgy when Jerry was out of town.

1983 September 26

The next morning, Nancy Jaax woke up at four o’clock. She got out of bed quietly so as not to wake Jaime and showered and put on her uniform. She wore green Army slacks with a black stripe down the leg, a green Army shirt, an in the cold before sunrise she put on a black military sweater. The sweater displayed the shoulder bars of a major, with gold oak leaves. She drank a Diet Coke to wake herself up, and walked upstairs to her study in the cupola of the house.

Today she might put on a biohazard space suit. She was in training for veterinary pathology, the study of disease in animals. Her specialty was turning out to be the effects Biosafety Level 4 hot agents, and in the presence of those kinds of agents you need to wear a space unit. She was also studying for her pathology-board exams, which were coming up in a week. As the sun rose that morning over the apple orchards and fields to the east of town, she opened her books and hunched over them. Grackles began croaking in the trees, and trucks began to move along the streets of Thurmont, below her window. The palm of her right hand still throbbed.

At seven o’clock, she went down t the master bedroom and woke Jaime, who was curled up in the bed. She went into Jason’s room. Jason was harder to wake, and Nancy had to shake him several times. Then the babysitter arrived, an older woman named Mrs. Trapane, who got Jaime and Jason dressed and gave them their breakfasts while Nancy climbed back up to the cupola and returned to her books. Mrs. Trapane would see Jason off to the school bus and would watch Jaime at home until Nancy came back from work that evening.

At seven-thirty, Nancy closed her books and kissed her children goodbye. She thought to herself, Have to remember to stop at the bank and get some money to pay Mrs. Trapane. She drove the Honda alone to work, heading south on the Gettysburg road, along the foot of Catoctin Mountain.

As she approached Fort Detrick, in the city of Frederick, the traffic thickened and slowed. She turned off the highway and arrived at the main gate of the base. A guard waved her through. She turned right, drove past the parade grounds with its flagpole, and parked her car near a massive, almost windowless building made of concrete and yellow bricks that covered almost ten acres of ground. Tall vent pipes on the roof discharged filtered exhaust air that was being pumped out of sealed biological laboratories inside the building. This was the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, or USAMRIID.

Military people often call USAMRIID the Institute. When they call the place USAMRIID, they drawl the word in a military way, making it sound like “you Sam rid,” which gives it some hang time in the air. The mission of USAMRIID is medical defense. The Institute conducts research into ways to protect soldiers again biological weapons and natural infectious diseases. It specializes in drugs, vaccines, and biocontainment. At the Institute, there are always a number of programs going on simultaneously—research into vaccines for various kind of bacteria, such as anthrax and botulism, research into the characteristics of viruses that might infect American troops, either naturally or in the form of a battlefield weapon. Beginning with the Second World War, Army labs at Fort Detrick performed research into offensive biological weapons—the Army was developing strains of lethal bacteria and viruses that could be loaded into bombs and dropped on an enemy. In 1969, President Richard M. Nixon signed an executive order that outlawed the development of offensive biological weapons in the United States. From then on, the Army labs were converted to peaceful uses, and USAMRIID was founded. It devoted itself to developing protective vaccines, and it concentrated on basic research into ways to control lethal micro-organisms. The Institute knows ways to stop a monster virus before it ignites an explosive chain of lethal transmission in the human race.

Major Nancy Jaax entered the building through the back entrance an showed her security badge to a guard behind a desk, who nodded and smiled at her. She headed into the main block of containment zones, traveling through a maze of corridors. There were soldiers everywhere, dressed in fatigues, and there were civilian scientists and technicians wearing ID badges. People seemed very busy, and rarely did anyone stop to chat with someone else in the corridors.

Nancy wanted to see what had happened to the Ebola monkeys during the night. She walked along a Biosafety Level 0 corridor, heading for a Level 4 biocontainment area known as AA-5, or the Ebola suite. The levels are numbered 0, 2, 3 and finally 4, the highest. (For some reason, there is no Level 1.) All the containment levels at the Institute, from Level 2 to Level 4, are kept under negative air pressure, so that if a leak develops, air will flow into the zones rather than outward to the normal world. The suite known as AA-5 was a group of negative-pressure biocontainment rooms that had been set up as a research lab for Ebola virus by a civilian Army scientist named Eugene Johnson. He was an expert in Ebola and its sister, Marburg. He had infected several monkeys with Ebola virus, and he had been giving them various drugs to see if they would stop the Ebola infection. In recent days, the monkeys had begun to die. Nancy had joined Johnson’s Ebola project as the pathologist. It was her job to determine the cause of death in the monkeys.

She came to a window in a wall. The window was made of heavy glass, like that in an aquarium, and it looked directly into the Ebola suite, directly into Level 4. You could not see the monkeys through this window. Every morning, a civilian animal caretaker put on a space unit and went inside to feed the monkeys and clean their cages and check on their physical condition. This morning there was a piece of paper taped to the inside of the glass, with handwritten lettering on it. It had been left there by a caretaker. The note said that during the night two of the animals had “gone down”. This is, they had crashed and bled out.

When she saw the note, she knew that she would be putting on a space suit and going in to dissect the monkeys. Ebola virus destroyed an animal’s internal organs, and the carcass deteriorated abruptly after death. It softened, and the tissue turned into jelly, even if you put it in a refrigerator to keep it cold. You wanted to dissect the animals quickly, before the spontaneous liquefaction began, because you can’t dissect gumbo.

When Nancy Jaax first applied to join the pathology group at the Institute, the colonel in charge it didn’t want to accept her. Nancy thought it was because she was a woman. He said to her, “This work is not for a married female. You can either going to neglect your work or neglect your family.” One day, she brought her resume into his office, hoping to persuade him to accept her. He said, “I can have anybody I want in my group”—implying that he didn’t want her because she wasn’t good enough—and he mentioned the great Thoroughbred stallion Secretariat. “If I want to have Secretariat in my group,” he said, “I can get Secretariat.”

“Well, sir, I am no plow horse!” she roared at him, and slammed her resume on his desk. He reconsidered the matter and allowed her to join the group.

When you begin working with biological agents, the Army starts you in Biosafety Level 2, and then you move up to Level 3. You don’t go into Level 4 until you have a lot of experience, and the Army may never allow you to work there. In order to work in the lower levels, you must have a number of vaccinations. Nancy had vaccinations for yellow fever, Q fever, Rift Valley fever, the VEE, EEE, and WEE complex (brain viruses that live in horses), and tularemia, anthrax and botulism. And, of course, she had a serious of shots for rabies, since she was a veterinarian. Her immune system reacted badly to all the shots; they made her sick. The Army therefore yanked her out of the vaccination program. At this point, Nancy Jaax was essentially washed up. She couldn’t proceed with any kind of work with Level 3 agents, because she couldn’t tolerate the vaccinations. There was only one way she could continue working with dangerous infectious agents. She had to get her assigned to work in a space suit in Level 4 areas. There aren’t any vaccines for Level 4 hot agents. A Level 4 hot agent is a lethal virus for which there is no vaccine and no cure.

Ebola virus is named for the Ebola River, which is the headstream of the Mongala River, a tributary of the Congo, or Zaire, River. The Ebola River empties tracts of rain forest, winding past scattered villages. The first known emergence of Ebola Zaire—the hottest type of Ebola virus—occurred September 1976, when it erupted simultaneously in fifty-five villages near the headwaters of the Ebola River. It seemed to come out of nowhere, and killed nine out of ten people it infected. Ebola Zaire is the most feared agent at the Institute. The general feeling around USAMRIID has always been “Those people who work with Ebola are crazy.” to mess around with Ebola is an easy way to die. Better to work with something safer, such as anthrax.

Eugene Johnson, the civilian biohazard expert who was running the Ebola research program at the Institute, had a reputation for being a little bit wild. He is something of a legend to the handful of people in the world who really know about hot agents and how to handle them. He is one of the world’s leading Ebola hunters. Gene Johnson is a large man, not to say massive, with a broad, heavy face and loose-flying disheveled brown hair and bushy brown beard and a gut that hangs over his belt, and glaring, deep eyes. If Gene Johnson were to put on a black leather jacker, he could pass for a roadie with Grateful Dead. He does not look at all like a man who works for the Army. He has a reputation for being a top-notch field epidemiologist (a person who studies viral diseases in the wild), but for some reason he does not often get around to publishing his work. That explains his somewhat mysterious reputation. When people who know Johnson’s work talk about him, you hear things like “Gene Johnson did this, Gene Johnson did that,” and it all sounds clever and imaginative. He is a rather shy man, somewhat suspicious of people, deeply suspicious of viruses, I think I have never met someone who is more afraid of viruses than Gene Johnson, and what makes his fear impressive is the fact that it is a deep intellectual respect, rooted in knowledge. He spent years traveling across central Africa in search of the reservoirs of Ebola and Marburg viruses. He had virtually ransacked Africa looking for these life forms, but despite his searches he had never found them in their natural hiding places. No one knew where any of the filoviruses came from; no one knew where they lived in nature. The trail had petered out in the forests and savannas of central Africa. to find the hidden reservoir of Ebola was one of Johnson’s great ambitions.

No one around the Institute wanted to get involved with his Ebola project. Ebola, the slate wiper, did things to people that you did not want to think about. The organism was too frightening to handle, even for those who were comfortable and adept in space suits. They did not care to do research on Ebola because they did not Ebola to do research on them. They didn’t know what kind of host the virus lived in—whether it was a fly or a bat or a tick or a spider or a scorpion or some kind of reptile, or an amphibian, such as a grog or a newt. Or maybe it lived in leopards or elephants. And they didn’t know exactly how virus spread, how it jumped from host to host.

Gene Johnson had suffered recurrent nightmares about Ebola virus ever since he began to work with it. He would wake up in a cold sweat. His dreams went more or less the same way. He would be wearing his space unit while holding Ebola in his gloved hand, holding some kind of liquid tainted with Ebola. Suddenly the liquid would be running all over his glove, and then he would realize that his glove was full of pinholes, and the liquid was dribbling over his bare hand and running inside his space suit. He would come awake with a start, saying to himself, My God, there’s been an exposure. And then he would find himself in his bedroom, with his wife sleeping beside him.

In reality, Ebola had not yet made a decisive, irreversible breakthrough into the human race, but seemed close to doing that. It had been emerging in microbreaks here and there in Africa. The worry was that a microbreak would develop into an unstoppable tidal wave. If the virus killed nine of ten people it infected and there was no vaccine or cure for it, you could see the possibilities. The possibilities were global. Johnson liked to say to people that we don’t really know what Ebola has done in the past, and we don’t know what it might do in the future. Ebola was unpredictable. An airborne strain of Ebola could emerge and circle around the worked in about six weeks, like the flu, killing large numbers of people, or it might forever remain a secret feeder at the margins, taking down humans a few at a time.

Ebola is a rather simple virus—as simple as a firestorm. It kills humans which swift efficiency and with a devastating range of effects. Ebola is distantly related to measles, mumps, and rabies. It is also related to certain pneumonia viruses: to the parainfluenza virus, which causes colds in children, and to the respiratory syncytial virus, which can cause fatal pneumonia in a person who has AIDS. In its own evolution through unknown hosts and hidden pathways in the rain forest, Ebola seems to have developed the worst elements of all the above viruses. Like measles, it triggers a rash all over the body. Some of its effects resemble rabies—psychosis, madness. Other of its effects look eerily like a bad cold.

The Ebola virus particle contains only seven different proteins—seven large molecules. Three of these proteins are vaguely understood, and four of the proteins are completely unknown—their structure and their function is a mystery. Whatever these Ebola proteins do, they seem to target the immune system for special attack. In this they are like HIV, which also destroys the immune system, but unlike the onset of HIV, the attack of Ebola is explosive. As Ebola sweeps through you, you immune system fails, and you seem to lose your ability to respond to viral attack. Your body becomes a city under seize, with its gates thrown open and hostile armies pouring in, making camp in the public squares and setting everything on fire; and from the moment Ebola enters your blood stream, the ware is already lost; you are almost certainly doomed. You can’t fight off Ebola the way you fight off a cold. Ebola does in ten days what it takes AIDS ten years to accomplish.

It is not really known how Ebola is transmitted from person to person. Army researchers believed that Ebola virus traveled through direct contact with blood and bodily fluids (in the same way the AIDS virus travels). Ebola seemed to have other routes of travel as well. Many of the people in Africa who came down with Ebola had handled Ebola-infected cadavers. It seems that one of Ebola’s paths goes from the dead to the living, winding in trickles of uncoagulated blood and slimes that come out of the dead body. In Zaire during the 1976 outbreak, grieving relatives kissed and embraced the dead or prepared the body for burial, and then, three to fourteen days later, they broke with Ebola.

Gene Johnson’s Ebola experiment was simple. He would infect a few monkeys with the virus, and then he would treat them with drugs in the hope that they would get better. That way, he might discover a drug that would flight Ebola virus or possibly cure it.

Monkeys are nearly identical to human beings in a biological sense, which is why they are used in medical experiments. Humans and monkeys are both primates, and Ebola feeds on primates in same way that a predator consumes certain kinds of flesh. Ebola can’t tell the difference between a human being and a monkey. The virus jumps easily back and forth between them.

Nancy Jaax volunteered to work as the pathologist on Johnson’s Ebola project. It was Level 4 work, which she was qualified to do, because she didn’t need to be vaccinated. She was eager to prove herself and eager to continue working with lethal viruses. However, some people around the Institute were skeptical of her ability to work in a space suit in Level 4. She was a “married female”—she might panic. They claimed that her hands looked nervous or clumsy, not good for work with Level 4 hot agents.

People felt that she might cut herself or stick herself with a contaminated needle—or stick someone else. Her hands became a safety issue.

Her immediate superior was Lieutenant Colonel Anthony Johnson (he is not related to Gene Johnson, the civilian who was the head of the Ebola project). Tony Johnson is a soft-spoken man and a cool customer. Now he had to decide whether to allow her to go into Biosafety Level 4. Wanting to be sure he understood the situation, he sent word around the Institute:

Who knows Nancy Jaax? Who can comment on her strengths and weakness? Major Jerry Jaax, Nancy’s husband, showed up in Lieutenant Colonel Johnson’s office. Jerry was against the idea of his wife putting on a space suit. He argued strongly against it. He said that there had been “family discussions” about Nancy working with Ebola virus. “Family discussion” Jerry had said to Nancy, “You’re the only wife I’ve got.” He did not wear a biological space suit himself at work, and he did not want his wife to wear one either. His biggest concern was that she would be handling Ebola. He could not stand the idea that his wife, the woman he loved, the mother of their children, and would hold in her hands a monstrous life form that is lethal and incurable.

Lieutenant Colonel Tony Johnson listened to what Major Jerry Jaax had to say, and listened to what other people had t say, and then he felt he should speak with Nancy himself, and so he called her into his office. He could see that she was tense. He watched her hands as she talked. They looked fine to him, not clumsy, and not too quick, either. He decided that the rumors he had been hearing about her hands were unfounded. She said to him, “I don’t want any special favors.” Well, she was not going to get any special favors. “I’m going to put you in the Ebola program,” he said. He told her that he would allow her to put on a space suit and go int the Ebola area, and that he would accompany her on the first few trips, to teach her how to do it and to observe her hands at work. He would watch her like a hawk. He believed that she was ready for total immersion in a hot zone.

As he spoke, she broke down an cried in front of him—“had a few tears,” as he would later recall. They were tears of happiness. At that moment, to hold Ebola virus in her hands was what she wanted more than anything else in the world.

1300 Hours

Nancy spent the morning doing paperwork in her office. After lunch, she removed her diamond engagement ring and her wedding band and locked them in her desk drawer. She dropped by Tony Johnson’s office and asked him if he was ready to go in. They went downstairs and along a corridor to the Ebola suite. There was only one locker room leading into it. Tony Johnson insisted that Nancy Jaax go in first, to get changed. He would follow.

The room was small and contained a few lockers along one wall, some shelves, and a mirror over a sink. She undressed, removing all of her clothing, including her underwear, and put everything in her locker. She left the Band-Aid stuck to her hand. From a shelf, she took up a sterile surgical scrub suit—green pants and a green shirt, the clothing that a surgeon wears in an operating room—and she dragged on the pants and tied the drawstring at the waist, and snapped the shirt’s snaps. You were not allowed to wear anything under the scrub suit, no underwear. She pulled a cloth surgical cap over her head and tucked her hair up into the cap while looking in the mirror. She did not appear nervous, but she was starting to feel a little bit nervous. This was only her second trip into a hot area.

Standing in her bare feet, she turned away from the mirror and faced a door leading into Level 2. A deep blue light streamed through a window in the door—ultraviolet light. Viruses fall apart under

ultraviolet light, which smashes their genetic material and makes them unable to replicate.

As she opened the door and entered Level 2, she felt the door stick against her pull, sucked in by a difference of air pressure, and a gentle drag of air whispered around her shoulders and traveled inward, toward the hot zone. This was negative air pressure, designed to keep hot agents from drifting outward. The door closed behind her, and she was in Level 2. The blue light bathed her face. She walked through a water-shower stall that contained an ultraviolet light, a bar of soap, and some ordinary shampoo. The shower stall led into a bathroom, where there was a shelf that held some clean white socks. She put on a pair of socks and pushed through another door, into Level 3.

This was a room known as the staging area. It contained a desk with a telephone and a sink. A cylindrical waxed cardboard box sat on the floor beside the desk. It was a biohazard container known as a “hatbox,” or “ice-cream container.” A hatbox is blazed with biohazard symbols, which are red, spiky three-petaled flowers, and it is used for storing and transporting infectious waste. This hatbox was empty. It was only a makeshift chair.

She found a box of latex rubber surgical gloves and a plastic shaker full of baby powder. She shook baby powder onto her hands and pulled on the gloves. Then she found a roll of sticky tape, and she tore off several strips of tape and hung them in a row on the edge of the desk.

Then she taped herself. Taking up one strip at a time, she taped the cuffs of her gloves to the sleeves of her scrub shirt, running the tape around the cuff to make a seal. She then tapped her socks to her trousers. Now she wore one layer of protection between herself and the replicative Other.

Lieutenant Colonel Johnson came in through Level 2 wearing a surgical scrub suit. He put on rubber gloves and began taping them to his sleeves, and he taped his socks to his pants.

Nancy turned to the right, into an antechamber, and found her space suit hanging on a rack. It was Chemturion biological space suit, and it was marked in letters across the chest: JAAX. A Chemturion is also known as a blue suit that meets government specifications for work with airborne hot agents.

She opened up the space suit and laid it down on the concrete floor and stepped into it, feet first. She pulled it up to her armpits and slid her arms into the sleeves until her fingers entered the gloves. The suit had brown rubber gloves that were attached by gaskets at the cuffs. These were the space suit’s main gloves, and they were made of heavy rubber. They were the most important barrier between her and Ebola.

The hands were the weak point, the most vulnerable part of the suit, because of what they handled. They handled needles, knives, and sharp pieces of bone. You are responsible for maintaining you space unit in the same way that a paratrooper is responsible for packing and maintaining his own parachute. Perhaps Nancy was in a bit of a hurry and did not inspect her space suit as closely as she should have.

Lieutenant Colonel Johnson gave her a short briefing on procedures and then helped her lower the helmet over her head. The helmet was made of soft, flexible plastic. Johnson looked at her face, visible through the clear faceplate, to see how she was doing.

She closed an oiled Ziploc zipper across the suit’s chest. The zipper made a popping sound as it snapped shut, pop, pop, pop. The moment the space suit was closed, her faceplate fogged up. She reached over to a wall and pulled down a coiled yellow air hose and plugged it into her suit. Then came a roar of flowing air, and her suit bloated up, fat and hard, and a whiff of dry air clear away some tiny beads of sweat that had collected inside her faceplate.

Around the Institute, they say that you can’t predict who will panic inside a biological space unit. It happens now and then, mainly to inexperienced people. The moment the helmet does over their faces, their eyes begin to glitter with fear, they sweat, turn purple, claw at the suit, try to tear it open to get some fresh air, lose their balance and fall down on the floor, and they can start screaming or moaning inside the suit, which makes them sound as if they are suffocating in a closet.

After he had helped Nancy Jaax put on her space suit, and had looked into her eyes for signs of panic, Tony Johnson put on his own suit, and when he was closed up and ready, he handed her a pack of dissection tools. He seemed calm and collected. They turned and faced the stainless-steel door together. The door lead into an air lock and Level 4. The door was plastered with biohazard symbol and warning:

The international symbol for biohazard, which is pasted on doors at USAMRIID whenever they open through a major transition of zones, is a red trefoil that reminds me of a red trillium, or toadshade.

The Level 4 air lock is a gray area, a place where two worlds meet, where the hot zone touches the normal world. The gray area is neither hot nor cold. A place that is neither provably sterile nor known to be infective. At USAMRIID, toadshades bloom in the gray zones. Nancy took a breath and gathered her thoughts into stillness, using her martial-arts training to get her breathing under control. People performed all kinds of little rituals before they walked through that steel door. Some people crossed themselves. Others carried amulets or charms inside their space suits, even though it was technically against the rules to bring anything inside the suit except your body and the surgical scrubs. They hoped the amulets might help ward off the hot agent if there was a major break in their suit.

She unplugged her air hose and unlatched the steel door and entered an air lock, and Tony Johnson followed her. The air lock was made entirely of stainless steel, and it was lined with nozzles for spraying water and chemicals. This was the decon shower. Decon means “decontamination.” The door closed behind them. Nancy opened the far door of the air lock, and they crossed over to the hot side.

1983 September 26, 1330 Hours

They were standing in a narrow cinder-block corridor. Various rooms opened on either side. The hot zone was a maze. From the walls dangled yellow ar hoses. There was an alarm strobe light on the ceiling that would be triggered if the air system failed. The walls were painted with thick, gobby epoxy paint, and all the electrical outlets were plugged around the edges with a gooey material. This was to seal any cracks and holes, so that a hot agent could not escape by drifting through hollow electrical conduits. Nancy reached for an air hose and plugged it into her suit. She could not hear anything except the roar of air in her helmet. The air rumbled so loudly in their suits that they did not try to speak to each other.

She opened a metal cabinet. Blue light streamed out of it, and she removed a pair of yellow rubber boots. They reminded her of barn boots. She slid the soft feet of her space suit into the boots and glanced at Johnson and caught his eye. Ready for action, boss.

They unplugged their air hoses and proceeded down the hallway and entered the monkey room. It contained two banks of cages, positioned facing each other along opposite walls of the room. Jaax and Johnson replugged their hoses and peered into the cages. One bank of cages contained two isolated monkeys. They were the so-called control monkeys. They had not been infected with Ebola virus, and they were healthy.

As soon as the two Army officers appeared in space suits, the healthy monkeys went nuts. They rattled their cages and leaped around. Humans in space suits make monkeys nervous. They hooted and grunted—“Ooo! Ooo! Haw, wah, haw!” And they uttered a high-pitched squeal: “Eek!”.

The monkeys moved to the front of their cages and shook the doors or leaped back and forth, whump, whump, whump, watching Jaax and Johnson the whole time, following them with their eyes, alert to everything. The cages had elaborated bolts on the doors to prevent fiddling by primate fingers. These monkeys were creative little boogers, she thought, and they were bored.

The other bank of cages was mostly quiet. This was the bank of Ebola cages. All the monkeys in these cages were infected with Ebola virus, and most of them were silent, passive and withdrawn, although one or two of them seemed queerly deranged. Their immune systems had failed or gone haywire. Most of the animals did not look very sick yet, but they did not display the alertness, the usual monkeys energy, the leaping and the cage rattling that you see in healthy monkeys, and most of them had not eaten their morning biscuits. They sat almost motionless in their cages, watching the two officers with expressionless faces.

They had been injected with the hottest strain of Ebola known to the world. It was the Mayinga strain of Ebola Zaire. This strain had come from a young woman named Mayinga N., who died of the virus on October 19, 1976. She was a nurse at a hospital in Zaire, and she had taken care of a Roman Catholic nun who died of Ebola. The nun had bled to death all over Nurse Mayinga, and then, a few days later, Nurse Mayinga had broken with Ebola and died. Some of Nurse Mayinga’s blood had ended up in the United States, and the strain of virus that had once lived in Nurse Mayinga’s blood now lived in small glass vials kept in superfreezers at the Institute, which were maintained at minus one hundred and sixty degrees Fahrenheit. The freezers were fitted with padlocks and alarms and were plastered with biohazard flowers and sealed with bands of sticky tape, because it seals cracks. It could be said that without sticky tape there would be no such thing as biocontainment.

Gene Johnson, the civilian scientist, had thawed a little bit of Nurse Mayinga’s frozened blood and had injected it into the monkeys. Then, as the monkeys became silk, he had treated them with a drug in hope that it would help them flight off the virus. The drug did not seem to be working.

Nancy Jaax and Tony Johnson inspected the monkeys, moving from cage to cage, until they found the two monkeys that had crashed and bled out. Those animals were hunched up, each in its own cage. They had bloody noses, and their eyes were half-open, glassy, and brilliant red, with dilated pupils. The monkeys showed no facial expression, not even pain or agony. The connective tissue under the skin had been destroyed by the virus, causing a subtle distortion of the face. Another reason for the strange faces was that the parts of the brain that control facial expression had also been destroyed. The masklike face, the red eyes, and the bloody nose were classic signs of Ebola that appear in all primates infected with the virus, both monkeys and humans. It hinted at a vicious combination of brain damage and soft-tissue destruction under the skin. The classic Ebola face made the monkeys look as if they had seem something beyond comprehensive. It was not a vision of heaven.

Nancy Jaax felt a wave of unease. She was distressed by the sight of the dead and suffering monkeys. As a veterinarian, she believed that it was her duty to heal animals and relieve their suffering. As a scientist, she believed that it was her obligation to perform medical research that would help alleviate human suffering. Even though she had grown up on a farm, where her father had raised liverstock for food, she had never been able to bear easily the death of an animal. As a girl, she had cried when her father had taken her 4-H Club prize steer to the butcher. She liked animals better than many people. In taking the veterinarian’s oath, she had pledged herself to a code of honor that bound her to the care of animals but also bound her to the saving of human lives through medicine. At times in her work, those two ideals clashed. She told herself that this research was being done to help find a cure for Ebola, that t was medical research that would help save human lives and might possibly avert a tragedy for the human species. That helped reduce her feeling of unease, but not completely, and she kept her emotions off to one side.

Johnson watched Jaax carefully as she began the removal procedure.

Handling an unconscious monkey in Level 4 is tricky operation, because monkeys can wake up, and they have teeth and a powerful bit, and they are remarkably strong and agile. The monkeys that are used in laboratories are not organ-grinder monkeys. They are large, wild animals from the rain forest. A bite by an Ebola-infected monkey would almost certainly be fatal.

First Nancy inspected the monkey, looking through the bars. It was a large male, and he looked as if he was really dead. She saw that he still had his canine fangs, and that made her nervous. Ordinarily the monkey would have had its fangs filed down for safety. For some reason, this one had enormous natural fangs. She stuck her gloved fingers through the bars and pinched the monkey’s toe while she watched for an eye movement. The eyes remained fixed and staring.

“GO AHEAD AND UNLOCK THE CAGE,” Lieutenant Colonel Johnson said. He had to shout to be heard above the roar of air in their space suits.

She unlocked the door and slid it up until the cage gaped wide open. She inspected the monkey again. No muscle twitches. The monkey was definitely down.

“ALL RIGHT, GO AHEAD AND MOVE HIM OUT,” Johnson said.

She reached inside and caught the monkey by the upper arms and rotated him so that he was facing away from her, so that he couldn’t bit her if he woke up. She pulled his arms back and held them immobile, and she lifted the monkey out of the cage.

Johnson took the monkey’s feet, and together they carried him over to a hatbox, a biohazard container, and they slid the monkey into it. Then they carried the hatbox to necropsy room, shuffling slowly in their suits. They were two human primates carrying another primate. One was the master of the earth, or at least believed himself to be, and the other was a nimble dweller in trees, a cousin of the master of the earth. Both species, the human and the monkey, were in the presence of another life form, which was older and more powerful than either of them, and was a dweller in blood.

Jaax and Johnson moved slowly out of the room, carrying the monkey, and turned left and then turned left again, and entered the necropsy room, and laid the monkey down on a stainless-steel table. The monkey’s skin was rashly and covered with red blotches, visible through his sparse hair.

“GLOVE UP,” Johnson said.

They put on latex rubber gloves, pulling them over the space suit gloves. They now wore three layers of gloves: the inner-lining glove, the space suit glove, and the outer glove. Johnson said, “WE’LL DO THE CHECK LIST. SCISSORS, HEMOSTATS.” He laid the tools in a row at the head of the table. Each tool was numbered, so he called the numbers out loud.

They went to work. Using blunt-ended scissors, Johnson opened the monkey while Jaax assisted with the procedure. They worked slowly and with exquisite care. They did not use any sharp blades, because a blade is a deadly object in a hot zone. A scalpel can nick your gloves and cut your fingers, and before you even feel a sensation of pain, the agent has already entered your blood stream.

Nancy handed tools to him, and she reached her fingers inside the monkey to tie off blood vessels and mop up excess blood with small sponges. The animal’s body cavity was a lake of blood. It was Ebola blood, and it had run everywhere inside the animal: there had been a lot of internal hemorrhaging. The liver was swollen, and she noticed some blood in the intestines.

She had to tell herself to slow her hands down. Perhaps her hands were moving too quickly. She talked herself through the procedure, keeping herself alert and centered. Keep it clean, keep it clean, she thought. Okay, pick up the hemostat. Clamp that artery ‘cause it’s leaking blood. Break off and rinse gloves. She could feel the Ebola blood through her gloves; it felt wet and slippery, even through her hands were clean and dry and dusted with baby powder.

She withdrew her hands from the carcass and rinsed them in a pan of disinfectant called EnviroChem, which sat in a sink. the liquid was pale green, the color of Japanese green tea. It destroys viruses. As she rinsed her gloves in it, the liquid turned brown with monkey blood. All she could hear was the noise of the air blowing inside her suit. It filled her suit with a roar like a subway train coming through a tunnel.

A virus is a small capsule made of membranes and proteins. The capsule contains one or more strands of DNA or RNA, which are long molecules that contain the software program for making a copy of virus. Some biologists classify viruses as “life forms,” because they are not stricky known to be alive. Viruses are ambiguously alive, neither alive nor dead. They carry on their existence in the borderlands between life and nonlife. They are dead. They can even form crystals. Virus particles that lie around in blood or mucus may seem dead, but the particles are waiting for something to come along. They have a sticky surface. If a cell comes along and touches the virus and the stickiness of the virus matches the stickiness of the cell, then the virus clings to the cell. The cell feels the virus sticking to it and enfolds the virus and drags it inside. Once the virus enters the cell, it becomes a Trojan horse. It switches on and begins to replicate.

A virus is a parasite. It can’t live on its own. It can only make copies of itself inside a cell using the cell’s materials and machinery to get the job done. All living things carry viruses in their cells. Even fungi and bacteria are inhabited by viruses and are occasionally destroyed by them. That is, disease have their own disease. A virus makes copies of itself inside a cell until eventually the cell gets pigged with virus and pops, and the viruses spill out of the broken cell. Or viruses can bud through a cell wall, like drips coming out of a faucet—drip, drip, drip, drip, copy, copy, copy, copy—that’s the way the AIDS virus works. The faucet runs and runs until the cell is exhausted, consumed, and destroyed. If enough cells are destroyed, the host dies. A virus does not “want” to kill its host. That is not in the best interest of virus, because then the virus may also die, unless it can jump fast enough out of the dying host into a new host.

The genetic code inside Ebola is a single strand of RNA. This type of molecule is thought to be the oldest and most “primite” coding mechanism for life. The earth’s primordial ocean, which came into existence not long after the earth was formed, about four and a half billion years ago, may well have contained microscopic life forms based on RNA. This suggested that Ebola is an ancient kind of life, perhaps nearly as old as the earth itself. Another hint that Ebola is extremely ancient is the way in which it can seem neither quite alive nor quite unalive.

Viruses may seem alive when they multiply, but in another sense they are obviously dead, are only machines, subtle ones to be sure, but strictly mechanical, no more alive than a jackhammer. Viruses are molecular sharks, a motive without a mind. Compact, hard, logical, totally selfish, the virus is dedicated to making copies of itself—which it can do on occasion with radiant speed. The prime directive is to replicate.

Viruses are too small to be seen. Here is a way to imagine the size of a virus. Consider the island of Manhattan shrunk to this size: /.

This Manhattan could easily hold nine million viruses. If you could magnify this Manhattan and if it were fully of viruses, you would see little figures clustered like the lunch crowd on Fifth Avenue. A hundred million crystallized polio viruses could cover the period at the end of this sentence. There could be two hundred and fifty Woodstock Festivals of viruses sitting on that period—the combined populations of Great Britain and France—and you would never know it.

Keep it clean, Nancy thought. No blood. No blood. I don’t like blood. Every time I see a drop of blood, I see a billion viruses. Break off and rinse. Break off and rinse. Slow yourself. Look at Tony’s suit. Check him.

You watched your partner’s suit for any sign of a hole or a break.

It was kind of like being a mother and watching your kid—a constant background check to see if everything is okay.

Meanwhile, Johnson was checking her. He observed her for any kind of mistake, any jerkiness with the tools. He wondered if he would see her drop something.

“RONGEUR,” he said.

“WHAT?” she asked.

He pointed at her air hose to suggest that she crimp it so that she could hear him better. She grabbed the hose and folded it. The air stopped flowing, her suit deflated around her, and the noise died away. He put his helmet close to hers and spoke the work rongeur again, and she released her hose. She handed him a pair of pliers called the rongeur. The word is French and means “gnawer.” It is used for opening skulls.

Getting into a skull is always a bitch in Level 4. A primate skull is hard and tough, and the bone plates are knitted together. Ordinarily you would whip through a skull with an electric bone saw, but you can’t use a bone saw in Level 4. It would throw a mist of bone particles and blood droplets into the air, and you do not want to create any kind of infective mist in a hot area, even if you are wearing a space suit; it is just too dangerous.

They popped the skull with the pliers. It made a loud cracking sound. They removed the brain, eyes, and spinal cord and dropped them into a jar of preservative.

Johnson was handing her a tube containing a sample when he stopped and looked at her gloved hands. He pointed to her right glove.

She glanced down. Her glove. It was drenched in blood, but now she saw the hole. It was rip across the palm of the outer glove on her right hand.

Nancy tore off the glove. Now her main suit glove was covered with blood. It spidered down the outer sleeve of her space suit. Great, just great—Ebola blood all over my suit. She rinsed her glove and arm in the disinfectant, and they came up clean and shiny wet. Then she noticed that her hand, inside the two remaining gloves, felt cold and clammy. There was something wet inside her space suit glove. She wondered if that glove was a leaker, too. She wondered if she had sustained a breach in her right main glove. She inspected that glove carefully. Then she saw it. It was a crack in the wrist. She had a breach in her space suit. Her hand felt wet. She wondered if there might be Ebola blood inside her space suit, somewhere close to that cut on the palm of her hand. She pointed to her glove and said, “HOLE.” Johnson bent over and inspected her glove. He saw the crack in the wrist. She saw his face erupt in surprise, and then he looked into her eyes. She saw he was afraid.

That terrified her. She jerked her thumb toward the exit. “I’M OUTTA HERE, MAN. CAN YOU FINISH?”

He replied, “I WANT YOU TO LEAVE IMMEDIATELY. I’LL SECURE THE AREA AND FOLLOW YOU OUT.”

Using only her left hand, her good hand, she unplugged her suit from the air hose. She practically ran down the corridor to the air lock, her right arm hanging rigidly at her side. She did not want to move that hand because every time she moved it she felt something squishing around in there, inside the glove. Fear threatened to overwhelm her. How was she going to remove her boots without using her bad hand? She kicked them off. They went flying down the corridor. She threw open the air-lock door and stepped inside and slammed the door behind her.

She pulled a chain that hung the ceiling of air lock. That started the decon shower. The decon shower takes seven minutes, and you are not permitted to leave during that period, because the shower needs time to work on viruses. First came a blast of water jets, which washed traces of blood from her space suit. The water jets stopped. then came a spray of EnviroChem, coming out of nozzles all up and down the sides of the air lock, which deconned her space suit. Of course, if something lived inside her glove, the chemical shower would not reach it.

There were no lights in the air lock; it was dim, almost dark. The place was literally a gray zone. She wished it had a clock. Then you would know how long you would have to wait. Five minutes to go? four minutes? Chemical mist drizzled down her faceplate. It was like driving a car in the rain when the windshield wipers are broken; you can’t see a thing. Shit, shit, shit, she thought.

At the Institute, there is a Level 4 biocontainment hospital called the Slammer, where a patient can be treated by doctors and nurses wearing space suits. If you are exposed to a hot agent and you go into the Slammer and fail to come out alive, then you body is taken to a nearby Level 4 biocontainment morgue, known as the Submarine. The soldiers around the Institute call the morgue the Submarine because its main door is made of heavy steel and looks like a pressure door in a submarine.

Son of bitch! she thought. Aw, fuck! They’ll put me into the Slammer. And Tony will be filling out accident reports while I’m breaking with Ebola. And a week later, I’ll be in the Submarine. Shit! Jerry’s in Texas. And I didn’t go to the bank today. There’s no money in the house. The kids are home with Mrs. Trapane, and she needs to be paid. I didn’t go to the market today. There’s no food in the house. How are the kids going to eat if I’m in the Slammer? Who’s going to stay with them tonight? Shit, shit, shit!

The shower stopped. She opened the door and flung herself into the staging area. She came out of the space suit fast. She shucked it. She leaped out of it. The space suit slapped to the concrete floor, wet, dripping with water.

As her right arm came out of the suit, she saw that the sleeve of her scrub suit was dark wet and her inner glove was red.

That space suit glove had been a leaker. Ebola blood had run over her innermost glove. It had smeared down on the latex, right against her skin, right against the Band-Aid. Her last glove was thin and translucent, and she could see the Band-Aid through it, directly under the Ebola blood. Her heart pounded, and she almost threw up—her stomach contracted and turned over, and she felt a gag reflex in her throat. The puke factor. It is a sudden urge to throw up when you find yourself unprotected in the presence of a Biosafety Level 4 organism. Her mind raced: Oh, shit. What now? I’ve got an undeconned glove—Ebola blood in here. Oh, Jesus. What’s the procedure here? What do I have to do now?

Tony Johnson’s blue figure moved in the air lock, and she heard the nozzles begin to hiss. He had begun the decon cycle. It would be seven minutes before he could answer any questions.

The main question was whether any blood had penetrated the last glove to the cut. Five or ten Ebola-virus particles suspended in a droplet of blood could easily slip through a pinhole in a surgical glove, and that might be enough to start an explosive infection. This stuff could amplify itself. A pinhole in a glove might not be visible to the eye. She went over to the sink and put her hand under the faucet to rinse off the blood and held there for a while. The water carried the blood down the drain, where the waste water would be cooked in heated tanks.

Then she pulled off the last glove, holding it delicately by the cuff. Her right hand came out caked with baby powder, her fingernails short, no nail polish, no ring, knuckles scarred by a bite form a goat that had nipped her when she was child, and a Band-Aid on the palm.

She saw blood mixed with the baby powder.

Please, please, make it my blood.

Yes—it was her own blood. She had bled around the edges of the Band-Aid. She did not see any monkey on her hand.

She put the last glove under the faucet. The water was running and it filled up the glove. The glove swelled up like a water balloon. She dreaded the sudden appearance of a thread of water squirting from the glove, the telltale of a leak, a sign that her life was over. The glove fattened and held. No leaks.

Suddenly her legs collapsed. She fell against the cinder-block wall and slid down it, feeling as if she had been punched in the stomach. She came to rest on the hatbox, the biohazard box that someone had been using as a chair. Her legs kicked out, and she went limp and leaned back against the wall. That was how Tony Johnson found her when he emerged from the air lock.

The accident report concluded that Major N. Jaax had not been exposed to Ebola virus. Her last glove had remained intact, and since everyone believed that the agent was transmitted through direct contact with blood and bodily fluids, there did not seem to be any way for it to have entered her bloodstream, even though it had breached her space suit. She drove home that night having escaped the Slammer by the skin of her last glove. She had almost caught Ebola from a dead monkey, who had caught t from a young woman named Mayinga, who had caught it from a nun who had crashed and bled out in the jungles of Zaire in years gone by.

She called Jerry that night in Texas. “Guess what? I had this little problem today. I had a near-Ebola experience.” She told him what had happened.

He was appalled. “God-damn it, Nancy! I told you not to get involved with that Ebola virus! That fucking Ebola!” And he went into a ten-minute diatribe about the dangers of doing hot work in a space suit, especially with Ebola.

She remained calm and did not argue with him. She realized he wasn’t angry with her, just scared. She let Jerry run on, and when he had gotten it all out of his system and was starting to taper off, she told him that she felt confident that everything was going to be all right.

Meanwhile, he was surprised at how calm his wife seemed. He would have flown home that night if he had perceived any inkling of distress in her.

The Ebola experiments were not a success in the sense that the drugs had no effect on the virus. All of Gene Johnson’s infected monkeys died no matter what drugs they were given. They all died. The virus absolutely nuked the monkeys. It was a complete slate wiper. The only survivors of the experiment were the two control monkeys—the healthy, uninfected monkeys that lived in cages across the room from the sick monkeys. The control monkeys had not been infected with Ebola, and so, as expected, they had not become sick.

Then, two weeks after the incident with the bloody glove, something frightening happened in the Ebola rooms. The two healthy monkeys developed red eyes and blood noses, and they crashed and bled out.

They had never been deliberately infected with Ebola virus, and they had not come near the sick monkeys. They were separated from the sick monkeys by open floor.

If a healthy person were placed on the other side of a room from a person who was sick with AIDS, the AIDS virus would not be able to drift across the room through the air and infect the healthy person. But Ebola had drifted across a room. It had moved quickly, decisively, and by an unknown route. Most likely the control monkeys inhaled it into their lungs. “It got there somehow,” Nancy Jaax would say to me as she told me the story some years later. “Monkeys spit and throw stuff. And when the caretakers wash the cages down with water hoses, that can create an aerosol of droplets. It probably traveled through the air in aerosolized secretion. That was when I knew that Ebola can travel through the air.”

1976 Summer—Autumn

One July 6, 1976, five hundred miles northwest of Mount Elgon, in southern Sudan, near the fingered edge of the central-African rain forest, a man who is known to Ebola hunters as Yu. G. went into shock and died with blood running from the orifices of his body. He is referred to only by his initials. Mr. Yu. G. was the first identified case, the index case, in an outbreak of an unknown virus.

Mr. Yu. G. was a storekeeper in a cotton factory in the town of Nzara. The population of Nzara had grown in recent years—the town had experienced, in its own way, the human population explosion that is occurring through the equatorial regions of the earth. The people of that area in southern Sudan are the Zande, a large tribe. The country of the Zande is savanna mixed with riverine forest, beautiful country, where acacia trees cluster along the banks of seasonal rivers. African doves perch in the trees and call their drawn-out calls. The land between the rivers is a sea of elephant grass, which can grow ten feet height. As you head south, toward Zaire, the land rises and forms hills, and the forest begins to spread away from the rivers and thickens into a closed canopy, and you enter the rain forest. The land around the town of Nzara held rich planations of teak and fruit trees and cotton. People were poor, but they worked hard and raised large families and kept to their tribal traditions.

Mr. Yu. G. was a salaried man. He worked at a desk in a room piled with cotton cloth at the back of the factory. Bats roosted in the ceiling of the room near his desk. If the bats were infected with Ebola, no one has been able to prove it. The virus may have entered the cotton factory by some unknown route—perhaps in insects trapped in the cotton fibers, for example, or in rats that lived in the factory. Or, possibly, the virus had nothing to do with the cotton factory, and Mr. Yu. G. was infected somewhere else. He did not go to a hospital, and died on a cot in his family compound. His family gave him a traditional Zande funeral and left his body under a mound of stones in a clearing of elephant grass.

His grave has been visited more than once by doctors from Europe and America, who want to see it and reflect on its meaning, and pay their respects to the index case of what later became known as Ebola Sudan.

He is remembered today as a “quiet, unremarkable man.” No photograph was taken of him during his lifetime, and no one seems to remember what he looked like. He wasn’t well known, even in his hometown.

They say that his brother was tall and slender, so perhaps, he was, too. He passed through the gates of life unnoticed by anyone except his family and a few of his co-workers. He might have made no difference except for the fact what he was a host.

His illness began to copy itself. A few days after he died, two other salaried men who worked at desks near him in the same room broke with bleeding, went into shock, and died with massive hemorrhages from the natural openings of the body. One of the dead men was a popular fellow known as P.G. Unlike the quiet Mr. Yu. G., he had a wide circle of friends, including several mistresses. He spread the agent far and wide in the town. The agent jumped easily from person to person, apparently through touching and sexual contact. It was a fast spreader, and it could live easily in people. It passed through as many as sixteen generations of infection as it jumped from person to person in Sudan. It also killed many of its hosts. While this is not necessarily in the best interest of the virus, if the virus is highly contagious, and can jump fast enough from host to host, then it does not matter, really, what happens to the previous host, because virus can amplify itself for quite a while, at least until it kills off much of the population of hosts. Most of the fatal cases of Ebola Sudan can be traced back through chains of infection to the quiet Mr. Yu. G. A hot strain radiated out of him and nearly devastated the human population of southern Sudan. The strain burned through the town of Nzara and reached eastward to the town of Maridi, where there was a hospital.

It hit the hospital like a bomb. It savaged patients and snaked like chain lightning out from the hospital through patients’ families. Apparently the medical staff had been giving patients injections with dirty needles. The virus jumped quickly through the hospital via the needles, and then it hit the medical staff. A characteristic of a lethal, contagious, and incurable virus is that it quickly gets into the medical people. In some cases, the medical system may intensify the outbreak, like a lens that focuses sunlight on a heap of tinder.

The virus tranformed the hospital at Maridi into a morgue. As it jumped from bed to bed, killing patients left and right, doctors began to notice signs of mental derangement, psychosis, depersonalization, zombie-like behavior. Some of the dying stripped off their clothes and ran out of the hospital, naked and bleeding, and wandered through the streets of the town, seeking their homes, not seeming to know what had happened or how they had gotten into this condition. There is no doubt that Ebola damages the brain and causes psychotic dementia. It is not easy, however, to separate brain damage from the effects of fear. If you were trapped in a hospital where people dissolving in their beds, you might try to escape, and if you were a bleeder and frightened, you might take off your clothes, and people might think you had gone mad.

The Sudan strain was more than twice as lethal as Marburg virus—its case-fatality rate was 50 percent. That is, fully half of the people who came down with it ended up dying, and quickly. This was the same kind of fatality rate as was seen with the black plague during the Middle Ages. If the Ebola Sudan virus had managed to spread out of central Africa, it might have entered Khartoum in a few weeks, penetrated Cairo a few weeks after that, and from there it would have hopped to Athens, New York, Paris, London, Singapore—it would have gone everywhere on the planet. Yet that never happened, and the crisis in Sudan passed away unnoticed by the world at large. What happened in Sudan could be compared to the secret detonation of an atomic bomb. If the human race came close to a major biological accident, we never knew it.

For reasons that are not clear, the outbreak subsided, and the virus vanished. The hospital at Maridi had been the epicenter of emergence. As the virus ravaged the hospital, the surviving medical staff panicked and ran off into the bush. It was probably the wisest thing to do and the best thing that could have happened, because it stopped the use of dirty needles and emptied the hospital, which helped to break the chain of infection.

There was another possible reason why the Ebola Sudan virus vanished. It was exceedingly hot. It killed people so fast that they didn’t have much time to infect other people before they died.

Furthermore, the virus was not airborne. It was not quite contagious enough to start a full-scale disaster. It traveled in blood, and the bleeding victim did not touch very many other people before dying, and so the virus did not have many chances to jump to a new host. Had people been coughing the virus into the air… it would have been a different story. In any case, the Ebola Sudan virus destroyed a few hundred people in central Africa the way a fire consumes a pile of straw—until the blaze burns out at the center and ends in a heap of ash—rather than smoldering around the planet, as AIDS has done, like a fire in a coal mine, impossible to put out. The Ebola virus, in its Sudan incarnation, retreated to the heart of the bush, where undoubtedly it lives to this day, cycling and cycling in some unknown host, able to shift its shape, able to mutate and become a new thing, with the potential to enter the human species in a new form.

Two months after the start of the Sudan emergence—the time was early September 1976—an even more lethal filovirus emerged five hundred miles to the west, in a district of northern Zaire called Bumba Zone, an ahead of tropical rain forest populated by scattered villages and drained by the Ebola River. The Ebola Zaire strain was nearly twice as lethal as Ebola Sudan. It seemed to emerge out of the stillness of an implacable force brooding on an inscrutable intention. To this day, the first human case of Ebola Zaire has never been identified.

In the first days of September, some unknown person who probably lived somewhere to the south of Ebola River perhaps touched something bloody. It might have been monkey meat—people in that area hunt monkeys for food—or it might have been the meat of some other animal, such as an elephant or a bat. Or perhaps the person touched a crushed insect, or perhaps he or she was bitten by a spider. Whatever the original host of the virus, it seems that a blood-to-blood contact in the rain forest enabled the virus to move into the human world. The portal into the human race may well have been a cut on this unknown person’s hand.

The virus surfaced in the Yambuku Mission Hospital, an upcountry clinic run by Belgian nuns. The hospital was a collection of corrugated tin roofs and whitewashed concrete walls sitting besides a church in the forest, where bells rang and you heard a sound of hymns and the words of the high mass spoken in Bantu. Next door, people stood in line at the clinic and shivered with malaria while they waited for a nun to give them an injection of medicine that might make them feel better.

The mission in Yambuku also ran a school for children. In later August, a teacher from the school and some friends went on a vacation trip to the northern part of Zaire. They borrowed a Land Rover from the mission to make their journey, and they explored the country as they headed northward, moving slowly along rutted tracks, no doubt getting stuck in the mud from time to time, which is the way things go when you try to drive through Zaire. The track was mostly a footpath enclosed by a canopy of trees, and it was always in shadow, as if they were driving through Zaire. The track was mostly a footpath enclosed by a canopy of trees, and it was always in shadow, as if they were driving through a tunnel. Eventually they came to the Ebola River and crossed it on a ferry barge and continued northward. Near the Obangui River, they stopped at a roadside market, where the schoolteacher bought some fresh antelope meat. One of his friends bought a freshly killed monkey and put it in the back of the Land Rover. Any of the friends could have handled the monkey or the antelope meat while they were bouncing around in the Land Rover.

They turned back, and when the schoolteacher arrived home, his wife stewed the antelope meat, and everyone in the family ate it. The following morning he felt unwell, and so before he reported to his

teaching job at the school, he stopped off at the Yambuku Hospital, on the other side of the church, to get an injection of medicine from the nuns.

At the beginning of each day, the nuns at Yambuku Hospital would lay out five hypodermic syringes on a table, and they would use them to give shots to patients all day long. They were using five needles a day to give injections to hundreds of people in the hospital’s outpatient and maternity clinics. The nuns and staff occasionally rinsed the needles in a pan of warm water after an injection, to get the blood off the needle, but more often they proceeded from shot to shot without rinsing the needle, moving from arm to arm, mixing blood with blood. Since Ebola virus is highly infective and since as few as five or ten particles of the virus in a blood-borne contact can start an extreme amplification in a new host, there would have been excellent opportunity for the agent to spread.

A few days after schoolteacher received his injection, he broke with Ebola Zaire. He was the first known case of Ebola Zaire, but he may well have contracted the virus from a dirty needle during his injection at the hospital, which means that someone else might have previously visited the hospital while sick with Ebola virus and earlier in the day received an injection from the same needle that was then used on the schoolteacher.

That unknown person probably stood in line for an injection just ahead of the schoolteacher. That person would have started the Ebola outbreak in Zaire. As in Sudan, the emergence of a life form that could in theory have gone around the earth began with one infected person.

The virus erupted simultaneously in fifty-five villages surrounding the hospital. First it killed people who had received injections, and then it moved through families, killing family members,

particularly women, who in Africa prepare the dead for burial. It swept through the Yambuku Hospital’s nursing staff, killing most of the nurses, and then it hit the Belgian nuns. The first nun to break with Ebola was a midwife who had delivered a stillborn child. The mother was dying of Ebola and had given the virus to her unborn baby. The fetus had evidently crashed and bled out inside the mother’s womb. The woman then aborted spontaneously, and the nun who assisted at this grotesque delivery came away from the experience with blood on her hands. The blood of the mother and fetus was radiantly hot, and the nun must have had a small break or cut on the skin of her hands. She developed an explosive infection and was dead in five days.

There was a nun at the Yambuku Hospital who is known today as Sister M.E. She became gravely ill with l’epidemie, or “the epidemic,” as they had begun to call it. A priest at Yambuku decided to try to take her to the city of Kinshasa, the capital of Zaire, in order to get her better medical treatment. He and another nun, named Sister E.R., drove Sister M.E. in a Land Rover to the town of Bumba, a sprawl of cinder blocks and wooden shacks that huddles beside the Congo River. They went to the airfield at Bumba and hired a small plane to fly to Kinshasa, an when they reached the city, they took Sister M.E. to Ngaliema Hospital, a private hospital run by Swedish nurses, where she was given a room of her own. There she endured her agonals and committed her soul to Christ.

Ebola Zaire attacks every organ and tissue in the human body except skeletal muscle and bone. It is a perfect parasite because it transforms virtually every part of the body into a digested slime of virus particles.

The seven mysterious proteins that, assembled together, make up the Ebola-virus particle, work as a relentless machine, a molecular shark, and they consume the body as the virus makes copies of itself. Small blood clots begin to appear in the bloodstream, and the blood thickens and slows, and the clots begin to stick to the walls of blood vessels. This is known as pavementing, because the clots fit together in a mosaic. The mosaic thickens and throws more clots, and the clots drift through the bloodstream into the small capillaries, where they get stuck. This shuts off the blood supply to various part of the body, causing dead spots to appear in the brain, liver, kidneys, lungs, intestines, testicles, breast tissue (of men as well as women), and all through the skin. The skin develops red spots, called petechiae, which are hemorrhages under the skin. Ebola attacks connective tissue with particular ferocity; it multiplies in collagen, the chief constituent protein of the tissue that holds the organs together. (The seven Ebola proteins somehow chew up the body’s structural proteins.) In this way, collagen in the body turns to mush, and the underlayers of the skin die and liquefy. The skin bubbles up into a sea of tiny white blisters mixed with red spots known as a maculopapular rash. The rash has been likened to tapioca pudding. Spontaneous rips appear in the skin, and hemorrhagic blood pours from the rips. The red spots on the skin grow and spread and merge to become huge, spontaneous bruises, and he skin goes soft and pulpy, and can tear off if it is touched with any kind of pressure. You mouth bleeds, and you bleed around your teeth, and you may have hemorrhages from the salivary glands—literally every opening in the body bleeds, no matter how small. The surface of the tongue turns brilliant red and then sloughs off, and is swallowed or spat out. It is said to be extraordinarily painful to lose the surface of one’s tongue. The tongue’s skin may be torn off during rushes of the black vomit. The back of the throat and the lining of the windpipe may also slough off, and the dead tissue slides down the windpipe into the lungs or is coughed up with sputum. Your heart bleeds into itself; the heart muscle softens and has hemorrhages into its chambers, and blood squeezes out of the heart muscle as the heart beats, and it floods the chest cavity. The brain becomes clogged with dead blood cells, a condition known as sludging of the brain. Ebola attacks the lining of the eyeball, and the eyeballs may fill up with blood: you may go blind. Droplets of blood stand out on the eyelids: you may weep blood. The blood runs from your eyes down your cheeks and refuses to coagulate. You may have a hemispherical stroke, in which one whole side of the body is paralyzed, which is invariably fatal in a case of Ebola. Even while the body’s internal organs are becoming plugged with coagulated blood, the blood that streams out of the body cannot clot; it resembles when being squeezed out of curds. The blood has been stripped of its clotting factors. If you put the runny Ebola blood in a test tube and look at it, you see that the blood is destroyed. Its red cells are broken and dead. The blood looks as if it has been buzzed in an electric blender.

Ebola kills a great deal of tissue while the host is still alive. It triggers a creeping, spotty necrosis that spreads through all the internal organs. The liver bulges up and turns yellow, begins to liquefy, and then it cracks apart. The cracks run across the liver and deep inside it, and the liver completely dies and goes putrid. The kidneys become jammed with blood clots and dead cells, and cease functioning. As the kidneys fail, the blood becomes toxic with urine. The spleen turns into a single huge, hard blood clot the size of a baseball. The intestines may fill up completely with blood. The lining of the gut dies and sloughs off into the bowels and is defecated along with large amounts of blood. In men, the testicles bloat up and turn black-and-blue, the semen goes hot with Ebola, and the nipples may bleed. In women, the labia turn blue, livid, and protrusive, and there may be massive vaginal bleeding. The virus is a catastrophe for a pregnant woman: the child is aborted

spontaneously and is usually infected with Ebola virus, born with red eyes and a bloody nose.

Ebola destroys the brain more thoroughly than does Marburg, and Ebola victims often go into epileptic convulsions during the final stage. The convulsions are generalized grand mal seizures—the whole body twitches and shakes, the arms and legs thrash around, and the eyes, sometimes bloody, roll up into the head. The tremors and convulsions of the patient may smear or splatter blood around. Possibly this epileptic splashing of blood is one of Ebola’s strategies for success—it makes the victim go into a flurry of seizures as he dies, spreading blood all over the place, thus giving the virus a chance to jump to a new host—a kind of transmission through smearing.

Ebola (and Marburg) multiplies so rapidly and powerfully that the body’s infected cells become crystal-like blocks of packed virus particles. These crystals are broods of virus getting ready to hatch from the cell. They are known as bricks. The bricks, or crystals, first appear near the center of the cell and then migrate toward the surface. As a crystal reaches a cell wall, it disintegrates into hundreds of individual virus particles, and the bloodlings push through the cell wall like hair and float away in the bloodstream of the host. The hatched Ebola particles cling to cells everywhere in the body, and get inside them, and continue to multiply. It keeps on multiplying until areas of tissue all through the body are filled with crystalloids, which hatch, and more Ebola particles drift into the bloodstream, and the amplification continues inexorably until a droplet of host’s blood can contain a hundred million individual virus particles.

After death, the cadaver suddenly deteriorates: the internal organs, having been dead or partially dead for days, have already begun to dissolve, and a sort of shock-related meltdown occurs. The corpse’s connective tissue, skin, and organs, already peppered with dead spots, heated by fever, and damaged by shock, begin to liquefy, and the fluids that leak from the cadaver are saturated with Ebola-virus particles.

When it was all over, the floor, chair, and walls in Sister M.E’s hospital room were stained with blood. Someone who saw the room told me that after they took her body away for burial (wrapped in many sheets), no one at the hospital could bear to go into the room to clean it up. The nurses and doctors didn’t want to touch the blood on the walls and were frankly fearful of breathing the air in the room, too. So the room was closed and locked, and remained that way for days. The appearance of the nun’s hospital room after her death may have raised in some minds one or two question about the nature of the Supreme Being, or, for persons not inclined to theology, the blood on the walls may have served as a reminder of the nature of Nature.

No one knew what had killed the nun, but clearly it was a replicating agent, and the signs and symptoms of the disease were not easy to consider with a calm mind. What also did not lead to calm thoughts were rumors coming out of the jungle to the effect that the agent was wiping out whole villages upriver on the Congo. These rumors were not true. The virus was hitting families selectively, but no one understood this because the flow of news coming from upriver was being choked off. Doctors at the hospital in Kinshasa examined the nun’s case and began to suspect that she might have died of Marburg or a Marburg-like agent.

Then Sister E.R., the nun who had traveled with Sister M.E. during the drive to Bumba and the plane flight to Kinshasa, broke with l’eoudenue. They put her in a private room at the hospital, where she began to die with the same signs and symptoms that had preceded Sister M.E.‘s death.

There was a young nurse at the Ngaliema Hospital named Mayinga N. (Her first name was Mayinga and her last name is given as N.) Nurse Mayinga had been caring for Sister M.E. when the nun had died in the bloodstained room. She may have been splattered with the nun’s blood or with black vomit. At any rate, Nurse Mayinga developed a headache and fatigue. she knew she was becoming sick, but she did not want to admit to herself what it was. She came from a poor but ambitious family, and she had received a scholarship to go to college in Europe. What worried her was the possibility that if she became ill, she would not be allowed to travel abroad. When the headache came upon her, she left her job at the hospital and disappeared. She dropped out of sight for two days. During that time, she went into the city, hoping to get her travel permits arranged before she became visibly sick. On the first day of her disappearance—the date was October 12, 1976—she spent a day waiting in lines at the offices of the Zairean foreign ministry, trying to get her papers straight.

The next day, October 13, she felt worse, but instead of reporting to work, again she went into the city. This time, she took a taxi to the largest hospital in Kinshasa, the Mama Yemo Hospital. By now, as her headache became blinding and her stomach pain increased, she must have been terribly frightened. Why didn’t she go to the Ngaliema Hospital to seek treatment where she worked and where the doctors would have taken care of her? It must have been a case of psychological denial. She did not want to admit, even to herself, that she had been infected. Perhaps she had a touch of malaria, she hoped. So she went to Mama Yemo Hospital, the hospital of last resort for the city’s poor, and spent hours waiting in a casualty ward jammed with ragged people and children.

I can see her in my mind’s eye—Nurse Mayinga, the source of the virus in the United States Army’s freezers. She was a pleasant, quiet, beautiful young African woman, about twenty years old, in the prime of her life, with a future and dreams, hoping somehow that what was happening to her could not be happening. They say that her parents loved her dearly, that she was the apple of their eye. Now she is sitting in the casualty ward at Mama Yemo among the cases of malaria, among the large-bellied children in rags, and no one is paying any attention to her because all she has is a headache and red eyes. Perhaps the fact that she is crying has made her eyes red. A doctor gives her a shot for malaria and tells her that she should be in quarantine for her illness. But there is no room in the quarantine ward at Mama Yemo Hospital; so she leaves the hospital and hails another taxi. She tells the driver to take her to another hospital, to University Hospital, where perhaps the doctors can treat her. But when she arrives at University Hospital, the doctors can’t seem to find anything wrong with her, except for possibly some sign of malaria. Her headache is getting worse. She is sitting in the waiting room of this hospital, and as I try to imagine her there, I am almost certain she is crying. Finally she does the only thing left for her to do. She returns to Ngaliema Hospital and asks to be admitted as a patient. They put her in a private room, and there she falls into lethargy, and her face freezes into a mask.

News of the virus and what it did to people had been trickling out of the forest, and now a rumor that a sick nurse had wandered around Kinshasa for two days, having face-to-face contact with many people in crowded rooms and public places, caused a panic in the city. The news spread first along the mission grapevine and through government employees and among the diplomats at cocktail parties, and finally the rumors began to reach Europe. When the story reached the offices of the World Health Organization in Geneva, the place went into a full-scale alert. People who were there at the time said that you could feel fear in the hallways, and the director looked like a visibly shaken man. Nurse Mayinga seemed to be a vector for an explosive claim of lethal transmission in a crowded third-world city with a population of two million people. Officials at the WHO began to fear that Nurse Mayinga would become the vector for a world-wide plague. European governments contemplated blocking flights from Kinshasa. The fact that one infected person had wandered around the city for two days when she should have been isolated in a hospital room began to look like a species-threatening event.

President Mobutu Sese Seko, the maximum leader of Zaire, sent his army into action. He stationed soldiers around Ngaliema Hospital with orders to let no one enter or leave except doctors. Much of the medical staff was no under quarantine inside the hospital, but the soldiers made sure that the quarantine was enforced. President Mobutu also ordered army units to seal off Bumba Zone with roadblocks and to shoot anyone trying to come out. Bumba’s main link with the outside world was the Congo River. Captains of riverboats had heard about the virus by this time, and they refused to stop their boats anywhere along the length of the river in Bumba, even though people beseeched them from the banks. Then all radio contact with Bumba was lost. No one knew what was happening upriver, who was dying, what the virus was doing. Bumba had dropped off the face of the earth into the silent heart of darkness.

As the first nun at Ngaliema Hospital, Sister M.E., lay dying, her doctors had decided to give her a so-called agonal biopsy. This is a rapid sampling of tissue, done close to the moment of death instead of a full autopsy. She was a member of a religious order that prohibited autopsies, but the doctors very much wanted to know what was replicating inside her. As the terminal shock and convulsions came over her, they inserted a needle into her upper abdomen and sucked out a quantity of liver. Her liver had begun to liquefy, and the needle was large. A fair amount of the nun’s liver traveled up the needle and filled a biopsy syringe. Possibly it was during this agonal biopsy that her blood squirted on the walls. The doctors also took some samples of blood from her arm and put it in glass tubes. The nun’s blood was precious beyond measure, since it contained the unknown hot agent.

The blood was flown to a national laboratory in Belgium and to the England natural laboratory, the Microbiological Research Establishment at Porton Down, in Wiltshire. Scientists at both labs began racing to identify the agent. Meanwhile, at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia—the C.D.C.—scientists were feeling left out, and were still scrambling to get their hands on a little bit of the nun’s blood, making telephone calls to Africa and Europe, pleading for the samples.

There is a branch of the C.D.C. that deals with unknown emerging viruses. It’s called the Special Pathogens Branch. In 1976, at the time of the Zaire outbreak, the branch was being run by a doctor named Karl M. Johnson, a virus hunter whose home terrain had been the rain forests of Central and South America. (He is not related to Gene Johnson, the civilian virus hunter, or to Lieutenant Colonel Tony Johnson, the pathologist.) Karl Johnson and his C.D.C. colleagues had heard almost nothing about the occurrences upriver in Zaire—all they knew was that people in Zaire were dying of a “fever” that had “generalized symptoms”—no details had come in from the bush or from the hospital where the nun had just died. Yet it sounded like a bad one. Johnson telephoned a friend of his at the English lab, in Porton Down, and reportedly said to him, “If you’ve got any little dregs to spare of that nun’s blood, we’d like to have a look at it.” The Englishman agreed to send it to him, and what he received was literally dregs.

The nun’s blood arrived at C.D.C. in glass tubes in a box lined with dry ice. The tubes had cracked and broken during shipment, and raw, rotten blood had run around inside the box. A C.D.C. virologist named Patricia Webb—who was then married to Johnson—opened the box. She found that the package was sticky with blood. The blood looked like tar. It was black and gooey, like Turkish coffee. She put on rubber gloves, but other than that, she did not take any special precautions in handling the blood. Using some cotton balls, she managed to dab up some of the black stuff, and then by squeezing the cotton between her fingertips, she collected a few droplets of it, just enough to begin testing it for viruses.

Patrica Webb put some of the black blood droplets into flasks of monkey cells, and pretty soon the cells got sick and began to die—they burst. The unknown agent could infect monkey cells and pop them.

Another C.D.C. doctor who worked on the unknown virus was Frederick A. Murphy, a virologist who had helped to identify Marburg virus. He was and is one of the world’s leading electron-microscope photographers of viruses. (His photographs of viruses have been exhibited in art museums.) Murphy wanted to take a close look at those dying cells to see if he could photograph a virus in them. On October 13—the same day Nurse Mayinga was sitting in the waiting rooms of hospitals in Kinshasa—he placed a droplet of fluid from the cells on a small screen and let it dry, and he put it in his electron microscope to see what he could see.

He couldn’t believe his eyes. The sample was jammed with virus particles. The dried fluid was shot through with something that looked like string. His breath stopped in his throat. He thought, Marburg. He believed he was looking at Marburg virus.

Murphy stood up abruptly, feeling strange. The lab where he had prepared these samples—that lab was hot. The lab was as hot as hell. He went out of the microscope room, closing the door behind him, and hurried down a hallway to the laboratory where he had worked with the material. He got a bottle of Clorox bleach and scrubbed the room from top to bottom, washing countertops and sinks, everything, with bleach. He really scoured the place. After he had finished, he found Patricia Webb and told her what he had seen in his microscope. She telephoned her husband and said to him, “Karl, you’d better come quick to the lab. Fred has looked at a specimen, and he’s got worms.”

Staring at the worms, they tried to classify the shapes. They saw snakes, pigtails, branchy, forked things that looked like the letter Y, and they noticed squiggles like a small g, and bends like the letter U, and loopy 6s. They also noticed a classic shape, which they began calling the shepherd’s crook. Other Ebola experts have taken to calling this loop the eyebolt, after a bolt of the same name that can be found in a hardware store. It could also be described as a Cheerio with a long tail.

The next day, Patrica Webb ran some tests on the virus and found that it did not react to any of the tests for Marburg or any other known virus. Therefore, it was an unknown agent, a new virus. She and her colleagues had isolated the strain and shown that it was something new. They had earned the right to name the organism. Karl Johnson named it Ebola.

Karl Johnson has since left the C.D.C., and he now spends a great deal of his time fly-fishing for trout in Montana. He does consulting work on various matters, including the design of pressurized hot zones. I learned that he could be reached at a fax number in Big Sky, Montana, so I sent him a fax. In it, I said that I was fascinated by Ebola virus. My fax was received, but there was no reply. So I waited a day and then sent him another fax. It fell away into silence. The man must have been too busy fishing to bother to answer. After I had given up hope, my fax machine suddenly emitted this reply:

Two days after he and his colleagues isolated Ebola virus for the first time, Karl Johnson headed for Africa in the company of two other C.D.C. doctors, along with seventeen boxes of gear, to try to organize an effort to stop the virus in Zaire and Sudan (the outbreak in Sudan was still going on). They flew first to Geneva, to make contact with the World Health Organization, where they found that the WHO knew very little about the outbreaks. So the C.D.C. doctors organized their equipment and packed more boxes, getting ready to go to the Geneva airport, from where they would fly to Africa. But then, at the last possible moment, one of C.D.C. doctors panicked. It is said he was the doctor assigned to go to Sudan, and it is said he was afraid to proceed any farther. It was not an unusual situation. As Karl Johnson explained to me, “I’ve seen young physicians run from these hemorrhagic viruses, literally. They’re unable to work in the middle of an outbreak. They refuse to get off the plane.”

Johnson, one of the discoverers of Ebola virus, preferred to talk about these events while fly-fishing. (“We’ve got to keep our priorities straight,” he explained to me.) So I flew to Montana and spent a couple of days with him fishing for brown trout ont the Bighorn River. It was October, the weather had turned clear and warm, and the cottonwood trees along the banks were yellow and rattled in a south wind. Standing waist-deep in a mutable slick of the river, wearing sunglasses, with a cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth and a fly rod in his hand, Johnson ripped his line off the water and laid a cast upstream. He was a lean, bearded man, with a soft voice that one had to listen for in the wind. He is a great figure in the history of virus hunting, having discovered and named some of the most dangerous life forms on the planet. “I’m so glad nature is not benign,” he remarked. He studied the water, took a step downstream, and placed anther cast. “But on a day like today, we can pretend nature is benign. All monsters and beasts have their benign moments.”

“What happened in Zaire?” I asked.

“When we got to Kinshasa, the place was an absolute mad house,” he said. “There was no news coming out of Bumba, no radio contact. We knew it was bad in there, and we knew we were dealing with something new. We didn’t know if the virus could be spread by droplets in the air, something like influenza. If Ebola had spread easily through the air, the world would be a very different place today.”

“How so?”

“There would be a lot fewer of us. It would have been exceedingly difficult to confirm that virus if it had any major respiratory component.

I did figure that if Ebola was the Andromeda strain—incredibly lethal and spread by droplet infection—there wasn’t going to be any safe place in the world anyway. It was better to be working at the epicenter than to get the infection at the London opera.”

“Are you worried about a species-threatening event?”

He stared at me, “What the hell do you mean by that?”

“I mean a virus that wipes us out.”

“Well, I think it could happen. Certainly it hasn’t happened yet. I’m not worried. More likely it would be a virus that reduces us by ninety percent.”

“Nine out of ten human killed? And you’re not bothered.”

A look of mysterious amusement crossed his face. “A virus can be useful to a species by thinning it out,” he said.

A scream cut the air. It sound nonhuman.

He took his eyes off the water and looked around. “Hear that pheasant? That’s what I like about the Bighorn River,” he said.

“Do you find viruses beautiful?”

“Oh, yeah,” he said softly. “Isn’t true that if you stare into the eyes of a cobra, the fear has another side to it? The fear is lessened as you begin to see the essence of the beauty. Looking at Ebola under an electron microscope is looking at a gorgeously wrought ice castle. The thing is cold. So totally pure.”

Karl Johnson became the chief of an international WHO team that gathered in Kinshasa.

The other C.D.C. doctor, Joel Breman, who had flown with Johnson to Zaire, became a member of a field exploration team that boarded an aircraft bound for the interior to see what was going on in Bumba. The airplane was a C-130 Buffalo troop-transport, an American-made military aircraft that belonged to the Zairmen Air Force. It happened to be President Mobutu’s private plane, equipped with leopard-skin seats, folding beds, and a wet bar, a sort of flying presidential palace that ordinarily took the president and his family on vacations to Switzerland, but now it carried the WHO team into the hot zone, following the Congo River north by east. They sat on the leopard-skin seats and stared out the windows at endless tracts of rain forest and brown river, a featureless blanket broken by the occasional gleam of an oxbow lake or a cluster of round huts strung like beads on a barely visible road or footpath. As he leaned against the window and watched the terrain unfold into the heart of Africa, Breman became terrified of coming to earth. It was safe in the air, high above the immeasurable forest, but down there… It began to dawn on him that he was going to Burmba to die. He had recently been assigned to Michigan as a state epidemiologist, and suddenly he had been called to Africa. He has left his wife back home in Michagan with their two children, and he began to suspect that he would never see them again. He had brought an overnight bag with a toothbrush, and he had managed to pack a few paper surgical masks and some gowns and rubber gloves into the bag. He did not have proper equipment for handling a hot agent. The Buffalo descended, and the town of Bumba appeared, a rotting tropical port spread out along the Congo River.

The Buffalo landed at an airstrip outside the town. The plane’s Zairmen crew was terrified, afraid to breathe the air, and they left the propellers idling while they showed the doctors down the gangway and heaved their bags out after them. The doctors found themselves standing in the backwash of the Buffalo as it accelerated to take off.

In the town, they met with the governor of Bumba Zone. He was a local politician, quite distraught. He had found himself in deep waters, in over his head. “We are in a bad way,” he told the doctors. “We have not been able to get salt or sugar.” His voice trembled on the edge of weeping as he added, “We have not even been able to get beer.”

A Belgian doctor on the team knew how to handle this situation. With a dramatic flourish, he placed a black airline pilot’s bag on the table. Then he turned the bag upside down, and wads of currency slapped out, making an impressive heap. “Governor, perhaps this will make things a little better.” he said.

“What are you doing?” Breman said to the Belgian.

The Belgian shrugged. “Look, this is the way things are done here.”

The governor scooped up the money and pledged his full cooperation together with all the extensive resources of government at his disposal—and he loaned them two Land Rovers.

They pushed north toward the Ebola River.

It was the rainy season, and the “road” was a string of mudholes cut by running streams. Engines howling, wheels spinning, they proceeded through the forest at the pace of a wall, in continual rain and oppressive heat. Occasionally they came to villages, and at each village they encountered a roadblock of fallen trees. Having had centuries of experience with the smallpox virus, the village elders had instituted their own methods for controlling the virus, according to their received wisdom, which was to cut their villages off from the world, to protect their people from a raging plague. It was reverse quarantine, an ancient practice in Africa, where a village bars itself from strangers during a time of disease, and drives away outside who appear.

“Who are you? What are you doing?” they shouted to the Land Rovers from behind a barrier of trees.

“We are doctors! We are coming to help!”

Eventually the people would clear away the trees, and the team would proceed deeper into the forest. In a long and desperate day of travel, they penetrated fifty miles away from the Congo River, and finally, toward evening, they came to a row of round, hatched African houses. Beyond the houses stood a white church in the middle of the forest. Around the church, there were two soccer fields, and in the middle of one field they noticed a heap of burned mattresses. Two hundred yards farther on, they came to the Yambuku Mission Hospital, a complex of low, whitewashed buildings made of concrete, with corrugated tin roofs.

The place was as silent as a tomb and appeared to be deserted. The beds were iron or wooden frames without mattresses—the blood-soaked mattresses had been burned in the soccer field—and the floors were clean, spotless, rinsed. The team discovered three surviving nuns and one priest, along with a few devoted African nurses. They had cleaned up the mess after the virus had wiped out everyone else, and now they were busy fogging the rooms with insecticide, in the hope that it might somehow disperse the virus. One room in the hospital had not been cleaned up. No one, not even the nuns, had the courage to enter the obstetric ward. When Joel Breman and the team went in, they found basins of foul water standing among discarded, bloodstained syringes. The room had been abandoned in the middle of childbirths, were dying mothers had aborted fetuses infected with Ebola. The team had discovered the red chamber of virus queen at the end of the earth, where the life form had amplified through mothers and their unborn children.

The rains continued all day and night. Around the hospital and the church stood the beautiful ferocious trees, a complex of camphors and teaks. Their crowns entwined and crisscrossed and whispered with rain, and bowed and shifted as troops of monkeys passed through them like currents of wind, leaping from crown to crown, crying their untranslatable cries. The next day, the doctors set out deeper into the forest in their Land Rovers, and they made contact with infected villages, where they found people dying in huts. Some of the victims had been put into isolation huts on the edge of the village—an old African technique for dealing with smallpox. Some of the huts where people had died had been burned down. Already the virus seemed to be petering out, and most of the people who were going to die were already dead, the virus having echoed so swiftly through Bumba. A wave of emotion roled over Joel Breman as he realized, with the clarity of a doctor who suddenly sees into the heart of things, that the victims had received the infection from the hospital. The virus had taken root with the nuns and had done its work among those who had sought help from them. In one village, he examined a man dying of Ebola. The man sat in a chair, holding his stomach and leaning forward with pain, and blood streamed around his teeth.

They tried to reach Kinshasa by radio, to tell Karl Johnson and the others that the epidemic had already peaked. A week later, they were still trying to make radio contact, but they could not get through. They traveled back to the town of Bumba and waited by the river. One day an airplane droned overhead. It circled the town once and touched down, and they ran for it.

At the Ngaliema hospital in Kinshasa, Nurse Mayinga had been put into a private room, which was accessible through a kind of empty room, a gray zone, where the nurses and staff were supposed to put on bioprotective gear before they entered. Mayinga was cared by a South African doctor named Margaretha Isaacson, who at first wore a military gas mask, but it became increasily uncomfortable in the tropical heat. She thought to herself, I can’t bear it. I’ll be surprised if I come out of this alive anyway. That made her think about her own children. She thought, My children are grown up, they are no great responsibility. And she removed her mask and treated the dying girl face-to-face.

Dr. Isaacson did everything she could to save Mayinga, but she was as helpless before the agent as medieval doctors had been in the face of the black plague. (“This was not like AIDS,” she would later recall. “AIDS is a child’s play compared with this.”) She gave Nurse Mayinga ice cubes to suck on, which helped to ease the pain in her throat, and she gave her Valium to try to stave off her apprehension of what lay ahead.

“I know I am dying,” Mayinga said to her.

“That’s nonsense. You are not going to die.” Dr. Isaacson replied.

When Mayinga’s bleeding began, it came from her mouth and nose. It never came in a rush, but the blood dripped and ran and would not stop and would not clot. It was a hemorrhagic nose bleed, the kind that does not stop until the heart stops beating. Eventually Dr. Isaacson gave her three transfusions of whole blood to replace what she lost in nosebleeds. Mayinga remained conscious and despondent until the end. In the final stage, her heart developed a galloping beat. Ebola had entered her heart.

Mayinga could feel her heart going blubbery inside her chest, and it frightened her unspeakably. That night, she died of a heart attack.

Her room was contaminated with blood, and there was also the question of the two nuns’ rooms, both of which were still locked and bloodstrained. R. Isaacson said to the staff, “I won’t be of much use to you now,” and she got a bucket and mop and wash the rooms.

Medical teams fanned out into Kinshasa and managed to locate thirty-seven people who had face-to-face contact with Mayinga during the time when she had wandered around the city. They set up two biocontainment pavilions at the hospital and shut the people up for a couple of weeks. They wrapped like cadavers of the nuns an Nurse Mayinga in sheets soaked in chemicals, then double-bagged the mummies in plastic and put each one in an airtight coffin which a screw-down lid, and held the funeral services at the hospital, under the watch of doctors.

Karl Johnson, having heard nothing from the team of doctors upriver in Bumba, wondered if they were dead, and assumed that the virus was about to go on a burn through the city. He organized a floating hospital ship and had it moored in the Congo River. It was an isolation ship for doctors. The city would be the hot zone, and the floating ship would be the gray area, the place of refuge for the doctors. Approximately a thousand Americans were living in Zaire at the time. In the United States, the Amy’s Eighty-second Airborne Division went on alert and prepared to evacuate the Americans by air as soon as the first Ebola cases started popping up in the city. But to the strange and wonderful relief of Zaire and the world, the virus never went on a burn through the city. It subsides on the headwaters of the Ebola River and went back to its hiding place in the forest. The Ebola agent seemed not to be contagious in face-to-face contacts. It did not seem to be able to travel through the air. No one caught the virus from Nurse Mayinga, even though she had been in close contact with at least thirty-seven people. She had shared a bottle soda pop with someone, and not even that person became ill. The crisis passed.

1987 September

As with Ebola, the secret hiding place of the Marburg agent was unknown. After erupting in Charles Monet and Dr. Shem Musoke, Marburg dropped out of sight, and no one could say where it had gone. It seemed to vanish off the face of the earth, but viruses never go away, they only hide, and Marburg continued to cycle in some reservoir of animals or insects in Africa.

On the second of day of September 1987, around suppertime, Eugene Johnson, the civilian biohazard expert attached to USAMRIID, stood in a passenger-arrival area outside the customs gates at Dulles International Airport, near Washington. He was waiting for a KLM flight from Amsterdam, which carried a passenger who had come from Kenya. A man with a duffle bag passed through customs, and he and Johnson nodded to each other. (“I’m going to leave this person’s name out of it. Let’s just say he was someone I knew, someone I trust.” Johnson explained to me). The man laid down the duffle bag at Johnson’s feet, unzipped it, and pulled out a wad of bath towels wrapped around something. Pulling off the towels, he revealed an unmarked cardboard box wound with tape. He handed the box to Johnson. They had little to say to each other. Johnson carried the box out of the terminal building, put it in the trunk of his car, and drove to the Institute. The box held blood serum from a ten-year-old Danish boy who will be called Peter Cardinal. He had died a day or so earlier at Nairobi Hospital with a combination of extreme symptoms that suggested an unidentified Level 4 virus.

As he drove to the Institute, Johnson wondered just what he was going to do with the box. He was inclined to sterilize its contents in an oven and then incinerate it. Just cook it and burn it, and forget it. Most of the samples that came into the Institute—and samples of blood and tissue arrived constantly from all parts of the world—contained nothing unusual, no interesting viruses. In other words, most of the samples were false alarms. Johnson wasn’t sure he wanted to take the time to analyze this boy’s blood serum, if, in all probability, nothing would be found in it. By the time he pulled into the gates of Fork Detrick, he had decided to go ahead. He knew the work would keep him up most of the night, but it had to be done immediately, before the blood serum deriorated.

Johnson put on a surgical scrub suit and rubber gloves, and carried the box into the Level 3 staging area of the Ebola suite, where he opened the box, revealing a mass of foam peanuts. Out of the peanuts he fished a metal cylinder sealed with tape and marked with a biohazard symbol. Along the wall of the staging area was a row of stainless-steel cabinets with rubber gloves protruding into them. They were Biosafety Level 4 cabinets. They could be sealed off from the outside world while you handled a hot agent inside them with the rubber gloves. These cabinets were similar in design to the safety cabinets that are used to handling nuclear-bomb parts. Here the cabinets were designed to keep human beings from coming into direct contact with Nature. Johnson unscrewed some wingnuts and opened a door in the cabinets, and placed the metal cylinder inside. He closed and tightened the door.

Next, he put his hands into the gloves, picked up the cylinder and, looking through a window to see what he was doing, peeled the tape off the cylinder. The tape stuck to his rubber gloves, and he couldn’t get it off. Damn! he swore to himself. It was now eight o’clock at night, and he would never get home. Finally he got the cylinder open. Inside it was a wad of paper towel soaked in bleach. He pulled apart the wad and found a Ziploc bag. It contained a couple of plastic tubes with screw tops. He unscrewed them and shook out two very small plastic vials containing golden liquid: Peter Cardinal’s blood serum.

The boy’s mother and father worked for a Danish relief organization Kenya, and lived in a house in the town of Kisumu, on Lake Victoria. Peter had been a student at a boarding school in Denmark. That August, a few weeks before he died, he had gone to Africa to visit his parents and his older sister. She was a student at a private school in Nairobi. She and Peter were very close, and while Peter was visiting his family in Kenya, the two young people spent most of their time together—brother and sister, best friends.

The Cardinal family went on vacation after Peter’s arrival, and traveled by car through Kenya—his mother and father wanted to show him the beauty and sweetness of Africa. They were visiting Mombasa, staying in a hotel by the sea, when Peter developed red eyes. His parents took him to the hospital, where the doctors examined him an concluded that he had come down with malaria. His mother did not believe it was malaria. She began to perceive that her song was dying, and she became frantic. She insisted that he be taken to Nairobi for treatment. The Flying Doctors, an air-ambulance service, picked him up, and he was rushed to Nairbori Hospital, where he came under care of Dr. David Silverstein, who had also taken care of Dr. Musoke after Charles Monet had spewed the black vomit into Musoke’s eyes.

“Peter Cardinal was a blond-haired, blue-eyed guy, a tall, thin guy, a fit-looking ten-year-old,” Dr. Silverstein recalled as we drank coffee and tea at a table in the shopping mall near his house outside Washington. A small girl sitting burst into wails, and her mother hushed her. Crowds of shoppers passed by our table. I kept my eyes on Dr. Silverstein’s face—steel-rimmed glasses, mustache, eyes that gazed into space—as he recalled the unusual death he had seen, which he spoke of a matter-of-face way. “When Peter came to me, he was febrile, but he was very with it, very alert and communicative. We gave him an X-ray. His lungs were fluffy.” A kind of watery mucus had begun to collect in the boy’s longs, which caused him difficulty in breathing. “It was a typical ARDS picture—acute respiratory distress syndrome—like early pneumonia,” Dr. Silverstein said.

“Shortly afterward, he started turning bluish on it. He had blue in his fingertips. Also, he had little red spots. I had everybody glove up before they handled him. We suspected he had Marburg, but we didn’t have the paranoia we had with Dr. Musoke. We just took precautions. In twenty-four hours, he was on a respirator. We noted that he bled easily from puncture sites, and he had deranged liver functions. The small red spots became large, spontaneous bruises. He turned black-and-blue. Then his pupils dilated up on us. That was a sign of brain death. He was bleeding around the brain.”

He swelled up, and his filled with pockets of blood. In some places, the skin almost separated from the underlying tissue. This happened during the last phase, while he was on a respirator. It is called third spacing. If you bleed into the first space, you bleed into you lungs. If you bleed into the second space, you bleed into your stomach and intestines. If you bleed into the third space, you bleed into the space between the skin and the flesh. The skin puffs up and separates from the flesh like a bag. Peter Cardinal had bled out under his skin.

The more one contemplates the hot viruses, the less they look like parasites and the more they begin to look like predators. It is a characteristic of a predator to become invisible to its prey during the quiet and sometimes lengthy stalk that precedes an explosive attack. The savanna grass ripples on the plains, and the only sound in the air is the sound of African doves calling from acacia trees, a pulse that goes on through the heat of the day and never slows and never ends. In the distance, in the flickering heat, in the immense distance, a herd of zebras gaze. Suddenly from the grass comes a streak of movement, and a lion is among them and hangs on a zebra’s throat. The zebra gives out a barking cry, choked off, and the two interlocked beings, the predator and the prey, spin around in a dance, until you lose sight of the action in a billow of dust, and the next day the bones have a surface of flies. Some of the predators that feed on humans have lived on the earth for a long time, far longer than the human race, and their origins go back, it seems, almost to the formation of the planet. When a human being is fed upon and consumed by one of them, especially in Africa, the event is telescoped against horizons of space and time, and takes on a feeling of immense antiquity.

Peter Cardinal’s parents and sister were stunned as they watched him being slowing torn apart by an invisible predator. They could not comprehend his suffering or reach him to give him comfort. As the blood poured into his third space, his eyes remained open and dilated, staring, bloody, deep, dark, and bottomless. They didn’t know if he could see them, and they couldn’t tell what he saw or thought or felt behind the open eyes. The machines hooked up to his scalp were showing flatlines in his brain. There was little electrical activity in his brain, but now and then the flatlines gave a spooky twitch, as if something continued to struggle inside the boy, some destroyed fragment of his soul.

They had to make a decision about whether to turn off the respirator. Dr. Silverstein said to them, “We’re much better off not letting him survive, because of brain death.”

“If they had only brought him in sooner from Mombasa,” the mother said.

“I’m sorry, but that would not have helped. There was nothing that anyone could have done,” Silverstein replied to her. “He was doomed from the beginning.”

Working with his hands in the rubber gloves protruding into the cabinets, Gene Johnson took a little bit of the boy’s blood serum and dropped it into flasks that contained living cells from a monkey. If anything lived in Peter Cardinal’s blood, it might begin to replicate in the monkey cells. Then Johnson went home to get some sleep. The procedure had taken him until three o’clock in the morning to finish.

In the following days, Johnson watched the flasks to see if there were any changes in the monkey cells. He saw that they were bursting and dying. They were infected with something. The Cardinal strain was definitely a hot agent—it killed the cells in vast numbers, and it killed them fast.

Now for the next stage of the virus isolation. He drew off a little bit of fluid from the flasks and injected it into three rhesus monkeys, to infect them with the Cardinal agent. Two of the monkeys died and the third animal went into borderline shock, but somehow pulled through and survived. So the Cardinal agent was viciously hot, a fast replicator, and it could kill monkeys. “I knew god-damned well we had Marburg,” Johnson would later say to me.

He took some of the Cardinal strain and injected it into guinea pigs to see if it would infect them. It killed them like flies. Not only that, the testicles of the males swelled up to the size of golf balls and turned purple. The Cardinal strain was a sophisticated organism that knew what they wanted. It could multiply in many different kinds of meat. It was an invasive life form, devastating and promiscuous. It showed a kind of obscenity you see only in nature, an obscenity so extreme that it dissolves imperceptibly into beauty. It made a living somewhere in Africa. What made it particularly interesting was that it multiplied easily in various species, in monkeys, humans, guinea pigs. It was extremely lethal in these species, which meant that its original host was probably not monkeys, humans or guinea pigs but some other animal or insect that it did not kill. A virus does not generally kill its natural host. The Marburg virus was a traveler: it could jump species; it could break through the lines that separate one species from another, and when it jumped into another species, it could devastate the species. It did not know boundaries. It did not know what humans are; or perhaps you could say that it knew only too well what humans are: it knew that humans are meat.

As soon as he isolated the Cardinal strain and confirmed that it was Marburg, Johnson turned his attention to the question of where and how Peter Cardinal night have become infected. Where had that kid been? What had he been doing to get himself infected? Exactly where had he traveled?

These questions haunted Johnson. He had been trying to find the secret reservoirs of the thread viruses for years.

He telephoned a friend and colleague in Kenya named Dr. Peter Turkei, who was a scientist at the Kenya Medical Research Institute in Nairobi. “We know this is Marburg,” Gene said to him. “Can you get a history of the kid? Find out where he was and what he did?”

Dr. Tukei said he would locate the parents and interview them.

A week late, Gene’s telephone rang. It was Dr. Tukei on the line.

“You know where that kid was?” he said. “He was in Kitum Cave on Mount Elgon.”

Gene felt a prickling sensation on his scalp. The paths of Charles Monet and Peter Cardinal had crossed at only one place on earth, and that was inside Kitum Cave. What had they done in the cave? What had they found in there? What had they touched? What had they breathed? What lived in Kitum Cave?

Eugene Johnson sat at a picnic table at Fort Detrick near a duck pond, leaning forward and gazing at me. It was hot day in the middle of summer.

He was wearing sunglasses. He placed his large elbows on the table, took off his sunglasses, and rubbed his eyes. He was six foot two, maybe two hundred and fifty pounds. His eyes were brown and set deep in his bearded face, and there were dark circles under the lower lids. He looked tired.

“So Peter Tukei got on the phone to tell me that the boy had visited Kitum Cave,” Johnson said. “I still get chills when I think about it. A few weeks later, I flew to Nairobi, and I talked with David Silverstein, the kid’s doctor. Peter Tukei was with me. Then we went everyplace in Kenya the kid went, even to his house. His parents had a nice house in Kisumu, near Lake Victoria. It was a stucco house with a wall around it, and there was a cook and groundskeepers and a driver. The house was clean and neat, open and whitewashed. We saw that there was a rock hyrax living on the roof. It was a pet, and it lived in the gutters.

There were a couple of storks, and there were rabbits and goats and all kinds of birds. I didn’t see any bats around this house.”

He paused, thinking. No one else was around. A few ducks swam in the pond. “I was really nervous about talking with the parents,” he said. “See, I am a field person. My wife and I don’t have children. I’m not the kind of a guy who can console a mother, plus I work in the U.S. military. I had no idea how to talk to them. I tried to put myself in their place, and I remembered how I felt when my father died. I let them talk about their son, Peter Cardinal and his sister had been inseparable from the moment he arrived in Kenya. The kids had spent the whole time together, doing everything together. So what was the difference in behavior? Why did Peter Cardinal get the virus but not his sister? There was one difference in their behavior. The parents told me a story about the rocks in the cave. They told me their kid was an amateur geologist. There was this issue: did he cut his hand on any crystals in the cave? We went over that possibility with the parents, Peter had said to them that he wanted to collect some of the crystals in Kitum Cave. So he beat on the walls of the cave with a hammer and collected some rocks with crystals in them. The rocks were broken up by the driver and washed by the cook. We tested their blood, and they were not positive for Marburg.”

It seems possible that the point of contact had been the boy’s hands, that the virus had entered Cardinal’s bloodstream through a tiny cut. Possibly he had pricked his finger on a crystal that had been contaminated with urine from some animal or the remains of a crushed insect. But even if he had pricked his finger on a crystal, that didn’t tell where the virus lived in nature; it didn’t identify the virus’s natural host.

“We went to look at the cave,” he said. “We had to protect ourselves when we went inside. We knew that Marburg is transmitted by the aerosol route.”

In 1986—the year before Peter Cardinal died—Gene Johnson had done an experiment that showed that Marburg and Ebola can indeed travel through the air. He infected monkeys with Marburg and Ebola by letting them breathe it into their lungs, and he discovered that a very small dose of airborne Marburg or Ebola could start an explosive infection in a monkey. Therefore, Johnson wanted the members of expedition to wear breathing apparatus inside the cave.

“I brought with me these military gas masks with filters. We needed some kind of covering to put over our heads, too, or we’d get bat shit in our hair. We bought pillowcases at a local store. They were white, with big flowers. So the first time we went into the cave, it was a bunch of Kenyans and me wearing these military gas masks and these flowered pillowcases on our heads, and the Kenyans are just cracking up.”

They explored the cave and made a map of it. After this scouting trip, Gene Johnson persuaded the Army to sponsor a major expedition to Kitum Cave. Half a year after Peter Cardinal died, in the spring of 1988, Gene showed up in Nairobi with twenty shipping crates full of biohazard gear and scientific equipment. It included several military body bags, for holding human cadavers, and the members of his team had a serious discussion among themselves about how to handle their own remains if one of them died of Marburg. This time, Gene felt that he was closing in on the virus. He knew it would be hard to find even if it lived inside Kitum Cave, but he felt he was getting too close to fail in his quest. The monster lived in a cave, and he was going in there to find it.

The Kenyan government agreed to close Kitum Cave to tourists while the joint Kenya-U.S. expedition searched it for viruses. The head of the expedition was Dr. Peter Tukei of Kenya Medical Research Institute. Gene Johnson conceived the idea and gathered the equipment and found the money to pay for t. There were thirty-five team members, and most of them were Kenyans, including wildlife naturalists, scientists, doctors, and laborers. They brought along a large number of guinea pigs, traveling in boxes, and seventeen monkeys in cages, including baboons, Sykes’ monkeys, and African green monkeys. The monkeys and guinea pigs were sentinel animals, like canaries in a coal mine: they would be placed in cages inside and near Kitum Cave in the hope that some of them would break with Marburg virus. There are no instruments that can detect a virus. The best way to find a virus in the wild, at the present time, is to place a sentinel animal at the suspected location of the virus and hope the animal gets sick. Johnson figured that if any of his monkeys or guinea pigs crashed, he would be able to isolate the virus from the sick animals and would perhaps be able to discover how the animals had caught it.

1988 Spring

The Kitum Cave expedition set up headquarters in the Mount Elgon Lodge, a decayed resort dating from the nineteen twenties, when the English had ruled East Africa. The lodge had been built for sporting people and trout fishermen. It sat on a promontory overlooking the red-dirt road that wound up the mountain to Kitum Cave. It had once been surrounded by English gardens, which had partly collapsed into clay and African weeds. Indoors there were hardwood floors, waxed daily to perfect gleam. The lodge had turrets with round rooms and medieval doors, hand-carved from African olive wood, and the living room boasted an immense fireplace with a carved mantelpiece. The staff spoke very little English, but they were intent on maintaining English hospitality for the rare guest who might happen to show up. The Mount Elgon Lodge was a monument to the incomplete failure of the British Empire, which carried on automatically, like an uncontrollable tic, in the provincial backwaters of Africa long after it had died at the core. In the evenings, as the frost-tinged night came on, the staff built fires of Elgon olive logs in the fireplaces, and the food in the dining room was horrible, in the best English tradition. There was, however, a splendid bar. It was a quaint hideaway in a round chamber, stocked with shining rows of Tusker-beer bottles and French aperitifs and obscure African brandies. The men could sit at the bar and drink Tuskers or lean on the great mantel by the fire and tell stories after a hard day in the cave wearing a space suit. A sign on the wall by the concierge’s desk mentioned the delicate matter of money. It announced that since Mount Elgon Lodge’s suppliers had cut off all credit to the lodge, the lodge was unfortunately unable to extend any credit to its guests.

They moved the animals up the mountain in stages, to let them get used to the climate. When they got to the valley that leads to the cave, they cleared away some underbrush and put up blue tarpaulins. The cave itself was considered to be a Level 4 hot zone. The tarp closest to the cave covered a gray area, a place where the worlds met. The men took chemical showers under the gray-area tarp, to decon their space suits after a visit to the cave. Another tarp covered a Level 3 staging area, where the men changed in and out of their space suits. Another tarp covered a Level 4 necropsy area. Under that tarp, wearing space suits, they dissected any small animals that they had trapped, looking for signs of Marburg virus.

“We were going where no one had gone before,” Johnson said to me. “We brought the Biosafety Level 4 philosophy to the jungle.”

They wore orange Racal space suits inside the cave. A Racal suit is a portable, positive-pressure space suit with a battery-powered air supply. It is for use in fieldwork with extreme biohazards that are believed to be airborne. A Racal suit is also known as an orange suit because it is bright orange. It is lighter than a Chemturion, and unlike a Chemturion, it is fully portable, with a self-contained breathing apparatus. The main body of the suit (apart from helmet and the blowers) is disposable, so that you can burn it after using it once or twice.

Wearing their Racal space units, they laid out a trail that wound into Kitum Cave, marking the trail with avalanche poles so that people would not get lost. Along the trail, they placed cages holding the monkeys and guinea pigs. They surrounded the cages with electrified wire, powered by a battery, to discourage leopards from trying to eat the monkeys. They placed some of the monkeys directly underneath bat colonies in the roof of the cave, hoping that something would drop on a monkey that would cause the animal to break with Marburg.

They collected somewhere between thirty thousand and seventy thousand biting insects inside the cave—the cave is full of bugs. “We put stickum paper over cracks in the cave, to catch crawling bugs,” Johnson said to me. “We hung light traps inside the cave to collect flying insects. The light traps were battery powered. You know how to collect ticks? They come out of the ground when they smell carbon dioxide from your breath. They smell it and come up and bite your ass. So we brought these huge tanks of carbon dioxide, and we used it to attract ticks. We trapped all the rodents that went into the cave. We used Havahart traps. Way at the back of the cave, by a pool of water, we found sand flies. These are biting flies. We saw leopard tracks all over the place, and Cape-buffalo tracks. We didn’t take any food samples from large animals, nothing from leopards or buffalo. Nothing from the antelopes.”

“Could Marburg live in large African cats?” I asked. “Could it be a leopard virus?”

“Maybe. We just didn’t have permits to trap leopards. We did collect genet cats, and it wasn’t there.”

“Could it live in elephants?”

“Did you ever try to draw blood from a wild elephant? We didn’t.”

The Kenyan naturalists trapped and netted hundreds of birds, rodents, hyaxes, and bats. In the hot necropsy zone, under the tarp, they sacrificed the animals and dissected them while wearing Racal suits, taking samples of blood and tissue, which they froze in jars of liquid nitrogen. Some local people—they were Elgon Masai—had lived inside some of the caves on Mount Elgon and had kept their cattle in the caves. The Kenyan doctors drew blood from their cattle. None of the local people or the cattle tested positive for Marburg antibodies—if they had tested positive, it would have shown that they had been exposed to Marburg. Despite the fact that nobody showed signs of having been infected, the Elgon Masai could tell stories of how a family member, a child or a young wife, had died bleeding in someone’s arms. They had seen family members crash and bleed out, but whether their illnesses were caused by Marburg or some other virus—who could tell? Perhaps the local Masa people knew the Marburg agent in their own way. If so, they had never given it a name.

None of the sentinel monkeys became sick. They remained healthy and bored, having sat in their cages in the cave for weeks. The experiment required that they be sacrificed at the end of the time so that the researchers could take tissue samples and observe their bodies for any signs of infection. At this point, the hard part of primate research began to torment Gene Johnson. He could not being himself to euthanize the monkeys. He couldn’t stand the idea of killing them and couldn’t go into the cave to finish the job. He waited outside in the forest while another member of the team put on a space suit and went inside and gave the monkeys massive shots of sedative, which put them to sleep forever. “I don’t like killing animals,” he said to me. “That was a major issue for me. After you’ve fed ‘em bananas. That was terrible. It sucked.” He put on his orange Racal space suit and opened up the monkeys under necropsy tent, feeling frustrated and sad, especially when all the monkeys turned out to be healthy.

The expedition was a dry hole. All the sentinel animals remained healthy, and the blood and tissue samples from the other animals, insects, birds, Masai people, and their cattle showed no sign of Marburg virus. It must have been a bitter disappointment for Gene Johnson, so disheartening that he was never able to bring himself to publish an account of the expedition and its findings. There seemed to be no point in publishing the fact that he hadn’t found anything in Kitum Cave. All that he could say for sure is that Marburg lives in the shadow of Mount Elgon.

What Johnson did not know at the time, but what he sensed almost instinctively after the failure of the Kitum Cave expedition, was that the knowledge and experience he gained inside a cover in Africa, and the space suits and biohazard gear he carried back with him to the Institute, might serve him well at another time and in another place. He kept his African gear hidden away at the Institute, piled in olive-drab military trunks in storage rooms and in tractor trailers parked behind buildings and padlocked, because he did not want anyone else to touch his gear or use it or take it away from him. He wanted to be ready to load it on an airplane at a moment’s notice, in case Marburg or Ebola came to the surface again in Africa. And sometimes he thought of a favorite saying, a remark by Louis Pasteur, “Chance favors the prepared mind.” Pasteur developed vaccines for anthrax and rabies.

1989 Summer

The Army had always had a hard time figuring out what to do with Nancy and Jerry Jaax. They were married officers at the same rank in a small corps, the veterinary Corps. What do you do with a married pair of doggy doctors who need to be promoted? What if one of them (the wife) is trained in the use of space suits? Where do you send them? The Army assigned the Jaaxes to the Institute of Chemical Defense, near Aberdeen, Maryland. They sold their Victorian house and moved, bring their birds and animals with them. Nancy was not sorry to leave the house in Thurmont. They moved into a tract house, which was more to her liking, and there they began to raise fish in tanks, as a hobby, and Nancy went to work in an Army program to study the effects of nerve gas on rat brains. Her job was to open up the rat’s head and figure out what the nerve gas has done to the brain. This was safer and more pleasant than working with Ebola, but it was a little dull. Eventually she and Jerry both received promotions to lieutenant colonel and wore silver oak leaves on their shoulders. Jaime and Jason were growing up. Jaime became a superb gymnast, short and wiry like Nancy, and Nancy and Jerry had hopes for her in the nationals, if not the Olympics. Jason grew into a tall, quiet kid. Herky, their parrot, did not change. Parrots live for many years. He went on shouting “Mom! Mom!” and whistling the march from The Bridge on The River Kwai.

Colonel Tony Johnson, Nancy’s commanding officer when she had worked at USAMRIID, remembered her competence in a space suit and wanted to get her back. He felt she belonged at the Institute. He was eventually appointed head of pathology at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, and when that happened, his old job came open, the job of chief of pathology at the Institute. He urged the Army to appoint Nancy Jaax to the position, and the Army listened. They agreed that she ought to be doing hot biological work, and she got the job in the summer of 1989. At the same time, the Army appointed Jerry Jaax head of the veterinary division at the Institute. So the Jaax became important and rather powerful figures. Nancy went back to biological work in space suits. Jerry still didn’t like it, but he had learned to live with it.

With these promotions, the Jaax sold their house in Aberdeen and moved back to Thurmont, in August 1989. This time, Nancy told Jerry it was not going to be a Victorian. They bought a contemporary Cape house with dormer windows, with a lot of land around it, meadow and forest, where the dogs could run and the children could play. Their house stood on the lower slope of Catoctin Mountain, overlooking the town, above a sea of apple orchards. From their kitchen window, they could look into the distance over rolling farmland where armies had marched during the Civil War. Central Maryland stretched away to the horizon in folds and hollows, in bands of trees and rumpled field, studded by silos that marked the presence of family farms. High over the beautiful countryside, passenger jets crisscrossed the sky, leaving white contrails behind them.