The Hot Zone

by Richard Preston

  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 bring 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 and watered monkeys for thirty days, they become your friends. I fed ’em bananas. That was terrible. It sucked.” He put on his orange Racal space suit and opened up the monkeys under the necropsy tent, feeling frustrated and sad, especially when all the monkeys turned out to be healthy.

  The expedition was a dry hole. All of the sentinel animals remained healthy, and the blood and tissue samples from the other animals, insects, birds, Masai people, and their cattle showed no signs 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 cave in Africa, and the space suits and biohazard gear he carried back with him to Fort Detrick, 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 use it at a moment’s notice, in case Marburg or Ebola ever came to the surface again. 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 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, bringing 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 had 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, the 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 Jaaxes 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 Jaaxes 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 fields, 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.

  PART TWO

  THE MONKEY HOUSE

  RESTON

  1989 OCTOBER 4, WEDNESDAY

  The city of Reston, Virginia, is a prosperous community about ten miles west of Washington, D.C., just beyond the Beltway. On a fall day, when a western wind clears the air, from the upper floors of the office buildings in Reston you can see the creamy spike of the Washington Monument, sitting in the middle of the Mall, and beyond it the Capitol dome. Reston was one of the first planned suburbs in America, a visible symbol of the American belief in rational design and suburban prosperity, a community of gently curved streets, making arcs through landscaped neighborhoods, where disorder and chaos were given no sign of acknowledgment and no places to hide. The population of Reston has grown in recent years, and high-technology businesses and blue-chip consulting firms have moved into office parks there, where glass buildings grew up during the nineteen-eighties like crystals. Before the crystals appeared, Reston was surrounded by farmland, and the town still contains meadows. In spring, the meadows burst into galaxies of yellow-mustard flowers, and robins and thrashers sing in stands of tulip trees and white ash. The town offers handsome, expensive residential neighborhoods, good schools, parks, golf courses, excellent day care for children. There are lakes in Reston named for American naturalists (Lake Thoreau, Lake Audubon), surrounded by water-front homes. Reston is situated within easy commuting distance of downtown Washington. Along Leesburg Pike, which funnels traffic into the city, there are developments of executive homes with Mercedes-Benzes parked in crescent-shaped driveways. Reston was once a country town, and its rural past still fights obliteration, like a nail that won’t stay hammered down. Among the upscale houses, you see the occasional bungalow with cardboard stuffed in a broken window and a pickup truck parked in the side yard. In the autumn, vegetable stands along Leesburg Pike sell pumpkins and butternut squash.

  Not far from Leesburg Pike there is a small office park. It was built in the nineteen-sixties, and is not as glassy or as fashionable as the newer office parks, but it is clean and neat, and it has been there long enough for sycamores and sweet-gum trees to grow up around it and throw shade over the lawns. Across the street, a McDonald’s is jammed at lunch hour with office workers. In the autumn of 1989, a company called Hazleton Research Products was using a one-story building in the office park as a monkey house. Hazleton Research Products is a division of Corning, Inc. Coming’s Hazleton unit is involved with the importation and sale of laboratory animals. The Hazleton monkey house was known as the Reston Primate Quarantine Unit.

  Each year, about sixteen thousand wild monkeys are imported into the United States from the tropical regions of the earth. Imported monkeys must be held in quarantine for a month before they are shipped anywhere else in the United States. This is to prevent the spread of infectious diseases that could kill other primates, including humans.


  Dan Dalgard, a doctor of veterinary medicine, was the consulting veterinarian at the Reston Primate Quarantine Unit. He was on call to take care of the monkeys if they became sick or needed medical attention. He was actually a principal scientist at another company owned by Corning, called Hazleton Washington. This company has its headquarters on Leesburg Pike in Vienna, Virginia, not far from the monkey house in Reston, and so Dalgard could easily drive his car over to Reston to check on the monkeys if he was needed there. Dalgard was a tall man in his fifties, with metal-framed glasses, pale blue eyes, a shy manner, and a soft drawl that he had picked up in Texas at veterinary school. Generally he wore a gray business suit if he was working in his office, or a white lab coat if he was working with animals. He had an international reputation as a knowledgeable and skilled veterinarian who specialized in primate husbandry. He was a calm, even-tempered man with a kind of dreamy nature; a man given to staring out the window of his office, thinking about one thing or another. On evenings and weekends, he repaired antique clocks as a hobby. He liked to fix things with his hands; it made him feel peaceful and calm and daydreamy, and he was patient with a jammed clock. He sometimes had longings to leave veterinary medicine and devote himself full-time to clocks.

  On Wednesday, October 4, 1989, Hazleton Research Products accepted a shipment of a hundred wild monkeys from the Philippines. The shipment originated at Ferlite Farms, a monkey wholesale facility located not far from the city of Manila. The monkeys themselves came from coastal rain forests on the island of Mindanao. The monkeys had been shipped by boat to Ferlite Farms, where they were jammed together in large cages known as gang cages, in which the male monkeys often fought and bloodied and killed one another. The monkeys were then put into wooden crates and flown to Amsterdam on a specially fitted cargo airplane, and from Amsterdam they were flown to New York City. They arrived at JFK International Airport and were driven by truck down the eastern seaboard of the United States to the Reston monkey house.

  The monkeys were crab-eating monkeys, a species that lives along rivers and in mangrove swamps in Southeast Asia. Crab eaters are used as laboratory animals because they are common, cheap, and easily obtained. They have long, arching, whiplike tails, whitish fur on the chest, and cream-colored fur on the back. The crab eater is a type of macaque (pronounced ma-KACK). It is sometimes called a long-tailed macaque. The monkey has a protrusive, doglike snout with flaring nostrils and exceedingly sharp canine teeth, able to rip flesh as easily as a honed knife. The skin is pinkish gray, close to the color of a white person. The hand looks quite human, with a thumb and delicate fingers with fingernails. The females have two breasts on the upper chest that look startlingly human, with pale nipples.

  Crab eaters do not like humans. They have a competitive relationship with people who live in the rain forest. They like vegetables, especially eggplants, and they like to raid farmers’ crops. Crab-eating monkeys travel in a troop, making tumbling jumps through the trees, screaming, “Kra! Kra!” They know perfectly well that after they have pulled off an eggplant raid on a farmer’s field they are likely to have a visit from the farmer, who will come around looking for them with a shotgun, and so they have to be ready to move out and head deep into the forest at a moment’s notice. The sight of a gun will set off their alarm cries: “Kra! Kra! Kra!” In some parts of the world, these monkeys are called kras, because of the sound they make, and many people who live in Asian rain forests consider them to be obnoxious pests. At the close of day, when night comes, the troop goes to sleep in a dead, leafless tree. This is the troop’s home tree. The monkeys prefer to sleep in a dead tree so that they can see in all directions, keeping watch for humans and other evil predators. The monkey tree usually hangs out over a river, so that they can relieve themselves from the branches without littering the ground.

  At sunrise, the monkeys stir and wake up, and you hear their cries as they greet the sun. The mothers gather their children and herd them along the branches, and the troop moves out, leaping through trees, searching for fruit. They like to eat all kinds of things. In addition to vegetables and fruits, they eat insects, grass, roots, and small pieces of clay, which they chew and swallow, perhaps to get salt and minerals. They lust after crabs. When the urge for crabs comes upon them, the troop will head for a mangrove swamp to have a feeding bout. They descend from the trees and take up positions in the water beside crab holes. A crab comes out of its hole, and the monkey snatches it out of the water. The monkey has a way to deal with the crab’s claws. He grabs the crab from behind as it emerges from its hole and rips off the claws and throws them away and then devours the rest of the crab. Sometimes a monkey isn’t quick enough with the claws, and the crab latches onto the monkey’s fingers, and the monkey lets out a shriek and shakes its hand, trying to get the crab off, and jumps around in the water. You can always tell when crab eaters are having a feeding bout on crabs because you hear an occasional string of shrieks coming out of the swamp as a result of difficulty with a crab.

  The troop has a strict hierarchy. It is led by a dominant male, the largest, most aggressive monkey. He maintains control over the troop by staring. He stares down subordinates if they challenge him. If a human stares at a dominant male monkey in a cage, the monkey will rush to the front of the cage, staring back, and will become exceedingly angry, slamming against the bars, trying to attack the person. He will want to kill the human who stared at him: he can’t afford to show fear when his authority is challenged by another evil primate. If two dominant male monkeys are placed in the same cage, only one monkey will leave the cage alive.

  The crab-eating monkeys at the Reston monkey house were placed each in its own cage, under artificial lights, and were fed monkey biscuits and fruit. There were twelve monkey rooms in the monkey house, and they were designated by the letters A through L. Two of the monkeys that arrived on October 4 were dead in their crates. That was not unusual, since monkeys die during shipments. But in the next three weeks, an unusual number of monkeys began to die at the Reston monkey house.

  On October 4, the same day the shipment of monkeys reached the Reston monkey house, something happened that would change Colonel Jerry Jaax’s life forever. Jerry had a brother named John, who lived in Kansas City with his wife and two small children. John Jaax was a prominent businessman and a banker, and he was a partner in a manufacturing company that made plastic for credit cards. He was a couple of years younger than Jerry, and the two men were as close as brothers can be. They had grown up together on a farm in Kansas and had both gone to college at Kansas State. They looked very much alike: tall, with prematurely gray hair, a beak nose, sharp eyes, a calm manner; and their voices sounded alike. The only difference in appearance between them was that John wore a mustache and Jerry did not.

  John Jaax and his wife planned to attend a parent-teachers’ meeting on the evening of October 4 at their children’s school. Near the end of the day, John telephoned his wife from his office at the manufacturing plant to tell her that he would be working late. She happened to be out of the house when he called, so he left a message on the answering machine, explaining that he would go directly from the office to the meeting, and he would see her there. When he did not show up, she became worried. She drove over to the factory.

  The place was deserted, the machines silent. She walked the length of the factory floor to a staircase. John’s office overlooked the factory floor from a balcony at the top of the staircase. She climbed the stairs. The door to his office was standing open a crack, and she went inside. John had been shot many times, and there was blood all over the room. It was a violent killing.

  The police officer who took the case at Kansas City Homicide was named Reed Buente. He had known John personally and had admired him, having worked for him as a security guard at the Bank of Kansas City when John was president of the bank. Officer Buente was determined to solve the case and bring the killer or killers to trial. But as time went by and no breaks came along, the investigator became
discouraged. John Jaax had been having difficulties with his partner in the plastic business, a man named John Weaver, and Kansas City Homicide looked at the partner as a suspect. (When I called Officer Buente recently, he confirmed this. Weaver has since died of a heart attack, and the case remains open, since unsolved murder cases are never closed.) There were few physical clues, and Weaver, as it turned out, had an alibi. The investigator ran into more and more difficulties with the case. At one point, he said to Jerry, “You can have someone killed pretty easy. And it’s cheap. You can have someone killed for what you would pay for a desk.”

  The murder of John Jaax threw Jerry into a paralysis of grief. Time is supposed to heal all things, but time opened an emotional gangrene in Jerry. Nancy began to think that he was in a clinical depression.

  “I feel like my life is over,” he said to her. “It’s just not the same anymore. My life will never be the same. It’s just inconceivable that Johnny could have had an enemy.” At the funeral in Kansas City, Nancy and Jerry’s children, Jaime and Jason, looked into the coffin and said to their father, “Gee, Dad, he looks like you lying there.”