The Virus (27 page)

Once more she crawled through the undergrowth at the edge of the clearing. Once more she poked her head above the sill. This time the windows were not barred. There was a plain sheet of glass and that was all.

Stephanie peered through the glass. It took some time for her eyes to become accustomed to the gloom. When at last she was able to see clearly, she gave a gasp of astonishment. For the walls of the hut were lined with shelves from floor to roof. And on every shelf vials of liquid stood six deep. She strained her eyes to see what was written on each vial. And then suddenly illumination dawned. For each tube was marked with the date of its completion, and below the date appeared the words, written in Frau Matthofer’s unmistakably Gothic handwriting: “MARBURG VIRUS — ANTISERUM FROM GREEN MONKEY”!

“Oh God!” Stephanie suddenly saw it all. How much time did she have? She shut her eyes and prayed that she would have enough time. Then she slipped back into the forest.

15

Harry Bolbeck had been at the Bronx Zoo for over six months. He was enjoying himself enormously. He sometimes felt that dropping out of school to take a job with the animals had been the best thing he had ever done. Animals weren’t like teachers. They didn’t pressure you and muck you around all the time. They didn’t mind if you showed up late, unless it was your turn on the feeding run in which case they minded a great deal — but that was understandable. Frankly, Harry Bolbeck preferred animals to human beings. He particularly liked the monkeys with whom he had been working for the last two weeks.

The monkey-house was next to the Sea Lions and opposite the Carnivores. Each morning he took the Lexington Avenue express to East Tremont Avenue and walked the few hundred yards north to the Boston Road entrance of the zoo. He would show his pass at the turnstile and then enjoy, for the next fifteen minutes, the magical walk through the woods, past the elephants and buffalos, then down the hill to Wolf Wood and up again to the monkey-house where he would check in with the Head Keeper before getting on with his work.

The monkeys fascinated him. The Bronx Zoo had all sorts. They had two six hundred pound gorillas — the equivalent of three football full-backs rolled into one; they had chimpanzees and orang-utans. They had gibbons, the most skilled brachiators among the apes (Bolbeck had learned that a brachiator was an animal which used its arms to swing through the trees). They had langurs from India and colobus monkeys from Africa. They had a proboscis monkey from the island of Borneo which was the only place in the whole wide world where the ‘nosiest of the simians’ as the proboscis monkey was sometimes called, still survived. Bolbeck’s job was to look after them all; to feed them and water them. And to love and cherish them as well. He had learned early on that monkeys and apes of whatever kind responded wonderfully to affection. The monkey-house at the Bronx Zoo was not a spectacularly sympathetic place. Those who had designed and built it had done their best to maintain the fiction that a small tropical sanctuary existed somewhere between the seals and the lions. But they had not wholly succeeded. The cages were large and airy; they were filled with trees and branches to swing on. There were rocks to scramble over and forest pools to drink from. But, in the last resort — whatever the pretence —the animals were in a prison. And they knew it.

That was why the instinctive sympathy which Bolbeck brought to his work was so important. He was, on the surface, an unattractive youth. He had long dark hair which was certainly not as clean as it should have been; a straggling unkempt beard and a tendency to acne. But the animals loved him notwithstanding. He seemed to be able to talk to them in a language which they could understand. Monkeys gibbered. And Harry Bolbeck had learned to gibber back.

One Friday morning in the late summer, Harry Bolbeck realized as he walked through the woods of the Zoo on his way to work that he was in a particularly good mood. One reason for the good mood was the approach of the weekend. He and his friend, Steve Mulliner, took it in turns to have the weekend off and this time it was his turn. Another, perhaps more important, reason was the sheer enjoyment that Bolbeck was deriving from trying to communicate with a new batch of monkeys — guenons of various sorts — which had arrived at the zoo earlier in the week. Bolbeck probably liked the guenons more than any other kind of monkey. He liked the variety — they came with all kinds of colours, spots and stripes. He liked the clear markings, white bibs, white nose blobs, white tiaras. He liked the athleticism of the species, though of course the limits of the monkey cage acted as a severe restraint on the kind of aerial dynamics at which they were so adept. Above all he liked the guenons’ sense of humour. It was marvellous to see the little animals play tricks on each other and then roar with laughter, rocking back on their haunches, when the trick succeeded. The previous day he had seen one of the new arrivals, a guenon with an odd bright green fur, peel back the skin of a banana and eat the fruit. Then it had picked up a stick of approximately the same dimensions as the fruit it had just eaten and had pushed the banana skin around it so that it seemed, on casual inspection, as though the fruit remained untouched. Bolbeck had seen the little green monkey take up the fake banana and offer it to one of the others. Then, when the deceit had been discovered and the empty banana skin had been thrown angrily to the floor, he had witnessed an eruption of mirth such as he had never seen before.

Where on earth had the little green monkey learned that trick? he wondered, as he changed his clothes in the staff-room of the monkey-house. His colleague, Steve Mulliner, had arrived for work ahead of him and was already changing.

“Hey, Steve, do you know what I saw in the guenon cage yesterday?”

“No, what?”

Steve Mulliner, like Bolbeck himself, worked with the animals of the Bronx Zoo for love not for money and he had been fascinated by the tale of the bananas.

“Man, isn’t that something!” he had exclaimed. “I’d love to see that. Do you think he would do that again?”

“We can try.”

Later that morning, at a time when there were very few visitors to the monkey-house, Bolbeck and Mulliner went into the guenon cage with a bunch of bananas.

“That’s the one.” Bolbeck pointed to the green monkey as it sat in the crotch of a tree-trunk some distance from its fellows. “Here.” He held up a banana.

The rest of the new arrivals fled chattering and suspicious as he raised his arm. It would take them some time to get used to the rewards as well as the drawbacks of captivity. But the little green monkey showed an exactly contrary reaction. With a single continuous movement he leapt off his perch, seized the banana and returned to the tree where he sat and eagerly stripped away the peel to get at the fruit inside.

“Look!” Bolbeck drew Mulliner’s attention to the process of consumption. “See how carefully he’s folding back the skin.”

They watched fascinated as the monkey finished off the banana; laid the skin in the fork of the tree; then skittered off in search of a piece of wood of the right size and consistency. When he had found what he was looking for, the animal retrieved the skin and repeated on an unsuspecting colleague the trick he had already played the previous day.

“He chose a different fall-guy today,” Bolbeck commented. “Yesterday, he tried it on a Diana monkey. Today, he’s going after the Patas.”

“Shit!” Mulliner shook his head in disbelief as the small charade unfolded.

This time when the Patas monkey discovered the trick, it did not merely content itself with hurling the empty skin to the floor. It launched a full scale attack on the perpetrator of the deception and the green monkey was forced to retire to the very top of the cage and swing from the roof with its long prehensile tail.

“See. He’s laughing! He’s really laughing!”

Steve Mulliner, regarding the scene for himself, could not disagree with his friend’s observation.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” he said. “What kind of monkey is it anyway? Where did it come from?”

“It came in on the last African consignment. They’ve put it down as a grass monkey of some kind, but they haven’t got around yet to the precise classification. Our labelling people are running a bit behind.”

Steve Mulliner regarded the little animal with interest. The fun and games finished, it had once more regained its customary perch in the fork of the tree.

“That animal has been in contact with human beings before, Harry,” Mulliner said. “I don’t think he invented that trick himself. I think he learned it somewhere.”

“Could be.” Bolbeck sounded unconvinced. “But I don’t see why he couldn’t have worked it out for himself.”

They both stood there in the monkey cage for the next few minutes watching the animals. Outside a small knot of people watched them, as though expecting something to happen.

Bolbeck picked up the discarded banana skin from off the floor.

“Let’s play the same trick on the monkey and see how it reacts.”

He stuffed the skin with a piece of stick and then, to increase the verisimilitude, bound up the peel with a piece of clear adhesive tape.

“Give me that bunch of bananas, Steve.”

Bolbeck began tossing bananas to the various monkeys in the cage. The animals ate them avidly. When it was the green monkey’s turn, he held out the fake banana.

“Here, come and get it! Have a sip of your own medicine.”

The little monkey bounced off his perch and took the banana in his paw. Then he paused as though he was about to spring back to the tree but had just thought better of it.

“He knows there’s something wrong, even without opening it.” Bolbeck could not suppress his astonishment.

Suddenly the monkey hurled the banana straight at his keeper’s face, forcing Bolbeck to duck so that the missile passed harmlessly over his shoulder. Then, without warning, it leapt onto his shoulder and bit him hard in the lobe of his left ear.

“Goddammit!” Bolbeck shouted in pain. “The little bugger’s bitten me.” He put his hand to his ear and felt the blood.

16

The second outbreak of Marburg disease, occurring by unlucky coincidence like the first in New York, threw the authorities into a state of alarm bordering upon panic.

The problem was mathematical. The initial case, the index case, was poor Harry Bolbeck, whose monkey-bitten ear was the immediate source of infection. He in turn transmitted the disease to five persons before being hospitalized in Columbia Presbyterian Hospital’s maximum isolation ward. Those five persons — and they included his work-mate, Steve Mulliner, and Mulliner’s girl-friend, Judy Cox — were themselves traced and isolated but not before two of the five had infected respectively eight and nine other people. So the ripples spread in ever-widening circles. By the morning of the twelfth day six deaths had already occurred (Bolbeck had been the first to go, followed closely by Mulliner and Cox); all isolation units throughout the United States were already full and the limited supplies of serum were nearing the point of exhaustion. It only needed a few more cases for the dam to burst and for the flood to become truly unstoppable.

The President’s reaction, once he was informed of the crisis, was immediate:

“Why in God’s name don’t we have a vaccine? You people” — he was addressing an emergency meeting of Federal and state health officials — “have a vaccine for polio and flu and whooping cough and even the goddam common cold. So why haven’t you got a vaccine for Marburg if it’s the deadliest disease known to man.”

After the meeting, John Shearer, the hard-hitting aide from California who had been White House link-man in the CIA’s secret plan to develop an anti-Marburg vaccine, had stayed behind in the Oval Office.

“Actually, sir,” he had addressed the President with an unusual degree of deference, “we
do
have a vaccine. Pharmacorp have it in the final stage of development. We’ve been working closely with Irving Woodnutt, who’s the head of Pharmacorp.”

The President nodded. “I know Woodnutt. A real shit if ever there was one. He thinks he’s going to run for Senate on my coat-tails, but I tell you he won’t make it to first base.”

“I don’t disagree with your evaluation,” Shearer interrupted diplomatically. “But the fact is, under Woodnutt’s pressure, Pharmacorp have enough vaccine available now for trial tests and, after that, we can undertake a crash campaign of preventive inoculation. We can inoculate 200 million Americans if we have to. Pharmacorp have built it into a multi-purpose flu shot.”

“Why didn’t you say so at the meeting?” The President had been thunderstruck.

“Circumstances, sir,” Shearer had replied diplomatically.

He had gone on to explain the background. It had taken a long time because he had had to deal with the first outbreak of Marburg and with all subsequent events so that the President could have a clear picture.

“Jesus,” the President exclaimed when he had finished. “Those people always try to be too clever, don’t they?” He was referring of course to the CIA. “Why couldn’t they just go along with the WHO scheme? Why take the risk of bringing the monkeys back?”

“But it wasn’t Sam and Griselda,” Shearer protested.

“Who are Sam and Griselda?” the President asked impatiently.

“Were, not are. Sam and Griselda are dead.” Shearer explained the circumstances and added: “Those two never infected anybody. Not as far as we know. Bolbeck caught the disease from a monkey in the Bronx Zoo. That monkey is dead now. Incinerated.”

“What happened? I thought you said the WHO operation was wholly successful.”

Shearer shook his head. “We don’t know what happened. It’s a mystery. I guess they just didn’t get all of them.”

They turned back to the subject of the vaccination program.

“How soon can you get it going? From what they told us today, we are dealing with a geometrical progression, aren’t we?”

“We are.” Shearer agreed. “If we don’t stop the outbreak within the next few days, we shan’t be talking about hundreds or even thousands of dead Americans. We shall be talking about hundreds of thousands.”