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physician’s efforts, however, paid off. Johnson survived.
    As soon as he was up and about, Johnson started studying samples of the San Joaquin virus brought back to Panama with MacKenzie and Muñoz. He was able to confirm in the sophisticated MARU facilities what had tentatively been discovered in his glove-box contraption on the Bolivian frontier: the disease was caused by a virus that was similar to, but not the same as, Junin and Tacaribe.
    With Johnson safely recuperating, Webb headed back to Washington in late August. It had been two weeks, the worst was over, and it was time she got back to work. On board the plane she was suddenly seized by a pounding headache, muscle pains, and waves of shaking chills. The symptoms escalated until Webb knew that, despite all her protestations to the Gorgas nursing staff, she had gotten the virus from kissing and embracing her fiancé. She was treated at the NIH hospital and, after ten distressing days, had recovered enough to go home. A few weeks later, Webb moved to Panama and eagerly joined in the detective work.
    Though they had no way of knowing whether their painful illnesses had actually made them immune to the virus, Muñoz, MacKenzie, and Johnson made the journey back to San Joaquín in September, traveling now aboard USAF planes. They were quite naturally nervous, even fearful, but they felt compelled to return to the danger zone. The men shared a powerful scientific curiosity that pushed both doubt and fear aside, replacing them with a sleuthing urge every bit as powerful as that of a detective hunting down a serial killer. They needed to find out how the virus was transmitted in order to stop its spread.
    On the way, Johnson and MacKenzie reviewed all the possible ways the three of them could have become infected. Since the infections seemed to have been simultaneous, it was unlikely they were due to accidents or carelessness in their primitive field laboratories. The window screens and DDT had probably protected them from any virus-carrying insects that might lurk in San Joaquín. And the fact that many family members who tended to dying relatives were not ill seemed to rule out person-to-person transmission of the virus. Of course, Webb’s illness forced an opposite conclusion.
    The only experience the three had shared shortly before becoming ill was the town party. But what possible association could there have been between the party and their near-deaths?
    In their absence Kuns had remained in San Joaquín, painstakingly capturing samples of every species of insect and mammal—from bedbugs to teeth-baring bats and slithering anacondas—he could get his hands on, all the while aware of the need to handle the animals with extreme care. As the wild rats tried to claw at him, or mosquitoes dove for his vulnerable flesh, Kuns deftly manipulated the creatures.
    â€œI understand the ways of animals,” Kuns told his Bolivian assistants. He had a Ph. D. in veterinary sciences, specializing in the study of diseases
that affected both humans and animals, and he had minored in wildlife ecology studies. Kuns was a details man; his training reinforced a natural tendency toward searching for answers by tediously sifting through mountains of minutiae. He and Johnson—the impatient man of action—were a study in contrasts. While the rest of the MARU team recuperated in Panama, Kuns organized forty San Joaquin men to assist in the capture of local creatures. All the men were volunteers who believed they had already had the strange disease and their survival presumably rendered them immune. Over a year’s time Kuns and his volunteers would collect some 10,000 mammals of dozens of species, all of which had to be identified and studied for viral contamination. Even more insects were amassed, and Kuns pored over microscopes, used field texts to figure out just what species each and every creature represented, and trained his assistants to do the