Part 1, Chapter 8 Cardinal Summary

At this point, the narrative jumps to September 1987, where a container of blood samples from a dead Dutch boy is smuggled to Eugene Johnson. The child, whose name was Peter Cardinal, died at Nairobi Hospital in Kenya of what Johnson identifies as a new strain of the Marburg virus. Johnson discovers that the boy had recently visited the Kitum Cave, which is the very same cave that Charles Monet visited in the first chapter. The child's death was very similar to Monet's except that rather than "bleeding out" through his orifices, the boy bled out under his own skin.

Part 1, Chapter 8 Cardinal Analysis

Although the story has moved forward in time, the author is still using flashbacks to build the history of the Marburg and Ebola viruses. The flashbacks make it clear at the beginning of this chapter that...