A Heartbeat Away

by Michael Palmer

  “How many of these checkpoints are there?” Angie asked.

  “Three or four depending on what you count. There’s this one, which leads to several cool zones including offices and our library. Down the hallway, beyond another doorway, things get serious. There’s a pair of parallel, secure portals leading to the Kitchen.”

  “The Kitchen?”

  “Our cheery name for the WRX3883 laboratory suites and tissue culture incubators.”

  “Where the beasties get cooked up.”

  “Exactly.”

  “One floor below the Kitchen, on the very bottom level of the facility, also secured off by one or two doors, is what I call Hell’s Kitchen—Sylvia Chen’s animal lab. Twenty or so monkeys and some cats. I almost never went near the place because I hated it so much and because none of my research involved her animals.”

  “But the space is empty now?”

  “I assume. If it’s not, then Hell would not be a strong enough word.”

  Angie pointed in the direction of a security camera fastened to the ceiling above a hand and retinal scanner.

  “Is that the camera they used to film you stealing the virus?” she asked.

  Griff nodded. “One of them. There are state-of-the-art security cameras throughout this place. Don’t ask me how they got footage of me, though, because I haven’t got a clue.”

  “Will the system let me in?”

  “The security system requires identification to enter and to leave the lab. But Melvin is a super-stickler for details, so he’ll probably unlock the door from the inside and then get us passes. Look, there he is. Oh, one warning—he hates being called anything other than Melvin.”

  Griff motioned to the porthole. Beyond it Angie saw a tall—very tall, actually—gangly man in a knee-length lab coat advancing toward them. There were no more than six inches between his unruly mop of auburn hair and the ceiling. Melvin completed his biometric scans and the door separating them opened with a loud click.

  At six foot six or so, the virologist had to hunch to pass beneath the metal threshold without hitting his head. He was clean-shaven, with rounded, childlike features and thick tortoise-shell spectacles.

  “I once suggested that Melvin try growing a mustache just to make him look a little more professorial,” Griff told Angie. “His response was that unless he could grow the exact one that Daniel Day Lewis had as Bill the Butcher in The Gangs of New York it was simply not worth the effort.”

  “I might call that eccentric.”

  “He’s also a bit unpredictable. A mastery of social skills has never been one of his strengths.”

  Typically, even though he and Griff had worked shoulder to shoulder for years, Forbush did not open his arms for a welcoming embrace. Instead, he offered a somewhat tepid handshake.

  “Good to see you, my friend,” Griff said. “I’d like you to meet Angela Fletcher. She’s a reporter from The Washington Post, here to write about our efforts.”

  Forbush took hold of Angie’s outstretched hand, but rather than shake it, he rotated her wrist in various directions, carefully studying it.

  “Nicole Kidman,” he said, finally. “Narrow hands, long fingers. I can show you some stills from her films and you’ll see that your hands and hers are a near perfect match.”

  Angie laughed.

  “Thanks, Melvin. She’s one of my favorites, especially in Moulin Rouge and To Die For. She was nominated for an Academy Award for that, yes?”

  “Actually, no. She won an Oscar in 2002 for The Hours.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Don’t be. I know a lot about the movies, so if someone gets something wrong, I just tell them. Then, if they keep thinking they’re right, I just show them. Film can be doctored, but it really doesn’t lie, so if I say I’m right, I always am.” He handed out specially coded access cards. “So, are you two ready to create your biometric profiles?”

  “I already have one,” Griff said.

  “No, you don’t. Right after they took you away, everything that said you existed vanished. Then Dr. Chen disappeared not long after that.”

  “But you stayed.”

  “The truth is I didn’t have anyplace to go. You and Dr. Chen were the only ones who could have written a recommendation for me. Believe it or not, in the past, prospective employers have thought I was strange.”

  Griff set his hand around the taller man’s shoulders.

  “Your kind of strange is a good kind of strange, Melvin. I’m glad to see you again.”

  “After it was clear neither you nor Dr. Chen was coming back, Sam, her animal guy, and I sold her animals to other labs, and Sam got a job with one of them. Then I just cleaned up and accepted the government’s invitation to stay around. I just now found out where you’ve been. No one would ever tell me. All they would say was that you had stolen WRX3883. I knew that wasn’t possible.”

  “Well, I’ll tell you, it wasn’t pleasant, either. The president had me thrown into solitary confinement at a federal prison in Colorado.”

  “Now he wants you out here working again?”

  “Go figure.”

  “You have the spirit to fight back but the good sense to control it,” Forbush said. “Your eyes are full of hate. That’s good. Hate keeps a man alive. It gives him strength.”

  “I’m not even going to try and guess what movie that’s from,” Griff said.

  “Ben-Hur, actually. Jack Hawkins playing the slave master Quintus Arrius.”

  “Melvin, you’re amazing,” Angie said.

  “Glad you think so, Ms. Angela. This man here understood me. He’s the best.”

  “I’m sort of figuring that out.”

  “How anybody could think he was guilty of stealing our virus is beyond me. I tried to tell them that it was impossible, but nobody would listen.”

  “What was impossible?” Griff asked, his interest suddenly peaked.

  “You being the one to steal the WRX3883 cultures. I told Dr. Chen and the others why it never could have happened the way they said. I even showed her proof that it wasn’t you. But she didn’t do anything about it. Then when she disappeared, so did anybody I could raise the issue to.”

  “I don’t understand, Melvin,” Griff said. “What do you mean you showed her that it wasn’t me?”

  “Just what I said. I brought her to my theater and showed her why I know you didn’t steal the virus.”

  “Well, everybody thinks that I did. I realize that knowing I’m a good guy is enough to convince you it couldn’t have been me, but you can’t show somebody a person’s character.”

  “That’s true,” Forbush said with a wry grin, “but I can show them the film. And like I said, film can be doctored, but it doesn’t lie.”

  CHAPTER 27

  DAY 3

  1:30 P.M. (CST)

  After all they had been through, Griff was obsessed with the need to reopen his lab and get to work. But there was no way he could put off seeing exactly what evidence Forbush believed he had. He felt sickened by the notion that his friend had tried unsuccessfully to convince people that he had been framed.

  But he wasn’t surprised.

  Had the president simply not cared, or were the people who had set him up that good?

  Hate keeps a man alive. It gives him strength.

  As Forbush led him and Angie down the passageway to the lounge area, Griff felt his bitterness and anger grow. How deep did the conspiracy to get him away from Veritas go? If Allaire was in any way involved, he had better hope that Griff never found out.

  Forbush had his choice of bungalows outside the hangar, but it seemed as if he spent little time in any of them. Instead, he had converted two small underground offices into a sleeping area and a rather sophisticated movie theater, outfitted with five stadium seats and an antique popcorn machine. The seventy-inch movie screen, DVD player, and state-of-the-art home theater projector were, as Forbush put it, enlightened gifts from the United States government.

  “You mea
n they bought this stuff for you?” Griff asked.

  “Well, define bought. I filled out some paperwork, and marked certain items as research materials. It took some time, but ultimately they shipped me exactly what I ordered. And when I leave government service, Uncle Sam will get to watch movies and make popcorn.”

  “The Pork Barrel Cinema,” Angie said. “We should have a marquee made up.”

  “Just don’t put a photo of it in your newspaper. So, do you want me to pop up some buttered corn, or do you just want to see what I have?”

  “I can’t believe this,” Griff said, slumping into one of the chairs in the front row. “Nine months in a goddamn cell.”

  “Be tough,” Angie said. “What goes around comes around.”

  Forbush extracted a video from the middle of an entire wall of hundreds of carefully aligned video and DVD cases. Then he held up the cover.

  “Gaslight. Have you seen it?”

  “I know the word,” Griff said. “It’s a verb, and it means to sabotage someone’s life to make them think they’re going nuts.”

  “And this is where that word came from. Ingrid Bergman won the best actress Oscar in 1944, playing the naïve singer Charles Boyer sets out to drive crazy. It’s about things not being as they look on the surface.” He extracted the tape from the case. “I give you the surveillance video from security cameras twenty through twenty-four. It was never nominated for a Oscar, but it could have been—for best special effects.”

  “Does it say why they chose me for the leading role?” Griff asked glumly.

  “No, I can’t explain why they picked you,” Forbush said, “but I think I have a good idea who played you.”

  He worked his way around to the projector and queued up the video.

  Angie locked her fingers in Griff’s as an image of the lab appeared on the wide, white screen.

  “I’ve spliced a couple of camera views together,” Forbush said. “The timing’s in the lower right.”

  Nine months, Griff was thinking. Nine months of my life gone.

  Images of the sadistic Florence penitentiary guards flashed strobelike through his mind.

  At the bottom of the surveillance footage was the fuzzy lettering of a date and time marker that indicated the recorded events occurred some nine and a quarter months ago, at a few minutes past midnight.

  “Since this is a silent film, I’ll provide the narration,” Forbush offered from his seat behind them and to the right. “For Ms. Angie’s benefit, what we’re looking at here is footage from the WRX3883 culture lab.”

  “Actually, Melvin,” Griff said, “Ms. Angie knows this stuff. She’s written pieces about hot zone virology, including a couple about me.”

  Angie stood up and pointed to a large cabinet on the right side of the scene.

  “What’s this?” she asked.

  “That’s one of the biosafety cabinets we use to work with hot agents,” Forbush answered.

  “No, I know that. I mean this incubator or whatever it is next to it.”

  Forbush sounded genuinely impressed.

  “That’s Big Bertha. We custom built her to mimic a human host in various stages of WRX3883 infection—body temperature, natural defenses, that sort of thing.”

  “So you’ve got virus growing in some sort of nutrient bath, incubating in a way that simulates the host organism’s response. Amazing.”

  “Well,” Griff said, “when your boss is the president, and you’ve got Dr. Sylvia Chen running the show, research expense is never a big concern.”

  “Okay, audience,” Forbush broke in, “in our next scene, you’ll see Griff enter the lab. Security access logs will document that it was him, even though it wasn’t.”

  “How did you get this, Melvin?” Griff asked. “We don’t archive surveillance video.”

  “After I learned about your arrest I archived the footage myself,” Forbush explained. “I wanted to see with my own eyes what they said you’d done. It wasn’t until I watched it on the big screen twenty or so times that I figured out what was wrong.”

  The video showed an empty lab for two more minutes before someone dressed in a white biocontainment suit entered the frame. The suit was bloated from air pumped through an attached yellow hose that descended from the ceiling. The intruder moved like Neil Armstrong on the moon.

  “Now, with his back to the camera, we can’t tell who this is. The only clue that it’s Griff is the canvas bag he’s carrying,”

  “That’s my bag all right,” Griff said. “But that’s not me.”

  “In ten seconds, you might think otherwise,” Forbush replied.

  As soon as the tenth second ticked past, the suited person turned and faced the camera directly. Griff and Angie uttered gasps of astonishment. It was easy to see Griff’s face through the hood’s clear plastic front shield. If this was a double, it was a perfect one.

  “How in the hell did they do that?” Griff asked.

  “How did James Cameron make all those beautiful, tall, sexy blue Na’vi in Avatar? How do you and I manage to re-create human RNA out of thin air?”

  Mesmerized, they watched as Griff carefully removed tissue cultures of WRX3883 from the incubator and placed them inside six seamless aluminum canisters.

  “Those canisters are custom designed to permit safe transport of cultured virus from one lab suite to another,” Griff explained. “We can sterilize the outsides without harming the virus.”

  “For the first few viewings I wondered why you didn’t do anything to disable the cameras,” Forbush said. “Then I realized you didn’t have to. It would be perfectly normal for you to make this specimen transfer.”

  The next sequence cut to Griff, still carrying the black canvas bag, but now dressed in his street clothes and on his way out of the lab. He traveled through a maze of concrete corridors before he came to a stop at Security Checkpoint Two. The video showed him place his hand upon the biometric scanner and ended when he opened the security door to exit.

  “Is that it?” Griff turned to Melvin and asked. “I thought you said you had proof. You show that in a court of law and I’m gone for good.”

  “What do you mean?” Forbush asked. “That is proof. Proof positive.”

  Griff and Angie exchanged bewildered looks.

  “I don’t get it,” Griff said, an edge of irritation in his voice.

  “What? You’re telling me you didn’t see that. Look again.”

  Forbush reran the last minute of footage. He froze the frame just as Griff set his hand on the wall-mounted biometric scanner.

  “I still didn’t see anything,” Griff said.

  Forbush sighed.

  “Do you know that there are people like me who live for finding goofs in film? And trust me when I say there’s not a movie without them. Hollywood even hires continuity specialists to make sure that if a character is wearing a hat in one shot, she’s got the same hat on the same way if there’s a change in the camera angle.”

  “So you found a goof that clears me?”

  “More than a goof,” he said. “Look at the screen where I froze it. What do you see?”

  “My hand on the scanner,” Griff replied.

  “Which hand?” Melvin asked him.

  “My left,” Griff said. “It happened so fast, I wasn’t even looking for it.”

  “You’re right-handed. That’s your primary hand. That’s the hand your security profile was built from. The scanner is set up so that either hand can be placed in the indentation. In other words, it has two thumbs. Since the mold is to the left of the door, a left-hander would just set his—or her—left hand in place. But a right-hander would have to step across the indentation to set their hand in it. We each scan one and only one hand when we are creating our security profile—our dominant hand. You couldn’t have possibly exited through that checkpoint using a left-hand scan, which means—”

  “It wasn’t Griff carrying that bag,” Angie finished for him.

  “No. But it was somebo
dy,” Forbush continued. “Whoever did this probably used other security footage of Griff to cobble together a perfect digital forgery. It’s really flawless. Well, except for that one little gaffe.”

  “And you showed this to Sylvia?” Griff asked.

  “Oh yeah, I showed her. I didn’t come right out and confront her, though.”

  “Confront her about what?” Angie asked.

  “Sylvia Chen’s biometric profile. She’s one of the three left-handed primaries that we have in the system. I would bet the thief was her.”

  “Maybe that’s why she disappeared,” Griff said. “The president told me that at one point there were dozens of FBI agents—I think he actually said hundreds—out looking for her.”

  “Maybe it’s worth trying some more,” Angie said. “Does Sylvia have an office down in the lab?”

  Forbush nodded.

  “We’d have to suit up, but I can take you in there. A couple of agents have already searched there, though.”

  “If neither of them were women, we ought to look again.”

  “Why?”

  “Most women have a special talent built onto their X chromosomes. The talent to find things. If we want to find out who’s behind Genesis, that office is the first place we should look.”

  CHAPTER 28

  DAY 3

  4:00 P.M. (CST)

  Griff had gone ahead to get his lab operational, and had left Angie and Forbush to get started in Sylvia Chen’s office. Angie held her security card up to the reader and the red light above the palm scanner turned green. Standing off to one side, Forbush next had her set her hand on the opaque plate that initiated the biometric scan sequence. As she was waiting for approval, Angie suddenly found herself imagining Sylvia Chen approaching the door from the other side, carrying Griff’s canvas bag, and knowing that she was setting up an innocent man who had been her friend and coworker for years.