Michael Palmer - A Heartbeat Away

“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.”

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 mean 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.