A Heartbeat Away

CHAPTER 26

The corrugated steel hangar was carefully constructed to conceal the entrance to the Kalvesta Biosafety Level 4 facility. In one of its previous incarnations, the massive Quonset-style structure had been part of an Air Force training center. The government left behind the skeletons of a few decommissioned aircraft to convince any trespassers who snuck by the small security contingent that the facility contained nothing of any great interest.

Griff and Angie walked briskly across the hard-baked clay and gazed at the newly installed chain-link fencing. The perimeter was guarded by a team of heavily armed military personnel—the third such security checkpoint through which they had passed. The setup was nothing like the sleepy installation where less than a year ago, Griff and the rest of the Veritas team had sought to establish a biologic pathway into the will center of the human brain.

“How in heaven could Genesis have snuck the virus past all these guards?” Angie asked.

“They couldn’t, is my guess,” Griff replied. “But back before my arrest, there wasn’t this level of security in place. In fact, there was hardly any security at all.” He pointed past Stafford and his squad to a squat, concrete building that stood in close proximity to the hangar. “That was our topside security. We had one guard on duty at all times, and there was a collection of sophisticated electronic monitoring inside, but that was it.”

“So at least now we’re safe.”

“I think these troops are here as much to keep track of us, and to keep us penned in, as to keep anyone from getting at us.”

“Especially now that Genesis thinks you’re dead.”

Griff assured himself that there was no levity in Angie’s remark, and then nodded. At some point, he had vowed, he would learn about the men who had given their lives to foster the deception that he was dead. Perhaps their families could use some help.

Anxious to sever the connection to his decoy, Griff used up an hour of the flight to Kalvesta cutting off his beard, and then shaving his face clean. Now, the wintry afternoon breeze felt strange on his skin. Angie had given the transformation her approval.

“Still handsome after all these years,” she said.

As the pair neared the hangar, several of the soldiers standing guard tensed. The Army corporal in charge stepped forward and introduced himself first to Griff, next to Angie, and last to Stafford and his men.

“Do you know where Melvin Forbush is?” Griff asked the man. “I was told that he’d meet us topside.”

“Forbush has sent up word he will meet you in the lab, sir. He’s been below ground since we arrived here. We haven’t even seen him yet.”

Griff laughed and Angie gave him a puzzled look.

“Melvin is as good a microbiologist as you’ll ever find,” he explained, “but he is also, how should I put it, a little eccentric.”

“Oh, I love eccentric—at least I usually do. Will I love Melvin?”

“I suspect you might. I do. He’s an absolute fanatic about his work, but he’s even more of a nut about Hollywood. Melvin is inevitably only one of two places—working on his equipment, or watching movies. I’m not surprised he hasn’t been above ground. Listen, corporal, I know my way around, and also the biosecurity protocols. Sergeant Stafford and his men will wait around here. They worry about us, so you can assure them that this is the only way in and the only way out of the lab.”

Before Stafford had the chance to respond, the corporal nodded toward the security guard. The razor-wire gate slid open on a track and Griff and Angie entered the hangar, a building about the size of two football fields set side by side. The ground beneath the arcing metal was hard-packed dirt, frozen solid by the Kansas winter. However, where once the hangar was a huge, nearly empty shell, now it was filled with military vehicles—Humvee battle buggies, Jeeps, transports, two ambulances, and a tanker. The trucks were parked in rows along the hangar walls and two more vehicles pulled in through the rear entrance while they were watching.

“I guess Allaire’s taking this all pretty seriously,” Angie understated.

“Impending death has a way of spurring people to action.”

Kalvesta’s dramatic, busy transformation was ironic given the size of the microbe at the center of it all. When Griff first arrived from New York with the team from Sylvia Chen’s lab, the BL-4 facility had been a tawdry oasis in the high plains desert, consisting of a dozen or so bungalows spaced along some ill-defined dirt streets, a rutted landing strip, and a dilapidated basketball court.

Of course, the real story of the place lay in the gleaming laboratory far below the surface.

The ingress to the lab was unchanged since Griff’s forced departure. Mounted on the wall beside the hangar entrance was a Kronos 4500 time clock. The corporal swiped his security card through the clock’s reader slot. Instantly, a rust-speckled Cessna T-37 Tweety Bird, secured by wheel chocks and parked in the center of the space, began to move.

The aircraft, once a trainer for the USAF, glided aside, along with the perfectly camouflaged ground beneath it, to reveal a flight of circular steel stairs that descended fifty or sixty feet to a grated metal landing and elevator bay.

“Impressive,” Angie said.

“Only the beginning,” Griff replied.

On the way down to the landing, their footsteps echoed off the polished steel walls. The elevator was small. Griff’s stomach knotted up the way it did whenever he was inside the claustrophobic atmosphere of what he used to refer to as a human incubator. In his world of killer germs, a healthy fear was a vital tool for staying alert, and therefore, alive.

The elevator traveled slowly. The 250-foot journey down took thirty seconds. They exited into a long, fluorescent-lit corridor with a seven-foot ceiling. The hum of powerful air-conditioning and purification units echoed throughout the space. The smooth, whitewashed concrete walls were unadorned, save for several framed safety posters, each a reminder that death was never farther away than a moment of inattentiveness. At the end of the corridor was a closed steel door, painted fire engine red, and stenciled SECURITY CHECKPOINT ONE in white lettering. There was a six-inch wire-mesh porthole in the center. To one side, another sign warned that the door was alarmed, and that access through it required authenticated biometric scans.

“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.”