A Heartbeat Away - Michael Palmer [60]
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