A Heartbeat Away - Michael Palmer [63]
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