Each positive pressure suit had a huge clear wraparound visor and built-in gloves but otherwise resembled a cross between an astronaut’s moonwalk suit and a wetsuit. Air nozzles with a snap coupling at the end hung like tails from each pressure suit. Once the scientists were suited up, they put on rubber boots, grabbed one of the coiled hoses from the ceiling, and snapped them to their air nozzles. The hoses rapidly inflated the suits and puffed them up.
“They look like balloons with people inside,” Willie said.
“More like the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man from Ghostbusters,” Joe said.
“What’s the point of inflating the suits like that?” Willie asked.
“If the suit gets punctured,” Kate said, “air is forced out instead of sucked in, blowing out the pathogen and buying you some time to get into decontamination before you can get infected.”
Kate had some understanding of dealing with deadly viruses. Her military training had prepared her for chemical warfare situations on the battlefield.
“In those suits, it will be difficult to convey our stories through body language,” Boyd said. “But thanks to those large visors, we’ll be able to express a lot of emotion and narrative with our faces.”
“We’re going to be silently squirting liquids into pipettes and squinting at viruses through microscopes,” Chet said. “Where’s the drama in that?”
“Because there’s a small tribe in Africa that is going to be wiped out if we can’t discover which variation of bird flu jumped from their chickens into their children,” Boyd said. “Not just the people but an entire culture are hanging in the balance. So yes, there’s drama.”
“Can that actually happen?” Tom asked. “Can a chicken sneeze and infect you with something?”
“Do chickens sneeze?” Joe asked.
“Who cares?” Chet said. “We won’t be talking and we’re going to be in those white suits. Nobody is going to know what’s going on.”
“They will know the emotion,” Boyd said.
Once the suits were inflated, the scientists in the video unhooked the hoses, walked through another air lock, and entered the lab, where they immediately connected their pressure suits again to coiled air hoses that hung from the ceilings.
The lab was filled with workstations, biosafety cabinets, incubators, microscopes, and centrifuges for working with pathogens, freezers for storing the pathogens, and autoclaves for sterilizing equipment. There were also cameras in every corner to allow for constant surveillance.
The scientists filed in one by one, and each went to a workstation. When a scientist walked as far as a hose could go, he unlatched the hose from his suit, set the hose on a hook overhead, then walked to the next station or piece of equipment and attached himself to a new hose there.
There was an adjacent control room, where people could observe the scientists at work and interact with them. It was separated from the lab by a large, super-thick window and an air lock. The observers could see images from the microscopes and the readouts from other devices in the lab on their computer screens.
“The scientists in the lab are isolated physically from everybody else, but they are connected to the outside world electronically,” Nick said. “The surveillance footage and the readouts from their equipment can be shared over a secure web connection to scientists within the building and all over the world. They call it the Biosecurity Collaboration Platform.”
“I call it an open invitation to hack into the entire system,” Joe said. “They might as well have a sign out front that says ‘C’mon in, everybody is welcome!’ ”
“What are those blue suits hanging in the control room?” Chet asked, pointing to suits similar to the pressure suits but not nearly as bulky. “I saw some in the balloon-suit room, too.”
“In case the positive pressure suit system fails, or there is some other emergency, those are protective suits with their own battery-operated air-purifying respirators attached,” Nick said. “The battery has a four-to-six-hour charge.”
“What happens if you’re in one of those white balloon suits and have an itch?” Willie said. “Or need to pee?”
“You have to leave the lab and go through decontamination,” Kate said. “You’re about to see that process now.”
To exit the lab, the scientists went through an air lock into a shower room, where their pressure suits were doused for eight minutes with decontamination chemicals. From there, they went through another air lock back into the suit room. They climbed out of the pressure suits, went through an air lock into another changing room, stripped out of their scrubs, gloves, and socks and stuffed everything into a biohazard hamper, and then went naked into another shower room. After showering, they went through an air lock back into the locker room to get dressed in their street clothes.
“How much of that do we need to build?” Tom asked.
“The lab and the control room,” Nick said. “We’re going to tunnel in through the control room wall. I’ll enter the lab through the control room air lock, retrieve the virus from a refrigeration unit in the lab, and off we go.”
“You’re not going to put on a balloon suit or one of those blue ones?” Willie asked.
“I’m stealing the vial, not opening it,” Nick said.
“Be careful,” Boyd said. “A horrific lab accident in the Congo left me impotent and destroyed my marriage. Six other colleagues weren’t so lucky.”
“You know the virus is fake, right?” Kate said. “There is no actual danger.”
“That’s the careless attitude that gets people killed,” Boyd said. “Do you want those deaths, and the shattered lives of their loved ones, on your conscience? I know a man blinded by a deadly lab accident. Now the only thing he sees are the people that he lost.”
“Oh God,” Willie said. “He’s in character already.”
“We all need to prepare,” Nick said. “The sooner the better. There are more instructional videos on board that you can watch. I’ve also got books on lab procedure and blueprints of typical biolabs for you to study. Let’s get to it. We land in Paris in ten hours…”
“That’s where Dr. Lyle Fairbanks will find his redemption,” Boyd said. “Or lose his soul.”
Gaëlle Rochon picked them up at the airport the next morning. Introductions were made all around, and she drove them in a rented van to the storefront that Nick had leased on avenue Denfert-Rochereau.
The Indian restaurant that had last occupied the property, and all of its fixtures and furniture, were long gone, but the space still smelled of curry and grease. The windows were covered with cardboard, and there was a thick layer of dust on the hardwood floor.
“There’s a large apartment on the second floor,” Kate said. “That’s where you’ll be staying. You’ll find cots and furniture up there. While you’re out and about on the street, if any neighbors ask what you’re doing, tell them we’re turning this place into an American-style diner. You’re the design team that was brought in from America to do it.”
“How do we explain the medical equipment?” Chet asked.
“Say that a clinic of some kind is going in upstairs, but you really don’t know much about it,” Kate said.
Nick turned to Chet, Tom, and Joe. “Use this floor any way you need to make the set in the basement work.”
“Let’s take a look downstairs,” Tom said.
Nick led the way to the back of the room and a wide flight of stairs to the basement.
“The kitchen was downstairs,” he said as they went down the stairs. “So it’s a big space with all the utilities you’ll need already routed in.”
The walls were covered with subway tiles, and the floor was concrete. There were lots of open holes in the walls and floors with pipes sticking out and exposed wiring where kitchen appliances once were.
Tom nodded to himself as he walked the perimeter of the room. “I can work with this. I’ll use the existing walls as much as possible and keep demolition to a minimum.”
&n
bsp; “Give Gaëlle a list of everything you need that can be purchased legally and for cash,” Nick said. “I’ll get the rest.”
“I made up a list on the plane of the laboratory equipment that I need.” Chet handed the list to Nick. “Basically it’s everything you saw in that lab, along with some compressors and fans to run the air hoses.”
Joe tapped the floor with his foot. “I’d like a look underground. I want to see what cable, telecom, and other utility lines I can tap.”
“I’d like to go, too,” Chet said. “I need to see the street signs in the sewer and catacombs so I can create convincing fakes.”
“I’ll be glad to give you both a tour,” Gaëlle said. “There are jumpsuits, helmets, and boots upstairs for you. We can go whenever you’re ready. One of my favorite manholes is right down the street.”
“Welcome to Paris,” Willie said.
—
They spent the next week building the lab, working in shifts under Tom’s direction. They also helped Chet with the tedious task of running all the necessary wires, A/V cables, and air supply lines that were needed to operate the lights, positive pressure suit air hoses, surveillance cameras, and scientific equipment. The set was capped with a fake ceiling to hold the lights and the hoses. Two of the actual basement walls were incorporated into the control room, but the rest of the lab was made with fake walls.
The interior walls of the control room and the lab were elaborately tiled, painted, and decorated. But the opposite side, visible only from the outside of the set, were naked plywood and two-by-fours, like the framing of a house without drywall. The fake walls were propped up with wooden braces bolted into the concrete floor. The air lock doors, with the exception of the one between the control room and the lab, opened to the empty basement. The portion of the basement walls visible through the portholes in the lab’s air lock doors were painted to imply the room beyond.
“It’s as convincing as the hospital set on Grey’s Anatomy,” Boyd declared on the night the set was completed.
The next morning at 9:00, after a last tour of the set, everyone but Nick, Kate, Gaëlle, and Joe got into their positive pressure suits and prepared to do a rehearsal. Joe sat at a console on the first floor and faced two keyboards and four flat-screen monitors aligned in a row.
“There are discreet green lights inside and outside the lab set to let the cast know when the cameras are live,” Joe said. “That way they only have to act when we know that someone is watching.”
“Let’s see the surveillance feed from the real institute,” Kate said.
“Breaking into their website was ridiculously easy,” Joe said. He tapped a few keys and one of his screens filled with dozens of thumbnail mini-screens showing corridors, labs, parking lots, conference rooms, and offices within the institute. “I’m also hardwired into their surveillance system as a backup. I could probably shut down their alarms and hijack control of their air locks for real if I wanted to.”
“It’s a good thing we’re fake thieves,” Kate said. “When this is over, remind me to have a serious talk with their security people.”
“Show me our lab,” Nick said.
Joe tapped another key, and the empty lab appeared on another screen.
“Can you pull up the surveillance feed from one of their real labs and see how it compares to ours?” Nick asked.
“Sure,” Joe said.
An instant later, the image on the screen split, the real lab showing up on the left, their empty set on the right. In the real lab, half a dozen scientists in their white inflated positive pressure suits were diligently at work.
“Formidable,” Gaëlle said. “There is no difference.”
“Re-creating an empty room is easy,” Nick said. “It’s the acting that matters. Let’s start the show.”
Joe hit a button on another console. Suddenly the fans, compressors, and other equipment mounted on the first floor roared loudly to life to pump air into the hoses in the basement set to inflate the positive pressure suits. He pressed a second button that turned on the green light for the actors. That was their call to action.
Boyd, Willie, Chet, and Tom lumbered into the lab one by one, unhooked their air hoses, and moved to their workstations or elsewhere in the room before hooking up to a nearby air hose again. They all seemed to move around the lab with purpose, retrieving samples, putting others away, examining things under microscopes, carefully squirting liquids into pipettes, and putting vials into the centrifuge.
“That’s as dull as the real lab work,” Gaëlle said. “If there’s a story there, I’m missing it.”
“That’s because we can’t see much of their faces from these high angles,” Joe said. “Their expressions are lost.”
“Don’t tell Boyd that,” Kate said. “He’ll demand close-ups.”
“What matters to me is that they are coming across as real lab workers,” Nick said. “Let’s keep it going for a few more minutes. We don’t know how long they will have to perform at any given time. I want to be sure they can sustain it for a while.”
—
On the set, Boyd approached Willie, who was at a microscope, examining a slide. The microscope itself didn’t actually work. The magnified image on her monitor was part of a preprogrammed show generated by the computer. He hunched down and looked over her shoulder.
“That’s the pathogen that rendered me impotent,” he said.
“This is going to be the elbow that renders you impotent if you don’t stop crowding me.”
“That’s not your line,” Boyd said. “It’s ‘You’re more of a man now than you ever were, Dr. Fairbanks. You sure as hell aren’t impotent when it comes to saving lives.’ ”
“If I say that, I’ll throw up in this suit, which could kill me,” Willie said. “I could drown in my own puke.”
“The line underscores the sacrifices we make and the ultimate nobility of what we do here,” Boyd said. “Do you have a better line that achieves the same thing?”
“Nobody can hear what we say. It’s a silent movie.”
“Some of the greatest films in the history of cinema were silent,” Boyd said. “It’s the performance that matters.”
“Are you insecure about your virility?”
“That line doesn’t work,” Boyd said.
“It’s a genuine question. You’ve written two scripts now that are focused on glorifying your tiddlywink. You’re obsessed with yourself.”
“That’s ironic coming from a woman who inflated her breasts like one of these suits.”
She tried to elbow him, but couldn’t move fast enough with her arm in an inflated sleeve. He easily dodged it.
“Now we have some drama and nobody had to hear a word,” Boyd said. “I think I’ve proved my point.”
Proud of himself, Boyd walked away from her toward Chet at another workstation, stretching his air hose taut. He disconnected it but forgot to set it in a hook before letting go. The hose snapped back like a whip, sweeping vials off countertops and whacking Willie out of her seat. A hiss of air came from her suit.
“Congratulations,” Chet said. “You’ve just contaminated the entire lab and probably killed Willie.”
—
“Now I see the story,” Gaëlle said. “Willie can’t stand him.”
“Cut,” Nick said with a sigh.
Joe hit the button turning off the green light and shutting down the air system that was inflating their suits.
“Can I talk to them?” Nick asked.
Joe hit a button on a console and pointed to the monitor. “Go ahead, there’s a mike embedded in the monitor. They’ll all hear you.”
“You started off great but then you forgot to follow lab procedure,” Nick said. “Trying to elbow a fellow scientist in the groin is a definite no-no in a room full of toxic viruses, Willie. It may not be a written rule, but I think it’s generally understood.”
“Let’s review,” Kate said. “Never let go of a taut air hose, Boyd. Always hook
it up and make sure it’s secure before moving on and connecting to another one. You’ve seen now what can happen if a hose flies around. A mistake like that could kill people in a real lab but, more important, it will kill me, Nick, and Gaëlle in the real world.”
“This was only our first rehearsal,” Boyd said. “We are just beginning to find our characters and get comfortable in this space. It’s all part of the artistic process.”
“You have two days, three at the most, to get it down before showtime,” Nick said. “We’re picking up Huck Moseby at the airport in two hours.”
“That’s our checkered flag,” Kate said. “The con begins today.”
—
Whenever Huck Moseby dreamed of Paris, it was never about strolling the Champs-Élysées or climbing the Eiffel Tower, or riding an excursion boat along the Seine at sunset, or enjoying a coffee and tart at a sidewalk café. His dream was to visit the sewers, the Shangri-la of waste disposal systems, the inspiration for such literary masterpieces as The Phantom of the Opera and Les Misérables. There was a time when the Paris sewers were appreciated. In the late 1800s, the rich and powerful would dress up in their finest clothes to tour the sewers on fancy gaslit gondolas to see for themselves the technological and engineering marvel that was the pride of Paris. Far too few people in the world today, in Huck’s opinion, realized that the sewers were what truly made Paris the City of Light.
He was thinking about that as he arrived at Charles de Gaulle Airport. Nick, Kate, and a beautiful young blond woman were waiting for him outside customs.
“How was your flight?” Nick asked.
The flight had been seven hours of sheer bliss for Huck. He’d flown Air France first-class, where he was pampered like never before in his life. He was going to forever treasure the faux-leather case of toiletries, the airplane socks, and the eye mask that he’d been given.