Interdite, Found
Season 1 — Episode 01: The Suite
A serialized Novel by Art Blue

[GABBY]

The director called cut and the port went quiet.

Not quite — Houston’s Ship Channel didn’t know the word. The cranes kept moving. The container ships kept groaning against their berths, the steel hulls ticking in the heat like enormous clocks counting down to nothing.

But the film set went quiet, which in Gabby Meri’s experience was the only kind of quiet that mattered. The cameras stopped. The boom swung away.

The first AD called “that’s a wrap on today” and sixty crew members exhaled at once, the collective sigh of people who had been standing in ninety-two-degree humidity for eleven hours and could finally stop pretending it didn’t bother them.

Gabby pulled the Interpol lanyard over her head and handed it to the wardrobe assistant who materialized at her elbow like a ghost with a garment bag. The badge was a prop. The Glock on her hip was rubber.

The pantsuit was Armani, which no actual Interpol agent would ever wear to a port inspection, but the director had opinions about silhouettes and Gabby had stopped arguing about wardrobe on American productions three films ago. You pick your battles. Wardrobe is never the battle.

She’d been shooting the same scene since seven that morning — a dockside confrontation with an FBI liaison, the two of them standing between stacked shipping containers in the LaPorte terminal while the dialogue explained, for the audience’s