On Sunday Berman had forced himself to pay another painful visit to his mother at the Valley Springs Assisted Living home in Louisville. Each time he went, he thought he detected a tangible decline in his mother’s capabilities. On this occasion, she was just a little more belligerent toward him, and just a little less capable of completing a coherent sentence. The inexorable decay was frightening, not for his mother, as he had given up any hope of stemming her disease, but for himself.
He felt his going there was like those juvenile-offender programs in which at-risk teens are sent to a hard adult jail in the hope that they’ll be scared straight. Except Berman was trying to make sure he worked even harder to make sure his Nano team had the funds to make progress with the science. His ability to comprehend the technical aspects of the program had long ago been left behind by the advances his scientists were making, but he kept on top of it the best he could. What Berman could do was ensure he secured the money.
To that end, he closeted himself away for hours in the nerve center of Nano with his senior scientist, Allan Stevens, and his small inner circle, the molecular manufacturing guys, listening in as the team revised the scientific protocols over and over again. The margins they were working with seemed minute: in the nano universe, an infinitesimal number of molecules, too few or too many, could lead on the one hand to underperformance and on the other hand to overwhelming stress on the body and, potentially, catastrophic failure. That much had become clear. It was a tightrope walk.
The bulk of his time Berman spent with Whitney Jones, being debriefed about the intelligence she had gleaned from the latest group of Chinese dignitaries and their competitive nationalistic mind-set, and combing over the Nano strategy for the upcoming weeks. From what Whitney and Berman could divine, the huge injection of financing to take the microbivores project to the next level, namely the move to mammal and then human safety studies, was still on track, and once that had taken place, the sharing of the advances in nanotechnology would begin in earnest. But the performance criteria remained as challenges that Nano had to meet. For that reason, Berman spent more time with the premier athletes still in training, and through interpreters he tried to get a fix on their psyches. Were they going to be ready to assume the responsibility that was being placed on them? Could he trust they would act as instructed? Some of the expendables obviously hadn’t, although ultimately they had contributed in unexpected but valuable ways.
Berman was consumed by his work. The preparations were meticulous in every detail, and Berman was on hand for each and every aspect of their development. He could leave nothing to chance. He undertook a monkish existence, rising even earlier, working even harder. For these few weeks, Berman needed his head to be as clear as it could be. He was a grown man; he could delay his inevitable gratification till the time he could truly appreciate it. So he made a pact with himself. No red meat; no alcohol; no cigars. And no Pia. She was simply too much of a distraction.
30.
PIA’S APARTMENT, BOULDER, COLORADO
SUNDAY, MAY 12, 2013, 10:25 A.M. (FIVE DAYS LATER)
Pia was too busy to be bored, but whenever she stopped work and tried to focus on the bigger picture, she felt restless. She was consumed with trying to get back to Zachary Berman’s house to create a set of circumstances by which to get the photograph of his eyes that she hoped would give her access to the rest of the Nano buildings, but Berman was either away or not available, thanks to more visiting Chinese.
She tried visiting his office early before the day began, as she’d done the first time, but he was never there, so she’d given up after three or four attempts. She had dared go to Berman’s office only twice during normal business hours, and each time his secretary, a woman who worked nine to five and dealt mostly with Berman’s correspondence, said he wasn’t available. Pia didn’t want to push her luck by appearing to be stalking the head of the company. There was as little sign of Whitney Jones as there was of Berman. Pia tried not to be paranoid, but she couldn’t quite dispel the idea she was being intentionally ignored.
Uncharacteristically, she then had tried hard to befriend the two assistants she had been assigned, Pamela Ellis and Jason Rodriguez, looking for some institutional gossip about Berman and Whitney. Pamela was impossible, Pia decided very quickly. She was a clone of Mariel Spallek, minus a few years. As clumsy as Pia’s attempts to engage the young woman in conversation may have been, there was no reason Pia could think of for Pamela to rebuff them so categorically. On a few occasions, Pia was sure she could feel Pamela’s eyes burning into the back of her head, and when she turned, she was sure Pamela had just looked down or away. The possibility that she was a spy installed in her office by Mariel Spallek struck Pia almost as soon as she met the woman, and Pia made sure their relationship was strictly cool and businesslike.
Jason Rodriguez was also slightly standoffish but, in comparison, much more friendly. He was, as he freely admitted, a science nerd. He was eager to learn about nanotechnology, so he was happy to pick Pia’s brain as often as he could. He was smart and understood the potential for the science and was as ambitious as he was oversized. Jason admitted to being six feet six, but Pia wondered if he wasn’t taller. For college, Jason told Pia he had a choice between sports and study—he couldn’t imagine devoting as much time as he wanted to each, and he chose science. He happily talked about his undergraduate and postgraduate studies at the University of Michigan, but about what he had worked on at Nano before being assigned to Pia, he wouldn’t say anything at all.
Pia had gone so far as to ask Jason if he wanted to go out for a drink one evening, but he declined, citing pressure of work. Jason had talked to Pia more than once about his girlfriend at Michigan, and in the past tense, so Pia was fairly sure he was neither taken nor gay. Her pride was slightly dented when he turned her down a second time, at which point Pia backed off, in case she was making herself too obvious. She knew there was an element of irrationality on her part, being accustomed too often to having to fend off unwanted advances from men.
Pia’s main concern continued to be, What the hell had gotten into Zach Berman? Pia asked herself the question day after day. She was aware of the irony of the situation. Prior to the mysterious jogger episode, she had been fighting him off for months, but now that she was trying to make herself available to him, he had vanished. Or at least he was not around to ask about another dinner date. Pia was so anxious to try out the next phase of her plan that she’d agree to almost anything to get herself back inside Berman’s home with him. But he wasn’t giving her the chance.
Meanwhile, Nano was moving quickly with preparations for mammalian safety experiments, beginning with mice using Pia’s microbivore design. But as her results with the roundworms got more and more encouraging, the pressure on Pia had let up. Mariel checked in on Pia less frequently, and was herself much less objectionable. Pia almost missed the haranguing. Wouldn’t Mariel want her to ramp up the preparations, to push the science as far as she could take it, so that they could at least start the prolonged FDA approval process? And what about the microbivores computer software guys with whom Pia had yet to meet up? Continually Pia had been told that they might be available the following week but it kept getting put off.
Then Pia was told by Mariel that Pamela Ellis was being reassigned within the building. Mariel gave Pia an experiment to run involving a commercial product, a DNA array for a pregnancy testing kit that was, as far as Pia was concerned, the equivalent of busywork.
On Sunday, Pia sat on her couch, nursing her ongoing unease and frustration. Something Paul Caldwell had said stuck in her mind. How much did she know about what Nano was doing with her ideas? Perhaps Pamela Ellis was somewhere in the locked-up confines of the secret Nano, performing experiments Pia should be doing in her lab, maybe using mice with the oligosaccharide-shielded microbivores. Or other experiments they did not want her to see or even know about.
Pia’s iPhone rattled on the tabletop in front of her and snapped her out of her daydream. The display identified the caller as Paul. Pia was pleased with the distraction.
“Hi, Paul, I was just thinking about you.”
“That’s nice, but listen, Pia!” His voice was low as if he didn’t want to be heard by anyone around him. “This is serious. I think we’ve got another one.”
“Another what?”
“An athlete from Nano, on his way into the ER. A cyclist this time. Where are you?”
“I’m at home, give me ten minutes and I can be there. What do you know about the cyclist?” Pia pulled on her sneakers and grabbed her car keys and a jacket and left home running as she talked into the phone jammed between her shoulder and her ear. She’d been sitting around waiting for something to happen, and now it seemed like it had.
“He’s at the far end of the Carter Lake Loop,” said Paul. “I know the ride. A member of the public was a couple hundred feet behind him and saw him go down and called nine-one-one. The ambulance relayed the details of the call to us so we can prepare the ER, and they said the rider is supposedly unresponsive. He’s an Asian male, and he’s wearing a cycling suit with a Nano logo.”
“Oh, God, that’s great! I mean, it’s not great, but we can try to keep this guy in the hospital once we have him, right? And we can get some more blood.”
“We can try, Pia.”
“Does Nano know about him?”
“That I don’t know.”
“Okay, I’m in the car, how much time do I have?” Pia was pleased. Paul was keeping the small blood sample from the jogger that he had held back from the batch that had disappeared at the lab. At first Pia was going to bring it back to her lab to run some tests on it, but then had hesitated. The problem was that there was such a small amount, she couldn’t waste any. She decided that before she did anything, she would need to have a better idea of what kind of tests she wanted to run. Besides, Mariel Spallek had been riding her too hard to risk any kind of extracurricular activity like that, but a larger sample of blood would give Pia an incentive to find a way to test it to see if it could explain what had happened to the victim.
“The ambulance is about halfway there, so my guess is he won’t be back here for a while, depending on what they find at the scene. Come over and we can strategize. Noakes isn’t here today, thank goodness, and I’ve called the police. So yes, let’s try and hold on to this one.”
Even though the ambulance hadn’t yet reached the rider, Pia raced over to the hospital and excitedly found Paul in the center of the ER in front of the main desk.
“Do they have him?” Pia demanded. Her face was flushed. She was out of breath in her excitement.
“I don’t know, Pia. You need to calm down. We hope the guy is okay, right?”
“Yes, yes, I’m sorry, Paul. I’ve just been going crazy at work thinking about that jogger. It is driving me insane not to have any answers, I’m not the patient type. I need answers.”
“I know you do, Pia, you’ve told me enough times,” said Paul. He smiled at Pia. He was calmness personified, making Pia’s anxiety that much more pronounced. “I’ve talked to our in-house counsel, and she is on her way in. I seem to have lost Mr. Noakes’s contact information, so he is not on his way. Oh, well. We have two Boulder police officers here, and I have told them that there might be a disturbance. I said that we’re expecting a cardiac patient who’s going to need attention but who might possibly be essentially kidnapped by a third party. Actually I didn’t use the word kidnapped. I just said that other people might come and demand to take custody and have the patient discharged against our medical advice. I’ve also asked for our Mandarin translator to be called in, and she is on her way. That’s about all we can do for the moment.”
Paul was wearing a radio headset, which was linked into the communications between the EMTs and the ER. He pressed the TALK button and asked the ambulance driver his ETA to the scene of the accident. Pia couldn’t unscramble the static-ridden half of the conversation that Paul was having. When he finished, he turned to her.
“They’re there. It’s David and Bill, the same guys who were with the runner, which is good. We’ll find out if the man is presenting the same symptoms.”
“What can they see?” Pia questioned nervously. “Tell them to get the patient into the ambulance right away.”
“Give them a chance! They have to stabilize him, see what’s going on. You know the drill. Excuse me a second, Pia, I really have to check on another patient.”
Paul marched from the reception area of the ER over to a nearby bay where there was a lot of activity. Pia looked at her watch every thirty seconds and back at Paul. Pia was too far away to hear what was being said. After what seemed to Pia like a long fifteen minutes, Paul came back and smiled at her.
“Okay, let’s check in. They should be on their way back.” Paul called up the ambulance, and relayed what the EMT was telling him.
“Okay, you’re still at the scene. Initially very similar signs, yes . . . Apparently unresponsive . . . You performed CPR . . .”
“Ask about the tattoos,” Pia said.
“What, hold on a second. What’s that, Pia?” Paul held his hand over the radio set so he could hear Pia’s question.
“Ask them if he has tattoos on his right forearm.”
“We can find that out when they get here, they apparently just revived the patient. A tattoo isn’t going to be germane to the immediate situation. What’s that?” Now Paul was straining to hear the EMT. He pulled the unit off his belt and looked at the controls. He had lost contact.
“I can’t hear them, dammit. Dispatch! We lost contact with Dave and Bill. Dave? Dave? Can you hear me?”
“What’s the matter?” asked Pia, although it was obvious that Paul couldn’t hear the EMT.
Pia and Paul stood there, useless, for a couple of long minutes. Then Paul’s radio crackled into life.
“What’s happening?” demanded Paul.
“What is it?” said Pia. Paul held up his hand, palm forward, telling Pia to wait while he heard whatever the story was.
“Are you serious? . . . The patient’s name was Yang. . . . And it was the same people who arrived, you’re sure of that. . . . Okay, I understand. You stay there, of course, get the police on the radio. . . .”
Pia experienced a sinking feeling in her stomach as she listened to Paul’s end of the conversation.
“Okay, wait there.” Paul broke off the call.
“What the hell?”
“They never got the guy in the ambulance. The same crew as came in here swooped in with a white van this time and took the man away. It sounds like it was practically at gunpoint, and just like with our guy, he’d completely revived. In the blink of the eye he went from moribund to fully conscious, and they don’t know how long his heart had been stopped and how long he’d not been breathing. . . .”
“Where is this loop place? Where did they pick him up?”
“I guess it’s thirty, thirty-five miles north of here. Why?”
“Because from where they are to Nano is about the same distance as it is from here to Nano, but they have to go on twisty back roads, and we can go mostly by freeway. Let’s go, we can head them off.”
“Head them off? What are you talking about?”
“We have to stop them getting back into Nano if we can or, at the very least, see where they enter the Nano grounds to be sure that’s where they have taken him.”
“How are we going to do that?”
“We’ll think of something. We know which road they have to take on the way in from Carter Lake Loop. Paul, are you coming or not? He’s supposed to be your patient. You were worried they might kidnap him here. But they didn’t wait this time, they took him before he even got in the ambulance. Let’s go, Pa
ul, we’re wasting time!”
Pia set off at a run, and much against his better judgment, Paul followed.
31.
ROUTE 36, NORTH OF BOULDER, COLORADO
SUNDAY, MAY 12, 2013, 10:50 A.M.
Paul had no time to argue with Pia’s decision to take her car; she ran out to the ER parking lot and jumped in the VW, barely waiting long enough for Paul to hop in and get his door closed. As he struggled to fasten his seat belt, she was already on the way.
“Pia, let’s think about this. What are we going to do, even if we see the right white van? And how will we know it is the right van? And you forgot your seat belt.”
Pia cast Paul a dirty look as if to say “you are not my keeper,” and accelerated out of the hospital lot. Aggressively she zigzagged through traffic on her way to the freeway, heading northwest.
“We’re going to find them, then improvise. If nothing else, we’ll follow them to Nano.”
“And then what?”
“I don’t know! What I do know is that we can’t sit around and wait for the police to go see the EMTs. I’m sure Mariel had some excuse . . . whoa! Look out!”
Pia swerved to avoid a car that was trying to execute a perfectly legal lane change with blinkers flashing. The driver didn’t see Pia coming up fast.