Nano (14 page)

19.

NANO, LLC, BOULDER, COLORADO

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 24, 2013, 12:09
P.M
.

After looking at the security logs as she did every day, Mariel Spallek had to concede that since Pia had started work before six o’clock that morning, she was certainly entitled to take an extra forty-five minutes at lunchtime to go for a run. Pia had also told her that jogging restored her when she felt tired, and that she did much of her best thinking when she was pounding the pavement on the mountain road above Nano. It helped that Mariel was in a good mood. She had purloined another lab on the floor below for Pia’s use as well as more testing equipment so that Pia could run twice as many tests on the various levels of the polyethylene glycol incorporated into the nanobot surfaces that they were experimenting with. Once Pia had gotten all these apparatuses set up, Mariel told Pia she could go for her jog, but added that she would prefer that Pia not come across any more Nano employees in extremis. That comment had brought a laugh from both women.

It was Pia’s custom to run up and away from Nano to get to a higher elevation, but this time she turned right out of the gate and back down the road toward town. After a few hundred yards, she turned on a smaller secondary road that she had never been on before. After another hundred yards or so, she stopped and made her way up the embankment at the edge of the road and into the forest that surrounded Nano. Pia’s plan was to try to determine if there was a second entrance into the facility, which she now strongly suspected, or anything new she could see from the outside. There were plenty of back roads in the area, and she could have tried driving around to see what she could find, but doing it on foot seemed like a better idea. Her plan was to circumambulate the complex along the perimeter fence, even though Nano occupied a considerable area. She was hoping for some success, since she’d gleaned precisely nothing of consequence since she’d left the emergency room the previous day.

Pia plunged into the woods. It had been a dry spring so far, and a fine dust hung in the air as small branches and twigs snapped underfoot. The undergrowth thickened as Pia made her way deeper into the trees, and she fended off branches with her forearms and got some scratches for her trouble. After just five minutes she felt she could have been in the middle of nowhere. Ahead, the trees were taller and fuller and she had a hard time seeing down into the valley-like depression where Nano was situated. As Pia strained for a look ahead, she walked straight into a dark-green, thin-mesh chickenwire fence, scraping her nose in the process.

“Dammit!” Pia put her hand to her face but there was no blood. Now that she focused on what was right in front of her, she could see the nearly invisible fence. A narrow trench had been dug and it extended to the left and right, as far as she could see, so that the fence went into the ground. Brown metal stanchions were set into the ground at fifteen- to twenty-foot intervals, and the ten-foot-high fence was strung between them. Pia shook it—it was taut and strong, possibly coated with a dark green material that might have been a nanotechnology product. She heard a sound, and straight ahead on the opposite side of the fence she saw a young deer standing stock-still, staring right at her.

“No need to be afraid,” Pia said. “Neither one of us is getting through this fence.”

So Nano had a second, outer perimeter barrier significantly beyond the imposing concertina wire–topped chain-link fence closer in. Pia had no reason to believe this new barrier didn’t run all the way around the facility except, obviously, at the main gate. It was yet another example of how seriously Nano took security. It also changed Pia’s estimate for how long it would take her to walk around the complex.

Pia’s iPhone sounded and she gasped. Running into the unexpected fence had made her jittery, and she didn’t expect a phone call while in the woods. She released the unit from the strap around her arm and recognized Paul Caldwell’s number on the screen. Pia’s hopes were raised—perhaps he’d found out something useful from tests on the runner’s blood.

“Pia?”

“Paul, yes, what can you tell me?”

“Pia, I can hardly hear you, it’s a bad connection. Listen . . .”

Pia could hear nothing. She turned and headed back toward the road where she had entered the woods. She could hear Paul’s voice trailing in and out when the line beeped a couple of times, and the call was lost. Reaching the road, Pia waited for Paul to redial—she wanted to avoid the exasperating situation when both parties try to call the other when a connection is lost. She hoped Paul wasn’t waiting for her.

Her phone rang again.

“Paul?”

“Pia, is that you?”

“Yes Paul, it’s me, what’s up? What did you find out?”

“Okay, I can hear you. Listen. There was a problem with the blood.”

“Problem? What do you mean? What did they find?”

“They didn’t find anything, Pia. The blood never got tested. It never made it to the lab.”

“What do you mean? When we talked last night you said you’d just sent it. You expected some sort of results today.”

“I said I sent it, yes, but I was just saying what usually happened. Except it didn’t happen in this case.”

“So what the hell did happen?” Pia was mad, and even though she felt self-conscious yelling into her phone, standing by the side of a road, yell she did. She could hear Paul apologize on the other end, but that was no help. Except for her seeming success with Berman in scheduling another visit to his lair, nothing else was working out. And now there was a problem with the blood. It didn’t seem fair.

“I put the blood in the usual pouch and left it in the secure box outside for the courier. He picked it up and dropped it off at the lab. He’s our regular delivery guy and I trust him, but I also checked, and there is a record of his signature at the other end. That proves the blood was received, but after that, no one has any record of it. It didn’t make it to the lab.”

“How can that happen?” said Pia. “Paul, you should have walked it down to the lab yourself.”

“Come on, Pia, give me a break. This has never happened before. Sure, a sample gets mislabeled once in a while, but no blood sample has ever disappeared into thin air like that. Believe me, I’ve got them turning the place upside down over there. That lab does half its business with us, and I said we’d take our blood somewhere else if they don’t find it. I doubt Noakes would have it in him to do that, but I’ve made the threat on his behalf.”

“What was the label on the vial?”

“There was a standard bar code from the hospital. I wrote my name on another label, and ‘runner’ on it, as shorthand. There’s a lot of blood going over there with my name on it. I was trying to be careful, in case the bar code came off. Pia, I’m sorry this happened but it’s not the end of the world—”

“Right,” Pia said abruptly, and ended the call. It may not be the end of the world for Dr. Caldwell, but it left Pia in a mess of frustration. She was back to square one—she had nothing. And she felt a certain amount of anxiety. The fence seemed like a sinister presence to her, an unnecessary second protective curtain around the border of Nano, shielding it from the outside world. The main fence that flanked the parking lot was taller than this one and was impressive enough on its own. She supposed this outer boundary could be breached more easily, but she had no doubt there were sensors that would indicate any intruder. Or was it the case that Nano was more concerned with stopping people from getting out rather than preventing them from getting in? She had no answer.

Before she could think too much along those lines, cutting through the still mountain air, Pia heard the high-pitched whine of an engine. An approaching motorbike, she thought, and she ducked back down into the fringe of the woods, where she wasn’t visible from the road. Before she could see any motorized transportation she saw first one, then a second cyclist dressed in black gear with Nano logos and wearing solid black bike helmets and dark, wraparound sunglasses. They were breathing evenly and climbing the hill at an impressive speed, their shoes clipped into the pedals, their rhythmically swaying bodies centered over the handlebars. As the first one passed, he glanced back over his left shoulder toward his colleague, and Pia caught a glimpse of enough of his face to tell his background. He was Asian, possibly Chinese.

Close behind the cyclists was a man in biking leathers on a dirt bike wearing a full-face helmet, maintaining the same speed as the larger road bikes. Further back, a white van followed at the same pace, but keeping more distance than the motorbike. Pia could see nothing through the vehicle’s blacked-out windows. A couple of minutes after the group had passed and no one else appeared, Pia followed, running, half expecting to see the group heading back in the direction from which they had come.

Rounding a hairpin turn at the top of the rise, Pia had a view into the distance. Ahead was a long, steep uphill grade. Up near the summit she could just make out the cyclists who had not slowed. Even from that great distance she could tell they were moving remarkably fast despite the gradient. Who were they and why were they wearing Nano logos? While Pia watched, they disappeared over the crest of the distant hill, followed by the motorcycle and then the van.

For a moment Pia stood where she was, staring at the spot where the group had disappeared, straight up into the Rocky Mountains. She shook her head in disbelief. It was all too much of a coincidence. As there had been a runner, there were cyclists apparently operating out of Nano in some way, and they were important enough to be trailed and shepherded by a motorbike and a white van.

The interruption had stopped Pia from fully assimilating what Paul Caldwell had told her. Blood from the Chinese runner that had been accidentally saved had been sent to a lab and then lost. Such a loss had never happened before, and there was no good explanation for the sample’s disappearance. The lab was being turned inside out in a desperate attempt to locate the missing sample, or so she had been told by a contrite Paul.
Good grief,
she thought dejectedly.

Pia was sure the lab workers were wasting their time. She had no doubt that someone from Nano had taken the blood sample before it could be tested. Nano knew that blood had been taken from the runner but they may have assumed it was all intercepted in the ER. This later action meant they were very thorough and had a long reach. They must have stationed someone at the hospital or, more likely, at the lab, to intercept anything coming in from the ER at that particular hospital. Such an action wouldn’t be difficult to pull off for an outfit with Nano’s resources.

All the same, she cursed her foolishness in trusting Paul Caldwell with the blood. He could just as well have attached a giant sign to the blood saying,
STEAL
ME
! He’d not only written his name, but indicated the sample was from the runner.

Then Pia’s more rational self kicked in. Despite the odd encounter in the ER, Pia had given Caldwell no reason to act in a clandestine or secretive manner with the blood. Sure, Nano had snatched the other samples away, but it was too much to expect an ER doctor to anticipate something that had never happened before: the loss, for whatever reason, of a blood sample after it had reached the lab. The message that Pia got from the unfortunate episode was that the stakes were raised and that she would have to be more careful in the future. With the enormous amounts of money involved with nanotechnology, she was up against a formidable foe carefully clothed in secrecy.

Pia turned around and started jogging back the way she’d come. She’d take her run and skip the idea of circling Nano on foot. After all, what difference would it make if there was a second or even third entrance to the complex? Such a discovery wasn’t going to tell her anything except add to the sense of secrecy. What was becoming progressively clear to her was that her only and most promising resource of learning any secrets about what Nano was doing was Zachary Berman. There were no iris scanners at his house, or at least she hadn’t seen any, and no razor-wire barriers. But thinking about going back into his house unaccompanied by George sent an involuntary shiver down Pia’s spine. Intuitively she knew that if Berman was anything, he was a dangerous snake in the grass.

20.

BOULDER MEMORIAL HOSPITAL, AURORA, COLORADO

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 24, 2013, 5:32
P.M.

Before she went home and changed and showered for her dinner date, Pia had one stop to make after leaving Nano for the day. She knew Dr. Caldwell was on duty because she had called the hospital. When the receptionist heard the caller was a doctor, she offered to page Dr. Caldwell. Pia declined and hopped in her car and drove straight over. Her task at hand couldn’t have been done on the phone. She needed a favor that required person-to-person contact.

Pia walked into the ER, and as luck would have it, Paul Caldwell was standing in the second bay she looked into, having been called in to check a first-year resident’s care of a young boy who’d taken a serious blow to the head from falling off his bike. Pia watched as Caldwell finished assuring the anxious mom that the kid would be fine. When he was finished and had turned the case back to the first-year resident, he turned and came out of the cubicle, on his way to the main desk. He saw Pia, smiled an uncertain smile, and raised his eyebrows.

“I didn’t expect to see you here,” he said. He’d hoped to see Pia again, but not so soon, especially after her reaction to the lost blood sample and precipitous end to their phone conversation. He was quite sure she had hung up on him.

“I’m sorry I gave you a hard time about the blood,” she said, lowering her voice. They were standing in the middle of the busy ER. “I realize it wasn’t your fault.”

“You realize I didn’t lose the sample on purpose. Well, I’m glad you’re giving me the benefit of the doubt. That’s very generous of you.”

Paul continued on to the ER desk, where he dropped off his paperwork on the head-trauma case. Pia followed close behind. She noticed he was dressed impeccably, just as he’d been the day before when she had first met him.

“Do you have a moment to talk?” Pia asked.

“I think so,” Paul said. He leaned over the ER desk and asked the head nurse if there was any other case waiting for him. Paul’s role was mainly supervisory unless the ER was overwhelmed. In that situation he saw cases cold. The nurse gave him a thumbs-up sign, meaning for the moment he wasn’t needed.

“Come on!” Paul said to Pia. He led her down the hall into a doctors’ lounge. Inside the windowless room were several club chairs, a couch, and a single desk. The desk was occupied by a resident physician dressed in rumpled scrub clothes, looking much more like the ER doctors Pia was accustomed to seeing from her medical school experience. The doctor was doing paperwork and didn’t look up when Paul and Pia entered.

“I think Nano had something to do with the blood disappearing,” Pia said quickly and quietly once they had seated themselves. “In fact, I’m sure of it.”

“What makes you think so?” Paul studied Pia’s face. Her comment sounded paranoid to him. He also noticed something else. She wasn’t maintaining eye contact.

“It’s really just a hunch.” Pia looked over at the doctor at the desk. He was paying them no heed. “The place has a lot of secrets, I’m coming to find. The security is extraordinary. I’d not given it much thought until now, but it seems excessive, even considering the need to protect nanotechnology patents. I mean, there are iris scanners. It’s like the Pentagon or the CIA, for shit’s sake. And on top of that, it’s not just runners who have some sort of association with Nano. This afternoon, while I was out supposedly to jog but really to reconnoiter the Nano complex, I saw a couple of cyclists with Nano logos who I think were also Chinese, being followed by other people I assume work at Nano: one on a motorbike and others in a white van with heavily tinted windows.”

“Cyclists?”

“Yes, Lance Armstrong types: professional-looking with all the paraphernalia, including flashy racing bikes. And I discovered that Nano has two fences, the inner fence you saw with razor wire, for chrissake, and another fence a couple of hundred yards back in the woods that’s camouflaged. I didn’t even see it until I literally walked into it.”

“You were out in the woods?”

“Yes. That’s where I was when you called me. I was going to walk around the property to find out where the other entrances are. There has to be at least one more way into the place.”

“Okay, but I don’t see how that adds up to Nano stealing my blood sample.”

“You said nothing like that had ever happened before. If there was a flaw in the lab’s system, you’d expect it to have happened at least once before, wouldn’t you? The amount of blood the hospital must send out for tests.”

“It’s true, they test a lot of blood,” said Paul. “We have a lab in the hospital, but the bulk of it is outsourced. It is more economical.”

Pia realized her logic was shaky at best. She was saying Nano must have taken the blood because they were secretive and a little sinister. But she stood by her instincts. Last year, George Wilson had tried to shoot down all of the outlandish-sounding conspiracy theories she came up with surrounding the deaths at Columbia, but in the end, she had gotten to the heart of the matter by instinct and deductive reasoning. She’d been very wide of the mark on the way to her conclusion, but she was basically right in the end. With Nano she was getting another gut feeling, and she was determined to follow through with it. There was definitely something strange transpiring, on, and she was going to find out what it was all about.

“Let me say this,” Pia continued when she sensed Paul’s dubiousness. “They certainly have the personnel to pull off something like stealing a blood sample from a clinical lab. You saw those guys yourself who came here with my boss. They looked like a private SWAT team. Come on! It’s a company that makes paint additives, or so they want us to believe. Why all the security and strong-arm tactics?”

“I did think their barging in here was a bit over the top,” Paul said, although he was reluctant to buy into Pia’s idea completely. He liked his life to be stress-free and uncomplicated and this affair was becoming complicated. He liked to work, and have enough free time to enjoy nature, at least when he wasn’t spending his spare time noodling with computer code, a hobby that was a holdover from college robotics courses. Paul loved the relative autonomy of being an ER physician, which was why suits like Noakes drove him crazy, and why the idea of a company like Nano stealing evidence, if that was what had happened, was so antithetical to his beliefs. But he didn’t want to complicate his life.

“So how are you going to find out if they did it?” Paul asked after a pause.

“Paul, trust me, I have a nose for this stuff. They did it.”

“All right, how are you going to prove it?”

“I’m going to do a little undercover work,” Pia said. She waited for Paul to reprimand her, as George would undoubtedly have done, but he said nothing.

“Which is another reason I’m here.” Pia paused.

“Go on.”

Pia lowered her voice and leaned closer to Paul. “I need a scrip. I need a prescription, or better still, maybe you could just give me a few pills if they’re available in the ER.”

“What kind of pills are you talking about?” Paul questioned warily. Pia asking for drugs raised an immediate red flag. Obviously he didn’t know her well, having met her for the first time the day before. He also noticed that she was still continuing to avoid looking at him, making him wonder if she had been like that yesterday. He couldn’t remember.

“Sleep medication,” Pia said. She was studying her hands. She felt awkward. “Not a lot. In fact, only a few pills or capsules or whatever. I hardly slept a wink last night. Thanks. I really appreciate you doing it.”

Paul leaned back, “Hey, I haven’t agreed to do it!”

“No, right, sorry, I’m jumping the gun. I need some Temazepam.”

“That’s a benzodiazepine, a controlled substance.”

“I know, I know. I’m having terrible trouble sleeping. I can’t sleep at all, in fact. I had some Ambien, it doesn’t work at all. I mean, look at me.”

Paul looked at Pia, and she seemed completely fine to him. In fact, she looked totally gorgeous. Like Pia, Paul relied a lot on his intuition to guide him. He was suspicious of Pia’s claim that she wanted the narcotic to help her get to sleep. Something wasn’t right, and she wouldn’t look at him.

“Look, sorry,” Pia said. She stood up. “I can ask someone else, it’s not a big deal.” She started toward the door.

“Pia, there’s something I didn’t tell you.”

And Pia turned back. She noticed that the other person in the room was still ignoring them as if he wasn’t even aware of their presence.

“I didn’t send all the blood to the lab. I kept a few cc’s here in the ER. They are in the fridge.”

“You did?” Pia’s face lit up. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I would have told you earlier, but you hung up on me. And I did tell you I sent a sample of the blood over to the lab. I didn’t send all of it because you said you might want to take a look at it. I sent enough for standard diagnostic tests and kept the rest.”

“I wish you’d told me.”

“I’m telling you now. You could have used a little time to chill out when we were talking earlier. I’m not going to come running after you like a lost puppy who got scolded. I’ve got my own stuff to worry about, you know.”

“Okay, I get it,” said Pia. “And you’re right. Okay, great! You keep the blood. We don’t know what we’re looking for, so you should hold on to what you have till we have a better idea.”

“Okay, I’ll keep it, but let me ask you another, personal question.”

“What’s that?” Pia asked. She stiffened, not knowing what was coming.

“Why are you avoiding looking at me? It makes me nervous, like you’re being secretive or you’re not telling me the truth.”

Pia forced herself to lock eyes with Paul at least for a few beats. It was hard for her as always. Then she came back to where she had been sitting and sat back down. Looking at her hands, she shook her head. “You’re right, but you’re wrong.”

It was time for Paul to shake his head. “If I’m supposed to understand that comment, you’re giving me far more credit than I deserve. What the hell are you saying?”

“You’re right about me not telling the truth, but you’re wrong about it being the reason I have difficulty looking you in the eye. This is probably more than you want to know, but I’ve been diagnosed with adult attachment disorder. Are you familiar with that?”

“I can’t say that I am.”

“Let’s put it this way and keep it simple. You can look it up online if you want. Basically I have trouble with social relationships.” Pia went on to give a quick explanation about her foster-care past. It was unusual for her to be as open as she was, but she liked Paul intuitively. She felt there was a beginning of a bond and she was willing to be uncharacteristically open in return. When she was finished, she forced herself to look at him again and try to hold it. She couldn’t.

After a moment of silence Paul said, “Thank you for telling me what you have. I feel honored. I felt yesterday I wanted to get to know you more, and now it is an even stronger feeling. But what about this comment you made that you weren’t telling me the truth? Do you have a drug problem, Pia?”

Pia couldn’t help herself. She laughed, and it wasn’t just a titter. It was a belly laugh, making her again glance over at the resident working away at the nearby desk. She was relieved to see he was still totally ignoring them. Pia redirected her attention back to Paul. “Oh, no,” she said, trying to control herself, and lowering her voice even more. “No, I don’t have a drug problem. What I wasn’t telling you the truth about is why I need a couple of Temazepam tablets. It’s not for me to go to sleep. It is for a particular gentleman to go to sleep. To be bluntly honest, I guess I need a kind of date-rape concoction but not for the usual reasons. I’m not going to rape anybody, at least not literally.”

Paul made an exaggerated expression of confusion. Now it was his turn to lean forward. “Okay,” he said. “I think you’d better tell me exactly what you have in mind, because I haven’t the slightest idea.” He and Pia’s heads were almost touching. He could smell her perfume. It was one of his favorites.

Sotto voce Pia told Paul of her idea of trying to discover the truth behind Nano by putting herself potentially in harm’s way at Zachary Berman’s extravagant home.

“You’re not joking, are you?” Paul questioned.

“Not in the slightest. I think it is the only way. The irony is that I’d be willing to bet that he’s probably done something similar to not a few women. Maybe not with Temazepam but at least with alcohol.”

“What made you think of Temazepam?”

Pia was encouraged. Paul had not dismissed the idea out of hand. “This afternoon I looked up date-rape drugs on the Internet. Apparently it’s one that is used quite frequently, and it’s readily available. Truthfully, I’m not choosy. You have a better idea?”

It was Paul’s turn to chuckle. “It’s not something I’ve had experience with except on a couple of rape cases that have come through the emergency room. We test for drugs like that if there is any indication to do so, meaning if the victim might have been given a Mickey Finn.”

“What do you say, now that I have told you the truth? Will you give me a couple of tablets or what?”

“I can’t, in good conscience as a doctor, give you medication, even two tablets, for you to commit what might be interpreted as a felony, provided you don’t sexually abuse your victim.”

“Fat chance,” Pia said. She couldn’t help smile. She liked Paul’s sense of humor.

“But I tell you what. I’ll give you a couple of Temazepam if you tell me they’re for you to take yourself.”

“Fair enough,” Pia said.

“But they are not tablets. They’re capsules. Is that okay?”

“That’s even better,” Pia said.

“And one other request. You have to tell me Berman’s address. If I don’t hear from you tomorrow by midmorning, I want to know where to send the police. I have to be honest: I’m not condoning this plan in the slightest.”

“Fair enough,” Pia repeated.