Nano (4 page)

3.

NANO, LLC, BOULDER, COLORADO

SUNDAY, APRIL 21, 2013, 12:33
P.M
.

“So the company you work for is called Nano. What’s the main guy’s name again?” George shouted to make himself heard above the sound of the wind and raspy growl of the VW’s engine. It was a fire-engine red VW GTI. He didn’t even know Pia could drive, let alone like this. He gripped the edges of his bucket seat and nervously watched the winding road as Pia slalomed along.

Every time they turned, he reflexively pressed his left foot against the floor pan as if he could influence what the car might do with an imaginary foot brake. The last thing he wanted was for the vehicle to spin out on one of the hairpin turns. They were heading up into the foothills of the Rocky Mountains that cascaded down onto Boulder like an angry sea. The aspens were still leafless despite the fact that it was almost May, and their spidery branches, in contrast to the dark evergreens, looked yellow. On straightaways, where he felt he could release his life-or-death grip on the seat, George wrapped his arms around himself. Coming from Los Angeles, he thought the place was damned cold. Pia seemed immune. She was still dressed in her jogging clothes and a sweatshirt thrown over her shoulders.

“Berman. Zachary Berman,” Pia yelled back. The car’s windows were down, and the wind was whipping around her jet-black, nearly shoulder-length hair. She was wearing a pair of cycling sunglasses that curved around the side of her head. When George hazarded a glance in her direction, he saw a distorted reflected image of himself. His hair was standing on end and his face was twisted horizontally.

“What’s he like?”

“I don’t know much about him,” said Pia, telling a white lie. Despite what she wasn’t telling George, Pia didn’t know a huge amount about Berman above and beyond what was in the press. He was a kind of international playboy in the mold of a few other more famous, relatively young, highly successful business entrepreneurs such as Richard Branson and Larry Ellison. But she did know that although he was married with kids, it was, in his words, an open marriage.

The reality was that Zachary Berman had happened upon Pia in one of Nano’s several cafeterias and was actively pursuing her. At first Pia had allowed herself to have a few casual dates with the man because she was truly impressed with what he was accomplishing in nanotechnology and the promise he represented in medical nanotechnology. But when he started to get personal, and she learned about the Berman family in New York, she put an end to it, to Zachary’s chagrin.

Then it became a problem. As a man unaccustomed to hearing the word
no
from a woman, he’d become a pest, as far as Pia was concerned. Even if he hadn’t been married, she wouldn’t have been all that interested in any kind of a relationship. She was in Boulder to work and recover from the emotional trauma she’d experienced in New York City. Besides, she didn’t even know if she was capable of a relationship even if he was not the driven, selfish man she thought he was. Over the years, Pia had become quite knowledgeable about her social limitations.

“Is he single?” George continued.

“No, he’s married with two kids,” Pia shouted back without elaboration, hoping the topic would end there. She didn’t want to trouble George with the information that Berman was attracted to her and that his attentions had gotten to the point of being bothersome. Also in the back of her mind was the gnawing discomfort that Berman was due back that very day from an important business trip that had thankfully taken him away for almost two weeks.

“How old is he?” George persisted.

“Late forties, something like that.” Pia clenched her teeth. George could be tedious about such things.

“I think I saw a picture of him,” George said. “It was in
People
magazine, taken at the last Cannes Film Festival. He has one of those big yachts.”

“Really?” Pia responded vaguely, as if she weren’t interested, and she wasn’t.

“Was he involved when the company, as you said, gave you this car?”

Pia massaged the leather steering wheel. She didn’t like where the conversation was going but didn’t know how to prevent it, short of saying she didn’t want to talk about Zachary Berman, which would have conveyed the message she was trying to avoid. George was behaving exactly as she remembered he did—he was always full of questions that probed her private life. He had fussed around Pia’s apartment for twenty minutes before she could get him to leave, with his litany of questions about whether or not she was looking after herself properly with no appropriate food in her refrigerator, suggesting that perhaps she wasn’t actually living there. Pia knew George was trying to find out if Pia was seeing someone.

“Actually, he was involved. He had found out that I had been cycling to work and wanted me to have one of the company cars. He said it was too dangerous on the mountain roads, especially at night when I have to go in to check on some of my experiments.”

“It looks brand new,” George said, glancing around the interior.

“Guess I got lucky,” Pia responded, looking over at George. George was annoying her, but maybe his showing up like this might actually serve a positive purpose. Perhaps it was a way to discourage Berman from pestering her.

“Pia!” George yelled.

She looked back at the road and something flashed in front of the car. There was a dull thump.

“We hit something,” said George, and he turned around to look behind. Pia slowed the car, stopped, and flipped into reverse. She then backed up the road faster than George would have preferred. Pia stopped and jumped out of the car, the engine still running. Before George could get out, she came around to his side of the car, holding something in her hand. George got to his feet to see what it was.

“It’s a prairie dog,” she said. “Must have barely clipped it; at least I hope that was the case. It’s alive, I think. Damn, I hate this kind of thing.”

Pia cradled a small fur ball in her two hands. George could see a creature like a fat squirrel. It didn’t look like it was moving too much.

“They’re all over the place farther down the mountain,” said Pia. “What are you doing up here, little guy?” Her voice was quiet and kind, and awakened in George a confusion he’d harbored about Pia. He knew she could be remarkably dismissive of people, himself included, as if she thought others had no feelings. But with animals, she couldn’t be more caring. In physiology lab during the first year of medical school, Pia had refused to take any part in elaborate experiments using dogs, because the animals were euthanized at the end. Even stray cats around the med school dorm never failed to get her attention in some form or another.

“Here, you take him!”
That was more like Pia,
George thought. She handed him the small, still-warm bundle. “There’s a vet in town that’s open on weekends. We’re making an emergency detour.”

George held the animal as they drove in silence back into Boulder proper. George thought the creature was dead, but Pia intently stared ahead, a woman on a mission. Over the next half hour, they visited the vet clinic and determined that, yes, the animal was dead, most likely of a broken neck. Pia was as upset as George had ever seen her, her eyes even watery. For George that was definitely a first.

Leaving the vet, George was pleased when Pia pulled into a nearby Burger King. They didn’t talk until they’d gotten their food.

“Sorry about the little guy,” George offered to break the silence.

“Thank you,” Pia said. She took a fortifying breath. “It’s the second time it’s happened. The last time I had trouble sleeping for days.”

Wanting to change the subject, George said, “Back at your apartment, when you were explaining that Will’s infection influenced your coming here to investigate nanotechnology as a possible cure, it reminded me of Rothman, and his death. I know you didn’t want to talk about it back then, but I’d love to know what really happened. I know those finance guys in Connecticut were involved, but who actually did the killing? Do you know?”

Pia put down her burger and stared hard at George with dark pupils so huge that George thought he could drown in them. Her full lips narrowed. She looked as if she were about to combust. George put down his burger, afraid of what was coming. He leaned back in his chair to create a little distance.

“I’ve said this once and I’m not going to say it again,” Pia hissed, leaning forward with narrowed eyes. “Time is not going to change the way I feel. I’m not going to talk with you or anyone else about Rothman’s death. Not now, not ever! Just understand that the people who ordered it are gone. That’s enough. Although I know it was done with polonium-210, I don’t know exactly how it was carried out, nor exactly who did it, but I do know that if I talk about it, I will be killed. And if I were to tell you what I do know, you’d be killed.”

“Okay, okay!” George managed. He could see fire in Pia’s eyes. “I won’t ask again.”

Pia’s face relaxed. She did know that Rothman’s and his colleague’s murders were carried out by an Albanian gang that was a rival to one in which her long-estranged father was a high-ranking member. What she had been told was that if she talked about what little she knew, it would not only lead to her and George’s deaths, but would excite a blood feud between the two rival gangs, with scores of people probably ending up in the ground. It was a lose-lose situation and a responsibility that Pia could not bear.

Pia and George finished their lunch in silence. It wasn’t until they drove within sight of Nano, LLC, that they talked.

“This place is impressive,” George said, gazing at the institution as they pulled up to a vehicular gate. The landscaped complex was far larger than he would have imagined, comprising multiple modern buildings, some as high as five stories tall, that stretched off into dense clumps of huge evergreen trees. The whole area was surrounded by a towering chain-link fence topped with razor-encrusted concertina wire. It appeared more like a military base than a commercial establishment. “Looks like they take security very seriously here.” The people inside the booth were all dressed in smart, military-style uniforms.

“You got that right. As fast as nanotechnology is expanding, the competition is fierce and contentious. Nano has its own legal department with a number of very busy patent attorneys.” Pia waited as one of the security men slid open a door and stepped out of the booth.

Pia handed over her identification, which the guard examined carefully. He then looked over at George expectantly.

“He’s with me,” Pia said. “He’s a guest of mine.”

“You’ll have to head over to the central security office and talk to a supervisor,” the guard said. His tone wasn’t friendly, but it wasn’t unfriendly, either; just professional.

As the gate lifted and Pia drove forward, she said, “I’ve never brought a visitor here. It’s not really encouraged.”

“Is it going to be a problem?”

“Let’s see what they say at the central office. I can’t imagine they’re not going to let you come in, at least to the building where I work. I see FedEx people and the like there every day, so it is not as if it is off-limits to outsiders.”

“Maybe you should go in alone and do your thing. I could always just hang out in the car beyond the fence until you’re finished.”

“Oh, come on, George. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.”

George fought back the timidity that overtook him whenever Pia was taking him somewhere he thought he wouldn’t be welcome. In medical school she’d come close to getting them both kicked out when she became hell-bent on investigating the deaths in the laboratory where she was doing an elective, despite the administration’s very specific warnings against it. But this was a scientific lab. What would they have to hide from him? He was a radiology resident, for chrissake.

In the ultramodern, spacious lobby, Pia went directly to the security office and asked for a supervisor. As they waited, they looked at the banks of closed-circuit monitors watched by attentive staff. Scenes of labs, corridors, and common areas throughout the complex changed rapidly on the screens.

When the supervisor appeared, she examined George’s driver’s license and hospital ID, interviewed him briefly, had him sit in front of an iris-recognition recorder, then wordlessly disappeared back into the bowels of the department. After more than twenty minutes, she emerged, handed George’s IDs back to him, and then gave Pia his pass.

“He’s your responsibility while he visits here,” she said matter-of-factly.

“Let’s go, we’re all set,” Pia said.

“What do you think took so long?” George asked as he followed Pia back out into the lobby.

“I’m sure they ran a background check on you. They must be relieved you’re a radiology resident at UCLA, since there’s little chance of your being some kind of industrial spy. My sense is that’s what they’re paranoid about.”

Before accessing the elevators, Pia and George had to swipe their passes and then peer through the iris scanner. Green lights showed all was in order. George had seen security like this before, but only in movies.

“So what’s in this building besides your lab?” George asked as the elevator rose to the fourth floor.

“This building houses all the general biology laboratories. There’s a lot of biology research going on because the powers that be at Nano are convinced that the real future of nanotechnology is going to be in medicine.”

“The complex is huge. What goes on in all the other buildings?”

“I haven’t the faintest idea,” Pia said.

“You’re not curious?”

“Somewhat, I suppose. But not really. Most current nanotechnology applications are concerned with paints, lightweight materials, energy generation and storage, fabrics, and informational technology—nonmedical uses like that, which doesn’t interest me in the slightest. I do know that Nano has some medical diagnostic products on the market, like sensors and DNA arrays for in vitro testing and sequencing. That I would find more interesting, but not the other commercial stuff. All I’m really interested in is their nanorobot microbivores, the ones I’m working with.”