Nano (40 page)

“Jesus,” said George.

Still holding his gun out in front of him, Burim searched the apartment, first looking into the kitchen area. It was a mess, with dirty dishes piled on the countertops and in the sink. Wasting no time, Burim dashed to the back of the living room. There were two closed doors that led, he assumed, to bedrooms. Burim held the handle to the first, clutching his gun in his other hand. He opened the door quickly, and rolled around the door into the room, ready to fire again. There was an unmade double bed, an open wardrobe and not much else. Burim checked a small bathroom. It was empty.

Burim went to the second door off the living room. He ignored George who was frozen in place two steps into the apartment. Burim grasped the doorknob of the final door, holding this pistol at the ready alongside his head. He then yanked open the door.

•   •   •

J
IMMY
Y
AN YAWNED.
It had been a hell of a day. But Zach Berman’s plane was now ready to head back to Boulder, and in a few minutes, Jimmy’s car would be roaring on the motorway up the spine of England to Manchester and another airport, and a plane that would take him home and to a powerful new life of his own.

Jimmy moved over to the base of the airstairs leading up to Berman’s plane. Berman was standing on the tarmac off to the side, and looked crushed and a little drunk. Jimmy nodded that it was time, and the guards let Berman go. Berman walked unsteadily toward the stairs. Jimmy held out his hand to shake if Berman was so inclined, but he wasn’t. He stopped for a moment, glared at Jimmy for a beat, then climbed the stairs. At the top, he didn’t look back.

Berman turned to the right and sank into one of the leather swivel chairs. He leaned back and closed his eyes. The pilots were going through their last preflight checks. A few moments later as the door to the Gulfstream banged shut, Berman opened his eyes and nodded to the cabin attendant. It was only then that he made a point to turn and look into the depth of the plane. He was surprised. He was the only passenger. Whitney Jones had never got on.

Berman leaned over to the large oval window, which was a hallmark of the Gulfstream design. He craned his neck to see what he could. He made out Jimmy’s figure, and, yes, there was Whitney Jones, standing right next to him. Berman leaned back into his seat.
I have my money,
he thought,
but why does it feel like I’ve lost everything?

•   •   •

“Y
OU FEEL OKAY?”
Jimmy said to Whitney.

“I feel fine,” Whitney said. “Better than fine. I’m flabbergasted at what you have been able to do. Nano will be far better with you at the helm.”

“With your help,” Jimmy said. “You’ll be supplying the needed continuity.”

“Thank you for the recognition,” Whitney responded. “Actually, I deserve it, after how hard I had to work these last months trying to hold the place together. But you are the one who deserves the recognition.”

“I’m pleased you have been so supportive of our little coup.”

“Like I said, if you’d come to me sooner, I’d have helped. Berman was ignoring the business with his stupid, adolescent obsession. Nano will be much safer with you. What you did was so damn clever.”

With Whitney Jones sitting next to him back at the stadium, Berman had looked at the transaction page on the computer and suspected nothing. At the time neither did Whitney. It was a dummy page that only looked like the real thing. There had been no money transfer. Berman thought Jimmy had stolen some respirocytes, but the truth was far worse. The proprietary secrets that comprised Nano’s real worth, besides the highly mortgaged physical plant, was all in Chinese hands. In a few days, a Chinese buyout would complete what was already a de facto truth—Nano belonged to China. Jimmy knew all of Nano’s research secrets, and by now Chinese researchers were well ahead of Nano’s. Jimmy was going home to run the company with Whitney as his newly installed number two. For the foreseeable future China was to dominate medical nanotechnology.

“I’m glad you feel as you do,” said Jimmy. “I’m happy.”

Jimmy was feeling very pleased with himself. Nano was taken care of, and the girl was gone, too. When he learned, thanks to the UK-based Chinese Triads, that Burim Graziani was in London searching for Pia Grazdani, Jimmy decided he could use the Albanian to clean up after him. Burim was on Chinese intelligence’s radar in the United States, recognized as an up-and-coming gangster and as such potentially a useful person in the New York area. Jimmy thought that using an Albanian team to get rid of Pia, and then sending in Burim to remove any evidence of the men who had done away with Pia, was a very neat way indeed to end the whole sordid affair.

•   •   •

W
HERE THE HELL
had Harry and Billy gotten to? Burim had called Harry and had told him they had missed the action, thank you very much, but that now his party were desperate for a pickup. When Burim had called, he was huddled in the shadows a few hundred yards down the street from the Wimbledon house that was now swarming with police. He knew they had to get out of the area and fast. When Burim’s phone buzzed, it was Harry calling to fix their exact location.

“Where the hell are you? We’re trapped and we need to get out of here now.”

“Okay. We can see the cops from where we parked. We’ll come around the other way real slow. Okay?”

“There’s two of us,” said Burim.

“I know. You got the girl.”

There was a long pause before Burim spoke.

“No, I didn’t,” said Burim, reliving the event in his mind. “She wasn’t there. The apartment was empty. We were too late. It’s just me and an accomplice.”

EPILOGUE

ABOARD A GULFSTREAM G550 JET, 800 MILES OFF THE IRISH COAST.

SATURDAY, AUGUST 3, 2013, 3:12
A.M.

Within thirty minutes of the plane taking off, Zachary Berman was even more drunk than he had been earlier. Pia was gone, and what the hell was Whitney Jones doing? Had she fallen for that Chinese toad? Such a betrayal after all he had done for her. He was inconsolable, even though he had gotten his long-sought-after capital financing. His respirocytes had worked and China had its gold medal. Their athlete would probably win the marathon, too. Berman had seen the transaction go through and he had all the money he would need for his research, but this was the definition of a Pyrrhic victory. The personal price he had to pay was enormous. The loss of face alone was galling. Berman would get revenge, somehow, sometime.

Pia was too much for him. She was such a hard-ass and couldn’t be trusted. She’d never submit to him. She would work tirelessly to destroy him. That bastard Jimmy Yan had said all those things, but Berman knew that Jimmy didn’t really know her. She was coming around, he was sure of it. If Berman had been given the time he was promised, she would have turned, and she would become as trusted a lieutenant as Whitney or Mariel had been, he knew it. When he thought about Whitney, he laughed ruefully.

“Look how that ended up!” he said out loud. There was no one in the back of the plane to answer him.

Such were Berman’s constant thoughts as the plane pushed on toward home.

•   •   •

T
HE FIRST SIGN
that something was amiss with Berman’s flight was when its copilot failed to make his planned check in at four
A
.
M
. The control tower in Ireland that had been following the flight couldn’t raise Berman’s plane, and when authorities in Newfoundland, Canada, reported that they couldn’t establish contact with the Gulfstream, either, the alert was sounded. But the force of the explosion that tore the plane apart was such that no identifiable wreckage of Zachary Berman’s Gulfstream was ever found in the cold, deep waters of the North Atlantic.

* * *
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