“Sure,” said Pia. “I’d be happy to come to dinner.”
Berman eyed Pia. She truly was one of the most exotically attractive women he’d seen in a long time, and here she was, seemingly offering herself on a platter. He tried to calm himself. It was more than he could have hoped for. “Okay,” he said. “So when are you free?”
“I’m free tonight, I believe. If that’s not too presumptuous.”
“That’s not presumptuous at all. So tonight it is. Does eight o’clock suit you?”
“It suits me fine,” said Pia, who smiled. “But there is one thing I would like to make clear.”
“And what might that be?”
“You promised no repeat of what you called your boorish behavior that happened before you went on your trip to China. I want to hold you to that promise.”
Berman raised his hands palms out. “On my mother’s honor.” His lips curled into a slight smile.
“Okay,” Pia said simply. “See you at eight!” She stood up and left Berman’s office, feeling his eyes burning into her back. “Let him enjoy his fantasies,” she whispered to herself. Once outside in the cool morning air she further murmured: “Mission accomplished.”
For his part, Berman rocked back in his plush rocking swivel chair and thanked the gods for such an unexpectedly promising start to his day. Even his hangover had miraculously disappeared.
CHAPTER 19
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.”