“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, Paul, we’re wasting time!”
Pia set off at a run, and much against his better judgment, Paul followed.
CHAPTER 31