“Dr. Grazdani.”
It was Russ.
“Yes,” said Pia, knowing there was nowhere to run to.
“Welcome back.”
“Thank you, Russ,” said Pia. “It’s nice to be back.”
Pia scuttled away, slapped the elevator call button impatiently, and boarded the moment the doors opened. The whole time she was worried she’d hear her name being called out a second time. She breathed a sigh of relief when the doors closed and the elevator began its smooth ascent. Once she arrived on the fourth floor, she wasted no time walking down to her lab. Again she used the phone trick and again the scanner cooperated. A moment later she was in her lab.
Although she was tempted to wander around to look at the experiments under way and get a sense of what was going on with the mammalian experiments, she felt she didn’t have the time. Berman might well be madder than hell, as well as sexually frustrated, and possibly might react by making her persona non grata. She doubted it, knowing what she did about the man, but she couldn’t be sure and wanted to get in as much searching around Nano as she could in case it was the last time she would be able to get in the facility.
Knowing that there were security cameras all over Nano, Pia understood she couldn’t just wander around in her lab coat and jeans, looking out of place. Many employees wore scrubs, as in a teaching hospital, and she wanted at least that much anonymity. Pia found a set in Mariel’s office that were a bit too large but she put them on anyway, topping off her disguise with a surgical mask and a hood.
A few miles away, on a bedside table in an upscale apartment, a cell phone trilled. A text was delivered. A couple of minutes later, the phone sounded again, and this time a hand reached out from under the bedclothes and picked up the phone to check it. Whitney Jones was irritated at having forgotten to mute the phone when she’d turned out the light. The fact that it had rung wasn’t unusual. Her phone number was linked to numerous systems across the whole company that alerted her to certain people’s movements, but the only person who really mattered was Berman, and if he wanted to reach her, he could use the house phone, which he did on a regular basis. Sometimes it was for the most trivial of reasons, including that he couldn’t sleep.
Whitney looked at the screen. There were two texts: The first informed her that Zachary Berman had entered Nano at 2:05 A.M., then, at 2:08, he had gone into one of the labs on the fourth floor. Whitney sighed. There was nothing unusual about Berman showing up at Nano at any hour of the day or night, but she wondered sleepily why he wanted to visit that particular lab. She shrugged and put the phone back on her night table. Quickly, she fell back asleep before she was able to speculate any further.
Fully attired in scrubs, Pia headed for the door to the hallway. The lab was much as she had left it, with the same banks of equipment she had spent hours and days and months poring over. She wondered for a second who worked there now, but quickly discarded the thought. She had no time to reminisce; there was work to be done. What she did notice were banks of mice cages.
Leaving the relative safety of her familiar lab, Pia stepped out into the corridor. Her plan was to head down to the doors leading to the bridge that she had tried to go through unsuccessfully on several previous occasions. They were the doors from which Mariel always emerged whenever she had been off doing whatever it was she did elsewhere in the complex.
As Pia approached the doors she began to wonder what she might find. There were other buildings in the Nano complex, but the one to which she was headed seemed to hold the most promise. It was close to the building that housed most of the biotech labs, and it was physically connected. If there was an infirmary on the grounds, it most likely was there.
Pia tried to walk at a normal pace. She didn’t want to appear in a hurry, nor did she want to look as if she didn’t know where she was going. As she approached the door, she cupped the iPhone in her hand in an attempt to make it less obvious and made sure the photo of Berman’s eyes was on the screen. Pia brought the phone up along the right side of her head. To the left, on the ceiling, was what looked like a security camera: a small, inverted, dark brown plastic bowl. Stepping up to the scanner, Pia moved the phone in front of her eyes. As soon as she heard the telltale beep, she quickly lowered the phone and slipped it into the pocket of her scrub pants. The light flashed green. The door clicked. She was through.
Once again, Pia’s heart was pounding, now with a mixture of fear and anticipation. But on the other side of the storied doors the corridor looked exactly the same as it did on the near side: brightly lit with white walls and white composite floor. To Pia it didn’t even look like she was on a bridge connecting the two buildings. But after walking fifty feet or so, she guessed she had passed into the new building, and that knowledge lent the sterile corridor a sinister feel. There were a few blank doors but no signs or numbers. Above were occasional inverted plasic half spheres, probably cameras. She passed a bank of elevators on her left with oversized doors.
Suddenly, she saw someone walking along the corridor toward her, a man, judging by his size, but with his face concealed behind a surgical mask like hers. He was carrying a modern-looking white valise that blended with the environment. Pia’s heart skipped a beat as he glanced in her direction as they closed on each other. At about ten feet of her, he nodded slightly before looking forward in the direction he was headed. Pia nodded back and kept walking. They passed without a word like two ships in the night.
Pia let out a breath. Holding it in had been instinct. Of course there were to be people around, she reasoned, as well as other people possibly following her on TV monitors. She had to expect as much. She had to stay calm and continue walking. But where was she going? She passed several doors with iris scanners. Which ones should she enter? She assumed she was on the fourth floor as the bridge came from the fourth floor of the biotech building. But she couldn’t be sure. In theory, the idea of exploring the building seemed straightforward. In reality it was anything but.
The corridor took a left-hand turn and soon reached an intersection. Lines painted on the floor pointed in opposite directions: green to the left, and red the right. Which one to take? In either direction, the way ahead looked the same: more corridor. Green for go, thought Pia, but then changed her mind and went the other way, turning right. After what seemed a hundred feet, there was another left-hand turn, and then in front of Pia, past an unmanned guard station, was a set of heavy, large double doors with an iris scanner set in the wall to the side. Whatever passed through these doors had to be big.
Pia still didn’t know what she was looking for, but her intuition told her she had stumbled onto something. For the fourth time that night, she flashed her iPhone over the scanner and waited for the green light. When it came on, she opened one of the doors and walked in. When she saw what the room contained, Pia’s eyes bulged and she swallowed hard. “Oh, my God,” she said in a stunned whisper.
When Whitney Jones’s phone woke her for the second time, she saw it was Berman again, moving around the Nano complex. Good grief! Now he was in the main room inside the inner sanctum, so only the hardwired devices like the iris scanners would be able to communicate with the outside world. If she could, she would have called Berman to find out if everything was hunky-dory and ask what was making him wander all over creation. She decided to send a text that would be waiting for him when he got back outside the infirmary building.