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?
“You 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.
Where 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
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.
The 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.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dr. Robin Cook is the author of thirty-one previous books and is credited with popularizing the medical thriller with his wildly successful first novel, COMA. He divides his time between New Hampshire and Florida. His most recent bestsellers are DEATH BENEFIT, CURE, and INTERVENTION.
For a complete list of this author’s books click here or visit www.penguin.com/cookchecklist