Nano

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.”

“What was the label on the vial?”

“There was a standard bar code from the hospital. I wrote my name on another label, and ‘runner’ on it, as shorthand. There’s a lot of blood going over there with my name on it. I was trying to be careful, in case the bar code came off. Pia, I’m sorry this happened but it’s not the end of the world—”

“Right,” Pia said abruptly, and ended the call. It may not be the end of the world for Dr. Caldwell, but it left Pia in a mess of frustration. She was back to square one — she had nothing. And she felt a certain amount of anxiety. The fence seemed like a sinister presence to her, an unnecessary second protective curtain around the border of Nano, shielding it from the outside world. The main fence that flanked the parking lot was taller than this one and was impressive enough on its own. She supposed this outer boundary could be breached more easily, but she had no doubt there were sensors that would indicate any intruder. Or was it the case that Nano was more concerned with stopping people from getting out rather than preventing them from getting in? She had no answer.

Before she could think too much along those lines, cutting through the still mountain air, Pia heard the high-pitched whine of an engine. An approaching motorbike, she thought, and she ducked back down into the fringe of the woods, where she wasn’t visible from the road. Before she could see any motorized transportation she saw first one, then a second cyclist dressed in black gear with Nano logos and wearing solid black bike helmets and dark, wraparound sunglasses. They were breathing evenly and climbing the hill at an impressive speed, their shoes clipped into the pedals, their rhythmically swaying bodies centered over the handlebars. As the first one passed, he glanced back over his left shoulder toward his colleague, and Pia caught a glimpse of enough of his face to tell his background. He was Asian, possibly Chinese.

Close behind the cyclists was a man in biking leathers on a dirt bike wearing a full-face helmet, maintaining the same speed as the larger road bikes. Further back, a white van followed at the same pace, but keeping more distance than the motorbike. Pia could see nothing through the vehicle’s blacked-out windows. A couple of minutes after the group had passed and no one else appeared, Pia followed, running, half expecting to see the group heading back in the direction from which they had come.

Rounding a hairpin turn at the top of the rise, Pia had a view into the distance. Ahead was a long, steep uphill grade. Up near the summit she could just make out the cyclists who had not slowed. Even from that great distance she could tell they were moving remarkably fast despite the gradient. Who were they and why were they wearing Nano logos? While Pia watched, they disappeared over the crest of the distant hill, followed by the motorcycle and then the van.

For a moment Pia stood where she was, staring at the spot where the group had disappeared, straight up into the Rocky Mountains. She shook her head in disbelief. It was all too much of a coincidence. As there had been a runner, there were cyclists apparently operating out of Nano in some way, and they were important enough to be trailed and shepherded by a motorbike and a white van.

The interruption had stopped Pia from fully assimilating what Paul Caldwell had told her. Blood from the Chinese runner that had been accidentally saved had been sent to a lab and then lost. Such a loss had never happened before, and there was no good explanation for the sample’s disappearance. The lab was being turned inside out in a desperate attempt to locate the missing sample, or so she had been told by a contrite Paul. Good grief, she thought dejectedly.

Pia was sure the lab workers were wasting their time. She had no doubt that someone from Nano had taken the blood sample before it could be tested. Nano knew that blood had been taken from the runner but they may have assumed it was all intercepted in the ER. This later action meant they were very thorough and had a long reach. They must have stationed someone at the hospital or, more likely, at the lab, to intercept anything coming in from the ER at that particular hospital. Such an action wouldn’t be difficult to pull off for an outfit with Nano’s resources.

All the same, she cursed her foolishness in trusting Paul Caldwell with the blood. He could just as well have attached a giant sign to the blood saying, STEAL ME! He’d not only written his name, but indicated the sample was from the runner.

Then Pia’s more rational self kicked in. Despite the odd encounter in the ER, Pia had given Caldwell no reason to act in a clandestine or secretive manner with the blood. Sure, Nano had snatched the other samples away, but it was too much to expect an ER doctor to anticipate something that had never happened before: the loss, for whatever reason, of a blood sample after it had reached the lab. The message that Pia got from the unfortunate episode was that the stakes were raised and that she would have to be more careful in the future. With the enormous amounts of money involved with nanotechnology, she was up against a formidable foe carefully clothed in secrecy.

Pia turned around and started jogging back the way she’d come. She’d take her run and skip the idea of circling Nano on foot. After all, what difference would it make if there was a second or even third entrance to the complex? Such a discovery wasn’t going to tell her anything except add to the sense of secrecy. What was becoming progressively clear to her was that her only and most promising resource of learning any secrets about what Nano was doing was Zachary Berman. There were no iris scanners at his house, or at least she hadn’t seen any, and no razor-wire barriers. But thinking about going back into his house unaccompanied by George sent an involuntary shiver down Pia’s spine. Intuitively she knew that if Berman was anything, he was a dangerous snake in the grass.