Nano

CHAPTER 20

Before she went home and changed and showered for her dinner date, Pia had one stop to make after leaving Nano for the day. She knew Dr. Caldwell was on duty because she had called the hospital. When the receptionist heard the caller was a doctor, she offered to page Dr. Caldwell. Pia declined and hopped in her car and drove straight over. Her task at hand couldn’t have been done on the phone. She needed a favor that required person-to-person contact.

Pia walked into the ER, and as luck would have it, Paul Caldwell was standing in the second bay she looked into, having been called in to check a first-year resident’s care of a young boy who’d taken a serious blow to the head from falling off his bike. Pia watched as Caldwell finished assuring the anxious mom that the kid would be fine. When he was finished and had turned the case back to the first-year resident, he turned and came out of the cubicle, on his way to the main desk. He saw Pia, smiled an uncertain smile, and raised his eyebrows.

“I didn’t expect to see you here,” he said. He’d hoped to see Pia again, but not so soon, especially after her reaction to the lost blood sample and precipitous end to their phone conversation. He was quite sure she had hung up on him.

“I’m sorry I gave you a hard time about the blood,” she said, lowering her voice. They were standing in the middle of the busy ER. “I realize it wasn’t your fault.”

“You realize I didn’t lose the sample on purpose. Well, I’m glad you’re giving me the benefit of the doubt. That’s very generous of you.”

Paul continued on to the ER desk, where he dropped off his paperwork on the head-trauma case. Pia followed close behind. She noticed he was dressed impeccably, just as he’d been the day before when she had first met him.

“Do you have a moment to talk?” Pia asked.

“I think so,” Paul said. He leaned over the ER desk and asked the head nurse if there was any other case waiting for him. Paul’s role was mainly supervisory unless the ER was overwhelmed. In that situation he saw cases cold. The nurse gave him a thumbs-up sign, meaning for the moment he wasn’t needed.

“Come on!” Paul said to Pia. He led her down the hall into a doctors’ lounge. Inside the windowless room were several club chairs, a couch, and a single desk. The desk was occupied by a resident physician dressed in rumpled scrub clothes, looking much more like the ER doctors Pia was accustomed to seeing from her medical school experience. The doctor was doing paperwork and didn’t look up when Paul and Pia entered.

“I think Nano had something to do with the blood disappearing,” Pia said quickly and quietly once they had seated themselves. “In fact, I’m sure of it.”

“What makes you think so?” Paul studied Pia’s face. Her comment sounded paranoid to him. He also noticed something else. She wasn’t maintaining eye contact.

“It’s really just a hunch.” Pia looked over at the doctor at the desk. He was paying them no heed. “The place has a lot of secrets, I’m coming to find. The security is extraordinary. I’d not given it much thought until now, but it seems excessive, even considering the need to protect nanotechnology patents. I mean, there are iris scanners. It’s like the Pentagon or the CIA, for shit’s sake. And on top of that, it’s not just runners who have some sort of association with Nano. This afternoon, while I was out supposedly to jog but really to reconnoiter the Nano complex, I saw a couple of cyclists with Nano logos who I think were also Chinese, being followed by other people I assume work at Nano: one on a motorbike and others in a white van with heavily tinted windows.”

“Cyclists?”

“Yes, Lance Armstrong types: professional-looking with all the paraphernalia, including flashy racing bikes. And I discovered that Nano has two fences, the inner fence you saw with razor wire, for chrissake, and another fence a couple of hundred yards back in the woods that’s camouflaged. I didn’t even see it until I literally walked into it.”

“You were out in the woods?”

“Yes. That’s where I was when you called me. I was going to walk around the property to find out where the other entrances are. There has to be at least one more way into the place.”

“Okay, but I don’t see how that adds up to Nano stealing my blood sample.”

“You said nothing like that had ever happened before. If there was a flaw in the lab’s system, you’d expect it to have happened at least once before, wouldn’t you? The amount of blood the hospital must send out for tests.”

“It’s true, they test a lot of blood,” said Paul. “We have a lab in the hospital, but the bulk of it is outsourced. It is more economical.”

Pia realized her logic was shaky at best. She was saying Nano must have taken the blood because they were secretive and a little sinister. But she stood by her instincts. Last year, George Wilson had tried to shoot down all of the outlandish-sounding conspiracy theories she came up with surrounding the deaths at Columbia, but in the end, she had gotten to the heart of the matter by instinct and deductive reasoning. She’d been very wide of the mark on the way to her conclusion, but she was basically right in the end. With Nano she was getting another gut feeling, and she was determined to follow through with it. There was definitely something strange transpiring, on, and she was going to find out what it was all about.

“Let me say this,” Pia continued when she sensed Paul’s dubiousness. “They certainly have the personnel to pull off something like stealing a blood sample from a clinical lab. You saw those guys yourself who came here with my boss. They looked like a private SWAT team. Come on! It’s a company that makes paint additives, or so they want us to believe. Why all the security and strong-arm tactics?”

“I did think their barging in here was a bit over the top,” Paul said, although he was reluctant to buy into Pia’s idea completely. He liked his life to be stress-free and uncomplicated and this affair was becoming complicated. He liked to work, and have enough free time to enjoy nature, at least when he wasn’t spending his spare time noodling with computer code, a hobby that was a holdover from college robotics courses. Paul loved the relative autonomy of being an ER physician, which was why suits like Noakes drove him crazy, and why the idea of a company like Nano stealing evidence, if that was what had happened, was so antithetical to his beliefs. But he didn’t want to complicate his life.

“So how are you going to find out if they did it?” Paul asked after a pause.

“Paul, trust me, I have a nose for this stuff. They did it.”

“All right, how are you going to prove it?”

“I’m going to do a little undercover work,” Pia said. She waited for Paul to reprimand her, as George would undoubtedly have done, but he said nothing.

“Which is another reason I’m here.” Pia paused.

“Go on.”

Pia lowered her voice and leaned closer to Paul. “I need a scrip. I need a prescription, or better still, maybe you could just give me a few pills if they’re available in the ER.”

“What kind of pills are you talking about?” Paul questioned warily. Pia asking for drugs raised an immediate red flag. Obviously he didn’t know her well, having met her for the first time the day before. He also noticed that she was still continuing to avoid looking at him, making him wonder if she had been like that yesterday. He couldn’t remember.

“Sleep medication,” Pia said. She was studying her hands. She felt awkward. “Not a lot. In fact, only a few pills or capsules or whatever. I hardly slept a wink last night. Thanks. I really appreciate you doing it.”

Paul leaned back, “Hey, I haven’t agreed to do it!”

“No, right, sorry, I’m jumping the gun. I need some Temazepam.”

“That’s a benzodiazepine, a controlled substance.”

“I know, I know. I’m having terrible trouble sleeping. I can’t sleep at all, in fact. I had some Ambien, it doesn’t work at all. I mean, look at me.”

Paul looked at Pia, and she seemed completely fine to him. In fact, she looked totally gorgeous. Like Pia, Paul relied a lot on his intuition to guide him. He was suspicious of Pia’s claim that she wanted the narcotic to help her get to sleep. Something wasn’t right, and she wouldn’t look at him.

“Look, sorry,” Pia said. She stood up. “I can ask someone else, it’s not a big deal.” She started toward the door.

“Pia, there’s something I didn’t tell you.”

And Pia turned back. She noticed that the other person in the room was still ignoring them as if he wasn’t even aware of their presence.

“I didn’t send all the blood to the lab. I kept a few cc’s here in the ER. They are in the fridge.”

“You did?” Pia’s face lit up. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I would have told you earlier, but you hung up on me. And I did tell you I sent a sample of the blood over to the lab. I didn’t send all of it because you said you might want to take a look at it. I sent enough for standard diagnostic tests and kept the rest.”

“I wish you’d told me.”

“I’m telling you now. You could have used a little time to chill out when we were talking earlier. I’m not going to come running after you like a lost puppy who got scolded. I’ve got my own stuff to worry about, you know.”

“Okay, I get it,” said Pia. “And you’re right. Okay, great! You keep the blood. We don’t know what we’re looking for, so you should hold on to what you have till we have a better idea.”

“Okay, I’ll keep it, but let me ask you another, personal question.”

“What’s that?” Pia asked. She stiffened, not knowing what was coming.

“Why are you avoiding looking at me? It makes me nervous, like you’re being secretive or you’re not telling me the truth.”

Pia forced herself to lock eyes with Paul at least for a few beats. It was hard for her as always. Then she came back to where she had been sitting and sat back down. Looking at her hands, she shook her head. “You’re right, but you’re wrong.”

It was time for Paul to shake his head. “If I’m supposed to understand that comment, you’re giving me far more credit than I deserve. What the hell are you saying?”

“You’re right about me not telling the truth, but you’re wrong about it being the reason I have difficulty looking you in the eye. This is probably more than you want to know, but I’ve been diagnosed with adult attachment disorder. Are you familiar with that?”

“I can’t say that I am.”

“Let’s put it this way and keep it simple. You can look it up online if you want. Basically I have trouble with social relationships.” Pia went on to give a quick explanation about her foster-care past. It was unusual for her to be as open as she was, but she liked Paul intuitively. She felt there was a beginning of a bond and she was willing to be uncharacteristically open in return. When she was finished, she forced herself to look at him again and try to hold it. She couldn’t.

After a moment of silence Paul said, “Thank you for telling me what you have. I feel honored. I felt yesterday I wanted to get to know you more, and now it is an even stronger feeling. But what about this comment you made that you weren’t telling me the truth? Do you have a drug problem, Pia?”

Pia couldn’t help herself. She laughed, and it wasn’t just a titter. It was a belly laugh, making her again glance over at the resident working away at the nearby desk. She was relieved to see he was still totally ignoring them. Pia redirected her attention back to Paul. “Oh, no,” she said, trying to control herself, and lowering her voice even more. “No, I don’t have a drug problem. What I wasn’t telling you the truth about is why I need a couple of Temazepam tablets. It’s not for me to go to sleep. It is for a particular gentleman to go to sleep. To be bluntly honest, I guess I need a kind of date-rape concoction but not for the usual reasons. I’m not going to rape anybody, at least not literally.”

Paul made an exaggerated expression of confusion. Now it was his turn to lean forward. “Okay,” he said. “I think you’d better tell me exactly what you have in mind, because I haven’t the slightest idea.” He and Pia’s heads were almost touching. He could smell her perfume. It was one of his favorites.

Sotto voce Pia told Paul of her idea of trying to discover the truth behind Nano by putting herself potentially in harm’s way at Zachary Berman’s extravagant home.

“You’re not joking, are you?” Paul questioned.

“Not in the slightest. I think it is the only way. The irony is that I’d be willing to bet that he’s probably done something similar to not a few women. Maybe not with Temazepam but at least with alcohol.”

“What made you think of Temazepam?”

Pia was encouraged. Paul had not dismissed the idea out of hand. “This afternoon I looked up date-rape drugs on the Internet. Apparently it’s one that is used quite frequently, and it’s readily available. Truthfully, I’m not choosy. You have a better idea?”

It was Paul’s turn to chuckle. “It’s not something I’ve had experience with except on a couple of rape cases that have come through the emergency room. We test for drugs like that if there is any indication to do so, meaning if the victim might have been given a Mickey Finn.”

“What do you say, now that I have told you the truth? Will you give me a couple of tablets or what?”

“I can’t, in good conscience as a doctor, give you medication, even two tablets, for you to commit what might be interpreted as a felony, provided you don’t sexually abuse your victim.”

“Fat chance,” Pia said. She couldn’t help smile. She liked Paul’s sense of humor.

“But I tell you what. I’ll give you a couple of Temazepam if you tell me they’re for you to take yourself.”

“Fair enough,” Pia said.

“But they are not tablets. They’re capsules. Is that okay?”

“That’s even better,” Pia said.

“And one other request. You have to tell me Berman’s address. If I don’t hear from you tomorrow by midmorning, I want to know where to send the police. I have to be honest: I’m not condoning this plan in the slightest.”

“Fair enough,” Pia repeated.