Nano

CHAPTER 44

Like millions of other Americans. Paul Caldwell didn’t have a landline in his apartment, relying solely on his cell phone for communication. When he was off, he was really off, so he never had night call like most other physicians. For Paul that meant that when he climbed into bed, the cell phone was switched off.

Pia had learned all this about Paul early on in their friendship. She knew that when he was off duty and away from the hospital, if she really wanted to get hold of him, she had to go to his apartment. If it happened to be after hours, she knew it meant getting him out of bed.

That information had been theoretical until now. Leaving Nano, Pia didn’t bother trying to call Paul. Instead she drove directly to his apartment. Leaving her car running, she ran up to the front door of his building and leaned heavily on his intercom buzzer for a good minute before he answered.

“Who is it?” Paul asked, sleepily.

“Paul, it’s Pia. I have to talk to you.”

“Pia? Is that you? It’s three-thirty in the morning, can’t this wait?”

“No, it can’t wait. If it could, I wouldn’t be here.”

“What’s happening? Are you all right?”

“Paul, just let me in!”

Paul buzzed Pia in, and she ran up the three flight of stairs to his door.

“You have company?” she asked. She wanted to be sure.

“No. Only me.” Paul held open the door dressed only in his boxers, his eyes half closed, and his hair askew. “What is it that can’t wait?” He closed the door and stood in his foyer, looking pathetic.

“Where’s the sample of blood? The blood from the Chinese runner.”

“What? Why do you need that now?”

“Because I do. Where is it, Paul? I’m in a hurry.”

“I can see that. The blood’s at the hospital in the freezer of the refrigerator in the doctors’ lounge. At least that’s where I put it. Can’t you sit down and tell me what’s going on?”

“No, I can’t, really. I don’t have the time. I need to look at that blood. Look at it closely. You have to trust me, Paul. I know what I’m doing. If you get dressed, you can follow me in your car. We’ll go to the hospital, and you’ll get the sample and give it to me. Then you can be back here in your bed in thirty minutes or so. This can’t wait for morning. By morning I might not be able to get back into my lab at Nano.”

“I didn’t think you could get in your lab now. What’s changed?”

“I don’t have time to explain. I’ve got to get back there right now. I’ve burned a couple of bridges, maybe all of them, but I have an idea of what’s going on at Nano, what they didn’t want me to know. Let’s put it this way: it’s worse than I ever suspected. Come on, Paul. A couple of hours from now I’ll come back here and explain it all to you, provided I’m right.”

Paul started to protest, but Pia was already gone, leaving his door ajar. He knew he could go back to bed, but he knew Pia would come right back and get him up again. He pulled on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt, stepped into a pair of loafers and walked outside. Pia was sitting impatiently in her car with the engine running. Paul stepped up to the car, and Pia lowered the window.

“There’s really no time for talking, Paul. If you get me the blood, I can be back here within the hour, and we’ll have everything we need.”

“Need for what?”

Pia’s window rose, and Paul had no option. He got in his car and followed Pia to Boulder Memorial. All was quiet at the hospital, and they drove all the way up to the ER loading dock. Paul escorted Pia through the quiet ER to the staff lounge. It was the first time she had seen the ER without any patients waiting.

Without speaking, because one of the ER physicians was sleeping on the couch, Paul opened the fridge where the staff kept their packed lunches and reached into the back of the freezer compartment to retrieve a brown paper bag.

“You kept it in here?”

Paul shrugged. “No one ever cleans out the freezer. You had me paranoid about this after the other sample was lost, so I thought of here. Hiding in plain sight, sort of.”

“But the blood’s frozen. I need to look at it under a microscope.”

“Yes, Pia, it’s been in the freezer. I didn’t know how long I was supposed to be keeping it. And I never imagined you’d need it at five minutes’ notice in the middle of the night. “

“Okay, okay. You go home, and I’ll be right over as soon as I can, okay?”

They quickly went back outside. Pia climbed back into her car, which she’d left running, but Paul kept her door from closing. “Do I have to worry about you? Where exactly are you going?”

“No, you don’t have to worry. I’d love to tell you everything, but it would take too long to explain. I’ll be back as soon as I can to your apartment to fill you in. Turn on your phone, and I’ll call you, or I’ll just ring your buzzer again. Whatever! Now let my door close!”

Pia’s door slammed shut, and she backed up quickly and headed for the exit. Paul watched her go. She was a trip, that was for sure. Headstrong was not quite a forceful enough word for him to describe her. She could be exasperating, yet that was part of her charm. Paul found himself worrying about Pia, despite her protestations. He knew he wasn’t going to fall back asleep until she showed up.

Whitney Jones often had trouble getting back to sleep once she’d been awoken. But when her cell phone had finally stopped informing her of Zachary Berman’s movements, she’d fallen into a deep slumber. She’d heard the ping as Berman left the inner lab and, quickly, another as he apparently moved around the Nano complex. By the time the phone sounded again, when Pia exited the Nano bio-lab building, Jones was asleep.

But her rest was short-lived.

Now, as she woke again, she was irritated. Whitney snapped on the light to see what was going on this time. She wished she could just switch off the damn phone, but being apprised of her boss’s movements was part of her job. Whitney got a glass of water from the kitchen faucet and sat at her counter. She saw that Zachary Berman had gone back into the Nano complex, just after four o’clock in the morning. But she knew he had just left — where had he been? What the hell was he doing?

Whitney scrolled back to her texts to see what her boss had said in reply to her query about what he was up to. But there was no text from Berman. She was momentarily confused, but then she realized that what she had assumed to be a text from Berman was the security system at Nano telling her that he had reentered the lab he had been in before. Why was he doing that? It didn’t make sense.

Whitney saw that she’d missed another text as Berman left Nano. Whitney thrummed her fingers on the marble countertop. Berman hadn’t responded to her text. That wasn’t unprecedented, but it was unusual, given that he was so active at that time of night. She figured he must have seen his phone and just ignored her message. She could have taken that as an affront, but she had learned to know better.

The phone pinged as she held it in her hand. Now she was being told he was going back into that same lab in the common area at Nano for a second time. Why was he going in and out of that particular lab?

Whitney thought about the lab for a second, and then she remembered who had worked in it. Her mind raced with the possibilities that this realization presented her.

“Shit,” she said quietly, and finally called Berman on his main house phone.

Pia looked through the eyepieces of a high-power microscope to view the centrifuged blood from the submerged man. She backed up the objective and the field came into view. Just as she suspected, she saw a plethora of spheroid forms that looked for all intents and purposes like microbivores. Yet she doubted they were, because under the light microscope there was a cobalt bluish cast to the structures and the microbivores looked black. So far she felt her suspicions were vindicated. The blood from the submerged, dissected man contained billions of nanorobots of some sort.

Pia then moved over to the console of the scanning electron microscope. She had prepared a sample of the same blood and placed it into the specimen chamber and activated the vacuum pumps. There was now a complete vacuum, so she turned on the electron source. Sometime later she had an image on the monitor screen. She knew she was looking at nanorobots, and she knew they were definitely not microbivores. Microbivores were spheroid; the ones she was looking at were spherical. What kind of nanorobots they were, she had no idea. To get a better view, she upped the magnification to the order of 300,000 and waited for the scanning to take place. When it was finished, she brought it into focus.

Now she could see the nanorobots with much better clarity. She could not appreciate the blue cast that she had seen under the light microscope since the electron microscope image was only in black-and-white. What she could now see is that the nanorobots’ surface, from the equator to about halfway up to the poles, was covered with what looked like nanoelectrical rotors. What they did, she had no idea.

Switching to the blood sample she had gotten from Paul, which was now thawed, Pia went through the same sequence. With the light microscope, she searched for any nanorobots. At first all she saw were blood cells, mostly red, but also some white. She searched for more than ten minutes and was about to give up when she found one of the bluish spheres. The Chinese runner had the nanorobots in his blood, just not as high a concentration, but their presence gave Pia the idea of what they might be.

When she had first arrived at Nano, and had done her due diligence in relations to nanorobots, she’d learned that Robert Freitas, the man who had originally designed the microbivores, had also designed a respirocyte, a nanorobot capable of carrying oxygen and carbon dioxide a thousand times more efficiently than a natural red blood cell. If Pia was forced to guess at that point what she was looking at, she would have said a respirocyte. The implications were obvious: Nano was using nanorobot artifical red blood cells prematurely in human subjects with disastrous results. The why she didn’t even try to comprehend.

Knowing that she had accomplished all she could under the circumstances, Pia collected her samples and the extra blood and put it all into the brown paper bag she’d used to bring back the jogger’s blood.

Pia powered down the equipment in the lab and checked her watch. It was now approaching five o’clock in the morning. She had wasted no time and was pleased she had not been interrupted. She wouldn’t need to come back because she felt she had everything she needed to expose Nano and, in the process, Zachary Berman with her evidence of the vile, inhuman experiments that were going on. She had her proof: two blood samples from separate sources, one involving live and one mostly dead human subjects and hopefully one photo, which she had yet to look at.

Despite the reassuring quiet of the deserted lab, Pia knew she had taken a great risk leaving and then coming back to Nano, but she felt she had had to confirm the presence of the nanorobots in both blood samples.

Paul’s involvement was the key. Without Paul, Pia’s claims might possibly be written off as the desperate actions of a disgruntled employee who’d recently been terminated, or even a thwarted lover of the company boss, especially if she were to just disappear. Although she alone had seen the bodies in the tanks and was possibly easy to discredit, Paul Caldwell certainly could not be. He had been with Pia when the first blood sample was drawn, and he was a medical professional with an excellent reputation and credentials who could vouch that the blood had indeed come from the Chinese jogger. She had found out much more than she had expected that evening, and now that she had, she needed to act at once.

Pia texted Paul that she was on her way but didn’t expect an answer, assuming he’d most likely gone back to sleep. Her plan was to return to his apartment regardless of whether he responded to her text. She’d just wake him up as she’d done earlier. Hurrying out of the lab, she descended to the reception area. As keyed up as she was, she had to force herself to walk at a normal pace. In the lobby it was the quietest time of the graveyard shift, and Russ must have been on a break, because only the younger, unfamiliar security guard was on duty. He merely nodded as Pia left. She only had to negotiate the parking lot, and she was home free.

The old Toyota started fine. At this point Pia was worried about every possible negative contingency. Without a problem she drove out of the lot and through the gate. There had been a moment of concern when the guard seemed to take longer than usual to raise the barrier, but he finally did, and Pia was able to pull out into the deserted county road. This was to be another careful ride, taken at just the speed limit, and she made sure that her seat belt was fastened. As excited as she was, she wanted no mistakes or lapses of appropriate judgment.

But then, despite her attention to detail and quite inexplicably, a police cruiser appeared in her rearview mirror. To her horror it came right up behind her, tailgating her. A moment later its emergency lights started flashing and the siren sounded once.

“Pull over, please!” said the metallic voice. Reluctantly she complied, wondering what on earth she could have done. She came to a stop, engine running.

What the hell? thought Pia. Perhaps she had a broken taillight, but she didn’t think so. No one emerged from the cruiser. The question flashed through her mind if she should call 911, but she didn’t. Then, two large SUVs pulled in behind the police car. Alarmed, Pia took her foot off the brake, but before she could move, another SUV sped up from the opposite direction, crossed from the other side of the road and stopped right in front of her, blocking her with its high beams directly in her face. Quickly, two men alighted from this SUV, one at either door. A third man apparently coming from behind rapped on her window, and then pulled open her door. He leaned down.

“Hello, Pia,” said Zachary Berman. “Nice to see you again so soon. We need to talk.” Berman held the door open for Pia, who saw no alternative to getting out of her car.

“I’ve already called the police,” Pia said out of desperation. “You’re just making it worse for yourself.”

“As you can see, Pia, the police are already here. And they don’t seem to be rushing to your aid. Ah, Miss Jones has arrived.”

Whitney Jones walked up to where Pia was standing, and Pia felt slightly more at ease with the presence of another woman at the scene. Pia felt nothing violent was likely to happen with Whitney there.

“I’m sorry about this, Pia, I really am,” said Jones, and before Pia could respond, Jones jabbed her through the sleeve of her shirt in the arm with a syringe and depressed the plunger.

One of the Nano security guards caught Pia before she fell unconscious to the ground.