Nano

CHAPTER 49

It was a beautiful English midsummer’s day. Zach Berman felt somewhat better after his three-hour sleep, but he wanted to feel fresh air on his face. The interior of the vicarage was a warren of stale air, with corridors and passageways linking wings of the building. Most of the rooms, like his bedroom, were tiny, and all the ceilings were low. Running along the walls and framing doorways were massive wooden beams, some of which had been salvaged from British warships in the eighteenth century, according to Jimmy Yan.

The garden was lovely, with English summer flowers and a manicured lawn as flat as a green on a golf course. A game of croquet had been set up. In one of the distant, expansive lawns was a flock of sheep, which made the place resemble a nineteenth-century painting. It was all terribly bucolic. It was as if the Chinese were playing the lord of the manor.

Berman walked around the house a couple of times and thought about what he might say to Pia and how to couch his argument. He knew it was going to be an uphill struggle, headstrong as she was and as self-righteous as he expected her to be. He could already hear her purported outrage. If the prize wasn’t as important for him, he wouldn’t bother to make the effort. From his perspective it was absolutely critical that she acted volitionally. Berman had never on principle paid for sex nor had he ever, in his mind, forced himself on a woman. His enjoyment depended as much on his partners’ as on his own. What Berman wanted more than the physical rush was the boost to his self-esteem.

After his second circuit of the house, he stood in front, looking down on the village. He could see the village green in the center, with modest, storybook houses dotted around. They looked as if they had been molded from the landscape, as if they had grown rather than been built by human hands. In the middle distance a car was navigating a one-lane village road and kept disappearing behind the hedgerows. Beyond them, rows of golden wheat swayed in pocket-sized fields.

Berman was joined by Jimmy Yan.

“It’s very pretty,” said Jimmy, looking out at the scene.

“It is. And peaceful.”

“Quite so. No one bothers us here; no one asks any questions; everything is quiet. We are careful to keep our traffic to a minimum.”

The two men stood in silence for a moment. Jimmy turned slightly and indicated another large building to the west of where they were standing, almost obscured by a dense copse of trees.

“That is the manor house, built in 1460; a rather chaotic time in British history. We own that as well, but it has not been decided whether to renovate it. It will require a lot of money. It is ironic that we Chinese are here now buying such real estate after all the mischief we endured during the colonialism era. But it is a lovely building, and quite old. Of course, Chinese civilization is the most ancient of all, and I don’t think much was happening in the culture of your country in 1460.”

Actually, there was a lot going on in the North American continent before Columbus discovered the new world, thought Berman, but he didn’t have the energy or inclination to engage in an academic debate with Jimmy Yan.

“So have you decided what to do with the girl?” Yan continued.

“I’m going over that in my head right now.”

“Well, you should be prepared, because I’ve been informed that she is waking up. You need to go and see her. As I mentioned, we like things to be quiet around here. Not that anyone will hear what is happening, but we dislike disturbances of any kind. I hope you understand.”

Berman nodded, and Jimmy Yan returned to the house. Berman listened to the songbirds another minute, then followed him inside.

—

She was standing in a room, but the light was so blinding she couldn’t make out any details. When she tried to turn away from the light, she realized she couldn’t move. She was rooted to the spot, her arms and legs glued to her side, and she couldn’t even close her eyes to offer some protection against the light. Then the lights went off, and she was in complete darkness. All she could hear was her own breathing, until she heard voices and people moving around in the room. What were they doing? She couldn’t speak; she couldn’t see; she couldn’t move.

The lights came back on, but not so bright, and she could see a body lying submerged in a glass tank of liquid. The person was dead, surely, as half of him was missing. From the waist down, there was nothing. She couldn’t look away, so when the half figure turned in the water and stared at her, there was nothing she could do but scream silently. Then she felt a punch on her arm, and she was falling, falling straight down into a black nothingness.

—

Very gradually Pia could make out her surroundings more clearly, but what she was aware of most of all was a restraint on her right arm. She was lying on a bare mattress, shackled with a length of chain connected to a ring on the wall in a large, damp, musty room. It was hot as Hades, and Pia’s head pounded in time with her racing heartbeat. Where the hell was she? What had happened to her?

Pia picked up snatches of a dream.

She remembered being inside Nano and seeing the dreadful tanks with half-dissected people inside. Paul. She had seen Paul and made him go somewhere with her, but she couldn’t remember where. Then it was as if she were looking through a powerful microscope, but she didn’t know what she was looking at. Paul came to mind again; Paul was going to help her, but he couldn’t because she never made it back to him. Zachary Berman had stopped her, and now she was here, wherever here was. She felt fear grip her throat, and she started to shiver despite the heat. I’ve got to get ahold of myself, she thought, taking a deep breath and letting it out slowly. The shaking stopped.

Pia looked around. The room was perhaps twenty feet long, ten feet wide, and as high as twelve feet, lined with red brick on all four walls. On the wall opposite the bed was what looked like a planked oak door with no details. There was a sheen of condensation on every surface. Next to the platform-style bed was a toilet with no seat. Next to that was a sink with a single faucet. In the corner of one wall, where it met the ceiling, was a tiny window, but the light in the room came from big fluorescent lamps that hung incongruously from above. There was no clue as to where she was, and Pia had no memory of being taken anywhere. But she thought time had passed. There was daylight outside, but what day was it from which she remembered those events? Monday, perhaps.

Pia closed her eyes and tried to concentrate on something other than her throbbing head. Sunday. Yes, that was the day she went to see Berman at his house. With that, the memories came back in a rush: Berman, the camera, what she saw at Nano, Paul Caldwell, the blood sample from the ER lounge, Nano again, seeing the spherical nanorobots and being stopped by the police on the way back to Paul’s. Now she knew what had happened. She had been kidnapped by Zachary Berman. She knew she had to think hard about those events to recall all the details, but she was unable to concentrate.

In addition to her headache, Pia was stiff all over, especially where her injuries from the car wreck were still healing. Her broken left humerus in particular felt as if it had been broken all over again. The sling was still in place, as was the gauntlet cast for her left radial fracture. That felt fine. With some effort she got herself up into a sitting position on the side of the bed. She could see that there was enough chain for her to reach the toilet and the sink but that was about all. Sitting up made her left arm feel better.

When she was able to think a bit more clearly, Pia tried to figure out if anyone could possibly have seen her being kidnapped. Paul Caldwell must be expecting her back, but unless someone saw her getting taken, she would have simply disappeared. But she had been stopped by Boulder cops! They looked like Boulder cops, in what appeared to be a Boulder police cruiser, which was why she had pulled over to the side of the road, so unless Berman had bought them off, they would know. Pia considered the possibility, then sank back on the mattress. The cops had been in on it, she realized. The cops had stayed in their cruiser while Berman took her. If they were real cops.

She had been in a terrible predicament before, but Pia felt more desperate this time. Not only did she have no idea where she was being held, but she hadn’t seen or heard a soul since she had started coming around. She thought about yelling out but didn’t think her headache would tolerate it. Best to wait. Was she someplace within Nano? She had no idea.

So it was almost with relief that a few minutes later Pia heard dead bolts being drawn on the heavy wooden door opposite where she was lying. A figure ducked his head to pass through the low doorway, and Pia knew before he looked up that it was Zach Berman.