Nano

CHAPTER 63

Burim showed the color Xerox of the photograph of Pia to yet another young girl who was living on the streets. By now he must have shown that picture to ten thousand strays and runaways. He had been offered girls like that, if such was his fancy, or perhaps a younger girl? He had been told many times that he could have the address of the girl in the picture for twenty or fifty or a hundred pounds. But no one had seen Pia. Burim knew it was useless, but he pressed on. It was better than sitting around doing nothing, and he felt progressively desperate. In reality he knew that the only way he would ever hear anything was if the London Albanian crime network picked up some word. Burim took the cell phone that Harry had lent him the day before, and called the house in Tottenham. No, Harry hadn’t heard anything. And what was Burim thinking, calling at this time of the morning?

Burim ended the call. He wondered if George was having any luck or if Burim had just replicated his own futility in bringing him here. Of course part of the reason for getting him to London was just for Burim to give vent to his anger at George for getting him involved in such a futile wild-goose chase.

The man who had been following Burim for the past three hours noted the time of Burim’s call, and emailed what he had observed to his boss. This was what he had been asked to look for, and finally, he had witnessed it.

George had found Burim late on Thursday morning. Burim had decided even before he got there that it was probably smart not to let the local Albanians know he had brought the kid over, so he had told George to find himself a room in a different part of town from him. He had handed George a sheaf of banknotes and told him to get himself a cell phone. Then he gave George a few copies of the picture of Pia and told him to keep his cell phone on. He never knew when the call might be coming. George was dutifully doing as Burim asked, visiting the major Underground, train, and bus stations with the pictures of Pia, and like Burim, he was seeing a different side to London than most American visitors ever saw.

Jimmy Yan had been asleep only two hours when his alarm woke him on Friday morning. Still, he wasn’t tempted to try to grab another few minutes — it was not his habit to do so, and today it was important that everything run on time. Jimmy had stayed up most of the night to finalize the elaborate preparations, finishing with a long call on the secure line to his superior in Beijing, going over every detail of the plan, especially the piece that catered to their unexpected houseguest.

He knew Zach Berman and Whitney Jones had been woken early, and he called his associate to gather the party in front of the vicarage after a light breakfast.

“Good morning, Whitney, I haven’t seen you in a while,” said Berman when he came out of the house.

“I’ve been busy,” said Whitney Jones, irritably, looking at her boss. “It’s hard to run a business in Colorado from rural England.”

The barb went over Berman’s head. He expected Whitney to do her job whether there was a seven-hour time difference or not.

Jimmy then joined Berman and Whitney. He motioned for them to join him in the second of two cars.

“We are taking the scenic route to Windsor,” said Jimmy. He was in a buoyant mood as usual. He had learned early in life that it was best not to play one’s hand. “Little Chalfont… Amersham… Beaconsfield.”

Jimmy was an enthusiastic tour guide. As they drove up a steep hill out of the small town of Amersham, Jimmy said this was called Gore Hill, named for an ancient battle with Vikings, after which blood ran down the incline and back into the town.

Berman and Whitney had dutifully looked out and nodded. Neither was all that interested.

“That way is John Milton’s house, in Chalfont St. Giles,” said Jimmy, indicating a road even smaller than the one they were on. “But it is too far out of our way. Perhaps we’ll check it out next time we’re in the countryside.”

Thirty minutes later they were aboard a speedy riverboat, headed east down the Thames. Whitney Jones was enjoying her freedom from the confines of the dingy room she had been working in for days; Berman looked completely distracted. Jimmy checked his smartphone every couple of minutes. A flurry of texts kept him apprised of developments. Everything was running according to plan.

As Pia lay in bed in the still of the morning, she had heard the doors of two or three cars close and the sound of tires on gravel as they had driven away. She had assumed this was Berman and Whitney Jones leaving with the Chinese man she had met last night. Who was that man? Pia wondered. In the last few days she had looked forward to her walks around the garden, and she doubted she was going to be allowed out in Berman’s absence. These recent days had been more bearable, with the food, the bathroom. Even the ridiculous dinner the night before had, in reality, been a welcome diversion from her general boredom.

Just as she had that thought, the door opened and the Chinese doctor entered the room, followed by a guard; a different man, for once. The doctor walked straight over to Pia and grabbed her good arm.

“Hey, what’s this?” she demanded, trying to pull away.

The doctor was avoiding her gaze, and Pia knew that was a bad sign.

“What are you doing to me?” she demanded, as the guard put his hands on her shoulders and forced her back supine on the bed.

In the next instant, she felt a stab in her arm, followed by a stinging sensation, and then a kind of spinning blackness settle over her like the slow-motion closing of an old-fashioned camera’s shutter.

Burim’s borrowed cell phone rang once, and before it could sound again, he answered the call.

“Yes?”

“It’s Harry. We heard something, from a reliable contact. She’s in the Pipeline.”

“The pipeline? What’s that, for God’s sake? Where is she?”

“We don’t know where she is. Listen carefully! Remember these peoples’ names, and go to a library and look them up on a computer. You’ll find out what the Pipeline is.”

Harry mentioned two Albanian names to Burim. Burim wrote them down.

“Do you have everything we gave you?”

Harry had given Burim the cell phone he was talking on, and a SIG Sauer automatic pistol with a spare ammunition clip, which Burim had stuffed in a small backpack at the house in Tottenham. He carried it over his shoulder

“Yes, I have everything.”

“Okay. Be ready. We may not hear anything more for hours. But you will have to respond quickly if there is any chance of success so stay alert.”

Burim looked at his watch. It was two o’clock. He was at King’s Cross railway station, a busy terminus, and within a couple of minutes he was on his way to the St. Pancras Library nearby.

Zachary Berman was bemused to learn that the evening’s athletics events did not begin until seven P.M. at the Olympic Stadium. Why had they left so early? Why did they have to sit around in this corporate suite hobnobbing with Chinese officials? In contrast Whitney Jones was seemingly having a fine time, or so Berman gathered from looking over at her.

Whitney was enjoying herself. This was the first time she had been able to relax since they’d come to England almost two weeks before. Even though the future of Nano was being decided at these championships, something she knew about intimately, there were still humdrum details to deal with. There were numerous experiments running in Boulder, as well as the day-to-day operation of the facilities. Staff had to be managed, along with all the other mundane tasks, and her boss had shown little interest in any of them, since he had Pia to worry about. So everything had all fallen on Whitney’s capable shoulders.

Now Whitney sat in the Chinese delegation’s suite, sipping Champagne and talking with Jimmy Yan, whom she found delightfully intriguing. Jimmy was such a breath of fresh air compared with Berman, and Whitney couldn’t help but complain about her boss a little.

“Yes, he does seem to be preoccupied,” said Jimmy. “And I agree, that woman is not healthy for him. But we are businessmen. Or businesspeople, Miss Jones. As long as Mr. Berman can deliver what he has promised to us, we are happy. We all have our foibles. I just hope that the big picture has been adequately taken care of.”

“I can assure you that everything is ready,” said Whitney. “The Web sites are prepared and just need to be accessed.”

“I am very confident that everything will run smoothly. As smoothly as the athletes this evening. London has done a good job with these games, as they did with the Olympics. They weren’t as spectacular as Beijing, of course, but the English have been interested in involving their citizenry, which was less of an issue for us.”

“They have to allow the taxpayers access,” said Whitney. “That’s the way democracies are supposed to work.”

“Indeed,” said Jimmy. “But not in here, not right now. Would you like more Champagne?”

“I notice you are not drinking.”

“Not yet. I want to toast a Chinese victory. I see we have a women’s hundred-meter race up first. Sprinting has not proved to be a strong point for us like it is for the Jamaicans, so perhaps I will have to wait for our success in the long-distance, endurance events.”

Burim sat in front of the computer monitor in the St. Pancras Library. The homeless man he had elbowed off the terminal had said he was going to find “the management,” and Burim hurried, in case the man actually persuaded someone to come see what he was complaining about. Burim found the search engine and typed in the two names he had been given. What he eventually found didn’t make for pretty reading.

The men were key figures of an Albanian sex ring that specialized in smuggling Eastern European girls to the Far East or North Africa or the Arab states of the Middle East. The ring was not averse to taking vulnerable girls off the streets of London or Manchester or Edinburgh, or any other European capital. The girls were often teenage runaways unable to find adequate work in Prague, Budapest, or Bratslavia and were often rather attractive in the current paradigm of the fashion world: youthful, slim yet curvaceous with sculpted facial features. Such a young women of exceptional beauty could fetch up to £500,000 in the Arab market. Burim read quickly to the end of the article. “The Pipeline” was what they termed the chain along which the captured girls were passed, usually forced to take heavy doses of illegal drugs. Once someone was in the Pipeline, the piece read, it was almost impossible for them to be traced. It was the equivalent of being sucked into a black hole. They all but disappeared.

Burim hurried out of the library and called Harry, but there was no reply. Then he called George.

“Any luck?” he said.

“Not a thing. There are so many runaways. I had the wrong idea about London,” said George.

“Keep working but keep your phone handy,” Burim said, and hung up. He didn’t think George would cope well with hearing about the Pipeline, but he wanted him available.

To conserve battery power, Burim resisted trying to call Harry. Otherwise he merely walked the London streets as the day wore on; he couldn’t sit still. What he wished was that all this was taking place in New York, where he had real power and connections, not London.

Jimmy Yan had to force Berman to come sit in the front of the box to watch the evening’s last event, the women’s 10,000-meter final. Berman had continued to brood, and had drunk more gin and tonics than he should have. There was a Briton in the race, and the possibility of her winning the medal had the regular Brits in the crowd cheering her name and chanting in unison.

“This race will be a good one, I can feel it,” said Jimmy.

After five laps, a pack of four women — two of them Kenyans, with the Briton and an American — were leading and pulling away from the field. The Kenyans took turns in the lead and pushed the pace of the race. Whitney cheered for the American by name, and Jimmy chided her jokingly.

“Well, the Chinese runner is way back,” said Whitney.

“Give her time,” said Jimmy. “She’s a slow starter.”

Berman saw the Chinese runner, Wei, make her move with four laps to go. It was as if she had engaged another gear, and she picked up speed smoothly and effortlessly. From near the back of the field she overtook the women one by one, until with two laps to go only the Kenyans and the American were in her way. The crowd saw her coming, and as the British runner tired, they cheered Wei’s heroic charge. On a large TV set in the suite, Berman could see Wei was running with marvelous economy. He looked across at Jimmy Yan. As the Chinese officials around him hollered and screamed, Jimmy was impassive, as if unsurprised. Jimmy looked over and caught Berman’s eye. He nodded and smiled and pointed to the track.

“Look at her go!” shouted Whitney. On the last lap, Wei caught the Kenyans and ran on their shoulder as they raced two abreast, trying to hold her at bay and block her passage to the front. Wei was undaunted. She steered a wide course around the duo on the final curve, so wide it looked as though she were running herself out of contention, but she managed to find yet another gear. First she was at their shoulder, then she overtook the Kenyans with apparent ease, and as she coasted to the win and the world championship she waved her arms over her head in joy.

Inside the box, it was pandemonium. Amid the din, the men around him clapped each other on the back. They were delirious.

Feeling like the odd man out, Berman went back and used the facilities. The suite had a small powder room in the rear. After using the toilet, he flushed it, then stared at himself in the mirror. He knew he had drunk too much, but his mind was functioning fine. What was bothering him was the way the woman won the race. It had seemed too staged, too planned, too improbable considering the level of competition involving several preeminent athletes, including the holder of the world record. Something didn’t feel right. Berman washed his hands absentmindedly, then returned to the box.

“What’s the matter?”

It was Jimmy, who had come up behind Berman, a hand clamped a little too hard on his shoulder.

“You tell me, Jimmy. There’s something about the way that woman won the race.”

“Come with me, and we can talk about it.”

“Why can’t you tell me here?” asked Berman.

“Come with me,” said Jimmy. “I have to insist.”