“Pia, we’re going to get into an accident, if not arrested.”
“No, we’re not! There’s the freeway ramp.”
Pia drove onto the highway, where her speed was less conspicuous. She pushed on, driving over eighty, till she slowed and took an exit.
“What are you doing?” Paul gripped what he could to keep himself righted.
“This is the fastest way to Nano, plus it intersects the road to Carter Lake Loop, which is coming up right now.” She rolled through a stop sign, then accelerated again. “This is actually the Carter Lake Loop road now. The Nano main entrance is coming up on the left in just a few minutes.”
“How are we going to recognize the van other than the fact that it’s white? A white van is not much of a description. Pia, this is crazy.” Paul’s knuckles were blanched holding on to the armrest.
“I’m going to drive right past Nano, and then we’ll follow the road north heading for Carter Lake Loop. There can’t be that many white vans around.”
They drove for a few minutes in a tense silence. Pia was hunched forward, holding the steering wheel tightly in both hands. She was on a mission.
Paul allowed himself to look out the window and recognized where they were. He saw the logic in Pia’s plan, but still wondered what they could do once they saw the van, provided they did see the van.
Pia drove quickly but attentively. She passed the turnoff to the Nano security gate on the left without slowing, and had to blare her horn to warn a black Suburban, which threatened to pull out in her way. She continued on, banking to her left, accelerating again.
“Okay, now what?” Paul questioned.
“We’re just going to head out toward Carter Lake Loop. I estimate we probably have ten minutes or so on them. I think it is better to drive out and intercept them. I have a suspicion there’s a separate entrance to Nano that I’d like to find. I don’t think they’ll use the main entrance.”
“Why don’t we just call the police and let them handle this?” said Paul. Pia’s determination and rashness were making him nervous.
“The police have already been called, and they’re up with the EMTs. Besides, I’m sure Mariel has some kind of watertight legal explanation for what’s going on, just like when she stormed into the ER to get the runner. The local police are not going to help with the situation.”
Pia continued the gradual left-hand turn following the road until it straightened out. They were now passing the Nano property on the left and a few of the Nano buildings could be seen poking up through the evergreens and aspens. To the right the road fell off into a gully containing a tree-lined mountain brook. She was traveling at more than fifty miles an hour.
Pia glanced over to Paul and was about to say something, but suddenly something caught her attention. Out of the corner of her left eye, Pia saw a shape in her side mirror bearing down on her car. Before she could even respond, she felt the shuddering impact as her VW was rammed hard across the rear on the left side. Try as she might, she couldn’t keep the car straight as the giant shape pushed and pushed, grinding her car toward the edge of the road. Pia may have screamed, but the sound was drowned out by the rending of metal as the car hit the soft gravel at the side of the road, followed by a second of silence as it flew off and down the embankment toward the tree line. Then she felt a sickening thud, accompanied by the smashing of glass, as the car rolled once, then twice, and perhaps again, but Pia couldn’t know how many times, because everything went black and was perfectly still and quiet.
32.
BOULDER MEMORIAL HOSPITAL, AURORA, COLORADO
THURSDAY, MAY 16, 2013, 12:55 P.M. (FOUR DAYS LATER)
George Wilson looked down at Pia lying in the hospital bed and felt sick to his stomach. When he received word of what had happened some forty-eight hours after the event, thoughtfully sent along by Zach Berman through Whitney Jones, he dropped everything, made a plea to his chief of radiology about having to attend to another family emergency, this time relatively for real, and rushed straight to Boulder. Since he had arrived two days previously, he hadn’t left the hospital once, and had only slept fitfully for forty-five minutes at a time slouched in a backbreaking hospital room chair.
George’s mind kept sliding back to the time he and Pia had stood in a different hospital room, in New York, watching their fellow medical student Will McKinley fight for his life. McKinley was still worrisomely ill with a recalcitrant, antibiotic-resistant infection in his skull. Even though George had been told that Pia’s injuries now weren’t life threatening like they were initially, he couldn’t help but think of Will and how close he and Pia had come to being in a permanent state of limbo, hanging between life and death. Head injuries could be like that.
Pia had been severely injured. She had fractured her left arm in two places, mid-humerus and radius, and four ribs. The ribs were apparently from the steering wheel. As the roof of the car had compressed when the vehicle rolled over, Pia received a serious blow to the head and a resultant concussion, and her neck was badly strained with bleeding into the para-spinal muscles, so she was wearing a neck brace. She had suffered some internal injuries as well, trauma that couldn’t be seen but was more life threatening than the broken bones and cuts and bruises, a very familiar sight to George. The blunt force of the crash and probably the steering wheel had ruptured Pia’s spleen, causing blood to pump into her abdominal cavity, and without the rapid response of an ambulance and EMTs from this same hospital, Pia could well have bled to death as she lay unconscious in the wreckage of her new automobile. Luckily they had accurately diagnosed the problem and had alerted the ER so that when she had arrived, she was taken almost directly to surgery to stem the bleeding. There was no doubt it had saved her life.
Pia was still currently in a drug-induced coma to allow the swelling of her brain to subside, and was being artificially respired to make sure she got full aeration of her lungs. To monitor this, she was given round-the-clock nursing care. George understood all this, but he was desperate for Pia to wake up so that he could hear her voice, but he knew he had to be patient, and he was learning that that was a virtue he had in short supply. There was nothing he could do, and he hated the feeling of powerlessness.
George heard the door to the room open and felt someone come in and stand next to him. At first he thought it was one of the nurses, but it wasn’t.
“Any change?” asked Paul Caldwell.
“Hello, Paul. No, nothing new.” George met Paul when he had first arrived. Paul, too, had been standing vigil in between runs back down to the ER. George’s first reaction was anger and jealousy, but he soon realized that both emotions were uncalled for. When he heard that Paul had been in the vehicle involved in the accident with Pia, he had assumed Paul had been driving and was responsible for what had happened. And he had further assumed that he and Pia were an item, which seemed to make superficial sense, as George recognized Paul as a handsome and intelligent doctor. When George learned that he was wrong on both accounts, he felt foolish and was moved to admit his mistake and apologize. He also quickly came to be grateful for Paul’s concern and the fact that Paul had been an effective ombudsman for the most difficult period of Pia’s hospitalization, making sure the best surgeon available had come in to take the case.
“Listen, George, my offer that I made yesterday still stands. You should go over to my apartment and lie down for a couple of hours. And have a proper shower and change your clothes. Frankly, if you did that you’d be doing us all a favor.”
George looked over at Paul, and he was smiling. George appreciated Paul’s attempt to defuse the tension with a bit of humor, and as soon as Paul mentioned lying down, George suddenly felt an overwhelming fatigue come over him.
“You know, Paul, I may just do that. I don’t think much is going to change here for the next few hours.”
“No. The plan is to reduce t
he drugs over the next day or so and bring her out of this sleep. Everything seems to be nice and stable. My sense is that she knows you’ve been here, George, I’m sure of it. But I imagine you want to be in good shape when she fully wakes up.”
“Yes, you’re right. Maybe I will take a couple of hours.”
“Good. I’ll get a cab for you. I wrote the address down, and here’s a key.”
Paul handed over what George needed.
“Paul, how are you feeling? I’m sorry I never asked.”
“Me, oh, I’m fine.”
In truth, Paul’s left hand was causing him a lot of discomfort, but he wasn’t going to complain, given how lucky he had been to walk away from the accident with nothing worse than a mild concussion from his head hitting the roof of the car—like Pia, he, too, had been knocked unconscious for a time—a couple of broken fingers, and bruising on his chest and thighs.
Paul had spent enough nights in the ER dealing with the aftermath of car crashes to know that there was often a strange randomness to the severity of injuries drivers and passengers suffered. He had seen pictures of crashes that left cars an unrecognizable tangle of mangled metal, which was how Pia’s VW looked, and killed three, yet a fourth person escaped with only a broken leg. In another instance, one he had thought about frequently since this accident with Pia, the driver had died while the man sitting next to him had been left without so much as a scratch. It was so random as to be astonishing. It also made him feel slightly guilty, considering how banged up Pia had been.
Paul remembered fastening his own seat belt, which certainly had been a good idea, and that Pia had not fastened hers. He even remembered trying to get her to do it, only to be rewarded with a dirty look. But he discovered later that Pia had been wearing her belt, and thank God, for without it, she would certainly have died. He couldn’t remember her actually fastening it, and wondered when she would have thought to do it, as fixated she was on catching the van from Nano carrying the injured cyclist back to the ER. He was very thankful that she’d paused long enough to take the precaution that saved her life. There were other things about the accident that Paul had trouble remembering, which made him recognize that he apparently had a certain amount of post-traumatic amnesia.
“All right!” George said finally. “I’m out of here for a few hours. You’ll check on her, won’t you?”
“Absolutely,” Paul said. He gave George a reassuring pat on the back. “Every time I have a free moment in the ER, I’ll pop up here and make sure all is in order. You have a nap. You deserve it.”
“Thanks,” George said. He smiled weakly, gave Pia’s leg a squeeze through the sheet, and left the room.
Paul watched George go, then, as he did every time he came into Pia’s room, looked around at the ostentatiously large displays of flowers that Zach Berman had been sending over from Nano on a daily basis. Paul had taken it upon himself earlier that day to throw out the first huge bouquet, which had seen better days. Berman himself had yet to put in an appearance, and neither had any other company official, although Pia’s new colleague tech, Jason Rodriguez, had been to see her. Paul noted that Pia’s direct boss, Mariel Spallek, hadn’t been in either, but he was not surprised, given what Pia had said about her.
What was really bothering Paul, however, was a feeling about Nano and the accident, made worse by the fact that no one from Nano’s administration had shown up. Try as he might, Paul could not remember much just before the accident nor immediately after, which was why he thought he’d suffered traumatic amnesia. All he remembered was waking up in the ambulance with the siren screaming, and this lack of memory left him with a vague feeling of foreboding that kept nagging at him, making him question if it truly had been an accident, and if it hadn’t, whether there was some complicity on the part of Nano.
This was Paul’s second day back at work, but with these thoughts, he was finding it hard to focus on the ER. On top of that, he was worried about Pia, despite what he had said to George. He hoped to God that she would be the same person when she woke up. But even that had a slight downside, having come to understand her mild paranoia, her tenacity of purpose, and how prone she was to conspiracy theory. What was worrying him was the fear that when she woke up, she would resume her search for answers to all the questions she had about Nano, only with even more vigor, especially if she shared Paul’s questions about what caused their car to go off the road.
Paul had initially told the police about his vague sense that the accident had not been an accident, meaning Pia’s vehicle might have been forced off the road. But he recognized that this idea was not given a lot of credence, and he could understand why. Then a day after the accident, two officers had quizzed Paul more closely, especially on the reasons why Pia was driving so fast since it had been ascertained she’d been traveling at approximately fifty-five mph in a thirty-mile-an-hour zone. Paul had been honest and had explained that he and Pia were trying to intercept a van that had taken a patient before the individual could be loaded into an ambulance, a fact that the police had confirmed. Paul had also told them about the previous incident in the ER involving the Chinese runner and Mariel Spallek coming to collect him and sign him out against medical advice. Paul’s natural reticence and caution kept him from mentioning any of Pia’s suspicions about Nano, as he didn’t know how much credence to give them himself.
When the two officers returned to the ER the following day to ask further questions, Paul was glad he had been circumspect the day before. The officers asked him repeatedly about the supposedly planned intervention with the van carrying the cyclist—why did they deem it necessary to dangerously race around Boulder, chasing a man who had turned down the offer of help from an ambulance from the Boulder Memorial Hospital? Why were they so concerned about this one patient? The police seemed less interested in the possibility that the VW had been rear-ended on the road than the fact that Pia had been speeding, particularly because, according to them, the VW showed no evidence of having been hit by another vehicle, as banged up it was. Paul knew Pia would be far less sanguine about accepting the line of questioning than he was, but he was being honest. The fact remained that he truly couldn’t remember much at all about what had actually happened.
But in his own mind, Paul had asked himself over and over about the causes of the accident. Sure, Pia had been driving fast, but she was in control and was not being reckless, as far as he could recall. If another vehicle had been involved, where had it come from? Was the car racing Pia for some reason, or was it a third car that no one knew about? The idea that they had been pushed off the road had occurred to Paul almost immediately when he’d become oriented to time and place, but it seemed outlandish, like something that happened in a movie. It would mean that someone had tried to murder him and Pia, or at least Pia, and he would have been collateral damage. He had shared Pia’s suspicions, mostly unvoiced, that Nano might be experimenting on human subjects somewhere in the facility, but this line of reasoning about the accident struck Paul as being close to paranoia. Of course, he guessed that Pia would almost certainly feel differently when she came to, especially if, by some slim chance, she remembered more than he.
Paul looked down at Pia’s face. Despite the turmoil of his thoughts, Pia appeared to be in a deep but contented sleep. The contrast made Paul realize he was exhausted. He would have liked nothing better than to lie down next to her and catch a few minutes’ rest himself.
33.
NANO, LLC, BOULDER, COLORADO
FRIDAY, MAY 17, 2013, 2:12 A.M.
Despite the noise in the room, Zach Berman was practically asleep on his feet. Two Chinese trainers were shouting instructions to a pair of riders crouched over racing bikes on stands that converted them to stationary mode. The riders were wired up to banks of instruments, and as they pedaled furiously they yelled back to the trainers, begging to be allowed to stop, or so Berman assumed, going by the littl
e Mandarin he’d been able to pick up. The air in the lab was so thick and close that the riders were perspiring profusely and adding to Berman’s sleepiness.
He had spent hours in the room as the scientists and trainers tried again to replicate the conditions under which the rider might go into arrest, as the runner and now two cyclists had done in the open. Indeed, the same cyclist who’d had the mishap previously was one of the test subjects, but try as the scientists might, adjusting dosages, degree of hydration, various stressors, and varying riding conditions, both men were riding as hard, and complaining as loudly, as ever after almost ten hours of work, with absolutely no change in their relatively slow heart rates and their normal cardiac rhythms and shallow breathing.
These had been a frantic few days for Zach Berman. Despite strict orders for all the subjects not to go out on their own, no matter how confident they felt, here he was, presented with yet another problem. The cyclist’s crisis had come just weeks after the jogger’s similar public collapse, over which Berman believed he had finally prevailed and ridden out the storm of questioning that had emanated from China. Having another similar episode would be inconvenient timing, to say the very least. Berman’s backers believed the technology was close to being perfected, and any technical glitch like this seemed to throw the whole project into doubt. Berman knew he couldn’t help much with the science, but he had to be in the room to witness the work, as being away from it, speculating on what was going wrong, proved unbearable for him. His only consolation was that it was better that it should happen now rather than when it really counted.
The other problem driving Berman nuts was that he couldn’t stop thinking about Pia. The emergency contingency plans put into place by Berman’s head of security had worked smoothly. As soon as the rider had gone down, the team assembled their van and got ready to retrieve him, and they were aware, through their contact at Boulder Memorial, that the ambulance was getting there ahead of the Nano team. But the pickup from the ambulance went well and the situation appeared to be under control when the chief of security heard a report that the head of the Boulder Memorial ER and “some young woman” seemed to have set off in pursuit.