“I’m glad you feel as you do,” said Jimmy. “I’m happy.”
Jimmy was feeling very pleased with himself. Nano was taken care of, and the girl was gone, too. When he learned, thanks to the UK-based Chinese Triads, that Burim Graziani was in London searching for Pia Grazdani, Jimmy decided he could use the Albanian to clean up after him. Burim was on Chinese intelligence’s radar in the United States, recognized as an up-and-coming gangster and as such potentially a useful person in the New York area. Jimmy thought that using an Albanian team to get rid of Pia, and then sending in Burim to remove any evidence of the men who had done away with Pia, was a very neat way indeed to end the whole sordid affair.
• • •
WHERE THE HELL had Harry and Billy gotten to? Burim had called Harry and had told him they had missed the action, thank you very much, but that now his party were desperate for a pickup. When Burim had called, he was huddled in the shadows a few hundred yards down the street from the Wimbledon house that was now swarming with police. He knew they had to get out of the area and fast. When Burim’s phone buzzed, it was Harry calling to fix their exact location.
“Where the hell are you? We’re trapped and we need to get out of here now.”
“Okay. We can see the cops from where we parked. We’ll come around the other way real slow. Okay?”
“There’s two of us,” said Burim.
“I know. You got the girl.”
There was a long pause before Burim spoke.
“No, I didn’t,” said Burim, reliving the event in his mind. “She wasn’t there. The apartment was empty. We were too late. It’s just me and an accomplice.”
EPILOGUE
ABOARD A GULFSTREAM G550 JET, 800 MILES OFF THE IRISH COAST.
SATURDAY, AUGUST 3, 2013, 3:12 A.M.
Within thirty minutes of the plane taking off, Zachary Berman was even more drunk than he had been earlier. Pia was gone, and what the hell was Whitney Jones doing? Had she fallen for that Chinese toad? Such a betrayal after all he had done for her. He was inconsolable, even though he had gotten his long-sought-after capital financing. His respirocytes had worked and China had its gold medal. Their athlete would probably win the marathon, too. Berman had seen the transaction go through and he had all the money he would need for his research, but this was the definition of a Pyrrhic victory. The personal price he had to pay was enormous. The loss of face alone was galling. Berman would get revenge, somehow, sometime.
Pia was too much for him. She was such a hard-ass and couldn’t be trusted. She’d never submit to him. She would work tirelessly to destroy him. That bastard Jimmy Yan had said all those things, but Berman knew that Jimmy didn’t really know her. She was coming around, he was sure of it. If Berman had been given the time he was promised, she would have turned, and she would become as trusted a lieutenant as Whitney or Mariel had been, he knew it. When he thought about Whitney, he laughed ruefully.
“Look how that ended up!” he said out loud. There was no one in the back of the plane to answer him.
Such were Berman’s constant thoughts as the plane pushed on toward home.
• • •
THE FIRST SIGN that something was amiss with Berman’s flight was when its copilot failed to make his planned check in at four A.M. The control tower in Ireland that had been following the flight couldn’t raise Berman’s plane, and when authorities in Newfoundland, Canada, reported that they couldn’t establish contact with the Gulfstream, either, the alert was sounded. But the force of the explosion that tore the plane apart was such that no identifiable wreckage of Zachary Berman’s Gulfstream was ever found in the cold, deep waters of the North Atlantic.
* * *
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Robin Cook, Nano
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