“Not long,” George added hopefully. “I only got a couple of days free. I told my chief it was a family emergency. I have to go back on Tuesday. I’m hoping to talk you into reciprocating and coming out to L.A. sometime soon.”

“Okay, we’ll talk about that later. Lunch? Sure, but it’ll have to be fast. Then how about we head out to where I work. I can show you some of what I’ve been doing. The fact is, I’ve got a couple of experiments running I need to check on within the hour.”

“Sounds good,” said George. He brightened. It seemed like progress, of a sort.

2.

ABOARD A GULFSTREAM G550 JET OVER THE WESTERN PACIFIC OCEAN EN ROUTE TO BOULDER MUNICIPAL AIRPORT

SUNDAY, APRIL 21, 2013

Zachary Berman was happiest when he was flying, and preferably, as he was now, on the Gulfstream jet owned by Nano, LLC, of which he was the majority stockholder, president, and CEO. He loved the feeling of time being suspended as the plane sped on toward its destination at 51,000 feet, currently far above the seemingly limitless expanse of the Pacific Ocean, heading for the North American continent. However hectic and stressful his life was on the ground, in the air he felt detached, safe, maybe even invincible. The plane had communications that rivaled those of Air Force One, but by turning them off, he had plenty of time to plan, strategize, and gloat about Nano’s progress, especially on a long flight like this one: Beijing to Boulder, more than six thousand miles as the crow flies. Of course Zach, as most people called him, knew that his plane’s journey would be less than that, due to the plane’s polar route and the oblate shape of the earth.

As far as Zach was concerned, the trip had been a great success to the point of bringing a smile to his face. Putting his work aside, he lowered the back of his chair and raised the footrest, turning the seat into a comfortable lounger. Cradled in the hand-selected, hand-stitched Moroccan leather, he thought about Nano’s spreadsheets and capital needs. A smile appeared on his stubble encrusted, masculine face. For the moment things seemed to be going swimmingly. He even allowed himself to doze.

About an hour later, as Berman nursed the dregs of what would be his last single-malt scotch of the trip and with the back of his chair in the upright position, he idly looked out of the plane’s small window. His mind turned as it often did to his father and to the question of what he would have made of his son’s enormous recent success and flying home from a business trip to China in a sumptuous private jet that was, for all practical purposes, his. Every day as he looked in the mirror to shave, Zachary flinched at his progressive resemblance to his late father, Eli, especially now that Zach was closing in on fifty.

This was one reason he kept his thick, slightly salt-and-pepper hair considerably longer than his father’s closely cropped style. Zachary’s expensive cut would have made the older man blanch. Growing up in a middle-class home in a strongly blue-collar neighborhood in Palisades Park, New Jersey, Zachary often saw flecks of paint in his dad’s hair, an occupational hazard for a painting contractor, and he wondered why his father took so little interest in his appearance and what it implied. When Zach worked summers for his dad, from the time he was fourteen through college and grad school, he always wore a baseball cap as protection against such paint splatters. He’d worried their presence would mark him as a mere day laborer. From an early age, Zach had set his sights high.