“There!” Jimmy grabbed his arm and pointed, and Berman definitely saw the team’s colors, all the riders in a group in the middle of the pack as the massed ranks of riders crossed the line.

“I saw Bo,” Jimmy said. “I’m sure of it.”

Thank God, thought Berman. His rider had to finish the race, and this was only the first hurdle of many to come in the next few months. Not that finishing a race was a great obstacle in itself, but the officials in China had made it clear, there were to be no more problems or failures: certainly no injuries during public events; no more riders going down on the back roads of Boulder; and no more visits to emergency rooms in American ambulances. Berman wished he had the power to control each situation to such an extent.

“We should go down and see the team,” said Berman, who felt that their finishing the race without any disasters was a cause for modest celebration.

“As you wish,” said Jimmy. “I will go and see Liang once more before we leave.”

Liang was the rider selected to take the place of Han, who had been flown back to the United States to have his Achilles operated on out of sight of potentially curious European surgeons. Han’s injury had baffled Nano’s scientific team. They knew of such injuries to juiced-up baseball players who had added too much muscle and overtaxed their tendons, sometimes shearing them clean off the bone. But Han hadn’t been putting on bulk to hit home runs, he was leaner and built for speed and endurance. If anything, his muscles had become smaller in girth, just much more efficient and able to avoid lactic acid buildup entirely.

Doctors in both Shanghai and Boulder had spent days poring over MRIs of Han’s legs taken well before his injury when he was being considered to be a subject, but found no minute tear that might have caused the rupture, or any other structural weakness. Eventually the Chinese and American scientists agreed that his injury was an unhappy fluke. “Shit happens” was how the phlegmatic, down-home Victor Klaastens had put it, and Berman finally had to agree that it applied in this case, just as it did in the rest of life.

Jimmy had gotten Liang holed up in an apartment somewhere in Milan. Berman didn’t know where it was, he only knew that Liang had flown back to Milan in the same Chinese plane that had taken Han to Colorado, and that he was being attended to by a Chinese doctor who had spent the past two years at Nano. The Chinese were leaving nothing to chance, or leaving nothing to the Americans, which might be the same thing as far as they were concerned.

“How is Liang?” asked Berman as Jimmy got his things together.