Pia still didn’t know what she was looking for, but her intuition told her she had stumbled onto something. For the fourth time that night, she flashed her iPhone over the scanner and waited for the green light. When it came on, she opened one of the doors and walked in. When she saw what the room contained, Pia’s eyes bulged and she swallowed hard. “Oh, my God,” she said in a stunned whisper.

•   •   •

WHEN WHITNEY JONES’S PHONE woke her for the second time, she saw it was Berman again, moving around the Nano complex. Good grief! Now he was in the main room inside the inner sanctum, so only the hardwired devices like the iris scanners would be able to communicate with the outside world. If she could, she would have called Berman to find out if everything was hunky-dory and ask what was making him wander all over creation. She decided to send a text that would be waiting for him when he got back outside the infirmary building.

“What’s up?” she typed. “Everything ok? Don’t forget London calls at 8 am ur time.”

Putting her phone back down, Whitney cursed before rolling over. She worried that she might have trouble going back to sleep.

Chapter 43

43.

NANO, LLC, BOULDER, COLORADO

MONDAY, JULY 22, 2013, 2:48 A.M.

Pia stood in front of a large, almost ten-foot-high glass tank full of liquid. At her eye level, suspended upright in the liquid, was the body of a man, or, more accurately, two-thirds of the body of a man. He looked Chinese or Asian. The man’s brain was entirely exposed, and over his mouth was a tight-fitting mask, like a piece of scuba equipment. His eyes were open, staring blankly ahead. Pia could see that the chest had been opened and a portion of the wall cut away to expose the inflating and deflating lung. One of the man’s legs and one arm had been removed entirely, the stumps sealed tightly with a white material. On the remaining leg and arm, various muscles had been exposed, with electrodes inserted into particular muscle bundles.

The man was stationary, and to her horror, Pia could see what was holding him in place. He was anchored or impaled on a vertical pole that pierced his body in a cephalic-caudal axis, and also by various tubes that emanated from his body and disappeared into a number of sealed boxes on the floor. More lines ran from these boxes to the wall, where banks of signal lights were arranged in displays with a series of stopcocks. Pia looked at the lines more closely and could see that in one the red liquid was moving—it was bright red, oxygenated blood.

This half-man was alive, or mostly alive. And he was stuck on a spike like a butterfly collector’s specimen.