ABOARD A GULFSTREAM G550 JET EN ROUTE TO MILAN’S LINATE AIRPORT

MONDAY, JULY 22, 2013, 12:00 P.M. MST

Whitney Jones wasn’t helping Zach Berman’s mood. With the muffled drone of the jet engines in the background, he went over the events of the last fifteen hours in his mind. Whitney was sitting in a seat across from him and openly glared at him from time to time. Berman felt duped by Pia, and made to look ridiculous. He was angry enough about it without having to be reminded by the look on his subordinate’s face of how the whole Nano enterprise had been endangered because of his infatuation with one woman. “You idiot,” said the look on Whitney’s face.

But the more he thought about it, the more Berman was confident that his carefully laid plans and the countless hours of work and sacrifice over the years had been endangered, but not compromised. He went over every detail in his mind, looking for a loose end that remained, or a possibility that hadn’t occurred to him that jeopardized everything. He had yet to find one.

Pia’s penetration of what was called Nano’s inner sanctum had initiated a hurried but detailed operation to rid Nano of all evidence of the vivisected bodies and to substitute dogs in the aquarium baths. It was something that had been planned for the near future anyway, since the physiological experiments that the bodies had been used for were already successfully completed. Berman also knew he was assisted by the fact that Pia was a remarkably private, secretive person, a lone wolf who had few long-term friends, save for George Wilson, who was way off in L.A. and, according to what Whitney had been able to find out, was kept at arm’s length by Pia.

Berman had learned what he knew about Pia from the several times he’d had her followed by a local private investigator. From those reports he knew that the only possible problem was the ER doctor, Paul Caldwell. The head of Nano security agreed and considered Caldwell a potential difficulty, but as long as Pia had kept him in the dark, or neglected to tell him absolutely everything, which was assumed to be the case, then Caldwell was less of a threat alive than he was dead. One disappearance, that of Pia, would be relatively easy to explain considering her personality; but if a second person connected to the first went missing, too, then it became a pattern.