More than any of these matters, what Berman thought about most in the hours of the flight to Europe was himself. He had been fooled by this woman, and made to look laughably callow, but as she lay unconscious in the back of the SUV on the way to the airport, when he should have been furious, he found that he didn’t desire her any less. If anything, he wanted her more than ever. And he had made a snap decision not to leave her fate up to the head of security or even Whitney. He was still in control, and he wasn’t done with Pia Grazdani. Even before they had intercepted Pia leaving Nano, Berman had phoned Jimmy Yan in China, where he was spending a few days with his family before the semi-controlled chaos of the athletics championships. Or at least that’s where he said he was and what he was doing.

Jimmy was calmness personified on the phone, and it reassured Berman. In response to a specific question about privacy, Jimmy confirmed that he was speaking on a safe link as Berman himself was, and that Berman could tell him exactly what had happened. When Berman had finished with the saga about Pia, Jimmy was quiet for a minute, and then told Berman what he had to do. Berman promised Jimmy that he would personally deal with Pia, and that he was able to leave immediately as requested.

Systems had been set in place for weeks in the event of the successful conclusion of the experimental phase of the relationship between Nano and Jimmy’s higher-ups in the Chinese government. Once the expected result in London was achieved, the first of the new rounds of secure money transfers would take place, and China would begin to receive access to the first of the equally secure Web sites that contained thousands of pages of technical specifications for some of Nano’s proprietary secrets, mostly in the arena of molecular manufacturing, and even a number of its products. Jimmy said that in two days he would pick up Berman at the airport and take him to the house he described to him, and then ended the call.