“I tried to talk her out of it. It was the second time she’d gone up to Berman’s house by herself. The first time she had gone in to search his house.” Paul did not include the part about his giving her two capsules of Temazepam. In retrospect he was embarrassed about it. “On this second visit, my guess is that she was successful getting the photo she needed. Using it, I think, she got into a secret part of Nano and found something, as I said, extraordinary.” Paul then went on to tell George the story of the blood sample he’d been holding, and how she had shown up in the middle of the night to get it, wanting to look at it under a microscope.

“I wonder what she found?” George asked, looking off into the middle distance, trying to imagine. He looked back at Paul. “This is all very worrisome, to say the very least.”

“I couldn’t agree with you more. The security guys that showed up in my ER looked like a SWAT team. And on top of that was the accident.”

“Right!” George agreed, feeling anger well up inside of him. “Pia was convinced the car accident was no accident, and still you let her go back to Nano that night? And you also let her go and see Berman on her own, twice, with these crazy plans? What kind of a friend are you?”

George had promised himself that he wasn’t going to yell at Paul and suggest her disappearance was his fault if it turned out that Pia had gone rogue again. He knew better than anyone that Pia was fearless and single-minded. In the days that he’d spent in Colorado when Pia was injured after the car accident, he came to like and respect Paul, and he knew he was a good friend to Pia. But now that he was here, George couldn’t help himself.

“If you weren’t prepared to go with her, why didn’t you at least call me?”

“It wasn’t a case of my being prepared, George. She didn’t tell me anything. It was the middle of the night, for God’s sake. I had lectured her in the past about being responsible but she’s a grown woman. I had to trust that she knew what she was doing.”

“Yeah? And look where it got her!”

“I know that, George! Do you think I haven’t been thinking about all this the last thirty hours? ‘You should have stopped her.’ ‘You should have called the police.’ ‘You should have called George.’ I’ve thought all these things a hundred times. But at four o’clock in the morning, when she had woken me from a sound sleep, I wasn’t thinking as I might have had it been four o’clock in the afternoon. She always had a good reason to go it alone.”