“Do you remember how excited you were when you first came to work at Nano? The enthusiasm with which you talked about your work was truly infectious. When you came over for dinner with that boy, you and I talked about the possibilities of what we are doing. And this is a whole new world of possibilities. A new frontier for medicine. It’s going to open up treatments and cures for thousands of maladies. And you know something else: it is going to save money. Nano is about to enter a new era. I’m done with respirocytes and athletes. We can move on to legitimate experimentation and development using animal models first and then humans. Can you imagine injecting a few cc’s of respirocytes into a drowning victim? Or what about people with debilitating COPD who can’t breathe enough to climb a single flight of stairs. They’ll be cured with respirocytes. The good we are going to do in the future will be a thousand times greater than any harm we did in the past. Ten thousand times more! We have no need for the kind of experimentation that was required to develop respirocytes fast enough for our Chinese backers. And to tell you the truth, on some level I now regret it.”

Pia glared at Berman.

“Bullshit. You’ll still do whatever it takes.”

“I see that you may not believe me, but it’s true.”

“You wanted to take shortcuts so you could save yourself.”

“What do you mean?”

“You told me about your mother, who’s living with Alzheimer’s. The literature you gave me focuses a lot on Alzheimer’s. You’re terrified you’re going to see signs of it in yourself and you’ll do anything to find a cure.”

“It’s not guaranteed that I’ll get the disease, but, yes, the chances are high. Both my parents struggled with it, and it was tragic to see my father go as he did. Now my mother is going downhill quickly. And I do have the gene associated with an increased risk, meaning I’m facing a double whammy. So, yes, I’m focused on Alzheimer’s research as well as infectious disease. Is that such a bad thing?”

“So you admit it. Of course it’s a bad thing, when you’re killing people in order to do it.”

“Ten people, perhaps, and they were criminals, convicted felons who were scheduled for execution. They would have died anyway if our program had not existed. And we didn’t intend them to die, that was not the goal. In reality all we affected was the date of death.”