“What are you doing to me?” she demanded, as the guard put his hands on her shoulders and forced her back supine on the bed.

In the next instant, she felt a stab in her arm, followed by a stinging sensation, and then a kind of spinning blackness settle over her like the slow-motion closing of an old-fashioned camera’s shutter.

•   •   •

BURIM’S BORROWED cell phone rang once, and before it could sound again, he answered the call.

“Yes?”

“It’s Harry. We heard something, from a reliable contact. She’s in the Pipeline.”

“The pipeline? What’s that, for God’s sake? Where is she?”

“We don’t know where she is. Listen carefully! Remember these peoples’ names, and go to a library and look them up on a computer. You’ll find out what the Pipeline is.”

Harry mentioned two Albanian names to Burim. Burim wrote them down.

“Do you have everything we gave you?”

Harry had given Burim the cell phone he was talking on, and a SIG Sauer automatic pistol with a spare ammunition clip, which Burim had stuffed in a small backpack at the house in Tottenham. He carried it over his shoulder

“Yes, I have everything.”

“Okay. Be ready. We may not hear anything more for hours. But you will have to respond quickly if there is any chance of success so stay alert.”

Burim looked at his watch. It was two o’clock. He was at King’s Cross railway station, a busy terminus, and within a couple of minutes he was on his way to the St. Pancras Library nearby.

•   •   •

ZACHARY BERMAN WAS BEMUSED to learn that the evening’s athletics events did not begin until seven P.M. at the Olympic Stadium. Why had they left so early? Why did they have to sit around in this corporate suite hobnobbing with Chinese officials? In contrast Whitney Jones was seemingly having a fine time, or so Berman gathered from looking over at her.

Whitney was enjoying herself. This was the first time she had been able to relax since they’d come to England almost two weeks before. Even though the future of Nano was being decided at these championships, something she knew about intimately, there were still humdrum details to deal with. There were numerous experiments running in Boulder, as well as the day-to-day operation of the facilities. Staff had to be managed, along with all the other mundane tasks, and her boss had shown little interest in any of them, since he had Pia to worry about. So everything had all fallen on Whitney’s capable shoulders.

Now Whitney sat in the Chinese delegation’s suite, sipping Champagne and talking with Jimmy Yan, whom she found delightfully intriguing. Jimmy was such a breath of fresh air compared with Berman, and Whitney couldn’t help but complain about her boss a little.