“Okay. We can see the cops from where we parked. We’ll come around the other way real slow. Okay?”

“There’s two of us,” said Burim.

“I know. You got the girl.”

There was a long pause before Burim spoke.

“No, I didn’t,” said Burim, reliving the event in his mind. “She wasn’t there. The apartment was empty. We were too late. It’s just me and an accomplice.”

EPILOGUE

EPILOGUE

ABOARD A GULFSTREAM G550 JET, 800 MILES OFF THE IRISH COAST.

SATURDAY, AUGUST 3, 2013, 3:12 A.M.

Within thirty minutes of the plane taking off, Zachary Berman was even more drunk than he had been earlier. Pia was gone, and what the hell was Whitney Jones doing? Had she fallen for that Chinese toad? Such a betrayal after all he had done for her. He was inconsolable, even though he had gotten his long-sought-after capital financing. His respirocytes had worked and China had its gold medal. Their athlete would probably win the marathon, too. Berman had seen the transaction go through and he had all the money he would need for his research, but this was the definition of a Pyrrhic victory. The personal price he had to pay was enormous. The loss of face alone was galling. Berman would get revenge, somehow, sometime.

Pia was too much for him. She was such a hard-ass and couldn’t be trusted. She’d never submit to him. She would work tirelessly to destroy him. That bastard Jimmy Yan had said all those things, but Berman knew that Jimmy didn’t really know her. She was coming around, he was sure of it. If Berman had been given the time he was promised, she would have turned, and she would become as trusted a lieutenant as Whitney or Mariel had been, he knew it. When he thought about Whitney, he laughed ruefully.

“Look how that ended up!” he said out loud. There was no one in the back of the plane to answer him.

Such were Berman’s constant thoughts as the plane pushed on toward home.

•   •   •

THE FIRST SIGN that something was amiss with Berman’s flight was when its copilot failed to make his planned check in at four A.M. The control tower in Ireland that had been following the flight couldn’t raise Berman’s plane, and when authorities in Newfoundland, Canada, reported that they couldn’t establish contact with the Gulfstream, either, the alert was sounded. But the force of the explosion that tore the plane apart was such that no identifiable wreckage of Zachary Berman’s Gulfstream was ever found in the cold, deep waters of the North Atlantic.