A half hour later, the cyclist was technically dead, but his breathing and heart and vital functions were being maintained mechanically. His body would most likely be worked up and kept with the others in this state for as long as it was useful. The man’s blood was running through a system that centrifuged it in 100 cc samples, separating out the usual components and the additives before reintroducing the cells and the plasma back into his artificially maintained circulation.

A surgical team entered the room, gloved and gowned as if for a regular operative procedure. The only difference was that none of the team was terribly concerned with sterility, and the scrub had been perfunctory at best. Without ceremony, a splenectomy was performed on the dead man and a lung sample was taken. Both the spleen and the lung sample were immediately sectioned and examined in the same room by one of the senior scientists on the staff. Under the high-powered microscope, he could see what he knew would be there, a profusion of microscopic, sapphire-blue spheres blocking the capillaries. The scientist checked his watch. He knew the boss was out of the country, but he’d need to hear about this right away.

1.

BOULDER, COLORADO

SUNDAY, APRIL 21, 2013, 11:53 A.M.

The woman is desperate and defenseless. A large man is sitting on her chest, restraining her, his head turned while watching the other end of a long room. The man’s blocking her view, but she knows that whatever’s going on is bad. She senses that someone she knows and cares for is going to die. As she struggles with the weight on top of her, she looks at up at her tormentor’s face. He’s a man she knew at one of the foster homes and institutions in which she was raised, a man who got too close. She looks away and then back at him. Now he’s another man, her uncle, the worst of the men who have affected her life, and he’s holding the video camera she came to hate.

The uncle she so despises says something in Albanian to a colleague who is somewhere in the room. It’s a language she recognizes but no longer understands. The look on his face, with its cruel smile, is that of a predator, with her being the prey. Enjoying his victim’s terror, he speaks again, but now in English. “Do it!” he snarls to his compatriot. “Shoot him!” The woman lifts and twists her head unnaturally to get a view. A hooded man is tied to a chair with duct tape. He jerks back and forth as he tries to free an arm or a leg, like a desperate insect caught in a spiderweb. The other man has a gun. He’s walking around the chair, shouting in Albanian, lunging forward with the gun outstretched, poking the bound man, teasing him as a cat teases a captured mouse. With his free hand the armed man reaches over and tears off the hood and then looks back toward his partner. The woman recognizes the bound victim. It is a former medical school classmate named Will. And now she can see the gunman and recognizes him as well. It’s her father. He sees her and turns back toward Will, and as she fills the world with a screamed “No!” he shoots the prisoner in the head.