For an hour, Pia played devil’s advocate, taking the opposite point of view and trying to bolster the case that Mariel wasn’t dissembling or hiding anything significant and that the runner’s ailment could easily be explained away. The man certainly didn’t want to be treated by Paul Caldwell, that had been clear, and he seemed to want to go with the Chinese men and the guards who came to pick him up, even if they did come armed to a civilian hospital ER. And by the time he was discharged, the man appeared against all the odds to be in decent health. He was weak, to be sure, but otherwise reasonably okay. Pia remembered he had the presence of mind to acknowledge her help.

And what about those guards? Pia thought. If they were employed by Nano, they represented a much higher level of paramilitary security than she’d seen before. Their uniforms were different from the regular security personnel Pia encountered downstairs in her building and at the vehicular entrance to Nano’s grounds. And who were the two Chinese men in business suits? Were they part of the Chinese contingent currently visiting Nano? The more Pia pondered the situation, the more questions she had.

But what puzzled Pia the most were the runner and his medical issues. As Pia thought back over the episode, she was convinced that he had been in full cardiopulmonary arrest when she had came upon him on the road and had probably been in that state for a considerable length of time. But by the time he left the ER two hours later, mostly under his own power, he didn’t seem impaired in any way. He certainly was a medical curiosity, if not a total anomaly. She also recalled seeing the numbers tattooed on his right forearm as well as the puncture marks on his left arm when she went to take his blood. The blood!

Pia reached into her pants pocket and found Paul Caldwell’s card. She dialed his number on her cell phone, but Caldwell didn’t answer. She cursed and declined to leave a message. She wandered into the kitchen but realized there was no food in the house, as if that were ever not the case. Then the phone rang.

“Pia, it’s Paul. Sorry, I put the phone down and couldn’t find it for a second. I do it all the time.”

“Thanks for calling back,” said Pia.

“Sure. Did you find anything out at work? ”

“No, I found nothing. I couldn’t find out anything about a medical facility, or the Chinese man, or anything. What I’m calling about is to ask if you ran any tests on the blood.”