“Yes, I sent a sample out to the lab late in the day. We won’t hear anything till tomorrow at this point. I’ve been thinking about the runner, and I wonder if we were totally off base right from the beginning. Can he have been truly as ill as he appeared when you came upon him? Because the symptoms and signs, as meager as they were, don’t add up to anything I’m familiar with. And he walked out of the ER under his own steam with only a little help, which would seem impossible if he’d been in cardiac arrest for God knows how long.”

“I know, it doesn’t add up,” Pia agreed. “I’ve been thinking about the whole affair since you dropped me off. But I’m about as sure as I can be that he had no pulse and wasn’t breathing when I came upon him.”

“So what are you going to do? Let it drop? It was pretty clear that woman who showed up was in charge of the situation. If she’s your boss, it puts you in a difficult position, I’d imagine. Then again, I guess we should wait and see what the blood tests show, right?”

The symptoms and signs didn’t add up. Caldwell was entirely correct, Pia thought, the clinical history didn’t make sense at all. But she was sure he was wrong in thinking they were totally off base from the start. She was 99.9 percent certain the runner had been clinically dead when she happened upon him. And now, miraculously, he had all but totally recovered and seemed to have suffered no ill effects.

Pia corrected herself. She couldn’t be 100 percent certain the runner had not suffered any ill effects since she could not talk to the guy to find out, or find anyone at Nano who would tell her. Maybe he wasn’t doing so well now. But if he was, then there had to be some medical Lazarus program running within the four walls of Nano that enabled a man to survive a massive, normally lethal medical crisis apparently unharmed.

“Pia, we’ll have to wait and see, right? Pia, are you still there?”

The fact that she was on the phone with Paul Caldwell had slipped from Pia’s mind entirely. She ended the call without saying another word and sat on the arm of her rented couch. It was suddenly obvious to her what she had to do to find out what was going on at Nano. There was one person who undoubtedly knew everything. That was Zachary Berman.