Berman raised his hands palms out. “On my mother’s honor.” His lips curled into a slight smile.

“Okay,” Pia said simply. “See you at eight!” She stood up and left Berman’s office, feeling his eyes burning into her back. “Let him enjoy his fantasies,” she whispered to herself. Once outside in the cool morning air she further murmured: “Mission accomplished.”

For his part, Berman rocked back in his plush rocking swivel chair and thanked the gods for such an unexpectedly promising start to his day. Even his hangover had miraculously disappeared.

Chapter 19

19.

NANO, LLC, BOULDER, COLORADO

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 24, 2013, 12:09 P.M.

After looking at the security logs as she did every day, Mariel Spallek had to concede that since Pia had started work before six o’clock that morning, she was certainly entitled to take an extra forty-five minutes at lunchtime to go for a run. Pia had also told her that jogging restored her when she felt tired, and that she did much of her best thinking when she was pounding the pavement on the mountain road above Nano. It helped that Mariel was in a good mood. She had purloined another lab on the floor below for Pia’s use as well as more testing equipment so that Pia could run twice as many tests on the various levels of the polyethylene glycol incorporated into the nanobot surfaces that they were experimenting with. Once Pia had gotten all these apparatuses set up, Mariel told Pia she could go for her jog, but added that she would prefer that Pia not come across any more Nano employees in extremis. That comment had brought a laugh from both women.

It was Pia’s custom to run up and away from Nano to get to a higher elevation, but this time she turned right out of the gate and back down the road toward town. After a few hundred yards, she turned on a smaller secondary road that she had never been on before. After another hundred yards or so, she stopped and made her way up the embankment at the edge of the road and into the forest that surrounded Nano. Pia’s plan was to try to determine if there was a second entrance into the facility, which she now strongly suspected, or anything new she could see from the outside. There were plenty of back roads in the area, and she could have tried driving around to see what she could find, but doing it on foot seemed like a better idea. Her plan was to circumambulate the complex along the perimeter fence, even though Nano occupied a considerable area. She was hoping for some success, since she’d gleaned precisely nothing of consequence since she’d left the emergency room the previous day.