For a moment Pia stood where she was, staring at the spot where the group had disappeared, straight up into the Rocky Mountains. She shook her head in disbelief. It was all too much of a coincidence. As there had been a runner, there were cyclists apparently operating out of Nano in some way, and they were important enough to be trailed and shepherded by a motorbike and a white van.

The interruption had stopped Pia from fully assimilating what Paul Caldwell had told her. Blood from the Chinese runner that had been accidentally saved had been sent to a lab and then lost. Such a loss had never happened before, and there was no good explanation for the sample’s disappearance. The lab was being turned inside out in a desperate attempt to locate the missing sample, or so she had been told by a contrite Paul. Good grief, she thought dejectedly.

Pia was sure the lab workers were wasting their time. She had no doubt that someone from Nano had taken the blood sample before it could be tested. Nano knew that blood had been taken from the runner but they may have assumed it was all intercepted in the ER. This later action meant they were very thorough and had a long reach. They must have stationed someone at the hospital or, more likely, at the lab, to intercept anything coming in from the ER at that particular hospital. Such an action wouldn’t be difficult to pull off for an outfit with Nano’s resources.

All the same, she cursed her foolishness in trusting Paul Caldwell with the blood. He could just as well have attached a giant sign to the blood saying, STEAL ME! He’d not only written his name, but indicated the sample was from the runner.

Then Pia’s more rational self kicked in. Despite the odd encounter in the ER, Pia had given Caldwell no reason to act in a clandestine or secretive manner with the blood. Sure, Nano had snatched the other samples away, but it was too much to expect an ER doctor to anticipate something that had never happened before: the loss, for whatever reason, of a blood sample after it had reached the lab. The message that Pia got from the unfortunate episode was that the stakes were raised and that she would have to be more careful in the future. With the enormous amounts of money involved with nanotechnology, she was up against a formidable foe carefully clothed in secrecy.