Nano (16 page)

“You know where the bathroom is, you used it the other night. It’s off the foyer. The wet bar is in the living room, and I should—”

“Now, you sit down and don’t move!” said Pia with trumped-up authority. “I’ll be right back.”

Pia hurried out of the den, picked up her clutch purse, and headed for the foyer. Her pulse was racing. In the bathroom for a couple of seconds, she located the two thirty-milligram capsules of Temazepam. Then she flushed the toilet and washed her hands. Back at the wet bar in the living room, she filled a wineglass with ice from the icemaker, tucked her purse under her arm, and headed back to the den.

Berman was sitting on the couch, nursing his scotch. On the cocktail table in front of him was a second tumbler half-filled with neat whiskey, normally enough alcohol to knock her out cold. Pia realized that her plan was in danger of backfiring badly at the crucial moment. She could not get drunk herself. How much had Berman had to drink? A couple of glasses of Champagne, a couple of glasses each of white and red wine. Some, but not enough for a man the size of Berman and with a tolerance gained from being a heavy drinker. And herself? So far, she had had most of a flute of Champagne and less than half a glass of wine. She could take more than that, but with whiskey, that would be pushing it. She had no real experience with hard liquor.

Pia poured the whole cup of ice into the whiskey and mopped up the overflow with a napkin.

“Sorry, spilled a little. Well, good health.”

“Santé!” said Berman, taking a sip of his whiskey and relishing it.

Pia took a sip, and the booze made her cough.

“Steady on,” said Berman. “Are you enjoying it, or would you like something else?”

“I like the taste. I developed a liking for this stuff a while ago. But when I was at middle school it was more often Crown Royal I drank.” She was warming to the role she was playing. Looking over her shoulder, she gazed at all the photos. “I get the impression you’re an active guy.”

“I think that’s a fair description.”

“Is that one of you on the top of a mountain?” Pia asked, pointing to one photo in particular.

“It is,” Berman said proudly. “It was taken on the summit of one of the lesser peaks in the Himalayas.”

“I’m impressed,” Pia said. “Would you mind showing it to me?”

“Not at all!” Berman got up and walked around the couch. As he did so, Pia reached her tumbler down under the cocktail table and managed to pour out most of the liquid while holding in the ice with her fingers. When Berman came back with the photo she dutifully pretended to admire it. In actuality she thought rich man’s mountain climbing was one of the more ridiculous endeavors.

Berman came back around the couch.

Pia laughed as she put her tumbler down onto the cocktail table. “Now, that was a treat.” She pretended to belch and laughed a bit more. “Come on, with your drink. You’re losing.”

“I wasn’t aware it was a race.”

Pretending to be getting high, Pia said, “Can you change the music? Come on, let’s have a proper party.” She snatched Berman’s glass and handed him his iPhone. The glass was still about half-full.

“What do you want to listen to?” Berman asked.

“How about something a bit more contemporary,” Pia suggested as she stepped over to the open liquor cabinet and filled Berman’s glass to just below the brim. She looked back at Berman, who was busy with his custom app, apparently scrolling through music selections. Pia dropped both of the Temazepam capsules into the amber fluid and tried to get them to sink.

“How’s this?” said Berman. What sounded to Pia like the Beatles came on.

“No, too old,” said Pia. She used her finger to stir the whiskey, but there was no effect. The red-and-blue capsules floated around like miniature buoys. “Shit,” Pia quietly hissed. She put the glass down and fished out the troublesome capsules.

“This?” Berman called out.

The new music was unfamiliar to Pia. “I don’t recognize it. What is it?”

“It’s an old band I used to like in the eighties. Is that fun enough for you?”

“The eighties? Do you have anything from the last ten years? Something I might have heard of?”

Pia struggled with the capsules, finally managing to break them in half. When she did so, she poured the white powder into the drink.

“Oh, for God’s sake,” she shouted out.

“What is it?” yelled Berman over the music.

“I spilled some more of your whiskey, I’m sorry.” Pia found a long glass stirrer in the cabinet and started frantically trying to get the powder, which was now floating on the surface, to dissolve. She cursed herself for not having tried a dry run.

“How about something else,” she suggested. Finally the powder seemed to start to dissolve.

“Okay, but you’re not being much help.” Berman found a radio station playing some kind of electronic music, slow and languid.

“There,” said Pia, “I like that.”

“Really? Sounds god-awful to me,” said Berman.

Pia looked into the bottom of Berman’s glass. There was a small piece of blue capsular material. She tried to get it with her finger, but it agonizingly kept moving away from her fingertip. Instead, she poured most of the spiked drink into a second tumbler, leaving the pill debris where it was. She then carried the glass over to the cocktail table and rescued hers. Making sure Berman could not see what she was doing, she filled hers with bottled water and some whiskey for color. With her heart racing, she returned to the cocktail table and put her glass down.

“Come on!” she said in a lively tone, reaching out to Berman. “Dance with me!”

Pia moved her body to the rhythm of the hypnotic music, swaying, holding an arm over her head, apparently lost in the moment. Berman sat back and drank his whiskey. What a woman!

“I’d prefer to watch you,” said Berman. As he watched, he drank. Pia snatched glances at Berman, afraid that the medication might have a bitter taste that would alert Berman to its presence. She knew one capsule was the recommended dose for someone with anxiety or insomnia, but she wasn’t sure how much of the two capsules actually got into the drink.

Pia had absolutely no experience of dancing, let alone exotic dancing, but she could move in sync with the music, which thankfully retained the same tempo from one song to the next, if
song
was the right word. She took the whiskey bottle and refilled Berman’s glass. He had already drunk about a quarter of it. Apparently the taste wasn’t bad.

“Hey, no fair,” he said, and it looked to Pia as if he were having trouble focusing on her. Pia grabbed her own glass and made a point to knock back most of it. This was enough for Berman to slip into a binge mode himself, taking healthy gulps of whiskey as Pia went back to her provocative dancing.

As Berman kept up his drinking, Pia was encouraged to be progressively more creative. After a number of songs and several more additions to Berman’s glass, she began to wonder what was keeping the guy awake. She wondered if maybe Berman popped benzodiazepines every night and had a tolerance for the drugs. But then, while she was refilling his drink, Berman’s eyes seemed to disappear up inside his head, and his glass slipped from his grasp. Pia lunged forward and caught the glass before it rolled off his lap. His head sank back, and he began snoring gently.

“Thank God,” said Pia. She took the iPhone and found the control that switched off the radio. Suddenly the house was plunged into absolute silence. Quickly she ran back to the kitchen with Berman’s tumbler and the other two glasses and rinsed them all out in the unlikely scenario that a Mickey Finn was suspected the following day. She even made certain the pesky blue capsule material was properly disposed of before she put the glasses back in the den and poured a little whiskey into two of them.

“Okay,” she said to no one in particular when all was ready, “let’s see what we can find.”

22.

ZACHARY
BERMAN’S HOME, BOULDER, COLORADO

THURSDAY, APRIL 25, 2013, 2:14
A.M.

Pia reckoned she had four or five hours to search Berman’s home. The fact that her host was drunk and drugged up didn’t stop Pia from going back and checking on him twice in the hours since he’d finally succumbed. Pia had arranged Berman in a kind of a recovery position on his large couch with his head a little over the side in case he became nauseous. She was confident that to the world, he appeared to be sleeping like a baby. Pia spent ten minutes in the kitchen, drinking several glasses of water until she felt slightly more human herself. She wanted all her faculties.

Pia had no notion of what she was looking for in Berman’s house. She walked through the whole place, making a mental note of the location and function of each room. The property was on three levels, with guest rooms, a workout room, a wine cellar, and access to the garage downstairs. She had seen the whole of the first floor, but nothing of the second. The two main rooms up there could be reached by a main staircase from the living room, and by a back stair from the kitchen.

Berman’s giant master bedroom, with two huge baths, occupied most of the space. But there was another room as well, and it was the one Pia was most interested in. It was clearly a home office.

Wearing a pair of latex examination gloves she’d picked up in the ER when Paul Caldwell was off getting her Temazepam capsules, Pia sat at Berman’s desk in his chair and looked around. The table was glass and on it sat a large Mac, the latest model with retina display. To the right was a six-inch-high stack of papers; to the left, a flat-panel charger for Berman’s iPhone and Android. To the side, below the table, was a cherrywood filing cabinet that was locked. Pia swiveled around and took in the room. Unlike the rest of the house, there was a smooth finish to the walls, wood paneling that lent the room a more businesslike air than the rest of the timbered home.

There were a couple of low cabinets against one wall and Pia tried the door handles on both. Each was locked. Bookcases lined the other wall, filled with what Pia saw as a standard guy’s collection of business books, sports biographies, and thrillers, with a few coffee table books on the Rockies thrown in. She pulled a few of the books back but the wall behind was solid. There was no drawer in the glass desk, and Pia ran her hand along the flat surfaces in the room, looking for keys. Nothing.

All Pia had ready access to was the pile of papers on the desk.

Pia read through the pile meticulously. Most of the papers turned out to be printed-out copies of intra-company emails. Many were anotated in pencil in Berman’s hand. The majority were status reports of tests and experiments going on throughout Nano, and Pia recognized a few of them as her own. Her unfamiliarity with some aspects of other applications of nanotechnology hindered her ability to decode some of the more technical language. Scattered among the emails were copies of requisition forms that Berman had signed, including hers for the additional biocompatibility experiments.

One paper was a form for a new office chair for someone named Al Clift that Berman had turned down. He drew vigorous circles around the price—$359—and wrote “request denied” next to it. All Berman could be accused of from the evidence in this pile of paperwork was being a micromanager, and a cheap one at that.

Pia slumped down in the seat and stared at the Mac. It was powered down and she thought if she turned it on, Berman most likely would know someone had been in his office, and she’d be the prime suspect. She was frustrated and extremely tired. It was now a quarter of four. She decided to take one more tour around the house, come back to the office and look at the papers again, and then leave before Berman woke up.

The lower level yielded nothing. She could see into the wine vault but couldn’t open the door, which had a separate lock. Through the window she saw row after row of bottles but no safe or cabinet or any other out-of-place piece of furniture. The climate-control system hummed along, keeping the room at a steady temperature and humidity. Pia hesitated to go into the garage in case Berman considered it part of the outside and her visit would be recorded. She had a moment of panic when she wondered if Berman had been lying about cameras inside the house being off, but it was much too late to be concerned about that.

She carefully checked the door into the garage. It didn’t seem to be wired. When she opened the door, she kept herself out of view until she could be sure there were no switches on any of the doorjambs. It seemed that the outer doors of the garage were the ones wired to the alarm system. It made sense, considering what was in the garage.

There were three vehicles: a Ford F-150 with a snowplow attachment, a Range Rover, and an Aston Martin. There was also a sailboat on a trailer. The room had two freezers, which on inspection were largely filled with venison and elk meat. One wall was covered with power tools and gardening equipment mounted on hooks. This was a meticulous and well-prepared man, Pia thought.

As she followed that line of reasoning, Pia realized it was unlikely Berman would store sensitive material in plain sight in his home. Why risk having documents lying around at home, no matter how good the security system, when he could leave everything at work? Nano had fences, armed guards, iris scanners, multiple cameras, and who knew what else. Pia sighed. She’d give the paperwork one more look and then cut out.

Pia walked up to the main level of the house. As she passed the small room where Berman kept his TV monitors, a movement caught Pia’s eye on one of the screens. She moved closer and was horrified to see something walking up the steps toward the front door that was barely ten feet from where she was standing. It was the tall and unmistakable figure of Whitney Jones.

Pia did an immediate one-eighty and hurried back toward Berman and the den. As she ran along on her tiptoes, she pulled off the surgical gloves and held them in her hand. In the den, Berman hadn’t moved, and he was still snoring peacefully. Pia imagined Whitney was approaching the front door. Quickly she pulled the den door to without shutting it. By then she could hear the sound of heels on the hardwood floor, so she made her way over to the couch. She plopped herself down and curled up in the corner with Berman’s feet in her lap. She hoped she looked as if she were asleep. Once again her heart was pounding in her chest.

Whitney had walked into the dining room but hadn’t looked in the den. Pia peeked and saw from a display on the TV console that it was 4:42
A
.
M
. Did she always show up that early? Maybe the garage had been wired, after all. Pia knew Whitney would have seen her car in the driveway. As the footfalls receded, she figured Whitney was going to check on the bedroom, the logical place. Pia reached under her short dress and stuffed the exam gloves into her panties. Her heart was thumping so loudly in her ears, she thought Whitney could probably hear it from upstairs.

After what seemed like a half hour, the footsteps returned, louder and faster this time. Whitney hadn’t found Berman in his bed, perhaps she was now worried. After another circuit of the living area, the door to the den opened slowly, and the room was filled with light. Pia breathed more loudly. Now her head was pounding from anxiety, and she felt nauseous. Whitney must have surveyed the scene from the doorway because the door quickly closed and the den was plunged back into darkness.

Pia lay still, thanking her luck in seeing Whitney on the monitor and not having to run into her someplace else in the house, wondering if she had left any evidence of her nocturnal visitation. She figured Whitney was still in the house, and she didn’t relish the idea of lying here in the dark, listening to Zach Berman snore. She needed to grab a couple of hours’ real sleep in her bed. Pia swung her legs over the couch, fumbled for her purse in the dark, and stepped over to the door.