Walking on the damp, densely packed sand, Gaetano first rambled to the east while scanning the faces of all the people on the beach. It wasn’t particularly crowded, because most everybody was having lunch. When he ran out of people, he turned around and walked west. When he ran out of people in that direction, he decided the professor and the sister weren’t on the beach. So much for that idea, he thought moodily.
Gaetano went back and retrieved his shoes. He helped himself to a towel and went up to the landing, where he rinsed his feet off. With his shoes back on, he climbed the remaining stairs and set off up the sidewalk that traversed the lush lawn in front of the hotel’s plantation-style main building. Inside, he found himself in what looked like the living room of a large, luxurious house. A small bar in the corner with six stools reminded him it was, after all, a hotel. With no customers, the bartender was busy cleaning his glasses.
Using a house phone on a desk stocked with hotel stationery, Gaetano called the hotel operator. He asked how to dial one of the guest rooms and was told she would be happy to connect him. Gaetano said he wanted room 108.
While the phone rang, Gaetano helped himself to a bowl of fruit on the desk. He let it ring ten times before the operator came back on the line to ask if he’d like to leave a message. Gaetano said he’d try again later and hung up.
At that point, Gaetano wondered if the hotel had a pool. He hadn’t seen one where he would have expected it, namely out in the middle of the expansive lawn, but since the hotel’s grounds were obviously large, Gaetano figured there still could have been one. Accordingly, he walked across the living room-like lounge and entered the hotel’s reception area. There he asked and was given directions.
It turned out the pool was to the east, set away from the ocean at the base of a formal garden that rose up in successive tiers to be capped by a medieval cloister. Gaetano was impressed with the setting but disappointed at having the same luck as he had on the beach. The professor and Tony’s sister were neither at the pool nor in the snack bar next to the pool. They also weren’t in a nearby health club or on one of the many tennis courts.
“Crap!” Gaetano mumbled. It was clear to him that his marks were currently not in the hotel. He looked at his watch. It was now after two. He shook his head. Instead of wondering if he would have to spend the night, he started thinking how many nights it might take at the rate he was going.
Retracing his steps back to the reception area, Gaetano found a comfortable couch that had another bowl of fruit as well as a stack of classy magazines that were positioned so as to afford a clear view through an archway to the front entrance of the hotel. Resigned to waiting, Gaetano sat down and made himself comfortable.
sixteen
2:07 P.M., Friday, March 1, 2002
Leaving Spencer to go up to his expansive office, Paul took the stairs and descended into the basement of the central building after the two of them had said goodbye to their guests. Paul often wondered what Spencer did all day, rattling around in that huge room, which was four times the size of Paul’s neighboring office and ten times more sumptuous. Yet Paul did not begrudge the situation. It had been Spencer’s only demand during the building of the new clinic. Other than insisting on a ridiculously large personal space, Spencer had otherwise given Paul relatively free rein-most important, in regard to the laboratory and its equipment. Besides, Paul had a second office, albeit tiny, in the laboratory, which he used a hell of a lot more than the one in the admin building.
Paul was whistling as he opened the fire door on the basement level of the stairwell. He had reason to be in a good mood. Not only was he anticipating a serious enhancement of his legitimacy as a stem-cell researcher by collaborating with a potential Nobel laureate, but more important, he was looking at the prospect of a significant and needed financial windfall for the clinic. Like the mythological phoenix, Paul had again risen from the ashes, and this time there had been literal ashes. Less than a year before, he and the other principals at the clinic had to flee Massachusetts with barbarians in the form of Federal marshals at their former facility’s gate. Luckily, Paul had anticipated problems because of what he had been spearheading in the research arena, although he envisioned the problems would come via the FDA, not directly from the Justice Department, and he had been making detailed plans to move the clinic out of harm’s way offshore. For almost a year, he had been siphoning off funds behind Spencer’s back, which had been easy, since Spencer had essentially retired to Florida. Paul had used the money to buy the land in the Bahamas, design a new clinic, and begin construction. The unexpected raid by law enforcement in the wake of a couple pesky whistle-blowers merely meant he and his cohorts’ departure had to be precipitous and prior to the new clinic’s completion. It also meant they had to activate a preplanned doomsday protocol, burning down their old facility to eliminate all the evidence.
The irony for Paul was that this recent rise from the ashes had been his second miraculous recovery. Only seven years before, his prospects had appeared dismal. He’d lost his hospital privileges and was poised to lose his medical license in the State of Illinois only two years after he’d finished his ob/gyn residency. It was over some stupid, diddly-squat Medicaid/Medicare billing scam he’d copied from some local colleagues and then refined. The problem had forced him to flee the state. Pure serendipity had taken him to Massachusetts, where he’d taken a fellowship in infertility in order to avoid the Massachusetts Medical Board’s finding out about his problems in Illinois. His luck continued when one of the fellowship instructors happened to be Spencer Wingate, who was contemplating retiring. The rest was history.
“If only my friends could see me now!” Paul mumbled happily, as he walked down the basement’s central corridor. Such musings were a favorite pastime. Of course, he used the term friends loosely, since he didn’t have many, having been forced to be a loner most of his life after being the butt of jokes throughout his formative years. He’d always been a hard worker, yet he was destined to continually come up short by society’s usual criteria, save for getting a medical degree. But now, with a superbly equipped laboratory at his disposal and without even the threat of FDA oversight, he knew he was positioned to become the biomedical researcher of the year, maybe the decade… maybe even the century, considering the Wingate’s potential to have a virtual monopoly with both reproductive and therapeutic cloning. Of course, for Paul, the idea he was to be a famous researcher was the biggest irony of all. He’d never planned on it, had no appropriate training for it, and even had the dubious honor of being the last in his class in medical school. Paul laughed silently, knowing that in reality he owed his present position not only to luck, but also to U.S. politicians’ ongoing preoccupation with the abortion issue, which had effectively kept oversight from the infertility business as well as handicapped stem-cell research. If that hadn’t been the case, researchers on the mainland would be where he was at the moment.
Paul rapped on Kurt Hermann’s door. Kurt was the clinic’s head of security and one of Paul’s first hirelings. Soon after his arrival at the Wingate Clinic, Paul had sensed the enormous profit potential of infertility, particularly if one were willing to push the boundaries and take full advantage of the lack of oversight of the field. With that in mind, Paul had assumed security would be a big issue. Accordingly, he had wanted to find the right person for the job, someone without a lot of scruples, in case draconian methods became necessary, someone highly chauvinistic in the nonsexist sense of the term, and someone with some serious experience. Paul had found all of the above in Kurt Hermann. The fact that the man had been discharged from the U.S. Army’s Special Forces under less-than-honorable circumstances following a series of prostitute murders on the island of Okinawa did not trouble Paul in the slightest. In fact, he had considered it a plus.