Tom Hyman (8 page)

On their way back to the Hotel Meurice at three in the morning, Anne, sleepstarved and bleary with jet lag, said she’d at least have to have some time to think about it. In the elevator up to their suite she said yes, she probably would marry him. Dalton completed his whirlwind seduction that night in bed. Anne succumbed almost with relief.

The best surprise was how exciting the sex was. In retrospect, much of it had to do with the circumstances—the wine, the sense of dislocation, the removal from everything familiar—which let her surrender so completely to the sensual side of her nature. She had had sex with four other men—the music professor, Matty, one previous boyfriend, and another professor, who had forced himself on her in his office. None of them had given her pleasure like this. If she wasn’t yet in love, she decided, it was certainly a great beginning.

A month later, Anne Marie Beauregard and Dalton Francis Stewart III were married at a small private ceremony on Long Island. Dalton apologized for insisting that everything be done so quickly, but there were so many demands on his time, he felt that if they didn’t get married now, the opportunity might be lost forever.

After a short honeymoon in the Caribbean, Dalton parked Anne in his estate on Long Island and went on with his life as before. She rarely saw him anymore. The last time had been a week ago. He was just back from somewhere and on his way to somewhere else. They had dinner and spent the night at the family’s brownstone on Fifth Avenue. The next morning he was gone.

The sex that night had been rushed and perfunctory. Dalton brought her some gifts and asked her if there was anything she needed. Otherwise, he was his usual distant, distracted self.

Thinking back on that incredible courtship, Anne now saw it in a new light. Dalton had approached their relationship as if it were a contest and she were the prize. Once he decided he wanted her, he had gone after her, pulling out all the stops. And her early resistance had only increased his determination. He wouldn’t quit until he had subdued her.

She had consented, she realized with some mortification, just because it was so much a part of her nature to be agreeable. He had bulldozed her, and she had been too polite and intimidated to resist, or to insist on a larger say in matters. She hadn’t negotiated with him.

She had surrendered to him. And now that he had the prize, his interest in her had faded. Professions of love notwithstanding, he didn’t seem to want a real relationship. He didn’t seem to care who she was or what she wanted out of life.

She had tried to persuade Dalton to let her take a job in Manhattan—she had been offered a research position at the Rockefeller Institute that she very much wanted to take—but he had talked her out of it. He told her that her social status made any job, especially a career, out of the question. While he succeeded in the world of business, he expected her to succeed for them in the world of society.

It wasn’t enough to be rich, he insisted; one also had to know the right people, do the right things, be seen at the right places. It was up to her to see to these matters. That was to be her career.

She had tried, but she had little feeling for society and its demands, and no desire to rise in it. It was all painfully boring and phony.

And then there was the matter of children. She had told him before they were married how much she wanted children—how important a family was to her. He had agreed enthusiastically. It was important to him also.

But he had insisted from the very beginning that she use birth control.

One night, after a particularly torrid bout of lovemaking, he asked her if she was remembering her pills.

“What if I said no?” she asked teasingly.

“I’d be upset,” he replied.

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“Why? I thought we were going to have children. Why wait?

I’m ready now.”

“No, you can’t,” Dalton replied, his voice suddenly tight.

“I can’t? Why not?”

Dalton remained silent.

“You’re frightening me, Dalton,” she said. “Talk to me. Why can’t I?”

Dalton sat up in bed. “I’ve got a problem,” he whispered. “A bad gene. It can be inherited. It causes severe retardation.”

Anne could scarcely believe his words. She felt as if he had punched her in the stomach. “Why didn’t you tell me?” she demanded. “You owed it to me to tell me.”

Dalton hid his face in his hands. “I know. I know. I wanted to.

Believe me. But I was afraid you’d back out of the marriage.

I didn’t want to risk losing you. I’m sorry, Anne. Honest, I am sorry.”

Anne felt cruelly deceived nevertheless. Life without children would be unthinkably empty. The following day Dalton made a lot of apologies and excuses and vaguely promised that if there was no other solution, they would adopt.

Anne stepped out of the shower and dried herself. She felt slightly better. She stood in front of the full-length mirror on the bathroom wall and studied herself in the bright light of the ceiling heat lamps.

Was she really beautiful? People always said she was, but she didn’t quite believe it. She thought of herself as very average.

Maybe that’s all beauty was—being quintessentially average. At the moment she looked more bedraggled than beautiful.

She wrapped a towel around her waist and walked back into the bedroom.

She shook her head. It hurt. She was still drunk.

She closed the drapes to shut out the lateafternoon light, then flung herself nude on top of the bed. The room felt hot, stuffy.

Her eyes wandered to the ornate molded plaster border that defined the edges of the bedroom ceiling. The corners were the fanciest—a delicate scrollwork of leaf clusters and other design elements she could not identify. Suddenly she spotted a small face, a chimera, hiding among the leaves. It appeared to be leering down at her. She squinted her eyes, but the face remained. Silly.

An illusion caused by the room’s dim light, she decided. If she opened the drapes or turned on a lamp, she knew, the face would disappear.

She kept her eyes fastened on the small face until she began to feel dizzy again.

She rested a hand on her breast and brought her other hand up between her legs. She closed her eyes and squeezed her thighs against her fingers. Through the haze of the wine, she felt a warm rush of desire.

She squeezed her legs together harder and dug her fingers into her breast.

Tears welled from the corners of her eyes. Why did she have to spend her life feeling lonely and unloved?

Dalton Stewart came out of Goth’s lab and walked straight to his rented Toyota Land Cruiser, parked just outside the building.

Waiting for him were his chief executive assistant, Hank Ajemian, and his chauffeur-bodyguard, Gil Trabert. Ajemian opened the back door for his boss and then slid in beside him.

Stewart removed the gold fountain pen clipped to his shirt pocket and held it out. A miniature microphone and transmitter were concealed inside. Goth had refused to allow any recording devices inside his office, so Stewart had resorted to using a bug with a remote transmitter. “Did you get everything?” he asked.

Ajemian picked up the portable laser-disk recorder from the floor and set it on his lap. “Came through perfectly.”

Trabert started the jeep and wheeled it slowly out of the weedchoked lot. Prince Bandar’s jeep was already bouncing down the hill, trailing a cloud of dust. Yamamoto and Fairfield, who had come out behind Stewart, were just getting into their vehicles.

Stewart craned his neck around to look back toward the lab’s entrance.

He was wondering what had become of the baroness.

He had hoped to speak to her, but she was nowhere in sight.

Stewart looked at his chief assistant, slumped forward in his wrinkled suit. Ajemian was short, overweight, and bald. He suffered from allergies that caused dark circles under his eyes and gave his Brooklyn accent an added overtone of nasal congestion.

He presented a dramatic contrast to his tall, slim, well-manicured WASP

boss.

“You heard it all,” Stewart said. “What did you think?”

Ajemian closed his eyes and sniffled. Some plant pollen in the air was making his nose run and his eyes water. “Goth sounds a little off the wall to me,” he ventured.

“You think so?”

“Well, you asked the key question,” Ajemian answered, instinctively flattering his boss. “Where’s the proof? He said he doesn’t have any, so what the hell is he talking about?”

“You think he’s a fraud?”

“I don’t rule it out. More likely Goth is conning himself. He wants to believe he can do these things. Maybe he needs to believe it.”

“You think we should forget it, then?”

Ajemian pulled a tissue from his pocket and blew his nose loudly. He hated it when his boss put him on the spot like this.

“Well, what’s he offering us? Basically nothing—beyond his word. And I don’t think that’s worth much. As you yourself said—” “Stop quoting me, for godsakes. I know what I said.”

Ajemian nodded.

“I want to think about it,” Stewart decided.

Both men were clutching the edges of the seats in front of them to keep from being thrown around by the rough mountain road.

Stewart appraised his chief assistant. He was wearing that hangdog look he put on whenever Stewart was abrupt with him.

He paid Hank Ajemian a million dollars a year, along with stock options, a fat expense account, and a complete medical plan. And Ajemian was worth it. He didn’t have much imagination, but he was quick and savvy, and an absolute wizard with a balance sheet. He could cut corners and bend rules with the best of them. He knew how to pull out all the stops to outwit a rival in a deal or to confound and defeat an army of regulatory investigators. He could put together—or take apart—a deal like no one else Stewart had ever known. When Ajemian was doing the numbers, the competition didn’t stand a chance.

And Stewart trusted him. He was loyal. And it wasn’t just his personality that made him that way. He owed Stewart a lot.

In 1988 Ajemian had been hit by both the SEC and the United States Attorney General’s office in a Wall Street securities fraud case that sent him to the federal penitentiary in Danbury, Connecticut, for three years. When he got out of prison, in 1992, no one would hire him. He had a wife and three children, and he was reduced to sending his kids to live with relatives while he and his wife, Carol, cleaned offices to stay alive.

That was how he met Dalton Stewart. He was polishing his office floor one night when Stewart walked in. Ajemian had seen some papers on Stewart’s desk relating to plans to buy out a small pharmaceuticals company in upstate New York. He couldn’t resist pointing out a few ways in which Stewart might improve his bargaining position. Stewart, once he got over the shock of being given advice by a nosy cleaning man, was impressed. Despite Ajemian’s jail record, he put him on the payroll as an investment consultant. Stewart had reason to be sympathetic. His own father had once gone to prison for a crime similar to Ajemian’s.

In the years since, Ajemian had become Stewart’s only real confidant.

“Goth’s a crackpot,” Ajemian declared. “You read the file. He’s an embarrassment in the scientific community.”

“He won the Nobel Prize.”

“He’s still a crackpot.”

“Hold on a minute,” Stewart countered. “Don’t confuse being controversial with being crazy. The guy’s a genius. Nobody disputes that. And I find it hard to believe that a man with his brains—and ego—would spend ten years working a dry hole.

He’s on to something. And if he can do what he says he can do . .

.”

Stewart paused. He felt a sudden euphoric rush, akin to the sensation he experienced when he decided to go after a beautiful woman. “There’s an opportunity to make some money here, Hank. A lot of money.”

Ajemian rubbed his nose. “Goth may be years from being able to produce the kind of genetic package he was talking about in there.”

“That’s part of the risk of backing him. But he’s not asking for much, either. Ten million. That’s not big money. We lost twice that last year on that damned drugstore chain you talked me into buying.”

“It was only twelve million,” Ajemian protested. “And the numbers were there—” Stewart waved a hand to cut him off. “Think of the possibilities. If the genetic program works even half as well as Goth says it will, the market for it is unlimited. We’re talking about the one thing that matters to people more than anything else in their life

—their children. Everybody naturally wants the best. And a kid who’s a genius? Who never gets sick? Who’ll probably live to be over a hundred? My God, they’ll be kicking the doors down.

Everybody will want this. Those who can afford it will demand to have it.”

The jeep reached the bottom of the mountain road, and Trabert swung it onto the highway and headed back toward their hotel on the west end of the island.

“If it works,” Ajemian said. He pulled out another tissue to wipe his nose.

Stewart warmed to his subject. “We could build the first clinic right here. Just buy up that medical school up on the hill. It’s perfect.

Give Goth whatever he needs and put him in charge. Then buy up one of the island’s best hotels. Or build one. Or two.

People who come to the clinic could make it a Caribbean vacation. And we’d sock it to them. Make the deal so expensive only the rich could afford it. Hell, we could set almost any price we wanted. Figure a package deal of about a hundred thousand dollars per couple, everything included—food, transportation, hotel, and all the time they need at the clinic. Probably a week, with some future trips during and after the pregnancy. We might charge more for those. When the first clinic is going full blast, we build a second one. And another hotel. And then a third. When the island can’t hold any more, we find a second island. And right now the whole region’s economy is a shambles. We could buy up beach front property for nothing on half a dozen out-of-the-way islands. Then invite some of the big, prestigious chains—Hyatt, Sheraton—to build here. And while we’re at it, we’ll buy out one