Aldous was twenty-four then; Katrina, twenty-one.
The baroness was immediately taken by them. Blond, and slight of frame, they both looked like teenagers. They possessed a wonderfully innocent, androgynous quality that spoke to her.
They were street-smart and intelligent, but hedonists at heart.
When the baroness was reasonably sure of their inclinations, she made them a proposal: Come back to Germany and live with her.
She would guarantee them a luxurious, protected life, free of responsibility. In exchange, they were to provide the baroness with sex. They were to be hers exclusively—to be available to her whenever she wanted them. And everything she did with them was to be kept secret.
They turned her down.
She kept after them, and eventually persuaded them to come to Germany as her guests and give it a try.
The baroness, who fired servants and employees on a regular basis, hadn’t expected the menage to work out for very long, but so far it had. She knew that one day they would probably leave just as suddenly as they had decided to stay. In the meantime, she’d extract what pleasure from them she could.
Although the two were now permanent guests at Schloss Vogel, she rarely saw them except when she was in the mood for their services. And she preferred it this way. She was interested in them solely as a means of satisfying her carnal fantasies.
Sometimes she enjoyed directing them in various sexual acts with each other, or playing games of bondage and discipline. But usually all she wanted from them was simply a massage and a tongue bath, and they had become skilled at obliging her.
After dinner the three retreated to the baroness’s bedroom on the third floor and removed their clothes.
Ecstasy took the baroness longer than usual to reach this particular night, because her head was filled with thoughts of Jupiter.
She had done all she could do about the situation. Now there was nothing left but to wait for the right moment. She was sure that moment would come, but the waiting frustrated her enormously. She was constantly second-guessing herself, wondering if she had overlooked anything, wondering if there might have been a better strategy.
Stewart should play into her hands eventually, but in the meantime events were not completely under her control, and that always made her nervous. The longer the wait, the greater the chance of the unforeseen.
And the longer she had to wait, the more she lusted after Jupiter.
It was meant to be hers.
She closed her eyes and willed her body to relax. Aldous and Katrina applied their tongues, lips, and hands to her flesh. They started at a very languid pace and gradually, imperceptibly increased the intensity, exploring every inch of her until she was shuddering with pleasure.
Finally, her nerve endings screaming for release, she cried out, tensed convulsively, and exploded in a long crescendo of rapturous spasms.
When her orgasm had subsided, Katrina and Aldous turned their attentions to each other.
The baroness lay back and watched them. Later, when she was ready, they would start in on her all over again. She would sleep well tonight.
Dalton Stewart signed the last of a stack of realestate contracts and leaned back against the limousine’s plush seat cushions. Hank jemian took the pile and neatly stacked it inside his briefcase.
They were on their way to pick up Anne at the island’s airport.
She was now eight months into her pregnancy and doing splendidly. Her suite at the hospital was ready. Stewart had supervised the details of the renovation himself. It was a small luxury apartment within the confines of the hospital, with every amenity and every protection, from an elaborate electronics alarm system to a round-the-clock staff of nurses and bodyguards.
Stewart had had two limousines flown down from New York.
One of them, complete with two shifts of drivers on twenty-four hour standby, was exclusively for Anne. The moment she went into labor, she could be whisked the ten blocks from the hotel to the hospital in a matter of minutes.
The second limo was a stretch Mercedes SEL-660 and had cost him half a million dollars by the time the customizers at the body shop were through with it. It was armor-plated, with bullet-proof glass, puncture-proof tires, and a 450-horsepower truck engine.
Its top speed was 140 mph. It got seven miles to the gallon. Stewart intended to give it to President Despres as a special gift at the opening ceremony for Goth’s new hospital wing next week.
“How much land do we own?” Stewart asked.
“I get eight thousand five hundred and forty-five acres,” Ajem ian said. “That includes over a mile of beach front. The best beach front.”
Stewart felt a surge of optimism. Despite the headaches involved in trying to operate in a country that barely qualified as a third-world dictatorship, his efforts were beginning to show results. “Not bad.
I’m surprised Despres hasn’t interfered more.”
Ajemian scratched his jowls with the back end of one of his cheap ballpoint pens. He always carried a pocketful of them, along with his wads of Kleenex. Stewart had given him two goldplated Mont Blancs, but Ajemian never used them. “One reason is that we bought a thousand acres from him,” Ajemian said. “At a grossly inflated price. Another is that any time he wants he can just take it all back from us.”
“He wouldn’t dare. He’s still counting on me to get the U.S. foreign aid taps flowing for him again. We’ll just have to keep dangling that in front of him for a couple of years.”
“Well, I strongly recommend we stop buying for the time being.
The word is out, and prices are starting to shoot up.”
Stewart watched out the window as the countryside flew past them.
“Property’s still a steal. And once we start developing, vacant land values—especially the oceanfront—will go way up.
We’ll be able to make back our investment just by selling off a few hundred acres. I tell you what. Let’s buy another five thousand. Put together some big contiguous parcels on the other end of the island.
After we finish on this end, we can build a new clinic out there and develop a second cluster.”
Ajemian uncapped a ballpoint and started scratching numbers out on a pad. “We’re running up debt too fast,” he said. “The banks are going to cut us off. They think we’re crazy doing this anyway. Our exposure is ridiculous.”
“Have the banks ever been right about anything?”
Ajemian pulled a tissue from his pocket and wiped his nose. “I know.
But we’re really stretched thin, Dalton. We had massive debt going into this affair. And our earnings are way down. The banks just aren’t buying our projections anymore. We should be belt-tightening, not throwing money around.”
Stewart groaned impatiently. He sometimes found Ajemian’s obsessive caution maddening. This was one of those times.
“We’ve been through this all before. There will never be another opportunity like this, Hank. Not in our lifetime.”
Ajemian squirmed uncomfortably in his seat. “I understand.
Sure. But we can cash in on it without laying out any more capital now. There won’t be any money coming in on this for at least a year.
And that’s only if nothing goes wrong. And something always goes wrong. We’re skirting bankruptcy now. I mean it.”
Stewart was tempted to tell Ajemian the truth about Anne’s pregnancy.
It might make him feel better about the amount of risk involved. But he decided against it. It had to remain his secret.
“All right. Forget the five thousand acres.”
They discussed other business matters. Ajemian read aloud from a pile of faxes sent down from New York earlier. Stewart dictated a reply for each, leaving it to his assistant to flesh them out.
Stewart gazed out the side window of the limousine as he listened to Ajemian read the faxes in his high-speed monotone.
Coronado’s midday traffic was limited almost entirely to trucks, buses, and
bicycles, but progress was slow and exasperating. The Avenida des lose Martires de la Revolucion del Ocho de Noviembre, or Avenida Ocho for short, was in a sad condition, now more dirt than macadam. Added to the choking dust from the neglected pavement were the eye-stinging belches of diesel exhaust from the trucks and buses, the cacophony of beeping horns, jingling bicycle bells, and shouts of ragged children darting among the vehicles, hawking everything from cigarettes to sex.
The buildings along the boulevard had been built in the nineteenth century by the French, who governed the island for over a hundred years. The French left in 1967, and the country’s entire infrastructure looked as if it hadn’t seen a day’s maintenance since.
The stone and plaster facades of the once proud town houses were chipped and dirty, and the windows were missing shutters. Balcony railings were frequently collapsed or broken; chimney pots sagged at crazy angles; and many of the roofs had been repaired so many times over the years with such a wide assortment of different-colored materials that they looked like patchwork quilts. The sidewalks were thick with beggars and gangs of unemployed males with nothing to do.
Street brawls, public drunkenness, and petty crimes were commonplace, even in broad daylight. Only the enormous posters and murals of President Despres looked fresh and new. His bulging, bespectacled eyes and self-satisfied grin were everywhere, gazing down on his poverty-stricken subjects like some giant cat watching mice in a cage.
Stewart imagined the new city that would eventually sweep much of this poverty and misery away. He saw high-rise hotels and office buildings, bustling streets full of markets and theaters and restaurants, all catering to the explosion of tourism that he was sure would soon transform this benighted backwater into a Caribbean paradise.
Things were rapidly falling into place. Goth’s clinic was now up and running. In another month Jupiter’s first pilot test program would begin. If all went well with that stage, then several teams of publicists and advertising specialists Stewart had already hired would begin the work of developing a selective campaign to market the program. The campaign would be very upscale.
Details would be put out in the most discreet fashion possible, through a carefully screened list of prominent doctors who might be willing to refer their richest patients.
The doctors should be more than willing, Stewart guessed, since he planned to offer a finder’s fee of $25,000 for each referral.
Such a generous sum would be possible because he planned to charge the first couples $500,000 per treatment—payable in advance. The rich wouldn’t quibble with the price. Indeed, their ability to afford such an expensive medical service would in itself be a status symbol. And having a genetically superior child would be, among other obvious advantages, the very ultimate status symbol. Stewart anticipated a sizable waiting list within months.
At its present size and staff level, Goth’s clinic would be able to handle comfortably a dozen couples a week. That would generate grosses in the neighborhood of $25 million a month. Within the first year Stewart planned to expand the clinic to handle as Juler s LurJ
many as forty-eight couples a week. That would quadruple income to around $100 million a month. The procedure was a relatively expensive one, since each treatment required extensive DNA analysis and genetic surgery; but at those rates the profit margins would still be enormous.
Start-up and development costs would be earned out in the first two or three weeks of operation.
After that, salaries and operating expenses would consume less than two or three percent of the gross take each month. Bribes, commissions, finder’s fees, and local “taxes” to Despres would eat up another three to four percent. That left a net profit per month in the range of $90
million.
There would be no U.S. taxes. The money would be channeled into a foundation that Ajemian had established for the purpose called the Coronado Genetic Research Institute. The institute would keep its money in bank accounts already set up for it in Panama, the Bahamas, Switzerland, and Liechtenstein.
After a few years, when the carriage trade began to thin out, Stewart would build a series of satellite clinics around the island and set lower prices so that the world’s vast middle-class market could be tapped. Fees could then be lowered to something like fifty thousand dollars per treatment.
The details of the broader marketing program would all be carefully worked out at the appropriate time. But one thing was certain: if the formula worked as Goth claimed, it would generate more money than any single product or service ever offered to anybody anywhere. There were many millions of potential customers. Stewart estimated the program could gross as much as a trillion dollars in its first decade. It was an absurdly astronomical sum, but he and Ajemian had brainstormed it several times. He estimated that in those ten years he could plausibly increase his own personal worth to two hundred billion dollars.
Two hundred billion dollars.
It would be the financial killing to end all financial killings-one of the greatest transfers of wealth in history. In one decade it would make him the richest person on earth—arguably the richest individual who had ever lived. Since no one had ever accumulated that much wealth, there was nothing to compare it to, no way to measure its potential. But it would be breathtaking.
The prospect made him giddy.
A permanent financial arrangement still remained to be hammered out with Goth, but Stewart saw no special difficulties in that area. Goth was as happy these days as a six-year-old on Christmas morning.
Stewart Biotech had come to his rescue, and Stewart was counting on the likelihood that Goth would not want to see that relationship terminated. Once Goth had the women in the pilot program pregnant, Stewart would close a deal with him.
He would offer him a fat yearly salary and expense account, plus a two-percent share of net profits from Jupiter. This would very quickly make the doctor very rich.
If Goth was greedy and held out for more, Stewart would be generous and up the doctor’s percentages a fraction, but he wasn’t about to make any major concessions. He wouldn’t have to. He had the doctor in a legal and moral armlock. The new foundation owned the hospital and everything in Goth’s labs. And all relevant government officials—including President Despres himself—were now on the foundation’s payroll. If Stewart chose, he could kick the doctor off the premises—shut him out completely—and there wouldn’t be a thing Goth could do about it.
The one potential threat—Baroness von Hauser—seemed to have vanished without a trace. That bothered him. The baroness had a reputation for persistence.
The next few weeks would be an extremely anxious time. He had overextended himself perilously, as Ajemian continually reminded him.
If Jupiter was a failure, he’d be in trouble.
Everything now depended on that child growing inside Anne’s womb.
Anne Stewart propped another pillow under her neck and sank back against the sofa, trying to find a more relaxed position. She rested her hands on her swollen belly and took a deep breath.
The pregnancy had gone so fast and so smoothly, she found it hard to believe that the baby would soon be due. Despite the tensions with Dalton, she had never known a more serene period in her life.
Lexy Tate spread some beluga caviar on a triangle of toast and offered it to her. The hotel had sent up a table loaded with a variety of treats and delicacies, and Lexy was determined to take advantage of it.
Anne shook her head. “No thanks. I’ll never develop a taste for that stuff.”
“Pity,” Lexy replied. She made a wolfish grin and stuffed the wedge greedily into her own mouth.
Anne felt a twinge of guilt. On her invitation, Lexy had come to El Coronado two weeks ago, moving into a suite on the same floor of the hotel as the Stewarts. She had planned to fly home to New York yesterday; but since the birth was now so close, Anne had begged her to stay on until the baby was born.
“The biggest New Year’s Eve in a thousand years and he g
oes to a party without you,” Lexy said. “I think it’s pretty shabby.”
“You know how he is about me taking chances. He still hasn’t gotten over the attic stairs incident.”
“That’s no excuse. You’re completely ambulatory. There’s no 135
reason he couldn’t have taken you. My mother, for godsakes-she played golf right up until her water broke. She insisted on finishing the round before she’d let them take her to the hospital.
I was born in the golf cart on the way back to the clubhouse.”
Anne laughed. “You were not. You were born in Doctors’ Hospital on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. And your mother was in labor for twenty-three hours.”
“Who told you that?”
“Your mother.”
“She’s a terrible liar.”
“Why didn’t you go with Dalton?” Anne demanded. “He did ask you.”
Lexy piled caviar on another piece of toast. “He was straining to be polite.”
“I hate for you not to be out celebrating because of me.”
Lexy shrugged. “I really don’t mind. I’ve been to enough parties—New Year’s and otherwise—to last me until the next millennium. I’ve seen it all. And felt it all too. I was once goosed at a dinner party by the President of the United States—did I ever tell you that? I’ve also been groped under the table by a Belgian ambassador, and been barfed on by a senator from a state I won’t name. Jesus, that guy was a jerk! And I once danced cheek-tocheek with a president of Italy, who whispered obscene suggestions in my ear. At least I think they were obscene; my Italian isn’t that great. Oh, and I once let an English MP
have his way with me in a third-floor bedroom of my parents’ house.
That was a drunken New Year’s Eve a very long time ago.”
“Which Italian president was it?”
Lexy stuck out her tongue. She grabbed the TV remote, punched the On button, and began flicking impatiently through the channels.
All stations were focused on the impending Big Event. One channel was covering street parties in the capitals of Europe, where the early morning hours of January 1, 2000, had already arrived; another was interviewing the leader of a group of endof-the-worlders standing vigil on a snow-swept mountaintop in Northern California; a third was running a documentary reviewing events of the past hundred years. On a fourth station a moderator was asking a panel of distinguished academics to predict what the next thousand years might have in store.
Tom Hyman Page 13