Tom Hyman (16 page)

“In return for these discreet services, I’m prepared to make a sizable donation.”

“Thank you, Baroness. It will be greatly appreciated.”

The baroness walked over close to Mossler, still sitting on the bench.

“And it will be kept secret.”

He looked up at her. “Of course.”

“No one must know I’ve even met you. Do you follow me?”

Mossler shrugged. He looked unhappy. “If you insist.”

“I do insist. If it ever gets out that we’ve had any dealings, that’s the end. No more money. Is that clear?”

“Quite clear, Baroness.”

“Good. I’m glad we understand one another.” The baroness reached down and squeezed Mossler’s bicep. He flinched in surprise. “You must be quite strong,” she said.

Mossler flushed and grinned.

“Can you box?”

“Box? Sure. Karate too.”

The baroness squared off in front of him. “Stand up. Let’s see what you can do.”

Mossler’s jaw fell. “What? Against you?”

The baroness smiled invitingly. “Why not?”

Mossler got to his feet. “I might hurt you, that’s why.”

“Really?” she taunted. “Go ahead and try.”

“I’d rather wrestle you,” Mossler said, leering at her.

“Very well. Try to pin me down.”

“This some trick?”

“Herr Mossler, I’m beginning to think you’re a coward.”

Mossler scowled. He pulled off his jacket. “I’ll try not to hurt you.” He hunched his shoulders and lumbered toward her, angling for a hold. The baroness avoided him easily.

Mossler pressed his attack, feinting and lunging to grab her waist or legs. She sidestepped him and slammed the edge of her palm against his ear. He fell sideways onto one knee, scrambled to his feet, and lunged again. His face was red, furious.

They circled each other. Mossler spun around and momentarily caught her neck with his arm. But she ducked under and rammed a fist into his solar plexus.

He gasped and staggered backward. The baroness whirled, brought a leg up and around, and smashed her instep against the back of his neck with enough force to send him sprawling. His foot caught the edge of the rowing machine and he crashed nosefirst into the carpet. He took his time getting up.

The baroness buzzed her secretary. “Karla, please come up and show Mr.

Mossler out. I’m going to take a shower.”

Joseph Cooper got another midnight call from Roy. “We’re getting a lot of interference on the bugs,” Roy said. “Something electronic in the hospital.”

“I’ll replace them.”

“Never mind. We need something else. Listen carefully.”

“Go ahead.”

“Goth uses a removable computer hard disk with an important program on it. When it’s not in the computer, he keeps it locked up somewhere.

It’s a black plastic cartridge, six inches wide, two inches high, four inches deep. I want you to get it, copy it, and put it back. And under no circumstances must Goth find out. Can you do that?”

“It won’t be easy. He hardly ever leaves the lab.”

“New Year’s Eve,” Roy said.

“What about it?”

“He won’t be there then. And hospital security’ll be lax.”

“What’s on this disk?”

“That’s none of your business.”

“No. I guess not.”

“When you have the disk, call me immediately.”

That afternoon the baroness drove to her country estate, Schloss Vogel, and had dinner with two guests, Katrina Zymonywicz and Aldous Sikorsky.

She had found them in Warsaw two years earlier. They had been attached to a theatrical company that had gone out of business and were reduced to doing street performances to stay alive.

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.