Part 4 (1/2)

Chapter 2

_Sunday, April 5

8:20 A.M.

_”Okay, you'd better take it from here,” Winston Bartlett declared to Kenji Noda over the roar of the engine. He had lifted his feet off the pedals and was unbuckling the c.o.c.kpit seat belt. He liked having a turn piloting his McDonnell Douglas 520N helicopter on the commutes between his corporate headquarters in Lower Manhattan and his medical research park in northern New Jersey, but prudence dictated a more experienced hand on the collective during descent and landing. For that he had Noda, formerly of the j.a.panese Defense Forces. A tall, wiry man of few words, Noda was also his bodyguard, chauffeur, and curator of his museum-quality _katana _sword collection.

With the sharp, delicious aroma of the pine forest below wafting through the cabin, Noda quickly put aside the origami he'd been folding, to center his mind and slid around a special opening in the bulkhead. He strapped himself into the seat, then took the radio headphones. The sky was the purest blue, with not another craft in the visual perimeter. They were, after all, over a forest.

As Bartlett settled himself in the pa.s.senger compartment, he thought about where matters stood. There was the very real prospect he had rolled the dice one time too many. The daily blood tests at his clinic in New Jersey were showing he was disturbingly close to using up his nine lives.

To look at him, though, you'd never suspect. At sixty-seven he was still trim and athletic, confident even c.o.c.ky, with a full head of steel dark hair and probing eyes that instantly appraised whatever they caught in their gaze. He played handball at a private health club near his Gramercy Park mansion for an hour every other morning and he routinely defeated men half his age, including Grant Hampton. Remaining a player in every sense of the term was the main reason he enjoyed flying his M-D chopper, even though his license had been lapsed for eight years. It was the perfect embodiment of his l.u.s.t for life. As he never failed to point out, his lifelong business success wasn't bad for a City College grad with a bachelor's degree in Oriental art history.

He had gotten this far because he wanted success enough to make it happen.

He'd started out in New York real estate, but for the last twenty years he had concentrated on buying up small, under- priced medical-device manufacturers with valuable patents and weak bottom lines. He dismantled some of the companies and sold off the pieces, always for more than he'd paid for the whole. Others he restructured with new management, and when a profitable turnaround was in sight, he took them public or sold them to a major player like Johnson & Johnson. The potential winners, though, the ones with promising pipelines of medical devices or drugs whose FDA approval was imminent, he relocated here at the BMD campus in northern New Jersey.

But compet.i.tion was fierce, and the bigger players like Merck and J&J had limitless research capital. They could write off dead ends a lot easier. Thus it was that five years ago, when his pipeline was drying up, Winston Bartlett took the biggest gamble of his life. He acquired a cash-strapped new start-up called the Gerex Corporation, whose head scientist was at the cutting edge of stem cell research. Karl Van de Vliet, M.D., Ph.D., had just had his funding terminated and his laboratory at Stanford University closed after a political flap by right-wingers.

Bartlett had moved Van de Vliet here to New Jersey and poured millions into his stem cell efforts, bleeding BMD's working capital white and racking up 85 million in short-term debt just to keep the rest of the company afloat. Now, though, the gamble was paying off. This month Gerex was winding up stage-three clinical trials for the National Inst.i.tutes of Health. These trials validated a revolutionary procedure that changed the rules of everything known about healing the human body. Already his CFO, Grant Hampton, was heading a negotiating team hammering out a deal with the British biotech conglomerate Cambridge Pharmaceuticals to sell them a 49 percent stake in Gerex. Over 650 million in cash and stock were on the table, and there were escalators, depending on the results of the trials now under way.

The problem was, Cambridge had only seen the financial and summaries of data from Gerex's successful clinical trials. They knew nothing about the fiasco of the Beta procedure.

”Karl called just before we left and said she's worse this morning,”

Bartlett remarked to Noda. He was removing his aviator shades and there was deep frustration in his eyes. ”G.o.d I feel so d.a.m.ned responsible.

She was--”

”Having the Beta was Kristen's idea,” Noda reminded him. ”She wanted to do it.”