CHAPTER 2

Burton Ramsey, PhD, looked nervously over his shoulder as he handed the ticket agent at Aeromexico cash for his flight to Monterrey, Mexico. He knew ticket agents occasionally notified the DEA when customers paid for international flights with cash, but he didn’t want a record of the ticket to show up on his credit card.

He breathed a sigh of relief when he boarded the plane without a visit from any governmental agents. As soon as the flight was airborne, he ordered a double Chivas Regal from the stewardess and reflexively felt in his coat pocket for his cigarettes. As he began to pull one out of the pack, his eyes focused on the NO SMOKING sign above his seat. Shit, he thought. Even the foreign carriers are getting as prudish as the damn American airline companies are.

Frowning, he stuffed the cigarette pack back into his pocket and accepted his drink from the stewardess without even a thank-you. As he sipped, he began to make notes about what he needed to accomplish in Monterrey.

Dr. Humberto Garza and his lawyer, Felix Navarro, met Ramsey at the airport and took him directly to an empty building near the Monterrey General Hospital. The building had evidently once housed a laboratory, for there were long bar-topped cabinets, each with its own sink, arranged throughout a large central room. This room was flanked on either side with smaller, office-type rooms that still had a few scarred desks and wooden chairs that had been left by the previous occupants.

Ramsey thought he had never seen so many teeth in one face as Garza grinned. “Do you think this will be satisfactory, Señor Ramsey?”

Yeah, maybe for a high school biology project, thought Ramsey, but he forced a smile. “Certainly, Dr. Garza. As I told you over the phone, if you can supply me with the chemicals I’ll need, I feel I can finish my research project quite nicely in this building.”

The lawyer, Navarro, frowned slightly, and then he shrugged. “My client, Dr. Garza, hesitates to ask this, out of politeness, but I feel I would not be doing my duty to him if I did not ask a few questions about the research you plan to do here.”

Ramsey glanced from Garza to Navarro, his lips slowly curving up in a smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes. His voice became low and hard, his manner brusque. “I thought I made it clear in our negotiations that my research is completely secret—that is why I’m moving my lab from the States to here.”

Navarro felt a frisson of fear turn his bowels to water as he stared into Ramsey’s slowly reddening face. This americano was huge. Though he looked to be in his mid-forties, he stood ramrod-straight at six feet, two inches, was broad in the neck and shoulders, and had a rugged face that looked as if he could chew up and spit out anyone who angered him. Navarro quickly spread his hands in a placating manner, “Oh no, you misunderstand me, señor.” He looked at Garza, who suddenly wasn’t showing so many teeth. “We just need some . . . ah, assurance that whatever you are working on is . . . ah, within the law.”

Ramsey folded his arms and relaxed a little. “Oh, you mean you need to make sure I’m not making LSD or amphetamines, or something like that?”

Now both Garza and Navarro were smiling again, relieved that the rich americano hadn’t taken offense at the question. “Sí, señor. That is all that the law requires of us.”

Ramsey pulled a legal-size sheet of paper out of his coat and handed it to Garza. “Here, Dr. Garza, is a list of the chemicals and equipment that I’ll need. You’re welcome to show it to a competent chemist of your choice and have him tell you that none of those chemicals are used in the manufacture of any illicit drugs, or for anything even remotely considered illegal.”

While Garza was reading the list of chemicals, Ramsey took ten one-hundred-dollar bills out of his wallet and handed them to Navarro, counting them out slowly while he stared at the lawyer. “I am a generous man, Navarro, but I won’t tolerate meddling in my affairs. Is that understood?” he growled, all friendliness gone from his tone.

Their eyes widened, and Ramsey thought the two men were going to dislocate their necks with their vigorous nodding as they spread the bills like a deck of cards, their eyes on the cash instead of Ramsey. “Sí, señor. There will be no questions asked, either about your research or your work permit, which will be available whenever you need it.”

Now Ramsey allowed himself a genuine smile as he stuck out his hand, “Gentlemen, it’s a pleasure doing business with you.”

On the flight back to Houston and BioTech, Ramsey sipped another Chivas as he once again went over the elaborate precautions he had taken to avoid leaving a paper trail the BioTech Oversight Committee could follow.

Finally, satisfied he had done all he could to avoid detection, he put out his reading light and leaned back to dream about the millions of dollars that would soon be his.

He arrived in Houston at eleven thirty at night. By the time he retrieved his car from the overnight parking garage and traversed the maze of intersecting freeways around the city to his apartment, it was well after one in the morning. He was exhausted by his one-day trip, but he figured it was worth it if it kept the bloodhounds off his trail.

If BioTech found out what he was about to do, it would not only cost him the millions of dollars he expected to make off his discovery, but it would also earn him fifteen to twenty years in prison.

Burton Ramsey, Ph.D. in biochemistry and paid researcher at BioTech, had begun working on a “blood scrubber” formula to hopefully reduce dependence on dialysis machines for patients with kidney failure. He’d succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. Without knowing quite how he did it, Ramsey perfected a formula that cleansed the blood so completely it took out all of the free radicals and waste products that had caused much of the body’s aging. In short, he had a formula that stopped physical aging from progressing, and in some cases would even cause a mild rejuvenation of damaged or aged cells and body organs.

The fly in Ramsey’s ointment was that the serum did nothing to stop the aging of the central nervous system and brain, so that even though the body stayed youthful, the mind continued to age and ultimately decay. However, Ramsey was ever the pragmatist and figured half a loaf was better than none, and he knew that many aging millionaires would, too, and would pay practically any price to remain looking youthful well into their eighties.

Reality finally set in when he studied the contract he had signed with BioTech and realized he would get a measly 2 percent of the royalties for his serum—that is, if the government ever approved it for public use.

Ramsey, after much consideration, finally decided the government would probably mark the serum as top secret and keep it for the exclusive use of aging generals and influential politicians, a process that would put nothing in Ramsey’s pockets and do nothing for the very people he had vowed to help with his research.

Therefore, he had hit upon the simple expedient of faking his progress notes, destroying his records, and claiming failure of his project. He intended to move to Mexico and spend a year seeing if he could somehow make his serum work on nerves and brain tissue while he waited for BioTech to forget about him and his “failed” research. After that, whether he’d succeeded in improving his serum or not, he would announce to the world his discovery under his own name, and to hell with BioTech and the government that had paid for his work.

Of course, BioTech would be plenty suspicious, so he had to cover his ass—that explained all of the James Bond–style traveling and maneuvering. He thought to himself on the long ride back to Houston, it would all be worth it if he could show BioTech, and especially the medical doctors on the Progress Committee, he was a man to be reckoned with. In addition, if they really tried to push it, he could show the authorities his lab and his chemical requisitions and claim to have made his discovery after moving to Mexico and dare them and their platoons of hired guns and doctors to disprove it.

Burton Ramsey claimed to despise MDs for the plain and simple reason he had lusted to be one for as far back as his memory went. He had not been able to get that MD behind his name for one reason. And it had not been for lack of brains or intelligence or grades or skill or dedication. It had been because of money, or the lack thereof.

When he finished undergraduate school at a small state university in Texas with a dual degree in chemistry and biology, he took his Medical College Admissions Test, scoring well above the needed score, did his interviews, and was accepted at three prestigious medical schools. Unfortunately, he came along at a time when there was a glut of doctors, and scholarships and grants simply weren’t as available as in years past. What money there was seemed to be sucked up by minorities under affirmative-action guidelines, which caused him to be forever afterward suspicious of all ethnicities other than his own.

He tried every avenue he could think of to raise money. He had none, his family had none, and he had no friends or patrons who could advance him the enormous sums it would have taken to get through four years of medical school. He had worked his way through undergraduate school, but he knew he could never do that in medical school even though one dean of admissions had said he knew of students who did. But Burton knew his wasn’t the kind of brain that could do such a thing.

He was highly intelligent with an IQ just a little short of genius, but he wasn’t quick. He made straight As in college, but he did it by hard, unrelenting work. He was a plodder and he knew it. He knew students who didn’t have to study, didn’t have to take notes in class, and he admired them for their quick minds. But that was before he’d been denied the chance to become a physician.

What made the situation even more ironic was that Ramsey himself wasn’t motivated by money. He wasn’t seeking the MD degree because of the huge salaries or the lavish lifestyles that physicians enjoyed, but because he felt a true calling to help people and to do good things with his life. The seeds of his bitterness were sown by the cold eyes of the medical school interviewers who failed to recognize his idealism, and by the medical school accountants who awarded the few scholarships available to those less altruistically motivated than him.

In the end he simply continued his studies, getting first his master’s degree, then his Ph.D. in biochemistry while continuing to work at night to pay for his schooling. Because he had to work almost full-time, he had to take a light academic load and he was thirty-one years old before he finally received his Ph.D. and could go looking for the kind of job that would finally reward him for all his hard work.

He was never exactly certain when it happened, but at some point, he had begun to display a hatred and contempt for all physicians. It might have occurred in his first research job when he discovered that a man with an MD, doing no more important work than he was doing, was paid a higher salary even though he most certainly wasn’t as good a scientist or researcher as Burton Ramsey. Whatever the reason, by the time he was forty, his dislike and contempt for all things materia medica was in full flower.

He liked nothing better than to say, loudly if there were doctors present, a good mortician knew his way around a body better than a surgeon any day and for whatever ailed him give him a good chiropractor every time. He was also fond of saying nature healed and physicians took the fees and the credit.

And then, inexplicably, he met and married an MD: Sheila Goodman. She was in her last year of residency in endocrinology and geriatrics, and he was working in a hematology lab in Dallas, beginning his interest in blood and the arterial and venous systems.

At first, he treated her with the same scorn and derision he reserved for all MDs, calling her “the little rich girl who went to medical school on Daddy’s money.” One day, Sheila stopped him in the hall by placing her hand against his chest. She fixed him with her large brown eyes. “I don’t know where you’re getting your information, Dr. Ramsey, but my daddy didn’t pay for my education. He died when I was nine years old, and my mother worked two jobs to get me through college.” He watched her with new interest as she turned to walk away. “I helped pay for medical school by working as a waitress until midnight, four nights a week.”

Although Sheila wasn’t a beautiful woman by most standards, all who knew her thought her to be quite attractive, mostly because of the goodness and compassion for all things that was mirrored on her face. She was of medium height, with sunflower-blue eyes, a peaches-and-cream complexion, and a body that was slightly boxy but made her look more maternal than frumpy. Ramsey finally got up the courage to ask her to lunch, to apologize for his earlier remarks. Halfway through the meal, he fell in love with her, in spite of her degree.

They stayed in Dallas for four years, until she got a prestigious offer from the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. He followed her, working first at a lab independent of the medical complex. One day he announced to her he was damned if he was going to follow her around, especially since she wouldn’t take his last name and went around calling herself “Dr. Goodman.”

He moved out and went to work for first one, then another private laboratory in the Houston Medical Center area. Eventually, his bitterness and constant carping drove them apart and they officially separated. Somehow, in spite of this, they managed to remain good friends. In fact, Sheila was practically Ramsey’s only friend.

Now he was forty-four years old and had been at BioTech for four years and was about to finish his research project, and he hoped, in the process get rich. Once all the details of that little business was accomplished, he was confident that he could force Sheila to give up this silly business of fooling around with people’s hormones and be his full-time wife.