Some people had been surprised at his meteoric rise, but not Cal. He was accustomed to success from an early age, partly as a self-fulfilling prophecy of the confidence and competitiveness that was part of his genetic makeup, and which had been honed to an obsession by his equally competitive father. From early childhood he’d wanted to win at everything, especially in competition with his two older brothers. From board games like Monopoly to school grades, from athletics to the presents he gave his parents at Christmas, Cal insisted on being number one with a kind of single-mindedness few could match. And success only reinforced his appetite for more success, to the extent that over the years he lost all vestiges of the need for moral principles. In his mind cheating, which he didn’t refer to as such, and ignoring ethics, which he considered mere limitations for the faint of heart, were simply tools to advance one’s agenda.

SuperiorCare Hospital Corporation officers were not aware of these details of Cal’s background and personality. But they were very aware of his contributions to the company and were eager to reward him, particularly the CEO, Raymond Housman. By coincidence this recognition had materialized more or less at the same time a mounting financial problem had been brought to the CEO’s attention by his CFO, Clyde English. To their collective horror, accounting had determined that the company had lost, in 2006, about twenty-seven million dollars from its bottom line because India’s growing medical tourism industry had caused a disturbing number of American patients to shun SuperiorCare hospitals and wing off to the Asian subcontinent for their surgeries.

Linking the two issues, Raymond Housman had invited Cal to a secret meeting in his office. He’d explained the medical tourism issue and the need to somehow turn it around. He’d then offered Cal an unparalleled opportunity. He said SuperiorCare was looking to lavishly fund through a secretive bank in Lugano, Switzerland, a company with the express purpose of seriously diminishing demand for patients to go to India for surgery, if he would agree to form it. Raymond was very clear that SuperiorCare Hospital Corporation wanted no ostensible connection with such a company and would strenuously deny there was a connection if asked, nor did they want to know how the company accomplished its goal. What Raymond didn’t say but what Cal definitely heard was that his termination at SuperiorCare Hospital Corporation was temporary and that his success in the current venture would be a cause for him to be welcomed back into the corporate fold with open arms at an extremely high level, essentially leapfrogging the corporate ladder.

Despite having no idea how he was going to engineer the new company’s objective, Cal had accepted immediately with the proviso that Petra Danderoff, then his co-director of the public relations department, would be included in the deal. At first Housman had balked with no one to run SuperiorCare’s PR, but after being reminded of the seriousness of the medical tourism problem, he relented.