After extensive research and much discussion, Cal et al. had decided to go into the nurse business by founding a company called Nurses International. Their plan, as was accomplished, was to hire a dozen young and vulnerable, attractive, impressionable, newly graduated Indian nurses, pay them U.S. nurses’ wages, and bring them to the States on tourist visas, specifically to California, for a monthlong training session with the idea of turning them into a team of beholden and therefore easily manipulated spies. In California they had been purposefully spoiled to maximize their manipulability and to take advantage of their wish to emigrate. At the same time, they had been trained in computers during the morning hours, particularly in regard to computer-hacking techniques. In the afternoons they had worked for a few hours as nurses in a SuperiorCare hospital to improve their American English as well as acquaint them with American patient expectations, both of which, it had been assumed, would make it easier to hire them out to private Indian hospitals.

Everything had gone miraculously according to plan, with teams of two nurses currently in six private Indian medical tourism hospitals. For housing, all had been required to live together in a mansion rented by Nurses International in the diplomatic area of New Delhi, to the initial chagrin of the nurses’ families. Since the money the nurses were providing continued, however, family complaints vanished.

After they had been working for a week, with all of them complaining they wanted to go back to California sooner than the six months they were required to remain in India, they had been instructed to begin extracting patient-outcome data from the computers in their respective hospitals. The goal was to be able to begin to calculate infection rates, adverse outcome rates, and death rates for their future ad campaigns. To Cal and the others’ surprise, none of the nurses questioned this activity, and they were wonderfully successful. But then disaster had struck. Something had happened that no one had anticipated. The stats had turned out to be quite good, even strikingly excellent in several of the institutions.

For a few days Cal and Petra had been depressed and unsure of what to do. After all the money they’d gone through to set up the elaborate spy system, they had begun to feel pressure for results. Raymond Housman had even sent a secret representative a week earlier for an update on when they could expect something to happen. It seemed that the bottom-line losses from medical tourism were continuing, and ticking upward at an alarming rate. Cal had promised results would soon be forthcoming, since at the time of the envoy’s visit, the outcome data were just beginning to flow in.

But then, by tapping into his creativity and urge to win, Cal had come up with a second idea. If there were no bad statistics to be found for the basis of a negative ad campaign, why not create their own bad-outcome, hard-luck stories with the help of their installed fifth column and feed the stories to the media in real time. With the unsuspecting help of an anesthesiologist and pathologist whom he’d gotten to know in Charlotte, North Carolina, while he’d worked at SuperiorCare’s corporate office, Cal had settled on succinylcholine as his drug of choice to cause sudden death. The idea was to find patients who’d had a history of some sort of heart disease and who’d had succinylcholine as part of their anesthesia, and inject them with an additional bolus of the muscle-paralyzing drug the evening following their operations. Cal had been assured the drug would be undetectable, and if it was detected, it would be assumed to be from the patient’s anesthesia. Best of all, there’d be an immediate diagnosis of a fatal heart attack because of the cardiac history.