“It’s a good thing I’m leaving this place,” she complained. “I must have put on twenty pounds since we got here. I’m blowing up like a tick.”
Paul rolled his eyes. Gamay was up at six every day for her five-mile run that burned off any possible trace of culinary excess. Although she was only two inches short of six feet tall, she carried no more than one hundred thirty pounds on her small-hipped frame, most of it muscle from her active lifestyle.
Paul eyed a tall glass that contained a frothy strawberry concoction.
“Maybe you shouldn’t have the frappe,” he said.
Gamay brushed a strand of dark red hair out of her eyes and flashed a dazzling smile that showed the slight gap between her two front teeth.
“Last one . . . promise.”
Her eyes had a dreamy expression as she took a long sip.
“Easy promise to keep, now that you’re leaving town. What do you know about Bonefish Key?”
Gamay dabbed the pink mustache off her upper lip with a napkin.
“Only what I’ve read in scientific journals or come across on the Internet. It’s on the west coast of Florida. They’ve made some discoveries that have led to patents in the field of biomedicine. There’s a great deal of interest in finding something in the wild that could be used to cure disease.”
“I remember the bioprospectors we met a while back in the Amazon rain forest.”
Gamay nodded.
“Same concept, but there’s a growing consensus that the ocean’s potential for pharmaceuticals and medicines dwarfs that of the rain forest. The organisms that grow in the ocean are far more dynamic, biologically speaking, than anything on land.”
Furrowing his brow, Paul said, “If Kurt is interested in the marine center, why not go through Kane?”
“I asked him the same question. He said not to expect help from Kane. That we’re on our own and that-”
“He’ll explain later,” Paul finished the sentence.
Gamay feigned a look of astonishment.
“You’re positively psychic at times.”
He put his index finger to his temple.
“My mystic powers are telling me that you are about to offer me the rest of your strawberry frappe.”
Gamay pushed the glass across the table.
“How do you think we should approach this thing with Kane out of the picture?”
“You could try using your NUMA bona fides to leverage a tour of the place.”
“I thought of that. The NUMA connection might get me in the front door, but I don’t know if I’d get the kind of access that would do us any good.”
Paul nodded in agreement.
“You’d get the VIP treatment, a quick tour by a PR flack, a ham sandwich, and a fond good-bye. Kurt apparently wants us to take a look behind the scenes.”
“That was my impression. I need an edge, and I think I know where I can find one.”
“While you work on that edge, I’ll see if I can get you on a flight to Florida.”
Paul stopped by his office to make travel arrangements. Gamay went to the boat dock to tell her dive crew that she was leaving Scripps. She hauled her scuba gear to the dormitory room that had been provided for their stay. She called an ocean chemist colleague at the Scripps Center for Marine Biotechnology and Biomedicine. In her usual Gamay fashion, she got right to the point.
“I’m trying to wrangle an overnight stay at Bonefish Key. I remember you saying that your center has worked with them on oceanborne treatments for asthma and arthritis.”