But Biofem Inc., the company he ran with a gynecologist named Larry C. Ford, was a scheme with heft, an enterprise that might really make a difference in the world. Larry was a brilliant scientist, Riley told friends, a little odd, perhaps, with his sneakers-cum-business suits and the stories he told of his CIA links. But the project was serious. They were on the cusp of something that could prevent millions of people from dying of AIDS, especially in Africa. And they were going to get rich in the process.

He felt the bullet like a haymaker to the chin. When he looked down there was blood everywhere and out of the corner of his eye he saw a man in black running away. He staggered into the pastel-colored courtyard and hollered for 911. Crumpled among the familiar exteriors of his life -- the sandstone facades and palm trees -- he groped for his cellphone and called Ford on the second floor. Who else would he call but Ford? Ford came running, and he was kneeling down pressing a tourniquet to Riley's face when the cops showed up. Ford was that way -- always there to help.

It was only later that Riley understood -- after Ford had shot himself with one of his many guns; after the city of Irvine put up 100 of Ford's suburban neighbors and their kids in the Hyatt for four days while the cops dug up Ford's backyard, removing automatic rifles from the concrete bunker beneath the jacaranda bushes, and tubes of cholera and typhoid fever germs from under the buffalo steaks in his deep freeze; after they rounded up a bunch of Ford's associates who seemed to have crawled out of a Ross MacDonald novel; after the FBI, CIA and ATF were brought in and Ford's connection to South Africa's Dr. Death was exposed. Only then did a gloomy realization settle upon Riley.

His partner, Ford, had sent a hitman to kill him, or so it seemed.

And that was kind of the least of it. "I mean, not to minimize his injury," says Victor Ray, one of two lead detectives on the case for the Irvine police, "but Pat Riley getting shot exposed a whole lot of more serious things. More than I ever wanted to know, really. I was happy to be a local flatfoot before this case came along. It's turned out to be the most bizarre friggin' thing I ever heard in my life."

This bizarre friggin' case, which an Orange County grand jury is starting to unravel, isn't just about a squabble between business partners. Ghoulish apartheid-era germ warfare experiments in South Africa are part of the story, and stashes of explosives and deadly germs and illegal firearms. Weighing the evidence available so far, it's not clear whether Ford was a player in an evil international plot or just a brainy fruitcake dabbling in danger. But this much is clear: In the person of Larry Ford, someone's big dreams found a refuge in Irvine, down where the megalopolis meets the desert and where, to paraphrase Raymond Chandler, the hot Santa Ana winds send housewives reaching for kitchen knives while they eye the backs of their husbands' necks.

Ford isn't the first of his type. In the past few years, the biotech gold rush has churned up some strange characters, several of them medical men like Ford. At the University of California at Irvine Medical Center, with which Ford himself was affiliated for a while, a doctor sold donor organs for profit, a researcher put a radioactive substance on a colleague's chair and Ricardo Asch, the fertility doctor, was losing so much money on his racehorse that he intermingled his patients' embryos to improve his success rates.

Ford himself doesn't seem to have cared about money. He was apparently motivated by some twisted ideology and some genuine altruism, a nostalgia for apartheid, perhaps (he had ties to the old South African military), along with a dream of stopping AIDS with the product he'd designed, a vaginal suppository, or microbicide, that kills germs spread by sex. But in the land of the fast buck, in an era in which doctors become biotech millionaires overnight, greedy characters glom onto the Larry Fords of the world -- the big-thinking science guys, the could-be-geniuses -- like a cloud of sweet poison. And sometimes they get a lot more than they bargained for.

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