Fatal Reaction

little room beside the copy machine and used them to pack up the diplomas, photographs, coffee cups, and bottles of aspirin that those of us who are desk-bound inevitably amass. There were a couple of things I thought might conceivably hold interest for Elliott, such as a Laurie Anderson concert stagebill that was a couple of months old and a receipt from a trip to the doctor. I set those aside.
    In the back of the bottom drawer of his desk I found a bottle of Bushmills, three-quarters full, lying on its side beneath the Yellow Pages. I left it in the drawer. Once we’d inked the deal with Takisawa I figured I’d drink a toast to Danny.
    With my impromptu exorcism complete I felt better and was able to settle down to carefully read through the Takisawa file.
    Companies have distinct personalities, just like people, and while I was trying to learn the nuts and bolts of the deal that was on the table, I was also trying to get a sense of Takisawa’s personality. The more I read, the more apparent it became that any alliance between the two companies was not going to be a natural fit, but rather a Kissingeresque marriage of convenience. Azor desperately needed money to finance its efforts with ZK-501, but Stephen was every bit as desperate to give almost! nothing away. The company had already gambled heavily to get this far and it could ill afford to concede too much to its new partner.
    On the other hand, Takisawa was being asked to drop forty million dollars into the slot machine of the ZK-501 project and would almost certainly want to be sure that it not just understood the odds but would get a large enough share of any eventual jackpot to justify the risk in the unlikely event their investment paid off.
    The entire discussion was complicated by the fact that what was being negotiated was the rights to something that did not yet exist and might never come to be. The oft-quoted rule of thumb was that only one of every six promising research projects ever yields a drug. Even so, most new drugs do not represent a breakthrough. Their action is not novel. They just do what an existing drug does a little differently and hopefully a little better. A new drug that does something new or works in a previously undiscovered way is very rare. When he was being honest about the odds Stephen would tell you that, at best, he was asking Takisawa to stake him to a hundred-to-one shot.
    Stephen’s position in all this was colored by his belief that forty million dollars constituted mere pocket change for a company of Takisawa’s size. Nonetheless, judging from the correspondence we’d thus far received from Tokyo, Takisawa was nervous at the prospect of laying out that kind of money to back the scientific hunches of a cocky wunderkind like Stephen. In addition to all manner of reporting requirements, the Japanese proposed a payout schedule for the forty million that was based on performance benchmarks, while Stephen naturally preferred to receive a check for the full amount on the day the two parties shook hands on the deal.
    There were other issues as well. Takisawa wanted a training component that provided for three of their scientists to be sent annually to the labs in Oak Brook to observe and study. Stephen had announced that he had no intention of running a vocational school for Japanese chemists, but despite his protests I sensed there might be room to maneuver. I imagined a trio of earnest, white-coated Japanese scientists taking notes as Borland demonstrated his frozen-frog trick.
    There were some points on which I knew Stephen would not budge. Tops on this list of potential deal breakers was Takisawa’s insistence on receiving in exchange for their investment enough shares in Azor Pharmaceuticals to justify a seat on the company’s board of directors. Stephen believed he had too many enemies on his board and after my conversation with Guttman I was inclined to agree with him. I made another note and decided to give myself twenty-four hours to come up with a list of palatable compromises.
    The rest of it I broke down: documents to be pulled from files, financials to be updated by the accountants, phone calls to be made, issues to be addressed with Stephen, and questions that might be able to be answered without him. When I was finished, my “to do” list filled eight pages of my legal pad.
    I found myself wishing I could clone Cheryl. While I desperately needed her to hold down the fort at Callahan Ross, I could have