Fatal Reaction

was get into my car, go home, and crawl into a tall scotch before doing the same to my own bed. Nevertheless I still had to stopp at Azor. With four days to go before the delegation from Takisawa arrived I knew I would never be able to sleep without reading through the day’s faxes.
    Pulling into the parking lot at Azor I was dismayed to see Stephen’s BMW still in the lot. I’m sure his employees just assumed that he never left. His car was there when they arrived for work in the morning and it was still there at night when they left. As eager as I was to tell him about my meeting with Hiroshi, I had been hoping to just run in and out tonight.
    “You’re pulling night duty,” observed Paramilitary Bill, looking up from whatever he was reading at the security desk.
    I mumbled my assent and rummaged through my purse for my ID card. I couldn’t help stealing a surreptitious look at the magazine Bill was reading. Expecting Soldier of Fortune or at least White Supremacist Weekly, I was disappointed to see that it was nothing more unusual than a body-building magazine.
    I slid my card through the reader and made my way to Stephen’s office. I found him at his desk, hunched over his keyboard. He was pecking away furiously using the peculiar, two-fingered technique he had long ago perfected for himself. He was actually very fast, but there was something about all that energy channeled from his huge frame into the tips of just two fingers that always struck me as comical.
    “Hi,” I said.
    “Where’ve you been?” he demanded, looking up from his keyboard. “I thought your flight was supposed to get in at seven.”
    “My plane was delayed so I caught a later flight,” I replied, knowing instantly that there was something wrong. It wasn’t like him to be rude.
    “You should have called. I’ve had the whole world out looking for you.”
    “Why? What’s happened?”
    In lieu of an explanation, he handed me a two-page fax. I immediately recognized from the letterhead that it had come from Takisawa. As I read it I felt as though all the air had been sucked out of the room.
    The fax, dated that morning, was as explicit as the dozens before it had been vague. The $40 million deal that Stephen and Danny had originally proposed, the one that had been on the table since the two of them had returned from Japan, had now been deemed by Takisawa’s chairman to be too rich. They were now countering by halving their offer.
    I looked up from the page at Stephen. I couldn’t tell whether he was furious or desperate or perhaps a little bit of both. Having spent the past few days reviewing the ZK-501 project’s financial projections, I knew his back was against the wall. If he didn’t get Takisawa’s money, and get it soon, he was going to have no choice but to pull the plug on ZK-501, take as a loss the $26 million he’d already invested in the drug, and sit back helplessly as he watched the company he’d started begin its sickening spiral into the red.
    “This is just high-stakes bluff poker, Stephen. We’ve got to figure out our next move.”
    “Maybe. Or maybe we just played hardball too hard.”
    “I think you’re wrong,” I said, hoping I sounded more confident than I actually felt. “When I talked to Hiroshi today in New York he really made it sound as though _ they’re going for the deal.”
    “Maybe they really can’t handle the money,” countered Stephen morosely, “in which case we are well and truly fucked.”
    “They have the money,” I assured him. “This is too good a deal for them to pass up. You’ve said it yourself a hundred times. Takisawa is a second-level pharmaceutical company with global ambitions. Their growth strategy is to buy heavily into U.S. companies whose products they license. They’re not just determined to barter their way into U.S. market; now they want to gain access to its newest technology, and they’re paying big bucks for it. Remember Genlife? Takisawa paid $100 million for them last fall.”
    “Yeah, but look what happened to Genlife stock. It’s dropped twelve points in the last two quarters. Maybe Takisawa feels like they’ve been burned and now they’re having second thoughts.”
    “No. They’re just playing us. Old man Takisawa didn’t get where he is by paying retail. This is a classic Japanese negotiating tactic,” I said, silently reassuring myself that the books I’d read on doing business with the Japanese couldn’t all be wrong. “They