Fatal Reaction (29 page)

The tape clicked.

“Hi, Kate. It’s me, Stephen. I don’t know if you’re asleep or not, but I thought you’d want to know. I just got a fax from Takisawa. It’s too long for me to read the whole thing over the phone, but basically it says they’re willing to go along with our counterproposal in principle— whatever that means. I’ll leave a copy on your desk. I guess we’re not dead yet.”

For a minute I just stood there, wrapped in the blanket, and stared at the phone. I pushed the rewind button and listened to the message again. Then I did a little dance around the living room before I went to get dressed.

Friday was marked by a sense of urgency that infected every person at Azor Pharmaceuticals from the secretaries to the scientists. With the power shutdown set for five o’clock, many investigators had spent the night working in their labs, finishing up experiments, while others had arrived before dawn. Things were even more frantic in the ZK-501 labs, because the scientists were working feverishly not just to complete their work but to get their labs ready for Takisawa.

By the time I arrived Carl Woodruff was already pacing the halls, clipboard in hand, looking as edgy as an expectant father in a film from the fifties. His goal, he announced to whoever would listen, was to have everyone out of their labs by four o’clock in order to give the cleaning crew an hour to go through before the lights went out and the building was sealed.

By lunchtime tempers were flaring and emotions running high. Even behind the closed doors of my office I could hear Borland cursing as Carl explained that he would not only have to wear a lab coat during the Takisawa visit, but his girlie calendars would have to come down.

I spent much of the day boxing up the various papers in Danny’s office that I would need to work on over the weekend. Unlike at Callahan Ross, where I was not expected to even slit open my own envelopes, at Azor I had to carry the boxes to the car myself. When I was finished I made the rounds of the ZK-501 labs, handing out maps and directions to the party at my mother’s Sunday night. When I stopped by Lou Remminger’s lab the thought of Lou and my mother in the same room gave me pause. I considered bringing up the subject of appropriate attire but could not think of a graceful way to approach the subject. What was I going to say, “I’m planning on wearing a black Chanel suit. Were you thinking of wearing your nose ring?”

“Do you have a minute?” asked Remminger in conspiratorial tones, as she dropped the invitation absent-mindedly onto the chaos of papers on her desk.

“Sure. Why?”

She looked at her watch. “Come sneak down to crystallography with me. Michelle says she’s going to try to diffract a new batch of crystals.”

“And?”

“And I just have a feeling, that’s all.”

I followed Remminger down the service stairs past the animal labs where movers were busy loading some of the smaller, more temperature-sensitive animals into transport carriers. When we got to the aquarium window, there were a half-dozen other people milling about, waiting to see what, if anything, was going to happen. To my surprise Stephen arrived shortly after we did. He came up behind us and put his hand on my shoulder.

He bent down and whispered in my ear, “Keep your fingers crossed.”

Collectively we held our breaths as we watched Michelle go through it all again. Her face was ashen, and she looked so tired under her dark cap of curls that I wondered how long it had been since she last slept. Michael Childress hovered behind her, hands clasped behind his back like a mad scientist in a cartoon.

Once the crystals were loaded in the generator, Michelle typed in the commands that set the X rays in motion. For several minutes nothing happened. People shifted restlessly from one foot to another and craned their necks for a better view. As the numbers began appearing on the computer monitor, silence passed over the ranks of watchers like darkness in an eclipse. I didn’t know whether it was good or bad until Stephen, who could see clearly above everyone else, started cheering.

Suddenly everybody was hugging, laughing. To my enduring astonishment one of the muscle-bound twins from Remminger’s lab grabbed me and gave me a big kiss on the lips. As Stephen made his way through the crowd to congratulate her I caught a glimpse of Michelle Goodwin standing mutely in her triumph, her eyes glistening with tears. My heart leapt for her.

Childress, on the other hand, was as animated as a lottery winner, shaking hands and accepting congratulations that no doubt really belonged to Michelle. For now at least, there seemed enough good will—and credit—to go around.

From somewhere Dave Borland appeared, a champagne bottle in each hand, which he swung like a pair of Indian clubs. Stephen’s assistant, Rachel, produced a pocket-instamatic and the two crystallographers stood in front of the computer console self-consciously shaking hands for the camera.

Champagne corks popped and Borland doused Michelle and Childress with champagne as if they were baseball players who’d brought home the championship. Michelle’s friend from the animal lab managed to scrounge up some gerbil-size paper cups and we all raised our tiny glasses and drank to toast the crystallographers’ accomplishment.

Someone facetiously called out: “Speech! Speech!”

Childress needed no further encouragement. He immediately stepped in front of Michelle and began explaining the importance of the discovery. Remminger hissed something under her breath. It sounded suspiciously like “Pig.”

From Stephen’s point of view the solution of the receptor’s structure could not have come at a better time. Twenty-four hours ago the deal with Takisawa had seemed all but dead. Now he not only had an agreement in principle with the Japanese, but a certifiable breakthrough in the form of the first diffractable crystals of ZKBP.

But from the crystaliographers’ perspective it couldn’t have come at a worse time. In a few minutes Michael Childress had a plane to catch and in three hours the power company would shut off electricity to the labs in order to install the new transformers. Michelle would have no choice but to surrender her precious crystals to the safekeeping of a rented freezer. Indeed, even before Childress had finished speaking, the other investigators had begun to slip away, leaving Michelle with her loquacious colleague and a floor full of crushed paper cups to be picked up.

Suddenly Carl Woodruff appeared and grabbed me by the arm. “I need you,” he said. “It’s an emergency.”

“What is it?”

“I need a lawyer.”

“What for?”

“To threaten people, what else do you need a lawyer for?”

I followed him at a trot down the hall toward the elevator. On our way up the fire stairs he explained that the company that had promised to rent us the diesel refrigeration unit had just called to say they had made a mistake and it was no longer available.

“Just point me to a telephone and give me their number,” I announced. I was not about to have Michelle Goodwin’s triumph with the crystals undone by nondelivery of a large appliance.

By three o’clock I was on the loading dock watching the truck back up in order to unload the promised freezer. I’d only had to threaten the dispatcher at the rental company with a lawsuit and dismemberment in order to get him to see things my way. The five hundred dollars extra I offered him helped, too.

“Let’s just hope the damn thing works,” muttered Borland as we watched them load it on a dolly and push it down the hall. Borland and Michelle had both come to supervise the packing of the freezer and the preparation of the cold rooms.

Borland had already turned the temperature way down in the cold room that had been filled with items that needed to be kept cold but were not considered temperature sensitive. The contents of the remaining cold room would then be shifted into the diesel unit, where the temperature could be maintained to within a tenth of a degree throughout the duration of the blackout. It took us close to an hour, scurrying back and forth between cold rooms, to accomplish the job. We all cursed Childress, who was no doubt savoring the day’s success over drinks in first class on his way to Boston while we humped Styrofoam boxes and bottles of reagents up and down the hall.

When we were finally finished, Carl Woodruff produced two rolls of silver duct tape. “It’s that time,” he announced, handing one roll to Dave Borland and the other to Michelle Goodwin. Working quickly the two scientists sealed the door to the first cold room.

“Are you sure it’s going to stay cold?” Michelle asked Borland when they were done.

“Don’t worry,” he assured her kindly. “We lost power once at Baxter after a big electrical storm. All we did was tape the cold rooms shut and they only lost a degree a day, and it was summertime, too.”

Woodruff looked at his watch. “Right on schedule,” he chirped. “Now let’s get the labs buttoned up so that we can blow this pop stand.”

* * *

Stephen and I were the last ones to leave the building, but before leaving we took one long last walk through the ZK-501 labs to make sure they had been left in parade condition. The investigators had been instructed to be in the building by seven
A.M.
on Monday in order to switch on all their equipment. If it had a display and could be turned on, Stephen wanted it on. His goal was to show off labs that glittered like Las Vegas to the Japanese.

As we neared five o’clock a tremendous silence settled over the building. Most of the animals had been moved to other quarters for the weekend. The computers, the ventilation hoods, the special air handling systems had all been switched off. I sensed in Stephen a reluctance to leave, as if he was afraid that somehow he might not be coming back. I put it down to not wanting to give up control, especially on the eve of such an important site visit. He kept finding all sorts of reasons to linger: an oscillator that looked dusty, a piece of tape coming loose off the side of the X-ray generator, a garbage can that needed emptying.

When we came to the diesel-powered refrigeration unit that we’d rented, I let him take his time. It was a walk-in freezer the size of a small shed, powered by a throaty motor that rumbled like a truck. Inside sat Azor’s precious ZKBP crystals. Stephen checked the padlock twice to confirm that it was secure and watched the gauges to make sure not only that the temperature was correct, but that there was enough fuel in the tank to keep it running through the weekend. In the end I had to literally take him by the hand and lead him out of the building.

Standing in the parking lot, I realized the temperature had dropped sharply since morning and it had started to snow. The sun had already been down for an hour. A grizzled man wearing a hard hat and an enormous down-filled parka that made him look like the Pillsbury Doughboy came and introduced himself as the job foreman from Commonwealth Edison.

“Security says they’ve got everybody out of the building, so I think we’re ready to rock and roll,” he told Stephen.

“Just promise me you’ll be finished on Monday morning,” said Stephen.

“No problem. We’ll have this baby up and running, all juiced up by six
A.M.”

The foreman raised his hand and gave the signal. Stephen looked like he was going to be sick. Then without a sound or any other kind of warning, the lights went out.

CHAPTER 23

Mother spent most of Saturday driving me crazy. Actually it was Cheryl who bore the brunt of it. I was busy running a different part of the circus. For the past couple of days I’d been trying to convince Stephen that even if we didn’t need more lawyers, we needed more bodies. Takisawa, I pointed out, was bringing seventeen people to Chicago. For the purposes of “face” I contended that we needed to have at least that number on our side of the table. Whether he was swayed by my arguments or succumbing to last-minute anxiety, Saturday morning he finally agreed to let me pad the numbers for our side.

Unfortunately that meant that I had to quickly come up with some new faces which I managed to scrape together from Callahan Ross. Included in the group was an associate who’d had some experience dealing with the Japanese. But everyone else was recruited just to fill chairs. Facetiously, Stephen inquired whether we might be better off hiring models in the interest of keeping the billing down.

I spent the morning briefing the Callahan Ross contingent. It seemed only fair that they have some under
standing of what was going on in order to help keep them awake. But my main message to them was that their job was to show up and shut up. What I was looking for was dark suits and closed mouths—something Callahan Ross had been serving up faithfully for over a hundred years.

Through it all Cheryl kept sidling in with phone messages from Mother. There was some crisis with the flowers, the wine store had delivered the wrong vintage, the pianist who’d originally been hired had sprained a finger shoveling snow, and had I ever heard anything about the one they were sending in his place.... It was not that I did not appreciate these little missives from my mother, but at this point there was nothing I could do about it, and she was making everybody nuts.

We broke for lunch at twelve-thirty and attacked a deli tray from Jacobs Brothers. I was just raising a pastrami sandwich to my lips when I heard myself being paged. I picked up the conference room phone and was surprised to find Elliott on the other end of the line. There were loud noises in the background like someone was sawing wood or running a vacuum.

“What’s going on?” I bellowed, once he had identified himself.

“I’m at Danny’s apartment. The biohazard people are here cleaning up,” he said, shouting over the noise. I put my finger in my free ear in the hopes that it would help. “I need to talk to you.”

“What about?”

“Childress.”

“Can’t you go to a quieter phone?”

“This was the quietest place I could find. I can’t leave. Can you come here?”

It made sense that Elliott had to stay. Many of the companies that dispose of biologically active waste recruit their workforce from the ranks of the homeless and the otherwise unemployable. Knowing Elliott, he’d want to make absolutely sure that nothing of value walked out during the cleaning. Still, I didn’t really have time for this today.