Megan's Cure (4 page)

Chapter 7

THEY STOPPED FOR gas and a bathroom break once and then continued on to the outskirts of Fayetteville, Tennessee before stopping again.
 
On the way, the man said little.
 
He told Megan to find anything on the radio.
 
So, she played with the dial a few times in the first hour as different stations came in and out of range.
 
Preachers.
 
Old rock and roll.
 
Country.
 
She would glance at him to see if there was anything he liked, but she got no reaction.
 
He seemed totally focused on something far ahead of them.
 
Finally, she turned toward the passenger window, gazed out and watched the countryside roll past in silence.

The forests flew by in an unending montage.
 
Some were little more than tall scrubland and she could see hills in the distance.
 
Other stretches were so lush with tall trees and thick ivy she imagined you could burrow in and disappear within 20 feet of the highway.
 
Places where the hills had been gashed open by the highway builders remained red and raw.

Their second stop was at a Wal-Mart.
 
First, they bought her a toothbrush.
 
Then, they went to the kids clothing area.
 
He let Megan pick out some panties, three T-shirts, socks and pajamas.
 
She stayed away from her usual favorite choices of pinks and pastels, opting for white and primary colors.
 
She wasn’t feeling frilly.
 
She picked the pajamas with soccer balls all over them.

It was when they stopped at a Jack-in-the-Box before getting back on the highway that she decided, finally, that he really was a bit strange.
 
It wasn’t just her imagination.
 
While they sat across from each other eating their hamburgers and French fries and sipping their sodas, he just gazed past her into the parking lot.
 
She looked up when she heard his voice and then realized he was murmuring softly to himself.
 

Megan tried to remember what he had told her at the school.

She was in danger, he had said.
 
She had to come with him right away, at that moment.
 
No delays.
 
How long?
 
Maybe a week or longer.
 
Don’t worry.
 
He would take care of everything.
 
Didn’t she remember him?
 
Of course she did. Megan assumed he would explain more.
 
Fill in the details.
 
But, they had driven in silence almost the entire time.

She wasn’t too worried about him.
 
She’d learned early to talk to adults, the Americans, because her mother relied on her so much to negotiate the English-speaking world.
 
She knew more about renting apartments, bus schedules and getting refunds for broken appliances and ill-fitting clothes than any of her peers.
 
She also had a pretty good idea what people were thinking.
 
Were they angry?
 
Impatient?
 
Friendly just long enough to get what they wanted?
 
She often had to decide on the spot.

The ones that she and her mother could trust she kept engraved in her memory.
 
She went back to them for help when she needed it, and sometimes when she really didn’t.
 
They wanted to help.
 
They liked her.
 
For no particular reason, she would visit the assistant librarian, the man who owned the no-name convenience store and the older black woman who sat on her porch all day and told stories.
 
She made sure they knew her name was ‘Megan.’
 

She felt her companion was one of those – a bit odd perhaps but still deserving her trust.
 

When they finally stopped an hour after nightfall it was at the Magnolia Motel, a small establishment a few blocks off the highway.
 
It had a dozen units with parking in front and an office on the far right side.
 
A gigantic magnolia tree stood on the other side of the office, towering above it and covered with big pink and white blossoms.
 
The fragrance on the evening air reminded Megan of sweet lemonade with a dash of vanilla.

The door to the office had a bell attached and it brought out a young man who left the television on in the other room.
 
It was a game show.

She heard herself described as “my daughter” and knew enough not to look surprised.
 
She saw a $100 bill passed over the counter and some bills and change returned.
 
Megan wandered over to a table set against the wall that was stacked with game boxes, many held together with tape.
 
Monopoly.
 
Clue.
 
Chutes and Ladders.
 
Checkers. Yahtzee.
 
Some she didn’t know.
 
There was an old pack of playing cards with a giant ace of spades on the front.
 
She picked them up, studied the pack and looked over at the counter.
 
They both watched her.

“You can borrow those,” the young man said.

Megan flashed her biggest smile.

“Thank you,” she said in a strong voice.
 
She clasped them in a tight grip and led the way out the door.
 

Chapter 8

ALL 14 INTERNS were in their second year of graduate business school.
 
Most of the top
MBA
programs were represented, including Harvard, Stanford, Chicago, Wharton and Sloan.
 
They were half way through a six-week program at Merrick & Merrick, the third largest pharmaceutical company in the world.
 

It was supposedly a mix of work and education.
 
But everyone in the conference room that looked out from San Francisco’s China Basin waterfront toward Oakland across the bay knew that this was a courting ritual.
 
Merrick was strutting its stuff as an exciting employment opportunity – hot products, great management team, wonderful city.
 
The MBAs were mainly trying to avoid disproving anything in the glowing resumes and transcripts that had resulted in their selection to the program.
 

Vice President Troy Axmann began the session on product development in the darkened conference room with a click of the handheld keypad that controlled the overhead projector.
 
He stood to the side of a screen filling the wall behind him that was immediately transformed into a floor-to-ceiling banana split.
 
A mountain of whipped cream decorated with slivered almonds and Maraschino cherries filled the top half of the screen, sitting atop chocolate and caramel sauce that oozed over pistachio, French vanilla and coffee ice cream.

“This is what awaits us at the end of the presentation,” said Axmann.
 
Someone away from the screen said, “Yes!” in a stage whisper that sent a wave of smiles rippling toward the front that splashed onto Axmann himself.
 
He sent a smile back the other way.

“Perfect,” he thought to himself.
 
It always amazed him that Ivy Leaguers and Wall Street analysts responded to the promise of a quick sugar high in pretty much the same way as five-year-olds.
 

Axmann’s movie-star good looks were a huge asset to his presentations.
 
But he knew that more than ten minutes of Powerpoint slides in a darkened conference room about his area of expertise – getting drugs from concept to approved medicines – would bore at least some in the audience.
 
He wanted to leave a positive, lasting impression.
 
If they recalled nothing else about this session three months from now, the MBAs should remember the banana splits.
 
He’d had the chocolate sauce flown in from Belgium.

The next slide was an old black-and-white portrait, circa 1900, of an anonymous gentleman with an impressive set of white whiskers who looked to be somewhere between 80 and 100.

“Compared to our brethren here in the Bay Area at the high-tech software and hardware companies, we might seem a little stodgy,” said Axmann.
 
“Look at the executive teams at the top 10 drug companies – ‘Big Pharma’ as we’re called – and you’ll see many people who have been at their companies a long time.

“People who started out 25 years ago as researchers, chemists, salesmen,” he continued.
 
“It’s true that there is a premium placed on people who know the science, know the history and – most important – understand how this industry works.”

The next slide was of a living room filled with folding tables and a half-dozen young programmers working in front of multiple computer monitors arrayed in front of them.
 
Pizza boxes were scattered around and a huge, overweight ginger cat slept on top of a large piece of computer equipment in the foreground.

 
“Looks like my frat house,” said someone at the table.

“Exactly,” said Axmann.
 
“Or any one of 100 software startups around here in Palo Alto, Fremont or San Francisco.

“Don’t get me wrong,” he continued.
 
“There are plenty of start ups in the drug business.
 
But, they won’t look like this, of course.
 
The software crowd might get a workable prototype of whatever they’re making – maybe a Windows app – up and running in a year.
 
If they can attract, say, $5 million, they’ve got a shot.
 
They can run it up the flagpole, wave it around.
 
See if it’s useful and if they can get people – businesses, consumers or whatever their market is – to use it.”

The next slide showed a room with a dozen people wearing lab coats sitting at laboratory work benches surrounded by microscopes and other equipment.

“Here is how a biotech startup looks,” said Axmann.
 
“There is probably more than $5 million worth of equipment just in this room alone.
 
And, getting just one drug out of here and safely on the market will cost more than 100 times that amount and that’s on the cheap end.
 
A price tag of $1 billion to get a drug from concept to market is not unusual.
 
And, on average it will take eight years from discovery to FDA approval.”

The image on the screen disappeared and another one appeared showing a man wearing a tuxedo at a craps table.
 
He was preparing to throw a pair of dice.

“Billion-dollar bets,” said Axmann.
 
“That’s what we’re about.
 
Billion-dollar bets.
 
It’s not for the faint of heart.
 
Sure…we have to execute.
 
We have many thousands of people devoted to making, marketing and selling our products.
 
But make no mistake.
 
Where the rubber meets the road is deciding
where
we place the bets.
 
Bet wrong and you’re out hundreds of millions of dollars.
 
Hit it right, and you’ve got this.”

The screen now changed to show bars of black and blue running lengthwise.
 
Each colored bar had a drug name next to it.
 
There were dates running along the top of the slide, starting at 2006 and running out to 2016.
 
A few of the bars ran across the entire slide.
 
Most stopped part way across.

“The six black bars represent Merrick & Merrick drugs earning at least $1 billion a year in revenue,” said Axmann.
 
“The blue ones sell less than $1 billion but more than $200 million annually.
 
Where they end is the year that we lose patent protection and the generics enter the market.

“The top two are, of course, our entries for the cholesterol and the anti-depression markets,” he continued.
 
“Those two bring in $4 billion a year…each!
 
Next, is Morceptin, our flagship cancer treatment that is now used for four types of cancer.
 
Annual sales are $3 billion but it is the fastest growing of our major drugs and our patents on it run through 2016.

“There have been breakthroughs historically in the drug industry, such as antibiotics and chemotherapy,” said Axmann.
 
“But, the application of genetic technology combined with better understanding of the human genome – that’s a true revolution just beginning to take off.
 
It will save tens of millions of lives.
 
It will add billions of years of improved quality of life to the world.
 
How many software apps can claim that?”

The executive directed everyone’s attention back to the screen behind him.

“Does anyone see any problems ahead for us?” he asked.

Halfway down the table, an attractive woman with auburn hair in her mid 20s raised her
 
hand.
 

“Stanford,” thought Axmann.
 
“Chemical engineering major with two years at McKinsey Consulting.”

“Yes,” he said.

“In 2012,” she said.
 
“A third of your patents go away along with half the revenue stream.”

“Correct,” said Axmann.
 
“That’s our challenge over the next five years.
 
Replenish the pipeline.
 
And, that’s also our shareholders’ leap of faith – that we have the smarts and the guts to make the right bets.
 
We either discover and develop them ourselves, or buy them probably from the startups we discussed.
 
Either way, they must be on the market before the ones you see here hit the wall.

“And, of course, if any of our cash cows, the drugs currently represented by the black bars, drop out before they’re supposed to for some reason – it might be competition, patent problems, FDA issues – the consequences are enormous.
 
To be honest, that’s what I lose sleep over at night.”

The executive paused while he looked around the room at the MBA candidates watching him.
 
He felt a pain in his gut.
 
Stomach acid washing over his ulcer.
 
He needed to sit down. Axmann clicked the projector controller one more time.
 
The banana split reappeared.

“I’m getting hungry,” he said with a thin smile.
 
“Ice cream, anyone?”