Fatal Reaction (19 page)

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 used her unflappable intelligence here. I was also glad my mother had agreed to take over the planning of the actual visit. I didn’t care how much it ended up costing me in draperies and antiques. Looking at the monumental size of the other tasks that lay ahead of me I didn’t see how I could have possibly managed otherwise.

And still I wondered whether all the effort was for nothing. When I listened to it, there was a small voice in my head that rattled off the hundred ways the deal could go wrong. If Mikos announced that they’d solved the structure first, Takisawa could get cold feet and back out, just as Okuda had with the integrase inhibitor. The Japanese, who possessed a horror of litigation, might recoil when they learned of the Serezine suits which Azor was obliged to carry on its balance sheet as a liability. Or, as we’d feared all along, their interest could just dry up and blow away as soon as we revealed to them that Danny was gone.

I didn’t know enough about the science to understand the full extent of the reversals that were possible, but what little I did know chilled me. Even if Azor’s crystallographers were able to solve the structure of the receptor molecule before Mikos, there was no guarantee Remminger would be able to design the new drug or even that it would work. There was always a chance that the toxic side effect-causing structures of the molecule could not be separated from its anti-inflammatory action and could therefore not be eliminated. Or they could make it and then find out it made you crazy or caused cancer or birth defects.

The more I thought about it, the more anxious I got. I felt overwhelmed and defeated without having even begun. I had to remind myself that that always happened at the beginning of a new case and I’d been there enough before to know it would pass. I found myself thinking of that hoary business riddle, “Q: How do you eat an elephant? A: One bite at a time.”

By the time Lou Remminger knocked on my door she found me at the center of a blizzard of paper, as immersed in the problem of capital dilution as she was in the search for a successor molecule to ZK-501.

“I didn’t think high-priced downtown lawyers had to work on Sundays,” she drawled as she came in and took a seat. She was dressed in a pair of low-rider black jeans and a T-shirt that was two sizes too small and best described as phlegm-colored. I’d heard that Remminger had been invited to a dinner at the Chicago Academy of Sciences honoring Stephen Hawkings, the world-famous mathematician, only to be turned away at the door when security refused to believe she was Dr. Lou Remminger, the famous chemist.

I wondered why she did it. Maybe she’d decided the attention she got was worth the occasional hassles. It was hard to believe there were many places she went professionally where she didn’t turn heads.

“I thought I’d come by and see if you were interested in furthering your scientific education,” she continued. “Always.”

“Michelle’s got some crystals she’s going to try to diffract in a little while. I thought you might want to come down and watch.”

“Does this mean she’s close to the structure?” I asked with transparent eagerness. I couldn’t help but think how wonderful it would be if we had the structure in time for the Takisawa visit.

“I don’t know about close, but we’d sure be closer.”

“So, tell me, how do they grow the crystals?” I asked. “Michelle starts out with the receptor that Borland purifies and then she adds another drug for the protein to latch onto. After that she suspends a drop of the solution from a glass slide and very slowly changes the composition of the solution and the surrounding vapor over a number of days. I think there may also be a magical chant involved that they teach you as a postdoc, but don’t quote me on that.”

“So how big are these crystals when they’re ready to be looked at?”

“A big one would be a sixteenth of an inch long.”

I found myself marveling, not for the first time, at the certitude with which scientists like Borland and Remminger seemed to deal with the subatomic world. I found it nearly impossible to imagine what a piece of furniture would look like upholstered in a different fabric while to the scientists of the ZK-501 project atoms and molecules seemed as solid and tangible as a sack of apples.

“The trouble, as you have no doubt heard, is that proteins in general and ZKBP in particular are a pain to work with. The conditions have to be absolutely perfect to grow crystals and even if you grow them once there’s still no guarantee you’ll be able to grow them again.”

“So it’s largely a matter of luck, then?”

“I wouldn’t say that, but crystallography is one of those things where it’s better to be lucky than good.”

“And is Michelle lucky?”

“We’ll see in about ten minutes, though I’ve got to say that up until now
lucky
is not a word I’d have picked to describe Michelle.”

“Why’s that?”

“I guess you wouldn’t know him, but Michelle did her dissertation under Max Guzak—literally. Max is the big crystallographer at Rutgers. He’s a lot like Childress except that on top of having a big ego he has something of a dick control problem. Too bad nobody ever warned poor little Michelle. She just showed up all starstruck that she’d been chosen to work in the great man’s lab, having never had a date in her life—and all of a sudden there’s this good-looking, Nobel prizewinner stroking her cheek and telling her how devastatingly attractive he finds her. I’m sure he told her she was the love of his life and fed her some story about how they were destined for each other.”

“So what happened?”

“He fucked her for a couple of weeks and then dumped her for some new techie in his lab with blond hair and big tits.”

“How did Michelle take it?”

“Michelle is tougher than she looks. Instead of running home to mama, Michelle stuck it out and finished her dissertation. Not only that, but she told him that if he didn’t recommend her for a postdoc at M.I.T., she’d tell his wife all about what had gone on between them.”

“So did she end up getting the postdoc?”

“Yeah. When she was finished there she was offered a postdoc at Purdue. That’s when she started her work on PGHS-1 and doing triathlons.”

“What’s that?”

“A race where you swim for two hours, bike fifty miles, and then run a marathon.”

“I know what a triathlon is,” I replied. “What’s PGHS-1?”

“It’s one of two enzymes that aspirin binds to in the body. When Michelle started working on it, it was considered a key enzyme for the development of a new generation of analgesic compounds.”

“And was it?”

“Nope. It turns out that it’s the other enzyme, PGHS-2, that represents the active site. Michelle spent three years demonstrating that she could solve the" structure of a complex molecule; unfortunately it was the wrong molecule. That’s why she jumped at the chance to come to Azor to work on the integrase inhibitor. She took a lot of flack from her department when- she took a leave of absence from Purdue. I’ve even heard rumors that they might not take her back at the end of the year, that they’re going to say she violated her contract by coming to Azor.”

“So why did she come?”

“Because she thought she was getting another shot at stepping into the spotlight. It’s like a tryout in the majors. How can you not step up to the plate and see if you’re good enough?”

“But Mikos solved the structure of integrase first, and Azor had to abandon the project when Okuda pulled out.”

“There are some people around here who think that if they didn’t waste so much time putting on a dog and pony show for every company that Danny and Stephen brought through here in the hopes of striking up some kind of joint venture deal she might have gotten to it first.” Lou looked down at her watch and hopped to her feet. “Come on, it’s time to see whether Michelle’s luck has changed.”

I followed Lou Remminger into the basement. Crystal-lographers, she explained, are by necessity bottom dwellers. The computer equipment and X-ray generators necessary for their craft are much too heavy to be supported by an upper floor. At Azor they are relegated to the bowels of the building, somewhere between the loading dock and the animal labs.

The main crystallography lab was nicknamed the aquarium on account of the large plate-glass window that separated it from the hallway. Through it could be glimpsed all manner of bulky and unfamiliar equipment, which collectively seemed to emit an ominous, low hum.

Before I’d become involved with Azor I’d always thought of scientific research as a highly cerebral enterprise. But the reality had much more in common with carpentry than with philosophy. I had seen for myself that laboratories are frustrating, physical workshops, places where the gap between the concepts and successful experiments formed a cruel and difficult chasm.

By the time we arrived in the basement a half-dozen investigators were already gathered around the aquarium window, peering into the darkened crystallography lab where Michelle Goodwin labored alone. The room was so crammed with equipment that there was no room for spectators. Also, many of the scientists no doubt preferred to avoid exposure to the high levels of radiation that were the inevitable by-product of the X-ray equipment. Everyone who worked in the basement, not just the crystallographers, wore a small device on their ID card that measured the cumulative amount of radiation to which they were exposed. Because it was colored red it was naturally referred to as “the red badge of courage.”

Perched on a library stool, Michelle sat hunched over the superstructure of the X-ray generator like a bicycle racer poised over the handlebars. Her short dark curls were disheveled and her face, never pretty, was pulled into a tight frown of concentration. Her hand trembled as she mounted a thin capillary tube into the generator’s rotating top. The generator, which was shaped like an industrial freezer with computers mounted at either end, was so big that it took up most of the available space in the lab.

“That’s the crystal,” Remminger informed me in a whisper. “It’s floating in the liquid inside the tube.”

Michelle moved quickly to one of the monitors and punched commands into the computer console. I couldn’t begin to understand what I was seeing, but the tension on Michelle’s face spoke volumes about its importance.

“She’s just sent the X rays through the crystal,” said Remminger.

As the machines hummed into action Michelle stepped away from the monitor to give all the spectators an unobstructed view.

“It’ll be a few seconds before the pattern emerges,” whispered Carl Woodruff, coming up behind me. There was anxiety in his voice—and excitement.

“Is Stephen here?” asked Remminger, looking over her shoulder.

“No,” whispered Carl. “He thought his presence would make it worse if she doesn’t succeed.”

We all waited, straining in anticipation. For a full minute I don’t think any of the people gathered in that hallway even breathed. When the first spots appeared on the screen a murmur of excitement rippled through the assembly, and even though I didn’t understand any of it, my heart soared. But just as suddenly as it had started a hush descended. I couldn’t see Michelle’s face, but her body stiffened in disappointment as if she’d been dealt a blow.

“Oh shit,” whispered Remminger.

“Proteins have very large, complex structures,” Carl explained as Lou made her way into the crystallography lab to console Michelle. “They have hundreds of atoms, thousands of electrons, protons, and neutrons. Shoot an X ray through a protein and you should see a small galaxy of spots. But look at this, there are only a dozen. What she’s got in there isn’t ZKBP, it’s something else. A salt maybe.”

Through the window I saw Lou say something to Michelle, but when the crystallographer turned around, her face was pale and rigid as a mask. Wordlessly she stalked out of the X-ray lab, past the rapidly dispersing scientists, and made her way quickly down the hall and out through the animal labs.

“Poor Michelle,” someone whispered.

“Poor Michelle is right,” echoed Borland. “Somebody better go after her and take away her damn car keys.”

CHAPTER 16