Twenty faces stared back at him, male and female, black and white, doughy and chiseled, but attentive to a one. Dean scrutinized them, amused by himself, the market challenges, the tension in the room. His hair, silvered but as yet unthinned by age, was short and expertly styled. A forty-five-hundred-dollar suit disguised his softening athlete's build, enhancing his shoulders, firming his posture, creating a more tapered waist. Dean Kagan had never been forthcoming about his age, but an average of the conflicting public-record accounts put him at seventy-three.
The air smelled of linseed oil and leather, still new-car strong though twenty-seven years of weekly 6:30 A.M. "stratcom" meetings had passed through the war room since it was constructed. The impressive plane of wood on which rested elbows, reports, and various mugs of designer coffee was Bolivian mahogany, acquired for a pretty penny before the import laws clamped down. The brass fittings of the cabinets were polished to a boot-camp gleam, and the window that stretched the length of the north wall, providing a twenty-six-story view of Westwood and the smog-shrouded Santa Monicas beyond, was spotless.
The solid-core oak door had been calibrated to bulletproof, as had been the door leading into the anteroom, one of many details put into effect by the same overpriced Beverly Hills firm that had sent contractors to secure the oil fields of Kirkuk. Stem-cell research that Beacon-Kagan sponsored on three continents had led to increased threats, but there'd be no shoot-em-ups here, nor at the Kagan estate, where the windows were tactical glass and Dean's security adviser-who lived full-time in a guesthouse-was always within handgun range. The master suite even had a walk-in closet that converted to a safe room in case of burglary or attack. Dean had cut a swath through the world of international commerce over the past half century, and he wasn't going down because some mouth-breathing crusader with a hair-trigger twitch couldn't shake a fit of empathy over the treatment of his primate brethren.
Beacon-Kagan had sprung up fast and hard in the late seventies, stealing talent from the universities and competing corporations and developing a slate of solid but unexceptional meds that kept the company reasonably profitable from the start. As it grew more innovative and reactive, it began to reap higher dividends. Beacon-Kagan had added its name to the roll of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, at last muscling up to the table with Merck, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Pfizer, and its other better-regarded, higher-market-cap competitors. Over the past several decades, Dean had driven the company-and its stock-north with relentless focus and vigor, Beacon having long fallen out of the picture, slumped into his potatoes au gratin at a corporate luncheon in his fifty-ninth year with a blown aorta. Today Beacon-Kagan was poised not only to compete but to trailblaze.
Dean punched an intercom button built into the desk. The door creaked open, and a nervous assistant stood in the gap, her hands clenched before a tasteful charcoal skirt.
"My coffee," Dean said.
The assistant relayed the message to someone out of sight, and a demitasse, gold rimmed, appeared almost instantly through the gap. She delivered it to Dean and backed away, ready to respond if he chose to make eye contact.
The leather chair cocked under his weight. "Now," he said, with the relish of a football coach assigning a particularly grueling hitting drill, "let's trot out the workhorses."
The senior VP of Sales and Marketing ruffled her notepad, then pulled off a stylish pair of glasses and set them on the table. Jane Bernard was a tenacious, steely woman with handsome features and a shell of coiffed gray hair. "Why don't we begin with Midachol?"
Dean tipped his head in a nod.
They'd added their own statin to the cluster behind the counters and, with aggressive promotion, managed to squeak out an 11 percent market share to the tune of a billion and a half a year. To approve a new drug, the FDA demanded only that it be shown superior to a placebo, not to other drugs. In Beacon-Kagan-conducted trials, Midachol had beat a sugar pill at lowering cholesterol nine times out of ten.
The young man across from her looked up from his BlackBerry and shot Jane a wink. In an approximation of an arranged marriage, he was engaged to her daughter, currently back east finishing a clinical social work degree at Smith. Chase Kagan returned to his e-mail, holding the wireless device in both hands like a GameBoy. His navy jacket hung over the back of his chair, freeing him to display the rich colors of his madras shirt. A knee, clad in artfully rumpled linen, was propped against the table's lip. His eyes were small and pale, set in pouches of loose skin accented by lashes so light they disappeared unless the sun hit them. He carried an air of uninterest-not apathy but boredom, as if he knew all the answers before the questions had been asked. A precocious but well-earned affectation for a twenty-eight-year-old a few promotions out of B-school.
Jane offered her future son-in-law a terse smile, folded her arms, and said, "We've stayed horizontal for June and July-"
Dean said, "Lobby the panel, get them to change the parameters of high blood pressure. We already got one-forty over ninety moved to one-twenty over eighty, see if they'll give us another adjustment. It'll open up the market for everyone. Two of the panel members are our consultants-I'm sure the other fine M.D.'s are living subsidized lifestyles on someone else's dime. Sandeep, put out a pigeon to our brothers-in-arms. We can play well with others at this stage, fight it out over market share later. What else?"
"We need a more aggressive ad campaign," Jane said. "We have to go up against the competition directly."
"Who's stopping you?" Dean said. "Here's what we do: Pick off the top dog. We run a quick trial comparing Midachol to Lipitor-twenty mgs of ours against ten mgs of theirs. We don't have to disclose dosage-"
"Better yet"-all heads swiveled to Diane Little, head of Legal-"nor do the guidelines specify how we need to administer. So for the Lipitor sample group, we can give the drugs other than as recommended-say, topically instead of orally."
Dean's head panned the table. "What else? I want to hear those gears clanking, hamsters running on their wheels. Earn those stock options."
Jenner, Research, cleared his throat. "If we're moving toward comparative branding, how about an obscure safety test? We'll stress that Midachol usage doesn't cause testicular cancer. Since the other companies haven't tested for it, it buys us a 'proven safer than' tag in the commercial."
"We do, however, have some FDA complaints about the incomplete list of side effects on the current commercials. That we might need to address," Little said. "We capped them at five seconds for a thirty-second spot, but we need at least ten."
"No," Dean said. "I'm not paying two-fifty K per prime-time hit to air voice-over about burning urination and flatulence. Refer viewers to a Web site."
"We'll hear about it from the FDA, Mr. Kagan."
"I've been hearing from the FDA for twenty years. What do we care about fines? We negotiate the levels of the fines every lobbying season. Now-do you know how many people the FDA employs to review industry ads for accuracy and balance, Ms. Little? Thirty. Thirty people for thirty-four thousand ads annually. They're slow. By the time they send us a warning letter, the campaign's run its course and the ads are off the air."
"And if we're nailed?"
"Our bottom line can handle a few nickels out and a page-twenty-seven mention in the Journal better than explosive diarrhea as declaimed by Mr. Moviephone. Next."
"We think you at least want to consider-"
"Next. How are we looking in the ambulatory-suicide department?"
"Strong," said Patrick White, VP of Product Management. "We gained two on Prozac, nearly as much on Zoloft. But we're losing the patent on Pastol next year, so we need some strategies for extending-"