a firm finger jabbed across the grain of the mahogany. "I'll be pushing up daisies before I permit this company to backslide on its P&E multiple. I want blood from a stone. And I want it staining our next quarterly sales estimate. Booked sales will be up before the shareholders' confab in November. I am not having another week's golf at Wailea rained on by those Wharton clones from the pension funds."
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
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
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