Chapter 3 – DAMON
DAMON
The file wasn't where it should have been.
I'd asked for the phase-three cardiac sub-analysis, the full dataset, not the summary, and what sat on my desk was a forty-page summary with half the appendices missing.
I flipped through it twice. The numbers I needed weren't there.
The numbers that would let me stand in front of a camera and dismantle that lab's hatchet job line by line simply weren't there.
"Patricia." I didn't shout. I never had to. The intercom carried fine. "The full sub-analysis. Not the summary. I asked for it this morning."
A pause followed that told me everything.
"I—that was what was sent up from R&D, Mr. Sterling. The summary. I can call down and?—"
My phone lit up on the desk. A number I didn't recognize, then a second, then a third, stacking like planes circling a runway.
The Tribune woman had my cell, which meant somebody had given it to her, which meant the messaging I'd been trying for the better part of a week to control was spreading like wildfire.
The screen flashed again. Bloomberg. I declined it.
"Patricia, come in here."
She came. Mid-forties, cardigan, a coffee ring on the saucer she carried because she always carried coffee even when nobody asked.
Eight years she'd sat outside my door. She knew the building's bones, knew which board members took calls before nine and which ones I could ignore until noon. I'd give her that. She knew things.
"The study broke into the financial press overnight," I said.
"Bloomberg's calling. The Journal already ran it.
The Tribune piece that was supposed to bury this comes out Sunday, which is three days too late, and right now what I need to fight back is sitting in a database that I cannot access because the one document I asked for didn't arrive.
" I set the summary down flat. "How many of those calls did you screen? "
"I—there were a great many, sir, I've been trying to triage?—"
"How many got patched to the floor?"
She didn't answer fast enough.
"Two," she said finally. "Mr. Park in IR took one before I could?—"
"So a journalist spoke to someone on my investor relations team about an active crisis without a single approved talking point in front of them." I stood. The window behind me showed the city flat and gray under a sky that hadn't decided whether to rain. "Patricia, I think we're done."
Her face moved through several things before it settled on understanding.
"Mr. Sterling?—"
"Clear your desk. HR will handle the package, and it'll be generous, you've earned that much.
But I can't run a war from a fort that leaks.
" I was already looking past her to the doorway, where Adam Park's deputy, a sharp kid named Reese, hovered with a tablet clutched to his chest. "Reese.
Come in. Patricia, thank you. Genuinely. "
She set the coffee saucer down on the corner of my desk, the cup rattling once, and walked out with more dignity than most would manage. I'd remember that.
Reese came in like a man stepping onto thin ice.
"Sir, I—with respect, are you sure? Patricia knows where everything is. She's got the board's whole rhythm memorized, she's the only one who can find anything in the old contract archive, and we are walking into the worst week this company's had in a decade. Losing her right now is?—"
"All the more reason." I picked up my phone, killed another incoming call without looking at the name.
"I don't need someone who knows where everything is.
I need someone who can get me what I ask for the first time I ask.
Find me one. Today. Pull from the executive pool, borrow from Mark's office if you have to, but I want competent hands outside that door by end of day. "
"It's a lot to expect someone to walk into cold?—"
"Reese." I let it come out flat. "Everyone in this building can be replaced. Everyone. Me included, on a bad enough day. Sentiment is a luxury and I cannot afford a single luxury this week. Are we clear?"
He swallowed. "Crystal."
"Good." I came around the desk. The summary I left where it lay, useless paper.
"Now. The real problem. That study didn't crawl out of a hole on its own, and even if Brighton planted it, it doesn't bite unless our own data gives it teeth.
So either our trials were clean and somebody can prove it to me in twenty minutes, or they weren't, and somebody buried a signal in a sub-analysis and let me walk into a launch with my throat bare.
" I buttoned my jacket. "I want the head of R&D in the small conference room.
The one with no windows. Forty minutes."
Reese was tapping at the tablet already. "I'll see if Dr. Milton is?—"
"Not on a call. In a room. Across a table from me, with every dataset from every phase, and an explanation I can actually use.
" I stopped at the door and looked back at him.
"And Reese. If the explanation is good, we go fight Brighton together.
If it's not—" I let the pause do its work, the way my father had taught me before I was old enough to shave.
"Then by Monday I'll be looking at a new head of R&D, and you'll be the one who set up that interview.
So make sure I'm in that room with the person who can either save this or hang for it. Understood?"
"Understood, sir."
He went. The door clicked. The phone lit again, and again, that runway full of circling planes, and I let every one of them ring out into nothing.
I stood at the window a moment longer than I should have, knuckles on the glass, looking down at the slick gray streets twelve floors below.
Two thousand jobs. A drug that worked, I was certain it worked, three phases of data that I had believed in the way you believe in things you'd staked your name on.
The launch was the thing I'd built my whole adult life toward, the thing that would finally make my father look at me and see not the heir but the man who'd outgrown him.
And somewhere in this building, in a database I couldn't reach because a forty-page summary had landed on my desk instead of the truth, the answer was waiting. Clean, or dirty. Salvation, or the end of everything.
I went back out to Patricia's empty desk to hunt for a pen, because apparently, mine was missing too. When I saw the note stuck to her monitor that simply read MADDIE, I frowned and picked it up.
Maddie? Had she called in the midst of all this chaos? No, there were no missed calls from her on my personal phone and she wouldn't call my secretary unless it was something that wasn't time sensitive. Probably about the launch party.
As if flowers and gourmet food were going to be capable of saving this absolute disaster.
I crumpled the note and tossed it in the bin, snatching up the pen that had written it. It was the kind you'd buy in a pack of ten at any store, but for now, it would have to do.
I had more pressing matters to attend to.