The Finder: A Novel Read Free Page B

deserve.
    Which was why Tom Reilly used his corporate seats as often as possible. His job was to make rain for Good Pharma and that meant wooing and wowing a steady stream of potential investors. He himself loved the Yankees—though how many baseball games could a man see in a year?—but what he
really
loved was how great seats at the game put people in a great mood. And he made sure to keep that mood going. After the game he had the limo take his group straight from the stadium to one of the best night spots, maybe a hot little lounge crowded with models, maybe a jazz club downtown. Always something to do in New York, folks. Affable Germans, clever Brits, fake-relaxed Japanese, high-tech cowboys from out west in $7,000 snakeskin boots or gumbo-guzzlers from down south—gimme anybody! They
all
had a blast with Tom Reilly. Show them a good time, make sure they get back to their hotel exhausted with fun. Good
fun.
Good
Pharma.
The first equals the second. They were no longer just a small company. Last year's revenues topped $800 million. Market capitalization now $33.2 billion. Growing steadily. Twenty-eight percent last year. See what happens when you whip
that
out of your pants! New drugs in the pipeline. Emphasis on lifestyle improvement therapies. Good stuff coming out of Good Pharma. That was the message, and the message was the medium, baby. Good Pharma was a new enough biopharmaceutical company that it needed to keep hustling investors. Nibble on our stock, graze on our bonds, get a taste of it. Rub a little of that surgingmarket penetration on your gums, snuff a bit up into your nostrils. Like that?
Taste
that . . .
feel
that—that stream of patents, the awesome products under development? The new applications, the category killers, all aimed at global use? Good stuff, right? Then gobble some of the pills or, better yet, just inject the stock right into your bloodstream.
Good
Pharma! Nine million dollars spent on branding research, too: respondents liked the postironic pun in the company title. Seemed hip, new, futuristically cool in its faux–Big Brother cleverness. "Big pharma" (derogatory but perceived as powerful and efficacious) plus "good karma" (retrohippyish, naturalish, organic or Hindu or religious or
something
kind of humane and nice) equals Good Pharma! They had drugs coming along that were going to make the aging baby boomers start cha-cha-ing all over the golf course. Make them remember their sixth-grade homework, hump everything that moved, lose weight while they slept, dunk basketballs. That was true, in fact, even if anecdotal. The Good Pharma researchers in one of the cartilage-therapy trials had enrolled a couple of
old
NBA players, geezery black giants who felt so good they started dunking the ball again. The stuff was based on some kind of Brazilian tree frog bone cells that they'd cloned. Think of when that hit the market, think of the clip in the webcast commercials when a seventy-year-old black man dunks a basketball! Millions of thick-hipped white women would
demand
prescriptions! Score with Good Pharma!
    But now it was time for baseball. The pin-striped Yanks were on the field, expertly whipping the ball around, warming up under a soft seven p.m. sky. Tom had the tickets ready in his hand and settled down in the seats with his two guests, a sixtyish Cuban investor from Miami named Jaime "Jim" Martinez and his protégé, a young man who knew enough to say nada.
    "You were right!" agreed Martinez, seeing how close they were to home plate but expecting no less. "Very good seats."
    "Absolutely," burbled Tom, the message being
you guys are worth it.
That was half of making a deal, getting that symmetrical rush of greed started. And he should know, he'd made a lot of deals for a guy who was just a few years over forty. Tom Reilly, Senior Executive Vice President for Schmoozing Big Investors. Corporate responsibility for the Manufacture of Extremely Valuable Hype. Skills include Smiling Through