Bloodline

by Sidney Sheldon

Chapter 17

 

  Elizabeth was awed.

  She had been here in her father's Zurich headquarters often, but always as a visitor. The power belonged to him. And now it belonged to her. She looked around the huge office and felt like an imposter. The room had been magnificently decorated by Ernst Hohl. At one end stood a Roentgen cabinet with a Millet landscape over it. There was a fireplace, and in front of it a chamois leather couch, a large coffee table and four easy chairs. Around the walls were Renoirs, Chagalls, Klees and two early Courbets. The desk was a solid block of black mahogany. Next to it, on a large console table, was a communications complex - a battery of telephones with direct lines to company headquarters around the world. There were two red phones with scramblers, an intricate intercom system, a ticker tape machine, and other equipment. Hanging behind the desk was a portrait of old Samuel Roffe.

  A private door led to a large dressing room, with cedar closets and lined drawers. Someone had removed Sam's clothing, and Elizabeth was grateful. She walked through a tiled bathroom that included a marble bathtub and a stall shower. There were fresh Turkish towels hanging on warming racks. The medicine chest was empty. All the daily paraphernalia of her father's life had been taken away. Kate Erling, probably. Elizabeth idly wondered whether Kate had been in love with Sam.

  The executive suite included a large sauna, a fully equipped gymnasium, a barbershop, and a dining room that could seat a hundred people. When foreign guests were being entertained, a little flag representing their country was placed in the floral centerpiece on the table.

  In addition, there was Sam's private dining room, tastefully decorated, with muraled walls.

  Kate Erling had explained to Elizabeth, "There are two chefs on duty during the day, and one at night. If you are having more than twelve guests for luncheon or dinner, they need two hours' notice. "

  Now Elizabeth sat at the desk, piled high with papers, memoranda, and statistics and reports, and she did not know where to begin. She thought of her father sitting here, in this chair, behind this desk, and she was suddenly filled with a sense of unbearable loss. Sam had been so able, so brilliant. How she needed him now!

  Elizabeth had managed to see Alec for a few moments before he returned to London.

  "Take your time," he had advised her. "Don't let anyone pressure you. "

  So he had sensed her feelings.

  "Alec, do you think I should vote to let the company go public?"

  He had smiled at her and said awkwardly, "I'm afraid I do, old girl, but then I've got my own ax to grind, haven't I? Our shares are no good to any of us until we can sell them. That's up to you now. "

  Elizabeth was remembering that conversation as she sat alone in the huge office. The temptation to telephone Alec was overpowering. All she had to say was, "I've changed my mind. " And get out. She did not belong here. She felt so inadequate.

  She looked at the set of intercom buttons on the console. Opposite one of them was the name RHYS WILLIAMS. Elizabeth debated a moment, then flicked down the switch.

  Rhys was seated across from her, watching her. Elizabeth knew exactly what he must be thinking, what they were all thinking. That she had no business being there.

  "That was quite a bomb you dropped at the meeting this morning," Rhys said.

  "I'm sorry if I upset everyone. "

  He grinned. "'Upset' is hardly the word. You put everyone in a state of shock. It was all supposed to have been cut-and-dried. The publicity releases were ready to send out. " He studied her a moment "What made you decide not to sign, Liz?"

  How could she explain that is was nothing more than a feeling, an intuition? He would laugh at her. And yet Sam had refused to let Roffe and Sons go public. She had to find out why.

  As though reading her thoughts, Rhys said, "Your great-great grandfather set this up as a family business, to keep away outsiders. But it was a small company then. Things have changed. We're running one of the biggest drugstores in the world. Whoever sits in your father's chair has to make all the final decisions. It's one hell of a responsibility. "

  She looked at him and wondered whether this was Rhys's way of telling her to get out. "Will you help me?"

  "You know I will. "

  She felt a rush of relief and she realized how much she had been counting on him.

  "The first thing we'd better do," Rhys said, "is take you on a tour of the plant here. Do you know about the physical structure of this company?"

  "Not much. "

  That was not true. Elizabeth had been in enough meetings with Sam over the past few years to have picked up a good deal of knowledge about the workings of Roffe and Sons. But she wanted to hear it from Rhys's point of view.

  "We manufacture much more than drugs, Liz. We make chemicals and perfumes and vitamins and hair sprays and pesticides. We produce cosmetics and bio-electronic instruments. We have a food division, and a division of animal nitrates. " Elizabeth was aware of all that, but she let Rhys go on. "We publish magazines for distribution to doctors. We make adhesives, and building protection agents and plastic explosives. "

  Elizabeth could sense that he was becoming caught up by what he was saying, she could hear the undertone of pride in his voice, and she was oddly reminded of her father.

  "Roffe and Sons owns factories and holding companies in over a hundred countries. Every one of them reports to this office. " He paused, as though to make sure that she understood the point. "Old Samuel went into business with a horse and a test tube. It's grown to sixty factories around the world, ten research centers and a network of thousands of salesmen and detail men and women. " They were the ones, Elizabeth knew, who called on the doctors and hospitals. "Last year, in the United States alone, they spent over fourteen billion dollars on drugs - and we have a healthy share of that market. "

  And yet Roffe and Sons was in trouble with the banks. Something was wrong.

  Rhys took Elizabeth on a tour of the company's headquarters' factory. In actuality, the Zurich division was a dozen factories, with seventy-five buildings on the sixty acres of ground. It was a world in microcosm, completely self-sustaining. They visited the manufacturing plants, the research departments, the toxicology laboratories, the storage plants. Rhys brought Elizabeth to a sound stage, where they made motion pictures for research and for their worldwide advertising and products divisions. "We use more film here," Rhys told Elizabeth, "than the major Hollywood studios. "

  They went through the molecular biology department, and the liquid center, where fifty giant stainless steel, glasslined tanks hung suspended from the ceiling, filled with liquids ready to be bottled. They saw the tablet-compression rooms, where powders were formed into tablets, sized, stamped with ROFFE AND SONS, packaged and labeled, without anyone ever touching them. Some of the drugs were ethical products, available only on prescription, others were proprietary items, sold over the counter.

  Set apart from the other buildings were several small buildings. These were for the scientists: the analytical chemists, biochemists, organic chemists, parasitologists, pathologists.

  "More than three hundred scientists work here," Rhys told Elizabeth. "Most of them are Ph. D. 's.

  Would you like to see our hundred-million-dollar room?"

  Elizabeth nodded, intrigued.

  It was in an isolated brick building, guarded by a uniformed policeman with a gun. Rhys showed his security pass, and he and Elizabeth were permitted to enter a long corridor with a steel door at the end of it. The guard used two keys to open the door, and Elizabeth and Rhys entered. The room contained no windows. It was lined from floor to ceiling with shelves filled with every variety of bottles, jars and tubes.

  "Why do they call this the hundred-million-dollar room?" Elizabeth asked.

  "Because that's what it cost to furnish it. See all those compounds on the shelves? None of them have names, only numbers. They're the ones that didn't make it. They're the failures
. "

  "But a hundred million - "

  "For every new drug that works, there are about a thousand that end up in this room. Some drugs are worked on for as long as ten years, and then abandoned. A single drug can cost five or ten million dollars in research before we find out that it's no good, or that someone else has beaten us to it. We don't throw any of these things away because now and then one of our bright young men will back into a discovery that can make something in this room valuable. "

  The amounts of money involved were awesome.

  "Come on," Rhys said. "I'll show you the Loss Room. "

  It was in another building, this one unguarded, containing, like the other rooms, only shelves filled with bottles and jars.

  "We lose a fortune here too," Rhys said. "But we plan it that way. "

  "I don't understand. "

  Rhys walked over to a shelf and picked up a bottle. It was labeled "Botulism. " "Do you know how many cases of botulism there were in the United States last year? Twenty-five. But it costs us millions of dollars to keep this drug in stock. " He picked up another bottle at random. "This is an antidote for rabies. This room is full of drugs that are cures for rare diseases - snakebites, poisonous plants. We furnish them free to the armed forces and to hospitals, as a public service. "

  "I like that," Elizabeth said. Old Samuel would have liked it too, she thought.

  Rhys took Elizabeth to the capsule rooms, where empty bottles were carried in on a giant conveyor belt. By the time they had crossed the room, the bottles had been sterilized, filled with capsules, labeled, topped with cotton, and sealed. All done by automation.

  There was a glassblowing factory, an architectural center to plan new buildings, a real estate division to acquire the land for them. In one building there were scores of writers turning out pamphlets in fifty languages, and printing presses to print them.

  Some of the departments reminded Elizabeth of George Orwell's 1984. The Sterile Rooms were bathed in eerie ultraviolet lights. Adjoining rooms were painted in different colors - white, green or blue - and the workers wore uniforms to match. Each time they entered or left the room, they had to go through a special sterilizing chamber. Blue workers were locked in for the entire day. Before they could eat or rest or go to the toilet, they had to undress, enter a neutral green zone, put on other clothes, and reverse the process when they returned.

  "I think you'll find this interesting," Rhys said.

  They were walking down the gray corridor of a research building. They reached a door marked "RESTRICTED - DO NOT ENTER. " Rhys pushed the door open, and he and Elizabeth walked through. They went through a second door and Elizabeth found herself in a dimly lit room filled with hundreds of cages containing animals. The room was hot and humid, and she felt as if she had suddenly been transported to a jungle. As her eyes grew accustomed to the half-light, she saw that the cages were filled with monkeys and hamsters and cats and white mice. Many of the animals had obscene-looking growths protruding from various parts of their bodies. Some had their heads shaven, and were crowned with electrodes that had been implanted in their brains. Some of the animals were screaming and gibbering, racing around in their cages, while others were comatose and lethargic. The noise and the stench were unbearable. It was like some kind of hell. Elizabeth walked up to a cage that contained a single white kitten. Its brain was exposed, enclosed in a clear plastic covering through which protruded half a dozen wires.

  "What - what's going on here?" Elizabeth asked.

  A tall, bearded young man making notes in front of a cage explained, "We're testing a new tranquilizer. "

  "I hope it works," Elizabeth said weakly. "I think I could use it. " And she walked out of the room before she could become sick.

  Rhys was at her side in the corridor. "Are you all right?"

  She took a deep breath. "I - I'm fine. Is all that really necessary?"

  Rhys looked at her and replied. "Those experiments save a lot of lives. More than one third of the people born since nineteen fifty are alive only because of modern drugs. Think about that. "

  Elizabeth thought about it.

  It took six full days to tour the key buildings, and when Elizabeth had finished, she was exhausted, her head spinning with the vastness of it. And she realized she was seeing just one Roffe plant. There were dozens of others scattered around the world.

  The facts and figures were stunning. "It takes between five and ten years to market a new drug, and out of every two thousand compounds tested, we'll average only three products. . . . "

  And ". . . Roffe and Sons has three hundred people working here in quality control alone. "

  And ". . . Worldwide, Roffe and Sons is responsible for over half a million employees. . . "

  And ". . . our gross income last year was. . . "

  Elizabeth listened, trying to digest the incredible figures that Rhys was throwing at her. She had known that the company was large, but "large" was such an anonymous word. Having it actually translated into terms of people and money was staggering.

  That night as Elizabeth lay in bed, recalling all the things she had seen and heard, she was filled with an overpowering feeling of inadequacy.

  Ivo: Believe me, cara, it is much better to leave all this to us. You don't understand these things.

  ALEC: I think you should sell but I have an ax to grind.

  WALTHER: Why bother yourself with this? You can go off anywhere you like and enjoy your money.

  They were right, all of them, Elizabeth thought. I'm going to get out and let them do what they like with the company. I do not belong in this position.

  The moment she made the decision, she felt a deep sense of relief. She fell asleep almost immediately.

  The following day, Friday, was the beginning of a holiday weekend. When Elizabeth arrived at the office, she sent for Rhys to announce her decision.

  "Mr. Williams had to fly to Nairobi last night," Kate Erling informed her. "He said to tell you he would be back on Tuesday. Can anyone else help you?"

  Elizabeth hesitated. "Put in a call to Sir Alec, please. "

  "Yes, Miss Roffe. " Kate added, a note of hesitation in her voice, "A package for you was delivered this morning by the police department. It contains the personal belongings your father had with him at Chamonix. "

  The mention of Sam brought back that sharp sense of loss, of grief.

  "The police apologized because they could not give it to your messenger. It was already on its way to you. "

  Elizabeth frowned. "My messenger?"

  "The man you sent to Chamonix to pick it up. "

  "I didn't send anyone to Chamonix. " It was obviously some bureaucratic mix-up. "Where is it?"

  "I put it in your closet. "

  There was a Vuitton suitcase, containing Sam's clothes, and a locked attache case with a key taped to it. Probably company reports. She would let Rhys handle them. Then she remembered that he was away. Well, she decided, she would go away for the weekend too. She looked at the attache case and thought, Perhaps there's something personal belonging to Sam. I'd better look at it first.

  Kate Erling buzzed. "I'm sorry, Miss Roffe. Sir Alec's out of the office. "

  "Leave a message for him to call me, please. I'll be at the villa in Sardinia. Leave the same message for Mr. Palazzi, Mr. Gassner and Mr. Martel. "

  She would tell them all that she was leaving, that they could sell the stock, do as they pleased with the company.

  She was looking forward to the long weekend. The villa was a retreat, a soothing cocoon, where she could be alone to think about herself and her future. Events had been flung at her so rapidly that she had had no chance to put things into any kind of perspective. Sam's accident - Elizabeth's mind tripped over the word "death"; inheriting the controlling stock of Roffe and Sons; the urgent pressure from the family to let the company go public. And the company itself. The awesome heartbeat of a behemoth whose pow
er spanned the world. It was too much to cope with all at once.

  When she flew to Sardinia late that afternoon, Elizabeth had the attache case with her.