"Yes," I said slowly, putting down my bag.
"I can put you all into contact, just to put feelers out," Anke offered. "I did something similar for the Holbrooks."
"Yes, that would be very helpful, Anke," I replied. Maybe she wasn't such a terrible assistant after all.
"Isn't she great?" Adrian gushed.
"Adrian, help Anke with anything she needs on that effort," I told him. He saluted me. "Sure thing, boss."
Adrian's crush was sort of cute. He was barely out of high school, and I knew he wouldn't act on it. It was more puppy love than anything else.
* * *
The conference wasin less than a week, and Josie was scheduled to present the team's progress to me and my brothers along with Owen Frost.
"How's it looking?" he asked after shaking my hand when we met in the lobby.
"A lot better," I told him.
Tara and Anke were already in the room when I walked in. The first slide was up on the screen with the same thin blue circle logo. I admired how sharp it looked against the black background.
"I just want to say right off the bat," Owen began. "I've been to a lot of these types of conferences. This is by far the best thing I've seen. I love this logo."
Josie smiled.
"Yes, it's quite beautiful," Anke said. The expression on Josie's face seemed to grow dark, but then the smile was back. I must have imagined it.
"As you can see," Josie said, flipping through the presentation, "we have everything about ninety-five percent done. Mace will be speaking against these slides, so I'll run through what I've written for the presentation. Mace will need to memorize the final version after comments."
"I'm really impressed with what you all managed to accomplish in a short period of time," I said after she ran through the presentation.
"I've made a few more notes," Owen added, "but yes, I think this is quite good."
"There's a lot more!" Josie said. She closed the PowerPoint and brought up a website. It had the same black color with pops of blue.
It looked masculine and credible but still fresh. My brothers nodded appreciatively as Josie walked us through the website. Adrian elbowed Parker when his picture came up.
"You boys photograph so well!" Anke said with a laugh. Adrian laughed louder than anyone else.
"Shut up!" Parker hissed at him. Owen smirked. Josie didn't seem all that amused.
"Back to the topic at hand," she said, face serious. "As you can see, the website gives an animated walk-through of the gene therapy procedure. We have easy-to-digest information on how the various gene therapies work. We also have interviews with people who have used it. We also had a video produced."
She hit the play button. There were sweeping drone shots of the facility and images of Harrogate, the hydroelectric plant, and workers in the lab. The stunning visuals were punctuated by soft but upbeat music. Josie explained the story behind it as the video played.
"Svensson PharmaTech is all about innovation in health. We take a macro view of how our company integrated into and revitalized the town of Harrogate."
The screen showed videos and images of a run-down city that then transformed into the city as it was today. And when I said transformed, I didn't mean it just faded into another picture.
"How did you do that?" Garrett demanded. Josie grinned.
"It's such a cool effect, isn't it?" she asked, rewinding the video. We watched as an aerial flyover video of run-down Harrogate seemed to grow and brighten as new buildings popped up and trees sprouted.
"A guy I know does CGI for Hollywood movies. He rendered this graphic on the computer." She turned back to the video. "So you can see our innovation in Harrogate and in the fact that we developed this hydroelectric plant to power our buildings and the servers processing the genetic data. This technology is specifically tailored to each individual patient…"
There was a shot of Henry sitting in a medical chair, getting blood drawn.
"Did they have to bribe him to get him to sit still for that long?" I muttered to Owen. He snorted.
