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moneymaking services to Medicaid patients?
    While it did nothing to shed light on their motives, a careful reading of the proposed purchase agreement between HCC and Prescott Memorial Hospital made one thing perfectly clear: HCC was no novice when it came to this kind of transaction. There was none of the amorphous, let’s-cover-our-asses-just-in-case language that you usually find in a company’s first time through a particular kind of deal. Indeed, every document generated by HCC was an impervious construction, one that had obviously been passed through many hands and tightened by able minds.
    The time frame that HCC had set out for the deal also disturbed me. Despite HCC’s reputation for moving quickly, I still would have expected the purchase of an asset as complex as a hospital to take longer than ten days to complete. Indeed, two years before, when Northwestern Memorial Hospital had approached Prescott Memorial about merging into their system, the two hospitals had negotiated off and on for six months before deciding not to come to terms. Now HCC proposed to do a similar deal in less than two weeks. Not only that, but there were steep financial penalties built into the agreement for even the most trifling delays. Perhaps it was fatigue clouding my judgment, but the reasons for this eluded me. The use of this kind of fast clock was usually reserved for deals where there was another buyer waiting in the wings. But Prescott Memorial wasn’t even up for sale, which meant that it was unlikely that HCC’s haste could be attributed to the fear of competing bidders.
    All of this was even more perplexing in light of the hospital’s financial situation. Health Care Corporation was the self-proclaimed leader in the field of for-profit medicine. What did they want with a hospital whose balance sheet painted a picture that could best be described as hand-to-mouth? While all of this merely buttressed my decision to not get involved, as I slowly returned the documents to the box I couldn’t help but wonder: What on earth did HCC want with Prescott Memorial Hospital, and even more importantly, why were they in such a big hurry?
     

CHAPTER 4
     
    The next day was an exercise in frustration. While Cheryl kept my mother at bay with a series of increasingly inventive excuses, I found my efforts to reestablish negotiations with Icon deflected every bit as deftly. Under other circumstances I might have appreciated the symmetry of the situation or at least admitted that it served me right for being a coward. But the stakes for Delirium were much too high—something that Mark Millman and Bill Delius had both taken pains to point out separately and at great length.
    Summoning the associates who’d been working on Delirium to my office, I set them to work drafting a tentative term sheet based on our negotiations so far, even though I didn’t think we’d ever use it. Besides wanting to keep morale up, I needed to keep them busy. Whenever there was a lull in the action, there was a danger that one of my partners would snag them for another assignment, leaving me scrambling if things with Icon suddenly heated back up.
    Afterward I asked Jeff Tannenbaum to stay behind. Jeff was an experienced associate who’d been working Wlth me on Delirium from the beginning. Together we toed to figure out a way to reach out to Gabriel Hurt and rekindle his lust for Delirium’s new technology. I used the word lust deliberately.
    The truth is, even I had to admit that what Bill Delius had developed was sexy. It was a new integrated language-based input device designed to free the computer user from having to use a keyboard or mouse. A tiny video camera mounted on the edge of the monitor tracked the user’s voice and movements and, using proprietary software, translated the visual and auditory information into commands the computer could understand. You could literally look at an icon on the screen and command the computer to open it.
    Developing the