him that it was one more way that the elderly could be victimized, this time by the financial world. He couldn’t help but worry that his ailing grandmother had been taken advantage of, and such a thought had helped rearrange his priorities.
Grabbing his jacket from the closet, George headed down to the elevators. Once there he briefly thought about Pia, and wondered if he should go up to her room to make sure she was awake. But he hit the down button. Hell, if she was going to be spending the day with Will, she could get herself up. Instead he decided to grab a coffee, rewarding himself with a more leisurely entry into the day than usual.
15.
STATISTICAL SOLUTIONS LLC CHELSEA, NEW YORK CITY MARCH 3, 2011, 9:17 A.M.
As was his habit, Edmund made sure he and Russell were fashionably late for their meeting at Statistical Solutions headquarters. They were greeted coolly by Henry Green and hustled directly into the same conference room as the previous day. The mood was somber, if not funereal. The room was occupied by a half-dozen people, including the slacker Tom dressed in a plaid shirt, wrinkled, low-riding Bermuda shorts, and flip- flops. Isabel was not to be seen. Two of the other people in the room-a young man and a woman-were dressed in a similar casual vein as Tom; two additional men who were a couple of years older wore dress shirts without jackets, pleated pants, and striped ties. Their haircuts were neat, conservative. The final man was dressed in a full dark suit and had an ostrich briefcase at his side.
Henry Green spoke first. In front of him were several copies of what looked like a bound report.
“Thank you, gentlemen, for coming in today. As I mentioned yesterday, Statistical Solutions LLC has decided to exercise its option to terminate its consultancy agreement with LifeDeals, Incorporated, as of close of business today, March third, 2011. In doing so, we are acting without prejudice, and we adhere to the articles of our initial agreement-”
“Yes, yes, blah, blah, blah,” Edmund said, interrupting Henry rudely. “We get it, Henry, you’re reading us the legal fine print so we think twice about suing you for incompetence. ‘If our information is useless, don’t blame us.’ Now, let’s play a game. Hands up, who in this room’s a lawyer? You?” Edmund asked, pointing quickly at Tom. Tom stared back at Edmund and didn’t flinch. “Don’t think so,” Edmund commented with a snicker. “How about you two?” Edmund gestured toward the two men dressed in shirts and ties. “Wrong again. Looks to me like a couple of accountants.”
“Mr. Mathews, I am trying to do this as painlessly and professionally as I can. Yes, I have asked our legal representation to join us, as you have so astutely observed-”
“He’s calling me Mr. Mathews now,” Edmund said, swinging around to address Russell. “He’s definitely been talking to his lawyers.”
“Okay, Edmund, that’s enough,” Russell mumbled. He was tired of making excuses for Edmund when he blew up in public like this. It was like traveling around town with a rebellious and obnoxious teenager.
In fact, Russell and Edmund had discussed whether they should bring their own lawyer to the meeting. Russell contended that if each side lawyered up, it was more than likely that the meeting would be aborted before it began. One lawyer would speak, the other would object, and LifeDeals and Statistical Solutions would be advised to leave the matter to their legal representation. What Russell had not anticipated was that Edmund saw red the moment he spotted Statistical Solutions’ legal counsel, who stood out from the others like a sore thumb. On edge from everything that was going on, Edmund took the man’s presence as a personal affront.
“If I may make a suggestion,” Russell said. “We came here this morning for the report that you promised. Let’s deal with the legal issues of our relationship after the fact.”
“Okay, Russell, thank you,” Henry said, glancing at Edmund, who appeared reasonably composed.
Edmund rolled his fists one over the other, like an umpire indicating for play to proceed. He wanted the facts, not the support behind the facts, and the longer it took getting the information implied that it wasn’t going to be to their liking.
“. . . and Paul, who had more than five years’ experience at the Department of Defense.” Edmund drummed his fingers on the desk.
“Okay. The work we did last night-all night, in fact-was to estimate how a shift to the right of the bell curves we previously created on the timing of the redemption of the life insurance policies LifeDeals holds would affect cash flow. We’ll have the formal report in a day or two but we can give you a preliminary one today. I have to say, we were surprised.”
Henry paused and took a sip from a glass of water.
“We were surprised how quickly even the slightest shift of the bell curves would affect the company’s financial situation. It would create a period of time in which the payment of premiums would need to be continued to maintain policy values with limited income. This effect is predicted because of the steepness of the bell curves’ slopes. As we know, once the policies start to be cashed out by LifeDeals, income can be expected to rise very rapidly, which is why we had strongly recommended that you maximize your purchase of life settlement policies in relation to capitalization. Everyone clear on this?”
Russell nodded vigorously. There was nothing new here.
“Okay, good. Next we looked at the life-span statistics of individuals lucky enough under current procurement and distribution protocols to get a new organ, be it a lung, a heart, a liver, a kidney, or a pancreas, depending on which degenerative disease is involved. We found that getting an organ alters these people’s life expectancies to a marked degree. Understand that we already factored in standard organ replacement rates in the preliminary data that we all approved, and it was at that time a small variable. But the new circumstances, the potential new circumstances, I should say, caused us to drill down into those statistics further and find different research that previously wasn’t relevant.”
Henry paused again to take a drink. Edmund was fit to burst.
“There are newer statistics which show how well new organs work for patients over a long period. The older figures implied that organ recipients still had the propensity, whatever it was, to affect the new organ and often adversely. But to a greater extent than we initially would have expected, new organs, or at least a large percentage of them, do very well over many years provided it’s a good match. Of course newer antirejection drugs have helped as well. In many or most cases, ten to fifteen years of life expectancy can be added to patients’ lives. In lay terms, it appears that you can put a new radiator in a beat-up car engine, and it doesn’t matter so much how you drive. The radiator’s going to hold up.
“We applied these newly developed statistics to the bell curves of LifeDeals’ policyholders and there’s no way around it-the implications are pretty catastrophic for cash flow if a percentage of policyholders get new organs. The higher the percentage, of course, the more catastrophic the effect.”
“What percentage?” Edmund barked.
“Well, the problem seems to be that the cash flow issue starts almost immediately with just a small shift to the right. Just a few percentage points.”
“What do you mean by ‘a few’? Five? Ten?”
“Er, five’s not good, ten would be, as I said, catastrophic.”
“So we’d need five to ten percent of diabetics to get a new pancreas,” said Edmund. “What are the chances of that happening?”
There was silence.
“These are not rich people. They won’t be able to afford it. It’s fucking pie in the sky.”
“Not necessarily,” Tom Graham said, speaking up for the first time, his voice surprisingly deep. “What you
