Jerry sat back in his chair. He was a man with a lot of secrets, which is why he assumed everyone else had them. Some of Jerry’s secrets concerned the fact that he was unfaithful to Charlotte, his wife of twenty-two years. He had had affairs with some of his patients, one of which continued after Trotter ended his medical practice and went into finance. It was still going on, with trysts at an apartment Trotter maintained in the Village for that express purpose. Trotter didn’t feel any guilt about Charlotte. He thought of it as a kind of deal even though Charlotte had never been approached about it. He played around, and she lived the high life. Shopping was her sport.

From Jerry’s perspective risk was a big part of life. Everybody handled risk differently. He thought he handled risk well, which was what made him a good hedge fund guy. Others handled risk poorly. The real question that dogged Jerry’s mind at that moment was how much would have to be on the line for someone to do something truly desperate. He was just beginning to think there might be a way to solve the problem that Edmund had tossed into his lap.

Jerry Trotter had another secret, one that weighed on his mind more heavily than any other. It had nothing to do with women. Not only had Jerry taken a very sizable personal stake in LifeDeals, in addition to the position his fund had acquired publicly, but he had made a third and completely clandestine investment that was larger than the other two stakes combined. Jerry had studied what Edmund and Russell had set up with LifeDeals, read the business plans, and pored over the sales reports. He had commissioned his own secret research and paid lawyers hefty fees to set up financial instruments ready to be sold at a few days’ notice. And then, masked by a series of offshore shell companies, he had set up the bare bones of a parallel company that would mimic LifeDeals, right down to the type of policies it went after. As Edmund never tired of saying, life insurance was a $26 trillion business in the USA alone. There was plenty of money to go around.

Edmund and Russell’s bad news about regenerative medicine had hit Jerry Trotter like a hammer blow, much more than Edmund could have guessed. His due diligence had completely missed it, as had Edmund’s. To his partner and his firm, LifeDeals’ predicament was unfortunate but it hardly threatened the hedge fund’s success, even in the short term. But Jerry stood to lose much more. His personal stake was very large but also survivable. But if the shadow company that he was rolling out went down, he was probably ruined. The various subsidiaries were already buying policies. Individually, each was tiny compared with LifeDeals’. Together, Jerry had once been proud to think, they were larger.