“Murder, Jerry? Like having him shot?” Edmund was appalled. At the same time he didn’t think he had the luxury of dismissing any idea out of hand no matter how preposterous it sounded.

“No, not at all. The two of them should die in a way that doesn’t invite suspicion of homicide. It must look like an accident. There shouldn’t even be an investigation, although I suppose that would be inevitable. But there can be nothing that makes this look deliberate. Because it wouldn’t be beyond the realm of possibility that any semi-competent murder investigation would lead right to LifeDeals. You sat there yourself at Statistical Solutions and talked about what this could do to the company’s bottom line.”

“Do you have any specific suggestions, Jerry?” Although the proposal was outlandish and terrifying, Edmund wanted to find out what Jerry was proposing. It wasn’t as if Edmund had any plan B waiting in the wings.

“As a matter of fact, I do.”

Edmund continued to stare out at the water.

“I’ll tell you,” said Jerry, “most of the medical people will know that Rothman’s first interest in research, before he became involved in regenerative medicine, was salmonella, which is the number-one cause of food-borne illness in general and typhoid fever in particular. He’s investigating the virulence of the bacteria—what causes it to be a tremendously deadly bacteria on the one hand, and a bothersome but nondeadly cause of gastrointestinal distress on the other. Why does one type give you the runs but another kills you? We did a little research. He’s found that growing salmonella in outer space produces a very lethal strain. He should be fed some of this particular strain.

“A lot of people don’t care for the man—they’re jealous of his Nobel Prize, and they think he’s got an attitude. If he dies from the bacteria he’s studying, a lot of people are going to say, ‘Oh, that’s terrible,’ and then smile at the irony of it later.”

Jerry made it sound so easy.

“I suppose that would be clever,” Edmund said. He felt he had to say something.

“That’s not the half of it. The typhoid fever he’d immediately develop might or might not kill him. There has to be something else that will kill him quickly and definitively, but it’s got to be something you can’t easily detect. There’s a substance called polonium-210—very radioactive and deadly if you ingest it but not harmful otherwise. We’d use it because it produces many of the same symptoms as typhoid and would be masked by it. It’s what killed Alexander Litvinenko in London a few years ago.”

“I remember that. That was just a theory, surely, the polonium.”

“I think it was more than that,” Jerry said.

“Why do we need it?”