“Think of LifeDeals as a swimming pool,” said Gloria. “There’s water pouring out already and there’s going to be a lot less of it pouring in than you planned in the near term. You guys are going to be left high and dry with no life preserver.”

Gloria was enjoying herself.

“You want some advice? I doubt it but I’m going to give it to you anyway. Hurry up and securitize and sell those tranches ASAP, before others start to see that the ground under LifeDeals is going to be more like quicksand than bedrock. Once that happens, your bonds are going to go begging. Some of the money that comes in from the bonds you might be able to squirrel away if you’re clever, and I know you are, but you certainly aren’t going to get back your seed money. Unless you want to break the law. Which brings us neatly full circle. Perhaps you’ll end up going to jail this time.”

“Russell, we gotta go,” Edmund said, as Russell gathered up his papers. Edmund and Gloria held each other’s glare. Gloria had played her hand, and she could see it had hit home.

“So sorry you guys have to run, but I have to go to lunch anyway,” she said.

Gloria handed Russell some more of his papers. She’d already decided to strengthen her position against LifeDeals significantly later that day. Edmund was right in part—she had wanted them to tell her about their business plan, and she assumed Edmund would be arrogant enough to tell her too much. Now she’d seen their model, and it was even worse than she could have hoped. Or better. Maybe she’d cost herself some money, but she already had more than she could reasonably spend in three lifetimes.

That look on Edmund’s face was priceless.

Edmund and Russell were silent as they waited for the elevator. Russell stole a look at Edmund’s face, and it bore an expression he had never seen. It looked like grief. They got in the elevator.

“Hold these a second,” Edmund said to Russell, handing him his case and his coat. Edmund stepped forward and slammed the elevator door hard with the fist he’d made of his left hand. He cried out and grabbed his hand. The pain, when it came, was a relief.

10.

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY MEDICAL CENTER
NEW YORK CITY
MARCH 2, 2011, 1:00 P.M.

Pia had quickly learned to feel at home in what Dr. Yamamoto liked to call the “bathroom,” the organ bath facility where the mouse kidneys, hearts, lungs, and pancreases were being nurtured. She had spent the morning in there, harvesting reams of data on the pH levels in the baths and using a handheld tablet to look at the histories of a few organs that had failed. They were later found to have very subtle variations in acidity or alkalinity from the rest of the samples. Pia’s task was to monitor the baths, and she tried to figure out how she might rig up some kind of electronic alarm to her cell phone like Rothman and Yamamoto had that would alert her when a bath developed a slight variation in pH.