“Which is a good thing, of course,” Isabel said. Neither Isabel nor her colleague Tom Graham enjoyed working on mortality statistics for LifeDeals, even less when they found out what LifeDeals was doing with them. They’d mentioned their misgivings to Green, but he’d waved them off, saying they were not being paid to make ethical value judgments. Yeah, the concept of making money from people’s deaths is creepy, but the pay is good.

“Yes, it’s a wonderful day for medicine and fat people, less good for my investors,” Edmund said.

“Listen, we gave you full license to draw up parameters for us, using actuarial data and cross-referencing it with our cash-flow projections, and nowhere did we see any information about this,” Russell said, getting a nod of agreement from Edmund.

“Russell, we built in increases in life expectancy and added tolerances for unexpected developments, but they were capped at five percent,” Henry said. “As we discussed, as you agreed. If there is about to be a major breakthrough like custom-made transplantable pancreases from stem cell research or fallout from the human genome project, we can’t be held responsible. You can’t anticipate once-in-a-century events.”

“Then all this fucking statistical research is useless,” Edmund snapped, throwing up his hands in frustration. “It’s all nothing but mental masturbation.”

“Na-ha,” Isabel said, not at all intimidated. “It’s good data for what we had. If there’s a paradigm shift, then numbers change and graphs have to be adjusted to reflect it. Simple as that.” She shrugged and sat back in her chair.

Tom Graham was looking at a fingernail and didn’t respond.

“That’s it! That’s what we get! Whoops, sorry, wrong number. We didn’t think of that! We were paying you to think of everything. It’s not as if stem cells popped out of the blue. What sort of company are you running anyway?”

“Okay, let’s not get worked up here,” Russell interjected. “Henry, Edmund apologizes—”

“Don’t apologize to me, apologize to them,” Henry said, indicating Isabel and Tom. Isabel glowered at Edmund, who eventually raised a hand to speak. It was about as contrite as he was going to be.

“Henry, listen, we need some fresh models run based on some new assumptions that I can e-mail to you in an hour or so, soon as we get back. We need to see how our cash flow is affected in these new scenarios. You’ll have to make assumptions as there is no real data available. We’d be very grateful if you could do it for us. And we need it right away. As you know, there’s provision in our contract—”

“Yes, Russell, I know,” said Henry. “In actual fact, I happened to take a look at our contract when you were on your way over. We’ll do the work for you, have it for you tomorrow, as soon as we can. As you know, Russell, there’s a mutual twenty-four-hour cancellation provision in the contract, under certain circumstances. I believe circumstances such as these cover the provision more than adequately. So consider this your notice.”