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.