“Okay, Russell, thank you,” Henry said, glancing at Edmund, who appeared reasonably composed. Well, you won’t look so composed in five minutes, Henry thought. “We’ll proceed with our presentation. There’s a copy of our termination letter in the packets we’ll give you at the end of the meeting, as well as a completely nonprejudicial note from our legal department reiterating the reasonable scope of our services, which is what I was trying to do a few minutes ago. But I appreciate you’re eager to hear the results. I want to assure you that we had our best people working on this. Isabel Lee, whom you met and who is unable to join us today, put in a solid shift on this. So did Tom Graham, who graduated two years ago from MIT. . . .”

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.