Death Benefit by Robin Cook Page A

policies for no more than 15 cents on the dollar. There were millions of Americans who needed money for long-term care, or to finance an operation when they didn’t have medical coverage or, as was increasingly the case, even when they did, but the coverage wasn’t adequate or the insurance company figured out a way not to pay. LifeDeals had to pay the balance of the premiums, but when the policyholder passed on, as they would as surely as night follows day, the payout was theirs.
    Within six months, the LifeDeals board was confident enough to take the company public. Edmund and Russell held options that made them very wealthy once again, but they wanted capitalization to buy more policies. Edmund’s favorite statistic was that there was more than $26 trillion in life insurance policies sloshing around out there for the taking. Their plan was to start securitizing the policies, aggregating them, and selling bonds. This time, the assets behind the securities were cast-iron, personally guaranteed by the grim reaper. And thousands of people every day were walking away from policies they had paid into for years because they couldn’t afford the premiums. They were waiting to be picked off.
    Edmund liked to think his company could someday be worth a trillion dollars.
     
     
    W ho is it?” Edmund asked.
    “Teddy doesn’t know. He heard it from a friend who heard it from a friend. But he trusts the party. Swears it’s true.”
    “It’s just someone being a wiseass,” said Edmund.
    “No,” said Russell. “It’s a biggish bet. Whoever it is, they’re sure we’re going down the toilet.”
    “Well, we fucking well better find out who it is before we catch a cold.”
    Russell knew the implications as well as Edmund. They needed a large institutional investor to underwrite their securitized package, and if it was known on the street that LifeDeals was getting shorted, that partner would be very hard to find. Everyone remembered what happened in 2008.
    “We need to start going through the 13Fs right away,” Russell said, referencing the quarterly statements institutional investment managers had to file with the SEC outlining their holdings.
    “And I need to start making some calls.”
    Russell had left Wall Street with more intact relationships than had Edmund, and he could easily plug into the rumor mill. It was, after all, a very small community. Edmund didn’t need to say anything, both men knew what was at stake.

7.
    COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY MEDICAL CENTER
NEW YORK CITY
MARCH 1, 2011, 7:30 P.M.
     
     
    O ff by themselves, Pia, Lesley, and Will were sitting in the mostly empty hospital cafeteria nursing cups of postprandial tea and coffee. Seeing what Rothman and Yamamoto were working on had left each of them shell-shocked. As medical students, they were well aware from an academic standpoint what was being done in the lab and having seen it with their own eyes made it real and concrete. They’d been to the future, and it was difficult to absorb.
    “I can’t get over it,” Lesley Wong said. “I’m still blown away. Growing organs from a patient’s own stem cells. Something like that is going to revolutionize medicine.”
    “It’s certainly going to revolutionize the care of degenerative disease,” Pia said. “It’s going to provide cures instead of just treating symptoms.”
    “Down the road we could grow our own organs and freeze ’em for when we need ’em,” Will said. “Hey, I wonder how Columbia divides the cash on a medical breakthrough like this. This is going to be huge. Yamamoto said that the university has filed patents, but don’t you think that Rothman and Yamamoto have to get some kind of cut? Don’t you think, Pia?”
    Pia had come with Lesley and Will not because she wanted company per se, but because she still felt unnerved by what she had seen and wanted to talk about it. After Dr. Yamamoto led them out of the inner lab with the organ baths that morning, they’d settled in a corner