Death Benefit (19 page)

Rothman stood up. “Now I have to go back in the biosafety unit for another hour or so.” Typical of his Asperger’s syndrome behavior, he didn’t comment further, just left.

Pia remained sitting after Rothman had departed. Except for the sounds emanating from some of the automatic equipment out in the lab, there was silence. Even the desk lamp went out again until she waved her hand in the air. She’d been taken aback by the evening’s events. She felt exposed, emotionally naked, and found herself worried that Rothman might decide on further thought that she was much too big a risk. She sat in her chair for at least ten minutes before she got up and left. As she descended in the elevator, she started to feel better, relieved to a degree that she’d been as open as she had. Having been in foster care himself, Rothman understood her. All at once Pia felt confident all was going to work out. It was her opinion that you can trust only a man whose actions match his words, or better still, who acts without asking for anything in return. The only person she knew who fit that bill was Dr. Rothman. She knew that even George, as generous as he was, had his own agenda.

Exiting into the cold night, Pia didn’t know exactly what she was going to do, but she had to admit that Rothman had made a lot of sense. And as unbelievable as it was, she felt he’d morphed into the father figure she’d never had.

 

 

W
hen his home office phone rang just after eight in the morning, a very anxious Jerry Trotter snapped it up. He’d been hoping it would ring, and he was hoping it would be Harry Hooper.

“I just had breakfast with that Morgan guy I was telling you about last night,” Hooper said, launching right in after Trotter picked up.

“You met with the guy? Sat down in front of him and ate breakfast?” Trotter was surprised. Brubaker and Hooper were usually more indirect, avoiding face-to-face meetings.

“He wouldn’t say anything more over the phone. He wanted a meeting, insisted on it. At six-thirty in the morning. He thinks I’m a headhunter for real, and he wants a new job, like yesterday. I couldn’t see the harm in it. It’s not like I’m going to see the guy again.”

“But what do you know about being a headhunter?”

“What’s to know? I just asked the guy to tell me about himself, about his strengths, where he sees himself in five years, all that BS. I said I didn’t know of anyone who needed someone exactly like him, but I’d keep an ear to the ground, keep him in mind.”

“Didn’t he ask you for your business card?”

“Said I was all out,” Hooper said. “Said I’d been meeting with a lot of bankers the last couple of weeks and underestimated demand. Almost convinced myself I was that busy. Anyway, we finally got around to talking about your woman friend. She and the thick guy who she was working for at the time definitely slept together. More than once. Not just some drunken hookup at a convention but an actual affair—hotel rooms in the afternoon, that kind of thing.”

“And he knows this how?”

“He was going out with this woman who was good friends with your girl. Real good friends, like girlfriends who told each other everything. So your friend tells this woman she’s seeing this guy who’s married. Then she says it’s her boss. She swore the friend to secrecy, made her swear she’d never tell anyone, all that. But the woman told my guy. Information’s valuable, as you know, and it all depends on the circumstances. This woman thought it would help in her relationship with my guy, bring them closer, having a shared secret. It didn’t work. They broke up after a while.”

“So why’d he tell you?”

“Like I said, information can be valuable. I was asking about your girl, he knew something. Maybe he wanted the supposed job I was checking out your friend for. I don’t really know. I guess I may have led him to believe I’m better connected on Wall Street than I am.”

“He’s going to be pissed when you disappear all of a sudden.”

“What’s he gonna do, tell his boss? Anyway, I plan to call him next week, start letting him down slow. It looks like I’m going to be downsized myself. Sure is a cruel world.”

“Okay,” Jerry said. “Give me a second to think.”

Jerry held the phone in both hands. This was good—Gloria Croft and Edmund Mathews had slept together ten, twelve years ago. And clearly it hadn’t ended well because Gloria was apparently enjoying trying to ruin Edmund. But for what Jerry had in mind, there had to be more. This was good, but it wasn’t enough.

“Okay, I like this, but I need more. Keep digging. Try and figure out why it ended between them, and why it ended so badly.”

“All right, got it.”

Jerry sat back in his chair. He was a man with a lot of secrets, which is why he assumed everyone else had them. Some of Jerry’s secrets concerned the fact that he was unfaithful to Charlotte, his wife of twenty-two years. He had had affairs with some of his patients, one of which continued after Trotter ended his medical practice and went into finance. It was still going on, with trysts at an apartment Trotter maintained in the Village for that express purpose. Trotter didn’t feel any guilt about Charlotte. He thought of it as a kind of deal even though Charlotte had never been approached about it. He played around, and she lived the high life. Shopping was her sport.

From Jerry’s perspective risk was a big part of life. Everybody handled risk differently. He thought he handled risk well, which was what made him a good hedge fund guy. Others handled risk poorly. The real question that dogged Jerry’s mind at that moment was how much would have to be on the line for someone to do something truly desperate. He was just beginning to think there might be a way to solve the problem that Edmund had tossed into his lap.

Jerry Trotter had another secret, one that weighed on his mind more heavily than any other. It had nothing to do with women. Not only had Jerry taken a very sizable personal stake in LifeDeals, in addition to the position his fund had acquired publicly, but he had made a third and completely clandestine investment that was larger than the other two stakes combined. Jerry had studied what Edmund and Russell had set up with LifeDeals, read the business plans, and pored over the sales reports. He had commissioned his own secret research and paid lawyers hefty fees to set up financial instruments ready to be sold at a few days’ notice. And then, masked by a series of offshore shell companies, he had set up the bare bones of a parallel company that would mimic LifeDeals, right down to the type of policies it went after. As Edmund never tired of saying, life insurance was a $26 trillion business in the USA alone. There was plenty of money to go around.

Edmund and Russell’s bad news about regenerative medicine had hit Jerry Trotter like a hammer blow, much more than Edmund could have guessed. His due diligence had completely missed it, as had Edmund’s. To his partner and his firm, LifeDeals’ predicament was unfortunate but it hardly threatened the hedge fund’s success, even in the short term. But Jerry stood to lose much more. His personal stake was very large but also survivable. But if the shadow company that he was rolling out went down, he was probably ruined. The various subsidiaries were already buying policies. Individually, each was tiny compared with LifeDeals’. Together, Jerry had once been proud to think, they were larger.

Over the course of approximately eighteen-plus hours, from the moment he’d left the Terrasini restaurant, Jerry Trotter had become an extremely desperate man. He hadn’t slept all night, instead using his old calculator and various files and portfolios to try to figure out ways in which he could emerge from this intact. He knew he was clutching at straws with Harry Hooper, but he was hoping against hope that Edmund Mathews had something more than just money at stake, something that would mean Jerry didn’t have to try to fix this mess all on his own. Jerry had few qualms, but he much preferred to delegate the truly dirty stuff, the stuff that could get you thrown in jail or worse.

 

 

B
y noon Jerry was near to being a basket case. After finishing the call with Harry Hooper, he went back to doing what he’d done at the end of the night: surfing the Internet just to have something to do. Jerry was buzzing on the amphetamines he’d taken to keep him awake and he knew he had thirty-six to forty hours until he crashed. Every couple of hours he drank a Red Bull, and he chugged Diet Cokes constantly. His wife, Charlotte, had no idea what was going on but was familiar enough with the routine to keep well out of her husband’s way. For Jerry the Internet was a wonderful resource and babysitter, so to speak. You could find out anything you wanted to know on it, as well as plenty of things you didn’t know you wanted to know. It couldn’t help much with finding the Fountain of Youth or proving the existence of God, but otherwise, it was golden.

The Internet was particularly useful when it came to providing practical solutions to all manner of problems. Jerry had recently discovered how to tune his universal remote so that it operated the controls on his TV, and he was grateful for that. This was a different kind of problem. As he sat alone in his darkened study with the shades drawn, he stared at the screen on his Mac, following threads in obscure discussion groups, piling up memberships in esoteric organizations, clicking on links that took him to some tortured recesses of our collective consciousness as represented on the World Wide Web.

Some of Jerry’s on-screen reading reminded him of being at medical school. What he wouldn’t have given to have had this resource back then! The dry phrasing of the medical material hadn’t changed in thirty years. Jerry thought he’d perhaps spent a couple of hours reading about salmonella when he was a student. He’d always been slightly germophobic, especially when it came to the more powerful microbes, and reading about this one made him uncomfortable. But Dr. Rothman’s first specialty, the one that brought him his first Nobel, was fascinating.

It was such a versatile and dangerous bacteria.

The longer he sat at his desk, the more convinced Jerry became that only one course of action was open to him. He was initially horrified by the thought, but it looked like there were no other options, and he hated to be backed into a corner. Whenever he got squeamish, Jerry pondered the prospect of being broke and disgraced. If it all came crashing down, he’d be a laughingstock. Some ambitious hack would write a book about him, and he’d come across like a buffoon, an idiot. He would avoid that fate at any cost.

Once Jerry had the idea percolating in his mind, really all he needed was the resolve and the money. Spending hours researching certain specialized activities on the Internet had convinced him of something else: Money really could buy you anything. He had the money. He just had to convince himself he could follow it through.

Now, toward midday, the throwaway cell phone rang again. Trotter was hoping for Hooper, but he got Brubaker.

“What do you have?” Trotter said.

“Confirmation that those two guys are definitely the leaders in this organ-making field. Way out in front. Independently confirmed beyond that source I mentioned. And no one can be precise on the timeline because it depends on the results of tests that no one can predict. They might do a test and it doesn’t work, which sets them back a week, a month. Or it does work and it’s on to the next one.”

“But eventually it’s going to work?”

“That’s what I’m hearing.”

“Too much to hope that it blows up in their face.”

“If you’re looking for them to fail, doesn’t look like it’s gonna happen. From every source, they’re very confident.”

“How do you know?”

“So I’m told. Plus they’ve formed a private company to control the patents that have been applied for. And it’s not one patent. It is a whole series of patents to be sure they’ll control the whole field.”

“Thanks, I figured. That means they’re close.”

“Not necessarily—just means they’re confident they’re going to get there.”

“How’d you find out about the company?”

“You really wanna know?”

“Indulge me.”

“Okay, boss. I have a friend in the New York State Division of Corporations. Can find out when people register corporations or LLCs. Comes in handy when guys set up limited liability companies to hide money from their wives.”

“I’ll bear that in mind.”

“Rothman Medical they call it. So it wasn’t hard to find. Registered two weeks ago. They probably registered it overseas too, in better tax locations. As I said, they’re being thorough.”

“And who are the partners?”

“The members of the company? Just the same two guys.”

Jerry ended the call. Rothman and Yamamoto. It seemed like the two of them were piloting the whole ship on their own. Jerry checked his watch. It was nearly twelve-thirty, almost four and a half hours since he’d spoken with Hooper. Suddenly Jerry felt crushingly tired. It was vital to him that Hooper find something he could use as leverage on Edmund Mathews. His brain was close to fried; he had to have someone help him with this. He knew Hooper would call him the second he had anything, but like the previous evening, he couldn’t resist calling.

“It’s me,” he said redundantly when Hooper picked up.

“Is there a problem?”

“Just checking in,” Jerry said, trying to control his voice.

With his antennae constantly up, Hooper sensed there was a problem, and the problem was Jerry. Jerry had said only five words, but it sounded to Hooper like Trotter was tweaking on crystal meth. Having been a policeman, he’d had to deal with all manner of drugs. “You don’t sound so good.”

“I’m tired is all.”

“Well, I got some lines in the pond,” said Hooper. “Just waiting for a bite. Just try and relax.”