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one’s youth there was time to procrastinate. At his age, he hadn’t a moment to waste. And he wanted, more than anything, to leave behind as glorious a legacy as his father had left him. He straightened his navy blue jacket, turned, and swept the agenda for the morning off the desk’s mirror-like surface.
    There was a knock on the door. It opened and Hans Altgeld strolled in. Schultz smiled at the sight of his faithful man of action. Thickset, with bleached blond hair of an almost comical shade of yellow, Hans carried his fifty-odd years well. Hans did work for Berliner of the white-collar and semi-white-collar crime variety. Low-levelespionage and sophisticated threats were part of Hans’s daily responsibilities. Stopping research from appearing in scientific journals in order to keep Berliner’s stock high was another asset he provided. Usually it involved arranging expensive gifts and lunches for editors and eminent research scholars and making sure various bits of research in question were debunked or talked up—whichever was more useful. There had been a few incidents where physical violence had been necessary to encourage some people to see things from Berliner’s perspective. But Hans was always up for a challenge.
    Hans glided toward the desk and stood beside it with hands folded behind his back, managing to dwarf it with his demeanor.
    Schultz extended his hand. Hans engulfed it in his beefy one. “ Wie geht’s , Hans?” Schultz said. “Surely, you aren’t here to see me.” He chuckled. “The chairman is out of town.”
    Hans’s work at Berliner had remained unchanged under Schultz’s son. Without speaking, he set a key on Schultz’s desk.
    Schultz raised an eyebrow.
    “Lars Lindstrom is dying,” Hans said.
    Schultz put both palms on the desk and leaned into it. An enormous weight had been lifted off his being with those few words. Lars was the last remaining link to Hiram Rosen, Samuel Rosen, and the Indus pills. With him gone—soon, hopefully—he was free. Berliner was free.
    “Finally we can bury the past,” Schultz said. “Once I’m done addressing the board,” he pointed to the room next door, “I’ll drink some champagne. A lot of champagne!” He rubbed his hands together. “This is excellent news!”
    Hans’s expression remained impassive.
    Schultz recognized the look in Hans’s watery gray eyes and picked up a phone. “Start without me,” he said to his son’s secretary and settled into the worn leather chair. “I haven’t been in this room much since we last met. Five years ago, wasn’t it?” He waved Hans to a chair in front of the desk.
    “Five years ago, following Hiram Rosen’s death, we intercepted two packages from his lawyer’s office,” Hans said in a dull monotone.“One addressed to a Dr. Klein, care of a London post office box, the other to a Dr. P.S. Oup, care of a PO box in Manhattan. Both packages contained a sheet of paper each and a vial of pills. We burned them.” Hans pointed to a fireplace at one corner of the room.
    “A moment of triumph,” Schultz said, wondering what Hans was getting at.
    Hans nodded. “Since the packages contained the key to decode Hiram’s research, we surmised that Hiram had sent his work in coded form to Lars Lindstrom and Dr. Oup, whom we haven’t yet identified. We hired a company to monitor Lars’s phone after Hiram died. We also monitored Hiram’s old business partner Kevin Forsyth, Maxine Rosen, and Ernst Frank. A software tap that would send me text messages every time one of them made a phone call and used words such as research, tablets, India—”
    Schultz gave an impatient wave. “I remember all this! I’m old. Not gaga.” He turned his eyes toward the boardroom. He ached to celebrate the decades of work, the frustrating, humiliating hours spent with the FDA, the Euro Medicines Approval Board, and all those in power, to get their assurance that Berliner’s two new drugs would receive the adulation