by Peter May
“I just know,” Margaret said. “Everything about it. And more. But I doubt if you’ll find much in the way of forensic evidence. It’s a sterile environment.”
“We found the freezer,” Li said. “Big walk-in cabinet. Could probably hold anything up to twenty bodies in there. In bits.” He shrugged. “It was empty. We will defrost it, and see what forensics find in the melt water.”
“I wouldn’t hold your breath,” Margaret said. “These people have been very careful.”
“Yes, I know,” Li said. “Everything’s gone. All the files, patient records . . . All the bedrooms are empty, the beds all made up with clean sheets. They did not just do this in a couple of hours. Cui must have figured we would be back after our visit yesterday.” He stood up. “I wanted you to have a look at this thing, Margaret. You probably know more about computers than most of our people.”
“I’m no expert,” Margaret said.
“We will get experts in,” Li said. “But I need you to have a look at it now. From what I can tell, all the files have been erased.”
Margaret slipped behind the desk and took in the computer screen. It was empty, apart from a few system pull-down menus along the top, the time display, and the hard disk and trash icons. She opened up the hard disk. There were only two folders in it. The system folder and an applications folder. Inside the applications folder were coloured icons representing various programs. Accounting, database, word processing, an internet browser. She looked up. “You’re right. They’ve erased all the files. Probably backed them up on Zip disk and taken them where we’ll never find them, or even destroyed them.”
Li said, “Shit!”
Margaret forced a smiled. “It might not be as bad as you think. The operating system and all the software have been left untouched. Which means they didn’t erase the hard disk. Just the files. And when you erase files, they’re usually still there until they’ve been written over. You just can’t see them. But with the right kind of software you can pull them back on-screen.”
“Can you do that?” Li asked, suddenly re-energised.
She shook her head. “You’ll need one of those experts,” she said.
Li turned immediately to discuss with Dai and Mei-Ling how soon they could get a computer expert on site. Margaret turned back to the computer. She stared at the screen for several moments, remembering that dark afternoon in Chicago after her father’s funeral when she started up his computer and in a moment of idle curiosity discovered things about him she wished she hadn’t. Using the mouse, she guided the on-screen arrow to the Internet Explorer icon and double-clicked on it. The internet browser immediately opened up on-screen, and she heard the familiar series of beeps in rapid succession which indicated that the internal modem was dialling up to connect her to the Internet. It was followed by a short burst of white noise and a sequence of chirruping as her computer talked to another computer, extending some kind of digital handshake across the ether.
Li and the others turned around. “What’s happening?” he asked.
“I’m going on-line,” Margaret said. “I discovered recently that people leave trails and traces on their computers that they sometimes forget are there.” She remembered the Aphrodite Home Page, and SAMANTHA—Click me to watch live, and JULI—I like women. And she remembered, too, the shock of discovering that her father was paying for pornography on the Internet.
It was one of the wonders of the new global technology, Margaret reflected, that she could sit here in China and open up the same computer software that was on her father’s computer thousands of miles away in Chicago. This was a Chinese version, and so in Chinese characters rather than English. But the graphics were the same, and Margaret had no difficulty finding her way around. The modem had connected the computer to the Internet and downloaded the home page of some Chinese medical institute. Down the left side of the screen were the same four tabs as those on her father’s computer, name tabs on folders in an electronic filing cabinet. Margaret pointed the arrow to the HISTORY tab and the file slid out across the screen. And there they were. The last five hundred Internet sites visited by this computer, all neatly packaged in dated folders. Margaret opened up the top folder, which was dated two days before. The address of the last Internet site visited was www.tol.com. It meant nothing to Margaret. She clicked on it and waited while the computer delivered the address into cyberspace and received the website in return. It came back in fragments, strips of colour, little logos indicating that graphics or photographs would fill their spaces. And then the screen wiped blank and the tol home page appeared in full.
Margaret sat staring at it, the skin tightening all across her scalp. She heard the murmur of voices as Li and the group of officers standing in the doorway engaged in some muted discussion. She heard the rain pattering on the glass of the window and dripping on the ledge. She could hear her own heart pumping blood through ventricles and arteries and tiny capillary veins. She heard the silent scream inside her head.
And then the voices had stopped, and Li was saying, “Margaret? Are you all right?”
She forced herself to look up and meet his eye. Everything she did and said felt as if it were in slow motion. “I was wrong,” she said. “When I saw those cool boxes in the operating theatre, I think I knew it then. I just didn’t want to believe it.”
Li frowned. “What are you talking about?” He moved round the desk to look at the screen. A logo was blazed in red across the top of it. TRANSPLANTS ONLINE. Underneath it, on the left, was a photograph of a serious-looking man with grey hair and a white coat. He had a stethoscope around his neck. The caption beneath it revealed him to be Dr. Al Gardner. Li’s heart felt as if it were beating in his throat as he quickly scanned the short biography below it. Dr. Gardner was the Chief Executive of the New York Transplant Co-ordination Clinic. He described himself as a “transplant co-ordinator,” working, it said, to bring donors and recipients together across the globe in a miraculous fusion of life. Down the right-hand side of the page was a long list of organs: kidneys, hearts, lungs, livers . . . each underlined, a small blue “GO” button beside each one. Li said, “I do not understand.”
“We’ve got access straight into the site because the computer’s pulled this page up out of its memory,” Margaret said trying to stay controlled, to think clearly. “I guess normally they would have to enter a password of some kind.” She moved the mouse to the right side of the screen and clicked the “GO” button beside Kidneys. Almost immediately another page appeared on screen. There was a column of code numbers beside a list of recipient requirements: age, sex, blood type, HLA . . . Mei-Ling had squeezed in beside Li and was looking at the screen.
“What is all this stuff?” Li asked.
“All the information you need to know to match a kidney to a potential recipient,” Mei-Ling said. Margaret glanced up at her and saw that she was ghostly pale.
Li said, “Are you saying that is what they have been doing here? Killing these girls for their organs?”
Margaret nodded reluctantly. “I guess.”
“But you ruled it out. You and Dr. Lan.”
Margaret said, “Because it never made sense that they would keep them alive during the procedure. It still doesn’t. I mean, it takes several minutes for the heart to stop after you kill someone. If you removed the organs immediately, they would still be perfectly fresh and undamaged. But these bastards went to a lot of trouble keeping these poor women alive, riding on the very edge of consciousness.”
“But now you’re saying it was the organs they were after?”
Margaret looked back at the screen. “I don’t know how else to explain it.” She glanced at Mei-Ling. “And everything we saw downstairs would be in keeping with the removal of organs. The stainless-steel bowl that they would probably have kept filled with crushed ice for packing around the organs in the cool boxes. The litre jugs that would have been filled, probably with a saline solution, for flushing and irrigating the organs to cool them
first—using those big turkey basters we saw . . .” She turned back to the screen. “And this.” She shook her head. “I mean, I’ve heard of this guy.”
Li looked incredulous. “Really?”
“He was in the news in the States a couple of years ago when he was investigated by the FBI on suspicion of trading in organs. He insisted he was just an honest broker, taking a small commission for bringing together needy US recipients and legally available organs around the world. They couldn’t find any evidence to the contrary.”
Mei-Ling said, “But you think he has been trading with Cui Feng?”
Margaret said bleakly, “If we accept that Cui Feng’s people have been murdering girls here for their organs, the only reason they would have a direct link to Al Gardner’s website would be to sell them.”
“How would that work?” Li asked.
Margaret shrugged. “They’d have organs from a girl with a specific blood type and HLA tissue type, they’d go on to Gardner’s website and look for specific matches on the recipient list. Once they’d found the matches, presumably they’d contact Gardner and he’d bring organ and recipient together.”
“Here?”
“I guess. Though possibly also in some third, neutral country. India, maybe, or somewhere in the Middle East.”
Li was frowning. “There is something I am missing here,” he said. “These recipients . . . who would they be?”
“I guess, people who’re going to die without a transplant and have the money to pay for an organ, no questions asked.”
“Americans?” Li said.
Margaret was puzzled by the question. “I suppose most of them would be. If not all.”
Li glanced at Mei-Ling. “But Cui’s clinic was full of Japanese.”
“Japanese?” Margaret was caught completely off balance.
“That is what Cui told us,” Mei-Ling said.
Tiny electrical charges went sparking off between nerve endings in Margaret’s brain. She could almost feel them, seeking to build bridges between deeply buried memory and conscious recollection. Fragments emerging from the deep started locking together in partially assembled pieces of a subconscious puzzle. And as she began to recognise and catalogue some of these pieces, her brain told her heart that it needed more oxygen, and her heart started beating faster. Finally, it all found expression in a whispered oath. “Jesus Christ!” she said under her breath.
Li was startled. “What!”
She remembered reading something a couple of years ago. Some report on international traffic in organs. A task force who had found no proof of anything. And then there was David. That night in the sushi restaurant in Chicago. What was it he’d said? They got this weird religion in Japan. Shinto. They have a pretty strange view of the sanctity of the dead body. And something else . . . She fought to remember, and then suddenly it came to her. Because, of course, he was a cardiac consultant. Last time a doctor over there performed a heart transplant was in nineteen sixty-eight, and he got charged with murder. Then the name she’d been searching for came to her. “The Bellagio Task Force,” she said. “That’s what they were called.”
“Margaret, what are you talking about?” The frustration in Li’s voice was clear.
“Bear with me,” she said, and she turned back to the computer and called up an Internet search engine to try to find what it was she was looking for. It only took a couple of minutes before she had the report up on the screen. THE BELLAGIO TASK FORCE REPORT ON TRANSPLANTATION, BODILY INTEGRITY, AND THE INTERNATIONAL TRAFFIC IN ORGANS. She scrolled quickly through the pages, and then stopped suddenly. There it was. “Listen to this.” And she read, “Asian concepts of bodily integrity, the respect due elders, and objections to a standard of brain death, practically eliminate cadaveric organ donation in such countries as Japan. Despite an embrace of most medical technologies and deeply ingrained habits of gift-giving, transplantation from cadaveric sources is rare. Heart transplantation is not performed at all and the limited number of kidneys donated come from living related persons.” She turned to Li and Mei-Ling, wide-eyed, almost exultant. “You see? If you’re Japanese and you need a heart transplant or a new liver, or a kidney, the chances are you’re not going to get it in Japan. Even if you have all the money in the world. And you’re not going to get it in the States either, because there’s more than sixty thousand people in the queue ahead of you.” She paused, considering for herself the implications of what she was saying. “So you’re going to die.”
Li was still toiling to take all this on board. “But why can they not get organs in Japan?” he said. “Are they not one of the most technologically advanced nations in the world?”
“And one of the most religious and superstitious,” Margaret said. David’s words came back to her again. “Shinto,” she said, and she turned and entered the words Shinto plus Transplants into the search engine. Within twenty seconds she was spoiled for choice. Dozens of documents came up. She picked one at random. In Shinto, the dead body is considered to be impure and dangerous, and thus quite powerful. She clicked on another. In folk belief context, injuring a dead body is a serious crime. And another. It is difficult to obtain consent from bereaved families for organ donation, or dissection for medical education, or pathological anatomy . . . the Japanese regard them all in the sense of injuring a dead body.
And in a moment of absolute clarity, she knew exactly what had happened, and why these women had become unwitting donors.
“Oh, my God,” she said. “The man is a monster.” She turned to Li. “These women weren’t picked at random to have their organs stolen. They were exact matches for specific Japanese recipients with the money to pay for them.”
“How would he know these women were exact matches?” Li asked, puzzled by this sudden leap.
“Because they’d all had abortions at his clinics,” Margaret said. “Three hundred thousand women a year pass through his clinics. That’s one-and-a-half million since he started. And nothing would be easier than to tissue-type them when they came in for the procedure. He must have the most comprehensive list of organ donor matches in the world. Only, these women were never donors, they had their organs taken without consent. As soon as Cui had a client, some wealthy Japanese facing certain death, he could consult his files and find an exact match. They’d snatch the girl and take the organ.” She stopped, as another revelation struck her. “That’s why they went after the girl in Beijing. Jack’s sister. Because her HLA DQ-alpha gene was almost unique in China. She must have been a rare, but perfect match for some Japanese. Only, she turned out to be a junkie and they killed her for nothing.”
She stood up and walked towards the window, hands clutching her head. Every nerve-end was tingling, every fibre of her straining to come to terms with her revelation. She saw her reflection in the window and thought she was staring at a mad woman. She spun round to face the others.
“And do you know what’s really sick? The thing that I could never understand? They were keeping them alive to meet the needs of some Japanese religious or superstitious fear of violating the integrity of a dead body. It didn’t matter that they were killing a living person in the process.” She threw back her head and stared up at the ceiling. “Jesus, life’s always so much cheaper, isn’t it?” She lowered her head again and stared wild-eyed at Li and Mei-Ling. “Cui Feng was offering a unique service. Life-saving organs from a living body. Maybe one could be charitable and suggest that perhaps the recipients didn’t know that the donors were ultimately paying with their lives. But, then, you don’t take someone’s heart and expect that they’ll still be alive. Do you? Jesus . . .” She leaned forward on the desk and shook her head, blinking back tears of shock.
There was a long silence. Li glanced towards the officers standing in the doorway. He was not sure how much they had understood, but they knew for sure that something dramatic was unfolding here. Mei-Ling sat down in the seat vacated by Margaret. She was a dreadful colour, and Li saw that her hands were trembl
ing. He looked at Margaret again. “So why did Cui need to sell organs through the Internet if he had ready-made customers in Japan?”
Margaret looked up from the desk. She had been focusing very hard on the grain of the wood, trying not to think about what it was she knew. If she had been unhappy to know about her father’s predilection for pornography, she would never have wished to know this, could never have imagined it. She said, “Waste not, want not. Once Cui had fulfilled his contract to his Japanese customer, there was still a lot of money to be made by selling on the other organs.” And having said it out loud, she realised just what a cold-blooded and mercenary operation Cui had been running here. If it was possible to conjure up an image of hell, this would be it. They might never know just how many poor women had been butchered in operating theatre number one, while some wealthy Japanese recipient lay anaesthetised on the table in the operating theatre through the wall waiting for one of their organs. A life for a life.
There was a loud beep from the computer and Margaret looked at the screen to see a message informing them that the connection had been terminated due to lack of network activity.
“Of course,” she said. “There is no proof of any of this. Unless you can find the back-up copies of whatever files they kept on the computer.”
“Or retrieve them from the hard disk,” Li said.
Margaret nodded distractedly. She was thinking of Chai Rui and how she had died so completely in vain, and how that had led, ultimately, to Jack Geller’s murder. And she let her mind drift to the hundreds of thousands of people around the world who were dying needlessly because organs for transplant were so difficult to obtain, and how the fears and superstitions of potential donors had led to the appalling trade that had been conducted from this clinic. It all seemed like such a waste. She looked sadly at Li. “And it doesn’t bring us any closer to finding Xinxin,” she said, and the pain in the pit of her stomach intensified with the thought.
Mei-Ling spoke for the first time in a long while. She still looked unwell, and stood up shakily as she spoke. “You said you thought the surgeon might be an American,” she said to Margaret.
