Set on the surgical nurse’s table alongside the toolbox were a stainless-steel bowl, a couple of empty litre jugs and several plastic ‘turkey basters’, like giant eye-droppers. On a shelf stood two blue and white plastic cool boxes, the kind you might pack with ice to keep beer cold on a picnic. Margaret looked at them for a very long time and became aware that her breathing was starting to become rapid and shallow.
Her thoughts were interrupted by Mei-Ling crossing to where a CD player sat on the shelf of one of the cabinets against the far wall. It was wired into speakers hanging from all four corners of the operating room. The surgeon whose theatre this was, liked to listen to music while he worked. Mei-Ling switched it on and hit the play button. The room was immediately filled by the deep, sonorous tones of a church organ, stepping down in time to a slow, rhythmic descending bass note that was suddenly given relief by a surge of violins. Every hair on Margaret’s body stood on end. She knew this music. It was one of her favourite pieces. Albinoni’s Adagio in G Minor. But the pictures it conjured for her now were almost too horrific to contemplate. Of a surgeon delicately wielding his scalpel to murder and butcher a succession of young women to the strains of one of the most beautiful pieces of music ever written.
She reached back and switched on the big surgical lamps, and suddenly the room was thrown into an almost blinding blaze of light burning out on white tiles. A solo violin swooped and screeched to a pitch, like the scream of every dead girl who had passed through this hellish place. Margaret’s legs nearly gave way under her, and she reached for the surgical nurse’s trolley to steady herself. One of the litre jugs toppled over.
‘Are you all right,’ Mei-Ling said, and she switched off the music. The silence that replaced it was almost worse.
‘I’m okay,’ Margaret said, and she looked at Mei-Ling. ‘You know this is where it was done,’ she said. There could be no equivocation. There was nothing scientific about it, but she knew it with an absolute certainty.
Mei-Ling nodded grimly. She felt it, too. Margaret could see from her pallor that the blood had drained from her face. ‘Do you know this music?’ Mei-Ling asked.
‘Attributed by some to an Italian called Albinoni,’ Margaret said. ‘Probably composed in the early eighteenth century.’ She paused. ‘I used to love it.’ And now she shook her head. ‘But I don’t think I’ll ever be able to listen to it again. It sounds to me now like music straight from hell.’ She thought for a moment. ‘It would make me think that the surgeon was not Chinese. And if we take the “Y” cut into consideration, probably not European either. I’d say there was a good chance this monster is an American.’
The radio on Mei-Ling’s belt crackled, and Margaret made out Li’s voice talking rapidly in Chinese. Mei-Ling responded, and then said to Margaret, ‘He wants us up in the administration office.’
Now that the power had been restored, they were able to ride up to the second floor in the elevator. A number of detectives and forensics people were standing in the corridor outside the main office. Inside, Li was going through the files on the hard disk of the office computer. It was a Macintosh PowerPC G4 with a twenty-one-inch flatscreen monitor. Nothing but the best and latest in technology for Cui Feng, Margaret thought. Li looked up as they came in.
‘Anything down there?’ he asked.
Margaret said, ‘That’s where they did it.’
Li froze. His eyes widened. ‘How do you know?’
‘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. T
RANS
P
LANTS
O
NLINE
. 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.