A Killing in China Basin - Kirk Russell [56]
‘So Alex got you a false identity.’
‘Yes. She knew someone who wanted to shed their current identity. I bought that identity so I could use it when I traveled in certain countries, and I only did it after there’d been an attempt to kill me. Mind you, this was quite a few years ago.’
Lafaye held her hands up, showed her fingertips, the scarring and deformation.
‘I did a lot of things that seem crazy now, but one thing I knew was I didn’t want this to happen again because I got recognized in the wrong locale. If you want to travel with me I’ll introduce you to a man named Huarang. He did the manicure work on my hands, though we’re on speaking terms now.
‘Huarang deals in organs, mostly kidneys, but he’ll get you a young healthy heart if you need a transplant. He’s very computer literate, or the people who work for him are, and they’re adept at locating potential donors by scouring hospital records. They match donors to recipients via databases they’ve built up during the years he’s been collecting UN money to inoculate and do blood tests at his clinic. He also gets grants from the Red Cross. In fact, his clinics do many good things. With me, he’s happy to provide the names of competitors.’
‘Now you can lecture me; how does it work with a kidney?’
‘When he gets an order for a kidney he searches his database and then front guys go out and locate the donor. If the donor is poor and the police are bribed, and it’s easily proved that the donor was paid well for his kidney, then often there’s nothing the unwilling donor can do later. He may have been drugged when he signed papers or had no idea what the papers said because he doesn’t read, and of course he had no idea that any of this connects to Huarang’s charity work, or that Huarang is connected to it in any way. He wakes up with stitches in his back and a check for the equivalent of five thousand dollars, which in the areas where Huarang works is a fortune.
‘Usually, the donor is a young man with a match to the recipient that has been verified by the doctors who will do the transplant. The donor is always healthy and will recover; meanwhile his kidney will move along a well-traveled chain where everyone steps on the price until it gets to the hospital and goes into a rich American or Saudi, or someone who can afford it but cannot afford to wait.’
‘Come on, you’re not telling me it’s this well known and he’s out there today operating like this, and at the same time collecting aid money for his clinics.’
‘He absolutely is and I became part of his Indonesia operation for a few months during the nineties. That’s when he did my nails for me. I offered my services to get inside his operation. I had medical training and I told him I didn’t have many scruples. That’s the magic combination. I was in the operating room at the compound at least a dozen times as a surgical nurse, assisting as a young man’s healthy kidney was removed. I watched the liver removed from a very fit young man I’d been joking with an hour before, a young man who thought he was just selling one kidney so that his mother could get a needed operation. They sewed him up, helicoptered him to a remote area of the jungle and shoved him out.’
‘Were you in the helicopter when the kid got pushed out?’
‘I was. I watched him fall. Without a liver he was dead anyway.’
‘So it didn’t matter.’
‘Of course, it mattered.’
She stared hard at him.
‘Huarang is just one dealer in one country. There are many people who need organ transplants. There are Americans routinely getting transplants outside the United States for the simple reason that it’s more affordable elsewhere and, guess what, sometimes organs are more abundant and cheaper. Who knew?
‘Huarang was probably trying to sell my organs when I escaped. When he destroyed my fingernails he did it because one of his men had found a video camera among my things and I was on tape talking about what I’d witnessed. I’d shot the operating room and the helicopter taking off from