Page 145 of Gone Before Goodbye
“No. We needed a kidney with her DNA markings for a certain medical experiment. That’s what I mean. Imagine how much faster you can make progress if you just buy real human organs instead of having to spend years trying it with pigs or in labs.”
Maggie doesn’t even know what to say to that.
“We’ve bought dozens of organs like this. Some, yes, we sold for transplantation. For profit. Others we kept for important experimentation. We took everyone’s blood at refugee camps all over the world. You helped with that, as a matter of fact, for us. Now we have all that DNA stored in our own data banks. We can get exactly what we need when we need it—and when we see a match, well, everyone has a price.”
“Who removed Nadia’s kidney?”
“I wouldn’t normally know. We did so many.”
“Normally. But in this case?”
“You’re wondering whether it was your husband.”
Maggie shakes her head. “I know it wasn’t.”
“Because he was too good a man?”
“Because there are lines he wouldn’t cross.”
“Ah, but selling her kidney wasn’t a bad thing. It was pure commerce. It saved the donor’s—”
“Yeah, yeah, Nadia explained all that to me. I don’t need to hear it again. Who removed her kidney?”
“You know now, don’t you?”
She nods. “Trace Packer.”
“Yes. Packer did many. He believed that innovation in organ donation was the future of medicine. He was willing to push the boundaries.”
“In a dangerous way. I was at Apollo Longevity when we tried to implant the THUMPR7 in Kabir Abargil, a poor man—”
“A poor man who consented,” Ragoravich interjects. “A poor man who was going to die and knew the risks and made an informed decision—”
“Yeah, okay, whatever.”
“No, no, you listen.” Ragoravich makes a fist and shakes it at her. “We have always sacrificed our fellow human beings for the greater good. Always. Wars, of course, but every advancement we humans have made—when we first created aqueducts for water, when we first traveled, built bridges, explored, pioneered, literally everything throughout history we ever did to advance civilization and—”
Maggie holds up her hand and says, “Oleg?”
“Yes?”
“I get it. You are extraordinarily creative with your self-justifications. But I don’t really care.”
“And in truth, neither do I. I want to live. That’s all that matters to me in the end. It’s why I focused on the heart. That’s the immediate need. But we work here on every organ because there is overlap in the research—and because eventually I will need those too. Once we can replicate organs and tissues, a human could live theoretically for hundreds of years. And no, this isn’t for the masses. We can’t have everyone living that long. Even the knowledge that the possibility exists would end the world because, yes, people would kill to get it. That’s not justification, Doctor McCabe. That’s fact. God—if you are superstitious enough to believe in that man-made delusion—created a world where the only way to survive is to kill. You watch a lion take down a gazelle. The lion will try to keep the poor creature alive whilehe eats it so it stays fresh. The gazelle slowly dies in agony. That’s the ‘perfect’ world designed by a just and kind deity.” He chuckles. “And I’m the one delusional with self-justification?”
Maggie tries to catch him off guard. “Did you kill my husband?”
“No.” There is no hesitation. “I needed him alive to work on that artificial heart. His death was a tremendous blow to me.”
She tries again: “Did Trace kill him?”
“Could be,” he says in too casual a way. “Marc found out about Trace organ harvesting. It upset him. Trace might have killed Marc to protect himself. But I don’t know.” Oleg’s breath grows raspier. “I’m getting tired, so I need to get to the point. My latest heart is failing. I have run out of time. We have the latest THUMPR7 here. We have the DNA sequencing machine and all the other equipment. We both know what went wrong the first time you tried the operation on that ‘poor man’ in Dubai—you didn’t have a heart. We have an ideal, healthy one now from a brain-dead man in a coma. The heart isn’t being shipped either. I’ve paid to have the brain-dead man brought here. Your husband and Trace Packer wrote quite a bit on the advantages of ‘beating-heart’ transplantation when developing the THUMPR7. We will have the ultimate version of that. The heart will be taken out by a team just minutes before insertion. In short, the conditions are finally perfect for the transplant that can save my life.”
“Why are you telling me all this?”
Oleg Ragoravich gives her a sharklike smile. “Why do you think?”
And then she sees it. “You want me to do the transplant?”
