Peter May - The Killing Room

‘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?’