“Who the hell is this?” the sleepy delegado said when Silva awoke him at home.
It was an hour earlier up there, but Silva still thought the lazy bastard should have been behind his desk, or at least on the way to the office.
“Chief Inspector Silva, calling from Sao Paulo.”
“Oh.” There was a rustle of bedclothes and a muffled com-plaint from a female somewhere in the background.
“What can I do for you, Chief Inspector?”
Silva explained the situation, told the delegado to check his e-mail, and moved on to the next number on his list.
Chapter Forty-three
While Silva was speaking to the people in charge of border checkpoints, Denise Ramiro, a medical technician at Dr. Bittler’s clinic, was gently sucking air out of a pipette she’d inserted into a test tube of blood.
A thin column of the red liquid arose. Swiftly, with a ges-ture she’d performed a thousand times, Denise removed the pipette from her mouth, covered the tiny hole with the tip of one latex-gloved finger, and then lifted it, allowing a small quantity of the blood to dribble into another test tube on the opposite end of the same rack.
Denise had no inkling of the origin of the blood in the first tube, no idea that it had been drawn from an Indian baby snatched from the Xingu reservation. She knew only that the blood in the second tube was that of Raul Oliveira, one of Dr. Bittler’s patients.
Denise, like most of the employees at the clinic, was a thor-oughly honest person with an impeccable record. And, like them, she was wholly unaware of how Dr. Bittler sourced the organs he used for transplants. In fact, the only people on his staff privy to that information were Bittler himself, Claudia Andrade, Roberto Ribeiro, Gretchen Furtwangler, Bittler’s longtime secretary, and the anesthesiologist, Teobaldo Vargas.
Harvesting organs was not a simple procedure, but it was a good deal simpler than implanting them. It required fewer people, less expertise, and less time. And it was performed in one of two secret operating rooms, located under the build-ing, accessible only from the parking lot.
Denise had no knowledge of those operating rooms, or of the adjoining oven used for cremating human remains, or of the holding cells that were used to keep the unwilling donors until their time came.
She was aware that the clinic seemed to have an almost unending supply of organs, but as far as she was concerned, the organs were obtained in ways common to the profession, if not strictly legal. She assumed it was a simple matter of her boss giving money to the families of the recently deceased.
No, it wasn’t supposed to be that way, but this was Brazil. People with money had always enjoyed special privilege. That’s just the way it was. It had been going on for so long that Denise, and most of her compatriots, didn’t even think of questioning it.
The procedure she was performing that day was called a crossmatch. The objective was to determine an organ’s com-patibility. A so-called positive crossmatch was, in fact, a neg-ative result for the patient. It meant that the available organ would probably be rejected by the body of the person who needed it. Each test was carried out with samples of refriger-ated blood and each took about forty-five minutes.
The result of the first test had been positive. It appeared that the young patient, Raul Oliveira, had a shot at only two organs. He would have been out of luck if the second cross-match had turned out the same way as the first.
But it didn’t.
“Bingo,” Denise said, irreverently, leaning back from her microscope. She peeled off her latex gloves, stretched her back, and picked up the telephone to report the result to Claudia Andrade.
Arnaldo awoke to the sound of music.
He had a pain in his head that surpassed any hangover he’d ever known. His mouth was dry, his lips were cracked, and his vision was blurry. He sat up. It took some effort. He felt weak as a kitten.
When the area around him came into focus, it turned out to be a prison cell. At least that’s what it looked like. The door was steel, with a little peephole. He was naked, but not cold. The room, in fact, was uncomfortably warm.
He tried to put two and two together. The big guy with the fucking Flamengo medallion had picked him up. He’d called Silva from the back of the van. He’d drunk something, eaten something, and then. . and then he couldn’t remem-ber anything more.
The bastard must have drugged him. But why? What the hell was going on?
He started to get up, but movement made his head spin and he sank back onto the sheets, sheets only, no cover, no pillow, a thin mattress. He put his aching head in his hands and looked down. The floor was concrete, the metal bed frame fas-tened to it with bolts, bolts with large hexagonal heads.
The music went on. Something classical. It might have been an overture, the way it slipped from melody to melody. And the volume was turned up far too high. The sound was driving daggers into his head.
He stuck his fingers in his ears, lifted his head, and let his eyes sweep around the room.
There was a toilet in the corner, a stainless steel toilet without a seat. Next to it, bolted to the wall, was a sink, also stainless steel, with a single tap. No shower. No other furni-ture, only the bed. No windows. No indication whether it was day or night.
The music changed. A woman began to sing, but not in Portuguese.
It sounded to Arnaldo like some fucking German opera.
* * *
The indian baby’s heart wasn’t much larger than one of his tiny fists. Cutting it out was a delicate business, and it took Bittler longer than usual. When he’d finished, he told Teobaldo to go upstairs and anesthetize Raul Oliveira.
Three hours later, Raul, too, was dead.
Bittler’s surgical mask concealed his nose and mouth, but not his anger. Claudia could read it in his eyes. He looked at the dead child as if it had displeased him and was deserving of punishment.
“Shock him again,” he said.
“It’s no use,” she said. “He’s gone.”
“Shock him, I say.”
So she did. The little heart contracted once. But only once.
“Damn,” Bittler said.
“His parents are outside,” Claudia said.
“You think I don’t know that?” Bittler replied testily. “Go out there and lie to them.”
“What?”
“Tell them we’re finished. Tell them the operation was a success. Tell them he’ll be in intensive care for the next twenty-four hours, and that we never allow family or friends into intensive care.”
“They won’t believe it.”
“Why shouldn’t they?”
“We’ve only been in here for the last two and a half hours. They must know that a successful procedure takes-”
“They don’t know a damned thing,” he snapped.
Teobaldo’s eyes were twinkling above his mask. It was a rare thing for Bittler to lose his temper, and the anesthesiol-ogist seemed to be enjoying the spectacle. Bittler glanced at Teobaldo, noted his amusement, and flushed. Then he took a deep breath and went on in a calmer voice.
“They’ll believe you because they’ll want to believe you. Tell them to go home and get some rest. Tell them we’ll call them just as soon as his condition stabilizes. Come to me as soon as they’ve left.”
Ten minutes later, Claudia found her employer in his office. She came in with a sour expression on her face. Bittler took it in with a certain degree of satisfaction.
“I was right, wasn’t I?” he said smugly. “They believed every word.”
“They’re gone for the moment,” she admitted grudgingly. She closed the door and leaned against it. “But it doesn’t solve anything. We’ve won a few hours, nothing more. We can’t keep them in the dark forever.”