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Overview
On a remote island in Central America, transplants are being performed for the elite of the crime world—with organs harvested from those killed by a sinister organization.
Following the trail of mutilated bodies across the globe, intelligence agent David Morton must discover who is the mastermind behind the carnage. His own gut reaction convinces him that none of the usual players—The Chinese Triads, Japan’s organized crime syndicate, the Russian criminal fraternity, the Mafia—are responsible.
There’s a powerful new player on the block . . .
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781497663442 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Open Road Media |
| Publication date: | 07/01/2014 |
| Series: | The David Morton Novels , #4 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 384 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
He has been a widely syndicated foreign correspondent and was a writer and producer for three flagship BBC programs: Man Alive, Tomorrow’s World, and Horizon. He contributes regularly to Facta, a respected monthly Japanese news magazine. Thomas was the lead expert for a twelve-part series on international intelligence for Ian Punnett’s Coast to Coast, the most listened-to overnight radio broadcast in North America, with three million weekly listeners. He has recently appeared on Euronews (available in ten languages and three hundred million households) and Russia Today.
He has received numerous awards for his reporting, including an International Television Award and two Mark Twain Society Awards. Shipwreck won an Edgar Award.
Four of Thomas’s books—Voyage of the Damned, Ruin from the Air, The Day the Bubble Burst, and The Day Their World Ended—have been made into feature films starring such A-listers as Paul Newman, Billy Crystal, Robert Vaughn, and Jacqueline Bisset. The Day Guernica Died is currently under option.
Thomas’s most recent bestseller is Gideon’s Spies: Mossad’s Secret Warriors. Published in sixteen languages and forty countries, Gideon’s Spies is known throughout the world as the leading resource on Israeli intelligence. It was made into a major documentary for Channel 4 in Britain, which Thomas wrote and narrated, called The Spy Machine. The Observer called The Spy Machine a “clear” picture of Israeli intelligence operations, and the Times called it “impressive” and ”chilling.”
A member of the London Speaker Bureau and Macmillan Speakers, Thomas continues to grow his already-impressive platform, lecturing widely on the secret world of intelligence. He also regularly provides expert analysis on intelligence for US and European television and radio programs.
Gordon Thomas is a political and investigative journalist and the author of fifty-three books, published in more than thirty countries and in dozens of languages. The total sales of his works exceed forty-five million copies.
He has been a widely syndicated foreign correspondent and was a writer and producer for three flagship BBC programs: Man Alive, Tomorrow’s World, and Horizon. He contributes regularly to Facta, a respected monthly Japanese news magazine. Thomas was the lead expert for a twelve-part series on international intelligence for Ian Punnett’s Coast to Coast, the most listened-to overnight radio broadcast in North America, with three million weekly listeners. He has recently appeared on Euronews (available in ten languages and three hundred million households) and Russia Today.
He has received numerous awards for his reporting, including an International Television Award and two Mark Twain Society Awards. Shipwreck won an Edgar Award.
Four of Thomas’s books—Voyage of the Damned, Ruin from the Air, The Day the Bubble Burst, and The Day Their World Ended—have been made into feature films starring such A-listers as Paul Newman, Billy Crystal, Robert Vaughn, and Jacqueline Bisset. The Day Guernica Died is currently under option.
Thomas’s most recent bestseller is Gideon’s Spies: Mossad’s Secret Warriors. Published in sixteen languages and forty countries, Gideon’s Spies is known throughout the world as the leading resource on Israeli intelligence. It was made into a major documentary for Channel 4 in Britain, which Thomas wrote and narrated, called The Spy Machine. The Observer called The Spy Machine a “clear” picture of Israeli intelligence operations, and the Times called it “impressive” and ”chilling.”
A member of the London Speaker Bureau and Macmillan Speakers, Thomas continues to grow his already-impressive platform, lecturing widely on the secret world of intelligence. He also regularly provides expert analysis on intelligence for US and European television and radio programs.
Read an Excerpt
Organ Hunters
A David Morton Novel
By Gordon Thomas
OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 1994 Gordon ThomasAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4976-6344-2
CHAPTER 1
The smell seemed to travel faster than the red of dawn colouring the dusky sky in this corner of the Indian subcontinent; the stench of poverty subsumed by something even more universal: human fear. It clung to the young woman, souring her body as she stumbled across the wasteland. Those who had spent the night here – the poorest of the poor – looked the other way, creating their own private spaces, wanting to be no part of what was about to happen on this moonscape of smoking fires and picked-over garbage; surrounded by more than stink, by hopelessness; they were the wretched who would never inherit the earth. As the woman passed, a man squatted carefully, placing his feet with the precision of a dancer, before relieving himself. Another cleaned his teeth vigorously with fingers dipped in a fetid puddle. Holy cows wandered across the ground, depositing unholy smells, adding to the powerful reek of human excrement and pollution.
A van stood parked at the edge of the wasteland. From it had emerged the two men who were now pursuing the woman. One carried a plastic box. Both wore green coveralls, the type medics use, and sneakers which squelched through the garbage. Their dark glasses marked them as city people. But it was their rubber gloves which were a final proof for the human vultures beginning to pick over the fresh garbage dumped during the night. The men reached the woman as she glanced desperately back.
'No!' she screamed, the first and last words those close enough heard her cry. They pretended not to hear.
One pursuer expertly strangled her with a looped wire, the other pulled open her shift. His companion took from the box a scalpel and cut into her chest cavity, then used surgical shears to rip through the ribcage. With the knife he snipped free her heart and placed it in a plastic bag in the box. From first to last the removal had taken no longer than one of the women tending her fire needed to quick-bake her morning bread.
She, along with all the wretched of the earth, had seen this happen before, many times. The woman had been sold by her family to a dealer in human organs, one of very many on the subcontinent. Her family needed his money to keep themselves alive a little longer. The dealer had sent the men to collect his part of the transaction.
Reaching the van, one of the men tossed a coin to a hovering scavenger, and drove off. The scavenger stripped off the woman's clothes before burying the body to fulfil his contract with the dealer.
The dealer had a client for the heart, a man on the far side of the world, a foreigner rich enough to bypass the lengthy waiting lists in his own land for a replacement organ. The dealer had negotiated through a woman he addressed only as Madam. He saw his respect had pleased her. Now she had arrived in Madras to finalise their transaction. But when he telephoned her hotel suite to say the heart was available, Madam informed him she had just received a call informing her that the man for whom it was intended had died. She sounded calm and totally in control. The dealer proffered brief condolences and went about the business of finding a new recipient for the organ.
In their weeks of negotiation he had created in his mind a picture of Madam. She would be tall and blonde, elegant and remote, with a memsahib's liking for gin and cards. On all counts he was wrong about her appearance and habits. And doubtless he would have been astounded at her reaction to his call. After she put down the gold-plated telephone, she stood in the living room of her palace within the hotel palace, and cursed and screamed so loudly, so terribly, that the junior staff who stood and listened at the corridor door were too fearful to knock, and sent for the general manager. He used his pass key to enter. What he saw moved his dark, puckish face to tears. Such naked grief he had never witnessed in all his years as a hotelier.
Madam returned home still consumed by her loss, which had taken her to the very edge of madness. For months she lay in a private nursing home, while some of the very best doctors and nurses worked to heal her mind with a careful balance of drugs and psychotherapy. Gradually, she appeared to return to her former self.
On the day of her discharge, her chief psychiatrist reminded her again that to have loved so dearly was both noble and life-sustaining, and that the way to cherish those feelings was to perpetuate the memory of her loved one. Given the great fortune her lover had left her, there was almost nothing she could not do. The doctor had suggested she should endow a foundation, build an art museum, launch a charity; with her wealth the opportunities for philanthropy were endless. She must do something to constantly remind her of the only man on earth she had ever loved.
Later she realised, the doctor's well-meaning words finally dredged from deep within her subconscious, what she had always planned to do. After all those months of treatment she knew no one could possibly now match her strength and ruthlessness. And no drug nor therapist had been able to uncover her need to take revenge on a world which had cheated her of a life with the one man she had respected as her equal.
She had planned with the utmost care and stealth, always working through others, never revealing herself. To the world she was now one of its richest women. She had played the role for perfection, while using a portion of her new fortune to investigate all the ramifications of the traffic in human organs. She had discovered much that shocked, albeit brieflly. She asked herself questions she suspected others had already posed. Do the world's governments really want to keep the terminally ill alive? Or was there some hidden international agenda which paid only lip-service to prolonging life? The fate of ordinary sufferers, the million or so who at any given time need a replacement organ, did not concern her. Her interest lay only in a relatively small group. Through them, she would take her revenge. Once more she had moved with the greatest secrecy.
She had spent vast sums of money to create a network of companies and institutions so cleverly interlinked that only she knew all their intricacies. Sovereign, proud and expansionist, under her iron control, the conglomerate was as ruthlessly acquisitive and exploitative as any mediaeval kingdom, as far-flung as the British empire had been once, as cohesive as the states of the American republic still were. The conglomerate maintained its own private security force, intelligence service, banks and airline. It had its own hospitals and even a worldwide network of fitness centres.
To all those it employed, her empire was known as the Organisation. She remained its first and only head and had chosen to be known by the same respectful title the Madras organ- broker had used. Madam.
With the Organisation up and running, Madam had set out to take her revenge on the inhabitants of the earth who spent more money on illegal drugs than they did on food, and yet had been unable to provide a drug or a replacement organ which could have saved her loved one.
First she had recruited her medical team and built them a clinic equal to none. Then she contacted the leaders of that other great growth industry – crime – and assured them that if they, or their associates, were in need of replacement organs, she could provide them. To make them understand how little she was asking in return, she told each of them that a billion dollars, measured in gold, was equal to the weight of a grown man. All she required each time was the equivalent of the weight of a man's heart, liver or kidney. It was an offer so eminently reasonable that they all accepted her terms.
And so, with everything in place, the harvesting had begun.
CHAPTER 2Standing in the motel bedroom doorway David Morton allowed the scene to go flat, finding a place in his mind for only all-important first impressions.
He'd briefly wondered if the cop beside him would come to understand the value of this. A couple of murmured questions had told him all he needed to know about the rookie: he was a week out of academy and, until now, had never seen someone dead.
That's what this stranger likes to do, thought the rookie, observe without being observed. Yet he wasn't a desk man, not with those eyes. There was something buried in them, a secret, like his accent. English? You couldn't tell. Everything about him spoke of self-protection. But one thing was sure: he wasn't a cop, or FBI, or even Agency – at least, not judging from those who had been guest speakers at the academy. There'd been a swagger about them, a challenge, a dare-me attitude. This stranger possessed only a troubling intensity. They hadn't said anything about that in the body-language course.
Out of the corner of his eye Morton saw the patrolman moisten his lips. The kid had been plunged right in at the deep end. A corpse that looked as if Hannibal Lecter had been feeling peckish. And the CIA as attendant pallbearers. No police academy taught you how to cope with that.
'Would have been worse if he had been a woman,' suggested the rookie.
Morton affected not to hear. He had no small-talk about corpses.
'Wonder how he ended up here?' went on the rookie, not discouraged by the lack of response.
Morton continued to preserve a dead silence.
'Who are you with?' asked the rookie with too much casualness.
'Whoever you like.'
'You mean mind my own business?' the rookie asked, colouring.
'Something like that.' Morton smiled his on-loan smile.
'Sorry. I didn't mean to pry.'
'It's OK.' He smiled again and gave that quick sideways look. The observer's glance that stays on you after it's turned away.
The patrolman had a football jock's build, all shoulders and no waist. In ten years he'd have run to fat unless he took care. It would take effort to do that. Just as it did to cope with the death which had occurred in this room. 'Ever seen anything as gross as this, sir?' asked the rookie, once more wetting his lips.
'Violent death is always gross,' Morton replied in a voice designed to discourage further questions.
He had done the same this past month in Bangkok, Mexico City and Delhi. He had gone to those places with no more than that indefinable something – even now he could not put a name to it – which had always driven him. In the past others had tried to formalise it into a methodology. They had called it 'creating situations', 'drawing fact out of darkness' and 'applying the art of informed conjecture'. It was all that, and more. At its simplest – and most complex – it was the right to violate all the rules of critical enquiry to reach the basic truth. To discover that the few known facts are designed to lead to some distant, unwritten goal. In this case it had been Bangkok, Mexico City and Delhi which had acted as the first stepping stones: what had happened there, and what he had learned since, had reinforced his initial suspicion, confirmed that action could not wait for certainty. Those first victims had established he was right to deal in the middle range of probability – that surmise, a willingness to make an imaginative leap, were as important as the known facts. Because all together they added up to that something. As usual, he had shared this with no one outside his trusted circle. Police in those cities tried to probe when he'd viewed other bodies which had undergone the same desecration. You almost expected it in places like that. But here, in Washington?
And it had happened to Ronald Stamp, who actually worked for Hammer Force; in the end had worked for him. One of those life-is-strange coincidences? Or had Stamp used his vacation for a little private sleuthing? But he had been a desk man, one of the Prof's team. The Prof ran Psychological Assessment with a firm hand, and he'd have fired Stamp quicker than you could say psycho-profile if he'd ever suspected the researcher was stepping out of line.
The Prof had said that with Stamp you were still talking potential: Lively mind. Can spot the uglies quicker than most. But his heart still leads. Another year he'd have been on the Top Desk. Drugs, arms, money-laundering. Could have handled one or all of them. But not yet. Such a waste, such a waste. Think this is connected, David?
Exactly the same question had filled Morton's mind while he stood in the doorway of the motel room. Those other deaths had been similar. The same surgical skill involved; the same surprised looks on the victims' faces. Tenuous, maybe. But enough to confirm that once more he was right to deal in the realm of surmise. Speculation was a way of life. Others, he knew, were sometimes shocked by his seeming lack of precision; his readiness to resist the obvious: that the killings were the work of ritualists, or a demented serial killer with flesh-eating tendencies. Instead he knew the connection between the slaughters was different, even if he could not yet define who, exactly, was behind it. That, too, was a part of his something, to be comfortable with giving suspicion the same credibility as fact. That was a part of what he himself was, someone always ready to fill in the gaps, recreate the conversations no one had recorded, mesh what had happened with all the finer details of life – or, in Stamp's case, death. But all this he also kept to himself for the moment, not only out of a natural self-restraint, but because it was also a part of that something.
Now it posed one question in his mind.
How had Stamp ended up in a motel within walking distance of the White House, half a world away from his computer, dead and minus his kidneys?
Who needed them was easier to answer. The same person who required the heart ripped from a French paedophile in a Bangkok brothel, the liver of an Australian backpacker in that Mexico City flophouse, or the eyes of a respectable German tourist, taken while she was sightseeing in the grounds of a Hindu temple in Delhi; each killed by someone who understood enough anatomy to know how and where to cut.
Local law enforcement said the murders were committed by cultists with a hunger for the more bizarre forms of ritual killing. They had pointed out there were scores of sects in Asia and Central America for which eating human flesh was a requirement. He hadn't pressed the point. Those deaths were nothing to do with appeasing the gods of voodoo or offering sacrifices to Satan incarnate. Any more than was Stamp's.
Once more the rookie broke Morton's reverie. 'At the academy we had a seminar on grave robbery and mutilation of the dead. There's over a thousand such reportings a year. Our lecturer said not one has ever been proven. He should see this.'
Morton pretended to address the matter for the first time. 'He'd probably still tell you that policemen look for explanations which make sense, especially to juries.'
The rookie looked uneasily into the room. 'Who would do this?'
'Good question.'
'Any thoughts?'
'No.'
'You play it pretty close.'
'Yes,' Morton replied more firmly. The kid had been trained in checks and balances, where evidence was tagged, cross-referenced and secured in plastic bags. He'd wanted reassurance that this killing was part of that world. It wasn't.
Lester Finel's computers – Hammer Force had the very latest – had established that in the past six months there had been a hundred similar cases of stolen human organs. A Canadian in the Australian outback, with his heart and kidneys removed; police said dingos were responsible. a Dutchman in a mountain hut in Peru minus his liver; ritual killing, insisted the Lima Federals. The youngest victim was a six-year-old girl in Sarajevo; she lost everything. The organ thefts were spread across all five continents. He'd told Lester to subject every case to detailed analysis. The computer chief had cautioned that could take weeks, given that special programmes would have to be written to take into account each victim's tissue-matching capability and much else. He'd also explained that the number of cases would increase as his computers sifted and collated. Lester said they could be looking at a thousand, perhaps even more, victims.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Organ Hunters by Gordon Thomas. Copyright © 1994 Gordon Thomas. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
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