Cui Feng—Al Gardner

Cui Feng—Al Gardner describes a suspected commercial connection between Cui Feng’s alleged organ-removal operation and Al Gardner’s online transplant-matching service. The link emerges when Margaret Campbell traces the clinic computer’s browsing history to Transplants Online, whose listings appear capable of matching organs with recipients. The evidence supports a plausible route for arranging sales, but it does not establish that Cui Feng and Gardner completed a transaction or communicated directly. The distinction between a revealing digital trace and a proven business relationship remains central to the investigation.

The digital trace

Margaret finds the website through the computer’s stored history, which contains the last five hundred sites visited. The most recent folder is dated two days earlier and leads to Transplants Online. Because the page is available from the computer’s memory, Margaret can open it without the password that would normally be required. The site’s accessibility suggests that someone using the clinic computer had reached a restricted part of the service, though the scene does not identify who used it or what, if anything, they did there.

The home page presents Gardner as chief executive of the New York Transplant Co-ordination Clinic and describes him as a transplant coordinator who brings donors and recipients together internationally. A list of organs, each accompanied by a link, leads to recipient requirements. When Margaret opens the kidney listing, she finds code numbers alongside fields for age, sex, blood type, and HLA. The page therefore offers more than a general medical description: it displays information organized for assessing compatibility between an organ and a potential recipient. Mei-Ling recognizes the information as relevant to matching a kidney, confirming the practical meaning of the screen without establishing who supplied or used the listed data.

Gardner’s public position

Margaret recognizes Gardner’s name from a report that he had been investigated by the FBI on suspicion of trading in organs. According to her account, Gardner maintained that he was an honest broker who took a small commission for connecting needy recipients in the United States with legally available organs around the world. The investigation, she says, found no evidence to the contrary. That earlier inquiry therefore supplies context for suspicion, not proof that Gardner participated in Cui Feng’s alleged crimes.

The tension between the site’s stated coordinating role and the clinic computer’s browsing history sharpens the question of what kind of intermediary Gardner was. The website makes recipient matching appear orderly and technical: personal and medical characteristics are converted into searchable requirements, and a listed organ can be considered against them. Margaret’s inference is that the service could also provide a route from organs obtained through Cui Feng’s operation to people seeking transplants. The scene leaves the site’s claims and its potential use in unresolved conflict rather than treating its public description as conclusive evidence of innocence or guilt.

The proposed chain

Margaret reasons that the clinic’s direct access to the site would make sense if Cui Feng’s people were looking for buyers. In her reconstruction, they could enter an organ’s blood type and HLA tissue type, search the recipient requirements for a match, and then contact Gardner to bring the organ and recipient together. She allows that any transplant might take place in China or in a third country, mentioning India or somewhere in the Middle East as possibilities. These are proposed steps and locations, not confirmed events; the available evidence does not identify a particular recipient, destination, or completed sale.

The surrounding clinical evidence helps explain why Margaret connects the web page to the clinic. During the examination of the remains, she finds small blue suture ends among the vessels left after organs had been removed. Later, the operating room contains equipment and supplies associated with surgical work, including a steel table, an electrocautery machine, a bowl, jugs, plastic basters, and cool boxes. Margaret interprets the containers and supplies as consistent with cooling and packing organs. Taken together with the recipient-matching page, these physical and digital traces make the proposed chain intelligible; neither set, by itself, documents a transaction with Gardner.

Existing demand and unresolved responsibility

The investigation also raises the possibility that Cui Feng already had a Japanese customer. Li Yan asks why Cui would use the internet if he had customers in Japan. Margaret proposes that Cui’s operation might first have fulfilled a contract for that customer and then sold other available organs through the website. Her answer makes the suspected arrangement appear commercially layered: a direct customer would not necessarily account for every organ, while the online service could offer another means of matching supply to demand. The book presents this as an explanation for the website connection, not as independently verified accounting of sales.

Jiang Baofu’s account supplies a separate piece of context about how the operation’s remains were handled. He says he discovered body parts in a freezer about a year and a half after starting work as an orderly, and that he agreed to dispose of them for extra money. He describes this as a business arrangement and says his night work as a construction-site watchman made it possible to arrange burial beneath concrete. His testimony supports the existence of an organized disposal scheme, but it does not place him in contact with Gardner or prove that the online service received organs from Cui Feng.

The relationship thus remains an investigative inference assembled from access records, a matching interface, Gardner’s reported history, and evidence of an operation that required both clinical and logistical arrangements. Its significance lies in the possible connection between local violence and an international market mediated by technical systems: the screen can turn medical compatibility into a route for commerce, while leaving the people and transactions behind its coded listings difficult to see. The abrupt loss of the internet connection ends the examination without resolving who used the site or whether a sale was completed.