Illegal Organ Trading and Removal from Living Victims

Illegal Organ Trading and Removal from Living Victims is the criminal system Margaret Campbell believes explains the evidence at the clinic: women were allegedly selected for their tissue compatibility, operated on while alive, and used as unwilling sources of organs for paying recipients. Her reconstruction links clinic records to an online matching service and an international market. It also exposes the scheme’s central contradiction: keeping a victim alive could accommodate a recipient’s fear of receiving an organ from a dead body, while making the living person bear the cost of that fear. The novel presents this account as a reasoned but still developing inference, not as a conclusion independently verified in the scene.

Proposed Method and Physical Clues

Li Yan asks whether the people behind the clinic have been killing women for their organs. Margaret Campbell answers cautiously, then explains why she and Dr Lan had previously rejected that theory: they could not understand why the victims would be kept alive during the procedure if the purpose were simply to obtain fresh organs. She now revisits that apparent inconsistency as a clue to the intended recipients’ demands. Her reasoning changes the question from what would be medically necessary to what the buyers might be willing to pay for.

The clinic’s equipment supplies part of her explanation. Margaret points to a stainless-steel bowl that might have held crushed ice, litre jugs that might have contained saline for cooling and flushing organs, and large turkey basters that could have been used in that process. These objects do not, on their own, establish the crime. In her reconstruction, however, they fit a set of preparations for organ removal and transport, and give practical weight to what might otherwise sound like conjecture. The scene’s shift from puzzlement to suspicion is built out of ordinary clinical items whose possible purpose has suddenly changed.

Matching Patients to Recipients

The proposed selection process begins not with a random search for victims but with compatibility. Margaret says the women were exact matches for particular Japanese recipients, and explains that the clinic records could have supplied blood-type and HLA tissue-type information. On her account, women who attended the clinics for abortions were tissue-typed without their knowledge or consent. Cui Feng’s people could then compare those records against recipient requirements, identify a suitable match, and abduct the woman when a client was available.

Margaret gives the scale she believes made such a search possible: three hundred thousand women passed through the clinics each year, amounting to one-and-a-half million since the clinic system began. She infers that this gave the operation an exceptionally comprehensive pool of potential matches. The figures make the alleged practice more than an improvised search for a compatible donor: in her account, routine medical visits created a searchable resource that could later be exploited. The women had not volunteered as donors; the information gathered about them was repurposed to identify targets.

She connects the same logic to the earlier case in Beijing involving Jack Geller’s sister. Margaret says the woman’s HLA DQ-alpha gene was almost unique in China and believes that this rarity made her a possible match for a Japanese recipient. The theory also accounts for why the attempt ended without producing a usable organ: Margaret says the woman had a drug problem and concludes that the people who targeted her had selected a potential match that proved unsuitable. This link extends the proposed system beyond one clinic and one group of victims, while remaining part of Margaret’s explanation rather than a separately demonstrated record of the selection process.

The Online Broker and International Market

The computer screen brings the clinic evidence into contact with an online organ-brokerage network. Margaret recognizes Al Gardner’s name from an earlier investigation by the FBI in the United States. Gardner had maintained that he was an honest broker, taking a small commission to connect needy American recipients with legally available organs around the world; according to Margaret, investigators found no evidence to the contrary at that time. That history makes his appearance significant to her, but it does not by itself prove that he participated in Cui Feng’s alleged crimes.

Margaret’s present inference rests on a direct link between Cui Feng’s people and Gardner’s website. If the clinic had harvested organs to fulfil contracts with Japanese recipients, she reasons, the website could have been used to find recipients for additional organs. The proposed sequence is specific: the sellers would consult a list of recipients for blood and HLA matches, contact Gardner, and rely on him to bring the organ and recipient together. The eventual transaction might have occurred locally or in a neutral third country, with India and the Middle East offered as possibilities rather than confirmed destinations. Transplants Online thus figures as a route for matching and brokerage in Margaret’s account, not merely as a source of background information.

Cultural Rationale and Human Cost

Margaret’s search about Shinto and transplants supplies the cultural explanation she had been missing. The material she finds describes the dead body as impure, dangerous, and powerful, and reports that injuring a dead body can be treated as a serious offense. It also describes resistance among bereaved families to organ donation, dissection, and pathological examination. Margaret extrapolates from this research to the scheme’s intended Japanese clients: some may have feared violating the integrity of a dead body, even as the alleged solution required the death of a living person. The text presents this as her interpretation of the buyers’ concerns, not as a claim that all Japanese people share one belief or attitude.

This is the moral reversal at the heart of the concept. The operation’s supposed selling point was access to organs from a living body, while the recipient’s interest in avoiding the perceived pollution of death was given priority over the life of the person supplying them. Margaret cannot know whether the recipients understood how the organs were obtained, and she allows that some might not have known; she rejects that possibility as a complete defence, since receiving a heart necessarily entails the donor’s death. Her account therefore distinguishes uncertainty about each buyer’s knowledge from the violence built into the proposed supply system.

Nor would the alleged trade have ended with the first contract. Margaret reasons that after Cui Feng’s people had fulfilled a Japanese client’s order, other organs could still be sold through the online network. That prospect makes the operation appear, in her formulation, not like a single transaction but a profit-seeking system in which a victim’s compatibility could serve one buyer and the remaining organs could serve others. The interrupted computer connection leaves the investigation without a completed online search in this scene. What it does leave is a coherent, disturbing hypothesis: medical information gathered under one pretext, brokered across borders, could turn women into targets selected for their bodies’ usefulness to strangers.