Chapter 35

 

When Elaine woke up, it was twilight outside. She had slept so deeply that for a few unsettling seconds she wasn’t sure if it was morning or evening.

She lay there in bed for a moment, thinking about her trip to Ukraine, about nearly getting shot down in the jet, and about the Procurement Officer position that Spyro had offered her.

She had to send Luna the pictures she’d taken of the kidneys and decide how to proceed.

She slipped out of bed and onto the floor to retrieve Dmitry’s sat-phone. Before she’d come upstairs last night, Spyro had asked her for the sat-phone he’d given her to use on the Ukraine trip and told her he was going to destroy it. She had hidden Dmitry’s phone inside the mattress, alongside the burner phone.

She quietly put on her bathrobe, sat down at the small desk, and turned on the sat-phone, making sure the volume was down. She thought the “cave house” style walls were too thick to pick up a signal except by the windows, and she was right—the display showed no connection.

When she started opening the photos she taken on the plane and saw the bloody human kidneys floating around in the container, a little of the shock came back to her. She brushed the sick feeling aside and zoomed in on the labels affixed to the plastic bags.

In black permanent marker was a hand-written six digit number followed by a dash, then a single Roman numeral, and then another dash and some Cyrillic characters that looked like abbreviations:

 

038483 - IV - Pr.

 

At first Elaine was at a loss to what it might all mean, except for the Roman numerals. She knew that in Russia and the former Soviet Republics, the blood types O, A, B, and AB were designated as Type I, II, III and IV. It was one of those obscure facts she’d learned in a Russian Studies course.

She then realized that the two Cyrillic abbreviations that tagged on at the end—L. and Pr.—stood for left or right. So it seemed that each plastic bag was labeled to indicate the blood type of the kidney donor and whether the organ was taken from the left or right side of the body.

But what was the number in front of all that?

The most logical assumption was that they were donor ID numbers.

She composed a short text message explaining all this to Luna, then carried the phone into the bathroom, to the window, to see if she could pick up a signal. She hoped that Spyro didn’t have any kind of system that could detect this type of phone being used on the property—she doubted it. He certainly didn’t have a way to prevent her or anyone else from picking up a signal from an orbiting satellite. Before she’d left the UK to go on his assignment, she had considered bringing a sat-phone along with her, just as she’d considered bringing a burner phone along, but had decided against either. If Spyro had caught her with a burner phone in her luggage it would have been difficult enough to explain—trying to explain why a governess would carry around a sat-phone would have been impossible. Ordinary people simply didn’t have them.

Elaine again made sure the sat-phone volume was turned down and waited, moving the phone around the window frame…the signal strength came alive and showed one bar.

That would do.

Before she could type in Luna’s number, the sat-phone vibrated in her hand.

One message received.

From Luna.

It was sent at 2:12 p.m. Santorini time.

Elaine quickly opened it.

I THINK DMITRY MAY HAVE BEEN ARRESTED. SOMEONE FOLLOWED HIM IN A TAXI FROM THE FERRY TERMINAL ON SANTORINI AND THEN THE POLICE SHOWED UP—CALL ME ASAP.

“Oh my god,” Elaine gasped.

With her heart pounding, she quickly sent the message with all the photos, then called Luna.

 

* * *

“Did he get rid of the sat-phone and all the other stuff?” Elaine whispered, as soon as Luna updated her about the frantic phone call she’d received from Dmitry.

“I don’t know—we got cut off, or he cut me off, I’m not sure what happened. I could hear sirens in the background.”

Now Elaine was almost as scared as she’d been on the jet last night. Not only for Dmitry, but for herself.

She looked out the window and over the pool area—she wished she could see out the front side of the villa in the dawn light.

“Do you think I abort and get the hell out of here?” she asked Luna.

“I’m not sure…I’m looking at the photos you sent now. This organ trafficking operation is a damn serious crime, and a high profile, headline-worthy one. Martin Valdez will be overjoyed when he—”

“We can’t turn this over to Valdez yet!” Elaine hissed.

“Why not?”

“Because Spyro offered me a higher position.”

“What are you talking about?”

Elaine quickly explained his offer to make her Special Procurement Officer. “If I accept it, I’m pretty sure he’ll send me to Panacea and we can see exactly what’s going on there.”

“I don’t know, Elaine…I think you’ve dug in deeply enough. If they connect you to Dmitry—”

“I don’t want to just bust him for organ trafficking, Luna! I want to put him in jail for killing my father!”

Luna didn’t respond for a few seconds. “I understand that, baby doll, but we need to get hold of Lonnie Hendrix to make that happen.”

“And you haven’t got any leads?”

“I’m waiting to hear back from a colleague.”

Elaine managed to calm herself down enough to think more clearly. “Let’s take this one step at a time, Luna. We don’t know what’s going on with the cops and Dmitry—maybe the situation isn’t as bad as we think.”