Page 107 of Gone Before Goodbye

“He doesn’t trust me right now. It’s why he sent you. He told you about the money laundering?”

“Yes.”

“Did he give you his whole theory on corruption—on how it starts small and it either grows like a cancer or it dies?”

“He didn’t use a cancer analogy.”

“But you get it. And if it starts with money laundering, you can probably guess the next profitable step.”

Maggie nods. “Selling organs.”

“I was in that refugee camp when I was recruited to donate mykidney. WorldCures was there too. After I agreed to be a donor, I was flown here. For the surgery.”

Maggie is puzzled by this. “To Dubai?”

“Yes. To a place called Apollo Longevity.”

Apollo Longevity.

Nadia is trying to read her face. “You’ve been there, right? At Apollo Longevity.”

“You already know I have.”

Nadia gives her a slow nod. “WorldCures has a relationship with Apollo Longevity.”

“Had,” Maggie says, correcting her. She tries to keep her voice controlled, even, though the memories are starting to rock her. “We had some space in their facility.” And then, because Maggie wants to change the subject and is tired of Nadia’s cute evasions: “Are you going to tell me my husband removed your kidney?”

“I wouldn’t care if he did, but no, I don’t know. What matters is that I got my family out. At a cost. Not just my kidney. The organ brokers, they would only provide two of us with identities to get into the United States. I gave them to my mother and my brother. They do live in the Midwest now, just like I told you. They are prosperous and happy.”

“And what about you, Nadia? What happened to you?”

“I stayed here. In Dubai.”

“On your own?”

“Yes.”

“That must have been difficult.”

“Not really, no,” she says, but the words feel forced. “I, Salima, became Nadia. I did well here. I worked in clubs like this. Someone—a man usually—was always willing to take care of me. One Ukrainian benefactor gave me access to online education. He opened the door, and I walked through it. I learned quite a few languages, including Russian and English, which helped when I met Trace Packer one nightat this club. He’d been drinking heavily. You know Trace liked nightclubs, right?”

“Yes.”

“He told me I looked familiar. I figured it was just a line—”

It probably was, Maggie thinks.

“—and I was going to tell him he was mistaken, but I, well, I remembered him. He was kind at the refugee camp. He was so nice to his patients. So I told him who I was.”

“You told him you were Salima?”

“From the refugee camp, yes. He said he remembered me. The next day, we met for coffee. He told me about WorldCures’ latest missions. So I volunteered to help out.”

Maggie tries to sort this all out in her head. Some of it she had figured out already. Charles Lockwood had hinted that laundering money was only the start—that that crime alone would not have been enough to make Marc flip on someone as deadly as Oleg Ragoravich.

But harvesting organs?

That would have been the proverbial straw for Marc. The money laundering—again, it was bad but once you cross that line, there really is no going back. Even if Marc wanted to flip on that, everyone who worked at WorldCures—especially their three founders—would be subject to prosecution or, at the very least, have their reputations destroyed. More than that—much more—Oleg Ragoravich would never let them sell him out and just walk away. If Marc or Trace had any delusions about that, one quick helicopter trip would have straightened them out.