“None of us get to decide how we die, Doctor McCabe.” He separates his hands, points the palms toward the sky. “Why should Aleksander be any different?”
Maggie nods. “Fascinating albeit sociopathic rationale,” she says. “I assume you didn’t share your plan with Aleksander.”
“I did not, no.”
“But he figured it out. Too late. After the surgery was done, when he saw the work I’d done, he realized you were — how did you so poetically put it? — fattening him up for the kill. That’s why he ran.”
“Yes. I think he deluded himself into believing that Nadia had true feelings for him. So we had people watch the club, figuring he would show up.”
Oleg Ragoravich — the real one — tilts his head back, closes his eyes, struggles to swallow. She can see he’s in pain. Maggie waits for him to continue.
“My main passion has always been in medical innovations because I have spent so much of my life in poor health. Health is everything — but we know that, don’t we? You can have all the riches in the world, but if you don’t have your health... Well, it’s an old saying, but that’s because it’s so true. I’ve always had a congenitally weak heart in the physical sense — but the heart of a lion when I want something. And I wanted to find a way to cure me — and in the process, help others like me to live longer.”
“Others like you,” Maggie says.
“Yes.”
“You mean the rich and powerful?”
“Don’t be naive. It’s always been that way. Medical research is held back by archaic rules. I don’t have time for any of that. Mankind doesn’t either. And you Americans especially have grown so lazy and stupid. You think you’d be healthier if you relied on your” — Ragoravich shakes his head as he says in pure disgust — “‘natural immunities.’ Please. Natural immunities. It makes me laugh.” His voice goes up an octave in mimicry: “‘Oh, we don’t need modern medicine, we just need to meditate and trust our “natural immunities” like in the old days!’ Bah. Do you know what the global life expectancy was in 1900? Thirty-seven years. Thirty-seven! That’s what your natural immunities got you.
Do you know what life expectancy is today? Seventy-three. Think about that. And do you know why? Of course you do. You’re an intelligent physician. We live longer because of modern medicine — antibiotics, vaccines, control of infectious disease, new treatments for cancer, stroke, and yes, cardiovascular disease. We live longer because we stopped relying on our ‘natural immunities.’”
He is panting by the time he finishes the rant. He takes a second, starts breathing again, looks at her. “What do you think?”
“I think the other Oleg didn’t talk this much.”
That makes him chuckle. “Very good, Doctor McCabe. But you know I’m right. Science and medicine work. The rest... They call me corrupt, but these so-called ‘wellness influencers’ preying on your gullibility, buying in bulk, repackaging junk as a ‘health supplement,’ jacking up the price...” He waves his hand dismissively in the air. “But you didn’t come here to listen to a sick old man rant about humanity’s innate stupidity.”
“True, I did not,” she says.
“Tell me what you already know, Doctor McCabe, and I’ll tell you the rest.”
Maggie doesn’t hesitate — she dives right in. “Like a lot of your competitors, you laundered money through charities. But you did it with a dual purpose. You focused on charities that had connections to medical innovations, especially if they featured cardiology or cellular regenerative advancements. So-called ‘fountain of youth’ medicine. As you just explained, nothing with placebo supplements or scam therapies. Only charities involved in true medical innovations.”
“Yes.”
“It was common knowledge that WorldCures was doing major work on heart transplants via THUMPR7. You would have been all over that.”
“WorldCures was my number one priority.”
“So you donated to us and several other like-minded charities. You started the corruption with the money laundering. Then you moved on to black-market organ donation. And then, because you hated the — what do you call them, archaic rules? — some form of human experimentation. I assume that’s what’s going on down here?”
“Close,” Ragoravich says. “You know we bought a kidney from Nadia when she was Salima?”
“Yes.”
“And she thinks we sold it on the black market for transplantation.”
“You didn’t?”
“No. We needed a kidney with her DNA markings for a certain medical experiment. That’s what I mean. Imagine how much faster you can make progress if you just buy real human organs instead of having to spend years trying it with pigs or in labs.”
Maggie doesn’t even know what to say to that.
“We’ve bought dozens of organs like this. Some, yes, we sold for transplantation. For profit. Others we kept for important experimentation. We took everyone’s blood at refugee camps all over the world. You helped with that, as a matter of fact, for us. Now we have all that DNA stored in our own data banks. We can get exactly what we need when we need it — and when we see a match, well, everyone has a price.”
“Who removed Nadia’s kidney?”
“I wouldn’t normally know. We did so many.”
“Normally. But in this case?”
“You’re wondering whether it was your husband.”
Maggie shakes her head. “I know it wasn’t.”
“Because he was too good a man?”
“Because there are lines he wouldn’t cross.”
“Ah, but selling her kidney wasn’t a bad thing. It was pure commerce. It saved the donor’s—”
“Yeah, yeah, Nadia explained all that to me. I don’t need to hear it again. Who removed her kidney?”
“You know now, don’t you?”
She nods. “Trace Packer.”
“Yes. Packer did many. He believed that innovation in organ donation was the future of medicine. He was willing to push the boundaries.”
“In a dangerous way. I was at Apollo Longevity when we tried to implant the THUMPR7 in Kabir Abargil, a poor man—”
“A poor man who consented,” Ragoravich interjects. “A poor man who was going to die and knew the risks and made an informed decision—”
“Yeah, okay, whatever.”
“No, no, you listen.” Ragoravich makes a fist and shakes it at her. “We have always sacrificed our fellow human beings for the greater good. Always. Wars, of course, but every advancement we humans have made — when we first created aqueducts for water, when we first traveled, built bridges, explored, pioneered, literally everything throughout history we ever did to advance civilization and—”
Maggie holds up her hand and says, “Oleg?”
“Yes?”
“I get it. You are extraordinarily creative with your self-justifications. But I don’t really care.”
“And in truth, neither do I. I want to live. That’s all that matters to me in the end. It’s why I focused on the heart. That’s the immediate need. But we work here on every organ because there is overlap in the research — and because eventually I will need those too. Once we can replicate organs and tissues, a human could live theoretically for hundreds of years. And no, this isn’t for the masses. We can’t have everyone living that long. Even the knowledge that the possibility exists would end the world because, yes, people would kill to get it. That’s not justification, Doctor McCabe. That’s fact. God — if you are superstitious enough to believe in that man-made delusion — created a world where the only way to survive is to kill. You watch a lion take down a gazelle. The lion will try to keep the poor creature alive while he eats it so it stays fresh. The gazelle slowly dies in agony. That’s the ‘perfect’ world designed by a just and kind deity.” He chuckles. “And I’m the one delusional with self-justification?”